The Thompson Gunner (19 page)

It's only now that I realise how poorly I must have fitted in when we moved to Australia. I must have seemed like a weird kid sometimes. I felt like a weird kid, but only because of my accent. That's what the others at school focused on, and they'd keep coming up and telling me to talk so they could hear it. I didn't like being the outsider. In my family, I'd been the one insider where we'd lived before. I knew it was a privilege, and I resented losing it. But I got rid of the accent and the problem went away. It made it seem as if it must have been the only different thing about me.

Once, not long after we arrived here, nits or lice or some other hair infestation ripped through our class and a lot of us got short hair. Mine stayed that way. I kept telling my mother it was what school told us to do. I got shorter and shorter hair. Don't-mess-with-me hair.

I did well at school though, much like before, and that seemed to be the main thing. Good marks were the best measure of a healthy adjustment. Good marks and having a good time, which I did even though I felt a bit adrift. It wasn't a feeling I could put into words. It wasn't just about missing what I'd had before, and all my friends. I could talk about that, and I did. I felt uneasy, and I kept that feeling in my head and it took years to let it go.

But
I made new friends, and I adjusted. I could be funny, and that always helped. I hung out with boys. I learned to kick a ball that wasn't round. I remember thinking they were weak, soft, unworldly. I didn't know the word ‘unworldly' then, but it best describes what I thought of them, that side of them. They were good friends, though.

I think I first made friends with boys in Australia because that's what I was used to. In Ballystewart none of the girls in my class lived anywhere near us, but some of the boys did.

So, I took these four Brisbane boys, I taught them the hand signals, and I taught them how they should crawl if they ever carried a gun. One of their parents saw us doing it, so they took us to an adventure playground one weekend and we did the obstacle course so many times and drank so much cordial that Andrew Hailey vomited bright red.

And my don't-mess-with-me hair was soldier's hair. It reminded me of where I'd come from. And no one knew.

In 1972, we had Cubs and Brownies once a month in the Scouts' and Guides' hall in Ballystewart. We never went camping because it wouldn't have been safe and, for the same reason, there were some badge activities we knew we'd never do. I did the art badge. I got it for gluing seeds on paper to make a picture. We didn't mind really that we couldn't do badges. We played a lot of games and we had a good time.

The
first time I saw a real gun was there, when Mark Macleish brought it along in a bag. He said he'd found a few of them at home, but the bolts were kept separate so this wasn't the whole thing, and the ammo and magazines were kept separate, too. We didn't mind. It was a big moment anyway. The gun was treasure in that bag, the best secret I'd ever been in on.

I wondered if it had killed anyone yet, or been in a war somewhere and come home. I put my hand in scared, but the barrel was safe and hard, cold and precise.

We were supposed to be doing something with flowers that night, but I'd already finished. Dried flowers and twigs, that's what we had to work with, and instructions to make something decorative for hanging on a wall, a gift we were to give someone. I sprayed mine all gold and left it to dry and went down the back where there were drinks, and where Mark was waiting.

When I got home on those nights, my mother would say, ‘Did you have a good time at Brownies? Did you learn anything?' And often we didn't, but we did our best to that week. We cross-referenced the gun with the diagrams in the Commandoes and we tried to teach ourselves to strip it and put it back together. It might have been a Sten, that gun, and it was heavy but not so hard to take apart into its bigger bits. Not that we got much of a look at it, since we had to keep it in Mark's bag as much as possible, but we could take it to bits all right, and he went home with his bag clanking as though it was full of tools.

That
sounds unlikely now, but it feels like a memory. It feels like it shouldn't have happened that way, or at all. My parents have always said that most of the province was peaceful, and made it clear that their views are more informed than mine. So it was easier to learn to believe a little less in what might have been my own life. It would have been harder to talk, and I'd always said I wouldn't.

