Read Fifty/Fifty and Other Stories Online
Authors: Matthew W. McFarland
“
Who are you?” he asked. He reminded me in his body language and manner of a Jack Russell, all vicious energy and barely concealed anger, cooped up in a frame that wanted to be one of the big dogs. I know that it’s clichéd to say he had hard, cold eyes, but he did. I wondered if the one dreadful thing that I knew about him was leading me to make such harsh observations. His clothes were well worn, and not altogether unsoiled, and he carried a plastic carrier bag of paperback books in one hand. I wasn’t able to discern the titles. From his pale blue jeans poked a pair of scuffed white trainers, which he must have attempted to clean recently, for although the shoes themselves were not dirty, the discoloured laces betrayed heavy use. They were the sort of generic shoes you get in department stores or supermarkets, devoid of any branding or style.
I told him my name and where I was from, who I was representing, and he made some of the usual jokes you hear about civil servants, and a government at odds with itself.
“
How do you like working with that bunch of clowns?” he asked, meaning the politicians. He didn’t care what my response was; he just wanted to voice his opinion. In my awkwardness I said something joking and inappropriate where I should have been professional. I could feel colour rising to my cheeks.
“
What was your name again?” he asked, but this time I felt the quick and unheralded sickness in my stomach that comes with genuine fear. His eyes had narrowed as he said it, and leaning toward me I swear I could feel his violence, just out of reach on the other side of some thin veil, the thickness of which I could not understand. His intention had been to make me feel threatened, of that I was certain.
I had arrived much too early for the presentation, and as the other civil servants, academic staff and community workers began to arrive, he joked with the ones he knew, and I got the impression that he was desperate to be the centre of attention. I’m not sure if this is what made all the other people in the room visibly wary of him, or if his notoriety was the greater factor. Either way it was unsettling.
I had taken the weak coffee and chosen a seat somewhere in the middle of the lecture room, and he sat down almost directly behind me. One of the ladies involved with the project clearly knew him very well, for she chatted and joked with him a lot, and any time he made a comment she laughed and turned it towards humour. I guess it was how she coped with the moral ambiguity of dealing with such men.
I later found out that they prefer to be called political ex-prisoners – to call them ex political prisoners is to deny them the distinction that although they are no longer in confinement, they are still very much political. When I got back to my office, I spent the day looking for information on all of the men who were at the presentation, but I found nothing about what had led them to be incarcerated. I had been certain that they were terrible, terrible men. Murderers of innocent people. Women, children, babies. A few days later I was out somewhere in the car with my father, and on the way home I told him about it.
“
Yeah,” he said, “I know the sort of guy you mean. They want you to know they’re the hard man.” I told him I thought it was more than that, and he shrugged.
“
I wouldn’t worry about it,” he told me. I asked him about the troubles. I told him that it had been weighing heavily on my mind, that looking into the past of the ex-prisoners had set me off on a multitude of tangents.
“
There were times your Mum and I thought about leaving here,” he said. “Once – you probably don’t remember this, you were very young. Your Mum knows about this. Once I was out at the Park Centre with you and your brother. I never liked that place by the way, but we were there. I saw these two guys, you know, real hard looking, and they came past us with their hoods up and they were looking around, you know, looking for someone. I didn’t like the look of it, and anyway we left. And they killed an off-duty policeman.”
“
Shit,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say.
“
And the thing is,” he continued, “they were looking for him. Somebody must have seen him and made a phone call and they went out and shot him, in the Park Centre. In broad daylight. That’s the kind of thing that happened then. In front of his family.”
“
Did you tell anyone?” I asked, “What did you do?” I wanted to ask him how he had felt.
“
I couldn’t have given a description, I didn’t see them well enough,” he said, shaking his head. “I just knew something was wrong, that there was something else going on there.” He was looking out the windscreen – we had stopped in the little cul-de-sac outside my house and had been talking for a while. There was a strange look on his face.
I looked it up – it was a Tuesday in the August of 1988, and I would have just turned five, and my brother was three. My own little boy is four now, and I can’t imagine the panic I would have felt in my father’s situation. Or even the fear in the aftermath, and knowing how lucky we were not to have been caught up in it. Close calls can be a powerful thing, when left to run unchecked through the imagination.
“
Why didn’t you leave?” I asked.
“
There was one day where we nearly did,” he said. “Do you know about Michael Stone and the Milltown Cemetery attack?” he asked.
“
Sort of,” I nodded. I knew less than I wanted to admit to him, and I think he saw that in my expression.
“
Well he was this nutcase who attacked an IRA funeral in the Milltown Cemetery, and then a few days later when they were burying one of the people he killed, two soldiers drove into the funeral procession by mistake and they were killed. It was a crazy time, and tensions were high. I think they panicked, and maybe one of them fired his gun, and they weren’t in uniform and the crowd at the funeral dragged them from their car and they were taken off and shot. This was all on TV.”
“
What? On TV?” I asked, my eyes widening.
“
Your mum and I were watching the news and this came on and you and your brother were there, and we were so shocked that we didn’t even turn it off for a minute. There were helicopters but the soldiers weren’t in uniform, and the crowd had stripped them, and nobody knew what was happening or they could have saved them.”
