May 1970
By afternoon he’d finished the Beano summer special and two Fantastic Four comics. He’d ploughed through his Uncle Creepy and Cousin Eerie horror mags as well.
American imports, they would have proved expensive if purchased new, but Eban traded for these regularly at Smithfield Market secondhand bazaar.
The low sun was slanting in through the skylight.
Through the gaps in the sheeting and the bolt-holes pockmarking them. Shafts of light shone down and through, criss-crossing the interior, making it look like the deck of some kind of spacecraft.
He walked amongst them, putting his hands underneath the beams.
Enjoying the heat, the glow.
Since he’d been hiding out here, it had become his favourite time of day.
The light made him squint to look directly out onto the street.
To the right he could see the vast, dark mound of Black Mountain.
It was one of the most prominent features of the city, towering above most of West Belfast and reaching a height of some 1,275 feet.
He heard John Parkes, his Sunday school teacher, say that there had been flint and copper finds in the area. That the mountain had deserted farms and overgrown paths joining the fields and homesteads, and trails scattered all over it. On a clear day there were views of Strangford Lough, the Mournes and the Sperrins. Even of Scotland and Donegal.
To his left he could see the whitewashed walls of Jersey Street, Shankill Road Mission Hall, where he was sent regularly on Sunday afternoons and where John Parkes and his son John Junior gave witness.
The hall always caught the late afternoon sunshine, illuminating it spectacularly like some blazing sepulchre.
He liked John Parkes.
Liked the way people deferred to him. The quiet authority he had. His certainty of spiritual belief that rendered the man himself believable.
He was a solid, middle-aged man who always dressed in smart pinstriped suits, shirt and tie.
Psalm 91: He that dwelleth in the shelter of the most high shall abide in the shadow of the almighty.
His go-to scripture.
Eban felt safe when he heard John Parkes intone what seemed to him a contract.
A certainty.
A conviction.
The bald dome of his head was blotched with premature liver spots and one large purple birthmark in the shape of a country.
Or so the boys thought.
They argued whether it reminded them more of Africa than of South America.
They joked that his whole cranium was like a globe of the world.
Eban saw the man’s head as resembling nothing less than the cratered surface of the pale moon itself.
He listened when John Parkes spoke.
In between the Bible readings and the catechism.
The colouring-in books of Old Testament prophets: Daniel in the lions’ den; Elijah ascending into heaven in a chariot of fire; Noah in the belly of the great whale and the born-again sing-song of I will make you fishers of men and Jesus loves me, yes I know.
Somewhere in all of this Eban felt that there was something of value to be had.
To be discovered, cherished and learned from.
Stored away for when he might need it sometime in the future.
John Parkes was a local historian of sorts.
Fiercely proud of his roots and his community, he often told his young charges, “Be proud you’re from the Shankill, boys and girls; in the Irish it means ‘Old Church’ and was otherwise formally ‘the church of the white crossing’: Ecclesia alba de vado. So when people ask you, you tell them, ‘I was born at the crossing of the white church, in the shadow of the black mountain.’”
As a Presbyterian minister, he had raised a few eyebrows during this sensitive time by preaching in his Sunday evening service that they – his congregation – were as Irish as anyone on the island, and that their forefathers, Henry Joy McCracken and William Orr, were something called ‘Dissenters’, and how they had fought and died for that birthright.
Eban’s eyes were growing heavy in the half-light of McGrew’s pub with the remembering, and as late afternoon approached, he stepped gingerly and uncertainly between the detritus.