I had almost hoped, in a brief, self-pitying death wish of a moment, that they would find me cut to pieces near the Connswater River, and she would read about it in the papers before weeping, wailing and feeling sorry for everything that she had done to me. It was the laughter that shook me out of my martyrdom fantasy; it was the demonic, sniggering, spittle-filled laughter from the very back of the bus. Padre Pio had his feet dangling out of the broken window and his body reclined horizontally along the seat. His face convulsed with laughter, and a thin trail of blood and saliva trickled down the side of his mouth.
‘Look at your face Ruin, just look at your fucking stupid face,’ PP cackled.
Instantly, as if he himself had summoned them up from my own pores, pin pricks of pain pulsed and rippled all over my cheeks. When I put my hands to them there were micro fountains of blood bubbling up from the skin. As I tried to clear my face with the back of my hands, Padre Pio started abusing the elderly passengers, reminding them about Airey Neave’s recent ‘up and under’ demise. Then he began conducting an insane orchestra of insult-songs all the way to the peninsula, singing and chanting to the tune of ‘Those Were the Days My Friend’ that ‘we’re gonna burn yer town, we’re gonna burn yer town, we’re gonna burn, we’ll burn your Orange hole down.’
Now we are on the road again, this time up the Falls, on Irish Cup Final day. There is only one thing on PP’s mind this afternoon and it is not victory over Portadown. It is not about putting one over all the Prods of various hues who will turn up at Windsor just to see Cliftonville defeated. It will not be about our team lifting the cup in the club’s one hundredth-anniversary season. Padre Pio simply wants to be the first one onto the Windsor turf. He wants to be seen on TV dodging the peelers and the security men, avoiding the missiles that will rain down on him from the North Stand. He wants the world to see that he’s game.
At the Royal Victoria Hospital, the oul bird leans across the cab and rattles the glass with a coin. The driver breaks suddenly. She gets out, pays the cabbie and then looks back in disgust at us.
‘I really hope yiz win today, but yiz are still going to hell, ya bunch of weirdos,’ she croaks.
PP leans out and hollers, ‘Just you go in there and get your bag plumbed in.’
The taxi is barely across Broadway, which is cordoned off at the bottom near the motorway by a line of battleship-grey RUC Land Rovers and a bottle-green wall of cops in riot gear, when the driver stops again. Our new fellow passenger is a wino in a pork-pie hat and old black Crombie coat. The neck of a brown bottle is sticking out of one of its pockets. There is a pencil-thin film of dried brown liquor caked above his upper lip and his eyes are bleary. When the cab passes by a mural close to Beechmount showing the head of a black man being squashed over a lemon juicer and the words above it, ‘Don’t squeeze a South African dry!’ the wino fishes the bottle of Mundies out of the Crombie and tilts it towards the disappearing wall mural.
‘Fuck you, Sambo cunt,’ he rasps, before guzzling back the wine.
He continues to down the Mundies while moaning about his plight. ‘See they’ve banned it from the Provie and the Sticky clubs because of this Apartheid thing. So I have ta drink my Mundies on the streets now. They won’t even let me take it into the hostel.’
When we ignore his protests he changes the subject. ‘Here lads, who’s playing up at Casement Park today? That’s some crowd going up the road. Any of you lads got a spare feg or a couple of shillings even? I got robbed in Castle Street earlier.’
‘I’m not giving you anything for being a silly old racist cunt,’ Rex Mundi pipes up while attempting to roll another joint in the back of the cab.
‘Ach Jesus, lads. Give me a chance. I defended this district once, you know.’
This produces gales of laughter from us, but the wino suddenly has a serious face on.
‘It was nineteen hundred and sixty-nine, not that long ago. A few of us were out that day and we did our bit. We stopped the Orangemen burning people in their beds. Then in nineteen hundred and a seventy-one there were a few of us left taking on the British Army down in the Lower Falls too,’ he says, taking another swig of the South African hooch.
‘Oh aye, grandad,’ PP interrupts. ‘Just like nineteen hundred and sixteen when we beat the Brits!’
Padre Pio then swivels around, drops his trousers and Y-fronts and spreads his arse cheeks apart right in front of the wino’s face, close enough for the oul boy to peer right up his chocolate alley.
The wino looks terrified and rattles the glass to be left off the road.
‘Casement’s for Gaelic football, ya stupid oul soak,’ PP shouts out while he pulls his monks and trousers back up in one rapid movement.
I’m amazed we haven’t been booted out of the taxi, but our driver has ignored us all the way towards the Donegall Road. Maybe he is still scared of PP’s da, maybe he is scared of PP – and if he isn’t yet then he really should be.
When PP signals for the driver to halt just before St James he reminds us that there is still plenty of time before kick-off to get more drugs and drink ahead of our trek down to Windsor. I’m left to pay the fare while PP is having a last word with the cabbie.
‘You keep quiet about my da now, comrade. I probably shouldn’t have told you where he is hiding out these days in case the Brits ask the Yanks to send him back.’
‘No worries, son. No worries. You can trust me. See that oul boy by the way.’
‘Aye, what about him? Pain in the arse.’
‘I never charge him. Wanna know why?’
‘Aye, why?’
‘He was picked up eventually in 1971 and never recovered over what the British did to him. He couldn’t hold a pint glass straight, even back then, let alone shoot straight with a rifle. He was just the first person the Brits picked up that day and they decided to do a number on him after one of their squaddies got killed near the Falls Park. Next time you see him in the back of a black hack or walking the road, don’t give him such a hard time, son.’
‘I will stand and salute him instead,’ Padre Pio promised as he gave a military-style farewell to our driver.
3
THE KINGDOM OF TROUT
28 April 1979
At first it seems no one in the house has remembered to take down the Christmas crib in the front window. However, on closer inspection, there are no multicoloured lights, sheep, shepherds, Mary, Joseph or baby Jesus in the manger. Instead, there is a naked, cockless, bearded Action Man waving out to the street from the inside of a clipped together Airfix stronghold that’s been smeared with splashes of brown paint. He is sitting on a white-framed Sindy doll bed, but the giant ‘S’ on the headboard has been painted over and replaced with ‘H’ in the same smudged scrawl as the streaks slashed over the plastic walls.
I look over to Padre