'I'm sure he'll let you for a fiver.'
I drank up and got out. Outside the Bolshevik, the kid was picking up his papers again. Reasonably, the landlord had thrown him out for getting hit in his bar and the papers had spilled. I helped him.
'They're pretty fucked, son. Nobody will buy them now. I'm sorry.'
`Bollocks,' he replied.
'What?'
'Forget it.'
A window rapped behind us. I looked round. Ronnie Clay and his pals were hooting and jeering at us, obscenely pantomiming a variety of sexual acts. Ronnie was back to normal, I was glad to see. I didn't want to have to start liking him.
`Let's move on,' I said to the kid.
We walked on, no doubt confirming the delighted predictions of my workmates.
`Hey, kid, what's your name?'
He skipped further away from me, his dirty coat flapping. `You're not going to fruit me up, are you? You're going to try and fuck my bum, you dirty poof. Help!' he started shouting to passers-by. `Help. I'm being raped. Help!P
`Jesus, kid. Stop it.You're safe.'
'Help, help! Rape!'
To my panic and horror several concerned citizens looked like they were thinking of stopping and rescuing the poor child, sorting me out into the bargain.
`Fuck up, you little shit,' I hissed. `I wouldn't fuck you with somebody else's dick.'
The kid stopped abruptly. The same calculating and memorizing expression spread over his face. Having stored the phrase, he decided he liked it, and thus he believed me.
`Roche,' he said.
`What?'
`My name. Roche.You asked me my name.'
We walked on through Cornmarket. The passers-by walked on, evidently concluding that he was my younger brother or that he had decided it was OK if I raped him. Either way it wasn't their problem and they moved on.
Needless to say, I wasn't so keen on his company now but I felt I had to keep the conversation going until our way could part. `Do you often get smacked like that?'
`Aye sometimes.' He stiffened and drew himself to his full half-height. `Usually, I smack the fuckers right back.!
`You didn't just now'
'Aye, well, there were six or seven of you. Sometimes I just piss in their beer when they're not looking. I can piss at will. It's handy.'
'What age are you?'
'Fifteen.'
I looked at his tiny, wizened face and his little boy's physique.
'Aye, right,' I said.
'OK, fourteen.'
I laughed.
'Thirteen?'
'If you don't know, kid, who gives a shit?'
'Twelve'
'Why aren't you at school?'
'It's half past five, you dumb fuck. What school did you go to?'
I began to think that Billy had had the right technique for dealing with this youngster. I glared.
'Ah, don't be so fucking humpy. It was a stupid question,' he chided.
'A great man once said there's no such thing as a stupid question'
'He didn't have a lot of conversations with you, then.'
'Watch your lip'
'Why, what's it doing? Tricks?'
I gave up.
'Stop,' he screamed at me.
I froze. He bent down and picked up a coin from almost underneath my foot.
'Fifty p,' he said.'Magic'
I walked on. He tripped along beside me.
'Do you ever think about anything other than money?'
'I'm a businessman. I've got to get along.'
'You remind me of a friend of mine.' I laughed.
'What's his name?'
'Chuckie'
'Is he a fat ugly character with a big fuck-off car?'
`Yeah.You know him?'
`I copped a fiver for looking after his motor a few days ago.'
`Where was this?'
`Up the Falls.'
`Where?' I asked, surprised.
`Falls Road, dimwit.!
Chuckle had a lot of Catholic friends but I couldn't see him being too comfortable in that most unUnionist heartland. But then I was beginning to understand that Chuckle's greed was ecumenical. He would go anywhere to make money.
'What's the big deal?' asked my young companion, `Is he a Prod? I knew he was a Prod.!
'How?'
`He didn't have any rhythm.'
`I presume you do have rhythm, then.!
`Aye, don't you?'
'Only intermittently.,
`Speak English, you fancy bastard,' said Roche huffily. He seemed sensitive to words in a variety of ways, this prodigy.
'Now who's being humpy?' I chided.
`Aye, well, don't use stupid fucking words you don't even know yourself.'
