If I had known history was to be written that Sunday in the International Hotel I might have made an effort to get out of bed before teatime. I might have put on my white shirt and bow tie, taken my duffel coat from under the stairs, and been at the bus stop on the green in good time for the 5.05 to the city centre, instead of sending my mother down to the phone box at the end of the road to call me in sick. But then if history was so easy to predict it might never have a chance to happen at all for the crowds of people wanting to have their photographs taken to say, ‘I was there’. In any case I had worked a fourteen-hour shift the day before and had fallen in love twice and twice been rebuffed, which seemed pretty momentous to me at the time, and I felt entitled to a little self-indulgence. Besides, it was fucking miserable outside. January had been going on for more or less ever by that stage and the wind around the bedroom windowpanes sounded a bit too biblical and final for my liking. (My knowledge of the Bible may have been even sketchier then than it is now, but I’d read enough to know that bad weather was not to be trifled with.) So I turned my back on the bigger story – for, who knows, with all that’s been written about this place since, I might well have merited a footnote somewhere: Daniel Hamilton, a barman working in the hotel, remembers the mood as being ‘dignified and resolute’ – turned my back and buried my head beneath the covers, comforting myself with bitter-sweet thoughts of Ingrid and Stanley and the campfire stench of my vest and underpants.
*
The day before the inaugural meeting of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association in January 1967, the morning of the day of the Portadown Bun Boycott, a blaze broke out in Belfast city centre. I saw the flames above the rooftops as I got off the bus in Glengall Street and being, as usual, half an hour and more early for work, and flames of that size not then being regular sights in the city, I did what everyone else appeared to be doing that morning (fires after all looking much more like our idea of history in the making) and walked towards their source.
‘Brand’s Arcade,’ I was told by a wreck of a man balancing a cardboard box on his head outside the Classic. He had stood on the same spot, with the same box, all day every day for as long as I could remember, his long weird beard tucked down the front of a greasy gabardine.
‘Aren’t you going to have a look?’ I asked him.
The man pointed at the box. On the wall behind him, Audrey Hepburn looked anguished and lovely in a white habit.
‘I’d love to, son, but it’d be more than my life’s worth to move.’
Round the corner, two fire tenders were parked nose-to-tail at the bottom of Fountain Street and three more had stopped, every which way, where the bulk of the onlookers were gathered, a hundred yards along, across the mouth of Donegall Place. Running unseen between the two, Brand’s Arcade, sure enough, was a tunnel issuing thick brown smoke at either end. I joined the crowd at Robinson & Cleaver’s and saw over the shoulders of the people in front firemen in slick waterproofs plunge into the entrance to the arcade, while behind them the enormous eel-grey hoses thrashed and slithered on the glistening road. Half a dozen policemen tried their best to press us back, but the spectacle of the fire exerted a far greater force forward and the policemen soon abandoned their efforts and fell to spectating with us. A mannequin ignited in the window of the first-floor department store. Flames darted from the ruined roof, now the purest yellow, now tinged violet and green; the air seemed liquid and the neighbouring buildings wobbled as though they would at any moment melt away entirely. A few yards to my left, a man was sobbing and it occurred to me that some of those watching were seeing their jobs turn to ashes. A few yards to my right, another man whistled through his fingers. I knew before I picked the owner out that the whistle belonged to Barney Keenan.
‘Danny Boy!’
He rubbed his hands as I squeezed through the crowd towards him, then held them out, gloved palms up, to the blaze.
‘Toasty warm,’ he said.
Barney came from down around the Monaghan border and lodged in the International’s staff house in Atholl Street, behind the Ritz cinema. Though it was clean and comfortable, nobody could ever accuse the place of being overheated. Barney, however, suffered more than most. These city winters, he said, with their boggy fogs and mizzles were turning his bones to cold mush. To add to his discomfort there had been an outbreak of flu among staff earlier in the week; the toll was high and rising. Barney’s precautions this morning ran to a woolly hat, a scarf and several extra layers of clothes, making him twice the man I had last seen leaving the hotel the night before. He closed his eyes now in rapture: ‘Toas-ty warm.’
Beside him, Cecil, the hotel’s night porter, pulled on a matchstick-thin roll-up, his cheeks almost meeting in the middle with the effort. When he exhaled he managed the near-miracle that cold morning of blowing nothing whatever out.
Barney nudged me with his elbow.
‘Cecil here saw the whole thing start, near enough. Just as he was coming off work. Didn’t you, Cecil?’
