Novel excerpt - Coming Over; from Heard

Heard

Part one – Coming Over

1972: Belfast ~ Liverpool

Andrea stood facing her father and because of the distance between them she could look over his taller shoulder and through the cabin window at the city she was leaving behind by sea. She recognized little. The small, claustrophobic, and deadly few miles where her father, mother and brother would continue to live were already hidden amongst the houses of Belfast. The City was grey, or the day has become grey in her memory, in the act of her recall.

Clifford Shea looked drawn and tired on the day he sent his ten-year-old daughter away. A troubled man. Yet his wet mud-coloured eyes shone for Andrea. Watching, she waited for him to speak. He had an unlit cigarette between his lips. He was furtive, half in hiding, submerged in his greatcoat, and trying to look relaxed. Heated, he took it off. He was tall, lean and neat in his brown suit, shirt and tie; dressed for work, in fact. On other days at dawn Andrea watched him receding from the house, walking deserted streets, to Shortland’s Printers and then (and only then) he changed into overalls – well, depending.  The print shop was cover. They were fine about it, part of it. On active duty he would walk through the front doors and out through the back. As time went by and got worse, Clifford and others went straight through the print works more often, for months at a time and at one certain point, Clifford went through for good. Clifford was a product of, a participant in, the armed struggle and - much later – an architect of its cessation. 

He clapped his hands lightly together and caught Andrea’s attention.

‘It is a fine ship’s cabin for such a young girl traveller eh?’

Andrea glanced at her mother with a sideward eye. 

Eileen Shea looked like an exotic Jewess to her daughter. A slim, aquiline, nose rested above her gentle red upper lip, slightly parted from a full lower buddy. Her brown eyes were wide, warm, and enquiring (though much later Andrea would conclude that she was rather cold towards her children). Her hair was short and tied back. She had natural poise and elegance. As tall as her husband, she matched him in wit, and in politics. The Sheas were equal in the eyes of their children and united in the decisions they made. Eileen gave instruction to Andrea. 

‘It’s a short crossing Andrea and you will be there after a night’s rest in bed. Don’t wander.’ After a paused she added, ‘You can read here,’ patting the bunk, ‘don’t you think Clifford? She can read here.’ 

Clifford Shea looked at his wife and held up his hands in ascent. All three paused. 

‘Well I will see about food.’

Andrea watched her mother leave. Outside from the corridor came the sounds of passengers milling about with bags. Turning back Andrea saw that her father had sat down upon the bunk and looked for signs of him remembering to disembark. She kept one ear on any possible announcement. She waited. He rummaged a bag.

The formality, in which he gave his daughter the gift, echoed a presentation, a Head rewarding merit. He was stiff with the act, odd and slow. She thought of her prize drawing of muddy boots, left lying on the back steps of the house, composed over a weekend; of the careful lines, of waiting for evening to watch them in shadow and decide on pastels; a patient act. At home, it hung in the back hall. Her father put the gift in her hands and held hers with his. A book, expensive, covered, properly made. Freed again, Andrea looked at her hands and saw the gold inlaid writing on the green leather cover. She was unprepared for the ceremonial nature of what was happening, of the leaving, that it was happening, there and then. 

‘Something more to keep you occupied.’ 

He tousled her hair. The book had the emblem of Shorthand’s Printers, where her father worked. Andrea frowned thoughtfully. Illustrated Flowers of British Fields. Her father caught the look on her face. 

‘Something beautiful, on the flowers of the Isles, for a flower of the land.’

‘I will study this,’ Andrea told him, seriously.

Her father looked at the neat pile (in size order) of books arranged on the patch of table beside the head of the bunk. Moving to it he fanned the collection out a little bit and smiled at her. With her announcement ear, Andrea heard footsteps outside the cabin door, still ajar.

‘Though I see you have been busy with a small collection of activities of your own Ma, judging by the contents of the bag.’

At her father’s words Andrea turned to her returning mother. His voice was still in the air, ending. Andrea felt red hot, at the centre of matters. Her father’s mock disapproval of the fellow kindness of his wife released Andrea’s tears. She raised her face to her mother’s but did not need to make eye contact. Eileen Shea pulled her daughter to her. Andrea sensed the stiffening in her father she expected of him. He quietly exhaled. This released further sobs from Andrea and she felt a tightening of her mother’s hands around her. Andrea had not heard a question (and thirty years later, when she met him again, Andrea wondered if she had been right; did she ask the question or make a case?) because her father cleared his throat and spoke. 

‘Yes you can, and yes you will.’

