Paperboy Page 17

  Roberta’s father was a milkman who got up very early in the morning, and Mandy’s mother took Keep Fit with plump pensioners in the church hall. Mandy fancied my big brother, so the two wee girls giggled as we approached them at the swing. My big brother provoked a lot of reactions in me, but giggling wasn’t one of them. I just couldn’t understand girls.

  ‘Hiya!’ said Mandy, swinging happily. Roberta giggled.

  ‘’Bout ye?’ said my big brother. He spat out his Wrigley’s in a very manly way.

  ‘Mandy fancies you!’ announced Roberta indiscreetly.

  My big brother did not reply directly. Instead, he picked up a small stone and fired it at the bough of the tree, knocking off a small piece of bark. Mandy jumped a little, but looked impressed. Throwing stones was a sign of virility in West Belfast.

  Roberta and Mandy weren’t cheeky or millies, so I thought they would be easy to impress. I picked up a slightly larger stone and also threw it at the poor, embattled tree. My aim wasn’t as good as my big brother’s, so I missed the tree, and Mandy had to duck as my stone flew past her head into the field, missing its target by several miles. The two girls giggled again. This giggle had a different tone to the one they had given in response to my big brother, though. He was a genius at aiming footballs, rugby balls, cricket balls and stones. I was only good at aiming newspapers through letterboxes.

  As if to consolidate my humiliation, my big brother then picked up a large, impressive piece of cement from the remains of last year’s boney. There was still white ash on it, which covered his hands and his Wrangler jacket. Although he now looked like Auntie Mabel after she had been mixing flour to make buns for the soldiers, the girls still looked at him respectfully. No mocking giggles for my big brother. He hurled the lump of cement with both hands, and the projectile ploughed into the bough of the tree and knocked off several small and hopeless green shoots. The rope swing shuddered, and Mandy seemed to shudder too at this display of masculinity. I knew instinctively that it was my turn. Not to be outdone, I looked around the debris of last year’s bonfire. There were some rusty springs that were all that remained of the old mattress that Mrs Porter had given us when her husband died, but I realised that these would be too small to make an impact.

  ‘What’s that you’ve got in your pocket?’ asked Mandy, who had suddenly noticed the dandelion leaves falling out of the pockets of my parallels.

  ‘It’s dandelion leaves for our Snowball, so it is,’ I replied innocently. The giggling erupted once more.

  ‘Dandelion leaves make you wet the bed, ya know, wee boy,’ taunted Mandy. There then ensued a musical chorus of ‘Wet the bed, wet the bed’, and eventually my traitorous big brother joined in: ‘Wet the bed, wet the bed, wet the bed … ’

  It didn’t make sense. How could a weed from up the fields impact on my bladder function while I was in my bed? Maybe I had missed that page in my biology book. Maybe that’s what made Snowball pee on his straw so much. I hadn’t wet the bed for years, although I had recently spilled some Lucozade on the sheets when I was in bed with the chickenpox. Anyway, now I understood why my big brother wasn’t carrying any dandelion leaves in his pockets. He had plucked dozens of leaves, but they had all been stuffed into my pockets. I was clearly intended to be the beast of burden for all potentially embarrassing materials. I was the ass for kicking.

  By this stage, I was becoming desperate to save face. I needed a big stone, and I needed one now. I suddenly spied a red brick from last year’s bonfire debris. It had been used to hold down the sides of our tent the night before the Eleventh Night, when I had been allowed to sleep beside the boney (rather than inside it). I lifted the heavy half-brick and flung it at the tree. Once again, however, it missed its intended destination, and once again Mandy had to duck. As she fell off the swing into the ashy dust below, the red brick continued on its tragic trajectory and hit poor Roberta Ross on the head. ‘Oh f**k!’ said my big brother and disappeared into the distance in an instant, like a summarily sacked paperboy.

  Mandy was now lying on the ground, holding her scratched leg and crying. Roberta looked up at me with a trickle of blood on her forehead, and, as she stared at me, the water came to her eyes too. I had red brick on my hands.

  I froze on the spot. I had made two wee girls cry. I had made two wee girls bleed! I was in trouble. This was the worst thing I had ever done in my life – worse even than stealing sweetie mice from the youth-club tuck shop when the minister’s wife’s back was turned to open a new box of Tayto Cheese & Onion. I felt guilt and fear in equal measure. And I was ashamed.

