Dead I Well May Be (2 page)

The Europa, “the most bombed hotel in Europe,” had been redesigned with crumple zones to absorb the impact of explosions. And now it had done well on its first field test: the whole building intact, except for the windows on the lower floors where the hijacked car had erupted with most effect.

But the Belfast glaziers couldn’t complain about that, for with Christmas coming the payday from surrounding buildings would be enough to keep their own in Islay whisky and Belgian chocolate and Italian shoes. And we didn’t care. It was a job, there was money at the end, and it was heavy lifting, which is a tricky thing if you don’t look out.

We laid down a long sheet for a lobby door and an AP man snapped our pic and said it was a good one and walked back with us behind the police lines. We chatted and he said he was from Jacksonville, Florida,
and couldn’t believe how dark it was so soon, and I explained, having taken geography, that Belfast was on the same latitude as Moscow and the panhandle of Alaska and the nights were long in summer and in winter you paid the price.

The AP man jogged down to the offices of the
Belfast Telegraph
. The army boys got in their Land Rovers and drove to base. The coppers yawned and changed shifts, and the crowd, such as it was, was drifting away now and back to other occupations.

We laughed when our photograph appeared on the front page of the evening
Telegraph
. There we were rebuilding the proud city, the indomitable faces of Belfast. “Their Spirit Will Not Be Broken,” a headline proclaimed.

Aye, just our bloody backs, a man called Spider said.

But we walked with swagger as the vans unloaded the last of the big plates and the side windows and the boards for the pub.

We worked, the rain eased, the wind changed, and papers, fragments, bits of the hijacked car, and pulverized brick and glass coated us as we moved. The dismal stuff of explosion so familiar now in many cities. A confusion of words and particles that the poet Ciaran Carson calls Belfast Confetti.

Putting in the windows would take weeks, but that was the purview of professionals. At the end of the day our work was done, the glass unloaded, and we were paid off with a wee bonus for no breakages and no thefts. A few of us saved the dough for Christmas presents but most went to the Mermaid Tavern for a pint or two.

We drank and bought rounds of the black stuff and ate pickled eggs and Irish stew.

I left to do some shopping before the late-night closing. I got myself a couple of books and the new Nirvana record. I bought Nan a winter coat. She’s been a chocolate addict since wartime rationing, so I couldn’t resist a giant bar of Toblerone. On the bus back I met Tommy Little, whom I’d known in the army, Tommy staying in and making sergeant and me getting kicked out and ending up in the brig, in, of all places, Saint Helena—a nasty, windswept shithole whose other famous military prisoner, Napoleon, died mysteriously. So you could say I got off lightly. We laughed and Tommy said that I was a wild man and I said he was on his way to general.

Another bus, the road, the long walk up the hill. The ever-present conspiracy of fog and rain.

Nan was watching
Coronation Street
. No problem to smuggle in a hidden coat. We had a late dinner of Ulster fry: potato bread and bacon, soda bread and egg.

She only ever watched the soaps, so she hadn’t even heard about the morning bombing. I didn’t enlighten her. She would have been upset. I produced the Toblerone and Nan practically laughed with delight.

Oh, you shouldn’t have, she said.

I picked up a wee bit of work today, I explained, and she made the tea and we ate the chocolate and I helped her get the last clues in her crossword book.

The darkness filled, the fires went out. I showered and retired to bed. The late-night noises of the house and the street began around me. The pipes in the attic water tank. The dogs communing across the town.

Mrs. Clawson yelling with only half a heart: Were ye on the dander again, you drunken scut?

Below me the creaking of boards and beams as the chimney took away the last heat from the fire and the house chilled and the floor timbers shrank and cooled.

And I was gone, off in a deep, hard-work sleep…

Late next morning a man from the dole office was waiting for me. A big man with glasses, tweed jacket, blue shirt, red tie, and a clipboard, but who otherwise, in different circumstances entirely, could possibly have been an ok sort of bloke. He should really have been a skinny wee fella with greasy hair, but this was a tough part of town and he was here on business. He was sipping Nan’s tea and eating the last piece of Toblerone. I sat down and the man had news.

