Departures (5 page)

My parents had never planned the size or contours of their family. Occasionally, while they were courting, my father would imagine himself in the company of the children they would have, but he hadn't thought about when they'd have them or how many there would be. My mother, so savvy about other matters, was like a child herself about this. After I was born, they greeted the confirmation of her two subsequent pregnancies with a mixture of bafflement and joy, each having thought the other had taken precautions. Whatever contraceptive she eventually employed following Nicola's birth, it proved effective for nearly six years, until she discovered she was going to have a baby at the age of thirty-nine. She was dumbstruck, having naively assumed that childbirth wasn't possible for a woman nearing forty. And, for her, it wasn't: she took pains in her seventh month, alone in the house on a Saturday in June. Eight days later she was dead.

My father blamed himself, even before it was over. Theirs had been a reversal of traditional roles in every respect but one, and it was in this sense that he felt he'd failed her. The day before the funeral, when the transfer from the Housing Executive at last came through, my father seized upon it as her dying wish.

Ever the optimist, my mother had long ago packed most of her belongings into sturdy cardboard boxes, the contents of which she had inscribed in capital letters on the outsides, all in anticipation of an imminent move. Though impeccably itemised and arranged, each box was a haphazard collection of items, apparently grouped according to owner rather than function. While another
woman would have put the kitchen items in one box, the contents of her wardrobe in another, her business papers in a third, my mother had piled sketch pads, chequebooks, perfume, lingerie, hair lacquer, a coffee mug, and a dozen other things together in the same box and listed them all under the heading, MINE. My father dug out that box, and the two others like it, the night her body was prepared. For the three days that followed he sat on the floor of the bedroom they had shared, the contents laid out neatly in rows in front of him, softly turning the pages of her books, running his fingers along the dark, heavily punctuated scribbles she had penciled in the margins, and refusing all offers of food. Then he packed them all up again and sealed them with tape, and when he was done he went down to the Housing Executive and took the first thing they offered him, sight-unseen, so anxious was he to escape from the house that reminded him so much of her.

They gave us a flat, one of sixteen identical units in a large, four-story block which itself was one of many constituting the Glencairn estate. Each block was a warren of tunnels, overpasses, stairwells, and hallways with silent concrete chambers jutting out on either side. Every corner on the ground floor of every block stank of stale beer and urine; above, the smell was of old potato peelings and laundry dried in small, airless rooms.

A stairwell led from the makeshift car park at the side of the building to the third level corridor onto which all the upper flats opened, and ours was one of these. It had two bedrooms on its second floor, a kitchen, a sitting room, a bathroom, and a toilet beneath the stairs. It also had what can only be described as a decorative balcony, presumably our compensation for the small back garden we'd been promised but never received. If it had been positioned in front of either of the bedroom windows rather
than astride the empty space between, we could have stood on the balcony and viewed the whole city, and perhaps even beyond: the soft curve of Helen's Bay, the dull orange lights of Bangor, the majestic double outline of the Harland and Wolf cranes, the shipyard, Central Station, and even, on clear evenings, the momentary flash from the lighthouse in Donaghadee. But in fact the balcony was no more than a sheet of corrugated iron, bent in at the corners, painted a sad, coagulated red, and welded onto a floorless iron frame which protruded some distance from the wall.

All the same, to me, as to my siblings, Glencairn was an estate like any other. It had a chippy, a winemart, and a healthy proportion of children under fourteen. But to my father, who could still recall a time when phone boxes and petrol stations existed unmolested on the Road, when one could travel freely between the Shankill and the Falls, and when, every spring, there were swans in the Woodvale Park, Glencairn epitomised all that was wrong with the city. It was large and dirty and prone to garish displays of colour; its stench assailed his nostrils and made his stomach turn; outside its windows the rumble and grind of passing buses kept him sleepless and on edge. That he had made the move himself only tortured him further, for he knew that she, too, would have been unhappy there.

