Our Wee Town’s Violent History Is Having Its Hollywood Moment
An excerpt from Prestige Drama by Séamas O’Reilly
We heard about Monica Logue going missing same as everyone else. It was in the Gazette and I’d know the editor, Deirdre, very well since she comes into the shop the odd time buying flowers for her mammy’s grave. It’s all anyone’s been talking about. You’d think having a world-famous celebrity in town would be the biggest news going, but it turns out her not being in town at all trumps it handy. I reckon she’s taking a bit of time out from the stress of it all and you’d imagine those Hollywood types have their own demons with the drink and drugs although sometimes you see them going into rehab and they’re on some chat show going on about how they were drinking a bottle of wine a night and you think they’ve hardly touched the sides of what we get up to. Sure there’s nuns in Derry drink more than these fluthers and no one bats an eyelid. Most of my teachers were half cut in class, I’d swear it, but I guess it’s different everywhere. Maybe she got a look at Waterloo Street on a Friday night and realised she’d landed in Sodom and Gomorrah and fucked off back to the Hollywood Hills in pure shock.
It’ll all work out in the end. I hope it does because I think she’s marvellous. Me and Paul binged Blackfinch when it was on streaming and I couldn’t believe she was going to be in this thing. You’d almost not mind that it was an American and not someone from here if it’s someone of her talent and stature, and sure it’d mean more eyes on it and Paul was happy about it too because he’s had a glad eye for her since the nineties although he’d never say it but I’ve seen him reading every word printed.
Some of the stories you hear, though. I’ve heard the same as everyone else, that she needed to dry out or she was kidnapped by Provos who’d run out of horses to hold hostage. Some saying she was murdered by Diarmuid himself seeing as he’s the last one saw her alive, and isn’t that always what they say in cop shows before they put the screws on the school caretaker or the weirdo uncle. Few days ago, everyone and their mammy had seen her. Eileen says she was out buying buns in the bakery the day before yesterday which would hardly be the behaviour of someone about to skip town, but I’d trust her as soon as I’d trust an MP, I mean, a greater gossip than Eileen Downey never put her arm through a coat, and I don’t think she means to lie but she gets ideas in her head and lets them run away with her and you wouldn’t say a word to her if you were in your right mind, I mean you wouldn’t tell her the time.
You would get to worrying though all the same. There’s a lot of ways people can go, sure there was a wain on our estate God help us was run over by an ambulance, and another a few years before who fell in the river after a frisbee although they said that wee boy was troubled, never so far to say as he was suicidal only that it was worth mentioning just that about him, that he was “troubled” which seemed to be saying the same thing.
There’s a monument for mental health near where he drowned on the Foyle Road, it’s at the start of the bridge with a few steps reaching out into the river. I always liked it and I don’t often like the monuments but I like that one. They had to cordon it off since people were throwing themselves off it which I said was one way to spread suicide awareness anyway. Next thing there’ll be a wee plinth with a length of rope and a bottle of pills, there yous are, lads, help yourselves.
There’s the other one, the Hands Across the Divide, over by where Tillie’s used to be, it’s two lads reaching out for one another. It’s good because it could be about the Troubles or it could be about mental health or the environment or gays. They’re not touching, the hands, but they’re trying to touch and I reckon that’s the point. It’s all about awareness.
More people have died from suicide since the Good Friday Agreement than were killed in all the fighting before it, I hear people saying that a lot. Father McLaughlin used to say it in mass before collection. Now the details of how fixing the church’s roof was going to help teen suicides was never made clear to me but, that aside, everyone would nod at this fact like it was wile wise. I always wondered how it was that everyone’s killing themselves now when things are better, when no one was back in the day. I read a pamphlet that says a thousand more people died by suicide than murder even during the Troubles, so is that better or worse than now? If it’s better, then it seems a weird thing to go on about, and if it’s worse, then maybe the Troubles were better for people’s mental health than everyone lets on, gave them something else to worry about. But you can’t say things like that these days. Everyone just wants to move past it.
The whole place has gone mad with Hollywood arriving, talking about our wee town having its moment in the spotlight and how it’ll give a boost to the economy like Thrones did for Belfast, as if they needed it anyway. In my own personal view it’s a great thing altogether. Very good for getting the story out there—and if there’s jobs in it, all the better.
The whole place has gone mad with Hollywood arriving, talking about our wee town having its moment in the spotlight.
