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 36th 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
48th 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
36th 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.
“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 8th
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 2nd
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 14th
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.