I let that go and we walked on in silence. I didn't know what delicate emotional corns I had trodden on with this child but I was growing less interested. Near the City Hall I stopped at a right turn. `Listen, kid, I don't know where you're going but I'm going up this way. I'll see you around!
I was just moving off when the kid put an indescribably begrimed hand on my sleeve and stopped me. `Hold on,' he said. `Have you been to college?'
'Yeah'
He looked hard at me for a minute. `C'mere'
He pulled me up a side-street. Briefly, I began to consider the possibility that he shared Ronnie Clay's suspicions about me and was going to offer me a cut-price blowjob or something. The world was certainly getting more complicated that way.
We pulled up at the blankish wall of a multi-storey car park. He pointed at it.
'What's that?' he asked.
`A wallT
'You're not funny,' he snapped.
'So people say.'
`What's that?' He pointed to a small clutch of graffiti four feet up the wall (optimum reading height for the stunted little fucker). It was small and closely written. I moved nearer.
OTG, I read. OTG.
`What does that mean?' asked Roche.
'Listen, kid, I don't know. Nobody seems to know. I've asked around. It's been in the papers.'
`Read out the letters, you tossbag.'
'Read them out yourself, you cheeky little shit'
He stared hard at me.
Ah, right, that's it, I thought. He can't read. `OTG,' I said - me and my bleeding heart.
'Again'
'O-T-G. Can you
'I can read fine, fuckface'
I turned on my heel and walked on. He had charm, sure, but it was so obscure. Before I got to the end of the street I heard him call after me. I stopped and turned round.
He stood amidst a clutch of homegoing office girls. 'Hey, does your dick reach your arse?' he shouted thinly in the distance.
Not yet, I thought, not yet.
By the time I'd walked half-way home, the city was weary from all its work. Belfast had quickened and slowed. The traffic was quieter now It was six o'clock. The homebound workers were now all home and the streets had thinned of people. Though bright, the light had softened. The sky was wispy and vague, a moderate effort.The sky looked distinctly underwritten up there.
I crossed Shaftesbury Square. Though early, the Lavery's overspill was already out on the street. Groups of unusually dirty youths lounged on the pavement with beer glasses in their hands. As I passed the bar, stepping over their outstretched legs, a warm, urinous waft hung in the air outside the doorway. I hated Lavery's. It had to be the dirtiest, most crowded, least likeable bar in Western Europe. Consequently, it was enormously popular. Very Belfast. Einstein got it wrong. The Theory of Relativity didn't apply to Lavery's. Lavery's time was different time. You went into Lavery's one night at the age of eighteen and you stumbled out, pissed, to find you were in your thirties already. People drank their lives away there. Lavery's was for failures. I was working as a tile layer and I couldn't get into Lavery's because I was too successful.
I walked up the Lisburn Road and passed the Anabaptist double-duckers as we called South Belfast Gospel Hall, the Windsor Tabernacle, the Elim Penteco
stal, the Methodist Mission, the Presbyterian Presbytery, and the Unitarian Church of Protestant Mnemonists or something like that. At the door of all the adjacent rectories, broken pastors stood, staring at me with grim expressions. To the old law, they held true. You crap on my grandfather, you crap on me. I found these guys infinitely more frightening than Crab, Hally or Ronnie Clay. I tried not to look like a Catholic. I tightened my Bible belt. I thought they were convinced.
I crossed the junction of Elmwood Avenue and glanced down its treeful length. The Bolshevik fiasco and the business with the crazy kid had depressed me unaccountably. It didn't feel good to be going home on this blue evening. I didn't want to face my empty flat. I didn't want to face my empty evening.
Home, I showered, I ignored my cat, I put on my suit and I headed down to the supermarket. The girl who liked me might be there and I could think of nothing better. I knew I was sad, buying groceries I didn't need just to meet some adolescent girl whom I wouldn't even chat up. I was sad but I was happy that way.
