The Ballad of HMS Belfast Read online

  One day I clicked with his staccato walk, and glimpsed the open notebook:

  Squiggles, dashes, question-marks, dense as the Rosetta stone.

  His good eye glittered at me: it was either nonsense, or a formula — for

  Perpetual motion, the scaffolding of shopping lists, or the collapsing city.

  Night Patrol

  Jerking his head spasmodically as he is penetrated by invisible gunfire,

  The private wakes to a frieze of pull-outs from Contact and Men Only.

  Sellotape and Blu-Tack. The antiquated plumbing is stuttering that he

  Is not in Balkan Street or Hooker Street, but in a bunk bed

  In the Grand Central Hotel: a room that is a room knocked into other rooms.

  But the whole Victorian creamy façade has been tossed off

  To show the inner-city tubing: cables, sewers, a snarl of Portakabins,

  Soft-porn shops and carry-outs. A Telstar Taxis depot that is a hole

  In a breeze-block wall, a wire grille and a voice-box uttering gobbledygook.

  Campaign

  They had questioned him for hours. Who exactly was he? And when

  He told them, they questioned him again. When they accepted who he was, as

  Someone not involved, they pulled out his fingernails. Then

  They took him to a waste-ground somewhere near the Horseshoe Bend, and told him

  What he was. They shot him nine times.

  A dark umbilicus of smoke was rising from a heap of burning tyres.

  The bad smell he smelt was the smell of himself. Broken glass and knotted Durex.

  The knuckles of a face in a nylon stocking. I used to see him in the Gladstone Bar,

  Drawing pints for strangers, his almost-perfect fingers flecked with scum.

  Smithfield Market

  Sidelong to the arcade, the glassed-in April cloud — fleeting, pewter-edged —

  Gets lost in shadowed aisles and inlets, branching into passages, into cul-de-sacs,

  Stalls, compartments, alcoves. Everything unstitched, unravelled — mouldy fabric,

  Rusted heaps of nuts and bolts, electrical spare parts: the ammunition dump

  In miniature. Maggots seethe between the ribs and corrugations.

  Since everything went up in smoke, no entrances, no exits.

  But as the charred beams hissed and flickered, I glimpsed a map of Belfast

  In the ruins: obliterated streets, the faint impression of a key.

  Something many-toothed, elaborate, stirred briefly in the labyrinth.

  Army

  The duck patrol is waddling down the odd-numbers side of Raglan Street,

  The bass-ackwards private at the rear trying not to think of a third eye

  Being drilled in the back of his head. Fifty-five. They stop. The head

  Peers round, then leaps the gap of Balaclava Street. He waves the body over

  One by one. Forty-nine. Cape Street. A gable wall. Garnet Street. A gable wall.

  Frere Street. Forty-seven. Forty-five-and-a-half. Milan Street. A grocer’s shop.

  They stop. They check their guns. Thirteen. Milton Street. An iron lamp-post.

  Number One. Ormond Street. Two ducks in front of a duck and two ducks

  Behind a duck, how many ducks? Five? No. Three. This is not the end.

  33333

  I was trying to explain to the invisible man behind the wire-grilled

  One-way mirror and squawk-box exactly where it was I wanted to go, except

  I didn’t know myself — a number in the Holy Land, Damascus Street or Cairo?

  At any rate in about x amount of minutes, where x is a small number,

  I found myself in the synthetic leopard-skin bucket-seat of a Ford Zephyr

  Gunning through a mesh of ramps, diversions, one-way systems. We shoot out

  Under the glare of the sodium lights along the blank brick wall of the Gasworks

  And I start to ease back: I know this place like the back of my hand, except

  My hand is cut off at the wrist. We stop at an open door I never knew existed.

  Two Winos

  Most days you will find this pair reclining on the waste ground

  Between Electric Street and Hemp Street, sharing a bottle of Drawbridge

  British Wine. They stare at isolated clouds, or puffs of steam which leak out

  From the broken pipes and vents at the back of the Franklin Laundry . . .

  They converse in snarls and giggles, and they understand each other perfectly.

  Just now they have entered the giggling phase, though what there is

  To laugh at, who knows. Unless it was this momentary ray of sunlight

  That glanced across their patch of crushed coke, broken glass and cinders;

  And the bottle which had seemed half-empty until then is now half-full.

  Cocktails

  Bombing at about ninety miles an hour with the exhaust skittering

  The skid-marked pitted tarmac of Kennedy Way, they hit the ramp and sailed

  Clean over the red-and-white guillotine of the check-point and landed

  On the M1 flyover, then disappeared before the Brits knew what hit them. So

  The story went: we were in the Whip and Saddle bar of the Europa.

  There was talk of someone who was shot nine times and lived, and someone else

  Had the inside info on the Romper Room. We were trying to remember the facts

  Behind the Black & Decker case, when someone ordered another drink and we entered

  The realm of Jabberwocks and Angels’ Wings, Widows’ Kisses, Corpse Revivers.

