The Troubles Read online

  Thinking of the disappointment that waits reminds me of the rival affection, lest loyal love, I feel for my father. I do not wish to involve him or my young brothers in convoluted IRA actions. I know there is acceleration in recruitment, which makes us all prime candidates. I am the eldest and it is my place to defend us from our neighbor’s let alone the monarch, which could be continents away for all I give a shit about. As I raise my shoulders and wipe my soiled, vomit-streaked face I have nobility to my stance now. I walk past the gaudy repugnant murals that line the consecrated streets feeling purged and anew.

  My father’s stench of pungent brown liquor and stale sweat greets me as I make my way into our unpretentious kitchen. I am starving; my hunger etching its way deep into my gut. The day’s expulsions have weakened my burgeoning form’s normally steely vigor. I noiselessly make my way past the inebriated loathsome figure that sits foreboding like an aging monarch at our kitchen table. A cigarette is sitting in the crook of his mouth unlit and unnoticed.

  “Bout ye Da? How are ye doing this morn?’’ He ought to be acknowledging me as his eyes flicker with recognition. There is muteness in his dull lack of a response, which I am grateful for. We communicate in polarizing dark violent blacks and sentimental forgiving whites and I’m covetous for the pale calm grays in between but that ability if it ever existed in him, must have been extinguished before I was born.

  ‘’Have ye seen Quinn, Da?” My voice is low and respectful and I feel that aching paternal concern for my younger brother. “Come on, let’s get ya away from the kitchen door. Ta se guar go elor inniu. It is bloody cold in here.’’ His gaze lazily drags up my body to meet mine. I know just by the absence of electricity that courses through our exchanges when I have apparently blundered that he must be oblivious to yesterday’s calamities. There is a part of me that masochistically wants him to pummel me to show me he cares even if the abuse is ugly, but nothing, he is vacant. He latches like a leech to my shoulder and we walk in warped sync as though we have done this march thousands of previous times and there is nothing obtuse about a son chaperoning his father to bed.

  CHAPTER 5; ‘’ IS Fhearr fheychainn na bhith san duil (It is better to try than to hope)

  Kiera Flanagan… “Is cuma liom. Mom, I’m okay, please let me stay home. I’m too tired for the service today.” In actuality, I know the Flanagan family will be the public face of victimization exploiting the erosion that is eating the fabric of our society. It feels much like an outbreak and I am patient number one. Mother is nervously making her way through our home inspecting, repeating her tasks neurotically.

  She interjects dismissing my reluctance,“Ya cannot stay here because yer Da and cousins are going to fix the bummed upstairs.” She pauses and grabs my hand so tightly the blood washes white. “Oh me Lord, me lovely daughter.’’ She is inspecting my face again for any damage that I might be concealing as I am getting more proficient at disguising my fears as the months go by and I leave my childhood in the wake of Ireland.

  “Stop it. Leave me be!” I am equally frustrated with my parents and yank my face away. “I’m frigging fine! We are Okay, could have been a whole lot worse Ma.”

  How can they be so visionless to how shortsighted the political conflict is? Why have they chosen to align with their side of circumstance? Do they have any real tangible reason to be on one side or another? I clearly think not!

  I am lazily behind my mother in submissive step as we are making our way to the dead center of our Shankill suburb. On the structured horizon the West Kirk Presbyterian Church comes into a crowning glory. Though its gray stonewalls are enveloped in a morning mist instead of evoking a calm in my spirit, the spiritual stronghold presents faithless to me like every other inanimate dwelling on the summit in the foreground.

  Beyond the heavy cast iron doors the cathedral ceiling is buckled and recessed in the common fashion of midcentury architecture. Seated piously in the wooden pews hold with exception, every protestant I know; they are my relatives, neighbors, and classmates. Not one of them, though, with their downcast piteous glances has invoked a passionate response that the bewitching young man with vivid green eyes has. I am unapologetically naive to this kind of captivation and as I stand on shaky legs in the aisle, delicious delirium erupts deep in the recesses of my torso. ‘’Sit Down child.’’ Mother choicely demands me to slide down the narrow pews, as she finally looks me clear in the eyes.

