Visits

Dieses Buch erscheint als Band 1 der Belletristik-Edition poetis im Verlag des Institute for Science and Innovation Communication (inscico)

This book appears as Volume One of the Edition poetis published by inscico Institute for Science and Innovation Communication

1. Auflage 2017 / 1st Edition 2017

Das Buch ist unter der ISBN 978-3-9814811-9-8 im Handel erhältlich.

This book is available for sale under ISBN 978-3-9814811-9-8.

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Die Weitergabe dieses Buches als Ganzes oder in Teilen ist nicht gestattet.

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced.

Copyright © 2017 by inscico GmbH, Kleve / Germany

www.inscico.eu/verlag

Cover-Foto: Robert Bräutigam

(Taken in a Ruin Bar in Budapest / Hungary)

For Eva, Maggie and Lila – my true inheritance.

Your feet will bring you where your heart is

An áit a bhuil do chroí is ann a thabharfas do chosa thú

Irish Proverb

Thanks

To all those who offered practical help and encouragement.

In particular:

My husband Alexander Gerber for formatting and production and for pushing me out through the door to my first writing group.

The Creative Writing Group in Berlin.

The Schreibgruppe, Culucu in Kleve, Niederrhein.

Erwin Kraut for editorial comment, proofreading and mentoring.

Louise Churcher for proofreading.

Vanessa Gneisinger and Fiona Kahlau for editorial comment.

To my son Dylan, my family and my friends for helping me stay on track.

Contents

Foreword

Visits

Marching Orders

Visiting Gran

Visiting the Past

The meaning of it all

Me, aged six

Memory Tricks

Exposure

The Journey Home

The Playground

The Big Brown Car

Up Yours and Definitely No Surrender

Inheritance

A collection of rather banal memories

A Safe Distance

Making Small Talk in a Troubled Country

Tour Of Duty

Secrets

Green

She was invited to a wedding

After Noelle

A Walk In The Dark

Into the Light – Dia non Dul

Wishing Well

The last time I visited

In May

About the Author

Illustrations

Endnotes

Foreword

Whilst many of the pieces in this collection are based on real events, this is creative writing and not autobiographical. Names, characters, places and incidents are used fictitiously.

Therefore, whereas, for example, my son really did ask me about Bloody Sunday in an airport bookshop (Up Yours and Definitely No Surrender), my brother and I were never turned into thorn bushes (The Playground) and there was no insurance man called Raymond (The Big Brown Car).

Although I left Northern Ireland for good in 1990, somehow I am always visiting it inside my head. Always looking for that piece of myself I left behind. This is why I say I left Northern Ireland a long time ago, but Northern Ireland has never left me.

Visits

Rattling down a road of my own making

still alone, chasing ghosts

from Berlin morning windows

March sunshine seeks me out

but I’m not playing

I can‘t

We stop

„Bitte entschuldigen Sie die Störung. Wegen einer technischen Defekt können wir die Fahrt voraussichtlich nicht weiter...“ i

But I can’t

Stop

Mourning

from Berlin morning windows

still alone, chasing ghosts

rattling down a road of my own making

Marching Orders

last orders

real women don’t drink pints

and swear at real men

or forget to comb the curls

at the back of their hair

so there

and anyhow I’m not good for you

and you’re certainly not for me

but I know this

so who cares

My head is full of words, and worries and other people’s questions. Cycling home through the woods, in deep and earnest conversation with myself I suddenly realize it’s The Twelfth of July.ii Fancy that, and I can still remember that one warm 12th thirty years ago, nineteen years of age, home for the first summer break from university. I fancied myself in love. With Rodney. A bad guy, not even a very clever one. But a beautiful one. Warm grass and kisses, grown-up drinks and blushes. In a hurry. Always in a hurry. The cows strung out along the foot of the hill, going home for milking. Sheep feeding and bleating on the blue-green Sperrin Mountains deep into the night.

