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BLACK CAB BLASPHEMIES

28 April 1979

There’s a steamer swelling in my pants that won’t go soft. It’s all the fault of the oul doll sitting opposite on the flip-down seat in the back of a Falls black taxi. I keep hearing Lou Reed in my head every time I look across at her shiny black-leather boots and the pencil skirt exposing a slash of her naked thigh. She’s in her late forties or early fifties, has big bouncy tits and is a bit on the beefy side. Her heavy-handed, aquamarine eyeshadow clashes with the deep red lipstick, which leaves a lurid line around the edge of the unfiltered Park Drive she is smoking.

At first she smiles, almost knowingly, as if she has spotted what’s going on inside my army trousers. But then her face suddenly shrivels to a scowl when she pans up to my old school blazer and the upside-down mini crucifix pinned on the pocket where the St Malachy’s College badge was once attached, to where Gloria Ab Intus is no more. She must think she’s stumbled upon a satanic coven when my cousin leaps on board and reveals the back of his biker jacket with the head of a horned goat inside the stencilled pentagram, and the words ‘Rex Mundi’ below in silver sprayed-on script.

Our progress up the road is held back by Padre Pio chatting to the driver, who seems to know his runaway father. Judging by the way our taxi man rolls his own fegs out of a home-made tobacco tin adorned with Gaelic script and a crude tricolour, he must have done some time for the cause – probably just a few months on remand in Crumlin Road jail by the looks of him. He is way too fat to have been smearing shite all over the walls up in the H-Block.

‘Is your da still in Dundalk, son?’ he asks PP.

‘Nah, New Jersey. The last I heard of him anyway, but you’re not supposed to know that.’

The oul babe in boots is slithering along the rough leather seating, inching her arse away from us to the relative safety of the other window. She blows smoke out in short nervous jets into the street, which is filling up with Reds fans, several of whom are horsing back carry-outs before the long walk up the Falls and down to Windsor Park.

‘If you’re ever in touch with your daddy, tell him Big G was asking after him. Tell him he still owes me a tenner.’ The driver laughs.

‘Oh aye. Will do, mate,’ Padre Pio answers, as he backs away from the front of the cab and into the back with us, dismissing the driver with a couple of sneaky hand jerks behind the glass while mouthing, ‘wanker’.

Seated next to me, Padre Pio suddenly points to our fellow passenger and says as loud as possible, ‘Hey, what’s wrong with that oul bat? What’s she staring at?’

Rex Mundi steps in chivalrously. ‘Leave the oul bird alone, dickhead!’

The woman has her head out of the window now. She is shaking slightly, and the feg between her forefinger and middle finger is vibrating.

‘She probably doesn’t like our dress sense, gentlemen,’ I say, as the taxi finally begins to move towards Divis Street. We’re following a long line of beetle-shaped vehicles stuffed with Reds supporters making the same journey as us, all of them chanting, ‘Windsor, Windsor here we come! Windsor here we come!’

Rex Mundi is busy rolling a joint that he informs us we’ll only light up at half-time on the Kop, just to soothe the nerves. My cousin has only one metal badge dug deep into the lapel of his leather biker jacket. The only badge he would ever wear was the emblem of his adopted hometown’s team: the club crest of Brighton and Hove Albion. Two years ago, he warned me that punk badges were only for posers. We were walking along Hove seafront after Top of the Pops, and I was still reeling with shock and awe after having watched Johnny Rotten sing ‘Pretty Vacant’.

Our crew don’t wear badges or scarves. We were banned from doing that shortly after Padre Pio read an article in The Sunday Mirror (or rather that I read out to the ignorant semi-illiterate twat one morning) about the English footie hooligans who never donned their club colours. This meant they could go anywhere, even into the opposition’s end, totally unidentified. This, he keeps reminding us all, is exactly what he has done. I suppose that is why, deep down, behind the hostility, PP actually likes Rex Mundi. My cousin has seen some real action on the terraces across the water, especially the aggro between Brighton and their hated rivals Crystal Palace down at the Goldstone Ground, where their serious rucking made those old warring mods and rockers out to be a bunch of fairies. Padre Pio’s eyes would widen as Rex relayed the derby day damage; how his older brother Mick nearly blinded a Palace fan with diluted ammonia squirted from a water pistol.

