The Cold, Cold Ground

they heard me through the bulletproofing and armour plate.
    I stood there looking ridiculous with my full riot gear, helmet and Sterling sub-machine gun.
    A wee lad was gawping at me. “Is that a real gun, mister?” he asked.
    “I certainly hope so,” I said, opened my gate and walked down the garden path. It wasn’t a bad house: a neat job in the middle of the terrace, built in the 1950s, like the rest of Victoria Estate, Carrickfergus for the Protestant working poor. Of course these days hardly anybody was working. The ICI textile plant hadclosed last year, in the autumn of 1980, and they had employed one in every four men in Carrick. Now the town had an unemployment rate of twenty per cent and it would have been worse but for emigration to England and Australia and the brand new DeLorean factory that had just opened in Dunmurray. If people bought DeLoreans in anything like the numbers predicted then Carrickfergus and Northern Ireland had a chance. Otherwise …
    “Busy night?” Mrs Campbell asked from next door.
    Mrs Campbell … I smiled and said nothing. Best not to. She was trouble. Thirty-two. Red hair. Looker. Husband away on the North Sea oil rigs. Two weans under ten. There was no way.
    “You know, what with the riots and everything?” she insisted while I hunted for my keys.
    “Aye,” I said.
    “I suppose you heard about the Pope?”
    “Yes.”
    “You could find about a dozen suspects on this street,” she said with a cackle.
    “I’m sure you could,” I agreed.
    “Personally, mind, I find it shocking, really shocking,” she said.
    I blinked a couple of times and looked straight ahead. This statement worried me. It meant that she was trying to show empathy, which led me to the inescapable conclusion that she probably fancied me and that she (and everybody else on the street) knew that I was a Catholic.
    I hadn’t been here three weeks, barely spoken to anyone. What had I done in this time to give myself away? Was it the way I pronounced the letter “H” or was it just that I was marginally less sour than Coronation Road’s dour Protestant population?
    I put the key in the lock, shook my head and went inside. I hung up my coat, took off my bulletproof vest and unbuckled the handgun. In case we’d been needed for riot duty I’d alsobeen issued with a CS gas canister, a billy club and that scary World War Two machine gun – presumably to deal with an IRA ambush en route. I carefully put all these weapons on the hall table.
    I hung my helmet on the hook and went upstairs.
    There were three bedrooms. I used two for storage and had taken the front one for myself as it was the biggest and came with a fireplace and a nice view across Coronation Road to the Antrim Hills beyond.
    Victoria Estate lay at the edge of Carrickfergus and hence at the edge of the Greater Belfast Urban Area. Carrick was gradually being swallowed up by Belfast but for the moment it still possessed some individual character: a medieval town of 13,000 people with a small working harbour and a couple of now empty textile factories.
    North of Coronation Road you were in the Irish countryside, south and east you were in the city. I liked that. I had a foot in both camps too. I’d been born in 1950 in Cushendun when that part of rural Northern Ireland was like another planet. No phones, no electricity, people still using horses to get around, peat for cooking and heating, and on Sundays some of the crazier Protestants rowing or sailing across the North Channel in little doreys to attend the kirk in Scotland.
    Aye, I’d been whelped a country boy but in 1969, right as the Troubles were kicking off, I’d gone to Queen’s University Belfast on a full scholarship to study psychology. I’d loved the city: its bars, its alleys, its character and, at least for a while, the university area was immune to the worst of the violence.
    It was the era of Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson, and QUB was a little candle of light held up against the gathering dark.
    And I’d done well there if I say so myself. Nobody was doing psychology in those days and I’d shone. Not much competition, I suppose, but still. I’d gained a first-class degree, fell inand out of love a couple of times, published a little paper on the unreliability of eyewitness testimony in the Irish Journal of Criminology and perhaps I would have stayed an academic or gotten a job across the water but for the incident.
    The incident .
    Why I was here now.