Different troubles are still troubles; only memory blurs the lines.
“It’s a deer hide,” he says to the woman sitting opposite him on the Belfast to Bangor train, nodding at the package he’d just placed in the overhead rack. “From Lapland. Bought it in the Christmas Market. Only ninety quid. She wanted a hundred, but I reminded her it was raining and my business was better than none at all, so she took the ninety, looked like she was 'bout to cry though. Polish lass, I think, or from one of them Eastern European countries.”
“Lovely,” the woman says, as if this was just what she’d expected to hear.
“Wud’ye remind me not to forget it?” the man asks.
“Sure I will, and what stop are ye?”
“Last stop., Bangor,” he replies.
“I’m the one before ye. Bangor West,” she says. “But I’ll remind ye anyway, sure you can sit and hold your parcel for one stop.”.
The man looks satisfied with this solution; it’s maybe even better than he expected. He wouldn’t forget his parcel and he’s landed himself some company for the half-hour journey.
The woman doesn’t seem to mind a chat either. She looks to be in her sixties, as does the man, though she is a bit more colorful in her red rain jacket with a hood, curled blonde to graying hair, and red lips that make the cool blue eyes leap out of her face. The man, if you ignore the web of thread veins on and around his nose, has a pleasant face and wears a smart navy blue rain jacket with a hood. Rain is something you can rely on here.
You can also rely on the trains; they run on time. The conductors haven’t been replaced by robots, yet. There’s a table to put your newspaper on and read it without doing contortions, and there’s free high-speed internet. Best of all, there’s the conversations you overhear, that make you want to laugh, cry, think. Make you feel something.
In what I consider to be a fragile state of peace, people are less wary of complete strangers these days. Not like during The Troubles, when we were inherently suspicious and had an armory of questions to detect someone’s religion. If you went to St Columbanus’ Secondary School, that was a dead giveaway, as was a name like Concepta. No question there, but in my girls-only grammar school it was a big deal to find out that out of the 120 in my year, Linda Meredith, unlike the other 119 of us, was Catholic. Looking back, I applaud her parents. The idea was certainly vanguard, and I never remember Linda Meredith getting bullied the way poor Susan Newberry was for having an older mother than the rest of us. I think we were all too intrigued with having a Catholic in the classroom to worry about bullying Linda Meredith. Besides she was pretty and thin, and she made good grades. At that age, we believed at least one of those qualities might rub off.
Nowadays, Protestants name their kids with Gaelic names, like Saoirse, which makes the whole detecting the religion thing much trickier, and people talk to strangers without caring. As did the pair on the train.
“What are ye going to do with the deer hide?” the woman asks, looking at the parcel.
“I’m going to put it on the back of the settee,” he replied. “Always wanted one but they were awful dear two years ago. Now I don’t mind spending the money, saved up a wee bit during the pandemic, and she gave me the ten quid off.”
“Hope you don’t have any friends in PETA?” The woman says this with an evil twinkle in her eye.
“Awk, what a load of auld nonsense,” he says, “Sure wasn’t the beast dead anyway?”
I left Northern Ireland, where I was born and where I remained for twenty-one years because I had no choice, at the first opportunity. But every time I visit, I’m reminded why I love this messed up wee country for all its problems. People find humor on the grayest of days and in the darkest of times.
I stare out the window of the train, as the defunct shipyard, and the murals of East Belfast, honoring the preferred murdered gangs or the football hero George Best, shrink into the distance. There are fewer green hills littered with sheep these days; golf courses, council houses, mansions, and luxury hotels, all mesh together to the extent that Bangor may as well be an extension of Belfast. Only Belfast Lough remains the same; water is water.
As a Protestant child, I knew no better than what my bigoted parents passed on.; o Only when I went to college and mixed with Catholics did I start to question what I’d been taught, but I stayed loyal to the cause, whatever that was. I viewed the groups of young Catholic men, who were often seen huddled in the student unions of Belfast drinking tea and smoking cigarettes and having a clear-headed conversation, as the enemy. As my sister-in-law often reminds me, “Protestants drink and Catholics think.”.
Very few were left untouched in one way or another by sectarian violence. My experience came in the form of Brian. I was fifteen when my alcoholic dad found me a job with an old friend of his, no doubt one of his drinking mates. That friend was Brian, who owned a petrol station and shop and something of a used car dealership. Brian offered me 50 pence an hour and told me he didn’t need me; he’d given me a job as a favor. I served petrol, worked long shifts, mopped the floors if there were no customers around, and did everything I could to prove he did need me as badly as I needed the money.
Brian’s parents were the parents I wished I’d had, stable, stern, always well-groomed, and kind. Two of their sons had followed them into a business where there’s always a demand in Northern Ireland —opening fish and chip shops just like their father had done. Brian had been lured into the other business where there’s a career for life, joining one of the protestant paramilitary groups. Joining is easy. Leaving, it turns out, is not. Brian’s parents had shipped him off to the British Navy for a few years hoping that would clean him up, and in a certain way, it did. He came back healthy and disciplined and ready to make a fresh start with this business, or so he thought.
