The Thompson Gunner (27 page)

He drops it into a plastic specimen jar, and starts suturing.

‘You'd be surprised how long foreign bodies can stay in there before causing trouble for no good reason,' he says, drawing the edges of the wound together as he ties the first knot. ‘I did my residency in a war vets' hospital and I can remember one old guy who had to have shrapnel removed from his buttock about seventy years after the Somme, because it was starting to irritate his sciatic nerve.'

I look at the piece of glass, and it's fresh but for the blood, kept fresh all these years inside my hand. But its time was up. It's been surfacing for days, this piece, pointing and starting to hurt. It's amazing what the hand can hide away. There's not much of it, and where's the room, with all the fine workings for fingers? But every so often it's done this, delivered up a piece.

Four times now, I think, since the glass blew in there on a city road, on a rainy day, in another world, when I was young.

I'
D SAID TO
my mother that I was going to play with Mark and Sammy in the woods, so she thought I must have fallen out of a tree when Mr Macleish brought me home with my hand bandaged.

‘It was my own stupid fault,' I told her. ‘I fell on some windscreen glass in the McKendrys' field.'

‘Honestly,' she said, ‘is it safe to let you out?'

But she wasn't too worried. She could see I was all right. I might have had a bandage, but she could see four fingers and a thumb, and all of them moving. It must have been a weekend, and I'd been taken to the Macleishes' in the morning. My parents were going out somewhere for the day, I can't remember where.

‘They came back to our house when she hurt her hand,' Mr Macleish said, ‘so we thought the best thing to do was take her to Newtownards and get it sorted out. She bumped her head as well, so we thought we'd better get her seen to. Everything's all right with that, though.'

My mother thanked him for going to the trouble of looking after me, and she took a closer look at my bandaged hand and said, ‘Margaret Riddoch, could you not see yourself liking dolls just a wee bit more?'

She shook her head, and smiled and put her hand on my shoulder. She took me inside, made me something to eat and said, ‘Let's not turn the television on this afternoon. Let's listen to music instead.'

We played Cliff Richard, and sang along. My heart was still racing, my head was still sore, I couldn't eat much. My whole body ached in bed that night, and I lay awake, listening for cars above the ringing in my ears.

When we moved to Australia, we lived in a suburb where the cars drove past all night. We slept with the windows open, with screens on them, and the noise of bats and possums came in from the mango tree outside my room. There was so much noise, so much life out there in the dark, that it took some adjusting to. I was used to silence at night, or perhaps just the sound of trees, sighing as the wind went through them.

I didn't know how to make new friends when I got to Australia, since I'd only ever had one set of friends and I'd built that up from scratch. We shared things by the time I left Ballystewart, my friends and me – interests, secrets, a small but intense amount of history even though we were only eight.

I didn't fit in in Australia. I was the foreign kid, obviously, but I was more foreign than they knew. I didn't realise
till now how much I was the odd one out. Back then it was everyone else at school who was odd, as far as I could see. I'd been dropped into a crazy country and I had to make the best of it. It's all a blur now – a blur of ‘Sesame Street', Coco Pops, fights at school, my mother telling me I'd never make friends if I kept going round hitting people, and did I not want to make friends? And I did, of course I did. I wanted them to stop calling me the foreign kid, I wanted them to stop frustrating me with how little they understood, I wanted to find out if there was more to them – the kind of stuff that might come out if you hit them a few times – but I also wanted to make friends.

So I learned hopscotch, and knuckles, though I didn't like them much. I learned a new accent. I learned to swim in my first summer holidays, though I was never much good at butterfly, backstroke or turns. I won a prize for most improved time over twenty-five metres breaststroke. I waged war with boys across three gardens at once, commando-style.

One night in my twenties, my mother said, ‘We always thought when you were nine that you'd be a lesbian. We'd fully adjusted, you know. All that short hair, that toughness, playing with boys.'

