The Ballad of HMS Belfast Read online

  CIARAN CARSON

  The Ballad of

  HMS Belfast

  A Compendium of Belfast Poems

  PICADOR

  in association with The Gallery Press

  Contents

  Dunne

  Dresden

  Judgement

  Belfast Confetti

  Clearance

  Linear B

  Night Patrol

  Campaign

  Smithfield Market

  Army

  33333

  Two Winos

  Cocktails

  Travellers

  Snowball

  The Exiles’ Club

  Slate Street School

  The Irish for No

  Serial

  Asylum

  Patchwork

  Turn Again

  Loaf

  Snow

  Ambition

  Queen’s Gambit

  Last Orders

  Hairline Crack

  Bloody Hand

  Jump Leads

  Yes

  The Mouth

  Night Out

  Jawbox

  John Ruskin in Belfast

  Narrative in Black and White

  Hamlet

  Second Language

  Eesti

  Apparat

  The Brain of Edward Carson

  Opus 14

  All Souls

  58

  Opus Operandi

  The Ballad of HMS Belfast

  Pro tanto quid retribuamus

  For so much, what shall we give in return.

  Dunne

  It was then I heard of the missing man.

  The wireless spoke through a hiss of static —

  Someone was being interviewed:

  The missing man, the caller said, can be found

  At Cullyhanna Parochial House.

  That was all. Those were his very words.

  I reached an avenue of darkened yews.

  Somewhere footsteps on the gravel.

  I then identified myself, and he

  Embraced me, someone I had never seen

  Before, but it was him all right, bearded

  And dishevelled. There were tears in his eyes.

  He knew nothing of the ransoms.

  He did not know who they were. He knew nothing

  Of his whereabouts. He did not even know

  If he was in the South or North.

  It seemed he was relieved from hiding in

  Some outhouse filled with ploughs and harrows,

  Rusted winnowings that jabbed and rasped

  At him. He had felt like a beaten child.

  When they hooded him with a balaclava,

  He thought the woolly blackness was like being

  Shut up under stairs, without a hint of hope,

  Stitches dropped that no one could knit back.

  From Camlough, Silverbridge and Crossmaglen

  The military were closing in. He was,

  It seemed, the paste on the wallpaper, or

  The wall, spunked out between the leaves, etched

  At last into the memories of what might have been.

  He was released. The three bullets they had given him

  As souvenirs chinked in his pocket. He slipped

  Through a hole in the security net.

  All day long for seven days, he had lain

  On the broad of his back on the floor.

  He could see nothing, but turned, again

  And again, to an image of himself as a child

  Hunched in bed, staring at the ceiling,

  At the enigmatic pits and tics

  That scored the blankness, and then, farther,

  To the stars that brushed against that windowpane.

  Dresden

  Horse Boyle was called Horse Boyle because of his brother Mule;

  Though why Mule was called Mule is anybody’s guess. I stayed there once,

  Or rather, I nearly stayed there once. But that’s another story.

  At any rate they lived in this decrepit caravan, not two miles out of Carrick,

  Encroached upon by baroque pyramids of empty baked bean tins, rusts

  And ochres, hints of autumn merging into twilight. Horse believed

  They were as good as a watchdog, and to tell you the truth

  You couldn’t go near the place without something falling over:

  A minor avalanche would ensue — more like a shop bell, really,

  The old-fashioned ones on string, connected to the latch, I think,

  And as you entered in, the bell would tinkle in the empty shop, a musk

  Of soap and turf and sweets would hit you from the gloom. Tobacco.

  Baling wire. Twine. And, of course, shelves and pyramids of tins.

  An old woman would appear from the back — there was a sizzling pan in there,

  Somewhere, a whiff of eggs and bacon — and ask you what you wanted;

  Or rather, she wouldn’t ask; she would talk about the weather. It had rained

  That day, but it was looking better. They had just put in the spuds.

  I had only come to pass the time of day, so I bought a token packet of Gold Leaf.

  All this time the fry was frying away. Maybe she’d a daughter in there

  Somewhere, though I hadn’t heard the neighbours talk of it; if anybody knew,

  It would be Horse. Horse kept his ears to the ground.

  And he was a great man for current affairs; he owned the only TV in the place.

  Come dusk he’d set off on his rounds, to tell the whole townland the latest

  Situation in the Middle East, a mortar bomb attack in Mullaghbawn —

  The damn things never worked, of course — and so he’d tell the story

  How in his young day it was very different. Take young Flynn, for instance,

  Who was ordered to take this bus and smuggle some sticks of gelignite

  Across the border, into Derry, when the RUC — or was it the RIC? —

  Got wind of it. The bus was stopped, the peeler stepped on. Young Flynn

  Took it like a man, of course: he owned up right away. He opened the bag

  And produced the bomb, his rank and serial number. For all the world

  Like a pound of sausages. Of course, the thing was, the peeler’s bike

  Had got a puncture, and he didn’t know young Flynn from Adam. All he wanted

  Was to get home for his tea. Flynn was in for seven years and learned to speak

  The best of Irish. He had thirteen words for a cow in heat;

  A word for the third thwart in a boat, the wake of a boat on the ebb tide.

