Paperboy (6 page)

I was learning that a TV commercial was like the Bible in Belfast: if you took it entirely literally, it could cause a lot of pain. Of course it had all been Trevor Johnston's fault – he had made me do it!

When my rival first arrived to do paper delivery, the pecking order of paperboys was already established. The rule was that when everyone assembled at Oul' Mac's van for the distribution of the papers, the more senior paperboys received theirs first. By this stage, it was I who was in pole position. New boys and younger boys got their newspapers last, even if sometimes these included a couple of torn back pages for which they would have to suffer the consequences from an angry customer who played the Football Pools. The shade of the paperbags slung on the shoulders of the line-up of paperboys painted a spectrum of power and status. At the front, almost head to head with Oul' Mac, were the dirtiest bags, while the clean bags loitered nervously at the back. To my horror, after a few months of Trevor being in his employ, and twice in one week, Oul' Mac gave him his papers first. This was getting serious! Maybe Mrs Mac hadn't cleaned Oul' Mac's glasses that month, or maybe he was confused by the smell of all that Brut, I hoped desperately, clinging to the possibility of some sensory impairment on Mac's part as an explanation.

Suddenly, Trevor Johnston was everywhere, like little Jimmy Osmond. He was even in my scout troop! And when he was made the leader of my patrol group just because he was tall and good at knots, I was livid. As we lined up, raised three fingers to God and the Queen and said, ‘Dib, dib, dib', Trevor was at the top. Big Jaunty was the leader of the pack.

Then, one Friday night, I was delivering the
Jackie
to Irene Maxwell. I had struggled to remove the white knitting wool tied round the gate and gatepost to stop Irene's wee brother from getting out onto the road, so I was already distracted. When I removed the glossy magazine from the grimy interior of my paperbag, there was David Cassidy on the cover.

‘He looks a bit like Big Jaunty, so he does,' I found myself thinking, before catching myself on. It was the last straw. I snapped like one of my guitar strings being tuned too tightly. I hated Trevor Johnston! I wanted him to try to jump Mr Hamilton's fence and catch his Doc Marten laces on the wire, and fall on his pretty face and tear his parallels at the knees and to have to get stitches in the Royal. I knew the only pacifist paperboy in West Belfast should not be thinking this way, but then again, most people in Belfast were justifying much worse.

However, fate was to intervene, as generously as a drunk customer deciding to tip on a Christmas Eve. It was just a couple of weeks before the banging of the bin lids for the anniversary of Internment, and my mother was standing at our front gate, shouting up the street at me that my dinner was ready. I had just finished the papers, and, as I arrived at the merciless and still unforgiven, guitar-abusing gate, who should be striding up the street towards our house but Trevor's da! He always looked like he was marching, even when it wasn't the Twelfth.

‘Doesn't his son do the papers with you, love?' my mother asked and added, innocently, ‘You know, Big Jaunty – he looks like the lovely wee fella that sings on the Partridge Family, so he does.' I gripped my paperbag strap and breathed deeply.

‘Hello, Mr Johnston, what about ye? It would melt ye the day,' Mammy said, alluding to the fine summer weather.

‘Och, Betty love, what about ye?' he replied. ‘Isn't it terrible what them Fenians are tryin' til do til us?'

‘Och aye, terrible, love,' she complied.

This was like talking about the weather to Trevor's da.

‘I hope you're not buying any more of that Papish cheese?' he continued.

‘Wouldn't touch it, love,' lied my mother impressively.

Just then, I noticed an unfamiliar feeling of warmth in my Doc Martens – and I knew it couldn't have been coins, as it wasn't a Friday night. I looked down to see that Trevor's da's dog had just peed on my boots. It was a yappy wee chihuahua, which was quite surprising because most of the Loyalist leadership had rottweilers. My big brother said men who walked chihuahuas were homos, just like wee lads who played violins. (He added this second fact just to peeve me, of course.) According to my big brother, there was only one thing in the world worse than being a Provo, and that was being a homo. I sometimes wondered what he would do if he ever met a homo Provo. I thought homos were boys who wanted to kiss boys, and that had nothing to do with either small dogs or musical instruments. I myself only wanted to kiss Sharon Burgess, and I couldn't imagine Trevor's da kissing one of his mates with a moustache in the UVF.

