Casualties

Notes of Prey

Notes of Prey

                                                       

By John Rogan

Inspired by the organist, his mother, would open the wooden casing of the piano, quietly look over the keys, and begin to play. She only did it right after church, early on Sunday afternoons. The usual distracted stress that was always pulling her off to something was noticeably absent from her face. Her fingers slowly moved to each note, with her eyes closed. She listened to the song float upwards. David watched the yellow sunlight streak through the white lace curtains onto his mother’s stilled back and reflect the fine glazed wood of the piano.

                                      15 May 1988

Dom asked if he was still feeling it from last night. Bern said he got some sleep. The dryness at the edge of David’s eye stung red.

“I got a couple hours of sleep.” David said. They drove out to a storage unit along the docks in East Belfast. The air was salty and oily. It was just before noon and the late morning sun hung white and clear over Belfast harbor, so when the boys looked out at the cranes and container ships they could discern the different shades of powdered blue in the sky and the deep impenetrable black-blue of the ocean stretching away from them. David unlocked the storage unit. They slid the garage-like door upwards. A stale, moldy smell wafted out. The storage unit was full of old chairs, shelves, desks, and boxes. Inside, they found a long wooden box in the back underneath a layer of blankets. The large box was filled with brand new brake pads and packaging straw. They took the brake pads out and put them in a pile on a dusty desk with the packaging straw. David and Bern tried pushing the bottom of the wooden box, while Dom held a small flashlight. The bottom came loose. David handed the white rectangular piece of wood to Bern. Bern put the false-bottom onto the dusty desk with the brake pads. Dom shined the circle of light from the flashlight into the box. David was crouched down, and Bern looked over Dom’s shoulder. Inside the box were three thirty-round, large-capacity banana clips, 1,000 7.62 millimeter rounds, and three Vz 58 Czechoslovakian assault rifles.

                                     

1970 - 1977

The three of them were born in 1970. They knew each other from the Young Citizens Voulunteer meetings in the scout’s hall on Crimea Street off the Shankhill road. Bern Hamilton and Dom King were already friends when David Prey came up from Portadown.

David’s grandfather was killed at the Battle of the Somme. He was in the 36^th Ulster division. David’s father was picked up by the RUC in 1969. A patrol found him inside the steel fence of one of Belfast’s main electrical grids. He had been trying to blow up the electrical grid, and blame it on the IRA, but the bomb went off the moment after he set it. The high-tension wires and coils had come crashing down from the explosion and created a whitish-blue throbbing current through the ground. The nighttime sky set against the glowing and pulsating blue ground coming up through his eyes, and the burning static entering into his face and mouth was the last thing David’s father remembered when he woke up in the hospital. He had a heart attack from being electrocuted. The bomb blast mangled and burned the right side of his neck. At his trial the court had not been able to prove he was a member of the UVF. In his defence he said he was framed by Fenian terrorists. The court could not prove he had set the bomb, so he was convicted of possession of explosives and sentenced to five years.

David grew up in Portadown, Armagh. He was born while his father’s trial was starting. The long green fields, clean sunlight and open skies are what he thinks of when he thinks of his youth there. His mother was always working, but he remembers her being present. They had to survive, while his father was in prison. David did not remember a luxurious life. He remembered his mother constantly working or running with all her kids in tow to this place or that at all hours of the night or day.

He had an older brother and two younger sisters: Hugh, Elizabeth, and Victoria, but he did not know where they were now.

The memories he has are not of Catholics and Protestants and fighting, of course that was very much what was going on, but he did not notice it. David remembered the blue sky out the classroom window and the yellow, clean sunlight, easily reflecting the sand by the swing set during recess. The voices of all the kids at the school in the cafeteria at Portadown came to him when he least expected it. David often thought of where all those kids ended up, and what the teachers were doing now. He often wonders what his life would be like if he had been able to stay at school.

But everything got all messed up. David’s father was out of prison just under a year before he was shot and killed coming out the job he had just started. The RUC thought it was the IRA. His father had got along well with the UVF and UDA paramilitary command in prison, so it was not some kind of internal feud, but they never caught who did it.  David could not remember the year 76 or 77, but he remembers that first Christmas, and how he did not really understand why his father was not there.

1978 - 1983

After that he can remember a kind of blankness, things were happening and he was seeing them, but everything was off and unnatural. David found his mother sleeping on the floor often, unable to wake up, a blood-colored pool of vomit by her head. She would spend all day crying, and then sleeping, and then smoking cigarettes all night long. His mother would sit in the kitchen with a bottle of whiskey and a glass. In the morning she would be asleep with her head on the table. He stayed inside all the time and stopped going to school. Once David realized he did not have to go to school he began wandering around Portadown in the afternoons and evenings. His mother would be gone for a long time and then for days. David and Hugh, his older brother, would steal a loaf of bread from the closest corner store. Hugh was in charge of handing out slices bread and cheese to David and his sisters around dinner time. David got tired of walking, so he took a nice bike he saw. The next day he did not want to ride the same bike back into Portadown centre, for fear that the owner would recognize it. David walked back into the town centre and stole another bike. He kept up this routine, until Hugh started yelling at him about the eight bikes in the backyard. David tried to think of how he could bring all the bikes back and dump them in the town centre, but he pictured himself trying to ride eight bikes and got a headache.  David started giving the bikes away to other girls and boys he saw around Portadown, hoping they would talk to him. He told one of the girls he gave a bike to that he really just wanted to talk to someone, since he could not talk to his Mom and Dad anymore.

“Where’s your Da?” The girl asked. David told her his father was living in England. “And Where’s your Mum?” The question came like a sudden shock to David and his answer made his vision blur into tears.

“I don’t know. I think she may have gone to go live with my Dad.”

The police started coming by the house. He saw his mother one last time when she was screaming at the clerk in court. The court officers escorted her out. David still remembers her screaming like an animal when hey dragged her down the granite hallway and carried her out of the courthouse. That day was also the last day he saw Hugh, Elizabeth and Victoria. He was not sure where they ended up. David was sent to the Kincora boy’s school in Belfast. He ate better. The people there were not nice to him, but they were not nice to any of the other boys. A social worker asked him all sorts of questions, and he usually sat watching cartoons on the television with the other boys. There was some big scandal he did not understand, and he was sent to the Woodvale boys home where all the boys made fun of him for being a child prostitute.

David did not understand where his Mother and Father had gone and their absence, filled with empty afternoons, beatings, and vicious bullying from the other kids at the foster home, became an immovable fact that made him first really sad, and then extremely angry. He did not understand why the boys at his new home called him a ‘faggot’. There was something going on in the news about the Kincora boy’s school he could not control. He tried to explain to other boys that he had just been sent there, he was not gay, he had never been raped by rich businessmen, but the other boys did not want to hear what he had to say. They told him to shut up. A group of them would beat him to the ground, until he stopped moving. One morning the boys kicked him in the head, and a couple hours later David felt dizzy. He fainted and his head hit the edge of a table when he fell. David remembered waking up and there was blood in his eye and his hair was wet and heavy. He needed seventeen stitches. David got beat up again, so the stitches popped open, and he had to sit and painfully feel the doctor sow the wound shut again.

David found a ladder in one of the janitor’s closet that did not close and lock all the way. He sat in his bed and stared at the ceiling for hours, until it was that time of night when nothing is moving. All the social workers had gone home and there was one sleepy foster home volunteer awake at the front. He went out to the back where the kids played and set the ladder against the wall. It was very cold and he could not see anything. The wind whipped into his ear, climbing and deafening, he swung his leg over the wall. David sat on top of the wall and tried to see as much of Belfast as he could, before he realized someone might see him, and not trying to overthink the chaos he had just been through he jumped down and disappeared into the maze of streets that made up Belfast.

1984

During the day he walked by the shipyards in East Belfast. He explored the rough neighborhoods of Sailortown where the workers lived. In the afternoon he liked the frenetic activity of Belfast Centre. And in the evening he enjoyed watching the sun go down over the subdued violence of the Falls Road and the Shankhill road in West Belfast. At night he usually made his way over to the large botanic garden behind Queen’s University. The white Victorian greenhouse stood at the center surrounded by high Oak and Maple trees and a planned forest of shrubs, pines, and native trees stretching along the walking paths, benches and vibrant green of the grass.  It was Spring in 1984, David was 14 when he came out of the Woodvale Boy’s home. It was warm enough where he could find a secluded, hidden spot and sleep in the botanic garden after midnight. He had to start stealing almost immediately to eat. It started out with shoplifting food. The summer tedium stretched, and he started noticing on his walk back to the Botanic Garden the construction sites in East Belfast with no security on them at night. He started stealing aluminum and copper and bringing his haul by a scrapyard by the docks. The scrapyard was a deserted looking, dirty place with a barbed wire fence around it. He made enough money to eat, and he no longer had to run out of grocery and corner stores with food hidden in his pants. The lit paths of Queen’s university were deserted at night. A security guard made his rounds, but David knew they usually stopped after 10 pm. The white lamps merged with the green leaves, creating a translucent, electrified green in the leaves where they crossed with the white glowing orbs.

He would scope out a construction sight, and get so much metal together he could not carry it all over to the scrapyard. He began looking for pick-up trucks. When he found one he would break the window and go inside and look for some kind of key. Many times there were keys but not for the truck. He would swear when each one failed in the ignition. If it was taking too long, and there was not a spare key for the truck somewhere inside he had to abandon it. He would eventually find some sort of truck with the spare key in it. In the middle of the night he would cut the chain link fences around the construction sites. He kept the truck a couple blocks away to avoid RUC patrols, and when everything was gathered he would drive the truck over and load it up with copper wiring, brass door locks, and aluminum siding. After he got his money and drove out of the scrapyard he would abandon the truck on a dark street.

The grumpy, unshaven man who always weighed his stuff and paid him kept asking where he got the metal and David told him through his father’s contracting business. When David started showing up in a different pick-up truck each time and the dollar amounts he was getting paid kept going up the grumpy man behind the desk asked where he was from. David told him his family lived off the Shankhill road. David had not had a bath or shower all Summer, and his clothes were starting to rip. The coolness of Autumn was driving him to make bigger and bigger hauls. The grumpy, unshaven man seemed to not believe him. “Do you have anywhere to live?”

“I live with my family.”

“What Street! What’s your name?”

“My name’s Prey. David Prey” and thinking of a street sign he had seen “I live on Agnes street.”

“Augh, I never heard of any Preys in the Shankhill or on Agnes Street. Jesus, you think a bath would kill ya.” David got quiet and ashamed. Dried dirt stained his skin. He was always looking for food and he forgot he may not look like the kids that go to school and have families on the Shankhill. David wondered if the grumpy scrapyard worker was going to call the cops, but he stood there waiting for his money, feeling like he wanted to cry.

“Are you a Taig?”

“No, my father was an Orangemen.”

“You mean your father on Agnes Street is an Orangemen. Son, I know every Orangmen on the Shankhill.”

“In Portadown.”

“You just said your family was from the Shankhill.” The unshaven scrapyard worker sighed dramtically. “Jesus Christ. Where you getting those pick-up trucks you’ve been bringing by.”

“I borrow them.” David said flatly

“From your family on Agnes street?....” The grumpy scrapyard worker asked sarcastically. David again lapsed into an ashamed silence. He was getting upset. He was tired and hungry and he had been running around all night getting this metal together and now he just wanted his money.

“Are you going to give me my money or what?” David did not look at the scrapyard worker, but instead behind him at any way he could get in over the barbed wire fence and if there was anything he could possibly steal the next day if the scrapyard worker decided to rat on him.

“Fucking Christ, here.” The unshaven scrapyard worker counted and handed over his money. “Hold on a minute.” He reached for a piece of paper, wrote on it, and then handed it to David. “Now go here on Thursday evening. Tell them Jacky from the scrapyard sent you. Sneak into a gym, take a shower and run a comb through your hair. Don’t go looking like this! At the meeting tell them you are looking for work.”

David looked up at the man’s calm eyes and was about to quietly say ‘thank you’, but the grumpy, unshaven scrapyard worker started screaming:

“Now get out of here and if I see you again bringing one more lifted vehicle onto my property I’m calling the cops!”

David got into his truck and tried to think of where he could ditch it. He looked down at the scrap of paper and the messy writing on it:

Young Citizens Volunteers meeting

 48^th Scout’s Hall.  3 upper Meenan Street.

Thursday

                            

                                       27 September 1984

Iron folding chairs were lined up on the squeaky tile floor. David walked in out of the dark. His eyes had trouble adjusting to the overhead fluorescent bulbs, so when he looked over the hall the chairs, the skinny wooden speaking podium, The flags, the boys and their fathers speaking with other boys and their fathers- it all seemed somewhat unreal. White flashes obscured his view, until settling, adjusting, he saw a man walking towards him dressed like a cop. He had on a hat like he was in the British navy, and getting closer David saw pins and stripes like on a British military uniform. The uniform was grey with buttons along the front, and blue embroidery along the collar and the cuff-links. The man was now talking to David, but David was focused on the fine-ironed creases of the thick grey fabric. With the hat, David imagined he was talking to someone in British Army Intelligence, M16,  or Special Branch.  The man introduced himself as Trevor, and asked David if this was his first time here. David turned from looking at all the flags streaming down the walls, and flatly staring, unsure of what to say, he realized that no one had really talked to him, considered him and welcomed him anywhere since his Mum went away.

“Good, Good. Very Good. Yes. I mean a no, no. no. I’ve never been to one of these meetings…This is my first meeting” Energy seemed to shoot into Trevor’s eyes, and David stopped looking at his uniform.

“Well, welcome to the Young Citizens Volunteers! Let me introduce you to some people.” He gently put his hand on David’s back and ushered him over to where the fathers and their sons were talking with other fathers and their sons. “We have connections to organizations all over the Shankhill, Belfast, and all over Northern Ireland. Are you from Belfast?”

“I grew up in Portadown.”

“Oh, beautiful country down there. Armagh, tough area. Portadown manages to stay within the limits of sanity. Did you ever march in the parades?” David did not know what “the parades” were. So he shook his head no, and Trevor looked a little deflated.

“Hey everyone! This is David’d first meeting. David’s from Portadown.”

“Hi David”, several men and boys stuck their hands out, and he shook them weakly, overwhelmed by the circle of people all of a sudden scrutinizing him.

“What brings you up from Portadown, David?”

“No one really knows, but my Dad was shot by the IRA.” The group went silent immediately.

“What’s your name again?”

“David Prey.”

“What was your father’s name.” It pained David to realize he had forgot his Dad’s first name, and right when he felt like crying: “Francis. Francis Prey was my father’s name.” Trevor nodded to some of the other older men and said

“Okay. It looks like we are going to get the meeting underway.” Several older men came forward and wanted to shake David’s hand, before they went and found their seats with their sons.

David had not heard a human voice speaking to him in any sort of reassuring way for as far back as he could remember. Everyone finally settled down in the iron folding chairs. Waiting for quiet, Trevor began: “Friends, family members and fellow members of the community. I stand before you today engaged in a great tradition, a state of society one of which the men of Ulster have long been accustomed to - warfare. As I speak, a wife is identifying her husband’s body in a morgue in County Down. Her husband was a British Officer, sent here to uphold the rule of law against the decaying morals in our country. Crime, terrorism, Sinn Fein,  and the IRA [Trevor quickly made eye-contact with David] under the guise of progress have quickly eroded the moral clarity and family-oriented values many of the older gentlemen at this meeting will remember growing up with.

Tonight, we hand this struggle down to our sons. We are the only barrier between our Community and the encroaching onslaught of moral degradation that has been prevalent since the so-called Civil Rights movement of the late 1960’s. This man was killed by a booby trap bomb underneath his car. Tell me who has a right to leave a bomb for a man going to work in the morning.” The men and boys in the iron folding chairs clapped, and urged him on.

 “This man’s only crime was trying to uphold the decent, family-oriented, democratically decided and morally righteous will of the community of Ulster. I say we all bow our heads in silence while we contemplate the ultimate sacrifice Sergeant Theodore Grisham made for our community this morning.” David looked around at all the solemn faces bowed. There were two kids there by themselves, without their Dads, and while everyone’s head was bowed they looked straight forward. One of the kids saw David looking at him, and David shot his glance downward, like he was praying for the Sergeant.

There is a price for this vigilance. We have a responsibility. As our home is used as bargaining chip for politicians in London, and with the hordes of the Republic ready to subjugate and erase the traditions of our community – We must stand, as we did at The Somme, at Ypres, at Thiepval Ridge, at the Messines, and we, unlike others in London, do not forget our service, who we are, as The British Empire’s defenders in their darkest hour. The men of Ulster have come forward, bringing energy and light in that dark time, and beat back the immoral hordes trying to tear the social fabric of our Traditions and our Families and our Home apart. I stand here speaking to you at this meeting concerning an urgency, that like the Orangemen in 1795, facing extinction at the hands of Romanist thugs, and like our ancestors, and our fathers before us, we have to stand up, and prove ourselves worthy to follow in their paths, and defend the holy unity of country, family, and community that has for so long given us our moral strength as a people.”