In those days you could still cycle down the main road and survive. In the evening traffic was minimal, cycling to the cawing of the late evening crows, retracing the tracks of my first secret Catholic friendship. Calling in on my gran, playing cards with one of her slightly crazy sisters or my other gran sitting in front of a turned-off telly watching for signs of life outside the window. How often did I push my bike to the subway entry, turn round and wave at my gran still standing there anxiously waiting? And how I would love to do it now, then turn round, for one last wave. Before I am swallowed up by that subway entry.

Visiting Gran

Granny clacks her cameo rings, gnarled knuckles gripping scored and burn-marked surfaces. She’s dealing cards onto her coffee table.

„Can I maybe open the window?“ Me, small-child conscious, tries to prise, unpermitted, the window latch open. But it is stuck with years and years of smoked-out Silk Cut. The china dog guarding the plastic fireplace seems to be mocking me as I sit back down in resignation and am promptly swallowed up by a too-big mock leather sofa. It farts me out again just in time to stop my son from hitting his head against a chipped edge. He is trying to pick up cards, which have tumbled out of his hands, uncoordinated in anticipation, onto a deep-pile carpet which needs a good shampoo and conditioning.

„You’ve dropped your cards. Be careful.” Granny admonishes. „And there’s still one there!“

„Where?“

„There. By the poof. A Queen of Spades.“ she snaps. And I had been told that she was almost blind.

“Here. Let me.“ The card is greasy, smudges my fingers. I try to wipe it on my trousers before putting it back into the nervous grasp of my son.

„Mind ye don’t bend it. I’ve had those cards for ages.“ Granny sticks a Silk Cut in her mouth and squints over a lighter.

We’re going to play Blackjack. Granny goes first, looking for all the world like a dragon with a perm, she slaps a card down on the table.

„But I don’t remember the rules!“ I protest.

„Aye.“ she replies.

„No! I mean how does it go again?“ I glance quickly at her ears. She’s not put her hearing aid in again.

„THE RULES! HOW DO YOU PLAY IT?“

„Sure ah taught ye.“ she says.

Thirty years ago I think, but don’t say it.

„I’ve forgotten, Granny. Just tell me again, please!“

„Och!“ Her eyebrows snap at each other in annoyance. „Them aul things.“ she mutters under breath. Then louder:

„Yer aim is to get a hand of twenty one. Two to nine at face value. Ten, Jack, Queen and King are all worth ten. An Ace can be one or eleven. Blackjack is when you get twenty one with just two cards. That’ll be of course an ace and a ten.” She hacks up some phlegm.

„Er, ok.“

„Was will diese alte Frau, Mama?“ iii

„Dylan, das ist unhöflich. Die ist deine Ur-Oma!“

„Ja, aber ich weiß nicht was sie will!“

„Die Regeln erklären, natürlich.“

„What‘s that? What does he want?“

„For me to explain the rules, Granny.“

„Eh? A biccie. Does he want a biccie?“

„Oh Mama, darf ich eins haben?“iv

„No Dylan you had enough earlier!“

„Aber Mama, nur eins, bitte.“ v

„No, Dy-“

„Och let the wee cub have a biccie! Would you like a wee biccie?“ She slaps her cards down in delight. She gets up before I can stop her and shuffles over the shag pile onto the dirty carpet and out into the kitchen.

My son’s face is glowing with victory.

„Don’t get too excited.“ I say and feeling mean, add „They’ll be stale and soft and nibbled at the edges by mice.“

„Eeeh, Mama!“

„Oh shut up and look here. The aim of the game is to score twenty one. These cards here are worth......“

Visiting the Past

And so, I am lying in bed. In almost darkness. In between. I let them come. Images and whispers, snatches of thoughts and associations, just as suddenly snatched away again. I am tense. So tense that my right arm begins to go numb. I move, flinging my arm at some silly angle above my head. Free, blood assaults my veins. It hurts. A swollen sack of pain. Concentrate. I must concentrate. Images and whispers, snatches of thoughts.

