Dead I Well May Be

6: THE LOST WORLD

Yes. It’s true. We’re lost. We’re in a boat on the wild ocean. The seas are high, and there is no compass. We’re fucked. Blind. Ignorant. The night bewildering and there is no dawn. We are outside latitude or longitude or maps. No land, no dead reckoning, no horizon. Fucked in spades. In this cabin of stale air, with asthmatics, fellow fools before the mast, who know no shanties but who cough nocturnes for me. But they’re more doomed than me. I’m ok, really, for I’m not with them. I am not a boy or a man, rather I am a cow, or a black buffalo, or a bird, or a tiny caterpillar crawling under the door. I am, that is, until one of the others wheezes or says something and I’m back again, a haunted passenger, seasick, lost, fucked.

I close my eyes and lean back and open them.

Days go by.

And it’s not that bad, for I have, as contingency, made myself another world. I’ve been staring at the ceiling, lying on my back, head on the straw, arms on my chest. There are above me valleys, ridges, craters, lines. Funnel cobwebs in the corner. The color is a washed-out gray. Often I imagine they’re cities, rivers, an aerial map of a country. The topography is surprisingly uneven; it’s a mountain kingdom. We haven’t been talking much, so I’ve been building a story of an imaginary civilization. The big crack down the middle separates two continents that are at war. They’re always at war. There are canals, too, like the ones Percival Lowell used to see on Mars. The continent nearest the door is drying up, dying, so the inhabitants want to conquer their neighbors. The continent near the tiny barred window hole has plenty of water; those people live an agricultural, tractable existence, though occasionally death comes to Arcadia, for there are damp and flood marks. The window continent also has the spiderwebs, and I imagine these are desperate, impenetrable morasses where only fools go, of which in a pastoral idyll there are many.

There are wars and negotiations and sometimes individual narratives within the grander themes. There are factions and religions, and perhaps down here we are gods.

My story gets interrupted in the morning for a feature. The window lets in the sunlight and every day there’s a black-and-white movie: shadows marching across the canyoned ceiling surface, slowly, for about three hours and then they disappear. It’s not much of a show, but the plotting is at least linear and unconflicted.

It’s been a fortnight, and we are lousy, scabrous, and covered in bites. Our wounds have not healed well. Fergal sits towards the corner nearest the light. He’s filing part of my belt buckle into a lock pick. He thinks the locks on the leg irons could be reasonably straightforward to pick since they’re all standard bolt jobs from the seventies. Fergal was a jemmy for a while, so maybe he would know, but Scotchy and I, unfortunately, know Fergal too well to hold out much hope. In any case, the lock on the door needs a big thick key and we don’t have the metal, so Scotchy doesn’t see the point of getting us out of the leg irons if we could never open the door. But he’s only saying that. He needs it as much as both of us.

It’s been ten days since they took out Andy. He’s buried by now, or cremated, or whatever it is they do around here. Eaten in some Mayan ceremony, for all I know. No one has said anything to us about him. No one’s said anything to us about anything, but I imagine now we’re pretty much screwed sideways. A dead gringo-that can’t be something you’d want the world outside to know about. They’ll bury the case, do nothing about us, let us rot. I mean, they couldn’t hush this up if we ever got out to tell the papers. I really don’t see how they can bail us now, of course. It’s the word of a drug smuggler, but the whole thing would still stink. I haven’t said anything about this to the others. Scotchy probably has his outside hopes still pinned to his friendship with Darkey, and Fergal’s energy is concentrated on his silly little pick.

We’ve been out to the yard several times and no one has bothered us. I think Andy got killed because they were after our clothes. It sounds stupid, but now that they have our shoes they’re leaving us alone. We got some straw for bedding, and for a while Scotchy had us making an attempt to clean the cell out a bit. He’s stopped in the last couple of days. It’s not the futility of the thing; rather, I think, he just doesn’t have the energy to boss us and keep himself together.

So there’s Scotchy sleeping, Fergal filing the belt buckle against the concrete. The flies, caterpillars, roaches, the sweat on my skin, and of course the ceiling.

The movie’s over, and it’s only four hours until dinner. The narrative kicks in without me. Agriculture, herds of animals. The dust rising from pilgrims coming to wash in the sacred river. Millions of them. The primary cult of the two kingdoms is shared by the majority of the population, but like the Endians, they hector one another over trivialities. One says you bathe only up to the waist, the other that the head must sink beneath the water. Scholars at universities debate it. Everyone wears turbans, incidentally, but some tie at the front and others at the back. They argue over that, too, it’s crazy. It’s like that Frank Gorshin episode of Star Trek.