Everyone clapped in an uproar and Trevor walked from behind the small portable wood podium like he was stepping off a stage. People came up and introduced themselves to him and welcomed him. David weakly shook their hands, and veered away from eye-contact. There was coffee and donuts. He told an older man and his son how his father blew up the Belfast Electrical grid in 1969. He examined the flags: The Union Jack, the term “For Ulster and God” around a floating red hand, The same red hand in the middle of a shamrock with a list of the World War I battle names Trevor had referenced during his speech. David told another boy and his father how his grandfather had been killed at the Somme when he saw the flag for the 36^th Ulster Divison. He milled around until people started to filter out. Trevor saw David and seemed to remember him. “David!” David showed Trevor the piece of paper and told him how a guy named Jackie from the scrapyard in East Belfast told him to come in looking for work. Trevor listened intently and nodded silently like he understood.

The two boys who had not been bowing their heads walked up to David when he was trying to hide a donut in his pocket to eat later. “So you know Jackie?”

                                      2 January 1985

“He’s been organizing down around the Ballymurphy estates for Sinn Fein. We left him a note to leave or get burnt-out. We know he’s been handing intelligence over to the IRA, and just before Christmas a member of the Ulster Defense Regiment was killed by a sniper, minding his own business, doing a patrol on a street corner in the Taig estates around Ballymurphy. Fellow who was killed was not much older than us. So, on Christmas Eve we put a brick through his  window with another warning, but he just boarded it up.”

“Is it just him in the house?” David asked Dom. Bern piped in dismissively: “He’s got a wife and some kids. And he had a chance to move them to a safer neighborhood, but he didn’t take it.” David was in the backseat looking down at the smell of gasoline coming up from the glass bottles clinking together. Bern and Dom had picked him up from his rent-controlled apartment. They had shown him how to forge documents, so that he could appear to be 18, and so be eligible for services like Unemployment payments and subsidized housing. Bern, Dom and David lived off “the dole” as they called it, and any other profits they made from “fundraising activities.” Bern and Dom had been talking to David about getting  real guns and trying to do bigger robberies, “so the higher ups would take notice.” As Dom put it. Lately, David Bern and Dom had been holding up late-night off-licence poker games being held in Republican bars and drinking clubs, using a rusted and broken revolver. They had to flee their last attempt, because one of the stone-faced men being robbed produced a functioning handgun and shot through the clouds of cigar smoke, the bullet whizzing by Bern’s head and thwacking into the wall behind him.

Dom and Bern showed David the house. David saw the boarded-up front window. He looked into the darkened windows upstairs, and thought of his wife and kids. David thought of the Sinn Fein man’s family together under one roof and all the lonely, sad days he had spent by himself.

“Would you do the honors.” Bern held a bottle filled with Petrol up for David. The gasoline smell on the rag came up to David nose, but then was whipped away by a gust of the icy, blustering late-night cold. The street was dark, and it was around 1 am. They were obscured behind a street corner, so they looked like all the other shadows snaking and glinting out the narrow and winding lane with its rows of identical tiny houses. They had parked their stolen car, so they could quickly get over to the East Belfast and ditch it. Dom held a lighter. David picked up two bottles of petrol with rags and he put one on the ground. He held the gasoline soaked rag up to the lighter’s flame and watched it flare. David held it in his hand and watched the flames climb up the rag with awe. “Throw it!” Bern yelled. David heaved the full botlle. It fell short, landing on the doorstep and spilling a puddle of fire up to the front door. Bern lit his and threw it. The Petrol bomb splashed onto the roof, creating an instant circle of fire. “Let’s go!” Dom said, but disappointed David picked the other petrol Bomb up off the sidewalk and took the lighter out of Dom’s hand. David walked forward, trying to light the rag. The wind kept blowing the lighter out, so David had to turn his back to the wind. He stood sideways in the middle of the street.  The rag caught. Just when he heard Bern call his name “David!” he approached the front window that was not boarded up. There was a woman screaming, someone running inside, a man yelling, and David shoved the petrol bomb through the window. The glass shattered, and David saw the flames erupt within the house.

Bern and Dom were ahead of him, the few white streetlights on the narrow street refracted their light off the brick buildings and the sidewalk. They sprinted through the icy, white-glinting night towards the car.

                                      12 May 1985

It was Mother’s Day, and David did not want to think about it. When Dom, Bern, and David met at the hospital Dom and Bern seemed to David to possess some kind of comfortable confidence, while David was always looking around, unsure. Dom and Bern dropped out of school, but they came from nice working- class families on Crimea Street.

At Tom Trainor’s newsstand on the corner of Crimea Street and The Shankhill road people who knew could buy cigarettes without the tax. The newsstand had been there for as long as anyone could remember. Tom came from an old Loyalist family, and he was sure to give a large sum of the money over to the UVF every month for the privilege. The story was he got the cigarettes from his cousin in the Republic, smuggled in from the Continent, no one really cared, as long as he kept giving money every month.

Old Tom was closing down the newsstand the other night and two kids started messing around with him. They were drunk and they wanted nude-y magazines. Tom told them he did not sell that stuff. One of the kids spit in his face. Old Tom turned to the kid who had just spat at him. The other kid punched Tom in the side of the head when he turned, so Tom fell and broke his hip.

 “Aagh, when your may age. It’s tough coming back from something like this.” Tom lapsed into tears. The thick yellow morning sunlight was coming through the sterilized hospital room window. Tom was lying in a hospital bed telling the story to Dom, Bern and David. David almost started crying when Tom started crying. Bern and Dom got up to comfort him, but David looked away.

Tom thought he had seen the kids before, and he thought they might be from Crumlin Road.

David, Bern and Dom got a ride over to Crumlin road from Trevor. Trevor dropped them off, and quickly drove away. The three of them walked until they found a group of kids.

“Have any of you heard of  anybody knocking off a newsstand on the Shankhill. We’re looking for the two kids who did it. We just want to talk to them.” The three of them stayed together and they stopped anyone under the age of 18, and asked them if they knew about the newsstand getting knocked off and who might have done it.

          The cloud-obscured sun began setting in the concrete claustrophobia of the narrow street. They found one kid who kept stuttering nervous when they asked him about the newsstand. The boy was anxiously backing away from Dom and Bern when David hit him from behind. David sat on his legs. Bern sat on his chest, and Dom stooped over him and kept asking for names. The boy started crying and told them two names: “Charles Finney and Jimmy Brown were bragging about it! They live on Glenfarme street. I’m sorry I did not tell you when you first asked me.”

          “Let this be a lesson to you” Dom said. “This time we’re letting you go with no permanent injuries, but when you see evil in your community and your called to testify, next time.” Dom slapped him across the face. “Speak up.”

          The three of them went to Glenfarme street. The streetlights were coming on and kids were getting called in to dinner. They asked a young group of boys where Charles Finney and Jimmy Brown hang out. One of the boys shot his glance over to a boy walking about a block away with brown hair. David followed the boy’s line of sight and was running towards the kid with brown hair. Bern and Dom stayed back, talking to the kids. When David started yelling Bern and Dom turned around, because they thought David was standing quietly behind them.

          “Are you Charles?”

 Finney! Jimmy Brown!” David screamed at the boy. The boy began to run. David tackled him and Bern and Dom came running up. “What’s you name?” Dom started asking. The kid screamed like it was a confession that his name was Jimmy Brown. They dragged him into a side alley. He tried to kick, so David held his legs. The kid started howling, “Please, no!” They broke both of his knees and his right ankle with a crowbar Bern had carried in his jacket all day.

          “Where the fuck is Charles!” David screamed into Jimmy’s quivering, red face. Some parents in the houses nearby had called the RUC. When Dom, Bern and David saw the flashing lights they ran for Crimea street.

          They had been run all over since they heard from Trevor this morning, so they decided to get off the street and get some food. They went into The Widow Rose’s pub, set up on the barstools, ordered three pints and looked over the food.

The Widow Rose was the only pub that had opened recently. The interior was small, with a clean hardwood floors. Hanging lamps with black iron triangular shades hung from the ceiling and threw yellow light onto the boys, as they sat at the cherry lacquered bar. There were booths along the far wall, with tuffed green vinyl cushioning. A mirror reflected themselves drinking back at them, and a jukebox that seemed to be continuously playing Elvis continued to play. Between the booths and the bar were four small wooden tables with  wooden chairs around them.

The owner of the pub was fellow named Paul Watt. He had well-known UDA/UFF connections. In October 1981 him and his group of followers had driven into Ardoyne with Ak-47’s and opened fire on a group of men standing in front of the Shamrock Social Club. One man was wounded, and a member Belfast City Council was killed. The Shamrock Social Club was a well-known meeting point for the Ardoyne IRA. The older fellows in the UVF like Trevor did not like UDA men, like Paul. The UVF thought UDA men were criminals and gangsters masquerading as defenders of Ulster. The attack on the Shamrock Social Club was welcomed by the wider Loyalist Community in Belfast with the UDA taking responsibility, while the UVF quietly applauded the action. Paul Watt and his crew used guns from a UVF arms dump in Belfast to rob an armored car in 1984. They made off with   £30,000. Their crew took a chunk out and gave the rest to the UDA.

The UVF leadership felt they were entitled to some of those funds, and when Paul Watt and his friends tried drinking at a UVF bar on the Shankhill, named The Bunch of Grapes in February 1985, a drunken fight broke out. a UVF man began bleeding profusely out of his broken nose. Someone pulled out a shotgun from behind the bar, there was a scuffle and an 18 year-old member of Paul Watt’s crew, Michael Hayes, was killed. Michael had grabbed the shotgun muzzle, pulled it downward. Everyone stopped fighting when they heard the shot punctuate the room - the sound muffled by Michael’s stomach. Paul and two other UDA men came back to the Bunch of Grapes that night with handguns and shot three UVF men, killing two and badly injuring another one. Someone from the UVF threw a pipe bomb into Paul’s family’s house in East Belfast a couple weeks later. After the split with the UVF after the Bunch of Grapes shooting in the Winter of 1985, Paul had solidified his ties with the UDA, made a violent reputation for himself, and began to launch attacks against members of Sinn Fein. His followers successfully committed multiple armored car robberies in the Republic of Ireland with the all the funds going directly to the UDA.

The Widow Rose pub was located on the edge of the Crimea Street neighborhood, close enough so they knew they were safe, but far enough away where they would not run into people who could identify them. The fact it was Paul Watt’s bar, made it so there would not be undercovers or the RUC coming in, while Trevor and higher up UVF fellows would also stay away.

          Bern said to Dom, draining his pint:

          “So you have to elevate when you are in the headlock.” Bern had gotten grades so bad they kicked him off the wrestling team, and it was the only part of school he cared about, so he dropped out.

          “So, your stuck in a headlock, and you start squirming?” Dom asked, skeptical.

          “Elevating” Bern said calmly, professionally.

          “While he’s got you down there and your arms are free, take a swing at his balls or elbow him in the stomach.”

          “You can’t do that. You’ll get disqualified.” Bern shook his head

          “I’ve already been disqualified!” Dom laughed and drained his Pint, whooped, and pounded his open palm on the bar. Their adrenaline was still running from Crumlin street. They kept signaling the bar-maid over for another pint to calm down.

          “It’s not for brawling.” Bern added patiently “It’s for when you get brought down to the ground and you’re wrapped up to the point you can’t breathe. In the league you can tap out, but it’s not much different than strangling someone to death.”

          “Strangling someone? Have you ever strangled someone?”

          “No, but one time I really did not want to tap out and this big bloke from Chesire has got one in on me, and I start to see stars, and I’m thinking I’m going to die, but I’m fine with it, just as long as the bloke from Chesire did not make me tap out. I woke up and the match was over, but I remember my neck hurt for a couple days. It’s a match, so they won’t let you die, the refs watch everything. But you’re not getting oxygen to your brain, if they don’t want to let go…” Bern tried to trail off mystically.

          “if they don’t want to let go?” Dom asked

          “Then you die!” Bern yelled, condescendingly not believing how dense Dom was sometimes. They were in a mood for celebration. The day’s mission had been successfully accomplished.      

“David, let’s do a shot.” Bern leaned over to David.

David was not listening to what they were talking about. The barmaid took his order for a plate of fried fish and chips and another pint. He finished the second half of his pint in one frothy gulp, burped, heard the bar door opening, so he turned, expecting someone from Crumlin Road to come bursting through the door, but instead Angela Watt and Theresa Gibson walked in.

“That’s Paul Watt’s daughter. The Blonde one.” Bern said into David’ sear. David heard Paul Watt, recognized the name, and turned to see the two girls walk through the door. Theresa Gibson was thin pale, and attractive with brown hair blown-out, but carefully coifed into a mess. All the hairspray made her hair look black. Her thin angular face held a grimly set mouth.  She wore a lot of powdery make-up to be able to give her face the appearance of looking perfectly white. Theresa wore black boots, and a wooly, gray one-piece pull-over sweater dress she must have got in London.

Angela had puffy blonde hair that was parted in the middle. Black ribbons swept the tangle of dirty blonde hairs backwards. She wore an orange, yellow and black plaid skirt with thick wool, dark gray leggings, since it was still cool at night. Her face, unlike Theresa’s, appeared full and healthy. Angela had high cheek bones, with thin blue almond eyes, so when her eyes lit up, her face rose, and her perfect white smile seemed to be amused by men stunned into awkwardness by merely looking at her. When she took off her long black jacket and placed it on a chair David saw the clip for her bra in the middle of her back, beneath her cream-colored sweater. She wore fashionable black boots with heels that came up just above her ankle. After she took off her jacket, she swept her hair backwards, straightened her back, and shot a self-conscious glance over to David, Bern, and Dom. The boys did not know this, but Angela cried in the guidance counselor’s office at school everyday because people kept focusing on her prematurely developing breasts. Men and boys began acting strange around her, when before they had just ignored her. Watching man after boy spiral into hysteria at the sight of her had made Angela depressed. She had just wanted to be like the other girls, but now other girls were jealous of her because she got more attention from men. Angela never asked for this attention, but it was cruelly fixated on her everywhere she went. She felt trapped, hounded and harassed, while she had to constantly struggle under this pressure people put on her. Angela was expected to do everything just the same, go to school, listen to the teachers, do your homework, but she had been treated like an extraordinary person because of her feminine beauty, and when she put herself in positions that other girls put themselves in, people reacted different to her then they did to a boy or even a plain looking girl. This change in status had come very quickly upon Angela, with her breasts enlarged, and hips widening, she realized everyone, with a glance, had given her a different appearance-based position in relation to others her own age and, dazed by the sudden seismic shift upwards, she was still trying to process her new role.

David wondered what room she was in when the Pipe bomb exploded in the Watt residence. If she screamed, and how she had been woken, most likely, in the middle of the night and looked around lost, terrified, caught off-guard, by the loud bang, the smell of gunpowder and her Dad running through the house screaming if she was okay. He wondered what she slept in and he was trying to imagine what she would look like just wearing a T-shirt.

“Angela!” Dom was leaning over with his arm over his mouth. Dom funneled the yell out of the hunched enclosure he made with his arms, and to anyone else it looked like he was just on the bar taking a nap. Angela heard her name and looked around.

“Angela!” David was about to tell Dom to cut it out when:

“Who the fuck keeps calling my name!” After the second “Angela” she had essentially charged the group of boys. It happened incredibly fast. Her blue eyes were bitterly scrutinizing David while she kept demanding to know their names. “What’s your name!” David stuttered out his own name, he had to pause, swallow to continue: “David Prey.” The way he said it sounded very meek to him. She was pulling at Dom’s arm when Bern tried to get her to let go. “Don’t you fucking touch me!” Bern put his arms in the air and sat back in his stool. Theresa had fallen in behind Angela. Theresa watched David and Bern while Angela kept hitting Dom in the shoulder. “Stand, the fuck Up!” Angela screamed into his ear.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend.”

“Oohoho” Angela turned to Theresa in mock cry. “The big boy did realize what he was doing. “No one ever mean’s anything it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Who the fuck are you? How the fuck do you know my name? I don’t know who the fuck you are and you’re in my father’s pub calling my name, so who the fuck are you? And What’s your fucking name?” Dom winced every time she violently said the f____ word.