It´s you – my namesake. Twenty nine years ago. July 1983. The second time we took up our friendship. In the mess of your parents’ house. Too much furniture, a pile of tyres, bin bags full of God knows what. The family dog, a young Alsatian, pisses in the hall against the telephone table.

„Shall I get a cloth?“ I offer, me, the good girl, the nice visitor.

„Och leave it be. ‘s good for the carpet.“ Your father says and pets the dog as if in praise. If he registers my surprise he doesn’t let on.

„Maggie!“ he roars „Wud ye put the kettle on!“ and goes into the living room to put the telly on. Maggie, a big woman spilling out of shapeless clothes, appears through a doorless doorway, sniffs the air, then seeing me, tries to flatten down her toilet brush shock of hair. Behind her, her spitting image, her eldest son Ian, smirks.

„Och it’s Craferd, aul’ Craferd.“

I stick out my tongue at him.

„Never mind him!“ shouts Maggie and pushes him back into the living room. „Go mik us a cup o’ tay, ye cheeky hallion, ye.“ And then to me „Sharn’s in the back bedroom tryin’ tae get wee Adele tae sleep.”

„Oh“

„Och sure ye’ll be alright. Go aun in. She´ll be pleased tae see ye.“

In the dim, curtains badly drawn, Sharon is bent over a cot singing softly. I make a big show of closing the door carefully, and am rewarded with a smile and a whispered invitation to come and look. An impossibly tiny baby, with big liquid eyes and jet back curls, is sucking on a dummy and staring riveted at her mother.

„She’s lovely.“ I whisper in awe. And indeed she is. Up until now I could never really see what all the fuss was about as regards babies. All this cooing and geeing and soppification. And then I stare too at her mother. Can this be the same girl who had tried to engage me in a conversation about my sex life at the toothpaste counter less than a year and a half ago? While I had blushed and stammered in my supermarket overalls, and tidied up rows of mouthwashes behind my weekend counter, she had looked at me knowingly.

„There are things you can use, you know.“

And while she was giving birth and learning to nurse I was drinking my way through my first year at university, learning little in the way of academic knowledge, but a lot about life. And politics, philosophy, unrequited love. And deeper meanings. Or so I thought. But now, perched here on the edge of a bed in a dusty cluttered room, I realize I know nothing. Nothing at all.

The meaning of it all

What is

love?

Frogs or

Aubergines bursting

at their purple seams

or me pushed gamely up against a small town wall

wanting it all

fuck hesitate!

fucking it up

in true film fashion

slipperless

pretending not

to believe in the myth

losing myself to learning lessons?

so then

what the fuck

is?

Me, aged six

The family garden in the 1970’s

Hair

Still there, still fair

pretty as the picture

I am looking out of

with my brother, and

a row of dolls, lined up

legs kicking the technicolour air

of the bright 60’s sunshine.

The family garden

still made of grass

stretching away behind us into the blue

Sperrin Mountains.

Idyllic you may think

but we are already old and worried,

discontent

posing for pictures

on a Sunday afternoon

The Protestant family album

Oh! How cute! Is that your brother?

Did he really have such white hair?

And weren’t you pretty, then!

Then.

And then we turned to play

upset the dolls

fists and legs flying in the air

For Gawd’s sake! Can’t a body

have a bit o’ peace around here!

Peace?

No!

Like the hair

It’s not there

Memory Tricks

Long legs hold me

I cannot breathe

sacks of flour in a dusty storeroom

we are hiding, but how?

