the world gone mad

Ashleigh Cowan

A day without a bombing is worth celebrating and I’m out with the lads down for a few pints, not to Cosgrove’s as they got sacked to shit last week but to Kate Daly’s where you can still have a good chat with your mates and not worry so about being pushed around so. We’re all rowdy coming off a week of being pent up inside watching news waiting for the all clear to get back out on the streets. My family’s got the only working TV on our floor so we’ve had visitors in and out trying to get a glimpse of what they can’t see looking out their own windows. My mam eats it up, she gets so riled sitting there in front of the telly with a cigarette and an angry look, grumbling at the set with the other wives wondering when the fuck something was going to be done, there are children walking those streets, God bless, and don’t they know how dangerous it is for a child in these times? The other wives rock and mutter agreements and cross themselves like pious little biddies and I laugh but really I’m thinking how fucked up it is myself. When I was just a wee thing I thought that this was how the whole world lived, getting woken up to bombs in the middle of the night, burnt out buildings with broken windows on every corner, kids on the other side of the street shouting at you, ones that you weren’t allowed to play with since they went to a different church than you did. The world must be a pretty fuckin’ miserable place. But now we’re big men, seventeen, not little babies anymore and I’m seeing that it’s just Belfast that’s gone to Hell and that’s a good cause to make it to mass every Sunday. So when the lads across the street shout taunts at us now we know well enough to shout back and usually we can’t get to school without there being a fight. Just got to be careful not to fight with the ones with guns. They’re pretty hard to miss though, running down the streets in packs shouting and hollering like hooligans. I’ve got some pride but I’m no good to my mam if I’m shot dead in the chest so when I hear those sorts of shouts I stay inside and keep my baby sister away from the windows.
So we’re off to Kate Daly’s as it’s Thursday and there’s the canteen quiz. As usual none of us win the big cash prize but we have a few laughs calling out answers to the stupid questions and trying to drink each other under. There’s four of us lads and we’ve been mates since primary, back when we were little punk shits who’d play truant from school and go kicking rocks into the harbor and the talk was nothing but tittes, who’d seen ‘em and how big were they. Our talk’s grown up a bit now but Aiden still likes to boast when he’s had a few too many and we give him shit but we all know we’re just jealous. There’s a girl I’ve seen a fair few times on the walk to and from school. I know she lives near me but when I turn to go down the lane to my school she turns the other way and I know we’re from a different class of people so I don’t even bother with the hello. She probably has an older brother who’d come try and rough me up and might even knock his pretty sister around for carrying on talking to someone like me and I can’t have that on my head.
When the quiz is done we stick around the pub and I order up another round of pints. Brian asks me if I’ve heard from my brother and it gives me a pain to tell him no, we’ve heard nothing. A full year and not so much as a phone call. Brian shakes his head and claps me on the shoulder, ‘salright mate, he’ll come home right soon enough. I shrug. The night before he left there was big fight in the living room where he’d stood up to my da and said that someone in this family had to do his bit for Ireland and it sure isn’t going to be you, you sorry excuse for a man. I could tell my da wanted to hit him but my mam was crying in the kitchen and I knew he didn’t want to make things worse. So they squared off to each other, my brother with his face all red and that white spit at the corners of his mouth and my da, who after hearing that, lights a cigarette and tells him, go then, be a man. And so he did, and now my brother’s in the provisional IRA off somewhere doing his bit for Ireland. I know my mam watches the news because she hopes to see him but if he’s dead, it’s not the six o’clock report that she’s gonna hear it from.
I don’t want to get into a big political talk tonight so I say thanks and raise my glass to my brother Johnny, let’s hope he’s still breathing. They three laugh. We drain our glasses and head outside where Darren starts rolling up a spliff for us to share on the walk home. We’re leaning up against the side of the pub while Brian and Aiden light cigarettes and stand in the street with their fists shoved in their pockets and their collars turned up against the wind. The only people out at this time are ones like us, red faced and sloppy, and armed officers patrolling up and down sidewalks reminding the lot of us to get home. A few blocks up I can see the bright floodlights set up at a checkpoint. We have to show papers, prove residency, a whole pain in the ass process that just says yes, I do live here, now please don’t shoot me ’cause I’m already unsteady on my feet and I just want to get home to the warm bed and the clean sheets. Darren’s being too loud, stumbling over his feet and talking in a cloud of smoke and I tell him to stop being a dolt and stamp that spliff out, I’m not looking for any trouble tonight. Aiden laughs, says these bastards’d just steal our stash and be done with it, no one gives a fuck anymore. I know it’s true. The Provisionals sell cheap smack on street corners to buy more guns and everyone’s fucked up all the time, drink or pills or weed or something you can inject ’cause it’s the only way any of us can get through the day without thinking too much about how shitty this town is.
