Saoirse

Looking back, I guess it was a tad dangerous to travel up to Belfast from Dublin, by bus during that week in February when all the Catholic cab drivers were being shot by RHD, UVF, UDA etc…..leading to back and forth from the IRA, the “real” IRA and all the rest. The bus ride was pleasant enough and started, in the early morning, in the dark, at the Bus Eireann station on O’Connell Street. I had walked in the dark from Raglan Road, past the windswept trees blowing their bits and wares past the US Embassy (which I would be visiting shortly after this trip), and down Pembroke to Northumberland to Lower Mount, Merrion Square and a handful of other streets in getting to Trinity…for this morning, past some gypsy kids from the Liberties, out early, stealing themselves a little morning light as it begged coming onto us, on their horses, dirty and skinny, and over the O’Connell Street bridge to the station.

I met friends of mine who were making the journey with me, myself to see my then Belfast boy, the only redhead I could ever abide by, with an old man’s soul. He was already up there and we were staying nearby his family’s house, as his relatives were also in town. The heavily made up woman with big jowls and wide pants lapels at the shop outside the bus station was singing loud and at the top of her voice, the Celine Dion song from TITANIC, because it was being played everywhere people were known to breathe. Most of the people in the brightly lit shop were quietly enjoying her singing, and while it wasn’t her best, she meant it and that’s all the Irish really care about. Whether You care about Something. Got my tea and my Tayto’s and something like onion and cheese on a bap and we loaded up. The journey went though town after town until we got to Northern Ireland, and the towns, well, they didn’t change much, but for the occasional flag whose colours I didn’t quite recognize. The people of the North I liked – they weren’t so pleased as those down in the South. They had problems – old, massive, hurting and ancient problems and you could read it across their faces. Another friend of mine once made her Irish face look like the people in Donegal, in the North, who always had a face on them that looked like it was fighting the wind blowing at them. It usually did, and Ireland was the place wherein I learned that wind could drive you mad, make you curse, lift your skirt and show your arse to the world and have a personality all its own. These people made those windy faces. Caught up in it, like me.

By the time we got to Belfast, he was waiting for us and we went straight to his house for dinner with his parents, both teachers, both Catholic. He exclaimed once that his parents always went on vacation in August, as it was marching season and they preferred not to be around for all that. I liked them immediately, just as I liked him immediately. Their house was sweet and small, and he then drove me out to where I was staying with my friend’s group, who happened to be Protestant, and happened to be in the Protestant section of town (no more than an eight minute walk, but many universes away within levels of danger, circumstance and feeling).  Walking past those murals as we did throughout the weekend, back and forth over the tiny bridge and from catholic to protestant enclave and back again, it is immense what energies you feel.  Those murals were like nothing I've ever seen before and still none like them to this day - the colours, the faces, the combinations of righteous, mythological and political symbols as they extended to their catholic or protestant gods.....I'd have to crack their heads open and go at them for a hundred years before I could ever see even more than an inch into those thick, wielding forests of hate, reactionaryisms, pride and mourning. 

I was staying in a big, tall white house which housed at least 5-6 Irish girls – the one I liked the most was very tall with black hair and a strong nose (the so called black Irish always appealed to me most, I loved the strain of Irish people who had either the blackest hair or darkest eyes imaginable….some Spaniard or Norman Englishman had laid his claim and much else to that lot centuries ago) who had this wonderful sense of herself that I didn’t quite grasp or have yet in talking about these workers on the streets who, instead of the American cat call, would say something to her like “you’re a big, tall girl, aren’t ye”….she said this the next day, as we girls sat around the big white and round table listening to cd after cd after cd and that was the very first day I drank Irish tea with no sugar or milk (they were out, being students and all) for something like 8 hours. It was a true session, and boys and friends and neighbours floated in and out, while we sat there and talked about our lives, our visit, the current tide of troubles, music, America, anything…..I seem to remember my friend from school’s story of being direct descendants of Bridget, the Irish maid who worked for Lizzie Borden’s family, and who supposedly knew the secrets inside that New England mortician’s house. My blood was hopped up on the tea, and my ears filling with sounds of Sinead O’Connor singing “I love you, my hard Englishman…” and a certain quiet in my bones, especially when it came to evening time and we took our fill of some homemade soup and sat around even more so, doing much of the same until we went out for pints.

The pints from the night before were what had set us back into that day of musical and tea-laden reflection. The boy had driven me to them and then out with him – pubs and parties, this neighborhood and that, with some disquiet and mostly ease…we passed through a checkpoint, he and I, and the English soldier knew he was Catholic by his name which he had to give him (but oddly not show him any ID to back it up – how trusting they are, even with their supposed enemies)…he pointed up at the Europa Hotel, and told me it was the world’s most bombed hotel…….. "before Sarajevo”.  I admired him greatly for adding this, and we became close over a sort of war-wounded, ethnic hatred backed up background, him more directly, me more remotely from the war in Sarajevo which killed my great aunt who I never met and destroyed so many of the places I never got to see. When word came in that the church in which my father was born was leveled to the ground with Serbian bombs, my father went into his room and was never quite the same after. The world of his childhood wasn’t as he loved to dream up in his fantastical head that it was. They rebuilt it up, but you know how that goes. The boy and I would talk about factions, and soldiers and sanctions non-politically, since he was the sort who could talk about anything, intellectually speaking but always kept his heart in it. Never cold, or detached. He was the perfect example of something mattering to Him. On that night we went to lounges and pubs wherein I remember staying late and pouring leftover drinks into each other and drinking like nothing had happened. I was a pro back then with a stomach of steel. Some local boys told me I didn’t act or look like an American, and I must have blushed so red I became a tenth more Irish in that moment. They’d said they were going to Wisconsin and had I ever been there….obviously my answer was no, and they actually seemed surprised that, as an American, I hadn’t been to every state. At the local parties later, in mixed company but taking place in the catholic neighborhood, some boys in sweat pants, black hair and baby faces with their lusciously troubled accents which I swooned over, since it had depth, and a certain strength to it, less happy-go-lucky than the typical Irish vocal fare, told us why he had a fresh big black eye on him – it was because the soldiers knew he was “too good looking to be a Protestant”. So proud of himself and his reminders, he was.

Somewhere, on that long and drunken night, I seemed to lose my passport at one of those parties…..the next day no word and the next none either, and by the time I left the Belfast bus station in the nighttime, at the end of the mildly frightening weekend (frightening for others, but not for me), gazing at the burly English soldiers who stood guard with strong jaws and permanent five o’clock shadow, and noticing the differences in the languages which appeared in public places – in the South, it was English and Irish/Gaelic, in the North it was English, but also French, Spanish, German, Italian…like they wanted so badly to be non-Irish and a continental tribe, by the time I was back on Raglan Road, safely secured in its tender leaves and soft palate pavement, and black wrought iron gates and red doors, I was forced to visit the nearby US Embassy and get a replacement passport. I was upset, since my lost version had recorded my trip to Sarajevo through France and Vienna from the previous September…those stamps were gone, and I had to start anew. Weeks later, the boy came to me after a trip up North to see his family and he had my passport in his hand. Turns out one of the local partygoers remembered me and let him know to give it back to me. Could have sold it down the river for more than a few pound, but they returned it quick as they could. So trusting, like little children, and left cowering in the corner, drunk and happy for a time, laughing too loud and telling jokes about their worst nightmares……that is what the Irish are to me, that gleaming black eye caught on a young boy who didn’t hate a thing in the world and the space between him and the rest of it which goes un-filled and un-connected betwixt and between all the years since.

M. Lucia