Come on, we’ll go back to the caravan.
No, said the boy.
We’ll make a nice cup of tea.
I don’t want tea.
Come on back. We’ll dump loads of sugar in it and rot our teeth to hell and sing songs into the evening. Are you on? Let’s go back. Please.
Will he die, Mammy?
Of course he won’t, she said.
How do you know?
I don’t, she replied softly.
There’s four already dead, he said.
Yes, I know.
The boy stared a moment beyond her shoulder and then bit his lip and walked away and she watched him go, his shirt moiling around him.
The sea wind blew bitter and she felt it cold at the edges of her eyes and she followed his movement, beyond the pier and up the far hillside, becoming just a small speck of white in the distance.
The boy wandered in a stupor for an hour, found himself by a barbed-wire fence. Behind the fence some sheep were daubed haphazardly with red. He flung stones at the sheep and when they scattered he twanged the barbed wire and wondered if the reverberation would connect with all other pieces of barbed wire, that the sound might carry, from fence post to fence post, all the way north to a squat gray building topped with razor wire.
Bastards, he shouted.
Later in the day, when he came back down to the town, the headline stared at the boy from the newsstands. The newspaper sported a bright purple banner but no photograph and it wasn’t even the biggest headline, but he bought a copy anyway, tore out the front page, put it in his jeans pocket. He felt as if he were carrying his uncle at his hip, that he could stay alive in there and emerge when all of this was over.
The boy hopped the railing along the beach and landed soft on the sand.
In the rocks near the pier he lit a fire with the rest of the newspaper. He warmed his hands as the pages burned and curled. The smoke made his eyes water. He read through the article five times and was surprised to learn that his uncle was just twenty-five years old. He was one of four prisoners on the strike—already, for each man dead another had replaced him and the boy found it strange that the living were stepping into the bodies of the gone. The dying, he thought, could go on forever. A phrase from the newspaper rattled around in the boy’s head: intent to kill. He wondered what it meant. He let it roll beneath his tongue and he thought to himself that it sounded like the title of a film he had seen once on television. For a second the boy allowed his uncle to appear on a movie poster. An explosion lit the side of his face and a black helicopter cut the air. Beneath his uncle’s chin soldiers were running scared. They were moving out of the poster and his uncle’s eyes followed them.
The boy had never met his uncle—his mother never visited the prison—but he’d seen photos, and in those images the face was hard and angular with shocking blue eyes, the hair curled, the eyebrows tufted, a scar running a line of outrage across the bottom of his nose.
This was the face the boy would carry with him, even though he knew it had since become bearded, the hair longer and dirty and ringleted, that before the hunger strike his uncle had worn a blanket like many of the other men, that he had once lived in a cell where they smeared their own shit on the wall in protest. There had been a picture smuggled out of the H-blocks when the dirty protest was on—a prisoner in a cell, by a window, wrapped in a dark blanket, with shit swirled in patterns on the wall behind his head. The boy wondered how anyone could live like that, shit on the walls and a floor full of piss. The men had their cells sprayed down by prison guards once a week and sometimes their bedding was so soaked they got pneumonia. When the protest failed they cleaned their cells and opted for hunger instead.
The boy poked through the ashes of the fire and tucked the article into his pocket.
There was a slowness in his walk until he reached the far hillside overlooking the pier and then he ran up the slope, making his own path through the grasses and heather.
He kicked at the heather with violence and swung his arms through the air and spat at the sky and then he lay down at the top of the hill and shoved his face into the grass. In the grass he found his uncle’s face once more, and it was hard and worn and looked like it belonged in a catechism. The beard went all the way to his chest. The skin had already begun to stretch across the cheekbones with this morning’s first refusal of food. His eyes seemed larger for the fact of his hunger. When the boy turned and looked up to the sky again he thought that if there really was a God he didn’t like Him, he could never like Him.
He cursed aloud and his shout went out over the water—the horizon was already stained with sunset—and the water took the shout and swallowed it. He tried again. Fuck you, God.
A flock of birds rose up and over him with thin calls and he put his face to the earth once more, cursing his father, gone in an accident years ago, and now his father’s brother going too.
The boy thought to himself that the uncle he didn’t know was all the uncle he’d ever know.
* * *
OUTSIDE THE CHEMIST’S there was an old-style weighing machine and he stood upon it, but he didn’t have a tenpenny piece so the needle didn’t waver.
He punched the glass, then put his mouth to the slot where the money should go, and he reamed up a glob of phlegm and let it go. A man in the shop, working late, looked up from a small pile of pills on the counter and saw the young boy with his mouth to the machine.
The boy lifted his head suddenly, then lowered his eyes and stepped down off the weighing scales. The phlegm hung oblong from the coin slot.
He began running up the road and he could still taste the metallic residue of the coin slot on his lips. The pharmacist came to the door of the shop and watched the boy, who was spitting now on the side windows of cars as he went, stopping just once to look over his shoulder. The boy saw the pharmacist shaking his head as he went back inside, the shop bell ringing behind him. The boy gave him two fingers, then turned and ran toward the headland, where a single light burned against a window.
