Every day of the week, we meet people who have the capacity to lay the world bare at our feet. Criminally, it’s not often that we pay enough attention, that we take the time to listen, that we ask the right questions. After the attacks of 7 October 2023 and the latest war on the Gaza Strip began, I went back to the recording of an interview I had carried out with Shahd Abusalama, an English-based native of Gaza, the year before. 

‘This violence is unsustainable,’ Shahd had said of the then 15-year-long blockade of Gaza, ‘I’m living in the middle of contradictions and I’m always struggling in between those structures of power.’ 

As October turned into November and one year into the next, I thought of those words and of Shahd as she watched, tortured, what was happening from England. When I travelled to London in January this year to talk with Shahd, her father Ismail was still trapped in the Gaza Strip along with her brother Mohammed and her nieces Eliya and Naya. On 15 March, Ismail arrived in Barcelona to join Shahd’s mother Halima. Mohammed and Eliya and Naya and their mother are in Cairo now. More than 2 million other Gazans remain trapped. This is a story of Shahd and of her family who escaped, and of her family and friends who didn’t.

‘We’d like to stop talking about human things, but stone are no better.’ – Etel Adnan, ‘October 27, 2003’, from Time

Outside Shahd’s living room window, a cherry tree is trying to blossom in January. It’s the coldest day of the winter in London. In the park on the other side of Denmark Hill, ice is packed tight against the foot of a tree trunk. The cold front bites at my fingers beneath my gloves. Shahd isn’t wearing any. She pulls the sleeves of her jumper down as far as they will go over her hands. I don’t offer her my gloves.

It’s 17 January, and 163 people have been killed in Gaza in the past 24 hours. In Rafah, 19 people are about to die in an Israeli airstrike on the home of the al-Zamili family, while thousands are fleeing to Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, trying to escape the onslaught. In Gaza City, where Shahd was born and grew up, the homes of the al-Sharafi, Shama’a and al-Harazin families have been marked for destruction from the air.

For three months, Shahd’s family had been charging phones by car battery to transmit proof of life, but when I met her in mid-January there had been a communications blackout on the Gaza Strip for four days. The days bleed into each other, the mind reels, the skin burns.

She has a week-old message on her phone from her friend Amal Samouni. In 2009, Amal lost her father, brother and 25 other relatives in an Israeli military attack. Amal was left with permanent shrapnel injuries. She was the subject of the 2018 documentary film Samouni Road, which won L’Œil d’or at Cannes. Now, Amal is sheltering in a tent with her children, and three other brothers are missing, taken by Israeli troops. She is asking Shahd for help. Shahd doesn’t know what she can do for her from here.

‘This is another story for you,’ she offers me, ‘There are so many fucking stories that our minds can’t breathe.’

I first met Shahd in Belfast two years ago, where she had come to perform Dabke at a festival of Palestinian culture. We met on one of those rare Belfast mornings when it is both dry enough and warm enough to sit and drink coffee in the street. She had been out until four, partying with locals in a social club formed to raise money for dependents of political prisoners during our own conflict. She was fresh while her boyfriend, who had taken a taxi home at midnight, was looking like Belfast had taken it out of him.

As of this year, Shahd has been living in England a decade. She arrived as a refugee but was issued a British passport last summer. Has it ever felt like home? I ask her. She laughs.

‘One time I came back [to the UK], with a refugee document, and I found it so strange when the officer in the airport – Manchester, I think it was – told me, “Welcome home,” for the first time ever and the only time. You’re so used to coming back and being treated like an outsider; you do have the documents they give us, but we still have to queue with the other nationalities and the biometric is not recognised.’

‘There was another time at the airport, I had my permanent residency at that point, and I had to change my travel documents, so I was given new refugee travel documents with biometrics, and all I was thinking was, “Oooohhh, maybe I’ve been upgraded in the system.” And I went to the lane with the locals, and the lady saw me and asked, “Are you British?” And I was like, “I’m a permanent resident but I have a refugee travel document.” “No, no, you have to go. Change,” she said.

‘Every time you have any encounter with the system, you’re reminded you’re an outsider. It’s alienating, it doesn’t make sense. I’ve lived here 10 years but until last June, I was always investigated upon return to the country. “Where were you?” “What were you up to?”’

Sitting in the flat on Denmark Hill, Shahd tries her father on the phone and gets a recorded message from the network provider: ‘Peace for Gaza, communication has been disconnected, but with our love may Gaza and its people be protected’, is the English translation.

‘Hearing this recording brings all sorts of scenarios into your head. You have nothing that you can do but pray.’

Shahd has done more than pray. Along with those copper-fastened categories of Gazan, Palestinian – of which she is fiercely proud – the lingering feeling of refugee – which she can’t shake off – her new status as British citizen/subject – which she is still weighing up – she is a doctor of philosophy, a dancer of Dabke, an activist, a teacher, a Londoner in that sense that one carves this identity painstakingly out for oneself, a singer, a writer, and a woman touched by rage and hurt and diminishing reserves of hope. She is the author of a blog, Palestine from My Eyes, and a forthcoming book on Gaza, Between Reality and Documentary – but what she has seen of England may be just as crucial to relate.

Three times while teaching at Sheffield Hallam University, where she completed her PhD in Palestinian cinema, Shahd was accused of antisemitism. Three times, she was cleared. However, the third time it happened, she’d had enough and packed her bags for London. She is currently taking a legal case against the university for discrimination.

‘We are all terrified,’ she says of the Palestinian diaspora in England.

‘We know we are really in a horrible position, but because we have our families risking their lives under bombs we don’t talk about it as much, but this is very important. It’s very important to address the vulnerabilities of people like us in a system like the UK that has responsibility for paving the ground for apartheid in 1948 (Al-Nakba – the Catastrophe – is how Palestinians refer to their forced displacement in the aftermath of Britain’s withdrawal from Palestine and the formation of Israel). That we don’t talk about it as much is just because we have the priority of saving lives. I can’t remember what it’s like to live normally.’

Not long after she first arrived in London, Shahd helped found the Hawiyya Dance Company to showcase Palestinian Dabke. Is she more at home here, then? Is that why she came back? There is pain etched in her voice when she considers this question. And maybe it’s pain caused by the twisted nature of the query, that I’m asking her to think deep about here when her childhood home in Gaza has been gutted and her father, brother, sister-in-law and nieces lie freezing in a tent on the border with Egypt.

‘It’s a difficult question, to be honest, because I’m at odds with the system wherever I go. But I just thought that, in London, maybe because it’s where I founded my Dabke group and my oldest friends are still here …’.

As often happens, her thought trails off, returning to her family in Gaza before boomeranging back to England.

‘They are living a nightmarish reality. They were displaced again from central Gaza, from Nuseirat [refugee camp], most of its residents fled; our relatives who hosted my family are all displaced and pitching tents. My family has managed to pitch a tent at Rafah. The freezing weather at night is unbearable, they go to great lengths to get water, to get wood, to cook something – my God, the risks they have to take. Every day, they worry whether they have enough to feed the children. Sometimes, the adults don’t eat because they prioritise the child.

‘We’ve been disconnected from our family in the north, my uncles, my aunties, cousins … in Jabalia refugee camp, they chose to remain and some of them can’t leave – my two uncles, they’re older than the Israeli state, they were five when they were first made refugees, and now we can’t get in touch with them, their homes are destroyed. One of them, Hader, lost his daughter Rana and two of her children [On 23 October last year, Rana, 40, was killed along with her children Mohammed, 5, and Naama, 7, in an Israeli airstrike on their home in Jabaila. Heba, 35, wife of another of Shahd’s cousins, was killed in the same attack, along with her children Leen, 12, Jihad, 10, and Sham, 5].

‘My oldest uncle, Abu Sama, is like a moving history of the land, he knows so much, he is very educated as a nurse, he was displaced so many times and he is hardly mobile, he’s in a wheelchair – they live now in their bombed house, there’s a room that is still intact. The schools are full, UN schools are not safe despite what international status they have, and so people return to their bombed homes: whatever is there is good enough, even if it doesn’t have a roof, even if it doesn’t have standing walls.

‘I never really felt at home in this country, and for somebody with my history, it’s hard to reconcile … to constantly feel like you matter less or you don’t matter at all … the ethnic cleansing facing my family has shattered me into a thousand pieces. Is it supposed to be like this? Is it normal? I’m supposedly now British and I should feel more care from the system, but I don’t feel any difference in my reality, I don’t feel any defence. When it comes to my family, I don’t feel like the system cares at all – they’re opposing a ceasefire, what is more disturbing than that?

‘Since coming to England I’ve missed a lot, including culture, and Dabke has been an important part of my life since I was a child in Gaza. Much of people’s perception of Palestine here is viewed through destruction and loss, and I wanted to be part of changing this image to remind people that our culture is grounded in the land, that it speaks to our history in the land, and this is what Dabke symbolises for me, and it felt like a great honour to speak it and perform it in front of international audiences to remind them that Palestinians are not just strugglers. They say that if there is no culture, there is no people, and providing this culture was my way of resisting the image, the negative images that people associate with Gaza and reminding them of our culture, our music and our depth.’

Shahd was educated at the United Nations school in the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza City, in part by Huda Hamada, whose speciality was science. Huda is dead now, killed along with her husband, two sons, one a journalist, and a daughter, a pharmacist, in an Israeli airstrike on their home in Al-Saftawi Street in mid-October 2023, next door to where Shahd grew up.

Shahd took what she learned from the likes of Huda to England with her, where she threw herself into the life of the place. But maybe this has been her undoing, why she had booked a one-way ticket out of here when I talked to her. Maybe she would go to Barcelona, to stay with her mother, who escaped Gaza over Christmas. If she had kept her head down, stopped seeing back home, or saying nothing here of what she still saw there, then maybe … I mean, England’s culture is no longer based on crude notions of white supremacism, it’s adaptable if the subject is mouldable, it can accommodate the once foreign at the highest echelons of power if simple but fundamental premises are accepted, a monopoly on violence on the world stage being one. If Shahd had shut the fuck up, she could’ve fit right in, gone far even. The Dabke could have been rendered quaint, the turns of phrase adorable.

‘But imagine the cost of living like that,’ she replies instantly when I put this to her.

‘It gives an insight into the type of society I live within, function within, that speaking on the part of the oppressed is making me a target, making me unsafe and is playing into my thoughts of leaving the country for good.’

But what about the benefits of living in a democracy – political participation without crackdown, cultural production without censure?

‘Except if you’re Palestinian, this is the exception, Palestine is the exception. I’ve seen it even before this, you’ve seen it, and it’s really the litmus test; I see it now as a test for humanity, there’s no excuse for ignorance now, we’re not in 1948, we’re not in World War Two when criminals could get away with their crimes and millions could die before any accountability or change. We live in different times, and genocide is being broadcast on live TV and people are being killed in their tens of thousands. There are areas where people have no clue how many people are dead.’

‘Watch your brothers die on TV, and don’t move, they are in a new world, although with no exit’ – Etel Adnan, ‘October 27, 2003’

If Ruskin Park was cold, Shahd’s flat is colder still. She moves to turn on an electric heater, a radiator on wheels that trundles over the floor like an armoured car, and then she hesitates. She asks me to help her fix the living room door. What’s the point of the heater if the door is lying open?

The door has come off its hinge at the top. I look at the hinge and ask for a screwdriver. As if I know what I’m doing. She brings instead a power drill and I insist upon a screwdriver, attempting a tone of authority. I look at the hinge and look again, talking about maybe needing a new one while contemplating the metal, hefting the door back and forward, up and down off the floor. Shahd digs a screwdriver out from beneath the kitchen sink and I’m able to determine that it’s a star and that the screws are stars. I turn the screwdriver, but the screws stay loose and the door unstable, ‘No,’ I sigh, ‘new hinge.’ ‘Thank you,’ she laughs. I mutter some shit about spring being a long time coming and ask for more words.

‘Every town we performed in was so special, the Dabke itself brought amazing reactions from the people wherever we performed,’ she says.

‘We had a lot of demand on us to perform at so many events, and it would be the central thing that drew people in. Always, it was breath-taking for people to watch that they’d want us again, again, again; in Cornwall they want us again, Belfast they want us again. It has a very powerful impact on people. The steps itself take a lot of inspiration from the movement of the peasant, it’s the peasant folk dance, and together with the music they make a fiery atmosphere.

‘Often, because I’m the speaker, it’s through me that the poems come in. We don’t just dance to music but we also try to make a narrative of the music, so after five minutes of dance, we have sometimes poems to give us a breather, and it would be my voice that’s reciting the poems. I sometimes sing as well, not just perform Dabke, but I would be a dancer most of the time.

‘I came here with an awareness that I have privileges that not many of my classmates had, and not because I’m smarter or whatever but just because of inequality, and so I came here with awareness of my privilege in comparison to others who I left behind, and at least here, despite all the restrictions, I don’t have the worries of sudden bombings or power cuts and water cuts. And I tried to use that privilege, but I still have survivor’s guilt to this day, ten years later.’

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To hear Shahd talk of privilege in these terms seems almost absurd. To escape death by bombing when so many of your loved ones and compatriots haven’t, to still have windows in your walls when your relatives don’t, to call that privilege is to torture the word beyond recognition. But there’s also a concrete reality to what she says: her father, Ismail, who spent 13 years in Israeli prisons for alleged involvement with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was a landlord, renting out three flats, before Shahd’s family were forced to leave Gaza City in the face of the Israeli advance. Shahd insists he could never have brought himself to evict anyone for failing to pay rent.

‘I’ve thought it about long and deep, but I think the selfish culture comes from the privilege, the sense of privilege, and it’s people feeling like, “Oh, this doesn’t affect us, we don’t care,”’ Shahd says.

‘This attitude, the selfishness that comes from privilege, there needs to be a lot of reflection on this here, there’s probably a lesson that they could take from Palestine, with the social togetherness and the social support that people provide to one another even at times when basic necessities are insufficient or unavailable.

‘I grew up in a society that had destitution and poverty, but I’d never seen a homeless person. Palestinians understand that life is about struggle, and we learned this a very hard way and try to support each other as much as possible. Money has lost its value in Gaza; if you have money you don’t have anything to buy, and if you don’t have money there’s hardly anything you can buy because most things are very expensive because they don’t exist as usual.

‘I’ve seen my family sitting outside the home, just sitting and waiting for God’s mercy, and I would be talking to them, checking on them [by video call], “How are you? How was your night? What did you have for breakfast?” Things like that, and I would see people coming past and they would be like, “Please come, sit here, anything you need, whatever you need, we’re family.” Every home is open these days because there could be anybody who’s suddenly homeless or doesn’t have shelter. My uncles keep shuffling around homes, it’s incredible, but without the social solidarity people couldn’t have survived – they share everything, even a loaf of bread. And the oldest are sacrificing themselves for the young, oh God.’

But here, thank God, no one is sacrificing themselves for the young, so, I suggest to Shahd, should she be grateful for the shelter England has offered her, for taking her in, providing her a passport, offering her an education?

‘There are many people in the UK who want to expel me or deport me, I’ve seen a lot of hate like this,’ she says.

‘It’s absolutely astonishing that we’re expected to show gratitude for living and being conditioned to live like second-class citizens in this country, it shouldn’t be normalised. The feeling of being a refugee has never escaped me. Since last June, I am British, and, for once, I thought maybe my British citizenship could save my family. I tried to talk to my MP, I emailed her multiple times, and after so long, after ignoring my emails for so long, finally I received an email from her parroting the Israeli narrative and trying to explain it from the Israeli perspective. She ignored the whole thing about my family in her reply, didn’t ask how they were, nothing whatsoever, it’s as if she didn’t even take note that I was writing to her on behalf of my family.

‘And the gratefulness? Do you know how I feel? I feel so angry, so outraged. You know what, just before deciding to leave, I was like, “God, how long is this is going to continue, this nightmare that we’re living?” I can’t find work, I can’t work, I can’t function as a human being, I almost forgot what it’s like to live normally, I don’t know what’s normal. I applied for the job centre and there’s just no understanding whatsoever. I live in emergency times and I can’t guarantee what’s going to happen. I could look at my phone now … I don’t know what’s going to happen, I didn’t know that my mum was going to be in Spain.

‘For the first time ever, I felt, “Okay, maybe it’s good to use the system to relieve a bit of the financial burden on myself,” and when I did, it felt like harassment, honestly, that I had to keep reminding them that my family is under constant bombing, that they’re in a tent, I don’t know what’s going to happen, I don’t know what my day is going to be like, if I might have to travel all of a sudden and be with my mum. I can’t attend every day, a meeting once a week or twice a week, can there be another way to communicate? By phone? And they were like, it has to be in person. How do you expect me to really engage with these processes now? It felt like they really don’t see our humanity and they’re just like, with a straight face, “This is what Universal Credit means. You need to be attending meetings in order to get.”’

‘When she said that she was water and light, they started to eat something bitter and hard in the dark… That’s to say they didn’t hear the storm’ – Etel Adnan, ‘October 27, 2003’

Dear England is showing at the Prince Edward Theatre on Old Compton Street. ‘The country that gave the world football has since delivered a painful pattern of loss,’ is how they sell it, ‘Why can’t England’s men win at their own game?’ The ads slide past on the wall as the escalator ascends towards Liverpool Street.

Outside in the light, David Cameron has ordered the Royal Air Force into action against the Houthis. Eighty per cent of people in Yemen eat once a day. Kids are taught in caves because Saudi Arabia – with the RAF’s assistance – already bombed the schools. Impeding free trade is the Houthis’ crime this time, putting their necks on the line for the people of Palestine. Leaders like Cameron can still pick a fight for England’s enlisted men when they want to. Trade must be free.

‘It’s dangerous times, not just for Palestine but for the whole world,’ Shahd says.

‘If a school or a hospital or a bakery or an ambulance is allowed to be bombed in Gaza and that’s gone unnoticed or normalised, then why be surprised if those become legitimate targets in any other place in the world? Schools and churches and mosques, residential homes, it’s just causing unnecessary destruction just for fun and experimenting with their military innovations on our bodies and our lands.

‘When you’re young, you think there’s a possibility for change. I came here with lots of energy, and I did give so much energy into this place. And you’d think that now, with the whole situation that Israel created with the dispersion of Palestinians and so many being in the Global North in respected positions, you’d think that there would be a little more sympathy, more sensitivity. On the ground, in the terms of mobilisations, you’ve never seen the gap so stark between the people and the leadership like we did in the past three months.’

Ismail, at 72, is a fit man. Every morning, he would go swimming in the Mediterranean. He was in the sea with Shahd’s mother Halima when the attack out of Gaza began on 7 October. In the panic of trying to get out of the water, he injured his shoulder. Later, when the family were forced to flee Nuseirat refugee camp, after their earlier eviction from Al Siftawi Street, he went out on a donkey cart looking for shelter for the family, including his grandchildren, one five years old, another five months, ‘a storage unit, anything that was not a tent’, in Shahd’s words, when there were explosions nearby, the donkeys panicked – ‘imagine, donkeys panic!’ – and rushed in each other’s direction, crushing Ismail’s knees between them. Now, he can barely walk 50 metres at a time and has regular bouts of fainting.

On Denmark Hill, on her phone, Shahd shows me photographs of the family home on Al Siftawi Street, built by Ismail, next door to Huda’s bombed out house, the insides now reduced to char. In October, Shahd had sent me a photo of Halima and Ismail in the living room, preparing to go on a demonstration against their imminent displacement, sunlight creeping in past the curtains, through the white archways. Amid the devastation, cushions are what I notice. In the photo from before, a cushion acts as a guardian of normality, lying plonked against the arm of the sofa, holding up the background while Halima and Ismail showcase a red-and-white keffiyeh and the flag of Palestine. In the later photos, Halima and Ismail are gone and the yellow foam is hanging out of the cushions. The coverings have been punctured and scorched, the curtains have collapsed, the windows are broken and the archways are black.

It seems obvious that we should feel uncomfortable when we’re confronted with scenes like this, stories like these, but what is this discomfort really? What is it not? It’s not guilt, shame or helplessness – we’re not helpless. It’s not inadequacy and it’s not rage. It’s lazy halfway-house resignation. Here we are resigning ourselves, letting our legs catch the breeze, dangling from the precipice, our eyelids drooping, perched at the end of the world. Our sensibility for the world and those in it dies from disinterest, not exhaustion, and this angers Shahd.

‘It shouldn’t be normalised that people under the same system are afforded different rights,’ she says.

‘The stratification of rights is against the very principle that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights claims to champion, and the stratification of rights has been part and parcel of oppression in Palestine – it’s not functioning in this way here, but we have to make it serious, take a serious note of how stratifications of rights can lead to more division, more hate, more violence.

‘I really came here thinking I could be a positive force for my people, and I thought, despite all the flaws of the system that excluded and alienated me, I enjoyed a privilege and access to platforms which my peers in Gaza don’t have access to, and I try to use that as much as possible, with hope that something will change.

‘I graduated from here, I lived a lot of my life here, I thought maybe there was still something to offer, or something to take from this place, the downfalls outweigh … I’ve booked already my flight to Spain, a one-way flight. I’ll see how it goes with my mum, and the job-hunting process, but so far I haven’t been lucky with anything I applied for in this country and I feel, even before all this started, I felt that I was punished for who I am. I applied for so many positions, I think it’s related to what happened in Sheffield. If you Google me, you will see a lot of bad things, a lot of bad coverage.

‘I don’t want to give up hope on the people because I can see people are trying, but the system is overpowering and now I see things at a depth that not many people can see because of my background and my personal encounter with the system. I see how it’s not welfare that is driving the government and its polices, it’s not world peace, it’s economics, it’s exploitation and it’s warfare. And it’s sad, it’s really sad that at the most multicultural of times that the world has ever experienced, with all these movements across continents – we’re not homogeneous societies anymore, whether here or there – despite this, the world order that has been consolidated since World War Two is still maintaining those realities, unequal realities. It defines my existence, it defines my interaction with the world, and I’m sure it defines many people’s interactions with the world if they belong to a racialised community, but if you don’t feel it and it doesn’t affect you, you’re probably privileged and need to reflect and appreciate what you’ve got and use what you’ve got to make it available to others.

‘In Ukraine, it took eight days to issue sanctions – the international system has never been mobilised that quickly. Do you remember the protests in Hong Kong? They opened routes for people from Hong Kong to come and settle here, they offered the same to Ukrainian refugees, and I don’t know if you noticed but if you land at any UK airport you see banners greeting refugees from Ukraine and you think, ‘Woah, what a treatment.’ You’ve never seen this treatment extended to any other people. Like, imagine: I’d love to come back and see a banner guiding Palestinian refugees, but it’s only Ukrainian refugees, so there’s power politics even when it comes to refugees. This is pain and a struggle, this should be universal regardless of what power you have, the treatment of those people should be universal, and there are treaties that afford these people running away from wars the protection rights they need, but then you see all these countries making up double standards, sometimes implementing them, sometimes not.