  ‘You’re dead!’ shouted Mandy.

  I couldn’t disagree.

  ‘Her Da is gonna kill you!’ she continued.

  Not if my Da kills me first, I thought.

  What had happened to me? I had turned from rabbit nurturer to terrorist in seconds!

  Roberta just looked at me pitifully and cried, until the blood and tears blended on her cheeks. She didn’t shout or scream or call me a ‘cheeky wee bastard’ or anything – and that just made it worse.

  What am I going to do? I thought. I had to consider the right course of action. Roberta’s da was a milkman, so he was probably a hard man because milkmen were legitimate targets. But it was the afternoon, so he was probably in bed right now … Having evaluated all of my options, I took a moral decision. I ran away.

  I didn’t set foot in that wee girl’s street for two years after this, in case her da got me. I had to find an alternative route to the July bonfire through Mr Beattie’s hedge, and I missed a whole winter season of street-sliding on my biscuit-tin lid. I had a recurring nightmare of Roberta’s da coming to our front door with an angry face, shaking a milk bottle in my face and threatening to split my head like his wee girl’s. But it never came to pass. Any hope, however, of a career progression from paperboy to milk boy was shattered.

  Interestingly, my big brother displayed great loyalty, by not revealing any of the details of the assault to my parents, so I got off with it. I felt guilty though. I still feel guilty. But somehow I learned something that day up the fields. The bloodied face of Roberta Ross was unforgettable. I worked out that I didn’t want to do anything like that ever again. Sure, there were enough people drawing blood in Belfast, and too many of them seemed to enjoy it. So I chose a different path – the path of the pacifist paperboy. It all happened up the fields. The same fields where I watched peace from a distance, in 1976.

  It was 28 August, and there had been no big stories or elections for a while, just the usual marches and murders. While the papers were usually a bit lighter in the summer, on this day there were shoulder-breaking extra pages. Oul’ Mac had arrived late with the delivery because the crowds were still causing a traffic jam on the Shankill Road. Although he was shouting and saying ‘f**k’ even more than usual, there was no danger of Oul’ Mac’s van being hijacked today. For this was the day that the Catholic women of the Falls Road would walk across the Peace Line and when the Protestant women of the Shankill Road would join them to walk together for peace. This was unheard of.

  I first stumbled upon the suggestion that this miracle might actually happen on a recent front page of one of my Belly Tellys. I was so shocked when I read this news that I stopped still on the pavement mid-delivery and my paperbag dropped off my shoulder, landing perilously close to a recent dirty deposit made by Petra, our street’s now legendary labrador.

  I wasn’t used to miracles. Protestants and Catholics didn’t mix deliberately, unless they were rioting at the Peace Line, or arguing on Scene Around Six; unless there were petrol bombs or politicians present. We weren’t allowed to live in the same street; we weren’t allowed to go to school together; we weren’t allowed to get married; and we even got blown up in different pubs. And, after that, we would be buried in different graveyards. My granda’s family were buried in an old cemetery that was divided between the two sides: when I went to visit my dead relatives, I noticed there were no Virgin Marys on
our side of the cemetery. I wondered if the corpses were building peace walls underground, but I was pretty sure that wouldn’t matter quite so much down there.

  Of course, sometimes Catholics and Protestants couldn’t avoid ending up in the same place together – like when all the kids from the Falls and the Shankill had to go to the Cupar Street Clinic to get a polio vaccination. In the waiting room, the mothers would talk away to each other like everything was all right, agree that it was terrible what was going on, so it was, and that it was a small minority on both sides that was causing all the trouble, so it was. They would not dare to get any more specific, for fear there would be an unhealthy exchange in a clinic with such large needles present. But although we queued together for polio injections on the Peace Line, that wasn’t the same as marching together for peace in public. You were supposed to march against them, not with them!

  On that sunny August day, the front page of the Belfast Telegraph had a picture showing our mountain, the Black Mountain, rising behind a 25,000 strong throng of widely flared women in Woodvale Park. In the same picture, I could make out the trees in the park where my name was carved alongside that of Sharon Burgess. Elton John and Kiki Dee were at No.1, but it seemed possible now that Sharon might go breaking my heart anyway. In the grainy image on the front page of my papers, I could also see the fields on the slopes of the Black Mountain in the background, where, only a few hours ago, I had sat and watched the huge rally for peace. I had been a tiny dot up there behind it all.

