White Church, Black Mountain Page 5

“See these Fenians, Barnsey, they’re not too fond ‘o the crown… but they’ll not say no to the half-crown!”

  All the men laughed self-consciously. Price couldn’t let that go.

  “Word is Ronnie Simpson’s already earmarked three hundred grand for OAPs and summer schemes. Keeping the rates down and buying in the votes, eh lads?”

  “Sure, it’s money from America, Leo.”

  “And from Europe,” corrected Barnes punctiliously.

  “It has to be spent… and we’re the boys to spend it!”

  All nodded and laughed again. Strain thought he’d push it.

  “What’s the craic with this Historical Crimes Enquiries then? Your boys won’t want anything to do with it… digging up the past and that.” He paused. “Will they?”

  Price smiled conspiratorially. “A Truth Commission is what this country’s being crying out for. It’s about time we shone some light on state collusion with Loyalist murderers.”

  Both Strain and Barnes looked like they had been filleted. They stared at Price, incredulous.

  He smiled. “Don’t worry. It’s cross-community isn’t it? How do you propose to do it without us?”

  In a moment, Strain and Barnes realised he was right. If the government wanted to throw money at this, then both recipients were bound at the hip pocket.

  A chain gang arrangement.

  It was business.

  Just business.

  Mayor Simpson had seen that right away, and unbeknown to his colleagues, had already promised monies for the GAA and the Irish Language to the Nationalists.

  Price shook his hands under the dryer and moved to the door.

  “Leo,” called Strain, “if you’re still interested in those deep fat fryers, give me a shout next week.”

  “Right Ken… sure I’ll see you upstairs later for a wee drink,” Price said and left.

  “He’s not the worst,” ventured Barnes.

  “Fenian bastard!” spat Strain back at him. “Ya couldn’t trust ‘em. They’re all the same.”

  12

  Shankill Road,

  Belfast, Northern Ireland

  May 1970

  It was around now that Eban’s serious truanting began in earnest.

  It started innocently enough.

  Walking aimlessly around the town, through Smithfield market. Over to the Waterworks.

  He figured that he would be caught within days.

  Welcomed and feared it in equal measure.

  But after three weeks of absence, and with his classmates reporting that no apparent interest one way or the other had been shown by Mr Gilchrist his form teacher, it dawned on him that he was now in chaotic free-fall.

  Amazingly for him, no-one seemed to mind.

  So with things getting out of hand, and without consciously knowing it, Eban Barnard found himself an out.

  A way back through the maze. A break in the loop.

  It would have to be extreme, but desperation was now where it was at.

  Teaming up with Sandy Courtney, an older boy of correction facility infamy, Eban embarked on an attention-seeking whirlwind of petty crime and altogether forbidden activities that made his head spin.

  The Belfast of the late 60s and early 70s was an intoxicating playground for a degenerate, where redevelopment and civil turmoil invited recklessness, abandon and adventure.

  A mere bagatelle got them off and running.

  Climbing into Belfast Zoo without paying was a relatively straightforward affair.

  Dropping in over the outside perimeter fence, they landed directly in the chimpanzee enclosure.

  Hairy little men ran screaming and shrieking in all directions for cover.

  Sandy had chased a few and flapped his arms, gibbering in idiot imitation.

  Eban began to see why people said that Sandy had ‘a wee want in him’.

  Clambering over a low wall without any apparent sign of detection, they strolled cockily past the brown bear enclosure and by the snake house.

  It only took a matter of moments for them to be apprehended, the zoo, unbeknownst to them, being completely closed to the public during renovation works.

  Three keepers with brooms and disbelieving indignation rushed them.

  “What if you’d dropped over the wall and into the lion’s cage, eh? What then… eh?” yelled the man.

  “Frank, call the police.”

  A woman in blue overalls and wellingtons arrived on the scene, carrying a hose. Eban saw his chance.

  “Missus,” he said tearfully, pointing, “the big boy made me do it.”

  He knew from experience that puppy-dog eyes and hot tears would carry some weight in these matters.

  Sandy looked hurt. He whimpered; then tried to run, but was held.

  Reprieve.

  They were turned loose with firm admonishments.

  Sandy’s momentary ire was dismantled adroitly with blandishments and promises of new and better schemes. Eban Barnard was discovering a penchant for manipulation.

  Soon they’d moved on to frequenting the little secondhand shop in Derry Street. The owner was always glad to see them, for they invariably produced the goods.

  Fagin-like, he made them tea and biscuits whilst surveying the spirit levels, power drills, socket sets and wood planes the boys would deliver him. Building sites within a three-mile radius were fair game.

  When Fagin expressed an interest in cigarette coupons (exchangeable for gifts or cash), Mrs Barnard’s five-year stash of Embassy Regal slips disappeared.

  Alex copped the blame for that one.

  Result.

  The money and what it brought made everything worthwhile.

  A fortune to him, it bought fake blood and plastic vampire fangs, ice cream, American comic books and boiled sweets.

  But that wasn’t the real reason for any of it.

  Quite simply, Eban ached to be noticed.

