Paperboy Read online

  Sometimes though, it was very confusing. People who lived in caravans all year round were baddies, but people who lived in caravans for the Twelfth Fortnight were goodies. Men with long hair and beards who played drums in heavy-metal bands were baddies, because they worshipped the Devil – but men with short hair and moustaches who played drums in the flute band on the Twelfth were goodies, because they worshipped Ulster.

  Wee African babies were goodies because they were starving to death, but we were goodies because we sent them money from our jumble sales. English people were mainly goodies, especially if they played for Man United, but if they wanted the troops out or were homos, then they were baddies. Scottish people were goodies because of tartan and the Bay City Rollers; Swedish people were goodies because of Agnetha. And my granny could not be moved in her view that all Germans were baddies, even though we had beaten them long ago and were still beating them in It’s a Knockout.

  Americans were special goodies, but it was complicated in the USA. They were mostly goodies, because of Walt Disney and the Osmonds (although my big brother said Donny was an even bigger goody-goody than me). I wondered if Donny had got saved on a bin at the caravan too, but then again, he was a Mormon – and Mrs Piper said they were baddies.

  Americans were mainly goodies, because they made the best movies and had thousands of nuclear bombs pointing at the Russians, who were serious baddies. Americans were also goodies because they had dropped atomic bombs on Japan to win the war for us. American cowboys were goodies but American Indians were baddies, except for Tonto, because he helped the Lone Ranger. There were both goodies and baddies in Starsky and Hutch, but the two detectives were goodies of course, and always won. And I could not imagine anything in creation more goodie than Farrah Fawcett-Majors from Charlie’s Angels, who I put up on my bedroom wall in a swimsuit. However, sometimes my father would shout at Americans on the news because they were sending money to the IRA to kill us, so I realised that some Americans must be baddies too. Which was okay, because I knew it was a very big country and they couldn’t all be goodies.

  Will Robinson in Lost in Space was an American and he was definitely a goodie, but Dr Zachary Smith on the same spaceship was a baddie and he was an American too. Of course maybe it didn’t matter what country you came from when you were lost in outer space, and just because someone had an American accent didn’t mean they actually came from America – like the DJs on Downtown Radio, for instance.

  However, there was no doubt whatsoever about who the biggest baddies were. Everyone knew the facts. Russians, Provos and Daleks were the worst. They were the ones who wanted us dead the most. They were all powerful, showed no mercy and wanted to exterminate us. Of course, the Provos didn’t have as many nuclear bombs and ray guns as the Russians and the Daleks, but they lived just over the Peace Wall so they were much more immediately threatening baddies.

  I could understand why the IRA wanted the Brits out and all, but I couldn’t understand how they decided who they were going to kill to get their way. It was dead scary, so it was. Loyalists were easy to understand because they just wanted to kill Catholics full stop, but the IRA had an ever-growing list of what they called ‘legitimate targets’. Some of these I could understand – such as soldiers and policemen and taxi drivers – but when the list started to grow, to include cleaners and painters and decorators, I began to get worried. If the IRA wanted to kill you, they would get you, so you lived in hope that they wouldn’t make you one of their legitimate targets. But the way things were going, it seemed, soon all Protestants, including paperboys, would be legitimate targets.

  I started to get concerned when I noticed a pattern from the pages of my newspapers: the IRA were favouring attacks on milkmen and blowing up the Milk Marketing Board. I concluded that the milk industry must have been a major barrier to a United Ireland. It reminded me of Trevor’s da’s campaign to boycott Catholic cheese, so as to save Ulster. I wondered if the Provos thought all the cows were Protestants. I suppose that would have been hard to swallow, right enough. Or maybe they thought the Brits were putting secret drugs in the milk to turn us English, and that we would all wake up one day talking like on Monty Python: I guessed for a Provo that would be worse than being chopped up and turned into Frankenstein’s monster in black and white on BBC 2 on a Friday night. I thought that if Trevor’s da and a Provo ever got together in prison, they would probably have a lot in common – as long as the Provo liked Elvis and absolutely no dairy products were present.

