The Ballad of HMS Belfast Read online

It’s getting nearer now, that out-of-focus look he had: a wall-eye

  With its yellowed white, the confused rainbow of the iris weeping unpredictably.

  The tortoise-shell frame had one missing lens. Why they were bi-focals

  I don’t know; he didn’t read. Spinning yarns was more his line, always something

  Off the top of his head. Or he might sing a song: perhaps I’m going down the town

  And I know who’s going with me. I have a wee hoy of my own, and his name is —

  Here he’d mention my name, which was almost my name; half of it, at least,

  Was right. All this while he champed, between gulps of tea, two thick buttered

  Doorsteps of a Peter Pan loaf, and cast his eye on the yellowed pages

  Of an Old Moore’s Almanac for 1948, the year, in fact, that I was born.

  Storms this month, I see; hurricanes and thunder . . . the almanac was upside down,

  But sure enough, just then, above the smoke-stack of the mill on up the street,

  I caught a dark umbilicus of cloud, a momentary flash. Rain pattered on the window.

  A yellow bakery van went by; he sniffed the ozone. A car backfired.

  You can tell that this was all some time ago, although it does repeat itself.

  On this particular day, my other uncle, Pat, had just come in from work.

  He plunked two loaves down on the table. A doughy-sour inveterate smell

  Breathed out from him, and as he lifted off the white cloud of his cap, it sparked off

  The authoritative onset of this other, needle-in-the-haystack day that I

  Began with. That ratchety delay with which the clock is poised, conjugating

  All its tensed-up coils and springs: rain pattered on the window. An electric

  Yellow bakery van whirred off. A car backfired. Someone seemed to get up very

  Slowly. A dog was barking. The car backfired again. Everything was getting faster

  And the door bursts open. He is babbling, stammering, contractions

  Getting nearer, nearer, all the blips run into one another till they are

  A wave, a wall: They said to push, she pushed, they said to shut her mouth,

  She pushed, they said to keep her head down, and she pushed once more —

  The wave has almost broken — more, they said: a lock of hair, a bald patch,

  Hair again. Flecks of blood and foam. He cannot get it all out fast enough.

  Afterwards, a lull. He sits up and he takes a cup of tea, a slice of toast.

  He is himself again, though I can see myself in him. I remember very well, he says,

  When you were born; oh yes, thunder, hurricanes; and as I see the bruised

  Posthumous violet of his face, I hear him talk about the shape of this particular

  Cloud he saw last week, or this dog he’d noticed last week, which he’d imitate,

  Panting, slabbering and heaving as it lolled about the margins of the new estate —

  Nettles, yellow chickweed, piss-the-beds — sniffing, wagging, following itself

  Back through that remembered day of complex perfume, a trail of moments

  Dislocated, then located. This dog. That bitch. There is a long-forgotten

  Whimper, a groan of joy as it discovers home: a creosoted hutch, a bowl,

  The acrid spoor of something that was human.

  Patchwork

  It was only just this minute that I noticed the perfectly triangular

  Barbed wire rip in the sleeve of my shirt, and wondered where I’d got it.

  I’d crossed no fences that I knew about. Then it struck me: an almost identical

  Tear in my new white Sunday shirt, when I was six. My mother, after her initial

  Nagging, stitched it up. But you can never make a perfect job on tears like that.

  Eventually she cut it up for handkerchiefs: six neatly-hemmed squares.

  Snags of greyish wool remind me of the mountain that we climbed that day —

  Nearly at the summit, we could see the map of Belfast. My father stopped

  For a cigarette, and pointed out the landmarks: Gallaher’s tobacco factory,

  Clonard Monastery, the invisible speck of our house, lost in all the rows

  And terraces and furrows, like this one sheep that’s strayed into the rags

  And bandages that flock the holy well. A little stack of ball-point pens,

  Some broken spectacles, a walking-stick, two hearing-aids: prayers

  Repeated and repeated until granted.

  So when I saw, last

  week, the crucifix

  Ear-ring dangling from the right ear of this young Charismatic

  Christian fiddle-player, I could not help but think of beads, beads

  Told over and over — like my father’s rosary of olive stones from

  Mount Olive, I think, that he had thumbed and fingered so much, the decades

  Missed a pip or two. The cross itself was ebony and silver, just like

  This young girl’s, that swung and tinkled like a thurible. She was playing

  The Teetotaller. Someone had to buy a drink just then, of course: a pint of Harp,

  Four pints of stout, two Paddy whiskies, and a bottle of Lucozade — the baby

  Version, not the ones you get in hospital, wrapped in crackling see-through

  Cellophane. You remember how you held it to the light, and light shone through?

  The opposite of Polaroids, really, the world filmed in dazzling sunshine:

  A quite unremarkable day of mist and drizzle. The rainy hush of traffic,

  Muted car-horns, a dog making a dog-leg walk across a zebra crossing . . .

  As the lights changed from red to green and back to red again

  I fingered the eighteen stitches in the puckered mouth of my appendicectomy.