  Most of the women in our street, including my mother, had decided to go to the rally. My mother said she would know some of the Catholic women from the Falls Road, because she used to sew with them before the Troubles. The few women in our street who stayed behind that day were the ones who believed that God or the man they voted for – or both – would disapprove of marching for peace with Catholics, or ‘Roman Catholics’, as Mrs Piper called them. She always corrected you for saying ‘Catholic’, which was almost as wicked as saying ‘Derry’ instead of ‘Londonderry’. But for a brief interval that summer, the Mrs Pipers were the minority.

  Of course, most of the men stayed at home. It seemed that peace was women’s work. Manning vigilante barricades, hijacking buses and joining the UDA was for my gender. Titch McCracken said you were only a real Ulsterman if you were prepared to fight and die to keep Ulster British. I was prepared to defend the earth from an alien invasion, but that was as far as I was willing to go.

  As I climbed up the fields that day, I wondered why a boy could only watch peace. Reaching the higher fields, I was amazed at the sight of the crowds in Woodvale Park that afternoon, and moved by the sound of singing and cheering. A strange mix of laughter and the refrain of ‘Abide with Me’ was bouncing off the Black Mountain that day. This was unbelievable.

  Unexpectedly, I found myself weeping. I was used to the echo of bomb blasts and gunfire. Were we really capable of this? It seemed a lot harder than fighting. This was the answer. The Troubles would be over soon. One day the killing would stop. There would be no more bombs at the shops and no more soldiers on the streets. And everyone would agree that all the fighting had been a waste of life. I was living in hope, so I was.

  Chapter 16

  Puppy Love

  I hated spots, so I did. An enormous zit always seemed to erupt on the end of my nose just in time for the Westy Disco on a Saturday night. Sharon Burgess would have been too sensitive to my feelings to have ever drawn attention to such things, but I feared my big red nose could be seen throbbing in the dark, like the disco lights that flashed in time with ‘Shang-a-Lang’. So I applied Clearasil lotion to my pitted face every day, in spite of the typical taunts I knew this would draw from my big brother. I even tried to burn off my spots with Brut. I already of course had some personal experience of the proven fiery effects of aftershave on sensitive skin, and so I splashed it all over my spots. It hurt, but it didn’t work. It just made the spots grow larger.

  I wanted to look good for my first sweetheart: I needed to retain her affections under possible threat. The disturbing revelations of the wee millie at my jumble-sale fiasco were still ringing in my ears: ‘She’s only going out with you because she fancies your big brother, ya know.’

  I repeated these words in my head many times thereafter. Even when I tried to forget them, they wouldn’t go away. It was like putting ABBA’s Greatest Hits on repeat on the stereogram in the sitting room and not being able to get ‘I Do, I Do, I Do …’ out of your head for the rest of the day.

  I never mentioned any of this to Sharon Burgess, because I believed she was innocent until proven guilty. It would have been very out of character for the lovely Sharon Burgess to be going out with a wee lad just to get close to his big brother. She was too perfect to do anything like that. Her deep brown eyes were too bright and honest to be clouded by any such deceit. Her skin was soft and beautiful, and she never had any spots. Sharon Burgess was like a Miss World, but younger, in parallels and without a tiara. Our family watched Miss World on TV every year. It was real family viewing. My mother admired the evening gowns, and my father enjoyed the swimsuits. My brothers and I were also more than susceptible to the charms of this beauty contest, and we enjoyed picking our favourite ones every year, like in the Eurovision Song Contest. One year, however, we were sent to bed early for fighting, after my big brother accused me of staring at Miss Argentina’s diddies.