‘Have you heard our news?' asked Trevor's da.

‘No, love,' said my mother, ‘Is your Martha bad with her nerves again?'

‘No, Betty, love, we're movin' to Bangor.'

‘Yes!' I almost leapt out of my squelching boots.

Bangor was on the train by the sea, and where you moved if you got a good job in the bank. We used to go to there on the Sunday-school excursion, but we had to sing ‘Jesus Loves Me' and not ‘The Sash' on the double-decker. Bangor had a Barry's Amusements that still used old money like my granny: halfpennies, pennies and sixpences. The dodgems didn't do decimal. Barry's also had an old ghost train that was scary but not frightening. It was a safe sort of scary, not like getting a bus in Belfast in the riots.

Bangor also had a very famous outdoor swimming pool called Pickie Pool, where, as my parents told me, they would go for a paddle when they were courting. I never got a go in it because I always forgot my rubber ring. Of course, Big Jaunty wouldn't need any inflatable assistance once he got there. He was probably a brilliant swimmer, like yer man Mark Spitz with the moustache, from the Olympics!

My mother was genuinely shocked by Trevor's da's revelation.

‘Och, I'm sorry to hear your news, love. When are yousens leavin'?' she enquired.

This was breaking news, and I could tell she was determined to get all the details before Big Aggie up the street, who was jealous of her sewing and usually uncovered the best gossip first.

‘September, love. Martha says it's not the same round here since all the dirt from down the Road are movin' up, and she says our Trevor would be far better off in Bangor with his asthma, and it's got one of them new shopping centres.'

As he marched off down the street, I'm sure I heard my mother say something under her breath, like, ‘I'm sure they'll be delighted in Bangor.'

Afterwards, Mum rushed the fish fingers and Smash ‘potatoes', and disappeared for most of the evening. Later, as I ran around the corner to the erstwhile telephone box towering inferno, with two 2p pieces in my hand to listen to the new Showaddywaddy single on Dial-a-Disc, I spotted my mother still sprinting from house to house like a good paperboy, conveying the news to the most trusted neighbours. She was clearly enjoying delivering these tidings. Sadly, I had to hang up on Dial-a-Disc after the first chorus of ‘Under the Moon of Love', because my big brother walked past and overheard me singing along, and shouted through one of the many broken windows: ‘Are you singing down the phone to Sharon Burgess, ya big fruit?!'

As I stomped home in humiliation, I noticed as I looked down that the white ash from Titch's papers was now covering my Doc Martens, due to the adhesive properties of Trevor's da's dog's pee. It was, I imagined, just like the layer of ash from Pompeii in my school history book. As I looked for a convenient pavement puddle to clean it off my boots, I noticed Irene Maxwell standing at her gate, crying her eyes out.

‘What's the matter with you, Irene?' I asked. She could hardly splutter the words out through the sobs, but I knew what was coming next anyway.

‘Big Jaunty's leavin' to live in Bangor, and he was lovely, so he was, and he looked like David Cassidy and … and I think I love him,' she wailed.

‘Now she sounds like a David Cassidy song herself,' I thought, unsympathetically.

Then I did two sins I had been told not to do. Uncle John at the Good News Club had told me not to tell lies, and my father had told me not to be such a selfish wee bastard. To my shame, I did both simultaneously, with a heartbroken Irene Maxwell.

‘Och, isn't that awful?' I feigned. ‘I hadn't heard he was leavin' and Big Jaunty was one of my best paperboy mates too. Oul' Mac'll be ragin', so he will, and – oh no, I might have to be the new patrol leader in the Scouts!'

My thoughtless words only compounded Irene's grief, and so I made a stab at consoling her: ‘Sure, you and wee Sandra might see him at Pickie Pool on the Sunday-school excursion next year. Although I heard Trevor's mammy doesn't let him go out much, because he's bad with his asthma.'

Poor Irene. I handed her my other two pence and told her not to worry, because Showaddywaddy's new single was brilliant and that she should go and listen to it on Dial-a-Disc round in the telephone box, but that she should watch her sandals, because the ash from Titch's paperbag was still on the floor.

