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NB: rough. apologies.
...
The city still slept, with its head tucked under its wing, like poor robin redbreast when the north wind does blow.
The sun come palely, the colour of cowardice, and waking was like walking in to freezing water, when it’s so damn cold that your balls retract.
I lay with my eyes half open, feeling the sickness roll over inside of me, and watching the world through the moth-made exit wounds in my threadbare curtains.
I counted to one hundred and in the end found it within me to stand. I wiped my running nose on the hem of my T-shirt and groped toward the window. Parting the curtains a crack, the light glanced off my body the way it would off the blade of a knife. I held my head in my hands, feeling as rough as justice, hearing my own heart slogging.
Outside the morning would go through the motions. I would meet my mates at the corner and we would stand, maybe drink a little, too preoccupied with the business of growing to invent for ourselves any more games.
We were not children anymore.
Joe is the first up on The Parade. He raises his right hand, still inside his coat. It makes a funny kind of curtsy, with the corner of his Parker angled out toward me. I smile, vaguely. It’s a cold one, he goes, when he reaches me. I nod.
Together we walk aways along, and stand, looking up. We watch the strange bird-like manoeuvres of the lead lifters, their stalk-legged silhouettes burnt on the rust coloured retina of the city skyline, black on tarnished steel.
They beetle and bend about the deserted houses, and up along the striated spines of defunct factories, gas works and that. Above us they monkey nimbly, freed from the unrelenting gracelessness of the ground. They remind me of lumbering land-bound seals, suddenly sylphlike in water. Joe and me, we are entranced. Entranced and jealous.
They’ll fall, Shanna, eh? What d’you think?
I give it some thought. Maybe, I go, maybe. But I do not see it myself. The narrow margin between the rooftops and the sky, that is their proper home, the world they were born to inhabit. If they do any falling it will be at ground level only.
Lo, Shanna. Lo, Joe.
We turn to see Sunny emerge from the worm-farm narrows between the houses. He is grinning away and smoking with an insouciant air. My breakfastless stomach butterfly strokes and I start to resent Joe’s stocky, stolidly heterosexual presence.
Sunny is unconcerned. He plays the cigarette like some kind of wind instrument, making every zephyring exhale correspond to an inner, imaginary note. Or so it seems to me at any rate.
Ah, give us one of those, Sunny, goes Joe. And I have to look away and grind my teeth. Sunny follows my gaze to the roof tops. He smiles, flipping a butt in to the air to turn a reluctant somersault. That’s the Lenahans, he goes, knowingly.
We stand for awhile, consideringly, allowing the sediment of significance to settle. Joe breaks the silence first, because he usually does. He goes that Mickey Lenahan is funny, that’s right, Sunny, isn’t it?
‘Pends, on what you take as funny.
Touched. Slow, like. Simple.
Yes, then. Mickey Lenahan is funny.
We’re quiet a while longer, the duration of Joe’s cigarette. He smokes hastily, making a meal of it, burning his fingers, cursing and stubbing and fumbling. Sunny looks on wryly. I sigh. I wonder how long Ryan will be, I need to piss. Think he’d fall, goes Joe.
Beg pardon?
Think he’d fall. Or his brother, what’s his name-?
Quinn.
You’d think Quinn’d be bothered, case he fell.
Sunny shrugs. ‘Haps not, he says quietly, darkly. And I know he is thinking about Frankie, ‘cause he promised we’d go see the dogs the weekend and Frankie went got legless with Red Bernard and Donnie Asher instead. I want to tell him I know how he feels, how I suffered his disappointment with him. Not about missing the dogs so much, but that all of us look up to Frankie, and we feel the disillusionment keenly when he does something that makes him just like everybody else.
But I do not tell Sunny that. I do not get chance. Ryan comes stomping and throwing stones. Look at the fuckers, he goes. Not hello or how are you, but look at the fuckers.
Look at the fuckers.
Where?
On the roof there, stupid. Pikey Lenahan and his spazz brother.