So, there were two things at least that my mother wasn't clear on: me, and how sexual orientation works.

In Ballystewart, it was the boys who happened to be close to home. From there, it wasn't so much that we found common ground, but more that we invented it together. We took what we had and what we saw and we kept ourselves busy and, in time, that amounts to something.
In Brisbane, it was the boys who seemed to be interested that I'd seen soldiers on the streets. I came from a place that was in the news because of bombings and shootings, and the most normal thing for me that year was to take a few of my new friends and teach them some of what I knew. How to crawl without being seen, how to ambush, how to signal. And I'd say things like, ‘I can strip a Sten gun in the dark. I can kill, you know.'

I'd be scared when I said it, but I knew it left them awestruck in the right kind of way, and ready to take orders. And I made it clear that there was secrecy required, and they swore to observe it. And I never told them much anyway, just what they needed to know, and only general information at that. The scars on my hand were still pink then, though they were fading.

Within a year or two, we'd all moved on to other things. Football and cricket for them, David Cassidy for me, mainly. A few of the girls in the class were big on ‘The Partridge Family', and I wanted flares and then Susan Dey hair, since that looked very grown-up. And I thought if I mastered that look David Cassidy and I might drive around in a bus and he'd think I was great, and I never got round to addressing the issue that they were brother and sister.

In the dream with David Cassidy I had no scars, and he thought my hands were beautiful, and told me so.

‘It was my own stupid fault. It was my own stupid fault.' I'd practised the line in the car that day, with my hand bandaged up and throbbing, and my head ringing and blood in my hair as well. Mr Macleish said it was the best way.
And he also said ‘Soldiers never tell', and we were all proud when he talked that way. So I've never told. Never.

‘It was my own stupid fault.' It sounded too grown up, almost, but it worked when I practised it, and I liked him for trusting me with a line he'd use himself.

He'd been angry before we got in the car, though. Not with me or Mark, but with Paul. ‘What were you thinking?' he said to him, with the anger just kept in. ‘What were you thinking? You idiot. How could you think it'd be anything but trouble? Right now of all times. And in the van, too. Are you never going to learn?'

He took the keys and he locked them away after that. They'd hung on a hook inside the door before then, and Paul could just take them from there. Not any more.

We shouldn't have been in Belfast that day. We should have gone to the woods, but that was never the real plan. Paul took us to Belfast because he'd heard there would be trouble and he said you should never back down in the face of trouble. So we should go.

There was a show on, an agricultural show. There were diggers and harvesters, and brighter newer equipment than I'd ever seen before.

I remember the van we drove in to get there, but not much of the trip to Belfast. We bought a big serve of chips wrapped up in paper, and ate them with vinegar and salt. I remember being pushed in a crowd, pushed out of the exhibition and onto the street. Paul's hand was on my shoulder but he was looking straight ahead. ‘It's on,' he said. Something like that. ‘I think it's on.' And he looked scared.

I remember his look now with complete clarity, as if that was the moment we'd lost the afternoon. And we were hurrying and the person behind me was kicking my shoes, bumping me in the back.

It's clear, but it's a picture I sometimes can't trust. I was eight, I was a kid in a crowd, I can't know the whole story.

The bang split the air like a punch to the chest, that's how it seemed. I don't know where we were by then. It's a moment I can't see. I can feel its percussion, in a hazy unforgettable way, how the world shook like a beaten blanket, and some things are certain after that, too. How hard the road felt, and cold. How fast my heart beat against it. The weight of being pressed down against the road, the inability to move other than to turn my head. The sight I saw with my one open eye then, the man towering over me in camouflage, the black hood over his head, the loose bottom edge of the hood shaking and shaking as he kept firing and kept firing. Emptying that Tommy gun and spilling cartridges down onto the road not far from where I lay, close enough that I could feel them land hot in my hair once or twice.