‘You think it’s bad now?’ Cecil didn’t wait for me to ask. ‘You want to have seen it earlier.’
Being a night porter, Cecil lived in constant dread of missing out, having apparently convinced himself that the city turned into a place of riotous pleasure and thrilling calamity while he was dispensing indigestion tablets to overindulgent businessmen. He was obviously going to milk this scoop for all it was worth. He smiled a smile as tight as his cigarette.
‘The fire brigade’d to get the woman off the roof.’
Barney was nodding. Just then, as though taking their cue, firemen came sprinting from the mouth of the arcade. A moment later a pane of glass exploded somewhere deep inside. The crowd oohed. Barney was still nodding. There was no avoiding it.
‘What woman?’
Cecil’s cheeks collapsed and the end of his cigarette glimmered then greyed.
‘The caretaker’s wife. She was up there on the roof in her nightdress.’
‘Her nightdress! ’
Barney slipped his hands into his armpits and frowned, as though in wonder that, the flames having spared her, the cold hadn’t done for the woman altogether.
‘I’m telling you,’ Cecil said and told me nothing else.
There came the sound of more glass breaking. A fireman sat on the kerb and accepted a cigarette from another bystander. His face beneath the yellow helmet was the colour of slate.
‘How’s it looking in there?’ Cecil called to him in the tone of one who knew about these matters.
‘How’s it looking?’ The fireman gave him a stare over his shoulder. ‘Bloody terrible, what do you think?’
‘I was only asking,’ Cecil said, his voice a small thing, disappearing.
Slow handclapping had broken out on the southern rim of the crowd, in front of the City Hall. It spread, picking up momentum and volume, climaxing in a raucous cheer. Barney raised himself on his tiptoes.
‘UTVs arrived.’
That’s quick for them,’ I said, and the woman next to me said, ‘Maybe they heard it on the BBC.’
Soon everyone around me was on tiptoes too. The more energetic bounced on the spot.
Can you see anything? Are they interviewing people?
The first shoves followed shortly.
That’s my foot!
Get your fat arse out of my road!
A candy-pink hat was propelled at waist height through the ruck. Only as it neared me did I realise there was still a head inside. A young woman, in a suit to match the hat, stumbled to a halt before me, rearranged her little decorative veil and pressed on once more.
‘Bloody journalists,’ a man called after her and when I looked again she was indeed taking photographs of the burning arcade.
The scuffling had now become general.
‘We should get going,’ I shouted to Barney who alone had kept his balance, head and shoulders above the rest.
‘My God, Danny Boy,’ he shouted back. ‘There’s Cecil up there. He’s getting himself on the TV.’
*
The International Hotel stood on the south side of Donegall Square, directly behind the City Hall. You were unlikely to miss it. A canopy of frosted glass, supported by slender mosaic pillars, thrust the name, in blue lettering, out into the street; low black-marble walls flanked the approach to the main entrance and shielded the stairs which ran down on either side from the footpath to the basement bars. It was only stunning.
As Barney and I walked towards the hotel, away from Brand’s Arcade, we could still hear whistles and cat-calling and the blast of water on stone. A faint mist hung in the air and a single charred page rode the current higher up, attracting the attention of a couple of sooty-looking seagulls.
‘What have you in today?’ I asked, and Barney’s shoulders slumped.
‘The heap. Three o’clock, four o’clock, four-thirty and five: wall-to-wall weddings.’
At the corner of Adelaide Street and Donegall Square South a couple were conducting a whispered argument on the steps down to Cotter’s Kitchen. She turned her back. There were tears in his eyes.
‘You’d think,’ Barney went on, ‘people’d have something better to do with their Saturdays.’
‘You’d think,’ I said.
Twenty or thirty yards further along a taxi was pulled up at the kerb before the hotel. The driver, a yellow-faced man in a brown car coat, was helping the Vances and Jack, the day porter, load the Vances’s cases into the boot. Barney lengthened his stride.
‘That yous, then?’ he called out.
The Vances turned as one and I observed, not for the first time, how Americans seemed fashioned from a more up-to-date, and better-wearing, version of the stuff that went into the making of the rest of us.
‘Afraid so,’ Mr Vance said.
‘All good things …’ said Mrs Vance.
Barney nodded glumly. The Vances were heavy tippers whose largesse had on more than one occasion in the last six days extended into the kitchens and as far down the pecking order as commis chefs like Barney.