Cliftonville FC are to play in the final today in yellow tops and blue shirts, and this is already seriously pissing off Padre Pio. When he clocks a group of fans wearing home-made, paper mache, stove-pipe hats, painted with yellow and blue hoops, he explodes.

‘Yiz look like a bunch of fucking Southampton fans in 1976, ya wankers,’ he roars out the window as our taxi passes Divis Tower. ‘Fucking clowns. Total fucking clowns. I didn’t recognise one of them, Ruin. Did you? Not a single one of them. Dressed up like bastard Southampton fans from 1976, and I bet not one of them has had their legs splashed with somebody else’s piss inside the Cage at Solitude!’

‘Too fucking right, mate,’ I fire back as quickly as possible to placate him.

But on he goes, ranting and raving against a newly found bunch of enemies to berate. ‘I bet ya not one of them wankers ever went down to Glenavon or Portadown or had darts thrown at them on the Shore Road when we played Crusaders.’

‘Too fucking right, mate,’ I repeat, while suddenly remembering the afternoon, not too long ago, we went down to Castlereagh Park to watch Cliftonville play Ards.

We had been too late for the official club coaches and opted instead to jump on a commuter bus full of coffin-dodging pensioners decked out in their greys and creams. When we met at our rendezvous point not far from the spot where I saw firemen shovelling bits of bodies into sacks seven years earlier on Bloody Friday, our group decided to hide our colours. Anybody carrying Cliftonville scarves shoved them into their parkas or tied them under their jerseys. The Ulsterbus was heading into the hun heartland of East Belfast, so we had to keep our heads down. Our safety pact lasted all of five minutes. As the bus crawled up Albertbridge Road, PP had one of his occasional kamikaze notions. When we reached the traffic lights at The Albert Bar, Padre Pio pulled a scarf out of one of the younger kid’s pockets, put the red-and-white bars up against the window and started hammering. Two oul boys pinting outside ran into the pub, and before the lights hit amber there was a mob gathered outside armed with snooker cues and pool balls. The windows imploded. Within seconds, clear glass turned into hundreds of shattered fragments, some flying through the air like missiles. I hit the deck and lay on my stomach, only looking up eventually to see three middle-aged bare-chested men trying to yank open the rubber flaps of the automatic doors with pool cues. But they were either too tubby or too pissed to force their way on board. The OAPs inside had been holding up their Co-Op shopping bags to their faces as if they were going to shield them from the flying glass. The driver put the gears into third and moved swiftly onto the Newtownards Road with a large crowd in pursuit. If they had reached us, there would have been a lynching. But as I lay there on the floor, all I could think about was Sabine. She had grown up not too far from here, further up at the posher end of the Newtownards Road, and there I was, going to die in a bus at the grimier end of it.

I had almost hoped, in a brief, self-pitying death wish of a moment, that they would find me cut to pieces near the Connswater River, and she would read about it in the papers before weeping, wailing and feeling sorry for everything that she had done to me. It was the laughter that shook me out of my martyrdom fantasy; it was the demonic, sniggering, spittle-filled laughter from the very back of the bus. Padre Pio had his feet dangling out of the broken window and his body reclined horizontally along the seat. His face convulsed with laughter, and a thin trail of blood and saliva trickled down the side of his mouth.

‘Look at your face Ruin, just look at your fucking stupid face,’ PP cackled.

Instantly, as if he himself had summoned them up from my own pores, pin pricks of pain pulsed and rippled all over my cheeks. When I put my hands to them there were micro fountains of blood bubbling up from the skin. As I tried to clear my face with the back of my hands, Padre Pio started abusing the elderly passengers, reminding them about Airey Neave’s recent ‘up and under’ demise. Then he began conducting an insane orchestra of insult-songs all the way to the peninsula, singing and chanting to the tune of ‘Those Were the Days My Friend’ that ‘we’re gonna burn yer town, we’re gonna burn yer town, we’re gonna burn, we’ll burn your Orange hole down.’

