By the time I had returned from sick leave, Stanley had left Belfast and I never saw him again. That spring, Ingrid told me she’d had a letter. The weekend in Mosney had gone well, he had been booked on the strength of it for a summer week in the Butlin’s in Skegness. He was still hoping to break into television.
‘Poor Stanley,’ Ingrid said, ‘breaking in’s the only way he’s likely to get there.’
Perhaps he did make it in the end. I don’t know, I have never been much of a one for television, apart from the wrestling.
Ingrid it was who told me all that I have written here about him. She seemed to have picked up a lot in a short time.
She was a Blue Bar regular for a while, sitting at the counter two or three evenings a week, reading a newspaper or a book, attracting the attention of more than one man transformed in his own eyes, by two or three pints, into Tom Jones.
‘How can I tell you?’ she would say to these men, ‘how uninterested I am?’
‘How can I tell you you’re barred?’ said Jamesie, to those who were slow on the uptake.
And then one night she stopped by to tell me she would not be in for a few weeks and that was the last I heard of her too. Some part of me suspected that she had gone off to join Stanley in England, but a couple of summers later Hugh returned from his holidays in Enniskillen and said he had seen her come out of an office in the town and drive off in a flash new Rover. I asked him was he sure it was Ingrid. He told me he had crossed the road and it was her name on the door of the office. Titterington, wasn’t that it? There was a child in the car, he said, a girl and beautiful.
I often meant to go to Enniskillen, but somehow I never got around to it. Hugh went every year and, six weeks after quitting the International, died there, or just outside, driving past an army foot patrol on the dark road to Boho. Accidental discharge, army headquarters said and that, as it so often was with the army, was that. Liam Strong was bereft, and then a few months later was dead himself. He and Rita both, killed breaking the habit of a married lifetime when a satchel full of gelignite was thrown into the restaurant they had gone to for dinner one Saturday evening early in 1972. That same year, Oscar had a bag put over his head in an entry behind a drinking club and was shot for informing. Oscar. Jamesie lost almost the entire male line of his family to Loyalist assassins and Republican feuds. His hair turned white. (Women like the distinguished look, he tells me.) My own brother was shot in the thigh in mistake for another man and bled to death. Oh, it just goes on and on, I shouldn’t get started.
Ted Connolly played for Sunderland for two more years before being transferred to Workington. He carried on as the voice of the Dairy Pride cow for several years after that. Kids here whose parents barely remember the hat-trick of headers against Wales still butt the air in perfect time when chanting the slogan, ‘You’ll never put another butter on your bap!’
Fitz turned out to be neither Fitz nor Moore. He was arrested and charged under the name of Thomas Kavanagh, in Galway, for selling guns to a Garda Siochana he believed to be a Provisional. Which was lucky for him in a way, had the Garda really been a Provisional, Fitz-Kavanagh might have wound up, like so many others, missing to this day, in an unmarked grave: There were no guns.
Rumours continued to circulate about Clive White’s doings for much of the seventies. According to one, he cut some deal with a local British Army commander – and who knows what other kinds of commander – and made a packet using his lorries to move rubble from bomb sites out to the north foreshore of Belfast Lough. Explosions to order, was the suggestion. Insurance companies and all sorts were said to be involved. Who knows? Anything’s possible.
Last I heard, Clive had married and was importing Italian leather furniture. I’m sure someone has thought to look down the sides of the chairs as they come through customs.
Councillor Trevor Noades became Trevor Noades MEP, no scandal that I am aware of ever attached to his name, and with the aid of European money we got a B.U.M. of sorts eventually. Contractors on the Westlink, as they ended up calling it, were paid a foot at a time, so many individuals and organisations wanted them dead, for so many different reasons. It is hard to ascribe civic-mindedness to people who were blasting the fuck out of their own city, but there would appear to have been something of that in the paramilitary threats.
The arterial route that was to have been the new Shankill Road failed to materialise, but the developers made a mess of the road anyway. Malvern Street is altered beyond all recognition. You’d have to ask the people living there whether it has changed for the better.
And the Bishop of Ripon never did make it to Belfast. The Tuesday after the fire in Brand’s Arcade, his visit was called off. One of the organisers said now was not the right time. He was asked when the time would be right.
He thought long and hard before replying.
‘Not for a good many years,’ he said.