Mrs Vance adjusted the fingers of her emerald green gloves. Ten separate tugs. Jack returned, jingling, to the hotel. The taxi driver waited with one foot in the car and one on the road, glancing up and down the street. Everyone else regarded the interior of the car. The royal-blue leather upholstery was as soft and worn-looking as the jeans Mr Vance had astonished the other residents by wearing one morning at breakfast.
‘Well,’ Barney said.
‘Well,’ said Mrs Vance.
‘It’s been a real pleasure.’
‘Yes,’ the Vances said together and laughed.
They shook hands with Barney. Mr Vance gripped my elbow.
‘Another time,’ he said, and Mrs Vance glanced at her watch and then they were in the car and gone. Barney waved to them all the way down Donegall Square and into Howard Street.
‘Bye-bye tips.’
He scuffed up the steps ahead of me (personally, the kind of steps they were, I always found it hard to resist clicking my heels at the end of them) and paused before the double glass doors.
‘Hello drudgery.’
‘Hello, Barney.’
Marian Kennedy was on reception and had come out from behind her desk to see how the fire was going. ‘Were you round at Brand’s? What’s it like now?’
‘Desperate.’ Barney laid a tender hand on her sleeve. Marian flinched. ‘Bodies everywhere.’
One of Marian’s legs was shorter than the other and she wore a built-up shoe on her left foot. It was this foot she swung now at Barney’s backside, but Barney was already running down the lobby.
‘Don’t worry, Keenan,’ she shouted, ‘I’ll get you later.’
The phone was ringing. Marian pivoted on her long leg and swung round behind reception to answer it.
‘Good morning, the International.’
We blew each other extravagant kisses.
‘Friday week? Let’s see … No, Friday week looks fine at the minute. Double or twin?’
A guest I didn’t recognise, tall and handsomely built, came out of the lift and crossed the lobby to the lounge, a copy of the Racing Post tucked under his arm. Looking in through the doorway I counted reflected in the mirrored back wall another half-dozen guests sitting in the lounge’s easy chairs reading their papers. Two children, a boy and a girl, played jacks on the crimson carpet at their mother’s feet. The Williamses, Room 211. Mr Williams was rumoured to be bad with his nerves and was rarely seen downstairs apart from at mealtimes.
On the other side of the lobby, in the dining room, breakfast had been cleared away and the tables were already being set for lunch. The Master was standing by a pillar (standing by, not leaning on, the Master never leaned) closely observing Paula, the waitress who had started the previous Monday. Paula was not yet sixteen. She had never been away from home before – she was staying with an aunt somewhere in the south of the city – and gave a whole new meaning to bewildered.
‘Side plate,’ the Master said. Paula slid the one nearest her an inch to the left. Her uniform was all stiff folds about her and plasters showed salmon-pink beneath the heels of her nylons where her new shoes had been rubbing.
‘Perfect,’ said the Master, and Paula bent a little at one knee under the weight of his unexpected praise.
I hopped out of sight before he could turn. The Master had an unfailing knack of making even the most innocent feel they had done something wrong – pacing the hotel corridors in much the same way, I imagined, as he had paced between the desks of the school where he had taught before his reincarnation as a hotel manager. Carmel Quinn claimed actually to have wet her pants in the face of one of his silent stares; most people preferred to keep eye contact with him to a minimum.
A short flight of steps led down from the lobby to a corridor, always referred to as the Long Corridor, with the cloak deposit and toilets on the right-hand side, a door into the kitchen further along on the left, and a function room, the Damask Room, at the end. Barney was waiting for me on the bottom step, biting his lip. He had cause to be nervous, Marian didn’t make idle threats.
‘Murderous,’ I said and turning sharply to my left carried on down the stairs to the sanctuary of the basement. Ahead of me, the Cocktail Bar was still in darkness, but lights shone on my right from the doorway of the Blue Bar.
People I knew who had never been to the International before would ask me sometimes, why the Blue Bar? And I would simply say, because it is. And it was. Carpets, upholstery – everything that wasn’t glass or metal: all blue. Other people, of course, customers and guests, would want to know why the Cocktail Bar was the Cocktail Bar, even though it was as red as the Blue Bar was blue. But a red bar is like a dog with fur, no more than you would expect. I have never known another blue bar, before or since.
I unbuttoned my coat and walked in to find Hugh trimming his fingernails over an ashtray on the counter. Hugh was the head barman in the Blue Bar and was just entering the jowly stage of middle age. He glanced up and down and gave me his usual greeting.
‘Danny Boy. How’s the big bad world?’
