Paperboy Page 6

  One Saturday night, at our local disco, ‘the Westy’, in a lull between Suzi Quatro and Mudd, I asked Sharon Burgess secretly if she thought Trevor’s da was in the UVF. The Westy Disco was a good place to pose such a discreet question, because it was dark and noisy, and no one could hear, or see your eyes.

  ‘Big Jaunty’s da?’ she replied. ‘I don’t know, but Big Jaunty’s lovely, so he is, he looks like David Cassidy.’ I dropped my carton of hot peas and vinegar over the new platform shoes I had just got from John Frazer’s.

  For six months, Trevor turned up on time and never thieved. He consistently delivered, and was even starting to get some eye contact from Oul’ Mac. My position was under threat. The more time I spent with Trevor, the more he irked me.

  He was of course the only paperboy with no spots. He never had to use any of his tips to buy a tube of Clearasil which he would have to hide at the back of the bathroom cabinet, behind his father’s old Brylcreem jar (that had not been used since he went baldy), in case his big brother found it and accused him of wearing girl’s make-up.

  I noticed, when we lined up to get the newspapers from Oul’ Mac’s van, that Trevor always smelled of Brut aftershave – and he hadn’t even started shaving! And so it came to pass that Trevor Johnston would be responsible for the most embarrassing incident of my life to date.

  Spurred on by jealousy of my rival, I used some of my birthday money to proudly buy my first bottle of Brut from Boots, near the City Hall. I knew that Henry Cooper wore this aftershave, and he had knocked out Muhammed Ali. I only wanted to knock out Trevor Johnston, so I was sure it would do the trick. As I opened my first bottle of Brut, I recalled Henry Cooper in the TV adverts saying that he splashed it all over. The instructions on the bottle itself said the same thing: ‘Splash all over.’ So that night, as I was getting ready to meet Sharon Burgess, to watch her wee brother play the flute at the band parade, I did just that. By this time, Sharon and I had become an item, much to my great joy.

  But no one had warned me that ‘all over’ should not include your jimmy joe. As the burning sensation increased, I rapidly ran a cold bath, submerged the painful region and sat, shivering and suffering in silence, in the vain hope that no one would notice. My mother’s intuition, however, intervened to inform her that something was amiss. Her persistent knocking at the locked bathroom door eventually forced me to admit my error with the aftershave.

  ‘Come on, love, tell me what’s wrong,’ she pleaded. ‘I’m your mammy, love, it’s all right.’

  ‘Okay!’ I finally confessed. ‘I put Brut on my jimmy joe!’ I blurted out, ‘and it’s killin’ me!’

  Within seconds, Mammy was down the stairs and into the greenhouse in the back garden, where my father was watering his tomatoes.

  ‘Oh my God, Eric, we’re gonna have to take our Tony to the Royal! He’s put aftershave on his wee jimmy joe!’ she shrieked, much, much too loudly.

  Could it get any worse? The prospect of being wheeled into Casualty in the Royal with a Brut burn on my jimmy joe was an absolute nightmare. My mother’s unnecessary use of the word ‘wee’ in this context completed my humiliation.

  I heard the sound of the watering can clattering on the crazy paving and my father shouting: ‘The stupid wee glipe!’ But, then to my relief, he added, ‘No son of mine will be going to the Royal with an aftershave burn on his …’

  This welcome pronouncement was interrupted by the outbreak of hysterical laugher from the nearby garden shed. My big brother had been in there with my wee brother, teaching him how to play poker with matches, and they had heard everything. The reverberation of their laughter on the shaky wooden walls of the garden shed continued long after the pain had subsided. My wee brother was only six years old at the time, but for weeks afterwards, he replaced ‘Humpty Dumpty Sat on a Wall’ with a new nursery rhyme, which he chanted again and again, with a delighted chuckle as he bounced up and down the street on his space hopper: ‘Our Tony put Brut on his wee jimmy joe/Our Tony put Brut on his wee jimmy joe’.

  I was learning that a TV commercial was like the Bible in Belfast: if you took it entirely literally, it could cause a lot of pain. Of course it had all been Trevor Johnston’s fault – he had made me do it!

