As the Belfast accent of the tannoy tells us what is happening
I’m about to quote from Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North —
Blossoming mushroom: from some unknown tree a leaf has stuck to it —
When it goes off and we’re thrown out of kilter. My mouth is full
Of broken glass and quinine as everything reverses South.
The Mouth
There was this head had this mouth he kept shooting off. Unfortunately.
It could have been worse for us than it was for him. Provisionally.
But since nothing in this world is certain and you don’t know who hears what
We thought it was time he bit off more than he could chew. Literally.
By the time he is found there’ll be nothing much left to tell who he was.
But of course some clever dick from the ‘Forscenic Lab’ reconstructs
Him, what he used to be — not from his actual teeth, not his fingerprints,
But from the core — the toothmarks of the first and last bite he’d taken of
This sour apple. But then we would have told them anyway. Publicity.
Night Out
Every Thursday night when we press the brass button on the galvanized wire mesh gate
A figure appears momentarily at the end of the strip-lit concrete passageway,
Then disappears. The gate squeaks open, slams shut almost instantly behind us.
Then through the semi-opaque heavy-duty polythene swing doors they might have taken
From a hospital. At the bar, we get the once-over once again.
Seven whiskeys later, the band is launching into Four Green Fields.
From somewhere out beyond the breeze-block walls we get a broken rhythm
Of machine-gun fire. A ragged chorus. So the sentence of the night
Is punctuated through and through by rounds of drink, of bullets, of applause.
Jawbox
What looks to us like a crackly newsreel, the picture jumping with flak,
Was clear as day, once. But that’s taken as read, since this is a ‘quotation’
In the main text of the film, which begins with someone flicking open
The glossy pages of a Homes and Gardens kitchen supplement: Sink or Swim, the caption
Says, The Belfast sink combines old-fashioned charm with tried and tested
Practicality . . . ‘Why Belfast?’, the character begins to ponder — he puts the accent
On the fast, as if the name was Irish, which it was (or is); this is how
His father says it, just as, being from Belfast, he calls the sink a ‘jawbox’.
At first you think the screen’s gone blank, till you realise the camera
Has focussed on the sink itself: it has eaten up the whole
Picture. Then it backtracks, to reveal a ’forties kitchen with a kind of wartime
Atmosphere: an old bakelite Clydesdale radio glows in the corner, humming
Over names like Moscow, Hilversum, Berlin. There’s those jugs with blue and white
Striped bars, which give a premonition of the future (still our past) — filled
With flowers, they’re déjà vu before their time, just as the sink, retired now
To the garden, overflows with hyacinths, geraniums.
There’s something threatening about the kitchen — knives, glass, the epileptic
Buzzing of the overhead fluorescent strip, the white glaze blotched with calligraphic
Tea-leaves. Something in the pattern brings to mind an ornamental
Slightly murderous detail, and the picture changes with a click to show
The handcuffed metal Xs of an old-style elevator gate. Someone’s going down —
Chinese shadows flicking off and on across the various floors — to the Forensic Lab.
It’s like suspicion, this weightless feeling in his stomach; and the clickety-clack
Reminds him of a railway journey, interrupted, for the seventh time that week,
By a bomb on the line between Dundalk and Newry. Or Newry and Dundalk, depending
Where you’re coming from: like the difference between Cambodia and Kampuchea.
Shepherded on board an Ulsterbus, knowing now that the appointment won’t be kept,
His attention wanders out across the rushy unkempt landscape, where a white dot
Concentrates his gaze. He lurches nearer. A hedge, a stone wall, gets in the way,
And then, brimming with water, wind-skimmed, rippled — he remembers how
He used to scoop an icy draught from it — the Belfast sink reveals itself.
It’s now a cattle-trough, ripped out from a deconstructed farmhouse renovated
In the ‘hacienda’ style — not inappropriately, since South of the Border
Down Mexico Way is a big hit in these parts. Just then the border passes through him
Like a knife, invisibly, as the blip of the bus is captured on surveillance radar.
What’s been stirring in his memory, like tea-leaves stirred in water —
He’s elbow-deep in it, fingers trying to unblock the plughole — is the half-gnawed
Apple found at the mise-en-scène. The body, face-down on the steaming
Freshly-tarmacked road. He bites into the core, imagining his mouth’s interior.
That twinge, an old occlusion. The tooth he broke on the rim of the jawbox
When he was eight. Blood-spattered white glaze; dilating, red confetti.
He spits out the pips and stares at the imaginary pith, seeing himself engraved there:
Furrows, indentations, grooves, as crisp as fingerprints. A little hinge of skin.
The mouth suggests the body —
Biting, grinding, breathing, chewing, spitting, tasting; clenched
In a grimace or a smile — his child’s body, hunched in the dark alcove underneath
The sink, sulking, tearful, wishing he was dead. Imprisoned by so many
Small transgressions, he wants to break out of the trap. He’s caught between
Belfast and Belfast, in the accordion pleats between two lurching carriages
Banging, rattling, threatening to break loose, as he gets a terrifying glimpse
Of railway sleepers, blotchy gravel flicking past a smell of creosote and oil and urine.