  Travellers

  On the waste ground that was Market Street and Verner Street, wandering trouserless

  Through his personal map — junked refrigerators, cars and cookers, anchored

  Caravans — the small boy trips over an extended tow-bar, picks himself up, giggles

  And pisses on a smouldering mound of Pampers. Sic transit gloria mundi —

  This is the exact site, now that I recall it, of Murdock’s stables, past tense.

  Murdock himself moved out to the Flying Horse estate some years ago. He wanted

  To end his days among friends; there were Murdocks in the local graveyard.

  The long umbilicus of dung between his back yard and Downpatrick faded. Belfast

  Tore itself apart and patched things up again. Like this. Like his extended family.

  Snowball

  All the signs: beehive hair-do, white handbag, white stilettos, split skirt.

  An Audi Quattro sidles up in first gear past the loading-bay of Tomb Street

  GPO — a litter of white plastic cord, a broken whiskey bottle —

  Then revs away towards the Albert Clock. The heels click off — another

  Blind date? Like a fish-net stocking, everything is full of holes . . .

  Arse-about-face, night-shift and the Christmas rush, perfume oozing from

  Crushed packets — Blue Grass, Obsession — and once, in a forgotten pigeon-hole,

  I woke up to this card stamped 9 August 1910: Meet me usual place & time

  Tomorrow — What I have to tell you might not wait — Yours — Forever — B.

  The Exiles’ Club

  Every Thursday in the upstairs lounge of the Wollongong Bar they make

  Themselves at home with Red Heart Stout, Park Drive cigarettes and Dunville’s whiskey,

  A slightly-mouldy batch of soda farls. Eventually, they get down to business.

  After years they have reconstructed the whole of the Falls Road, and now

  Are working on the back streets: Lemon, Peel and Omar, Balaclava, Alma.

  They just about keep up with the news of bombings and demolition, and are

  Struggling with the finer details: the names and dates carved out

  On the back bench of the Leavers’ Class in Slate Street School; the Nemo Café menu;

  The effects of the 1941 Blitz, the e
ntire contents of Paddy Lavery’s pawnshop.

  Slate Street School

  Back again. Day one. Fingers blue with cold. I joined the lengthening queue.

  Roll-call. Then inside: chalk-dust and iced milk, the smell of watered ink.

  Roods, perches, acres, ounces, pounds, tons weighed imponderably in the darkening

  Air. We had chanted the twelve-times table for the twelfth or thirteenth time

  When it began to snow. Chalky numerals shimmered down; we crowded to the window —

  These are the countless souls of purgatory, whose numbers constantly diminish

  And increase; each flake as it brushes to the ground is yet another soul released.

  And I am the avenging Archangel, stooping over mills and factories and barracks.

  I will bury the dark city of Belfast forever under snow: inches, feet, yards, chains, miles.

  The Irish for No

  Was it a vision, or a waking dream? I heard her voice before I saw

  What looked like the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, except Romeo

  Seemed to have shinned up a pipe and was inside arguing with her. The casements

  Were wide open and I could see some Japanese-style wall-hangings, the dangling

  Quotation marks of a yin-yang mobile. It’s got nothing, she was snarling, nothing

  To do with politics, and, before the bamboo curtain came down, That goes for you too!

  It was time to turn into the dog’s-leg short-cut from Chlorine Gardens

  Into Cloreen Park, where you might see an Ulster Says No scrawled on the side

  Of the power-block — which immediately reminds me of the Eglantine Inn

  Just on the corner: on the missing h of Cloreen, you might say. We were debating,

  Bacchus and the pards and me, how to render The Ulster Bank — the Bank

  That Likes to Say Yes into Irish, and whether eglantine was alien to Ireland.

  I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, when yes is the verb repeated,

  Not exactly yes, but phatic nods and whispers. The Bank That Answers All

  Your Questions, maybe? That Greek portico of Mourne granite, dazzling

  With promises and feldspar, mirrors you in the Delphic black of its windows.

  And the bruised pansies of the funeral parlour are dying in reversed gold letters,

  The long sigh of the afternoon is not yet complete on the promontory where the victim,

  A corporal in the UDR from Lisbellaw, was last seen having driven over half

  Of Ulster, a legally-held gun was found and the incidence of stress came up

  On the headland which shadows Larne Harbour and the black pitch of warehouses.

  There is a melancholy blast of diesel, a puff of smoke which might be black or white.

  So the harbour slips away to perilous seas as things remain unsolved; we listen

  To the ex cathedra of the fog-horn, and drink and leave the world unseen —

  What’s all this to the Belfast business-man who drilled

  Thirteen holes in his head with a Black & Decker? It was just a normal morning

  When they came. The tennis-court shone with dew or frost, a little before dawn.

  The border, it seemed, was not yet crossed: the Milky Way trailed snowy brambles,

  The stars clustered thick as blackberries. They opened the door into the dark:

  The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. Empty jam-jars.

  Mish-mash. Hotch-potch. And now you rub your eyes and get acquainted with the light

  A dust of something reminiscent drowses over the garage smell of creosote,

  The concrete: blue clouds in porcelain, a paint-brush steeped in a chipped cup;

  Staples hyphenate a wet cardboard box as the upturned can of oil still spills

  And the unfed cat toys with the yin-yang of a tennis-ball, debating whether yes is no.