I was as heartless as an apprentice petrol-bomber but happier than a paperboy sent home on full pay because Oul' Mac's van was hijacked. Trevor would be transferred to a North Down newsagent, and he would take his brown parallels with the tartan turn-ups and his feathered hair and his inflammatory Brut with him to Bangor. And all the girls at Pickie Pool would say Big Jaunty was lovely, so he was, and that he looked like David Cassidy, but I wouldn't have to care anymore!

After six months of serious challenge, I was to be peerless and without equal once more – undisputedly, the top paperboy in the Upper Shankill.

Chapter 6
Three Steps to Heaven

W
eekends were hard work for a paperboy, so they were. There wasn't just the gauntlet of Friday nights to be run, with the possibility of attacks by wee hoods hopeful of stealing your takings for the week: on Saturdays, there were heavy additional professional demands too. Saturday night meant two newspapers to be delivered, and so double the weekday workload. There was
Ireland's Saturday Night
as well as that day's edition of the
Belfast Telegraph
. The former was very popular in the Upper Shankill, even though it had ‘Ireland' in the title. Of course, you weren't supposed to like anything with Ireland in the title (although the Church of Ireland seemed to be all right for some people). I remember us all having to cheer very quietly the night Dana – who said she was from ‘Derry' instead of ‘Londonderry' – won the
Eurovision Song Contest
for Ireland. If Mrs Piper had heard us cheering because of ‘All Kinds of Everything' getting ‘douze points' from Norway, she might very well have suspected that we were secret IRA supporters and we could have ended up by getting a ‘friendly' call from Trevor's da.

Anyway, for some strange reason,
Ireland's Saturday Night
was known to everyone as the
Ulster
. In my younger days, I had thought that the Shankill was Ulster. Later I realised the Shankill was in Ulster. Then, in geography class one day, I noticed on the map that Ulster was in Ireland. Finally, I learned that, although Ulster was not actually in Britain, it was, in fact, more British than Britain itself. It all made perfect sense. The
Ulster
newspaper was simple too. It was a straightforward weekly sports paper with all the day's sporting results. Published on a Saturday evening, to catch all the latest sports results from matches and races that had taken place earlier in the day, it was a true ‘hot-off-the-presses' newspaper.

You felt special delivering the
Ulster
, because people were standing in the street waiting for it. You were a very important person, because you were the courier of extremely valuable information: you had something fresh and precious, something everyone wanted now. With the
Ulsters
slung over my shoulder, I felt like a scout from a John Wayne movie, returning to the circled wagons to tell his compatriots where the Apaches were. Men who liked football and horses got the
Ulster
, and they often met me at their front door to take delivery of it. They were like kids getting a birthday card or their Eleven Plus results, or like Irene Maxwell getting her
Jackie
when it had David Cassidy on the front. These customers would start reading the paper straight away, standing up, fully absorbed in its contents, even before the front door was shut again.

All of this was, however, a mystery to me. I couldn't imagine a more boring newspaper, apart from that pink English newspaper with all the numbers in it, which nobody up our way ever got. I myself preferred to read about
Space 1999
and
The Tomorrow People
in
Look-in
magazine. Science fiction was so much more exciting than football, and it seemed to cause less trouble, even though there was usually a higher body count. Unlike with football, Protestants and Catholics seemed to like the same science-fiction programmes. No one ever rioted after an episode of
Lost in Space
, even when Dr Zachary Smith had endangered the life of Will Robinson and his family yet again!

I had sixteen
Ulsters
to dispatch on a Saturday evening. This wasn't very many, relatively speaking, but though it didn't take long to deliver them, it did tend to mess up my social life if I was planning to meet Sharon Burgess at the Westy Disco on a Saturday night.

The Westy Disco was so called because it was a disco that was held in a hut on the corner of the West Circular Road. It was an old Nissen hut from the war which was used by Ballygomartin Presbyterian as a church hall, falling down and freezing though it was. I went to our well-ordered Scouts meetings there when the lights were on, but on a Saturday night the hut was transformed, and the lights were switched off and replaced by flashing coloured spotlights and ultraviolet tubes that made your white socks and dandruff glow in the dark. I always made sure to wash my hair with Head & Shoulders before a night out at the Westy Disco, because there was nothing as humiliating as wee girls laughing at your fluorescent dandruff as you tried to do a manly dance to Status Quo.