I bought another load of mushrooms. I couldn't think of anything else. The girl who liked me wasn't there. I fell in love anyway. I was served by a spotty seventeen-year-old boy with geeky red hair and amazing, award-winning acne. It was obviously his first week at the job. He couldn't get anything right. He just mumbled inaudibly and blushed collar upwards. He blushed at the till, he blushed at the bananas, the baguettes and the fromage frais. He blushed infinitely more than my regular girl. I don't think he was blushing because of any passion for me. When he turned his red head I saw the hearing aid nestling behind his ear, unhidden by his hair. This kid just blushed because he thought he was generally a crap idea, a big mistake. It made me want to kiss his lumpy neck. It made me want to die of love.
When I got back, Chuckie had called (Slat had called too, Amnesty had called again and Crab and Hally continued their old guff but I ignored them all). I called Chuckie back. He and the rest of the boys were going to some kind of gathering in one of the new yuppie bars on the Dublin Road. I was too bored and lonely to say no.
I got my cat and forced him to sit on my knee while I watched the old folks in the two houses opposite me. I'd often seen these two playing out their comedy. They didn't seem to talk to each other but they always did the same things at the same times. He was Asian, obviously a widower, a soft-bellied old guy often being visited by various clutches of children and grandchildren. She was true Ulster intemperate stock, a bluehaired old dear often dressed in a miraculous pair of pink seminylon stretch slacks (no visitors). That evening they were out gardening in their little patches of green out front. They bent over their shrubs, their heads nearly touching, tugging at a weed bush that bordered both their little gardens. I sometimes suspected they didn't get on but I had to say that, that evening, the races sure seemed united in their mutual hatred of weeds. It was beautiful.
When I got to the bar where I was meeting the boys, I was horrified. There was a sign over the door.
`An Evening of Irish Poetry Tonight 8 p.m.,' it said.
`Oh, fuck,' I replied.
Obviously there were no bouncers that night. What hordes would they be fighting off? I stood on the doorstep and pondered. Could any solitude be worse than this? I was amazed that Chuckie would attend such a gathering. I mean, Slat, Septic and the rest of us were basically yobbish, vulgar and sad but we could claim some form of brush with education, with literature. Chuckie, however, was moronically ill-informed. I suspected Max's hand in this.
Inside, I found that my suspicions were correct and I also found, to my meagre delight, that Aoirghe was with them. I walked up to them. I patted Chuckie's arm, said hello to Max and was greeting the fearsome Aoirghe when I unfortunately coughed.
Her eyes narrowed. `Are you taking the piss again?'
`Jesus!' I choked. `I just coughed. Gimme a break.'
Her eyes narrowed more (how could she see anything like that?). `Yeah, and I got your message. Thanks very much, it was charming' She hissed the last word.
I blushed and coughed again. `Whoops, sorry. Sorry about the message. I was pissed about getting nosy calls from Amnesty.'
She turned to Max and started some chat with her. I shrugged my shoulders at Chuckie, smiled amiably at him and grabbed him viciously by the balls.
`Ow.,
'I don't fucking believe it, Chuckie. How come you didn't tell me she was going to be here?' I gave his pebbles another twist. `Hmm?'
`Fuck, Jake. Let go. It wasn't my fault.'
I released him.
Slat, Septic and Donal arrived. We stood in a bunch waiting for the wimp who couldn't stand the pressure of resisting buying the first round.
'Look,' Chuckie whispered to me, 'she's just staying for the poetry. After that, she's fucking off with one of the poets.'
My relief was tempered with a qualm of jealousy. That moment scared me badly. I shook my head and cleared my mind. I held my hand in front of my face and counted my fingers. I was OK.
'What's wrong with you?' asked Chuckie.
`Never mind that. What the fuck are you doing at a poetry reading?'
Chuckie looked slightly miffed at my surprise. Septic muffled a laugh.'It was Aoirghe's idea. One of the guys reading is a councillor for just Us. He wrote a book when he was in the Maze.'
'Oh, great.'
`One of them's famous,' said Chuckie consolingly. `Shauny ... Shinny ... Shamie ...'
'Sugar Ray Leonard?' suggested Septic.
'Chuckle struggled on manfully, `Shilly . . .
'Shague Ghinthoss,' shouted Max.
`Even better,' I complained.
