My assailant had a bizarre speech impediment. In all of his brief communications with me, he started every sentence with the word ‘f**kin’ ’. It was supposed to sound hard, but it just sounded peculiar:
‘F**kin’ wee lad, have you any money on ye?’
‘F**kin’ you there, who do you think yer looking at?’
‘F**kin’ when do you collect the f**kin’ money here?’
He was seriously interfering with the execution of my professional duties. So I slipped through a hole in the Coopers’ fence. All the Coopers had blonde hair and a turn in their eye, but their granda was brilliant at bowls and they got the Weekly News and a TV Times. I jumped over a few red-brick walls, landing uncomfortably on a bootful of loose change, and eventually arrived at my own back door.
‘Dad, there’s a robber!’ I said breathlessly as I burst into the house, kicking off my boots and launching a fleet of coins across the sitting-room shag pile. My father had just changed out of his dirty blue foundry overalls into his new beige trousers from the Club Book.
‘Right!’ he barked angrily. ‘Where is the wee bastard? Show me!’
I knew he meant business when he stubbed out his cigar in the seashell ashtray from Millisle. He had given up chain-smoking cigarettes because they gave you cancer. Now he chain-smoked Hamlet cigars instead. The living room was just as smoky, but I preferred the smell. Daddy particularly enjoyed smoking a Hamlet cigar, while sipping a black coffee and sucking cherry menthol Tunes as he watched a documentary on BBC 2. ‘Your father’s a very clever man,’ my mother would say. I think she was referring to the documentaries.
Dad went upstairs straight away and took out the large wooden pickaxe handle from under his bed. This had appeared under my parents’ bed when the Troubles started. I think it was meant to be our family’s protection against a rumoured IRA invasion of our estate. The Provos seemed somewhat better equipped, so I had worked out an escape plan to hide in the roof space when they attacked. I had devised the exact same plan should there ever be a Dalek invasion, because I knew they wouldn’t be able to use the stepladders.
Within seconds, we were in our red Ford Escort respray on the trail of the wee hood. I was now more shaken by the commissioning of the pickaxe handle than by the robber. I didn’t regard my father as a violent man. Yes, he gave me a few hidings with the strap for my cheek, but he wasn’t a fighter and he scorned the paramilitaries. ‘No son of mine will be getting involved with any of those paramilitary gabshites!’ he would pronounce regularly.
We drove around the estate a few times, searching for the robber. I got a surge of excitement with the realisation that the predator in parallels had now become the prey. My father would grab the wee hood, bring him back to our house and phone the police. The police would bring him home to his wee two-up, two-down. His Da would give him a good hiding and he would never attempt to rob a paperboy again.
But what happened next shocked me. I spotted the robber at the top of another paperboy’s street. I pointed him out. My father abruptly stopped the car, pulling up the handbrake with a screech.
‘You stay here!’ he commanded, as he grabbed the pickaxe handle from the back seat and sprang out of the car. He ran up behind the wee hood in the dark. It was raining now, and everything looked blurred through the windscreen. I watched my father unleash the weapon with force across the wee lad’s back. I feared he was going to kill him.
The hood stumbled on the impact, yelped like a beaten dog and ran for his life. Now I felt sorry for him. All this for a packet of Wrigley’s and a Thunderbird 2 badge. Dad had hit him so hard that he had lost his own balance and landed in a puddle on the pavement in his good trousers and cut his hand on the kerb. He looked like Captain James T. Kirk, after fighting a monster alone on a dangerous alien planet, all sweaty and bloody, determined to save the crew of the USS Enterprise. By this stage, however, I just wanted him beamed up as quickly as possible.
‘That’s the end of him!’ my father announced when he returned to the car, soaked, breathless, bleeding and sweating.
‘It nearly was!’ I thought. ‘No son of mine is gettin’ robbed by no wee hood!’ Dad proclaimed.
I had expected the robber to be brought to the police: now I was afraid the police would arrest my father. Fortunately, the RUC had other priorities at the time.
My father drove us home very quickly, and his heavy breath steamed up the inside of the windscreen. This was the same car we went on picnics in. Within a few minutes we were back home and he was just Dad again, falling off the sofa, laughing at posh Englishmen talking to a dead parrot on Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
My mother was appalled by the state of his soaked and shredded slacks. She had fifteen more weeks at 99p to pay for them, and now they were ruined. She ended up using them to clean the windows. But I knew she was secretly pleased by the protective pickaxe blows for her son. She tended to Dad’s injured hand like Florence Nightingale nursing the soldiers in my school history book. She called him ‘Eric, love’ and he called her ‘Betty, love.’
Everything was all right again. I felt safe and protected by the strength and toughness of this new action-hero dad. He was like Clint Eastwood, only bald with glasses, and this Wild West was in Belfast.
I understood that this was the Northern Ireland way. If someone hits you, you hit him back harder. It felt satisfying and powerful, but I knew this way solved absolutely nothing. I saw it every day in Belfast. Tit-for-tat for tit-for-tat. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a Catholic for a Protestant. Men excusing heinous acts of inhumanity to protect or liberate ‘their’ people, belligerently sowing pain and bitterness for generations to come. I suppose it made them feel potent and powerful too. I got a little taste of it that night with my father and the wee hood, but I spat it out. It sickened me. There had to be another way. I resolved that I would be Belfast’s first pacifist paperboy.
Chapter 3
The Belfast Crack
‘Patience is a virtue,’ said Mrs Rowing, in a gently reproach-ful manner.
The Rowings lived just around the corner from us, in the newest red-brick semis in our estate. These newer houses were basically the same as ours, but being more modern, they had no larders, smaller gardens, and the toilet and bath were in the same room. All the modernity of 1970s Shankill living was reflected in these most up-to-date of dwellings, which had central heating in some rooms and an outside water tap at the back door. The outside tap seemed to impress everyone, which I couldn’t really understand, because my granny had a toilet outside her back door and it impressed no one. Running water in your back yard was not a universally applauded amenity.
Our family home however, while it was one of the older semis, was years ahead even of the newer residences. My father had used his fitter’s skills and had already installed central heating in our house all by himself with pipes he had borrowed from the foundry. I had held the torch for him in the dark under the floorboards, as he hammered stubborn pipes into shape to keep his family warm. I was in awe of my Da’s skill and heroism. I noticed that even when he sweated big drops, he kept on working. As I held the increasingly heavy industrial torch – which my Da had also borrowed from the foundry – I distracted myself from the ache in my arm with thoughts of how people in Belfast had hidden from German bombers under floorboards just like this during the Blitz, when my father was a wee boy – not that long ago, really. At night sometimes, I had bad dreams of screaming air-raid sirens and German bombers, like in black-and-white movies, droning in the distance and then appearing in the skies above the Black Mountain to drop hundreds of bombs in our direction – one of which could be heading for your house, for all you knew. When people on the Shankill talked about the Blitz, they always mentioned Percy Street, where a bomb had landed on the air-raid shelter and killed whole families. It sounded even worse than the Troubles to me.
Looking at Mrs Rowing as she held the door open