style="font-size:15px;"> We found a place and moved in, and Robbie began to talk about getting married. I’d say I was nearly flattered to begin with, but then it dawned on me that he meant it and I panicked.
I couldn’t, I told him, I hadn’t even finished first year. Besides, I was way too young, and everyone would think I was pregnant.
He gave me a funny look.
It was a shock that look, I can tell you.
“Hold on now,” I said to him, hardly knowing what I was saying. “Marriage is one thing—I could maybe even get used to it. But not pregnancy. Pregnancy is definitely, definitely out.”
He laughed and said he could always get a rise out of me, and when did I want to get married, what about early July? He’d take extra time, and we could go off somewhere over the Twelfth Holiday and I could start into my second year with a ring on my finger, then everyone would know who owned me.
You’d think, wouldn’t you, that I’d have had the wit to hear that, but I didn’t. I never had sense—my mother was never tired telling me that—I never had any idea of what I was doing till it was done.
Before we were married I took Robbie home to Derry for the weekend. Londonderry, I should say, for I was a proper Protestant then, a paid-up member of the tribe. It only turned into Derry after I’d moved down South.
We went to Londonderry on the bus. Separate rooms and best behaviour. Robbie’s idea. I could have told him for nothing we weren’t about to get anyone’s blessing.
My brother, Brian, took me aside about half an hour after the introductions.
“You’re not serious, are you?” He didn’t expect an answer.
I phoned my mother from Belfast for her verdict, though it was plain as the nose on her face what she’d thought. But I couldn’t ever leave her be, I always had to force her hand, to make her spell things out in black and white.
There was a small, deep silence down the phone line. Then, in that neutral, damning voice of hers, she told me he was common.
And I laughed aloud, for he was, he was all the things she had reared me against—he was working-class, sectarian; he drank too much; he neither knew nor cared what people thought.
And there was I, the teacher’s daughter.
I laughed, but she’d hurt me and she’d meant to.
Poor Robbie, he wanted me to have my family’s blessing; he was trying in his own way to do right by me.
Dream on. The only thing in his favour was that he wasn’t a Catholic, but even I couldn’t make her say that out loud, for being sectarian was part of being common.
So that was that. My father was dead, and I’d no other siblings, which meant there was no one else to object except for Robbie’s family. And they did, by Christ they did. If they said I was the wrong girl for him then that was far and away the kindest thing they said.
None of them liked me. His brother Billy said four years, five at the most—it would take that long for the bed to cool. And there’d be no children—not unless I got caught—there’d be nothing to hold us together, so we’d part.
His sister Avril said my mother’s unsayable: at least she’s a Protestant. Which shocked his sister Rita, for it had never once occurred to her that anyone belonging to her would even think of marrying out.
They said all this to Robbie behind my back, knowing full well he’d repeat every word to my face. He wouldn’t listen any more than I would. He booked the Registry Office, and he put the notice in the paper; then he told them they could come if they wanted or stay away, it was all the same to him.
We didn’t even ask my family.
In the end they all came, but Billy was right, it was four years and only half a child, and yes, he was right again, I was taking no chances, I hadn’t been on the Pill that first night with Robbie, but I was round at the family planning clinic first thing the next morning.
The baby—what there was of her—was only because I got drunk and slipped up.
You’ll think me hard, but I wasn’t hard, only very young. And you weren’t reared there, you don’t know what it is to grow up in a place where everything seems normal enough on the surface but underneath it’s all distorted and wrong. And the worst part is that you don’t even know it’s distorted because for you it is normal, and if you don’t leave it behind and live somewhere truly normal, you’ll never find out.
I suppose the Catholics were right when they called it a war, though our lot denied it. It was a war, but it wasn’t like a normal war; there weren’t any uniforms or fronts or advancing-and-retreating armies, and when the peace finally came there wasn’t any going back home to your own place and learning how to forget. A civil war.
A few years back, Liam showed me a catalogue someone had sent him, the work of a German painter called Otto Dix. These were portraits Dix had done in Germany between the two World Wars, Liam said, when Germany was all busted up and the streets were full of profiteers and prostitutes and starving young soldiers minus their arms or legs.
But it wasn’t despair that Otto Dix had painted; it was people who’d made money fast and were getting through the pain of the world by living as hard as they could. Black-marketeers, pimps, club owners, satirists. The paintings were normal, but at the same time they were distorted, they fairly glittered with rage and hope-lessness, they hurt you as you looked. I glanced through the first few pages then shut the catalogue fast and put a big pile of ironed clothes down on top of it to cover it up. I wanted to be by myself with it, to turn the pages slowly and stare at the pictures, which frightened me yet somehow brought me home.
Robbie only ever struck me the once, and that was on account of his sister Rita leaving her husband and my not being home all night.
Rita was fifteen years older than Robbie, she had more than half-reared him, so his feelings were softer for her than for Avril or any of the brothers. Rita was married to a man by the name of Larry Hughes, who had strong paramilitary connections. Larry was UDA and no picnic to live with, but he’d got himself a longish stretch for aiding and abetting on a murder charge, so it was a good while since she’d had to.
Well, Rita buckled down, she went out to work, reared the two young ones, never looked at another man nor missed out on a prison visit. Not for Larry’s sake, mind, but to keep Larry’s comrades in the Organisation off her back—or that’s what she told Robbie. And she told him she’d be gone the minute Larry was out, but he never really believed her. He thought it was only talk.
Larry did five years then got early release, and home he came. The key was in the lock, the fridge was stuffed with food, the whole place was spotless. But when Larry lifted his voice and yelled for Rita he knew from the feel of the silence that the house was empty.
He went mad. He went straight to the mother—no joy—then he went and got Robbie out of his work, for if anyone knew where she’d gone it would be Robbie.
But Robbie didn’t know. He told Larry over and over till Larry had no choice but to believe him.
Larry started coming on heavy. He wanted her found