‘It’s no surprise when you see me and other people who have families in Gaza who are glued to the screen, because we get our news from the screen … I saw on Al Jazeera news that the Israeli army had been setting fire to homes in Al Siftawi, and then we knew that our home was bombed. At that time, my uncle and cousins in the north, they went for a visit to the house, my house, and they saw the destruction. The house next door was completely flattened, the debris all around, and also our house itself had been directly hit by shells.

‘Later, we learned that they burned it, they burned everything, they burned our home. We’ve been seeing videos of the Israeli army setting fire, with impunity, to homes for no reason, just for entertainment. These videos, they left us all in shock. The burning means your memory is burned too, they’re not just destroying, they’re erasing our memories; family albums are burning, everything. My mum, she came to terms with the fact that her embroidered clothes, which are so precious to her, have also been burned, that the family albums are burned.

‘Another family was showing me their photo albums, and I was enjoying it! And all of a sudden it occurred to me that these albums that I’m looking at with this family, my family doesn’t have that now, and I had a panic attack … There is no future for the house.’

Even without the houses on Al Saftawi Street, without Huda Hamada and her children, there must be a future. Nobody, no matter what they claim, fights for the past. It’s 2 February, and transportation company Kuehne+Nagel has confirmed it has severed all ties with the Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit. It’s 9 February and there are worried comments in the pages of the Financial Times on the impact of a boycott campaign in support of justice for Palestinians. It’s 12 February, and ‘hell is falling down’ upon the civilians of Rafah. Every weekend in London tens of thousands have been marching for a ceasefire.

Day by day, the future swings like a pendulum. Everywhere it swings back and forth, everywhere but in Gaza. Because in Gaza, the bravest people on the face of today’s earth grasp the future in their hands, not letting it get further away from their children, colouring it with clumps of Palestinian soil. Their grip relents not even when their hands are severed by the past.

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‘It’s never been so obvious that the status quo is not representing the people in the streets,’ says Shahd.

‘I believe that there is so much pain festering in so many homes, not just Palestinians; anybody with any shred of humanity is horrified to see the images and to hear the news that’s coming from Gaza. Even people who have no relation to Gaza. Everybody can see what’s going on, despite the filtering of the news in Western mainstream media and despite all the twisting and the propaganda and Israel claiming to be the victim here, despite its support by even greater military superpowers. It’s a sense of immunity that spreads in the messed-up psyche of these politicians.

‘They really need to do a lot of unlearning to free themselves of their colonial legacy, of the British Empire, and see the world from the perspective of those who were under the brutality of the British Empire. Palestine Action, for example, gives me hope that there are people who are willing to use their privilege, to put their bodies on the line to shut down arms factories.

‘I think something like that, focusing on these spaces afforded to us, in terms of direct action, using one’s privilege to denormalise the presence of such lethal and destructive factories so close to our living spaces, our universities and schools, there should be really more compassion, taking responsibility for the system and take steps to change.’

‘Stay strong,’ I’d told Shahd that day on Denmark Hill, laying my gloved hand on her arm before retreating to the train. Absurd imprecation. Things of nothing. Weakness mocking strength from behind its intricate firewalls. Doing the bare minimum will be the death of us.

‘Let’s not bother to fear those who insult our insubordination, the conquered will always have the last word’ – Etel Adnan, ‘October 27, 2003’

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“There’s something about us Irish,” Joe Biden once told an audience, "about how we view ourselves and how we are viewed by others.

“We have a combination of spirituality and yet we are doubters, we are compassionate, but we are demanding.”

Speaking after his induction into the Irish-America Hall of Fame in March 2013, the then United States vice-president gave a performance that was years in the making. Joe Biden demonstrated that he knew the importance of a good story.   

“I remember I was going to meet the queen of England as a young senator and as I was getting ready to leave for the airport – I give you my word – before I left the house I got a call from my mother – swear to God – ‘Joey, be polite, BUT. DO. NOT. KISS. HER RING.’ – swear to God.

“I got the great honour of introducing my mother to Pope John Paul. My mother said ‘Joey, don’t kiss his ring’. There was this thing. This Thing. This Thing. About never bending. Never bending. As my dad would say, it’s all about dignity. All about dignity. Everyone. Everyone is entitled to be treated with dignity. No man, under any circumstance, has a right to treat someone in a way that doesn’t acknowledge their dignity.”

The assembled crowd of Irish-Americans loved this, didn’t even seem annoyed by his habit of intoning and repeating the simplest of words as if they were his campaign fund account details. First, they cracked up with laughter and then descended into reverential silence. Joey was on form.

Before Biden did any story-telling that day in the Marriot Essex Hotel on Central Park, he got his god-daughter, “Catherine Eugenia Finnegan Biden Owens”, to rise from among the audience – “Where are you missy? Stand up, baby… I want you to know, she represents CO-CA CO-LA in New York, I just want you to know that, so take damn good care of her”. The crowd cracked up at this too, and on – or back – Joey seamlessly moved to the Coffin Ships and the Molly Maguires. Money and power draped in the fine linen of Irish-American endurance.

Fast forward eleven years, and Joey’s now the main man in the White House and people in the Gaza Strip are eating grass by the side of the road. They’re shovelling animal feed into their children’s mouths as the month of Ramadan begins. They can only dream of Coffin Ships.

Joey, now in charge of the largest military that has ever imposed itself upon the earth, says he’s going to build a temporary port to get some food fit for human consumption to the Palestinians of Gaza, while his air force has been dropping packets of Skittles and tabasco sauce on the refugee camps. People who know about these things aren’t impressed.

“If the Americans or the EU give a hoot about Palestinian lives, they would not pretend like they are Hollywood action heroes airlifting supplies into Berlin… they would stop the endless flow of weapons to Israel, and stop the political support for Israeli genocide,” human rights professor Osaka Jogakuin told Al Jazeera last week.

“Biden could halt all of this tomorrow with one phone call. The fact that he is not doing so – and thinks voters will be fooled by this – shows that he must think they are stupid.”

Avril Benoit of Doctors Without Borders labelled the US plan a “glaring distraction”: “This is not a logistics problem; it is a political problem… the US should insist on immediate humanitarian access using the roads and entry points that already exist.”

Mohammed al-Masri, from the Palestinian Centre for Research and Strategic Studies, added “if the US was serious, it would have pressured Israel into opening the land crossings and allowing aid and relief in as well as stopping the onslaught. We have not heard Biden call for a stopping of the war or even a ceasefire.

“What is important for the Palestinians is that Biden pressures Israel, because he is a partner in the ongoing war.”

In June 1982, the senator from Delaware was making a name for himself in Washington when Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, then under pressure in the US over the invasion of Lebanon, appeared before the Foreign Relations Committee. As Begin was “grilled” over Israel’s use of cluster bombs to target civilians, Biden intervened and “delivered a very impassioned speech”.

According to Begin, Biden said, if it were up to him, “he would go even further than Israel, adding that he’d forcefully fend off anyone who sought to invade his country, even if that meant killing women or children”.

Begin was shocked, “I said to him: No, sir… according to our values, it is forbidden to hurt women and children, even in war. Sometimes there are casualties among the civilian population as well. But it is forbidden to aspire to this. This is a yardstick of human civilization, not to hurt civilians.”

Three months later, on September 16 1982, a right-wing Christian Lebanese militia entered the Sabra and Shatila camp in Beirut and, as their Israeli military ally observed from a distance, massacred an estimated 3,000 Palestinian refugees, women and children among them, over a 48-hour period. The United Nations later found that “Israeli authorities or forces were involved, directly or indirectly, in the massacres”.

Presumably, given his comments on Capitol Hill, Biden could understand the need for Sabra and Shatila.

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***

On January 29 1863, Kerry man Patrick O’Connor led soldiers from the California Volunteers into the Bear River camp of the Shoshone people, in present day Idaho, where they slaughtered four-hundred of them – men, women and children. Men like Patrick O’Connor, whose family had left their own trail of tears behind them in An Bualtín, Corca Dhuibhne, helped the Irish in America to become White.

Oppressed and starved at home, where England used Ireland as a laboratory for racism and colonial rule, the fleeing Irish, initially viewed with contempt and suspicion by the original Anglo-Saxon settlers of north America, were gradually if painfully accepted into the fold, rendering valuable services like staffing the police forces that kept other immigrant communities and freed blacks in their place. 

This isn’t the universal story of how the Irish earned their place in America – there was struggle against indentured servitude, alliances with rebellious slaves, there were the Molly Maguires and Jim Larkin and Daniel Berrigan – but it is the element of the story that allowed the Irish to become Coca-Cola executives and war-time presidents.  

The Israeli historian Ilan Pappé has described how Jewish settlers – reviled and discriminated against in the European societies they fled in the years leading up to the Holocaust – became White through similar work in Palestine.

In the 1920s, says Pappé, Zionism, beginning the eviction of the Arab population from the land in Palestine, “became a settler colonial project and not just a project for salvaging Jews from anti-semitism…

“It was not just the classical settler colonial imposition of settlers from abroad imposing themselves upon the native population, it also was kind of creating this idea that they can produce or establish a European state in the midst of the Arab world, very much like the white supremacists in South Africa.”

Maybe Biden sees parallels then in the stories of the Irish in America and Israel in the Middle East, maybe he’s a fan of Leon Uris’ Exodus and Trinity novels –  "Just keep the arms coming to Israel”. Regardless, he’s not for turning in his support for the war on Gaza.

What then would be the point of a bit of grandstanding on the part of a few small-time Irish politicians?

According to Irish News columnist Brian Feeney, “There are 230 US companies in the north employing tens of thousands. [Stormont finance minister Conor] Murphy and US special envoy Joe Kennedy have been working together all week to expand that number. Visiting different cities, meeting prospective investors, allows the north to be part of what Billy Cantwell, editor of Australia’s Irish Echo, calls Ireland’s ‘shamrock empire’.”

State Department figures have put the level of US Foreign Direct Investment in the south of Ireland at $557 billion for 2021. “There are over 950 US subsidiaries in Ireland,” a State Department report has noted.

It's easy to see why, in this context, Leo Varadkar doesn’t believe in boycotts. Leader of the opposition Mary Lou McDonald says she’d talk to “the Devil himself” if it meant getting a ceasefire in Gaza. But are they going to tell Biden something he doesn’t already know? And surely “the Devil”, by definition, couldn’t care less anyway?

Seriously, though, nobody’s going to the White House on behalf of the Palestinians. This is about us and our relationship to empire and what it can do for or to us.

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***

Whose war (genocide) is this anyway? Last week, the Washington Post reported that the US has provided more than 100 shipments of military hardware to Israel since the attacks of October 7 2023, “amounting to thousands of precision-guided munitions, small-diameter bombs, bunker busters, small arms and other lethal aid”.

“That’s an extraordinary number of sales over the course of a pretty short amount of time, which really strongly suggests that the Israeli campaign would not be sustainable without this level of US support,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, a former official in Biden’s administration.

“The US cannot maintain that, on the one hand, Israel is a sovereign state that’s making its own decisions and we’re not going to second-guess them, and, on the other hand, transfer this level of armament in such a short time and somehow act as if we are not directly involved.”

Defence secretary Lloyd Austin said last month that US munitions had killed 25,000 women and children in Gaza since the beginning of the onslaught. On Tuesday this week, it was reported that US airstrikes on port cities and towns in western Yemen had killed at least eleven people and wounded fourteen more.

The week before, the Irish Examiner was reporting that “almost 1,200 civil flights carrying weapons were allowed to travel across Irish airspace last year, the highest number in six years”.

Transport minister Eamon Ryan rejected just eight applications to transport weapons in that time and has said “the vast majority tend to be, in terms of military, American chartered flights, where the personnel are being brought to Germany or to their various bases”.

The direction of travel is west-to-east, USA to Arab world, with Ireland conveniently in between. Where does neutrality then sit in this itinerary, and where complicity and where waging war and where useless words and where downright lies?

Either Irish people in the White House on March 17 matter or they don’t. And if they do matter, who to? Is the shamrock reception purely an exercise in sentimentality and goodwill towards the old country on the part of Biden (a politician with more than five decades’ worth of experience in a cut-throat world) or is there something in it for him too? Would a boycott damage his chances among Irish-American voters? Maybe, maybe not.

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***

It’s Friday, March 15 and there’s over 20 dead after the Israeli military attacked desperate people searching for food at the Kuwait roundabout in northern Gaza. Footage from the scene shows at least one victim with an arm torn off due to the ferocity of the helicopter gunfire aimed at them.

People say this isn’t a war, that a war needs two more or less matched sides slugging it out, but in a pure sense war is nothing but the serial killing of poor people on an industrial basis, day after day; in 21^st Century terms, usually made possible by US munitions.

Biden says there’s no line Israel can cross that will lead him to putting a hold on those munitions. Not even massacring starving civilians looking for food.

Ireland’s leaders, when they talk about our interests and having private words with Joey, drastically underestimate just where we are in historical terms. For the first time, we are watching a genocide being played out in real time “in the desperate, so far vain, hope that the world might do something” as Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh, South Africa’s representative at the International Court of Justice, has put it – a genocide made possible only by the arms and political cover provided by the man we, in turn, are going to give cover to.

In fairness to him, Leo Varadkar called again for a ceasefire in Gaza when he spoke at the John F Kennedy Memorial Library in Boston on Monday night, but he walked a torturous path to get there. The path went through Ukraine, where there is an ongoing “battle between freedom and tyranny, between the rule of international law and war crimes, between hope and despair”.

The west must remain steadfast against Russia, Varadkar insisted, and “provide the political, humanitarian, military, financial and other help to ensure that Ukraine prevails”. Simple moral imperatives.

By the time Varadkar had reached the Middle East, however, he had entered an inexplicable “cycle of violence”. Last year’s Hamas attacks can never be “contextualised”, Varadkar insisted; alone among all the days in the world, there must never be an attempt to understand October 7 2023 and its brutality and slaughter and where it might have sprung from.

Then, the taoiseach felt comfortable in saying the innocent shouldn’t be punished along with the guilty, that their cries would haunt us if we didn’t speak up.

Varadkar wants humanitarian aid for Gaza, but when was the last time you heard someone call for a no-fly zone over the Strip? I’m willing to bet you haven’t heard anyone call for that ever. Because the call would be absurd, wouldn’t it? And failing the rest of the world defending them, have the Palestinians the right to defend themselves?

The leaders of the government and the opposition in Ireland have been better than most but what have they risked?

As the Palestinian journalist Mohammed El-Kurd has written: “The rallying cry that we are all Palestinians must abandon the metaphor and manifest materially. Meaning, all of us—Palestinians or otherwise—must embody the Palestinian condition, the condition of resistance and refusal, in the lives we lead and the company we keep. Meaning we reject our complicity in this bloodshed and our inertia when confronted with all of that blood. Because Gaza cannot stand alone in sacrifice.” 

***

Empire cloaks itself in stories. The ascent of the downtrodden Irish to the White House. Barak Obama’s eight years in power (during which Libya and Syria were condemned to death).

The American version of empire is just the latest that needs stories to sustain itself. The Romans had their foreign emperors, Sepitimius Severus from Libya and his son Marcus Aurelius. The Algerians were Frenchmen until they flung indefinitely deferred privilege back in the metropole’s face.

Likewise, Biden stitches his narrative together using St Patrick’s Day as the needle, it’s his foundation myth.

It’s only when empire is stripped bare of its stories that we can see its real face, decide whether we can live with it or not in the cold light of day and decide what to do about it.

And if not now, then when? If not this St Patrick’s Day, then which one will we opt out of, when will the blood we allow them to soak up with shamrock begin to choke us? When Donald Trump is back in the White House and has invaded Mexico or Nicaragua? If a catastrophe like that happened and we then found our courage (Mexicans are good Catholics after all), what will that say of our regard for Palestinians, and before them the Afghans and Iraqis, whose bones we did a Morrison’s Jig upon in the Oval Office?

Some say to boycott the White House would be an act of madness and probably they’re right. The representatives of a tiny, insignificant country like Ireland daring to reject the attentions of empire on behalf of a despised, condemned people would almost be an act as absurd as declaring war on a superpower from an occupied post office.

It would be an act so ridiculous, so mad that it would be sublime. And maybe that’s what the world needs, maybe that’s the only thing that can save us, disrupt the story arc, strip power bare and give the Wretched hope – acts of sublime madness.  

It’s only March
But you can already tell
Flour is going to be big this year,
In this year, hot this year

They’re wearing nothing
But it on Parisian catwalks,
Rolling in the stuff, skin caked
Before they strut

There’s a bag at the British Museum
Squat against a Parthenon horse’s head,
Tourists are propping their new-borns by it
Then shoving each other for a better shot

‘No touching!’ scream the curators.

It is snorted off thighs in Berlin nightclubs.
Just a gram spilt between
The naked kneecap and the exposed pelvis
Is driving disco goers mad

‘It’s the smell of it,’ one explains,
‘Like a baby’s shampooed crown.’

‘It’s the new colour,’ another insists,
‘White bleeds into red while you watch.’

They are baying for it
On Wall Street
Knowing the time is ripe
For making a killing

Time itself bleeds for it.

One fella sets himself on fire over it,
A guard, by the warehouse doors.
What’s he trying to say through the flames?
Unhinged, no doubt, something about price.

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Mohammed has some questions. Some are about his family. Are they still alive? If they are, where are they? How are they? 

He hasn't talked to them for 25 days now. Last time they talked, his mother, father, brothers and sisters were in Gaza City, his home town; Mohammed was in Belfast. 

Mohammed is still in Belfast but Gaza city has become a place only for the dying and the dead. Did his family flee the Israeli advance? To Khan Younis (now also a place marked for the dying and the dead)? To the border with Egypt at Rafah? Did they seek shelter in al-Shifa hospital? Mohammed has no word.

Mohammed’s journey to Belfast took more than three years to complete. To get out of Gaza and into Egypt, then reach Turkey and on into Greece then to Ireland via Belgium took three years. He spent more than two years lingering in Athens with no way of earning a living. “Athens was terrible,” he says. Belgium was worse. No work, no food, no home.

A year and seven months ago, Mohammed reached Ireland, but a part of Ireland where he is at the mercy of the British Home Office, and the Home Office have now decided they want him gone.

Mohammed came to Belfast with a half-decent life in mind, one not strangled by economic blockade and periodic bombardment, but his claim for Humanitarian Protection has been turned down.

The UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees today calls the strip “one of the most dangerous places in the world”. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister Yoav Gallant are on record as stating they will turn Gaza into rubble and “eliminate everything” in it. But the Home Office doesn’t believe Mohammed would be in any danger in Gaza.

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Mohammed’s friend Sultan lives in Manchester but is in Belfast because his residency permit got lost in the post. He had to send his permit to the Driver & Vehicle Licensing Agency so he could book a driving test. That was four months ago. Now, he’s been told it might be in Royal Mail’s Belfast sorting office and he is here to try reclaim it. He can’t complete his university application without it. Can’t work. Life is put on hold.

Sultan waited “a week, maybe 10 days” for confirmation of his right to remain from the Home Office last year, but while Sultan’s father is Palestinian and currently resident in the occupied West Bank, his mother is Ukrainian and Sultan has Ukrainian citizenship. Another friend, Abdalrahman, from Rafah in Gaza, has waited in Belfast for more than a year for a first interview with the Home Office. But Abdalrahman is merely Palestinian.

“What is the difference between us and Ukraine? Is it because they are closer to here? Or is it because we are Arabs and Muslims?” Mohammed wants to know.

At times like this, you notice how those who possess power measure out time for people who have none. Sultan’s four months without a permit. Those 25 days. Mohammed’s mother Sama, his father Mahmoud, his brothers Hasan, Fehid and sisters Feryil, Amal and Douah have said nothing to him for 25 days now. On day 26, he’ll still wait for word of them from a place the United Nations says has “no safe space left” in it.

“Since the war on Gaza started, it’s been liked being trapped in a dream, only watching. How can something like this be allowed to happen? How people are continuing to live there?” Mohammed asks.

“We had a life in Palestine, even in Gaza, even if it was hard, and we just wanted to be allowed to live it. I love my life the same way other people love their lives, so why am I not allowed to live it?”

In Gaza, Mohammed drove a taxi, where he earned around $10 a day. He’d like to drive a taxi in Belfast too, but that would be against the law. Instead, he is doled out six pounds per day to live on.

“What I want is to be free… Is something wrong with that?” asks Mohammed.

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Yes, the Home Office has decided, there is something wrong with that. Freedom – freedom to work, to buy a cup of coffee – is not for the likes of Mohammed.

But what are they going to do with this man they have decided is immune from the impact of bomb blasts?

Are they going to smuggle him back into Gaza through one of those tunnels? Get Israel to drop him from a bomber plane over Khan Younis? How about negotiating a humanitarian pause so he can be shuttled quickly through the Rafah crossing to take his place among the condemned? Probably, they’ll wait. Power can afford to take its time.

“No papers. No going back. No word. Just this. Until when?”

What would you do during a genocide?

I no longer need to ask myself that question. Because I know now. I will sit in a cinema with my daughter watching The Exorcist. By such means am I forfeiting my humanity.

Tonight (Friday, October 27), there are 60,000 civilians cowering in Al-Shifa Hospital and the Israeli government is threatening to bomb it. Doctors are operating on the wounded without anaesthetic. While Gaza cries out for salvation, I lose myself in the imaginarium of the diabolical.  

Gaza has gone dark. The last time Dr Ghassan Abu Sitta, the heroic surgeon of Ahli-Baptist and Shifa hospitals, made contact with the outside world was five hours ago. Six hours before that, he was telling CNN “President Joe Biden is basically telling the Israelis they haven’t killed enough Palestinians and there is more room for slaughter…

“What is the quota for Palestinian blood that the US administration wants for it to force Israelis into a ceasefire?”

Then, the Israeli government upped the stakes. As the US ambassador was addressing the United Nations, defending the onslaught on 2.3 million captive people, the Israeli military cut Gaza’s last remaining phone network and sent its missiles in. The human rights group Al-Mezan says “ambulances and civil defense teams will not be able to locate the injured or people stuck under rubble,” because nobody can now call an ambulance.  

Al Jazeera’s chief correspondent Wael al-Dahdouh says of Gaza tonight “We are not fine, body parts are everywhere, missiles are targeting everyone, and the bombing hasn’t stopped for a second.”

