Two Summers

Summer on the Road

THAT WAS THE SUMMER Mark was sleeping on the sun lounger in the front room. Jilly had come home from Edinburgh the week after Easter with Danielle. Second time since the New Year.

'I'm not going back this time,' she said. She said that the last time too. Then she had stayed less than a week, most of it out in the hall on the phone, Danielle on the floor at her feet playing with whatever the telephone seat drawer yielded up by way of toys: neighbours' spare keys, Goodwill Offering envelopes for Sunday services long since passed, squirmy elastic bands that Jilly said were a choking hazard and shouldn't be there.

'They shouldn't be there?' her father said. 'They shouldn't be there?'

He didn't finish. He rarely did.

Jilly went back to Edinburgh and three months later came home again. Ten weeks now and counting.

She had had the box room when they were growing up, being the eldest, being the girl. Her room had been off limits to Mark and Dennis, the only door in the house other than the bathroom door, facing it down the landing, that was ever shut.

Which only seemed to make her more paranoid.

'Which one of yous was in my room?' she would say at dinner.

'It wasn't me.' (Mark)

'It wasn't me.' (Dennis)

'It was me.' (Mother) 'I had to put away your ironing.'

'I could have put it away myself.'

'The last lot was still sitting on top of the chest of drawers.'

'I've been busy, in case you hadn't noticed.'

Mark didn't know about Dennis, but he did go in there sometimes, those very rare occasions when there was nobody else in the house, on the lookout for magazines - between the mattress and the bed base, the more grown-up ones were - hands sweating as he searched them for the problem pages.

My boyfriend says if I loved him I'd go all the way.

I am embarrassed by my hair you know where.

I am seventeen and still haven't had my first period.

Are you really supposed to blow?

Jilly clearly couldn't go back into the box room, not with Danielle, and the travel cot (it weighed a ton when he carried it up the stairs for her) and all the other bits and pieces it took to keep a baby of fourteen months going from one day to the next.

The original plan was Mark and Dennis would alternate on the sun lounger, till Dennis said, 'Well wait a minute: I've my O levels coming up. Nobody made Mark sleep on a sun lounger last year.'

'Sure, why would they have? Jilly wasn't here last year.'

'It doesn't matter: nobody made you.'

'He has a point,' their father said and nodded.

'Oh, listen, if I'm making everybody's life difficult,' Jilly said.

'You're not,' said their mother. 'Mark can sleep on the lounger on school nights and Dennis can sleep on it at the weekends. There.'

'I have to revise at the weekends too you know,' Dennis said. He had his head down, but Mark knew he was smiling: he had hardly had a book in his hand all year.

'You can swap as soon as the exams finish,' said King Solomon, in their father's voice but then midway through June a friend of his whose wife worked in the City Hall told him of openings in the Council's cleansing department - holiday cover for roadsweepers and binmen - and without even talking to Mark about it he said sure, why not, put his name down.

'I thought it'd be money towards when he goes to university,' he told Mark's mother, the day the letter dropped on the mat with word - the first anyone else in the family had heard about it - that Mark had been offered the job, starting first Monday of July. 'And he'll get a donkey jacket out of it.' Which, since it sounded as though he wasn't going to get to hold on to much of the money, was actually the one detail of the deal Mark could see in his favour.

'Now, the only thing is, the depot they have assigned you is over the far side of the Shankill Road.'

'The Shankill! What time does he have to start?'

'Half seven.'

'He'll have to be leaving here about quarter past six if he's to be there on time. It's two buses.'

'Does that mean I'm going to be woken up every morning with him clomping through the living room?' Dennis said. 'Some rest that's going to be for me!'

'He has a point,' said their father.

So Mark was sleeping in a sleeping bag on the sun lounger. Or not sleeping a whole lot. There were the springs for one thing. Twelve of them in all. Thick and hard and, after even a minute or two away from direct sunlight, cold. They really only left you a strip up the middle about two feet wide to lie on.

