I walked to the Esso garage at the bottom of the hill to get chocolate and fizzy drinks for my trip to Ireland and bunged them in my book bag. I wrapped my long, green-and-white-striped Exeter University scarf around my face and tried to warm myself up. I was freezing when I got to Exeter St. David’s train station. I sat on the train, watching green pastures and back gardens swoosh by, drinking cups of British Rail tea. Annie had spent the weekend in Manchester, and we were meeting in Liverpool to catch the ferry to Dublin. I bought a secondhand British Rail coat at a surplus shop near the docks.
The ferry wasn’t full, and Annie and I were the only people in the on-board cinema. We watched a Peter Seller’s film and slept in the red-carpeted aisle. Annie shook me awake in the morning. “I need a cuppa. I’m parched.” We had tea, and one of the sailors let us climb out onto the slippery bow with him to see Ireland coming closer.
In Dublin, we looked for a cheap bed and breakfast. They got lower in price the further we walked away from the river. We found a room, dropped off our gear, and roamed the rainy, gritty streets. Music floated out of the pubs, and I tried to drink a pint of Guinness Stout. The murky, black liquid reminded me of the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles where dinosaurs sank to their death. We bought some cans of lager, got fish and chips, and went back to our room.
It had stopped raining, but the air felt frozen. Our room overlooked a busy intersection to the west of the Liffey. We’d got water pistols to play with at a corner shop in Liverpool in case we got bored on the ferry. Annie found them in her bag when she pulled out her dry black sweater, or jumper, as my mind now automatically translated. We leaned out the window, spraying the buses below us until the drivers thought it was raining and turned on their windscreen wipers. Annie called it “playing God.”
After another day in Dublin, we decided to take a train to Belfast. It was April 1981, and the civil war, aka the Troubles, was escalating in Northern Ireland as Provisional Irish Republican Army volunteer Bobby Sands led a hunger strike against British authorities in Maze Prison. There was no escaping the violence as IRA and Ulster-loyalist paramilitary groups engaged in armed conflict.
Annie and I didn’t have a particular agenda in mind. I was just curious to see Belfast for myself, loved the Belfast punk band Stiff Little Fingers, and didn’t realize that specific day would have any significance. As soon as we crossed the border into Northern Ireland, the train stopped, and British soldiers in green fatigues and flak jackets flooded our compartment waving giant automatic guns. We showed them our passports. Inadvertently, we had arrived in Belfast on the day Bobby Sands was elected to parliament from his prison cell.
We stepped into a city smothered by rioting.
“What’s going on?” I asked, just as Annie and I heard an explosion. The people around us scattered.
“I don’t know. Oi, mate,” Annie caught the arm of someone running past us, “what’s happening?”
“Bobby Sands was elected to parliament!” he shouted.
“Are we happy or mad?” I looked around and couldn’t tell.
Four bombs went off in the city that day, and it looked like the entire British army was there. Every time I turned a corner, I found myself staring down the barrel of an M-16. Annie said that was because the soldiers fixed their sites randomly on people who were passing, looking for terrorists. After a few blocks, I stopped worrying about getting my head shot off by mistake. “Guns in my face” was the situation, and I quickly adjusted my sense of reality to normalize that. Sometimes I think our adaptability might be a bad thing.
The soldiers kept snapping our pictures. “I feel like a rock star,” Annie said.
“‘The British army is waiting out there, an’ it weighs fifteen-hundred tons.’” I repeated that one line of the Clash song “White Man in Hammersmith Palais” until Annie gave me a jab in the shoulder.
We were riot-hopping, following the noise from one riot to another, when some soldiers stopped us for interrogation. The soldier who searched me was suspicious when he saw my American passport. He said that Belfast was a strange place to come on holiday. I said if he thought that was strange, I was going to Iran and Afghanistan next. I thought Annie was going to bite off my head. She gave me a solid punch in the arm. “Jesus fucking Christ, this is not Disneyland.”
I rubbed my arm. There was a woman with the pinkest hair I’d ever seen sitting in the rain on a bench in front of the city hall with its blue-green domes, her hair clashing with the nearby bright-red phone box. All of the shopping precincts had checkpoints where we were searched and asked to show our passports. Soldiers stopped Annie from taking a photo of tanks in the street. They didn’t want us photographing their equipment or them. I guess no one was supposed to know exactly what the British army was doing or how much of it had taken over the city. Soldiers cruised past us pointing submachine guns out the backs of their green Land Rovers.