Last night, Wael lost much of his family in an Israeli air strike, including his wife, his fifteen-year-old son Mahmoud, his seven-year-old daughter Sham and his grandson Adam, who was all of 18-months.

Wael should keep his chin up though, because Joe Biden says he doesn’t believe there are 7,000 Palestinians dead, or that there are 1,600 others missing, entombed below the rubble. He doesn’t believe that more than 3,000 children have been slaughtered. His spokesperson says the Ministry of Health in Gaza is a “so-called” health ministry, not a real one, and therefore is presumably incapable of counting the dead.

I think Joe Biden has a point. Can these seven thousand souls really be dead when they were never even given a chance to live? When you sentence someone to an indefinite period in an open air prison, wall them up and give them just about enough to survive on, does it count when you finally snuff them out? Or maybe Joe, a great fella for remembering the wrongs done to his ancestral homeland, just couldn’t give a fuck when the victims are brown.

Although the phone lines are down and no ambulances can be called, there’s no one to save anyway, least of all the undead, because they’re not dying according to Joe, not really. It’s a “so-called” death these Palestinians suffer. Nothing but propaganda. No need to worry.

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In Shifa or Ahli-Baptist hospital, Ghassan Abu Sitta sometimes operates for three days at a time, then showers, sleeps, and goes back to it because the conveyor belt of Palestine’s undead refuses to slow down.

Somehow, he also finds the time to tweet the words of James Baldwin, “The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”

“This is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle,” Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, has said of the war on Gaza.

The leaders of the West agree: Hamas has shed innocent blood and so Hamas must be punished, wiped out, buried before it can shed more. But it wasn’t Hamas who came for Huda Hamada and the other innocents of Al-Saftawi street in the early hours of Tuesday morning.  

It was still dark in the Gaza City neighbourhood when Bibi’s Children of Light sent their missile into it – but then it must be always dark in Al-Saftawi Street, it’s right in the middle of the jungle after all.

Huda, a veteran primary school teacher, her husband, their son Muhmmad Baalousha, their daughter Iman, another son Ayman and his wife were wiped out in the attack. The bomb also killed Abu Salah al-Mahlawi, his son Salah and two grandchildren, Hassan and Muhammad. They had defied an Israeli order to evacuate the north of the Gaza Strip, preferring not to leave one refugee camp for another. Taking such an audacious action, choosing to stay in their own home, made them fair game for the military planners.   

It was around 4am on Tuesday morning when the ceilings came down on Huda, her family and their neighbours. The dawn prayer would not yet have been called. All must have been still in bed. Hopefully, they were still sleeping. In Washington DC, it was still Monday night. In the US capital’s bars and hotels, the journalists and diplomats and political hacks would have been deep in whiskey and debate about what price Gaza must be made to pay.

Shahd Absulama grew up with these two families in Al-Saftawi street – Huda taught her in the United Nations school in the Jabalia refugee camp, Iman went to school with Shahd’s cousins. The families were never missing from one another’s weddings and funerals, sharing joy and grief, leaving their mark on each other and their neighbourhood, intertwining themselves like ivy in each other’s affairs.

Huda’s house was similar to others on the street, the trees at the entrance making it look “beautiful”, a host of embroidered furniture inside, symbols of the land, “colourful collections”, all gone now, “disfigured” is the word Shahd uses. Two more families wiped off the face of some dusty Palestinian earth.

Huda, according to Shahd and others who knew her, dedicated her life to the children of the camp, instilling belief in their ability to overcome the deadening impact of a life lived under military occupation and, more recently, a crippling blockade. Her son Salah was a journalist and office manager for the Palestine Today media channel in Gaza. Her daughter Iman was a pharmacist. And now as Gaza cries out for people such as these, they are gone.

“She taught me all through primary school, she taught science. She was very kind. She believed in me. I was one of her favourite students,” says Shahd, with a laugh, of the late Huda.

“She, they, were loved by so many people... So they stayed [when the Israeli army told them to leave], that shouldn’t be a green light to murder people in their home. This is mad. It’s insane. This is a war crime. To massacre a family like that… a teacher, a journalist, a pharmacist, people who spent their lives trying to help others. We have no words left, outrage is no longer enough.”

After a life lived in each other’s pockets, the Abusalama family were denied the right to say goodbye to their neighbours this week. They had taken the road south last Friday – their room for manoeuvre strangled, they travelled six miles in all – to Al-Nusairat, another refugee camp. Shahd’s father Ismail, 71, initially refused to leave the home he had built with his own hands but was finally convinced to go with the rest. Now, they are in Shahd’s grandmother’s home – the old woman was herself forced to flee Ashdod during the original Nakba – crammed together with “other aunties and uncles and their children and grandchildren”.

Shahd’s mother Halima charges her phone off a car battery to let her children abroad know they are still alive. Every twelve hours is the routine, but when I talked with Shahd she hadn’t heard from Halima for close to a full day. The silence was becoming tortuous.

“I'm fighting my darkest thoughts; seeing my family TV massacred by Israel while I'm in the UK unable to say goodbye,” said Shahd from London.

“I feel that I'm looking for my loved ones in the faces on those pictured… They feel abandoned because they are abandoned. They have no water, no food, no fuel, Israel has bombed the bakery down the street from them. I’m struggling to imagine their situation, people crammed on top of one another, no room to think, no room to breathe… It is shameful.

“Israel has responsibility as an occupying power to ensure the safety and welfare of the civilian population and the rest of the world has a responsibility to ensure these standards are met. What is it that’s different about us that we can be bombed and shelled with impunity?”

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As of Tuesday night, Euro-Med Monitor, a human rights body based in Geneva, had documented the killing of 1,046 Palestinian children in Israel’s then 10-day old war on Gaza, Hassan and Muhammad of Al-Saftawi Street now among them, with an estimated 167 others clinging on beneath the rubble. According to Save the Children, as of the end of August this year, 545 children had been killed in the 18 months of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

How pathetic, how sick and twisted it is to be comparing the statistics on slaughtered children between one place and the next. But does anything better signify the fact that we consider the Palestinians to be scum? What are the kids of Gaza worth anyway?

“We live in a racist world where powers act only out of their own geo-political interests,” added Shahd.

“We have a messed-up system, so messed up that if these crimes are allowed for the Palestinians – we may be got out of sight – but the target will move to another people. We are living through one of the darkest times in history.

“The people there [in Gaza] have seen, have felt nothing like this before in terms of the amount of bombs and munitions that are being dropped on them, nothing. I feel dehumanised in every sense. I can’t tolerate another day.

“We have been killed in our thousands before – and what happened then? Nobody is doing anything? Well, what did they do before? At least refugees should be able to go home, my people should be able to move around their own country without fear, their homes shouldn’t be their graves.

“I’m finding it hard that we still need to do the convincing that what is happening is an injustice. If there are decent humane people reading about the family of Huda, how could they not be so moved that they would try to make this stop, do something, anything?”

Timing his trip deftly with a couple of by-election defeats back home, British prime minister Rishi Sunak was in the Middle East on Thursday, and he decided to get all Churchillian on the darkness theme in Jerusalem.

“I’m proud to stand here with you in Israel’s darkest hour. As your friend, we will stand with you in solidarity, we will stand with your people, and we also want you to win,” Sunak said in a joint press conference with Bibi.

But who is it Sunak wants Israel to win against? Who is it that he wants the Israeli team to smash and grind down to powder? Is it the family of Shahd Abuslama, herself a British citizen? What about the Gaza-confined in-laws of Scotland’s first minister Hamza Yousuf? Must they die so Sunak can celebrate? Are the dead of Al-Saftawi Street a sure sign of progress?

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“Even here, politicians like him, they are fuelling hatred among their own populations,” said Shahd of Sunak.

“They don’t care for us, they don’t see us as humans, they see us a problem.”

When the killing does stop, wise men like Rishi will say that what Gaza needs now more than ever before is educators and medicine women and tellers of uncomfortable truths – just not those like Huda Hamada and her daughter Iman and her son Muhammad, because they are gone, and the things they could have said if they were spared may have been just too uncomfortable to stomach.

Something Shahd Abusalama said to me in the spring of last year has played over and over in my head, to the point where I forgot where it had come from even though the words kept repeating themselves.

Unable to sleep last night, trying to break the grim habit of demanding media updates from Palestine on my phone screen, I went back to the transcript of my interview with her, looking for the details she’d shared of her family and their journeying, but instead stopped dead at the oddly familiar words, screaming now like a warning, “We are trying to say ‘this violence is unsustainable’.”

I’d sat down to interview Shahd on a May day in Sheffield about her fight against suspension from the city’s Hallam university as a result of her political activism. Shahd, an academic with a PhD in media studies, is from the Gaza Strip, born the daughter of refugees of Palestine’s 1948 Nakba. Growing up, she told me, her “centre of gravity” was the Jabalia refugee camp. That’s where she attended a United Nations school and learnt to dance the Dabke.

On Monday, Israeli missiles smashed into Jabalia’s market place, killing dozens of blameless ones stood by stalls and on street corners. According to Al Jazeera, so far this week, five neighbourhoods have been completely levelled in the central Gaza Strip.

“I’m living in the middle of contradictions and I’m always struggling in between those structures of power,” Shahd had added last year, “I feel trapped in violence that extends from Palestine to here and I don’t know how to get free from it.”

On Wednesday of this week, Shahd, now living in London, was writing of her loved ones not far from Jabalia, “My family is hosting more relatives who escaped heavy bombardment, knowing that our home may not be any safer. ‘The ground is shaking beneath us, and the walls feel like they're falling inwards’ is how my mum put it. Drinkable water is running out, and we can hardly reach them.”

“We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything will be closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,” Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant told the world on Monday. And the world looked on largely unmoved.

“A siege is appropriate? Cutting off power? Cutting off water, Sir Keir?” is what a reporter asked Britain’s Labour leader at his party conference of Gallant’s declaration. 

“I think Israel does have that right,” said Starmer the hard man, the man of consequence and consequences, his earlier career as a human rights lawyer now locked up safely in the past.

Words keep rebounding from the past though, finding themselves recommissioned to better suit their next target. Animals. Beasts. Dogs. Low life.

“Evil gunmen who have crawled out of the ghettoes of West Belfast, evil human pus…” was how one city councillor depicted my home place back in 1988. But the intent behind Gallant’s words is on another level altogether.

Gaza’s last power plant is now out of action, hospitals are running on generators, the end of their fuel terrifyingly in sight, the fate of children in incubators and patients on dialysis machines hangs in the balance, drinking water and food are running out.  

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“Attacks against civilian infrastructure, especially electricity, are war crimes. Cutting off men, women, children of water, electricity and heating with winter coming – these are acts of pure terror,” European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has said, but alas that was last year’s October not this one, and the people she was sticking up for then were Europeans, not Arabs.  

“Cockroaches” and “snakes” is what the radio station RTLM labelled Rwanda’s Tutsi minority ahead of the genocide of the mid-1990s. Human animals, in effect. Academic careers have been built on exposing the conditioning that must take place before a genocide can be put into effect, Hollywood has put it in lights for us, and yet here we are. Gaza 2023, and the world looks on, unwilling to risk anything for a couple of million poor Palestinians.  

Maybe Mr Gallant has a point, some people think. The paroxysm of rage that escaped from Gaza on Saturday morning engulfed hundreds, leaving the bodies of young and old strewn across kibbutzim and the Supernova music festival site three miles from the wall most of their killers would never previously have been able to cross. This was a war crime many seem to think came out of nowhere, driven by inexplicable, pathological intent.  

“This violence is unsustainable,” said Shahd 18 months ago, and the words came from a place of anguish. Shahd is no more responsible for the slaughter of civilians on Saturday than are her trapped family or the hundreds of thousands of others now cowering under Israeli air strikes, so what was she talking about?

“You have to remember that Gaza, more than 70 per cent of its population are refugees who descend from those lands, so it’s basically a refugee concentration camp,” she said of the strip of land 25 miles long, never more than five miles wide, home to 2.3 million people, more than half of them children, that has been under blockade for 16 long years.

“Violence is always there, it’s always part of the underlying elements of our reality, it’s always present, it’s an occupation, it’s a siege and it’s one of the most frequently bombarded areas and it’s just incredible, honestly very horrific.

“Basic access to electricity, water, 95 per cent of water is contaminated in Gaza, the issue of malnutrition is just widespread among refugee children especially, and these are reports that have been issued by the UN.

“The UN made this famous call in 2012 saying that Gaza may be uninhabitable by 2020 and we have already now passed that threshold and they have come out with another report, another update, saying that Gaza is uninhabitable. But for us, for the Palestinians inside who have to live with that harsh reality day in and day out, we cannot even begin to grasp how these humanitarian organisations thought that it was ever inhabitable.”

That was in May 2022. Today – October 12 2023 – Ghassan Abu Sitta, a reconstructive surgeon at the Gaza Strip’s biggest hospital Shifa, says he has 50 patients waiting to go to the operating room: “We’re already beyond the capacity of the system to cope.” This morning, the Red Cross said the fuel to operate hospital generators could run out in a few hours.

“I’m trying my best, but even when I call out what is obvious, when we call out the oppression, we are silenced and so I always feel alienated, I always feel like I’m the exception to the rule and how can I feel at peace with my surroundings when I know of all these multi-layered violent structures that are basically there and they’re legitimating the continuing violence against us and fuelling it more? So how can I ever feel at peace?” Shahd Abusalama

As of this afternoon, there are 1,417 Palestinians lying dead in Gaza, including 447 children, 10 medics, at least six journalists and 11 UN employees. More than 300,000 people have fled their homes, made refugees, two, three, four, five times over. It’s said that people get tired of the statistics, even the imagery, of massacre, but we’re not weary of them, not really, we don’t know what to do with them is the thing. We’re scared of them.

We’re in the grip of a collective cowardice that dictates no real risks should be taken when rich men prepare the ground for genocide and the wretched of the earth suffer what they must. Meanwhile, “the feeling of dehumanisation is eating us alive,” says Shahd.

These, then, are the human animals of Gaza: Shahd’s mother Halima and her father Ismail, her brother Mohammed and her young niece Eliya; the four families sheltering in the Abusalama home – her aunts and uncles and cousins – not safe even there, rationing the scant fuel for the generator so they can attempt to let their children scattered around the world know that they have survived another night under bombardment.

And still the nights come.

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‘Money's no more stress, buíochas le G4S
Tá ár bhfiacla ar fad íoctha, now it's time to invest, huh?
Nah, I'm giving half to me ma
Some blood money for my honeys
And the rest to the Ra’

A few years ago, there was a mural painted in the Holyland area of Belfast in honour of north Down golfer Rory McIlroy.

The Holyland houses students and, increasingly, migrant families, packed tight into terraced houses converted into ‘multiple occupancy’ dwellings.  

“It was the intention of the mural of Rory to send out a positive message that if you work hard enough at what you do, you can achieve your goals,” said the landlord Declan Boyle, who commissioned the work for the gable wall of one of his properties.

Boyle owns at least 31 houses in the south Belfast neighbourhood, it could be more than 50, more than 100 even, but when a journalist recently asked him for an exact figure, the former city councillor told them it was none of their business. The going rate for a Boyle terrace house is about £1,500 a month.

The local media lapped the mural up when it was painted back in 2012. This was to be the New Belfast, city on a hill, capital of the New Northern Ireland. Murals of men in balaclavas could be replaced with those of millionaire celebrities. Our face was washed for the world and our manky yellow teeth bleached white for the bright new day.

The future was going to look like a golf course, it was going to taste of lightly peppered smashed avocado, it was going to smell like the bleached bogs of a new office block and it was going to sound like Snow Patrol.

The band from Bangor’s 2008 release Take Back the City was about their love for Belfast, lead singer Gary Lightbody explained. The band love Belfast so much that they filmed the video for the track in London. But that wasn’t necessarily contradictory - the song is a gift for tourist boards anywhere, giving them music to go with their promotional videos for their regenerated linen/dock/factory/homeless zones. Listening to it or watching the video, Take Back the City doesn’t allow you to fix yourself in a place, it’s like you’re on the moving walkway in an airport, watching the destinations from airline ads float past you on the wall. All that is solid melts into air.

But Belfast, you old bitch. While the city still had its problems, it was a "fully functional, vibrant, European city these days,” said Lightbody in one interview from the time. Who says something like that? That the place they love is “fully functional”?’ What does that even mean?

It was Northern Ireland PLC speak at its peak. The call centres are booming, every landlord’s box room is getting top notch rates and, here, we even have a wee bit of edginess left if you fancy a weekend break with a difference. “You can sing 'til you drop… 'Cause the fun just never stops”.

This was music that the upwardly mobile could listen to while they were working for their landlord’s holiday money, and their landlord could listen to it too on one of their city breaks,  because there was no was hint of tension in it, no friction, less contradiction. It was about a nowhere place, an anywhere space, filmed in a dockyard about to be recommissioned as condos for stock market staff.

John Lennon and Paul McCartney had warned about this death of connection way back in 1965 when they wrote Nowhere Man… “He's a real nowhere man… Sitting in his nowhere land… Doesn't have a point of view”.

Which kind of brings me to what I had originally sat down to write about. The hip hop group Kneecap played Féile an Phobail in west Belfast’s Falls Park for the second year running on Friday night.  

When they played last year, unveiling a mural of a police jeep on fire on their roundabout way to the stage, the official representatives of Northern Ireland PLC weren’t best pleased. Doug Beattie, leader of the Unionist party that ran a one-party state for 50 years, accused the band of “grooming a new generation of young people with insidious messaging”.

Out of work justice minister Naomi Long couldn’t even bring her respectable self to utter the group’s name, calling them “the band in question”. “Young children” had been “groomed into sectarian hatred” just by listening to or being in the company of Kneecap, Long alleged.  

Again, who talks like this? ‘Insidious messaging’? ‘Band in question’? It’s the language of the insincere, fighting hard to keep out of the sentence what it is they really want to say. But if they were sincere with their words for just a minute, what would it sound like? Kneecap think they know… “I’m a H. Double O. D… Low life scum, that’s what they say about me”.

The ‘band in question’, who switch from Irish to English throughout their songs, are inspired by, among others, NWA. Seven words from NWA’s Fuck tha Police – “cause my identity by itself causes violence” – run through Kneecap’s work, but it is work that is laced with that most effective, dangerous of things, applying their inspirations solidly to their own time and place… “C.E.A.R.T.A, is cuma liom sa foc faoi aon garda, dúidín lásta, tá mise ró-ghasta, ní fheicfidh tú mise i mo sheasamh ró fháda.”

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Some people, like the former justice minister, hate the name ‘Kneecap’, it riles and annoys, but then those it riles don’t seem to get that the characters depicted in their lyrics would have been as likely to have been on the end of an IRA punishment shooting as to have been part of the IRA. The realities of working-class life don’t often allow for such clear-cut distinctions.

They shapeshift with perverted pleasure from protest to hedonism, back and forth, making one out of the other, their lyrics mercilessly cutting open the puritan streak in Irish republicanism as much as they do the cheap moralism in their conservative and liberal critics. They can take the stinking machismo laden English hooligan chant of ‘Get your tits out for the lads’ and turn it into a slogan that tens of millions of people around the world, from India to Kenya to the Falls Park can identify with in Get your Brits out.

They take the language of authority and officialdom and turn it inside out, use it against itself, allowing their largely young and working-class audiences to get a grip on an environment that was shaped in spite of them, “An bhfuil aon rud mídhleathach ort? I won't say it again, Má fhaighimid rud éigin, there's things that you'll have to explain."

There was a crinkle in the air when they sang in west Belfast last night, a fission running from the stage to the crowd and back again. If you want to be all Joyceian about it, you could even say this fission was running into the two graveyards that abut the Falls Park and coming back in full of poweful charge. Whatever about that, they got each other, these fenians on the stage and those below them on the grass.

I stood at the back of the crowd, trying to spy my own daughter revelling among her cairde and pobal, drinking deep the reassurance that this is after all her time and her place, shapeshifting through languages and accents and meanings, but keeping them solid for all that, laughing in the face of nowhere men everywhere, gilding herself against the world of call centres and landlords and bourgeois frowns.

There’s a scene at the end of Gillo Pontecorvo’s epic story of the Algerian independence struggle, The Battle of Algiers, where the armed conspirators have been mopped up and neutralised, “now the tapeworm’s headless”, remarks a sophisticated French general while lazily drawing on a celebratory cigarette.  But alas, a couple of years later, from out of the ghettos, “no one knows why” relays a confused journalist back to Paris, come civilians in their thousands, chanting in Arabic, attempting to overrun the European quarter without a single weapon; night after night, the Kasbah echoes “with those strange cries, rhythmic, nightmarish” as the centre lost faith in its ability to hold things together.

In the Belfast that came after the armed conspiracy, there was supposed to be endless call centre jobs and hotel work and loads of balls talked about the Titanic. The dangerous energy of a people in struggle was to be boxed up and put on a museum shelf, to be viewed dimly through protective glass not deemed safe for leaning upon.

Maybe that’s the fear Kneecap are tapping into, that the protective glass might be cracking. Maybe in the dead of night in north Down, on Malone and Cyprus Avenue, there are people of means tossing and turning, listening for the step of Nike-clad feet, alive for strange chants of ‘C.E.A.R.T.A’, the hissing, steadily rising whisper of a thousand stoned young fenians coming through their open windows on a balmy August night… ‘Your sniffer dogs are shite, your sniffer dogs are shite.’

God almighty, the future wasn’t supposed to sound like this, it was supposed to be squeaky clean, sanitised, free of uncomfortable meaning, written in the lingua franca of invisible power. But always, there are lowlifes conspiring and scribbling, dancing and loving, smoking and drinking and singing, forcing a future for their lowly kin into the night air.

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“And I still keep getting caught stealing. If a thing ain’t nailed down, I’m stealing it. I don’t even know why.”

WHAT was this thing Sinéad O’Connor was able to do to us with her pencil and her voice?

The best way I can put it is that it was like she was driving us right to the ledge, right to the part where the concrete starts crumbling off beneath your feet, before she’d come up behind you, take you by the hand and lead you gently away in the other direction.

After getting you there, she’d let you know that, yes, there is every reason in the world to go right to that ledge and beyond, and it’s essential that you look and see what’s down below, ‘But here, come on see what I found over the way we came’. Because we missed it when she was singing us to the ledge.

We miss so many things around us, right in front of us, things begging us for their attention, that it took someone as dedicated and uncompromising as Sinéad O’Connor to point many of them out to us. An unflinching gaze like that must have been fucking exhausting. And exhilarating. What a gift to give, taking maladies, and through the force of putting words upon them and a voice to them, producing this (even momentary) collective joy.