For a good many years, in fact, Belfast disgraced itself. There is no other word. And no justification, least of all the beautiful ideals of tolerance and equality on which the Civil Rights Association was founded in the International Hotel in January 1967. But, like I said, I shouldn’t get started.
*
Some years ago I was attending the funeral of Priscilla Coote, funerals having become a sort of habit with me then, when I met Paula, now a stoutly pretty woman of forty. She was living in Sligo, she said, and was up north visiting her mother when she read the death notice in the paper. (‘Suddenly, at home,’ I am, in an odd way, happy to report.) Priscilla Coote; it wasn’t a name you were likely to forget. She called me Jamesie by mistake and blushed when I corrected her. No one else from the International showed, so Paula and I sat together at the back of the church. Paula said it was funny, she didn’t suppose if she’d been living in Belfast she’d have come either. She hadn’t known the woman all that well. It was just being at home again and seeing the death notice like that.
‘I’m afraid,’ she said, ‘I came as much to see who else would be here.’
We walked a bit with the mourners behind the hearse, but didn’t go out to the graveyard. When the cortege dispersed to the cars we drove to a bar by the university. We talked, the way you do, about the old days and who was where and when we last saw everyone. The times being what they were, it was all a bit grim. To lighten the mood, I asked Paula did she remember when she started at the hotel; her uniform, the way it sat on her, like it had been cut out of a Cornflakes’ box. That was the week of the Civil Rights meeting. Paula looked blank. The week, I said, that Brand’s Arcade went on fire. Paula said she had no memory of a fire, no real memory even of Brand’s Arcade. She was fifteen and had only just arrived in Belfast, everything was a mystery to her.
Two things did stick in her mind from those first few days: her absolute terror of cocking up and being sent home to the country in disgrace, and the man who went berserk one morning and had to be carted away in a straitjacket.
‘He’d written all over his face and chest with lipstick. Devil symbols, somebody told me.’ She smiled at the recollection of her naivety. ‘I think he’d, you know, dirtied himself.’
We stayed in the bar the rest of the afternoon, watching the customers come and go.
‘Are you still …?’ She pulled an invisible pint and I grimaced into the one I was drinking: no. She asked me how long I’d stayed in the International and I told her, till the very end.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I’ve been away a long time.’
‘God, Paula,’ I said, ‘if you were to try to keep up with all the things that have happened here … It’s like a whole new city now, sometimes I hardly know it myself.’
She nodded at this with great sincerity and I realised we were both a bit tipsy.
‘Was it a …’ She looked out the window. In a first floor office across the street a man was talking on the telephone, tossing a pencil and shooting his hand out to catch it. ‘You know.’
‘A bomb? Nothing so dramatic. We went the way most things did, not with a bang but a whimper. Business those last few years?’ I held my nose.
‘Sad all the same,’ Paula said.
‘At least they didn’t knock it down. The City Council took it over for extra offices.’
This amused Paula, as I had hoped it might.
‘The way I remember it,’ she said, ‘some of those councillors spent more time in our hotel than they did in the City Hall.’
‘I could tell you stories.’
‘Couldn’t we all,’ she said and looked at me slyly.
We had one more drink for old times’ sake.
Paula wrote her address on a cigarette box and of course I lost it before I was halfway home. If she managed to hang on to mine she never used it. Like I really thought she was going to.
It was dark when we left the bar. I decided to pick the car up in the morning and walked with her into the city centre for a taxi. We said goodbye at the fortress front of Fon-a-Cab. Paula apologised again for getting my name wrong earlier.
‘Danny Boy. I don’t know how I could have forgotten it.’
‘It’s only been twenty-odd years.’
‘The Master!’ she said suddenly, as though delighted to have retrieved another name.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The Master.’
She raised a finger, hesitated a moment then jabbed the air between us.
‘There was another night, it could even have been the very first one, I was sitting in the dining room late on, waiting for a lift. I heard someone crying somewhere off the lobby. I was like …’ She mimicked a shudder and ended up by pulling her coat tighter. ‘It kept on going and I’m sitting there on my own and in the end I did that thing you see people do in films and you swear blind you’d never do yourself, I went to the door to see who it was was doing the crying. It was coming from the lounge.’