Everywhere we went on the Catholic side of Belfast, we heard bombs going off as Protestant royalists protested Bobby Sands’ election to parliament. On the Protestant side, pictures of the royal family stared out of every shop. Lady Diana and Prince Charles engagement mugs hung in the windows and their souvenir tea towels flapped in the breeze in eerie outdoor displays. The brick walls were spray-painted with Union Jack graffiti.
We were making our way back to the Catholic side of town when I looked behind me and saw a battalion of soldiers and police in riot gear. They held shields in front of their faces. I tapped Annie’s shoulder, but she was staring straight ahead at an angry mob marching toward us wielding stones and bottles. I went speechless and tugged on Annie’s sleeve.
“Get out of the fucking way!” Annie grabbed my arm and yanked me off the street. We dove into a doorway as rocks exploded against the brick wall behind us and bottles rocketed past our heads and shattered. We were trapped between the demonstrators and the law. It was pissing down bricks like rain. People scurried off the street like cockroaches surprised by light. We ran out of the doorway to help a young woman push her baby’s pram out of the line of fire.
“Pick a side,” Annie said.
“No contest.” I looked over my shoulder at the advancing army. “If I’m going to die, they’re gonna find my body on the Catholic side of town.”
We got on our hands and knees and crawled beneath the flying debris toward the protesters. A few of them saw us trying to reach them and waved us on.
When we were safely behind the front lines, a bloke in the crowd took us into a leftist café and bought us cups of tea. Posters on the walls said “Troops Out” and “Free the H-Block Prisoners.” I figured the “H” stood for “hunger,” as the slogan referred to the IRA hunger strikers who wanted to be treated as political prisoners in an occupied country and not as criminals. We’d all heard Maggie Thatcher in her flat, bloodless voice talking about Bobby Sands on the telly, “There can be no flexibility. Crime is crime is crime. It is not political. It is crime.” I wondered if she read Gertrude Stein.
When it got dark, we decided it was time to get out of Ulster, or “Ulcer,” as Annie had begun to call it. Annie said she was bored dodging rubber bullets and tear gas, but I knew that meant she was nervous. There had been another bomb scare in the shopping precinct we’d just left with chips that were still too hot to eat. The pubs with their pro-IRA graffiti had elaborate fencing around the entrances that you had to weave through so no one could toss in a bomb and run away. The soldiers snapped our photos one more time. “Smile, you’re a terrorist,” I said. Annie wrapped her red-and-black Manchester United scarf more tightly around her neck and blew on her fingertips sticking out of black, fingerless gloves. I put my chips inside my green army-surplus jacket to warm myself up.
At the station, we discovered that we’d missed the last train to Dublin. Suddenly our tiny bed-and-breakfast room where we slept crammed into a single bed seemed like Eden. All we wanted to do was get back to it. There was only one more train leaving Belfast that night. It was a local one that would only take us as far as Portadown, about twenty-three miles to the southwest. We jumped on it anyway to put some distance between our bodies and the explosions. In Portadown, we asked a mother and daughter sitting on a bench how to get to the bus station. They smiled at each other. “It’s in the city center,” the mum said.
“How do we find it?” I asked.
“You can’t miss it.” The adolescent girl looked like she was trying not to laugh. “It has a bomb in the middle of it.”
“Sorry?” I said.
“There’s a bomb in the city center,” her mum explained. “The whole area’s cordoned off. You won’t get near the bus station tonight, love.”
“Brilliant,” Annie said.
We walked to the motorway and tried to catch a ride south. The yellow motorway lights barely illuminated the trees behind us. No one would stop. We were freezing, and it was spooky. “Maybe it’s ’cos there’s two of us,” Annie said.
“Maybe it’s because it’s dead stupid,” I said.
“Maybe it’s ’cos there’s two of us,” Annie repeated. She hid in the thicket, and I stood on the road alone.
Oh good, I thought. Here I am, rape bait. Almost immediately, a car stopped. I ran to the driver’s side window. “Cheers, mate. Can you take my friend, too? She’s over there.” When I pointed, Annie came out onto the road and waved. “I swear on my life we’re harmless,” I said, my breath blowing out in white gasps. “No one would stop for the both of us, and we’re really cold and desperate.”
Annie approached the car. “Sorry, mate. We hadn’t wanted to fool you, but no one would stop.”
“We’re really, really sorry,” I said.
The bloke hunched inside his green anorak. “Just the two of you? No blokes? Right, get in. Hurry up, it’s freezing. I want to close the window.” Annie climbed in back, and I sat on the passenger side, fastening my seatbelt and thanking the driver profusely. The heater was on, and as the car sped down the motorway, I felt my feet thawing inside my black-and-white Converse high-tops.
“I can take you as far as Newry,” the man said.
“Ta very much,” I said. “We really appreciate it.”