You can go back and trace that exhilaration running like an electrified thread from the repressed, repressing Ireland of the 1980s to the one that’s still trying to find its head tonight; let the sparks fly out, feel it near busting clean out of YouTube, breaking the algorithms, in the likes of Jackie, I Am Stretched on Your Grave and The Last Day of Our Acquaintance.

But before Sinéad O’Connor was a superstar, she was a shoplifter. And kleptomania can be a hard thing to shake. She even stole from a prince.

Before she took Nothing Compares 2 U from the unsuspecting Yank, she stole shoes and outfits for her mates to wear at Pretenders concerts. Probably, all these things were transformed for the better by her intervention.

In the next few days, there might be some people saying that Ireland didn’t deserve Sinéad O’Connor – that the country chewed her up and spat her out – but then them people are getting their notions all mixed up. Sinéad O’Connor in all her yet-to-be-worked-out contradictions was Ireland. Or at least the only version of Ireland that’s worth having.

If we’re not prepared to be a country of misfits and malcontents, a people with a keen eye for the beauty to be found even on the wrong roads then we’ll be of no use to the world in the times that are coming, no use even to ourselves.

I can’t say that I feel sad tonight – and maybe that’s a failure of empathy, but I should at least try to be honest if I’m writing about someone who suffered for her truth telling – I just feel electrified, the volts are heaving right now in the pit of my stomach listening back to her voice, that such a being was ever with us, that she chose to spend her time making us feel a bit better about ourselves.  

Good night, you ferocious composin’, singin’, thievin’ dream woman, we’re a better people for having been around you.

On Tuesday, July 11 2023, I went to look at Belfast’s bonfires before they burned. What I found were lost things heaped around the pyres. Books, photographs, cassette tapes, postcards from another time waiting on the flames.

A couple of days later, I went back to see what had survived. Much had.

Here’s what the aftermath looks like. I don’t know what it means. Maybe it’s that we’re powerless in the face of spectres. Maybe, after all, they’re the future and we’re but the memory…

Maybe we are rain drops on the faces of the lost
Noises overheard
Stubborn fragments

Maybe we are the fond recollections
And smiles seen darkly
Through a makeshift diary

Whatever about that, all must drink and dance
Then find their way homewards
When the party’s over

Watch the road, however
For rusty nails in fallen meteorites
And mad men who strangle history at birth

Eyes peeled and ears hot, that’s our lot
In this world turning upside down   

I went to see Belfast’s bonfires last night before they burned. It was raining and daylight was fading and most of the sites were still deserted.

On the Shankill, a cat guarded the pyre; the children’s fire burned for no one in particular up in the Oldpark; on Sandy Row, happy hardcore wafted about near empty wasteland. The party was still elsewhere, making its lazy way to midnight and the flames. I was bored and tired and low.

But then at Donegall Pass, I found an entire universe had been recruited for the burning, a galaxy had been left lying open for a gander before it got lit:

THERE was a man in court earlier this week accused of ferrying a wanted man across the Irish Sea, from Carrickfergus in Ireland’s north-east to Port Patrick on the west coast of Scotland, aboard a private boat.

The ferryman was betrayed by his dog. A French pug. Cops say a French pug was observed boarding the boat with what looked like the accused on the night of the escape run and, when they raided his house a couple of days later, lo and behold, there was a French pug, just hanging out with the ferryman. Bail was denied. The case continues.

If you sit about for long enough in a court room, you get these moments of relief and you bank them, even when it’s at someone else’s expense, because a lot of the rest of the stuff that goes on is, well...

Did you hear the one about the fella who allegedly ran from TK Max with a £6.99 pair of socks? Judge gave him four months.

Judge says, because the defendant has nowhere to live, a custodial sentence would help him get his life together. Daniel hadn’t washed for several days when he allegedly took the goods. The prosecution says that although TK Max got the socks back, they “weren’t fit for resale”. It wasn’t made clear whether Daniel managed to get them on his feet before capture. Regardless, he managed to outrun security, only to be identified on CCTV by police and subsequently detained. Defendant has been released pending appeal. The judge gave no direction on where he might reside in the meantime.

Much court work is done by video link these days. For petty sessions, at least. Removes some of the cost of moving prisoners and legal representatives about. Usually, there is a grey room on a screen above the judge’s head and a disembodied voice answering when a demand for fresh meat is presented… ‘I’ll get him now Your Worship’… Then the top of a crew cut appears… ‘I swear by Almighty God’… Then a young one, a middling one, a young one, all looking far from fresh, all aging in the nanosecond it takes for their image to be sent from place of detention to court, are deposited in front of the grey wall… Sometimes the mute button is hit because the accused has become audibly upset at the direction proceedings are taking… Another benefit of video link… ‘What is the police attitude to bail?’ Laughing. Out. Loud.

And on… ‘Let’s execute the warrant on Mr N.’

‘Legal aid granted.’

‘Warrant executed. Probation order revoked.’

In the middle of the court room, there is a bewildering maelstrom of nervous activity and whispered chit-chat that replaces the withering rain you’ve just come in out of. The cold follows you in. There are easy smiles on the faces of the newly graduated legal professionals, bouncing on heels in anticipation of what life is about to bring… tonight, this summer, next year… One struts like an iguana in and out of the chamber without ever appearing to defend or prosecute a single soul, just tousling his silky dark hair and playing with his lavender band and collarette… The attitude of the new on the job veers wildly into deference upon a harsh look or word that might be headed in that direction from the judge… Paper rustling… You’re up… Throat clearing… Where is the accused? Is he outside? In the gallery? In cells below? Let me just check… No, he’s in Spain, your honour. Spain!?! Another one had beamed in from Spain the other day, initially unbeknownst to the Presiding. Smoking an e-cigarette on some sidewalk or other, summoning a smoker’s hackle from the back of their chest when the law men were trying to talk. You could sense the deflation in the Presiding’s voice when the defendant announced his location… ‘Spain, your honour. Death threats, you see,’ because it was sentencing day in the big house. 

Back in the room, a woman is called and ushered. She stands in the dock, behind the big windows, charged with stealing £4.72 worth of goods from Home Bargains… A pair of gloves and a bottle of deodorant…. Said offence was stated by the relevant arresting officer to have taken place on February 5.

The temperature on February 5 was three below freezing. Even when it’s cold enough for your fingers to ache, still you sweat. But in towns across the land, this woman has dangerous fellow travellers who take it upon themselves to loot mittens, socks, scarves, whiskey, oranges, vodka, ready meals, nappies and a lot more besides. With the supply lines already under pressure, the warehouses could be bare if shoplifting was allowed to get out of hand.

And then where would we be? The market must be protected against the poor, but to protect the poor against the market would be to infringe upon their right to be poor.  But still, you sit here in this big room, or at home with your belly aching, and ask yourself, ‘Is it criminal to be poor?’

Don’t be absurd, of course it’s no crime to be poor, the presiding judge in your mind might say. If it was, where then would charity fit in this immaculately ordered big society? If poverty was against the law, what would we do instead of Children in Need or Comic Relief? A year without a Red Nose Day to celebrate would surely feel like a wasted one. A generation deprived of Pudsey Bear would doubtless be one left bereft of direction or principles.

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If we legislated against the poor, what would fill the news segments instead of the statistics of misery? Where would be without the annual hand wringing over the disparity in exam results? How could we navigate our condition, recognise who was worthy and who not, without the imbalance in life expectancy? How could we relate to Ebenezer Scrooge at Christmas? 

Come on, FFS, of course it’s no crime to be poor, we live in a democracy do we not? People can choose to be anything they like in a democracy, even dirt poor.

It is suspect, though, to be conscious of the totally unnecessary nature of that state – of being poor, of it grinding you down day by stinking day, watching William Windsor on the TV talking about homelessness – and it certainly is a crime to act upon that consciousness. To be conscious to the degree that you would risk your liberty in a race against time down a rain sodden side street, G4S in hot pursuit, the line to the local cop shop already hot. Thus far and no further, Tramp.

So many cracks in the pavement though. So many flaws in the algorithm. We’ve built a metropolis of abundance in which we are all perpetually homesick. We gape at these cathedrals of luxury that tower over us and still trip over the need that lingers in the midst of them. Why is it the soul of a cold woman who can’t abide by these contradictions the one to go on trial? What is the true cost of the multitude of people and things that are put in motion, not to resolve this contradiction, but to bury it out of sight in an unmarked grave from which it keeps clawing itself free?

To be cold is not a crime, certainly not, you can’t judge someone for being cold, we’re real humane like that, but to get your meter chipped by a spark so that the bills stop coming even though the electric keeps running? To take food from a supermarket without paying? To plummet headfirst, far from the landlord’s threatening texts, stolen popcorn at the ready, into shows about gold heists without first paying for a TV licence? A Crime is a Crime is a Crime.

Committing these acts requires a degree of dishonesty, a preparedness to say ‘No’ when the cashier asks if there is anything else that needs paying for, but when we’re living in a society that refuses to look itself in the face, what is that degree worth? Could it even be measured on Dike’s scales?

We lie to ourselves and one another about war and the need for it and about peace and how it can wait, and then we lie to ourselves about rickety boats on the ocean and why exactly they’re bringing their modest payload of suffering children in our direction. We lie to ourselves that tomorrow will be better when what tomorrow will bring is a flood. Honesty is not the principle on which our society is organised, far from it, our organising principle is power and the ability to exercise it – even in a criminal manner – in the interests of further entrenching privilege. Poor scum be damned.   

Petty sessions in courts across the land, for example, are an organised system of people of means sitting in judgement on people with none. The grotesque crafted imbalance is demonstrable in the swagger of those who are paid to be there versus the nervous breakdown disposition of those who are going to pay whether they like it or not, are going to have it squeezed out through their pores; it is obvious in the calm sense of ownership of space and time which lights the faces of the dispensers of justice versus the terrified expressions of those who know these things are stacked against them. Space and time may as well have been cruelly engineered solely to crush these lost ones personally. The vibrating limbs, the battle scars, the nervous tics are all on one side of the bargain in these palaces of jurisprudence.

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It could be argued that the above is coming close to a truism, and that may be the biggest indictment of all. How is it possible for someone to write these few lines and be accused of predictability? How did we get here? Have we always been just here – right here – accepting the right of the comfortable to determine the parameters of dignity and survival?

What was that (imperfect) social contract, that (unequal) balance of forces, that belonged to us in the dim receding past? What did they call it? Welfare state or some such crap? When was it taken away? By whom? How did we let that happen? Why is it so unfathomable that it could be reconstructed on more solid foundations?

What is broken is an equilibrium – in us, in our relations with each other and our presumed betters and our means of organising for contentment and self-respect. What is broken is how we account to one another. How we account for where we are in the order of things and where others are not.

Maybe we should, after all, codify against the poor. Do away with the charade. Maybe we should make the state of poverty itself a crime, an offence against common decency, make it an abomination as bad as lying down with a farm animal before burning the barn over its dead head.

Maybe we should punish the guilty poor by carting them off in leather and linen to a riverside penthouse, with no right of appeal; set them up with an inheritance fund that will knock some swagger into them, make them see the error of their ways whether they like it or not; and in the interests of societal peace, let them loose to loot stockmarkets instead of supermarkets.

Then again, maybe I’m just criminally ill with envy, and how could envy ever be satiated by giving us something we haven’t earned?

WHEN Lucy Frazer hears the word ‘culture’, she reaches for her big book of repressive legislation.

The British government deployed its Culture Secretary on Sunday morning to explain why 64 protestors had been arrested in London the day before.

A holiday had been declared so a crown could be put on the head of a halfwit with notions. A government minister had said the weekend would be a “chance to showcase our liberty”, but not for the 64.

“Tough calls” had to be made by London’s Metropolitan Police, Frazer told the BBC. And the call that was made was to confiscate words and detain anyone suspected of using them. On Saturday, certain word combinations were deemed off limits. Combinations like ‘Not My King’ and ‘Just Stop Oil’.  

Bits of guilty cardboard were loaded onto lorries by diligent men in uniform and taken off for further analysis, police waded into crowds to confiscate dangerous scraps of material, the wrong words on a t-shirt often led to detention.

The charge, according to the Met, was ‘suspicion of conspiring to cause a public nuisance’, and the Culture Secretary was down for that.

Debates about what culture might be and what it might not be are usually enough to bore the balls off me. But the ability to disrupt with words, to communicate dissent on the public stage is surely culture. Culture should cause a public nuisance, especially if the message it is trying to communicate is that the public are in danger of exploitation and, ultimately, extinction. Britain’s culture secretary disagrees though. Frazer prefers golden carriages rolling unimpeded over quaint cobblestone, the filthy idle rich sat inside complaining about how bored they are. Disneyland with cops at the ready, a foodbank on every corner and a flood on the horizon.

“We were on the global stage,” Frazer remined her electorate, the one which had just voted in their millions to kick her party out of councils across England. The rich man’s script must be stuck to, so the new laws which the Tory government had fast-tracked, setting down a 12-month prison sentence for blocking a road for example, were given a day out along with the Sax-Coburg-Gotha clan.

Human rights group Liberty says the laws are on “attack on people’s ability to stand up to power”. But who better to use the powers judiciously than London’s grand old Metropolitan Police? The force that was found, a month ago, in a report commissioned by itself, to be institutionally homophobic, misogynistic and racist.

“The Met can now no longer presume that it has the permission of the people of London to police them,” wrote the report’s author Louise Casey. The Met presumes away though.

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“Our tolerance for any disruption, whether through protest or otherwise, will be low,” the force warned ahead of Saturday’s £250 million royalty orgy. Read it again, and you can hear the words emerging from the orifice of a Robocop that has had Lucy Frazer’s face grafted onto it.

“We will deal robustly with anyone intent on undermining this celebration… You now have 15 seconds to comply… I am now authorised to use physical force… Thank you for your cooperation and good night.”

The head of the Republic campaign group Graham Smith was arrested early on Saturday and held for 16 hours. The “right to peaceful protest in the UK” no longer exists said Smith upon his release.

Patrick Thelwell, who was guilty of throwing eggs at the halfwit last November, says he was arrested on Saturday “on suspicion of carrying eggs”. When the police found that he was, this time, eggless they let him go, but first had to escort him through a mob of monarchists intent on lynching him.

Kush Naker, a doctor who specialises in infectious diseases, was among 20 people arrested while wearing ‘Just Stop Oil’ t-shirts. “I never thought in my life that I would be terrified that the police might arrest me for protesting peacefully in the UK. But that is now the state we are in,” said Naker.

Some see Saturday’s arrests as a promising start, but warn that the promise will only be fulfilled if the arrests become an everyday occurrence.

Striking an admirably egalitarian note, former Met detective Peter Bleksley insisted that if people can be arrested on suspicion of conspiring to cause a nuisance to the liege, then they should also be down for arrest on suspicion of conspiring to cause upset to anybody else, at any time.  

“If the Met police want to regain public trust and confidence, then they need to consistent,” said Bleksley from what might have been a television studio but could also have been his basement, “what policing is good for the king is surely good for his subjects,” mangling the notion of a sentence in his taut no-nonsense jaw in an honourable attempt to rise to the august occasion before giving up and spitting the words out onto the studio/basement floor.

Where does this contempt for dissent come from though? What serves as the inspiration for this martialling of a nation into strictly regimented party-mode for the multi-millionaire in a looted headdress?

There’s a clue to be found in the social media baiting of a man who made the mistake of having his hands in his pockets as his new king levitated past him in Westminster Abbey. The man had also made the mistake of being brown in a space traditionally given over to displays of white supremacism and so was greedily pounced upon by hyenas like Charlie Lawson, the Coronation Street hardman who can’t get over the fact he only ever got to act the part of a British soldier.

Having people from the places we colonised in our midst is bad enough, ran the theme of the comments, but then they can’t even behave properly when they’re here, are too mean to appreciate our generosity. Scroungers, thieves, spongers.

Officialdom didn’t make much room for culture in the colonies. Dissent wasn’t just frowned upon, it was beaten out of people. Disruption to the declared order was smothered in barbed wire. Those deemed a public nuisance could be shot.

In response to England’s new king having the Celtic languages incorporated into his voodoo ceremony, the west Belfast community group Glór na Móna pointed out that the last piece of repressive legislation aimed at the Irish language was only repealed by Westminster last year.

“These are dangerous days, to say what you feel is to dig your own grave,” sang  Sinéad O’Connor of England in Black Boys on Mopeds.

They’re not digging graves for demonstrators in London just yet, but then the colonies could still be on their roundabout way home.

At the turning of the light, the ascent into the dark, the entanglement, the mending, Old Bitch Béal Feirste wraps herself in her hand-me-downs.

Shawls, scarf, socks, screels and sonnets. Body below caked in drying Divis muck, face red from Bearna na Gaoithe.

She tucks herself in for the longest night beneath Bean Madigan, talking in tongues of rare calm. Of nothing being so broken that it can’t be of use even one more time.

All the while, starlings flit in bewildering forms along her bloodstream and curlews play with the kinks in her auburn hair.

'Take it easy,' she murmurs to herself, ourselves overhearing, 'a crescent moon is never that far off.

'

THE president of FIFA feels things. He feels things strongly. He feels like an Arab, like an African, he feels gay, he feels disabled, he feels like a migrant worker.

On Saturday, Gianni Infantino was one step away from performing Stevie Wonder’s Happy Birthday pean to Martin Luther King after giving a soliloquy on how he feels blinded by the forces of oppression.

Thankfully, he didn’t. Infantino walked his feelings back, which is probably just as well given that he was making his Gettysburg address from Doha. Without the clarification that he was just feeling gay for the purposes of making a political point, he could have found himself subject to an uncomfortable interrogation about the nature and location of his last sexual encounter.

Infantino’s speech was bizarre on many levels [(959) FIFA President Gianni Infantino Press conference - YouTube]. But that may only demonstrate that the man has his finger on the pulse of the weird times we are living. Introducing the world to the idea that he used to have ginger hair on his Thunderbirds puppet-like dome was a masterstroke in diverting his audience into forced visualisation.

Ostensibly standing up for the Qatari government, Infantino twice used the analogy of children in reference to the country’s development. When they grow up, they will be just like Switzerland was his not too subtle argument. Except that the Qataris may not want to be Swiss and, besides, actually existing Switzerland isn’t even the Switzerland of Infantino's imaginarium.  

However, once Infantino got through dishing his emotions onto a plate and playing with them for his queasy audience, he did make a point that stands up to scrutiny – and it wasn’t one that most media outlets cared to linger on in their reports of the press conference. According to Human Rights Watch, as the FIFA president highlighted, nearly 25,000 people have died in the Mediterranean sea since 2014 trying to reach Europe – more than 1,2000 this year alone [Endless Tragedies in the Mediterranean Sea | Human Rights Watch (hrw.org)].

As Human Rights Watch has made clear, it is the racist Fortress Europe policies of the EU that has been primarily responsible for the deaths of these mostly north African and Middle Eastern citizens.

“While the endless tragedy has many causes, the decision of European governments to prioritize border control over sea rescue is central,” says HRW.

While the majority of commentators giddily leaped upon Infantino’s faux pas in talking of “3,000 years” of European crimes against the world, the majority remained silent on the indisputable fact that these crimes are not a relic of yesteryear – that the building of a 21st century Fortress Europe is a crime, that the preventable drowning of refugees in the Mediterranean is a crime – and that the president of FIFA made a valid point in highlighting them.  

But come Sunday afternoon, there was the World Cup opening ceremony to delight in ignoring or sneering at, depending on the nature of your disdain. The mascots and soundtracks from World Cups past were there, including Gauchito from the spectacle the fascist Argentinian junta generously laid on in 1978. The BBC aired the ceremony only on their website without commentary or subtitles as a protest at Qatar’s human rights record. A fair protest, although failing to make any attempt to comprehend when someone speaks in a language other than English does follow in a fine British establishment tradition.

The Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, was flanked in the royal box at the Al Bayt Stadium by Infantino (presumably by now feeling something a bit more lofty than a migrant worker) and Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (he of butchered journalist infamy), while behind was slouched a man in military attire who wore a deranged stare like he was trying desperately to ignore the past (his own, everyone else’s, a universal congealed conglomeration of human regret) whispering sweet nothings into his ear.  

The opening of the World Cup wasn’t the only event happening in the Middle East at the weekend, however. In Jerusalem, the World Team Chess Championship was finally kicking off, having been rescheduled due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The problem as Justin Horton has pointed out, is the Championship is taking place in Occupied East Jerusalem, [Justin Horton | In Occupied Territory · LRB 17 November 2022].

According to Horton, “Along with the federations, players and officials participating in the tournament, FIDE is assisting in the slow erasure of Palestine as a nation and of Palestinians as a people.”

On Sunday morning, hours before Qatar kicked off against Ecuador in the World Cup’s opening game, NATO member Turkey launched Operation Claw-Sword, a series of air raids against the Kurdish inhabited areas of Iraq and Syria.

"Terrorists' shelters, bunkers, caves, tunnels, and warehouses were successfully destroyed," said Turkey's defence minister Hulusi Akar in the well-honed manner of generals who go to war with ‘terrorist’ peoples anywhere and everywhere they conjure them up.

The Kurds, on the other hand, say the targets were the city of Kobane and a number of densely populated villages, not isolated caves full of conspirators [Turkey Kurdish raids: Operation Claw-Sword targets militant bases - BBC News].

One thousand miles from Doha, on the other side of the Arabian peninsula, Saudi Arabia’s air war against Yemen, guided by British and US military advisors, trundles on with sickening effect. On Tuesday, Saudi Arabia begin their very own World Cup group of death with a game against Argentina, with not much hope that there will be a note of protest against the air war on Yemen from the assembled commentators.  

This World Cup has already been weird and it’s going to get weirder. Don’t discount a military man or two commandeering a truck load of Budweiser before stripping to his bare balls and screaming back at the universal past from the centre circle at half-time in the final, all while holding a loaded pistol to Giovanni Infantino’s poor ginger head.

The 2026 World Cup is scheduled to be held between Canada, Mexico and the USA. If we get that far. ‘Four more years,’ you might say, ‘What’s the lunatic going on about – “if we get that far”!?!’

But seriously, I’m not trying to be melodramatic, I’m not trying to say there’ll only be a couple of us left come the middle of the decade, fighting it out over the bone marrow from a canine tibia in the gutted shell of a Twitter skyscraper. Not really. But we are reaching a tipping point, that stage where change moves from the quantitative to the qualitative. When the previously normal becomes like a strange fever dream of a memory squinted at through a shattered kaleidoscope.

