Ulster says NO

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Ulster says No
1
Ulster Says No
.
We got to know each other well, Wilson and myself, after
so
long together, in the darkness of his resting place. I
liked him
immediately, after I had rubbed his bones together, and he
had
appeared, Genie-like, sitting cross-legged in front of me.
He
was young - young as I was, about seventeen - and wearing
his
army uniform of khaki brown. He had a fresh, innocent
face,
slightly pale, with a slender mouth and delicate, pointed
features; he had smiling blue eyes in whose depths I saw
compassionate starlight, and bright blonde hair that hung
in
lank strands over his forehead. Wilson was a handsome
young
fellow; his body appeared lithe and graceful, no weight of
gravity appeared to pull him down. His voice had the most
beautiful English lilt to it as if it was always on the
verge of
song; I heard soldier's marching songs humming at the back
of
his throat. He told me all about the Boer campaign and his
eyes
darkened as he spoke. Sometimes I thought I saw a tear. He
was
glad, he said, to be at rest, far away from Africa. I
apologised
for being the one who had torn open his tomb, pulling away
the
crumbling stone to hide myself inside; but he said that it
didn't matter; it was a long time since he'd had someone
to talk
to, and anyway he liked me. I could see that. With Wilson
it was
like looking in a mirror; we were that close; we looked at
each
other and we saw ourselves. We had an instant, intense
sympathy
with one another. Wilson wanted to know what was going on
"above
board". I told him and he said, "the world is a
stranger place
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Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
now, than ever it was before", and let a low, dark,
troubling
whistle escape him.
I told him. About the Bull. About the Minotaur. No, no, I
mustn't get confused; I don't want to go into that
labyrinth
again... I've been doing too much reading here; the
English
grammar classes are getting to me. The Bull was my father,
that
was his nickname. My laughing uncle Jack loved to tell the
story. About the Protestant farmer with the savage bull
and my
father ducking across the fields with the sledgehammer
hidden
under his coat. "The English were gone, the English
were gone,"
my uncle would laugh, "but some of the mongrel race
were holding
on!" My father emerged at last into the field where
the bull was
and revealed himself by slowly walking into the middle of
the
field. The bull who was at the far end of the field turned
and
snorted and pawed the ground. My father waited. The bull
lowered
his head and ambled towards him. My father opened his coat
and
held the sledgehammer ready. The bull began to trot, then
to
run, his feet pounding the earth. My father lifted the
sledgehammer up. He was only sixteen. The bull charged; he
thundered towards my father, running faster all the time.
My
father stood his ground. He was steadfast. The bull
sprouted
wings and flew straight at him. My father resisted him
like a
stone wall. The sledgehammer came down; crack! The bull's
head
opened down the middle; its brains flew out and hit my
father in
the face. Carelessly, he wiped the mess away. The bull was
dead
at his feet. My father left a note, a signature on the
side of
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Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
the animal: John Bull! It was a message for the farmer. My
father was a brave man. My father would destroy anything
English. "Get to hell out of here!" the note
said. Weeks later
the farmer left for Lancashire; where Wilson came from. He
was
better off there. The Bull had conquered him.
There were five of us: the Bull, my broken-hearted mother,
and the three children. I was the youngest. Pat was my
older
brother, then came Cissie, and then
mise,
by five or six years
younger than they were. I was born in nineteen-sixty two
and so
was seven or thereabouts when all hell began to break
loose and
the Bull found his mission in life. "Oh, if only I
was in
Belfast or Derry now!" he would lament. "I'd
break the bodies of
them fucking soldiers in two, so I would!" I knew all
the
phrases of war before I knew what they meant: "the
invading
army", "the savage foe", "the eternal
enemy", "the bloody
brits", "those English bastards", and so on
and so forth, until
those words were draining out of my infected ears like
pus. Nor
was my geography perfect. Once my father, having pulled my
ears
for some stupidity, demonstrated on a creased map where
Belfast
and Derry, constant source of his sadness, lay; and where
we
lay. We were as distant as North from South quite
literally; the
North was up there, its eminence apparent in the high
corner of
the map, and we were nowhere except in the dead centre of
things, where a pinprick had savaged the tiny lettering of
a
townland, and left a tiny hole through which our lives had
fallen. "Those bastards! Those Northern
bastards!" my father
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Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
moaned hopelessly. And I repeated, "those bastards,
those
Northern bastards!", just to appease him. He put his
arm around
my shoulder and squeezed. He could be a kind man when it
suited
him.
My father, the Bull, was an example of living history; he
had it all at his fingertips as if it was part of his own
experience. In the evenings he pounded the table and spoke
for
hours on end about the "English Treachery",
about "Queen Lizzy",
about "that fucking bastard Cromwell", and
"the Protestants who
had ruined us". He spoke about "the plantations
of Ulster and
Leinster", "the Battle of the Boyne",
"the seige of Limerick",
"the Wild Geese", and "the Flight of the
Earls"; about "the
Invasion of the French", "the Penal Laws",
"the Famine", "the
Evictions", "the Coffinships", "the
Fenians", "the I.R.B" and
"the I.R.A."; also "Lord Leitrim, "the
Black and Tans", "Home
Rule", "Partition", "Churchill and the
War", "Red Hugh O'Neill
and Red Hugh O'Donnell", "King James and
Sarsfield", "Wolfe Tone
and Robert Emmet"; together with "Roger
Casement, Padraig
Pearse, Joseph Mary Plunkett", "Bunreacht na
hEireann", "the War
of Independence", "the Civil War", and last
but not least
"DeValera", whom he hated with a vengeance. The
tears would come
to his eyes as he told how in the thirties, after he had
interned them in the desolation of the Curragh, DeValera,
had
ordered his father and my grandfather to be shot,
"for wanting
to free his own country, that was all, for wanting
freedom; what
was wrong with that?"
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Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
And then, in his maudlin rage, we had the songs and the
poems: "Kevin Barry was a young man...";
"the sea, oh the sea!
Long may it flow between England and me!"; "Sean
South from
Garryowen"; and on and on and on! I could recite
dozens of them
for you. When my father was tired of singing he'd put on
the
records: "The Wolfe Tones", "The Rifles of
the I.R.A.", "The Men
behind the Wire." He had an old battered mono record
player and
the only music that was allowed on it was rebel music and
rebel
songs. Bursting with emotion my father would leave the
house and
start sawing timber in the back yard, singing his songs
and
shouting, "Up the Rebels" at the top of his
voice. That was the
only entertainment we ever had. I only discovered the
Beatles
when I came here, to prison. I always found it strange to
imagine a world which was not pointed like a compass
needle to
the North. In our world, the Bull's world, we needed the
North
to make sense of anything and everything. Without it life
would
have had no meaning. No wonder that I too, before long,
began to
think about the North, and to give it the place of honour
in my
imagination. I had never seen it but little by little I
began to
recreate it in my own mind, to piece it together bit by
bit,
until it stood impressively whole and solid in front of
me, as
impenetrable and unknowable as a tombstone; as strange and
mysterious as the lives of those English buried in the
English
graveyard in Kilscreggan; lives forever shut away, and
hidden
behind stone.
For some reason I was a disappointment to my father; he
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Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
called me a "slow, fucking eejit!" And, he used
to say: "You'll
never be able to wipe your own fucking arse, that's for
sure!".
I think it was because of my mother. I think I remember
during
the first years of my childhood she was quite fond of me.
Cissie, poor Cissie, always said I was her favourite; but
as I
grew older, and as if my father's wrath frightened her
away, she
shrank more and more from me, until I noticed that she
seemed
almost afraid to touch me or to address a single word that
was
not a question or a command to me. In the end, I asked
nothing
from her; I needed all my wits about me to keep the Bull
at bay.
Strangely, my brother Pat, who shared a bedroom with me,
got on
great with my father. They were drinking buddies and would
come
rollicking home late at night, to sit by the fireside and
curse
the English. "They took our Land!" my father
would say. Pat
would nod. "Aye, Aye!" he'd answer. "They
took all we had!" my
father would say then and Pat would nod again and answer,
"Aye,
Aye!" "They left us with nothing at all!"
my father would say
next and Pat would nod his head more vigorously and
answer,
"Aye, Aye!" And my father would spit bitterly in
the flames and
crush a fallen, smouldering ember with his foot. "I'd
crush them
under my foot like that!" he'd say, pointing at the
crushed
ember. Pat would nod, consider the ember a moment, then
answer
pensively, "Aye, Aye!" The great, fucking fool!
Later Pat,
unable to find his own bed, would fall into mine, and get
sick
on top of me. If I complained, he'd warn me, "I'll
kick the
fucking shite out of you, laddie! I'll kick the fucking
shite
out of you!" And he had done once or twice; such
kickings, till
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Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
my arse bled shite all down my legs. "I'll take the
fucking
sledgehammer to you, one of these days!" he used to
whisper in
my ear before I slept. "I'll get you first!" I
used to promise
myself, and dug him as hard as I could with my elbows
while he
slept.
When I was about ten, Pat left school and went to work and
live "someplace else". Up North I think it must
have been, but
everytime I asked my mother said, "Sssh, don't
ask!" and so I
stopped asking. My father was happy though. "I'm so
proud of
Pat," he would say. Once he lifted me on the edge of
the table
and said, "I want to be proud of you too,
Sonny!" It was one of
his rare moments of gentleness. He pushed with his hands
towards
me as if he was pushing some invisible, intangible object
out of
the way. "We're going to push the fucking English
out!" he said.
"We're going to push them fucking out!" And then
with a single
blow of his hand he sent me reeling back over the
table-top,
scattering all the delft arranged for tea, and almost
sending me
into the fireplace. "Just like that!" he roared
and laughed.
"Just like that!" I lay on the broken heap of
delft waiting for
my mother or Cissie to lift me up but neither even looked
to see
if I was alive or dead. At ten, I still had no idea how
the
politics in my house worked. They didn't dare help me;
they
didn't want to know. I was marginalised, excluded, shut
out,
hated... To be in anyway associated with me was to invite
the
wrath of the Bull. "I only want to teach him a
lesson!" the Bull
explained. "I only want to make him strong!" I
was not
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Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
convinced. I suspected the Bull's hatred of me had a much
deeper
root. "How will he make his way in the world if he
can't be
strong?" I was weak, terribly weak. I picked myself
up off the
ground as I had done so many times before. I brushed the
fragments of broken delft out of my clothes, and then,
quick as
lightning, my head down and my arms over my head in case
something was thrown at me, I shot out of the room and
away from
him. I ran and ran and ran, until I felt safe. I'd climb a
tree
somewhere and shelter in its branches and wait for
nightfall. I
had to be back before nightfall. The Bull demanded it. If
I came
back later than that, he would roar and bellow, and
half-kill
me. "I was a dirty, little, disobedient
bastard!" he would say
as he clattered me good and hard. That was what I was!
"A dirty,
little, disobedient bastard!"
I was little, by any standards, but no one picked on me at
school, not my fellow pupils, not my teachers. In fact, I
inhabited a strange kind of isolation hemmed in by wry
smiles
and cold silence. I was left to myself; I did not
participate,
and was not invited to participate in any of the school
activities. The rest of the kids avoided me, I see that
now.
"What do you expect?" Cissie used to say
brutally. "Do you
expect them to like you? You!" She was unhappier than
I was
because she couldn't get a boyfriend. Poor Cissie! I was
not yet
old enough for sex to be a problem so I adapted more
easily to
my permanent state of quarantine. I amused myself during
class
and I was ignored totally. During the breaks I climbed
over the
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Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
stone wall at the back of the school and examined the
tombstones
in the English cemetery. They were nearly all soldiers,
their
graves covered in moss, their tombstones tangled with
thick,
winding creepers. The names were nearly always illegible.
By
diligently scratching with a sharp stone I uncovered the
names
of one or two. That's how I found Wilson's name; Private
Wilson,
born in eighteen eighty one, died in nineteen hundred and
seven;
a short life, a quick one, and no doubt a sad one. In the
middle
of it he had fought a war and had seen death flower up
bloodily
out of the scorched earth. He told me this afterwards and
much,
much more. "So that was you scraping up above?"
he asked me with
a sweet sarcasm. I nodded, but he didn't know it at the
time, I
was only passing the time before the school bell called me
back.
Clang! Clang! Clang! If I felt like it I ignored it. I
never
understood why all the other kids rushed when they heard
it as
if it was an alarm bell signalling a fire somewhere. No
one ever
protested when I came into class late. I was ushered
gently by
some concerned teacher to my desk, as if I was a sheep
being
gently pushed into its pen. My book was opened, spread
back, and
laid on the desk for me. I was not expected to read it;
no, it
was simply there as a prop, a prop to my existence. School
was
nothing more than theatre as far as I was concerned, a
matter of
appearance only. The reality of it I don't think I ever
grasped;
except once maybe, when the Inspector called; and then,
all at
once, certain things became clear. The Bull of course, was
at
the back of everything. For a little while, back then, I
suspected that the Bull was in charge in some way. He
ruled the
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Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
world. He made the laws. He said what was right and what
was
wrong. And dare you, just dare you, transgress! The Bull
would
have none of it and no excuses. The Bull was intransigent
and
implacable; and the Bull was totally, irredeemably,
unforgiving.
The Bull would never, ever, ever, just let you walk away.
Just
like that.
The Inspector's name was Mooney, and he had a face as big
and bright, and bald as the Moon's. His tragedy was an
overbearing officiousness he had got from God knows where.
The
Bull soon set that right, in the only way the Bull knew
how.
Some people just don't understand the way of the world; it
takes
violence to open their eyes; and violence, the Bull had
aplenty.
The Inspector acted as if he was Lord and Master of the
school:
he insisted on being left alone with us and expelled our
teacher
from the room; our kind, our knowing teacher. "I want
to ask you
some questions," he said, facing the classroom; and
then he
began, circling the room like a hawk, with a long, yellow
cane
grasped tightly in his hands. I was soon singled out; the
other
boys, their voices trembling, had answers to the questions
put
to them, but I, I retained a resolute blankness and could
only
blink my eyes haplessly at him. He pointed the cane at me.
"What
is wrong with you, boy?" he snarled. I didn't know.
None of his
questions meant anything to me. "I don't understand
what you're
saying!" I protested. The cane came down with a
vicious snapping
sound on the cover of the desk. "Sir!", he
roared. "Whenever you
talk to me, address me as Sir!" One of the other boys
tried to
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Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
warn him, tugging anxiously at the edge of his jacket.
"Please,
Sir..." Mooney's face turned blood red. "Shut
up! Shut up!" he
cried. Then turned to me again, his victim. "I want
to benefit
from the immense knowledge this young man has gained from
attending this glorious institution funded, at no cost to
himself, by the Government of this Nation!" He smiled
at his own
eloquence. None of the other teachers had ever treated me
this
way; I had never, ever been asked a single question about
anything; anything! Who was this Mooney? Was he English?
