Everything in This Country Must (6 page)

He had tried to dig his heels in and for the first time ever she had slapped him, lightly, on the cheek. They were standing outside a butcher’s shop. It had been burned down earlier that week and a couple of charred carcasses were still hanging on hooks. The boy stared over her shoulder at the meat that dangled in midair. Her light slap still stung his cheek and then he had begun to cry and they walked the streets together, her arm around his shoulder.

At home on Casement Row she locked the door, turned off the lights, and then she began to soak a duvet in the bath as she always did, just in case.

They sat in the darkness and listened to the sounds of the street.

He could tell a Saracen just by the way the wheels sounded against the tarmac. Or the direction of a helicopter by whichever windowpanes were rattling more, front or back. He picked at the stuffing that came from the arm of the couch and secretly spat the yellow sponge across the room. Boys his age were out there, firing stones. He had developed a specific scowl for his mother to see. It involved lifting the left side of his lip and scrunching up the side of his face. The scowl deepened as the riots went on, week after week.

There were all sorts of discussions on the radio as representatives of those on the blanket protest began to talk about a hunger strike. Decriminalization, remission, segregation, intransigence, political status. The words spun around in the boy’s head.

He thought that God must have been a sly and complicated bastard to give people different words for normal things.

There was a statue of the blessed Saint Martin de Porres that they kept on the mantelpiece. His mother liked it, she joked, because it looked like Al Jolson. She took it down from the shelf when the hunger strike began and the boy had asked her why but she didn’t reply. He thought maybe it had something to do with music. She was singing in a bistro in the city center. When the riots were at their worst she would take him to the bistro and have him sit on a stool near the piano, where he did his homework. She sang from seven until ten. The restaurant was quiet and she bought him a lot of Cokes, sang love songs that had no politics to them. She had a beautiful voice and sometimes he thought it was made more beautiful by all the cigarettes she smoked. He would watch the customers as they whispered. They were conspiratorial. They didn’t talk loud or address each other by the clue of their first names. They hunched over their plates. It seemed to the boy that even the food was under siege.

At the end of the evening she always sang a song about ferrying her love over the ocean, but the sea was too wide and she could not swim over and neither did she have wings to fly.

He and his mother took a taxi home each evening and he would watch her in the kitchen, staring at the back door, a teacup shaking in her hand, cigarette smoke curling up from the butt placed on the edge of the saucer.

In her nightdress she would practice moving through the dark of the house, beginning in the kitchen, then along the hallway, her eyes closed, touching the welcome mat with her toes, reaching out to check the bolt on the door, turning around, climbing the stairs without holding the banisters, still blind so she would learn the whole landscape of the house, along the landing, and into the bathroom, where she would take the duvet out from the airing cupboard. And then she would kneel down by the bath to run the water, all the time her eyes still shut tight, both taps fully opened. She would plunge the duvet into the water and finally she would carry the dripping mass down the stairs and lay it against the bottom of the door in case the street outside went up in flames.

Always that strange collaboration. Outside, the arc of color. Inside, the duvet soaking.

*   *   *

THE BOY TRIED
to stake out a cell in the caravan, one window, one bed, a jug of water, a fluorescent light, a chair, a galvanized bucket for a chamber pot. He stayed in the space, not breaking its borders, hungry for three hours until she came home—her face flushed with drink, he thought—and she was carting groceries: sausages, eggs, cheese, black pudding, three fresh loaves of bread.

I got the job.

Did you hear any news?

Two nights a week, she said.

Any news, Mammy?

Isn’t that great?

Mammy.

She sat down at the table and lit a cigarette and stared at the ash as it crumpled and flared. His first day he went to see the doctor, she said. They took his weight and his blood pressure and all that. Gave him a water cooler and some salt tablets and they put him in a cell on his own.

Salt tablets?

I think he must need them for—

Isn’t salt a type of food?

I don’t know, love. I don’t think so.

How much water does he drink?

A few pints a day, I suppose.

How much weight has he lost?

Oh, God, I don’t know, maybe a pound, love. Maybe more.

The boy pondered this for a while and then asked: Is he okay?

He’s fine, I think. They put food by his bed though.

They what?

They put food in his cell just in case. Leave it by his bed. On a little tray they wheel in and out. I heard it’s better food than they ever gave him before. And they count every last chip and pea.

Pigs, said the boy, and he was delighted when she didn’t scold him.

Did Grandma visit? he asked.

There’s no visits. There’s a priest in the prison and he phones her at night and he tells her everything that’s going on. And some others keep in touch with her, too. And there’s notes, they write notes on pieces of cigarette paper and get them smuggled out.

Jesus, they must have wild wee handwriting.

She gave a little chuckle and finished off the last of her cigarette. He noticed that she was smoking them farther than ever before, dragging all the way down to the filter, burning all the white paper, and that her fingers were a darkening yellow.

Will he write me one?

You never know, but I’m sure he’s exhausted.

Can we visit when there’s visits?

We’ll see.

A thought occurred to him and he asked: How much does he weigh?

She was startled and said: No idea, love.

