What music did my uncle like?
I’m sure he liked the same things, she said, and then she hesitated a moment, looked at the boy, and added: I’m sure your uncle had a radio too.
Like this one?
Perhaps, who knows.
With an aerial and all?
Possibly. Maybe he listened to the same songs your daddy did. Brown Sugar. Honky-Tonk Woman. They were great days for music, you know.
Aye. Thanks, Mammy.
Do you like it?
I do, aye. It’s dead on. I love it.
It’s so you won’t get lonely up here.
He turned the dial up and down, got mostly faint signals, except for one Gaelic radio station that came in loud and foreign.
He flicked his hair and then said: Mammy?
What, love?
I still want to wear a black armband, though.
She shook her head. You’d give the Pope heart problems, she said.
A thought occurred to him, and just as she stepped outside he asked her what was the count of his uncle’s blood pressure.
I’ve no idea. Why would I know that?
Just curious.
You’re a strange lad sometimes.
What’s normal blood pressure?
Much too high when you’re around. She laughed.
Seriously, Mammy.
One hundred and twenty over seventy, I think.
He imagined the way a line would slash between both figures.
She looked at her lipstick in the mirror once more: Enjoy your radio, she said. I’ll be home by midnight. Don’t forget to lock the door.
As she went away from the caravan he noticed she was wearing very tight pants. Her guitar case swung beside her. She had stickers from all over the country on the case, and he often thought it looked as if she was carrying an atlas: Dublin, Belfast, Limerick, Cork plastered on the side. Her leather jacket too looked like it had been on a long journey. Years ago, she and his father had gone around the country in a Bedford van with three or four other musicians. His father had been the roadie and he had constructed special wooden platforms for the speakers to sit on. But the days of show bands were long over, and his father was years dead, killed in a traffic accident in Kildare when his car had skidded out of control after blowing a right front tire. The boy had been seven then. He tried to recall the funeral but couldn’t; all that appeared were some shadowy figures with a box on their shoulders that he had later leaned across and kissed before it went into the back of the hearse.
He hugged the radio to himself and watched his mother go.
She was very careful to step to the side of the muddy path that twisted and curved away from the headland. Her feet left prints where she walked and the grass bent back as if it held the memory of her and all the places she had been.
When she was fully out of sight, the boy went to his duffel bag and took out an old black T-shirt. He tore a strip and fastened it high on his arm and it could have been a thick banded tattoo. It felt tight when he moved his arm into a muscle and he watched his reflection in the window for a moment.
You’re looking well, man.
Ach, I’m all right.
You’re right fit.
I am, aye.
You could kick the shite out of someone.
I could, aye.
A good beating. You’re the man for it. That’s for sure.
I am indeed.
He put the radio to his ear again and moved around the caravan within the space of his cell. To walk the perimeter took him just seven steps. He noticed that the reception was best at the window that looked out to sea and he stayed there, listening to a very dim signal from far away, a David Bowie number that he sang along with. There were radios in the prison, he had heard, small crystal sets. The parts were smuggled in and the prisoners tucked them away, hid them in their beards, their armpits, the crook of their elbows, even their arses. They reassembled them in their cells, and sometimes the best reception came when they put the crystal parts in their mouths and leaned close to the windows, so that their whole bodies became the news of what was happening to them.
The boy extended the aerial of his radio. He put it to his mouth. It made no difference to the sound.
He stood looking out to sea, the Bowie number fading now. The sun went very fast when it touched the horizon. The colors in the sky bled away. It became shadowy. Darkness doesn’t fall, he thought as he swayed to the radio, it rises up from the bottom of the sea and begins to breathe around us.
* * *
TWISTING IN HIS SLEEP, he turned his face to the wall in shame when she brought her sleeping bag over to his bed and nudged in beside him, saying she had heard him thrashing. She smelled of the bar—cigarette smoke in her hair and her voice hoarse from singing—and the boy wondered if she had enjoyed herself, and he hoped not, he couldn’t bear the thought of her laughing.
He could feel the blood racing through the veins in his arm and furtively he loosened the tight strip of black cloth. She zipped herself into her own bag and touched his hair and she said: Everything will be all right.
The boy pushed himself in against the wall and bit his tongue.
It’s a nice little pub, she said. Lots of tourists. They put a tip jar out for me and I made a few bob. It was one of those old jars like what you used to get bonbons in. I put a pound in the bottom first to make sure everyone put in paper money and nearly everyone did. Isn’t that funny? We’re going to like it here eventually, wait’ll you see.
Did you hear anything more?
I caught the phone ringing earlier by the pier and it was your grandma calling us.
When are we going to get a real phone?
Oh, one of these days.
What did she say?
She said she loves you.
That’s what she always says.
She said she wants for you to be strong.
Strong, he said, his voice breaking high and then deep, and he wondered to himself if he was two different people within just one word, both a boy and a man.
If you’re on hunger strike, he asked, does your blood pressure go up or down?
You ask the strangest questions.
Well, he said. Up or down?
I’ve no idea, replied his mother. I imagine both the numbers fluctuate. Why d’you ask?
Ach, no reason really.