Surely we are being missed

the dentist’s drill whines on children’s bones

the milk cart starts up

and out in the fields the smell of slurry

spreads, like the new healthy margarine

Tomorrow a magician will come

To trick coins out of children’s ears

From between their fingers

he will reward them with chocolate money

and orange lollipops

but you will get none

you will not be picked

again

amen

pull the cold leeches from the toilet walls

pick at your skin

don’t let them in

Exposure

Cold air

On cracked bone

The dentist drilling

„Open wide

Relax!“

Eyes squeezed shut

Spinning

Through the dust and debris

Of things past

A Northern Ireland sixties classroom

Palm outstretched

For the willow cane

For a pencil stuck

In a best friend’s head

For forbidden words

„Fuck you! You’re dead!“

Forbidden words

But worser still

The words left

Unsaid

Playing tig

In the schoolyard

Quickly caught, squashed

No room to breathe

„When a man marries a woman

He asks her if she wants

To make a baby.

She says yes, and then

He sticks his thing up her

Fanny“

No! No! No!

This is worse than custard

Force-fed in the school canteen

I run

The Journey Home

was ne’er much fun

A yellow bus, Mr Magowan

hacking and spitting us

all on board

for a twisty jaunt o’er

Gillygooley and Drumquin hills

I sit alone, mostly

Or with my brother

Counting rain drops on cloudy window panes

the others laughing, yelling, teasing

doing deals

and us? Small, so very small

waiting

in a vacuum of noise

every Protestant hedge

every Catholic tree

bringing us closer

and closer

end stretch

the yellow bus stops

C’mon get up, get out first

and maybe, just maybe....

But the seats have feet to trip us up

arms to hold us back

twisting and turning down the steps

schoolbags caught up in some

big thorn bush smelling blood

tearing for skin, demanding sacrifice

and the others? - laughing, yelling, pushing

my brother piggy in the middle bouncing ball

daring me to rescue

Still. I stand still. Where is the courage?

Blue. True Blue.

I hold on to the straps of my schoolbag.

And I run

And I run

And I run

The Playground

Sharon and her brother Mark circa 1973

Summer. School’s out for summer. Alice Cooper or summertime and the livin’ is easy, grass is jumpin’ and the fish are high. Or something Janis Jopinly like that. Yes, summertime – those lazy, hazy mythical days for swimming with friends in cool water, licking ice cream from between your fingers, falling in love and licking ice cream from between someone else’s fingers.

So far, so good. But it’s not good. For this is summer in Omagh, summer in a small town in Northern Ireland in the early 1970’s. There’s nothing to do, nowhere to swim and even if there were, it’s too cold and raining most of the time. I’ve spent all my pocket money in the first two days of the holidays on sweets and crisps. And I’ve eaten them all as I lie alone in the front room, reading and reading. Outside pouring rain. Inside, I read and read. But even with that I’m now bored.

And as for falling in love. Who would want me? For I’m nine or maybe ten, plump in all the wrong places and have wild red hair.

“You need to lose some weight.” said my mother’s sharp-tongued sister not that long ago, pinching at the fat around my waist as I stood in the kitchen reaching for a bun.

No, there’ll be none of this hot and wild smooch and sex business I secretly read through in the adult section of the mobile library when no-one’s watching. Harold Robbins “The Carpetbaggers”. What’s a fucking carpetbagger anyhow?

So yeah summer time. And a whole two desperate months of it.

“I wannae go tae the park!” whines my younger brother. Now that I’m old enough to be responsible my mother’s gone back to work part-time. And left me alone to look after my five-year old brother. What fun!

“Jesus!” I scream. He’s just hit me with his metal Tonka truck. I kick him. He kicks me back. I thump him. He screams hysterically.

“Am gonnae tell mammy on you, so I am!”

“You started it you wee bastard!”

“You said a bad word, so you did!” and he screams again. Louder.

Shit, what’ll I do? I decide:

“Ok, ok. Look if ye wannae go tae the playground, we’ll go tae the playground.”

So we go to the playground. At least the way there is free from danger. Up where we live, where the people own their own bungalows there is no room for a playground. The kids

down the road have their own slide and paddling pool, but they don’t want to play with us for we’ve moved from the park - about five years ago, but well, people don’t let go of the past so easily in Northern Ireland. So we aren’t good enough.