There are hunting parties, dare raids over the divide, and occasionally kids are captured like Gary Powers, and there’s a whole ta-do. It’s tense, and everyone’s bored with their life and this is bringing on war fever. People grumble, and there’s hysteria mounting in the press. A prime minister of the left continent is debating with his cabinet the consequences of mobilization. They’re at a country house in an island group near the continental divide. The peace party thinks there will be universal slaughter if war breaks out; they’re right, of course. The peace party recalls to memory the events of the last border war. He’s talking and they’re listening, jaws agape. It’s not my story now, it’s Granpa Sam’s, the mudbath shambles of July 1916, shit and skulls. The Ulster Division slaughtered by companies and then by battalions and then by week’s end there is no one left at all. From the picture on the piano Granpa Sam loses forty-five friends, forty-five out of fifty, in the first twenty minutes. The piano and the brown photographs and a sword and a violin. How rigid everyone is, how formal. Were they like that, were they not profane like the rest of us?

And now where have these thoughts come from? Home. War. It’s a universe away. An ocean. But the sheugh is wide. Aren’t we still in the New World? Possibilities.

I leave them there in the mud, poison gas drifting back into their own trenches. I’m back with the farmers of the window continent. Mechanization has not yet hit. Neither has enclosure. There is proper crop rotation and the fields are left fallow in winter and every seventh year. The crops are hardy and adaptable and disease in this kingdom is rare. They have malaria in the swamps, but they have discovered quinine. There’s a light rain, a sun shower; people are tilling soft drumlins and in the background there’s a blue lough. They’re wearing woolen trousers and cotton shirts, flat tweed caps. They have butter and buttermilk and potato bread and veda. Yes, that’s better. For breakfast there is a toasted slice of soda with Dromona and Lyle’s Golden Syrup. And then, bejesus, you’re out in the crisp morning and into the fields. The sun’s out over the lough and it’s a wee bit like County Down. There’s a church and a tractor, and you’re baling hay. I don’t mind being back here. A big ganch with a blue face is driving the tractor and we’re on the ground with forks shoveling it up onto the back of the truck. Sweating and cursing and spinning yarns. It’s lunch and we’re only thirteen, but the oul boy’s wife has brewed us cider and we’re half tore from just the smell of it. Big jam pieces on batch bread with butter and homemade blackcurrant. Yeah, that’ll do. I close my eyes and drift.

Later.

Sitting up. Both boys are sleeping now. Scotchy: a scrawny red beard, hollow eyes, lank, slablike skin. Fergal: bloody fingers from his pick and a wild untrimmed beard like that of an insane man. Hair sticking out everywhere-I think the Indians are frightened of him. Fuck knows how I look. Never had a beard before. Got one now with no mirror to see how it becomes me.

In a wee while, Scotchy will wake and scratch himself, crotch first and then feet and then hair and then the rest of him. He’ll do that for half an hour and talk to himself for a minute or two and then, if he’s got the energy, he’ll talk to me. He’ll pare down his fingernails and scratch himself some more. Fergal will wake and lie still; you won’t be able to tell when he’s conscious or not. He’ll lie there, off in some private place. He’ll speak even less than Scotchy, and if he has his energy he’ll work on his pick. Of course, our hair will start to fall out soon. Scotchy informs us that vitamin C is stored in the body only for about six weeks. After that, it’s scurvy.

I’m thinking logically, trying to get a grip. Blacker thoughts. Things do not stand well. We’ve lost weight and we’re weaker, and I know for a certainty that I’m starting to get bedsores. My nails are brittle and my throat’s cracked and I’m crippled by lethargy. If they would only give us some limes it would make a huge difference.

Mealtime. We eat rice and drink water. I keep waiting for variation, but it’s not coming. Scotchy mumbles something about eating the crickets for protein, but I’m not there yet.

A day or two later, he orders us to do it. It’s a joke to think that Scotchy is in a position to give orders, but he has a point. The crickets are easy to catch, and it’s diverting. You crunch them and pretend they’re potato chips. You crunch them well, otherwise they writhe about on the way down your throat. The mantises, if anything, are worse for that behavior. Fergal refuses to eat the insects, and Scotchy laughs and says that that’s more for the rest of us.

Fergal goes back to his filing, Scotchy to his rage and mumbling. I go back to nothing. Nothing and then thoughts, regrets, fear.

