happened?’
‘They came at about three in the morning. I ran downstairs when I heard them kicking in the door and they said where was Titch? I said he was at his aunt’s in Newry and one of them said “You’re effing lying you oul bitch” and two of them pushed me to one side and went upstairs to find him.’
She was crying now, pulling in the air with big, hungry gulps, her hands dipping and soaring. The words choked her as they came out.
‘And then they dragged him out of bed and down the stairs. He didn’t know what was happening and he kept shouting for me. Pulled him out the door and I tried to follow but one of them pushed me back and said “You stay out of it.” The same fella cut the phone and threw it out the front window, and then he said, “You effing stay in here. I’ll be in the hall and if you try to get out I’ll sort you out too and make sure he gets a worse one.”’
‘Where’s Titch now?’
‘Upstairs, lying in his room. He wouldn’t stay in hospital so eventually they let him home. When I brought him back from the hospital the only thing he said was “Don’t let anyone in.” He’s got a broken arm, a fracture in his leg and his face is all swollen up. The doctor said it was with baseball bats. He’s pushed his desk against the door of his room.’
‘I’ll leave him alone today then,’ I said. ‘Maybe call in on him tomorrow.’ I bent to give her an awkward kiss on the cheek. She wasn’t expecting it. It wasn’t our usual parting gesture. Her head was bowed and hot, the cheek damp and stiff, crusted with a layer of dried tears. I walked out on to the street.
I took a few steps. Then something made me look back up to Titch’s bedroom window. I hadn’t expected to see anything, I don’t even know what made me turn round. But what I did see nearly stopped my heart: a swollen, malevolent thing looking back at me, standing in the space made by a tugged-aside curtain. It took me a second to realise that it was Titch. His head seemed monstrous, the eyes shrunk to sunken currants, the face a blackened, purple mass of bruises.
Those watching eyes, I knew, had soaked up all the horror on my face. I stopped and raised a hand to him from the street. After what seemed a long time, one bandaged hand rose slowly in reply. I turned back then and kept on walking.
As I walked, I was trying to think what he had reminded me of. Something from childhood. The lonely monster, shut up in a tower. That, but something else too. Then I got it. When I was younger, we used to play with a kit called ‘Mr Potato Head’. You took an old potato, and stuck plastic eyes and a nose and stringy hair on it, and turned it into a bit of a character. For a couple of hours you’d prop him up in fruit bowls and push him around in empty egg cartons. But then you would go on to something else and forget about it, and two weeks later you’d find oul Mr Potato Head lying somewhere behind the bin, with his head turning all purple and yellow, and accidental eyes sprouting out of him.
So that’s what they’d done to Titch. Except he had felt and heard it all: every kick, every spike, every burning word. And he wouldn’t have understood why this evil had fallen upon him. For a packet of biscuits? Dumped by the bins to bloat and rot, my best mate, Mr Potato Head.
I couldn’t go back home. There would be too much chat out of Phyllis. By the time I usually came in Phyllis was always hungry for my presence, even though it was invariably unsatisfactory. She yearned for gossip and confidences. I found myself unable to provide these things. She could have wolfed down a six-course banquet of discussion, and I was only capable of passing her the occasional bruised windfall.
Sometimes I would struggle to do my best, courteously assembling snippets from here and there, but I couldn’t tonight. How could I hand over the happenings of the day? ‘Four men in balaclavas came round to Titch’s house last night, dragged him on to waste ground and gave him a terrible beating. Could you change over to BBC 2, I think the snooker’s on?’
But it wouldn’t be left at that. The story would make too big an impact. You can’t drop a boulder into the centre of a still lake and not expect to create some ripples. There would be a silence – not a dead silence, but a busy one, building to a gush of who, what, why, where, when, and now what will happen? And I knew the answer to most of these things, and yet had no heart to begin explaining any of it to Phyllis or even to myself. None whatsoever. An immense weariness came over me: it would have been very good to curl up in a dark corner away from it all, and sleep for a thousand years.
I started the walk into town, moving through the fine rain, the shining, shifting curtain of small falling needles. Nowhere does drizzle like Belfast. It’s our speciality. We should parcel it up and export it to the Saudis. They’re gasping for it, by all accounts.
Drink. The clatter of laughter, and raw shouts, and mists of smoke rising from wood-panelled cabins. Light filtered through stained glass. I was in the Crown Bar, Belfast, ornamented Victorian gin palace and liquor saloon: a doughty old coquette who had her fancy windows shattered every time the IRA attempted to blow up the Europa International Hotel opposite, which it did with a zeal undimmed by repetition.
Just a couple of years earlier one of the IRA’s 1,000-pound car bombs had hit the jackpot, and not only blasted a large, jagged hole in the side of the Europa, but instantly reduced the wedding-cake pomp of the nearby Grand Opera House to rubble as well. The Europa’s head concierge said afterwards that if he stood at his desk in the lobby he could now see straight through to the Opera House stage. Anything really nice we had, it got wrecked. After a while you got used to it.
For over a century, in and out of disturbances, the Crown had flung open her doors and spilled men out at night into the path of horse-drawn traps, trams, trolleybuses and finally motor cars. They were her roaring, weeping, brawling, laughing men, their walnut brains pickled and petrified in alcohol, pushed out to confront the cold, stony pavements and their icy wives. Or maybe their women were there with them too, arm-in-arm as they both swayed home in a sidelong pavement dance, bloodstreams running warm with beer and port.
Sometimes in the afternoons wee boys of the urchin class still swaggered in, so edgy you could cut yourself on their banter, and made deadpan offers to sell you three jokes for a pound.
I ordered a whiskey.
‘Jacky!’ I turned around, and there was Sammy who I went to school with, his face shining with the pleasant sweat of four pints, and a russet-haired girlfriend beaming by his arm. He was a couple of years older than me. It was a long time since I had last seen him.
‘Jacky, how are you?’ He placed an authoritative, amicable hand on my shoulder. He was heavier than I remembered him, kitted out in corduroys and a navy fisherman’s sweater: he looked oddly well-to-do. ‘How’s things? How’s your dad?’
Years ago, he used to come over to my house after school sometimes, to watch TV or play football. Big Jacky always called him the Sergeant Major, because of his blond brush-cut and his precocious capacity for organisation. He said that on his way home from work he could hear Sammy from halfway down the street, bawling us all into position for some pitched battle.
‘My dad died, Sam. Heart attack,’ I said, and gave a small smile to show that I was aware of the social awkwardness of my answer. He looked genuinely grieved: his girlfriend had the decency to look grieved too, even though she didn’t know me.
‘Och Jacky, that’s terrible. When did it happen?’
‘A