“You’re lucky I’m a decent bloke,” he said. “It’s dangerous hitchhiking out here. Don’t you young ladies know that?”
“We got stuck in Belfast,” I explained. “The train would only go as far as Portadown. There was a bomb in the city center, and we couldn’t get to the bus station. We just want to get back to Dublin.”
We were still caught in County Armagh, an IRA stronghold. On the motorway outside Newry, Annie said, “That geezer scared the shite out of me. As soon as he said that, about being a decent bloke, I was sure he was a serial rapist.”
I said, “I couldn’t decide if he was worried about us or if he wanted to give us a false sense of security before he murdered us.”
From Newry we got a ride to Dundalk, right on the border. It also had a bomb in it. Then we got lucky and caught a ride with an older man who took us over the border and all the way to Dublin. He said we reminded him of his daughter, and I prayed to God it wasn’t the daughter he’d raped regularly until she was sixteen. But he turned out to be a decent chap and dropped us off in front of our bed and breakfast, warning us not to accept rides from any lorry drivers.
The sky was cold slate. Nobody else was on the street.
“Crikey.” Annie rocked back and forth in her black monkey boots, hands in her pockets. “What a relief.”
“Yeah. We handled that really well. I’m proud of us,” I said. “I mean, the whole time the bombs were going off and that, we had nerves of steel.”
Someone’s car backfired on another street, and both of us hit the pavement and rolled behind the nearest vehicle.
“Well,” Annie said, standing up and dusting gravel off her trousers, “better safe than sorry.”
We had a cheap bottle of red wine in our room and sat on the bed to drink it. I was pretty sloshed by the time we finished it and lay down. “Aren’t you gonna even take off your baseball boots?” Annie asked.
“I’m too pissed.” I pulled the yellow duvet over my clothes.
“They’re wet, you lazy sod.” Annie pulled off my sneakers and socks and threw them by the radiator. She rummaged around in my bag for a pair of dry socks and put them on my feet. She put her own shoes, socks, scarf, and gloves by the radiator and squeezed into the small bed.
I shivered and snuggled against her jumper for warmth.
“Why haven’t we ever had sex?” Annie said.
“Because we’re not each other’s type.”
“I know, but why aren’t we? If you think about it logically, we’re perfect for each other.”
“It never occurs to me to have sex with you. You’re my best mate.”
“Aye, I can’t get me own head round it. But isn’t it kind of mental? We don’t have a girlfriend between us. We should be having sex.”
“Why?” I squinted at her. “Why should we be having sex?”
“Isn’t it what we’re supposed to want? Are we freaks?” Annie smacked me on the arse. “Kiss me.”
“My head hurts.”
Annie leaned back and said dramatically, “Take me.”
I started laughing too hard to do any such thing.
“Take me, Amanda. When a woman says ‘take me,’ you must take her. C’mon, give us a snog.”
I laughed myself into tears. Annie and I sang the Stiff Little Fingers’ song “Alternative Ulster” straight through five times. Then I played two Gang of Four songs in my head about the situation in Northern Ireland, “Ether” and “Armalite Rifle,” until I fell asleep to the raindrops slapping against the window.
Our last day in Dublin was sunny, and we rented bicycles. It was the first time I’d driven any kind of a vehicle since leaving the States, and while it was relatively easy for me to remember that cars drove on the opposite side of the road as a pedestrian, it was much harder on a moving bike. I thought I was going to die at a particularly frenetic intersection near Trinity College, but Annie urged me on and we pedaled out past the Guinness factory.
It was raining and the water was choppy when we took the ferry back to England.
When I got back to Exeter, I bunged my gear into my room and made it to the refectory just in time for tea. I took my shepherd’s pie, chips, and peas to a table where a group of my mates was sitting.
“Where the bloody hell have you been?” someone asked.
I told them what Annie and I had done, expecting them to be impressed. I didn’t bring up our nerves of steel, allowing that to be obvious.
My friends lectured me on how stupid I’d been. I drank fourteen cups of tea while I listened to them.
“Are you out of your fucking mind? You never hitchhike in Northern Ireland. You could have been picked up by any fucking terrorist. Terrorists do sometimes pick up people and use them for cover to get back and forth across the border, you know.”
I left the refectory subdued but with a massive tea buzz. Daffodils bent their yellow heads in the wind against the lush grass. The moon and stars were crisp and bright above the tall trees, and the sky was clear. I felt like I was at the hub of the universe. Bluebells lined the path. I went into the common room to watch Top of the Pops. Someone brought in my favorite chocolate biscuits, Digestives, and passed them to me. I was safe, and I had chocolate. Nirvana.