Return to Killybegs

12

On 20 October 1979, I was sentenced to fifteen months in prison. A grass from the ghetto had informed on me. For security reasons, he was hidden behind a curtain when he testified before the judge. Just his voice condemning me.

— Meehan struck the youth while telling him that the IRA punish dealers. That if he came back to the ghetto with his gear, he’d put a bullet in his knee…

I closed my eyes. I knew that fearful way of speaking. Maybe it was Paddy Toomey, given a hiding by our guys for having made a mess of his wife after coming home from the pub. Or Liam Moynihan, who’d been forced to leave the ghetto after an attempted rape. I leaned forward slightly, trying to find out. A tweed shoulder, a shadow of an arm behind the curtain…

— Sit up, Meehan.

I shrugged indifferently. One after another, we passed through these Diplock courts. A single magistrate, no juries, hidden witnesses. To send me to prison for having threatened a dealer? The British were wide of the mark. Our army was restructured, organized into closed units. I was smiling at the magistrate. He was avoiding my eye. After having been the leader of the 2nd Battalion, then of the Beflast Brigade, I had just been appointed to the IRA Army Council. The wee chap in black hadn’t the least idea who he was trying. Fifteen months? A gift. And yet it turned out to be a nightmare.

Since 1 March 1976, the imprisoned Republicans and Loyalists had lost their status as prisoners of war. Overnight, through the violence of the Special Powers Act, we became bandits and were forced to wear the same prison garb as the common criminals. On 14 September 1976, when I arrived in Long Kesh, Kieran Nugent demanded to remain naked in his cell. He wrapped himself in his blankets. He was nineteen years old and he was the one who started it. A second followed suit, then a third. Frank ‘Mickey’ Devlin, the guy with the pen, was the ninth.

In March 1978, beaten every time they went to the showers, the lads broke their furniture and refused to leave their cells. In retaliation, the screws removed everything, leaving only the mattresses on the floor. Several days later they stopped taking out the slop buckets. When they overflowed, the Republican soldiers decided to piss on the ground, shit in their hands and spread their excrement on the walls.

When I entered H-Block 4 of the prison compound on Thursday, 1 November 1979, three hundred comrades had been naked in their blankets and living in their shit for three years.

I hadn’t trembled in a long time. In front of the five warders, I took off my clothes without a word, without a look. I thought of Jack, of my boy, who had entered this room five months earlier. A mirror was placed on the ground. I crouched down without them having to ask, opened my anus with my fingers. I was fifty-four years old. The screws were younger than me. One of them handed me the prison clothes, carefully folded, petrol-blue with yellow stripes. I looked the kid in the eye and spat on the fabric.

The warders didn’t like my gesture. I was beaten. They threw me naked into a cell with a final kick in the back. My forehead hit the ground, my cheekbone. I was lying on my stomach, I sat up with difficulty. My thumb was sprained, a couple of my ribs were cracked. I was bleeding from the mouth and nose. A burning trickle was rolling down the back of my neck. The top of my head was damaged. I ran my hand over it. A bite. A chunk of flesh was missing. My left leg started to shake. I hugged my chest. It was cold. I looked around the cell. In a corner lay a scrap of a man, buried in his mattress.

— Jack?

I didn’t recognize my voice. Like a creaking door.

I was afraid it might be him, and I hoped it wouldn’t be. But it wasn’t. It was someone else’s son. He turned to me, got up slowly from his corner of the room. He was very young, slender or scrawny, more grey than pale, with a chaotic beard, and hair to his shoulders. Without a word, he took the folded blankets from the free mattress, draped them over my shoulders and sat down beside me. Then I lowered my guard. I don’t know why. That gesture, maybe. That coarse gentleness, that watchful silence. Perhaps also his eyes meeting mine. I breathed in little jerks. I released the warmth of my urine. I was pissing. The warm, glistening pool expanded underneath me. He didn’t move back. It reached his bare foot, surrounded it, continued its path of piss under the bed.

He held out his hand.

— Aidan Phelan, West Tyrone Brigade.

— Tyrone Meehan, Belfast Brigade.

He smiled.

— Danny Finley’s friend, I know. And it’s an honour for me.

Then he lit a cigarette, rolling tobacco in a margin of his Bible.

— The guys say Matthew burns better, but I prefer the Epistles.

He inhaled an acrid drag and handed it to me.

— St Peter, St Paul, makes no difference…

We smoked in silence. I was looking round the dark room. Rotten food was piled up in mucous mounds along the wall. An accumulation of filth, of moist decay, of decomposition. And then the shit, spread right up to the ceiling. Finger marks. A crucifix hanging on the broken light switch. I shivered.