‘Williams,’ I said, remembering the family name of the man who had been straitjacketed. ‘His wife always sat over there.’
‘No,’ said Paula.
She narrowed her eyes, the better to peer into the past.
‘What did you call …? The receptionist – the one with the … ah – got hitched, you remember, to – what’s this you call him?’
‘Marian,’ I said.
That’s her. She was hunched up in one of those big chairs they had in there, sobbing her heart out and the Master was sitting on the arm of the chair, stroking her hair. And I thought, well, you can imagine, but when I said this the next day to one of the older women – God, I think it might have been … it was, it was Priscilla – I told Priscilla what I had seen the next day, like it was some kind of naughty secret, like she would find it a big laugh, and she got all cross on me and said I wasn’t to repeat it to anyone else. She told me I was too young to know what I was talking about. Something awful had happened, before I started there. A boy had been killed. She scared me half to death, she was that annoyed. I never did mention any of it again.’
A pizza-delivery scooter pulled up at the kerb. The rider wore yellow rainproofs and ox-blood Dr Marten’s. He produced a tissue from a shoulder pocket and wiped his mirrors, then rode back into the traffic.
‘It was years before I found out the whole story,’ Paula said. ‘I don’t suppose it matters, but I wish I’d known sooner, so that I could have said something. Marian was really, really crying that night.’
*
On Thursday 13th October 1994, in Fernhill House in the Glencairn area of west Belfast, a group of men representing the Combined Loyalist Military Command announced a ceasefire, effective from midnight, echoing the ceasefire called six weeks before by the Provisional IRA and bringing to an end what people here were in the habit of referring to, even long afterwards, as ‘the last twenty-five years of violence’. A quarter of a century, it was a neat figure, giving the impression that a sensible, even preordained period of history was coming to a close.
The announcement was made by a stocky man in his early sixties, dressed in a shirt and tie and wearing strong-lensed reading glasses. He held a pipe in his left hand and when not called upon to speak busied himself with the pipe-smoker’s arcane rituals.
Bar a single, dimly remembered newspaper photograph, this was the first time I had ever set eyes on Gusty Spence. It was difficult, watching these proceedings on television, to comprehend how much of an influence this dapper, gentle-sounding man’s actions had had on my life, on all our lives.
More than twenty-eight years had passed since the UVF released its statement, signed ‘Captain William Johnston’, declaring war on the IRA. The first act in their war had taken place on 7th May 1966 when a petrol bomb was thrown at a Catholic-owned bar off the Shankill Road. At, not into. The petrol bomb hit a neighbouring house. Matilda Gould, the elderly woman who lived there with her son, was badly burned. She took several weeks to die.
Towards the end of May, John Scullion was killed as he walked home, late and alone, off the Springfield Road. So unused to violent death had Belfast become by that stage of the 1960s that police at first thought John Scullion had been stabbed. Only when his body was exhumed, in the light of subsequent events, was the cause of his fatal stomach wound found to be a bullet.
The men who killed him had been looking for another man to shoot that night, a man alleged to be in the IRA. He had been named by James Burns, Rocky to his friends, who had done time in the Crumlin Road and claimed to have met a lot of IRA men there. Before too long Burns was back inside, sentenced to nine years for the unlawful and malicious possession of a revolver and ammunition in the Canmore Street home of an eighteen-year-old Catholic man early in the morning of 25th June. A couple of days before he was gaoled, three other men, associates of Burns, were given life terms for the murder of Peter Ward, on Malvern Street, twenty-four hours after the incident in Canmore Street. Among those men was Gusty Spence. During the trial the confession of one of his co-accused was read out in court identifying Spence as Captain William Johnston. Spence denied he was Johnston, just as he has always denied being the man who fired the shots that killed Peter Ward.
At the end of his short prepared speech that morning in Glencairn, Gusty Spence engaged the cameras and spoke of the abject and true remorse of the Loyalist terror groups on whose behalf he was speaking.
It took me a while, but I believed him.
*
Peter Ward was a good barman. He was earning eight pounds eight shillings at the time of his death, twenty-five shillings above the union rate.
I can’t tell you much else about him, except that those who knew him thought the world of him. He is, I realise, an absence in this story. I wish it were not so, but guns do that, create holes which no amount of words can fill.
We’re powerful people for remembering here, I hope that’s one thing we don’t forget.