dugout was the drawing room, my father’s the potting shed. The events of 1968 took place while I was attempting and failing to broker peace somewhere between these camps, carrying communications written in codes which the two sides were doomed to misinterpret. If I paid any attention to them, it was with feelings of distaste and anxiety at such breakdown of order; locked as I was in the long disintegration of a marriage, I couldn’t face combat in the outside world.
‘In Mulligan’s bar I grew inebriated on the yeasty tang of stout and the fumes of golden hot whiskies in which cloves bobbed like tadpoles. I tried my first plate of boxty, the publican’s speciality, a dish that I became addicted to. It was hot, peppery and buttery and when someone said it was the food of the gods I agreed. A student who I later learned was Declan, the treasurer of Red Dawn, leaned across and asked teasingly if I’d heard that old rhyme:
“Boxty on the griddle
Boxty on the pan
If you don’t eat Boxty
You’ll never get a man!”
‘I smiled at him, registering that he had deep blue eyes but Majella reproved him, saying that we didn’t want to hear any of that old sexist claptrap. Finn took a spoonful from my plate without asking permission and declared that boxty was good, humble peasant food, the backbone of Ireland, the kind of dish that had its equivalent amongst working people in all cultures. A man stood up and sang a traditional ballad that brought tears to my eyes, a song about loss of land and family. Then Majella rapped the table and launched into a song that spoke of present injustice. She sang with such passion that I bit my gum through the boxty:
“Armoured cars and tanks and guns
Came to take away our sons
But every man will stand behind
The men behind the wire.
“Through the little streets of Belfast
In the dark of early morn
British soldiers came marauding,
Wrecking little homes with scorn;
Heedless of the crying children,
Dragging fathers from their beds,
Beating sons while helpless mothers
Watch the blood pour from their heads.
Round the world the truth will echo
Cromwell’s men are here again,
Britain’s name forever sullied
In the eyes of honest men.”
‘Afterwards, I asked her in a whisper if that was really happening and she said yes, nightly; men taken away and never charged, never given the chance of a fair hearing, their families left devastated. We were living in a tyranny but Bob Dylan was right, these were times of upheaval and change; this system of injustice couldn’t last, the people’s blood was up.
‘I understood that night that life had been racketing around elsewhere while I quietly occupied my little corner, mediating my parents’ antagonism and avoiding my mother’s censorious eye. In our tidy bungalow tucked away in a cul de sac it was a crime to leave an unwashed cup on the table, draw the curtains back untidily or spill a drop of liquid on the furniture. The background orchestration to my childhood had been the tight hissing from my mother’s lips as she heaped blame on my father or found fault with me. Now I was in a city where people opened their mouths wide to bellow their opinions and were willing to suffer terrible wounds, even death, for their beliefs. A sense of sheer animation, an impetuosity I would never have guessed at, was pulsing in me. I saw it reflected in Majella’s eyes, heard it echoed in her voice. The urge of something to aim for, something to risk everything for, that was what I wanted. The deliciousness of the boxty was giving me a taste for more flavours. I was ready for tumultuous change. I was ripe for falling in love and I did, with the scarred warring city and Majella and Finn.
‘When you are judging me, when you finally weigh up what you have learned, remember that the impulse was to do good, to create, to make a positive mark on the world. I fell far short of my own aspirations but I did possess them, and that remains some comfort to me.’
He looked in the bathroom mirror the evening Nina told him their life together was over and saw that he had a puzzled expression, like a child who doesn’t understand what it’s done wrong or a dog that suspects its owner is displeased. Then he did something he used to do as a child when he wanted to ease his troubles. He breathed on the mirror, wrote NINA in the condensation, then rubbed her name away hard with a flannel, making sure that none of the letters reappeared in the humid air. There, he thought angrily, morosely, self-pityingly; if that’s the way you want it, you can have it.
The next day he felt numb, as if his limbs had been shot full of Novocain. He prodded his arm; nothing. When he picked his hand up and let it drop it rested on his knee; someone else might have left it there. On the way home from work he stopped and had his right ear pierced in three places. The slap of the gun and the mild stinging helped him back into himself as did the burning antiseptic he had to bathe it in later. Nina didn’t notice, she was looking through him but when he fingered the tiny punctures and wiped the spots of blood he knew that he was real.
During the following weeks he stayed strangely calm. Maybe, he thought, he’d been expecting Nina’s decision for some time. She had always eluded him. Before she became ill she was light on her feet, fast moving. There she would be on the periphery of his vision, vanishing through a door or up the stairs. He would hear the car ignition and realise that she had left the house with no warning. She would come back hours later, cheeks flushed, or yawning, with puffy eyes. When he asked where she’d been she would reply for a walk or a visit to a museum or just sleeping in the car. The first time she said that, ‘just sleeping’, he was convinced that he was being made a fool of and she was seeing someone else. Yet it was only a few months into their marriage and he couldn’t detect an air of deceit; she looked at him full in the face and spoke with such simple frankness, he had to believe her. She had driven up to the Heath, she’d say, parked near the pub on Spaniard’s Hill and drifted off. When he asked why, if there was something wrong, she shook her head, saying that there was no explanation she could give.
He followed her once, feeling craven, a sneak. He was annoyed that she was the one taking off, behaving oddly, and yet he was acting as if he was the guilty partner, trailing her covertly. His hands were damp at the possibility that she might spot him but she didn’t, driving just over the speed limit. She headed down by the River Lea near Tottenham Hale and pulled up at a fishing area. Then she reclined the seat, folded her arms and tucked her chin down. He waited there for an hour, feeling ridiculous, spying on his wife sleeping and wondered what he had done to cause her to flee from him.
Before he and Nina married they had known each other for just over a year, living together for six months prior to the wedding. During those months she had never, as far as he was aware, felt the need for solitary outings. She was often a little touchy about her own possessions and her books but he understood that; they had both lived on their own and it was difficult adjusting to an invasion of territory. It seemed that, as soon as they were married, she found the need to put spaces between them, spaces that grew, broadening, deepening.
