Читать книгу Two Souls - Henry McDonald - Страница 16

8

‘BREAKING GLASS’

July 1978

All through the summer, my father continued to be obsessed with the Dutch midfielder Robbie Rensenbrink. The TV broadcasted images from Buenos Aires of the Argentine masses marking out their team’s triumphant progress with ticker-tape and toilet-roll storms and of their manager, Menotti, chain-smoking in the dugout. When their captain, Passarella, eventually lifted the World Cup in the sky-blue-and-white stripes, my dad cursed under his breath and muttered angrily about an ‘inch’ and a Junta.

For him the ‘inch’ became the difference between justice and injustice both on and off the field. In the last thirty seconds of normal time, the Dutch midfielder broke through Argentina’s defence and almost won the World Cup for the Netherlands, his shot striking the post just an inch away from global football glory. But that inch gave the Argentinians the space to regroup and go on to win 3-1 in extra time, thus allowing the military dictatorship to milk the victory. Even before that if-only moment, I had been subjected to lectures from my father all through the competition about CIA-trained torturers who put electrodes on their captives’ genitals, the thousands of ‘Disappeared’, the reports and rumours of death flights over the South Atlantic and the near total annihilation of his comrades far away across the ocean. After the Argentine team won, he would preface every lecture about the Junta’s exploitation of the World Cup by berating Rensenbrink for missing his chance.

When Rex Mundi arrived back in Belfast after six long years of exile, he brought over a birthday present for me, one which enraged my dad. It was a blue-and-white striped football shirt he had pilfered from an Argentinian student who had fallen asleep bare-chested on Brighton beach, having left the jersey on the pebbled shore. I barely took it off during the tournament, much to the disgust of my dad, who branded me a traitor to the ‘Disappeared’, the defeated Argentine Left, the Dutch and to Robbie Rensenbrink.

‘Take those colours off inside this house! And you, Aidan McManus, should know better than to bring the jersey being used by the Junta Generals. Your brother would be ashamed of you,’ my father said, thumping the table during one late Friday-night game and his fifth bottle of Red Heart Guinness.

Rex Mundi reminded me of this a few weeks later as we made our way via the railway tracks running parallel to the River Lagan up to Sabine’s house in the Holy Lands. He informed me that his once-firebombing brother cared little anymore for politics anywhere. After his release, Mick had ended up in West Berlin, dossing down in a squat of hippies by the Landwehr Canal, close to the Wall, which sounded even worse than the accommodation he had once shared with other prisoners during that eighteen-month stint in Crumlin Road jail. His brother was now an entrepreneur of narcotics, both a user and a dealer, who sent parcels of dope home to the English south coast with his couriers of hippy trailers, Bowie-disciples and German punks, the latter on their way to pose inanely up and down London’s Kings Road.

‘At least when our Mick comes home or sends his teams over to England there’s always seriously good dope to be had,’ Rex Mundi said as he deftly rolled up a joint even while we walk at pace under the shadow of the blue gas tank. The faint reek of Leb Gold is competing feebly with the pervasive stench of the sulphur from the coal-powered gasworks to our right.

‘So tell me about this art-house babe then, cousin,’ Rex Mundi continued as we climbed through a broken piece of fencing leading towards the safe territory of River Terrace.

‘I first saw her in The Pound. She always dances to the same song every week.’

‘What song?’

‘“The Speed of Life”, the first track on Bowie’s Low. We listen to the album all the time now.’

‘So apart from being a fellow Bowie freak, what’s so special about her?’ Rex Mundi asked.

‘She’s just different. So different from anyone I’ve ever met before. She’s a bit like the man himself: when I first saw her on the dance floor she looked as if she might have fallen to earth from another planet too.’

‘You are one serious wanker, cuz.’

‘Nah, you’re just jealous!’

‘Well then you’re taking a chance introducing me to her. You’re a brave man, Ruin. I could end up as second jockey.’

‘You can fuck right off and get that idea out of your head now or I’ll put you back on that boat to England,’ I replied, before changing the subject in case he really did have ideas about her. ‘So when did your Mick start losing interest in the revolution? I thought he went to Germany because he wanted to link up with the Baader-Meinhof gang?’

‘Yeah he probably did, but he ended up being linked up instead with a load of Turkish geezers who promised to make him really rich. Plus he got into smack, which means he won’t end up rich after all.’

‘Smack?’

‘Smack, yeah. Heroin, Robbie. Not blow or grass or any of that shit. Really serious business. Anyway, never mind about our Mick. What about your bird?’

‘Whatever you do, please do not call her a bird,’ I pleaded.

‘Has Padre Pio met her yet? he asked.