Night.

Morning, we pick the lice out of each other’s hair. My story, the farmers, the war, the movie. Mealtime again. Evening coming so fast, and then the night again. And every night and day it’s louder out there. All the noises of the forest that go on forever, stopping only to pause and tease us, for an hour or two, in the hottest part of the day.

The morning comes, and there are no cockcrows or songbirds, just the end of that nighttime roar and the beginning of the daytime one. Back to my other place. Late summer and the harvest is coming in and the window people are fat and happy and unprepared and the door continent is envious as its people tug and pull at the dry earth.

Light comes in. We know a few of the guards: Squinty, Poxy, Bandit (because of his one arm), Pacino (his scarred face), Chunnel (his big nostrils), FDR (he can barely walk). Except for Squinty, they don’t speak any English or, if they do, they won’t. Squinty only has about five words and it’s pointless asking him anything. We know none of the other prisoners. If there’s a leader, it’s an Indian in jeans and Andy’s shoes. Some of the others seem to defer to him. But really, that’s not important. They don’t give a shit about us; they don’t even see us anymore.

Dreams of food. Cadbury’s chocolate, cream doughnuts, golden glistening fish and chips. Beer, a real pint of Guinness, viscous, bitter, smooth.

And her, always her. Those eyes and that smile. Those long legs that invite you to touch her, to hold her, to take her on the bed, to remove her green skirt and white panties. To feel her breath on yours, to ease yourself inside of her, to screw her and hold her and lick her sweat. And then to lie next to her on the cool sheets.

Sit there, bored, scratch myself, throw Scotchy a cricket, but he doesn’t stir. Sit there.

I pick one fly out of the hundreds and try to follow it. It lands in the slop bucket, takes off, lands on Fergal, takes off again, back to the slop bucket, over to me, lays something on my arm (got to keep still, so it can), and off again. It’s a nice symmetry, Scotchy, Fergal, me-the flies keeping us moored together through a bucket of our own liquid shit.

Eat your crickets, Bruce, harder to catch now, Scotchy says, and throws his back. I grab the fucker and I do eat it, and he smiles at me.

It’s another third day and we get unlocked. The whistle goes, and we walk around the yard, keeping to ourselves, frightened. No one speaks to us; we stay away from everyone else. For a minute, I stare angrily at the man wearing my sandals and then I catch myself at it and stop. The whistle blows, and we take our bucket and our straw and go back in.

Guards come and produce padlocks from a bag. Lock us down. Close the door.

I sit there wondering if the others will bother to speak. Fergal’s agitated and he does:

Boys, listen, wee old bloke with the limp was giving me the eye. Think I might be on ta something. He’s got information for us, I can tell, maybe about Big Bob, Fergal says, excitedly.

Maybe he wanted your arse, I suggest, slowly.

Scotchy grins at me.

No, no, he knows something, Fergal persists. Doesn’t trust you two, but he does me.

Aye, maybe he’s the head boy on the fucking escape committee, wants your help with the glider they’re making in block C, Scotchy says, with heavy sarcasm.

I wink at him.

No reason to get all eggy, Fergal says.

All the reason in the world, I think, Scotchy retorts.

Fergal grunts and goes back to the belt buckle.

Scotchy nods at me and I nod back. I try to think of something funny that will cheer us up, but I can’t. My brain is slow and won’t move.

I lie back and pick things out of my beard. I huddle down into the straw. Food comes, and we gobble it down. Dark, and we get afeared, but the noise at least keeps us company.

Another day and another. The weather breaks, and one day it rains and the whole floor oozes with damp, as if things weren’t bad enough. Scotchy develops a cough and his hacking keeps us awake at all hours. Fergal and I are probably thinking the same thing: that he’s going to be next. In the morning, we’re expecting him to be coughing blood, but he isn’t, and he actually looks a little better. He saves his voice, and when night comes he’s coughing less.

Gave us a scare there, mate, I whisper in the dark. Thought you were getting cholera or, more likely, AIDS or the clap or something.

Scotchy doesn’t say anything, but I can feel him smiling. I go back to sleep. Night, bad dreams. Another day of the same shite. Scotchy recovers from his cough, and we don’t get anything worse than we have. We are getting weaker, though, malnutrition and diarrhea, and I know that this cannot go on indefinitely.

But what else can we do but conserve our strength and hope for better times? Micawberism, but my brain is too addled for anything else.