In the swaddle of her mother, in darkness, for a moment, Andrea pieced together the decision of her leaving. Her bedroom a few months before, when it was cold and fresh, Clifford came to Andrea and spoke to her about the war. It was after midnight when she heard the front door. Then later his movement in the kitchen, the sound of water. Then the squeak of the living room door. All of the doors had a noise, and they were never eased or oiled. They broadcast movement throughout the house. Finally the sound of his steps and the creak of the wood on the stairs. He scratched lightly on her door like a cat and popped his head around it. Seeing Andrea awake, he came in, in whispers. He smelled of drink. They chatted for a little while about the day, about small things of the house. Something about her brother Callum. Then her father became sombre.

‘I am going away again, except again I am not going anywhere but in my own city. The city is going to be my preoccupation.’ 

He paused and swallowed.

‘What I mean Andrea is that this place is going to take all my energy. And your Ma and I are worried about you and Callum.’ 

Andrea looked at him, uncomprehending. 

‘Ma and I have discussed this,’ he began again, nervously. 

Andrea watched his silhouetted figure against the light from outside the window. She knew that every light in the house was off, to give the appearance of an empty place. To discourage attention. She knew that there were soldiers on the corner. Clifford was bent forward and he looked tired. His eyes swept the curve and shape of the blankets as if scanning the details of a map. He ran his hand lightly across, smoothing the hills and valleys created around her curled legs. 

‘Yourself and Callum are to go and stay with your grandparents a while in London. First yourself in the summer, and Callum by the time of school starting.’

‘What about Ma, is she coming?’

‘Ma will visit you.’

‘I don’t want to go, and why can’t we go to Cork like last time?’

‘Andrea, this is no place for a child, with bombs and guns going off everywhere.’

‘I don’t want to go and why are you sending me to the enemy then?’ 

Her father paid her closer attention.

‘Your grandparents are not the enemy Andrea, and neither are the British working people.’

‘What?’ 

‘I mean the other men, women and children there.’

‘Who is the enemy that wants me to go then?’ 

In her anger Andrea threw to the floor her bedside hair brush. The sound of the thud made her father wince and jump back a little. For there was a boy in the house where Clifford had just come from, a young boy of about ten or twelve who stood by as his father was shot dead. The boy’s father – a prison guard – fell back gracefully, gently waving his arms, to the settee that he had risen from at the sound of  the door splintering, half of his face now gone. The boy looked at his falling father and then turned his eyes away to look at the floor. For a moment the only sound was of someone – perhaps it was the boy’s mother – descending half way down the stairs and stopping. The boy tilted his disbelieving head to Clifford in his heavy black coat and hooded face. The boy dropped to his knees before him. His expression was not pleading; rather someone recalling a fact, searching for an answer to a question, it having been asked. Clifford turned and left, lowering the gun to his side, and was three quarters along the front path when it occurred to him that he had not shouted the man’s name, that he had not stated the reason for the act. He slowed for an instant and then heard the engine start and roar. He got in and the lightless car speed away. In the dark, an arm from the back seat handed him a flask and he took a long drink to quench his parched throat.

On the end of Andrea’s bed Clifford, his throat parched again, looked at his daughter in shadow.

‘I want to send you from this place until the fighting is over, until the soldiers have gone. I want to send all of the children away but I have only the permission to send two. You and your brother. I want to get this summer over with because I think that times will get worse before they will get better. Better is coming, but it will only come at a cost. I do not want you to count as part of the cost.’

‘What cost?’ Andrea asked him.

‘People, my flower. Hearts will have to be broken before history will move.’

‘I don’t get it.’

‘You have seen and heard enough already I think.’

‘What will happen after?’

‘I don’t know exactly, we will be together again.’ 

‘What will I find in London?’ 

‘Loving grandparents. A creaky old house. An old man and a wise woman. Some distance from this cloudy place, a riverbank, and plenty of parks. Take some books; visit the gardens like you love to. I’ll stay here, kneeling amongst the weeds, in the evening sky, amongst the flowers like my girl.’ 

He played with her hair then as her mother did now, on the boat, in the swaddle of her, in the pleats of her clothes, in darkness but now with the engines started, rumbling through the ship. 

Andrea lay alone on the cabin bed and counted the two hours gone and the eight remaining. She relaxed into the gentle shudder of the boat’s slow, measured, progress. A heavy sensation; it was regular and there was almost a signature rhythm to it, which Andrea tried to capture the essence of. The deeper, longer, lower sound suggested a determined push and led to a tak-tak sound in the outer wall. The movement of the diamond patterned panel. Tak-tak-click. A lighter sound – a kind of ship’s rising in her mind – then led to movement between the clearances in both her cabin door and the adjacent small cupboard table beside her bunk, on which her books lay. Finally there was a moment of what she imagined to be the peak of the boat’s rise; the point when the vessel seemed to have pushed forward and paused that caused a small incident of stillness. Then the deeper sound again.