  Once, when lifting copper sheeting from the roof of a light engineering factory that they assumed was unoccupied, Eban found himself gazing down on a busy workshop floor.

  All at once the workmen – in blue dungarees, cigarette butts behind their ears – stopped their lathes and were gazing up at him.

  For one incredible moment it was as if time stood still.

  He looking down on them and they staring back up at him.

  It couldn’t go on of course.

  He ended it, poetically, in a blaze of self-destructive performance art.

  *

  The Rogers lived just three doors up from the Barnards. They had been family friends for years before moving to one of the new housing estates appearing around the fringes of the city for the first time.

  Eban knew that their coin gas meter had yet to be emptied.

  Just three doors up.

  Beautiful.

  They climbed over the back yard wall in broad daylight, and failing to gain entry to the house, kicked their way through the panels of the back parlour door.

  The racket was enough to start every dog in the street to barking and howling.

  Emptying the coins, they returned to the back yard and found some paint-pots on the shelves there.

  Immediately they set about hurling canary yellow and aquamarine in all directions, and at each other. They poured the rest down into the outside toilet cistern and flushed and splashed until the bowl and whitewashed walls were splattered in psychedelic pastels.

  Stealth had never been a consideration, so when the din brought old Mrs McGiven to place her one good eye against a hole in the outer door, the party was over.

  “I see ye Eban Barnard… I see ye wee lad… wait-’til-I-tell-yer-Da!”

  Dripping paint and still smiling, the mention of his father made Eban turn from his endeavours.

  For a solitary moment he considered dropping his trousers and sticking his arse up at where the voice had come from.

  But that seemed like something Sandy might do.

  Not his style at all.

  Th
e laughter stopped.

  In that moment, it was all over and done with.

  Frogmarched back to his own house. Voices raised, his mother in theatrical floods of tears, his father’s slow footfall on the stairs to the bedroom. His belt slapping through his trouser hoops as it was withdrawn and doubled. The indispensable crack-lash and smarting ache, denoting a line drawn in the sand.

  And a chance perhaps to start again.

  *

  Redemption presented itself in the most unexpected of opportunities.

  It was only two weeks hence and the Belfast Primary Schools Choir and Orchestra were about to have their moment.

  Stage lights fashioned from one hundred watt bulbs burned bright in hollowed-out aluminium cake tins.

  The schools ensemble of seventy massed recorders had taken In the Silver Moonlight just about as far as it could go.

  It was time for the huddled ranks of pubescent musical excellence to take stage centre.

  Brass and wind orchestras gathered for the massed denouement to the evening.

  Hundreds of expectant parents packed the auditorium, in a hushed silence, as their young protégés offered up some kind of validation for their parenting skills.

  Young Eban Barnard sweated profusely under the heat of the makeshift lights.

  Pressed into a woollen V-neck sweater knitted by his mother and strangled by an elasticated bow tie, he afforded himself a tentative look at the only other side-drummer in the company.

  His best friend, Stevie Burns, was a model of anticipation, poise and purpose.

  As they had been taught, Stevie held his sticks high in anticipation of the forthcoming trial, his eyes fixed on the music stand in front of them both. (As Mr Chambers, their new Primary Seven teacher, had prepared them to sight-read the arrangement for percussion.)

  But Eban – wan and perspiring – had alarmed eyes only for the spindly snare drum stand and the vast blackness of the auditorium in front of him.

  When their moment came, it took the seemingly benign form of When the Saints Go Marching In.

  Given his past transgressions, here was an unmitigated opportunity to shine.

  Sweat ran into his eyes and they smarted in the lights, but he drew on the memory of the countless sessions he’d practised on the living room furniture with his mother’s knitting needles. There were four beats, just four beats, in the opening verse. Anyone could do that, he told himself.

  “A trained monkey could do that,” was what Mr Chambers had said.

  Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.

  Eban and Stevie struck their small snare drums in perfect unison as one. The actual surface, the taut stretched-skin head of the drum, was surrounded by a raised wooden frame. It was a narrow enough target. The trick was not to crack the stick off the rim, but to hit firmly and confidently, dead centre on.

  “Oh when the saints… dit- dit-dit-dit… go marching in… dit-dit-dit-dit… Oh when the saints go marching in… dit-dit-dit…”

  Eban’s drum lurched worryingly on its rickety tripod stand.

  He hit it again and the clamps holding it to the stand began to yawn open.

  With every strike, the drum leaned a further notch. Soon it was lurching alarmingly at a crazy angle.

  If he kept this up, the drum would almost certainly tumble off the stand.

  In an instant, fast becoming an eternity, it was all so dreadfully, awfully clear.

  Another sound thwack and he faced the humiliating prospect of his small snare drum leaving its mooring and tumbling, rolling, careering slowly across the wooden boards of the Ulster Hall stage.

  Leaving him standing exposed and naked.

  Equally awful was the option of standing stock still, immobile, arms by his sides, as the band played on. Like some defective retard who, presented with his moment in the sun, bottled it.

  Faced with Hobson’s choice, he opted for the latter.

  He froze. He knew what they’d say: “Couldn’t keep his end up”; “Let the side down…”

  And in what seemed like time without ending, of excruciating mortification, he stood stock-still as a puzzled Stevie Burns assumed sole percussion duties.