“My name’s Dominic King.” Satisfied but still seething, since Dom was on his feet standing there like a hostage. “And you!” She went to Bern. Bern tried to cover his eyes like he could make this all go away if he closed his eyes and he just said like he was saying something terrible. “My name is Bernard Hamilton.”

“I haven’t seen any of you in school before, so aside form your pointless names, who are you, and how the fuck do you know who I am. Her hands were shaking, until she clenched them into a frustrated fist. David saw how the silence was getting her angrier and angrier the more they fumbled over what to say. He thought Angela was about to hit one of them. Theresa stood between them and the door, smartly smiling. David extended his hand. Angela turned from fuming around the bar room and stopped, shocked at the outstretched hand. “We don’t go to school. We’re paramilitaries. For Ulster. We’ve heard of your father and we meant no disrespect.”

“How’d you hear of my father.” She looked at his outstretched hand with disgust, so David awkwardly put his hand back by his side.

“We have a lot of respect for his work.”

“Hhmm.” She seemed to calm considering David’s countenance and finally getting what she had been asking for, an answer, the seething lack of understanding made more sense to her now. “Oh, A dodgy bunch of street kids. My Theresa you hear how the elite circles in this city are talking all about us now.” Theresa and Angela gave out a laugh that seemed to finally deflate the fear that had made Angela so explosively angry. “So what do you do? Steal buses and light them on fire?”

“Sometimes.” David made a goofy smile. “Could we buy you a drink. We’re very sorry to have upset you and we would like to make it up to you.”

“Anne Marie,” Anglea yelled at the bar maid. “Two gin and tonics for me and Theresa and this gang of champions is payin for them.” Theresa and Angela sat down. It started slow and nervous, they were only teenagers, still awkward, but the boys were already drunk from the beers. After Theresa and Angela got half-way through their gin  and tonics, the two girls were elegant, shrewd, and funny,  but most of all they were very aware of their surroundings. The girls were always probing the boys “Have you dated any Catholic girls?” David laughed at the question and told them, speaking for the group that they had not.

“What school do you guys go to?” Dom asked

“The school you do not go to” Theresa said, laughing, sipping on her drink, saying something for the first time.

“We live off of Crimea street and we work for the betting shop on the Shankhill. Sometimes we help deliver auto parts for an auto-body shop that’s right by where we live. We like working, keeps us busy.”

“Do you still talk to your families?” Theresa blurted out.

“Have you ever been arrested or interned?” Angela asked at the same time. An anticipatory sly smile slid up Angela’s face. She responded to Theresa questions “Ya, it’s mother’s day after all. Did you all get something for ya Mum.” Angela winced into laughing.

“People like us care very much about our families.” David said with a darkness drawing over him as he went from polite to sincere.  Angela was thrown-off by his sudden graveness, so she steered around David’s rippling restrained anger, and putting her arm on his shoulder asked very nicely this time. “I’m sorry after all that. I forgot your name. What is it again?”

“David Prey. My family is from Portadown.” He said, breathing out the anger into relaxation, realizing she did not mean any harm. David could see her making all sorts of considerations in her head before she asked another question.

‘Have you guys been picked up?”

“Not yet.” Dom laughed. Bern was telling Theresa about the last wrestling conference he was allowed to participate in before he kicked off the team.

“We heard of your father, because of the work he has been doing for the community. And we respect the sacrifices that you and your family have had to make.”

“They’ll kill us all if Sinn Fein and the IRA get their way.” Angela said out-loud, like she was showing her hand.

“That’s why we bring it to them.” David said. Angela laughed shortly, then looked over David suspiciously, until he was looking back at her for looking at him, and catching each other’s eye-contact, they darted their eyes anywhere else and nervously laughed it off.

                             23 June 1985

David kept popping into the Widow Rose hoping he would see Angela there again. He left messages with the bar-maid, and one day when he came in she was standing there in front of him.

“You’ve been looking for me.” Angela said to him, scrutinizing him grimly. She had the nervous energy of not having control over the situation.

“Would you like to go out some time?” Angela bent down to her knees and burst into laughter. David face went bright red and he was about to turn around and walk out. She straightened herself and said. “Sure.” David liked how he had no idea what she was thinking about, but he could tell she was always thinking.

They went to Alexandra Park to watch the bandsmen of the Royal Green Jackets put on a performance. They sat on the vibrant green grass. David watched the sun come through Angela’s long blonde hair. The concert started with one lone brass trumpet, playing a vulnerable, waning note, like a long cry, until the clarinets joined, a kind of windy rifling, and the big drums started to dole out. The separate sounds all merged together, blurring into the long walking lanes lined with thick oak trunks. The green explosion of leaves softly weaving in the barely perceptible wind over their heads. David tried to think of something to say, but Angela seemed to be enjoying the band, so they sat and listened and looked over the afternoon.

                             29 November 1985

 A van drove by blaring its horn. Across its body were posters with the word NO on them. A Union Jack and the Flag of Ulster flew from the driver and passenger side windows. In between the posters that said NO was a red hand with the thumb down. When the van passed a line of cars with Union Jack flags and Flags of Ulster flying followed, honking their horns. A sign on the back of the van said “42,000 have said no Maggie Thatcher”

Angela and Theresa waved bye to Dom, Bern, and David. They were going home. It was getting dark. Most people who had attended the Ulster Says No Rally were going home to their families and their jobs. Several Days previous Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had signed the Anglo- Irish Agreement. The agreement was meant to give the Republic of Ireland a greater say in governing Northern Ireland. Trevor, the UVF and the entire Loyalist community saw this as a concession to the IRA’s violence. Ulster had always been loyal to the crown, back to the Battle of The Somme, and Ulster’s Protestants, who were loyal to the United Kingdom, felt they were being betrayed by the British government. This kicked off a desperate hysteria along the Shankhill Road. Many in the loyalist community believed that if Sinn Fein, Ireland and Irish Catholics had more power in Northern Ireland then the Loyalist tradition: it’s people, it’s families, its history, it’s existence - would be destroyed completely

          “Join the RUC and come home to a real fire.” Dom laughed. He looked at the red words drip down and dry. Something inside the can of spray paint rattled when Dom shook it. “What do you guys think? It’s like the commercial for coal.” Bern laughed. David thought that it was too long to spell, and a security patrol would see them trying to spray-paint the whole clever phrase out, but he admitted it was funny without laughing. They had gone down Crimea street spray-painting “RUC Out” Trevor told them how members of the RUC were being given warnings to either leave the RUC or move out of Loyalist communities. The RUC and the British military were seen as traitors to the community. Many RUC men had resigned, some ripping off their uniforms in public protest against the new provisions set in place by the Anglo-Irish Agreement.

          When the last of sunlight had dripped out of the sky Dom, Bern and David headed for a neighbor’s garden on Crimea street. They got to the garden which was obscured from the household it belonged to. Next to the garden was an old wooden shed. Underneath the old, water-logged shed was where they kept empty glass bottles, a jug of petrol, a small can of oil, and old rags.

          David thought about Angela constantly. She provided some kind of safety for him, something not real, but in the future, a family, a house, all very vague, but if he could get Angela to believe he was someone worthy of being a part of her life it would give some peace to the uncertainty relentlessly tearing apart his peace of mind.

          Trevor had given them addresses. They were planning on doing the residence that was right by Crimea street, so they could just run home. David did not want to admit it, but since he had seen Angela earlier he wanted to do two houses. He figured she would have seen him at the rally, the two attacks happening simultaneously would make the paper, while one fire would probably not make the front page. People would talk about two RUC house going up in one night.

          So they split up. Dom and Bern went to one residence where there was an RUC patrol monitoring the house, so they had to abandon the plan. David made his way by himself. He looked for the address. The way Trevor wrote his nines made them sort of look like sevens, but David was confident this was the RUC man’s house. There were lights on. David bristled with anger when he thought of the vulnerable sanctuary of the RUC man huddled with his family - betraying his own community for a good paycheck and a uniform. The fiery, battle-laced rhetoric of Young Civil Volunteers had resonated with David, more so the idea of being part of a group, being safe, valued and included within the powerful clan of violent men who espoused the ideology. David thought of the pain in his life and attributed it all as a sacrifice to his home - Ulster. His identity, once mired and lost, was now resolute.

          David had adopted the ideas of those around him with an insecure fervor which wrought an extremity of behavior that was not understandable by those who had originally given him the ideas.

          David had a brick and the bottle full of Petrol. If he put the brick through the window with the lights on he pictured a whole family, immersed in fire, burning petrol splashed onto them, screaming, and running out the front door, the flames trailing behind them as they tried to escape the burning pain. David thought of a young child’s hair on fire and he touched his own scalp.

He heard voices when he broke a window with a brick. The voices inside the house turned from curiously disturbed to screaming when he heaved the flaming bottle of petrol through the broken window. David was running away, but he saw the fire illuminate the street for a moment in front of him. Behind David, The RUC man was trying to get his children out through the thick black smoke that choked out the front door.

                             8 March 1986

Reggie was telling David how he had counterfeit Gucci Jackie - O handbags. “Can people, like girls tell?” David asked. David took the butterfly knife he was carrying out of his pocket and snapped it open behind Reggie’s back, and then swiftly snapped the mechanism closed, so it folded up. David slid it back into his pocket. Reggie never even knew the knife-blade had been out.

“I sold one to a Gucci model over in London last Summer, came right from a photo shoot, said she could not tell the difference.”

“When were you in London? You haven’t left Belfast since you were born.” David joked with him. When he saw Reggie’s face go dour, he added, “You are right I didn’t see you around for a while this Summer.” Reggie’s face shot back into confidence, but David knew it was one of Reggie’s tall tales

“This is the one I can’t keep enough of.” Reggie showed David the counterfeit black Nylon Prada bag. “Flying off the shelves, very fashionable. Tourists over from London snatching them up.” Reggie handed David £ 150. David pocketed the money like nothing had occurred.

“Aye, I’m looking at it as a present for a girl, but she’s not like me and I think she’ll be able to tell it’s fake.” Reggie launched into some response about people from Italy not being able to tell they were fake, and David told him he would catch him next month.

Dom, Bern and David walked down to the Lower Shankhill to collect from an ecstasy and marijuana dealer named Mark Baird. The UVF hated drugs and really wanted nothing to do with them. The organization viewed itself as a protector of the community, and allowing the sale of drugs was forfeiting this moral responsibility, or so the older fellows in the UVF felt. Trevor wanted to warn Mark Baird to leave the lower Shankhill or get knee-capped. But others in the UVF pointed to the UDA’s tolerance of the drug trade, specifically Paul Watt’s B-company branch of the UDA that had grown rich from a number of armed robberies. B company was also heavy involved in importing Ecstasy and Marijuana and then selling it. So Trevor begrudgingly accepted Mark Baird’s existence within the Lower Shankhill as inevitable, but he wanted to make sure Mark Baird paid well for the privilege. The older guys in the UVF were willing to look the other way so long as funds were going towards the UVF and defending Ulster.

Dom came walking back up Mark Baird’s driveway.

“That was quick.” Bern quipped.

“He told me to fuck off.” Dom told Bern and David.

“What?” Bern said. David’s eyes narrowed, and he listened.

“I went down there he was working on his car in his driveway. I stood there. He knows why I’m there. And he tells me to fuck off. I’m standing there confused, and he starts coming at me yelling ‘get the fuck off my property.’ Like he was gonna hit me with one, so I split back up the driveway.”

“Let’s go.” David was walking down the driveway and Dom and Bern were behind him. When David got to the open hood, with Mark’s head down and working on the engine. He yelled “Hey Mark, what’s this all about?”

Mark sighed, put down what he was working on and came out from under the hood, wiping grease off his fingers. “I was hoping they would have coordinated the payments, but I guess I am supposed to pay twice now.” Dom, Bern and David stood there not sure of what to say. Mark leveled with them, they were just kids, he figured. “B company beat up my brother last week. Where were you? I start getting threats pinned to my door and I’m already paying you for protection. So I say, who’s the notes coming from? I hear it’s from the UDA. I go about my business, they beat up my younger brother, and I start hearing they are going to come after me. More notes, and two weeks ago someone put a couple through the front.” Mark had them follow him out front and he showed them the bullet hole above the door way and another in the second story. Mark nodded to the bullet hole above their head “When my sister visits I have her kids stay in that bedroom, if they was here the bullet could of gone right through one of them.” Mark was yelling mad now. “So, I call all around for Trevor and his group and they all say they don’t know me, even though I’m giving £400 a month to keep them fat. So I contact the people leaving the notes and its B company of the UDA.”

“Paul Watt’s crew?” David said. Mark’s eyes lit up.

“So you know about these fellas? My question is why don’t you stop them?  They say I got to pay £500 a month or they’ll bomb my house and attack any one buying from me. I’m looking around for the people protecting me and they don’t want nothing to do with me. So I gave the £500 to B company earlier this week, and I got none left for Trevor and the UVF.”

David stared up at the bullet hole on the second floor. He guessed it was a nine-millimeter from the size.

“Fair enough.” David broke the silence. “I’ll talk to Trevor, tell him about what happened here.” David nodded towards the two bullet holes in the front of the house.

Dom had the payphone. David and Bern could tell Trevor was yelling. Dom shook his head pointing into the mouthpiece, motioning to David and Bern who were listening. “We’ll take care of it. Like we take care of everything.” Dom said. David and Bern heard Trevor roar through the phone, a minute, angry voice, and Dom started to say “No, No, No we never have. Ok, I apologize. I meant no offense. Got it.” And adding one more with emphasis “I Got it.” Dom slammed down the phone “Jesus fucking Christ. Trevor says we got to get the £400 from Mark Baird or come up with it ourselves. He thinks we spent the money on skunk.” 

“I’ve never even smoked the stuff.” Bern said incredulously

“You told him about the drive-by and the bullet holes in the front of the house?” David asked, with a skeptical voice. Dom nodded gravely back to David. “So…?” David asked.

“We got to get the £400 together or we have to kneecap him. There is a gun in the broken part of the stone wall by the cattle-gate along the Ormeau road.”

“Fuckin shit.” Bern walked away. Dom looked sick.

“Jesus” David said. They went to the Ormeau road and found the broken wall by the cattle gate. A heavy silence held over them when they pulled the old revolver out and checked to see that it was loaded with five bullets. Most of the people they hurt they did not know, or they were kids, or they were nobodies, but they had just spoken with Mark, and they really did not understand why Trevor was being so stupid about it all. Mark knew people, he was connected to gangs down in Dublin. Trevor had a nice comfortable life while Dom, Bern and David were out here, walking the streets, making sure everything got done, while the higher-ups sat in safety and accused them of spending money on drugs.

“Trevor thinks we spent the money on skunk? He said that?” David could not believe it.

“He was pissed. You know those older guys and drugs. Kids like us, that’s what they think.” Dom said

They went into a corner store and got some whiskey shooters they could carry in their pocket and a Liter of Ale they passed around walking back to the Lower Shankhill.

It was just before people were going in for dinner when they arrived back at Mark Baird’s house. He was still at the bottom of his driveway, toying with the car, and working on something in his garage. Dom and Bern each did not want to  do it. David downed a whiskey shooter. His hand went from shaking to still, and he asked Dom to give him the gun. Dom handed the small, old revolver over and David started to walk down the driveway. Mark looked out from the dark of his garage and saw David walking towards him. David walked up to the front of the open car hood, pointed the gun at Mark’s leg and fired. The revolver shot upward, David tried to hold on, but powder burns made him let go, and the gun fell out of his hands above his head and onto the ground in front of them. The revolving chamber had detached from the rest of the gun and the four bullets rolled in Marks’s driveway. Mark had taken a hunting rifle from somewhere in his garage and he was loading it with one big bullet. David looked down at the destroyed gun, and realized it was too damaged to put back together quickly. He was dazed from the revolver misfiring in his hand. David saw a news report about him being shot dead in a drug feud, and he got so scared he blacked out. Operating within the murky action intense fear brings, David pulled the butterfly knife out of his pocket, whipped open the mechanism, and closed the five metres to Mark. David put one hand on the bolt that Mark was fumbling with, pushed the gun down and swung overhead. His free hand that was holding the butterfly knife came down into the side of Mark’s neck. The rifle was getting pushed into David’s throat. One hand was trying to fend the rifle off, but the cold barrel painfully bounced off David’s right eye and cheek, so he couldn’t see, and he kept swinging overhead with his free hand and the butterfly knife. David thought Mark would wrestle free and shoot him, but the rifle stopped coming up, until it fell onto the ground. The last light of the day was hanging in the sky, muted by the gray clouds. David saw neon crimson blood stains on the ground, on the broken gun, on the car, on the driveway, seeping into the crack between the garage and driveway, and on his hands. Mark tried to breathe and talk, lying on his back in the garage, but it was a desperate whispered gurgle. David saw a sad ‘why?’ pervade Mark’s pale face, and he took off running.

