First through the door that Saturday morning was Liam Strong. The clock showed all of three minutes past eleven when Hugh set him up with his dark rum and bottle of Carling. He would order two more of each before lunch, when he would go to collect his wife, Rita, from having her hair set. They would call in together around half past six for another couple of drinks on their way to the cinema. Some nights they had more than a couple and then they would forget to leave until closing time.
Liam and Hugh had been friends over thirty years, since the days when Hugh was an apprentice barman and Liam an apprentice drinker in the Hemisphere down Pottinger’s Entry. It was the beginning of an illustrious career for both men on opposite sides of the bar. I’m not saying Liam was a complete dipso. I had never seen him off-his-face drunk, though after three minutes past eleven I had not often seen him entirely sober. He was a stalwart, a regular, a highly prized customer in our line of business, and it was not the least advantage of Hugh coming to work in the hotel that he was followed by numerous other regulars from his numerous other ports of call. In this respect at least, the International was unique then in Belfast. People who had never set foot in a hotel in their lives looked upon its bar as their local; their living room, some of them. Liam’s own steadfastness to Hugh bordered on the fanatical, his only significant separation from his old friend having been brought on by the war, which Hugh had spent in the Beehive on the Falls Road and Liam in Crumlin Road gaol, interned for an IRA membership he had long since renounced.
‘I thought I was a soldier,’ I overheard him say once, ‘but I wasn’t, I was a complete balloon.’
These days, Liam’s politics were of a more constitutional bent. A cousin of Rita’s was married on to an in-law of Eddie McAteer, leader of the Nationalist Party. A decent spud, in Liam’s opinion, but no pushover: Eddie can fight his corner with the best of them.
The man himself had been speaking down in Limerick on Friday night, there was a report on the meeting in the Irish News which Liam had folded open on the bar and which he fell to reading as he sipped his beer.
‘He has a great way with the words, all the same, our Eddie,’ he said after a time, smacking the page with the back of his hand.
I had glanced at the report myself. Eddie McAteer assuring the people of Limerick that things were looking up in the North.
‘ “A faint feeling of lightness in the air”,’ Liam read. ‘I like that.’
The door opened. Bob Wallace, ‘the Buddha’ (we were fond of our nicknames in the International), a bookie’s runner from Sandy Row, came in brushing ash from his shoulders and his great bald head. I made a move, but Jamesie had him covered.
‘Bush, Bob?’
Bob nodded serenely, placed his hands flat on the counter and half closed his eyes in anticipation.
‘Talking of air,’ said Hugh to Liam with the barman’s instinct for steering conversation away from politics. ‘How’s the young fella getting on?’
Liam’s son had started work the month before with British Oxygen over in Castlereagh.
‘Well,’ said Liam. ‘Very well, I’m glad to say.’ And he blessed the company again for saving his son’s working life.
At the far end of the bar the Buddha stared, rapt, at the whiskey Jamesie set before him.
‘I never thought I’d see the day when you were thankful for British anything,’ Hugh muttered, forgetting himself, and Liam winked – Ah, now – and I wondered what memories were locked away by that brief shutter.
I left them to their talk and joined Jamesie at the till.
‘What happened to you last night?’ he asked me.
‘Didn’t fancy it,’ I said. ‘I was feeling a bit wrecked.’
‘Didn’t fancy it? Nurses? Fuck sake, wee lad.’
The nurses had started coming to the hotel restaurant on Sunday nights some time in the autumn, after five o’clock Mass round the corner in St Malachy’s. There were six of them lived together in a house off the Lisburn Road. They had been timid and ill-at-ease to start with, barely looking up from their plates while they ate, cutting dead their conversation the moment a man came within half a mile of their table. Little by little, though, they loosened up. They began to call in, in twos and threes, the odd week night when they weren’t working and even to venture down to the Blue Bar beforehand for a drink. Jamesie had been making up to them for weeks and had finally wangled an invite to a twenty-first birthday party the previous night. The old suave routine, he told me. Never fails.
‘Know that Karen one,’ Jamesie said now, ‘know with the black hair? Fuck me, you want to see her dance – the diddies on her? I’m not kidding, she’d have your eye out.’
Bob the Buddha, having contemplated his glass for an exact two minutes (I never was able to determine which came first, the baldness or this habit of meditation), breathed a heavy sigh, downed the whiskey and went out.
Odd? As two left feet anywhere but a bar.
