Everything in This Country Must Read online

  Always that strange collaboration. Outside, the arc of color. Inside, the duvet soaking.

  * * *

  THE BOY TRIED to stake out a cell in the caravan, one window, one bed, a jug of water, a fluorescent light, a chair, a galvanized bucket for a chamber pot. He stayed in the space, not breaking its borders, hungry for three hours until she came home—her face flushed with drink, he thought—and she was carting groceries: sausages, eggs, cheese, black pudding, three fresh loaves of bread.

  I got the job.

  Did you hear any news?

  Two nights a week, she said.

  Any news, Mammy?

  Isn’t that great?

  Mammy.

  She sat down at the table and lit a cigarette and stared at the ash as it crumpled and flared. His first day he went to see the doctor, she said. They took his weight and his blood pressure and all that. Gave him a water cooler and some salt tablets and they put him in a cell on his own.

  Salt tablets?

  I think he must need them for—

  Isn’t salt a type of food?

  I don’t know, love. I don’t think so.

  How much water does he drink?

  A few pints a day, I suppose.

  How much weight has he lost?

  Oh, God, I don’t know, maybe a pound, love. Maybe more.

  The boy pondered this for a while and then asked: Is he okay?

  He’s fine, I think. They put food by his bed though.

  They what?

  They put food in his cell just in case. Leave it by his bed. On a little tray they wheel in and out. I heard it’s better food than they ever gave him before. And they count every last chip and pea.

  Pigs, said the boy, and he was delighted when she didn’t scold him.

  Did Grandma visit? he asked.

  There’s no visits. There’s a priest in the prison and he phones her at night and he tells her everything that’s going on. And some others keep in touch with her, too. And there’s notes, they write notes on pieces of cigarette paper and get them smuggled out.

  Jesus, they must have wild wee handwriting.

  She gave a little chuckle and finished off the last of her cigarette. He noticed that she was smoking them farther than ever before, dragging all the way down to the filter, burning all the white paper, and that her fingers were a darkening yellow.

  Will he write me one?

  You never know, but I’m sure he’s exhausted.

  Can we visit when there’s visits?

  We’ll see.

  A thought occurred to him and he asked: How much does he weigh?

  She was startled and said: No idea, love.

  Approximately?

  I don’t know, love. I haven’t seen him in oh I don’t know how many years. When your father and I got married, that was the last time, he was one of the ushers. All jazzed up in a suit and dickie bow and he looked good. But now, oh, I couldn’t even guess.

  Approximately, Mammy.

  She scrunched her eyebrows: Ten and a half stone maybe, but you shouldn’t be thinking about that, love, he’s going to be all right, don’t think that way, it’s not good.

  Why not?

  Ah, come on, love.

  Come on where?

  Young man. Don’t push it please …

  You said come on.

  I said enough.

  Pardon me?

  Enough! she shouted.

  Enough what? he said gently.

  She slammed her fist down on the table and there was silence.

  He entered his space again and he lay on the thin yellow mattress and he put his arms behind his head, stared at the ceiling, imagined himself into his uncle’s body, his knuckles tightening white around a bed frame, knives and forks banging against a heating pipe, the sound of boots along a metal catwalk, the taunts of screws, helicopters outside the window flying over the razor wire, candles winking at a vigil outside the gate, the light slowly dwindling, prayers being intoned, his stomach beginning the first of its small and poignant rumblings. A plate of cod appeared on the table beside him, with a slice of lemon and a big heaping of chips. An apple tart with ice cream. Packets of sugar for the tea. Milk in tiny little cartons. All carefully ranged by the bed for maximum temptation. A shout went up from a distant cell and other roars began to reverberate around the prison. Word went around that a screw was coming. Someone passed the boy a cigarette from a neighboring cell, spinning it across the floor on a length of fishing wire, stopping a few inches from the cell, so that he got on his knees and used a page from the Bible to drag the cigarette under the door frame. The rollie was just thin enough to fit under the door and he lay back and snapped it aflame—by striking the match off his thumbnail—and he brought the smoke down long and hard into his lungs, made rings in the air against the ceiling, but then his mother came and broke the borders of his cell and stood above his bed.

  All right young man, she said. If you’re good, I have a special treat for you.

  She brought him out of his cell to the Formica table, where she had prepared a full fry, which he pushed away at first but then he speared the sausages and broke the skin of the eggs and dunked the fresh bread and ate with an anger that gave him a stomachache. When he looked at his empty plate he imagined it full and then he threw his prison blanket across it and groaned and tried to stop the hunger pains and all the quiet, necessary shiverings.

  * * *

  RANGED IN A NOTEBOOK in parallel columns:

  * * *

  AT THE TABLE he looked at his meals, pushed the food around on his plate. Every day there was news of an impending reconciliation, but always the talks broke down and even the radio announcers sounded tired. The newspapers printed cartoons he didn’t understand. He tried to read the editorials and the word breakthrough became ambiguous to him.

  He was reminded of a winter thaw years ago in Derry that had raised the rot of a neglected greyhound. When the sun began to shine the stench had risen.