The coupling snaps; another mouth floats into view, its rust-tinged canine edges
Sealed in labelled see-through polythene; there’s an O of condensation. From the cloud
A face begins to dawn: something like his own, but thicker, coarser, Jekyll
Turning into Hyde — an Englishman into an Irishman — emerging from the bloom
Behind the mirror. Breathed-on, becoming whole, the murderer is hunched
Behind the hedge. One bite from the apple, as the victim’s Ford Fiesta trickles
Up the driveway. The car door opens. The apple’s thrown away.
There’s a breath of fresh tar. The scent will always summon up that afternoon,
As it blossoms into apple, into mouth. It’s hanging in the air as Dr Jekyll finally
Makes it into Belfast. Beyond the steamed-up window, the half-dismantled gasworks
Loom up, like a rusty film noir laboratory — carboys, vats, alembics, coils, retorts.
It’s that effect where one image warps into the other, like the double helix
Of the DNA code, his footsteps dogged throughout the action by another. Or
A split screen might suggest the parallels of past and present, Jekyll ticking
Downwards in the lift, as Hyde runs down the spiral stairwell. Till they meet.
What looks to us like a crackly newsreel, the picture jumping with flak,
Is the spotted, rust-tinged mirror screwed above the Belfast sink. Jekyll’s head
Is jerking back and forward on the rim. Red confetti spatters the white glaze.
The camera backtracks to take in a tattered Homes and Gardens kitchen supplement.
A pair of hands — lean, corded, knuckly, of a dusky pallor, and thickly shadowed
With swart hair — come into view, and flick the pages of the magazine.
Belfast, the voice says, not Belfast. Then the credits roll.
John Ruskin in Belfast
As I approached the city, the storm-cloud of the Nineteenth Century
Began to wheel and mass its pendulous decades; the years grew weighty, slate-grey,
Palpable, muttering with dark caesurae, rolling in a clattering mockery
Of railway-luggage trains. All this while, the minutes seethed forth as artillery-smoke
Threatening to collapse into a dank fog. A single gauzy patch of iris blue —
All that remained of the free azure — contracted, shrank into oblivion
Till it became all pupil, olive-black, impenetrable; jagged migraine lightning
Flashed in the dark crock of my brain.
Like Turner, lashed to the mast of the Ariel, the better to see what he later painted —
The unwearied rage of memory, no distinction left between the sea and air —
I am riding out the hurricane, the writhing cloudscape of the sea collapsing
Into masses of accumulated yeast, which hang in ropes and wreaths from wave to wave;
Gouts and cataracts of foam pour from the smoky masts of the industrial Armada
As the wrack resolves itself in skeins and hanks, in terraces and sinks and troughs;
The air is sick with vitriol, the hospital-sweet scent of snuff, tobacco, linen.
And the labyrinthine alleyways are bloody with discarded bandages, every kind of ordure:
The dung of horses, dogs and rats and men; the knitted, knotted streets
Are crammed with old shoes, ashes, rags, smashed crockery, bullet casings, shreds
Of nameless clothes, rotten timber jaggy with bent nails, cinders, bones and half-bricks,
Broken bottles; and kneaded into, trampled, or heaving, fluttering, dancing
Over all of these, the tattered remnants of the news, every kind of foul advertisement,
The banner headlines that proclaim an oceanic riot, mutilated politics,
The seething yeast of anarchy: the very image of a pit, where a chained dwarf
Savages a chained bulldog.
As I strove against this lethargy and trance within myself, dismembered
Fragments of my speech, The Mystery of Life and Its Arts, swam up through the cumulus:
This strange agony of desire for justice is often, I think, seen in Ireland —
For being generous-hearted, and intending always to do right, you still neglect
External laws of right, and therefore you do wrong, without conceiving of it;
And so fly into wrath when thwarted, and will not admit the possibility of error . . . .
See how in the static mode of ancient Irish art, the missal-painter draws his angel
With no sense of failure, as a child might draw an angel, putting red dots
In the palm of each hand, while the eyes — the eyes are perfect circles, and,
I regret to say, the mouth is left out altogether.
That blank mouth, like the memory of a disappointed smile, comes back to haunt me.
That calm terror, closed against the smog and murk of Belfast: Let it not open
That it might condemn me. Let it remain inviolate.
Or let that missing mouth be mine, as, one evening in Siena
I walked the hills above, where fireflies moved like finely-broken starlight
Through the purple leaves, rising, falling, as the cobalt clouds — white-edged, mountainous —
Surged into thunderous night; and fireflies gusted everywhere, mixed with the lightning,
Till I thought I’d open up my mouth and swallow them, as I might gulp the Milky Way.