On one day I decide that it’s my birthday. I don’t tell the others. I just sit there with the knowledge that my teenage years are done. And it’s that night that I go back, way back to where it all began.

Does the memory work like a journal or a logbook? Can you record words and faces and read them back years from now? Most professionals say no. You either use it or lose it. The mind isn’t a video camera or a computer or a big book. Oh aye? Well, how do you account for the smells and the details and the dialogue?

It’s all there.

Really.

And big brother, where are you? And Ma and Da, are you still in this world? You exist somewhere, even if only for a time in that place of dreams. Oh, I see it all.

My eyes close. It’s set. All those moments, together in one moment. Future, present, past.

And it comes back. PJ hiding. Davey Quinn. Mrs. Miller. The hair falling in tiny helicopter blades.

All those moments, together in one. Weird that many of them come together around the solstice, Saturnalia, Nativity, the mass of Christ; no, not weird, it’s a hard time. The Christmas of last year at the Europa, the Christmas of long ago in the lean, black tenement streets, the Christmas yet to be…

The rain ghostwriting itself on the windowsill. The smell of turf from the kitchen grate. Belfast there, in winter memory, oozed up from the mudflats of the lough.

PJ under the shed. Hiding. Toys with him. What toys? Fluorescent patches on soldiers moving about in the darkness. He’s playing antipersonnel mines and hurling the plastic bodies away from imaginary explosions. He’s three years older, but I’m more mature, preferring Lego to Action Men, which (oh, yes) is a moot point because I’ve lost all my Action Men to him on a bet as to whether I can make an effective parachute out of bedsheets that would take me without injury from the washhouse roof to the back garden…

Yes, I remember.

I want to hide too, and I think about either running away up into the fields or sneaking under the bunk in our bedroom, but that would mean going upstairs, which is out of the question since Granpa is wandering around up there in his pajamas, looking for his teeth and muttering things about the pope, the prime minister, and sometimes the kaiser.

Granpa.

I can run over to Davey’s house and try and wangle an extra dinner from his parents. They would hide me all evening if they could. They like me better than Davey himself because, despite being a Protestant, I always say “please” and “thank you” and call Shirley “Mrs. Quinn,” even though all of us know she isn’t really married to Davey’s da.

I’m mulling over the possibilities in front of the Flintstones on TV when the living room door opens.

Ma comes in with a pound note. She’s so pretty, young.

Here, she says.

What’s that for? I ask, affecting an unconvincing air of ignorance.

You know full well. Now get your brother.

I don’t know where he is, I attempt.

You don’t?

No.

Not even if there was ten pence in it for you?

You want me to squeal on PJ for a miserly ten p.?

Take it or leave it.

The coin sitting in her hand. Heads up. It’s one of those that has been defaced by the Provos. A big cross over the face of the queen.

Sometimes they don’t take those vandalized ones in the sweetie shop.

Ma looks at the ten pence and shrugs. She reaches in the pocket of her slacks. Blue ones, the ones with the permanent jam stain on the buttocks.

She brings out a Free State ten p. with a fish as the head side and a harp as the tails.

He’s under the hut, I say, taking my piece of silver and putting it in my shorts.

She opens the window.

PJ, get in here. I can see you.

He does not come.

PJ, you’re under the shed. I can see you from here.

A minute later he appears in the living room, shooting me a dirty look.

You grassed me up, ya bastard, he whispers as Ma goes to get him a new T-shirt to wear.

I never did.

Oh, you liar.

Are you calling me a liar?

Yes.

I’ll kick your bake in.

Like to see you try.

Like to see you stop me.

Like to see you try to stop me.

Oh, I’ll try.

Try is right.

Try and succeed.

Aye, you will?

Think I won’t?

Uh-huh.

Well, we’ll see, so we will.

Aye, we will?

Aye, we will.

I shoot him a confused expression.

What were we talking about again? I ask.

He grins at me and we both crack up laughing.

Wee bugger, he whispers to me as Ma comes back with a yellow T-shirt.

Put this on, she says. I can’t believe you were crawling under the shed with all those worms and things. Son, I tell you, I think your head’s cut sometimes. Good job your da’s not here.

Aye, when’s he ever? PJ whispers. I don’t answer, and we walk outside into the road.

Is there any way out of this at all? he asks me.

Not if you want any presents this year, I say.

We walk sullenly along the street. It’s dusk and there are a lot of kids out playing kerby and tag and football. For a December night, the weather isn’t bad. A group of girls playing hopscotch and jumping with a big rope. A mild evening and everyone excited about tomorrow.