It turned out that my picture in the
Belfast Telegraph
had been enough to convince the Department of Health and Social Security that I was not unemployed at all but was in fact engaged in active work while claiming unemployment benefit. It was impossibly unlucky that my first bit of doing the double in months had been exposed in Northern Ireland’s most widely circulated newspaper. On page 1, too. But still, the boys in the DHSS are not that smart and I had the feeling that
they would never have found it but for some sleekit nosy neighbor tipping them off.

What if I deny that’s me? I suggested.

Are you denying it’s you?

I don’t know.

Well then, the man said, adjusting his glasses.

Nan offered us more tea. I said no but the man took a dish, as well as some of her drop scones.

How old are you again, Mr. Forsythe? he asked after a while.

Nineteen.

No longer a juvenile. Dear oh dear, he said ominously.

Look, what exactly are you saying I did wrong?

You were claiming unemployment benefit while working on a building site. I am afraid, Mr. Forsythe, you’ll have to go to court.

Yeah, but what for?

For benefit fraud, mate, the man scoffed …

But I didn’t go to court. I pleaded guilty the next week and signed off benefit forever. I was unemployed, had been so for over a year, and now I was never going to get any more money. I moped for another week. Nan couldn’t support me on her pension so there was no choice but to do what my cousin Leslie said I should have done twelve months earlier, which was to work for her brother-in-law who worked for Darkey White in America. Darkey would pay for my ticket, and I’d pay him back in time served.

I didn’t want to go to America, I didn’t want to work for Darkey White. I had my reasons.

But I went.

1: WHITE BOY IN HARLEM

I

open my eyes. The train tracks. The river. A wall of heat. Unbearable white sunlight smacking off the railings, the street and the god-awfulness of the buildings. Steam from the permanent Con Ed hole at the corner. Gum and graffiti tags on the sidewalk. People on the platform—Jesus Christ, are they really in sweaters and wool hats? Garbage everywhere: newspaper, bits of food, clothes, soda cans, beer cans. The traffic slow and angry. Diesel fumes from tubercular bus engines. Heat and poison from the exhausts on massive, bruised gypsy cabs.

I’m smoking. I’m standing here on the elevated subway platform looking down at all this enormous nightmare and I’m smoking. My skin can barely breathe. I’m panting. The back of my T-shirt is thick with sweat. 100 degrees, 90 percent relative humidity. I’m complaining about the pollution you can see in the sky above New Jersey and I’m smoking Camels. What an idiot.

Details. Dominican guys on the west side of Broadway. Black guys on the east. The Dominicans are in long cotton pants, sneakers, string T-shirts, gold chains. The black guys are in neat blue or yellow or red T-shirts with baggy denim shorts and better sneakers. The black guys are more comfortable, it’s their turf for now, the Dominicans are newcomers. It’s like
West Side
bloody
Story
.

In the deep pocket of my baggy shorts I start playing absently with the safety on my pistol. A very stupid thing to do. I stop myself. Besides, these guys aren’t the enemy. No, the enemy, like the Lord, is subtle, and in our own image.

Some kids playing basketball without a hoop. Women shopping; heavy bags weighing them down, the older women pushing carts, the younger wearing hardly anything at all. Beautiful girls with long dark legs and dreamy voices that are here the only sounds of heaven.

Harlem has changed, of course. I mean, I’m not talking about the 125th Street of today or even of five years ago. There’s a Starbucks there now. Multiplexes. HMV. An ex-president. This is before Giuliani saved the city. Twice. This is 1992. There are well over two thousand murders a year in New York. Gang wars. Crack killings.
The New York Times
publishes a murder map of Manhattan with a dot for every violent death. Once you get above Central Park the dots get thicker and east and north of Columbia University it becomes one big smudge. A killing took place yesterday at this very corner. A boy on a bicycle shot a woman in the chest when she didn’t give up her pocketbook. Those guys down there are packing heat. Shit, we’re all packing heat. The cops don’t care. Besides, what cops? Who ever sees a peeler around here except in Floridita? Anyway, it’s 1992. Bush the First is president, Dinkins is mayor, Major is PM, John Paul is the pope. According to the New York
Daily News
, it was 55 degrees yesterday and raining in Belfast. Which is par for the course in the summer there.

