Paperboy Read online

  The Westy was a good place to ask a wee girl you fancied for a slow dance during a Donny Osmond song, so that you could have a go at snogging. It was here in the dark that I discovered that tongues could have more fun than just blowing bubble gum. Of course, some of the people in the church who never smiled did not approve of such worldly discos. They said that dancing was a sin, because it was like sex. It surprised me that sex was a sin. I was certain that even good livin’ people did it, because they had lots of kids and not all of them could have been adopted. However, Reverend Lowe, our independently minded minister, allowed us to dance because, as he said, it kept us off the dangerous streets and out of the pubs and the paramilitary organisations. On several occasions, Reverend Lowe had been spotted ordering paramilitaries off the dangerous streets into the pubs. He used to preach about the lesser of two evils.

  I, however, was no ordinary member of the Westy Disco. I was in a very privileged position. My parents were voluntary youth leaders, in charge of the most popular youth gathering in the whole Shankill. This made me special: it was like being one of Paul and Linda McCartney’s children. My parents had started the disco, along with Uncle Henry and Auntie Emma from our street. (They weren’t my real aunt and uncle, but they were warm people, and just like family to us.) Uncle Henry did the door where we paid our 10p and blew into the breathalyser to get in. My mother and Auntie Emma, who were best friends and like mammys to the whole hut, did the tuck shop where you could get crisps and chewing gum, and peas and vinegar. Auntie Emma never missed a Saturday night, even though she didn’t like the disco lights because the ultraviolet rays made her prematurely false teeth look black. Uncle Henry was the warm heart of the Westy, but it was my father who was the star. Daddy was the DJ, like Jimmy Savile on Top of the Pops, only younger. He played the 45s on a double-deck turntable plugged into enormous speakers and would turn up the music so loud that the neighbours would complain. This was very cool, of course: not many dads up our way got accused of blaring out the Rollers too loud.

  As resident DJ at the Westy, my father picked the hits and read out the requests, so he did. With the profits from the tuck shop, he would buy two new singles every week from the record store. They were the latest new releases, and they would be his Top 40 predictions: he always managed to choose the songs that went to No.1. My father was an unlikely candidate for youth-club leader in the church, because he wasn’t ‘good livin’ ’ at all. He smoked and drank and said God didn’t exist because Christians didn’t practise what they preached. I wasn’t so sure that this followed, because paperboys often didn’t do what they were commanded to do either, but Oul’ Mac certainly still existed.

  For a middle-aged man, Da’s musical choices were very good, although he did get a little too excited by some of the more irritating Boney M singles. One of them was called ‘Belfast’: it was a bouncy little singalong pop song all about our hatred for one another in our city. We danced and sang along to it as if it was about something happy and funny, like ‘Waterloo’. I put my position as son of the DJ to good use, slipping in extra requests for my latest favourite singles and asking my da to play slow songs by Donny Osmond at just the right moment, when Sharon Burgess might be most receptive.

  One of the best slow songs that often elicited a snog from your girl was ‘Three Steps to Heaven’ by Showaddywaddy. The lyrics were brilliant. They gave you an easy-to-remember, step-by-step guide to getting yourself a girl. Showaddywaddy were geniuses. Unfortunately Mrs Piper disagreed, and when she heard this song blaring out while passing the hut on the way to her prayer meeting one night, she complained to my father for leading us all astray with ‘the Devil’s music’. She said that there was only one true step to heaven and that was for us all to get saved. My DJ da told her to catch herself on.

  Whatever Mrs Piper thought, I followed Showaddy-waddy’s instructions to the letter. ‘And as I travel on and things do go wrong ….’ they sang. It was as if they knew of my personal travel problems due to all the buses getting hijacked in Belfast! ‘Just call it steps one, two and three,’ they crooned, and I would listen with an earnest desire to follow these ‘three steps to heaven’, so I would. ‘Step One – to find a girl to love …’ Sharon Burgess, of course. ‘Step Two – she falls in love with you …’ Hopefully – if I have splashed enough Brut all over. ‘Step Three - you kiss and hold her tightly …’ Yes! A proper snog like Big Ruby at the caravan had shown me. ‘That sure feels like heaven to me.’

