The Cold Cold Ground

Adrian McKinty The Cold Cold Ground

Now don’t be a cry baby when there’s wood in the shed,

There’s a bird in the chimney and a stone in my bed,

When the road’s washed out they pass the bottle around,

And wait in the arms of the cold cold ground.

— Tom Waits, “Cold Cold Ground”, 1987

It is rumoured that after concluding his song about the

war in Ilium, Homer sang next of the war between the

frogs and rats.

— Jorge Luis Borges, “The Immortal”, 1949

1: THE THIN BLUE LINE

The riot had taken on a beauty of its own now. Arcs of gasoline fire under the crescent moon. Crimson tracer in mystical parabolas. Phosphorescence from the barrels of plastic bullet guns. A distant yelling like that of men below decks in a torpedoed prison ship. The scarlet whoosh of Molotovs intersecting with exacting surfaces. Helicopters everywhere: their spotlights finding one another like lovers in the Afterlife.

And all this through a lens of oleaginous Belfast rain.

I watched with the others by the Land Rover on Knockagh Mountain. No one spoke. Words were inadequate. You needed a Picasso for this scene, not a poet.

The police and the rioters were arranged in two ragged fronts that ran across a dozen streets, the opposing sides illuminated by the flash of newsmen’s cameras and the burning, petrol-filled milk bottles sent tumbling across the no man’s land like votive offerings to the god of curves.

Sometimes one side charged and the two lines touched for a time before decoupling and returning to their original positions.

The smell was the stench of civilization: gunpowder, cordite, slow match, kerosene.

It was perfect.

It was Giselle.

It was Swan Lake.

And yet …

And yet we had the feeling that we had seen better.

In fact we had seen better only last week when, in the hospital wing of The Maze Prison, IRA commander Bobby Sands had finally popped his clogs.

Bobby was a local lad from Newtownabbey and a poster boy for the movement, having never killed anyone and coming from a mixed Protestant-Catholic background. And bearded, he was a good Jesus, which didn’t hurt either.

Bobby Sands was the maitreya, the world teacher, the martyr who would redeem mankind through his suffering.

When Bobby finally died on the sixty-sixth day of his hunger strike the Catholic portions of the city had erupted with spontaneous anger and frustration.

But that was a week ago and Frankie Hughes, the second hunger striker to die, had none of Bobby’s advantages. No one thought Frankie was Jesus. Frankie enjoyed killing and was very good at it. Frankie shed no tears over dead children. Not even for the cameras.

And the riots for his death felt somewhat … orchestrated.

Perhaps on the ground it seemed like the same chaos and maybe that’s what they would print tomorrow in newspapers from Boston to Beijing … But up here on the Knockagh it was obvious that the peelers had the upper hand. The rioters had been cornered into a small western portion of the city between the hills and the Protestant estates. They faced a thousand fulltime peelers, plus two or three hundred police reserve, another two hundred UDR and a battalion-strength unit of British Army regulars in close support. The Brits on this occasion were the Black Watch who, notoriously, were full of Glaswegian roughnecks looking for any chance of a rumble. There were hundreds of rioters — not the thousands that had been predicted: this hardly represented a general uprising of even the Catholic population and as for the promised “revolution” … well, not tonight.

“It looks bad,” young Constable Price offered as a conversational opener.

“Ach, it’s half-hearted at best for this lad,” Detective Constable McCrabban replied in his harsh, sibilant, Ballymena-farmer accent.

“It’s no fun being the second hunger striker to croak it. Everybody remembers the first one, number two is no good at all. They won’t be writing folk songs for him,” Sergeant McCallister agreed.

“What do you think, Duffy?” Constable Price asked me.

I shrugged. “Crabbie’s right. It’s never gonna be as big for number two. And the rain didn’t help him.”

“The rain?” McCallister said sceptically. “Forget the rain! It’s the Pope. It was bad luck for Frankie to kick the bucket just a few hours before somebody tried to kill the Pope.”

I’d done an analysis of Belfast riots from 1870–1970 which showed an inverse proportion between rain and rioting. The heavier the downpour the less likely there was to be trouble, but I kept my trap shut about that — nobody else up here had gone to University and there was no gain to be had from rubbing in my book-learning. And big Sergeant McCallister did have a point about John Paul II. It wasn’t every news cycle that someone shot the Holy Father.

“He was a scumbag was Frankie Hughes. A rare ‘un. It was his ASU that killed Will Gordon and his wee girl,” Sergeant McCallister added.

“I thought it was the wee boy who was killed,” McCrabban said.

“Nah. The wee boy lived. The bomb was in the car. The wee lad was severely injured. Will and his young daughter were blown to bits,” McCallister explained.

There was a silence after that punctuated by a far-off discharge of baton rounds.

“Fenian bastards,” Price said.

Sergeant McCallister cleared his throat. Price wondered what that meant for a beat or two and then he remembered me.

“Oh, no offence, Duffy,” he muttered, his thin lips and pinched face even thinner and pinchier.

“No offence, Detective Sergeant Duffy,” Sergeant McCallister said to put the new constable in his place.

“No offence, Sergeant Duffy,” Price repeated petulantly.

“None taken, son. I’d love to see things from your point of view but I can’t get my head that far up my arse.”

Everybody laughed and I used this as my exit line and went inside the Land Rover to read the Belfast Telegraph.

It was all about the Pope. His potential assassin was a man called Mehmed Ali Agca, a Turk, who had shot him in St Peter’s Square. The Telegraph didn’t have much more information at this stage but they padded out the story with the shocked opinions of local people and politicians and a few right-wing Protestant nuts, like Councillor George Seawright who felt that this was an “important blow against the Anti-