The Wake - Table of contents

The Wake - afters (22)

I wasn’t sure what to say because some of the wankers definitely heard him. Ignoring my non-reply he went on: “There’s only one way to sort out this bloody circus of a so-called province and that’s the gun, boy, the old bomb and the bullet. These people only understand one thing and that’s brute force.”

“You think so?” I said this quite loudly trying to hit the right sort of reasoning tone with Aisling listening linked onto one arm and Eamonn McCann listening too I’d say, linked onto the other. I half looked round and McCann’s jaw was jutting. What the fuck’s going on here? it was saying.

“How’s Eamonn?” said Pearse throwing a big smile that I think was supposed to disarm but which wasn’t returned. He leaned to my ear then and whispered: “Look at history would you. Tell me one case —”

“Right Jeremiah, ready?”

This was a calculated interruption by McCann but it was going to take more than that.

“There’s never been a case —”

“It’s all right for you saying that,” I told him over my shoulder, starting to be pulled forward. “You’ll be in Manchester watching Georgie Best and them and we’ll be the ones caught up in it here.”

“Wouldn’t pay to look near them. Hey, I must go. You know I got a reference from Father McGaughey out of the Long Tower?”

“Did you right enough?” There was a thin blue line of smoke rising straight up in the air from behind the cop that was pressed against me nearly like it was coming out of his helmet. Chimney probably. Or something burning in a field.

“I did.” He was shouting now. “That bastard Hourigan wouldn’t give me one seeing I only gave him two weeks’ notice so I went to Father McGaughey. Remember I worked in the Long Tower primary awhile when I came out?”

“Ah, right.” It was downright indecent the way me and this cop were pressed together. Like the Embassy ballroom on a Saturday night.

“Get rid of him for Christ sake,” whispered Aisling pulling me against the cop so hard his helmet fell off and got caught between his chest and mine.

“Well, McGaughey had no hesitation. Sound man so he is. Makes you realise they’re not all bad. Listen, I’ll be in touch.” 

And that was him away. Anyway the cops ended up in the ditch most of them. Michael Farrell was explaining in a loud voice all through the push o war for the benefit of the TV cameras that we weren’t using violence, we were just exercising the legitimate right of legal marchers to walk on the road. The trouble was that some of the cops were being blinded by the man from Toome and I heard when I got to Derry that an RUC spokesman made a meal of it when he was interviewed on TV. So to this day I don’t know if the man from Toome was trying to help us or blacken us.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I was going to tell you about the second day. It was on the second day that my bowels moved in a field behind the Ponderosa on the Glenshane Pass and my form lifted. Except my feet were killing me, blisters and calluses and corns, the whole lot, I’ll never learn about what kind of shoes to wear. Still, all I could think of coming out of the field was lying beside Aisling again and that bitch wasn’t going to get in the way this time.