Extract from an unpublished novel set in Belfast during a series of sectarian killings in the 1980s. Written by J. G. Fitzgerald, whose career in finance involved periods working in Belfast and other parts of Northern Ireland during the 1970s and 1980s.
Two more bodies were discovered in the morning. One was a young man, lying face down on waste ground. He was described in a news report as a protestant, killed by a gunshot to the head. He was marked out for death because of his friends, his place of residence and his history, none of which he had chosen for himself. Another man was found slumped by a wall in the west of the city. His hands were tied behind his back. His throat was cut from one side to the other. His blood lay drying in a puddle around his head. His eyes stared upwards alarmingly. His mouth was open in a silent futile scream. He was said to be a catholic, murdered in retaliation for the murder of another man who was killed the night before in retaliation for the retaliatory murder of someone else.
There was nothing particularly unique about these discoveries. The absence of abrupt death for any length of time would have been a real surprise. The endless ritual of hatred was played out each night. Obscure men and women who lived unremarkable lives were killed at random while murderous tallymen kept the score on each side. People wondered who might be next. Few people really thought there was any reason why they should be next but every day they read and heard the evidence of random death. Fear was greatest in the poorer parts of Belfast where the killing was most intense.
Molly Devlin crossed the street not far from the coroner’s men as they collected their grim harvest but she didn’t notice them. She walked with her eyes fixed on the pavement, whispering anxiously to herself. She saw only memories and heard only her anxious prayers. She scarcely noticed two men rushing past her, carrying the headboard and foot of an old timber bed. They hurried around the corner and up the next street where they threw the bedstead onto a barricade of wooden debris.
The air was expectant with the smell of scorched wood and benzene. It had been the same weary pattern every day that week. It was the same on that midsummer week the year before and for years beyond counting as the followers of the Protestant Anglo-Saxon God and the Catholic Hibernian God spent their fury on each other.
It was the same pattern year after year. Young men gathered in the streets, eager for action.
They gathered bottles, filled them with petrol and cloth wicks. They placed neat lines of bottles at street corners, ready for action. Their faces were flushed with excitement as they learned their tribal history in sweat and fire. Their voices echoed through the streets like wolves howling in the wilderness.
Molly Devlin paid little attention to the chaos around her. It was wearily familiar. She had many desperate concerns of her own. It was six months two weeks and three days since her only surviving son, Tim, went out one morning, never to be seen again. Her life, already fragile, collapsed into a small circle of worry and hopelessness centred around her grandson, Martin, the last survivor of the family she had nurtured with tender care.
Each morning she took him, to the school where she brought her own children years before. It was a sorrowful task, reminding her of lost hopes. Years earlier she led Danny, Tim and the others along the same bleak streets, hand in hand, and left them at the same gate. She planted a kiss on his warm cheek and watched him trudge reluctantly into school and then retreated quickly, hoping to avoid anyone seeing her arrayed in all the signs of poverty, tattered shoes, the coat frayed at collar, cuff and hem, the old scarf washed so many times it was hard to know what colour it was, the old handbag with a strap tied with a safety pin. She turned into the church and crossed herself as she passed the statue of the Blessed Virgin, with her eyes raised heavenward in prayer for the poor suffering people of Belfast, even the black protestants living in mortal sin under threat of eternal damnation half a mile up the road, if the priest could be believed.
She finished her prayers and descended the street again. She stopped to look at one of the southern newspapers on a rack outside a shop. A picture of a body lying on a street in Belfast was displayed between reports about economic growth and agricultural subsidies. It was comforting to think that Irish people living in the Irish state would be bothered about such things. Ties of blood and history bound her to distant fellow-countrymen and women she had never seen and separated her from neighbours, who clung to a different narrative, a short distance away. A glance at the newspaper offered little hope. The North and all its troubles were a frightening distraction in the peaceful south.
She could not avoid noticing the next window with a miniature figure of a Red Indian Chief. She stood, for a while, transfixed by the Indian’s grim plastic smile. Wee Martin had fallen under the spell of the feathered chief with long hair and colourful battle dress. He would stand for ages looking at the face, the war paint and the box with all its complicated lettering. She saw, as clearly as if he were present, his face pressed against the window, his very life and soul captured by the little warrior until the steam of his breath obscured his view and he had to stand back and wipe the glass with his sleeve.