I
STUCK WITH
the story, the one about the accident in the McKendrys' field. I could see it, it was more plausible, it was more complete, and I had a duty to stick with it. I rehearsed it in the car and afterwards, and I can picture it all still, as good as a memory. When I look at the scars on my hands, it's the first thing I see. The ground rushing up at me as I fall from the top of something in the McKendrys' field. And I landed on the grass with my hand trying to break my fall, but my head hit the ground anyway and picked up some glass, too. And we climbed back over the fence and crossed the ploughed field to the Macleishes'.

I took what actually happened and I made it go away. I don't know if I even meant to, and I don't know if I could have done it, or would have done it, if we'd stayed in Bally-stewart. There, it was something to be kept secret, but to be kept as a shared secret – in Brisbane it felt different. It was mine alone, it was a secret no one would ever come looking for, and it was wrong for my new life. It didn't fit. I looked around me, at my new life and the things that made it up and, when I did that, I saw that it simply couldn't have happened. It was a horrible bad dream that had stopped making sense, and that I had to make go away.

I don't know
if it was quite that deliberate, but I do know that, at some level, I needed somehow to find a way to live, and there were things that had happened that could not be part of my story.

I'd had a life that had made complete sense to me, however much it shouldn't have, and it's as if, in the middle of it, someone had grabbed me by the heels and dragged me out backwards. I didn't live through it to the end. Nothing ended. Abruptly, one life was done and another underway and I was still eight but in a new land, with the wrong accent and the wrong skills and the wrong life led, with a lot of business started, none finished. But no one thinks of an eight-year-old – an English-speaking British eight-year-old – and the unmet necessity of closure.

So I took the past and I shut it out and I shut it out and I kept shutting it out, and at the worst and shakiest of times it can be lurking there for me. And at great times too, occasionally. It's not predictable.

So, the Thompson gunner isn't lifted from a Warren Zevon song or too many comics. I looked up and I saw him. But it's better, most of the time, not to believe in him at all.

I don't know if he hit anyone or anything with those bullets, or if by that point it was mainly about firing them. The full story would include that – some information about the target, and whether he hit it or not. And why they blew something up, but still stayed to shoot. But I never got to
ask. I never got to know the full story. We were gone not long after, I was left with these fragments, all secret and best denied. Blocked and blocked and added to and compressed by layers of news stories and pictures, clouded by being over-remembered and by being buried, and by surfacing patch worked in my sleep. I can make no inventory of the facts, just the lingering signs that something happened, some time.

Here's what I have from when the bomb went off. A minor hearing loss, but at a very particular level, and not one of much day-to-day use. A tattoo of road dirt across my scalp, tiny flecks of bitumen deep in the skin and there to stay. The fragments of glass in my hand, and the small scars left by them going in, and out.

Something landed on my head. A bag, a briefcase, maybe carried by the man who fell across my back. It hit me hard, probably hit my forehead into the road, knocked me out maybe, jumbled a lot of things, but it stopped it all being as bad as it might have been.

And that's all I have to help me make sense of it, and it doesn't make sense. You don't get to make sense of these things. You end up injured in a way that would require more contortions than you could have managed, even when you were young and supple, and nothing lets you work it out. There's no slow-motion view of it, no camera angles, nothing. One moment you're scared and being pushed, in the next all that's gone. The gaps stay gaps, though your inclination is to fill them with something, and that leaves you doubting the rest.

You try to see more than you did, or could, and you can talk yourself into seeing it. You work it, and work it, and fight against it and dream about it, and the Thompson gunner sometimes speaks and sometimes doesn't have a hood and sometimes steps on your hand, and what's true any more? You were blown deaf by the bomb for a while, probably, but there's a version of it where you can't hear the gun or the screaming and yet the cartridges land before your eyes with the pure sound of wind chimes, and that can't have happened, even though they're hollow when they're spent and it's a noise they might make.

But I do have scars, today's new glass, and the absolute lack of any honest memory of the injury that was once, in a lie, put down to the windscreen glass in the McKendrys' field. Some things stay true.