When they led me to the cell, the screws were wearing masks. The air was as thick as a sewer. I didn’t know that a smell could line the throat. By the time night fell, I had almost grown used to the stench, my sticky legs, the cold, the darkness, and all of our shit.

— Is cimí polaitiúla muid!

A voice from far off. The shout from a cell. My language.

— We are political prisoners! Aidan threw back, hobbling as far as the door.

— Táimid ag cimí polaitiúla! I roared in turn.

Up until that point, I hadn’t seen another soul. Only the screws’ hateful faces. And now here was this clamouring from my comrades, my friends, my brothers in arms. Dozens of furious, stony, beautiful voices. A magnificent din. Cries accompanied by raised fists, hammering the doors with bare flesh. I listened for my child’s voice in the heart of all that anguish. And then again I didn’t want to hear.

— Tiocfaidh ár lá! the first prisoner took up, roaring over the tumult.

— Tiocfaidh ár lá! the others responded. ‘Our day will come!’

— That was your first evening prayer, my companion smiled.

And then everything went quiet.

At night, Aidan would sometimes cry. He’d whimper like a child, pulling the blanket right up over his head. One morning I looked at him. He was sleeping on his belly, mouth open, cheek squashed. His arm was trailing on the ground. White maggots were wriggling in his hair and on the back of his hand.

After thirteen months, I looked the same as him. My hair was covering my ears and my nose in greasy clumps. My beard was long and messy. One face mirrored the other. I could see my gauntness in his drawn features, his dull skin, his eyes rimmed in black.

In his corner of the cell, he used to organize cockroach races. And I’d make him recite the thirty-two counties of Ireland.

— Meath… Mayo… Roscommon… Offaly…

I taught him Irish words. The prison essentials.

— Póg mo thóin!

— Kiss my arse! That was his favourite war cry, and he muttered it every time a screw opened the door.

We had decided to shit together, to make a ceremony of this private act and transform the humiliation into a shared ritual. He’d crouch down to the left of the door, I’d go in my hands. Then we’d smear our excrement over the wall with fingers spread wide, in big warm circles. In the beginning I used to vomit. The savagery of the image, the violence of the smell. And then, bit by bit, I learned to turn my disgust into rage. Fresh coats over dried coats, I spread the human rendering without feeling ashamed.

The prisoners had fashioned pipes out of rolled-up cardboard and they used to slide them into the cracks between the cell doors and the ground. At a set time, just after the meal, we would all piss into those tubes, spilling our urine into the corridor.

— They’ll never break us! my friend used to say.

We were forbidden visitors and post, locked up night and day without exercise. We had given up passing the time. We spoke little. We used to sit with our heads down for hours on end. Often, we wouldn’t even dare meet the other’s eyes.

— If we get out of here, we can never tell anyone about this, Aidan said one day.

— But everyone on the outside knows about it, I told him.

He shook his head.

— You think they know, Tyrone? But what is it they know, for Christ’s sake? Nobody can understand what we’re living through in here! Shit is just a word to them, Tyrone! It’s not matter! It’s not this filth that slides between your fingers!

One morning the warders opened our door, yelling, accompanied by helmeted police. They were running in the corridor, banging the walls with their batons. At the howling of the other inmates, we got up. Aidan pressed himself against me, back to back, nape against nape. We chained ourselves together, arm of one clasped through the other’s, fists clenched against our chests. We were bellowing at life, at fear. We shook with our fury. We formed a single body, which they broke apart with savage blows.

I was knocked to the ground, my blankets snatched away from me, then dragged by the legs into the corridor. The line of clubs. Protected by their riot shields, they were taking their revenge on these fucking Irish, on their blankets, on their shit, on their insults, on their contempt. They were beating naked men. Heads, legs, backs, raised arms. They were marking us. They were leaving their traces.

I was pulled by my beard and hair to the shower room. I struggled and shouted. I no longer hurt, no longer felt anything. The shouts from the others were intoxicating. For a moment, I thought they were going to kill us. Terror. There were three screws. They were keeping me on the floor. Arm locks, hands gripping my neck. I repaid them by scratching, spitting. And then I was lifted up like a sack and thrown heavily into a bathtub of freezing water. They were going to drown me. I threw my arms and legs about. A blow to my jaw. I fell back, head hitting the wall. They were washing me. They were scouring a year of resistance away. A screw was scrubbing me with a hard brush. My back, my arms. He was rubbing down a bad horse. Scraping the shit off a toilet bowl. He was puffing, mouth open, threatening my father, my mother, and all the pigs of my kind.