And Ryan goes off on one giving it jaw about the robbing bastards and what Big Jim did to them last time he caught them and what they’d get next time too. You don’t steal from your own, Ryan said, rather passionately. I looked at him sideways. That was a strangely scrupulous saying for Ryan and I wondered had he been on the beer already.
We follow the Lenahan’s around, tossing insults and stones both upwards until our necks are stiff and our throats are sore. But our heckling is desultory and lacklustre and the Lenahan’s pay us no mind. To me there is something gallant in that, brave, in their brazen, bodily ascension, getting as close to heaven as they dared. I keep it to myself though, aware that this is probably a minority opinion. But still, the image of the acrobatic thieves stays with me, something transcendent, leaving the filth and the failure of their physical and mental infirmities with the floor. I feel my eyes are getting moist and know that last night’s White Strike cider is coming back to haunt me.
Later, as I piss sloppily, splashily in to white ceramic bowl in Ryan’s bathroom, queasy after five too many beers, I think of the pair again and it takes me different. This time I shiver ‘cause it strikes me that pikey Lenahan might be the only one with the guts to admit what the rest of us can’t face: that Belfast is a doomed and dying city, dead in places already, and that the only thing to do with it is to pull it to bits and harvest it for parts.
Their carrion honesty throbs in my temples and when, back in the kitchen, I hear Ryan giving off again, this time to his aunty Eileen, I punch him hard on the arm and snap louder than I mean to. For fuck’s sake, Ryan, just shut up. You know shit, alright? You know shit.
…
Watching the lead lifters become ritual. Then gradually habit. It eats up some time, and forms a nucleus around which to construct our idle speculations and haphazard differences of opinion. In short, they provide something for us to hang the rapidly disintegrating threads of our friendship on, now that youthful collectivism is giving way to aspirant one-upmanship and private growing-pains.
At times we see them, sunk down to our level, Spazzy Lenahan barely controlling his jumping-bean body and automatic face, Pikey Lenahan straggling, staring, furtive and cowardly.
On the ground there is an ill-at-ease awkwardness to them. I attribute it some kind of metaphysical specialisation, that they’ve become used to looking down and walking on high wires. Ryan, of a less poetic bent, says Pikey knows his days are numbered, that he’s robbed round here for the last time.
When the men go by I try to get a look in their eyes, but I never see any sign of recognition. Maybe they can’t make us out as the stone throwers and name callers from way up there, or maybe I’m right and there is an aloofness about them. Maybe, in some secret special way, they know that they’re better than us.
…
The colder it gets the harder it is to get up in the morning. The cold could be a kind of weight, a gothic nightmare crouched on your chest, keeping you down and down. It doesn’t get light until well after ten. I find the city and myself have the same approach to waking, that we do so wincing, as if the day and ourselves are something we cannot quite face.
Mid October I come down bad, laid up for days with fever and shits. In my dreams I see the silhouettes of the lead lifters, shadow-puppetted, becoming mythical. The surge, inkily between Shankill and Falls Road, owing allegiance to nobody, lithe and indeterminate. I think of them like spectres, guardians of nothing.
…
By the time I see outside again we are hard on the heels of Halloween. When I walk to meet Sunny at Frankie’s I look up but the lead lifters are gone. I wonder if it is the cold, or maybe superstition.
In the flat-block I take off my coat. The place smells of paint where Frankie’s been doing the walls, but the fire is going regardless. Sunny lies on his belly before the TV wearing a stupefied expression. You pissed? I ask him. He rolls on his back. A bit, he goes, you mind? I shake my head. You seen Pikey lately?
Nah, Shanna, they’re gone.
What d’you mean, gone?
Juss gone. Don’t really know. Something happened.
What happened?
To Spa- to Mickey. Yeah, that sounds about right.
He nods his head, slowly, stupidly. He is in a bad way. I get down on the floor beside him, propping myself up on my elbow, the better to look him over. He kind of bows, brings his head down close to mine and very nearly brains me, banging the bridge of my nose with the thick of his forehead.
Ow.
Sorry, Shanna, sorry.