“I can’t believe you left the gun there.” Dom was saying while David chugged from the liter of Ale. They were walking back towards Crimea street with the streetlights coming on.

“Trevor’s going to be pissed.” Bern said

“If the gun had worked I wouldn’t have left it there.” David said. “Hold on.” David threw up onto the curb. Dom and Bern made a protective circle, with their back towards him, so David had privacy. They waited patiently, David said he was okay and then threw up more. Dom and Bern let David get sick while they scanned the road for RUC patrols.

                                      5 April 1986

It was 7: 45 pm on a Saturday. Dom, Bern and David were waiting at the bus stop in the white glow of the streetlight. Angela Watt and Theresa Gibson were going to meet them. Angela wanted to go to the Crescent Bar on Sandy Row, her and Theresa had heard all about it.

 “So Trevor sits me down. And starts asking if anyone from the UDA has approached me.” Dom is saying. “If I have any affiliation with the Ulster Young Militants or the UDA.”

“Did he ask about Paul Watt, Angela, or B Company? Anything specific?” David asked.

“No he was just asking me if I took drugs, if the UDA had approached me, and why I thought David had to take out Baird.” David exhaled and waited for Dom to keep talking. Like he was defending himself Dom said “I was right behind you… on the street. I was far away, but I know it was you or him.”

“The RUC didn’t find the rifle. Trevor told me.” Bern said

“The thing was for shooting lions in Africa. I got a black eye from it and I can still taste the barrel on my upper lip.” David broke in angrily. “I wanna know how the fuck Trevor knows what the RUC knows and not what’s in the papers.

 “The papers did not say anything about a rifle, but when….” Dom said

“I said something about the rifle. If there is no rifle, I killed him for drugs. Or this seems to be Trevor’s thought process. Trevor says they could not lift prints off the busted revolver, because it was coated in blood. Where in the paper’s is it saying that? How does some fuck-up playing big band dress up for the UVF get ideas like that? I think only a detective would be able to pass that along. I never said anything to him, and he knows how it went already.”

 “Once I heard the yelling I looked down the driveway and saw you wrestling with what from far away looked like a big ass-fucking rifle.” Dom finished.

“I saw it too.” Bern said. “Once the revolver misfired, Me and Dom saw you two struggling, there was definitely a rifle between the two of ya. We saw your face, bruised by the butt and barrel right after.”

“Anyone could of grabbed the rifle and hid it before the RUC showed up.” David said and then paused, thinking, he launched into a question again.

“Did he ask you either of you about B Company, Paul Watt, or Angela Watt?” Dom and Bern shook their heads in a definitive no.

“Just about being approached by the UDA or the Ulster Young Militants.”  Bern Said.

“And if we took drugs, and questions on how we knew Mark Baird, why you killed him, but that was it for me.” Dom said. Bern nodded in agreement. The question hung on Dom’s and Bern’s faces like why was David asking.

“Trevor asked me all about Paul Watt, my relations with Angela, and if I knew anything about B company. If I was in B company, and if what happened to Mark was because of some of result of my entanglement with the UDA’s B company. He asked me if I took drugs, and how I knew Mark Baird too. And he also asked me about the Ulster Young Militants… I told him we were work for him, the YCV and the UVF, but he was beyond angry over the whole thing. I could tell he took some bad heat for it, and he did not want to have anything more to do with us.” David said.

“He gave us the broken gun.” Bern said.

“The fuck, I said to him. I’m the one kneecapping a guy with a hunting rifle using Trevor’s grandfather’s cap gun from World War I.” David said angrily. Dom and Bern laughed. David smiled at Dom and Bern, but his thoughts kept him from laughing, because he knew this was bad. David looked outside the white light of the streetlight they were in. He saw the shadows along the sidewalks of the narrow street. A car stopped at the corner for the stoplight.  They could hear a man and woman fighting inside. The stoplight changed to green, the car moved forward, and the shrill, muffled sounds of the fighting moved away with the car. “So, no questions on Angela Watt, Paul Watt or B company. You’re sure. This is important.”

“We’re positive Dave.” Dom said

“Positive.” Bern added. David looked into the night sky above them, said “hhhmm”, and then looked up and down the street slowly, trying to make figures out of the shadows, but seeing nothing unusual, David said, “Someone’s watching us.”

The death of Mark Baird had brought a lot unwanted attention to The UVF around Crimea street. Mainly, Mark’s association with the drug trade had the RUC bringing Trevor and other UVF guys in for questioning. Trevor refused to believe the gun he had told them about was not functioning. “If the gun was not working why not just run? Why stab the guy to death? For suck’s sake. You three are the only one talking about a rifle, and how the fuck is Mark Baird getting his hand on a rifle? We got cops and women and the papers scared over this grisly murder. There’s a reporter asking UVF guys for comments. What do you benefit from Mark not being around to tell his side of the story?” Trevor had drilled David, Dom and Bern separately and then taken them off active service.

“You are no longer associated with The Young Ulster Volunteers or the UVF. Your actions have jeopardized the safety of our organization.” Trevor had said. The words played back, like stamps of shame, not good enough to be a part. David thought of his mother struggling to keep them fed and clothed, even with her drinking in the morning. He remembered how many jobs she worked. She would get fired from one and then start right up with another. This was when he had been a little. She could never put everything together, and the courts split them up despite all her effort.

Angela and Theresa walked up to the bus stop. Angela had black ribbons holding her dirty blonde hair off her face. She wore a plaid red and black mini-skirt, and a white sweater with a strapless white tank-top underneath. Theresa wore a lime green mini skirt, with a black sweater, and her dark brown hair was in braids down to her shoulders.

“Hey!” David said with an optimistic friendliness.

“Hey, you guys look like trouble.” Angela laughed. Dom, Bern and David exchanged awkward hellos with Theresa and Angela. The wind shifted, so the boys could smell the girls and the perfume they were wearing intermingling for an instant.

 ”None of you have been  to the Crescent, over on Sandy Row?”

“No” David said. Angela took out a cigarette and lit it.

“You boys are in for a treat.” David felt a strong feeling of safety, and inclusion when Angela was around. Her arms moved with the expressions on her face, so she seemed to center this disorganized wild energy she had bouncing around behind her eyes into one single effective, clear point. “Theresa had to pluck her eyebrows before we could come out.” Angela bent over into laughter, right as Theresa shoved her in the arm very hard. Dom, Bern and David laughed.

“That’s not true, Angela is all rotten tonight.” Theresa made a mock like she was answering a telephone “Yes dear, blood starts coming out of it. Why it’s called a period. It’s normal for girls our age. Okay I’ll meet you at the bus, Angela. I know just plug something in it, stop crying, David is going to be there.” Theresa shot a quick vengeful look over to Angela. “Ok, Go get a tampy from your Mum and clean all the blood off and we’ll go meet the boys.”

“You slut.” Angela said in mock anger.

“That’s what she telephoned me about, Anglea did.” Theresa was laughing saying to Dom, Bern and David. The boys looked confused, and then David asked “Is Anglea bleeding?” He was looking her over for blood, not sure of what Theresa was joking about. Dom and Bern were laughing, but they were not sure at what. The word “blood” distracted David to the bottom of Mark Baird’s driveway.

Theresa and Angela roared into laugher when they saw how confused the boys were. “You boys keep skipping school and you miss out on sex education.” The girls cackled, and Dom, Bern and David stood there silent, awkward and ignorant

 The bus pulled up and braked. Angela put out her cigarette, still sniggering. David followed her onto the bus.

When they got off the bus it looked like they were in Germany after World War II. Demolished buildings sat in piles of wreckage, dirty gray street blocks interspersed the deserted streets. One condemned building would stand with its entire East-facing wall off, so David could see the decay of the formerly inhabited apartments, the twisted iron supports, and the crumbling concrete. There was graffiti along the falling, jagged slab walls that were previously the perimeter of the destroyed housing estates. On the corner, jutting out, one of the only buildings standing was a two-story concrete box with a chain-link cage in the front. The Chain-link extended around the entire first story and joined the building at the beginning of the second story. There was a line of kids, waiting in the cage. A bouncer was checking id’s, knowing most if not all of them were fake or some id gaffed from an elder brother, sister or cousin.

“The Crezzy!” Angela said. Her arms framing the nighttime wasteland. They got in line. “They put this up to prevent drive-bys.” Angela said to David.

“People could still shoot thought it.” David said looking over the chain-link.

“Maybe so people can’t throw bombs, I don’t know.” Jenny Mcmillan told me of a Saturday night when the UV’s came in and turned off the music and warned against kids brawling outside after the bar closed. There’s lots of stuff that goes on here, but it’s student night, so we should be fine.

“It was the UVF?” David asked

“UVF, UFF, UDA I don’t even think they know sometimes. I think I remember Jenny said it was something with a U in it, like she would know. Maybe the UFF, but they’re all down here. Bunch of morons.”

David handed his id to the bouncer. The bouncer nodded, and they were inside the big iron protective door. There were two floors. A bar on each. The dancefloor was on the bottom floor, there was a dry-ice machine, and multi-colored spotlights that crossed, bounced and moved over the ceiling with the rhythm of the fast paced dance music. David looked over and a girl was peeing up against the wall. He had never heard this kind of very fast, electronic music before. It was Saturday at 9 o’clock on student night. There was probably 250 kids on each floor. A boy bumped into David, and before David could push him back he lost whoever’s shoulder it was. Dom, Bern, And Theresa were behind them, but David could not see where they were now. A girl burnt David’s elbow with a cigarette. Angela lit a cigarette, she saw the girl burn David, and David had to use a lot of his energy to stay calm, and laugh it off. “David!” Angela yelled over the music. David only saw her mouth open. He thought of her small, pink tongue, when she spoke. She was motioning him over to the bar. Angela had two full shot glasses out, from the bartender.

David, scared, walked up to the bar and said into Angela’s ear “This place smells like ass.”

“I know, the shots are 50 p each.” Angela said. The music was so loud they could not hear each other. Angela raised the shot glass and motioned for David to do the same. He took up the shot glass, “What is it?” David yelled.

“Cheers!” Angela clinked the shot glasses together, and poured the shot backwards into her mouth, cocking her head back, so it was all one motion. David saw that she had finished her shot, so he took his. The minty burning went down like battery acid. David farted after he took the shot. Dazed, with the liquid settling in his stomach, David saw a young boy throw up on the floor. David felt better, knowing the option was open to him, because there was dry and wet sawdust covering the floor, already soaking up the vomit and urine.

Angela was at the bar pounding for the bartender. She got another two, and handed the other to David. She downed it as fast as she had downed the first one. David felt like he might throw up after he took the second shot. He heard Angela say “it’s like chewing gum.” A girl who had just got a beer from the bartender fell off her stool and the full beer spilled on David. The girl was laughing, and David was about to say something when Angela yanked him onto the dancefloor. It felt like his heart was racing, he was sweating from the shot settling into his body, and the condensed body heat of all the kids wriggling around in the dry ice and the crisscrossing colored spotlights. It seemed easier to breathe, if David smoked a cigarette, so he got one from Angela. Right when he lit his cigarette and exhaled a confident puff, he got burnt by another cigarette on his elbow. When he turned to see who had done it he only saw the glowing dot disappear anonymously into a chaos of sweating, gyrating kids. A girl stumbled and fell, and then threw up on the floor. Angela began dancing with David. Angela had been to many raves around Belfast and this was David’s first time, so she knew how to dance, her arms over her head, with her hips and her legs touching and bouncing off of David, in step with the music. She moved her upper body, threw her sweater off somewhere, so David could see her in a strapless white tank top. Her blonde hair fell into the sweat between her cleavage. She arched her back, put her arms above her head, and smashed her hips into David’s groin. She did it until David got an erection. David was essentially moving up and down, moving his arms and watching Angela. He was only slight more in motion then someone just standing. He tried to make a joke, but it was only audible to himself over the music. She kept bouncing her hips into David’s dick. She felt it get harder each time she swung in, every time she got a smell of his masculine sweat, and felt his tall frame take account of her, question and try to find out more. The thrill of exciting him made her keep doing it, until David was completely hard, and he had to bend over and stop dancing. His pubescent boner was bulging through his pants.

Angela laughed, saw the tired look on David’s face and smelled victory. She took his hand and pulled him over to the spiral staircase that led to the second floor. A girl was screaming “Michael! Michael!” right next to David’s ear. A boy fell down the stairs and started laughing at the bottom. The girl, still screaming “Michael!” was crying and cursing at the fallen boy. A glass of beer spilled onto the stairs. At the top of the stairs on the second floor there was a girl lying on the ground, wrestling with another girl. The cigarette smoke and the mist from the dry ice machine collected up here. There were grimy cinema seats lined up against the wall with kids making out in them. The tables were barrels with piles of sticky glasses and full ashtrays on them. David walked over to the bar and could not get the bartender’s attention. He needed a pint. Angela put her arm in the air next to David, and the bartender immediately pointed at the two of them.

David took his pint over to the used cinema seats, and sat down, trying to get all this stimulation to slow down. He was looking to see where Angela went. David was distracted by the lights and the music and a girl crying, and another girl who was clearly giving another boy a blow job. Angela appeared, out of the bombardment of detailed flashes, two feet in front of him, and then getting up on his lap. She was rubbing his still hard dick with her hands, and before he could say anything, she took the gum out of her mouth and they were kissing. David seemed to resist at first, his mouth just hanging open, until he started to push back with his tongue and they went sideways in the dirty cinema seat, so he could smell her hair, and drawing back they looked at each other’s facial features up close for an instant, until overpowered by the smell and the presence of one another so close, they started to make out again. Angela clawed at his erection and pressed at the lean, ropy, teenage muscles along his arms and chest, while David kissed Angela’s neck, massaged her breasts, and pressed his knuckle into the moist underwear over her vagina.

                                      25 April 1986

“So, should we ask Angela?” Dom said.

“I’ve never taken anything outside a whiskey.” Bern said

“These old folks think we are all evil. We were the ones getting our hands dirty, and they can sit back and judge. It’s like we’re a bunch of Bob Marley’s or something. I’ve never touched anything outside of whiskey either. You remember I hardly had enough money for food when I met you guys, never mind buying skunk.” David said.

He looked at Dom and his question. “Maybe, we should.”

They sat in the Widow Rose, slowing sipping on the one Pint they could each afford. The three were in agreement that David had done nothing wrong, but the fallout after the Mark Baird murder and the break from the UVF left them suddenly disconnected from everyone they had known. Bern and Dom did not want to go back to school, they would be years behind. Dom’s and Bern’s parents lived on Crimea street, so they had a place to sleep at night.  David was not going back to sleeping in the Queen’s University botanic gardens.

The word was out. They could not get legitimate work, because they were labeled as drug users by people within the UVF, who had gotten them odd jobs before on the Shankhill. People not in the UVF would not give them work for fear of getting entangled with loyalist terrorists and possible reprisals.

No one wanted anything to do with them. The feeling was familiar to David: being undesired. The cold stares, someone closing a door, and the collective air of shame that hung like a physical weight on their shoulders. It was like a toxicity in the air, so David just wanted to scream, hit and yell, until it was gone, but it was bigger than him, something he could not hit. It was what everyone thought when they saw him, and he knew they had to see something different.

A peanut hit David’s ear.

There were two men sitting at one of the other tables. They both had shaved heads while one wore only a white t-shirt, and another wore a black leather jacket. David turned around. “Did you guys see that?” David asked Dom and Bern.

“What?” Bern asked. David heard the two men laughing to each other. Another peanut wizzed by David’s head and bounced off the table.

“That!” David said all in one motion, standing, pushing his chair back and yelling, “hey!” over to the two guys. “What the fuck are you throwing food at us for?”

“We was just minding our own business, but since your up out of your chair throwing swears at us. I’d like to know who the fuck is asking?” The man in the leather jacket whispered something to the man in the white t-shirt who was speaking. David watched them snigger. “Well, wee man, out of your chair?” said the man with the white T-shirt. David got an acute ringing anxiety that something was wrong, like something vague was prearranged against him. He lunged for the door. The man speaking with the white t-shirt struck David squarely across the jaw. The other man with the leather jacket seated at the table stood up at the same time Dom and Bern stood up. The man in the white T-shirt followed the punch David did not see coming with two more. David was on the ground getting kicked. The man with the white T-shirt was on top of him. He started punching David’s head into the ground. David desperately tried to block the punches, but the man kept pushing David’s arms to the side, and landing.  David heard, “Regards from the Baird family”, as one fist drilled into the cheek-bone below David’s right eye and slammed the back of his head into the barroom floor. He started to lose consciousness, and he was crying, asking for the man to stop punching.