Toy guns had been banned early that year, I think. Soldiers shot a kid in Belfast when he came around a corner with a plastic Tommy gun. They banned caps for cap guns, they banned fireworks. We had a box of sparklers from before all that, and my parents would still let me light one inside sometimes. We'd shut the curtains and turn out the lights, and the sparks would prickle on the back of my hand and the air would smell stronger than an old gun for a while after.

I was always a bit scared though when we did it, because fireworks and toy guns had been banned at the same time as each other, and the boy with the plastic Tommy gun had been shot dead. We talked about it once at dinner at the Macleishes', and Mark had asked why the soldiers couldn't have just wounded him instead, but his father said they had no choice.

‘You can't get too fancy about shooting someone,' he said. ‘You just aim for the middle. The minute you try lining up a foot or a leg you'll get shot yourself. Anyway, it was Ardoyne.
He would have been out in the streets in a year or two with a real gun.'

I knew about the first roadblock to go up outside the village. I knew days before that it would be on the weekend, even if I didn't know which day and exactly where. It was Sunday morning, and we drove through without being stopped. No one said what they were looking for, but I figured it was something to do with Catholics, and probably the IRA. We'd talked about it at school, and that's where we sang the songs about the Pope and Bernadette Devlin, after all.

My father slowed the car down but they waved us through and he said, ‘See, it's nothing to worry about, really. I know they might look scary, but it's all okay. If we just look straight ahead and don't make a fuss, we'll be on our way home in no time.'

We drove between the two tractors they'd parked in the road, and there were people on them with sticks and knives, and handkerchiefs on their faces – some of them even handkerchiefs I'd seen at school. They had a point to make, and it wasn't about disguise. Sammy McKendry lifted his hand in a small wave to me as we passed through, and one of the bigger McKendry boys – the one with the gun – nudged him to stop it. But the gun was just an old shotgun, probably the one I'd first heard in the woods when I was three or four.

Later, on a walk with my father, I'd seen the fox it had shot, the little dead fox, and I'd been terribly sad. And the shotgun cartridges tasted mainly plasticky but also something else, and I could leave marks in them with my teeth. Then my father saw me biting them and took them away because they were dirty and because you don't eat anything you pick up off the ground. I can't have been more than three, maybe younger. But I wasn't afraid of the shotgun, even though it had killed something. It was more like a tool, and that was its job. The fox had been killing chickens, probably, or killing something that it shouldn't, at least.

I
practised morse code in my room with a torch, sending messages to the far wall, but I was never very quick at it. I'd sit at the window if I couldn't sleep, watching the back lane as far as its bend, watching how black the night became if there was no moon. And I'd signal morse code into the night sky, usually just ‘Hello' one time after another. Light was amazing. We'd learned about it at school. The beam would travel forever, and sometimes I scared myself by wondering who I might be saying hello to. They might come to earth, come to my house, come for me.

I knew aliens wouldn't speak English, not as their first language, but morse code was harder than English, so if they could crack that the meaning of ‘Hello' shouldn't be too difficult.

And I'd shine the torch into the lane sometimes, but the beam was too weak when it got there so I couldn't see a thing. If the bed had been higher, I would have slept under it. That would have been better.

V
ISITING HOURS START
at two p.m., so I decide to go and see Courtney at the hospital.

When
I recall my father at the roadblock – when I think about the scene now, years later – I can see that his aim was to get us through it and on our way. He wanted to get me through it without me becoming too fearful of what was going on. That was his focus, and behind all his calm talk. What I didn't see at the time was that his sense of calm was forced. He seemed genuinely calm, and I was too, so the roadblock never seemed out of the ordinary.

We drove on and talked about my grandparents – my father's parents, who would be coming from Carrickfergus to visit us for lunch – and we talked about the kind of spring we looked like having, or at least my parents did, and around then they must have begun making plans for us all to leave. We needed to leave. I was learning to hate people I'd never seen, and hate is wasted energy on its best days, and sometimes far more destructive.