When the last star fades into the absolute azure, I will return
To where The Dawn of Christianity, by Turner, hangs in Belfast in its gilt frame:
Airy, half-discovered shades of aqua, the night becoming hazy milk and pearl,
The canvas is a perfect circle; and as I gaze into its opalescent mirror
I try to find its subject, The Flight into Egypt. A palm tree beckons
Like an angel’s hand: words issue from the sealed tomb of his mouth — Be thou there
Until I bring thee word — and the Holy Family vanishes into the breathed-on mirror
Where the Nile-blue sky becomes the Nile, abandoning the Empire
To its Massacre of Innocents, the mutilated hands and knees of children.
Narrative in Black and White
Now take these golf balls, scattered all around the place, which since
The reproduction’s blurred, you’d easily misconstrue as ping-pong —
You can’t make out the dimples. But they’re different as chalk and cheese:
Ever get hit by a golf ball? You’d know all about it. And perhaps
The golf club in the bottom corner is no give-away. People have been known
To mistake it for a gun. And the disembodied plus-fours
Might be army surplus. No, all these things are dangerous enough,
According to whose rules you play. Which is maybe why they’re put there,
Where you’d least expect them, floating against the façade of the Europa.
Hotel, that is. You know it? Looks as if it’s taken from a photograph,
Down to the missing E of the logo, the broken windows, which they only got
Around to fixing last week. Things drift off like that, or people drift in.
Like Treacy, who it’s all about, according to the guy who painted it.
This splash of red here: not blood, but a port-wine stain or strawberry mark
You saw him sitting, he would have his right hand over it. Like this.
Too easily recognised, he didn’t like. This is where the black gloves
Come in, gripping the revolving foyer doors. Or maybe one of them
Is raised, like saying Power — to the people, to himself, whatever.
Billiard balls? Well, maybe. Certainly these random scratches on the canvas
Suggest the chalk-marks on a green baize, a faded diagram from which
You’d try to piece together what the action was. Like trying to account
For Treacy’s movements. Though on the night in question, according to the barman
In The Beaten Docket, he’d staggered in from some win on the horses,
Slaps a tenner on the counter, and orders a ‘Blue Angel’. Blue what?
Says the barman. Angel, Treacy says, Blue Bols, vodka, ice, a drop of sugar.
Oh, and top it up with whipped cream. I say this just to show the sort
Of him, like someone who a year or two ago would not have known ‘cocktail’
From a hen’s arse. You’re sure, the barman says, you wouldn’t like a straw?
The staircase is important. The zig-zag is like taking one step forward,
Two steps back. For who would take the stairs up thirteen floors, when
He could take the lift? The reason why, the power had gone that night.
So only one way in, and one way out. As sure as meeting your own shadow.
This, I think, is what the mirror represents. Like, everybody knew about the split,
And what side Treacy ended up on. Of course, the detail’s lost;
You have to see it like it is, original. The colours, the dimensions.
Even the frame, like someone spying through binoculars, is saying something:
I’m watching you; but you, you can’t see me. Ping-pong. Yin-yang.
So here is Treacy, at the wrong end of the telescope, diminishing.
He was seen in this bar, that bar. Like what I’m saying is, that anybody
Might have fingered him. So the man on the thirteenth floor
sits pat.
He draws back the curtain. He stares through the kaleidoscope of snow
And sees what’s coming next. Treacy’s footsteps. Game, set and match.
They found him in the empty room. The face was blown off. They rolled down
One black glove. A Rorschach blot. The Red Hand, as he called himself.
Me? I knew him like a brother. Once. But then our lives grew parallel, if
Parallel is never meeting. He started dressing up and talking down. What
He would and wouldn’t do. And people don’t go shooting off their mouths like that.
Hamlet
As usual, the clock in The Clock Bar was a good few minutes fast:
A fiction no one really bothered to maintain, unlike the story
The comrade on my left was telling, which no one knew for certain truth:
Back in 1922, a sergeant, I forget his name, was shot outside the National Bank . . . .
Ah yes, what year was it that they knocked it down? Yet, its memory’s as fresh
As the inky smell of new pound notes — which interferes with the beer-and-whiskey
Tang of now, like two dogs meeting in the revolutionary 69 of a long sniff,
Or cattle jostling shit-stained flanks in the Pound. For pound, as some wag
Interrupted, was an off-shoot of the Falls, from the Irish, fál, a hedge;
Hence, any kind of enclosed thing, its twigs and branches commemorated
By the soldiers’ drab and olive camouflage, as they try to melt
Into a brick wall; red coats might be better, after all. At any rate,
This sergeant’s number came up; not a winning one. The bullet had his name on it.
Though Sergeant X, as we’ll call him, doesn’t really feature in the story:
The nub of it is, This tin can which was heard that night, trundling down
From the bank, down Balaclava Street. Which thousands heard, and no one ever
Saw. Which was heard for years, any night that trouble might be
Round the corner . . . and when it skittered to a halt, you knew