Every Saturday night, all of us teenagers crammed into that ageing Nissen hut, as the corrugated iron walls vibrated to the sounds of the latest hits from Sweet and The Glitter Band. The floor was sticky with chewing gum and slippy with condensation, but we managed to make our moves anyway – the Slush, the Twist, the Bump and the Hucklebuck. We had to, because this was our only dance floor. The Westy Disco certainly attracted far more kids than Sunday school or the Scouts. Some nights, there were more than four hundred of us in platforms and parallels, dancing innocently to Showaddywaddy and the Bay City Rollers, while outside our city convulsed.

The Westy was a good place to ask a wee girl you fancied for a slow dance during a Donny Osmond song, so that you could have a go at snogging. It was here in the dark that I discovered that tongues could have more fun than just blowing bubble gum. Of course, some of the people in the church who never smiled did not approve of such worldly discos. They said that dancing was a sin, because it was like sex. It surprised me that sex was a sin. I was certain that even good livin' people did it, because they had lots of kids and not all of them could have been adopted. However, Reverend Lowe, our independently minded minister, allowed us to dance because, as he said, it kept us off the dangerous streets and out of the pubs and the paramilitary organisations. On several occasions, Reverend Lowe had been spotted ordering paramilitaries off the dangerous streets into the pubs. He used to preach about the lesser of two evils.

I, however, was no ordinary member of the Westy Disco. I was in a very privileged position. My parents were voluntary youth leaders, in charge of the most popular youth gathering in the whole Shankill. This made me special: it was like being one of Paul and Linda McCartney's children. My parents had started the disco, along with Uncle Henry and Auntie Emma from our street. (They weren't my real aunt and uncle, but they were warm people, and just like family to us.) Uncle Henry did the door where we paid our 10p and blew into the breathalyser to get in. My mother and Auntie Emma, who were best friends and like mammys to the whole hut, did the tuck shop where you could get crisps and chewing gum, and peas and vinegar. Auntie Emma never missed a Saturday night, even though she didn't like the disco lights because the ultraviolet rays made her prematurely false teeth look black. Uncle Henry was the warm heart of the Westy, but it was my father who was the star. Daddy was the DJ, like Jimmy Savile on
Top of the Pops
, only younger. He played the 45s on a double-deck turntable plugged into enormous speakers and would turn up the music so loud that the neighbours would complain. This was very cool, of course: not many dads up our way got accused of blaring out the Rollers too loud.

As resident DJ at the Westy, my father picked the hits and read out the requests, so he did. With the profits from the tuck shop, he would buy two new singles every week from the record store. They were the latest new releases, and they would be his Top 40 predictions: he always managed to choose the songs that went to No.1. My father was an unlikely candidate for youth-club leader in the church, because he wasn't ‘good livin' ' at all. He smoked and drank and said God didn't exist because Christians didn't practise what they preached. I wasn't so sure that this followed, because paperboys often didn't do what they were commanded to do either, but Oul' Mac certainly still existed.

For a middle-aged man, Da's musical choices were very good, although he did get a little too excited by some of the more irritating Boney M singles. One of them was called ‘Belfast': it was a bouncy little singalong pop song all about our hatred for one another in our city. We danced and sang along to it as if it was about something happy and funny, like ‘Waterloo'. I put my position as son of the DJ to good use, slipping in extra requests for my latest favourite singles and asking my da to play slow songs by Donny Osmond at just the right moment, when Sharon Burgess might be most receptive.

One of the best slow songs that often elicited a snog from your girl was ‘Three Steps to Heaven' by Showaddywaddy. The lyrics were brilliant. They gave you an easy-to-remember, step-by-step guide to getting yourself a girl. Showaddywaddy were geniuses. Unfortunately Mrs Piper disagreed, and when she heard this song blaring out while passing the hut on the way to her prayer meeting one night, she complained to my father for leading us all astray with ‘the Devil's music'. She said that there was only one true step to heaven and that was for us all to get saved. My DJ da told her to catch herself on.