‘Up in flames.’
Hugh grimaced as he attacked a thumb. ‘Had it coming all the same.’
I slipped my coat off. Hugh examined his cuticles. ‘I don’t suppose you heard who just checked in?’
His tone was casual enough for it to be someone pretty famous.
‘Who?’
‘Ted Connolly.’
‘Ted Connolly!’ I said. ‘Who’s he?’
Hugh looked at me as though I had to be joking. He saw by my expression that I wasn’t.
‘You don’t know who Ted Connolly is? Ted Connolly, Sunderland and Northern Ireland? The Roker Wonder?’ He jabbed his forehead towards me in a way I could only suppose was intended to be helpful. ‘Bap Connolly?’
‘Hugh, are we talking about the kick the ball and chase it thing? ’Cause if we are …’ I passed a hand six inches over my head.
‘I know,’ Hugh said, ‘but everybody’s heard of Ted Connolly – hat-trick against Wales at Windsor Park, all headers?’
It was news to me.
‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘it’s Saturday, what’s he doing in Belfast?’
Hugh had returned to cutting his nails.
‘Septic toe,’ he said. ‘Out for a fortnight.’
I thought of the guest I had seen just now with the Racing Post under his arm and tried to remember if he had been limping. I didn’t even want to think how you went about getting yourself a septic toe.
Hugh nodded towards a sheet of paper lying on the bar.
‘Word from Next Door.’ Next Door in the Blue Bar as often as not meant Len Gray, the hotel’s bar manager, who was usually to be found there. ‘Another two down with the lurgy. Can you do an extra couple of hours the night?’
‘Have I a choice?’
‘No.’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s the boy.’
I slung my coat over my shoulder and went back out into the hallway. Directly opposite the Blue Bar was the staff-only door in behind the Cocktail Bar and just inside this a short passage ran left to the main store, where we hung our coats. As ever, on reaching the end of the passage, I snaked a hand into the storeroom and switched on the light before entering. Rodent-phobia. Not that I’d ever seen anything myself, but I’d heard the scare stories and, even suspecting scare stories were all they were, was scared. Rats as big as badgers, as fierce as Alsatians. And drunk. Thankfully, I had escaped the fate of most new-starts who usually wound up locked in here by way of welcome. The Master himself, I’d been told, had had to endure an hour’s incarceration after an unfortunate mix-up with a waiter working out his notice.
No one was much in the mood for pranks, though, when I arrived at the International.
The light on, I counted to ten to give anything four-legged time to make itself scarce – then to twenty for the elderly and the halt – and pushed open the door. The store was an alcoholic’s wet dream. Crate upon inviting crate of bottles, the familiar, the exotic and the downright obscure; kegs with tubes running from them, like intravenous drips. The roof was high and arched, the wall stone-cold stone. No frills, no distractions. No sound. No mistaking the fact that you were fifteen feet beneath the ground. I hooked the hood of my duffel over the nearest peg and beat it back to the Blue Bar.
Jamesie showed up a few minutes later, trailing an unpleasant odour of last night’s revelries and yesterday’s clothes. He went straight to the sink behind the bar, picking up a tumbler and turning on the cold tap. He needed two full pints before he could make his tongue work.
‘Bloody nurses,’ he said.
‘Forcing the drink down your throat, were they?’ Hugh asked him.
Jamesie refilled his glass.
‘Keep you drinking half the night thinking you’re on a good thing, then turf you out on the street without so much as a feel.’
Jamesie’s familiar lament.
‘Is it any wonder they won’t let you touch them,’ Hugh said, pocketing his nail scissors, ‘the state of your hands.’
Keep your head clear and your hands clean, Hugh had told me on my first day. Think about it, everything you handle ends up in someone’s mouth.
Jamesie slagged him off, then as now, Fuck sake, Hugh, take a Phensic, but I had heeded Hugh’s advice. So far it had served me pretty well.
‘Jamesie,’ I said, ‘did you hear who’s in? Te – Bap Connolly.’
Jamesie drained a third glass of water, burped.
‘The Roker Wanker,’ he said. ‘Don’t tell me they finally wised up and dropped him?’
Hugh was not pleased, but then, with Jamesie, Hugh almost never was.
We worked, the three of us, checking stock, reloading the optics, without speaking, the only sound the muffled footfalls in the dining room overhead, and as the hands on the clock moved on to eleven o’clock exactly, I crossed the floor to the door giving on to the outside steps and opened the bar for business.