picked up my T-shirt that I had flung onto the floor when we first leapt into bed. It was one of my home-made ones with a message marked out in black block capitals.
‘It was mostly this, you know. Why I took you home,’ she said, holding the T-shirt out to me.
‘My T-shirt?’
‘Yep. I liked the message and that you made it yourself. I hate them punk posers who send their cheques to companies that advertise for ‘Boy’ bondage trousers and fart-flaps in the back pages of the NME. You really hate Bob Dylan? That’s acceptable! Now if you had written ‘I hate Bowie’ on that shirt I would have ignored you. We’d have been finished before we even got started. And you hate Pink Floyd too – that’s an added bonus!’
5
COMMS 1
1987
Skyscraper’s friends are closing in on us. Although we few in here remain united and strong, we are without a dick to defend ourselves. They imagine their numbers give them the whip hand. Also, it’s possible they have brought in gear from the outside, so we can’t take any more chances. If we could get a package in here, anything at all – even a Derringer or a Pen Gun – that might make a big difference. Knowing we had something would be a blow to their morale.
For now, only rumour is keeping us alive. We have put it about that our friends beyond these walls have delivered the shopping, although soon the opposition will be trying to provoke us to produce product. We hear from bigger boys – the rosary-bead rattlers – that Skyscraper’s people fear being attack on the wings, landings, kitchens and yards, so they stay very close together.
Your name, of course, keeps coming up in their conversations. Even Skyscraper keeps mentioning you. He has his own team convinced that even though you are not in his gang, you are still someone who can be got at – someone who they can put pressure on to make us dissolve and go away. At least, that’s what those who follow him around like a pack of docile dogs keep insisting. They’re the ones he recruited as kids – who joined his very own merry wee band. They feared him giving them cold steel then; they still fear him now. They might be cowering, callow and stupid, but he’s not! You know and I know that Skyscraper isn’t as stupid as the rest of them. We believe his so-called faith in you is a front – a cloak to hide his true plot. He’s been in to see his boys several times and, like us, has heard that all the charges ranged against them are on the verge of collapse. The only trouble is, by the time we are all released and walking out the jail gates onto the Crumlin Road, there will be blood flowing even before we get to Carlisle Circus.
So, as the Bolshevik’s Eagle once asked: What’s to be done?
Well, if he wants a purge let’s give him one. A first strike seems to be our best option but naturally none of us in here are presently in a position to do that. On the outside, you are the only one we can trust to get the job done. If you can knock him out of the game then the entire rotten structure that he has established will collapse.
If he agrees to a meeting, you stress that you are only a third party and that all you want is the prevention of Irishmen killing Irishmen again – that we are free to operate our own struggles independently of each other and that maybe, just maybe, one day we will all reunite under a minimum programme that we can all agree on in the fight for national liberation … all the usual sentimental ballicks.
You suggest it should be somewhere he and his clowns will feel safe in. Somewhere far away down in the south – away from the attention of the Brits and the cops up here. But you plan in advance to make the strike en route and be certain to have your own people in place.
Finally, yes, we have all drunk from the bitter cup of factionalism and it is indeed sour. Yet we have no other option given that he and his allies – his wee praetorian guard – will eventually move against us. If what we do is rapid and surgical, we can bring this to an end without a prolonged shooting match. We are interested in your thoughts on where we go from here. How do we restructure the army and the party? How do we formulate a new leadership? Remember this – speak and write only in ‘Braille’. Keep your reply broad and clipped. All comms will arrive via the usual back channel, if you pardon the pun.
Yours in struggle … Comrade T.
6
THE CROWD
28 April 1979
We are not walking; we are surging all the way down the Donegall Road. We are a throbbing mass of primary colours: all reds, yellows and blues. We are a moving, menacing organism through which courses currents of fear and expectation. We are a jagged forward-marching phalanx of various uniforms from army surplus, denim skinners, snorkels, duffels, plastic, wool, leather, studs and spikes. We slide, stumble and trip over half bottles of Scotch, scrunched up beer tins, broken glass and even splashes of carrot-flecked boke. We spearhead onwards to the swing-gate of battleship-grey and bottle-green, to where the barrier of peelers and Brits will eventually part open, ushering us across the motorway and into the empty brick-studded fields behind Windsor Park. We are in a trance.
I am still on ‘our’ side of the M1, and Trout is crushed up against my shoulder. We’re hemmed in by a line of heavier older men in their twenties, all of whom he seems to know. They swell and bulge out of Wrangler jackets and blue parkas, and sport beards they shouldn’t have bothered sprouting until well into middle age. They are ‘comrading’ this and ‘macara-ing’ that to each other en route, talking in the Belfast code called ‘Braille’ about ‘jobs’, ‘gear’, ‘napperings’, ‘smokey joes’ and ‘up and unders’. The last one provokes Trout to cry out, ‘Oh Airey’s here, Airey’s there, Airey’s every-fucking-where, na, na, nan, nan-nan, na, na!’
The Brits patrolling close to the rundown redundant football stadium glare at us when they hear this particular chant, and one of them from the back of a jeep sweeps his SLR rifle with a black rubber gunsight across our line as if he is going to take us out; as if we really think he is going to open fire.
‘Who’s that lying on the dashboard? Who’s that splattered on the screen? Who’s that all over the wheel?’ Trout howls, as two-finger salutes are offered to the Brit patrol. He then pokes me in the shoulder and points up to the side of the decaying old touchline stand with the letters ‘Celtic Park’ still painted over the giant green background.
‘Look at that crowd, son, and ask yourself why! That is what this is about today, Robbie Ruin. They literally kicked and booted Belfast Celtic out of the league all them years ago to put the uppity Taig team in their place, which was off the pitch and out of the league for good. They made sure that that place over there was only good enough for ta run greyhounds around the track beyond the grass. But now we’re back and we’re on our way to Windsor to fuck them all over,’ Trout says.
At that, the beefy-boy brigade on either side of us raise clenched fists in unison into the air and instantly I can see an image of my father back at home, all alone by his radio at the sink, carefully shaving, readying himself for the Saturday ahead with his handful of comrades in the bar. I picture him throwing up at the thought of his son being carried forward by this force pulsating all around me. In my eyes, my da looks more lost than I am now in this moment: isolated, irrelevant, voiceless and being left further behind by the new tide that is propelling me on.
I am bricking it because I have lost sight of Padre Pio amid the thickening numbers that are now bunched up at the security line on the M1. The last thing I want or need is to be stuck with Trout throughout the entire final, listening to his sermons from on high about the sacrifices of his big brother, Mullet, and the struggle in general. Besides, it’s