* * *
IN THE HIGH and lonely caravan he was exhausted by his anger and he allowed his mother to hold him in the doorway. She placed her hand on the back of his neck and there was a faint smell of sweat and perfume to her. He broke the hug and they sat silently in near darkness until she began to teach him how to play chess. At first he refused the game, but she persisted in showing him the patterns the pieces could make, the hop of the pawn, the bishop’s shift sideways, the strange interchange between king and castle, the large vocabulary of the queen. He began to remember the rules and he reached for the pieces, shifting them quickly, without thought. She allowed him some vagabond moves and he slowly relaxed, his shoulders losing their tenseness. He was amazed at the way the knight moved, how brazen and complicated it was. He tried its permutations and developed an affinity for the form—the solid breathing body of a horse and yet something human too. He searched for a word he had learned in school, centaur, and held the word in his mouth.
For a long time he protected both knights, and he sat in a huff when his mother took one of them with her bishop.
A clock ticked and the generator hummed while the boy held the pout.
She rose suddenly and went to the fridge and brought out the playing piece that he had made from bread. It had hardened in the fridge and it was still red from the tomato sauce.
Here’s your knight, she said.
He laughed and took it and bit a little corner of the ear and immediately felt sorry that he had marred it. The bread tasted stale in his mouth and he tongued it into the palm of his hand and remolded it to the knight. After he put the knight down on the board, he noticed that she never threatened the piece. He began to put it in situations to test her, but his mother just smiled at him and avoided it. When the board was almost depleted she suddenly gathered all the chessmen and rearranged them, careful not to smush the shaped bread with her fingers.
The boy picked up his knight. It was mo
re pliable now that it was long out of the fridge and he had to continually wet the small piece he had bitten.
She started a new game but he coughed hard.
Why won’t you talk about it? he said.
I’d rather not.
That’s stupid. It’s stupid here. I hate it.
His mother sighed and twisted a lock of her hair around her finger. Her hair was extraordinarily black against the whiteness of her hands.
What does political status mean anyway?
It means they say it’s a war. That they’re prisoners of war and they should be treated like prisoners of war. If it’s not a war then they’re just criminals.
Of course it’s a war. Jesus.
Thatcher says it’s not, so they can’t get political status.
Tin-knickers?
She chuckled. Tin-knickers, aye.
He noticed that she spoke with her old northern accent and he was happy. He put the chess piece to his nose and smelled it, the tomato sauce it had been dipped into.
I’m going to write him a letter, said the boy.
He can’t get letters.
Why not?
It’s one of their rules.
I don’t care about their rules, said the boy. I’m going to write him a letter and send it to Grandma and she’ll smuggle it in for me.
And what’ll you say?
I’m going to tell him how to make a chess set.
Your uncle would like that, she said.
He could use all the bread they give him.
Yes.
He could dunk it in water.
Yes he could.
He’d have lots of time. He could shape them.
He could, yeah.
She sat forward in her seat and reached across and touched his face, stroking it very tenderly with her fingers. At the touch he immediately withdrew and her hand hovered in midair and he could see that she had been biting her nails.
That’s not good, he said. You won’t be able to play the guitar.
Oh, she said.
She was surprised by his comment and how old he sounded, and she withdrew her hand and began once again to wrap her hair around her fingers.
Are you going to get a gig?
What’s that? she asked, distracted.
Are you going to get a gig in the pub?
I’ll maybe ask tomorrow.
Are we really going to stay here?
For a while anyway, maybe.
I’m sick of beans on toast.
She rolled her eyes with great exaggeration and said: It’s stupid here.
He stared at her, confused, and then she jostled him on the shoulder and they both smiled.
Come on, she said, let’s play another.
The boy repositioned the chessmen. His mother showed him how to play a fool’s mate and after three turns he was able to stop it, using the knight that moved like a strange and unassailable drop of blood on the board. As the game went on it was still the only piece she didn’t take. He learned how to protect pawns; at what time to switch the castle and the king; how to form a small army in front of his most powerful pieces; how to keep his finger on the chessman until he had made up his mind.
Does he play chess?
I don’t know.
I could send him letters about it.
Yes, she said, with great sadness.
Would Grandma get them to him?
We’ll have to see.
A clock ticked with painful deliberation on a small shelf above the cooker, and it seemed to the boy that each tick got louder as the night went on.
I bet he’s great at chess.
Maybe he is, she said.
Did he play against Daddy?
When they were young maybe.
Who won?
I’m not so sure, love.
Why not?
Oh, Kevin, she said.
I’m just asking.
His mother allowed him to win a game and he was angry at the ease of it. She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke over his head and he craved one. When she went to put the chess set away he reached for the ashtray and took a quick pull and blew the smoke down between his knees. He fanned the air so she wouldn’t see and then he rose from the table and carefully wrapped his red knight in a piece of aluminum foil from her cigarette pack. He put the knight at the back of the fridge where it was coldest, took a milk bottle from the inside shelf, and pierced the gold metal lid with his finger. He put the bottle to his mouth and drank deep. His mother turned around and watched him as the boy wiped a sleeve across his mouth.
