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12

On 20 October 1979, I was sentenced to fifteen months in prison. A grass from the ghetto had informed on me. For security reasons, he was hidden behind a curtain when he testified before the judge. Just his voice condemning me.

—Meehan struck the youth while telling him that the IRA punish dealers. That if he came back to the ghetto with his gear, he’d put a bullet in his knee ...

I closed my eyes. I knew that fearful way of speaking. Maybe it was Paddy Toomey, given a hiding by our guys for having made a mess of his wife after coming home from the pub. Or Liam Moynihan, who’d been forced to leave the ghetto after an attempted rape. I leaned forward slightly, trying to find out. A tweed shoulder, a shadow of an arm behind the curtain ...

—Sit up, Meehan.

I shrugged indifferently. One after another, we passed through these Diplock courts. A single magistrate, no juries, hidden witnesses. To send me to prison for having threatened a dealer? The British were wide of the mark. Our army was restructured, organized into closed units. I was smiling at the magistrate. He was avoiding my eye. After having been the leader of the 2nd Battalion, then of the Beflast Brigade, I had just been appointed to the IRA Army Council. The wee chap in black hadn’t the least idea who he was trying. Fifteen months? A gift. And yet it turned out to be a nightmare.

Since 1 March 1976, the imprisoned Republicans and Loyalists had lost their status as prisoners of war. Overnight, through the violence of the Special Powers Act, we became bandits and were forced to wear the same prison garb as the common criminals. On 14 September 1976, when I arrived in Long Kesh, Kieran Nugent demanded to remain naked in his cell. He wrapped himself in his blankets. He was nineteen years old and he was the one who started it. A second followed suit, then a third. Frank ‘Mickey’ Devlin, the guy with the pen, was the ninth.

In March 1978, beaten every time they went to the showers, the lads broke their furniture and refused to leave their cells. In retaliation, the screws removed everything, leaving only the mattresses on the floor. Several days later they stopped taking out the slop buckets. When they overflowed, the Republican soldiers decided to piss on the ground, shit in their hands and spread their excrement on the walls.

When I entered H-Block 4 of the prison compound on Thursday, 1 November 1979, three hundred comrades had been naked in their blankets and living in their shit for three years.

I hadn’t trembled in a long time. In front of the five warders, I took off my clothes without a word, without a look. I thought of Jack, of my boy, who had entered this room five months earlier. A mirror was placed on the ground. I crouched down without them having to ask, opened my anus with my fingers. I was fifty-four years old. The screws were younger than me. One of them handed me the prison clothes, carefully folded, petrol-blue with yellow stripes. I looked the kid in the eye and spat on the fabric.

The warders didn’t like my gesture. I was beaten. They threw me naked into a cell with a final kick in the back. My forehead hit the ground, my cheekbone. I was lying on my stomach, I sat up with difficulty. My thumb was sprained, a couple of my ribs were cracked. I was bleeding from the mouth and nose. A burning trickle was rolling down the back of my neck. The top of my head was damaged. I ran my hand over it. A bite. A chunk of flesh was missing. My left leg started to shake. I hugged my chest. It was cold. I looked around the cell. In a corner lay a scrap of a man, buried in his mattress.

—Jack?

I didn’t recognize my voice. Like a creaking door.

I was afraid it might be him, and I hoped it wouldn’t be. But it wasn’t. It was someone else’s son. He turned to me, got up slowly from his corner of the room. He was very young, slender or scrawny, more grey than pale, with a chaotic beard, and hair to his shoulders. Without a word, he took the folded blankets from the free mattress, draped them over my shoulders and sat down beside me. Then I lowered my guard. I don’t know why. That gesture, maybe. That coarse gentleness, that watchful silence. Perhaps also his eyes meeting mine. I breathed in little jerks. I released the warmth of my urine. I was pissing. The warm, glistening pool expanded underneath me. He didn’t move back. It reached his bare foot, surrounded it, continued its path of piss under the bed.