  ‘’Forgive me Ma.” I am gutted with shame, wiping away any lascivious thoughts. They are the most worthy of parents and are doing the best with what they have been attributed in their respective births. She has already pardoned my folly without need of my apology though had I cursed in my father’s earshot I would have received a smart trouncing. The service begins with an enchanting hymn, the organ resonating deep as the chorus of voices enclose around me as I cross my hands over my scratchy, woolen, ankle-length skirt.

  ‘’Fight the good fight with all thy might; Christ is thy Strength, and Christ thy Right; Lay hold on life, and it shall be thy joy and crown eternally. Faint not nor fear, His arms are near, He changeth not, and thou art dear. Only believe, and thou shalt see that Christ is all in all to thee.’’

  There is an ethereal transformative quality to the instructive prayer. My mother’s chaotic molecular vibrations seem to have rearranged with metaphysical transformation visible only to me because I’ve mastered her stirs and cherish these moments with the most rarefied of familial love. Her hand reaches to the worn black bible in the pew before her and strokes it with humility.

  It is not the message of Christianity but the confinement of the church and its interpretation of the Bible that’s been long an issue for me. I prefer Celtic paganism and its openness to a magnitude of interpretations and traditions. I have long had strong misgivings toward female servitude toward men in the Protestant Church. Druid acknowledgement that the Divine has both male and female aspects is enlightening.

  I have lived my entire existence in Belfast; a cesspool of a city flanked by highland meadows as opposite as fire is to water; lush pastures of striking flowers, bright green patriotic shamrocks, sodden bogs and deep fens, hard oak and white birch wood forests. Predatory red fox, elusive red deer, wily otters, short tailed stoat, and diminutive pygmy shrew roam wild and have inhabited the isle for millennia without disturbance until a couple hundred years my fellow countryman began to hunt them in sustainable manner. In the cool temperate ocean that surrounds the sequestered land dwell deep in the depths curious and playful bottlenose dolphins, lethargic sea walruses, and cunning sleek white and black killer whales. The principle of love and a kinship with nature is perhaps my greatest pull to pagan beliefs. With the incestuous intertwining of ‘The Lord' and island politics superseding all that is just and honorable to me I have turned my back to any Christian church, pivoting my spirit to unsheltered creatures mighty and small, my soul in awe of indigenous vibrant fauna that has flourished even with extreme isolation from the mainland’s resources. I travel past city limits as often as possible breathing sacred air going unnoticed in my humble journey as perhaps any farmhand would.

  I work in, most ludicrously, the notorious Short Brothers Aerospace Factory, which produces turboprop airliners, and missiles for the British Armed Forces, five wearying days a week, ten hours a day. My job is a patriotic profession, a pride to my family as I am the Flanagan’s only child and having neither resources nor superior intellect to go to London to pursue a higher education; I am confined to a proverbial servitude. At nineteen years old there is an unspoken financial burden I feel from my mother and father to marry. I have had admirers to whom I have appeared uncharacteristically timid and supplicant, my fear masking my strength and sensuality. A fragile beauty my mom appeases all that question her. I have yet to characterize myself as this but her words slowly inhabit me insidiously seeping in, I feel forsaken and isolated in my outlined role. Fortunately the unrestraint of the ancient druidism lest naturism of my homeland inspire my
inner wild banshee and when I covertly vacate urban flow I feel at peace with myself not stifled by oppressive conditions.

  CHAPTER 6: “Tachraidh na daoine, ach cha tachair na cnuic.”(Men will meet, but the hills will not)

  Alastar Taggart…Winters icy chill is drawing near as fall comes to its end and the days are resting earlier in cloaked darkness thus giving permission to unsavory characters, as there is unbridled criminal activity from dusk till dawn. November rain is coming down in veracious currents erasing all nefarious evidence as though a city as corrupt as Belfast would have a police force examining and discarding it. Word has migrated to me this morning through backwater channels that I am being summoned to meet with Cathal Goulding.