You’re a mystery.
A good mystery?
Yes, a good mystery, she laughed.
I don’t want to be a mystery.
Well then you’re not.
Ach, Mammy, he said, and he turned himself to the wall.
He heard her body swish and move within the sleeping bag, trying to get comfortable. He was surprised when he found himself awake in the morning, alarmed that he had managed to fall asleep, his mother beside him, gently wheezing.
* * *
ON THE BEACH there stood a pole. A red-and-white life preserver ring hung from it. He went there late in the evening while his mother was gone, singing in the pub.
The beach was deserted. Windblown litter moved along the sand. A bright light burned in the house of the old kayaking couple, and the boy imagined that it was the safe house. He waved to his comrades and took to firing stones at the beach pole. At first he missed with most of his shots, but more and more the stones began to make small dents in the wood. He developed rhythms of firing and the pole became a soldier in riot gear. The life-preserver ring was his shield. The soldier had a baby face and spoke with a London accent. The boy stood back and threw a rock, which hit the eyes of the pole, and the soldier squealed. Some blood came from the eyebrow and the boy danced and spun in the sand and executed a perfect kung-fu kick in the air. He fired another stone, aiming this time at the neck. The boy had heard once that this is where military gear was most exposed.
In the house back north he had never been allowed out at night, but now he began his own riot on the sand.
Fuck you, he shouted.
The soldi
er crouched down at the knee but still the rock caught him and sent him reeling backward as sirens wailed and Molotov cocktails were carried in from the sea. The boy tore off his T-shirt and wrapped it around his face to act as a sort of balaclava. He ran forward and spat at the pole, and when he turned the soldier tried to hit him from behind, but the boy ducked with perfect timing. He swung around and kicked the soldier in the face and blood erupted from his nose.
You’d try it, would you? Come on. Get up. Come on.
In the distance he heard the familiar drone of Saracens. He went and put his thumb to the neck of the soldier from London. He said: Call your boys off or I’ll kill you. He pressed his finger harder into the neck. The soldier nodded meekly and the vehicles retreated.
He began to comb the beach for stones that fitted his hand, and he developed a tremendous accuracy with the rocks, cutting the air smoothly.
The tide was low and he took up different positions on the beach, hammering the stones against the pole, which became three soldiers, all standing in one another’s shadows. He dodged their rubber bullets and he taunted them from the rooftops.
Try me, youse fuckers.
At the end of his evening’s rioting, he walked up to the pole and smiled and told the soldiers that a man had to do what a man had to do. They were nothing but stupid wankers, he said, didn’t they know that? The soldiers whimpered in their incredible pain and one of them burned slowly from the feet up. The boy spat down and extinguished the fire and, with great humanity, allowed the soldier to live.
* * *
ONE NIGHT HE STAYED by the sea until almost midnight, when he saw his mother walking back down from the pub, carrying her guitar, and her shadow disturbed the globes of lamplight and then the darkness took her.
She was taking the long road, so the boy ran the short path up the hillside and was at the caravan before her.
His mother did not bring her sleeping bag over to lie beside him this time, but she came to his bed, kissed his hair, told him she loved him, took him in her arms and he was embarrassed by the weight of her hug. He wanted there to be a smell of drink on her, or some such violation, so he could pull away, but there wasn’t.
It was the twenty-first day and she told him his uncle had lost seventeen pounds and that the food was still kept at the bottom of the bed like an equinox between life and death. He was still in the cell block but might soon be removed to the prison hospital. It was said that his spirits were good, although a cough was tearing at his chest and he found it hard to swallow water. He was reading books for the first time in years, poetry and a play by W. B. Yeats. When he opened the Perspex window of his cell he could hear the Orangemen outside the prison gates, playing their Lambeg drums, and it was like a slow torture to him.
She gave the boy a newspaper and he was surprised to remember that other people had lives too. An elderly woman had been killed by a soldier who thought the umbrella she carried was a rifle. A young father was shot coming out of a maternity ward. A tightrope walker from France had been set on fire as he tried to walk a rope between two housing estates in Derry—a Molotov cocktail had hit against his knee and he had continued walking as the flames rose high around him, dropping finally into the Foyle, his balance pole lost in the dark waters below him. On the streets, the rioting was worse than ever before: burning barricades, tear gas, rubber bullets, checkpoints.
There was still no news of a breakthrough, although some international committees were involved now too; everyone was clamoring for a solution, it had to come soon, it was inevitable.
His mother said she wondered sometimes if everyone had dropped small pieces of their sanity here and there, lost them so that the whole world had gone mad and things had fallen asunder.
How long was the longest hunger strike? he asked.
Sixty-something days.
And the shortest?
Oh, please, Kevin, let’s not talk anymore about it.
It was forty days or so, wasn’t it?
Just go to bed. Please, son. Please.
I’m just asking you.
And I’m just asking you, go on to bed, please.
He couldn’t sleep, rose from his bed at four, tiptoed across the caravan, stole eighteen pounds from his mother’s handbag, and went down to the town, avoiding the graveyard. The streets were quiet and eerie. The stars swung in their sockets above him. Bats harried the streetlamps. He fired stones at each of the three traffic lights in town and smashed the amber glass of one, found himself sprinting through the streets with imaginary policemen following.