"Are
you English?" I asked him quietly. He stepped away
from me in
astonishment; his cane raised high, vibrated in the air
above my
head. "Do you think you can come in here and just
take over?"
The cane dropped slowly to his side. I could see him
puzzling
over that one, but I wasn't finished. "Do you think
there's no
price to be paid?" I sounded just like the Bull in
one of his
threatening moods, but the poor sod, Mooney, never knew.
He
didn't see the warning signs. The cane was raised up
again. "Out
with your hand!" he commanded. I held my hand out.
Whack! The
cane came down. It stung like a nettle stings. I didn't
care. I
was the Bull's son. The Bull had made me strong. Mooney
could
kick the shite out of me and I still wouldn't care.
"Again!"
Whack! Whack! "Again! Again!" Whack! Whack!
Whack! I defied him;
I pushed him to greater extremes; I held my hands high
under his
chin, inviting him to whack, whack, whack harder. He was
an
absolute madman I had decided. He was a walking fucking
mistake
and he was going to pay for it. I held my hands higher.
Whack!
Whack! I invited him into my trap. He deserved no pity. I
felt
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Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
no pity for him. None at all.
When he had finished, he slumped exhausted and out of
breath over my desk. His clothes were all dishevelled as
if he'd
just come through a thorny bush and thick beads of sweat
tumbled
down his big, white Mooney face. "All right, then!
All right!"
he said breathlessly. "Sit down! You've learned your
lesson!" I
sat down. All day I sat with my hands opened on the desk
in
front of me. They were red and blistered. My teachers were
horrified. They wanted to bandage my hands but I wouldn't
let
them. "Don't tell your father," one of them
whispered. I said
nothing. In the corridor I passed Mooney in deep
conversation
with the Principal. "I won't leave the school!"
he was
insisting. "I'll apologise to the boy! But the
Minister has
asked me to spend three days here and I won't leave for
any
reason!" The Principal called me. "Mr. Mooney
has something to
say to you." Mooney coughed awkwardly. "I am
sorry!" he said.
"But you must realise you're here to learn! It's for
your own
good! It shouldn't matter who your parants are! Do you
understand?" I nodded. "Good," he said.
"Now, run along!" The
Principal caught me by the shoulder as I turned away.
"You heard
Mr. Mooney say he was sorry, didn't you?" I nodded
again. "Mr.
Mooney is very, very sorry!" he repeated. "And
so am I!" I
nodded and turned away. Neither of them had looked at my
hands.
They were swollen like footballs and were a fiery scarlet
colour. They hurt so much I couldn't hold the straps of my
schoolbag and had to carry it on my shoulder; it fell off
on the
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Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
way home and I had to abandon it, books and all, to the
rain and
mud-filled shore. I met Cissie. She cried when she saw my
hands.
"Daddy will kill him!" she said over and over,
and I could tell
that, not knowing Mooney, she was unreasonably sorry for
him.
She bathed my hands in cold water when we got home. My
mother
cried as well and then went to her bedroom; we didn't see
her
after that for days. When the Bull came home I held my
hands out
to show him. "Who did that?" he asked.
"Mooney, the Inspector!"
I answered and he sat down to eat his tea. He never said a
word
all evening, but sat by the fire looking at the flames. I
think
he sat there all night. He was there first thing in the
morning
for breakfast looking in the flames still, silent as a
rock. I
let Cissie wrap my hands in some bandages. They felt much
better. "Is he going to school today?" she asked
the Bull. He
nodded. "Take him!" he said. On the way we
recovered my rainsodden
schoolbag. In school the teacher helped me lay the books
out on top of the heater to dry them, and opened his own
books
in front of me on my school desk. Then we waited. Everyone
was
waiting. The atmosphere was tense and frightened. No one
made a
sound; everyone was listening. We heard Mooney's voice
from the
classroom next door. "Why doesn't he be quiet?"
one of the boys
said out loud. "Why doesn't he go away?" one of
the other boys
asked. The teacher shuffled uneasily behind his desk. His
eyes
watered nervously and he wiped the edges of them with a
handkerchief. "Sssh, boys!" he told us.
"It's nearly time for
the Angelus!" He looked down the row of desks at me.
"Would you
ring the bell for the Angelus?" he asked me. I had
never been
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Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
asked before but I was glad to do it; bells, I've always
loved
the sound of bells, big and small. I lifted the bell in
both my
bandaged hands and carried it out into the school
corridor. The
teacher nodded from his desk and put his watch back in his
pocket. It was twelve, exactly. I rang the bell. Clang!
Clang!
And again. Clang! Clang! And as I rang I saw the large
hall door
of the school open and an immense man, big as a mountain,
step
inside: the Bull. Clang! Clang! I summoned him. Clang!
Clang! I
called him forth. Inside the classroom the boys stood
intoning
their prayers. I let the bell go silent. Their eyes
swivelled
towards me and opened wide when they saw the Bull. They
fell
silent. The teacher came to the door of the classroom.
"Please!"
he pleaded with the Bull. "Is this Mooney?" my
father asked me.
"No," I answered, and with a smile I could not
prevent, I
pointed to the next classroom. "In there!" I
said. "He has a
big, white, round face on him!" My father nodded and
advanced to
the next classroom. He looked through the glass and then
stepped
inside. There was no voice raised in terror or in pain. We
heard
a thud and a crunch and then another crunch, and then a
loud
crack and another crack. One by one the boys left the room
their
faces deathly white. "Get your coats from the
cloakroom and go
home!" the teacher ordered them. "Say nothing of
this to your
parents!" Five minutes later the Bull emerged
dragging a
senseless Mooney on the ground behind him. I had never
seen
anything like it. Mooney was unrecognisable. He had been
smashed
to bits. He was a bloody, featureless mess. My father hung
him
on a coat hook just inside the hall door. "Leave him
there!" he
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Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
ordered the assembled teachers. "Don't touch him!
Leave him
there until I come back and take him down!" He put
his arm
around my shoulder. "This is my child!" he said.
"And nobody,
nobody is allowed to treat my child like an animal!"
I was proud
of him then; the beauty, the power of his violence. I
could see
the fear in all their eyes. I felt a strange and terrible
sense
of triumph. They were all, all of them, afraid of him; and
because they were afraid of him, they were afraid of me. I
was
suddenly conscious of my own power, a power that had been
hidden
from me so long. Mooney, God bless him, had demonstrated
to me
my own vulnerability; the Bull, may his soul rot in hell,
had
shown me my own strength.
Cissie when I told her on the way home, sat down on the
footpath and cried. "Why can't he leave us
alone?" she sobbed.
"He's ruining our lives!" I put my bandaged hand
on her head.
"But Cissie!" I countered. "Don't you see?
You'll never have to
be afraid of anyone! No one will ever dare touch you!
Ever!" Her
eyes were swollen scarlet like my hands. She looked so
pathetic.
"You're right," she said. "No one will ever
touch me! Ever!" It
was many, many years, not until Cissie came to visit me in
prison, before I realised that she was terribly,
hopelessly in
love that time; and that every smashing blow the Bull
delivered
to the world was a blow also to her hopes and her dreams
of
love. I like to think that what I did, I did for her sake
as
much as my own. When we got home there was no Bull.
"He's gone
drinking with his buddies," Cissie said. "He'll
tell them all
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Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
about what he did! They'll have a good laugh about
it!" She was
restless all evening, going into every room, pulling all
the
drawers open as if she was looking for something. Then she
went
outside to the shed in the backyard. She was gone for
about
twenty minutes, then came back and called me out. "I
know you
think your father's a great fellow at the moment,"
she said
quietly. "I want you to take a look at this." We
went into the
darkness of the shed. There was a sack full of old rubbish
just
inside the window. Cissie shoved her hand in and pulled
something out. She held it up in the light from the
window.
Despite its thick coat of detritus it glimmered and
glistened in
the light. "This is what he used!" Cissie said.
She took a solid
piece of wood and put it in the angle of the window.
"Stand
back!" she warned me and raised the hammer over her
head. She
smashed the hammer down on the wood. The wood cracked in
the
middle and tore apart full of jagged splinters. I don't
know
why, but I began to cry. I think the noise of the wood
breaking
must have frightened me. Cissie wiped the tears away with
her
fingers. "Do you think Mooney deserved that?"
she asked me
softly. "Do you think anyone deserves the likes of
that?" She
pushed the hammer back down into the sack. "Now, go
to bed!" she
said. And though it was still bright, I went to bed and
curled
up under the blankets. I didn't sleep. Cissie had smashed
that
hammer into my imagination and I could see now, over and
over
and over, what had happened to Mooney. It was like a film
shown
over and over in my head. It was inside me, the violence
was
inside me, and I couldn't shut it out. No matter how hard
I
17
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
tried. I could have torn my eyes out, and my brain, and my
heart, and it wouldn't have mattered. The violence was set
on
slow motion action replay for the rest of my life and it
was too
late ever, to do anything about it.
We lived in the country about five miles from the nearest
town. Where we lived was known locally as Kilderry. Our
house, a
big old farmhouse with fields around it, had been
inherited by
my father from his people. In my father's family there was
only
himself and his brother Jack, who we never saw anymore,
anymore
than we saw Pat. I never knew anyone belonging to my
mother's
family. I always thought they must live far away. It was
Cissie
who told me, when she came to visit me here in prison,
that they
had always lived on the far side of the town, and that
they
would have nothing to do with the Bull nor he with them.
The
Bull, in any case, needed nobody; he resembled an island
of
solid rock in a sea of chaos. Even his "friends"
when they
called appeared distanced from him by what I thought was
respect, but now I know it was fear. The chaos around Bull
was
the fear he inspired in every one who knew him; and you
could
not know the Bull and remain unafraid of him. He demanded,
by
his very presence, that you be afraid. I had been afraid
of him
all my life, and so had my mother, and Cissie, and I bet
Pat and
Uncle Jack were afraid of him too; I bet they were, deep
down!
After about nineteen - seventy the Bulls friends came to
the house more and more frequently. They always came at
night
fall, bringing the shadows with them. There was about six
of
18
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
them, all chat and laughter, and shaking hands with
"the
missus", and "how's the little girl?", and
"how's the little
boy?" Fuck the lot of them from a height, that's what
I say! We
were banished from the room and they stayed to have their
conversations. Sometimes I caught a word, - I was curious,
you
see -, it might have been the name of a place or the name
of a
man, but it usually meant nothing to me. Only later did
some of
those names begin to click and appear significant. For
example,
the name Herrema, when it came seeping through the
floorboards,
like air escaping from a punctured tyre, definitely meant
something the first time I heard it; and meant a lot, a
lot
more, before I ever heard it said again. And there were
other
names which in the light of day, glimpsed in a newspaper,
might
leap out at me with a gasp of recognition and sudden
sorrow.
Those shadowy men plotting in the twilight of our
farmhouse
kitchen were gradually becoming clearer and clearer to me.
I
began to know them. I began to understand their nature,
and to
understand the importance of steering clear. Of keeping
out of
their way. Of having as little as possible to do with
them. I
had to plot and conspire all on my own to live
independently of
them; to live independently of everyone, because at twelve
or
thirteen I was beginning to be afraid and suspicious of
everyone. Everyone except Cissie, that is. Cissie was
different.
Cissie was the flower who had grown up out of the dungheap.
God
bless you, Cissie, wherever you are! Without knowing it
you gave
me something to live for!
19
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
I don't know what the Bull did or what he worked at. He
was
a farmer but ours was a miserable farm with just a few
cows and
a donkey and nothing more. There was money, not much
money, but
enough; I never knew where it came from. Every Friday I
saw my
mother sneaking it out of the tea caddy on the mantlepiece
as if
she was afraid someone might be looking at her. On Fridays
she
went into town and bought all she wanted; her eggs, her
rashers
and sausages, her pudding, her potatoes, her bacon and
cabbage,
her chops, her bread and butter, her milk. Then she put
the
change from the money back in the caddy on the mantlepiece.
I
never heard her mention money to the Bull and I never
heard him
ask if she had enough. She did with what he gave her, that
was
all; no one ever asked for more of anything from the Bull.
The
Bull had money of his own; I don't know how much, but he
had
enough to drink with. He went to the pub almost every
evening,
on his own since Pat had left, but seldom came back in the
rousing good form he did with Pat. Usually he was in a
sombre
mood, and tight-knit, as if he was thinking about
something
intractable, something that would not yield its secrets.
He used
to sit and read his paper, "An Phoblacht",
pulling it out of his
jacket pocket and rifling its soft, flaccid pages.
Sometimes
he'd look at me with undisguised contempt from over the
edge of
the paper. "When are you going to get sense,
son?" he'd ask.
"When are you going to grow up?" He waited for
an answer. "I'm
sick and tired of waiting for you to become a man!"
If I was
lucky he'd hand me the paper and say, "Here, read
this! You
might learn something!" If I wasn't, it was Gaelic
football
20
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
time! How high could he kick me in the air before I burst?
Once,
my head hit the ceiling, and broke the lamp. He blamed me.
He
pulled me by the hair. "You little bugger!" he
said. "You don't
even know how to say you're sorry!" I always left the
window in
my bedroom open in case I had to run in there and throw
myself
out of it. I had to do it once or twice, flinging myself
lengthwise under the raised sash, the Bull grabbing for my
ankles. In some moods I was sure he was capable of killing
me.
Sometimes I thought he wanted me dead. Now, I see he never
wanted to kill me; he only wanted to torture me, that was
all.
And that
all,
was the Bull's fatal error. The day I realised
that, I was suddenly much, much stronger than I had ever
been
before.
The Bull had his interests. He liked his Irish, that
gibberish he sometimes spoke when he was drunk. He liked
his
football, the loud, cheering, Sunday matches. He liked his
stupid music:
"Mo
chroi, O mo chroi, is gra geal mo chroi..." He
liked that tuneless diddley - da Ceili shite too. He liked
his
bloody paper. He liked his fucking drink. He liked his
shadowy,
bastard friends. And he liked his rotten greyhounds. There
were
two of them: Paddy and Mick. He coursed them regularly.
They
lived in a huge wire enclosure at the bottom of a field
close to
the house. They were lean and vicious creatures and had no
respect for any living creature, only the Bull. I hated
the
sight of them. The Bull used to threaten to throw me to
them.