A big tawny hound sitting right in the middle of the road, cars driving around it and honking at it, the dog paying no attention to them or to anything.

Mr. McClusky is trying to get his pigeons to fly into the coop, but they’re way up on the telephone wires.

Come down, you wee fucks, he’s saying to them over and over. Sooner or later his wife will come and reprimand him for his language in front of the kids. The pigeons will go into the coop anyway as soon as it gets cold.

Davey sees me farther up the road.

Hey, Mikey, what’s the craic? he shouts.

Nothing.

You wanna do nets?

I shake my head.

Can’t, I shout back.

What did you call me? he jokes.

We walk on, and a few doors down come to the house with a big hole in the fence. All the houses on the terrace are identical. They’re all redbricked and joined to one another in rows of six or seven. To get to the back garden, you have to go through the house itself or through a narrow entryway that two houses share. The only thing that distinguishes one house from another is how the gardens are kept. Some people grow flowers, others vegetables, some people have it all grass, and others-for some reason that neither PJ nor I understands-have the whole garden concreted over.

The Millers have gone for the uncared-for look. Their garden has three-foot-high grass and weird mechanical objects lurking in the undergrowth. We know they have a dog because of the amount of dog shite everywhere. The animal itself we have never seen. PJ speculates that it got lost in the grass and never made it back home and was now surviving on crickets and bits of postmen.

Or bits of little boys.

The only obvious concession to the season is a handwritten sticker in the window that says Double Milk Christmas Eve. Christmas they have spelled with no “h.”

We walk up the cracked path and bang on the knocker. At first no answer, and then a lot of swearing from the living room. We shrink back a little as footsteps come closer to the door.

It opens and Mr. Miller looks at us, very confused and angry for a second.

The bloody carols, is it? he says. Why aren’t you singing, ya wee fucks?

Er, it’s not, er…

If you think I’m going to give you a bloody penny without youse even opening your bakes to sing, you’ve another thing coming. Jesus, today youse weans want everything on a plate. That’s what’s the trouble. Fenians have the right idea. You always see them on the TV, working away, singing and doing that Irish dancing. They’re outbreeding us, so they are. Look at the Quinns down the road. They have ten weans, so they do, and she’s still up for more. You’d think they’d come to the door and not sing? Not that I’d give them anything. Bucket of water, maybe. Heh-heh…

Uh, we’re here for a haircut, Mr. Miller, PJ says, nervously.

Mr. Miller looks at the pair of us askance, cocking his head and thinking.

Oh aye, he says at last. Come on in. I’ll tell Mary.

PJ nudges me ahead of him into the house.

Go straight through to the kitchen, Mr. Miller says.

We walk along the hall, past the familiar pictures of war scenes and paintings of the Battle of the Boyne, all done by the head of the house himself with an uncanny and unfailing lack of talent. Mr. Miller has unorthodox views on perspective and characterization. In his paintings, King William looks much more a shipwrecked Ringo Starr than the commonplace image of a bewigged and magnificent King Billy that you can find on almost every Protestant street corner. Mr. Miller always paints Catholic King James to appear devilish and evil, although it’s hard to say which of the two kings looks the most like an actual human being.

PJ is always careful not to comment on the paintings, since the one time he did, Mr. Miller spent the next forty minutes explaining his motives and inspiration.

PJ pushes me in through the kitchen door and we sit down on the stools that are next to the table.

She’ll be down in a wee minute, Mr. Miller says and turns the lights on. He steps out of the kitchen, back into the living room, leaving us alone.

Through the open window all the smells of the street are coming in, teasing us with the promise of the world outdoors. Someone is cooking a fry and you can smell the bacon and the crisping of the potato bread.

There are big swarms of midges out doing maneuvers in the air and a few wasps that have survived the early frosts are buzzing from weed to weed in the Millers’ garden.

Maybe we could still make a break for it, PJ says. Nip out the back and over the fence.

I look at him with disdain.

Are you out of your tree, wee fella? Oul man Miller would shoot us.

How could he do that?

How do you think? With a gun.

He doesn’t have a gun.

He’s in the paramilitaries, I say, my voice dropping to a whisper.

You don’t know that, PJ mocks.

Ask Da when he gets in.

I will, and then you’ll feel wick.

No, you’ll feel wick.

No, you’ll-

PJ stops speaking as Mrs. Miller appears in the doorway.