He shouted.

— That’s for Agnes Wallace, you filthy bastard! Does that mean anything to you, Agnes Wallace?

My howls were drowning out his voice.

— And William Wright? That means nothing, either? You IRA scum!

He was scrubbing me violently, scraping me clean. He held my hands on the lip of the bath and forced the bristles under my nails. He was barking names in my ear.

— William McCully! John Cummings!

He was whacking rhythmically with the back of the brush.

— Robert Hamilton! John Milliken!

Milliken. I remembered. A head warder of the penitentiary administration, shot by the IRA on his way home.

Good Christ! He was avenging his dead.

— Thomas Fenton, you scumbag! Desmond Irvine, you murderer!

The second screw had taken over. He was tearing my hair out. He ploughed into my skull with blunt scissors. He cut, he slashed.

— Micky Cassidy! Gerald Melville!

Then I responded.

— James Connolly! Patrick Pearse! Eamonn Ceannt!

I bellowed with all my might. Blood for blood, rage for rage, their victims for mine.

The scissors took away part of my ear.

— Albert Miles!

— Tom Williams!

— Nazi! shouted the screw with the brush. Filthy fucking Nazi!

I had blood in my eyes. The third screw was choking me. He had wrapped his forearm around my neck. He was squeezing. I could barely breathe. My mouth was open, tongue hanging out, I clenched my jaw in vain. Before my eyes, on his tattooed arm, the pole of a Union Jack pierced through the Irish flag.

— You killed Danny Finley!

They pushed my head under the water and kept it there, one hand on my skull, the other on the nape of my neck, legs hobbled by two arms and a boot on my waist. Until I passed out.

On the way back, we met spacemen. A dozen guys with protective gloves, boots, overalls, transparent masks and waterproof hoods. They were carrying cleaning equipment, power hoses, vacuum cleaners.

— Go back to Mars, bastard! growled a wounded prisoner.

I was returned to my cell by my regular warder. An odd guy, almost bald and older than the others. He always had a word or a look for us.

We called him ‘Popeye’. Every single time he brought us our evening mess he’d glance around our cell with a sorry look on his face. He’d lift his paper mask, as though wanting to share our ordeal, shake his head and murmur:

— Jesus Mary!

He must have been a Catholic.

One day, he asked me to give up the dirty protest. To accept the blue uniform. I was alone in the cell. Aidan had been transferred to the prison service to learn that his sister had died, killed in a fire. Usually Popeye would remain in the doorway. This time, he came in. He stopped in the middle of the room, away from the soiled walls. He placed my mess on the mattress.

— Even animals don’t live like this.

I listed out our demands. I chanted our slogans. And I felt bad for doing it. He was speaking to me man to man and I was replying like a robot. Because his colleague was waiting in the corridor Popeye whispered cautious words. He told me that the public couldn’t care less about our shit, that the British would leave us like that for a thousand years if that was what it took. He told me that outside of our ghettos, with their isolated circle of Irish Republicans, the world wasn’t the slightest bit interested in us.

— It’s been four years now. Four years, do you get it? And look how far you’ve got. It’s you who’s living in the shit, Meehan, not Margaret Thatcher.

Often the other screws took the piss out of him, so the prisoners used to stand up for him. There were some amongst us who considered his compassion a manoeuvre — the good cop, bad cop tactic. But one evening, when Aidan was crying over his sister, Popeye proposed delivering a letter to his family for him. He made him promise that it wouldn’t be political. A letter of commiseration, words of comfort from a son to his grieving parents. And Aidan accepted. It was a crazy act for both men, criminal under prison law. For Popeye, it was treason.

Aidan shut himself off, facing the wall. First he spent a long time choosing a passage from the Bible, then he tore out the page. He read it to me.

—‘A prayer for help against the foe’, Psalm 60. David addresses God:

Thou hast showed thy people hard things:

Thou hast made us to drink the wine of astonishment …

He asked me what I thought of his choice. I made no reply. Yes, said Aidan, God has been making us see. And this ordeal was, for him, the proof of His presence. Then he spent a long time writing in the margins. Tiny script, cramped, the same used by prisoners before the blanket protest began, when we still had visitors. When we recounted our lives on sheets of cigarette paper folded over and over until they were no larger than a nail. Those stowaway secrets, enveloped in tinfoil and clingfilm. Those messages hidden in men’s cheeks in place of a missing filling. Those notes passed from one tongue to another in the visitors’ room at the moment of a kiss.

One evening after dinner the warder left with our two messes, and the message buried in some leftover white beans.

