Phyllis flew over to London with Titch’s mum a couple of months ago, on a trip to see us and go to a musical in the West End. She had wanted to catch The Phantom of the Opera, which sounded a bit corny to me, but she was excited about it and had been reading up all about it on her iPad and egging Titch’s mum on too. She kept saying, ‘And I believe the bit where the Phantom appears is amazing.’
The pair of them were sleeping in twin beds in the spare room, which made me glad we had one, and when I passed by at night I could hear their muffled voices through the door, giggling at some joke like a couple of girls.
I wanted to say that the Phantom had been haunting the West End for so long now he was probably falling apart at the seams, but I kept quiet. It cracked me up to hear Phyllis going on like she was some kind of theatre buff – ‘the Phantom is amazing’ – with Elsie watching her wide-eyed, her mouth ajar, as though this great-aunt was the font of all theatrical knowledge.
She’s in her seventies now, a bit tottery at the joints, but when I asked her if she would be okay leaving the newsagent’s she answered me all airy like a superannuated Holly Golightly: ‘Oh don’t worry, Marty has it all under control.’
Aye, Marty.
Shortly after McGee was killed, all those years ago, Phyllis was back on the phone. In the course of the conversation she said that ‘a wee lad called Marty has been calling round to the shop, asking for any odd jobs on Saturdays. He says he knows you.’
When she mentioned his name and his recent proximity, I had felt the prickle of wariness. What’s that shivery line from the old play? Something wicked this way comes. That might seem a strange thing for an adult to say about a young boy, but there it was. My instinct was to tell him to stay away. I didn’t know what that slippery wee fella would trail in the door behind him.
‘Tell him no for now, Phyllis,’ I said. ‘I’ll have a chat with him when I’m over.’
That night I lay motionless in bed and thought about him: his permanent air of twitchiness, the restlessness in his bones. From the first time I met him, I could sense he was out searching for a wing to creep under. We both knew it, but my wing had so few feathers on it at the time. And then he wandered into the path of McGee, a bird of prey.
It must have scared him, McGee’s murder. From what I had overheard out in the yard that night, he was already getting frightened before it. He understood right from wrong; not enough yet perhaps, but a bit at least. I thought about his pale face the night he had tried to warn me to get out. He had taken a risk for me, that night.
If I left him alone there I knew it was only a matter of time before someone else found him, someone built along the same lines as McGee.
The next time I went back to Belfast I didn’t see him around at all for a couple of days. Then I spotted him one evening hanging out alone on his wall as the daylight died, hunched in his bomber jacket. I sneaked up behind him.
‘Hello stranger,’ I said.
He jumped and turned around to look at me, surprised for a second before he remembered to seem blasé.
‘I thought you were in England.’
I vaulted over the wall. He wasn’t smoking, but there were two squashed cigarette butts on the ground directly beneath his dangling trainers.
‘Well, not at the moment,’ I said, ‘or I wouldn’t be here talking to you.’
‘Aye,’ he said.
‘How’s tricks?’ I said.
‘Okay, I suppose. Jeanette’s gone off to college.’
‘D’you miss her?’
‘Now and then. When she’s not here I’ve got her room, though.’
‘Come on and I’ll buy you a plate of chips and a cup of tea in the café.’
He liked the sound of that: although his shrug affected indifference, he was down off the wall in a jiffy.
The café combined a general air of decline with a brisk trade: its paintwork was peeling, but its deep-fat fryer was rarely out of action. Once we were sitting opposite each other over the scarred Formica table top, I got down to business.
‘I heard you got a bit too close to the action not long ago,’ I said.
He looked at me warily with his light, narrowed eyes, trying to work out what I knew and how.
‘McGee,’ I said, and took a slurp of my tea, watching him.
There was a silence, as he fussed about with the salt and vinegar on his chips, buying time.
‘Who told you that?’ he said.
‘A wee bird.’
He paused for a second, then dropped his voice.
‘Was it you that shot him?’
‘Now why would I do that?’ I said.
‘You know why,’ he said.
He sat back in his chair, staring.
‘I suppose I did have a reason,’ I said with a minimal smile. ‘But you know I’m not really that kind of person.’
I wasn’t worried that anyone in charge would actually think it was me. From what the news reports said, his death had Loyalist feud written all over it in indelible ink. Their interminable power struggle was still grinding on. Only the week before, wee Tommy’s dad had been gunned down outside a pub.