  When the milkmen came under attack, I was more worried than I had ever been that the IRA were about to turn their sights on me. Milk was a delivery service, after all – and perilously close to my own profession. One night I had a nightmare that Ruairí Ó Brádaigh went on the news and said that paperboys delivering the Belfast Telegraph were now officially a part of the evil British propaganda war-machine thingy he was always talking about. I woke up in a terrible sweat. I had to look up at Farrah Fawcett-Majors for quite a while for some comfort before I could get back to sleep again.

  But one night the bullets and bombs came closer to me than I had ever experienced until then. Ironically, it wasn’t because I was a paperboy delivering propaganda for the British war-machine thingy. It was because I was a boy scout.

  I liked being a scout. I had won Best Cub Scout in our troop in 1971. Normally Scouts was on a Wednesday night at eight o’clock, in the same Nissen Hut as the Westy Disco (except on Scouts night, the lights were on and there was no snogging). However, this week we were meeting early – at six o’clock – because we were going on a visit to the Belfast Fire Brigade Headquarters.

  I was very excited about the prospect of seeing the fire engines up close, because the nearest I had ever been to one was watching Trumpton. I wanted to meet the brave firemen who dampened the flames of the bonfires, the buses and the Co-op Superstore. My excitement was subdued, however, by the problems the early start would cause me as a hard-working paperboy.

  Determined to get everything fitted in, I rushed home from school, completed a particularly nasty algebra homework and learned my Latin verbs. Equipped with this absolutely crucial knowledge, I collected the papers from Oul’ Mac, with even fewer words than usual. Then I dashed over hedges at speed and delivered all forty-eight Belfast Telegraphs faster than my wee brother on his space hopper at Sports Day. It was now half past five. I gulped down two fish fingers and a lump of Smash and swiftly changed into my scout uniform. This was a green jumper with yellow scarf held together with a woggle. Different scout troops had different colours of scarf, and it was unfortunate that our scarf was yellow, because when I saw the IRA marching on the news they had green shirts and yellow scarves too. They looked just like our Scouts in fact, except that they had dark glasses and guns, while we had woggles and first-aid badges.

  By ten minutes to six, I was ready to leave: I would just have enough time to run down the hill to the West Circular Road, to join the other scouts. But as I opened the front door to leave, I heard a burst of gunfire and then another. It was much closer than usual. I felt my father put his hand on my shoulder to draw me back into the house. ‘Houl your horses!’ he said. ‘Wait til we see where that was.’

  Daddy got out the FM wireless and tuned into the army radio channel. You weren’t really allowed to do this, but everyone did because you could always find out where the trouble was, even before the Downtown Radio news. We soon heard English voices using the code name ‘Charlie’. Everybody knew that that meant our area. A voice said: ‘Shooting on the West Circular Road!’ That’s where the scouts were. ‘Shooting at the shops on the West Circular Road!’ another voice crackled. This was just across the road from the Nissen hut.

  ‘What if one of the scouts was over there buying chewing gum to bring on the trip?’ I thought. That’s what I had intended to do, if I hadn’t been so late.

  After a few more minutes of listening in to the secret conversations of the security forces, my father agreed that it was safe eno
ugh for me to go down the road to see what had happened with the Scouts. This was far more exciting than a visit to the fire station! As I ran down the hill, I could feel my heart beating twice as fast as usual. At first I thought this was down to the combination of sprinting and the excitement of the gun attack – but then it occurred to me that it might be my ‘bad’ heart, so I slowed down.

  Suddenly, as I reached the bottom of the hill, the whole earth shook. The windows of the houses around me fell out onto the street. I froze on the pavement, clutching my woggle, and the whole world stopped, it seemed, apart from the sound of raining splintered glass. Then there was silence. Then alarms and sirens and men shouting and women screaming, and a foul, heavy black smoke everywhere. ‘Danger, Will Robinson! Danger, Will Robinson!’