"You'd soon see what they'd do with a little piece of
shite like
21
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
you!" he'd say. I already knew. Every month or so the
Bull came
home with a cage full of live rabbits. Every time I had to
help
him cart the cage into the field where the greyhounds
were. The
Bull didn't need help but he demanded it all the same. I'd
had
to help him ever since Pat had left. The wire lid of the
cage
was lifted off and the rabbits would try to jump out. My
father
would grab one of them by the ears and swing it in over
the high
fence. The savagery that followed was indescribable. There
was
nowhere out of that thing. It was hell for little rabbits:
it
was absolute fucking hell! "Well, what are you
waiting for?" my
father wanted to know. He pointed into the cage. I had to
pick
one of the rabbits out, pulling it up by the scruff of the
neck,
and hold it in my hands. I could feel its heart beating
through
its fur. The poor thing was terrified. But what was worse,
much
worse, was that I had to do it; because, I thought, maybe
the
poor thing expected mercy from my hands, and I could give
it
none. I held it, and felt its heartbeat, and maybe it
hoped
against hope for release which would never come. What came
next
was the cruellest moment in the world for any living
thing. I
threw the poor beast high in the air and watched its
little legs
struggling uselessly. I never made any mistake: for it to
fall
back in my hands would have been crueller still. The
rabbit
tumbled over the top of the fence and down. Down, down
into
hell. I watched. "One of these fucking days, I'll
throw you in
over that fence just like them fucking rabbits!" the
Bull said.
In front of me the poor thing was torn to pieces. I saw
its
entrails ripped out, its still beating heart throbbing on
the
22
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
ground. "You can do it now, if you like, Bull,"
I said under my
breath, not caring whether he did or not. Once or twice he
grabbed me and threatened to throw me in but I just didn't
care.
I was beginning to understand. The Bull was finally
getting
through to me. I didn't count. I had never counted. I
wasn't
worth shite: not worth shite! And the Bull had me under
his boot
and could do what he liked with me. "You fucking
little
traitor!" he used to say. "You dirty, little,
disobedient
bastard! I'll show you!" And I knew that he would,
show me, for
as long as I let him, just as he had shown me the
greyhounds and
the rabbits. "The greyhounds aren't bad," he
said on the way
back up to the house. "It's just their natures! What
can you do
with nature?" Each time the rabbits came Cissie
crawled into my
bed because it was the furthest away and filled her ears
with
toilet tissue and bundled handkerchiefs. And then
silently, oh
so silently, she cried, and cried and cried, and cried.
And her
little heart beat in her little chest like a rabbit's
heart in
the hands of its executioner.
Every six weeks or so Paddy and Mick were taken to the
meet. I had to go along to help the Bull. The Bull had a
little
red Renault van and the dogs were bundled into the back of
it.
The dogs were muzzled but even so there was a wire fence
between
them and us. They were his dogs, but even the Bull didn't
trust
them. At the meet they were kept muzzled until the last
moment.
The Bull stood at the edge of the enclosure watching the
dogs
being brought in. Paddy and Mick always won. Maybe that's
where
23
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
the Bull made his money, I don't know, but I never saw him
show
any emotion as they edged ahead of the other chasing
greyhound
to snap their teeth first on the hare's helpless flight.
The
Bull didn't seem to enjoy the chase or the kill in the way
the
other men did, or maybe he enjoyed it in another way, a
less
obvious, a more subtle way. His satisfaction at the same
time
was tremendous. It seemed to increase his stature and make
him
look larger than he already was. He would glance around
and
accept the nods and winks of congratulation with a grimace
of
contentment. The Bull's dogs had done it again and what
else
could be expected? The Bull went to collect his dogs. I
stayed
in the crowd; it was the only place to hide. Once, someone
offered to put me on his shoulders to see better, but I
could
see as well as I wanted to from where I was. All around me
faces
shone with strange happiness as the flight of the hare was
rounded and driven into the earth. The greyhounds had it
all
their own way. It was easy for them. There was no way out
as far
as the hare was concerned. No way out of the circle of
raised,
cheering voices, or the thirst for the kill. All around
me, the
faces shone with strange happiness, and I could follow
every
moment of the chase in the oblivious, entranced eyes of
the
lookers-on. I dreamed I even saw the flesh torn in their
eyes
and the blood spurt in hot jets out of the bottomless
darkness
of their pupils. Then the arms raised up, the raucous
cheer, the
blinding gap-toothed smile, the fixed stare of complete
fulfillment. Who were these men gathered in a dreary field
to
witness this brutal sacrifice? What priesthood did they
belong
24
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
to in which the savagery of life was ritualised by dog and
hare?
How was their genuflection to the Universe, the mangled,
bloodied hare, different from that of other men? Were they
proud
of their own truths? Or was it all an act? Did they go
home to
cry in their beds like I did, or like Cissie did?
"Your mother's
made you too bloody soft!" my father used to say,
before he
drove his boot through the cleft in my backside. Was that
what
they were afraid of? That accusation? That retribution? I
would
have liked to believe it. To have believed it would have
redeemed them all, not that they sought or wanted
redemption.
Only for me... Only for me... I wanted to believe in some
goodness, somewhere. I could not see it in the Bull. I
could not
see it in these men. I could only see it in Cissie and in
the
soft-hearted tears she cried. Not one tear of remorse was
ever
shed at the meet, where real men would surely have laid
their
faces on each others shoulders and wept until all their
hearts
were emptied.
But tears would be wasted on a couple of dead hares. On
the
way home in the red Renault van, with Paddy and Mick
sniffing
through the wire at our exposed necks, we listened to the
News
on the radio. The soldiers had killed people at a march in
Derry. The Bull had to stop the car. At the side of the
road he
knelt in the mud and covered his face with his hands. He
roared.
He roared so loud, as if the greatest imaginable pain had
swept
into his heart, and he could not contain it. I thought he
was
dying. I hoped he was dying. I turned the radio up. The
dogs
began to howl. I turned the radio up louder. There was the
sound
25
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
of gunfire like crackling static. The Bull rolled on his
back as
if he had been shot. But he wasn't dead or bleeding... On
the
radio a voice said: "Good Christ! We're just being
shot down and
slaughtered! They're killing us for no reason! What on
earth is
going to happen to us at all? Where will it end? Where
will it
end?" I thought if ever I was going to run away from
the Bull,
this was my moment. The open road stretched before me. I
saw a
signpost with the word "Dublin" on it. I knew I
could walk the
distance. I wanted to go. I really wanted to go! But then
I
thought of Cissie. Cissie was all I had in the world. I
couldn't
go without her. "Come on, Da, come on!" I said.
"Let's get
home!" It was beginning to rain. The Bull began to
stir. "Don't
turn off the radio!" he warned me. All the way home
we heard the
news. A lot of people had been killed, just shot down. I
thought
the Bull was going to pull the steering wheel out of its
socket.
"We'll get them back for this!" he said.
"They're going to pay
such a fucking price as they never imagined! Just let them
wait
and see!" When he got me home he dragged me into the
house and
threw me on my knees by the fireplace. My mother jumped up
off
her chair. She was terrified, I could see that. None of us
had
ever seen the Bull in such a fury. Cissie pulled me away
from
the Bull's kicking feet. My mother stood between us.
"For Jesus'
sake, Bull, what's wrong?" I thought the Bull was
going to
flatten her, but he didn't. He swirled around the kitchen
table
his fists up in the air, roaring like an old cow calving.
Then
his fists came crashing down, right in the middle of the
table.
The table crashed to the floor under the impact of the
blow;
26
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
fragments of shattered wood flew everywhere. I began to
cry. I
began to cry, I couldn't help it, for the dead hares. The
Bull
knelt in the middle of the broken table; he knelt in front
of my
mother with his arms outstretched towards her as if he was
pleading with her for something. "The fucking
Brits!" he
answered her quietly. "The fucking Brits, that's
what's wrong!"
Cissie rushed me upstairs and into bed. I couldn't stop
crying.
Outside, the dogs in the van were still howling.
"Now, you just
shut up!" Cissie said, holding me. "Now you just
shut up, do you
hear?" I didn't blame anything or anybody for my
grief. I didn't
even blame the Bull. What was he to do with the rages he
felt?
What was he to do with his anguish? I almost felt sorry
for him.
It didn't last long, but I almost felt the only compassion
I
ever did feel for the Bull. He was just the way he was,
the way
he was made, and I guess there was nothing he could do
about it.
All that anger, all that blinding rage, I guess he had to
take
it out on someone. And, I guess, I was the best he had. He
was
my father, and in a way, some way, I guess, he needed me.
The next night the shadowy men came at twilight and stayed
till morning. This time there was no restraint in their
voices;
they could be heard loud and clear ringing through the
rafters,
full of savage menace, overflowing with savage hate. They
made
plans. I heard every detail; I knew exactly what they were
going
to do; I became, though I did not want to be, their
accomplice.
There was nothing I could do. Things were stepping up. We
were
all about to be swept along by a tidal wave of history, of
27
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
force, of hatred, of death, and there was nothing any of
us
could do about it. The next morning over breakfast nothing
was
said by any of us; we hardly exchanged glances. On my way
to
school I said to Cissie: "They're going to kill a
man!" She
slapped me hard on the face. "You keep your mouth
shut!" she
warned. "Or the Bull will cut your tongue out!"
I cried but I
could see she was crying to. In the end she sat down on
the side
of the road and held her hands over her face. The tears
streamed
out, thick like jelly, from behind her hands. "I want
to get
away from here!" she cried. "I want to get away
from that mad,
fucking bastard! That fucking Bull!" She stamped her
feet in the
ground. "Don't!" I attempted feebly.
"Please, don't!" She stood
up. "You're useless," she said to me bitterly.
"Just like the
Bull says, you're not able to wipe your own fucking arse!"
She
shook her fist at me. "Leave me a-fucking-lone!"
She screamed.
And I ran from her as fast as I could with her screams
stabbing
in my back like knives.
School was almost like home for the next two weeks. They
ran up black flags. They took us to Mass, the church was
packed
with people, the whole town was there, and we had to mourn
the
dead, whether we liked to or not. Then, they said, all
those
weak men who were afraid of the Bull, afraid of me, they
said,
there was going to be a March, a big March through the
town,
like a funeral. It was like the roof of the world was
caving in
and despair was falling through on top of us. This had a
strange
effect: suddenly I had friends at school; the other boys
talked
28
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
to me. They said: "Those fucking Brits!" and
looked at me
meaningfully, until I signalled my approval. One or two
went
further: "The I.R.A. are going to kick them out of
Ireland now,
aren't they?" To which I replied, suitably
ambiguously, "We'll
wait and see!" None of their friendliness tempted me
to any real
revelation, though I could have told them a lot of things
to
make their hair stand on end if I had wanted. After all,
the
shadowy men to these innocents were a complete mystery,
but I
had heard them speak, and to me they were no mystery at
all. But
I held my peace; times were rough; there was danger in the
air.
One morning I saw the Bull packing the back of the van
with
hurling sticks. He was leaving for the day. My mother had
prepared a bag of sandwiches and a flask of tea for him.
He
threw them on the seat beside him. He never said, Goodbye,
but
drove away with a look of intense determination on his
face, the
same sort of look he had when he came to the school to
punish
Mr. Mooney. Later in the day, we saw where he had gone to.
It
was on the telly: the crowds around the British Embassy,
the
Building in flames, the tattered, burning Union Jack, the
Guards
under seige by men with hurleys. I thought I saw the Bull,
hacking his way through the Guards. They might as well
have
given him the key to the Embassy; nothing could stop the
Bull
when he got going. He did good work that day. The Embassy
was
gutted. The next day one of the boys in school said to me:
"Hey,
did you see your old man on telly last night? Beating the
shite
out of the Guards he was!" I never even thought about
it. I just
hit him square between the eyes and he went flying
backwards his
29
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
arms and legs trailing in the air. It was the first time
in my
life that I ever hit anybody and I liked it. It felt good.
I
stood above him, ready to hit him again when he got up,
and that
felt good too. "Shut fucking up!" I roared at
him. "Or I'll cut
your fucking tongue out of your head!" And that felt
good too.
He climbed up off the ground with an astonished,
frightened look
on his face, and that felt good too; he was afraid of me,
I
could see it, he was afraid to look at me, the way I
sometimes
was with the Bull: he was scared shitless! He crawled
shamefaced
back to his seat and huddled there crying. He was weak and
I had exposed him. He was weak and I had put him in his
place.
The Bull didn't come back for over a week. We thought
maybe
he'd been arrested. I hoped maybe he'd been shot, killed
even;
but there was no hope of that. Dublin wasn't Derry or
Belfast:
the Bull was safe, the soldiers didn't shoot people in the
streets there! Even my mother didn't know where he was,
but none
of us had much worry for him. The Bull could take care of
himself, no one better. He'd come back; we all knew that.
In the
meantime, despite a mood of anxious foreboding, and the
knowledge that our peace would soon be shattered by the
Bull's
return, we enjoyed a week of strange and lovely
tranquillity. We
blossomed! I could see it in all our faces, but especially
Cissie's, she became almost plump and there was a new
freedom
and grace in her movements. She came and went as she
pleased
also, flitting in and out of the house at all times, like
a bird
let out of her cage. Once I followed her and discovered
another
30
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
source for her inner happiness. Not far down the road a
car had
pulled into a gateway hidden with low branches and dense
leaves.
Cissie disappeared into this car and into the embraces of
someone waiting inside. I climbed into the tree above them
and
edged out till I was positioned over the windscreen. I
thrilled
at what I saw; the symphony of roving, roaming hands,
indiscreet
and indelicate; the wild and innocent disarray of flesh,
with
all its sticky consequences; the flowering wilderness of
young,
half-mad, love, bursting with sadness and desire; the
blunt,
simple beauty of palped skin and tearing mouths. The Bull
would
kill her if he found out; there was no doubt about it.
Kill her
and kill him, whoever he was. Later when Cissie got out of
the
car she could hardly walk and she staggered home along the
roadway, her bundled nylons trailing desolately from the
pocket
of her coat. When I arrived home five minutes later than
her she
looked at me with dreadful suspicion. "Where were
you?" she
said. "Out feeding the greyhounds!" I told her.
"Where were
you?" I asked her. "Out walking!" she said,
and went straight to
bed, to dream.
At the end of the week our peace was shattered, as we had
all known it would be, but not by the Bull. It was first
thing
in the morning; we were still sleeping in our beds when
they
kicked the door in. I heard my mother screaming and
crying, and
then Cissie screaming and crying, and the sound of
furniture
being overturned on the floor. I thought, maybe it was the
Bull,
but there were too many voices and none was his. I wrapped
the
31
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
sheets and blankets around my head and hoped they would
not come
as far as me. But they did. I heard them tramping on the
stairs
and the door of my room being kicked open. I pulled the
blankets
tighter around my head but they were pulled away. I was
dragged
by the arms out of bed and dropped heavily on the floor. I
had
two ribs broken after. I saw my bed overturned, my drawers
ransacked, my furniture dismantled. One of them knelt over
me
and leering menacingly at me, questioned me: "Now,
you little
cunt, you tell me where everything is!" As he spoke I
heard two
gunshots. I began to cry. "Don't kill, Cissie!"