  When my rival first arrived to do paper delivery, the pecking order of paperboys was already established. The rule was that when everyone assembled at Oul’ Mac’s van for the distribution of the papers, the more senior paperboys received theirs first. By this stage, it was I who was in pole position. New boys and younger boys got their newspapers last, even if sometimes these included a couple of torn back pages for which they would have to suffer the consequences from an angry customer who played the Football Pools. The shade of the paperbags slung on the shoulders of the line-up of paperboys painted a spectrum of power and status. At the front, almost head to head with Oul’ Mac, were the dirtiest bags, while the clean bags loitered nervously at the back. To my horror, after a few months of Trevor being in his employ, and twice in one week, Oul’ Mac gave him his papers first. This was getting serious! Maybe Mrs Mac hadn’t cleaned Oul’ Mac’s glasses that month, or maybe he was confused by the smell of all that Brut, I hoped desperately, clinging to the possibility of some sensory impairment on Mac’s part as an explanation.

  Suddenly, Trevor Johnston was everywhere, like little Jimmy Osmond. He was even in my scout troop! And when he was made the leader of my patrol group just because he was tall and good at knots, I was livid. As we lined up, raised three fingers to God and the Queen and said, ‘Dib, dib, dib’, Trevor was at the top. Big Jaunty was the leader of the pack.

  Then, one Friday night, I was delivering the Jackie to Irene Maxwell. I had struggled to remove the white knitting wool tied round the gate and gatepost to stop Irene’s wee brother from getting out onto the road, so I was already distracted. When I removed the glossy magazine from the grimy interior of my paperbag, there was David Cassidy on the cover.

  ‘He looks a bit like Big Jaunty, so he does,’ I found myself thinking, before catching myself on. It was the last straw. I snapped like one of my guitar strings being tuned too tightly. I hated Trevor Johnston! I wanted him to try to jump Mr Hamilton’s fence and catch his Doc Marten laces on the wire, and fall on his pretty face and tear his parallels at the knees and to have to get stitches in the Royal. I knew the only pacifist paperboy in West Belfast should not be thinking this way, but then again, most people in Belfast were justifying much worse.

  However, fate was to intervene, as generously as a drunk customer deciding to tip on a Christmas Eve. It was just a couple of weeks before the banging of the bin lids for the anniversary of Internment, and my mother was standing at our front gate, shouting up the street at me that my dinner was ready. I had just finished the papers, and, as I arrived at the merciless and still unforgiven, guitar-abusing gate, who should be striding up the street towards our house but Trevor’s da! He always looked like he was marching, even when it wasn’t the Twelfth.

  ‘Doesn’t his son do the papers with you, love?’ my mother asked and added, innocently, ‘You know, Big Jaunty – he looks like the lovely wee fella that sings on the Partridge Family, so he does.’ I gripped my paperbag strap and breathed deeply.

  ‘Hello, Mr Johnston, what about ye? It would melt ye the day,’ Mammy said, alluding to the fine summer weather.

  ‘Och, Betty love, what about ye?’ he replied. ‘Isn’t it terrible what them Fenians are tryin’ til do til us?’

  ‘Och aye, terrible, love,’ she complied.

  This was like talking about the weather to Trevor’s da.

  ‘I hope you’re not buying any more of that Papish cheese?’ he continued.

  ‘Wouldn’t touch it, love,’ lied my mother impressively.

  Just then, I noticed an unfamiliar feeling of warmth in my Doc Martens – and I knew it couldn’t have been coins, as it wasn’t a Friday night. I looked down to see that Trevor’s da’s dog had just peed on my boots. It was a yappy wee chihuahua,
which was quite surprising because most of the Loyalist leadership had rottweilers. My big brother said men who walked chihuahuas were homos, just like wee lads who played violins. (He added this second fact just to peeve me, of course.) According to my big brother, there was only one thing in the world worse than being a Provo, and that was being a homo. I sometimes wondered what he would do if he ever met a homo Provo. I thought homos were boys who wanted to kiss boys, and that had nothing to do with either small dogs or musical instruments. I myself only wanted to kiss Sharon Burgess, and I couldn’t imagine Trevor’s da kissing one of his mates with a moustache in the UVF.

  ‘Have you heard our news?’ asked Trevor’s da.

  ‘No, love,’ said my mother, ‘Is your Martha bad with her nerves again?’

  ‘No, Betty, love, we’re movin’ to Bangor.’

  ‘Yes!’ I almost leapt out of my squelching boots.