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Because, and sorry to pummel you with grotesqueries, but I almost forgot to mention COP27. Even before the dismal failure of the latest COPout in Sharm El Sheikh, many scientists were publicly stating that the 1.5 °C limit to global warming needed to avert widespread societal breakdown is no longer possible [The World Will Likely Miss 1.5 Degrees C--Why Isn't Anyone Saying So? - Scientific American]

The idea that there can be a managed decline in the state of our environment, and consequently for everything else pertaining to us, runs contrary to what the scientists tell us about how our planet operates. The Earth is like us, which makes sense since we’re hooked into it and it into us – it can take only so much of something before the collapse or the rupture or the swell comes. And our time for pre-empting those rising waves is growing perishingly thin, if not already past.

But regardless, come 2026, I’ll be betting my dog marrow on Brazil - the South Americans always do well outside of Europe.

TRYING to go over to the other side was my big mistake. Although that’s not exactly right. Why? You mean ‘why not’? Why it’s not right? Because, because… it didn’t start there for a start. I don’t think it will end there either. Although it might.

Where then? Where will it end? Can we take it more slowly? It started in Damascus. Or was it Paris? No, it was definitely Damascus. For me, it began in Damascus. Got that? I’ve never been to Paris. Although I sometimes feel Paris has been to me. On the road from Damascus… you like that? I thought that you might.

And now I suppose you’re expecting a tale of hammams and souks in the evening? Or of Aramaic tripping off the clucking tongues of grandmothers flogging their wares? Or maybe of the head choppers stringing spool after spool of Bach and Mozart over the telephone wires? Or drilling holes into the eyes of Moses and Ephraim, Cecilia and Macarius on the church frescoes? I’m sorry, but no.

What I want to talk about is you and here. Maybe even of us if you would allow me to. How, you ask? How will I talk? How did I get here? With great difficulty is how. Difficulty. This is a circumstance which seems to follow me everywhere.

You see, the first decision which had to be made in me getting here was who to leave behind. There was my wife. She had to stay. I mean, how can a refugee transport a grave? You can’t hide something like that in the lining of your coat or up your back passage, even if the shrapnel did helpfully cut her into many smaller pieces. And the one who had me. I left her. It still hurts to call that woman ‘mother’, even if it’s only to myself. She doesn’t know where I am, that would be too cruel, for her to know that all my running was no use.

I took the boy. Just the boy. I’ve taught him to run also. I’ve taught him to run from his grandparents’ kisses after a cruel thing called hope, which is crueller even than the smell of upturned soil or burning skin. In Syria, even those who would kill us, love us. But now I know that you love like this here, too.

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How do you tell a child to count his breaths because they are a thing we cannot afford? That your feet bleeding is not a good enough reason to stop walking? That the girl who forgot her medicine and finished in the sea could not be saved?

And where are we now, exactly? I ask one who says we’re there and then another, who says we’re here. And yet, we haven’t moved. Wherever it is we are, you love to talk about the weather, so I think I’ve perfected my speech. ‘Where would we be without the rain,’ I ask when someone complains, ‘everyone would be running from the desert then, with nowhere left to run to.’ And they sort of laugh, or choke, or choke a laugh at this.

We could have stayed somewhere warmer. But then that would remind me too much of where I’ve come from. And there’s a lot about that I would like to forget and the rest to remember on my own terms, when I choose to, and not just because the smell of food rotting in the sun reminds me of it.

What’s that you say? Why not go somewhere really cold, the better to forget? Because I’m not fanatical about it.

Now, about the rotting food… While we waited in Athens – on patches of dead yellow grass above underground train stops, glassed off from ancient mud walls where the tourist signs say democracy began – something else had to be found, something more than I had already given, if we were to survive. There was no point in asking for help.

The smallest children used to go from café-to-café asking for potatoes and meat off the tourists’ plates. Sometimes they would get, other times they wouldn’t. Sometimes they would get their cheeks pulled gently, other times they would be kicked away by waiters, tiny bits of bread falling from their blistered lips. Sometimes they would be ignored, other times the tourists, usually couples, would press their heads closer and whisper about what conspiracy it was they thought the children were being used for. It never occurs to them that maybe they are the conspiracy.

I had to do something to put an end to the begging, even it if it was just that of my own stray son. The streets were so littered with bottles, cans, nappies, condoms, pizza boxes, socks, shoes, leaflets, advertisements, political propaganda that I decided to clean them. I found a brush in one bin and a dustpan thrown out the back of a nightclub and began my work. I got a sign translated into Greek by a Red Cross worker which read in black marker ‘I am trying to integrate into your society by cleaning our streets’ and placed it beside my useless coat, so citizens would know I wasn’t pleading with them. I wanted to be paid. And I was: small coins mostly, with engravings of Europa being abducted by Zeus and a Liberty Tree looking as though it was being electrocuted in a dungeon. Some would even clap and call ‘Bravo!’

Soon, I had a gang of comrades around me and I gave them streets to clean. Mine was the big avenue leading to the archaeological museum. No matter how many times I swept it, there was always more to do. Bins overflowing with tomatoes, eggplant, spinach, cucumbers were always lying by the side of the road, clogging your nose and the back of your throat with their decay. It was perfect. But when the white men in the black shirts began to take an interest in us, I knew it was time to move on. ‘We don’t want Arabs to clean our filth,’ they told the world, ‘the Arabs are the filth.’

My son – whose name you can’t have, not yet – he speaks with your accent now and plays your games, he’s always in the street with his stick; he’s even picked up some of your language – no, not this one, which I think he speaks even better than a lot of you, but that other one, the one they say is useless like us. What was it some of my neighbours used to call me? ‘Cara’? Not here though. There are no ‘caras’ here. I tell them this and that about how I got here but not about the boy. That would be stupid. It’s for his own good. And mine. And perhaps even yours, in the long run. We agreed this, the two of us, knowing that some day it would happen.

In here, they call me Paul. I don’t know why. If I have the time, before they come, I may ask Jude. Or I may not. It would mean trusting him to be quiet. Out there, back then, they called me… Well, I don’t feel like telling you that either just yet. Some of them are friendly. The ones who guard me that is. Jude takes the time to talk about your – or should that be their – football teams with me and ask me about mine. I don’t have a team, I always tell him. But he doesn’t listen. 

What Jude and I do share is an occupation, a vocation. Two, in fact. Back there, I was a nurse in a home for old people. Jude tells me he was one too, until they decided they had calculated it all wrong and that one man could do the work of three. And he wasn’t the one.

The work is long and requires you to be strong but gentle even when you’re tired and you’ve lost your patience and you want to be rough, but I couldn’t wait to learn from your old. The stories behind the names of towns and streets, their great loves and their big mistakes, and where it is we actually are.

The first home I worked in, back home, was especially for Armenians. It was built to let them feel at home with each other in their old age. Many of them were blind because they were orphans. That’s a stupid thing to say. Let me try again. When they were children, they suffered. Probably, you know about it. It was decided, due to their untrustworthiness, the Armenians had to go. Who decided? An empire, who else decides these things? So they were tied together in big circles of young and old and in between and placed at the river’s edge. When one was shot, they would all collapse under the weight of the lucky one into the water and drown. Who else but an empire could be so efficient?

Those who survived were usually children, taken in by Kurds or Arabs. Some found themselves alone in Beirut or Damascus or Aleppo, where they were sent to orphanages and bathed in water that was used ten, twenty times over. Here spread the glaucoma and the blindness. There were old men and women I looked after whose last sight of the world had been the scum on the side of a tin drum. I used to cry over this.

You tell me you mostly look after your old at home here and we tell ourselves the same back there. But what happens to them when you can’t even look after yourself? When those who have done everything for you are now too far gone even to teach what you should have learnt long before now. 

Do you know how I got caught? Trying to reach your highest mountain. All one thousand and thirty-eight metres of it. In Syria, we have Mount Hermon, which stands at… but that doesn’t matter, we can’t go there, not now. No, you don’t understand, even before now we couldn’t go there. It’s a ski resort, but for you not us. ‘You’, I’m sorry. I need to stop this. All this mixing everyone else up in the same dirty bag. You see, Mount Hermon was taken from us some time ago. I’ll leave it at that for now.

But I do love mountains. There’s an ecstasy I find in them, when your knees wobble and your teeth chatter when you reach the top and it’s all you can do to keep on breathing. And then, when you allow your knees to give way and your bare arms and the palms of your hands feel the earth. I could cry thinking about it. But I won’t. What good has crying ever done anyone? On my way here; in Turkey, in Greece, in Serbia when we were waiting, I would find mountains, hills, steep streets, whatever wherever I could to escape, to breathe, to feel like a man, to forget the black walls of the container.

Do you know, approaching the Turkish border, there were twenty-two of us in the one car? Can you imagine how that works? Where each hand goes and each foot? How to reassure your son when there are two men lying on top of him?

On my way back from that mountain in Kerry, I was going to follow your famine trail, even if it took me out of my way home. I wanted to feel that ground beneath my feet, maybe even to kneel and run my hands over it. I think it may have allowed me to understand you better. To feel the same hunger and fear and what is less than those but that doesn’t go away, even with death – the want, that bottomless bottomful feeling. You see, your mountains are like you: half-formed things or whole things made half. But you don’t see, do you?

Anyway, my attempt to live here, with you, was to end just like my attempt to live at home, badly. I didn’t know crossing your line would put me in this danger. On the road where the mountains part to let you into the north, our coach was pulled over by a grey man in a navy uniform. Behind him was a red minibus poking its nose from the top of a gravel track and I knew it was for me. When he stepped onto the coach, he shook the driver’s hand and gazed up the aisle. There were nods for some, quick questions for all, but when he came to me he began to tap his long fingers on the empty headrest in front of mine.

I leafed through my Walks of Ireland guidebook the better to look the tourist – a banlieue dweller from that Paris which has been to me, the son of a small businessman who had made good in England, a naturalised Arab-American who had studied under Edward Said at Yale even. But it was no use, he knew what he was looking for. He had seen me on the news in Calais, in Sicily, on the Mediterranean, in Tripoli, on Lesbos and Aegina, in Aleppo and Homs, Kirkuk, Budapest and Vienna. He had seen me coming in his daydreams and now I was here. 

‘Where are you coming from? Stop that, now. Where are you really from?’ These were the first demands. But never ‘where are you going to?’. That is in their hands. They’ve already decided upon that. To be processed is a thing I will never get used to. ‘Papers, please.’ Documentation. Passport. Fingerprints. Photograph. Date of birth. Address. Extent of your fanaticism. Nature of your danger to others. All of this without looking you in the eye.

They say that they have me now and that they won’t let me go and that they are going to send me back. ‘Back to where?’ I ask. ‘From where you came.’ ‘Damascus?’ ‘No, not there, that would be too dangerous.’ And I have to laugh at this. Their concern for my wellbeing. Send me to Itos, I say, there I can work and send my family some money, and it’s their turn to laugh. They refuse to believe such a place exists. They think I’m making it up. If not the place then certainly what happens there, the idea that I might be useful. Am I making this up? I don’t know anymore.

You… No, sorry, I was about to make you all the same again… We’ll go for ‘They’ instead. Savvy? I so love that word… savvy. Vous savez. Do you comprehend? I would have fitted in so well in Paris. We learned their language so perfectly in our schools.

So they say that the word is dead. That we now speak in pixels and moving images and emojis. But if we do, I’m not sure we’ve learnt this new tongue well enough or perhaps it is just that we’re not listening. Are you still listening? Were you ever? Was I ever doing enough to make you? Because there’s something else I need to tell you before I go.

It’s about that second trade Jude and I share, or shared. I was a guard once too, in the military police. I worked for Assad, both Bashar and Hafez. Father and son. I was a soldier in the Syrian Arab army. In Lebanon. On the dividing line with the mountain that was taken from us. I guarded those whose loyalty had been called into question, whose appreciation for father and son or one of the two seemed less than appropriate. Until the Mukhabarat arrived for them. I had already left to become a nurse in that old people’s home by the time the war began. When it did, they asked me to go back, at least into a militia. But I knew that I couldn’t, not because I loved Daesh, or that I wasn’t angry they had cut my wife up with shrapnel. But because I didn’t want to die. Cowardly, isn’t it? At least now I know what it is to be both the guarded and the guard. Maybe that’s the lesson I was supposed to learn all along.

If you have been listening this whole time, without your mind wandering elsewhere, you might have questions. How could he have worked for those monsters? What exactly did he do for them? Or maybe you are noting that I haven’t expressed any regret, which is what those who are sending me back have also noted. Or maybe you’re wondering do I really hate Daesh? Am I really a coward? Am I not an Islamist? Who really killed my wife? Or do the answers really matter now that I can’t be trusted? Was I ever to be trusted? Are answers even what you want? Are answers even possible? Don’t be ridiculous, of course they are.

But I still like to think that I have some control over what I say and what I don’t say – to contribute to my defence or my prosecution. To help, or not, with my conviction.

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Jude is in the corner of the room, the laughing emoji pin with the big fat bright blue tears running down over chubby yellow cheeks shining against his black jumper, looking at me – terrified – as I write this on my prison issue toilet roll with his prison issue pen, thinking I’m one of them after all and wondering when I’m going to slit his throat. Thinking, I can tell, ‘You’re not fucking Paul after all’. My dark green tie my old neighbour gave me for job interviews is stuffed into his mouth. The thin tip with the black lining is hanging out over his bottom lip, making him look faintly like a confused salamander. To try and distract him I tell him of how Sisyphus imprisoned Hades with his own handcuffs and how, ultimately, it was of no use… and already I can hear the rest of them banging on the door and demanding that the natural order of things be restored.

I must stop now, before they break the door down and it is too late; too late even to take Jude’s utility belt from around his waist and make it finally do some useful work in this place. Which I may or may not do. Let’s be honest, I won’t, I’ve come too far to stop going now. Even if going means backwards. But I know I’ve been rude in not introducing myself or my family properly.

And I don’t want to leave it like this between us. So I’ll give you their names, but since you are so good at giving identities and characteristics and cause and effect to all of us, I’ll leave it to you to decide who is who. There’s Ahmed and Leila, Mohammed and Mahmoud, Abu and Saeed, Ibrahim and Hussein, Moussa and Amal, Ragheb, Mariam and Nora. And I am in there somewhere among the marked, willing not to be registered or documented or saved, willing to be left alone.

‘MAGUIRE: Sally (nee Dempsey). Gone to her eternal reward. Deeply regretted by her loving husband Frank, heartbroken sons Liam and Ciarán, daughters Róisín and Kate, doting grandchildren and the entire family circle. Body will leave family home at 2 Kashmir Avenue for requiem mass at St Jude’s at 9.30am on Friday, March 12. Donations to Charlie’s Ethical Circus in lieu of flowers. Saints Paldo, Tato and Taso of Benavento pray for her. Does that sound okay Frank?’

‘Yes, that sounds perfect, thanks Collette. How did you spell Benevento again?’

‘B-e-n-a-v-e-n-t-o’

‘It’s an e instead of an a.’

‘In the middle?’

‘Aye.’

‘Okay, done. Are you sure Paldo, Tato and Taso are saints though?’

‘Certain. They were three brothers. They founded the Benedictine order in the eighth century. They entered the monastery of Farfa, which is in Sabina in Italy, before the three of them cleared off together to set up their own monastery at San Vincenzo. Sally loved to think of them lounging about in the sun with their sandals off after their prayers were done. She got great solace from them in her times of need.’

‘Well, you learn something new every day. Or two things, I never knew there was such a thing as an ethical circus either. Again, I’m sorry for your loss. I’ll be up to the wake tomorrow, and don’t be worrying about the bill, I’ll sort it.’

‘Thanks Collette, you’re a star. I’ll dig you out that leaflet about the circus when I can.’

‘Bye for now.’

‘Bye bye.’

That’s that done. I can’t wait to see everyone’s faces after they’ve read the paper in the morning. ‘Saints Paldo, Tato and Taso of Benevento’ pray for you, indeed. That’ll have them diving for their prayer books and their lives of the saints anthologies. ‘She got great solace from them,’ I’ll say straight faced, ‘in between the works of Nostradamus and Mao Tse-tung.’ 

Although it might placate Father Gillen for a while if he falls for it. He thinks it’s desperately inappropriate that I laugh about the way you died. I told him I thought it was very rock and roll to die on the toilet. Very Elvis of you. You even had the cigarette in your mouth. All that was missing was the cheeseburger. He didn’t get it. Sure what would he know about death or humour, or what’s not proper for that matter? I told him he was lucky you were even getting a catholic burial – that if it had have been up to you, your body would be in a black bag out the back waiting on the bin men. But he knows I’d be too ashamed to go through with that. Coward that I am.

I was thinking about the time you fell in the River Slaney. Trying to pirouette on top of that boulder to music only you were hearing. It was the lichen that was to blame. Made your toes lose your grip as you came full circle. I saw it happening before it actually did, but said nothing. Went arse-over-head you did, with a great big splash. Your skirt was up to your hips and your blouse was soaking wet. And all the rest of us could do was roll about laughing. And you sitting with the water lapping up round your waist with a massive pout on your face and your hair all over the place. And then you laughed too, in a way I’d never seen before – as if there wasn’t even a reason for it, that there didn’t need to be a reason for it. Ever. And there was a bit of blood running off your lip from where you’d bitten it when you fell.

That was some week – our honeymoon. The four of us tearing around the country, soles falling off our shoes and holes in our pockets, but we didn’t give a damn as long as we had enough for a night cap and a quiet laneway where we could park the car up and have a kip. I think there were days when we didn’t eat at all. That was your idea, to bring Ray and Flo with us, as if you were afraid we’d get bored of each other too soon. Have nothing left to say. My silences always did make you uncomfortable. And look at me now, gabbling on to a corpse.

Why did we follow that river? Do you remember? I don’t. Into the Wicklow mountains, saw Glendalough first then onto the source at Lugnaquilla. All the way south we followed it, through Baltinglass, Rathvilly, Tullow, Bunclody, Enniscorthy and on into Wexford – which is where you fell. And Stratford-on-Slayney – fucking sycophants, their own wee Stratford-upon-Avon in the middle of a bog. The Glen of Imaal. I can still remember the rivers that flow into it – the Dereen, the Derry, the Clody, the Bann, the Urrin, the Borrow, the Sow. And Kildavin, where they say you can spot the goosander – not that we did, maybe we didn’t look hard enough. Or didn’t know what it was we were looking for. Why did I say the Glen of Imaal? We never made it there. It just pops onto my tongue from time to time. Who knows why?

Anyway, the point is we didn’t get to see the goosander with its brown hair all spiked up on its head like a punk and its wee ones in tow, but sure that was in the days before punk anyway, so the sight would probably have been wasted on us. But deer, we saw plenty of those – there’s some photos of them in that rusty biscuit tin I dragged out of the cubby hole. Here, do you know what else I found in it? Half a jammy dodger. Without the jam, obviously. How old could that be, like? One of the kids must have left it lying in there when they thought they were about to be caught. I couldn’t believe it had kept for so long. Shows you how cold that cubby hole gets. It crumbled to smithereens as soon as I picked it up though. But, aye, those photos I was going on about… Me posing in front of those deer with my black sunglasses and mod jacket on. I was a cool one, eh? And swans, dippers, ducks and heron. There were stacks of those about. And kingfishers. Black-headed gulls, redshanks, oystercatchers. At night when we went prowling about with torches, we spotted bats and owls and otters. I even caught a pike one day, but we had to throw it back in. Only the Poles eat those apparently.

Ah Jesus Sally, why am I talking like this? Rivers we haven’t seen in decades. Fish we couldn’t recognise if we brought one home from the market for tea. And wouldn’t know how to cook it even if we did. I was never any good at this. I’m just spouting off stuff I’ve read about and stored somewhere for the right occasion.

Like now. I’m still breathing with the rest of them, still slurping manky tea in the kitchen and wrapping good as new beads around my yellow fingers over you. I can even say things that sound like ‘love’ to the kids and the grandkids and they’re even saying things like ‘you too’ to me. And Jesus, there are arms around shoulders and lips against foreheads and cheeks and tears and I’m feeling tender instead of raw. 

But I’ve decided I’m not reading from the Bible in the chapel. Father Gillen wanted me to read something from the Old Testament. He brought a choice of readings round earlier. The Book of Lamentations, Psalms one to about seventy-fucking-two, Malachi, Job and Esther, the Proverbs. He must think we’ve plenty of time on our hands at the minute. There was a few good lines in the Proverbs though, one of them went, ‘A stupid child is ruin to a father, and a wife’s quarrelling is a continual dripping of rain,’ lovely stuff for your wife’s funeral. Then it went on, ‘Strike a scoffer, and the simple will learn prudence; reprove the intelligent, and they will gain knowledge.’

Anyway, I’m not going to read any of that. The kids are going to read the prayers of the faithful and Liam’s reading something from the New Testament, something about not walking in darkness anymore. I’m going to write my own thing. I’ve started it already actually: ‘A letter from Francis the Sinner to the Sumerians…’ is how it begins. I was thinking it should be the Sumerians because of those TV shows we used to watch about the Sumerians actually being an alien civilisation who tamed lions as house pets and then had a nuclear war among themselves. It’ll add a nice science fiction feel to it all.

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Ray was in today. He looked terrible. You know he’s taken to the drink since Flo went. Well, taken more to the drink than before. He was shaking. Not because of the drink I think, but because of you. He just stood in front of you in the living room, shaking and muttering something beneath his breath. I don’t think it was a prayer. I actually think he was sober. I suppose it’s brought it all back to him. Not that it would ever leave him. What was it? Seven years ago? He was so solid at her funeral. Had a firm handshake and a joke for everyone at the wake. And then he went to bits when she was buried. Do you think that’ll happen to me? Not that I have a joke for anyone. I don’t know any jokes. Well, I know a couple, but they’re Ray’s, not mine. Do you remember the one he used to tell about the doctor phoning his patient?

So the phone rings and Sean answers and it’s the doctor. ‘What’s up doc?’ said Sean, thinking he was the funny one. ‘I’m afraid I have bad news and worse news,’ said the doctor. ‘Fucking hell, well give me the bad news first doc.’ And the doctor replies, ‘There’s no easy way to say this Sean, you only have twenty-four hours to live.’ Naturally, Sean is appalled. ‘That’s the bad news doc? How could anything be worse than that?’ And the doctor replies, ‘I’ve been trying to contact you since Monday.’

That one used to get me every time. Although he did wear it out a bit. I never heard him tell it again after Flo went. Not even at the wake. Anyway, so I was showing Ray the photos from the honeymoon that I dug out. He couldn’t believe it. He’d none left himself – he’s going to get copies made of them. That’s if they’re not water damaged, crying all over them he was. And here, I was saying to him about the goosander and us not seeing any. And do you know what? He claims he saw two of them making love. Although of course, he’s no pictures left to prove it. Probably blew his nose with them. He claims he called us when he spotted them, but that you and me were off somewhere on our own. Convenient for him that Flo’s not about to confirm what he says. So I says, ‘Is that right Ray? And how do goosanders make love?’