Hey there, she said.
What?
Give me a hug.
She came across and took his shoulders, but he curved himself away from her grip and stepped outside and he could hear her sighing behind him. She called his name but he didn’t turn and she went to the doorway of the caravan, watching him disappearing into the night, where a light drizzle fell. She shouted his name again.
He pulled his shirt over his head and moved farther away to a stone wall that ran like a bad suture toward the sea.
* * *
BACK HOME, there had been protests. Huge crowds lined up, carrying pictures, chanting as they made their way down the street. Once he had gone with his mother. She had held his hand, which was all right because he was still only twelve then. He could feel her nervousness and she kept her head down as she walked, watching her feet. A blue head scarf obscured most of her face. When she introduced herself to another woman she used her maiden name. The boy elbowed her. She leaned down and told him to shush or they would go right home. They moved along with the crowd, his mother sad and weary, talking to him about other marches in the sixties. They had been more hopeful, she said. There was trouble, sure, but it was a different sort of trouble, less menacing, more optimistic. She said the trouble nowadays tasted bitter.
Nobody even knows what a civil right is, she said, and her voice went high as if the past had just escaped her and she was surprised by its disappearance.
After a while, the boy didn’t listen to her, just walked along excitedly. He loved the sound of the voices around him and he carried himself with a sort of bravado. His arms swung by his side. On the ground he found a poster of the Free State with a balaclava painted on it so that the country itself seemed to have the face of a gunman. He picked the poster up and brandished it until the wind took it and it sailed back over the crowd. His mother lit her cigarettes anxiously. Down near the Diamond they heard the first rumors about petrol bombs being thrown farther on down side streets. The boy felt his fingers tingle generously at the thought of fire in the streets, but his mother grabbed his elbow and they immediately retreated home, with her dragging him so that the toes of his shoes were almost ripped by the pavement.
He had tried to dig his heels in and for the first time ever she had slapped him, lightly, on the cheek. They were standing outside a butcher’s shop. It had been burned down earlier that week and a couple of charred carcasses were still hanging on hooks. The boy stared over her shoulder at the meat that dangled in midair. Her light slap still stung his cheek and then he had begun to cry and they walked the streets together, her arm around his shoulder.
At home on Casement Row she locked the door, turned off the lights, and then she began to soak a duvet in the bath as she always did, just in case.
They sat in the darkness and listened to the sounds of the street.
He could tell a Saracen just by the way the wheels sounded against the tarmac. Or the direction of a helicopter by whichever windowpanes were rattling more, front or back. He picked at the stuffing that came from the arm of the couch and secretly spat the yellow sponge across the room. Boys his age were out there, firing stones. He had developed a specific scowl for his mother to see. It involved lifting the left side of his lip and scrunching up the side of his face. The scowl deepened as the riots went on, week after week.
There were all sorts of discussions on the radio as representatives of those on the blank
et protest began to talk about a hunger strike. Decriminalization, remission, segregation, intransigence, political status. The words spun around in the boy’s head.
He thought that God must have been a sly and complicated bastard to give people different words for normal things.
There was a statue of the blessed Saint Martin de Porres that they kept on the mantelpiece. His mother liked it, she joked, because it looked like Al Jolson. She took it down from the shelf when the hunger strike began and the boy had asked her why but she didn’t reply. He thought maybe it had something to do with music. She was singing in a bistro in the city center. When the riots were at their worst she would take him to the bistro and have him sit on a stool near the piano, where he did his homework. She sang from seven until ten. The restaurant was quiet and she bought him a lot of Cokes, sang love songs that had no politics to them. She had a beautiful voice and sometimes he thought it was made more beautiful by all the cigarettes she smoked. He would watch the customers as they whispered. They were conspiratorial. They didn’t talk loud or address each other by the clue of their first names. They hunched over their plates. It seemed to the boy that even the food was under siege.
At the end of the evening she always sang a song about ferrying her love over the ocean, but the sea was too wide and she could not swim over and neither did she have wings to fly.
He and his mother took a taxi home each evening and he would watch her in the kitchen, staring at the back door, a teacup shaking in her hand, cigarette smoke curling up from the butt placed on the edge of the saucer.
In her nightdress she would practice moving through the dark of the house, beginning in the kitchen, then along the hallway, her eyes closed, touching the welcome mat with her toes, reaching out to check the bolt on the door, turning around, climbing the stairs without holding the banisters, still blind so she would learn the whole landscape of the house, along the landing, and into the bathroom, where she would take the duvet out from the airing cupboard. And then she would kneel down by the bath to run the water, all the time her eyes still shut tight, both taps fully opened. She would plunge the duvet into the water and finally she would carry the dripping mass down the stairs and lay it against the bottom of the door in case the street outside went up in flames.