  The doctor’s waiting room, now that I remember it, had a print of The Angelus

  Above the fireplace; sometimes, waiting for the buzzer, I’d hear the Angelus

  Itself boom out from St Peter’s. With only two or three deliberate steps

  I could escape into the frame, unnoticed by the peasant and his wife. I’d vanish

  Into sepia. The last shivering bell would die on the wind.

  I was in the surgery. Stainless steel and hypodermics glinted on the shelves.

  Now I saw my mother: the needle shone between her thumb and finger, stitching,

  Darning, mending: the woolly callous on a sock, the unravelled jumper

  That became a scarf. I held my arms at arms’ length as she wound and wound:

  The tick-tack of the knitting needles made a cable-knit pullover.

  Come Christmas morning I would wear it, with a new white shirt unpinned

  From its cardboard stiffener.

  I shivered at the touch of cold

  white linen —

  A mild shock, as if, when almost sleeping, you’d dreamt you’d fallen

  Suddenly, and realised now, you were awake: the curtains fluttered

  In the breeze across the open window, exactly as they had before. Everything

  Was back to normal. Outside, the noise of children playing: a tin can kicked

  Across a tarred road, the whip-whop of a skipping-rope, singing —

  Poor Toby is dead and he lies in his grave, lies in his grave, lies in his grave . . .

  So, the nicotine-stained bone buttons on my father’s melodeon clicked

  And ticked as he wheezed his way through Oft in the Stilly Night — or,

  For that matter, Nearer My God to Thee, which he’d play on Sundays, just before

  He went to see my granny, after Mass. Sometimes she’d be sick — another

  Clean shirt’ll do me — and we’d climb the narrow stair to where she lay, buried

  Beneath the patchwork quilt.

  It took me twenty years to make

  that quilt —

  I’m speaking for her, now — and, your father’s stitched
into that quilt,

  Your uncles and your aunts. She’d take a sip from the baby Power’s

  On the bedside table. Anything that came to hand, a bit of cotton print,

  A poplin tie: I snipped them all up. I could see her working in the gloom,

  The shadow of the quilt draped round her knees. A needle shone between

  Her thumb and finger. Minutes, hours of stitches threaded patiently; my father

  Tugged at her, a stitch went wrong; she started up again. You drink your tea

  Just like your father: two sups and a gulp: and so, I’d see a mirror image

  Raise the cup and take two sips, and swallow, or place my cup exactly on

  The brown ring stain on the white damask tablecloth.

  Davy’s

  gone to England,

  Rosie to America; who’ll be next, I don’t know. Yet they all came back.

  I’d hardly know them now. The last time I saw them all together, was

  The funeral. As the Rosary was said, I noticed how my father handled the invisible

  Bead on the last decade: a gesture he’d repeat again at the graveside.

  A shower of hail: far away, up on the mountain, a cloud of sheep had scattered

  In the Hatchet Field. The stitches show in everything I’ve made, she’d say —

  The quilt was meant for someone’s wedding, but it never got that far.

  And some one of us has it now, though who exactly I don’t know.

  Turn Again

  There is a map of the city which shows the bridge that was never built.

  A map which shows the bridge that collapsed; the streets that never existed.

  Ireland’s Entry, Elbow Lane, Weigh-House Lane, Back Lane, Stone-Cutter’s Entry —

  Today’s plan is already yesterday’s — the streets that were there are gone.

  And the shape of the jails cannot be shown for security reasons.

  The linen backing is falling apart — the Falls Road hangs by a thread.

  When someone asks me where I live, I remember where I used to live.

  Someone asks me for directions, and I think again. I turn into

  A side-street to try to throw off my shadow, and history is changed.

  Loaf

  I chewed it over, this whiff I got just now, but trying to pin down

  That aroma — yeast, salt, flour, water — is like writing on the waxed sleeve

  That it’s wrapped in: the nib keeps skidding off. Or the ink won’t take. Blue-black

  Quink is what I used then. I liked the in-between-ness of it, neither

  One thing nor the other. A Conway Stewart fountain-pen, blue-ish green

  Mock tortoiseshell . . . the lever sticking sometimes in the quick of my thumb,

  I’d fill her up: a contented slurp like the bread you use to sup

  Soup. McWatters’ pan loaf, some said, was like blotting-paper: I thought of

  Leonardo’s diary, or a mirror code ending with, Eat this.

  Well, some people like blotting-paper. I used to eat chalk myself. Raw

  Flour, oatmeal. Paper. A vitamin deficiency? The corners of

  My books weren’t dog-eared, they were chewed. But neatly chewed, like the thumb-index

  Of a dictionary. I ate my way from A to Z, the list of weights

  And measures. So now I’m in McWatters’ flour-loft. Grains, pecks and bushels:

  So much raw material. I was raw. This was a summer job, not real

  Work. Myself and this other skiver, we mostly talked of this and that —

  Cigarettes and whiskey — between whatever it was we were supposed

  To do. Joe reckoned that Jameson’s Three Swallows was hard to beat

  Though you could make a case for their Robin Redbreast or Power’s Gold Label.

  One had the edge the others didn’t, though you couldn’t quite describe it.