  He knew the extinct names of insects, flowers, why this place was called

  Whatever: Carrick, for example, was a rock. He was damn right there —

  As the man said, When you buy meat you buy bones, when you buy land you buy stones.

  You’d be hard put to find a square foot in the whole bloody parish

  That wasn’t thick with flints and pebbles. To this day he could hear the grate

  And scrape as the spade struck home, for it reminded him of broken bones:

  Digging a graveyard, maybe — or better still, trying to dig a reclaimed tip

  Of broken delph and crockery ware — you know that sound that sets your teeth on edge

  When the chalk squeaks on the blackboard, or you shovel ashes from the stove?

  Master McGinty — he’d be on about McGinty then, and discipline, the capitals

  Of South America, Moore’s Melodies, the Battle of Clontarf, and

  Tell me this, an educated man like you: What goes on four legs when it’s young,

  Two legs when it�
�s grown up, and three legs when it’s old? I’d pretend

  I didn’t know. McGinty’s leather strap would come up then, stuffed

  With threepenny bits to give it weight and sting. Of course, it never did him

  Any harm: You could take a horse to water but you couldn’t make him drink.

  He himself was nearly going on to be a priest.

  And many’s the young cub left the school, as wise as when he came.

  Carrowkeel was where McGinty came from — Narrow Quarter, Flynn explained —

  Back before the Troubles, a place that was so mean and crabbed,

  Horse would have it, men were known to eat their dinner from a drawer.

  Which they’d slide shut the minute you’d walk in.

  He’d demonstrate this at the kitchen table, hunched and furtive, squinting

  Out the window — past the teetering minarets of rust, down the hedge-dark aisle —

  To where a stranger might appear, a passer-by, or what was maybe worse,

  Someone he knew. Someone who wanted something. Someone who was hungry.

  Of course who should come tottering up the lane that instant but his brother

  Mule. I forgot to mention they were twins. They were as like two —

  No, not peas in a pod, for this is not the time nor the place to go into

  Comparisons, and this is really Horse’s story, Horse who — now I’m getting

  Round to it — flew over Dresden in the war. He’d emigrated first, to

  Manchester. Something to do with scrap — redundant mill machinery,

  Giant flywheels, broken looms that would, eventually, be ships, or aeroplanes.

  He said he wore his fingers to the bone.

  And so, on impulse, he had joined the RAF. He became a rear gunner.

  Of all the missions, Dresden broke his heart. It reminded him of china.

  As he remembered it, long afterwards, he could hear, or almost hear

  Between the rapid desultory thunderclaps, a thousand tinkling echoes —

  All across the map of Dresden, store-rooms full of china shivered, teetered

  And collapsed, an avalanche of porcelain, slushing and cascading: cherubs,

  Shepherdesses, figurines of Hope and Peace and Victory, delicate bone fragments.

  He recalled in particular a figure from his childhood, a milkmaid

  Standing on the mantelpiece. Each night as they knelt down for the rosary,

  His eyes would wander up to where she seemed to beckon to him, smiling,

  Offering him, eternally, her pitcher of milk, her mouth of rose and cream.

  One day, reaching up to hold her yet again, his fingers stumbled, and she fell.

  He lifted down a biscuit tin, and opened it.

  It breathed an antique incense: things like pencils, snuff, tobacco.

  His war medals. A broken rosary. And there, the milkmaid’s

  creamy hand, the outstretched

  Pitcher of milk, all that survived. Outside, there was a scraping

  And a tittering; I knew Mule’s step by now, his careful drunken weaving

  Through the tin-stacks. I might have stayed the night, but there’s no time

  To go back to that now; I could hardly, at any rate, pick up the thread.

  I wandered out through the steeples of rust, the gate that was a broken bed.

  Judgement

  The tarred road simmered in a blue haze. The reservoir was dry

  The railway sleepers oozed with creosote. Not a cloud to be seen in the sky

  We were sitting at the Camlough halt — Johnny Mickey and myself — waiting

  For a train that never seemed to come. He was telling me this story

  Of a Father Clarke, who wanted to do in his dog. A black and white terrier.

  He says to the servant boy, Take out that old bitch, he says, and drown her.

  Johnny Mickey said the servant boy was Quigley, and now that he remembered it,

  He’d been arrested by a Sergeant Flynn, for having no bell on his bike.

  Hardly a hanging crime, you might say. But he was fìned fifteen shillings.

  The prisoner left the court-room and his step was long and slow

  By day and night he did contrive to fill this sergeant’s heart with woe

  So there was this auction one day, and Quigley sneaks in the back.