‘You must be fucking joking!’ I replied. ‘He knows fuck all about her, and let’s keep it that way.’

‘I hear you, cuz. But he’ll be feeling neglected by now. I’m surprised he’s not making it his business to know what’s keeping you from him.’

Rex was right, but I didn’t want PP anywhere near my Sabine, my new world. I wanted to leave him behind – him and all his shite. Sabine was a taste of freedom.

When we arrived at 66 Jerusalem Street, Sabine led us into the front room. The table was covered in a red-and-white chequered tablecloth, which boasted a spread of salads, veggie pastas and numerous oddly shaped bottles of Portuguese and French rosé wine. Rex Mundi went straight over, sniffed the food, lifted the bottle of Mateus Rosé and necked a third of it in one greedy gulp.

‘Fuck me! All this rabbit food! Is there anything dead on offer?’ he asked after slamming the bottle back down on the table.

She looked him up and down. There was instant disdain on her face, which secretly pleased me.

‘It must be exhausting being such a cool rebel with your special ‘Boy’ zips and bondage jacket there,’ Sabine said caustically as she delivered a kiss to my forehead.

My cousin planted his DMs on the table perilously close to the pastas and fumbled in his pockets for his red pack of Rizla. ‘Still, it’s nice in here. Who do you share it with? Have you got any tidy housemates?’ he asked.

‘By tidy I think he means sexy, Sabine,’ I interrupted.

‘I know exactly what he means … and wants. For your information, I live alone or at least I used to be totally alone until this cheeky wee shite came along. Now have you any other equally stupid questions you want to ask?’ Sabine said with her hands on her hips. She had that slightly scrunched up stare of defiance on her face that I had come to love. She was the picture of power on her home patch, defiantly underwhelmed by the sight of an original 1976 ‘English’ punk in her living room.

‘So, cuz here is invading your splendid isolation,’ Rex Mundi replied sulkily.

‘Actually your cousin is great company. He’s different from the rest of them.’

‘Fair play to him. Happy for the both of you,’ Rex Mundi grumbled. He began to roll the next joint, like a soldier who has been taught to deftly break apart and reassemble a rifle while blindfolded. He never looked down at the table once as he pieced the reefer together.

‘Here’s a present from our Mick and his Turkish mates in Berlin,’ he said, sparking up and passing the joint to Sabine. ‘Hey love, our Mick told me once that no one who lives in the Holy Lands was ever born in the Holy Lands. So where are you from originally?’

His question irritated me. ‘People are normally asked that in this town before they get a hole in the head or their throat slashed, Rex. You’ve been away too long.’

Sabine inhaled the hashish and released the smoke through her nostrils before emitting what sounded like an orgasmic sigh. ‘Don’t call me love. But just to satisfy your nosiness, I’m from East Belfast.’

‘Hey snap! Me too,’ Rex Mundi said. ‘I’m also from the east. Where abouts exactly?’

‘Imperial Drive off the Woodstock Road originally,’ she replied, which made my cousin choke as he took his turn to draw on the dope.

‘Fuck me pink, love. You were a two-minute walk from my house. You might remember it. It was the big three storey one on the main road that got burned down in 1971. The one just facing the chapel that your neighbours also tried to burn down quite a few times.’

Noticing that Rex Mundi’s tone had grown a little darker, I joked nervously. ‘Small world, eh! Belfast’s a village.’

‘Yeah, a village with lynch mobs carrying fiery torches. We were given twenty-four hours to get out of your area or else,’ he said, pointing at Sabine.

‘It wasn’t MY area,’ she protested. ‘Whatever happened to you and your family had nothing to do with me. Like now, with all this shit around us. I’ve no interest in any of it. None. The only parade I will ever attend is one that supports my right to control my own body. I won’t march behind any flag. So don’t lump me in with that lot over what happened to you.’

Rex Mundi deliberately ignored her protests. ‘Over what happened to us! I’ll tell you what happened to us, shall I? If it wasn’t for Ruin’s dad and some of his friends we would all be in the ground now. Have you told her about your dad and his old comrades yet, Robbie?’

Sabine sensed that he was turning on me now all of a sudden. ‘Leave Robert and his family out of this. It had nothing to do with my family, and besides, we weren’t even living in the area back in 1971.’

‘Where were you living then, Sabine?’ I asked, trying to deflect any questions from her about my dad’s old associates.

‘In Fallingbostel with the British Army of the Rhine,’ she said and immediately appeared to regret telling us this.

There was a silent cessation of hostility between them. A gentle paralysing fug of hashish hung in the air as we listened to Low once more, with Rex Mundi constantly going over to the record player and dropping the needle on ‘Breaking Glass’. He was trying to convince Sabine that it was a song about Iggy Pop invading the peace and space of Bowie’s Berlin hideaway.