‘What?’ he says.

‘You know, what’s the logistics of it? Paint me a picture.’

‘Away out of that you filthy old git, and you at your wife’s wake.’

I knew I had him then. He must think I’m doting. This is mad. All the conversations we ever had ended with me just wanting to be left alone and now this – I can’t wait to be alone with you to tell you all the nonsense that’s being talked over your body. Like an old granny, I am… Sorry, I didn’t mean that. Not in that way.

About this sermon. Ha! I’m already talking like a priest. This speech, this soliloquy, whatever it is. I suppose you think this is very out of character. The man of few words getting up to regale an audience and he waits until you’re dead to do it. Well, it’s not like that. I have to do it. I believe and all – you know that – but none of those words from the Old Testament would really mean anything, not knowing that you don’t believe. And people would be able to tell from my voice when I was reading that they meant nothing to me because they meant nothing to you. It’d be like making small talk in here with your pals from bingo.

Speaking of which, they were in earlier. Your bingo pals. They said they were taking a week off as a mark of respect. It must be the done thing for a fallen bingo companion, is it? A well-regarded one anyway. And all I could think of was to ask had they won anything lately. They must’ve thought I was after a loan to pay for your headstone. They hadn’t, or so they claimed. 

I’m dodging the subject again, I know. This isn’t going to be easy. Because you know I believe, and I can’t stand up there and spoof in front of everyone, especially Him. And the four of them as well. They remember. They never bring it up, how could they? Too embarrassed, or angry. But it’s there, and I couldn’t stand there reading some guff out about forty years happily married and know their eyes are boring into my skull, saying nothing, maybe not even thinking about it, but feeling deep down the stinking lie behind it all.

I mean, what would I say? In forty years of marriage, she made me happy every single day? You didn’t. They know it. I know it. You know it. If I said that, it would only be for the benefit of the priest, allowing to him to sleep easy at night knowing what happy, God-fearing parishioners he has. It’s not as if your role in life was to make me happy anyway, whatever the priest thinks. Do I talk about your drinking? About the bottles of vodka hidden behind the sofa? Do I mention the flirting you think I didn’t see? And what did I not see? Do I speculate about that? Will I mention your stealing? Hiding clothes and food underneath the kids in the pram when I was out of work or stuck out in Castlereagh (there’s another good one to keep the mourners entertained, how you were the real danger to them but they being too stupid to recognise it, they took me instead). Always too proud for charity you were, no matter how discreetly it was offered.

And me and my temper? It was like what couldn’t come out through my mouth had to come out some other way – and sometimes it got out through my fists. Not that I tried hard enough to stop it. Although you were little help – you never did know how to stop that tongue of yours from hurting people. Will I say the good times outweighed the bad though? Will I say I’d be lost without you and there’s so many things I wish I could’ve told you before it was too late? Wouldn’t be much point in writing anything if I’m going to say that, it’s all been said a million times.

I’m sorry Sal. But I’m working on it. I’ve always told you I’m working on it and now it’s too late. But I’ll give it one last go, I promise. And here, Sal, I’m making small talk with the lot of them. I’m brewing tea and coffee, I’m hugging the kids and praying with the grandkids, I’m even cracking a joke or two when I’m not scribbling these stupid notes.

‘A letter from Francis, a sinner, to the Sumerians…Ah come on now, laugh if you want, but I’m being serious. I am going to read a letter, I am Francis, I’m certainly a sinner and it might as well be addressed to the Sumerians as anyone else.

‘I met Sally – or Sal as her friends called her then – at school. I was the milk monitor in St Peter’s and because girls weren’t up to being milk monitors I used to visit their classrooms as well. She is – was, Jesus, what’s the difference? – one year younger than me. I used to pull her hair in the playground because that’s what you did when you liked a girl and, when we got older and could talk with less teasing, we went for ice cream together in Rossi’s, with our pals of course – Ray, who’s here today and always has been throughout everything, and his future wife Flo, God rest her. 

‘And we grew. Physically, me more than her; inside, her more than me. And so I married a woman when I wanted a wife – a silly, childish notion of a wife who could be teased and take it and had her milk provided for her but, of who, everything else was expected. And when we were married some time and had had our first child and I considered myself a man with growing entitlements I expected her to take more than teasing without complaining. My rage wasn’t blind because I saw the damage I did very clearly, sometimes even before the blood came or the bruises appeared.

‘For me to talk about loving her with all that in mind would be absurd. An insult to her, to God and to all of you in here. I’ll leave that one for myself to grapple with when we’re done here. Did she love me? Some days she did and some days she didn’t. You see, for her love wasn’t a constant, it was a struggle that had to be considered anew every single day. And while there wasn’t a day when she didn’t renew her love for our children before her head had left the pillow, I knew she would size me up while drinking her tea and make that day’s decision. I count myself blessed that there were days when she did love me. Now I do. Then I didn’t. I could compare myself to a spoilt child or a bear with a sore head but I won’t. The term to use – and one it took me until now to face up to – is thug. Demanding what wasn’t mine to take. Putting Sally down to raise myself up a little. Putting on a show of authority for an audience. Those are the things which I know applied to me. Apply to me.

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‘That audience I’m referring to is here today as well: Ciarán, Liam, Róisín and Kate – children who have grown into fine adults more in spite of me than because of me. Twice she left with some or all of them and twice she came back. Not for me. Not for herself. And not for our children – they don’t deserve to be burdened with that guilt. The truth is, and it took me a while to work this one out, she came back for you. All of ye in here. And for you Father, even though you were only a child yourself at the time, and our God, who she learned to hate and, finally, to rub out, deciding He’d never been there in the first place. She came back to save you all from being scandalised. She came back to stop your blushing and to make sure she didn’t set a bad example – who knows how many housewives would’ve followed a woman like her out the door? They could’ve had their own commune. And where would that have left all the rest of us?

‘And why am I doing this? Why am I worrying my children’s wounds? Why am I shattering my grandchildren’s illusions about me – forcing them to bury two grandparents on the same day? Why am I mortifying all of them in front all of you yet again? Because I can’t hurt myself without hurting them. And why break the habit of a lifetime in being the selfish one? Using my own wife’s funeral in a desperate attempt to secure salvation – making it certain I’ll burn in a desperate attempt to be saved.

‘As I’ve said, this isn’t a declaration of love, but I will leave you with this. I knew Sally. I can trace every inch of her. I grew beside her and I put most of the lines on her face. And she was a better human being than me. And even though she’s gone and I’m still here, I could never hope to catch up with her on that one. And maybe that’s what’s behind it all. In a world where I was supposed to be the stronger one, the provider, the protector, I couldn’t deal with the fact that I sheltered beneath her strength and her intelligence all of my life. I never knew how to make all those things like strength and softness go together in the same body – and so I achieved none of them. Fell between two stools as they say. And now I’m lost.’

Do you know what our kids thought of me as they listened to this? Did they curse me for shaming them in front of everyone? Did they curse me for making them suffer twice over?  Did they wish I was the one in the coffin and not their mother? I don’t know. What I do know is that when I went to genuflect in front of that stupid altar my back wouldn’t go back up the way that it came and I landed in a heap in front of the priest and that all your children came running. And they stroked the back of my head as if I’d said nothing at all.

So here, Sal, there’s no easy way out. No more. No moral. No solution. No epiphany or redemption. No conscience. But I’m feeling a bit spiritual as I lie here – well, I don’t really know where – But you, at least, had soul, Sal? Yeah? You and the goosander? 

IF YOU were to ask me why I am starting here, or why here is there, I couldn’t tell you. Except that I must start somewhere and it is absolutely essential to write some thing. Frankly, it’s no small miracle that I’m alive. If you ask me tell you what I was wearing or why it began, you’ll have to wait. Except that it did begin and what I was wearing caused me to sweat a great deal.

The darkness didn’t help but, then again, neither does the light. It was raining but not cold, which meant the hood of my coat stuck to my forehead and the smell wasn’t washed away by the water. The solitary streetlight shone an orange halo onto a smidgeon of the footpath on Union Street – just enough to illuminate a flooded drain at the kerb’s edge and a dead rat floating in the gutter, the incessant lukewarm rain bouncing off its upturned belly. I imagined a gull would find him – or was it her? – this way in the first light of morning and rip open a gut filled with dog shit, burger baps and gestating maggots with a single swipe of his bright orange beak. A baby’s bottle lay snug against the kerb where the puddle had drained, all teat and no milk, looking like a pram’s miscarriage, abandoned by a careless buggy that had trundled off and left it all alone.   

The thudding was made louder by the enclosed space of my hood, disconcerting me beyond the point of no return. I imagine, for a chronic claustrophobe, it would have been nigh on unbearable. Thump, thump, thump went the diminishing atmosphere inside my hood; squelch, squelch, squelch went the soles of my shoes. And all I could think was ‘Fie, Fi, Foe, Thumb, I smell the blood of an Englishman’. Or was it an Irishman? Too flustered to tell for sure – all I could really smell were my shoes and socks, damp merging with stinking sweat. 

A couple walked past hand in hand, highlights in their hair and designer glasses and skinny jeans to accentuate their asses. And I pondered the smell of a rapist said to be operating in the district. He was rumoured to come out about this time, when the clouds were obscuring the moon and the dearth of streetlights offered plenty of cover through which to stalk his prey. Drunken stragglers, kerb crawlers … and me? God forbid.

The thumping became a din impossible to drown out. Rainwater dripped from my matted, tatted hair onto my forehead and the broad of my nose, from whence it trickled onto my quivering lips. It was salty. Who fucks arses? He fucks arses? He most certainly fucks arses. 

The skin or nerves or sinew or some thing was becoming tighter around my left arm. I rolled up my sleeve to release the pressure. Pointless. Blood pressure must be sky high. I put my left hand under my clothes and rubbed my stomach – who knows why?  Rain splattered the protruding blue veins and pounded the light brown moles. And I thought of Little Nutbrown Hare. 

‘Guess how much I love you?’

Not enough to care.

The faint halo faded further into the distance. Ahead was the deserted car park, its rusted free railings rattling in the wind and I knew I should have taken a taxi.

‘Where to friend?’

‘Accident & Emergency please, you see I’m in the midst of a massive heart attack.’

‘A massive one, eh? I better put the foot down then.’

Why did it have to be a massive one? Rarely, you heard of people having a minor one and never at all of someone having a medium one. It’s always a massive one the middle-aged women go on about.

‘Dropped dead of a massive heart attack, so he did.’ 

And they always drop when it’s massive. They don’t faint or fall, stumble or crawl, they drop. Like a sack of something impossible to keep a grip on any longer because of its unbearably heavy burden. 

Think of some thing, any thing. Numbers, statistics, letters jumbled in conjunction into beautiful meaning, salvaging something lasting from a world of ever potential pain. 2,996 people died in the Al-Qaeda attacks on north America of September 11 2001. The hopes of 17,574,003 Chileans were smashed by the Central Intelligence Agency on September 11 1973. Up to 3,500 Palestinian refugees were butchered in Sabra and Shatila by Christian Falange militiamen while the Israeli army observed on September 16 1982. At least 7 civilians were killed at Kabul airport on August 16 2021 as 5,000 US troops tried to evacuate their embassy staff after 75,000 Taliban fighters had recaptured Afghanistan. Count footsteps or raindrops on your head. Recite poetry. I went out to the hazel wood because a fire was in my head… These things remind me now of Anaktoria who is far and I for one would rather see her warm supple step and the sparkle of her face than watch all the dazzling chariots and armoured hoplites of Lydia… She’s all states and all princes I nothing else is… There’s a stake in your fat black heart and the villagers never liked you They are dancing and stamping on you They always knew it was you Daddy daddy you bastard I’m through… Think of all the verses you’ll never write. Admit defeat. Conquer fear. Never could. Never would. 

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The burden was upon me and, in me, the coward has always had the controlling interest. When it comes to the decision between fight or flight, I freeze. It’s said skilled interrogators prefer the threat of pain to hang over a detainee for as long as possible as the reality of pain, the moment of its infliction, provides both a relief from the tension of waiting and a clarifying moment for the victim – there is no longer any doubt about the motivations and intentions of their captors. The line has been drawn again and who belongs to which side of it is again plain. The true coward, however, will find relief in neither the threat nor the reality. Both the promise of pain and the point of its infliction are equally and permanently unbearable. Perhaps this is how informers are made. The only alternative to threat and realisation – the third way – is talking. 

Talking on this night, though, brought no such promise of relief, however fleeting. Generally, we say what we think people want to hear even if it is just to quiet them for a wee while – and there was no one around to hear. You could babble a Hail Mary or practice breathing from the stomach upwards, contract the diaphragm and let the sigh of sighs rise, but the left arm will still tighten and the pain would still be imminent.  I felt the pulse on the inside of my right ankle and felt sick, picturing it throbbing in and out, fit to burst. My tongue gagged against some thing ready to come up, a sure sign. Yet my mouth was dry and there was a faint taste of pickled onion, which had to be one of the tell tales of death. And, suddenly, I could smell burnt toast – or was it hair – and knew immediately what this meant. A stroke. A massive one, no doubt. How unfair. All this time battling against the heart tying itself up in knots of blocked arteries and it was going to be a stroke that administers the coup de grace. Or both things. 

‘Dropped dead from a massive heart attack-stroke-stroke, so he did.’ 

And I’d be found in a puddle where Union Street meets Little Patrick Street. The smell from my shoes would overwhelm them. It would be all that was left to linger – the stench of rainwater and sweat left to dry and go wet and dry again in weary, stinking, sombre succession. It was my own fault I hadn’t washed them. There was now an intermittent throbbing pain on the left hand side of my chest and I wondered how bad it had to get before the collapse came.

The figure in front dragged me from the precipice of prayer and abdominal breathing exercises. Was it Him? Too dark to see for sure. Just how depraved was He? In Glasgow, it’s not unheard of to receive a rusty screwdriver up the rectum while ambling along the street. One minute, you’re all wobbly hands in pockets and easy saunter; the next, you’re all ripped denim and blood from your bottom as the assailant glides past with a smirk on his face. The screwdriver should be rusty to increase the risk of infection. An added, no doubt calculated, factor is the shame experienced in presenting oneself to hospital to describe all the symptoms of a brutal violation. It is the essence of rape shorn of all pretence of sexuality – the power to inflict, to humiliate, to hurt without consequence – an abuse of the most primordial of powers. Neither is it a motiveless crime – is there ever? It is reserved as punishment for those who break their word or try to pilfer what has already been pilfered. 

But I’m weaving a clumsy tangent. As I said, the screwdriver business isn’t sexual – it’s a matter of honour. To break your word deserves – demands – payment in kind. It’s wasn’t just how depraved was the prowler of Union Street but his motivation that was the crux of the matter. And His motive wasn’t honour and broken bonds.  

What to do and why to do so? Speed up, slow down or stand around and dilly dally; shilly shallying waiting for Sodom in Gomorrah. For fuck’s sake Polly, would you ever put the kettle on?  To press ahead would be to risk a confrontation in which I would surely freeze stiff. One shove and I’d be on my back. He’d be able to bugger me where I lay. The only hope would be that the stench from my shoes would be too much to maintain an erection for long. But again, just how depraved was He? To turn right and walk the top half of Library Street was equally risky. What if the figure in front wasn’t He? The derelict factory buildings with their rusting fire escapes and gaping glassless windows – like sockets gouged free of their balls to rule out the danger of witnesses – that ran the length of the street would surely be where he lurked if it wasn’t, in fact, He that lurked up yonder in front of me. Even minus the presence of a rapist, the crumbling red brick edifices usually scared the all too easy to scare wits out of me. I’d have to restrain myself from muttering some incantation the significant number of times as I scuttled past. Like ‘Candyman, Candyman… Fuck no, was it three times or five? Better leave it at two to be on the safe side’. You get the point, don’t you?  

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To stand still was to be alone with my own thoughts, a fate worse than anything the Candyman could inflict. To torture by thought is to remove the danger of trial by living. Possibly. Someone said that once. Maybe. Was it a hook he had instead of a hand? Or just a large knife? Too long ago to tell for sure.       

Momentum kept me stumbling forward regardless, perhaps spurred on by a desperate desire to outmanoeuvre the shooting pain to the upper chest that would come any minute now like lightning striking a rusty rod. The throbbing drum roll reaching a crescendo as it made its appearance. Maybe I could leave it behind me in the dark for the next poor creature to become its conductor. Not likely. The moment had passed for a farewell phone call. Besides, my phone was now dead and I never was much of a talker. I never was much of a doer either, come to think of it. 

The figure in front wore no hood, neither a hat, just a close-cropped head acting oblivious to the rain. Good people who live in peace and joy, breathe a prayer and a tear for the Croppy Boy. Away and fuck the Croppy Boy, say a prayer for those about to die on Union Street through heart attacks brought on by fear and the imminence of buggery. He stopped to light a cigarette – a strange decision on a night like this one – it would be all soggy butt and dying embers in no time. Impossible not to catch up now, maybe he’ll phone me an ambulance when it’s over. Possibly even hold my hand and encourage my breathing while we wait in the rain. Be grateful for small mercies says He, and I agree. 

But the face that came into the corner of my eye while I was overtaking it was a she not a middle-aged he (It’s always a middle-aged man with soiled shorts, a skimpy tee-shirt and a filthy unkempt beard in the mind’s eye – a hipster playing the part of a hobo or a hobo acting up as a hipster). And it was a face that smiled. But as she did so the cut above the left-hand side of her lip shed a new drop of blood.

‘What’s wrong with you?’

‘What’s wrong with me pal? What the fuck is wrong with you?’

Her voice was Glaswegian in tone. Maybe it was a She. Maybe she had a screwdriver in her pocket with which she tormented the district. Maybe she’d just had her way with her latest victim; a resister who gave her a cut lip for her troubles. Would she be satiated? Was she satiable? Play it cool. Don’t show you know. 

‘Have you ever seen the film Candyman?’

‘Aye, I watched it in Craig Maguire’s living room on Monday, September 11 2017 while his big brother kept trying to feel me up.’

‘Is it three times or five you have to say Candyman before he shows up?’

‘Five, but you have to be standing in front of a mirror for it to work.’

‘I forgot about that. And is it a hook or a big knife he has?’

‘It’s a hook. Have you really seen Candyman, like?’

‘Every night in my dreams,’ says I, which strikes me now as a somewhat inappropriate thing to say. I don’t dream.

I decided to be bold, ‘What’s your name?’

The response will last forever, which may not be that long. The Glasgow accent in the mouth of anyone is a thing of wonder. But in her. Fuck. She fondled the sound of her essence perfectly on her tongue. It’s a name better not wasted on voyeurs like you, who besides could not adequately imagine how it came off that one time she spoke it. For all I know, she never spoke it again. Secrets shared with the world inevitably become figurines of fun and this… well, this will not. She took my clumsy name in turn but insisted on calling me pal. 

‘So what’s wrong with you pal? I can see it in your eyes. They’ve this vile, wild look, like a badger who’s about to be baited by a pair of pitbulls. Are you on coke or speed?’

‘Not that.’

‘Is it too many vodka and red bulls or five or six Jagerbombs over what the adverts recommend you are? Or maybe it’s the blow laced with LSD, or acid and a few ’shrooms? Have you been on the swall for a couple of days and not been home? Have you been messing around with fuck its, pipes and bongs since you were barely out of primary school? Or maybe it’s methamphetamines, uppers and downers and one or two horse tranquilisers? Have you been sliding about the dance floor off your bake on Es or doing lines with the lads in the jacks? Have you been chasing the green fairy or the dragon, shooting up smack in the jacks or swalling McIllhatton’s finest to keep out the cold? Or maybe you’re one of those desperados who drinks Toilet Duck and bleach when they’re all out of dough just to keep the party going and the demons on the run?’

My head swam and my chest tightened as she made a manic dance with all the dreadful possibilities. Perish the thought what these substances would do to a weak heart. 

‘None of the above,’ I managed to gasp, ‘please stop, you’ll make it worse.’    

‘Then what is that in your eyes?’

‘It’s fear. Fear as pure as the sin of a new born.’

‘True that, there’s nothing purer they say.’

‘Something bad’s going to happen, you see. I’m no longer sure what. Maybe it’ll be a heart attack or a stroke or even an aneurism – all of them massive. It could be a clot kicking in somewhere or something vital giving up. All I know is my facial muscles will all contort at the same time, I’ll go all weak at the knees, there’ll be pain like no other and there’ll be no one around to mourn but the rain. I also regularly shit blood, but that can wait for now.’

‘I’ll be around pal, don’t you worry about that.’ And then she looked at me again. But different this time.

Sweet suffering Jesus, I repent, I believe! I bend my knobbly pimply hollow kneecap at your altar of altars. In my hour of need, you’ve heard, you’ve felt pity and you’ve put an angel in my midst, and a pretty Glaswegian angel who looks straight me in the bloodshot eyes at that. But then she laughed. She laughed so hard she doubled up and slapped her palms against the torn knees of her jeans. Fresh drops of blood fell from her lip to speckle the denim. Only after some time did she come to. 

‘I tell you pal, you’re a funny guy. You’ve cheered me up no end.’

Croppy Boy bit her lip and allowed the blood stain her ivory pale teeth. Then she turned, rose up slightly on tip toes clad in battered guddies, the laces still trailing against the concrete, and kissed me on the cheek. And she left. 

Her laughter reverberated down North Street and shook the pulled-down shutters in Smithfield. Or maybe that was the drunks sheltering in the shop front. Regardless, hindsight makes such considerations irrelevant. Her footsteps made a splash as they faded. She declined to stick around for the final act, whatever that happened to be. Autumn washed the dust and dirt from its highest echelons and sent it tumbling back to earth. Congealed grease and caked muck flushed from their fox holes and trundled under tyres and boots, making their filthy impact upon hubcaps and trouser legs and tights and the wheels of prams while brown and red and yellow danced manically against a canvass of ominous derelict grey.  

Was she a ghost or a Scottish refugee, a rapist or all of the above? All I know is that I loved her Croppy Boy head, her cut lip, her laugh and the way she called me pal with such easy disdain. As she went on her way with her lipstick in one pocket and perhaps a screwdriver in the other I knew another burden had been added to a fat black heart that couldn’t cope. Swings and roundabouts, I suppose.

But still, it was Easter.