The astronauts were going into the cells. Popeye was carrying me, hugging me around the waist. I had my hand on his shoulder. I was whimpering, swallowing my saliva and my blood. Everything hurt. My knees were knocking with every step. My skin was burning, as though it had been burnt to a crisp by the sun and then rubbed with sand. Everything was spinning around me. I stumbled. I waited a moment for the ground to become still.

And it was at that instant that I saw Robert Sands. For the first and last time in my life. The prisoner who used to start shouting in Irish once night fell: that was him. People had told me about him on the outside, their voices full of respect. He was twenty-seven years old. Before the blanket protest he had been writing articles and poems for the Republican press, drawing, giving classes in Irish. Bobby Sands had been arrested in a car along with four óglaigh. There had been one gun between five of them in the vehicle. And he got fourteen years in prison.

— Your leader is in a bad way, Popeye murmured.

Bobby commanded the IRA within the prison compound. Two screws were taking him back to his cell. They held him under his armpits, one on either side, and they were dragging him carelessly along the floor.

— Don’t watch.

I closed my eyes. I just caught a glimpse of him, half-covered by his blanket. Behind my closed eyelids I could still see his white skin and the marks of the blows. His arms were dangling and his legs were jelly, bare feet sliding along the tiles. His head hung listlessly. A soul wrapped in a coarse shroud.

A shock awaited me in my cell. The floor was wet and everything smelled of Javel, ammonia, chlorine — a mixture of morgue, toilets and hospital. The walls had been cleaned. Nothing left of us but the dark shadow of our dirt. They had soaked our blankets and our mattresses. Aidan was in his usual spot, his wet blanket around his waist and over his shoulders. He had shorter hair on one side and a large white dent at the front of his skull. He was rubbing his knees. I joined him in his corner. From his side, you could see the whitish light from outside. It was raining. I was in pain. My skin, my head. My blood was pounding through my veins. At the back of my jaw, two teeth were broken. My tongue was a wound. One of Aidan’s eyes was closed, my mouth was hanging open. We didn’t fight the silence. We waited for the night, pressed up against one another wordlessly.

— Tiocfaidh ár lá!

— Our day will come!

A roar in the corridor. The last of us had got back to his cell. I had dozed off, back against the wall. I looked up. Aidan was questioning me silently. He was smiling in the dark. The warders still hadn’t turned on the lights. And then he got up. He went over and squatted next to the door, in his little corner, under the crucifix. So I got up. He shit on the ground, I shit in my hands. And we began to repaint our cell.

When I left the Kesh on 7 January 1981, I hugged Aidan. I squeezed him as I would Jack. Our beards, our hair tangled together, our soiled blankets, our pride. Bobby Sands was organizing a hunger strike in order to obtain political prisoner status. From cell to cell, we had reformulated our demands. We had five of them and they were pathetic. The right to wear civilian clothes, to associate freely with other prisoners and not to have to work for the prison. We wanted to receive one visit, one letter and one parcel per week. We also wanted full restoration of remission lost through our protest.

I asked Aidan not to add his name to the list of prisoners volunteering for martyrdom. He was nineteen and had a little girl aged two. Sentenced to barely five years, he would walk out one day. He’d take care of her.

Because we knew that this strike would be fatal.

The previous year, in October 1980, seven prisoners had fasted for two and a half months. In Armagh Prison, three women had stopped eating. London bided its time. Negotiating a halt to the movement, the British promised to re-examine prisoner status. The hunger strike ceased. Mary and the two Mairéads agreed to eat, as did Tom, Séan, Leo, Tommy, Raymond and John. As did Brendan, the IRA officer running the prison camp, who was later replaced by Bobby Sands. One month on, the Northern Ireland Secretary of State, Humphrey Atkins, went back on his word. The Republican prisoners remained common criminals.

Bobby had accepted bringing the first fast to a halt, so it was up to him to take the lead in the second. The anguish of having been deceived added to his determination. He began his hunger strike on 1 March 1981, others followed, one per week, and the living men took over from the dead.

But not Aidan. Not him. I don’t know why I made him promise. There, between those walls, I had no authority to give him orders. Officer on the outside, the barbed wire and watchtowers had made me a simple soldier. Nobody could ever persuade Bobby Sands to quit his hunger strike. Not the Irish Republican Army Council, not all our leaders, not all our priests, not all the prayers of the women in our streets, not his sister, not his mother, not the tears of Gerald, his seven-year-old child. And yet I was begging this young lad to live. I asked him to do it for me.

— You stay alive, I said to Aidan Phelan.

He promised me as a son. And he kept his word.