A moment later, a pair of men in business suits entered the room from the inside stairs, talking as though they were accustomed to having to compete with several dozen voices and accustomed nonetheless to being heard. The slightly louder of the two (though I wouldn’t have staked money on that) was a guest from Dublin who had checked in an hour after the Vances on Sunday night. Fitzgerald, or Fitzpatrick, I wasn’t sure which, for he had insisted from the outset that everyone call him plain Fitz. And everyone did, in the International and across the road in the City Hall where he spent that small portion of each day when he actually ventured out of the hotel. Which isn’t to say he was idle. Since his arrival, I had seldom known him to be alone. He had lunch with one councillor in the dining room, afternoon tea in the lounge with another, met a third and a fourth for dinner and rounded off his day in the Cocktail Bar over brandy with a fifth. No, Fitz was far from idle. I had pieced together enough of his conversation in the past days (OK, so with a voice like his it didn’t take a detective) to know what this was all about: jobs. British Oxygen notwithstanding, Belfast as ever was light a few thousand. Fitz in his modest, if voluble, way was offering to make up a little of the shortfall. ‘Super-garages’ was the term being bandied about. Now I wouldn’t have known a super-garage if I’d found one in my soup, but I was certain of one thing, Fitz was the first person I had ever met, outside of the City Hall of course, who believed in the coming of the Belfast Urban Motorway.
That’s right, Belfast – Urban – Motorway: B.U.M.
I suppose I had been dimly aware of the B.U.M. for almost as long as I had been aware of Belfast itself. At odd intervals throughout my childhood the initials would make an appearance in the headlines of the local papers, complete with artists’ impressions of roads raised on stilts, curving through the unrecognisable city, and futuristic cars disappearing into tree-topped tunnels. M-plan to speed Ulster into 21st century claim. My parents taught me to be sceptical, they had been reading such stories since the end of the war, at least, and sure enough the next day the headlines would be taken up again with the more mundane stuff of factory closures and constitution-in-crisis claims.
Everything in our newspapers was a claim, apart from the factory closures.
And yet somewhere those artists’ impressions were taken seriously enough for their shadow to have fallen over large tracts of the inner city. Planning blight, we were learning to call it. Just when the motorway had begun to slip your mind, a councillor, or a minister up at Stormont, under questioning, would say that housing repairs were going to be carried out in such and such a place, just as soon as a final decision was taken on the B.U.M. Why waste money repairing what you were only going to bulldoze anyway?
They really did call it the B.U.M. in City Hall, by the way. They can’t all have been stupid, so perhaps the abbreviation was meant to make the idea less intimidating, in a Frankie Howerd, Up Pompeii sort of way, though even then someone might have stopped to wonder what message it sent to the people whose houses were currently mouldering along the road’s intended route. If they had any doubts before, there was no escaping now the fact that they were stranded up the arse-end of nowhere.
Fitz and his friend had stopped just inside the door to light cigars, it being a rule of Fitz’s never to smoke until he had stepped over the threshold into a barroom. Old-fashioned chivalry, Len Gray said, adding that he had even seen Fitz crush a newly lit cigar one evening when a woman came into the Cocktail Bar. They weren’t cheap either, the brand Fitz smoked: Armanda, we called them; as in leg. We had to order in more on Thursday morning. Fitz had got through in three days what we usually sold in a fortnight.
Guests with that kind of money more often than not booked into the Grand Central, on Royal Avenue, but Fitz had sentimental as well as practical reasons for choosing the International and its close-up view of the City Hall. Sixty years back, his grandfather, just then starting to make his way in the world, had travelled to Belfast to witness the hall’s grand opening. He wasn’t alone; there hadn’t been a building to match it anywhere in Ireland for half a century.
While standing at the balustrade of the great horseshoe stairwell, craning his neck to marvel at the mosaics lining the enormous dome a hundred feet above, he became aware of a hand resting against his. Glancing down, he found that the hand was attached to the slender wrist of the most beautiful girl he had ever set eyes on. When she realised what she had done, the girl blushed to melt his heart. Her name was Edith Banks and she had come up to Belfast that morning from Saintfield, County Down. Fitz’s grandfather determined then and there to marry her. Though he was expected to pass the night with relatives in Drogheda, he left the City Hall in search of a place to stay in Belfast. And the first place he saw was the International, or as it was then called (and if ever there was an omen it was this) the Union. When he tried to book a room, however, he was told that not only was the Union full, but there wasn’t a bed to be had in all of the city. In his sudden dejection he was on the point of walking away, leaving Belfast altogether (for at that moment the thought that you could marry a girl you had talked to for no more than fifteen minutes seemed preposterous), when the hotel proprietor herself appeared.