Dawn broke over the mountains and light gnawed the town into shape.
He walked along the coast road until he managed to hitch a lift in a farmer’s pickup truck. He sat sullen in the seat as the farmer talked about silage. The farmer said that the price of silage was in serious danger of bringing the government of Ireland to its knees. Silage was an issue they couldn’t ignore. Silage was what would get them votes in this part of the world. The farmer had a deep smell of drink to him. He crunched through the gears. Once he put his hand on the boy’s knee and said that in the north silage was a proper issue, even the Unionists were up in arms about it.
The boy sat on the edge of the seat and kept his hand on the door handle, just in case, until he was dropped off in the city center.
Thanks, he said to the farmer, and under his breath he muttered: Ye humpy cunt.
The city was in full throat. Tour buses negotiated corners. Cars careened around him. Music belched from record shops. On telegraph poles there hung signs that said: SUPPORT THE HUNGER STRIKERS! and from a balcony on Dominick Street black flags fluttered. The boy punched his fist in the air. Girls wore very tight jeans and he could see their nipples through the cloth of their T-shirts. You’ve got your high beams on, he whispered. He bent himself over at the waist to calm his erection. Down along by an archway he sang a little to a stray dog.
I’m going to get screwed and you’re not.
Diddly-di-idle-day.
You’re a dog and I’m a man.
Diddly-di-idle-day.
At the bus station he bought a ticket and played video games until he heard the bus announced over the tannoy. He boarded with a swagger, still singing his song.
When the bus driver mentioned over the microphone about a connection to Derry City from Donegal, the boy punched his fist in the air once more and said: Brits Out, Me In.
Just half an hour into the trip two policemen boarded the bus. They told the driver they were looking for a dark-eyed runaway who has bought a ticket from Galway all the way to Northern Ireland. He slid down in the rear seat, but a policeman touched his shoulder, leaned down, and said his name aloud. He began to cry. Your mammy’s worried sick, they said. They were gentle as they guided him down along through the seats, other passengers staring at him.
He asked the police to turn on the squad card siren as they drove out from the city of Galway along the coast road, and they did, and he sat in the back seat, grinning, careful the policemen wouldn’t see him.
* * *
SHE STAYED HOME with him now in the evenings and she wrote songs in a notebook. He had taken a peek at the book and noticed that she had written his father’s name in curly letters with a love heart ringed around it, like a schoolgirl.
The songs were mostly about love and he noticed that she liked to use the word ocean a lot in the lyrics. An ocean of this and an ocean of that. Late each night the boy could hear her humming tunes to herself when she thought he was asleep.
He had promised her he would never run away again and so, toward the end of the week, she took the gig in the pub again. It was their only money, she told him, and she needed to be able to trust him. He swore once more that he would never leave no matter what. In the caravan he searched for stations on the radio, sang along to a few, got bored, found himself imagining beautiful women calling at the door. On his bed he masturbated and cleaned the mess up with tissues. He was careful that she wouldn’t notice the ti
ssues in the rubbish bin. After a few days he began sneaking down to the town, stood on the rim of gray kegs at the back of the bar, watching her. She sang with her eyes closed and her lips very close to the microphone, holding the guitar close, her foot tapping in time to the songs. The small crowd seemed to sit under hats of cigarette smoke and the boy willed them to give her a longer, louder round of applause, to drop pound notes instead of coins into the tip jar.
At the end of the song called Carrickfergus, a young man blew his mother a kiss and the boy thought he should go into the bar and kick the fucker’s teeth in, but instead he turned around and snarled at an old Alsatian that was tied up at the back of the pub. It kept its muzzle flat to the ground and, when the boy threw a rock, it rose surly and mistrustful and loped away to the farthest end of its chain.
* * *
THE WEATHER BRIGHTENED and there were games on the beach. An odd bouquet of swimming togs and bikinis. Two women with skirts held high trod the low depths of the water as skeins of light caught the breaking waves. A small child threw a colored ball in the air. The ice-cream truck played its tinny tunes. The caps of swimmers bobbed on the sea and, farther out, an oil tanker seemed nailed down on the horizon.
His mother had bought him a pair of black shorts but he had refused them and now he felt the stickiness at the back of his trousers. He longed to take them off, but he stood with nonchalance at the rear of the beach while inwardly he cursed himself. He rolled up the sleeves of his shirt and noticed the line below which his arms were sunburned.
The sun climbed and shortened his shadow. He wondered if he threw himself down onto the sand would his shadow stand and watch him?
On the beach he saw the blond girl. She wore a red swimsuit this time and held a small radio to her ear. He watched her for half an hour, motionless in the sand, then he walked near the water. He was acutely conscious of his shoes and finally he took them off and strung them together, tucking his socks inside, and put them around his neck. The sand sucked his toes. The girl didn’t look up at him at all. She had a forearm shading her eyes and he thought that if he had money he would buy her some sunglasses. He would walk up and give them to her and then sit beside her. They would get bronzed in silence. Soon they would kiss.