With a handkerchief I wipe away the sweat from the little Buddha fat gathering on my belly. The train is never coming. Never. I wipe under my arms, too. I stamp out the fag and resist the temptation to light another. Are people giving me looks? I’m the only white person at the station and I’m going north up to Washington Heights, which, when you think about it, is just plain silly.

The guys wearing the wool hats are West Africans. I’ve seen them before. They sit there serene and composed, chittering about this and that and sometimes scratching out a game of dominoes. They’re going downtown. On that side there’s no shade, it’s boiling on them and they’re as mellow as you please. They sell watches from suitcases to marks on Fifth Avenue and Herald Square. I know their crew chief. He’s only been in North America four months and he has a twelve-man unit. I like him. He’s suave and he’s an operator and he never flies off the handle. I’d work for him but he only employs other boys from the Gambia. If you’ve ever checked, it’s a funny-looking country and I mentioned that to him one time and he told me all about the Brits,
colonialism, structural exploitation, the Frankfurt School, and all that shite and we got on fine and laughed and he took a Camel but still wouldn’t give me a job selling knockoff watches from a briefcase. And it’s not like they’re kin to him either, it’s just a question of trust. He won’t even hire Ghanaians. I can understand it. Do the same myself, more than likely. Today no dominoes, they’re just talking. English, actually, but you can’t follow it. No.

I put the hanky away and try and breathe for a while. Look around, breathe. The cars. The city. The river again: vulgar, stinking, vast, and in this haze, it and Harlem dissolving and despairing together. There are no swimmers, of course. Even the foolish aren’t that foolish.

I look away from the water. In this direction you wouldn’t believe how many empty lots there are, how many buildings are shells, how many roofs are burnt away, and it gets worse as you go east towards the Apollo. You can see it all since there’s a fine view from up here where the IRT becomes elevated for a while. 126th Street, for example, is behind the state’s massive Adam Clayton Powell Jr. building, where I got my driver’s license and you get social security cards and stuff and you’d think that that would be prime real estate. But it isn’t. Nearly every building is derelict for about three whole blocks. And 123rd, where I live, well, we’ll get to that.

Yawn. Stand on tiptoes. Roll my head. Lazy stretch.

Aye.

Sooner or later—minutes, hours—the train is going to come and it’s going to take me to 173rd Street and I’m going to meet Scotchy coming down from the Bronx and Scotchy is going to be late and he’ll spin me lies about some girl he has going and then Scotchy and I will impose our collective will on a barkeep up there and after that just maybe the tight wee bastard will spring for a cab to get us down to the other bar on 163rd where we have a bit more serious work to do with a young man called Dermot Finoukin. Because walking those ten blocks would just about kill me on a day like this. He won’t though, he’ll make us walk. Nice wee dander for you, Bruce, he’ll slabber. Yeah, that will be the way of it. Crap from Scotchy. Crap from Dermot. Down by myself. Dinner at KFC and a six-pack of beer from C-Town Supermarket for four dollars. Shit.

A black girl is talking to the Dominican boys outside the bodega and
it’s more Leonard Bernstein than ever as the hackles rise between the blacks and the Dominicans on this side of the street. Jesus, gunplay is all I need. Just make the train come and when it comes make the air-con work. But it doesn’t and I look away from the boys in case afterwards I’m asked to be a witness by the peels.

Lights appear in the tunnel at the City College stop. The downtown train comes and the Gambians and the other passengers get on and it’s just me now and a few wee muckers at the far end spitting down the sixty feet to Broadway beneath us.

A homeless man comes up the steps having leapt the barrier. He’s filthy and he smells and he’s going to ask me for a quarter. He’s coughing and then he says:

Sir, spa-carter.

His hands are swollen to twice what they should be and he could have anything from untreated winter frostbite to fucking leprosy.

Here, I say, and I don’t want to touch him, so I put the quarter on the ground and then immediately repent of this. How unbelievably humiliating to make a sixty-year-old man bend down and pick up a quarter. He does bend down, picks it up, thanks me, and wanders off.

The pay phone rings. Who knew the phone even worked? It rings and rings. The kids, spitting, look over at me, and eventually I go and pick it up.