  As I ventured around the corner onto the main road, I noticed some of my scout patrol crouching down on the ground behind a police cordon. There were still some windows falling out, and I saw that there were no tiles on the roof of the Post Office. I spotted wee Sammy Reeves in the crouching crowd. Sammy didn’t wash much and never had a girlfriend, but he was exceptionally good at knots. His face looked very white beneath the grime.

  ‘What happened?’ I whispered to him. I don’t know why I whispered, but no one was talking out loud.

  ‘The Provos fired at the scouts waiting outside the hut, and we all had to duck down on the ground behind a car, and we nearly shit ourselves, and then the police came and shouted at us to get away fast cos they had planted a bomb at the shops, and as soon as we got back here, the whole f**kin’ thing blew up!’ wee Sammy panted.

  I was raging. I had missed it! I had just missed it all by five minutes! Crestfallen and shaken, I walked home to hear what exactly had happened on the Downtown Radio news. I listened to the same bulletin every hour until midnight, even though the news didn’t change. It just said there had been a gun attack on a group of scouts in West Belfast.

  The next evening, it was on the front page of my papers, though no one in Belfast Royal Academy had even mentioned it in school that day. However, Titch McCracken was angrier than I had ever seen him, and he wasn’t even in the scouts after he got thrown out for smoking in a tent at Crawfordsburn Country Park. Titch said it just proved that all Catholics hated us and supported the IRA, but later when I was in school with wee Thomas O’Hara and he was joking that I fancied Patricia Thompson, I was very certain he wouldn’t want to hurt anybody.

  For months, the rest of the scouts could talk about how they had stood up to the IRA and escaped the bloody attack, but all I could say was that I had been doing my papers at the time. One of the older boys was awarded the Queen’s Award for Scouts, for his courage in getting all the younger boys to hit the ground when the bullets started flying. Reverend Lowe said we should thank God that we were delivered from harm that night and that we should not be longing for more such incidents in our lives. He must have been reading our minds and somehow understood the strange fascination violence held for us.

  For the rest of my career as a paperboy, when I sometimes heard gunfire in the distance while delivering my papers in the dark, I thought about the night they shot at the scouts. I worried that there might be other wee lads my age out there who weren’t getting a chance to duck down in time. Wee lads just like me, not really understanding all the trouble going on all around them. Maybe they liked Doctor Who too. Maybe they had a lovely girlfriend like Sharon Burgess. Maybe they were hoping to go to the Bay City Rollers concert in the Ulster Hall. I could not forget the night the bullets missed the scouts and I had missed the bullets. I kept on wishing it would all end. But I knew it never would, so I did.

  Chapter 12

  A Final Verbal Warning

  I got complacent, so I did. Now that my paperbag was black with experience, I began to cut corners and take risks. I was heading for a fall, as surely as the day I had slipped on Petra’s poop, fallen against Mrs Grant’s rose bush and torn my new tartan turn-ups out of John Frazer’s. The same day I had run home crying and been spotted of course by Big Jaunty, who had told all the other paperboys the next day, when they had all laughed until they cried.

  I had developed the sort of paperboy swagger that comes with the confidence of having delivered ten thousand papers with a completely clean disciplinary record. Among swaggers, the paperboy swagger was unique. It was more uncommon than a hard-man swagger, more routine than a marching-season swagger and less intimidating than a tartan-gang swagger. It was a swagger very much in its own right, and involved walking purposefully, while at the same time confidently swinging a heavy bag over one shoulder without losing your balance (no matter how high your platform shoes) whenever it swung back into place. Your shoulders would then continue an arrogant vertical and horizontal swaying motion, while one hand would remain fixed on the paperbag, holding it close to one leg. With your other hand, you would remove each newspaper from the paperbag, slapping and folding it aggressively against the other leg. It was paperboy poetry in motion. This complex ballet of the streets would be performed at great speed – unless you were in a bad mood because you had got the strap for your cheek and you weren’t going to the caravan that weekend.