I cried.
"Please, don't kill, Cissie!" But the Guard only
smiled and
rubbed my head. "Don't worry," he said. "We
don't kill people,
only dogs and animals!" It was the first time the
Guards had
come and they left the house looking like the tailend of a
jumble sale. Cissie said that they had always been afraid
of the
Bull until now; something really terrible must have
happened or
they wouldn't have come. Cissie said the Guards didn't
want to
come, that they had been ordered to. "You could see
in their
faces they were afraid!" she said. "If the Bull
was here they
were in for it!" The Guards found nothing; they left
emptyhanded.
One of them left a message for the Bull with me.
"Tell
your father," he said, "the next time he brings
them dogs
coursing I don't think he'll find much running in
them!" Inside
the wire enclosure both dogs lay dead, shot through the
neck. I
was delighted. The Bull had left a couple of live rabbits
in a
cage in the shed in the backyard. I took them down now to
the
dogs and put them inside the enclosure. I brought Cissie
down to
32
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
see it. The rabbits sat beside the dead bodies nibbling at
the
bloodied grass. We both laughed at the good of it. Cissie
said,
"C'mon, I'll show you what the Guards were looking
for. They
couldn't find their own shoes if they were asked to look
for
them!" We walked across some fields and clambered
through thorn
bushes. In a corner of a field, right in under the ditch,
Cissie
stopped and pulled away some sods of grass-covered earth.
Underneath there was a shore grating which she pulled up.
There
was just enough room for us to squeeze through. I don't
know how
the Bull ever got down there. Below us there was a tunnel
we
went through on our hands and knees. It was dark. I was
frightened. "Cissie, where are we?" I
complained. Cissie stood
up in front of me. We had arrived in a larger chamber, a
cave,
completely dark. Suddenly a caged bulb hanging over my
head came
alight with yellow brightness. Cissie played with a switch
in
the wall. "Can you believe it?" she said.
"They even have
electric light down here!" All around us there were
wooden
boxes. Cissie lifted the lid off one. "Look!"
she said. I saw
bits and pieces of blackened metal. "What is
it?" I asked.
"Rifles!" Cissie said. She opened another box.
"For explosives!"
she said, showing me a small instrument like a clock. She
pointed at another box. "I won't open that box!"
she said.
"There's gelignite in it! It can get on your hands!
The Bull
would find us out and we'd have to be killed then!"
She seemed
suddenly afraid. "Let's get out of here!" she
said, and switched
the light off. We got down on our hands and knees again
and
crawled along the tunnel. Cissie lifted me up to grasp the
shore
33
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
grating and pull myself out, then scrambled out herself.
"Quick!
Let's get back to the house!" she said. We ran across
the
fields. My mother had tidied up the house; she had righted
all
the furniture and swept up the broken delft. She was
sitting at
the table listening to the radio when we got back. She had
a
strange look on her face as she listened. She looked as if
she
wanted to cry but as if she wasn't able to cry and I
realised
that I had never, ever seen her cry. I wanted her to cry.
Cissie
sat at the table and then I sat beside her. We all
listened to
the radio. Someone had been killed and dumped on the side
of the
road. It was some Politician; even now, his name won't
come back
to me... I suppose his wife and children still remember
him.
He'd been tortured and shot through the back of the head.
They'd
carved a message in his arm: "Brits Out!" But he
wasn't a Brit;
he was Irish. "They've gone too far!" Cissie
said, shaking her
head. "They've gone too far, now!" On the radio
they said he had
a wife and three children, just like the Bull. They said,
he'd
been killed because he'd been too outspoken and had always
stood
up to the men of violence. The men of violence do not like
people to stand up to them, I knew that; it's a question
of
pride, they lose face if they don't do something. That
poor man!
They'd taken him to the Border and shot him for having had
too
much to say. Then they dumped his body on a roadside in
the
North, on British soil. Everything they did, those shadowy
men,
was full of symbolism. Somehow, they always managed to
carve a
mystical poetry out of their own violence and murder. It
was as
if they were sacrificing to unknown Gods who ruled them
and
34
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
every body was a gutted, bloodied beast, and every
roadside an
altar. Death, death, death, that was all they were able to
churn
up out of their souls, death and more death, and they
scrawled
their slogans across history like schoolboys writing
obscene
graffiti on toilet walls. And this had gone on for how
long,
without respite, without redemption? Hundreds and hundreds
of
years! No wonder my mother was out of tears: can anyone
cry more
than a lifetime's? I doubt it; I doubt it very much! I was
wasting my time waiting for my mother's tears to fall. She
was
sitting like she was in a trance. There wasn't a stir out
of
her. Cissie and myself left her to her own inner thoughts
and
dreams, unknown to us. We went back to bed. It was only
about
ten in the morning but we were both exhausted after all
that had
happened. We slept all day. We missed school. How could
anyone
expect us to go to school on a day like that?
In the evening I had to be taken to the Doctor with my
ribs. Cissie took me. We were lucky. While we were away
the Bull
came back and found the door kicked down and his
greyhounds
dead. When we came home the dogs' enclosure had been
flattened
and the dogs buried. Bull was nowhere to be seen. My
mother told
us to go to bed straight away. We went there and clung
desperately to the silence till morning. It was years
later
before Cissie told me all that happened. The Bull had gone
to
town with his van and his sledgehammer on the passenger
seat
beside him. The Guards when they saw him coming had bolted
and
barricaded the door of the barracks but the Bull smashed
his way
35
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
through it. The dozen or so Guards who were inside jumped
from
the windows to escape him. The Bull ran amok inside and
broke
everything. In the end he set fire to the barracks and
waited
for the flames to catch and build before he left it. He
stood
outside and watched it burn. The Guards kept their
distance.
"The Bull was afraid of no one!" Cissie told me.
"But everyone
was afraid of the Bull! Even the Guards were afraid of
him!" The
Bull turned to the watching crowd behind him and addressed
the
Guards. "If I ever find who the bastard was who
killed my dogs
I'll string him up by the intestines to the nearest
lamppost!"
And the Bull meant it; I don't think the Bull ever said a
word
he did not mean. He came back that night in a savage
temper. He
pulled me out of bed and began to shake and hit me.
"You let the
Guards in!" he said. "You let them kill my
dogs!" Cissie saved
me. She threw herself between us. "No! No, he
didn't!" she
screeched. "He fought them! He fought them all he
could!" She
pulled up my pyjamas to show him. "Look at the
bandages! They
broke his ribs! They beat him! He fought but there was too
many
of them for him! He was on his own!" She screamed the
last
sentence as if it was an insult she was hurling in the
Bull's
face. Maybe that's why he hit her; I think he took it,
what she
had said, for an insult. I think he thought she was
accusing him
of leaving me alone to fight his battles. And that sort of
thing
just wasn't acceptable to the Bull. So, he hit her. He hit
her
hard in the face. She went flying. She was a light thing,
Cissie, and there was very little of her to anchor her to
the
ground. She tumbled across the room like a thrown doll and
fell
36
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
looking dazed and disjointed on the wooden floor. I had
never
seen the Bull hit either Cissie or my mother before. I
think, it
was part of his code of conduct never to hit a women; he
could
make their lives a misery all right; he could tyrannise
and
brutalise them, but he prided himself on never hitting
them.
Until this time. I saw a look of pain on his face as if he
realised his pride was shattered now forever. He looked
away
from me as if to hide his expression; he looked away from
Cissie. Cissie was struggling to sit up on the floor. Her
face
looked funny, looked strangely twisted and distorted. She
touched her jaw and cheek and it obviously hurt because
she
began to cry and whimper. I just thought it was funny; I
began
to laugh. Her face looked as if it had had an extra
dimension
smashed into it; looked like some warped piece of painting
in
which the bones are broken and reassembled all wrong. I
laughed
and laughed and laughed. The Bull rounded on me like one
of his
dogs turning round a small, pathetic hare. But for the
first
time in my life I was not afraid of him and for the first
time
in my life I had the better of him, without having to
fight him.
"Hey, Bull," I said, pointing at Cissie sprawled
on the floor.
"Hey Bull, you hit a woman!" His hands fell
emptily by his
sides. He looked as if he was going to cry. Then, without
saying
a word, he turned and left the room. I helped Cissie up.
"You
little fucker!" she said. "What are you laughing
at?" But the
words came out all funny and I only laughed more.
"You know," I
said to her, "the Bull isn't all he thinks he's
cracked up to
be!" I'll never forget what I said then.
"Someday I'm going to
37
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
make him pay for everything! Someday, he'll be
sorry!" Cissie
was crying with the pain in her jaw, I don't think she
heard
what I had said, but I had heard it! Heard it as if it was
coming from outside of me, heard it like it was a third
person
in the room speaking those words. I could hardly believe
it, my
own hubris, as if for the moment I was immune from the
Bull. I
shouted downstairs. "You better get her a doctor! She
needs a
doctor!" And the Bull did it. He went back out into
his little
red van and came back a half-hour later with the only
doctor he
could find. I recognised him immediately and saw his hands
tremble as they reached out to touch Cissie's face. I saw
her
tears too tremble onto his fingers and roll down their
slopes
into the palms of his hands. And I saw the way his hands
closed
on her tears and squeezed them tight as if they were
something
precious and he would never let them go. I was rapidly
beginning
to discover more about what was hidden in our small house
than
anyone else living there could have imagined; and I was
determined to keep it secret. Cissie's heart, I decided,
would
not be safe in any hands, if not in mine.
The morning of the March in town the Bull produced a
bundle
of black rags from the back of the van and flung them at
me.
"Get into these!" he ordered. I pulled the black
clothes on;
they were a couple of sizes too big for me, but with the
trouser
belt drawn tight they didn't look too bad. The black beret
the
Bull shot towards me like a floppy, cloth frisbee, was the
problem; it fell persistently over my eyes, and looked
like a
38
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
burnt and blackened pancake on my head. I looked
ridiculous.
Cissie laughed when she saw me but not when the Bull
produced
some clothes for her too. "What do you expect me to
do with
these?" she protested. Then she dressed herself
slowly,
deliberately, trying to make the most of her impromptu
uniform.
She looked o.k., but maybe the skirt was a little short;
you
could see her knobbly knees. She pulled her thickest pair
of
black tights on and it made her legs look better; then in
front
of the Bull she began to march to and fro in the room
swinging
her arms. The Bull was amazed. "What the fuck are you
at?" he
roared. Cissie smiled at him indulgently. "This is
what you
expect from me, isn't it?" she asked him sweetly. And
continued
her march with more energy and vigour. "Istigh!
Isteach!" she
barked, like some lunatic soldier in some lunatic army.
The Bull
was red in the face, but I could see, he didn't know what
to do;
everyday now we seemed to regain some of the territory he
had
established over us. We were pushing the frontier back;
and it
had all started that time the Bull had shown weakness in
front
of us, that time he had hit Cissie. For the moment he
could not
think what to do to quell our defiance; the Bull was at a
loss;
he was terribly embarrassed. But still we knew our limits,
and
in most things, we did what he wanted; the violence of the
Bull
could never be discounted or taken lightly; it was as
inevitable
as it was unpredictable. We sat in the red van beside him;
Cissie sat on my lap. She felt warm and under her black
skirt
and blouse there was a smell of sweet perfume as if her
skin was
wrapped in wildflowers. The Bull sniffed unpleasantly but
I'm
39
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
sure he never noticed anything like that; anything like
the
scent a woman might wear. As we approached the town we
entered a
stream of traffic and there were more and more people
walking
until we were part of an enormous crowd heading for the
centre
of town. Once in the town the Bull shunted the van through
the
crowd and down a narrow roadway and into the wide yard of
what
looked like a disused garage. There was about two dozen
other
black-shirted creatures waiting there, friends of my
father's,
the shadowy men and their shadowy children, like sitting
crows
waiting for a dustbin to be put out. The Bull formed us
into a
tight group then marched up and down in front of us,
reminding
me of Cissie earlier, to demonstrate the type of stance
and
attitude he wanted from us. "Remember you're
soldiers!" he
reminded us. "Be proud! Ireland's cause is our
duty!" I wanted
to laugh but they all looked so stern and serious around
me; I
couldn't believe they were taking it so seriously; the
kids were
all behaving like well-regulated, good little soldiers.
And off
we went! We marched back down the narrow roadway, twisted
round
in the Main Street, and strode determinedly down into the
town
Centre. The crowd fell asunder on either side of us. I
could see
the mixture of awe and respect on their faces. I could see
that
they did not admire us, but that they were afraid of us
all the
same. They stood back; they moved to one side; they looked
at us
and then they looked away. Nobody laughed, as I had
feared, at
my ridiculous pancake beret. I began to think that if it
wasn't
ridiculous then I couldn't be. I began to take myself
seriously.
I began to be in awe of myself. I strode ahead forcefully.
We
40
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
marched down the town. Our shoes made a loud stamping
noise on
the road. Our unison, unpractised and unrehearsed, was
remarkable. I couldn't understand it, how before we even
reached
the end of the narrow road leading from the garage, our
arms and
legs were swinging perfectly together. We marched as one,
we
felt as one. The pride of the others invaded me. It was a
heady
feeling. I felt as if I was one of an elite, as if I was
one of
a handful. I tightened my face to stop from smiling. I
felt
strangely giddy. I felt as if I was floating on air; as if
I had
become part of some tremendous, charismatic centipede
whose
movements controlled mine. I was not myself; I was more
than
myself; I was better than myself. I had become a soldier.
And I
was gliding through history on hobnailed black leather
shoes.
Stamp! Stamp! Stamp! We swung through town, stamp! stamp!
stamp!
and joined the mainstream of the march. The immense crowd
opened
out to let us into its heart. We propelled it along. Soon
the
whole crowd was marching with military intensity and
fervour.
The air and buildings around us vibrated to the noise we
made.
Stamp! Stamp! Stamp! Ahead of us the Brass and Reed band
began
to play. I recognised the music: "A Nation once
Again!" One of
the Bull's favourites. That music infected us. We began to
stamp! stamp! stamp! with even greater energy and to swing
our
arms and legs wider and further. I felt completely
dislocated as
if my arms and legs were suddenly unattached from my body
and
flying all over the place in impossible formations. I
began to
sing... I began to sing! "And Ireland free, will one
day be, a
Nation once Again!" The Bull looked back suspiciously
at me from
41
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
the head of the group, but then I saw his mouth opening
and
shutting on the same words as my own. And then the others
began
to sing! It was a wonderful feeling of togetherness. We
were
like some fateful Greek Chorus intoning the future: the
entry
into the labyrinth; the unravelling of the clue; the
battle with
the monster; the victory. We marched straight into the
town
square and positioned ourselves in the middle of it, in
front of
the memorial for the 1916 fallen. My father stepped
forward and
pulled a long sheet of paper from his pocket. He began to
proclaim. My eyes were fixed on the sky above the square;
a grey
sky full of floating cloud. I watched the seagulls
whirling.