  Bangor was on the train by the sea, and where you moved if you got a good job in the bank. We used to go to there on the Sunday-school excursion, but we had to sing ‘Jesus Loves Me’ and not ‘The Sash’ on the double-decker. Bangor had a Barry’s Amusements that still used old money like my granny: halfpennies, pennies and sixpences. The dodgems didn’t do decimal. Barry’s also had an old ghost train that was scary but not frightening. It was a safe sort of scary, not like getting a bus in Belfast in the riots.

  Bangor also had a very famous outdoor swimming pool called Pickie Pool, where, as my parents told me, they would go for a paddle when they were courting. I never got a go in it because I always forgot my rubber ring. Of course, Big Jaunty wouldn’t need any inflatable assistance once he got there. He was probably a brilliant swimmer, like yer man Mark Spitz with the moustache, from the Olympics!

  My mother was genuinely shocked by Trevor’s da’s revelation.

  ‘Och, I’m sorry to hear your news, love. When are yousens leavin’?’ she enquired.

  This was breaking news, and I could tell she was determined to get all the details before Big Aggie up the street, who was jealous of her sewing and usually uncovered the best gossip first.

  ‘September, love. Martha says it’s not the same round here since all the dirt from down the Road are movin’ up, and she says our Trevor would be far better off in Bangor with his asthma, and it’s got one of them new shopping centres.’

  As he marched off down the street, I’m sure I heard my mother say something under her breath, like, ‘I’m sure they’ll be delighted in Bangor.’

  Afterwards, Mum rushed the fish fingers and Smash ‘potatoes’, and disappeared for most of the evening. Later, as I ran around the corner to the erstwhile telephone box towering inferno, with two 2p pieces in my hand to listen to the new Showaddywaddy single on Dial-a-Disc, I spotted my mother still sprinting from house to house like a good paperboy, conveying the news to the most trusted neighbours. She was clearly enjoying delivering these tidings. Sadly, I had to hang up on Dial-a-Disc after the first chorus of ‘Under the Moon of Love’, because my big brother walked past and overheard me singing along, and shouted through one of the many broken windows: ‘Are you singing down the phone to Sharon Burgess, ya big fruit?!’

  As I stomped home in humiliation, I noticed as I looked down that the white ash from Titch’s papers was now covering my Doc Martens, due to the adhesive properties of Trevor’s da’s dog’s pee. It was, I imagined, just like the layer of ash from Pompeii in my school history book. As I looked for a convenient pavement puddle to clean it off my boots, I noticed Irene Maxwell standing at her gate, crying her eyes out.

  ‘What’s the matter with you, Irene?’ I asked. She could hardly splutter the words out through the sobs, but I knew what was coming next anyway.

  ‘Big Jaunty’s leavin’ to live in Bangor, and he was lovely, so he was, and he looked like David Cassidy and … and I think I love him,’ she wailed.

  ‘Now she sounds like a David Cassidy song herself,’ I thought, unsympathetically.

  Then I did two sins I had been told not to do. Uncle John at the Good News Club had told me not to tell lies, and my father had told me not to be such a selfish wee bastard. To my shame, I did both simultaneously, with a heartbroken Irene Maxwell.

  ‘Och, isn’t that awful?’ I feigned. ‘I hadn’t heard he was leavin’ and Big Jaunty was one of my best paperboy mates too. Oul’ Mac’ll be ragin’, so he will, and – oh no, I might have to be the new patrol leader in the Scouts!’

  My thoughtless words only compounded Irene’s grief, and so I made a stab at consoling her: ‘Sure, you and wee Sandra might see him at Pickie Pool on the Sunday-school excursion next year. Although I heard Trevor’s mammy doesn’t let him go out much, because he’s bad with his asthma.’

  Poor Irene. I handed her my other two pence and told her not to worry, because Showaddywaddy’s new single was brilliant and that she should go and listen to it on Dial-a-Disc round in the telephone box, but that she should watch her sandals, because the ash from Titch’s paperbag was still on the floor.

  I was as heartless as an apprentice petrol-bomber but happier than a paperboy sent home on full pay because Oul’ Mac’s van was hijacked. Trevor would be transferred to a North Down newsagent, and he would take his brown parallels with the tartan turn-ups and his feathered hair and his inflammatory Brut with him to Bangor. And all the girls at Pickie Pool would say Big Jaunty was lovely, so he was, and that he looked like David Cassidy, but I wouldn’t have to care anymore!

  After six months of serious challenge, I was to be peerless and without equal once more – undisputedly, the top paperboy in the Upper Shankill.

