Loud and angry discordant guitar-strokes squashed the quiet verse of the traditional folk music. An impresario singer offered, with sarcasm, ‘a show’. Music rolled and broke in waves. There was the sound of a plane plummeting out of control and then silence, followed by the crying of a newborn.
‘Mama loves her baby,
And Daddy loves you too
And the sea may look warm to you babe
And the sky may look blue’
The anger of the drum and guitar took the harmony away again, dashing it to the rocks. A new beat, watchful and constant, emerged; a hospital monitor interspersed with a guitar riff glimmering like sudden rays of sunshine. A whispering voice was singing a warning:
‘Daddy’s flown across the ocean
Leaving just a memory
A snapshot in the family album’
The music took its time, moving at the pace of a heartbeat, creating tension,
‘All in all it was just a brick in the wall’
Then came the sound of helicopter blades turning, the roaring of a military man, followed by cymbals being struck like physical blows. The evils of the teacher.
Gerard was shaking his head at Sean, as if at a great distance, shocked. Before he could say anything an anthem struck up like a protest march. It sounded like the modern age. It was the sound of conviction. Sean felt the adrenalin of right and wrong surge within him.
‘We don’t need no education
We don’t need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom’
The song seemed to be advancing the perfect cause, overturning the wrong laws, and when the children sang in unison they conveyed certainty and loyalty, love and survival. Guitar riffs soared, one after the other.
There were playground sounds. Sean closed his eyes and laid back; a dream was being piped into his head, ready made. He thought of being about five or six at school. Then came to his mind an image of a baby with his mouth at a nipple, resolute and sucking, adhering to its mother. Like baby Liam. Then, out of nowhere, someone took the baby away, shook it, smacked it so that it screamed then handed it back, and the baby stopped its crying gradually and went back to sucking, albeit with occasional shudders. He remembered the water bucket at Castlereagh, held by the neck in the water until his eyes flooded with darkness and then his head was pulled out and each time he was on the brink of unconsciousness.
After the playground came the sound of a shouting-schoolmaster, a man with a voice the sound of failure; thin and hysterical. Then came the ringing of a phone. It stopped. A man exhaled.
‘Mother do you think they’ll drop the bomb
Mother do you think they’ll like this song
Mother do you think they’ll try to break my balls
Mother should I build the wall’
The voice was clear, it had a lilt to it. He and Gerard exchanged looks. Gerard grinned.
‘Béal Mor’s lost his mind. This isn’t in the rule book.’
‘It’s great.’
‘The words, Seany! The words!’
‘Mother will they put me in the firing line?
Is it just a waste of time?’
The music moved off and away, travelling on a railroad of guitar chords. They were tapping out the beat with the palms of their hands on their thighs.
How was it for the others after years in here, with no sky, no animals, no children, no women, no sounds beyond the banging of doors, to hear suddenly all the sounds of the world articulated with a crazy passion, as if a dying man was struggling for his last best memories?
After a bird-song came the voice of a boy pointing out an airplane and then male voices harmonizing in reverence to the blue sky. It was like a swoon. It touched his heart and he was afraid.
The music was halted by the sound of a hammer on a dull metal surface. He thought of the Belfast shipyards, saw the cranes. A man intoned despair and then the mood was broken again by rock and roll.
Gerard’s head nodded fast to it, like a young man at a concert.
‘Ooooh I need a dirty woman
Ooooh I need a dirty girl’
Sean burst out laughing. Gerard laughed as well.
‘She’d have to be a dirty woman, in here!’ he shouted, his hands cupping his mouth.
The phone rang and this time it was answered. It was a movie within a movie, an American woman moving about, an old British film playing in the background. What did it mean? Could he trust the music?
‘Day after day, love turns grey
Like the skin on a dying man’
The pure, absurd joy of rock and roll surged forth again and he leapt up, he couldn’t help himself, and with his blanket round his waist he jumped about and Gerard with him. There was shouting and smashing in the music and they charged about their cell like hooligans.