There was storms at sea when you saw the seagulls inland,
I had
been told. There was storms at sea then as my fathers
voice
raged inland. I heard his words only intermittently, I
recognised the slogans: "British Colonial
Imperialism!",
"Occupied Territory!", "Surrender and
Withdrawal!", "Peace with
Justice!", " Thirty-two county Republic!",
"New Ireland!", "New
Future Together!" His voice rang loud and clear, and
full of a
strange and bitter melancholy, like the voice of some aged
poet
intoning the sad and ageless poetry of his people. When he
finished the silence around him, and around us, was
palpable. On
a raised platform at the back of the square I saw the
politicians and priests of the area waiting for the Bull
to
finish. The crowd too were waiting expectantly to see what
we
would do next. The Bull delivered the coup-de-grace.
"About
Turn!" he ordered with quiet authority and we wheeled
round in
perfect harmony and strode away from the awestruck, timid
42
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
thousands who were gathered round us. Behind us the place
where
we had stood remained empty as if the crowd was afraid to
infringe on territory we had marked out as our own. There
was no
doubt about it; we were men and women apart; we were
different;
we were alien and strange to them and they were alien and
strange to us; our lives were divided. We marched away
from them
and they watched us go. We marched up through the deserted
streets of the town. It began to rain as it always does.
Let
them stay and listen to their Priests and Politicians, I
thought, let them get wet! We would soon be safe and dry.
We
turned down the narrow roadway again and marched into the
disused garage. We dispersed without a word. We shook
hands
only, my father doing the rounds of the shadowy men. My
hand was
warmly shook by all of the other youngsters; they sought
me out.
My father looked with quiet pride on me. Cissie sneered
contemptuously. I began to feel contempt for myself. My
earlier
euphoria was rapidly dissipated. My clothes looked
depressingly
black. My beret looked like a pancake again. I felt
ridiculous.
Cissie caught me by the hand and pulled me towards her. We
sat
back in the red van, with Cissie on my lap again. My
father was
silent. The roads all around were silent and deserted.
Cissie
leaned with her arm around my shoulder and her hair
against the
side of my face. I felt her lips against my ear. "My
fucking
feet are all fucking blistered!" she whispered
bitterly. "I'll
never be able to walk, ever again!" And inside my own
shoes,
tight and hot, I felt my own blisters rise, and prepare to
burst.
43
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
That was the last time I ever felt pride; nothing that
happened afterwards brought me anything but pain and
humiliation. We were on, and had always been on, the
slippery
slope to some imminent conclusion. It all must end
somewhere, I
told myself. Things can't go on forever. But the Bull used
to
say, "Things will get worse before they get
better!" And if that
was true things would never get better; how could they?
Things
would always get worse. Until the End. And no matter what
the
Bull or anyone else could say I knew the End would
eventually
come. It had to. It couldn't be avoided. It would take the
form
of death, if nothing else, but it would come. And so I
could
afford to be patient and I waited, certain that the Bull's
ranting and raving would one day stop, some way, some
how... God
only knew! For the moment the Bull was intolerable. He was
worse
than ever. We avoided him like the plague. We hated the
sight of
him. There would never be enough distance between us; I'd
have
run a mile to get away from him; I only wanted to hear
that he
was "gone" and never that he was
"here". We all felt the same
way. We hated the Bull. We'd have liked to have seen him
dead.
Cissie particularly. She had no freedom. Once a month she
concocted some reason to go to the doctor, and I wondered
what
other manoeuvres she employed to mislead the Bull and
conduct
her secret love affair. Once, I found the doctor's car
parked
down a side road but there was no sign of him or of Cissie.
I
climbed up in the nearest tree to watch and wait but it
got so
late I had to go home without discovering them. I couldn't
44
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
imagine where they were going on their lovers' trysts, and
couldn't imagine where in the area they could feel safe
from the
Bull. How could they or anybody make love in such a state
of
terror? How could they make love anymore than they could
feel
free with someone, or something, like the Bull breathing
down
the back of your neck? But Cissie was trying. She'd found
some
corner of the Bull's maze where she felt safe, where she
felt
free... When I found out where it was I couldn't believe
it. I
couldn't believe that she had taken such a risk; but
Cissie was
a desperate girl, and the doctor was a fool; and fools in
love,
they hadn't a hope!
But Cissie was clever too, in her own way. Every time the
shadowy men called she was out of the house and they
called more
and more frequently now. The Bull was away more and more
often
too; sometimes for days on end. Cissie took every chance
she
had. Once when the Bull went missing she called to the
doctor
every day; I knew, because she always went on her way home
from
school and I had to wait for her. "Play with the
rainwater or
something!" she'd say. "I won't be long!"
And she never was. Ten
minutes, fifteen minutes, never longer. I can imagine now
the
hurried passion of those moments; at the time I wanted to
believe her when she said she was just, "leaving a
note!" The
strangest thing is that it went on for so long
undisturbed, that
hidden love, as if the Gods were conspiring with them, and
would
protect them. Or maybe they liked the danger. I could
believe it
of Cissie. I never got to know Doctor Curran, but there
was some
spark in Cissie's eyes that showed she liked playing with
fire.
45
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
I sometimes think it was just a game she was playing with
the
Bull all that time. That that's all it was, a game, in
which the
Bull was being made to look a fool. And then I think that
maybe
as far as Cissie was concerned it was more than a game: it
was
war. Cissie could have chosen to run away at any time but
had
chosen to stay, to stay and fight. "I won't let the
Bull get the
better of me!" I remember her saying, and that was
her spirit.
No matter how strong or terrible that bastard was she
would not
let him get the better of her. Everything the Bull did to
hurt
her only made her more determined. She used to face him
with a
glint of defiance in her eye which said, "You'll
never win,
Bull! You'll never win, no matter how big or bad you
are!" And I
loved her for it, because she stood up for me too.
"Listen," she
said to me once, "we're in this together!" She
fed me her spirit
of rebellion. "It doesn't matter how small you are,
if you're
strong enough inside!" And I, the runt of the litter,
loved to
repeat that over and over to myself. You can do anything
as long
as you're strong enough inside! I was ready to do anything
for
Cissie against the Common Enemy. Together we plotted his
downfall; together we prayed for his destruction. We
rejoiced in
every misfortune that befell the Bull. When the news came
that
Pat, our brother, had been arrested and interned we danced
together on the road to school. The Bull was apoplectic.
His
veins stood out on his neck and forehead as if they were
going
to burst. I could barely contain a cheer. Pat's picture
was in
the paper. He'd been caught up North transporting a lorry
load
of explosives. He'd been shot in the arm trying to escape.
The
46
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
arm had been almost severed by a hail of army bullets. He
was
lucky to be alive. We were sorry he was. The paper said
he'd get
at least twenty years in jail. It wasn't long enough. It
wasn't
long enough, unless the Bull was in there with him. And
even
then it wasn't long enough.
The Bull took Pat's arrest badly. He never stopped,
morning, noon, or night, lamenting him. "My poor
Pat!" he'd cry
out in anguish. "My poor son rotting in an English
jail!" He'd
rattle the table with his fist and glaring into empty
space
pronounce his own far-seeing judgement on things.
"The English
have always stood with their muddy boots on the throat of
the
Irish! And now it's Pat they have! God bless him and keep
him
safe from all harm!" His benediction concluded he'd
rise from
the table and walk out into the yard to contemplate the
sunset.
God knows what devilment he was considering. When the
shadowy
men came there were long, long discussions. That was when
I
first heard the name of Herrema. It could have meant
anything to
me at the time, it was foreign enough and strange enough
to sit
snugly alongside Kalashnikov or Gelignite and not cause
them any
discomposure. Herrema: it sounded like air escaping from a
punctured bicycle tyre, it hissed around the house, and
around
my ears, for an entire evening; it reproduced itself in my
dreams and made my sleep uneasy, but in the morning when I
woke,
it was gone. It had left with the shadowy men and would
only
come back with them; that is, if they wanted it to.
Sometimes
the names they used figured only once in their roll-call,
47
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
received a quick death sentence, and were never spoken
again. I
could list a whole army of names that had passed through
their
lips and then been annihilated. To be spoken on the lips
of a
shadowy man was a hard thing for any name; better not to
be a
name, not to have a name, or to have a false name; if any
name
fell prey to a shadowy mouth it was finished. To be
nameless, to
be perfectly anonymous, was the best possible destiny in
the
world of the shadowy men. Herrema's misfortune was that he
had a
name. Who can forget it? There is a name that will echo in
history and remain part of living history until the living
are
all dead! Poor Herrema, once he was born with a name he
could
not escape the shadowy men. They notice things like that.
They
pay attention to people's names. Oh yes, they do! The
point is,
if you can help it, be a nobody, don't have a name, cease
to
exist, and then you'll be safe. And being safe is what
everyone
wants isn't it? Leave us in peace, is what everyone
demands,
isn't it? And so now you know. Take it from me. Be nothing
on
earth! Then you'll be safe. And the shadowy men won't even
know
you're there.
I don't know how long Herrema was in the underground
bunker
before I discovered him. It was Cissie in fact who led me
there.
The Bull was away at the time and she was flitting out of
the
house in the evenings in her lightest summer frocks,
despite the
cold, damp weather. I determined to catch her with the
Doctor;
it was the only excitement I had back then; and so I
followed
her. One evening I followed her so closely all she had to
do was
48
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
turn around and she would have seen me trailing furtively
behind
her but she never looked back. When I heard the Doctor's
car
approaching on the road I ducked into the nearest ditch
and
prayed he would not drive away with her. He didn't. He
stopped
the car in off the road, where it was partially concealed
by
hanging branches, and after five minutes of impatient
fumbling
with each other, they left the car and squirmed through a
gap in
the ditch into the nearest field. Cissie led him by the
hand. I
crawled, snake-like, on the ground after them, my elbows
plunging again and again into hidden, disgusting cowpats.
A hare
was disturbed by Cissie's feet and came bounding towards
me. I
put out my hands to catch him but he leapt through them,
his
feet touching my shoulders lightly, before he raced away.
God,
I'd have loved to be able to move like that, the speed and
grace, the beautiful animal ease of it. Humans are clumsy
by
comparison. Everything we do seems stupid and clumsy when
you
think of how the hare is. My elbows stuck with clots of
cowshite
I rowed faster and faster after Cissie and her Doctor.
They
crossed two more fields and I still couldn't imagine where
they
were heading for. Were they just going to lie down in the
grass
somewhere and go at it? It looked as if they were, and
then they
stopped. Cissie knelt on the ground and began to pull
clumps of
grassy earth away. The heavy sods of earth came away
easily in
her hands. I looked around to try to get my bearings and
was
surprised to see the farmhouse just two or three fields
below
me. This was crazy! Cissie was fucking mad to come here!
Her
legs disappeared into the ground and then the rest of her
body
49
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
slipped down. She was taking the Doctor in there -I
couldn't
believe it!- with all the guns, all the explosives; that
was her
love nest! And that was so like Cissie! I understand
now... The
joy she must have had in fucking herself to happiness,
outrageously surrounded by the Bull's plastic wrapped and
impotent Arsenal! And the danger in every touch, in every
whisper, which might set off, with any carelessness, an
alldestroying
explosion at any moment, and blow them both to
Kingdom Come. This was the still, cold, unbeating heart of
the
Bull's domain; if he found them there, they were both
dead, no
doubt about it, they were hung, drawn and quartered,
finito; and
Cissie, for my money, had a nerve like nobody else ever
born to
go down there, and take the only love and happiness she
had in
the world with her! But not this time! She didn't go down
this
time. She had just vanished into the hole in the ground
when her
arms shot back up again and the Doctor pulled her up
quickly.
Quickly she replaced the sods of earth, and pulled the
Doctor
away. They ran back down the field as fast as they could.
I
should have followed them. In the interests of furthering
my sex
education, and of nurturing my limited imagination, not to
mention the terrific entertainment of that most
stimulating of
human acts to behold, I should have followed them; but I
didn't.
Was I mad or was I just thoughtless, I don't know. But I
watched
and waited for a full half-hour and I thought if there was
someone down there they would have heard Cissie and would
have
come out to investigate, but no one had appeared;
therefore, I
concluded intelligently, there was no one in the bunker,
and
50
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
Cissie must have been upset by a rat or a spider or
something
like that. So, foolishly, I decided to go down in the
bunker. I
hadn't been back there since Cissie had taken me down to
see it.
Cissie had warned me: "Never go back! Never ever go
back! The
Bull will kill you!" and I had believed her. I never
had gone
back and that had suited her. Cissie had outmanoeuvred me
at the
same time as she was outmanoeuvreing the Bull. I didn't
like
that. It hurt. I needed to regain some of my loss of
selfesteem.
And so I went down in the bunker. I lifted the sods of
earth away and placed them neatly and methodically in a
pile
beside the shore grating, then I pulled the grating up. I
shuffled down into the hole and got down on my hands and
knees
to negotiate the tunnel. It was larger than I remembered
and was
easier to get through. Inside was complete darkness. I
could see
nothing. I knew there was a switch somewhere. I tried to
remember where but I couldn't. I stood up in the larger
chamber
and began to feel my way around the walls, leaning in over
the
wooden boxes, spreading my fingers out in wide circles.
Then I
heard behind me, a noise like a shoe scuffing the ground.
I
stopped dead. I listened hard. I could hear something. I
didn't
know what it was. It was like the breathing of a small
animal.
There's a fox in here, I thought. I got ready to swing
around
and kick with my feet. Then my fingers touched the light
switch.
My heart began to pound. I was afraid to turn the light
on. I
heard the scuffing sound again. It was bigger and heavier
than a
fox. I wanted to get out, to get out of there at all
costs, but
I couldn't move. I could hardly breath. And then a voice
said, a
51
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
voice with a strange, gentle, foreign accent,
"Please, please!
Why don't you say something?" I felt as if my chest
was going to
burst. I opened my mouth to scream but nothing came out. I
felt
cold tears trickling from my chin onto my neck. I was
dying. I
was sure of it. I was ready to drop down dead. And then
the
voice repeated, "Please! Say something? Why don't you
say
something?" With shaking, awkward fingers, I pulled
the light
switch down. "Please say something!" the voice
said. "Please say
a word! Just a single word!" I turned to look at him.