The man with the leather jacket had produced an automatic handgun when Dom and Bern had rushed them. Bern had the man’s arm raised and Dom was trying to pull the gun out of his hand when it went off. Everyone ducked suddenly. Bern held onto the man’s arm with the gun, twisting it, so three more shots bounced off the walls and echoed in the tiny barroom. Someone from behind the bar was screaming. The white t-shirt the man was wearing was splattered with blood from David’s nose. David was conscious enough to get off the floor when the man got off his chest. He crawled to the door. Dom was hitting the guy with the white t-shirt and yelling “Hold him, Bern! Hold him!” Dom was able to push the man with the white T-shirt back onto the floor. Dom ran over and got David up off his fours. He supported and pushed David out the front door of the Widow Rose. After Dom shoved David onto the street, he turned back around for the door, yelling “Bern!” Bern heard his name, he let go of the man with the leather jacket’s wrist and gun, and ran for the front door. Dom was supporting David, who was having trouble breathing through the blood pooling out of his nose. He was fading in and out of consciousness, while Dom tried to keep him up-right and away from the door way of the Widow Rose. Bern came lunging through the door, yelling “Go!” They swung around to the right side of the door, Dom pulling David, just as a flurry of automatic handgun fire came out the front entrance, shattering the glass door. Dom and Bern were sprinting, pushing David, and David was now aware enough to hear the gunshots and know he had to be running. David could only partially see out of his left eye. They did the zigging and zagging around street corners and through gardens they were accustomed to after fire-bombings, until they ended up safe in a tiny, secluded alleyway.

David knew he was not running and he wanted to sit down. Dom was asking Bern “Did they tag you?”

 Bern was frantically checking all over his body saying, “I don’t think so.” There was an iron taste in David’s mouth, and he realized the inside of his mouth was bleeding. He kept looking for somewhere to sit down, but found nothing in the cobbled stone alleyway. Dom and Bern were touching his face and saying something about a “hospital” when David blacked-out and fell onto the ground.

11 May 1986

          The man behind the counter looked suspiciously at David. David was stealing food from a Catholic owned corner market. He remembered distantly how his mother thought it was alright, stealing from Catholics, because they were the ones that killed David’s father. When everything fell apart. When he was younger, around his brothers and sister and Mum, things seemed safe, timeless, and warm, but that memory was fading. Time moved David forward into a place he could not make sense of – he felt lost whenever he came across an area in Belfast he knew they had lived, where his mother had walked the sidewalks with them all in tow, but no one was there anymore. He slung his army back-pack over his shoulder and headed for the door. The man behind the counter said “Son, do you got something of mine in that bag?” David flashed his eyes at him and said nothing, continuing out of the market with a friendly ding from the bell over the doorway. The man came out onto the sidewalk and started yelling, but David just laughed and walked faster.

          The continued flash of unfamiliar, unsympathetic people in David’s face made him long for the physical time he felt was his home. The blue glow of the tiny television; his brothers and sisters all together for warmth to keep the heat down; Mum coming home from a long day, getting drunk and playing with them.

          He remembered hearing about the death of his father, not really understanding it.  The years stretched forward, and he cannot really remember, but at some point it set in – that unlike all the other boys he did not have a Dad. His mother took him to the Orangemen marches in the Summer in Portadown. David remembers the marching bands, the big drums, the lines of uniformed men, with cheering, drunk people lining the streets. He remembers his Mum pointing out the desolate Catholic neighborhoods, and he wondered if his Dad was somewhere in there with all those quiet shadows. People did not care. Sinn Fein was gaining ground in legitimate politics and no one seemed to care that his family was gone. It was wrong what happened to his father, with his mother left to fend for herself, and he wanted people to hear it and see it – his pain. All those details and memories dragged out through time to now, so there was just a mess, confusion. David touched his nose and felt the sharp pain shoot through his left cheek and down to his missing tooth. It hurt when he breathed through his nose, but having to breathe through his mouth made his jaw sore. So, he switched between the two pains. He took out a slice of cheese, some ham and two pieces of bread. David had not eaten all day. When he went to go bite into the hastily made sandwich the cheap rubber-like ham slipped out and fell on the ground. It was covered in dirt. Looking down caused a sudden sharp pain to jerk through his jaw and his sinuses. He had more ham. David was not far from train tracks that moved containers from the ships out of Belfast Harbor. He heard a big freighter coupling along over the tracks. It seemed to go on forever. David guessed the train must be a couple kilometers long. He kept his mind locked on the dirt-covered ham on the ground and thought of his Dad like a hobo, riding away on the freight train, legs dangling in a box car, dirty, unshaven, just like he always looked, waving goodbye, as the train went down the line to David knew not where, and he started to cry which made his face hurt more, so he started a choking, child-like moan that turned into heavier crying, so everything blurred, until he slid onto his side and closed his eyes. Tired, he let reality slip away.

          David had not seen Angela since he got beaten up. The fight had occurred in her father’s bar, so he was not sure if she had heard of it. The swelling in his face had just gotten to the point of not being monstrous looking. He still hacked and coughed all sorts of blood, and his face seemed to ache when he smiled. When he woke up it was dark, eating a piece of cheese and ham in two bites he remembered it was Sunday, and Angela and Theresa usually hung out at Rex’s Arcade before the school week started.

          Rex’s Arcade was filled with light. Aside from Pac-man, Space Invaders, there was the first-person shooters Dom, Bern and David loved like Battlezone, Defender, and Bosconian. Lines of naked yellow light-bulbs played off the circus-like animated color of the walls. Dom saw Theresa playing whack- a -mole, so he walked up behind her and tapped her on the shoulder.

          “David! What the fuck happened to your face? Where have you been?”

          “Could you please stop yelling.” David said quietly. Theresa pointed over to her left and David saw Angela roll a skee ball down the short lane and score 100. The lost memories ripping him into tears stabilized. Time moving forward to nothing seemed to settle when he considered her standing there, picking up another skee ball. Angela screamed when he said hi.

          “David?! I was wondering where you have been. What happened to your face?” Angela said. David told Angela what happened at the Widow Rose.

          “You want to talk to my Dad? He usually doesn’t talk to people, but I can talk to him.” Angela told David.

                                       23 October 1986

          Ronnie was in his late 20’s. Most of the buses had been burned-out or stolen for barricades during the rioting, so people brought over black cabs from London to serve as Public Transportation for West and North Belfast. Ronnie knew the whole city well, so he gave up working in the shipyards and bought a black taxi.

          The whole Summer Dom, Bern and David had fidgeted around with the black pagers Ronnie had given them. There had been some unseen communication between Angela and her father. They only met Ronnie, but they knew they were working for Paul Watt’s B company in the UDA.

          Whenever the pager went off they went to a telephone booth, and called Ronnie, usually they had to walk to Queen’s University and go meet students buying skunk.

          Other nights Ronnie would pick up the three of them, fill their pockets with tablets, amphetamine powder, cheap coke, and send them into the raves on Castle Street. They had arrangements with bouncers and security, but Ronnie worried about them getting picked up by undercovers. He knew they were just kids handing out extremely illegal drugs to anyone who would ask. They never sold in one area more than 20 minutes.  Ronnie would page them or come into the rave to pull them out. They were often the least fashionable, and most grim-looking of the ravers. Ronnie dressed in Khakis, scanning the room for people that looked like cops, while David, Dom, and Bern were awestruck by this adult world they had stumbled into. They believed adults did not act this way. Adults acted adult.

 One time, Ronnie had to come with a cattle prod. A power-tripping older business type-guy refused to pay Bern. Bern told them how the businessman went down like a sack of potatoes when Ronnie zapped him. “His whole body went stiff like a board. He finally shut the fuck up and fell backwards.” The business guy was in his suit, unconscious and shaking on the ground. The female escort that was with the business guy freaked out and started crying, while Ronnie and Bern were going through his pockets. She spit on Ronnie and then hit him in the head with her purse, so he had to zap her too.

The onslaught of fast dance music, over the top luxury, and hedonistic partying contrasted with Dom’s, Bern’s and David’s very dull existence made them feel like they had been previously tricked, and lied to by adults about growing up. They believed adults worked hard and were responsible.

 One night, David sold a bag of coke to a woman who went into the bathroom to do it, when she came out she started screaming at David, until she vomited all over the front of his shirt and pants. David had to page Ronnie to get him a new set of clothes.

They sold mind expanding party supplies to sloppy, drunk people, who were all older than themselves. There was no rules, only weak people to listen to them. They gave Ronnie a cut of what they made. He made sure they had protection from the UDA. Dom, Bern and David carried large amounts of cash and drugs on them late into the night. If someone was trying to rob them they could call Ronnie, and if Ronnie was busy he could get someone else in the UDA to help them.

          David told Ronnie how they had robbed off-licence gambling games before, and if they could get their hand on a gun or guns the three could rob the post office in New Lodge.  Ronnie was skeptical of the whole thing, but as they made more and more money all Summer he agreed to talk to someone for David.

          Today, they waited on the slick streets of New Lodge. It had rained last night, and the clouds still hung on, but no rain fell.

Ronnie pulled up in his black taxi where they had arranged to meet.

“I need this back.” Ronnie handed a black automatic 9 mm pistol to David. As soon as the gun was in David’s hand, Ronnie was driving away. They walked to a side-street. From the side street they found a shaded garden with a large hedge. The hedge blocked the view from the residence the garden belonged to.

          “I’m not showing it to you. Grow up! It’s like what the SAS carry.” David said with a goofy, over exuberant smile. They took the balaclavas out of their pockets, pulled them over their faces and ran out of the garden they were hiding in, towards the front door of the New Lodge post office. An older woman was going in the door when they ran up to it, she gave a long, pained whining scream when Bern pulled her by her hair inside onto the post office floor. David shot the pistol once into the ceiling, so dust crumbled down, and the shell, unheard, tinkled off a wall. The marble floors and clean white walls echoed and compounded the gunshot, so the blasting reverb sounded like an explosion. Dom slid over the counter and tackled the clerk trying to run away. They grabbed all the brown mail sacks. Bern handed off the screaming older woman’s hair to David, who pointed the gun at the woman. She started to cry. David told her not to make any noise, so she tried to cry quietly, but she kept slipping, letting a hysterical whelp out, and every time she made a noise she winced like David was pulling the trigger.

          “Who the fuck just went out the back door!” Dom screamed.

          “We gotta go.” Bern said to David, balancing two mail bags. Dom threw first-class mail bags over the counter, picked up three, and waddled to the door. They could only carry two mailbags each. The bags were heavier and larger than David had anticipated. Outside of the Post Office was quiet, so when they bumbled out the Post Office door in black balaclavas they felt exposed, but oddly safe. But they were holding stolen mail bags which were too heavy for them to more than jog with, so they lugged the bags over to the garden they had launched the robbery from and ran to the nearest pay phone.  “So, bring em’ back here.” Ronnie said. Ronnie was at the Taxi company on the Lower Shankhill.

          “We don’t have a vehicle. We stashed the bags in a garden by the Post Office.” David said into the phone.

          “No vehicle! Garden! What the fuck are they doing in a garden! Oh Christ, get the fuck out of there. Every patrol in the RUC is heading there.”

“Should we leave the bags?” David asked

“Fuck No! And don’t be bringing any lifted vehicles by the cab company.” Ronnie said

“Ok.” David hung up the phone

They came back a half hour later with a stolen car. The six brown mailbags were still sitting in the shaded mud of the garden. The New Lodge Post office was surrounded by RUC vehicles, and they could see officers and detective coming in and out.

          They slammed the six bags into the back. Bern squeezed the door closed, with Dom lying on top of the bags in the back seat. A mail bag bulged over David’s head, so he had to duck when he drove. They got the bags into the car in a few rushed seconds and none of the military looking RUC men pounding in and out of the Post Office noticed.

          David pulled up the stolen vehicle to Balmoral Cemetery. They unloaded the bags out of the rear seat and pushed them over the high cemetery wall. From Balmoral cemetery, David figured they could sort, look for valuables and then carry the what they found over to the cab company on the Lower Shankhill. When David, Dom and Bern hopped over the cemetery wall they realized that a lone woman paying respects to her departed husband had watched the bags drop one by one over the wall. Her stern face greeted them like a pit-bull, and she started screaming about the RUC and the UDR, so David took out his gun and told her to shut up and sit down. She ran.

          “Fuck!” David ran after her, but she was too far ahead, and he did not know what he would do to her if he caught her. Shoot her? Winded, David panted back to Dom and Bern. “We gotta move fast. That bitch is going to go call someone.” They tore through thick brown envelopes and ripped open cardboard boxes. Some packages had money, checks, and jewelry in them, but those were rare, while more commonly the letters and boxes had food, clothes, letters and personal items. There was a pile of ripped carboard, torn greeting cards, cashmere sweaters, love letters, an old dress, tins of brownies, teddy bears, frayed packaging tape, three scarfs, a wooden rolling pin, family photographs, a black top hat, a pasta strainer, a note that says “I Love You” in big letters with a pink heart drawn below where it was signed “XOXO Grandma”, and other worthless junk.

          “Shit! Go!” Dom saw the RUC patrol coming up to the cemetery gates. The sun had gone down, but it was still light out.  The patrol would have to wind through the rows of tombstones to get to the them, the pile and the bags.  When they hopped back over the cemetery wall there was another RUC patrol right in front of them. They heard “Stop! Stay where you are!”, so they all ran in different directions.

 David ran, cut two corners and jumped into a bush. The small branches had cut his face, but David really hoped no one had seen him jump in.

Time passed, a UDR patrol went by and did not stop, so David figured he was safe. It started to rain slowly at first and then it picked up to a full deluge. He waited until it was fully dark, and then headed for the cab company on the Lower Shankhill. He had lost anything valuable he had been holding, only the heavy gun made his pants keep falling down. David was soaking wet and covered in dirt and scratches when he walked into the cab company. Ronnie was having a cigarette at a table in the cab company’s grimy, smoke-stained dispatch office. He looked intensely relieved when he saw David’s dirty face. Ronnie took David out to the garage where the cabs were serviced. They got into a black cab and David handed the gun back to him. Ronnie told him how Dom and Bern were waiting in the pub across the street. Dom and Bern had already told Ronnie how it went.

“Sorry.” David said, embarrassed. They got out of the black cab being serviced and over to the open bay doors of the garage. Ronnie lit a cigarette

“Hey, you fucked up the escape route, sometimes calling it off is the right thing. You fellas are just kids, but you did everything right, believe it or not, because the only thing that matters is getting caught and you did everything to make sure that did not happen. Next time have your vehicle ready, for fuck’s sake.” Ronnie cackled, and asked David if he wanted a drag. David took the cigarette and inhaled. David handed the cigarette back to Ronnie who said “Aye, all that really matters is not getting caught.” Ronnie took one last drag and flicked the lit cigarette butt onto the street. Heavy rain slapped into puddles. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” Ronnie said. David walked out of the garage into the rain to go meet Dom and Bern across the street.

13 January 1988

“I know some people down in Dublin. Things have turned to shit up here. It’d be better to get out of town.” Ronnie said over the phone.

“aye.” David agreed.

 “How’s the new place? You’ll love living on Castle Street, you’re only a couple doors down from my old flat.” Ronnie said.

“It’s alright, busy, a lot going on, everyone dresses really good.” David said.

“Haha, that’s cause they got money to spend. I talked to someone I used to work with about the rifles you were asking for. They said it would take some time. I’ll give you a call the second I hear from him. But don’t be giving anyone any money up-front for rifles. He’ll come through.”

“Ok.” David said, stretching into an awkward silence

“Here, meet me at the Widow Rose.”

“Now?”

“ya, I’m leaving today.”

“Alright. I’m on my way.” David said

Ronnie was hunched over a pint at the bar. When David came in Ronnie’s sour face illuminated. “David! You crazy bastard!” Ronnie’s face was red and the volume of his voice was extremely loud. Ronnie started to sing and then he trailed away “Forced from my home!” The bar-maid looked at Ronnie and his booming antics “I pint for my friend David.” The bar maid brought over the pint. “A stink-puss this one’s been giving me.” Ronnie pointed at the bar-maid setting David’s pint down in front of him.

“Piss off!” the girl said

“Aye, you fucking cunt, fuck you, and ya ugly bashed in face.” Ronnie said, raising his glass. “I want to make a toast. To the ugly fucking cunt behind the bar.”

“Fuck you! I’ll get the manager and get you out of here.”

“No you won’t!” Ronnie screamed, laughing. “You’re going to kick me out. Drive me away.” Ronnie laughed hysterically. “Go get the fuckin management! To kick me out.” Ronnie lapsed into hysterical, drunk crying. He wiped the tear from his face, and settled his eyes on David.