His old friends would drop by the garage at odd times of the day or evening, friends who wore sunglasses all year round and who seemed to have no visible means of income, but were never short of cash. I could always tell when Brian was off drinking with them when he wasn’t there to close up shop or open up in the morning. Sometimes I had to tell a white lie to his parents about his whereabouts. He may have been a paramilitary with tattoos on his biceps, but he didn’t mess with his mum who couldn’t have been more than five foot two. Brian and his mates went to the popular bars in town, but I soon deduced there was secret drinking in bars with no names in dodgy parts of Belfast.
Then one day there was no Brian, just mum and dad running the show. I learned he’d gone to jail for a year for something nobody talked about and that hadn’t made the evening news. His parents were business-minded and had a presence; in some ways, they brought about a sort of serenity to a petrol station shop if there were such a thing to be had. Most of the staff didn’t like this new stricter order and left. I didn’t like it at first but grew to appreciate discipline in one area of my life.
It was 1982 when Brian was released. He had lost weight in prison, but he looked strong and muscular; he told us he’d been lifting weights and I for one wasn’t about to ask about anything else that went on inside. An attractive English girlfriend appeared out of nowhere to live with him. They rented a house and lived in sin, it was 1982 after all, and would go out to dinner in the few fancy hotels that existed back then, that I knew because he would ask me to book the table. I had become in some loose sort of way his part-time assistant, and the pay was better. I was about to go to college, and I needed that job.
Then the shady friends, who were scarce when the parents were in charge, started to appear again, like drops of water from a dripping tap. One or two. Three or four. One or two again. Then, the three. It was a Saturday afternoon before the evening newspapers arrived. I remember dark hair and black leather jackets and sunglasses even though there was no sun. They asked where Brian was. Something told me to say I didn’t know. They didn’t like the answer. They walked around the petrol pumps, surveyed the cars on display in the forecourt, then came back. The obvious ringleader, short and stocky, took off his sunglasses.
“Tell’em Lenny was here,” he said.
“Okay,” I replied. I was blushing and I didn’t know why. His eyes bore through me, giving me a message that I wouldn’t forget this visit. A couple of hours later, when I opened the stack of Belfast Telegraphs, the front page announced that the Shankill Butcher had already murdered three people in the few weeks he’d been out of jail. I looked at his picture. The one who’d taken off his glasses and who’d been in the shop looking for Brian. I had a strange sensation of wanting to pee. When I look back, I wonder if this was the start of the paranoia that’s been looking over my shoulder throughout my adult life.
I started college in Belfast a few weeks later, deciding to live at home and commute on the train rather than shell out money for rent in the big city. Plus, I got to keep my job.
Then the bombshell. “You’ve heard about Brian,” my mum said as she opened the door. But how could I have? No cell phones with breaking news in those days. I’d worked the night before and I recalled he was on edge, but weren’t we all? She put the front page of the Belfast Telegraph in front of me. Brian had been shot dead on the Shankhill Road.
The weeks that followed had all sorts of reports about how he was a turncoat, according to the Catholic papers, or a UVF hero duped by his own men, according to the Protestant tabloids. The shady types spoke out, vowing revenge. Months later I learned the truth. The Butcher had bought a car and never paid for it. A friend of Brian’s took him drinking in an illegal bar in Belfast that Sunday night, a row broke out over the car, someone spiked Brian’s drink, and as he left the bar someone drove by on a motorbike and shot him in the back of the head. All someones.
The train pulls into Carnalea, one stop from Bangor West, bringing me back to the present.
“Wee woman next door to me is a vegan,” says the man as he looks at his parcel. “Thin as tin she is,” he goes on.
“At least we have our own beef, what with this Brexit nonsense and talk of a hard border with the South again,” says the woman.
“Wud’ye look at us,” says the man. “We were famous because of The Troubles, and now we’re in the news again because of Brexit. Famous for fighting with each other, for a museum named after a ship that sank, our airport named after an alcoholic football player, and Boris Johnson wants a border in the Irish Sea. Why can’t we be famous for Liam Neeson or Jamie Dornan or, I dunno, butter?”
The woman zips up her jacket and nods at the deer hide. “Hope you have a lovely Christmas and enjoy your deer hide,” she says, as she gets ready for her stop.
Troubles. Brexit. I recall one of the murals I’d seen that morning, paramilitaries past and present pointing their guns, with the message, “No Border in The Irish See.”. Lord, they were evil back then, but they did know how to spell.
A self-confessed paranoiac, Sharon Heller left her home country of Northern Ireland for London in 1984, going on to spend most of her adult life living and working in the Middle East, along with a few years in South America. She now lives in Western Colorado with her husband and their two Labradors. Sharon works with a non-profit organization dedicated to combating political extremism, a phenomenon she’s run into far too often. Drawing on her life experiences, she is working on her own book, a collection of essays entitled, Essential Paranoia.