A season of rejoicing for those born into sin. It was also one of the few occasions when Brigid Brennan took more than a solitary drink. She caused quite a stir in the corner house the first time she arrived at the bar with neither a shawl on her head or a husband on her arm. But they’d since got used to her infrequent public dalliances with drink and company. Plus, they enjoyed her craic and the annual after-party she laid on in her big living room. Phil brought the bottles of Powers smuggled up on the train from Dublin, the regulars brought their tobacco and their best stories and Bernadette brought Kate.

It was arriving to that part of the night when mouth organs were appearing miraculously out of top pockets and a tin whistle rolled from underneath the cushion on top of which Seanie Fitz was resting his arse. Someone in the corner began singing about how proud he was to have a rebel heart. The disjointed conversing and babble of disagreement and laughter was hushed and Patsy, one arm resting on the back of a free chair the other holding his half glass of smuggled Powers, allowed his eyelids to droop.

‘From rebel veins my life I drew,
In rebel arms I lay,
From rebel lips the lessons drew
That led me day by day.
And, rocked to rest on rebel breast
And nursed on rebel knee,
There woke and grew for weal or rue
A rebel heart in me.’

He had been dreaming wistfully of Bernadette’s rebel breasts but then, behind eyes serenely closed, he felt an anger rising in him. Bastards, he thought, dirty lowlife bastards. No respect for the living or the dead. The fury was becoming ever more raw, uncomfortably hot like the whisky gripped ever tighter in the sweating palm of his left hand. He urgently wanted to hit them for the coffin ships and every vomit smeared cholera victim locked below deck and every starved corpse thrown overboard.  He wanted to get back at them for every vain step taken towards the landlord’s door in Mayo’s hungry trail of tears. He wanted revenge for every misfit emigrant huddling against themselves on bare floorboards, using cheap whiskey and old newspapers to heat their lonely bones. He needed to throw a dig, plant a bomb, fire a shot for the unmarked graves of the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania, for those who had lost all hope on Grosse Isle and Ellis Island, for every minute of Terence MacSwiney’s staunch suffering. He wanted vengeance for the bullet ridden corpses of the McMahons and McKinney. Respectable Papists to be made an example of. No uppity nonsense here.

And now the French were on the sea, the mouth organs were at full throttle with Seanie’s tin whistle and the Shean Bhean Bhocht was bracing herself for another bout of pangs, the intensity of which are the preserve of the dispossessed in the depths of their perpetual disappointment. And Patsy wanted to hit himself or the singer or someone close for Diarmait na nGall’s avarice and Hugh O’Neill’s cowardice. He wanted to rip out his tongue, chop off his ears and spoon out his eyes rather than dwell upon those who cooked the Spanish washed ashore from the wrecks of their Armada, those who stole their gold and pieces of silver and fled back to their grim bogs to hide and count their worthless loot. He wanted to tie a noose of the finest Belfast linen around his own taut neck and have done with the shame of it all… for decorating British warships and their flying bombers, a fine successor to those who had sold their souls for penny rolls and lumps of hairy bacon; he couldn’t bear himself for talking in English, thinking in English, sinning in English…

But then there was her. Sitting there looking at him, a glass of smuggled Powers in one hand, the other resting on her crossed, brown skirted knees, wrists fair and bare, and that faint smile on her lips. He wondered had his anger been palpable and in the same instant doubted it would have phased herself anyway. Play it cool, he thought.  He returned what he measured to be a similarly faint smile, raised his glass graciously in her direction and took his packet of Park Drive and a box of matches from his shirt pocket. Humphrey Bogart back on the town. Still attempting amusement, he placed a cigarette in his mouth and struck a match. But as he took his first drag, he could feel flakes of tobacco on his tongue and paper clinging to his lips and saw her smile burst into a laugh. The bottom end of the cigarette was charred black and undoubtedly out. Drunker than I thought, fucking thing in the wrong way round. Not to worry – laugh carelessly, raise the butt in her direction as if you meant it. Aye, ever the clown. I like your cheeks when they’re stretched tight by your laugh. Laugher made by me… my laugher… our laughter. Conceived and shared together in luminous sin.  

Undeterred, he produced a second Park Drive and three matches – bought with the not inconsiderable proceeds from his sin in the shipyard – thinking to compensate for the embarrassment with the magic of flame. Lure her into a primordial worship of the man who controls the heat and the light. Primordial flames giving way to primordial desires and shockingly pre-Christian behaviour. The flame was too big. He sniffed the unmistakable aroma of singed hair. His nose hurt. He’d set his nasal hairs on fire. Bernadette fell off the chair in a fit, keeping her whiskey from spilling by sheer force of Catholic will. Seanie Fitz was singing of Finnegan’s Wake from his cushion in the corner; the whistle, passed to another to fondle and finger tentatively, was struggling gamely to keep up with the pace of his chanting. Brigid Brennan was staring at Bernadette and then himself, quizzically. Bernadette was picking herself up and dusting herself off. John Thompson and Kate were in the centre of the living room floor, arm in arm, spinning like an out of control carousel.

‘Then Mickey Maloney ducked his head
When a noggin of whiskey flew at him.
It missed, and falling on the bed
The whiskey scattered over Tim.
Tim revives, see how he rises!
Timothy risin' from the bed!
Says' "Whirl your whiskey 'round like blazes,"
"D'ainm an diabhal! Do ye think I'm dead?"’

Patsy felt his head spinning in tandem with the carousers on their carousel. His guts heaved to Seanie’s words. He needed air and the night before he embarrassed himself beyond repair. He made for the scullery door – leisurely, leisurely, leisurely; brisk, brisk, brisk. They’re all too absorbed in Kate’s legs and Seanie’s singing and where John Thompson’s eyes are going. Nobody will notice. He unlocked the back door and stepped into the yard and comparative silence. Fucking whiskey. Fucking Free Staters. Fucking Jackeens and their fucking songs. His stomach seemed to settle. Got away with it without a scene. Only Brigid was really watching. And she was always watching. Bernadette’s figure came into view, leaning against the frame of the back door: ‘Are you okay Patsy?’

Faint smile, languorous, cool. Bogart’s back baby, ‘Aye, I’m fine. Are you alright? You came sliding off that chair in a hurry.’

She laughed and said nothing. Epitome of cool. No embarrassment, ‘Do you get nervous a lot Patsy?’

Embarrassed laugh, feigning surprise. Epitome of being found out. Shame laid bare. Humphrey my hole.

‘Me?’ he snorted, almost bringing the vomit back up again. ‘No, why?’ Why? Because you’re a fucking klutz that’s why Patsy. 

Bernadette didn’t answer but picked up the slack left by the silence, eyes moving off Patsy skywards. Raised chin revealing her own taut neck, but one he imagined would be soft against wet lips. Not one for fine Belfast linen stretched tight. No shame to be stiffed from this one.

‘I used to love the black out.’

‘You used to love the black out? Are you a closet Nazi or something?’

‘You’d see more stars that way. I used to turn my lamp off and lift the black-out curtain and sit for ages staring at them… It must be like that all the time in Monaghan.’

Chuckle denoting wisdom beyond his years, a man of the world, ‘Aye. It’s a beautiful sight on a summer’s night. I’d sometimes lie out all night under them.’

The Monaghan cowboy. Altogether too wild to be tamed by the big smoke.

‘There’s still plenty out tonight though. Tell me some of their names.’

‘What?’

‘Of the stars. Don’t tell me you’ve been sleeping with them and still don’t know their names?’

‘Ah right, of course I do, aye.’

Move closer. Intimate moment of star gazing and bestowing knowledge. And maybe… ‘Well, there’s the Plough for a start.’ Patsy’s left arm arced above their bare heads. ‘See the seven stars that make the shape of one?’

‘That’s an easy one. Sure everyone knows that one. Tell me another.’

The Monaghan cowboy has come a cropper. It might well be time to be riding on out, ‘It’s difficult from here Bernadette. The sky has a different alignment in Monaghan. We see the stars in a different way.’

‘Really? I never knew that.’

There was that faint smile again.

‘Aye, that’s the beauty of the sky at night. Everyone sees it in a different light.’

‘That’s a beautiful way of looking at it.’

The Monaghan cowboy has pulled it from the fire. Go in for the kill, quickest to the draw wins, ‘Sure, if you want to come down to the home place sometime I’ll be able to tell you all the names from there.’

‘Aye, maybe. But I didn’t think you liked going home?’

‘When everything’s sorted out like.’

Things. A monster and a mad mother, ‘If we went in summer, we could sleep out under them.’

Not even a blush, ‘It’s a lovely idea Patsy… Are you going to come in? I’m starting to shiver.’

‘Here.’

Jacket off his back like Humphrey. Around the lady’s shoulders. Smooth.

‘Thanks.’

‘Fáilte.’

A polyglot into the bargain. Hand on the small of her back as he leads her in through the back door. The man in control. He goes red with the glances as they return to the living room. She keeps her cool.

‘Jesus, it’s getting cold outside,’ she says to no one in particular and retakes her chair, arms crossed around the front of Patsy’s black donkey jacket.

‘It’s lucky Patsy’s such a gentleman,’ Seanie Fitz, flushed from the stout and the singing, offers from his cushion.

‘Aye, he’d be the only one of those around here too.’

Redemption. Sweet suffering redemption. Singed nasal hairs, charred cigarette butts, heaving stomach and astronomical incompetence all consigned to the dustbin of history. He was Bernadette’s gentleman and she didn’t care who knew it. He felt like singing. He topped up his glass from the quarter-full bottle on the table and announced imperiously it was his turn for a chant.

‘Good man Patsy!’

‘Fair play yourself you big Monaghan whore ye!’

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‘There was an old woman and she lived in the woods, weile weile waile.
There was an old woman and she lived in the woods, down by the river Saile.
She had a baby three months old, weile weile waile.
She had a baby three months old, down by the river Saile.
She had a penknife, long and sharp, weile weile waile.
She had a penknife, long and sharp, down by the river Saile.’

He groped for his cigarettes and noticed the ice-cream glass had fallen to the floor. Tar streaked water contaminated the front pages while cigarette butts lay soaked and abandoned, like dead soldiers on a French beach. He left the butts where they lay, grabbed the glass and his coat from where it had fallen from Bernadette’s shoulders, lay back in bed and lit a Park Drive.

When his slowed, he managed a laugh of sorts. Still, he’d felt her lips against his own. ‘Do you want to see the old newspapers I have upstairs about the blackout and the blitz?’ ‘Aye, why not,’ she’d answered before he could even believe he’d asked her to go up to his bedroom, Mrs Brennan’s spare room. And as they slunk out the sitting room door, he thought he saw a wry smile on Brigid’s lips. Bernadette laughed when she saw the papers were stuck to the carpet with rainwater and not neatly arranged in some scrapbook. And then they’d looked at each other like Ingrid and Bogart and Patsy dared stoke her arm with his paint-splattered fingers, their mouths met as the coat fell from Bernadette’s shoulders and Patsy could feel her hips knock against his own. Bernadette was biting his lower lip when he gagged. ‘Are you alright,’ she’d asked as she shrank back from him. And then she said ‘I’ll see you downstairs,’ and he didn’t even say ‘don’t go,’ before his eyes rose to the scarred ceiling and he collapsed onto his bed. Still, he’d felt her lips against his own.

Then the guilt seeped in and he again thought about Ma. Fear returned as he rifled through his coat for the letter and reassurance. Mad Ma. Doting Ma. Proud of her son, planning a wedding Ma. Maybe they’ve committed her. Maybe the letter’s to tell me to come and see her in the big living room of the mad house at St Davnet’s. Maybe she’s raving to the whole hospital about loch monsters and who knows what else. But when he saw the familiar handwriting and the bushy moustache, he became embarrassed at his own imagination. Patsy the Amadán. Foolish Patsy. Impressionable Patsy. He placed the letter on top of the quilt and looked at his watch. He closed his eyes and thought of her.

The fear returned with the ebbing of his Park Drive and he glanced down at the letter on his lap. He commenced a new butt collection in the ice-cream jar and lit a candle. Behind the flame were piled glasses from pubs and ice cream parlours, rubbed clean after smokies and half’uns of whiskey, and then secreted by Patsy for sometime. Sometime should’ve been tonight’s party but he was content to allow the late comers to quaff their stout from Brigid Brennan’s finest tea set instead. He opened the envelope hastily. Along with the customary folded sheet of paper – always ruled by his mother with impeccably straight pencil lines – there was a newspaper clipping which fell out of the envelope onto the blanket. Patsy picked this up first and held it above his head to examine it as if it was a pair of Seanie Fitzpatrick’s soiled underpants.

“Monaghan Lake Monster! Sensation. A STRANGE monster, estimated to be 15ft long and to dive with a rumbling noise, is disturbing the peace of Lake Dromate, near Newbliss in Co Monaghan, and may rival the fame of the Lough Ness monster. First noticed by some men fishing from the shore, it appeared as a black patch a few inches above the water. Local farmers, armed with shotguns, rowed out in search for it and to their astonishment it broke surface about 20 yards from the boat.”

Oh God, oh sweet mother fucking Jesus. Patsy was hyperventilating again. She’s went to the papers. She’s convinced Da it’s real. He’s got his mates out in a boat firing pot shots at what they probably think is a Brit submarine disguised as a dinosaur. Father Farrelly’ll have him thrown into the Curragh and her committed to St Davnet’s. He lit another cigarette with shaking hands and tried to calm himself by reading the story that was printed on the other side of the snippet,

“Germans flee as allies near Eiffel Tower. THE Battle of Normandy has been won. The Germans’ power effectively to resist the Allies in France has now gone. This was the assessment of a senior staff officer in General Montgomery’s HQ last night as reports streamed in of the havoc wrought among the disorganised German remnants fleeing from the Falaise pocket under one of the war’s greatest tactical onslaughts. German losses in Normandy – killed, prisoners and wounded – are estimated at 400,000.”

“Killed, prisoners and wounded.” He read these words again and remembered the jokes from home that his brother John, inspired by Eoin O’Duffy’s talk of the Reds and their gang raping of the nuns, had run off to join the German army, as if it was Father Farrelly’s blessed sister herself who’d been molested by two bearded drunken communists on the altar of their own wee chapel out by Dromate. He imagined John lying on a beach in Normandy with his stomach torn open by a hand grenade or his temple punctured by a sniper’s bullet. He pictured him in a Prisoner of War camp, losing blood rapidly from a wound yet to be treated, or being tortured by English soldiers angry at yet another example of Paddy’s untrustworthiness.

There was no escape. His mind was sagging under the weight of a mad mother and a missing brother. He arose to open the bedroom window, gulp in the night and gaze at anonymous stars. But then there was her. There was always her, even before her there was her – the promise of her, the prospect of her. She reminded him how to breathe. She took his mouth on hers, she made the rest bearable. 

He fumbled for change and pulled out several Kings. Two rolled off the counter and clattered onto the stone floor, spinning furiously on their axes at first then wobbling to a stop among the sawdust. He bent to pick them up. Fuck, nerves, nerves, fuck. Big clumsy Patsy. Always nervous Patsy. Sweat on his palms and mad butterflies in his belly. Big bottle of plain and a half ’un to steady himself. He’d been the same in the paint shop that morning, getting green all over his boots and his hands and then on his nose when he tried to stop the snot escaping. Fool.

Tonight was her first night on since the party. Since their mouths met and she squeezed his left hand red with all the force of her contracting, delicate thighs. Phil always told him her shifts with a grin and a wink as he rubbed his glasses clean with his manky yellow cloth.

He steadied his hand around the solidity of the whiskey glass and thought furiously of things to say on her arrival. Tonight was not the night for shy grins and hair tousling. Their meeting of mouths had changed all that utterly. He’d broken the bonds of his inept past and moved into manhood. Tonight was the night for familiarity. Bogart asking his babe for a drink with a joke and a wink.

‘Ah, Bernadette. How’s your day been?’ Far too familiar, too husband and wife-like.

‘How’s things?’ Too aloof. Too distant.

‘I haven’t seen you since the other night. I was worried you’d gone and fallen down a rabbit hole. How’ve you been?’ Jackpot. Allusion to their shared secret. Concern for her welfare. Relaxed interest. Wee joke. All boxes ticked.

Quaff to celebrate. Thud on back. Choke on black stuff. Splutter, splutter. Fizzy bubbles up his nose. And there was Seanie Fitz’s arm around Patsy’s shoulders, his fat face looking down at him. All I need. Fuck sake. Seanie always made him feel vaguely uncomfortable. As if he’d be able to handle things better or appear in a different light to others if Seanie was absent. Tonight in particular, yet here he fucking was.

‘I take it you’re in for Bernadette?’

Play it cool. Laid back disinterest, ‘No, I’m in for a drink.’

‘Just as well. I wouldn’t waste my time on that one if I was you.’

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Jealousy. Bound to be jealous. He’s found out about us. But what happened next was all blur and babble. Seanie said something about a soldier and Phil got angry and said Bernadette would never step out with a Brit and Seanie said, no, it wasn’t one of them, it was a Yank. And then Seanie came over all confidential and leaned over the bar and whispered it wasn’t just that, it was a dark Yank. And then Phil said fuck off, I don’t believe you and Seanie said on my mother’s freshly dug grave I’m telling the truth and if you don’t believe me I just passed them on the road and they were walking in this direction and him as black as coal, except for the green uniform of course.

And then Phil came over all philosophical and said something about Irish being nigger if nigger wasn’t nigger. And then Seanie said you know what they say about the black lads, don’t you? And then Patsy couldn’t control his shaking any longer and he felt his hands balling into fists and heard himself calling Seanie a lying cunt and then he was flying off the stool in Seanie’s direction, his arms flailing towards his head. But Seanie sidestepped too quickly and Patsy found himself rolling around among the sawdust and beer slops and spit. And then Seanie went to kick him in the stomach but thought better of it at the last second and called him a no-good Free State bastard instead. And Phil was lifting him and asking him had he lost his mind and telling him to go home and sleep it off, that they’d talk about it tomorrow.            

But then there was her, standing in the narrow doorway, a carefully crafted look of defiance on her face as if to pre-empt any sly comments or stares of disapproval. And soldier boy was behind her but towering over her at the same time, all carefully pressed green and nervous eyes and delicate smile. And Patsy was lying back in Phil’s arms, dirt smearing his coat and snot in his nose. And the old boys in the corner were sniggering and muttering in their low familiar tongues into one another’s weather worn ears. Her look of defiance turned to one of puzzlement when she saw Patsy. He straightened his knees, shrugged off Phil’s back-to-front embrace and made for the door and the night, pushing her and soldier boy aside as he escaped.

She followed him out, asking the black lad, Private James Caulfield a Buffalo Soldier lately of the Massa, Naples and the Arno River in Italy and soon to be of the Ardennes offensive, to wait inside for a minute. Private Caulfield knew only too well what they said about the black lads, where he came from it was ‘coon’ and ‘rape’ and ‘lynch’, words which were only surmounted in their viciousness by the actions which not infrequently followed.

Lately, he’d heard some of these words spoken in this town – chiefly, but not solely, by others in uniform – so he looked around the room with a certain air of reticence. This was soon dampened by the old boys in flat caps calling him to them. Thinking he’d have a story or two to tell and hearing of the ready money these Yanks were said to have on their hips – admittedly, usually to spend on specimens younger and more shapely than themselves – they made a space for Private Caulfield and asked him what he was having.

Outside, Bernadette was asking Patsy what the hell was wrong with him and he was wiping his nose with the back of his hand and fixing his hair and fixed her with a stare fit for Mary Magdalen herself. And he parroted what’s wrong with me, what’s wrong with me and there was fury and indignant questions and a demand for answers. Bernadette’s head stopped slightly.

‘I didn’t know you felt so strongly, like that, about me like, Patsy.’

And Patsy acted the parrot again, accused her of lying and insisted she be ashamed of herself. And then it was Bernadette’s turn to be angry, ‘How fucking dare you speak to me like that. What do you know about me anyway? You don’t know me.’

‘Obviously not, given your walking out with a…’

‘With a what? A soldier? Is that it? Patsy the Pacifist, is that it now? I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s next stop Berlin for the things you’re painting with the green stuff you’ve got on your nose. And God help the kids underneath them. Or do you think they’re dropping food in those planes you’re colouring in?’

It was now Patsy’s head which fell, he shuffled his shoes and tried to kick off the sawdust that clung to them. There was no one around to tousle his hair. Bernadette’s tone softened.

‘Look Patsy, what happened the other night was nice and all, but doesn’t mean we’re a couple. Anyway, you don’t want me. Not really. You’re lost. And if it’s a nice wee wife you want to make you feel better about it, I’d advise you not to look for one around here. You’re too nice and the girls around here are too hard. Too rough at the edges, you know? You’d only get hurt.’

‘I’m hurt now.’

Bernadette bit her own lip, ‘Do you know why I spend my nights handing you lot bottles of stout?’

‘For the company?’

‘Because I can’t get a job in the mills, and do you know why?’

A head that shook. Patsy didn’t know.

‘Because they’re laying people off, never mind taking ones on. And why’s that, eh?’

Bernadette didn’t wait for an answer, ‘Because the skirts we’re wearing are getting a wee bit shorter and the knickers we’re wearing are that wee bit more skimpy, meaning they can make more of them with less girls.’

Bernadette let thoughts of her skimpy knickers sink into Patsy’s skull, ‘I like you Patsy, I do, but I’m going to be nobody’s wee wife, whatever people say about me… especially because of what people might say about me.’

She stroked his paint splattered arm and then made slowly for the door and soldier boy and a night serving bottles of stout. Patsy moved towards the middle of the deserted road and took the black wind face on. His eyes were fixed on the now invisible Divis Mountain, using row upon row of smoking chimney pots as a marker from there to there. His hair moved this way and that with the wants of the wind. His black poacher’s jacket allowed him to blend with the night.

In spite of the open bar door emitting light and the promise of a fire and warmth within, he was alone and terminally ill-equipped for the world, at least for this town of intimates and secrets, forsaken by Bernadette and all and everyone else.  

But that was done with now… Over. He cleared his brain and instead observed how her hair had disguised the freckles on her otherwise pale shoulders. How her spine protruded faintly from her arched back. This time, he hadn’t gagged with nervousness and fearful expectancy, he knew what had to be done and he did so eagerly and with no little affection. Still, he wanted to be done with her and himself and the whiskey, this town and all who dwelt therein.

Instead, he traced her spine with his index finger and heard her mumble something that sounded like ‘Danny’. He shuffled closer on his hip, took his sustenance from her warmth, replied with a faint ‘I’m here,’ and kissed her shoulder. In this bed, on this night, Patsy was whoever he needed to be and Brigid was someone similar. Spines and thighs in the dark made it possible.

Eyelids lost in the murk made it inevitable.