“A present for you.” Ronnie put a nine mm automatic handgun, two clips and a box of 50 nine mm bullets into David’s lap.

“Jesus!” David jumped to cover up the exposed handgun with the sweatshirt he had on under his heavy Winter jacket. Ronnie laughed harder. Tired, Ronnie looked for the bar-maid, but she had slipped into the back out of his abuse, and drunkenly taking account of his surroundings, he said in a serious tone, “Until things get straightened out and settle down, you’re going to have to be on your own, keep that money straight and someone will pick you up once the dust settles. Use that if anyone gets in the way of your cash. That flat on Castle Street is a gold mine. There will be other people that will want what you have, so let them know.” Ronnie motioned towards the gun David was trying to conceal. Ronnie turned and stared straight ahead. He leaned over the bar and refilled his own pint. Turning to David, he raised his foamy glass and shouted:

“To Belfast and the shit-storm it will always be!”

                                                -

For David Things had started on Remembrance Day.  The 8^th of November 1987.  He had the flu so bad he was not picking up calls for the first day ever.

Dom, Bern and David had worked with Ronnie and made a significant amount of money. Members of Paul Watt’s B company of the UDA had started to take notice. Raves, discos and dance clubs were getting bigger and more decadent while the booming trade in ecstasy was netting David, Dom, Bern, and Ronnie huge profits. Ronnie began to have more of a say in B company, because of the spike in cash coming in. Ronnie was able to set David up with a flat on Castle Street, so he could distribute ecstasy tablets or skunk in bulk without having to drive or walk somewhere and risk being stopped by a patrol.

 People came to David. His flat was a short walk for any of the low-level dealers, selling at any of the raves in Belfast City centre. David did not sell under 100 tablets. He was reliable, fair, had good prices and good stuff. David got calls at all hours of the day and night to sell E tablets and the numbers kept getting higher. One Friday night, he sold 2,000 E tablets and half a kilo of skunk between 9pm and midnight.

David was sweating out the virus in his body. When he stood up he felt like throwing up. His pager kept going off, but when he went to go find it he got nauseous and ended up stumbling for the sink or the bathroom. He threw up on his kitchen floor, and then had trouble cleaning it up because he was so nauseous. He laid down in his bed and woke up in complete dark. It was just past seven p.m. His sheets were soaked. David was extremely cold, covered in sweat, but his skin felt very hot.

He turned on the television jus to hear something. The television show that was scheduled to air was going to air next week. There was a special report. David saw the rubble around the statue of the soldier from World War I, people crying and screaming, well-dressed old men in uniforms covered in dust. People were digging, yelling for help, and throwing chunks of bricks. A woman in a red coat crouched over an older man crushed in the debris, she kept trying to touch him, while another woman held her up. A group of men cleared the women away. The men threw aside masonry, stone, and bricks. They lifted the gray, dusty, crumpled figure out of the debris. The woman in the red coat tried to touch the man being carried. Five men carried the older man over the rubble to where the ambulances were arriving. David saw the woman with the red coat’s arm waver in the air, trying to touch the older man they carried, but she was unable to get through. Her hand raised to her mouth in acute sorrow. He did not know what woman in the red coat’s relation to the older man was, but he could see from the clip on the news she loved him, and she was concerned he was hurt, but she had no idea if he would be okay.

David could not figure out what he was seeing. Enniskillen. He had forgotten, he was so sick, but there were parades all over the province. Castle Street was lined with banners and there had been a parade earlier in the day, David remembered hearing the marching bands through his fever. Remembrance day is a national holiday in Northern Ireland that commemorates the men who fought in World War I like David’s grandfather, and to honor the sacrifice of Ulstermen who fought in World War II when the Republic of Ireland had remained neutral. Many of those veterans, old men, had gotten dressed, proudly in their military uniforms and attended the various parades and functions throughout Northern Ireland. David was watching the veterans of Enniskillen get pulled out of masonry on the news.

He started to piece together the details. The RUC and UDR had searched the whole parade route, but the IRA had hid the enormous bomb inside a building, so when it exploded, the towns-people, gathered to watch the Remembrance day parade pass, were buried by a collapsing wall. The RUC were still counting, but there were at least 12 people dead and over 60 injured. All Protestants. Three married older couples made up six of the dead.

David had worked hard to get himself off the streets. He had a comfortable life, a nice apartment, and a good cash flow. Angela and David were dating regularly, and he thought of her all the time. What Enniskillen said to him was that what he had struggled and prevailed against meant nothing to Sinn Fein, The IRA, the Catholic community and Ireland. The RUC found an unexploded bomb in Tullyhummon. It had failed to detonate along the town’s Remembrance Day parade route. The command wire went back to the Republic.

There was no story he could think of about his Grandfather. David just knew he died at the Somme, and he pictured his grandfather dying on some muddy, artillery-pocked stretch of France and it meaning nothing, because his grandfather, his father and him could struggle, work and sacrifice, and then have a bomb explode and a wall crush their lives. All this bloodshed in the name of Catholic civil rights. The black space that was the death of his own father at the hands of the IRA was a void that could only be filled with the unfocused rage of loss. He had never been alive when the latest violent atrocity was not on the television. Bombing after bombing, Protestant after Protestant killed. It was ethnic cleansing. There was no respect for David’s family. He thought of his mother, the ever-absent victim, being pulled and humiliated from the courthouse. David did not want to be a victim like his Grandfather, his Dad, his Mum and the old men dressed up in their pressed uniforms being rushed to ambulances in Enniskillen.

It seemed to be escalating, Sinn Fein and Gerry Adams were gaining ground politically, while the Catholic community seemed determined and unashamed at the level of IRA violence they were willing to expose the Protestant community to. Maybe it was because for the first time in David’s life he had something, Angela, his flat on Castle Street, and he became afraid that something beyond his power, like the anonymous IRA members in dark the streets of West Belfast, would come and take everything away. This fear became so real, it became who David was, an unrelenting counter-force to fight what he saw as a sustained attack by the Irish-Catholic community to personally extinguish his past, his traditions, his family and himself.

Angela brought food by the flat. By Early December he was feeling better. Dom and Bern had their own flats, their own customers, and their own set of responsibilities with keeping the raves in Belfast supplied, so he did not see them every day like before.  His flat had a bedroom, a living room to watch T.V. in, a separate kitchen with brand new marble countertops, and shiny hardwood floors. When Angela came by for dinner she at first commented: “How adult.” The money David was making kept climbing, more and more people wanted Ecstasy, other dealers had tablets that were cut with methamphetamine, but people knew David had the real stuff, Molly, MDMA. He kept getting more and more customers.

The apartment seemed too big for him. Angela watched David tear into his dinner and she thought how he looked like a little boy. He was only 17. David’s wiry frame had begun to fill out. His shoulders spread apart and his hunched posture began to straighten. Angela noticed how his arms and shoulders looked more muscular, but he still got upset over little things like he always had. Angela calmed him down on several occasions when he would go on long, angry rants about Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and Sinn Fein. David would wind himself into a fury, spitting, red, anger everywhere he looked, and Angela would ask him “what’s wrong?” and he would calm down, even if he could talk to her on the phone, and hear she was coming by at some later time. It filled the vacancy that was his family’s humiliation, so his own. He was away from everyone he cared about, most of them were dead, His Dad, he figured his Mum was dead because she never came looking for him. People, like his brother and sisters, who were still alive, he figured, were in places he did not know. He was constantly in dangerous or risky situations. Paul Watt’s B company of the UDA gave him full protection, but David could tell they were still weary of him and his past UVF connections. Paul Watt’s concern for his own daughter’s well-being was what made David get actual protection from B company. David was always worried about getting robbed. It could happen at any time. He kept asking Ronnie for a gun. David always had a switchblade on him. All one of his customers had to do was pull a pistol and say give me everything. He was in a lot of risky situations, but he reaped the profits.

The anger seemed to be pulsating just below the surface.  A scintillating mood that unconsciously worked its way into David’s demeanor, his stride, the way he looked at situations, and how he reacted. More often than not, except with Angela, he found it safer to be scary, violent, and mean, so he did not get hurt, and then he could worry later if the situation had never meant to be threatening to him in the first place. He never apologized. People were always fucking with him, and they got what they deserved, if they thought he was being unreasonable they were being stupid. He decided if the city of Belfast got high over the weekend or not, just by looking at his pager. Of course, he was allowed to do it because of the older guys in the paramilitary organizations, but those guys could not sell E and skunk like he could. David was bringing in the money, and while his responsibilities rose the anxiety about what happened to his mum, his father, and his grandfather would materialize out of nowhere. A bomb, or he dreamed of someone walking up to him and asking: “are you David Prey?” gunshots exploded right when he nodded yes and he was looking down at the bullets holes in his stomach, blood pouring out, like his Dad, watching Angela and his life slip away. David was scared all the time, he imagined these hypothetical terrorist hits every where he walked. The more customers he got the more aware he was that word about him was spreading, and he hoped the wrong people did not find out, but at night he was sure, just like his dad, they would probably get him, and it made him really scared. When he got tired of going inward and thinking about all the wrongs in his past and those committed against his family, the emotion went forward, outwards. He vociferously extolled against Catholics, Ireland, Irish culture, Sinn Fein, and anyone supporting a United Ireland. Until Angela asked him what he was so mad about, and in the moment she asked him, he realized the anger just disappeared. He was left trying to understand the weight of the emotion that could be triggered so easily, and how it so often spiraled out into a messy rage he was not aware of, unless Angela’s soft voice was there to stop the energized backslide into negativity, so David could consider something beautiful and nurturing in his present and future.

He heard about it on January 2, from a kid who walked over from West Belfast every Saturday to pick up 200 E tablets. “Aye, its bad, the guy who heads the Crimea Street UVF was killed on New Year’s.” David stopped counting the cash the kid had just given him.

“Who?” David asked

“I don’t know. Some guys got in a fight with him at Rex’s.” The Rex bar was a popular UVF hangout for the older guys, and David knew Trevor hung out there. “That’s the thing they don’t think it was IRA, but other loyalists. There saying it’s some UDA guys, there was a fight inside the bar, and when he was walking out of Rex’s someone shot him in the legs, hit his artery and he bleed out by time the paramedics came. Dead. Bad news. Someone’s gotta pay for that.”

“Alright, It’s all here. I’ll see you next week, brother.”

“Thanks Dave, right, I’ll see you next week.” David rushed the kid out the door, called Ronnie and got no answer. He called Dom, but Dom was still asleep. Bern picked up the phone. Bern’s flat was at the end of the Shankhill road on Peter’s Hill, before the Shankhill became North Street, and led into David’s territory in Belfast City Centre.

“They killed Trevor.” Bern blurted out when he heard David’s voice.

 “What the fuck happened?” David could not believe it.

“Aye.” It sounded like Bern had been crying. “Things were busy, ya know, with New Years right up until midnight, and I basically stopped taking calls after midnight. I was celebrating myself, but I have a kid I’m more friends with, so he calls me up to come over and we’re downing Goldschlager shots to celebrate and then he starts telling me about what went on at the The Rex. Trevor would call us from there all the time.”

“I know.” David said.

“So around 1:30 we go down there, and there’s blood fucking everywhere in the doorway of Rex’s. The ambulance had cleared out, but I asked people hanging around what happened and some guys from B company in the UDA were drinking in Rex’s and Trevor did not want them there, and there was some kind of row when they got kicked out. Everyone’s talking about who the guys are.”

“Do you think it was Ronnie?” David asked. Bern exhaled gravely.

“I hope not.”

“Who said B company?” David asked.

“The Bouncer, Rick, who’s done Security for them for years. he knew Trevor and he was down there saying it was someone from B company.” Bern said

“Shit.” David suddenly felt like crying. Trevor was the first person to really give him a chance, because of Trevor David had everything he had now. The UVF would require blood. Trevor was too high-up for too long for there to be no reprisals. Whoever had done it had not intended to kill Trevor, just kneecap him. But the fella that pulled the trigger had panicked and emptied the whole gun into Trevor’s legs. He was hit six times. Rick, the Security guard tried to stop the flow of blood from the artery in Trevor’s thigh. The blood soaked up over a dozen table clothes, all while Trevor was growing pale, praying and going in and out consciousness. He started yelling “the Bastards got me.” and then he gave Rick a detailed sketch of his grandmother’s field in England,

“He was talking about the barn, and the kittens that were always playing in the hay, and how you could go out, and he seemed to know the horse’s name, and ride out to the fields where his grandmother grew yellow Canola. He kept talking about the yellow fields stretching away, and how his Grandmother would have a hot dinner for him when he came back from his ride.” Rick had told Bern.

“Everything was for my country, my home.” Trevor kept yelling, getting more and more incoherent, and they told him to rest for the paramedics, but he got quiet, his lips turned blue, his shallow breathing stopped, and he passed away.

 Every loyalist in Belfast would want revenge and people were hearing B company of the UDA was responsible. David’s own period of inactivity after the Mark Baird murder reminded him how powerful Trevor was amongst old loyalists.

The next night, the 2^nd of January 1988, Paul Watt was pulling out of his driveway when a bomb exploded underneath his car. Both of his legs were blown off. Angela heard the explosion. She came out of the house, saw her Dad wedged into the burning vehicle, still alive. Angela saw his charred face. She saw the white of his eyes blink through a ripple of heat and smoke. She moved towards the vehicle and then she would be driven back, crying, the tears already dried on her face from the heat.

Angela did not realize it, but she was screaming. Angela kept trying to talk to him, but the car was roaring with flames. There was a plastic bucket on the kitchen floor, so she ran back into the house, while her mother was hysterically babbling to the police on the phone. She filled the bucket but could not wait long enough for it to entirely fill, thinking of her Dad trapped in the car.

The small splash of water only simmered in the flames. Angela started to try and stamp out the flames with the bucket, but the bucket started to melt, and she was getting sharp, pin-prick burns on her hands. She was trying to talk to her Dad, but she only heard inarticulate grunts and screams from him. She heard “Angela!”

“Dad, just stay with me!” Angela pleaded, running in and out of the house, refilling a pitcher or bucket halfway and then bolting back out to her father. When the RUC arrived to pry him out of the car he was dead from third degree burns, loss of blood and smoke inhalation.

Angela called David from the hospital that night, she was exhausted, she cried over the phone, not really making sense, and she told David how she would see him soon.

On the morning of January 3, David kept calling Ronnie at home and at the cab company. Ronnie called David back from the smoky dispatch office of the cab company on the Lower Shankhill.

“It was the INLA. They just put out a statement.” Ronnie said when David started talking. He had never got the paper this morning. David went to his door, saw the paper lying in his doorway, and opened it to the article: “INLA claims responsibility for death of prominent Loyalist” In the article there was a small thumbnail picture of Paul Watt.

“The fuckin INLA.” David said. Ronnie was talking, but David was trying to read the newspaper article at the same time. “What about Trevor over at Rex’s. It wasn’t because of that?” Ronnie stayed silent for a moment.

“No. We talked to people, over in the UVF and UFF, and they said they had nothing but respect for Paul Watt, and it was not one of their people. Not long after the INLA put out the statement.” Ronnie said.

“I heard from Bern they think whoever got Trevor was associated with the UDA and B company.”

“They do.” Ronnie said flatly

“Were you at Rex’s?” David asked

“Fuck you! No, but I know who was, and with everyone talking that makes me just as responsible.”

“Who was it?”

“I can’t say. They’re hiding out in the Republic, we’ll see how this affects things.” Ronnie said, referring to the money coming in over E.

“It’s going to effect things! I could use that gun when you get one. Some rifles! Even an operable handgun” David said, his voice rising. “We could really use some rifles, with all this shit going on!”

“I’m not leaving a gun with a fucking teenager.” David heard the condescension in Ronnie’s voice.

“A teenager that’s making more money for you than all your other rackets combined, and a teenager who now is going to be targeted because he is associated with B company of the UDA when there’s  an old guy from the UVF dead, an old guy that was very good to that teenager in the old days, and yes Trevor was a prick, but he did not deserve to die!”

“Alright.” Ronnie said. David was yelling, and very upset. He had known Trevor well, despite their differences. David felt he had been responding to the chaos caused by people older than him and he wanted it to stop, even if that meant fighting.

“Get me a fucking gun or stop killing people I used to work for!” David screamed. “I’m a Fucking teenager! You’re the ones fighting like little kids.”

“Alright, stop yelling.” Ronnie said “Calm down. I’ll get you a gun. I appreciate that you, Dom, and Bern are on the front lines when something like this happens.”

