I made a film about it. Much later. I re-created it. Look. Here. See? A static shot. A frame empty of people. We are at the dark end of a narrow, short hallway. The sun hits our two-up, two-down at the front most of the day, and in it reaches but it can’t quite stretch to this passage-end and stairs’ foot, so it’s from darkness that the camera looks out into the bright day.
Summer outside. Summer 1969. Belfast. East Belfast, where ninety-six per cent of the inhabitants are Protestant and my family are not among that number.
Ahead there is a tiny vestibule and the heavy front door is opened back against its wall. You can see the straight path outside: a chequer-work of black and ox-blood tiles, three strides long; a hip-high wall of smooth-faced red brick is tight against its left side; it ends at a mustard-yellow wooden gate. The matching terrace of houses opposite stands very close and towers in shadow.
Imagine, in that doorway, the back of a tall woman. She’s on the threshold, arrested in the act of sweeping the first yard of path outside the door. Her right hand is at the top of the long brush-handle. Another woman, beyond the gate, has stopped and is speaking to her, to my mother. It’s a woman who lives in our street but someone we barely know. She has never stopped before. She’s on her way somewhere, as she has a coat on and a hat. I see my mother straighten up and the brush-head rise to a standstill, her right hand perched at shoulder-level. The bevelled head of the brush-shaft nestles into the socket of her palm.
What does this neighbour-stranger want?
My mother, stalwart at the door, waits. The woman looks anxious. I move forward, just a little, so I can hear. I am twelve. All the children are being kept indoors, for fear. The woman glances back up the street, the way she has come and then ahead. She’ll have seen the main road from where she stands and how empty it is, no passing cars, though it’s only early on an August mid-week evening. She’ll have known her voice would carry and be heard. I know something’s going on. The woman is weak, hovering nervously like that outside our gate. She says – she whines – “Oh, this is awful. Terrible. Things were all right before, weren’t they? Before all this began.”
My mother would have assured her in some facile way, brushing again, moving the dust towards the gate. But I knew the truth. My mother too.
Have you ever heard thrones fall? When the mighty are cast down, the thrones topple in their wake. They tumble, from an infinite height, colliding and hitting off each other in an ugly way. It should be thrilling and yet there is no sound, like a silent film. For how could there be sound? It is a soundless fall – or sounds like awe, and awe is a soundless thing.
I feel as though I am deep inside a passage tomb, in a chamber that waits and waits (while somewhere that fall unspools) for the moment when the times come right and the sun steps to its vantage-point and shafts the hall, striking the core with light. Then! Then there’s a bark of laughter in the dark. A whoop that echoes off the walls.
The words leapt inside me, licking the walls like flames: Things were not all right.
What did she want us to say, that woman? Did she want us to tell her, You have no guilt. We’ll be more than kind, now that our day has come. We’ll see you right.
She moved on. I went into the street. The sky, where the sunset should have been, was a weird orange-rose colour and a tree of smoke had risen, was rising, crawling upward, against it. Something huge was burning – the city west of us.
Sirens trailed their tales across the evening air – hurry – help me – save me – stop me. Each July the Twelfth I’d be kept indoors as the bonfires at every junction blazed to keep us Catholics down. But what’s afire now? Let them – let them taste fear for a change.
There’s another angle I never captured.
A first, and then a second, soldier was shot when I was fourteen. When I heard that three had been killed together I felt a spurt of reasonable delight. Their loss not ours. I was again in the house when I heard. I was standing in the living-room. The door to the hallway was open. Its wall, that I could see ahead of me, was papered in white embossed stripes and the masterful sun, thrusting in and along, made the contours bold in profile.
By hedges, then, I heard, on the radio news. Sparse March hedges and roadside whins, I imagined, on a cold brae, and spiteful sleet on their gullible teenage skin. A pint glass glinting in the ditch. Their trousers down.
If I’d touched it, the wallpaper would have been warm. Warm to the touch.
It couldn’t be right to be glad.
I stepped into a humble road, of cheap black tar, hedged either side.
A child can choose.