Shague Ghinthoss was an inappropriately famous poet who looked like Santa Claus and wrote about frogs, hedges and long-handled spades. He was a vaguely anti-English Catholic from Tyrone but the English loved him.They had a real appetite for hearing what a bunch of fuckers they were. I liked that about the English.
Max sloped over with a book. Aoirghe trailed along reluctantly behind her. Max smiled. `It's the launch of this new book. It's supposed to be very good' She passed it to me.
'According to whom?' I asked grammatically.
Chuckie coughed and old Aoirghe looked ready to tell me. I dipped into the book to avoid her eye.
'Of course,' she put in acidly, 'I wouldn't expect you to be sympathetic to any writers belonging to the Movement but even you couldn't deny Shague Ghinthoss's reputation.'
`Is that right?'
'There's a beautiful one of his on the first page,' said Max brightly.'It was good of a writer of his repute to endorse a book like this, don't you think?'
`I bet I can recite it without reading it.'
Chuckie looked impressed at satire passed him by. Aoirghe bristled. I passed the book to Deasely, open at the first page. Donal adopted a pedagogical expression.
I cleared my throat.
I stopped. There was no applause. Deasely looked at me severely. He tutted. `You left out the fifth blah, Jackson. Go to the back of the class and buy me a beer.'
He chucked the book back to Aoirghe. She looked like she was pissing blood.'Jesus, Jackson.Your friends are near as bad as you. Do you boys go to asshole support groups at weekends?'
It was a bad, bad evening. Before the reading started we were both to a number of Aoirghe's friends and associates. To do her justice, they weren't all extremist republicans. There was a man who taught Television-watching Skills at the University of Ulster. There was an old college chum of hers, a man with a Theory of everything. He had a Theory of Poetry. He had a Theory of Parties. A Theory of History. A Theory of Haircuts. He told me all of them. He did not include a Theory of How Not To Be Boring.
Then the reading commenced. We stood still while a series of twats in poetic clothes (a varying costume, always expressing equal measures of nonconformity, sensitivity and sexual menace) drivelled on about the flowers, the birds, the hedges, the berries, the spades, the earth, the sky and the sea. Whatever you said about Shague Ghinthoss's reputation, he defini
tely had one. All these tossers bore his mark. Unlike Ghinthoss, none of these boys was from the country. They were all pale-faced city boys and most obviously had never seen any of the hedges, berries or spades about which they wrote so passionately.
It was clear, in addition, that these were all nationalist hedges, republican berries, unProtestant flowers and extremely Irish spades.These subtleties were dashed, however, when the penultimate poet did his stuff. This unprepossessing john, we were told, had had his work translated from the original Gaelic into Russian but not into English. He was to read one of his poems in Irish and some guy would translate into English. (I should point out that I had seen this poet at the bar, showing a fine grasp of idiomatic English when he was trying to chat up one of the bar admittedly, he seemed to have some difficulty in understanding the phrase, `Fuck off, you ugly twat.')
This man read, haltingly but confidently, a poem entitled `Poem to a British Soldier About to Die'. It was hard enough to follow the text in detail, what with the simultaneous translation and the fact that it was crap, but the sentiments were apparent enough. The poem told the young British soldier (about to die) why he was about to die, why it was his fault, how it had been his fault for eight hundred years and would probably be his fault for another eight hundred, why the man who was going to shoot him was a fine Irishman who loved his children and never beat his wife and believed firmly in democracy and freedom for all, regardless of race or creed, and why such beliefs gave him no option but to murder the young British soldier (about to die).
There was silence after he finished. I waited for the boos and catcalls. How foolish. It wasn't until a few seconds into the cheers and whoops that I realized that everybody loved it. Weren't there any Protestants here? I looked over at Chuckie but he was blithe. He hadn't even been listening, a condition he shared with many of his faithmates.
The fat poet milked the applause. Some of the other scribes joined him on the podium. The rapture sounded as though it would never end. These culture vultures were frenzied in their acclaim. After a time the hubbub died down. The chubby humanist waited for total silence, then leaned close to the microphone.