American Skin

Stapleton was built to last though the odds were against him. Brought up in Belfast in the real bad dark years, he saw his father murdered by the British army. He took to the streets early, dodging rubber bullets and worse. He displayed a natural talent for guerrilla tactics. The Falls road taught him all he ever needed to know about survival. The Boyos spotted his potential and he was carrying an Arma-Lite by the time he was fourteen. They sent him to south Armagh, bandit country, and for three years he harassed, terrorised, and laid down hell for the hapless squaddies assigned to that god forsaken territory.

He was commander of his own unit at the age of nineteen and seemed blessed by some deity to always evade capture. He regularly made the British army’s top ten most wanted. Not all the touts, informers, or supergrasses could deliver him.

It was rumoured that his skills were fine-honed in the training camps of south Lebanon.

He was fuelled by a total hatred of all things English. Of short stature, he was wiry and began to attend gyms to build up muscle. Physical fitness was his passion and the key to his survival. Even his own mother said,

“God, he’s an ugly child.”

And he was, growing into an even uglier adult. He utilised that, letting his face intimidate people. A scar ran across his forehead, from the late detonation of a device in the centre of Derry. He’d never call it Londonderry. His nose had been broken more times than he could remember, due to literal in-fighting, up close and personal, the way he liked it. His street fighting was learned from the days of the Falls and consisted of fierce brutality combined with a speed that was near graceful in its execution. Face to face with some young soldier from the streets of Manchester, he liked nothing better than to drop his weapon, open his left palm and goad,

“Come on sissy boy.”

He kept his head shaven and that, with his dark eyes, ruined features, made his opponents pause for that deadly second. All he needed.

The Peace Talks were like the worst news. He never wanted the hostilities to end, they were part of his very blood. He had joined a breakaway faction who continued to rob banks and cause mayhem. But he had been planning a heist down South for some time and just needed the right patsy. He wanted this on many levels. The attitude in the Republic towards the North pissed him off big-time. As if the situation didn’t really concern them. When they got prosperous with the Celtic Tiger, they got even more arrogant. At least in his opinion. Sure, they had their poxy government bleating about Peace but you looked behind the earnest camera smiles and deep concern, you saw that they couldn’t give a toss for the North. He’d make them care. Hit the fucks where it now mattered... in the wallet. Take down their banks, they’d notice. To add insult to injury, he wanted a Southerner involved and then he’d off the prick. From time to time, he’d lain low in Dublin and saw the response when his accent was aired. A slight hesitation, then the platitudes. What they wanted was for the North to fuck the hell off and stop bothering them. They had a world stage to Riverdance and didn’t want it messed up with notions like freedom.

He’d conducted his own mini survey. Asked a selection of them to recite the Proclaimation of 1916 — not one bastard could. He was horrified, he could recite it in English and Irish. Nobody cared about the revival of the language, sure they had a TV channel catering to the native tongue but who watched it? The young kids were watching The O.C.... The Simpsons... Fear Factor.

He’d give them Fear Factor, all right. Try finding a pub with traditional music. Fuck no, all you got were U2 rip-off’s. He’d nothing against U2, in fact he felt, “Where the Streets Have No Name” was one of the best songs ever about the conflict and Belfast in particular. The only Republican group worth the name, The Wolfe Tones, had broken up, didn’t that say it all? He’d come of age in the sheebeens of Belfast, the illegal pubs in the no-go areas where night after night you got “The Men Behind the Wire,” “The Ballad of Bobby Sands,” “Brits Out,” “This Land is Your Land,” real songs. With the bodhrans, spoons, accordions, Uilleann pipes, all blasting at mega warp.

Jesus, he’d been in a pub on Gardiner Street one night, a supposed Republican enclave in the heart of Dublin and a woman said to him,

“The Corrs are the heart of Ireland.”

He’d muttered,

“Does it get more fucked than this?”

Van Morrison, before he got too rich and too arrogant, sang the wondrous “Madame George,” that got John A. Stapleton as close to tears as even CS gas could achieve. In times of stress, like waiting on a rooftop, the lone sniper par excellence, he could sing the whole of Astral Weeks in his head. As his finger massaged the trigger, he’d sing,

“Saw you walking, up by Cypress Avenue...”