But down in the council housing estate, known as The Park, they don’t want to play with us either for we’ve moved and become snobs, and for that we have to pay. They love to bully us. We are scared and alone. They sense blood and love to hunt us wherever we’re going. Which is a problem. Especially today, as the playground is in The Park and my bloody brother wants to go there, doesn’t he!

At the top of the steps leading down to the twisted shapes and rides in primary colours, I say a silent prayer, then out loud.

“C’mon, sure there’s no-one there anyhow.”

And for a while we are alone. Just the wind and some rain and the whoosh whoosh of cars racing by beyond the bushes. And just as I’m about to bribe my brother with some baked

beans for lunch if we go back now, I hear the sound of distant laughter. And, looking up, I see it’s time to run.

“Oh God! How I wish I was a bush. A big killer-thorned blackthorn bush.” I mutter and close my eyes in desperation.

And well you know that saying that sometimes you shouldn’t wish too hard……..

Newsflash

Police are still searching for the brother and sister who went missing early this morning. They were last seen at the local playground. Police reported finding a cardigan snagged on some blackthorn bushes in the nearby playing field.

This is the third such disappearance in this playground in the last thirteen months.

Epilogue

“I’m hungry.” says the little blackthorn bush.

“Snap up a few midges.” replies a bigger bush close by.

“But ah don’ wanntae eat midges. I wan’ baked beans.”

“Don’t be stupid. You can’t eat beans, you’re a blackthorn bush now.”

“But ah don’ wanntae be a blackthorn bush!” the little bush wails.

“Be quiet or they’ll hear you.” The big bush shakes her thorns, shiny finey killer thorns. But the little bush continues to wail. They, the Park kids, pissed off at not finding any prey to bully, are sparring with each other. They don’t seem to hear the wails of the hungry little blackthorn bush.

“I don’t wanntae be a blackthorn bush.” he persists.

“Oh God!” says the bigger one, exasperated “I don’t either, if you wanntae know the truth.”

Just then, a passing fairy lands on one of the bigger bush’s magnificent thorns.

“I am sorry.” says the fairy, “but you did wish.”

“Well can’t you just turn us back again?”

“No, I’m afraid not. I can grant you another wish though.”

“You mean I have one wish, but I can’t be the way I was before.”

“No neither you nor your brother. Take some time and think about it.” The little fairy begins to groom its wings.

“Shame the Crawfords aren’t here.” says one of the Park bullies.

“Aye,” laughs one of the others. “They’re always a good bit of entertainment.”

“Did you see that face on her the other day.” chimes in one of the other park bullies, “when Sandra Watson pulled aul’ Crawford’s knickers down in front of everybody at the bus stop. Did youse?”

A chorus of ayes. They fall about laughing.

The bigger bush is horrified and turns to the fairy. “Ok I know what I want. I want you to turn those bullies into plants just like us.”

“You mean like blackthorn bushes?” says the little bush.

“Oh no, no, that would be too good for them. No let me think.” Just then a lawnmower starts up. Someone from the district council sent to trim the playing field.

“I know,” says the big blackthorn bush excitedly. “Turn them into meadow flowers and put them on the pitch right in the path of that lawnmower.”

“Wonderful!” tinkles the fairy and then off she goes and does just that…

The Big Brown Car

The big brown car. It’ll be there again soon. My mother likes its visits. Shoos me out to play:

“Have tae hoover. Tidy the place up. The Insurance Man’s comin’. Ye’ll only git in the way.”

It’s cold outside. My plastic wellies keep suckin’ at my socks, rubbin’ my heels raw. The leaves are turnin’ on their branches. I stick my fingers in my ears cos’ I don’t want to hear then screamin’ as they’re torn off and tumbled through the wind until the last bit of life is ripped out of them.