‘Pleeeease, please can I have it gran?’ he asked, pathetically. Nothing would divert him from his desire but the plain fact was he couldn’t have it. She said no and she meant no. It was all she could do to survive with severely limited means especially now that his father had vanished and might never return, but she couldn’t tell Wee Martin that. She looked for some explanation other than the dreadful truth. She wished she could shield him from the hatred that surrounded them. She wished she could avoid answering his questions about the Prods and the impenetrable hate that separated them from her own people. She hated seeing his pure innocence corrupted but she could not disguise the hateful world in which he lived.
She told him if she bought the toy Indian he would forget about it in half an hour. He cried and protested. He wouldn’t grow tired of it. It was only a few feet away. He could almost touch it through the glass.
‘Why can’t I have it Gran?’ he asked desperately. It was the same question every time. She tried avoiding that side of the street. She tried diverting his attention. She scoured the market stalls in search of a cheap substitute but nothing else would do. She even went into the city (it wasn’t as easy for her to get around as it used to be) but everything was twice as expensive there. The city was full of people from other quarters, strange, noisy people who seemed not to have a care in the world. It was a place where warring tribes came out from their dark escarpments and met on neutral ground. People in the city seemed to fear nobody, spending money freely in the big shops. It reminded her forcefully how far her hopes had sunk.
Wee Martin looked at his grandmother with sad hurt eyes and did not understand why the world was full of things he wanted and couldn’t have. How do you tell an eight-year old boy that he can’t have a toy, a colouring book, anything at all from that enchanted window. The thing he wanted most was the warm sound of the father he could scarcely remember and the mother he had never seen coming up the stairs to tuck him into bed at night as darkness fell.
Molly hurried up the hill and stopped, as she always did, at the corner of the street where her eldest son, Danny, was killed. She could not resist looking even though she hated that street. Nothing would induce her ever to set foot there again. She knew the exact spot where Danny lay calling for help. She knew every crack on the pavement where his blood lay drying after the soldiers threw him in the back of an armoured car. They got him away quickly, to hide the evidence of their crime and prevent the truth from coming out. She blessed herself and looked heavenward as if her dear dead husband Paddy might comfort her. She whispered a prayer, begging him to help bring Tim home and watch over her.
More young men hurried past her, carrying bottles to the barricade. Tim would have something to say about it if he was there. He was one of a group of local men, civil rights campaigners, teachers, priests who would come out when trouble flared. They tried to restore calm. She had seen him many evenings shouting at the troublemakers, hunting young hooligans from the street. Tim hadn’t been seen for many months. There were fewer civil rights men than there used to be. The streets were controlled by sinister men who spoke the language of democracy and self-protection while they mobilised youthful innocence into for murderous purposes.
Those self-appointed leaders had served their own apprenticeships in the long war. They had little to add to the sum of human happiness. Their brutal nationalism was a dark and poisonous concoction smelted in the flaming streets. She had little sympathy for the shadowy defenders but she was glad of their protection when the fighting was at its worst. She was not afraid to criticise them openly when Tim was still at home but she was more circumspect and kept her thoughts to herself since he disappeared.
She crossed the street near the top of the hill and paused in front of a shabby brick-faced building, scarred by many fires and explosions. The republican tricolour fluttered from a pole above the entrance. She could scarcely believe she was even thinking of going inside. She knew the stories about dark deeds that went on inside that building; people arguing over money and politics, people who dealt in terror and death for the glorious republican cause. She didn’t agree with politics or fighting and those people were no strangers to any of that, and much worse besides but someone in her position had to seek help wherever she could find it. She wondered what would happen to Martin if she was taken. Would he be next in the grim tide of death? They wouldn’t dare take the life of a wee lad, surely? She was paralysed by competing fears. It was a dangerous to go in there, dangerous to walk away. She clutched her rosary beads tightly, wondering what to do, paralysed by fear of entering the dark interior.
© Copyright John Gerard Fitzgerald