  To bring up the damaging gossip I had heard about my own personal Miss Upper Shankill and my big brother carried the risk of accusing my sweetheart of an unproven crime. People in Belfast got accused of things they hadn’t done all the time, so I was determined not to make the same mistake myself. It would have been as bad as suggesting that Sarah Jane Smith only assisted the Doctor in the TARDIS because she fancied the Master. This was just as unthinkable, and to suggest such a thing would just have made Sharon chuck me. I did, however, closely observe any interactions she had with my big brother – but I couldn’t detect any signs of adoration. I even secretly looked up the problem page of Irene Maxwell’s Jackie one week before I delivered it, to see if there were any letters from a girl called Sharon in Belfast who fancied her boyfriend’s big brother. I also consoled myself with the thought that my big brother wasn’t interested in my girlfriend anyway, because she was too young for him and he preferred girls who did gymnastics.

  To look handsome enough for Sharon Burgess necessitated well-pressed parallels, polished platforms and feathered hair from His n’ Hers beside the graveyard where Sharon’s own mother did the feathering. But I knew I could only ever be superficially handsome without perfect skin like David Cassidy and perfect teeth like Donny Osmond. So I began a war on acne. Although I spent many hours on the battlefield in front of the bathroom mirror, I never seemed to win a strategic victory. I tried squeezing the most persistent spots, but that just made them bigger and then I would get shouted at by my mother for splatting zit pus on the bathroom mirror. Pinching the most stubborn spot was like trying to push an already torn newspaper through a customer’s letterbox: it just made things worse. I found myself facing defeat on a daily basis.

  Then, as if the acne wasn’t bad enough, I began to notice that my teeth were growing in a very strange manner. I noticed this change over the course of a few months, during my daily inspection of my face in the mirror, when I would be searching hopefully but in vain for signs of new hard hairs on my upper lip. I would also scan my skin for newly erupted or potentially threatening spot sites. At first, it was barely noticeable, with my upper canines growing down like those of a normal human, but after a while I observed that they kept growing further and further downwards. To my horror, I realised that I was developing fangs! It was ghoulish – I was beginning to look like Dracula. At Halloween I didn’t have to buy plastic fangs in a Lucky Bag any more, because my real teeth were becoming monstrous enough. I was turning into the only good livin’ vampire in history. How could this be happening? My mother was next to notice this dental
deformity, and I knew it was becoming obvious when my big brother began referring to me as ‘Fang’. I knew a visit to the dreaded dentist was inevitable.

  The dentist’s surgery was in a big old three-storey house overlooking Woodvale Park, where they even vandalised the bushes. When I sat in the dentist’s chair, I could see the tops of tall trees that had ‘Tony Loves Sharon – True’ carved into their boughs with the penknife I had won at the fairground in Millisle. Whenever I was trapped in that chair to have a hateful filling done, I would try to think of pleasant things to distract me from the pain. So, as the dentist drilled, I would look out of the window across the park and imagine Agnetha up a tree, singing ‘Fernando’.

  On the day my mother took me along to have my fangs checked, I sat in that same chair, dreading a diagnosis that would necessitate a cold sharp steel injection into the roof of my mouth. Fortunately, on this occasion, this was not to be the case. ‘Your son requires orthodontic treatment as a matter of urgency, Mrs Macaulay,’ said the dentist. ‘I will arrange an appointment for him to see Mrs Osborne immediately.’

  Within two weeks, I had my first visit to the orthodontist to arrange for a brace to be fitted, so that my vampire mouth could be pulled into shape. Mrs Osborne’s orthodontic surgery was located in one wing of her huge house up the Malone Road, where all the wealthy people lived. On my first appointment there, I was amazed to discover how the real rich people lived.

  Before this, the biggest house I had ever been in was a four-bedroom detached house up the Antrim Road with a double garage and an avocado bidet. That had been impressive – but I had never been inside anything quite like this before. There were rooms everywhere, and the walls were covered with dark polished wood instead of woodchip wallpaper. There was wood on the floor as well, instead of shag pile. There were no fluorescent light tubes in the kitchen. It was much more old-fashioned than our house, more like the Rowings’ place, but bigger and richer. They hadn’t knocked down the walls between the toilet and the bathroom, neither had they removed any chimney breasts to make more room and put in an electric fire. There were no lava lamps or brown suede pouffes, even though I was certain they could have afforded dozens of them. They had very old-looking wooden furniture that you couldn’t get on hire purchase in Gillespie & Wilson on the Shankill, and they had old chiming grandfather clocks and silver candlesticks you couldn’t buy in the Club Book.