  Like Gallaher’s Greens: dry, smoky, biting. He had this bebop hairstyle —

  Bee-bap, as they say in Belfast, a golden fuzz pricked up from the scalp —

  And he’d done time at one time or another for some petty crime. Theft?

  Jiggery-pokery. Night-shifts. The kind of fly moves that get you caught.

  And as it happened, he was between times just then, like me between terms.

  It seemed the Health Inspectors were due in a while, so we were given

  Galvanized buckets, sponges, those mops with the head of an albino

  Golliwog. The place breathed gunge and grease, the steamy damp of baking bread.

  So as I say, we talked: football, drink, girls, horses, though I didn’t know

  Much on any of these scores. They were clouds on the blue of the future.

  Walking the slippery catwalk from one bake-room to the next — like Dante’s

  Inferno, the midnight glare of ovens, a repeated doughy slap

  Of moulds being filled — we’d think of the cool of the loo or a lunchtime pint.

  The bitter edge of Guinness would cut through the bread and oxtail soup

  Till bread and soup and stout became all one. We would talk with our mouths full.

  Then back to Ajax and Domestos, the Augean pandemonium.

  Or sorting out spoiled loaves for pig-feed — waxed wrappers in one bag, sliced pan

  In the other; the pigs, it seemed, were particular. At other times,

  Stacking up empty flour-sacks: cloudy caesurae floating one on top

  Of one another, the print so faded we could barely read the text;

  That choked-up weave meant nothing much but passing time. Expanding moments,

  Watching dough rise, the stretch-marks lost in the enormous puff-ball — Is this

  The snow that was so bright last year?

  We worked slowly

  through the levels, till

  We found ourselves at last in No. 2 loft, high above the racket.

  My last week. As for him, he didn’t know. Muffled by forgotten drifts

  Of flour, I was thinking of the future, he was buried in the past.

  This move he’d worked, this girl he’d known. Everything stored away in cells.

  Pent-up honey talk oozed out of him, while I sang, Che sarà sarà.

  He asked if I’d remember him. We wrote our names on the snowed-up panes.

  The date, the names of girls, hearts and arrows. We made up affairs between

  The bakers and the packers — bread and paper — then we wiped it all clean.

  The glass shone for the first time in years. We were staring out the window

  At the end of summer. Aeroplanes flew by at intervals, going elsewhere:

  Tiny specks, the white lines of their past already fuzzing up the blue.

  Snow

  A white dot flicked back and forth across the bay window: not

  A table-tennis ball, but ‘ping-pong’, since this is happening in another era,

  The extended leaves of the dining-table — scratched mahogany veneer —

  Suggesting many such encounters, or time passing: the celluloid diminuendo

  As it bounces off into a corner and ticks to an incorrigible stop.

  I pick it up days later, trying to get that pallor right: it’s neither ivory

  Nor milk. Chalk is better; and there’s a hint of pearl, translucent

  Lurking just behind opaque. I broke open the husk so many times

  And always found it empty; the pith was a wordless bubble.

  Though there’s nothing in the thing itself, bits of it come back unbidden,

  Playing in the archaic dusk till the white blip became invisible.

  Just as, the other day, I felt the tacky pimples of a ping-pong bat

  When the bank-clerk counted out my money with her rubber thimble, and knew

  The black was bleeding into red. Her face was snow and roses just behind

  The bullet-proof glass: I couldn’t touch her if I tried. I crumpled up the chit —

  No use in keeping what
you haven’t got — and took a stroll to Ross’s auction.

  There was this ’thirties scuffed leather sofa I wanted to make a bid for.

  Gestures, prices: soundlessly collateral in the murmuring room.

  I won’t say what I paid for it: anything’s too much when you have nothing.

  But in the dark recesses underneath the cushions I found myself kneeling

  As decades of the Rosary dragged by, the slack of years ago hauled up

  Bead by bead; and with them, all the haberdashery of loss — cuff buttons,

  Broken ball-point pens and fluff, old pennies, pins and needles, and yes,

  A ping-pong ball. I cupped it in my hands like a crystal, seeing not

  The future, but a shadowed parlour just before the blinds are drawn. Someone

  Has put up two trestles. Handshakes all round, nods and whispers.

  Roses are brought in, and suddenly, white confetti seethes against the window.

  Ambition

  ‘I did not allow myself to think of ultimate escape . . . one step at a time was enough.’

  — John Buchan, Mr Standfast

  Now I’ve climbed this far, it’s time to look back. But smoke obscures

  The panorama from the Mountain Loney spring. The city and the mountain are on fire.

  My mouth’s still stinging from the cold sharp shock of water — a winter taste

  In summer — but my father’s wandered off somewhere. I can’t seem to find him.

  We’d been smoking ‘coffin nails’, and he’d been talking of his time inside, how

  Matches were that scarce, you’d have to split them four ways with your thumb-nail;

  And seven cigarette ends made a cigarette. Keep a thing for seven years,

  You’ll always find a use for it, he follows in the same breath . . . it reminds me

  Of the saint who, when he had his head cut off, picked up his head, and walked

  With it for seven miles. And the wise man said, The distance doesn’t matter,

  It’s the first step that was difficult.

  Any journey’s like that — the first step of your life, my father interrupts —