He was
tied up completely with ropes around his wrists and
ankles. He
was blindfolded but he was looking straight at me as if he
could
see me through the blindfold. "Say something!"
he pleaded with
me. "Please say something!" His mouth was
cracked and dry. There
was a bowl of water by his feet. I knelt beside him and
pushed
the bowl of water closer to him. He sat up as if he was
excited
by the fact that I was so near to him. "Say
something!" he said
again, with more urgency this time, with desperation
almost, as
if he craved this word, this something, more than anything
else
in existence, and pitying him, what could I do but offer
it to
him. "Hello!" I said. "Who are you?"
He shook himself with
delight. He laughed like a man told sudden, undreamt of
good
news. "I'm Herrema!" he said. "Have you
heard of me?" I
remembered. "Yes," I told him. "Good, good,
good!" he said,
barely able to contain his excitement. "Can you get
me out of
here?" I was sorry to disappoint him. I said nothing
and I could
see that he knew I could do nothing for him. "Is
there anyone
who can help me?" he said, almost to himself.
"No!" I said. I
52
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
had to be honest with him. I didn't want him to expect
anything
from me. "There's no one at all, who can help
you!"
I was out of touch at the time because we had no telly.
The
Bull had wrecked our telly. All because of Big Ian, my
hero! Big
Ian and the Bull were alike in some ways. Big Ian was a
large
mountain of a man with a loud, booming voice and so was
the
Bull. They both had history foaming at the mouth; and they
both
had their slogans, one set countering the other exactly,
that
justified them. They both had the threat of violence in
the back
of the throat, like a schoolteacher letting you know the
stick
was ready for use at any moment. And they were both,
hopelessly,
irredeemably lost in that corner of the map called the
North.
The two were like images facing each other in a mirror,
turned
inside out and reversed, but essentially the same. Only, I
liked
Big Ian. Every news time he did his appearing trick in our
kitchen with the sole intention, it seemed to me, of
provoking
the Bull to uncontainable fury. Every evening Big Ian
trotted it
out, his stolid, unbending line of resistance to the
Bull's
hopes and dreams. "No Surrender!" echoed around
us, and myself
and Cissie loved that. In our heart and soul it echoed,
"No
Surrender!", as the Bull danced like a badly made
puppet on a
string in front of the flashing, bright television screen.
"We
shall maintain the Union at all costs!" became our
battle hymn;
"Ulster says No!" our battle cry. The Bull
nearly had a fit.
"Someone should shoot that fucking Protestant
bastard!" he'd
roar, and shake the telly with his bare hands as if he
could
53
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
discommode the wily Protestant Minister of the Church by
doing
so. And Big Ian, implacably smug, smirked savagely as if
he was
only too aware of the Bull's outrageous impotence faced
with the
magic of modern technology. "I'll throw that fucking
television
set out of the window one of these days!" the Bull
used to say.
But then the Bull had no sense of humour. I don't ever
remember
him cracking a single joke. He was the Minotaur, he knew
nothing
of laughter, trapped in his eerie maze; he knew only the
crack
and crunch of bone and flesh, and the sizzling heat of
escaping
blood from torn veins and arteries; laughter was as alien
to him
to him as kindness; if he laughed it would crack him up,
he
wouldn't be able for it, it would destroy him utterly and
forever. On the other hand, Big Ian was the MC of
laughter.
Secretly, inwardly, we laughed every time he opened his
mouth,
as if somewhere in his own heart there was the tremendous
power
of contained laughter, incredibly, subversively
infectious. "No
Surrender!" and "Ulster says No!" became
the punchlines to
terrific in-jokes that only the initiates understood. And
Cissie
and I were initiates. We had been sworn in, had sworn
ourselves
in, to Big Ian's loyal cause. We like him, were against
the
Bull. We, like him, supported the Union. "Ulster says
No!" Big
Ian never let us down. Each news time we waiting
impatiently for
him to appear like some subversive magician of the
airwaves and
he always did. We hunched forward to catch every word that
fell
from his lips and we lapped them up. We waited for his
pearls of
priceless humour: the time he compared the ship honking
behind
him to the Pope blowing his nose, that was unforgettable.
I had
54
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
to leave the house to roll sore with laughter on the grass
of
the furthest field I could get to before my sanity
deserted me.
The poor, stupid Bull, if only he could have learned to
laugh
with Big Ian! It was left to me and Cissie to appreciate
Big
Ian's greatness. If I'd had him for a father I think I
could
have put up with anything. I would have joined the fight,
I
would have upheld the cause, I would have walked on all
the
Catholics around and trod them into the ground, without
any
afterthought, any misgiving whatsoever. Big Ian inspired
me
where the Bull only depressed me. In the mirror at night I
imitated his every move and gesture; I made myself large,
I
opened my arms in the air, I swayed the adoring,
spellbound
crowd with my fingertips. I intoned the fierce
intransigence of
his slogans. "We shall not be ruled by Rome!" I
told the bland,
indifferent mirror. I rose up high on my toes and offered
the
supreme catchphrase. "Ulster says NO!" That was
my favourite.
Repeating that, at the top of my silent voice, roaring it
from
the very root of my gaping, noiseless mouth, I
was
Ulster! I was
the voice of Ulster Protestantism. I was the opposite of
what
the Bull was; and I was proud of my share in the greatness
and
grandeur that was not Rome. And in my dreams I inhabited a
free
Ulster, with the red hand emblazoned on every gable wall,
and
the Union Jack floating over every Post Office and School
and
strapped to every chimney. I consigned the Bull willingly
to his
side of the Border. A Barbarian through and through he
would
never belong on Ulster soil. Freedom? He would never
understand
the meaning of the word! I knew what it meant. It meant:
no
55
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
Bull! Unity? That was the sickest joke of all, born from
the
cruellest depth of the Bull's eerie maze, his charnel
house
labyrinth in which he skulked with his dreams of despair.
How
could the Bull and I, made of the same horrid flesh and
blood,
reared on the same poisoned land, nurtured inside the same
crumbling four walls, looking out at the same rotting
light,
breathing in the same contaminated air, and speaking the
same
foul language, ever be united? The absurdity of it! The
stupid,
empty, moribund absurdity of it! No wonder I was driven
half-mad
by it; because I was, by the end of it all, half-mad, and
completely desperate. Only Big Ian kept me sane. The great
greyhaired bear of a man with his large embracing,
welcoming
arms, whose voice reached out to hold me from my Northern
homeland far away. Big Ian was my bulwark of sanity
against the
drivelling madness of the Bull; he kept me going for as
long as
he could, but one day the madness in me was sure to break
out. I
had it from my father. The Bull was surely as mad as mad
could
be. Every day his madness assailed him and vanquished him.
That's what happened with the telly. One day Big Ian was
on and
the Bull couldn't take it any longer. He shook the telly
as he
always did but that had no effect whatsoever on Big Ian's
enduring aplomb, his perfect imperturbability. But the
Bull was
determined to get to him this time. With a gut-wrenching
bellow
he wrapped his arms around the set and pulled it out from
the
wall. The back of the set ripped away in a shower of
sparks that
fizzled down the electrical cable and buzzed noisily into
the
wall socket. Big Ian disappeared, his voice fell silent,
and all
56
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
the lights in the house were abruptly extinguished. We sat
in
the darkness with the mountainous shadow of the Bull
whirling
past us to the open doorway, with the television set
trailing
its innards, gripped like an accordion in his hands. He
flung
the set away from him and drove his big boot through it.
Valves
and tubes scattered in the twilight air like little birds.
I
felt sad and empty and did not know what to do. Big Ian
was
gone. Big Ian was gone from me forever. The Bull had
driven him
out. The Bull had banished him. The Bull came back into
the
house and began to sift through his rebel music. He pulled
out
one of the Wolfe Tones stomach churning dirges and flapped
the
disc down on the turntable of his old, sad-looking mono
player.
He cursed the machine when it wouldn't work. He shook it
the way
he had shaken the telly. I waited for him to carry it to
the
door and kick it too into the next world. He snorted
menacingly
at it. He knocked it against the wall and rapped it with
his
fists. I would be next, I knew well. But this time, this
time, I
wasn't going to take it. Just let him! He began to pull
and drag
at the wires in the back of the record player. He was
ready to
snap them too, I could tell. Then Cissie said something.
"You're
wasting your time! There's no electricity! The fuse is
blown!"
Not: "You're a big, fucking eejit, Bull, you've blown
the fuse!"
No, not that! Nothing in our house was ever the Bull's
fault,
and nothing ever could be; we granted him instead the
passive
platitude of, "the fuse is blown!" That! It made
me sick, the
way we all pretended with him. I'd had enough of it. I was
done
with pretending. I was the one who said, "You've
blown the fuse,
57
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
Bull, you big, fucking eejit!" And the silence that
settled
suddenly between the four of us was like a bomb on the
point of
going off. The Bull glowered at me, his eyes flaming
through the
darkness. My mother said, "He didn't mean it, Bull!
He doesn't
know what he's saying!" And Cissie said, "He
didn't mean it,
Bull! He's gone soft in the head lately!" The futile
voices of
women pleading, sentences dropped like stones into a
dried-up
well, necessary precursors to inevitable violence. It had
to
happen. I did not resent it. The Bull's dilemma was clear.
Violence was the method he took to everything. It was his
be all
and end all. It was his right and his reason. It was all
he had
to earn respect for himself, from himself. To do nothing
was to
lose respect, deeply, inwardly. To do nothing in the face
of
insult was to lose face, to sink one's pride in the
despairing
rebuttal of violence. The Bull was no more capable of that
than
he was capable of eating his soup without slurping it. The
Bull!
The Bull was inexpressible. The Bull was beyond words. I
was
black and blue, yellow and purple, and green, white and
gold all
over for weeks afterwards. I could hardly talk for days.
Cissie's doctor friend had to come and wrap me up in
bandages. I
had no school for a month. I was shattered. I was in bits.
I
could barely stand. I thought I'd never be right again.
Cissie
said that, I was lucky to be alive! It was my mother, she
said,
who had saved me in the end. For the first time in my life
that
hopeless woman had done something for me. "You were
lucky!"
Cissie reminded me. I was lucky! Or was I? At the time I
didn't
care whether I was living or dead. I would have been happy
if
58
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
the Bull had murdered me. At least that way, I'd have had
nothing more to do with him, and he could never get at me
again.
I wanted to see an end to him. As soon as I could walk I
was
going to run away. As soon as I could walk I went back to
Herrema. He was gone from the bunker. Without a telly I
lost
touch. I never saw him come out of that Monasterevin house
where
the seige was. Years later I saw the film clips on the
prison
telly. I wouldn't have known him. A man looks all
different when
he's trussed up like a pig and blindfolded. He had a
gentle face
and kind eyes, I thought. He looked beyond the camera with
a
distracted air. I wondered what he was looking for. Maybe
he was
looking for me. Maybe he wanted to see the boy who had
told him,
"there's no one at all who can help you!" He
cried after I told
him that. He believed me. Without knowing it I had
infected him
with the bacillus of my own total despair. He thought his
case
was hopeless. He thought he was going to die in the Bull's
bunker. I reached out and took him by the hand. He stopped
crying, stopped sniffling. "But all this will have to
end
somewhere, sometime," I told him. "It can't go
on forever!"
Offering him my own touchstone philosophy. He nodded.
"Will you
wipe my face?" he asked. With a rag dipped in the
bowl of water
at his feet I wiped the stains of his tears away. "It
will end
somewhere, sometime!" he repeated. "Yes," I
said. Though without
a telly I never knew where or when it had ended. When I
went
back to the bunker and he wasn't there I forgot about him.
I
even forgot his name. When I saw him in prison I was
pleasantly
surprised. "So he's still alive then!" I said to
one of the
59
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
other prisoners. "Oh yes!" he answered.
"They should have
plugged him when they had the chance!" I had to
laugh. The farce
is never-ending. Some people think killing a man is like
eating
a sandwich, nothing more. I could have told him. I could
have
told him all about it. But I didn't. Why, I asked myself,
why
bother?
I thought I was never going to see Cissie again; I thought
she didn't care. When she came to the prison I felt so
happy. I
wanted to tell her, but Cissie and myself were never able
to say
things like that together. Instead I told her about
following
her and her medicine man. She laughed at that. They had
three
children in England, in a place called Endstone, a small
nowhere
of a village, Cissie said, where there were no Irish.
"My
children are going to be English!" Cissie said.
"I tell them
nothing about where I come from..." She looked
apologetically at
me. "They'll never know anything about you," she
said. In a way
I was sorry. It's not nice being written out of someone's
life
that way. "They'll want to know someday," I
hinted. She shook
her head. "No!" she insisted. "I tell them
I have no one! I tell
them I've been entirely alone all my life!" But still
she came
back, at least a half-a-dozen times. It's not easy at all,
you
see; it's not easy to pretend you have no one; it's almost
impossible. I've tried; here in prison I've tried. I
wanted to
eliminate everything; to forget who and what I was; to
clean the
slate and start from scratch; it couldn't work. I was too
well
known for it to have worked. I was in all the papers and
when I
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Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
arrived here everyone knew everything about me. There was
no
need for lies, no need for pretence, no room for evasion;
they
knew me inside out; the truth had preceded me. And then
there
was Pat; there will always be Pat. Sometimes I don't know
who's
on who's side anymore. The prisoners have always been kind
to
me; it was one of the warders who taunted me first with,
"Your
brother Pat says he's coming to get you!" I got so
much of that
in the beginning and it still goes on. Who gave them their
licence to amuse themselves at my expense? To hone their
blade
of wit on me as if I was some kind of barbers strop
intended for
that purpose? They must have nothing better to do!
"Hey, Ulster!
Your brother Pat says he's going to seal up your arse with
semtex and blow your backside to Hell and back!"
Yeah, yeah,
yeah! So funny! "Well, you know what he's going to
stick up your
arse," I tell them. "And I bet you like it when
you get it!"
Fuck them! I say nothing! I never rise to the bait. As far
as
I'm concerned all that is beneath me. I keep out of it. I
keep
my nose buried in a book. Every morning I go to English
Classes
and every afternoon I go to the Library to collect my
books.
Sometimes the Warders stop me on my way back to the cell
and
peruse the covers of my books. That's what they say.
"I just
want to peruse the cover of your book!" They spend
five or ten
minutes looking at the cover. "Aha, aha, aha..."
they mutter
idiotically. "The Legend of Theseus and the Minotaur."
They
scratch their heads under their peaked cap. "Now,
what the fuck
is that?" Sometimes I really wonder who's on who's
side anymore.