When the music changed again, they stood still. It was slowing to almost nothing with just the sounds of breathing, a woman in deep sleep.
‘Listen,’ said Gerard.
‘Did you ever hear The Dark Side of the Moon? That’s Pink Floyd as well. They’re the best band in the world.’
‘They are!’
They stood side by side, nodding in the direction of the door from where the sound came. There was the noise of doors and windows being broken in, breaking glass and a reprise of the earlier anthem.
‘I don’t need no arms around me
And I don’t need no drugs to calm me
I have seen the writing on the wall
Don’t think I need any thing at all
No, don’t think I need anything at all
All in all it was all just the bricks in the wall
All in all you were all just bricks in the wall’
The men started to move, but the music stopped.
Without warning the singer issued his ‘Goodbye’ and the sound was gone, as if a door had been shut.
Silence like a knife.
‘Well, lads, I’ll give you part two next time. Goodnight.’ And he turned the lights out.
Sean and Gerard sat down in the dark. There was some distant low light from a watch-tower and soon, when their eyes got used to the dark, they could see the shape of each other.
‘I’ve never heard anything like it,’ said Gerard. ‘Imagine if we were doing stuff like that.’
‘We ought to get them in the ’Ra.’
‘That’s what I should have been doing,’ Gerard went on. ‘Music. They took me away, a teacher who’d never killed a person, and I’ll get back home, one day, and be something else. God knows what.’
‘Listen, Gerard, we’re prisoners of war. We’ve got what we believe in and no one can take it away from us.’
O’Malley called out ‘Merry Christmas’ in Irish, and Sean and Gerard called back.
‘They can’t make me a criminal, no matter what they do to me, but what will they make of my two boys? You’re best off if you can be like your man Seamus there, just having your one life, on the inside. It’s easier.’
‘Why don’t they talk to each other, Seamus and Seamus?’
‘It’s like a bad marriage. They fell out a year ago, and haven’t spoken since.’
‘Jesus. If I piss you off, you’ll tell me, right?’
‘That music was really something. I might have some dreams tonight. My feet are like fucking ice blocks. Goodnight, Seany.’
‘Goodnight.’
His mattress was short. He’d ripped off about a quarter of it in the last couple of months to smear the walls with. He had two blankets but the floor was cold and his mattress was damp. After a while you went numb and then you could sleep. He could hear a man here or there talking, and from further along the sounds of snoring.
He thought about how the music travelled so far and wide. He had thought of his mother, his brother, his family, his community and he had felt anger and excitement, melancholy too. How powerful music was. Even though life was so barren there, he sometimes felt as if he was just now waking up to the world. He thought of the little boy seeing the plane, how man had brought things that were once mysterious down to size. A sky might have been infinite, a lake might have been a sea, before. Now you looked at them knowing they had borders. Why do people want to kill the magic, he wondered, and give answers to things that shouldn’t be understood. He’d told Father Pearse he was hanging on to his faith.
‘Good,’ the priest had replied. ‘Because in a hellhole created by man, you need God’s mystery.’
‘Ooooh I need a dirty woman . . .’
The refrain came back to him. He had air to breathe, food to eat and water to drink but there was a fourth hunger. He thought of Nancy Costello and her words as she left. Maybe she was thinking of him that night. He had an erection. He put his hand down between his legs.
He could hear that Gerard was asleep. He thought about Nancy with her sharp eyes and soft lips. He thought of undressing her.
There were footsteps as the screw walked past to push the button on the wall.
He had an image of her with her hands raised, letting him pull her top over her head, the hair caught for a moment then falling on to her naked shoulders. He would move his eyes from her face to her breasts. He would put his hands on them and kiss her neck and then he would lay her down and let her enjoy his need. He lay awake for some time, the music in his mind, wondering what it was like to have sex with a woman.