He held out his hand.

—Aidan Phelan, West Tyrone Brigade.

—Tyrone Meehan, Belfast Brigade.

He smiled.

—Danny Finley’s friend, I know. And it’s an honour for me.

Then he lit a cigarette, rolling tobacco in a margin of his Bible.

—The guys say Matthew burns better, but I prefer the Epistles.

He inhaled an acrid drag and handed it to me.

—St Peter, St Paul, makes no difference ...

We smoked in silence. I was looking round the dark room. Rotten food was piled up in mucous mounds along the wall. An accumulation of filth, of moist decay, of decomposition. And then the shit, spread right up to the ceiling. Finger marks. A crucifix hanging on the broken light switch. I shivered.

When they led me to the cell, the screws were wearing masks. The air was as thick as a sewer. I didn’t know that a smell could line the throat. By the time night fell, I had almost grown used to the stench, my sticky legs, the cold, the darkness, and all of our shit.

—
Is cimí polaitiúla muid!

A voice from far off. The shout from a cell. My language.

—We are political prisoners! Aidan threw back, hobbling as far as the door.

—
Táimid ag cimí polaitiúla!
I roared in turn.

Up until that point, I hadn’t seen another soul. Only the screws’ hateful faces. And now here was this clamouring from my comrades, my friends, my brothers in arms. Dozens of furious, stony, beautiful voices. A magnificent din. Cries accompanied by raised fists, hammering the doors with bare flesh. I listened for my child’s voice in the heart of all that anguish. And then again I didn’t want to hear.

—
Tiocfaidh ár lá!
the first prisoner took up, roaring over the tumult.

—
Tiocfaidh ár lá!
the others responded. ‘Our day will come!’

—That was your first evening prayer, my companion smiled.

And then everything went quiet.

At night, Aidan would sometimes cry. He’d whimper like a child, pulling the blanket right up over his head. One morning I looked at him. He was sleeping on his belly, mouth open, cheek squashed. His arm was trailing on the ground. White maggots were wriggling in his hair and on the back of his hand.

After thirteen months, I looked the same as him. My hair was covering my ears and my nose in greasy clumps. My beard was long and messy. One face mirrored the other. I could see my gauntness in his drawn features, his dull skin, his eyes rimmed in black.

In his corner of the cell, he used to organize cockroach races. And I’d make him recite the thirty-two counties of Ireland.

—Meath ... Mayo ... Roscommon ... Offaly ...

I taught him Irish words. The prison essentials.

—Póg mo thóin!

—Kiss my arse! That was his favourite war cry, and he muttered it every time a screw opened the door.

We had decided to shit together, to make a ceremony of this private act and transform the humiliation into a shared ritual. He’d crouch down to the left of the door, I’d go in my hands. Then we’d smear our excrement over the wall with fingers spread wide, in big warm circles. In the beginning I used to vomit. The savagery of the image, the violence of the smell. And then, bit by bit, I learned to turn my disgust into rage. Fresh coats over dried coats, I spread the human rendering without feeling ashamed.

The prisoners had fashioned pipes out of rolled-up cardboard and they used to slide them into the cracks between the cell doors and the ground. At a set time, just after the meal, we would all piss into those tubes, spilling our urine into the corridor.

—They’ll never break us! my friend used to say.

We were forbidden visitors and post, locked up night and day without exercise. We had given up passing the time. We spoke little. We used to sit with our heads down for hours on end. Often, we wouldn’t even dare meet the other’s eyes.

—If we get out of here, we can never tell anyone about this, Aidan said one day.

—But everyone on the outside knows about it, I told him.

He shook his head.

—You think they know, Tyrone? But what is it they know, for Christ’s sake? Nobody can understand what we’re living through in here! Shit is just a word to them, Tyrone! It’s not matter! It’s not this filth that slides between your fingers!