She must have just gotten out of bed, because she’s still wearing her nightie and slippers. Over the top of them she has pulled a big red dressing gown that’s tied round the waist with a leather belt that has an Elvis buckle in the middle of it. It suddenly occurs to me that she was on the night shift down at the mill and that we had woken her up in the middle of her sleep.

Hello, boys, she says and runs her fingers through her long reddish blond hair a couple of times to take out the knots. I give her over the pound note and she smiles.

Who’s first? she asks.

I point at PJ before he can point at me.

Ok, up you come, PJ, she says, and moves his stool into the center of the floor. She danders to the sink and lights herself a cigarette and puts it in her mouth. She ties a tea towel round PJ’s neck and then pulls a pair of scissors and a comb from her dressing gown pocket.

The comb looks none too clean and I’m glad that PJ is getting his haircut first.

I tilt my stool back against the work surface and look around the room. The Millers have wallpaper which says “Du Pont” all over it. Mr. Miller had worked at the Du Pont plant up in Derry before he had gone to jail for whatever he had gone to jail for. All the parents in the street know his criminal past but no one will tell the kids, which only makes it seem much worse. Of course, there are rumors-the one that I believed had Miller as a getaway driver for the paramilitaries in a robbery that had gone wrong. Because (another rumor said) Mr. Miller had been too drunk to drive…

The rest of the kitchen is uninteresting, except for the two calendars on opposite sides of the wall. One is from a Chinese takeaway and has a picture of Hong Kong on it. The other is a calendar from the Sun newspaper and has a woman holding a football with her breasts out over the top of it. It’s always a new woman each month, unlike the picture of Hong Kong, which stays the same. I look at the Sun calendar and instantly color and feel sure that Mrs. Miller knows that I’ve been looking at the woman’s chest.

I stare at the floor and watch PJ’s brown snips of hair start to gather there on the tiles.

Mrs. Miller’s toenails are painted pink and you can see them through the holes in her slippers. You can see her leg, too, when she moves. I wonder how old she is and steal a look at her.

Around thirty is my guess. She has no lines on her face and the bags under her eyes are probably from tiredness more than anything else. She’s certainly an attractive woman-at least to me; and it makes no sense that she’s married to an eejit like Mr. Miller.

I look up at the calendar again and see that the girl’s name is Stacy. Her breasts are like enormous honeydew melons, shiny and plastic-looking. They’re amazing and repulsive at the same time, like a particularly gruesome monster from Doctor Who that you both want and don’t want to look at simultaneously. To end the confusion they’re causing, I look at the floor again.

I find that I’m sweating. I gaze over at PJ and see that he’s only half done. I’m breathing rapidly and my hands are all clammy. I try looking out of the window, but the Millers’ backyard is just as grown over as their front and you can see nothing.

Suddenly the door opens and Mr. Miller comes in.

PJ says Ow as Mrs. Miller nicks him on the ear with the scissors.

Look at what you made me do, Mrs. Miller says to her husband, ash pouring out of her cigarette all over PJ’s head.

I made you do? Jesus. Can’t even get a drink of water in me own house, Mr. Miller says, angrily.

Jesus Christ, can you just wait five minutes, for God’s sake, Mrs. Miller says, spitting the words out.

Aye. Fucking shite, Mr. Miller says and stomps out, banging the door behind him. We hear him storm up the stairs, cursing all the way.

PJ and I are both bright red by this stage.

Mrs. Miller looks at me and smiles a sort of half smile.

Hold on, she says to PJ, and slides out the kitchen door after her husband. We hear her go up the stairs too. PJ turns round and looks at me. His face is a study in anguish.

I wish I was already bloody bald, he says quietly.

Aye, like Simon Baskin.

Who?

Yon boy from P4, cancer boy.

Oh, aye, PJ says, but I can see he’s too afeared for conversation.

We sit for a minute, PJ picking the bits of ash out of his hair and me biting my nails. The door opens and Mrs. Miller comes back in.

Ok, she says cheerfully and lights herself another cigarette. In two more minutes she declares that PJ is done. He takes the tea towel from round his neck and thanks her.

And, uh, now I have to go home to go to do some homework, PJ says.

Oh, you do? Mrs. Miller says.

Yes, PJ says, ignoring my telepathic protests and a desperate grab at his sleeve.

I’ll see you out, she says, and leads him to the front door. I can hardly believe it. He is supposed to wait for me. I don’t want to be alone in this house. I watch him go down the hall and Mrs. Miller open the front door. Light comes pouring in and PJ runs into it and then he’s suddenly gone. Spirited away, like the wee fella from Close Encounters.