  My brother younger Quinn has met me for my pithy twenty-minute lunch break at Harland and Wolff Shipyard. The massive, imposing shipyard is the plot where I have imperiled limb and life for years in the assistance of launching the first supertanker of our era. The ship, finally making its long awaited departure down the slipway is the awe-inspiring grand, long voyage, vessel, the Myrina. This heavy, industrial shipyard has been in our clan for two generations with my grandfather having worked on the RMS Olympic, Britannic and the ill-fated Titanic from 1909 to 1914. The obligation then falling upon his son, my father, bending his body like molten steel, not surprising he could not withstand the physically taxing daily grind. At fifteen years old I was then given no choice but to learn the dangerous trade and provide the basic necessities my younger siblings would clamor around a penniless father for.

  Quinn is wheezing discordantly, his little chest pumping as his slight asthma has reared from head. I am nervously perplexing over what he has just told me. It is often that a person’s mouth breaks his nose but in my case it was my impetuosity in recent events that has sealed my fate and brought my family name to Cathal Goulding’s cognizance. He is an ominous figurehead of the Official Sinn Feinn Worker’s Party of Dublin. Offering little in policy reform and withering the championed causes all the while he uses his position to further us into a battle during his controversial tenure. His quick temperament that of a criminal, having spent as much as fourteen years in different prisons, mastering the criminal mind. Upon his release he has embraced the ethos of Marxism and stubbornly governs against his own party from the polarizing viewpoint. He is valid in that he believes the British state has deliberately divided the Irish working class onto sectarian grounds to exploit them and keep them from overthrowing their bourgeois oppressors by skirmishing amongst their fellow neighbors. Though there is a naivety that the United Kingdom would ever relinquish its capitalistic greed for the more humane socialism that Marxism demands.

  Not at any time in my twenty-four years did I surmise that I would be coerced (by bulletin of Quinn) to take a trip to Dublin and parley with the auxiliary authority of the Official IRA. From chest height Quinn summons his burgeoning tenacity and with a quip to his speech out spills the inevitable appeal I’ve come to expect from my persistent brother. “I’m coming with ya!’’ An expectant chortle escapes me with affection.

  “There is no way in bloody hell ya’ll ever meet that man Quinn!” I lower my voice and cast an eye to see if any of the shipyard workers are paying heed. We are ignored as the boisterous men swear and joke all the while unhygienic, eating their brown-bagged lunches with blackened nails. “That man is dangerous and I will not have ya near more rubbish talk.” I am more unyielding in this than I have been about most direction in my rearing of Quinn. “Da needs you at home taking heed of the small children.” I see before me, this child less a brother to me but a son taking a fraction of the weight that is anchoring me. Unseen moisture creeps tenderly from my eyes and I am flustered by my own fitting emotion.

  Quinn has unfortunately caught this and with his voice deepened with awkward adolescent hormones he acquiesces. ‘’Fine Alastar, this is a good thing ya’re doing for us.”

  “What ya mean? Good thing?” I simply cannot see the obvious initiation waiting in Dublin culminating in anything but a variant of disastrous outcomes.

  ‘’Ya can get banjaxed dead with that kind of talk. Hush Alastar. We’ll be tory’s dead!’’

  Quinn has fulfilled his duty to me and has returned to our childhood home without too much chagrin; the departing view of his slight frame determines his innocence. He wants nothing more but to come to Dublin with me. His wide-eyed innocence remains unaffected and I know his considerations of service are forth right as he is a benevolent boy, but the comprehension that comes with maturity he has yet to acquire. I have made a concession, agreeing to contact my schoolteacher who has in recent years, become my paradigm into the world of the metaphysical. Lanary Sloan is the founder and sovereign of the Order of the Verdant River, a self-manifested pagan fellowship. He is to meet me in the glasshouse conservatory at the Belfast Botanic Garden Palm House. The park being our habitual rendezvous when time or circumstance dictates our prolonged imprisonment in the concrete shackles of Belfast.