  Serial

  As the Guinness-like chiaroscuro of the cat settled into the quickthorn hedge

  I had a feeling I’d been there before: in a black taxi, for example, when this bullet

  Drilled an invisible bee-line through the open window and knocked a chip

  Off the Scotch sandstone façade of the Falls Road Library. Everybody ducked

  To miss the already-dead split-second; the obvious soldier relaxed back into

  His Guinness-and-tan uniform, since to hear the shot is to know you are alive.

  It is this lapse of time which gives the film its serial quality: the next

  Episode is about the giant statue of the newly-renovated Carson, verdigris becoming

  Bronze. It is suggested that it might be camouflage — as glossed on

  In the SF novels of W. D. Flackes, particularly in his novel, The X

  People. And so in the words of another commentator, the future is only today

  Fading into the past — drawing, perhaps, a retrospective dotted line on the map

  For from here the border makes a peninsula of the South, especially in the shallows

  Of Lough Erne, where so much land is so much water anyway. And, since the Ormsby

  Room in Lakeland still remains un-named, they are thinking of calling it

  Something else: not a name, but the name of a place. Blacklion, for instance.

  The Blacklion Room has a certain sort of armorial flavour which would suit

  The tourist junkets, the loops and spirals of an Irish dancing costume.

  Waterfowlers in ulsters, mackintoshes, flak jackets, tank-tops, wade in

  Through the rushes and ignore the German fishermen trapped in the caves of Boho.

  The water-level is neither here nor there: as they say, it’s making up its mind

  To rain, the grey brainy mass of the clouds becoming cabbages, since a foot patrol

  Has just gone over to the other side: you can identify them by the black markings

  On their cheeks, the fact that it is winter and the hedges are bare.

  These errors of reading are not the only difference between us and them

  Though the shibboleths are lingua franca, since German became current.

  As for Irish, it was too identifiable as foreign: a museum where the stuffed

  Wolfhound was just as native as the Shell tiger — I am hunting with a telephoto

  Fish-eye, shooting, as they say, some footage. The crackly static

  Of the portable still gives some news, though, in between the magazines:

  I am hearing a lot, for example, of this campaign to save the English frog.

  Refrigerators stocked with spawn are humming quietly in wait; the light

  Goes off with a click as you shut the door. The freezing dark suggests

  That they are dying anyway, perplexed by their bi-focal vision, as next week,

  Or the last week, are the same, and nothing can be justified

  As the independent eye of the chameleon sees blue as green.

  Asylum

  The first indication was this repeated tic, the latch jigging and clicking

  As he rehearsed the possibility of entering, or opening. Maybe

  It was a knock, a question; Uncle John was not all there. Yet he had

  His father’s eyes, his mother’s nose; and I myself, according to my mother,

  Had his mouth. I would imagine speaking for him sometimes. He had

  A second cousin’s hands, or a cousin’s twice removed, an uncle’s way of walking:

  In other words, he was himself. So he might walk in this very minute, or turn

  His back on us to contemplate the yellow brick edgings of the bricked-in

  Windows of the mill wall opposite. He seemed to see things that we didn’t

  See: cloud-shadow eddying and swirling round a manhole; the bits of grit

  That glittered at the edges; individual as dirt, the dog-leg walk of a dog

  As it followed its nose from one side of the street to the other. His ears

  Might prick to the
clatter of an empty tin kicked down an entry,

  Diminishing the yelps of children as their skipping rope became a blur,

  Then slowed and stopped, then whipped back up again, the up-hill down-dale

  Quickening pulse of a cardiograph. We watched him hover and dilate

  In the frosted glass. Someone would get up; he would retreat. An electric

  Yellow bakery van hummed by; he sniffed the air. A car backfired.

  Like the fast-forward or the rewind button, everything is going far too

  Fast, though we might know precisely, having heard it all before for real,

  What is going on, like that climactic moment of a rounded, oratorical

  Gesture, practised in the mirror till it seemed completely unfamiliar:

  The hyped-up, ninety-to-the-dozen commentary that illustrates, in retrospect,

  The split-second when a goal is scored; the laid-back, bit-by-bit analysis

  As we take in every slowed-down motion of the replay. We are looking

  For a piece we know is there, amongst the clutter and the glug of bottles,

  Whispering, the chink of loose change, the unfamiliar voices that are us

  And cloud our hearing. The repeated melancholic parp of a car-horn

  Eventually has heralded the moment: now we know what’s coming next, the voice

  Hoarsened by the second-generation tape, the echo of a nearly-empty dusty

  Concert-hall, illuminated, we imagine, by the voice, one shaft of fitful sunlight

  That retreated almost instantly to a nimbo-cumulus — gold-edged, slate-blue,

  Glimmering between its cup and lip — imponderably weighing on the skylight.

  A yellow bakery van hums by. There is a lull, and then a car backfires.