May 1970
Sometime later, the pink weals on his rump now fading, Eban found himself once again drawn back to the wreck of McGrew’s pub.
Stepping back further into the alleyway and away from the sheerness of the climb, Eban darted glances this way and that. He shielded his eyes from the low, early morning summer sun that shot piercing orange spears down the alley from the east.
Lines of over-full dustbins awaiting collection stood to attention like squat, untidy sentinels outside garishly multi-coloured back doors.
The house numbers painted onto the bins with broad, unwieldy brush strokes.
The doors’ colours determined by the last job lot of emulsion purchased to paint the entire house inside and out.
Behind these doors, families were listening to reports of the previous night’s riots and wondering what remnants of the evening they might encounter on the way to work or school.
John Parkes, his Sunday school teacher, had called them ‘little fortresses of common love’.
Eban wasn’t sure why.
Just like the pictures at the start of Coronation Street on television, Parkes had said.
As he looked them up and down now, Eban half-expected to hear the plaintive refrain of the telly trumpet parp out its signature tune over the scene.
He wondered if they too had outside toilets in the yard, so that the seat almost burned your bare arse with the cold in winter.
Or no hot water, so that you bathed in a tin bath and your ma washed your hair over the sink, with a milk bottle full of hot water. A milk bottle full of cold for the rinse.
The rising heat from the summer sun warmed a yawning black cat. She stretched and stirred herself, half-interested in the smells and odours of family waste that peeped over the top of the receptacles.
By retreating another two steps backward and craning his neck, the boy could see the corrugated iron roof that enclosed the back yard of what had formerly been McGrew’s Pub and Off-Licence, and colloquially known as ‘The Wine Lodge’.
It sloped down toward him at a steepish angle, but was still flat enough to retain tin cans, a couple of old sneakers, a burst football and a bicycle tyre that had been thrown up there at some time or other.
It had stood like many others, bricked and boarded up since the night it had been attacked.
In the centre was his point of entry.
A Cyclops skylight.
Like a black scorched hole, scarred and blind in the very middle of the covering. The glass absent and the edges sooty and charred from the night when the Catholic Paddy McGrew and his family were burned out and the place ransacked.
It was to him, the portal to another world.
And it had become, without doubt, the most important, the most secret, the most liberating and the most beautiful thing in young Eban Barnard’s troubled life.
Eban knew that by placing a dustbin at the foot of what had been the back door jamb, he could elevate himself high enough to find footholds in the broken brick on each side.
Placing his school blazer over what seemed to be the dullest, bluntest glass, he could lie across the yard wall apex and pull himself onto the sloping roof.
Following the routine as usual, he lobbed his school bag up onto the roof ahead of him, and heaved and struggled to follow.
A pigeon fluttered up and off.
The boy also knew he should be at school.
He had his violin lesson today. What a mistake that had proved to be.
Following the fiasco with the drum, his parents had forked out for the hire of an instrument from the Belfast School of Music, but had instantly regretted it as Eban’s best efforts suggested cat strangulation on an industrial scale.
Miss McInerney, the spinster violin teacher, would be looking for him.
But the confusion and chaos of the last two weeks seemed to render everything null and void.
Men and boys ran the streets late at night, shouting and screaming.
Gunfire sounded close at hand.
Grown-ups seemed distracted and preoccupied.
His parents, the neighbours, his older brother Alex, even his teachers spoke in clandestine whispers.
Terms like petrol bomb, zip gun and rubber bullet filled the playground.
Classmates traded in spent CS gas canisters and brass shell casings as currency.
The older boys boasted of carrying weighty, oil-stained canvas bags from house to house, where local men would nervously receive them.
Eban welcomed the grown-up preoccupations and the decline of the natural order of things.
It served his purpose.
He could disappear unnoticed.
Now he could hear the voices of the women on their way to the Ladybird linen factory where his mother worked.
He was most vulnerable at this point in his modus operandi.
He would have to be quick.
This was the crucial moment.
Whilst on the roof, which seemed to him to be high above street level, he was exposed to others. A neighbour might notice him and assume that he was after copper, lead or other pickings from what the McGrews may have left behind them in their haste.
Dropping down slowly, carefully now, through the skylight and into his sanctuary.
Lowering himself, until his foot made firm contact with an old upturned gas stove.
He knew from his other visits that there would be enough light coming in from overhead, and through the rips and holes in the corrugated metal sheets covering the windows, to tentatively negotiate the sea of broken glass and debris which now crunched underfoot.
Crates, kegs, smashed beer and wine bottles, old shoes, cereal boxes, palettes and charred wooden beams fallen from the roof.
The flotsam and jetsam of the McGrews’ hurried flight from persecution.
Eban Barnard was in again, undetected.