  The night at the Westy Disco always ended with ‘The Last Waltz’ by Engelbert Humperdinck. When the first bars of the piano commenced, we knew it was time for a fish supper and perhaps the opportunity to walk a girl home. Engelbert certainly cleared the floor, because ‘The Last Waltz’ was old-fashioned compared to the latest number from The Rubettes, but I knew this tune also had a deeper meaning. It was my parents’ favourite song from the stereogram in the sitting room, and the one to which they had danced when they won the Ballroom Dancing Competition at Butlin’s in Mosney the year before. So Da played it every week, not just to let us all know that the disco was over but also to let my mother know that he loved her.

  In terms of paper delivery, the mountain had to go to Mohammed on a Saturday evening. Oul’ Mac didn’t deliver the Ulsters to the streets in the legendary yellow van, as was his wont on week nights. He had clearly carried out a cost– benefit analysis on using the van for such a relatively small delivery. The executive summary of this time-and-motion study was communicated to us in no uncertain terms: ‘Youse can come and get the Ulsters yerselves, ya lazy wee buggers,’ he advised. So on Saturdays I had to walk to Oul’ Mac’s shop, down at the bottom of the Ballygomartin Road. This was more of a nuisance than a heavy burden until one Saturday night, when something happened which would henceforth give my favourite Showaddywaddy song a whole new meaning.

  On the dark Saturday night in question, I am on my way home from the newsagents with my Ulsters. It is late October. I have already emptied my boots of the takings from late-paying customers and handed over the warm and fragrant coins to Mrs Mac. I have bought myself a packet of sweetie mice with a tip from Mrs Hill with the baldy poodle. Walking back up the hill towards my street, I hear the customary noise of a bomb thudding somewhere in the city. It is not too loud this time, not like the night the IRA blew up the Gasworks and the whole sky lit up like in a crash landing from Lost in Space.

  It is the first frost of October. Icy footpaths are brilliant for sliding on, except when your bag is so heavy that you lose balance, and your fall shreds the sports pages of the papers you are carrying, and No. 93, who never tips, complains, and Oul’ Mac shouts that you are a ‘clumsy wee hallion’. I can see my breath in the cold stillness. I recognise a frosty, smoky Halloween smell in the air: fog and sparklers. I am happy, as usual. As I walk past the chippy, my mouth waters at the wafting aroma of fish suppers on the vinegar-soaked pages of the papers I had delivered yesterday. I am alone, my ever darker paperbag over my shoulder, my fingers yet again black with ink from troubled pages.

  All at once, I become aware of two men, walking close behind me. I glance around. One of them looks like the lead singer in Showaddywaddy, yer man with the dark glasses. The other, smaller, one has an aggressive mouth like a dog that bites paperboys, and he looks like he’s had too many fish suppers. They are both staring at me in an unmistakable, ‘hard man’ way. I am outnumbered, so I don’t even dare to venture a ‘who d’ye think yer lookin’ at?’

  ‘Robbers!’ I conclude in a tense instant, although these are guys in their twenties – older than the usual robbers. Their pace has now quickened, as if they are trying to catch up with me. I quickly turn off the main Ballygomartin Road to escape into an empty street and up the hill towards home. Safety always seems to be hillwards in these parts. The two men follow.

  In my mind, all I can hear is the robot in Lost in Space repeating, ‘Danger, Will Robinson! Danger, Will Robinson! Danger, Will Robinson!’

  Catching up, my pu
rsuers bundle me into the small untidy front garden at No. 4, whose owners are never in, but who always get the Radio Times (I always read it in the street when Doctor Who is on the cover). The Showaddywaddy guy presses something hard and cold into my back through my duffle coat. ‘Danger, Will Robinson! Danger, Will Robinson!’

  I hear metal clicks against my toggles as I struggle and turn to get loose. I bite on my grammar-school scarf.

  ‘I don’t have any money,’ I cry, my newly broken voice returning to prepubescent shrillness. I am telling the truth. My boots are empty. Instinctively, I then turn out my pockets. There is no money, just the remains of a melting white sweetie mouse encrusting a bull’s-eye marble. My assailants don’t seem interested.

  They don’t speak. I freeze. I don’t understand. ‘They are IRA men after an easy target,’ I fret inwardly. ‘Danger, Will Robinson! Danger, Will Robinson!’