Your turn, Mrs. Miller says.

I sit on the stool while she ties the tea towel round my neck to collect the hair.

Same as usual, Mikey boy? she asks.

Uh, yeah.

It’s hard to breathe over the cigarette smoke and the odor of her perfume. I struggle not to cough.

Mrs. Miller starts cutting my hair. Her hands combing a bit and then cutting it. Her fingers are cold and smooth. She works a little at the side and then comes forward to do my fringe.

As she leans in I can see through the fold in her dressing gown, right through to her nightie. I blink for a second and look away. She tilts my head until I’m looking into her hands. Keep still now, she says.

The scissors make their way across my forehead, snipping little cusps of black hair onto the tea towel and down onto the floor.

There, she says, blowing smoke towards the window. That’s better, isn’t it?

Uh, I think so, I say, barely able to get the words out.

She takes another puff on the cigarette. Her fingers are almost as white as the paper around the tobacco.

I’ll touch up the back, she says.

She slips behind me and begins trimming the hair round the back of my ears. I can feel her breath on my neck as she struggles with the difficult bits. She had been a hairdresser for five years before she got the job at the mill. She was quick and she was half the price of the hairdresser down at the shopping center, or the barber in town. She was a friend of Ma’s, anyway, and Da let Mr. Miller in to use the phone all the time. Ma says she could cut our hair herself, but with him unemployed, it was all she could do to help.

There’s a noise from the living room like something falling. Mrs. Miller stops cutting. I turn round to look at her.

Just then Mr. Miller shouts, Mary (so loud you could probably hear it at our house).

Oh, I forgot completely, Mrs. Miller says in a panic. She puts down the scissors, dashes to a cupboard, and grabs a glass. She goes to the sink, runs the tap for a second, and fills it with water before practically sprinting out into the hall.

There’s more swearing from the living room. The only words I can make out-from Mr. Miller, of course-are: On bloody Christmas bloody Eve.

There’s the sound of something that might be a slap.

Mrs. Miller comes into the hall, staggering. Mr. Miller is right behind her. His fist clenched, he pulls it back and turns and stops. He stares at me sitting there under the kitchen light with the tea towel around my neck.

What the fuck are you looking at? he says.

Nothing, I’m going to say, should have said. Definitely should have said. But instead, these words come out:

A real hard man.

Mr. Miller is flabbergasted. He knows I’m being sarcastic. A ten-year-old taking the bloody piss. His face goes white, and then red. He storms into the kitchen and stands beside me.

What did you say? he whispers, leaning close.

N-nothing, I stammer.

He hesitates, unsure of whether to brain me then and there or tell my da, or get me in some more devious way.

Damn fucking right, you wee fucking bastard, he yells and brings his fist right up to my face and shakes it. He turns to his wife.

Gimme your money. I’m going to the fucking Rangers Club. Fucking bitch. Fucking weans.

He grabs the pound note and storms out, slamming the door. She picks up the scissors and starts cutting my hair again. She does a few combs and then cuts the back line and then that appears to be it.

Well, she says. That’s all, folks.

Thanks, I say.

She comes round to face me. She’s smiling, but there are tears welling up in her. She sniffs a little and dabs her eye with the hem of her dressing gown.

Are you ok, Mrs. Miller? I ask, anxiously.

She looks at me and smiles again, her lips parting a little and becoming moist and crimson under the strip light. Slowly, she reaches out her hand and touches me on the cheek with fingers so cold you would have thought she was a long time dead.

You’re a good boy, Michael, she says, and then her hand comes down to my neck and undoes the tea towel. She shakes the hairs out onto the floor, the loose curls floating down like tiny rotor blades.

Thank you very much, I say.

See you next month, she says, and puts her hand on my arm and sees me to the front door.

She runs her fingers through my hair, and I stand there on the porch for a moment.

She touches my face again and smiles, turns, and closes the door.

I run down the path into the street.

There’s light outside from the aurora. It’s white and gold and so strong you can almost see the outline of Knockagh Mountain.

Who’s the skinhead? Davey Quinn asks me, and I chase him all the way up to the graveyard.

Later, we both come down to the street and take opposite sides in the football game. Davey’s team wins, but I score a goal, so everything works out ok in the end.