  A lot of crockery ware came up. Delph bowls. Willow-pattern. Chamberpots.

  The bidding started at a shilling. Quigley lifts his finger. One-and-six.

  Everyone pretending not to look at one another. Or to know each other.

  Nods and winks. A folded Dundalk Democrat. Spectacles put on and off.

  And so on, till he won the bid at fifteen shillings. Name, please,

  Says the auctioneer. Sergeant Flynn, says Quigley, Forkhill Barracks.

  For to uphold the letter of the law this sergeant was too willing

  I took the law upon myself and fined him back his fifteen shillings

  He rambled on a bit — how this Flynn’s people on his mother’s side

  Were McErleans from County Derry, how you could never trust

  A McErlean. When they hanged young McCorley on the bridge of Toome

  It was a McErlean who set the whole thing up. That was in ’98,

  But some things never changed. You could trust a dog but not a cat.

  It was something in their nature, and nature, as they say, will out.

  The pot would always call the kettle black. He hummed a few lines.

  Come tender-hearted Christians all attention pay to me

  Till I relate and communicate these verses two or three

  Concerning of a gallant youth was cut off in his bloom

  And died upon the gallows tree near to the town of Toome

  Which brought Johnny Mickey back to the priest and the terrier bitch.

  Quigley, it transpired, had walked the country — Ballinliss and Aughaduff,

  Slievenacapall, Carnavaddy — looking for a place to drown her.

  It was the hottest summer in living memory. Not a cloud to be seen in the sky.

  The Cully Water was a trickle. The Tullyallen and the Ummeracam were dry.

  Not a breath of wind. Not so much water as would drown a rat. After three days

  Quigley and the bitch came back. They were both half-dead with thirst.

  He looked her up he looked her down in his heart was ne’er a pang

  I’ll tell you what says Father Clarke if she won’t be drowned she’ll hang

  Johnny Mickey said that priests had a great way with ropes and knots.

  It was one of the tricks that they learned in the seminary. Something to do

  With chasubles and albs. In less time than it takes to tell, Father Flynn

  had rigged up a noose. They brought the bitch out to the orchard

  And strung her up from the crook of an apple tree. And who was passing by

  But the poet McCooey. He peeped through a hole in the hedge.

  He spotted the two boys at their trade, and this is what he said:

  A man with no bell on his bike a man with a single bed

  It’s hardly any wonder that you’d go off your head

  Poor old bitch poor old friend you died without a bark

  Sentenced by Johnny Quigley and hung by Father Clarke

  Of course, said Johnny Mickey, your man McCooey’s long since dead.

  A white plume of steam appeared around the bend. A long lonesome blast.

  The tracks began to shimmer and to hum. Our train was coming in

  And not a minute late. It shivered to a halt. We both got on.

  We would pass the crazy map of a dried-up reservoir. A water-tower.

  We would watch the telegraph lines float up and down, till we arrived

  At the other end; I would hand Mickey Quigley over to the two attendants.

  Farewell unto you sweet Drumaul if in you I had stayed

  Among the Presbyt
erians I ne’er would have been betrayed

  The gallows tree I ne’er would have seen had I remained there

  For Dufferin you betrayed me McErlean you set the snare

  Belfast Confetti

  Suddenly as the riot squad moved in, it was raining exclamation marks,

  Nuts, bolts, nails, car-keys. A fount of broken type. And the explosion

  Itself — an asterisk on the map. This hyphenated line, a burst of rapid fire . . .

  I was trying to complete a sentence in my head, but it kept stuttering,

  All the alleyways and side-streets blocked with stops and colons.

  I know this labyrinth so well — Balaclava, Raglan, Inkerman, Odessa Street —

  Why can’t I escape? Every move is punctuated. Crimea Street. Dead end again.

  A Saracen, Kremlin-2 mesh. Makrolon face-shields. Walkie-talkies. What is

  My name? Where am I coming from? Where am I going? A fusillade of question-marks.

  Clearance

  The Royal Avenue Hotel collapses under the breaker’s pendulum:

  Zig-zag stairwells, chimney-flues, and a ’thirties mural

  Of an elegantly-dressed couple doing what seems to be the Tango, in Wedgewood

  Blue and white — happy days! Suddenly more sky

  Than there used to be. A breeze springs up from nowhere —

  There, through a gap in the rubble, a greengrocer’s shop

  I’d never noticed until now. Or had I passed it yesterday? Everything —

  Yellow, green and purple — is fresh as paint. Rain glistens on the aubergines

  And peppers; even from this distance, the potatoes smell of earth.

  Linear B

  Threading rapidly between crowds on Royal Avenue, reading

  Simultaneously, and writing in this black notebook, peering through

  A cracked lens fixed with Sellotape, his rendez-vous is not quite vous.

  But from years of watching, I know the zig-zags circle:

  He has been the same place many times, never standing still.