“No fucking shit!” David yelled

“Stop, fucking yelling at me!” Ronnie’s voice went down to a quick, violent whisper. “I’m the one who needs the gun right now. You think you are the only one talking and screaming at me. Fuck.” Ronnie hung up the phone. David heard the dial tone, and read the newspaper article:

“The Irish National Liberation Army took responsibility for the booby-trap bomb explosion which killed a prominent Loyalist, named Paul Watt. Mr. Watt had been a founding member of the UDA in 1971.

In 1981 he was charged in connection with the shooting death of a Belfast City Coucilor outside the Shamrock Social Club in Ardoyne, but all charges were dropped for lack of evidence. He was being questioned by authorities in the Republic of Ireland for a string of armed car robberies, but no charges were ever brought. Paul Watt was a member of the Clifton Street Orange Order in Belfast. He leaves behind a daughter and wife.

This is the first terrorist incident the IRA splinter group the INLA has claimed responsibility for since the deadly sniper attack on UDR officer, John Hawthorne, in Belfast this past November.”

The INLA. “The IRA for fuck-ups” is what Trevor had called them. The INLA viewed themselves as revolutionary Marxist Republicans, so they went after high profile targets that would get them large press coverage, because they lacked the membership and resources of the Provisional IRA. The INLA knew if they could take down a figure everyone was talking about, like Paul Watt, the whole Loyalist community would be in an uproar.

David was numb. Trevor was Dead. Paul Watt was Dead. Angela had called him from the ferry terminal. She was going to Glasgow, Scotland with her mother, until they felt safe. By the first week of January colors seemed dull, everything was slightly off-gray. The sunlight was stringy and weak when it pierced through the arctic air. David had trouble getting dinner together and he thought of Angela being gone when the sun-set. He had to order take-out and carry it back to his flat.

The anger would rise in Angela’s absence. The same cause, militant Irish Republicanism, had driven away the one he loved yet again. The reoccurring, ripping unfairness of it all made David’s anger climb into area’s where he was detached from reality, hour upon hour of recounting the things he lost. He felt forced to stare at the nothing that was his life and think about everyone gone. David got so mad at night he started to cry. There was no release.

He took an E pill. Everything became more vivid. Colors glowed and seemed to move. There were no barriers. All the people he missed he could communicate with by just thinking of them. He just had to go outside and he would see his brother and sisters and Dom and Bern and they would all go have a drink. David never stopped picking up calls. When he came down off the E he started drinking, and he enjoyed the brutal slugging of hard liquor, with its controllable surge of inebriation and mood enhancement, opposed to the capricious upward spike and downward slide of Ecstasy.

After a couple days of drinking he stopped picking up calls. He was peeing on a wall on Great Victoria Street when a UDR officer saw him. The older officer gave chase, and David ran into a street sign. He walked away from the metal street sign dazed and concussed, when the officer put his hands on him. David recoiled, pulled his arm away, knocked the UDR man down, and jumped over a rickety wood fence.

When David got back to his apartment, he had forgotten the incident had even happened, and after drinking more later in the night he saw the UDR man’s angry face, his neat greyish-brown mustache screaming commands, and David thought whoever the man was must have been from an old T.V. show he had watched.

He missed people. It was like a wall – the separation. And all he could do was live in his memories. He inserted his imagination into his memory and took quick glimpses of his mother doing laundry, putting a bowl of oatmeal in front of him or his sister crawling up his arm. If he got drunk enough he could imagine them all in a little apartment together, his Mum and brother and sisters. He imagined what it would have been like if Angela and him had been able to start a family. David could have started working a straight job, got a bigger flat, or purchased a house outside Belfast. Angela could have had a baby, maybe one or two more, and David would have had his own family. Irish Republicans had no respect for family. They had let Angela’s father burn to death in front of her. They had separated David from everyone he knew. The unrelenting cruelty of the absence made him want to cry. He felt that he was being exposed, made vulnerable, and the police, RUC or UDR could not protect him. David had to be his own deterrent. He started punching some old guy with a heavy Irish brogue, who was trying to sell him something. The old man ended up falling on the sidewalk. People tried to stop David from getting away, but he was so drunk when it happened he could not remember where that was.

A kid came by to buy some skunk. David was chatting him up, completely hammered and only in his underwear. The kid told him how there was a meeting of former IRA internees at the Sinn Fein’s head office on the Falls road that night.

David did not eat dinner that night. He drank whisky until he started to puke brown bile.

The next awful morning, The phone kept ringing and ringing. The ringing came came through his headache. He remembered where he was, saw the phone and picked it up.

“I’ve been calling you all day! Where have you been?” Ronnie asked

“What time is it?” David asked

“1: 30 in the afternoon. I hope you’re not missing any other calls. You don’t flip that stuff we lose money the longer it sits there.”

“I’m doing my job.” David said.

“I gotta come by and talk to you.”

Ronnie’s stooped figure looked pre-occupied when David opened the door. David let him in and Ronnie stood there saying no words.

“So, how is it?” David asked Ronnie. David, as hungover as he was, noticed Ronnie’s off-set demeanor.  There was a cut on the side of Ronnie’s forehead. Ronnie noticed David looking him over, so he told him.”

“Aye. They took out my black cab.” Ronnie told David how two guys had come running up, one with a pistol, another with a Sten gun. “I saw their hands with gloves on them right when I saw the guns. I ducked down in the driver’s seat. That Sten seemed to go on forever. I think the body of the cab stopped those little nine mms.” Ronnie told how they fired from behind, shattering all the windows, so a piece of glass hit Ronnie in the side of the forehead. The man with the Sten gun had come along the side of Ronnie’s cab and raked the side- doors and engine block until the clip ran out. The men had taken off running. “I left the cab before the RUC showed up. I’ve driven that cab for over five years. All gone.”

“Jesus.” David said. “Who was it?”

“ The IRA is not taking responsibility. Who do you think?”

“Probably someone in the UVF, who knew Trevor.” David said

“That’s what I think too.” Ronnie said

“Sorry, Ronnie.” David had never seen Ronnie this shaken up. Ronnie looked like he was going to cry and then he suddenly stood up.

“I gotta make some calls down at the cab company.”

David was scared to leave his apartment. He was not sure how people viewed him, UVF, UDA, drug dealer, criminal, paramilitary, if he crossed one person who saw the wrong image he could end up in jail or dead. This burst of violence around New Year’s 1988 rightfully made him afraid, but it stirred up feelings from his father’s assassination. David would be erased just like his father, unless David moved first to erase someone else. If he did not attack, David felt susceptible to the random violence happening around him. The blank space that was his father, the lack of memory, or an even clean image of his face, made David more resolved to survive. He felt under pressure, like he had been pushed into an untenable position, which was his own defeat, his death and his family’s. The only way out of this corner was to hit back harder than he had been hit.

David stayed in his apartment, and decide to stick to beer, so he could keep his wits about him. People came by for skunk and E tablets. David was busy meeting people sometimes up to ten to twelve people in a day. Each buying over £1000 worth. David had plastic bags all over his apartment. A scale for weighing out skunk, and huge vacuum sealed bags of pills in his closet.

It was a couple of hazy days drowning beers, smoking skunk and throwing bags of E tablets at kids.

When, only a couple days after David had seen him last, Ronnie called. He told David to meet him down at the Widow Rose.

                                                -

When David came out of the Widow Rose, he felt the weight of the gun Ronnie had given him in his jacket pocket. He went to a payphone and called Dom.

“Have you talked to Ronnie?” David asked when Dom picked up the phone.

“No, I haven’t seen him.” Dom said.

“Ok. He told me to do a job on the Falls Road tonight.” David lied.

“What kind of job?” Dom asked

“He did not say, just that we needed to drive over to the Falls road. Can you get a vehicle? And pick me up at Trainor’s newsstand at 6.”

 “Agh. Ronnie told you to have a vehicle for tonight? That’s short notice to say the least. Can’t we do it next week? I gotta scope out a new car.”

“Can you get one for tonight?” The sun was just starting to set. David thought of going by a store and getting a bottle of vodka.

“I can get one.” Dom said.

“Alright, I will see you at Trainor’s at 6.”

“Alright.”

David hung up the phone. There was no one to answer to now. Ronnie had somewhat made it clear - David was on his own. Any ideas of protection, safety or even being given any kind of opportunity could not be relied upon by the older generation. The older generation was dead and in shambles. Their impotence had allowed for their own demise. David wanted to make sure in the absence of Trevor, Paul Watt and Ronnie that there would be an energy present everybody would have to heed. He wanted that force to be himself, Bern and Dom. The time for being constantly blind-sided, confused and bewildered was over. He would be the cause for the action everyone else responded to, before any uncertain violence came hurtling at him.

Dom had used the ring with over eighty types of spare car keys on it. After breaking into a couple cars and failing to start the ignition, a key finally connected with a blue, four-door Ford Cortina.

 After Dom picked up Bern, David told them. “Ronnie’s gone down to the Republic. He’s going to hide-out somewhere in Dublin. Someone from the UVF sprayed his cab.”

“I heard from him after that, but I haven’t heard of him since.” Bern said.

“He met me at the Widow Rose before he left and he gave me this.” David showed Dom and Bern the sleek automatic nine mm handgun. Dom and Bern grew excited. They eagerly listened to what David was saying. “Ronnie said that we were on our own, that we had to keep our cash in line and someone would pick us up.”

“Pick us up?” Dom said, his mouth souring.

“Right.”  David said.

“So, we don’t have to call anyone and give money for protection. We just flip the E and skunk and pick up more?” Bern asked confused.

“That’s I guess what Ronnie said.” David said kind of surprised himself. David focused. “So, I believe we are under threat from at least the INLA, probably the Provisional IRA if they know who we are. I don’t think they do, but someone with the INLA is targeting us. They killed Angela’s Dad.” David said. Dom and Bern nodded gravely. “Angela is sitting up in Scotland and I’m not sure she’s coming back.” David said defeated. “So, to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen to us, I say we throw them off. Now, most of the INLA guys operate around the Divis Flats on the Falls Road. And most of those guys probably got interned at some point, and I know from a kid I sell to that they are having a meeting of former IRA internees at the Sinn Fein head office on the Falls road. We send a couple through the front.” David looked down at the gun. “We may get one of them, if not, everyone will be talking about an attack on the Sinn Fein head office. We can let the right people know we were behind it and get some protection.” Dom and Bern mulled over everything David had just said to them. “Someone in the INLA is targeting B company, whether we like it or not we are associated with B company. We need to send a message to the Taigs and maybe someone in the loyalist community that we can be relied to on to stand up for Ulster. It might help someone in the UVF convince them we did not kill Trevor, too. I’m not sure how much Ronnie was involved in that whole mess and we, right now, are most closely associated with Ronnie.”

“The UVs know who did it. They sent someone down to Dundalk to look for him.” Dom said

“Who did it?” Bern asked

“I don’t know. There going to get him though. Wait, so Ronnie did not tell you to do this?” Dom responded

“He okayed it.” David was lying. Ronnie had been too drunk to care about anything and the whole operation was David’s idea. “So, what do you say?” David said

“Ronnie’s gone?” Dom asked. David nodded his head.

“Alright.” Bern said. “If we’re on our own like David’s saying. Wouldn’t it be best to just keep selling?”

“What happens when people find out Ronnie’s gone? We are going to have to pay someone or we’ll get robbed.” David said “We’ll go do this, shoot up the Sinn Fein head office, and see if someone else from the UDA will help us out. No one knows who the fuck we are right now. All three of us are just drug dealers, possibly associated with the death of Trevor. The old guys will eat us alive. We need to do something besides sell skunk to students.”

“When People find out Ronnie’s gone they are going to go after all the money he made and that’s us.” Dom said fatally.

“When people found out that Ronnie’s gone, we don’t’ have guns and our flats are full of thousands of £ notes, bags of skunk and thousands of E tablets we are going to start getting threats and then we will get robbed by somebody. We need to put a message out that we have guns.”

Bern and Dom agreed that David had a point. Other dealers were forced to pay protection to the UDA or UVF. Right now, suddenly, they were fully independent. If they attacked the Sinn Fein head office, it would give them leverage with whoever would inevitably try and muscle in on their business.

David had the wrong night. The Davis flats tower loomed like an iceberg in the night-ocean.  There were scant row houses, trash in the streets, bombed out and collapsing buildings, trash-cans with fires in them, and people standing in circles around the bright-glowing smoke of the trashcans. Burnt-out vehicles and buses had not been removed yet, their black collapsed shells were swept to the sides of the road. A crumbling wall had “Brits Out” spray-painted onto it in white letters. The three lapsed into silence as they peered into enemy territory. The Sinn Fein Head office was completely dark when they drove past it. A mural of Bobby Sands leered at them. They circled the block and saw a group of kids hanging on a corner. They stopped in front of the dark Sinn Fein office.

“Doesn’t look like anyone is inside.” Bern said

“The meeting is probably over.” David realized he had the wrong night. “Go back around and slow down in front of those kids.” Dom went back around the block. When they got to the corner David started to lower his window. He started saying “Slow, Slow, Slow, Slower, Slower” To Dom. The kids were approaching the vehicle they thought was stopping for them. The sound of the first shot ripped through the interior of the car. The sound and the blast shocked David. The new automatic handgun did not recoil as much as the other older weapons he had fired before. After the first shot, the gun hung halfway out the window. Realizing the kids were running away from the car, David took his left hand and wrapped it around the grip. Steadied, David fired, trying to keep the gun pointed forward and down.  When he pulled the trigger, he flexed his shoulders and forearms to keep the gun somewhat pointed in the direction of the fleeing kids. He repeated, as fast as he could, trying to get through the series of explosions quickly, one right after the other, until he pulled the trigger and there was no explosion, just a click. “Go! Go! Go!” David yelled. Dom slammed on the gas. He braked, slowed and skidded into sharp turns and then accelerated out of them, until they reached the A1 on-ramp. The white humming lights that kept the highway lit tore over their heads in rapid intervals, like a thousand days and nights passing them by, without them even noticing. David felt the wind ripping through the interior of the stolen Cortina. The omni-auditory roar of the wind in his ear was the first thing he had enjoyed since Angela had left. They were heading South out of Belfast.

There was one kid David saw on the ground when they had driven away. If they were on the Falls road they must have been Taigs. But David was furious when he found nothing about the shooting on the news that night, or in the news-paper for the 14^th of January the next day.

                                     

23 March 1988

When David woke up in the morning he snorted two snowy lines of uncut cocaine. The morning news was always terrible, but within the airy spikes of his cocaine high David imagined his own news reports. When people started calling him later in the day, he would smoke a joint or two to relax. By dinner he was getting enough booze together, so he could fall asleep. He usually snorted molly or coke after he made sure he ate something in the evening. David would go out to the pubs on Castle Street and try and pick up girls, but he would always end up just walking around Belfast City Centre, grinding his teeth, feeling warm, watching the beauty of the bright city lights melt into the nighttime air, until he started getting weird chills, so he went back to his apartment and drank until he passed out.

Dom, Bern and David each called a black cab every Thursday afternoon. They each brought £5000 to a remote storage unit lot by Belfast Harbor. The razor-wired lot was nestled in with towering stacks of containers that had come off freight ships. Tall, unmanned cranes loomed over-head like inactive monsters. Ronnie told them over the phone from Dublin how the guy, who owned the storage unit lot, wanted nothing to do with them. He did not want them to know his name. The drugs and feuds had ruined their reputation. Dom, Bern and David knew he worked for the cab company, owned this storage lot, and to put £5000 beneath the office door every Thursday, but that was it. David had knocked the first time when he saw someone in the office, behind the shut blinds, but whoever it was did not open the door, so David continued to slip the money underneath.

Bern fronted a usually reliable kid £1000 in skunk. The kid refused to pay Bern. Bern had called someone at the cab company, but nothing happened. Bern was out £1000. When the next Thursday came and Bern only gave £4000, a couple UDA guys came to his door in Peter’s Hill, asking for the £1000. Bern told them about the kid and the skunk, but they wanted the money. Bern did not want any trouble, so he gave them the £1000.

“Why are we even paying these guys?” Bern had said, completely incensed, over the phone to David.

The Loyalist Paramilitaries of Ulster were naïve, they were being nice and so getting beat. David’s rage-filled perceptions reasoned his environment into an air-tight solution with only one problem: Catholics.  Many Ulstermen had families, livelihoods, and they could not go risking it all by building car-bombs and creating anarchy like members of the IRA. The hordes of uneducated Catholics, with their flawed, idolatrous form of worship, did not have this desire for family or community. Sinn Fein and the IRA thrived off creating instability. Causing mayhem was the only thing they could be successful at. The Catholic communities were too ignorant of their own moral bankruptcy to understand they were ruining decent, hard-working families with their pointless cause. No one wanted to stand up to stop them. David had a shallow, image-based perception of Catholics. The anger-augmented perception grew into a vital release for the constant fear David felt. The fear grew out of the alien picture he saw when he looked at the dirty, poor packs of rioting kids in the rough neighborhoods of West and North Belfast. He imagined Catholic families, living in large, brutal, thoughtless packs, not anything like the care his mother had shown him, with stringy, dirt-poor uncles, who drank too much and mixed fertilizer bombs to blow up in London, while craggily-faced mothers and aunts approved of the whole mess.

