Jonathan Lee - High Dive

A second Para took an interest in Dan. Said: ‘On your birthday it’s customary to do a dance.’

‘What?’

‘Do us a jig, if you please.’

‘Fuck off.’

A third Para fiddled with the radio behind the bar, found an Irish tune. Da di di, da da, da da. Sweaty brow. Greasy eyes. All the sticky charm of a congealed school meal.

‘Do a little Taig dance. A little Irish jig.’

‘Get lost,’ he told them.

The Para who’d been pulling pints now pulled the bolt of a Sterling down. ‘Have a go,’ he said. ‘It would be lovely.’ Two of the younger Paras looked to the floor in shame, guys whose sense of fairness hadn’t yet been pressed, and one tried and failed to intervene.

Dan standing. The room silent. He told the Para he wasn’t in the mood to entertain.

‘I think you should.’

‘No.’

‘How sure are you?’

‘Fuck you.’

‘Doing a little jig for a minute, that’s all I’m asking. Save your friends some trouble.’

He didn’t even know a jig.

The Para with the Sterling pointed it at Martina’s bare legs. This extracted a groan from the crowd.

Martina looked up at the Para. ‘I dare you,’ she said. Her defiance made Dan twitchy and proud. The anger she’d managed to salvage from a short cruel youth, all the shit she’d sucked up her nose while her father watched, all the poison pinned into her veins.

‘Dare him ,’ the Para said, and pointed at Dan. Seemed to be under the misapprehension that he’d said something terribly clever. ‘Go on, boy, just a little dance for this girl here. Do that and maybe I won’t take her out back for a prize. Time to teach her some tricks.’

There was the exchange of swear words. There was Martina’s hair being pulled and her face being slapped. There was another of the Paras saying, ‘This has got to stop, Rob.’ There was Jim Callaghan getting a baton in the ribs for intervening. And finally there was Dan standing there, in the middle of the floor, shifting his weight from foot to foot, the Paras clapping, cheering. One or two of the drinkers clapping too. Most staring down into their drinks.

Afterwards Martina drew her legs into her chest and sat by the window, saying nothing.

At the end of the week, waiting for the shame of the dance to cool, telling himself his life would contain no more moments like that, thinking of things he should have said and done, he came home early from an electrical job and decided to work on the garden. Quiet was what he wanted, the quiet only your own private land can provide. His mother was over at the club playing cards. She was a fierce cheat. Twice he’d had to beg them to restore her membership, and last week he’d promised a council of intimidating old women, frowning behind slow blooms of cigarette smoke — Mafia lords in a fucking film — that he’d be happy to provide transportation to other members of the club should they see fit to exercise the Christian principle of forgiveness . He’d nailed it with that form of words. The Christian bit was of limited interest to these old girls, but the offer of free transportation was a tangible earthly perk. Heads turned. Words were whispered. If he could promise a touch of assistance to those who struggled for lifts, who were less mobile or lived alone, well then, yes, they might see fit to overlook the unfortunate incident, which they were sure had involved no malice. It would be a nice gesture, altogether.

The sun today was low in a cold sky. Made his teeth hurt to look at it. He closed the kitchen window and went searching for some gardening gear.

On his knees in the cupboard under the stairs he tried on his father’s gloves. Too large. His father had been sausage-fingered. Big angry hands on a quiet determined man. A miracle, really, that he could do the fiddly work he did. After leaving the tobacco factory he’d retrained as an electrician and odd-job man. Said that the freedom inherent in self-employment more than compensated for the lack of security. By working nights and weekends — a peculiar kind of freedom, it seemed to Dan then — he’d earned just enough money to buy the family this narrow terraced house on what was then a safe, mostly Catholic street, and to pay down the mortgage each month. The back garden was a source of pride and worry. Every week weeds would sprout between paving stones. Every Tuesday morning, for fifteen minutes, his father would pull them up.

Growing up in this house Dan had seen riots break out in ’69. He’d seen the British Army mobilised to restore order. He’d looked on, with mounting excitement, as the barricades went up between Catholic and Protestant communities. By climbing trees you could swing yourself over to the other side, hide-and-seek, play You’re the Brits and We’re the IRA, chanting warnings, your voices charged with drama, bright with it, giving off imagined glory. He’d stood side by side with Jackson, a crayon-eating kid from the Ballymurphy, as authorities pulled the trees down in August ’69. In July of 1970, during a gun battle around the Falls, he was forced to stay indoors with his mother. The safety was as smothering as this cupboard. Gunshots cracking through the dark. To be a ten-year-old boy prevented from fighting — it had struck him as bitterly unfair.

Rust had made a hole in his father’s shovel. There were blisters of rust on the spade. Rust and dried mulch had ruined the garden shears and you could barely open the blades.

In a plastic bag in the cupboard he found rinsed-out soup cans that his mother was keeping for what? Made him think of coffee-jar bombs hurled at Land Rovers in Rathcoole. He’d seen his older cousins spring-load and throw them in fits of youthful excitement, an excitement he’d been desperate to take as his own. At some point the civil rights marches became minor riots. He went on a march with his dad, Connor, Tom, a family. The rainy weather had no effect on their mood. Adrenalin, sense of purpose. People broke rank and punches were thrown. Sound crowding in on you, people grabbing at your clothes. A brick struck his father on the head, side of the head, temple. Didn’t see the moment of impact. Saw the deepening bruise. It was more than sad. His father on the ground, one eye half closed, rain falling on his pale face, washing it. He might have survived if the police had listened. They said he was faking. They said it was a trap. One kicked his father hard in the stomach — a way to prove he was alive. His father didn’t move. The policeman shuddered. What do you do when the people making the rules aren’t interested in fairness? When they choose who to protect based on religion, race, history? The police are scum. People who join the police are scum. Dan hurried through the thought and went out to buy new tools.

Brand-new serrated grass whip in his hand, eleven-inch blade and a hardwood handle. The patio was a thin little runway of paving stones, modest but clean. Flower beds bordered it on three sides: tangled briars, creeping thistle, the hollow stems of other plant life he couldn’t fairly name. He’d let domestic duties slide. It felt good to tick off some jobs. His great discovery, coming out of adolescence, was that being busy gave you energy.

Three hours he worked at trying to clear the weeds. The grass whip, while effective for ripping into stubborn stuff, was curiously unsatisfying to wield. To get any rhythm going you needed to angle your body in an unnatural way. As time passed pain collected along the right flank of his back. Twice he managed to embed the tip of the blade in a fence post. The effort to extricate himself from these errors was tremendous. After a third comic wrestle, jerking and pulling and cursing as the blade refused to budge, he left it jutting out. He began using a severed stem from the most mysterious weed group in the garden, the stuff that looked a little like bamboo, to thwack and flatten nearby brambles. The simplicity of this new method pleased him: Nature against Nature. Before long, though, the stem broke and he admitted to himself, with a reluctance that tugged hard at his biceps and thighs, that it was time for the shears and the rake.