The officers take too long looking at our papers. They hold eye contact until it makes me sweat and ask Brian to open his bag. C’mon, I say, we’re just trying to get home. Standard procedure, says the officer in a way that would give my mam cause to give him a good smack in the gob for the disrespect in his voice. We can’t say anything though as they have guns and we don’t and after the officer is quite sure of that, he lets us pass and we stagger on, parting ways at the next intersection with handshakes and claps on the back and promises to meet again tomorrow, just as we’ve always done.
There’s no place here for lads like us. It’s not that we’re scared to fight. I want an Ireland united too but if every one of us did like my brother Johnny who saw the Provisionals on telly wearing black ski masks and clenching guns in their fists and thought that they had the answers, then who would be home on the weekdays to make sure mam gets dressed in the morning? We’ve all got problems and we’ve all known someone who’s died but at the end of the day, we’re the ones sticking around to make sure that the family stays ok and that should count for something.
After Johnny left my mam wouldn’t leave the house for a week, so embarrassed and ashamed she was. Even now when people ask where he’s gotten off to she tells them that he went to America to look for work and the neighbors all pretend to be impressed, how ambitious, that Johnny is! They all know the truth though and I can see it in the way they look at me climbing up and down the stairs to my floor every day. Some of them wonder what’s become of our family since and by the scowls I can tell that others wonder why I don’t do the same. If you don’t go off to fight you might as well not even call yourself Irish and it’s only a matter of time until I fuck off to the south where the Troubles aren’t so bad, or scrap it all and go to England or America where the only cause anyone would have to give me shit would be for the funny way I talk. We’ve talked about it plenty, the boys and I. Aiden’s got a cousin in New York and he’s sure he could put us up until we found work. I know I couldn’t leave my mam, though, not with my da working in Dublin and my baby sister now crawling and getting her head into every place it shouldn’t be. I wish he worked closer to home, but there aren’t many jobs these days and he did what he had to do. I used to wait up for him when he went to work but since Johnny left home he’s been staying later and later, always calling to tell me that he had a few too many after work and there’s a couch he can sleep on, but to tell my mam that everything’s fine. I wonder whose couch he’s sleeping on.
As I’m going inside I hear gunfire in the distance but it’s too far away to make my head hurt so I ignore it and carry on up the stairs. I ignore the part of my head that tells me to give a shit, too. It’s too much effort when it happens every day.
The next morning I wake up with a stomachache. My sister is crying from her crib in the next room over and I’m slow to go and pick her up and start the cooing and rocking. She needs a bottle and I wonder idly if we have any milk left in the fridge or if I’ll have to walk down to the corner market. My mam is on the couch in her housecoat, smoking a cigarette and watching the news. She has a habit of chewing her lip when she’s nervous and when I look at her to say good morning I see that she’s bit through again and I wonder how long she’s been up. I’m in the kitchen bouncing Maggie up and down in my arms, whistling a little song to make her smile while I get her bottle together when I hear my mam shout from the living room and the panic in her voice is enough to make me start and nearly drop Maggie all together. Sean, she shrieks, Sean, come look! I rush into the living room and follow her finger to the TV screen where the news is showing scenes from the shooting that happened the night prior. There are bodies lined up on the sidewalk and the camera is panning over as policemen stroll up and down, making notes in little booklets before pulling sheets over the victims’ heads. The last one in the row, mam says, look. Tell me it’s not, Sean. Her voice breaks, she is crying and that makes Maggie cry and I’m on my knees nose nearly pressed to the set trying to see, but I don’t have to try that hard because the way my head gets so dizzy all at once tells me that it is. I look back to her. ‘Tis, mam. It’s Johnny, I say, and she wails into a bunched up fistful of her robe. The image on the screen shakes and I’m staring into the face of my dead brother, his eyes shut and his red hair shaved down to the scalp. I don’t know what to do with my mam moaning and my sister shrieking. I get da on the phone at work and ask that he comes home but he tells me he can’t and I don’t even bother telling him what’s happened. I can hear the bedroom door slam and it muffles the sound of mam’s crying but only by a little. I want to go and comfort her, but I don’t know how and I’ve got to feed the baby or no one else will.
There’s no milk left in the fridge I say, to no one in particular. I look at Maggie who’s stopped crying and is sucking her thumb in wet, noisy slurps. Are you a hungry little love? I ask. Maggie laughs and blows a raspberry and I take her out down to the corner market to buy milk because there’s nothing else I can do.