The older loyalist guys seemed to hope the problem would just go away, and the old days of unquestioned British rule would somehow materialize. Many loyalist paramilitaries, to David’s dismay, seemed to believe if they did not act to meet the IRA’s degenerate violence they were somehow keeping themselves safe and pristine, usually a comfortable income allowed for this insulated mindset, while Police Officers and working-class Protestants were being killed every month. David knew he was not going to be able to be insulated. A shift in the political power dynamic of Northern Ireland would affect him most. He imagined himself a victim of things bigger than him, like every preceding member of his family.

 What David did not understand was that many of the older guys were jaded from the onslaught of violence in the 1970’s that had only indirectly effected David. Besides the death of his father, David never knew the intense level of conflict of the 1970’s, and many of the older guys never wanted to return to those blood-soaked days. David saw a group of weak, tired old men, looking to get rich off rackets, while there was a real battle for the existence of their community to be fought. David had cash, access to guns, and was ready to make a statement.

David was more aware at what was going on at the street level, and he felt he was being pushed. The Protestant community was acting civilized, only to be met by the constant death of Ulster police officers, loyalists, innocent Protestants, and British Military Personnel. The actions of the IRA pushed David, news report after news report, further into the mindset that a violent response was necessary. If Protestants kept playing the nice party in Ulster, David foresaw an ethnic pogrom against his own community. He imagined himself destitute and powerless with no recourse because Sinn Fein and The IRA had prevailed. Belfast and Northern Ireland was his home, not a part of Ireland, something different that Catholics never really understood. The narrow mindset of Irish-Catholics did not understand tradition. Sacrifice was necessary to create a family-oriented, community-based society that could create the collaborative cultural accomplishments of the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom defeated Hitler, while the Irish, stayed neutral, and laughed about the London Blitz.

Ulstermen like David’s Grandfather had fought and died to make the United Kingdom the amazing center of culture and power that David knew. It was everything he knew, so it was completely himself, and any attack on the symbols of Protestants or British rule became a personal affront to his identity.

The profits from the drug trade could fund a larger war against the IRA, but the old guys wanted nothing to do with it. Their overly simplistic dismissal of the large amount of cash Dom, Bern and David were making gave David the feeling of having his own independent power. He knew a way to be successful. But he did not have their support, so he decided to do it himself. When their less-than-eager UDA protection failed to materialize, after Bern got ripped off, they started to plan.

They bought an abandoned storage unit, so the rifles they paid for could be left in there. Ronnie assured them over a phone call from Dublin that if they slipped the money under the office door he would make sure they got the rifles. In the weird absence of any protective authority, Dom, Bern and David were weary of putting £75000 under the office door, but Ronnie promised them three AK- 47-style rifles and ammunition. 

Ronnie rang them from Dublin when the rifles were delivered.

 Dom, Bern and David posed and played with the unexpectedly heavy automatic Czech assault rifles in the closed musty, darkness of the storage unit. They each took a photograph holding the rifles with their black balaclavas on. Only two could be in the picture, while one took the shot, so they rotated the camera with the rifles and the balaclavas, until they each had an anonymous picture of themselves.

Angela was still gone, and it looked like she was not coming back. David found out from Theresa Gibson that Angela was attending University in Glasgow. His memory of her began to fade. When he was high or drunk he would remember her blonde hair with the black ribbons in it. He thought of the contours of her face, her breasts, the clothes she wore, and how this had all come together to make a person who had cared for him. His mind kept going back to her. Over and over, his mind would return to images of her, until there was nothing left to see. David tried to remember how Angela’s voice sounded when she said certain things. She had said “O.K.” Whenever David’s rantings reached hysteria. The all-knowing, patient tone of her “O.K.’s” made David happy, but he felt a sharp drop of sadness when he realized there was no way to have contact with her. He looked out his flat window, over Belfast City Centre and thought of the inaccessible regions Angela inhabited now, and how he would never share anything with her again. Her absence was like an ever-present aggression, always mocking him.

While the details of Angela’s love for David began to dissipate, he replaced them with images and stories from the news. There was a glass coffee table in front of his television that David used to snort uncut cocaine or molly off of. He liked doing a couple lines and then smoking a joint. The rush of cocaine or MDMA balanced well with the psychedelic effects of the skunk. The colors on the news station seemed more vivid, but also more grainy and fake, so David felt he could really see the unreality of seeing things that he was not actually seeing. The picture was reframed into his television, and the events unfolded like a personal soap opera for David. It was all scripted. David knew the end of the story. He would end up just like his mother and father – nothing. Unless..

To take someone like him or his mother, and deny, negate until there was nothing, was an outrage David could not get past. The unfairness played-back like a movie reel in his head. His mother was a good person, but people were cruel. They kept taking and taking, until the woman had nothing - not even her children. He saw this backwards slide against him on the news, with the victims. The newscaster always had a number for the wounded or dead. David began to think of the number of deaths like a scoreboard, and he felt like his team was losing. Above anything else, he would never be extinguished into nothing, like his mother, his father, and his grandfather. People like himself and his family deserved to be treated fairly, they had not, and David wanted everyone in Northern Ireland to understand this loss.

The day had been raw and rainy. The warmth of Spring tried to break through the lid-like clouds, but at night an artic front returned. Around when the evening news was on, the precipitation had turned to freezing rain. David snorted a line of MDMA next to a line of coke. He had been sitting in his flat, taking calls all day, so he decided to go out. The week’s news played back in his head, putting on his rain-jacket, David felt a sudden panic to get out of his flat. The news reports made David feel unstable, and he felt this untamed energy, enclosed within his flat, bouncing off the walls back at him. He felt this was especially true if overhead lighting was on. David preferred lamps, or sometimes he just sat in the dark, turning over his memories.

The last two weeks had been unsettling, and David needed things to be calm and still, but they seemed to be moving faster. He crunched over a frozen puddle. The cold night air held his breath like he was smoking a cigarette. There was no one out. No cars on the road. There was not a shop or pub open. David felt the sleety rain come down. He looked upward into the sky and let it sting his face.

The SAS got three obvious IRA terrorists at a gas station outside Gibraltar. The terrorists were going to blow up British troops stationed at the huge Naval station there. The SAS killed three of them without issuing a warning, and there were no guns on them or explosives found in their car. The media believed they had been executed. David felt they were in Gibraltar to maim or kill British servicemen, so he did not understand the outrage. The press acted like the terrorists were the innocent victims. Other European countries were getting involved, saying the operation was inhumane. David could not believe people’s ignorance. The three-shot dead by the SAS had been planning a bomb attack and were probably making a dry run. David knew it was kill or be killed, and he applauded the SAS operation in Gibraltar.

The top brass of the IRA had assembled a propaganda funeral for the three killed in Gibraltar at Belfast’s Milltown Cemetery. Michael Stone, a UDA man, had stood at the edge of the crowd and waited until the coffins were being lowered. When people’s heads were bowed in memory and prayer, he started lobbing hand grenades into the silenced crowd of mourners. David watched the crowds chase Michael Stone through the Roman Catholic shrines of Milltown Cemetery. Stone stopped, fired a handgun, threw a hand grenade at the crowd pursuing him and then took off running again. David saw a short clip of Gerry Adams speaking into a microphone, trying to keep everyone calm, while explosions thundered around him. The crowd chased the UDA man through the whole cemetery, with him stopping every couple meters to fire a few shots and throw another hand-grenade back at the mob. Three people were killed and over sixty wounded. The television crews caught the whole thing. The RUC picked him up on a road outside the cemetery. The crowd of mourners was about to beat him to death.

There was no way the old guys approved that. David was elated to hear of the attack at Milltown cemetery. The night of the attack, rioting had erupted in Catholic neighborhoods. He had felt a relative calm when he watched the nighttime sky reflect the fires in West Belfast.

They were having the funeral procession along the Andersontown road for one of the fellows killed by Michal Stone. Two young British Army corporals were working undercover when they drove too close to the crowds watching the procession. The mourners thought the two young servicemen were SAS, and the funeral procession was under attack, like the one at Milltown cemetery a couple days previous. The crowd blocked off the road with a black cab, so the two-corporal’s car could not get away. The mob of mourners surrounded the car and started to smash the driver-side and passenger windows. One of the servicemen produced a handgun and fired into the air, dispersing the crowd only shortly. The crowd wrenched them out of their vehicle. An IRA active service unit arrived and took the two young British Army corporals to the Casement Park sports ground where they were stripped, beaten, and searched. The small group of IRA men interrogated the young soldiers. The half-naked young corporals were hit, questioned and slashed with a knife. Terrified, the two corporals denied being part of any attack, they had just mistakenly driven too close to the procession. Their half-conscious bodies were thrown over a wall, put into a black cab and driven a short distance to a neighborhood dumping ground. The Active Service Unit had found their British Army identification on them, so they were executed with a handgun. Their dead bodies were found, mostly naked and covered in stab wounds. One corporal had been shot twice in the head and four times in the body. The IRA released a statement saying they had prevented a loyalist attack on the funeral procession.

Just before he had gone out, David watched a news story about the murder of a young woman near Belleek in county Fermagh. They suspected the IRA unit that carried out the murder had also planted the Remembrance Day bomb in nearby Enniskillen. The target had been the woman’s brother, a UDR man, but her brother was not even in the UDR, nor was her fiancé. Her name was Gillian Johnston, a 21-year-old chemist, who was engaged to be married to her boyfriend she had dated since she was 15. Gillian was sitting and waiting for him to come out of their house and get in their car. When her finance got into the car, the IRA active service unit shot 47 bullets into the young woman’s small frame. The IRA was disbanding the unit, after massive public backlash over Enniskillen and her grisly, unnecessary death. The IRA released a statement saying that it had been a “mistake” and that the unit had acted on “bad information.” Her fiancé was only wounded. He went on living without her.

An armor-plated RUC patrol van sloshed by him. David looked into a streetlight entangled in a bare tree. A film of frozen rain coated the bark. The sharp angles of the ice-tipped branches interlaced in the silent radiating hum of the white streetlight, like thin fingers frantically trying to hold onto something.

                                      15 May 1988

They had stolen a Ford Cortina from the lower Shankhill. Bern agreed to drive. David would go in first. Dom would watch the escape route from the door to the car.

David had blacked out for a couple hours and woke up in front of his television this morning.

On the drive over, David heard something like wind in his ear, or the far-off distant sound the ocean makes. Voices carried. It was Sunday afternoon. The only time David could remember his mother, his brother, and his sisters all having time together. His father’s quiet countenance would mull over a pint, David’s mother would make Sunday lunch, and after church they would sit together, eat and enjoy one another’s company.

The sun bounced white off the sidewalks, buildings and streets. David watched the Sunday afternoon from the passenger-side window. When he saw two young women walking together he imagined their congenial conversation, each sharing niceties about their jobs, their kids, and their husbands. Dom interrupted the conversation David was imagining the two young woman were having when he raised his Vz 58 assault rifle in the backseat, so any passing car could notice. “Put that out of sight! There’s UDR patrols everywhere. We just passed one!” David screamed at Dom.

“I’m being careful, what’s up your ass?” Dom sneered back.

“Fuck you. Keep it out of sight.” David shot back

“Jesus, What’s wrong with him.” Dom said to Bern. Bern kept focused on the road.

After Sunday afternoon lunch, his father had always asked to hear his mother play the piano. David can remember his father closing his eyes and listening to his mother playing. David’s brother, sisters and father, usually very raucous and loud, would awe into silence when the notes strung together. The women who was always trying to get them to eat their mashed potatoes was creating something, for a moment, that was beautiful.

An older couple, a man and woman in their 60’s, were walking on the sidewalk. The warm, reflecting sun highlighted the easy smile on their face. David saw, like a flash, the glazed wood chestnut of their family piano.

They had scoped out the Avenue Bar before. David knew it would be packed full of Catholics from the nearby Unity flats.

Dom was asking David if he was doing okay, seriously concerned about his unusually distracted nature. “David, you alright.” David was trying to finish the conversation of the two women walking in the sun. They were talking about where their sons were starting university when David was interrupted by Dom. “What! What the fuck you on me for! I’m getting prepped for the job!”

“Alright, you just seem kind of off.”

“I’m fucking on, shithead.” The butt of the fully-loaded VZ58 assault rifle sat upright on the floor in between David’s legs.

They went eerily silent, and listened to the car’s engine shift, while Bern cautiously turned onto Unity Street.

It would come through the sound like constant waves crashing, piano music, intermixed with the friendly Sunday afternoon conversations. “He just started a job…” It was clear. Slow, steady piano notes. David looked around. The piano notes got louder. The sidewalk was getting crowded, cabs and cars were double parking on the sidewalk. He heard more conversations. “The wedding will be next Fall.” Only to have the piano notes blot out the words, like static coming into a radio broadcast, the conversations vying, alternating with the piano notes coming in, and then just as sudden, out.

David was able to put the assault rifle into his arm pit. The long jacket he had on concealed the barrel. Bern kept the car running. David got out and went through the electronic security door. It was Sunday afternoon, so there was only one fellow doing Security at the door, and Dom was trying to occupy him. David walked past the fellow doing security and into the Avenue Bar. The flurry of conversation seemed to swell and overwhelm him in an instant. There was probably over 20 people in the small barroom. Conversations exploded around him. He picked up only chunks of what each person was saying. He checked the wall to see if there were speakers playing piano music faintly. The music still came though, each carefully selected note rolling out in harmony, so a tune would come together, before a conversation carried him off, “She doesn’t sleep much with the new baby.”

The fellow at the door doing security wanted to talk to David. Dom could not figure out what David was doing. The fellow doing security tried to walk into the bar and get David, but Dom got in-between him.

 The tune came together, and David tried to recognize it, put a title to it, but he just heard the soft tones measure out. The din of conversation held, blending together into a white noise, with the sweet notes of his mother’s piano playing coming through most clearly. Dom was yelling something at David. The Security guard was yelling. No one in the Avenue Bar noticed what was going on at the door.

 David saw the back of a woman with short brown hair. She was hunched, drinking a pint with a friend. She must have been in her late 30’s or early 40’s. She wore a full length dark dress that closed with a collar around her neck.

“David’s made Lieutenant and once he gets back…..She’s been very good to him…another one is on the way…They’ll need to get out of that flat and buy a proper house.” David tapped the woman on the shoulder. The woman turned, stunned by the David’s odd demeanor, she recoiled in her seat, before David softly asked “Is your last name Prey?”

“What!?”

“Prey, Is your last name Prey or have you ever gone by that name?” The woman looked terrified.

“What?! Pay. I’m sorry I cannot understand you?” extending her hand, the woman introduced herself.

“My name is Donna Maquire. Who are you?” The fellow doing security at the door, began wrestling with Dom and the Vz 58 he had under his jacket. People began to look over at the scuffle happening at the door. David stepped back, heard the last note of the piano, pulled the Vz 58 from under his jacket and fired into Donna Maquire. The patrons of the bar bolted still. David fired another shot and people started to run and hide. David felt confident after two singular shots. He held down the trigger, keeping the barrel down, and let the recoiling automatic function of the weapon take over. Dom shot the security guard at the door. David tightened his grip and kept a continuous squeeze on the trigger. The powder flashes colored the dim barroom. The shocked and agony-filled screams of the patrons were deafeningly interspersed by the steady explosive cracks from the assault rifle. A glass half full of beer hit David on the shoulder. Another bottle shattered on the ceiling over his head. David shot the old man who had thrown it.

People were jumping behind the bar, under tables, behind chairs, but David could see everyone in the small barroom. When people ducked onto the floor to hide he shot underneath the tables. The long bursts of recoiling automatic fire tried to go up into the ceiling. David would let go of the trigger, gain control, find a target and fire again. Dom came up beside him and emptied his Vz 58 in one long, uninterrupted chain. David had expended all thirty rounds in his clip. When Dom stopped firing, David listened. To his surprise there was no piano music, no conversations, shell casings clinked on the floor, the sun was coming through the barroom door – the Sunday afternoon sunlight hit the spreading pools of blood and reflected a sharp crimson red, seeping forward. David looked over the dark, blood-drenched clothes of the three dead. He saw the six-wounded people wriggling and crying in the blood on the floor, and finally, he felt absolutely nothing.