  Chapter 6

  Three Steps to Heaven

  Weekends were hard work for a paperboy, so they were. There wasn’t just the gauntlet of Friday nights to be run, with the possibility of attacks by wee hoods hopeful of stealing your takings for the week: on Saturdays, there were heavy additional professional demands too. Saturday night meant two newspapers to be delivered, and so double the weekday workload. There was Ireland’s Saturday Night as well as that day’s edition of the Belfast Telegraph. The former was very popular in the Upper Shankill, even though it had ‘Ireland’ in the title. Of course, you weren’t supposed to like anything with Ireland in the title (although the Church of Ireland seemed to be all right for some people). I remember us all having to cheer very quietly the night Dana – who said she was from ‘Derry’ instead of ‘Londonderry’ – won the Eurovision Song Contest for Ireland. If Mrs Piper had heard us cheering because of ‘All Kinds of Everything’ getting ‘douze points’ from Norway, she might very well have suspected that we were secret IRA supporters and we could have ended up by getting a ‘friendly’ call from Trevor’s da.

  Anyway, for some strange reason, Ireland’s Saturday Night was known to everyone as the Ulster. In my younger days, I had thought that the Shankill was Ulster. Later I realised the Shankill was in Ulster. Then, in geography class one day, I noticed on the map that Ulster was in Ireland. Finally, I learned that, although Ulster was not actually in Britain, it was, in fact, more British than Britain itself. It all made perfect sense. The Ulster newspaper was simple too. It was a straightforward weekly sports paper with all the day’s sporting results. Published on a Saturday evening, to catch all the latest sports results from matches and races that had taken place earlier in the day, it was a true ‘hot-off-the-presses’ newspaper.

  You felt special delivering the Ulster, because people were standing in the street waiting for it. You were a very important person, because you were the courier of extremely valuable information: you had something fresh and precious, something everyone wanted now. With the Ulsters slung over my shoulder, I felt like a scout from a John Wayne movie, returning to the circled wagons to tell his compatriots where the Apaches were. Men who liked football and horses got the Ulster, and they often met me at their front door to take delivery of it. They were like kids getting a birthday card or their Eleven Plus results, or like Irene Maxwell getting her Jackie when it had
David Cassidy on the front. These customers would start reading the paper straight away, standing up, fully absorbed in its contents, even before the front door was shut again.

  All of this was, however, a mystery to me. I couldn’t imagine a more boring newspaper, apart from that pink English newspaper with all the numbers in it, which nobody up our way ever got. I myself preferred to read about Space 1999 and The Tomorrow People in Look-in magazine. Science fiction was so much more exciting than football, and it seemed to cause less trouble, even though there was usually a higher body count. Unlike with football, Protestants and Catholics seemed to like the same science-fiction programmes. No one ever rioted after an episode of Lost in Space, even when Dr Zachary Smith had endangered the life of Will Robinson and his family yet again!

  I had sixteen Ulsters to dispatch on a Saturday evening. This wasn’t very many, relatively speaking, but though it didn’t take long to deliver them, it did tend to mess up my social life if I was planning to meet Sharon Burgess at the Westy Disco on a Saturday night.

  The Westy Disco was so called because it was a disco that was held in a hut on the corner of the West Circular Road. It was an old Nissen hut from the war which was used by Ballygomartin Presbyterian as a church hall, falling down and freezing though it was. I went to our well-ordered Scouts meetings there when the lights were on, but on a Saturday night the hut was transformed, and the lights were switched off and replaced by flashing coloured spotlights and ultraviolet tubes that made your white socks and dandruff glow in the dark. I always made sure to wash my hair with Head & Shoulders before a night out at the Westy Disco, because there was nothing as humiliating as wee girls laughing at your fluorescent dandruff as you tried to do a manly dance to Status Quo.

  Every Saturday night, all of us teenagers crammed into that ageing Nissen hut, as the corrugated iron walls vibrated to the sounds of the latest hits from Sweet and The Glitter Band. The floor was sticky with chewing gum and slippy with condensation, but we managed to make our moves anyway – the Slush, the Twist, the Bump and the Hucklebuck. We had to, because this was our only dance floor. The Westy Disco certainly attracted far more kids than Sunday school or the Scouts. Some nights, there were more than four hundred of us in platforms and parallels, dancing innocently to Showaddywaddy and the Bay City Rollers, while outside our city convulsed.