“
And this was on TV?” I asked, not quite able to grasp it. The faintest sliver of a memory poked into my consciousness, of sitting on the floor of the front room of our bungalow, whilst my parents watched something on the television, something that I had no interest in, but which I could see had unsettled them. My mother with a hand over her mouth, eyes wide. Shouting at my father to turn it off, turn it off.
“
Yes,” he said, “And your mum and I thought about leaving. Your uncle and your cousins were living in Chester then, and we thought about going there, or anywhere really.”
“
Why didn’t you?”
“
I don’t know,” he replied, “Your mum wasn’t sure, and things calmed down a bit, but I still regret not taking you somewhere else then, when we could have”
“
It must have been terrifying,” I said, “With us so young and all that going on.”
“
Yeah, but that’s the way it was. You just lived with it and that was it.”
When I was ten years old, the IRA bombed a hotel next to my primary school, and we had a day or two off school so that they could sweep up all the broken glass and debris. We weren’t allowed to play on the football pitch adjacent to the hotel grounds for a while either. Our house was about half a mile from the hotel, and the night it happened I fell out of bed, waking briefly and thinking the noise which had startled me onto the floor was my father slamming shut our garage door. It was metal and boomed if the wind caught it as it was closing. We walked past the school the next day to see the damage, and having a ten-year-old boy’s penchant for destruction, I remember being a little disappointed to see very little at all. A few days later we were back in our classrooms and life went on.
And once when I was out in Belfast city centre with my mother, the car park where we had left our car and the immediate area around it was cordoned off due to a bomb-scare and we couldn’t get back to it. I remember her being very scared, panicked even, and it still feels unpleasant to think about. The tone of her voice as she used a payphone to let my dad know what had happened was one I had never heard from her before.
These two very minor incidents are really the only ways the conflict directly touched my life growing up. I lived in a nice area, and my parents kept us very much sheltered from everything that was going on around us. The ceasefire in 1994 happened as I made the transition from primary to secondary school. There were checkpoints at the airports and so on, and you saw soldiers. My brother and I were fascinated by the mirrors that they would put under vehicle to check for explosives.
Somebody broke into our car once, and when two police officers came to our house to get the details, I stood in the driveway with my parents, fixated by the revolvers which were attached to their belts by long squiggly tethers that looked just like a keyring I had. But I didn’t know any different, and so I wouldn’t say that growing up in the midst of all this affected me in any sort of way which you could honestly construe as negative.
It comes as a shock then, as only now I start to comprehend what my parents must have gone through, trying to raise two small children through the eighties, and before that trying to live ordinary lives through the midst of a civil war. My mother likes to tell a story about getting stopped by an army patrol. I think we were on our way back from a caravanning holiday at Castle Archdale, on the shore of Lough Erne, so we had been in the car for a long time, and no doubt had bellies full of crisps and sweets. Anything to keep us quiet in the back seat on a stifling hot day. It was there, that summer, that I learnt how to ride a bicycle. According to my mum, the soldiers manning the checkpoint were very abrupt, rude even. They began to search the car, and as one of them opened my door I poked my head out, and with immaculate timing threw up all over his shiny boots.
“
Served him right! The cheeky so-and-so...” my mum always says when she tells it. I know that she wasn’t against the British army or anything, she was just being protective, and somewhat affronted - nobody should be allowed to poke around her children, and what sort of mother did they think she was anyway? That she would have semtex under our car seats?
It brings a wry smile to my face, every time I see a picture of that old red Ford Sierra of ours, thinking about those young soldiers, knowing now the genuine fear they must have felt on a daily basis, and then suddenly getting vomited on by a young kid. There must have been hysterics as they recounted the story back at base, my hapless victim going red at the ears and cursing my weak stomach. Those boys can’t have had too many light-hearted moments like that in those days.
Saints and Streetlights
I took a taxi home from the wedding at around 2.30 am. The band had wound down with a few slow numbers, the lights were brought up and the guests ebbed towards the doors as one great organism, chatting, laughing, swaying to and fro. The Bride’s sister was directing traffic outside, yelling surnames at the top of her voice as each taxi drew up.
“
That’s me!” I shouted, attempting to leap over a flowerbed and only just managing it as she called out my name. She was laughing at me as I fell into the back seat, laughing at my haste to get away, to get out of the cold. It may have been June, but a cold day and a cloudless evening beside the coast had left my bones cold. Her bridesmaid’s dress caught the wind as rain began to fall, initially as drizzle and then as fat, heavy drops battering the windscreen of the taxi as it sped along the dual carriageway.
I hadn’t been drinking very much, as in my old age it no longer agrees with me, but I felt tired from making the effort to be sociable. I can be perfectly charming whenever it suits me, but it rents an exertion from me that is hard to explain to the average person. An evening of joviality such as a wedding takes extra strain, as there are so many people with whom I have only a passing connection, and who mistake my shyness and social awkwardness for discourtesy.