After we had downed the third bottle of Mateus Rosé, Sabine gripped on to the side of the armchair and finally staggered to her feet. She grabbed a crumpled up sleeping bag, threw it at Rex and snarled, ‘You’re on the chair or the floor. Take your pick. I’m fucked and I expect to be fucked by this young man sometime in the morning. I’m off to bed, Robert.’

Rex Mundi ignored us as we snogged good night, preferring to skin up another joint while spearing a few tubes of pasta and popping a couple of olives into his mouth. He only opened his mouth again when I went over to replay ‘Breaking Glass’ once Sabine was in bed.

‘She is some find, mate. I’ll give you that. But Rob, a word of warning: don’t get too gone on her.’

‘What are you talking about? You heard her. She’s cracked on me.’

His voice grew strangely softer as he moved over to the other sofa where I was sitting. ‘I’m not being funny, but she won’t be around forever for you. She’ll move on, believe me. And it’s got nothing to do with her being a bluenose or me not even getting to be second jockey.’

‘Bluenose! What shite you talk! You know she’s not a drum-beater so why go on about where she is from? You heard her – she hates all that shit: the Twelfth, the Orangemen, the Queen. It means fuck all to her.’

‘Robbie. It’s got nothing to do with where she comes from; it’s about where she’s going. I’m telling you this. I’ve met her type so many times across the water. All those middle-class art college punk girls, dressed like they’re extras from the Masque of the Read Death just to piss off their daddies. They all go off to do higher things with richer people, mate, not with the likes of us. And speaking of daddy, don’t you think her da was in the Brits?’

‘Course he was in the Brits, but so what? By the way, don’t go mentioning that ever to her again, please.’

‘Why?’ Rex Mundi said as he lay back in the sofa beside me and took one final draw from the butt of the joint.

‘Because loose talk costs lives, as your uncle often reminds both me and you.’

Tired of his jibing at her, I zipped open the sleeping bag and flung it over to him. A short while later, he conked out. I cleared away the mostly uneaten food, rescued Low from the turntable and slipped it back into its sleeve. I walked over to the mantlepiece and picked up the portrait Sabine had painted of her father following her mother’s death. I looked back at my cousin, snoring inside the sleeping bag, and wondered why he had only mentioned my mum once since he came back. Rex Mundi had never asked a single question about how she had gotten sick or the way she had finally slipped away. Perhaps his dad had warned him not to pry, given my mother’s reputation for causing my father grief over the last few years and subjecting him to ridicule behind his back in the district. To his brother and friends, she was the lush, the bar-room bike, the chaser of hard men, the hunter of all those OCs, adjutants and operators.

Sabine was still awake when I tiptoed into the bedroom and slid in beside her. She slithered over to the side of the wall. I flipped over on my side and ran my forefinger along the contours of her body from the nape of her neck to the small of her back.

‘Your cousin really hates me, Robert,’ she sniffled.

‘He’s stoned and still finds it weird being back here, that’s all. He gets carried away with being home. For fuck’s sake, I had to stop him wearing a Troops-Out T-shirt today when we went round to the Fountain to meet some of my punk mates. My dad went ballistic and said if he wore that we would either be arrested or killed.’

‘But he blames me for being burnt out of his house even if that had nothing to do with me. I wasn’t even living here then.’

‘I know. I know. He’s just acting weird and will soon wise up. He was even going to wear that T-shirt down to The Harp. Imagine the reaction of some of the punks to that. He hasn’t a clue what it’s all about here.’

Sabine turned around abruptly and faced me. ‘Well, he’s no better than that idiot Joe Strummer wearing his ‘Smash H-Block’ T-shirt, is he? And you lot look up to Strummer like he’s some sort of guru.’

‘I thought Strummer was taking the piss out of all that shite in “Tommy Gun”,’ I said, feebly trying to defend The Clash frontman.

She started singing in a mocking whisper, ‘“Oh Tommy Gun, you ain’t happy less you got one! Tommy Gun. Ain’t gonna shoot the place up just for fun.” Total idiot, Robert.’

I continued singing where she’d left off but was met with a short sharp donkey kick into my shin.

‘Keep it down and go to sleep. I want you energised for the morning,’ she ordered, and then she said, ‘Robert? Is that his real name? Aidan? Why the fuck then does he go by Rex Mundi?’

‘Next time he wears the biker jacket instead of the ‘Boy’ gear, you will understand.’

‘Understand what, Robert?’

‘That he has the Devil on his back, Sabine.’

‘More like a chip on the shoulder, if you ask me,’ she murmured as she drifted off to sleep.