As the Brit patrol arrived on the street below, and he selected the end soldier, fixed on him, he’d hum the melody of the final track on the album and blow the face apart. It was poetry, the music of his inheritance. And he’d disappear from the rooftop as silently as the sound of the album being shut down.

The first part of his name — John A; he never acknowledged John... it was the Irish form always... Sean; the “A” stood for St. Anthony, Stapelton believed firmly in the man. It was widely held that if you lost something, you made a deal with Anthony, say five euro to find your wallet. Stapleton was trying to figure out how much it would cost for a country. He figured Anthony had a whole better chance of finding a United Ireland than either the Irish or UK politicians.

Stapleton had an Achilles heel. Jameson. He could do two shots tops. Once he hit three, he lost focus, became maudlin, sentimental, sloppy. He could down pints of the black all night and still take out a guy without any bother. Reach three Jameson and he started to talk. The worst action possible. You talked, you got shafted. He exercised massive control on the rare evenings he sampled the whiskey, as the two always loomed heavy for the third. Planning strategy, it was custom to plonk a bottle of the Jay on the table and get serious. Stapleton stuck to Guinness. More than once, a commander had asked,

“You don’t drink spirits?”

Like heresy.

So he’d do the two, then reach for the stout. He made even the most hardened vets a little uneasy, they wondered why he never let his defences down, especially when they were in a safe house and could afford to let the pressure ebb. A time, they were holed up in Enniskillen, after three days of lockdown, one of the guys had asked,

“Don’t you have a personal life?”

And got the look.

Stapleton flexed his fingers, always a dangerous sign, fixed his dark eyes on the guy, said,

“Let me set you straight on a couple of things.”

The guy glanced round at the other members of the unit but they weren’t getting into it, not with Stapleton. The guy wished he hadn’t left his pistol in the bedroom as he heard,

“We’re in a war sonny boy, not some damn picnic where you get the weekends off. I don’t know who trained you, but they didn’t do too good a job, else you wouldn’t be asking questions. When Eire is free, when the last Brit is packing his arse out of our country, I’ll start dating, having me some/un...”

He paused, letting venom leak over the word, then,

“Meantime, we have a job to do, a sacred duty, like the martyrs of sixteen, we don’t have time for personal lives... so shut your fucking mouth and get that pistol out of the bedroom, it won’t do you a whole lot of good if the Paras come bursting in, you think they’ll give you a moment to fetch it?”

The guy was killed two weeks later on a botched job in Derry, Stapleton shed no tears, muttered,

“Let that be a lesson to yous.”

His legend was ensured when they captured a British major outside of Fermanagh. The man, a veteran of eighteen months on the streets of Belfast, had been taken at dawn, he was not intimidated by his captors, regarded them with scorn, so they sent Stapleton to have a wee chat with him.

The major was seated on a hard chair, a wooden table before him. Stapleton took the chair opposite, said,

“How are they treating you?”

The major had undergone extensive training in subversive warfare and was not impressed by the good guy routine. He reached into his tunic, extracted a pack of Rothmans, a gold Zippo, and fired up, blew the smoke at Stapleton. Stapleton didn’t flinch, let the smoke invade his face, asked,

“Mind if I have one of these, I’m trying to quit but what the hell.”

The major, control reined tight, pushed the pack over, said,

“Knock yourself out, Paddy.”

Stapleton slowly lit the cig, studied the Zippo, it had the logo, “Queens finest.” As Stapleton downed a lungful of smoke, like an addict who hasn’t imbibed for a time, he asked, pointing at the logo,

“That a nancy boy thing?”

The major laughed, not quite believing this was the best the Boyos had to offer, said,

“You’d probably know, you look like a nancy boy yourself.”

Stapleton gouged the cig into the major’s right eye, saying,

“Jaysus, they’re right, those yokes are bad for your health.”

A few hours later, having garnered all the information the major had, he dragged the man outside, hung him from a tree near the road, said,

“It’s a slow knot, going to take a while to croak.”

He kept the Zippo, got a fellah on the Falls to erase the logo and put... “No Surrender” on there. It never ceased to amuse him that this was the war cry of the UDA.