Andrea counted these rhythms until the early hundreds but then the patterns changed altogether. Perhaps the ship had changed direction. She listened anew but was distracted by thoughts about the sea itself, and the boat within it. Eventually, fitfully, she fell asleep.

Later, in her paintings she would recreate this image of the struggling ship and the sleeping child. The ship is disproportionately miniature, lost in a large canvas of rough sea, and within its waves were painted the detail of events of a generation of fighting; floating like curious flotsam. A bombed, splintered, shop, Orangemen marching, protest murals, checkpoints, her father interned, her brother’s dirty, exhilarated face as he threw a stone at an RUC man (based on an actual family photograph), a group of men on a street corner by an overturned public bus (the driver among them, his cap and ticket machine still on), three boys approaching a smashed, shabby, British Leyland car - all three with outstretched arms and holding petrol bombs like winning athletes.

Andrea slept her night. 

In the black drizzle the ferry had its shoulder to the wind and shuddered on. The corridors had quietened. The bar was dark. The lounge passengers, journey slumbering, were stretched out in seats. The breathing, the clearing of throats and shuffling movements were submerged in the hum of ship’s noise. A cleaner mopped a toilet, her bucket of dirty water gently shaking in the rise and fall. A girl in the cafeteria stood back admiring the neatly staked shelf of glasses she had arranged, and pulled on a cigarette. On the car deck, a man walked the bare metal floor, pouring sand from a red bucket over oil stains, and shifting traffic cones with his boot. In the lorry lounge four drivers played cards in silent well-known company. The ships radio dish turned slowly, humming. On deck four gulls shivered beneath a lifeboat and thirty feet away a lone passenger in a long overcoat stared out at the murky weather from beneath the rim of his hat, stayed upon his head by his gloved hand. In her dark cabin Andrea laid on her side, curled, her arms wrapped around the pillow, her book of flowers on the floor. In the morning she would stretch awake and turn her head each way into her hair. There would be no movement and a calm sea. She would be new again.

James A Bullion 2008

Jamaica Road

Jamaica Road

I am quizzing my mother on a well-worn old family story about a journey I made aged two. It was sometimes told to evidence a ‘rebellious tendency’, sometimes ‘independence of spirit,’ and always ‘good luck.’ 

‘I want to talk to you,’ I say down the line, ‘about when I stole out to the park alone. When I crossed Jamaica Road.’ 

There is an unusual pause. We are at the end of a call, after the usual catalogue of family enquiry and evaluation of my mother’s poor health. 

‘You want to talk to me about what?’ 

‘I want you to talk about the story about when I disappeared and you found me in the park,’ I tell her. 

She cuts across me now.

‘You know the story.’ She is suspicious of a joke or a trick or a serious discussion.

‘I know roughly, but I haven’t heard it for years. I am trying to write it down.’

‘What, are you taking therapy?’

I laugh at this, and so does she, settling the mood, and we make a date. 

Summer 1967. The far end of Jamaica Road, Rotherhithe, South London; where the road meets the entrance to the Rotherhithe Tunnel. The Royal Arsenal Cooperative Society (RACS) are repairing their houses along the length of this street, the scaffolding slowly progressing up the road. The sound of knocking and splintering has been in the air all year. That din is then mixed with the noise of mid morning traffic outside. The residents are worn down. They are protesting by not shopping in the local Co-op until the work is completed. It is taking too long. Previously they had been protesting because the work had not started. My mother, despite being married to an RACS man, is at the root of these protests.

Today, there is a constant stream of commercial vehicles and cars wanting to cross the river through the tunnel. It is sunny. Cyclists weave along the centre of the road avoiding the grooves left by the tram tracks recently removed. It is a good place to cycle because the drivers avoid it from habit. 

 Our house consists of the basement, garden and first floor of a four-story apartment, a former shop that spills out directly onto Jamaica Road opposite Southwark Park. The house is run-down and unsafe, we want to move but cannot despite a vigorous press campaign run by a journalist aunt. So we too are waiting for the scaffolding to arrive. We are practically last.

My mother Eileen has pushed out Christine, her reluctant daughter of ten years, to school. She will arrive at the end of first break and the teachers, as usual, will not notice - or choose not to notice because they know that Christine will have been helping her mother. Half the time they are right. 