Now we are on the road again, this time up the Falls, on Irish Cup Final day. There is only one thing on PP’s mind this afternoon and it is not victory over Portadown. It is not about putting one over all the Prods of various hues who will turn up at Windsor just to see Cliftonville defeated. It will not be about our team lifting the cup in the club’s one hundredth-anniversary season. Padre Pio simply wants to be the first one onto the Windsor turf. He wants to be seen on TV dodging the peelers and the security men, avoiding the missiles that will rain down on him from the North Stand. He wants the world to see that he’s game.

At the Royal Victoria Hospital, the oul bird leans across the cab and rattles the glass with a coin. The driver breaks suddenly. She gets out, pays the cabbie and then looks back in disgust at us.

‘I really hope yiz win today, but yiz are still going to hell, ya bunch of weirdos,’ she croaks.

PP leans out and hollers, ‘Just you go in there and get your bag plumbed in.’

The taxi is barely across Broadway, which is cordoned off at the bottom near the motorway by a line of battleship-grey RUC Land Rovers and a bottle-green wall of cops in riot gear, when the driver stops again. Our new fellow passenger is a wino in a pork-pie hat and old black Crombie coat. The neck of a brown bottle is sticking out of one of its pockets. There is a pencil-thin film of dried brown liquor caked above his upper lip and his eyes are bleary. When the cab passes by a mural close to Beechmount showing the head of a black man being squashed over a lemon juicer and the words above it, ‘Don’t squeeze a South African dry!’ the wino fishes the bottle of Mundies out of the Crombie and tilts it towards the disappearing wall mural.

‘Fuck you, Sambo cunt,’ he rasps, before guzzling back the wine.

He continues to down the Mundies while moaning about his plight. ‘See they’ve banned it from the Provie and the Sticky clubs because of this Apartheid thing. So I have ta drink my Mundies on the streets now. They won’t even let me take it into the hostel.’

When we ignore his protests he changes the subject. ‘Here lads, who’s playing up at Casement Park today? That’s some crowd going up the road. Any of you lads got a spare feg or a couple of shillings even? I got robbed in Castle Street earlier.’

‘I’m not giving you anything for being a silly old racist cunt,’ Rex Mundi pipes up while attempting to roll another joint in the back of the cab.

‘Ach Jesus, lads. Give me a chance. I defended this district once, you know.’

This produces gales of laughter from us, but the wino suddenly has a serious face on.

‘It was nineteen hundred and sixty-nine, not that long ago. A few of us were out that day and we did our bit. We stopped the Orangemen burning people in their beds. Then in nineteen hundred and a seventy-one there were a few of us left taking on the British Army down in the Lower Falls too,’ he says, taking another swig of the South African hooch.

‘Oh aye, grandad,’ PP interrupts. ‘Just like nineteen hundred and sixteen when we beat the Brits!’

Padre Pio then swivels around, drops his trousers and Y-fronts and spreads his arse cheeks apart right in front of the wino’s face, close enough for the oul boy to peer right up his chocolate alley.

The wino looks terrified and rattles the glass to be left off the road.

‘Casement’s for Gaelic football, ya stupid oul soak,’ PP shouts out while he pulls his monks and trousers back up in one rapid movement.

I’m amazed we haven’t been booted out of the taxi, but our driver has ignored us all the way towards the Donegall Road. Maybe he is still scared of PP’s da, maybe he is scared of PP – and if he isn’t yet then he really should be.

When PP signals for the driver to halt just before St James he reminds us that there is still plenty of time before kick-off to get more drugs and drink ahead of our trek down to Windsor. I’m left to pay the fare while PP is having a last word with the cabbie.

‘You keep quiet about my da now, comrade. I probably shouldn’t have told you where he is hiding out these days in case the Brits ask the Yanks to send him back.’

‘No worries, son. No worries. You can trust me. See that oul boy by the way.’

‘Aye, what about him? Pain in the arse.’

‘I never charge him. Wanna know why?’

‘Aye, why?’

‘He was picked up eventually in 1971 and never recovered over what the British did to him. He couldn’t hold a pint glass straight, even back then, let alone shoot straight with a rifle. He was just the first person the Brits picked up that day and they decided to do a number on him after one of their squaddies got killed near the Falls Park. Next time you see him in the back of a black hack or walking the road, don’t give him such a hard time, son.’

‘I will stand and salute him instead,’ Padre Pio promised as he gave a military-style farewell to our driver.