Am I really so alone? They hand me back my book. "You
pathetic,
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Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
little, fucking I.R.A man's get!" is the usual
insult. I never
know what they mean. They talk in riddles. Their speech is
not
speech; it makes no sense; it twists and turns through a
mire of
confusion and embarrassment. You would think language
should be
simple; but language to them is like an uncontrollable
twitch,
now mild, now extreme, they don't know where it comes
from. It
goes in and out of their hearts and mouths and takes on
whatever
shape it wants to. Protean! It just climbs up their
throat,
squeezes through their vocal cords, trips across their
tongue,
and falls out of them. It sprays like vomit to my feet. I
walk
over it to get to my cell. I lock myself in, shutting the
steel
gate; if the key were mine I'd throw it away and never
come out
again. But in the mornings the gate must open, life must
go on,
the sound of the warders voices rattle on the empty
gangways,
the smell of porridge wafts up from the depths of the
kitchens,
and I want to die; oh, how I want to die! If only the
world
would let me die! Why am I living anyway? I've never been
able
to figure that out! Why was I born, as they put it, a
"pathetic,
little, fucking I.R.A. man's get!" It's not just
language that
lacks meaning; it's not just words that have no sense!
Life
itself is conceived and born out of emptiness and will one
day
return there! Nothing is meaningful; everything is
meaningless.
That's what I've learned in prison. That's what I believe
in
now... I don't even believe in Cissie anymore!
Cissie. I keep coming back to Cissie. Once she was the
flower on the dungheap. Once she was my only hope. And
then she
62
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
left me. She gave in to the Bull. She shouted,
"Surrender!
Unconditional Surrender!" loud and clear, and skipped
it with
her medicine man. They left for Endstone and I was alone
with
the Bull. She had no excuse for deserting me; no
worthwhile
excuse in the midst of the greatest battle of our lives,
the
battle for our lives; but she left anyway, running to
Endstone,
with Doctor Cure-all in her arms. What was the point in
being in
love, if not to defy the Bull with it? "I'm
sorry," she said
once, when I accused her. "If the Bull found out he
would have
killed him! I couldn't take the risk any longer! I really
did
love him! Not in the beginning, but afterwards! Yes, I
loved
him!" The tears streamed down her face so tenderly, I
was not
without pity. She loved him more than she loved me, that
was
what hurt so terribly. She loved him enough to abandon me,
to
abandon me to the Bull, our common enemy, to be eaten and
devoured by him. "You didn't care what happened to
me!" I said.
She admitted as much. "How could I care?" she
cried, and the
warder told her to "keep it down!" "How
could I care," she
whispered, "living in that place?" It was three
or four days
before we realised she was gone forever. I cried and cried
and
cried. The Bull thought I was in on it. He took an old
rusted
bicycle chain from the shed in the backyard and twisted it
round
my throat. He dragged me across the fields on some bizarre
cross-country run, pulling me roughly through the briared
ditches until I bled from ever pore in my body. He kicked
me in
the face and head until I was half-blind and half-stupid.
He
kicked me until he had exhausted himself and then he knelt
63
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
beside and pulled my head back by the hair until I thought
it
was going to snap off in his hands. Then he bit a corner
of my
ear off. I told myself that this was it, I was going to
die in
this corner of a field, south of the border, with my own
blood
raining into my eyes, blotting out the sky. Then the Bull
began
to snort and wheeze at me and blow hot air into my
bleeding
earhole. "I'm ashamed of you, son!" he said.
"I'm ashamed!" He
had hardly any breath after his exertions. Why did he
bother
talking at all? I didn't want to know! "You're no
bloody use,
are you?" How long did it last? A half-hour? An hour?
All my
bleeding life? Stop it, Bull! "You'll never be any
use!" He
pulled my head back even further, I felt my flesh tearing
asunder, my head pulling off my shoulders. "You're
hardly able
to wipe your own arse!" Did he want me alive to tell
me all
this? "What use is a son like that to any man! What
use is it?
Tell me!" I was paralysed in his arms. There was
blood pouring
into my mouth. I was choking on my own blood. I couldn't
speak;
not a word, not a single word. He shook me away from him.
I lay
on the ground with the bicycle chain twisted round my neck
like
some savage, mutilating necklace. I tried to pull it away
but it
was embedded in my skin. It hurt too much. The Bull stood
over
me. I reached my hand out to him. I wanted him to help me.
"Help
me, Bull!" my gaping hand screamed voicelessly.
"Help me!" He
turned away. He wriggled back through the ditch behind him
and
left me to die. The rain began to fall. A soft, cold rain.
It
washed my skin clean. It washed the blood out of my eyes
and
ears and nose and mouth. I began to breathe again, began
to feel
64
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
alive again. The rain loosened the chain from around my
neck. I
pulled it slowly away from my skin. On every link of the
chain a
bloody fragment of skin was encrusted as if it were a
necklace
made from torn and bleeding human flesh. I threw it away
from
me. I don't know what animals fed on it! I don't care! I
crawled
back through the rain, easing my way through the broken
ditches,
peddling with my elbows over the fields strewn with
cowshite. My
mother was alone in the house. I don't think she even
noticed as
I dragged myself in the door, trailing blood and flesh on
the
stone kitchen floor. I crawled to her feet and curled up
there.
I wanted her to pick me up and put me on her knees. I
wanted her
to hold me. But she didn't, wouldn't, couldn't... I don't
know.
No love could be shown in the Minotaur's maze. No love!
And she
had no love. I never saw such emptiness as lay in the
bottomless
darkness of her abysmal eyes. I never felt such pain as I
felt
then, curled and shivering in front of the small fire she
had
lain and lit for herself in the kitchen hearth. I could
not
speak my pain clearly but I tore the wretched pain-filled
syllables that clogged my throat like clotted blood up by
their
roots and spat them out on the ash-strewn ground at my
lips. "Oh
Cissie!" I cried out. "Oh Cissie! I hate you! I
hate you!" My
mother kicked me in the small of the back. "Sshh!"
she warned.
The Bull was coming. I heard his boots on the stone floor.
He
sat down on the opposite side of the fireplace. There was
silence for a long, long time. Then he said, "We're
going to see
your brother, Pat!" A small ray of hope glanced
through my heart
like deflected light from a mirror. We were going to
Ulster. We
65
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
were journeying to my homeland, up North, my own sweet
corner of
the map. "Good!" I tried to say.
"Good!" I might even see Big
Ian. I might even see my God-like hero, my "Ulster
says No!"
giant. If I was lucky.
I didn't see Big Ian, not at all; I looked and looked on
both sides of every street we passed through, but the big
man
never appeared. On television screens in the pubs we
stopped at
I watched for him to appear but he never did. He was
cautious of
the Bull now; he wasn't going to be responsible for any
more
televisions kicked to oblivion. The Bull had conjured him
out of
existence. Or so it seemed. We saw Pat all right! Bauld
Pat!
There were tears of happiness in both their eyes. They
were
allowed one quick embrace. I had never seen my father with
his
arms around anyone before. Was this what he did with all
his
love? Pat seemed even more stupid than I remembered.
Prison had
brought out all the nonsense in him. He talked in idiot
circles,
trotting round and round in well-rutted sentences like a
horse
in a circus. "Becoming a man... Soon be ready for the
fight!" he
said everytime he looked at me. "Bah!" the Bull
countered. "That
little fucking runt couldn't fight his way out of a paper
bag!"
And, "I brought him here to see a real man!" Pat
never said
anything that followed on what was said before; he seemed
to
pluck learned sentences from the air in front of his eyes,
sentences that appeared at random, with no connection to
what
went before or what came after. "I'll tell them
nothing!" he
said. "I'll do my time but I'll tell them
nothing!" He wasn't
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Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
the same Pat. "Are they treating you well?" the
Bull asked, with
a hint of suspicion in his voice. Pat nodded erratically,
his
head rolling on his shoulders. "Has anyone touched
you?" the
Bull asked. Pat shook his head vigorously. "No,no..."
he said.
"Only..." The Bull glowered at him. I knew what
was happening. I
knew all about this from the inside. Pat was afraid, he
was
afraid to say what he wanted to say; he was afraid to show
weakness in front of the Bull. Prison wasn't agreeing with
him,
that was for sure. He pulled himself together. "I
won't tell
them anything!" he promised. "I won't tell them
a fucking thing!
Fucking Imperialist, Colonialist state, and all
that!" He looked
at me for succour. "Soon be ready to join the fight,
won't you?"
The Bull took up the thread. "Bah, couldn't fight his
way out of
a paper bag, that runt!" They laughed together. The
Bull and his
calf. They should have been on stage together. They'd have
made
anybody laugh. I laughed too. And behind Pat, on the other
side
of the barrier, the prison warder, looked suspiciously at
us, as
if our laughter were a coded plan for escape, or for
murder.
"Time!" he barked. The Bull and Pat threw their
arms around each
other again. "Come on now!" the warden said. Pat
was led away.
He looked over his shoulder as he went. No matter how hard
he
tried he had to show some weakness in the end. There was
sadness
and tears there somewhere, I could see. The Bull could see
too
if he wanted to, but I don't think he wanted to. There was
no
room in the maze for weakness. Pat, the poor bastard!
Exiled
from the Bull's maze he was just a baby; outside of the
labyrinth that long streel of venomous vomit was no more
than an
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Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
infant. I bet he had a good cry when he got back to his
cell,
hiding his tears from the hard men around him. I bet he
cried
his eyes out. But I didn't care. He deserved to be chained
to a
rock somewhere and have his liver eaten away by some
devouring
bird, that's what I felt. Fuck him! He was my brother, but
he
was the Bull's son too, so fuck him! He didn't frighten me
any
longer. In fact, he didn't frighten me at all. He made me
want
to get sick, that was all. I hoped I'd never see him
again. I
had seen all I wanted to of, "a real man".
"You know what
happens now?" the Bull asked me. I hadn't a clue.
"They take him
into that room there and take all his clothes off him!
Then they
turn him inside out! They search every bleeding hole in
his
body! They stick their fingers up his arse until the skin
tears
and bleeds! They humiliate him, to his very soul! They
degrade
him!" He gripped my shoulder hard and stared in my
eyes. "And do
you know why?" he asked sternly. "Do you know
why?" I felt I
should know; I felt I should, but I didn't. The answer, of
course, was obvious. "They're Brits, that's
why!" the Bull said.
It was all so simple. "The Brits have humiliated and
degraded
the Irish for centuries; centuries! Do you understand
that? Can
you grasp that? Not one lifetime, not two, but hundreds of
years, generations and generations, millions of lifetimes,
hundreds of millions of years and lifetimes!" Moved
by his own
speech his voice wavered and softened, then hardened
again.
"It's impossible not to hate them!" he said.
"You might as well
try to stop breathing as try to stop hating the Brits!
Good God,
I'd kill every last fucking one of them, if I had the
means to
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Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
do it!" And the Bull said this in the heart of the
confines of
Britain's strongest prison, with steel-plated watchtowers
and
hundreds of armed and watchful, helmeted and visored
soldiers,
surrounding him. They let him go! It's hard to believe but
they
let him go, with only a glance at his papers, and a glance
at
his back as he walked away. What way was that to fight a
war? It
was not the Bull's way, that's for sure. The Bull's way
was to
kill, to kill, to kill! That was real war! I couldn't
understand
this other thing. I waited for someone to step out of the
shadows and pointing a gun at the Bull's heart and head
wish him
a speedy return to Hell, but it never happened. They let
him
walk away! With all the strength they had, all the force
they
had, all the power they had, they let him walk away! And
you
just can't do that, not in a real war! Someone, somewhere
along
the line, has to show courage! Someone, somewhere along
the
line, has to step out of the shadows and pull that
trigger!
Without the moral strength to do that you may as well give
up,
give in; because that's what you're up against: the moral
strength to do that! The moral strength or the moral
blindness?
I don't know... I don't know... But to let the Bull just
walk
away was a mistake I have never forgiven them.
On our way back the Bull drove slowly, terribly slowly. We
drove through town after town, and in each town the Bull
looked
around him with supernatural attention as if he was
committing
everything he saw to memory. Then, in one small town, no
town in
particular, he stopped the van. "Like some chips,
would you?" he
asked me. I was hungry. I nodded. I became his accomplice.
He
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Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
bundled a paper bag under his jacket, got out of the car
and
walked to a chip shop about a hundred yards up the road.
Five
minutes later he came out with a steaming bag of chips in
his
hand. As he came near the van he stopped beside a wastebin.
I
saw he had two bags in his hands now. I thought maybe he
had
bought two bags of chips. Then he threw one bag carelessly
into
the metal bin. He walked slowly to the van and sat in
beside me.
"Here's your chips," he said. "Did you get
any for yourself?" I
asked him. "I ate them on the way back," he
said. He started the
van. We drove up the street past the metal bin, past the
chip
shop. I saw mothers with prams, I saw children playing in
the
street. I could have jumped out of the van and run back to
the
bin, but I didn't. I could have shouted some word of
warning,
but I didn't do that either. I have no excuse. I'm not
trying to
hide anything. I plead guilty. It was all my fault. I am
responsible for it all. For all the deaths. For
everything. The
shadowy men were waiting when we got home. They were in
rare
good form. They were laughing and they shook my father's
hand
with barely-contained excitement. Mine was the hand that
needed
shaking! I was the one who had made it all happen. We had
heard
it all on the radio before we had reached home. There were
three
deaths, a mother and child, and a soldier. There was a man
who
lost his legs and another man who lost his arms and his
face.
There was a girl of fifteen who was blinded. There were
fifteen
people, men, women, and children, seriously wounded,
lacerated
by flying metal and shattered panes of glass. There was
nearly a
hundred brought to hospital with shock. There was a little
town
70
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
left on its knees, in bits, its flesh hanging from its
bones.
And I did all that... But it would never have happened if
they
had not let the Bull walk away! And so I blame them as
much as I
blame myself. And will never forgive them, anymore than I
can
forgive myself. In spite of it all, I slept well that
night,
with the voices of the shadowy men seeping through the
rafters
to hover round my bed. "You'll soon be big enough to
join the
fight!" one of them had said to me before I had gone
up to bed.
"How's Pat?" one of them asked my father.
"Pat's a tower of
strength!" the Bull answered proudly. "He says
he'll do his time
and tell them nothing!" I had no time for any of
that. I went up
to bed. The voices of the shadowy men hovered around me. I
buried my head in the pillow. I slept. It had been the
longest
day of my life. Everything had happened so slowly. I
wanted to
die. I wished I had never been born. I had blood on my
hands.
And the chips felt like poison in my stomach.
In the end there is only one way of dealing with the
Minotaur; and only one way to survive his deadly maze. The
Minotaur knows that one way; he has practised it all his
life;
it is part of his own being; in truth, he and it are the
same.
