The Sailor in the Wardrobe Read Free Page B

their shields. Eventually the police lost the battle and the British army was called in. My father said the picture was complete now with the four allies from the Second World War still doing the same thing, as if they could not get out of the habit. It was French troops in Algeria, Russian troops in Prague, American troops in Vietnam, and now the British troops in Northern Ireland. We heard Jack Lynch saying that we could no longer stand idly by and watch Irish people getting hurt again. I even made a petrol bomb myself one day, because I was working in a garage at the time. But then I had nothing much tothrow it at, so I just lit it and watched the earth on fire in the lane at the back.
    When the British soldiers first arrived in Belfast, the Catholic people thought it was a great liberation because at least they were no longer going to be ruled by their Protestant neighbours. We saw pictures of women on the streets, handing out cups of tea to the soldiers and saying they were welcome. But that didn’t last long and very soon, the British soldiers were despised even more than their neighbours. The same women who had given them tea were seen kneeling down in the streets, banging dustbin lids as the soldiers went by in Saracen jeeps. The army of occupation, they were called now, and you could hear the sound of dustbin lids echoing all over the city like a long shout, like the curse of history following them wherever they went through the streets. One day I came home and saw my mother banging the dustbin lid on the granite step in front of the house. I could hear it echo along the street and it looked like she was carrying out a solitary protest of her own. When I asked her if she was doing it against the British, she laughed out loud and kept repeating it all evening, because no such thing had ever even entered into her head and she was only banging the lid to try and knock the snails off.
    And now the long shout was coming after Dan Turley. I heard it very clearly, as if it was right beside us, or above us. Just one shout, like an accusation that would not go away. Dan’s surname left hanging in the air all around us. I knew how threatening it was to hear your own name being shouted out like this by some invisible voice. Your own name like the worst insult in the world, following you down the street like a million banging dustbin lids.
    We had struck a shoal and were pulling in the mackerel. Dozens of them, leaping into the boat as if they were surrendering. The boat was full of slapping as the fish jumped around inside the metal box. I once asked Dan what it was like for mackerel. Was it the same as drowning for us or was it more like getting drunk, suffocating with too much oxygen, like when you breathe in fast and get dizzy? But he said nothing. He never says much. He doesn’t even call me by name. He just mutters and sometimes you have to guess what he’s saying in his Northern accent. I know very little about him. I know he’s an old man, over seventy. But he doesn’t want conversations about where you’re from and what age you are and how a mackerel feels when he’s dying on the bottom of the boat, staring at people’s shoes up close. All he told me once was that mackerel never stop moving. They can’t stay still. They’re on the run all the time, travelling at thirty miles an hour underwater without stopping.
    Dan ignored the shout and pretended it wasn’t his name. Maybe he had heard this kind of phantom shout many times before, but then he must have lost his concentration, because the line suddenly slipped out of his hand and ran out across the gunwale. He tried to catch it, but a hook buried itself deep, right in between thumb and forefinger.
    ‘Hook,’ he said through his teeth and I saw the blood in his hand.
    Ever since I started working at the harbour, I have been dreaming about hooks in jaws. Hooks in eyes, hooks in every part of your body. Hook torture and hook crucifixion. Maybe I should have