  It starts to rain very heavily. Icy drops dilute the warm tears on my shivering cheeks. Suddenly, Mr Watson with the dyed black comb-over from No. 24 – whose wife gets Woman and who always gives a big tip at Easter – comes running down the street towards us. My oppressors see him coming, and mistakenly sense an attempted rescue. The tough guys just run off. But Mr Watson is just running to escape the downpour of hail. I stand alone in the trampled weeds of the garden of No. 4 beside a small gnome with a fishing rod and his nose broken off. Mr Watson runs straight past me. He has tonight’s Belfast Telegraph over his head to protect his much-too-black Brylcreemed hair.

  I must run home. But, I then remember, no one is at home. I must run to the Westy Disco, where Dad will be playing ‘Mamma Mia’ and Mum will be clipping Geordie Cooper around the ear for stealing penny chews, as per usual. I must tell them what has just happened. I can’t catch a breath. I can’t speak. They had put a gun in my back. I start to hyperventilate. (I thought only Americans hyperventilated.) I burst into the Westy Disco before Uncle Henry can even breathalyse me. A group of adults and wee girls gather around me at the tuck shop. I am crying. Then I am embarrassed: what if Sharon Burgess sees me like this?

  The mood of the tuck-shop crowd surrounding me changes from concern, to shock and then to outrage. Meanwhile, Geordie Cooper empties the penny-chew jar behind them all.

  The general consensus is that the IRA has just tried to kill me.

  ‘Them f**kin’ Provos have just tried to a pick off another wee Prod the night!’ shouts Philip Ferris insensitively. The rumour spreads across the dance floor that paperboys are now ‘legitimate targets’. Then I notice the muffled sounds of Showaddywaddy from the loudspeakers in the background – it’s ‘Three Steps to Heaven’. The lyrics mock me. I feel as if I have just taken several steps closer to heaven than I had ever wanted to.

  Within twenty-four hours, I am in Tennent Street police station with my father and a serious-looking young policeman with a moustache, called Darren. (All the RUC men have moustaches, and many of them are called Darren.) I feel more unsafe inside the RUC station than when I was cornered in a garden by the Showaddywaddy guy, because the Provos keep attacking the Tennent Street station with mortar bombs, and even though the building is surrounded by concrete and fencing nearly as tall as a peace wall, the mortars always get through. I pray the Provos haven’t planned an attack while I am giving my statement.

  Constable Darren shows me black-and-white pictures of hard men, the way they do in Starsky and Hutch, except these guys are all white. None of them looks like the Showaddywaddy guy, and they all look the same to me: scowling faces, long hair and sideburns like Elvis. I conclude that all criminals have sideburns in the same way that all policemen have moustaches, and that this distinctive use of facial hair is why they find it so easy to avoid one another. I point to the one who looks most like my attacker.

  ‘No, he’s in the Maze, son,’ says Darren the policeman. Then he asks me if they touched me anywhere. I don’t understand the question. They stuck a gun in my back: what could be worse than that? As we leave the RUC station, my father tells me that if I should ever set eyes on those two again, I must tell him right away, and that he would ‘take care of the bastards’. I can foresee another outing for the pickaxe handle, but I’m not so sure it would do the job this time.

  A few months after this, I was waiting on the Ballygomartin Road for the No. 73 bus across town. It was a slippy Saturday morning. The No. 73 said ‘Malone’ on the front, when on its way into town, and ‘Springmartin via Shankill’ on the way back. I liked the idea of being on the bus to posh Malone, where my orthodontist lived – but I wondered what the people from over there thought about having to get a rough Springmartin bus into town. But perhaps they didn’t get the bus.

  I was carrying my violin case this time, instead of my dirty paperbag. My fingertips were sore from last-minute practice. I had string-imprinted fingers and coin-embossed toes! I was on my way to the School of Music for orchestra practice, the only boy from this neck of the woods to go there. I had decided never to reveal to the other second violins that I was a Shankill paperboy. Most of them were Catholic grammar-school girls, and I fancied one of them, a dark-haired girl with a cello and an Irish name I couldn’t spell. But I knew the rules: I was the wrong sort from the wrong kind of place. So I settled for a distant admiration of her vibrato. Of course, I didn’t tell the other paperboys about the School of Music, either. I knew the combination of mixing with ‘Fenians’ and playing ‘poofy’ classical music would attract double derision from them.