PATSY watched a gull land with aplomb then embark on a prison guard-like tour of the cluttered, defenceless table.

Inspection complete and repast time being nigh, the bird settled for the smeared white plate that took pride of place in the centre of his new camp and began pecking ostentatiously at slices of buttered pancake before setting about the removal of the cherries buried in a decapitated scone.

Its ruthless eyes settled on the woman making for return, hand-in-hand with the child skipping by her side. Surprised by the new occupant – one not keen on the delicate etiquette of bathroom breaks and seating arrangements – the woman began self-conscious shooing movements with her free hand. The guard glared at the shoo merchant in a stare that spoke ‘If you’ve a problem, come over here without the child and we’ll settle it like animals’. The woman’s shooing became more nervously audible as she neared the table and its guard. What happened next was abominable. The guard rose erect to its full height, opened its beak full stretch into a deformed egg-like shape and emitted a shrill, threatening squeal more portending than any air raid siren. Its wings extended to their impressive limit. Its head warbled in perverted time to the rhythm of the screech. Beady eyes danced manically to a horrific tune. What lay beyond the open yellow beak was bright, fleshy pink fading to shadow and then to cavernous black, beyond which the source of sin himself might linger.      

The girl began to bawl, her mother’s shooing increased frantically until it became a discombobulating whirring movement, but as it did so her feet were taking cautious paces backwards, dragging the girl’s in toe. The guard smelt victory. Its height shrunk slightly. Dominance was polished off with a cherry replete with butter smears lifted slowly from the plate in a pincer movement while eye contact was returned slowly towards the defeated mammal and her crying offspring. The shoo merchant turned her back on the table and ushered the child indoors for some form of consolation. Or more aptly, a bribe that would attempt to smother the exposed parental cowardice in sugar. The victor kept its front to the door while considering what resources to snaffle next.

Patsy grinned. He loved Saturday mornings in the city. From a ragged parcel of bogland five miles from the nearest village, the hustle and bustle of Belfast’s Castle Lane was, to him, a revelation. Both a revelation and a titillation, strictly speaking, since he had found through experimentation that it was best to place himself strategically at the café’s window where he could observe gaggles of university students out on their expeditions and younger mothers with their ankles uncovered. The town was breathing a semi-interested sigh as the war moved ever further away. The black-out curtains could be removed from bedroom windows and the bomb craters took on an air of order as they were swept up and cordoned off. No blood stains and no reconstruction; just crucifixes on graves which awaited headstones, if such a luxury could be afforded, and the official stiff upper lip. Patsy had missed the worst of it.

As he attempted to resuscitate the dying embers of a fast-fading Park Drive and stirred his tea into a murky dark brown, pinning the teabag against the side of the cup with the tip of his spoon and forcing it to give off its last, he observed mother and child emerging from the bakery opposite. As the child attempted to turn towards the site of the lost Battle of the Pancake Plate, her mother jerked her in the opposite direction and sternly poked a finger in her face in an effort to knock the gull off the high perch of authority that had, until so recently, been occupied by mother and father alone… and Mother Church. Or the local pastor and His Royal Highness Albert Frederick Arthur George? Patsy couldn’t be sure. Whoever could be? The gull, oblivious to the demands of faith, fatherland and the primacy of parental prerogative alike, the spoils of war mopped up, took a shit on the white plate and prepared for take-off. 

Bernadette was late. He picked the camouflage green paint nervously from his fine bitten fingernails. Every Saturday like clockwork, she’d stroll briskly down Castle Lane arm in arm with Kate. Kate was fine. But Bernadette was grace. Her delicately taut face accentuated her dark brown eyes. A short head of hazel fell to her shoulders with an elegant kick. She walked with intent, talked with precision, looked with knowing.     

Always, there was a glance through the café window, a shy giggle and a broad smile, a wee wave and a dig aimed at her sister’s arm. Always, it briefly disconcerted Patsy that it was Kate, not Bernadette, who was the glancer, the giggler and the waver. But following the punch, Bernadette would graciously avert her gaze to Patsy’s table by the window, smile faintly and wave confidently, almost sympathetically, towards him. All being again right in the world, he’d grin slyly through the smoke of his Park Drive, hoping to look every inch the Humphrey Bogart to her Ingrid Bergman. And almost before he could return the greeting and carry off his carefully cultivated gentleman about town persona, they were gone; off to stare through the finely decorated windows of Anderson & McAuley and daydream of a future where the hats and dresses on display were theirs to flaunt on Royal Avenue, or at least of a job on the shop floor.     

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But there was no Bernadette this morning. Maybe Phil had asked her to lock up last night; she was bound to need a lie in after cajoling that shower out into the night and their wives. He’d call in later for a bottle of plain to see how she was. Now he thought about it, she did look tired when she was pushing him through the door at closing time. When later came, his query about her whereabouts, padded carefully in concern about her welfare, was effortlessly turned into her ball with which to play.

‘Ahh, are you worried about me Patsy? Do you hear that Phil? At least someone’s looking out for me around here.’

‘Yeah, like you’d need looking after Bernie.’

Red cheeks, shuffle shoes, shoes shuffling, shifty eyes in bent head settled on shuffling shoes, tell-tale shades of shame. Onto him, the both of them, they were. Say something, recover dignity, don’t be the shy schoolboy all your life. 

‘It’s just you looked a bit run down last night.’

‘Don’t be worrying about me Patsy. I’m well used to running about after their lordships in here.’

Exaggeration. She was hardly running anywhere. Patsy’s bottle of stout could be lifted from the shelf and placed on the counter in one swift, graceful swivel of Bernadette’s majestic waist.

‘And you staring at me all night like a simpleton.’ 

She laughs. I laugh. We all laugh together. A ritual to savour. The way she told him off for spending too much time looking at her from his stool. Patsy carefully moulded this and other throwaway remarks into affection, amorous complicity even, and placed them in a coherent order that made sense of what he regarded as their blossoming relationship. The fun of the hunt before the feast. A rite of passage. Phil behind the bar would give a knowing wink and all the lads on the other side of it would provide digs to the shoulders and tousle his hair every time Bernadette was moved to make a comment about his incessant stares. Tonight was no different; a bottle of plain, a shy grin, melancholy looks, an acerbic comment, acute embarrassment in the midst of hair tousling and another shy grin.

‘Bernadette’s not a girl for lying in, she’ll have had something to keep herself busy with this morning. Isn’t that right Bernie?’

Seanie Fitzpatrick destroys the moment.

‘And what would you know about my habits you louse? Less of the lip or you’ll be out the door.’

Illusion restored, Bernadette knew how to deal with the likes of Seanie Fitzpatrick. But every time he tried to put words in her mouth he’d feel a fat glob of moisture connecting with the broad of his nose. Despite its predictability, the coldness would still startle him as they splashed from there onto his eyelids and trickled towards faint stubble and his cheeks. The limit was five. Five fat globs could fall on his face at roughly equal intervals like well-aimed balls of spit before he would give up on her for another night. Whatever it was he was trying to draw out of her stubbornly refused to come.

Tonight was like the night before and the night before that. When he opened his eyes, there was a dim light emerging through the smudge of sweat on the bedroom window. He checked the time on his paint splattered wristwatch. Nearly there now.

He snorted, tousled his fair-brown hair, rubbed the streak of water from the side of his face with the back of a hand, and peered above himself. Shards of layers hung precariously from the ceiling, giving the water that dripped from it when it rained a faint whitish tint. Beneath the paint, the plaster had turned a mouldy black with the seeping damp. Thrice he had moved his cumbersome iron bed in an attempt to escape the rain, but he was always outmanoeuvred. Neither could he escape the musty stench that wafted off the walls, rose from the carpet and merged with the smell of dead cigarettes that floated in a small pool of ink black water in the tall ice cream glass he’d converted into an ash tray.

Old newspapers and an older piss pot cluttered the floor in an attempt to keep the carpet below dry. The papers were now sodden and falling apart under the strain, while the pot contained a noxious brew of urine and paint-streaked rain water. Patsy lunged suddenly from the bed and positioned himself over the pot, calculating that quick movements would outwit the cold. The initial feeling of liberation that came with pissing into the pot in full view of the street was now diluted by regularity and the condensation. Staring at the papers strewn around his feet, he could close his eyes and recite their front pages, including the Newsletter’s from Monday, September 4 1939: “Notice to the Public, Cinemas & Theatres. The government of Northern Ireland do not consider it necessary to apply the Order closing Cinemas and Theatres to Northern Ireland. ALL CINEMAS AND THEATRES WILL, THEREFORE, REMAIN OPEN AND PROGRAMMES WILL BE SHOWN AS USUAL.”; or the Belfast Telegraph’s headline from Tuesday, April 8 1941: “ULSTER AT CLOSE QUARTERS WITH WAR. North’s First Blitz: Night of Thrills”.

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He imagined Brigid Brennan had kept the papers as a reminder of a momentous age, but faced with his complaints about the damp, sacrificed posterity on the altar of the impossibility of paying not just a plasterer, but a roofer into the bargain. Patsy wondered whether she could hear him now, reading aloud her once precious headlines in a cut-glass upper-class English accent gleaned from the nightly war news broadcasts on the wireless. Given that her bed was pushed against the wall that divided their two rooms, she could probably hear his piss as it hit the pot or inadvertently added colour to the front pages; she would definitely hear his bed frame creaking as he tossed and turned in a growing frenzy most nights; although probably not the faint plopping sound the rainwater made when it hit his nose.

Brigid Brennan had a three-storey house, but under the pretence that heat rises she had banished herself and her lodger to the two box rooms on the top floor, leaving the more spacious middle one deserted. He knew that heat only rose when it had somewhere to come from in the first place, but he said nothing. She mourned her husband unassumingly. Their room below remained well kept but unoccupied. A couple’s room awaiting the consummation of a longing that could never be quenched. He’d learnt through Phil that Daniel Brennan had died two years before. A blow from above by a dislodged plank on the slipway at the shipyard had left his skull cracked in several places. His soft cap was no protection against wood that hurtled downwards from a forty-foot height. Rushed to hospital in the back of the owner’s limousine, he was dead before a doctor got to see him. Phil had heard the owner had ordered the chauffer to wash the blood stains off the floor and thoroughly clean the seat before he would travel home that evening. One less Papist in the employ of a loyal company was the view of the local Lodge, and there weren’t too many to start with, praise to all that’s Protestant and Proper. Still, the boss sent a wreath to the funeral, although attending was out of the question, passing the threshold of papacy would have ended him.    

Daniel left no children, just Brigid with his name and a house that was hard to heat. Through their bedroom door left ajar, Patsy had not long ago lingered on the stairs to witness her go through what appeared a routine of changing the sheets on the double bed no one slept in, taking a small bag from the chest of drawers, applying makeup to her cheeks with a small brush and resting one of them against the work clothes left hanging on the wardrobe door, leaving a new smudge on top of the one that was already there.

He shaved with one eye on the window and the other on the cracked looking glass he’d propped up on the shelf, working the soap off the bar into a white lather for his face by rubbing it fiercely in his hands. He cut himself just the once, where his jaw jutted out to his chin – which was progress – and watched as the blood was diluted by the lather into a small stream that ran towards his jugular. Below him, the first of his neighbours were traipsing up the avenue towards the trolleybus and work; men with black boots, lean jaws and a Park Drive between their lips, who hid receding hairlines below soft caps. He dressed methodically, being careful not to get any of the newspaper that was coming loose stuck to the soles of his socks. He brushed his boots, watched John Thompson shut the front door of the house directly opposite and tried to remember what their argument had been about two nights before. The way he was looking at her – the way he alleged he was looking at her – emerged from the haze.

At the bottom of the two flights of stairs, Mrs Brennan – a woman Patsy estimated to be in her early 40s, of thin but not fragile build whose few strands of grey in her head of coal-black hair she obscured with a red shawl when she left the house – was lingering in the hallway that was permanently cold due to the lack of sunlight. She had a bright yellow cloth for polishing in one hand and a floor brush in the other but didn't appear to be doing much with either.

‘That letter's still sitting there for you Patsy. Are you not going to open it?’

Patsy looked at the solitary scuffed brown envelope that lay on the hall table, marked with two green stamps in the top righthand corner bearing the distinguished, bushy moustache of Dubhghlas de hÍde, complete with the legend ‘An Chéad Uachtarán’. In the middle of the envelope was his mother's tiny, neat writing and her little act of defiance ‘BELFAST, IRELAND’. He lifted it and put it in the inside poacher's pocket of his black donkey jacket.

‘I'll read it on my break Mrs Brennan. I didn't get a chance yesterday.’

Mrs Brennan – oh so formal Mrs Brennan – emitted a short nasal snort which she castrated almost as soon as it rose.

‘I wouldn't suppose you'd get much peace to read a letter in the pub. Especially when it's from your mammy – you'd have all the lads laughing at you. And what have I told you about addressing me like that? It’s Brigid. I’m not old enough to be clinging to the altar rails just yet thank you very much.’

‘Sorry, I keep forgetting… Anyway, how do you know it's from my Ma?’

‘I'm only messing with you Patsy. For all I know, it could be from one your lovers.’

Brigid Brennan – young enough for a laugh Brigid Brennan – let her thought hang and made to go through the door with her brush and cloth into the living room.

‘Aye, well, maybe it is. Anyway, I'm late Brigid, I better go.’

Brigid lingered in the doorway, ‘I'll have dinner ready at six... If you're not too busy with one of your floosies.’

Patsy said nothing but closed the hall door and joined the trickle advancing up the hill. He kept his head down and hid his mouth and his shaving scar behind his turned-up collar. He checked his watch and decided he'd time to walk and save the trolleybus fare for a bottle of stout to kill the time between six and when Mrs – What Have I Told You About Addressing Me Like That – Brennan would leave him to his own devices in the scullery. He passed the corner of Cavendish Street and the tidy void left by eight households which were obliterated by a single German bomb five hours after the all clear had been given by the air raid wardens. His gaze remained fixed firmly on the pavement and the feather that was stuck to the path by the lollypop stains that ran in a dry trickle, like fingerprints, from the discarded stick. Further on, lay a dead pigeon on its back. About two yards away was a dismembered wing.

Outside Saint Dominic's grammar school for girls the elm trees had long since shed their summer dresses. Patsy trudged through the brown, red and yellow detritus, careful to avoid the dog shit that inevitably lay hidden in the undergrowth like so many vicious booby traps. He noted the effect the different leaves had on the soles of his boots, some crisp and satisfying to the ear underfoot, others soggy and disappointing. As he neared the town centre, pigeons too fat for frantic take-off loitered on cobbles and kerbs, full with the chopped heels of plain loaves and the remnants of Belfast baps smothered in lard. Absent-mindedly, as one waddled by in front of him, he drew back his foot and connected with it square in the chest, the pigeon deflated like a beach ball as it performed an irregular somersault and continued for about six feet under the momentum of Patsy’s boot before managing to put its wings into action and beat a hasty retreat. Patsy guffawed, more out of shock at what he’d just done than anything and, as the thrill subsided, looked quickly around him to make sure no one had seen.

The entrance to the shipyard always took on a grim grey shade in early morning. Patsy clocked in and took the letter from his inside pocket, turning it over and over again in his hands. Anyway, he thought in an effort to consolidate the argument that had been ongoing in his head since he’d left the house, opening a letter with the provocative moustache and the offending address might not go down too well if observed by the yard's appointed grandees of loyalist Ulster. Better leave it for later. In the shipyard, he was from Armagh, not Monaghan, precariously perched – but perched nonetheless – on the right side of the border. An Armagh catholic was there on sufferance due to his unquestionably dab hand with a paint brush and the need for enlightened pragmatism in deference to the war needs of the Empire. A Monaghan catholic, on the other hand – a citizen of ‘Era’ – would be too great a risk, no matter how dab the hand might be: A potential spy, a traitor in the midst, a sinner surreptitiously penetrating Gomorrah engaged in reconnaissance for the apocalypse.

‘Morning Paddy!’

‘Yeah, morning.’

He’d grown tired of correcting them. ‘It’s not Paddy pal, it’s Patsy.’ ‘Ah, right, sorry about that, keep getting the two mixed up. I’ve got you now.’ ‘Morning Paddy’ would still be there to greet him the next morning – all lessons forgotten. Patsy, Seamy, Micky, Seany, Paddy and his shillelagh coming to take a big black Guinness shit on the sash my father wore. Have you heard the one about the Irish man and his goat? No, tell us again. Give the sons of Ulster a good laugh. God knows we could do with one at this time of greatest peril for all we hold dear and true.

He allowed ‘Morning’ to suffice and went on his way to the paint-shop. Alone, he closed the door and set about emptying large globs of dead black into pots, stirring springtime green into a more threatening hue. He cleaned white spirits off brushes that had been left to soak overnight and cut pieces of sandpaper into manageable squares to purse between his lips when both his hands were busy. 

His mind drifted back to Monaghan. A worrying tone of madness had crept into his mother’s writing. ‘Monster in the loch,’ she wrote. ‘Father fishing and granda sat smoking his pipe when a thing that looked like it was sent by Satan himself rose up in front of their eyes’. Since he’d seen her last, he began to suspect the madness that had infected his grandmother in the two years before her passing had come home to roost in his Ma. He’d often be startled awake before dawn by a high-pitched singing coming from the direction of the loch. Pulling on trousers as he half fell through the open backdoor and stumbling towards the water, he’d find Granny on her knees shovelling muck into blob-like infant forms and giving full throat to,

‘They took her away and they put her in the jail, weile weile waile.
They took her away and they put her in the jail, down by the river Saile.’

In her more lucid moments, she’d spend her time picking nettles and water weeds, frying them into a thick gruel with rabbit liver and kidney which she would place in front of her husband on the kitchen table. Patsy’s grandfather would smile, pat his wife on the hand and, explaining he would eat it in the sun, take the plate outside, leave it on the ground for the dog to devour and amble off towards the loch with his pipe. And now his Ma was going the same way – penning letters about loch monsters and getting up to God knows what else he hadn’t heard about yet. A letter in reply was no good. What would he write? He’d have to go see her and take the chance he might not be allowed back north. At least then he’d be face to face with the madness. A laughing stock they were, a grandmother buried from the mad house at St Davnet’s and a father lucky to escape the firing squad for opposing the Treaty in what was proud Blue Shirt country. The Republic had hung itself and gone to hell and Da was off in hot pursuit of it.     

As he prepared his pots to leave the shop, he attempted to picture normality in Dromate; before the other letters started arriving. His normality – their normality – our normality. We’re all normal together. Like that his brother had maybe finally shown his face, exhibited all his fine limbs and both his eyes and ears to hush his mother’s fears and generally acted the prodigal son – until his father learnt of his return. Da chasing him up the lane with the shotgun loaded and the safety catch off, he thought, was the likely outcome. In his father's calculations, a couple of bits of buckshot in the backside would be lenient punishment for John's running about with the Blue Shirts, his decision to join the Free State army and – no one was sure whether this was better or worse on the scale of treachery – his unexplained desertion and disappearance a year later. Da might also have shot the bull due to the fact that its periods of heat lasted anything up to nine months of the year and was therefore next to impossible to contain. Ma's letters would not unregularly entail his father opening fire on something or someone.

‘Forgive me father for I have sinned, it’s been two years since my last confession.’

Jesus, no, he’d have me here all day if I told him that.

‘Forgive me father for I have sinned, it’s been two months since my last confession.’

Too precise, has it been exactly two months or a day or two either way?

‘Forgive me father for I have sinned, it’s been six and-a-half weeks since my last confession.’

That’ll do rightly. Outside St Paul’s, Jesus on his cross of woe and those knelt in prayer around his feet were hidden beneath purple quilts while Lancia cage cars rumbled up and down the street, their occupants’ eyes peeled for signs of another Easter resurrection. When stopped by the ever-vigilant men of proper order, Patsy was again from Armagh; the same logic being at work that, while a Patrick from Armagh was probably possibly, maybe even possibly probably a subversive, a Patrick from Monaghan was, by definition, definitely a rebel.

Inside St Paul’s, all was cool and quiet. He waited in the aisle and knocked his kneecap off the bench in front until it ached as he watched grandmothers and grandchildren complete the Stations of the Cross. When it was time, ‘Forgive me father for I have sinned’ knelt and offered up his six and-a-half weeks’ worth of abominations to Father Thomas McManus, defender of all that’s right and holy in a parish besieged by the agents of reformation, settlers all, men determined to complete the horrible conquest of the church of Patrick.

Pride, gluttony, touching himself… do I have to tell him that? Jesus, it’s been so long. Is it less of a sin if you can’t finish? Lust, that was it, lust was a suitable compromise. Lusting after Bernadette’s tender thighs with his left hand. Hardly the time or the place. Cut it out. But then to the business end of things: ‘I haven’t been very good to my mother.’

‘A common ailment, unfortunately, my child. Mothers suffer for our sins long before we are held to account for them.’

‘I send her money and all but I don’t write as often as I should, I haven’t been down to see her since I moved up from the country and I feel sort of ashamed about what she writes me.’

‘Ashamed?’

‘Well, you see it’s kind of difficult to explain father…’

Deep breath, in, out, out, in. Open your mouth and give him both barrels.

‘She thinks there’s a monster in the loch beside our farm.’

Silence. Contemplation. Leaving a priest speechless in confession, now there’s one for the brethren at the shipyard.

‘Monster, you say. You mean like the Loch Ness monster?’

‘I don’t know father, I haven’t seen it. I suppose so, yeah, something along those lines.’

‘I see. Is it aggressive?’

Patsy’s turn to be silent. Is the monster in my Ma’s mind aggressive? Very, Father.

‘I don’t know. She hasn’t said.’

‘Does it have big teeth, would you say?’

Patsy’s head bowed further than it had been.

‘I don’t know father.’

Father McManus was warming to his task: ‘And do you think I’m some sort of idiot that you can be coming in here with your tall tales of monsters? Do you think I would fall for these things like some sort of thick culchie schoolboy?’

Things. He knew then. The unmistakable scent of familial madness had seeped through the dark wire partition of the confessional like cow shit. 

‘Do you think this is a circus or a confessional? And on Holy Week too!’

Patsy mustered a response, ‘Father, I, I wasn’t trying to make fun of you… I, I was being serious.’

Stammering stuttering Patsy. Patsy the stammering stutterer.

‘Get out of my confessional before I come round there and put my toe up your arse. God forgive me and pardon me.’

Patsy fled from the black box, out over the cold clay flag stones, past Father McManus’ queue of curious penitents and into the street, not even pausing to bless himself on the threshold. Cage cars rumbled in the mid-distance, Jesus feigned death beneath his purple blanket.

Part Two to follow…