  A lifeless stooge in a vast expanse of public judgement, Eban wilted and his eyes filled with tears.

  George Chambers stared at him, uncomprehending.

  Stevie Burns played twice as hard.

  Out from the depths of the darkness, he imagined he could hear sniggers. Whispers. Alex and his mates perhaps?

  In that awful cauldron of indignity – illuminated in a sea of unforgiving, electric light and with nowhere to hide – Eban Barnard vowed never again to stand immobile whilst others beat the drum on his behalf.

  13

  “E.B… You’ll be late for work!”

  Emily knew that he’d arrived in late last night.

  He hadn’t come up to say goodnight, despite the fact that he would have seen her bedroom light on. She tried not to be upset by this kind of slight. She believed that it was not intended as such and had learned that to have even the most pedestrian expectations of romantic convention from Eban was to be disappointed.

  Affection, yes.

  In his own way.

  But he always held something back. And that was alright with her. Because she knew that she did as well.

  She was curious, however – less about where he had been, but rather what he had been doing when traipsing around his room into the early hours. Feverishly feeding paper into his printer, the printer-head buzzing back and forth. The paper tray emptied; then refilled immediately for the process to continue. Tramping into the kitchen for coffee. The kettle boiling. The clink of spoon in cup. Then returning. The office chair being pulled up to the desk again. Slapping on the computer keys once more.

  Until the very small hours.

  Living directly overhead was like living together.

  But with a degree of independence.

  She knew that his nocturnal machinations could not be work-related.

  Eban had strong feelings about that kind of thing.

  She returned with a piece of toast and rapped a knuckle lightly on the door, wary of bringing any of the others out onto the landing.

  The door cracked a few inches, then wider. Eban’s head emerged and looked furtively back and forth. Hair wild, eyes like saucers.

  “What’s the craic?” he said and coughed.

  Loose phlegm gurgled up in his throat and sounded like it might involuntarily leap out from his mouth. He covered it with a tissue in time.

  “Are you sick?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Well, officially yes – I’m not going to work – but actually no… I’ve lots to do.”

  “Want toast?”

  “Come in; come in.” He gestured urgently.

  He took the slice from her, holding it between his teeth and pulled her into the room, closing the door.

  Emily had visited him here less and less in recent months and couldn’t honestly remember when she had last stayed the night.

  The room was ultra-tidy for first thing in the morning. He was pretty organised, all things considered. Tidier than her room, that was for sure.

  The bed, which dominated the space, had been made up. Duvet pulled tight to all four corners, pillows plumped.

  The large bay windows overlooked the back garden, at the centre of which stood an impressive oak. It was a magnificent specimen. Bare now, but with branches that grew up and out at every angle. Up to the sky and down to the ground.

  Eban had recently told her that – in its current state – he simply couldn’t believe that it was the same tree that would fill the entire space with such a glorious explosion of swaying, green profusion come May.

  Instead, he said, the bare branches reminded him now of nothing less than the capillaries, veins and arteries of the human heart.

  He had the window sashes up a fair way and the fresh winter air was bracing.

 
Emily figured that – what with his cough – he must be smoking weed again, but the ashtrays were pristine.

  Facing the bed, on a wide Persian rug, was his media centre.

  TV, VCR, CD and DVD players and a dock for his iPhone.

  He had it rigged so that they all played through the speakers that bookended the arrangement. In front of the windows sat his desk, with PC and printer.

  Across the room a reclining chair, and on every available wall, floor-to-ceiling bookcases.

  It was a big, spacious, high-ceilinged room and he had optimised every inch of it.

  On the desk sat neatly-piled printed pages. Several bright green folders were lined up to accommodate these and a plethora of newspaper cuttings, also arranged for inclusion in separate files. In the centre of all of this was an official-looking form that Eban had filled in by hand.

  “Someone’s been a busy boy,” she said and made to move toward the desk for a closer look.

  He sprang across quickly to block her, putting himself between Emily and the desk.

  “Private!”

  “Okay, okay; you just had to say.” She was a little insulted but knew she shouldn’t be.

  She had no rights here.

  Emily sat down in the chair whilst Eban gathered up his materials in a rather clandestine manner.

  “Look… I think I should mention…” she said a little warily, “it was me who brought the mail in… again.” She rolled her eyes.

  Eban shared her disdain regarding their housemates’ tardiness.

  “Anyway… I couldn’t help but notice the official-looking letter… something about Historical Enquiries Team? Isn’t that the police or something?”

  He spun around from the desk and glared suspiciously at her.

  “I’m not snooping or anything—”

  “Then don’t!”

  “I’m not, but… ummm… and there was a letter from the hospital… you’re not sick or anything are you?”

  “CHRIST!”

  “Would you rather I’d left it for Rosemary? She’d have had a field day!” she offered in meek defence.

  Eban had gone red in the face, and went to speak but stopped himself. Emily could see that he was grinding his teeth together so violently that the veins on his face and forehead became swollen, his jaws taut. Instead he simply gestured toward the door, indicating that she should leave.