Whatever Mrs Piper thought, I followed Showaddy-waddy's instructions to the letter. ‘And as I travel on and things do go wrong ….' they sang. It was as if they knew of my personal travel problems due to all the buses getting hijacked in Belfast! ‘Just call it steps one, two and three,' they crooned, and I would listen with an earnest desire to follow these ‘three steps to heaven', so I would. ‘Step One – to find a girl to love …' Sharon Burgess, of course. ‘Step Two – she falls in love with you …' Hopefully – if I have splashed enough Brut all over. ‘Step Three - you kiss and hold her tightly …' Yes! A proper snog like Big Ruby at the caravan had shown me. ‘That sure feels like heaven to me.'

The night at the Westy Disco always ended with ‘The Last Waltz' by Engelbert Humperdinck. When the first bars of the piano commenced, we knew it was time for a fish supper and perhaps the opportunity to walk a girl home. Engelbert certainly cleared the floor, because ‘The Last Waltz' was old-fashioned compared to the latest number from The Rubettes, but I knew this tune also had a deeper meaning. It was my parents' favourite song from the stereogram in the sitting room, and the one to which they had danced when they won the Ballroom Dancing Competition at Butlin's in Mosney the year before. So Da played it every week, not just to let us all know that the disco was over but also to let my mother know that he loved her.

In terms of paper delivery, the mountain had to go to Mohammed on a Saturday evening. Oul' Mac didn't deliver the
Ulsters
to the streets in the legendary yellow van, as was his wont on week nights. He had clearly carried out a cost– benefit analysis on using the van for such a relatively small delivery. The executive summary of this time-and-motion study was communicated to us in no uncertain terms: ‘Youse can come and get the
Ulsters
yerselves, ya lazy wee buggers,' he advised. So on Saturdays I had to walk to Oul' Mac's shop, down at the bottom of the Ballygomartin Road. This was more of a nuisance than a heavy burden until one Saturday night, when something happened which would henceforth give my favourite Showaddywaddy song a whole new meaning.

On the dark Saturday night in question, I am on my way home from the newsagents with my
Ulsters
. It is late October. I have already emptied my boots of the takings from late-paying customers and handed over the warm and fragrant coins to Mrs Mac. I have bought myself a packet of sweetie mice with a tip from Mrs Hill with the baldy poodle. Walking back up the hill towards my street, I hear the customary noise of a bomb thudding somewhere in the city. It is not too loud this time, not like the night the IRA blew up the Gasworks and the whole sky lit up like in a crash landing from
Lost in Space
.

It is the first frost of October. Icy footpaths are brilliant for sliding on, except when your bag is so heavy that you lose balance, and your fall shreds the sports pages of the papers you are carrying, and No. 93, who never tips, complains, and Oul' Mac shouts that you are a ‘clumsy wee hallion'. I can see my breath in the cold stillness. I recognise a frosty, smoky Halloween smell in the air: fog and sparklers. I am happy, as usual. As I walk past the chippy, my mouth waters at the wafting aroma of fish suppers on the vinegar-soaked pages of the papers I had delivered yesterday. I am alone, my ever darker paperbag over my shoulder, my fingers yet again black with ink from troubled pages.

All at once, I become aware of two men, walking close behind me. I glance around. One of them looks like the lead singer in Showaddywaddy, yer man with the dark glasses. The other, smaller, one has an aggressive mouth like a dog that bites paperboys, and he looks like he's had too many fish suppers. They are both staring at me in an unmistakable, ‘hard man' way. I am outnumbered, so I don't even dare to venture a ‘who d'ye think yer lookin' at?'

‘Robbers!' I conclude in a tense instant, although these are guys in their twenties – older than the usual robbers. Their pace has now quickened, as if they are trying to catch up with me. I quickly turn off the main Ballygomartin Road to escape into an empty street and up the hill towards home. Safety always seems to be hillwards in these parts. The two men follow.

In my mind, all I can hear is the robot in
Lost in Space
repeating, ‘Danger, Will Robinson! Danger, Will Robinson! Danger, Will Robinson!'

Catching up, my pursuers bundle me into the small untidy front garden at No. 4, whose owners are never in, but who always get the
Radio Times
(I always read it in the street when
Doctor Who
is on the cover). The Showaddywaddy guy presses something hard and cold into my back through my duffle coat. ‘Danger, Will Robinson! Danger, Will Robinson!'

I hear metal clicks against my toggles as I struggle and turn to get loose. I bite on my grammar-school scarf.