As chance would have it, the proprietor was a Kilkenny woman, like his own mother, and the long and the short of it was that she offered to make him up a cot in her office. There he slept and the following morning took himself off to Saintfield and found Edith Banks and secured her hand in marriage.
‘So now,’ Fitz said when he told this story, ‘if ever I hear hotheads below in Dublin cursing the union I have a quiet smile to myself, for without the Union I wouldn’t be standing here.’
And if I tell you that I had seen Nationalist as well as Unionist councillors, sometimes both together, join in his enjoyment of the punchline, you will maybe understand something of the International in those days; or at least of the rarity of someone coming into town talking about jobs and the B.U.M.
Fitz’s big laugh – bigger, if anything, than usual this morning – exploded from him again now, as he finally satisfied himself his cigar was lit and approached the bar. I counted down the seconds to the slap on his companion’s back and placed myself at their service.
‘Gentlemen.’
Fitz reached for his wallet. The other man stopped him.
‘Ah, ah.’ The man wore a Rotary Club tie, the narrow end hanging half an inch lower than the broad. He made a move for his own wallet; Fitz took hold of his wrist.
‘Put that away, Trevor.’
Trevor refused, Fitz persisted. There followed more lunges for pockets, more laying on of hands, till at last Trevor brought the tussle to a halt.
‘You wouldn’t want to offend me now?’
Fitz signalled reluctant surrender.
‘Paddy,’ the victor said and held up two fingers.
‘Paddy it is,’ I said.
Fitz wandered off to choose a seat. Trevor (I recognised him vaguely) peered at the tariff card (was it Noades you called him?) and counted out money on the bar. I set down the glasses of whiskey (yes, Councillor Noades) and was just filling the water jug when Stanley came bustling in. He pulled up short, as though remembering he didn’t want to be seen to be hurrying, scanned the room and, not finding who he was looking for, slumped at a table against the wall and faced the door.
‘Do you want to check that?’
The man in the Rotary Club tie, whose name in that instant I had quite forgotten, moved coins across the counter to me.
‘Yes,’ I said, scooping them up. ‘No.’
In the mirror I watched Stanley remove and carefully fold his overcoat, then tap an untipped cigarette on the table top and light it with a Swift. He pinched a crumb of tobacco from his bottom lip and rubbed his fingers over the ashtray. An unfeasibly long time seemed to elapse before he released the smoke from his lungs. I watched him inhale again to see would he repeat the feat and, when he did, carried on watching to see could he do it a third time. I might have watched him smoke the entire cigarette had Jamesie not suddenly been at my side.
‘Look at your man.’
‘Hm?’
‘No Drink over there.’
‘He’s only in the door,’ I said.
‘Bollocks,’ said Jamesie. ‘He’s no intention of buying anything, I know him. That’s three times this week.’
Actually it was four times, though on two occasions he had bought a drink eventually, or should I say had a drink bought for him, both by the same goateed Englishman with the piercing voice (an actor, had to be), which is how I caught Stanley’s name.
‘Maybe he’s waiting for someone.’
Jamesie rested a hand on the counter and turned his head exaggeratedly, taking in the whole bar.
‘I’m sorry, was I away when they put up the waiting room sign?’
‘Jamesie,’ I said, ‘you’re a real laugh a month, do you know that?’
Jamesie smiled without mirth. I went out from behind the bar before he would. Stanley was looking at his watch as I approached.
‘You all right there?’
He started and pulled his sleeve over his wrist.
‘I’m just …’
‘No,’ I said, backing off. ‘Of course.’
Jamesie was standing, arms folded, watching me. I shrugged, he shook his head, I walked down the room to cast an eye over the toilets. Like the toilets needed it. The floor was still slick from the morning’s mopping and the urinal gleamed like something grand and civic. I did a quick spot check in the mirror: four, but none of them bad and nothing on my nose or chin. I grinned to see my teeth. So-so. I thought maybe I was all right looking. (It wasn’t that I hadn’t had my moments, in the last six months I had had plenty, but I would be fooling myself if I said looks had much to do with most of them.) I hoped that all right would be good enough.
When I left the toilets a minute later, Stanley had a brown lemonade in front of him and Jamesie’s face was set in a self-satisfied smirk. Hugh and Liam Strong were still deep in conversation. I went back behind the bar and picked up Liam’s Irish News, trying not to look at Jamesie or Stanley. Avoiding the first was easy, avoiding the second was much, much harder.
There were moments, even on a Saturday morning, when a bar seemed far too public a place to have to work in.