And then there was Danielle.

Some babies woke smiling no matter what hour of the day or night, his mother said, and some babies never woke but they howled. 'I had two smiley babies and one howler - you - in between, which just goes to show you.'

Don't be too hard on the wee thing, in other words, even if she's doing her howling right above your head at five o'clock when you have to be up in an hour for your first day at work.

He was up and dressed, in the end, twenty minutes before his alarm was due to go off. He had washed the night before so that he wouldn't have to go up the stairs, though how any of the rest of them slept through Danielle's waking and being changed and put back down again for another hour or two - 'please, for Mummy' - was beyond him.

His mother had left him out two pieces of bread buttered side up on a sheet of tinfoil and a bowl beside them with sliced tomato in it. Next to the bowl she had left a piece of paper with the address of his Great-Aunt Irene ('round corner from old place', she had added in brackets), though as his father had already said she was on the other side of the Shankill entirely, and it wasn't as if Mark was going to have time in his day to just dander across there and say hello.

He made up the sandwich and put it in the pocket of his bomber jacket and let himself out by the back door.

He passed a wee lad out on his bike delivering the early morning papers, but apart from him, and the far-off whine of the milk float, stopping and starting, stopping and starting, no one appeared to be out and about. Not even the fellas who boasted about sitting out all night to guard the Eleventh Night bonfire, on the waste ground at the entrance to the estate.

The estate was on a Blue Bus route, which meant it was technically outside the city limits. The first bus didn't leave until seven o'clock. The stop for the Red Bus - the City Bus - was another fifteen minutes' walk through the estate next to his. Half a dozen people were waiting, all in their own wee worlds, though they turned as one when he joined them on the footpath, almost as though he had gatecrashed a party. The bus, coming from a third estate, was a single-decker, a quarter full, mostly down at the back in the smoking seats. Mark stood near the front in the space for baby buggies, hanging on to the strap and watching the suburbs gather themselves into the city proper. Still the only shops open were newsagents and petrol stations, but at every stop more people got on, so that by the time the bus pulled up at the side of the City Hall, Mark was pressed right up against the window.

He had to pass inside the security gates on to Donegall Place to catch his second bus. It was nearly always civilian searchers these days, with just a couple of soldiers standing behind chatting to each other. A couple of Rag Days back, four men in fancy dress had stepped out from the students throwing flour at passers-by and shot a soldier and a woman searcher at the gate near the cathedral.

Mark saw himself in the angled mirror above the way out raise his arms while a searcher waved a wand vaguely about his legs and up his back. A second guy patted him down. Came back to his jacket pocket for a second pat. (His bomber jacket, for fuck sake.) A squeeze.

'What's that in there?' he asked.

'My lunch,' Mark said and went to take it out, but the guy shook his head: on you go.

Two Rag Days ago: aeons.

A church bell (where was it?) was chiming for seven o'clock as the second bus - another single-decker - pulled in. Again Mark stayed near the front, further forward in fact and not for the view this time. He was less certain of his fellow passengers, where they were coming from and where they were getting off. The route passed through Carlisle Circus - Shankill on the left side, New Lodge on the right: Protestant, Catholic, you might as well say - and then up the Crumlin Road, between the courthouse and the jail, as far as Agnes Street on the Shankill side, which was where Mark had been told he should get off. After that he didn't know: Oldpark, maybe, or Ardoyne, both places he had grown up understanding he ought to avoid.

Of course nobody said a word of any sort to him.

As he was standing waiting to cross the road though, a wee girl sitting on the back seat next to her mother gave him the fingers up the side of her nose.

Then the bus pulled away and he was looking up the long street of three-storey houses that led to the Council depot.

He zipped up his bomber jacket and jogged across.

First thing he noticed when he reached the end of the terrace were the bullet holes in the pillars supporting the corrugated iron gates. You could nearly have drawn a straight line joining the holes on the left and the holes on the right. He remembered as a kid making a machine gun out of fists...