But I stared calmly back at him until he got uncomfortable and shifted his gaze. You’ll notice I didn’t deny his suggestion flat out. I told him the truth, but with enough space there for him to imagine that I really might have had something to do with McGee’s death.
I didn’t do that for me, but for him. It’s what he needed. It was a feature of his personality that he could only respect someone older if he was a tiny bit frightened of them.
‘Phyllis told me you wanted to help out in the shop,’ I said.
‘Aye,’ he said.
He kept his eyes lowered, but his body was tensed and alert, his head cocked to one side like a listening bird. He had only just turned twelve: he said his birthday had happened while I’d been away, and his ma had given him money to take a couple of friends to see a horror film with a 15 certificate.
I didn’t understand how the ushers could have let him in, with him looking so small, but he wore a cynically streetwise air around town. Strangers give up early on shielding kids like Marty. They figure the likes of him have seen it all already.
‘I need to make one thing very clear,’ I said. ‘Everything that happens in that shop has to be above board. No nicking stuff, no so-called “donations” to anyone who might be collecting, no tip-offs about when the cash register is left unlocked to any special friends.’
His eyes widened in indignation: ‘D’you think I would do that?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘You might. But if you ever do, I will find out. And if anyone approaches you, tell me. As it is, the shop makes one big donation from Phyllis every year, and in public too. To yon wee disabled club.’
He nodded. I snaffled one of his chips. It was best to be honest.
‘One more thing,’ I said. ‘Your first Saturday’s money, take it down to Mrs Hackett and give it to her in exchange for all the Walnut Whips you nicked. After that it’s all yours.’
‘I’m not going to do that,’ he said, insulted.
‘Fine. I was going to give you a chance. But go back to sitting on your wall. Go back to being a top lad. Maybe one of the hoods will bring you into one of their wee schemes so you can scrape together just enough for a fancy skateboard. Then one day when you stop being useful to them you’ll see what happens.’
That stopped him in his tracks. The barbs were too sharp and specific. They stung and they were disorienting him. He couldn’t figure how I knew about the skateboard.
He glared at me and stood up in a fury. Then he got up and walked out the door. I didn’t follow: I pulled his plate over towards me and sat quietly polishing off the rest of his chips and enjoying my tea.
Two minutes later he walked back in and sat down.
‘Okay,’ he said, sulkily.
I pushed the plate back towards him and smiled.
That’s how it started. Now he’s a grown man, with a girlfriend and a baby on the way and a stake in our newsagent’s. He never got that tall but he keeps in shape: he’s a wiry, quick wee nut and he knows everything and everyone and how to dodge trouble. He gave up the fags when he turned fifteen, and got into kick-boxing and Thai cookery and later a part-time business degree. Phyllis loves him, and even says so occasionally, like the sap she’s always been. I suppose I do too, although it would freak him out if I ever admitted it, so I just get him a present on his birthday and see him right with his Christmas bonus and leave it at that.
He didn’t ask me about McGee again. I respected that. It takes intelligence to know when it’s better to keep a box locked. I’ve never had a reason yet not to trust him, but after all these years I still keep half an eye on him. Okay, a quarter of an eye. The thing is that in some ways he’s very like me.
Mrs Hackett got her Walnut Whip money – which according to Marty she accepted with good grace, even insisting he took half back – but she’s been dead five years now. McGee’s shop closed down when the old man retired. It’s turned into a chemist’s, and Phyllis goes there for her prescriptions. Belfast has changed, too. Everywhere you turn there are fellas with rampant facial hair sucking on giant sippy cups of warm, coffee-flavoured milk. The place is hiving with restaurants, with new eateries competing for awards every week. It’s as if after all those long years of constant arguing people now can’t get enough of stuffing their faces.
We came late to the recreational possibilities of food, although those of drink had been heavily explored. I can remember back when the city, wrapped in the drab shawl of the Troubles, had only one Italian restaurant, Luigi’s, run by a middle-aged owner who was a perfect caricature of an excitable Neapolitan. It was as though – in the absence of any other prominent Italians in Belfast – he was determined to give us our money’s worth in terms of gross stereotyping.
His customers were a willing audience. Deep in our parochial wrangling, we were thirsty for a taste of the exotic. In our city many people were permanently incensed over history, politics, borders, insults, threats, killings, and the simple fact of one another’s existence, but we’d never seen anyone get so worked up about food before. It was an enthralling novelty.
