I CAN’T PLACE it in time, that trip to Belfast. Not on a calendar, since that’s not how life worked for me then. There were school times, and school holidays. Short days, and long days. Time for planting, time when things grew, harvest. There was a time when the people who fell from boats at sea would not last long at all, and that was winter. I read that in the bank, next to the lifeboat.
But it was probably spring when we went into Belfast that day, and I know it was June when we left, and not much happened in between.
Books arrived and told me about Australia and how different it was, and I had to adjust to the idea of leaving everything I knew behind. ‘It’s very sunny in Australia,’ my father said one drizzly Sunday, while we waited for the weather to clear for our walk in the woods. ‘Sometimes people don’t even wear shoes.’ I didn’t know how those two things were related, or why the second was good, but he seemed very positive about the prospect.
Perhaps it was a matter of a few weeks between the bomb in Belfast and us leaving. I think I can remember a ninth birthday party with a magician when my hand was still bandaged. It was inside at someone’s house on another cloudy afternoon. And there was also a day when the sun shone and we did walk in the woods and I collected flowers for keeping in a flower press, so that I’d have something to take with me from the only place I knew. No one explained quarantine laws to me, and the flower press made it through customs unnoticed. I still have it, with its layers of spring flowers and leaves, brown and flat. I can still remember putting some of them in there when they had some bulk, then refitting the top and tightening the wing nuts at the corners.
There was another roadblock too, the same people standing there with a few rifles and a handgun, waving the traffic to a stop, making a show of looking in the boots of people’s cars.
And a trip to Belfast, another trip to Belfast in the van. This time, at night. My mother did my hair in Heidi plaits before I left for the Macleishes’. It was a style that she quite liked, though my thick unruly hair didn’t make it easy. I was sleeping over, which was something we did quite often at each other’s houses. But this time, in the middle of the night, I remember someone waking me and soon we were in the van and on our way to Belfast. Paul was driving, and his friend Danny was in the front with him, talking tough, which is what he did. The rest of us were in the back, with the bags.
But that was before the other trip in the van to Belfast, not after. It was before.