Adrian McKinty - Dead I Well May Be

She comes round to face me. She’s smiling, but there are tears welling up in her. She sniffs a little and dabs her eye with the hem of her dressing gown.

Are you ok, Mrs. Miller? I ask, anxiously.

She looks at me and smiles again, her lips parting a little and becoming moist and crimson under the strip light. Slowly, she reaches out her hand and touches me on the cheek with fingers so cold you would have thought she was a long time dead.

You’re a good boy, Michael, she says, and then her hand comes down to my neck and undoes the tea towel. She shakes the hairs out onto the floor, the loose curls floating down like tiny rotor blades.

Thank you very much, I say.

See you next month, she says, and puts her hand on my arm and sees me to the front door.

She runs her fingers through my hair, and I stand there on the porch for a moment.

She touches my face again and smiles, turns, and closes the door.

I run down the path into the street.

There’s light outside from the aurora. It’s white and gold and so strong you can almost see the outline of Knockagh Mountain.

Who’s the skinhead? Davey Quinn asks me, and I chase him all the way up to the graveyard.

Later, we both come down to the street and take opposite sides in the football game. Davey’s team wins, but I score a goal, so everything works out ok in the end.

When it’s late and chilly, I find PJ out in the shed and we sit by the paraffin lamp and tell each other scary stories. Many about Mr. Miller. We’re happy. The haircut’s over and tomorrow is Christmas and we’ll go to Nan’s house and there will be presents that Nan has bought for us out of her pension. She’ll have made dinner, too. Turkey, potatoes, pavlova, trifle.

We sit there and just think for a while. Ma should be calling us in to bed but Ma’s next door smoking and chatting with Mrs. Parkinson.

You know the way I asked Nan for the cardboard Death Star? PJ says after a time.

Aye.

I don’t think I want it now. I think I’m sick of all that Star Wars shite.

Really?

Yeah.

And your Action Men, too?

Aye, sick of all that. You can have them back.

I can?

Aye.

What’s got into you?

I don’t know.

Later, under the cool sheets of the upper bunk, I ponder this and other things, but eventually they all vape and there’s only one topic on my mind. Someday I would rescue her. In just a few years. When I was older. I would go in and punch him out and take her and we’d disappear across the water to England or America or somewhere where the sun shone and the sky was blue and we were far from soldiers and paramilitaries and bombs and violence. But, of course…

And yes, that was the night.

Later that evening Da came in singing and blitzed to high heaven. There were voices. Things flew. Things crashed.

Ma said, Over my dead body you will.

And he said, You’ll fucking do as you’re told. This is man’s business, and you’ll keep your fucking neb out of it.

And Ma’s one to overegg the custard when she gets the chance and said that if it was man’s business what was it to do with him.

He said that she was to shut the fuck up if she knew what was good for her.

And she said something that I’m sure was sarcastic and funny and he couldn’t think of a reply, and there was an almighty smash of something and she screamed that that was a wedding gift. A slap. A sob.

I knew that PJ would have the pillow over his ears, but I could hear.

I could hear.

It was 1982 and the year after the hunger strikes, and tension was as high as I ever remembered it. In Belfast, riots were as general as Joyce’s snow. Every night, petrol bombs and blast bombs, the peelers keeping apart Protestant and Catholic and sometimes nobody would get killed. Here in the northern suburbs, though, it was less of a problem; things were calmer, but it was like your pan of milk on the cusp, a slight notch up on the heat… Anything or anyone could make it overboil and scald.

And Mr. Miller believed that he was the boy who could make the magic. Really, he wasn’t much of a player, big to us, but small time in the larger scheme of things. But still. He was the boy. And later, when it went to shit, I couldn’t help but feel that I was partly responsible. You do that as a wean, you think the world revolves around you. Sometimes I used to think that when I left a room all the people in it froze like with the pause button on a video and only started up when I came back in again.

Epiphany came thirteen days early for PJ and me and Ma and Da. Oh aye.

Seething with fury and looking for trouble, Mr. Miller went down to the Rangers Club. Mr. Miller talked a great game and said that they were all yellow bastards down there, and if they really meant what they said about helping the police and the forces of law and order, they’d do something about it. He persuaded about half a dozen eejits that the best way of assuring the future of Northern Ireland as a political entity was to do a firebomb attack on a Catholic housing estate. In the brilliance of their plan they were all to go home and make Molotovs, and he and Arthur Durant would drive them over in Arthur’s van. Mr. Miller made especially sure that our da came along. Oh yes, that was how he’d get me. Maybe he would have had Dad fire the first Molotov or maybe he’d have got Dad’s prints on a bottle. In any case, he was arranging it so that ever after he would have something over him. The best laid plans…

They never got anywhere near the estate.

They were stopped by the army for driving too fast, the Molotovs were discovered in half a minute, and everyone was arrested. Marty Bains turned rat, and Da and Mr. Miller and all the rest got five years for conspiracy to cause explosions.

There followed an inevitable, clichéd, and speedy progression: Ma divorced Da, turned to drink, started smoking again, turfed out Granpa, starting going with Mrs. Miller to the Central Bar, took up with Mr. Henry, who owned the butcher’s, and since Mr. Henry and us didn’t get along, sent us to live with Nan in East Belfast.

Mrs. Miller stayed with her husband and somehow conceived a bairn, who is, I’m sure, a credit to his people.

Like his grandfather and great-grandfather before him, PJ went to sea, leaving at the age of fifteen, and is now… where?

Me? I lived with Nan, and God bless her, she’s a wonderful woman, but no disciplinarian, and things fell such that I went to the world of violence: the rackets and the army and America. From there to here.

And that was then and this is now.

Events, trapped by them, by history.

Trapped, and in this cell forever? I don’t think so. For like I say, Another Christmas coming. Another Christmas Eve…

Night and half-light and then the dawn. The days come and sometimes they wake us, other times we are up already. Scratching, squirming, moaning, dreaming.

All the agonies of memory and the present. Pain and guilt and recrimination.

Of course, I can never tell the boys what I suspect, that they’re here because of me. And that makes me think about her. Hair, eyes, but distant, fading, and I try for them, all the long day.

The same old view. Fergal, Scotchy, flies. Change position, lean back, look up.

The story, the movie, food. Exercise and slop on the third day. A scramble for dry straw. Lockdown. Water and then a squat above the bucket as only liquid comes out. Dry yourself with straw and try not to rub too hard. Last thing you need is a bleeding arse.

Sometimes Fergal mutters a Hail Mary. It irritates Scotchy, but he doesn’t say anything.

Watch Fergal at his pick. Watch Scotchy scratch himself.

Stare at the ceiling when light comes in.