A couple of largish tears drop to the floor. He stares after them, faintly surprised, as if he can’t believe he was their author. I missed you, he says after a while. His speech is thick, and I am conscious that something is very wrong. I ask him where Frankie is and he shakes his head. I’m so tired, Shanna, he goes. I pull him to me. It’s clumsy and I get a bright friction burn on my forearm. Did something happen? I ask him. What happened, Sunny?
Nuh. Juss tired.
You sure?
No.
What is it? Tell me.
He wipes his nose on the back of his hand. It’s alright for you, he goes, you’re different, you’re special. I’m not. I’m here… I’m juss… here…
He doesn’t have the words, but I know what he means and it pains me. I have a tight hold of him, too tight really. I’m the same as you, I tell him, and I repeat it over and over again, willing it true. I’m the same as you, I whisper hoarsely, fiercely, then half way through I change my mind. You’re the same as me, you’re the same is me. It all merges after a while in to seamless meaninglessness. Me and Sunny, Sunny and the city, the city and the lead lifters, the living and the dead. He looks at me blearily, his eyes are puffy pinky-red piss-holes. He looks so unlike himself it frightens me. I guess Red Bernard must’ve had words with him. He gets the straighten up and fly right speech at least once a month. It always has a bad effect on him.
…
I forget whose idea it was to go looking for the lead lifters. Probably Ryan. Probably he knew something already. Probably he was testing us. But we congregated aimlessly, earlyish, and set off to where Pikey Lenahan was supposed to doss with his idiot brother.
Mostly it was tramping on waste ground, places we’d have played battles and sieges as boys. Only Ryan still pretends to shoot guns now. The rest of us eye him uneasily. Lately his accustomed manic innocence has seemed rather desperate, rather unhinged. Ryan always was kind of childishly amoral. When we were little we thought it made him seem older, coarser, braver. But we’re not little any more. Ryan is this brittle, infantile being, brutalised in to uncomprehending kidness. Forever and ever amen.
Bang, bang, you’re dead, says Ryan. Fuck off, Ryan, says everybody else.
There’s a row of houses scheduled for demolition. Council are going to build flat blocks there, new ones, nicer than the place Frankie and ‘Chelle live. Supposedly. We go in there, because we can drink in there, because nobody comes there and it’s out of the wind. The buildings have no roofs. It’s like Mickey and Quinn Lenahan been working overtime, transferring the house, one slate at a time in to the sky. I lie on my back looking up, thinking. It was somewhere along here, they were dossing, said Joe, it used to be a B&B and then it was a squat or something.
What would you say to them if you found ‘em? I ask him. Don’t know, say Joe, probably nothing, just want to see, you know?
See what?
Don’t know.
Don’t know much, do you?
Look, you know what I mean. Come on.
And I suppose I do know what he means. We look around all the weird roofless houses, and the gutted shells of squats. We’ve gone a long way off the estate and I want to go back. Ryan goes to take a piss on some sheets of corrugated iron stacked against a once load bearing wall. He stands there a long time, looking down at the ground at something. Gradually, cautiously, we all make our way over to stand beside him.
What you got there, Ryan? Ryan nods his head and we all look down to where something protrudes from beneath the metal.
Fifteen minutes must have passed. We continue to observe the perfect inertia of the human foot, it’s cheap innocuous trainer and frayed tracksuit bottom, forming a weird intersection between thistle and scrap and piss. Well, says Joe, at long last, I guess we found Pikey.
…
Nobody moved the stacked sheets aside, nobody wanted to know. Nobody asked the obvious question: if that’s Pikey, then where’s his brother? There was no kind of answer we would have liked. We looked at each other for a bit and decided it was too cold, and that we’d walk back.
Sunny and me, we come up on The Parade alone. We have our heads down. We are thinking it is a rotten and dishonest world, vicious and deliberately deaf. Neither of us say anything, but as I go to break for home he catches hold of my wrist and we stare for a full minute, silently, gapingly, emptily upwards. One day, he says, we’ll just walk away from here. Aye, one day, I say.
But not today.
------
The human race, the only race I know where everybody loses.
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we are not amused