  As I make my way into the dome of the tropical wing; an overwhelming kaleidoscope of alluring scents and vivid wondrous tropical colors cascade like a waterfall in my purview. The tropical wing is the feat of the architecturally avant-garde visionary Richard Turner, cascading with a sixty-five feet long tunnel with the girth an ample twenty feet wide. Most impressively is the forty-six-foot cathedral of the glass dome above. Cool grey light streams through the six-foot long window panels gently coaxing the growth of the subtropical and tropical palms and trees. Sweet hibiscus scented perfumed condensation floats above the flowers and curled ferns encircle the rare tropical trees, the man-made botanical union creating a rarefied ambience that will only ever exist in this place in Belfast. Droplets of the precious humidity ruminate through plants of the bio dome and quickly beads of sweat come to my brow. Though Northern Ireland spends two-hundred days a year in rain and Belfast sits on the North Channel's cool temperate ocean waters yet this tropical garden purifies me more than the noxious drink the Belfast clouds recycle in their failed attempts of baptism.

  A voice splits through the stillness with a deep guttural resonance echoing off the glass walls. I turn quickly paranoid and having been through so much recently I exclaim, ‘’Oh Jesus Christ! Lanary it’s ya!’’

  ‘’Of course it’s me, I was told ya needed me.” His eyes glimmer with slight amusement at my obvious duress. Lanary might be a spiritual creature but his satirical humor is his dominant emotion. I see not an uncomely man with remnants of his handsomeness buried in his age, though I have never been certain how old Lanary is. All that is known is that he was a solder in World War 11 and that this awful forbearance has not visibly breached the sanity of his mind as it did to so many others. It seems instead to have propelled him on an investigatory journey of the spirit. This is perhaps why I trust him separate from my immediate family. His tone shifts to paternal concern and he rivals my gaze slightly bowing his neck to adjust to my slightly lower height.

  ‘’Son, how is it that ya’ve become embroiled in this mess? Reardon has... rest his soul... obviously ya were there and now, Cathal Goulding of all people, would like to see ya?”

  I am shamefaced with my response. “Lanary I couldn’t have been more of a fool. We were there I guess to show support in the face of those friggin’ peelers. I am now entrapped in a sticky web I fear I can’t get out of.’’

  He is kind with his words but his face remains stony and coolly removed. “Son I am here for ya, since ya and I met fortuitously just outside this very place.” He pauses for a long minute and touches a lime green leaf, which bares the distinct markings of a feather. “I have seen by yer desire to learn throughout all of our years, that ya will apply what I have imparted on to ya. These dastardly people are going to manipulate this the second ya step foot in Dublin!’’

  The benevolent advice he is imparting cause me to feel disconcerted as there is disconnection within his steeled expression and his words. For a fateful split second I have a lurching pain in my
gut, the same gnawing ache I had a few days ago when I had taken my neighborhood friend Reardon to the high-minded revolt which had descended into awry riot. The stoic man’s demeanor rearranges itself into severity so quickly I question my sane eyes. ‘’I will do me best to deescalate any tension but you must come with me.”

  My stomach queues again with a tight quake. “I’d expect no less me mate!’’

  Lanary grins a white gleaming smile unfurling from beneath his shaded beard like a hand from beneath a glove. “May the road rise to meet ya.''

  CHAPTER 7: Ni heolas go haontois (You must live with a person to know a person)

  Kiera Flanagan…My behind is stinging painfully from the lashed markings, which have disfigured my blush baby skin and the whippings have taken on the monotonous sound of chopping wood. There are only three times in my life I have ached this deeply, the pain so raw I found myself as a voyeur watching the torture.

  I have been found out. How could I not have caught, when in the confusion of the tossed molitave cocktail, my bedroom had been destroyed and was now being dismantled and rebuilt by my family? I failed to remember my journal under the floorboards in which I fully divulged my dissidence to the Protestant church on paper, the actions truth onto them revealing my true interest in my ancestral birthright, the Celtic worship of nature. I have dimwittedly allowed my secretive politics to appear potentially destabilizing my peaceful family dynamic.

  My father had been waiting; sitting proudly like the master he is, on the front stoop with an expression not of disappointment, but one of stern fear when mother and I had returned from the West Kirk Presbyterian Church. Immediately she knew my father would mar me as he’d done year’s earlier as customary punishment. “Kiera…” She had hastily whispered. “Stand behind me girl.” I took the searing whipping on the worn wooden chair in our family kitchen. With every single strike of flesh meeting leather she had gasped and begged her husband to bestow leniency towards their only child.