Eden Burning (17 page)

“So, that will be easy. Let’s make sure we have one more child-bearing Fenian who won’t have children.” William laughed.

“What’s going on?” asked Peter.

“That long-haired bitch, she’s for the chop. We only need to have a look in the diary and see when.” Cedric hit his hand against the steering wheel, laughing. He wiped a few tears with the back of his hand and put on a posh voice,

“William, can you tell me what the diary is looking like? When is the next available date?”

William snorted. “Give her a day or two to pray for her soul. She’ll need it.”

• • •

Clara opened the door of the Fast Shop on the corner of Brompton Park. A bell tinkled. Mr O Grady from the Fast Shop was on his knees behind the counter. He slowly got to his feet.

“Can I have a pan loaf please Mr O Grady?”

While Mr O Grady fixed his dentures in his mouth to reply, Clara surveyed the jars of sweets on the counter – pineapple chunks, lemon sorbets, rhubarb and custard, midget gems, wine gums, coconut mushrooms, liquorice allsorts and blackjacks.

Mr O Grady shuffled towards the counter with the pan loaf. He stared at her from behind thick rimmed glasses.

“How was school today Clara?”

“Great. Miss Donovan the Spanish teacher said if I wanted to do Spanish ‘A’ level, it would really be a good idea to try to get an au pair job in Spain this summer. I would need to save money for the flights. I am here to ask if you have any work.”

“Well, you’ve asked at the right time. I’m opening up a second shop in Andersonstown. I need to find someone to help out here. Why don’t you come round on Friday after school and we can talk. If you like what you hear you can start on Saturday.” Mr O Grady looked around to make sure no-one was listening. “I need you to hide the money from the till every hour in case they come in to rob you. It’s happened twice in the last month but they only got ten pounds.”

“Sounds like a good plan Mr O’Grady. Can I have a quarter of pineapple chunks and a quarter of liquorice allsorts?”

“You’re not going to eat me out of my profits when you’re here are you?” Mr O Grady chuckled, pushing his glasses back up to the bridge of his nose.

Clara blushed.

“Only joking. You can eat anything you want. You don’t want to put on too much weight though if you’re off to show your figure in Spain in the summer.”

Clara blushed again. She did have a sweet tooth.

“How much will I earn?”

“50p an hour.”

“Perfect.”

Clara imagined – two whole months without any rioting. Two months of not being afraid that someone would spit in your face or throw a brick at your head when walking home from school. She wondered what it would be like to able to go to bed at night without worrying that you might be killed in your sleep. Maybe those dreadful nightmares would stop too. The ones where she was lying in bed and someone broke down the front door and she heard heavy boots climbing the stairs. Clara would jump out of bed and straighten the sheets, and smooth the eiderdown to make it look as though no-one had been sleeping there. Then she would hide in the wardrobe and listen to whoever it was walk towards her father’s room.

She knew that the first place they would look would be under the bed. She sat on the floor of the wardrobe in the dark with the hanging jackets and trousers crumpled on top of her head. She held her hands over her face, pressing them into her eyes. When she loosened her fingers, the smell of the damp and mothballs surrounded her like a cloud of soggy mist. There was nowhere else to hide. She heard them turn the door knob of her bedroom. It squeaked. They clumped towards the wardrobe without even looking under the bed. Maybe that’s where she should have hidden there after all. The wardrobe door opened, light from the streetlamp outside shone on a black gloved hand and a parka. She woke up.

• • •

Ciaran McCann, Clara’s father, headed up the IRA in North Belfast. He read about Paddy’s and Michael’s murders in The Irish News while having a drink with Danny and Sean. The Easter Rising Club was dark inside, with no natural light. There were smelly drink-stained carpets which caught your feet
slightly as you walked to the bar, and there were chipped tiled floors which occasionally crunched when Ciaran walked by onto fragments of broken glass. An Irish Tricolour hung from the wall near a small stage.