In Glencairn the privacy she'd so valiantly defended was impossible to maintain. The estate was composed of a few extended families, each member of which kept the others informed as to the progress of their pregnancies, the state of their marriages, and their prospects for employment, immigration, and death. Even for an outsider it was almost impossible to take any action without the whole estate knowing of it in advance. A young unmarried couple occupied the flat next door, and during the day we could
hear every syllable of their conversations as clearly and effortlessly as they could hear ours. They'd been alloted the flat because she was three months pregnant, yet despite her condition, they made love nearly every afternoon as soon as he returned from work. The day my father came upon the three of us kneeling together on the unmade bed, clustered round a plastic beaker which we had pressed like a stethoscope against the wall, he resolved to go back to the Housing Executive and request again that he be moved.

Things might have been easier had my uncle not refused to visit us, fearful of the vandals and joyriders who were known to do damage to cars in Glencairn. When the farm dried up after my grandparents died, my uncle had sold the land for all he could get and about twice what it was worth to a pair of amateur genealogists, and then moved, not to Belfast but to Bangor, where he'd invested in commerical property, a corner pub with a fish-and-chip shop attached. When my mother was alive my uncle would leave his entrepreneurial interests occasionally and drive down to Belfast in his Volvo. With a benevolent air he'd hand the keys to his younger brother and, walking briskly for the benefit of his health, would head off into town on foot. When he was gone we'd load up the car, and my father would drive us out to the place where he'd been born.

The farm's new owners still lived in America and used the property as a holiday home only once or twice a year; my mother was sure they wouldn't object to our parking the car and laying our picnics in the fields behind the barn. We would chase rabbits and my mother would read, holding the book at arm's length above her to block out the sun, while my father wandered off on his own. Occasionally, when he was a long time returning, my mother
would set off to retrieve him, and once, after they both had been gone for over an hour and the colours and sounds of evening were well under way, I left Stephen and Nicola in the backseat of the car and headed out after them myself. They were pulling dry burs and grass seed from each other's clothing, and I nearly missed them, because the grass had grown tall by the stream where they lay and their voices were so soft at first I could hear only water. But I told you that story already, he was saying. I know, she'd answered. So tell me again.

As he could offer no more convincing a reason than my mother had for his sudden request for a transfer, the people at the Housing Executive were civil, but unsympathetic, and they soon wearied of his forlorn presence in their waiting rooms; it was because they refused to rehouse him that my father decided to squat. On Saturdays and Sundays after our dinner we would wander the broken streets of the lower Shankill until my father found a site which struck his fancy. There were many to choose from, for all the old estates in the area were scheduled for demolition, and most of the inhabitants had already been farmed out to new and improved dwellings further up the Road. One forgotten house looked very much like another from the outside, but inside the remnants of identity still littered their floors and clung to their plaster. In some the carpet remained, soaked through with rain from above and damp from below; in all, the shadows of past furnishings could be seen in vivid silhouette against the faded wallpaper that had surrounded them. As we went around the rooms we would point these lonely patches of colour out to one another, vying to see how many each of us could name. A mirror, a picture, perhaps a wall clock—the simple geometry of circles and squares could have indicated any one. The larger outlines of wardrobes,
headboards, and bookcases were easier to distinguish, as were the few whole walls still brightly patterned, protected behind units in which the china, silver, and trophies of a lifetime had once been displayed.

The site upon which my father finally settled was the first house in Park View Terrace, just off the Woodvale Road; it had belonged to a policeman before they burned him out. Unlike the houses of the lower Shankill, it had not been stripped of wood for the bonfires in July. Its doors and window frames were still intact; the rafters did not stretch like naked ribs between the roof space and the open air. No animals, furred or feathered, had settled in before us. Though for nearly a year it had lain empty, only a few splashes of graffiti adorned the iron sheet the authorities had used to block the door. While the parlour was uninhabitable because of the smell of petrol and charred upholstery, the fire had not gone beyond that room, and the rest of the house was practically new.