I want to get something for Courtney, maybe a book.
I don't expect I'll see her again after this. She's in a hospital bed being consumed by that cancer with the long name, and I can't believe that she handles every minute of it matter-of-factly. I want to tell her that I've noticed her there, that she wasn't just a photo op, that she's still in my head.

I find a large bookstore in the Murray Street Mall and the staff direct me to the young adult section on the basement level. Courtney is four years older than Elli, and that's near enough to a generation at their ages. The hospital says it is – ten-year-olds are treated as children and fourteen-year-olds aren't. I know Elli's books. I can't guess what would be right for Courtney.

The manager of the section seems to have read everything, and she makes the choice for me when I tell her it's for someone who is fourteen and very sick.

‘How about something funny?' she says. ‘Something that's funny but also a good book.'

With my Perth mini-map, I find my way back to the hospital. I will tell Courtney about canoeing practice, and that she shouldn't be putting any money on me. I will tell her I'm lined up for paintball tomorrow, and honestly not looking forward to it but sometimes you end up doing stupid things of other people's choosing, allegedly in the name of fun. I will tell her, yes, this is my life, the weekend ahead is no aberration. It's how it is. And part of what I like about the job – though just a part of it – is that it regularly throws me things I'm not expecting, and not good at, and invites me to try them out in a ridiculously public way. It fascinates me – it still does – that that can be part of any job.

There's
not the same sense of excitement when I get to the ward today. A young doctor is by himself in the office area, writing in a file, and he doesn't look up. He sniffs and clears his throat and keeps writing. I never see anything of him but the top of his head.

A nurse appears from a nearby room, pushing a blood pressure machine on a stand, and she stops abruptly and says, ‘Oh, it's you. I didn't think we were expecting to see you today.' She takes the stethoscope from around her neck and folds it up in her hand. ‘But you're very welcome, though. Courtney's been talking about you ever since your visit.'

‘I didn't get to talk to her much yesterday, and I've got a gap in my itinerary this afternoon, so . . .'

‘I know she'll be glad to see you. She's just in her room. Reading the new
NW
.'

Courtney's door is the fourth or fifth on the left, and it's open when I get there. I'm reaching up to knock on it when she sees me. She looks surprised, but it's not the same look as yesterday. She's watching a soap, with the voices distorted by poor reception on the small TV. She's holding a magazine, the new
NW
, with the obligatory Nicole Kidman cover. And ‘Meg's shock break-up' as one of the stories flagged.

‘Meg's shock break-up' next to a face that doesn't look like Meg Ryan, but looks a lot like I might in an off-guard moment.

It hit us both hard, Courtney and me. And she had less hair than yesterday, I'm sure of it. There was a brush next to the
bed, set down beside her with her hair caught in it. My visit was useless. I gave her the book on the way out. She was distraught on my behalf. She hoped the article was wrong, all of it, but one look at my face when I saw the magazine told her it wasn't.

I had to explain how these things happen, even to people who care about each other very much. It took a handful of her tissues for me to get through it. I found myself saying things I'd said to Elli weeks ago, and again today in my head in the Internet cafe, about the bad luck at the heart of this. I pulled up short of only some of the detail, but what the hell, she'd read the magazine and it turned out details weren't being spared. I told her she shouldn't be put off by it, that sometimes relationships work and keep working and then I realised she would die soon, almost certainly, and I wondered what the hell I was doing.

Meg's shock break-up. There I am, in a photo from Canada: ‘Meg Riddoch partying hard in Calgary with Canadian alt-country star Rob Castle and a friend at the PanCanadian Comedy Festival.' I look drunk in the photo, but I'm not. It was early in the evening, after the Uptown Showcase but before anything else, and I've got my arms around Jen and Rob Castle, and a Big Rock Traditional Ale in one hand. The photo was taken in the Ship and Anchor, before we'd even sat down. It was Gary who took it, I think, the guy who talked about writing and the fifteen-plus walkways.