The way is death, is murder. And say what you will, if you
are
trapped in the maze, sought by the Minotaur, and do not
have the
means or the will to do it, then you are done for. You
have no
hope. You have given up the ghost even before it is ripped
from
your entrails. And you will never be at peace. I had the
means;
I had the will. The Bull himself had given them to me.
"If
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Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
something oppresses you, you must rise up and strike it
dead!"
he said to me. "If it is stronger than you are, then
you must
use stealth, cunning, secrecy... And then strike when the
moment
is right!" He struck his fist hard into the centre of
the table.
I jumped away with sudden fright. "You weren't
expecting that,
were you?" he asked me. "No, no, you weren't!
You're asleep, you
see! You must never sleep! You must always be on your
guard! If
you're not one hundred per cent alert, then you're as good
as
dead!" The Bull was changed somehow, as if he had
lost an edge
of hardness he had always relied on; he was mellowed in
his old
age. For the first time I noticed the flecks of grey in
his
hair, the shadowy paleness of ageing in his eyes and face.
He
had had some news about Pat. Pat had tried to break out of
the
prison but had been caught and brought back. The Bull went
North
to see him. When he came back there was something
different
about him. I asked Cissie what had happened but she didn't
know.
"Pat was always a weakling," she said. "The
Bull could never see
it! It was bound to come out sometime!" So the Bull
seeing
weakness in Pat had felt weakness in himself perhaps; the
great
wall of illusion had tumbled down. He wasn't such a hard
man
after all. The Bull's sons weren't worth pissing on; and
who
could respect a man with sons like that? I saw it
sometimes when
the Bull looked at me: the shame! The same shame he had
whispered in my ear the time he was strangling me with the
bicycle chain. He couldn't hide from it anymore; and he
couldn't
wipe it out of existence the way he did most things he
hated.
Sometimes I knew he was sorry he hadn't finished me off;
but it
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Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
was too late now; he was never going to get the chance
again;
I'd see to that. The poor Bull, the poor, stupid, fucking
Bull!
He never even saw it coming. His judgement let him down.
After his visit to Pat he needed reassurance. "You'll
be
ready for the fight soon, won't you?" he used to say
to me, but
I never answered him. One day he took me to the Bunker; I
never
let on that I'd been down there. "I'm taking you into
my
confidence, son!" he warned me. "But I'll tell
you once and once
only, if you don't respect my confidence, it'll cost you
your
life! This isn't a game!" We slid down into the
Bunker and he
switched the light on. He opened one of the crates.
"Do you see
this?" he said, pulling out a rifle and offering it
to me. "This
can blow daylight all the way through a man!" I took
the rifle
from him. "It's a high-velocity weapon," he
explained. "The
bullets explode inside you!" I remember how cold it
felt in my
hands. "Here," the Bull said, "I'll show
you how to load it!" He
pulled out a carton of bullets and shot one into a slot in
the
side of the rifle. "Simple, isn't it?" he asked.
He smiled. He
could see that I was interested. "Some day I'll show
you how the
whole thing goes together," he said. He stocked the
rifle back
in the crate and pulled the lid over it. "The Brits
would love
to get their hands on this haul," he said. "But
they'll have to
do it over my dead body!" We climbed back out of the
Bunker. As
we walked across the field towards the farmhouse the Bull
slipped his arm around my shoulder. I hated him for doing
that.
"I promise you I'll make a man of you," he said.
"I'll make a
real man of you!"
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Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
The shadowy men came to the house that evening and the
Bull
did not order me upstairs straight away. He made me shake
their
hands, one by one, and introduced them to me by their
first
names. "This lad will be joining the fight
soon!" he told them.
"It'll do Pat good to hear that!" one of them
barked. They let
me sit with them for about twenty minutes. They sat around
the
table and the Bull asked who had the "agenda".
They conducted
their meeting like a business meeting. They referred to
each
other by their military titles. A report was given on the
planning, execution and success of a recent mission. The
conduct
of a young volunteer under pressure was highly commended.
Then I
was sent to bed. I had been offered a tantalising taste of
what
went on. I had been inducted into the solemnity of their
discussions. I had been allowed to sniff the glamour of
it; and
then sent to bed while the real business was seen to.
The next day, after my mother had lit the fire and gone to
town, the Bull said he was going to bring me on a job with
him,
that I was to dress in neutral clothes, ones I could
afford to
throw away later. "What are we going to do?" I
asked him. "No
need to know more than you need to!" he said.
"What are we going
to do?" I persisted. The Bull glared at me,
"Don't ask fucking
questions," he said. "You follow orders, that's
all that's about
it!" This was it then. I looked him straight in the
face. "No,"
I said quietly. The Bull couldn't take it in. I'd never
said,
No, to him in my entire life before. This was a new
experience
for him. "What the fuck?" he demanded
uncertainly. I waited; it
was up to him where we went from here. The Bull took a
short,
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Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
tentative step towards me. "You little cunt!" he
said. "What are
you saying? What's the fucking idea? I asked you nicely to
change your clothes on and come with me... Now what's up
with
you?" He was almost within reach of me; if he took
one more
step... "No," I said again, and he stopped dead
in his tracks.
For a moment, for just a moment, a look of immense hurt
flickered in his eyes. Then his face went red with anger.
"No
one says, No, to me," he roared. His fingers, like
lightningfast,
tearing claws, ripped the air in front of my face. I took
one step backwards. Then he came at me. I was caught in a
swirl
of arms and legs. I was kicked from one end of the kitchen
to
the other. I rolled under the table. The Bull danced
around the
table, kicking its legs, smashing it with his big boots.
The
legs of the table went flying and the table collapsed on
me. I
crept round the room with the top of the table resting on
my
back like a shell. I saw the Bull's feet running and
jumping,
and disappearing in the air above me; he came down with
the
weight and thunder of a brick wall on the table top and I
was
crushed to the ground. He pulled the table-top away and
knelt
beside me. He caught me by the hair and dragged me towards
the
fire. He threw me down in front of the burning turf. He
sat on
my back. He wheezed and snorted down the back of my neck.
He
stretched his fingers round my throat and gripped tightly.
He
squeezed harder and harder all the time. He pushed my face
into
the hot ash of the fireplace. The turf burned my eyes.
"I'm
going to burn your fucking face off!" he roared. No!
I didn't
want to die like that. Not like that. I only did what I
did to
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Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
save myself. I could not have done it otherwise. The Bull
pushed
me further into the flames. I could smell my own flesh
burning.
I could smell my own flesh roasting like a piece of meat
in the
fire. I had to do something. I reached my hands out in
front of
me and caught a fragment of the flaming turf. Jesus, don't
ask
me how I did it! I just did it! I stretched my arm back as
far
as I could and slipped the red-hot ember inside the open
neck of
the Bull's shirt. With a searing cry of terror and hurt
the Bull
vanished off my back. I curled away from the fire like a
scorched leaf. Then I screamed my pain as loud as I could
and
washed my hand in my own tears. The Bull was standing in
the
middle of the floor. He had ripped his shirt off. A
scarlet
crescent left by the burning turf descended from his right
shoulder over his chest and ribs. I scuppered across the
floor
on my hands and knees. I held my hand under the flowing
cold
water of the kitchen tap. I did not care any longer about
the
Bull. There was a sharp kitchen knife hanging on the wall
in
front of me. If he came near me I was going to rip his
guts out.
"Are you going to come with me?" he asked. You'd
think we were
back where we'd started from and nothing at all had
happened. I
turned towards the Bull. "No!" I screamed.
"No! No! No!" I held
my red and swollen hand up to his face. "Never!"
My lungs almost
burst with the effort of it. The Bull flinched. He moved
back as
if I'd hurled a stone in his face. "No, never!"
I repeated. He
spat on the ground. "You're no son of mine
then," he said. I
laughed. "What would your brother Pat think of
you?" he said.
"Fuck Pat!" I told him. "And fuck
you!" I took the shining knife
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Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
down off the wall. "Now, get out of the fucking
way," I told
him. The Bull laughed. "Oh, you're the big man now,
aren't you?"
he snorted. "Bigger than you'll ever fucking be
anyway," I said.
He was highly amused. "The big little man!" he
said and
repeated. "The big little man! The fucking runt of
the litter!
The Bull calf!" I had to do it. I had to walk by him.
He let me
go. He made that mistake too! He had me in his power, and
he let
me go! Why? Is a mortal enemy, in some way, untouchable?
"Don't
think I'll forget this," he warned. I walked out the
door into
the chilly sunlight. I started across the fields. I began
to
cry. I couldn't stop crying. I cried all the way to the
Bunker.
I cried for everything, for everything that had ever
happened in
my life. I cried for Cissie, I cried for Pat, I cried for
my
mother, I cried for myself; I even cried for the Bull. My
tears
were infinite and left nobody out. They burned me more
than the
turf had burned; they left scorching trails all down my
face. I
will never forget the devouring fire of those tears. I do
not
know whether they were tears of hate or tears of love; all
I
know is that they burned through my heart and left an
emptiness
inside me forever.
In the Bunker I found the rifle still intact. I cradled it
in my arms and carried it back down across the fields. The
Bull
was still standing in the middle of the kitchen. "Oh,
here's the
big little man back!" he said. He laughed out loud
when he saw
the rifle in my arms. "Look what the big man has
found!" I
tilted the gun towards him. He was still laughing when I
pulled
the trigger. I saw the trajectory of the bullet as it
blazed
77
Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
into his laughing mouth and exploded inside his head. The
Bull's
laughter disintegrated in immense sadness; headless, his
body
crashed to the floor; his blood poured out of him like
liquid
out of a bottle turned over. I stepped over him and with
the
tip of the rifle wrote three words in the blood that
pooled
under his gaping neck. Those words were, "Ulster says
No!"
That's how I got my nickname. That's why everyone in the
prison
calls me, "Ulster". When my mother came back
from the town, she
collapsed on the floor and lay beside the Bull and held
him in
her arms. She cried, I heard her sobbing. "I didn't
think you'd
miss him!" I said to her. "You'll never be the
man he was!" she
said. "You'll never be anything like him!"
"I wouldn't want to
be!" I told her, and I ran from the house. It was
late, it was
getting dark. I didn't know where to go. I ran towards the
school. The school was in darkness. There was nobody
there. At
the back of the school there was the English graveyard. I
climbed over the wall and crept in amongst the graves. I
came to
Wilson's grave, and it seemed to welcome me, it seemed to
say,
"you can rest here". There was just a faint
trace of sunset left
but it was getting cold. I wanted to shelter somewhere, to
hide
away from everything. I saw a chink in the stone surround
of
Wilson's tomb and using a rusted metal bar I found, I
widened
it, scrambling the loose stonework away until I had made a
hole
big enough to climb into. It was warm inside. I curled up
and
went to sleep. I wanted to sleep so badly. I didn't dream.
When
I woke Wilson was sitting beside me. He had made a moist
dressing of decayed leaf for my hand. "It will
heal," he said,
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Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
"in a day or two!" He was so kind and his accent
so sweet. "The
same thing happened to me when I was in the war," he
said
softly. I sat up, and my tears starting to flow again,
told him,
"I was in a war too!" He blinked incredulously
as if I had
brought him the strangest, the most unexpected news.
"Do they
still fight wars up there then?" he asked me. He was
interested,
and I was eager to satisfy his interest. "Oh,
yes!" I said. "You
wouldn't believe it..." He leaned towards me all
ears. "Let me
tell you," I offered, and he nodded assent. "Let
me tell you all
about the war I fought with the Bull!"
I couldn't stay underground forever. Wilson knew this.
"You
have a life," he said. "You have to live
it!" But I liked it
where I was, in Wilson's dark tomb, with only the creeping
of
little animals or the rustling of the leaves on the trees
to
disturb us. Life seemed idyllic to me there. "But
it's not
life!" Wilson reminded me. "It's death!"
Gradually he talked me
out into the open. In the evenings, when the orange glow
of
sunset had faded from the air, we slipped out of the grave
into
the bark-scented night of the graveyard. We walked amongst
the
tombstones. Wilson explained away the dead. "When we
went to
war," he said, "we were invulnerable! When we
came back we were
mortal!" The dead seemed to have so much to say; so
much seemed
hidden in their silence. I wondered what story the Bull
would
tell to the Ghosts he encountered. "I don't want to
leave you,
Wilson!" I said. "But you must go!" he told
me. I resisted him.
He did not like that. "But why?" I persisted.
"Because you don't
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Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
belong here!" he said finally. "And if you don't
go, I'll have
to throw you out!" I almost cried. "For the
first time in my
life I've found somewhere where I do belong!" I told
him. He
shook his head. He pointed up through the roof of the tomb
at
the world outside. "You have to go back!" he
said. "You can't
stay!" In the end I accepted this, though going back
into the
world did not please me. When the time came to say our
goodbyes,
Wilson was as sad as I was. "I'll go some of the way
with you,"
he said then. "I don't understand!" I told him.
"How can you go
with me?" He knelt on the ground and rattled his
bones together.
"These things," he said. I laughed. "Won't
you miss them?" I
asked. Wilson laughed. "They have some sentimental
value," he
said, "that's all! And anyway, someone will bring
them back!
Tell them they belong to young Wilson who fought in the
Boer
War!" He bundled his bones together like sticks for
the fire and
handed them to me. "Now go on!" he said.
"And don't lose any of
them!"
The night air was cool. I scaled the wall by the school
and
ran through the school yard. I climbed the school railings
and
ran towards the town. I ran on the road; I ran straight
down the
middle of the road. I ran through the pools of yellow
light cast
down by the streetlamps. My feet splashed through the
sickly
yellow pools. Wilson's bones rattled under my arms as I
ran,
like a weird sound of castanets accompanying my run. On
either
side of the road people stood to look at me. Some of them
pointed and shouted after me: "Look it's the Bull's
son! It's
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Ulster Says No © Tom Quinn 2001, 2002
the Bull's son!" I ran and ran and ran. The streets
and roads of
the town opened out like a huge, interminable labyrinth
through
which I ran; an infinitely intricate, infinitely insidious
labyrinth which wove around and through itself; which,
when it
reached its limits turned back into its own centre and
made
itself inescapable. I ran in ever-increasing,
ever-decreasing
circles, until they caught me and carried me screaming to
my
cell. And they gathered around me, and pulled Wilson's
bones out
of my hands, and pointed at me and shouted that I,
"was the
Bull's son! The Bull's son!" But I said, "I'm
not! I'm not! I'm
not!" And when they pulled and dragged me I said,
"I'm not the
Bull's son!" I said, "The Bull is dead! He's
dead!" I said, "I
slew the Bull! I slew him!" And if it drove me mad, I
said, it
was worth it, if that's what life cost me in the end. But
nothing I ever said meant anything to them. They only
looked at
me with blank eyes and vacant faces, and stared at
Wilson's
bones as if waiting for them to speak.
The End.