The driver of the taxi was young, perhaps 25, and had a thick Belfast accent. His hair was cropped close to his skull, and in the half-light of intermittent streetlamps and the beams of oncoming traffic I could see that his left arm sported a sleeve of tattoos from wrist all the way up to where it disappeared into his t-shirt. There was an open can of energy drink in the cup holder beside him, and his eyes gleamed in the rear-view mirror. With each bump there came a muffled shriek from the shock absorber on the left rear corner of the car, as I tried to guess the make and model from the dashboard and the steering wheel emblem.
We made small talk which I could have done without - that are you busy tonight, terrible weather, how long have you been on, which is nigh-on impossible to avoid, and being the end of June he asked me if I had any holidays planned. I didn’t, and in politeness I asked him the same.
“
Mahjoogoree” he said, “Have you been?”
“
Where, sorry?” I asked.
“
Mah joo go ree” he said again, “In Bosnia-Herzegovina”
“
Bosnia? What’s it like there?” I asked. I wasn’t familiar with the region at all - I later found out the correct spelling of Medjugorje, which apparently means ‘an area between mountains’.
“
Ah, it’s beautiful!” he replied, “You’ve never seen the like of it. There’s loads of poverty, but it’s amazing. Let me ask you something, do you believe in god?”
I didn’t know how to answer. It’s not a question that I have ever been comfortable discussing, let alone with a Belfast taxi driver. I really didn't see it coming. I chose my next words very carefully.
“
I’m a psychologist,” I answered, “so I’m more interested in why people believe in God, you know?” I hoped he would accept the evasion.
“
Aye, I know what you mean,” he said, “That is interesting. Why do people believe in God, or Allah or whatever? Why do people have that need for something else? I’m not an educated man, but I read a lot, you know? I think religion is fascinating.”
I hadn’t expected a philosophical discussion at this time of the morning, but whether boredom, or the caffeine from the energy drink was making him talkative, I had been drawn in.
“
So Medjugorje is this place where people had visions of the Virgin Mary, and thousands and thousands of people go on pilgrimages there every year.”
“
Oh right,” I said trying to hide my scepticism. His eyes darted back to the rear-view mirror.
“
I know it sounds stupid,” he said, “But I’ve been there and I saw something.”
“
What did you see?” I asked him, genuinely curious.
“
The sun”, he said, “It was moving. Changing shape. I looked up and it was spinning there in the sky, and all the people around me were watching it too. And then everything got dark and there was just the sun. It was the middle of the afternoon, and there weren’t any clouds. And from the sun there was this black halo, which came from the edges and went out and out. It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen, but when you tell anyone who wasn’t there they look at you like you have two heads.”
“
And you’re going back?”
“
I haven’t thought of anything else since I came home,” he said, and through the gap in the front seats he handed me a small, well thumbed pamphlet. I struggled to see it in the dark, but I could make out that it was cheaply-made, and dated in design. There were several more just like it crammed down in between his seat and the centre console of the car. It appeared to be full of passages of quotes, and it reminded me of the religious pamphlets which are handed out every morning by an old man in a flat cap and mackintosh, who stands at the corner of Donegall Square where commuters alight from buses. They try their best to ignore him as they rush to work.
He has that slightness which comes only from old age or illness, hunched ever so slightly, the thin coat accentuating the slope of his shoulders. He squints into the throng, picking out targets or victims. Every morning for several years I walked past him, and every morning I said “No Thank You” as politely as I could muster. And every morning he thrust his hand towards me, as if maybe that was my day, that was the day I accepted salvation, or whatever it was he was promoting.
On the mornings where I got too close to him, when to have not taken his pamphlet would have resulted in physical contact with his stiffly protruding arm, I held onto his material until I was out of sight before tossing it into the nearest bin. I think I waited to discard it where he couldn’t see me in a small and passive attempt at encouragement. I admired his dedication, stubbornness, his devotion, if not his manner. Not once did I read his pamphlets.
Back to the present, and the taxi driver was still explaining his pilgrimage of sorts.
“
So the Virgin Mary has appeared to these 6 children every day for 30 years, and she speaks to them. She gives them messages for us.” He kept looking at me in the rear-view mirror, presumably to see if I was following him. I wondered if I looked as tired as I felt.
“
What sort of messages?” I asked, leaning forward in my seat.
“
Here you go mate, that’s twelve quid,” he said, pulling up at the end of the street where my apartment building sat. I waited to see if he was going to continue, but he had the car in gear and was radioing in for his next job. I handed him some money and told him to keep the change.
“
You should check it out,” he said, as I opened the door, “Changed my whole life”, and with that he was gone, tyres spitting small stones and grit as he swung the taxi round and sped off the way we had come. I stood there, reeling from the surreal nature of the conversation and the abruptness with which it came to an end. The loosened tie at my neck flapped wildly as a gust of wind came down off the high buildings, and I could feel the rain getting heavier against my forehead. The coolness of it felt pleasing after the confines of the taxi. I walked the last hundred yards to my front door, exhausted, confused and a little drunker now in the fresh air. More than that I felt overwhelmed, but by what, I honestly couldn’t say.