  He decided he would not take food. When his mother wasn’t watching, he swept the chicken and rice off his plate and he stuck only to water. He lay back on his bed and tried to form a manifesto in his mind—he would not eat until all his uncle’s demands were given in to: the right to wear his own clothes, to have parcels and visits, to have remission restored, to refrain from prison work, to have free association. He didn’t understand all the demands but he whispered them aloud to the night anyway and fought the pangs in his stomach. He woke with his mouth dry.

  At breakfast he took his cornflakes outside and dumped them in the long grass.

  On his bed that afternoon he stretched out his torso and thought about how flat his belly was becoming. The boy looked for clues to his uncle’s body in his own: the chest concave, the ribs taut, the arms bare and rippled. His mother caught him staring in the mirror but she said nothing. He left abruptly, wandered along the cliff face, and spent hours in an abandoned Vauxhall down near a cove. He sat at the steering wheel, faced the shattered windshield, and began driving home, down narrow country roads toward the city. The gear lever rattled in his fingers. The accelerator touched the floor and he was tremendously skillful with the clutch. He broke through roadblocks and avoided the pursuit of a black helicopter. A crowd of masked men waited for him on the side of the road. He picked them up and they traveled east toward the jail for their own breakthrough.

  At dinnertime he asked if he could eat outside on his own, and when his mother agreed he walked out, feeling lightheaded, with a dull throb in his stomach now. He threw the plateful in the grass beside the morning’s cornflakes, most of which had already been picked over by seagulls.

  * * *

  THE GIRL STOOD above the vat of oil, waiting for it to heat. She had a pretty face and he was embarrassed when she looked at him a second time. Outside the church bells struck eleven chimes. He had been on hunger strike for thirty-four hours now. A picture of the Italian football team was hung above the rack of sweets. A statue of a saint was t
aped to the cash register. His palms were sweaty and he switched the coins from hand to hand. You’re the first customer of the morning, she said to him. He nodded and looked at his reflection in the stainless steel frontispiece of the counter. It made his face alternately fat and thin. He rose up and down on the tips of his toes and scrunched his face violently, then stopped when the girl behind the counter giggled.

  When he finally came out of the chip shop he was weeping, the vinegar so pungent that afterward he could smell it on his hands for days.

  * * *

  THE KAYAK WAS OUT EARLY. He saw how the old couple plied gracefully through the water and right then he hated them for their solitary joy, for the tandem rhythm they struck, for the way they knew each other’s moves in what he was sure was silence.

  He felt like a lone sniper at dawn, looking down on them.

  They were a hundred yards out, moving parallel to the headland. The waves rocked the boat up and down; it could have been the single beat of a cardiac machine. Farther out, there were whitecaps that broke early, but the kayak never moved off its course, the blades cutting the air, the nose sideways to the breakers. It was startlingly yellow on the water, as if the sea had decided to give it more color than it deserved and only the old couple, in their drab clothes, diluted that color, the man in a blue work shirt, the woman in a gray dress.

  The boy said to himself: Bang. Bang.

  On the step of the caravan his mother watched him out of the corner of her eye. He had been badly constipated after his hunger strike but he had not told her the reason why. She had given him medicine that had caused him to throw up, but now he told her that he felt much better, that he would like to take a walk into town.

  She reached into the pocket of her jeans and dug deep and came up with a fifty-pence coin, which she handed to him.

  Fifty pence?

  Yeah.

  What am I going to do with fifty pence?

  Get in half the trouble you will with a pound.

  The boy chuckled.

  Fair enough, he said.

  He ran down the hill, knocking at the brambles with a switch of stick. At the foot of the hill the chill of the early summer day cut through his shirt, and he hugged his arms around himself.

  Out on the water the kayak had become a tiny speck.

  In town there were some older teenagers at the back of an alley and he spied on them from the window of the video arcade. The light from a blue neon sign pulsed upon them. They too wore black drainpipes and white shirts, but their hair was shorter than his and they had sideburns. He smiled when he saw that they wore black armbands. He wanted to go outside and tell them that his uncle was on hunger strike—they would look at him with a certain awe and feel a shiver and know him to be a hard man. They would share their cigarettes and give him a nickname. He would show them his penknife and lie about how he once sliced a soldier from neck to stomach like a gutted deer.

  One of the teenagers looked around furtively and the boy was startled to see him bring a bag of glue to his mouth.

  The boy turned immediately and put his fifty pence into the machine. It lit up. He played with a bead of sweat beginning at his brow, but the teenagers in the alleyway kept their faces to the plastic bag. He wondered what it was like to get high. Back home he had never seen any of his friends taking drugs—once there had been a pusher in the house next door and she had ended up with bullets in both knees. He would listen to her coming along the street and her crutches struck the ground, a shrill metallic language. Late at night when she played her stereo he could hear the crutch tapping out a rhythm against the floor, but when she kept dealing the vigilantes kicked her door down, put two bullets in her elbows, and two more in her ankles for good measure, after which she disappeared altogether, and people said she’d gone to England, where she was dealing from a wheelchair.