Ciaran had three children – Conor aged nine, Frances eleven and Clara sixteen. He fed them history, including the history of the Irish Famine, sitting around the dinner table for Sunday lunch. Poor Irish families depended upon the humble potato to survive during the early nineteenth century. On the banks of Lake Titicaca between Peru and Bolivia, in 4,000 BC, Peruvians spread the ‘Chuño’ or potato on the ground during frosty nights. When the sun rose the potatoes were covered with straw to protect them from the harsh radiation of a relentless sun. Later children trampled the potatoes to remove their moisture and peel, they were placed in a running river to remove any bitterness and lastly, they were dried for fourteen days and stored for up to four years. For the Peruvians the gormless potato was a God. The Incas counted units of time by the length of time it took to cook a potato into various consistencies. Potatoes were used to divine for Truth and to predict the weather. There were more than one hundred varieties of the potato in a single Andean valley.

For Ciaran, 1845 was a good enough starting point not only for the potato but for Irish history. In 1845 the potato blight hit Ireland. ‘Fungus phytophthora infestans’ arrived, evidenced by dark blotches appearing on the tips of the potato leaves and plant stems, and white mould under the leaves. More than one million people in Ireland died from starvation between 1845 and 1851. Another million were forced to leave, many dying on the coffin ships on their way to find a new life in America.

Ciaran told his children how the freezing winds from the Atlantic battered the frail frames of starving women, babies and children, struggling through the bogs of Connemara to walk
north looking for food. Meanwhile on the East Coast carts carrying corn rumbled over uneven ground heading for Dublin where they were loaded with fattened livestock to be shipped to England.

Ciaran left The Easter Rising Club on the 4th January, and walked down Strathroy Park about two hundred feet behind Margaret Mulvenna. He noticed without much interest her frizzy curly brown hair, shopping bag, beige duffle coat (which looked a size too big), wrinkled woollen tights, purple skirt and flat black leather shoes. He saw her struggle with the weight of the shopping bag moving it from her left hand to her right. He didn’t see that she was carrying two pints of milk, half a stone of potatoes, six Paris buns, a plain and a pan loaf. He was more interested in what was happening ahead of Margaret.

Margaret was a small, slim-built mother of five. She had been born a Protestant but had converted to Catholicism ten years before when she married her husband Joseph, who was Catholic. Aged thirty-six, Joseph died unexpectedly from a brain haemorrhage while lying asleep in bed with Margaret on the 5th March 1970. A week later, she was burnt out of her house in the Protestant Glencairn District and moved for security into the inner district of Ardoyne with her five children. She was thirty years old. Her youngest child was five. Every morning she wakened with a sense of dread about what the day would bring. Every day she said ‘Thank You’ to God for being alive.

Ciaran glanced at his watch. Danny and Sean should be in position. He wondered for a moment if Margaret was going to walk straight into the line of Danny’s fire. A burst of machine gun fire rattled for about thirty seconds only a hundred yards in front of Margaret. Ciaran stopped, took a packet of Benson and Hedges out of his pocket, lit a cigarette, watching to see what would happen next.

At Margaret’s gate, a young British soldier lay shot on the ground. One of his comrades held his head with the helmet still on, as another ripped open his green jacket. Margaret dropped her shopping bags on the ground, ran towards him, and knelt on the ground beside the soldiers.

“Can I help?”

She looked into the boy’s white waxen face. He was eighteen. He stared back at her, more resigned than frightened.

“How bad is it?” he asked.

Margaret, put her hand on his shoulder and leant forward. She removed his helmet, smoothing his fringe back off his forehead. She remained silent.

“You’ll be OK. Hang in there. We’ll get you to hospital.” One of his friends whispered, patting his hand.

“Let me get some towels.” Margaret clambered awkwardly to her feet, feeling dizzy. One of the soldiers helped her to steady herself before she ran down the garden path, past the tall oak tree growing in the middle of the garden. She turned a key in the lock, ran upstairs, tripping on the top step and banging her head against the landing. Pulling herself to her feet she searched for a basin of water, clean towels and a pillow. She ran back down the garden path with the warm water splashing from side to side. She lifted his head gently to place the pillow on the ground. The soldier’s head was heavy and wet in her hands. Then she realised that it was not so much that his head was wet but that her hands slippery and smeared with his blood. He must have hit his head hard when he fell to the ground. He smiled weakly at her.

“Thank you.”

She passed the towels to his friends and moved the basin closer. She saw the small black hole in his chest. There was blue bruising spreading around the hole with only a small trickle of blood running down his body towards his trousers.