Approximately?

I don’t know, love. I haven’t seen him in oh I don’t know how many years. When your father and I got married, that was the last time, he was one of the ushers. All jazzed up in a suit and dickie bow and he looked good. But now, oh, I couldn’t even guess.

Approximately, Mammy.

She scrunched her eyebrows: Ten and a half stone maybe, but you shouldn’t be thinking about that, love, he’s going to be all right, don’t think that way, it’s not good.

Why not?

Ah, come on, love.

Come on where?

Young man. Don’t push it please …

You said come on.

I said enough.

Pardon me?

Enough! she shouted.

Enough what? he said gently.

She slammed her fist down on the table and there was silence.

He entered his space again and he lay on the thin yellow mattress and he put his arms behind his head, stared at the ceiling, imagined himself into his uncle’s body, his knuckles tightening white around a bed frame, knives and forks banging against a heating pipe, the sound of boots along a metal catwalk, the taunts of screws, helicopters outside the window flying over the razor wire, candles winking at a vigil outside the gate, the light slowly dwindling, prayers being intoned, his stomach beginning the first of its small and poignant rumblings. A plate of cod appeared on the table beside him, with a slice of lemon and a big heaping of chips. An apple tart with ice cream. Packets of sugar for the tea. Milk in tiny little cartons. All carefully ranged by the bed for maximum temptation. A shout went up from a distant cell and other roars began to reverberate around the prison. Word went around that a screw was coming. Someone passed the boy a cigarette from a neighboring cell, spinning it across the floor on a length of fishing wire, stopping a few inches from the cell, so that he got on his knees and used a page from the Bible to drag the cigarette under the door frame. The rollie was just thin enough to fit under the door and he lay back and snapped it aflame—by striking the match off his thumbnail—and he brought the smoke down long and hard into his lungs, made rings in the air against the ceiling, but then his mother came and broke the borders of his cell and stood above his bed.

All right young man, she said. If you’re good, I have a special treat for you.

She brought him out of his cell to the Formica table, where she had prepared a full fry, which he pushed away at first but then he speared the sausages and broke the skin of the eggs and dunked the fresh bread and ate with an anger that gave him a stomachache. When he looked at his empty plate he imagined it full and then he threw his prison blanket across it and groaned and tried to stop the hunger pains and all the quiet, necessary shiverings.

*   *   *

RANGED IN A NOTEBOOK
in parallel columns:

*   *   *

AT THE TABLE
he looked at his meals, pushed the food around on his plate. Every day there was news of an impending reconciliation, but always the talks broke down and even the radio announcers sounded tired. The newspapers printed cartoons he didn’t understand. He tried to read the editorials and the word
breakthrough
became ambiguous to him.

He was reminded of a winter thaw years ago in Derry that had raised the rot of a neglected greyhound. When the sun began to shine the stench had risen.

He decided he would not take food. When his mother wasn’t watching, he swept the chicken and rice off his plate and he stuck only to water. He lay back on his bed and tried to form a manifesto in his mind—he would not eat until all his uncle’s demands were given in to: the right to wear his own clothes, to have parcels and visits, to have remission restored, to refrain from prison work, to have free association. He didn’t understand all the demands but he whispered them aloud to the night anyway and fought the pangs in his stomach. He woke with his mouth dry.

At breakfast he took his cornflakes outside and dumped them in the long grass.

On his bed that afternoon he stretched out his torso and thought about how flat his belly was becoming. The boy looked for clues to his uncle’s body in his own: the chest concave, the ribs taut, the arms bare and rippled. His mother caught him staring in the mirror but she said nothing. He left abruptly, wandered along the cliff face, and spent hours in an abandoned Vauxhall down near a cove. He sat at the steering wheel, faced the shattered windshield, and began driving home, down narrow country roads toward the city. The gear lever rattled in his fingers. The accelerator touched the floor and he was tremendously skillful with the clutch. He broke through roadblocks and avoided the pursuit of a black helicopter. A crowd of masked men waited for him on the side of the road. He picked them up and they traveled east toward the jail for their own breakthrough.

At dinnertime he asked if he could eat outside on his own, and when his mother agreed he walked out, feeling lightheaded, with a dull throb in his stomach now. He threw the plateful in the grass beside the morning’s cornflakes, most of which had already been picked over by seagulls.

*   *   *

THE GIRL STOOD
above the vat of oil, waiting for it to heat. She had a pretty face and he was embarrassed when she looked at him a second time. Outside the church bells struck eleven chimes. He had been on hunger strike for thirty-four hours now. A picture of the Italian football team was hung above the rack of sweets. A statue of a saint was taped to the cash register. His palms were sweaty and he switched the coins from hand to hand. You’re the first customer of the morning, she said to him. He nodded and looked at his reflection in the stainless steel frontispiece of the counter. It made his face alternately fat and thin. He rose up and down on the tips of his toes and scrunched his face violently, then stopped when the girl behind the counter giggled.

When he finally came out of the chip shop he was weeping, the vinegar so pungent that afterward he could smell it on his hands for days.