  I had mastered the essentials of the job long ago, as well as identifying and honouring the importance of all of the more subtle dos and don’ts that were part of a paperboy’s unwritten induction manual. These included the following immutable rules:

  • Never throw newspapers towards a house like an American paperboy. This is Belfast: you could be mistaken for a petrol-bomber. Also, the paper might well get soaked or stolen.

  • Do not rub your nose while doing the papers, as the black ink on your hands will create a Groucho Marx moustache on your face at the exact moment that a wee girl you fancy or your big brother is walking down the street. They will laugh and you will be humiliated.

  • Do not over-fold your papers, or they will be too fat to fit through the standard letterbox.

  • Do not attempt to deliver papers on a bike. The weight of your paperbag will inevitably shift your centre of gravity, so that you lose balance and crash into a prickly hedge, a brick wall, a rusty car, or all three.

  • Do not fight with spring-loaded letterboxes. Accept that they will slice your fingers, no matter how good your delivery technique.

  • Never attempt to deliver to houses with snarling dogs, especially if the owner says, ‘Och, don’t worry, love, he wouldn’t touch ye.’

  • Do not be seen jumping over fences between semi-detached houses. This will upset the more upwardly mobile customer by reminding them that, although they have risen from terrace to semi, they still live on the Shankill and as such have not yet achieved suburban detached status.

  • Do keep ringing the doorbell if a curtain twitches and no one comes to the door, especially if they haven’t paid their paper money for two weeks in a row.

  • Do remember who is on holiday, so they do not return from Millisle to a newspaper mountain inside their front door.

  • Do be nice to old ladies, including pretending you like their cats that scratch you, and be friendly with families who have a Ford Cortina and wash it every week, as these are the ones who are most likely to give you a good tip.

  As my mastery of my trade became increasingly evident, I noticed how Oul’ Mac began to look at me with a certain amount of awe. Clearly he had never before seen such flawlessness in a paperboy. I was never late; never once had I given him cheek; I had never stolen even a single penny. My employer’s attitude to me changed from indifference to incredulity and then, finally, to admiration. I actually overheard him whispering the words, ‘best f**kin’ paperboy ever’ to Mrs Mac once, as I walked into the shop with a bulging bag of tepid takings, fresh from my boots. And indeed, to Mrs Mac, I was approaching sainthood.

  My customer complaint rate was exceptionally low. My clean slate had in fact been marred on a few occasions only, by unjust crumpled back-page complaints, and even then Oul’ Mac had taken responsibility fo
r the damaged goods as being van-related as opposed to bag-related. Each time, he had apologised to the customer, said it ‘hadn’t been the wee lad’s fault’, and given them a free Ulster. Even when customers sometimes complained unfairly – when, for example, it had actually been the postman who had spat on their step – I never told any of them where they could stick their Belfast Telegraph (at least not out loud), not even Mr Black from No. 13. And so the conflict had never escalated to management level and therefore Oul’ Mac never even got to hear about it.

  Of course, Mr Black had never liked me, since my very first paper round, when he had suggested I was too young for my vocation. The feeling was mutual: I didn’t like the oul’ get either. He was well known for being grumpy. My mother always described him as ‘yet another ignorant wee Belfast man’. I took this to mean that there was a large pool of such men in our city. Mr Black’s wife had died before I was born, and he had grown-up children in Canada and bad breath. He loved his greyhounds only.

  One day, while happily engaged in my work and delivering his paper perfectly and on time, with one of the greyhounds tugging at the turn-up of my parallels, the same Mr Black told me off for whistling ‘Fernando’ by ABBA. He said I should ‘not be whistling no Republican song at his front door’. There was a line in ‘Fernando’ that went something like, ‘How proud you were to fight for freedom in this land’, and so Protestants thought Fernando was a Provo. I was certain, however, that Fernando, the song’s hero, was fighting near the Rio Grande, because that rhymed with ‘land’ in the next line. ABBA spoke Swedish, so they liked easy English rhymes like that. I wasn’t sure exactly where the Rio Grande was, but I was certain it wasn’t anywhere near West Belfast. I supposed it might have been in the Bogside, but even then I was sure Fernando wasn’t a Provo.