Margaret soaked a towel in the warm water and pressed it to his chest.

“There may be internal bleeding,” one of his mates whispered lifting a second towel, dipping it into the water and ringing it out for Margaret.

He moved onto all fours and put his lips close to his mate’s ear.

“Don’t give up. Stay awake. Don’t go to sleep.” The wounded soldier’s eyes rolled back in his head. He took one large breath before his head moved and fell to the left of the pillow.

“You know you can’t sleep.” The soldier shook his shoulder gently.

Margaret held the boy’s hand and searched for a pulse. She bit her lower lip and shook her head.

“He’s dead?” His friend knelt on the ground, resting his head on the pavement, his arms stretched out in front of him.

The silence was only broken by the almost inaudible sobbing of his friend.

“Will someone say a prayer?” Margaret whispered.

“Will you? He’s a Catholic.” His friend knelt beside the dead boy with his hands joined.

Margaret, blessed herself and then blessed the dead soldier’s forehead with the sign of the Cross as she said, “Oh Angel of God, my Guardian dear, to whom his love entrusts me here, ever this day, be at my side to light, to guard, to rule and guide me home.”

Ciaran lit a second cigarette, watching Margaret bend over the soldier in prayer. He lit a third cigarette as a soldier arrived with a stretcher and he saw the body being trundled into the back of a Saracen tank. He watched Margaret rest her hand on his friend’s shoulder before he handed her the white towels covered in blood, the pillow and empty basin. Ciaran lit a fourth
cigarette, leaning against the railed garden of the house facing Margaret’s. He didn’t notice the bare oak tree. He didn’t see Smokey her white and grey cat sharpening his nails against the lower bark, or Dennis’s bike on the ground under the window sill. He didn’t see Margaret walk slowly up the path towards the front door with her head buried in the pillow. Ciaran kept his eyes on the Saracen tank until it turned right at the bottom of the street.

• • •

That same afternoon, Peter sat in his bedroom in a terraced house off the Shankill Road, strumming Van Morrison’s ‘Tupelo Honey’.

“She’s as sweet as Tupelo Honey. She’s an angel of the first degree.” The walls of his bedroom were papered with woodchip painted deep primrose yellow and orange hopsack curtains hung from the windows. His bed was covered with an orange and cream crocheted quilt made by Eileen for his sixteenth birthday. As he strummed, Peter searched his mind for a strategy to save Rose.

“Are you coming for a pint?” asked William, peering through the open door, expecting ‘No’ for a reply.

“OK. Give me ten minutes.”

Peter looked at himself in the mirror in the bathroom. He hadn’t shaved that morning. He had a stubbly gingery blonde beard, long and bushy sideburns, almost non-existent eye lashes and eyebrows. He looked as though seeing himself for the first time. He saw a broad face; square shaped with wide elongated eyes. He moved closer to the mirror, peering intensely as though trying to find out who was behind the face that looked back at him.

“You’re an ugly looking sod. Why would she look twice at
you? She deserves better.” His intense blue eyes looked back at him. “Save her life you ugly brute. Do something to make up for the disaster of a life form that you are.”

• • •

“What are you having?” William asked, scratching at a spot on his chin.

“A pint of lager.” Peter slid onto the bench beside the window.

“Why do they call it the Black Beetle?” Peter rubbed his hands on his jeans.

Cedric wearing a navy blue polo neck jumper and jeans threw his hands into the air and spluttered.

“The cockroaches.”

“Are cockroaches not brown?” Peter shuffled on the bench.

“Who bloody cares whether they’re black or brown or what they call this place. It’s a drinking hole, isn’t it, not a fucking art exhibition of brown and black cockroaches. Make mine a pint of Guinness with a whiskey chaser.”

“Cheers.” There was a few seconds of silence before Peter lifted his pint and gulped half of it down without speaking.

Cedric nudged William with his elbow. “He’s getting the hang of it at last.”

Peter placed his glass on the table, wiping his lips from left to right with the back of his hand.

“I’ve been thinking about what you were saying about that bitch on the Crumlin. She’s a bit of a lightweight, don’t you think? Why don’t we go for one of the big boys, one of the big hitters in Ardoyne?”

“Who do you have in mind?” asked William, raising an eyebrow to Cedric.