Squatting was a concept that would have appealed to my mother. She had always enjoyed defying authority, and though she would never have imposed her rights over those of others, she was prone to take a creative interpretation of what those rights entailed. Her convictions ranged from the fantastic—she believed it was everyone's right to drive, with or without a license—to the enigmatic—she abused expense accounts on the grounds that, had she not been working, she would not have been making the purchases she did—to the ideological. Once, in the midst of some school project and flummoxed by flow charts and graphs, I came to her to ask about taxes. She shrugged apologetically and told me she never paid them. My father looked up with the air of a man who had just discovered that something he had believed to be settled was still a matter for debate.

“No, and I will not, either,” she said defiantly, more to him than to me. “Why should I pay for what I don't want? I didn't vote for them; let them pay that did.”

My father, who had struggled unguided through Locke, Rousseau, and Hobbes, dropped his head into his hands.

“We're all citizens of the same state, Maddy,” he said, “and if that state provides—”

“No,” she said. “When I get what I vote for that's when I'll pay.”

My father was convinced that she would have liked the house in Park View Terrace. Long ago the Woodvale had been a posh place to live, and some vestiges of that respectability had yet to disappear. Most of the residents were pensioners with small private incomes who kept fairly much to themselves. Even next-door neighbours who had known each other since childhood confined their contact to a polite nod in passing or a brief, amicable exchange of words. Almost everyone was a self-professed Christian, and though my father all his life preferred to worship God not in His house but in His fields, he had respect for commmitted churchgoers. Be kind to the Christian, he once told me, and God may be kind to you.

“But it doesn't matter if you're not a Christian,” I'd told him smartly. “If you're not a Christian, you just won't be saved.”

It was the night of All Saints, and on the other side of the room my mother knelt with pins in her mouth preparing my sister and brother for the evening's masquerade. Her fine brows were knit with annoyance, directed not at the children but at the stubborn fabric which defied her fingers and seemed bent on wasting her time. My father watched her for a moment, silently deploring her impatience but observing her determination with an admiring eye; then he turned back to me.

“Don't you believe it,” he answered. “God knows who they are that love Him best.”

The short row of buildings of which the house he chose was one sat at the junction of Bray, Broom, and Enfield Streets. None of these was used frequently despite the proximity of a popular Chinese take-away, which every evening from four o'clock on caused the aroma of chips and fried onions to hang heavily on the air. It appeared that my father's quest for domestic isolation had at last come to an end, for there was only one other house in the strip which was not empty, and the occupant of that house was Harry.

Although he was not a helpless man, Harry was effectively deaf. He was also crippled with arthritis and had been pronounced legally blind. After eighty-three years of remembering to do a great many things, his memory had at last begun to fail. On occasion he forgot to take his pills or to carry his spectacles, or insert his hearing aid and his teeth. My father, who had vetted the area fully before deciding to move in, produced his assessment that Harry would be a quiet, unobtrusive neighbour. He listened to his wartime records with the earphones pluged in as he couldn't hear them any other way, and he did the same with the radio and the TV. He spent most of his time brewing tea the way his wife had taught him, with loose leaves and water just boiled, and when it was made he sat in his front room in an armchair by the window with a plate of biscuits and read the paper. In all the time my father had his hopeful eye on the Terrace, Harry had received only one visitor, a small, fat man with quick, impatient gestures and a high-pitched voice. This, my father had discovered, was Harry's nephew, George.

Geordie Bellam was known locally and by his own definition as a small businessman; the diminutive suited him
well. He owned a fifty-pence shop at the bottom of the Shankill which made no profit, and all of his money was tied up in its stock. He was in competition with three other bargain gift and toiletry shops, all of which had sprung up like weeds after he had established his, and all of which were owned and operated by Pakistani immigrants. He lived alone somewhere in Lisburn, though most evenings he slept on the floor in the unfurnished flat above his shop, so convinced was he that “the Pakis” were plotting to destroy him. For protection he had installed an expensive sprinkler system and an electronic, high-sensitivity alarm, but he refused to take the cheapest and most reliable option and simply get a guard dog. Having grown accustomed to being responsible for nothing but himself and his merchandise, the thought of having to feed or care for anything else annoyed him. It was only natural that he would resent being burdened with Harry when the old man's wife passed on.