  He stole another look at the alleyway.

  They breathed the bag in and out and it looked to him like the beat of a strange gray heart. Between hits of the glue they smoked cigarettes and one of the youths nonchalantly left a lit cigarette behind his ear and the smoke curled up above his head.

  The boy patted his pockets and cursed himself for spending all his money on one game, but he controlled the machine for two hours until his fingers began to ache, and when he looked again to the alleyway the youths were gone. On the ground lay a ring of cigarette butts and a patch of vomit. At the far end of the laneway was graffiti that said: SMASH THE H-BLOCK. Beyond that were the words: BOBBY SANDS M.P., R.I.P. He saluted the graffiti and wished he had some spray paint so he could put his uncle’s name in high strong letters all around the town.

  The sea threw waves on the beach, and out on the water he spied some fishing boats. One of them flew a black flag and the Irish tricolor promiscuously from atop its cabin. The boy ran down to the water’s edge and waved at the boat, but there was no response. He walked along the hard edge of the sand, whistling.

  Good on ye, he said to the disappearing boat.

  He took off his shoes and toyed with the water, daring it to wet his toes. The cold sand sucked around his feet and made gurgling noises. He found himself laughing and he wasn’t quite sure if he should be enjoying himself or not, in this strange town, on this strange beach, in this strange loneliness.

  He stepped in farther until the sea was up to his ankles and he kicked up spray and the droplets made shapes and parabolas in the air. Mathematics was the only thing he enjoyed in school, though he told nobody, and he wondered now if he could ever chart the arc of a droplet of water. It would be an odd graph, he thought, captured in a millisecond, from one end of an axis to another. He could create a formula for moving water and it would be decipherable only to him.

  The sea no longer felt cold and in a moment he was running along the sand, kicking furiously and laughing, and the sea itself seemed doomed to the fact of his joy.

  He shouted to the waves: Try me, come on, try me. He was soaked to the knees and moving at the edge of the empty beach like some piebald horse with his feet in the air and his neck outstretched, until he stopped quite suddenly and felt his face flush.

  On the pier sat three girls, dangling their legs over the edge. They were whispering to each other some secret which the boy knew was about him. He walked along the beach with his head hung to his chest and then gave another skip in the air just in case they were watching.

  He climbed over the pier and, out of their view, he sat on the rocks, took out a cigarette butt from his shirt pocket, and began drying it in the sun.

  As he waited he watched the girls move out onto the sand, where they sat together and shared an ice-cream cone. One of the girls stood up and took off her red pullover. She had short blond hair and her breasts stood out against a white shirt. When she placed her arms behind her head to stretch, it gave him an erection. He disappeared behind a large rock and, unzipping, he cradled the length of himself in his hand. As he masturbated he watched the girl stretching farther, furrowing a line in the sand with her toes. He locked his eyes on the back of her body and, when she put her arms behind her head and twisted once more, he cupped his other hand. He closed his eyes and bit his lip and, when he was finished, tucked his penis away, darting a look around.

  The old couple were bringing the kayak in to the pier. They were bent to the work of paddling so they had not seen him, but still the boy felt ashamed as he wiped his palm on a nearby rock. He took a small stone and fired it so that it arced through the air and hit the water about ten yards from the kayak, landing gently, so that the old man turned, puzzled.

  Go and shite, whispered the boy.

  * * *

  SHE WAS ON THE STEPS of the caravan staring into a small handheld mirror. She had a tube of lipstick to her mouth and she ran her tongue over her teeth. She seemed beautiful and he was angered by this and he wanted to tell her to wipe the lipstick off, but he knew she was just preparing for her gig. She would lean seductively into the microphone and sing about women tying up the
ir hair with black velvet bands.

  Mammy. I want to wear a black armband, he said, standing on the step.

  Ah, don’t start, not now, please. No.

  Ach, why not?

  Because I said no.

  I want one.

  Listen to your mother, please, and when I say no—

  I saw some boys in town wearing them.

  You don’t need one.

  I even saw some wee girls too.

  He exaggerated the word and she lowered her head to the mirror, touched the glass with her forefinger, as if she would find the answer written there. No, she said, and in that one word her accent seemed now distinctly southern, as if she had changed the place of her birth.

  The boy muttered beneath his breath and pushed past her into the caravan and then he saw the portable radio on the kitchen table wrapped in a blue ribbon.

  His mother came to the doorway and stood mantled by light.

  I didn’t think you’d like to play chess on your own, she said. I thought I’d get you a little something. A present. For when I’m out working. You might be able to tune in a pirate station.

  The boy lifted the radio and turned the dial and some scratchy music sounded out. He put it to his ear and began to sway.

  When your father and I were young we were in Portrush for a holiday and the room had a radio and we used to listen to a station called Radio Luxembourg, she said. Sometimes the reception was bad and your father would pick up the radio and walk around the room and sometimes I thought the music was coming from him—

  Did Daddy have a radio when he was young?

  Sure, your daddy was the first man in Derry listening to the Rolling Stones.

  They’re the ones who sing I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.

  They are indeed.