  The bus was late. I wondered if it had been hijacked – but it was a bit early in the day for hijackers. Then, from across the deserted misty road, an old Ford Cortina pulled up abruptly in front of me. It was the Showaddywaddy guy with the gun. He just sat and stared at me. ‘Danger, Will Robinson! Danger, Will Robinson!’

  Old Mrs McCready from No. 25, who always got The Sunday Post, arrived beside me at the bus stop, rummaging through her old-lady-shopping trolley bag. She didn’t even notice yer man, who continued to just sit and stare at me. I wondered what he was going to do this time. I was a teenager now, with a broken voice and getting taller. I still wasn’t a fighter, but I had by now learned a fairly effective ‘hard-man’ stare myself that worked with some of the rugby-playing bullies in school. I wasn’t sure if it would work with big lads with guns, but I attempted to stare back convincingly. It is possible that carrying a violin undermined the hard- man stare, but then again, gangsters in old black-and-white movies always looked quite threatening while carrying violin cases, though of course they didn’t wear duffle coats and grammar-school scarves.

  After what seemed like an endless five minutes, the Showaddywaddy guy simply sneered and drove off, giving me an ‘I-know-where-you-live’ kind of stare. However, even though I thought about him often after that, I never saw him again. The No. 73 eventually arrived, and I ‘dinged’ my ticket and sat down with my violin case on my knee, shaking a little. I could hear my bow rattling inside. I wasn’t going to tell my father. I didn’t want him to take care of yer man, because that would mean someone would then take care of my dad. That’s how it worked in Belfast. We were going nowhere – the tit-for-tat mindset reigned supreme.

  As we travelled down the Shankill Road, the bus driver turned up his wireless. It was Big T on Downtown Radio – he was always on Downtown on Saturday mornings, when you were having an Ulster fry. He was playing Showaddywaddy: they were singing ‘Three Steps to Heaven’. I shivered, so I did.

  Chapter 7

  Tips and Investments

  ‘Money, Money, Money’ was never off the radio. ‘It’s a rich man’s world!’ sang ABBA. In church, however, when I wasn’t daydreaming about Agnetha during the sermon, I heard Reverend Lowe teach an alternative message: that money couldn’t make you happy. Although there was evidence before us that the happiest people in our congregation seemed to be the two jolly ladies with thick make-up and bright red lipstick who sat at the front in fur coats. They didn’t live up our way anymore but came back in their Jaguar once a week to
go to church. When they opened their blue Presbyterian hymn books, I could make out, from where we sat at the back of the church, big gold rings on their plump fingers. I also noticed that Reverend Lowe always gave those fleshy hands an extra strong handshake when we all queued up to exchange a few words with him at the church door at the end of every Sunday morning service.

  ‘They’re real ladies and they’re very good givers,’ Uncle Henry once remarked. He counted the church collection.

  My father constantly reminded me that I was working class and should be very proud that we had no money. ‘No son of his was ever going to get above himself’ was another of his usual refrains. So, when I joined the nation’s workforce as a paperboy, I didn’t dare tell Daddy that I felt very well off indeed. Not only did I get pocket money every Friday night, and extra pocket money if there was overtime at the foundry, but I also earned £1.50 per week from Oul’ Mac, and on top of that I got tips. If you performed your duties well and with a smile, you could, I quickly realised, end up with more tips than wages. I soon learned the earning potential of providing a first-class service with a charming smile. Part of my brain had also developed a highly sensitive ‘tip detector’.

  Apart from the more obviously promising tipping scenarios – such as holiday times or when the distinctive smell of Tennant’s Lager could be detected on the breath of the customer in question – I was soon able to discern, from the use of certain words, the likelihood of potential additional earnings. ‘Sorry, I’ve nothing smaller, love,’ for example, signalled a healthy tip. This was the ‘no change, big tip’ scenario. On one such occasion, Mrs Grant from No. 2 told me to keep the change from a ten-pound note. I was aghast at her generosity, but spent the rest of the evening planning what I would do with the money. Then, the next day, she asked me for a fiver back: she had, she said, made a mistake because her nerves were bad with her Richard’s pains. So I had to postpone my plans for a fishing rod and an Etch-a-Sketch.