My sister Jackie, aged 5 years, is a mouthy paraplegic and unable to be schooled or tamed. She is trouble. My mother carries her everywhere in her powerful arms, moving between rooms, arranging and responding. Partly she cannot let her alone because of holes in the floor that Jackie might drag herself to (using her own powerful arms). We all fence in Jackie – it seems - until we can find a daytime solution, somewhere for her to go. That ‘we’ includes me, aged two. I am walking and talking and with a considerable amount of freedom most of the time. I have both a well-developed sense of protection for Jackie and a jealous temper.

My father, Alexander, is away on a long haul drive in his lorry for the RACS. He stays away for days, sleeping in the cabin bed of his cab. He is more and more out of touch with his family. We do not have a telephone. He turns up when he does and that is that. This house comes with his job. When he goes for good – which he will in a little while – so does the house. Soon, a Saturday, he packs an unusually large bag for work and climbs into his lorry, and drives off. Christine watches the cab turn the corner, my father feeding the wheel like rope between his hands. In a series of shrugs he’ll be gone. Then we’ll move. For the time being and on this day we are all trapped.

Then Jackie spills my mother’s scalding hot tea over her legs without noticing or crying out. She cannot feel them properly, and therefore does not react strongly. Nevertheless the liquid is burning her skin. My mother is in another room. I get her and silently take her hand, and lead her. In the room, responding, she shakes me free in irritation and begins to deal with my sister, hoisting her away to be cleaned up.

Thirty-nine years later my mother gently takes up the story again for me alone. I am used to a fast, third person comical telling and I realise, without an audience this cannot happen. It feels a little like a different story. 

‘I was busy with Jackie, in a panic. Meanwhile in the hall you, with a stool from the front room; climbed up, turned the door handle and you were gone. It should have been locked, of course. You were only wearing a terry. Gone’

My mother snaps her fingers.

‘I douse your sister’s leg in water for a long time, rub in some butter and wrap it in a towel. Complete balls that butter! Makes a burn worse but I didn’t know that then. And I’m talking to you but you are not answering. Then I hear the sound of the traffic. Outside noises. I stop the tap, I look for you and you are gone.’

My mother laughs nervously, bringing her fingers up to caress her brow.  

Outside the tunnel-bound cars were bumper to bumper because of an accident. Two cars have knocked one another in the centre of the road. It is a sedate affair. Some of the drivers have got out of their vehicles to look, smoke wait or talk. 

One driver sees the blond head of a child bob along from left to right; his small steadying outstretched hand brushing along the bonnet. The child continues to the busy still-flowing opposite side of the road. The driver reacts at last and shouts at the boy, which causes him to start running. Simultaneously he opens his car door and hits his horn. The child stops and turns for a moment to look at the driver. Behind the boy a car whizzes past. The child turns back and walks in front of a van, which clanks on its breaks, roughly swerves away, and misses him by inches. Frightened, the child runs to the safety of the pavement, on and into the entrance of the park.

He is flabbergasted, as he will tell my mother when she eventually rushes out.

‘ere luv, are you looking for a young ‘un. A little boy?’

My mother perfectly mimics his cockney voice. Even now, these many years on, she has half that frantic look on her face from the time. 

‘I rushed out and you were nowhere to be seen. The cars were at a standstill, and I thought ‘that’s it’. I have your sister in my arms and I am just rushing up towards the accident when the driver catches me.  The butter is melting on Jackie’s leg and my hand keeps slipping. I also associate the smell of butter with that day now!’

‘He’s just crossed the road. A right lucky charm. Little bleeder!’

Mother repeats his phrases.

‘He told me that you’d gone into the park and I went after you. But you were gone.’

My mother holds up both her palms and gestures their emptiness.

‘Gone and nowhere to be found.’

‘I wonder where I was.’ I say, ‘and if I was hiding from you?’

I have no memory of any of this time.  She has no knowledge of the events that occurred when I was missing. She searched for me for three hours, intermittently going back to the house in case I had turned up there. When she found me by the swings, I was filthy and I had mud in my mouth.

This usual ending is with laughter, but this time, with just me she is sombre and I am surprised. I don’t recall those hours in the park. I also don’t recall those family times when my father lived with us.

 We speak for a while about the stresses of bringing up three children for her and two for me, about her divorce and mine, about disability and health, and how spread out around Britain our family has become. I remind my mother that when my first marriage fell apart she told me that I had not tried hard enough to hold it together. 

‘I say a lot of things,’ she responds, and then we pause for such a time that our reminiscence stops altogether.

James A Bullion 2008

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