The Cold, Cold Ground

said.
    I turned round. It was Laura.
    “I came looking for you,” she said. “I wanted to ask you if you wanted to go to the cinema this week.”
    “I thought the IRA had blown up all the cinemas.”
    “Not all of them,” she laughed.
    “What’s playing?”
    “ Chariots of Fire ? Have you heard of it?”
    “Some kind of Ben Hur remake?”
    “It’s about the olympics.”
    Just then Heather came back from the toilet. She saw me talking to Laura and immediately put her arm through mine and kissed me on the cheek.
    Laura blinked a couple of times.
    “Laura, this is my friend, Heather. Heather, this is Laura,” I said.
    The two women looked at one another and said nothing.
    Heather put her hand on my cheek, turned my face to hers and kissed me on the lips.
    When the kiss was done, Laura, naturally, was gone.
    “Let’s finish our drinks and get out of here,” Heather said.
    We went outside and called a black taxi.
    It took us to her house in the wilds of Greenisland.
    It was a surprisingly big house for a young reserve constable.
    If I hadn’t seen her in the RUC van with us today, I would have been thinking: oh shit, IRA honey trap.
    She stripped off her clothes revealing fishnet stockings and a black basque.
    What the fuck is this? I was thinking when she grabbed my cock through my trousers.
    “We were nearly killed today,” she said.
    “Not really.”
    “Doesn’t it turn you on?” she said.
    “You turn me on,” I replied and kissed her again.
    She tasted of gin and better times.
    I kissed her breasts and her belly and laid her down on the bed.
    “Fuck me, you bitch!” she moaned.
    I didn’t need any more encouragement.
    We had hard, rampant animal sex and then she climbed on top of me and we fucked again.
    I fell asleep until 1.30 when she shook me hard.
    “My husband gets back from the night shift at two,” she said. “Get your clothes on and get the fuck out of here.”
    “Are you serious?”
    “He’s a sheet welder, he’ll fucking break you in half, wee man, now get out.”
    I had to walk five miles home in the rain.
    When I got back to #113 Coronation Road I was shattered. I ripped off my wet clothes, lit the upstairs paraffin heater and put on the Velvet Underground and Nico. I slid the stylus across to “Venus in Furs” and clicked the repeat switch. When John Cale’s crazy viola and Lou Reed’s ostrich guitar kicked in, I went to the bookcase found the Britannica Encyclopaedia of Art and skipped through the centuries until I came to the painting of Orpheus in the Underworld by Jan Velvet Brueghel. I lay in front of the heater as the rain came on and the wind rattled the bathroom windows. I looked at Brueghel’s hell: flying demons, fires, tormented souls and in the foreground two ladies in rather nice frocks.
    I lay there and let the minutes wash over me. The minutes. The hours. All eternity. I thought of Orpheus searching for his beloved in the realms of Hades. I thought of Laura and Heather. I thought of Tommy and Walter. I looked for meaning. But there was no meaning. It was nonsense. All of it. There was method but no key. They’re all just playing with us, I thought. And then at three o’clock exactly the lights went out again.

12: BITING AT THE GRAVE
    If the papers were to be believed there were two things going on in the world: the Royal Wedding and the IRA hunger strikes; one focal point was the baroque dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, London, the other was the middle of a sour, boggy portion of the Lagan Valley just west of Lisburn – the Maze Prison.
    The Maze was built in the aftermath of the disastrous Operation Demetrius in 1971 when hundreds of IRA “suspects” had been arrested in a desperate attempt to stop The Troubles from escalating. Initially they were kept in huts at the former RAF base of Long Kesh, but eventually the Maze prison was built around them with its massive perimeter fence and eight concrete “H Blocks”.
    Many of the internees had had no links whatsoever to the IRA but that had certainly changed after six months or a year’s detention by the British. The Brits have always been experts at pouring gasoline on every situation in Ireland: The Easter Rising, Bloody Sunday, Internment – all of them excellent recruiting tools for the radicals.
    After Internment ended and the prisoners were released it was decided that IRA volunteers would only get jail time if they were actually convicted of a crime: murder, conspiracy to cause