Luigi once chased a customer round the restaurant with a knife in a dispute over the quality of his monkfish. The fella on the other end of the knife had rashly suggested that the monkfish was past its best, and Luigi was determined to bully him into attesting otherwise. That was a high point, but there was some form of incident in there most nights. People used to pack out Luigi’s, settling in amid the red-checked tablecloths just to shovel down spaghetti and watch the owner work himself up into that evening’s rage, his gelled ringlets springing in indignation away from his contorting face. Even when Luigi was in a good mood, his jollity was as unnerving as his tantrums: it was potentially on the turn.
As time went on the food – which had often been tasty, at least – began to veer consistently towards the inedible, to the point of blatant provocation. It was as though Luigi, who used to swing so dramatically between moods, was jammed on anger. Maybe he’d caught it from us.
His delicate balance of theatre and culinary unpredictability began to tip against him. Other restaurants opened and gradually drew customers away. Even his tempers lost their cachet. The taxman circled. Luigi’s famous yellow Lamborghini vanished from outside the restaurant. I can’t remember now how it all ended. There were so many stories in Belfast at the time, each one more pressing than the last.
I can see it now among people my age from home, the struggle in their different ways to make sense of everything that happened. They’ll never manage it, because sense had so little to do with it. From the very start, the Troubles created their own logic, the crazed logic of opposition, like when you’re in the thick of a blazing row and you hear yourself smashing a glass and screaming in a high-pitched tone that isn’t normally yours. In the midst of so many voices urging you to weigh in, it was a fight just to stay half decent.
Here’s the funny thing, though: after I left, I never cared so deeply about any city again. It was Belfast, with its broad streets and narrow furies, that held all the poetry for me. It enraged me and clasped me close like a family member. Even after everything that had happened it was still home, the only place in the world where I didn’t talk with an accent. I approached every other city with the politeness reserved only for friends.
Sometimes I think that maybe now I’ll only go back for good in an urn, and whoever cares enough can spoon me out like instant coffee and sprinkle me over the Lagan. Or if Eve should die first, and I’m old and alone, perhaps I’ll leave London behind and let Belfast drive me crazy one more time.
The city does that: it sits and waits patiently for its émigrés to return, and sometimes they do. When the world-famous snooker player Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins was ruined with cancer, he came back to Belfast, to the same streets where he first started out as a wee lad playing truant in a local snooker hall called the Jampot.
He fell into a small council flat in Sandy Row. There was nowhere else for him to be. His crackling wire of electricity, that made sparks fly off the green baize every time he walked towards it, had worked loose and reduced everything in England to ash: his stacks of prize money, his cheeky street-urchin’s face, his marriage, his health. When he played in the world championship final in 1982, Big Jacky and I had sat jammed together on the sofa, eyes glued to the screen, and cheered at the television when he won the title for the second time. Away from the lights of the tournament halls, though, the little sizzle beneath his skin wouldn’t let up.
Higgins couldn’t get the hang of time, the way most people learn to. He couldn’t handle the way it slowed down without asking. When he was playing snooker, he could bend time to his will, letting it hang suspended in the air, or blasting balls round the table faster than an intake of breath. Out there in the world, though, the minutes moved too sluggishly for his internal beat, so he drank and brawled and head-butted to kick-start them somewhere in the chaos.
Back in Belfast in his final days, he haunted the pubs and streets, a six-stone shocker of a body hauled around by a tiny, gaunt head with burning eyes and a rasping voice, still smoking and drinking beneath a raffish fedora hat. Marty saw him a few times in the bar opposite his flat, reading the paper and sinking Guinness. By then a pint of the rich, black stout was often the closest he came to food. His loyal friends in the snooker fraternity, many of whom he had insulted in his cups, raised cash in an effort to buy him new teeth. He had none of his own left, but a skein of cockiness persisted in him like a live nerve.
The city still loved him and was soft on him. It prized even the husk of his charisma, and tolerated his explosive, sentimental qualities as similar to its own. It craned its ear in bars to hear his hoarse stories and stood him drinks, waiting for the day when it would wrap him up in legend and carry his coffin through the streets on a horse-drawn carriage. There’s a painted mural of him now in Sandy Row, wielding a cue in his flashy heyday. He died alone in his flat.
Higgins came home to Belfast when he was wrung out, looking for a last bit of comfort, but not everyone finds it there. Now that things are quieter, we tiptoe back to the old places where pain is tangled up with the past and unpick the threads and try to comb them into some kind of order. And there are certain people who can’t seem to get anything in order, because their threads are lost or too densely matted, because they still don’t know what happened to the people they loved, or who was to blame.