When it’s late and chilly, I find PJ out in the shed and we sit by the paraffin lamp and tell each other scary stories. Many about Mr. Miller. We’re happy. The haircut’s over and tomorrow is Christmas and we’ll go to Nan’s house and there will be presents that Nan has bought for us out of her pension. She’ll have made dinner, too. Turkey, potatoes, pavlova, trifle.

We sit there and just think for a while. Ma should be calling us in to bed but Ma’s next door smoking and chatting with Mrs. Parkinson.

You know the way I asked Nan for the cardboard Death Star? PJ says after a time.

Aye.

I don’t think I want it now. I think I’m sick of all that Star Wars shite.

Really?

Yeah.

And your Action Men, too?

Aye, sick of all that. You can have them back.

I can?

Aye.

What’s got into you?

I don’t know.

Later, under the cool sheets of the upper bunk, I ponder this and other things, but eventually they all vape and there’s only one topic on my mind. Someday I would rescue her. In just a few years. When I was older. I would go in and punch him out and take her and we’d disappear across the water to England or America or somewhere where the sun shone and the sky was blue and we were far from soldiers and paramilitaries and bombs and violence. But, of course…

And yes, that was the night.

Later that evening Da came in singing and blitzed to high heaven. There were voices. Things flew. Things crashed.

Ma said, Over my dead body you will.

And he said, You’ll fucking do as you’re told. This is man’s business, and you’ll keep your fucking neb out of it.

And Ma’s one to overegg the custard when she gets the chance and said that if it was man’s business what was it to do with him.

He said that she was to shut the fuck up if she knew what was good for her.

And she said something that I’m sure was sarcastic and funny and he couldn’t think of a reply, and there was an almighty smash of something and she screamed that that was a wedding gift. A slap. A sob.

I knew that PJ would have the pillow over his ears, but I could hear.

I could hear.

It was 1982 and the year after the hunger strikes, and tension was as high as I ever remembered it. In Belfast, riots were as general as Joyce’s snow. Every night, petrol bombs and blast bombs, the peelers keeping apart Protestant and Catholic and sometimes nobody would get killed. Here in the northern suburbs, though, it was less of a problem; things were calmer, but it was like your pan of milk on the cusp, a slight notch up on the heat… Anything or anyone could make it overboil and scald.

And Mr. Miller believed that he was the boy who could make the magic. Really, he wasn’t much of a player, big to us, but small time in the larger scheme of things. But still. He was the boy. And later, when it went to shit, I couldn’t help but feel that I was partly responsible. You do that as a wean, you think the world revolves around you. Sometimes I used to think that when I left a room all the people in it froze like with the pause button on a video and only started up when I came back in again.

Epiphany came thirteen days early for PJ and me and Ma and Da. Oh aye.

Seething with fury and looking for trouble, Mr. Miller went down to the Rangers Club. Mr. Miller talked a great game and said that they were all yellow bastards down there, and if they really meant what they said about helping the police and the forces of law and order, they’d do something about it. He persuaded about half a dozen eejits that the best way of assuring the future of Northern Ireland as a political entity was to do a firebomb attack on a Catholic housing estate. In the brilliance of their plan they were all to go home and make Molotovs, and he and Arthur Durant would drive them over in Arthur’s van. Mr. Miller made especially sure that our da came along. Oh yes, that was how he’d get me. Maybe he would have had Dad fire the first Molotov or maybe he’d have got Dad’s prints on a bottle. In any case, he was arranging it so that ever after he would have something over him. The best laid plans…

They never got anywhere near the estate.

They were stopped by the army for driving too fast, the Molotovs were discovered in half a minute, and everyone was arrested. Marty Bains turned rat, and Da and Mr. Miller and all the rest got five years for conspiracy to cause explosions.

There followed an inevitable, clichéd, and speedy progression: Ma divorced Da, turned to drink, started smoking again, turfed out Granpa, starting going with Mrs. Miller to the Central Bar, took up with Mr. Henry, who owned the butcher’s, and since Mr. Henry and us didn’t get along, sent us to live with Nan in East Belfast.

Mrs. Miller stayed with her husband and somehow conceived a bairn, who is, I’m sure, a credit to his people.

Like his grandfather and great-grandfather before him, PJ went to sea, leaving at the age of fifteen, and is now… where?

Me? I lived with Nan, and God bless her, she’s a wonderful woman, but no disciplinarian, and things fell such that I went to the world of violence: the rackets and the army and America. From there to here.

And that was then and this is now.

Events, trapped by them, by history.

Trapped, and in this cell forever? I don’t think so. For like I say, Another Christmas coming. Another Christmas Eve…