That’s one thing I think about a lot is jobs, it’s terrible the amount of unemployment that’s around and then you look at some of the people who do have jobs and you wonder how it even happened. Our Patricia’s Turlough minds the cars in the leisure centre up in Pennyburn and I always think how did he even get the job. He’s too good for it, you see, the great struggling actor! And now he’s given Patricia the bug, but sure it’s good to have a passion. It would just be nice to see some passion in the job he actually has, is all I’m saying, face like thunder while he’s raising the barriers and you’d feel bad even parking your car, like you’re taking food from his mouth. Before they started courting, I used to think he must have been born in the centre, swaddled in a kitbag, raised by the lifeguards and handed a work pass. He doesn’t even sweep the floors or hand out swimming caps or anything, I’ve never even seen him indoors, and I always used to joke he probably has a wee pullout bed and a stove to make his tea ’cos he just sits in his wee booth minding the cars all day and the face on him you’d think he was before a firing squad. That to me is a shame to be honest because there’s plenty would do that job and do it with a smile on their face.
But then I suppose my big thing, and as long as I live I will always return to it, is the handicapped, who I think have a terrible time of it already, and could do with a leg-up—or a wheel-up as the case may be. It’s every day I see some eejit collecting trolleys or serving drinks and looking like the world’s not done them any favours and when I see people like that I think: do you know what, that’d be a great job for a wee handicapped person. There are degrees of handicapped but I think it’s something we need to look into if the powers-that-be would give it a moment’s thought. When you do see wee handicaps in jobs they seem happy with it, they’re thankful for the opportunity, and sure if there’s a bit of a fuss learning them the ropes well it can’t be worse than some of the gombeens I see washing cars and doing dishes and not knowing how lucky they are. There was one used to work in Duffy’s making the teas and he was a credit to his disability, always smiling, and if he made a wee mistake he apologised and everything was fine. Except one time I was in there with Eileen Downey and she had a face on her the whole time like she was being served by a chimpanzee and I had to have a word with her and tell her she was being unkind even if he did get a few things wrong. She was put out to put it mildly because he gave her the wrong drink and me the wrong sandwich but I wasn’t complaining and I don’t need Eileen Downey to do that on my behalf, I’m loud enough on my own thank you very much, but the final straw for her was when he touched her biscuit when it nearly fell off her saucer as he was handing it to her and she picked it up with the tiniest tips of her two fingers as if it was polluted, as if he’d pulled it out of his arse in front of her, and what does she do but ask for another one. He was wile confused so I had to step in and tell him, slowly and at loud volume, that everything was fine and I nearly kicked her under the chair, I tell you she went down in my estimation there and then. She said the biscuit was half broke and I said it’ll all end up in the same place once it’s down ye and in any case a kind word never broke anyone’s mouth, Eileen Downey and then she said her Joe was after getting into gambling debts and she wouldn’t have minded if it was the football or the dogs but it was a wee mobile game that had girls with their tits out which I thought was strange that it made the difference to her but I did feel bad then because sometimes people are going through things and you don’t even know and it’s all about having empathy at the end of the day. We got that meal for free anyway because the wee fella forgot to come back with the cheque so it all worked out.
As for the telly, our Patricia thinks she’s hired already. If there’s one good thing about her and Turlough, and I’ll be honest, he’s a nice young man when he smiles a bit, God knows she could do a lot worse, it’s that they raise each other up when it comes to the acting. She’s in with the drama troupe and already sees her name in lights, and with Hollywood coming to town it’s very exciting altogether. Paul says I’m convinced she’s going to get Monica’s part and would I steal the poor woman’s grave as quick, but I paid him no mind because there’s going to be hundreds of parts for young girls even in the crowd scenes, and optimism is a choice, I tell him, why not support your child to the hilt, there’s enough disappointments in life without presuming them in advance. For the big parts I’d find myself a bit more realistic on that score since part of me thinks sure they’ll probably just get wee English girls in and make them do accents like they always do, but I don’t say that except to our Paul and he says the same. I just tell him to make sure he doesn’t say it out loud because then we’d never hear the end of it from Patricia, who’s very sensitive about these things.
Honest to God, you can hardly breathe around her. Twice last week he dropped the ball complimenting her friends, and in fairness he can be useless about these things but she laid the whole trap out for him, you’d forget how devious teenagers are if you didn’t have one under your roof, it’s demons they are. The whole lot of them are convinced they’re made for showbiz, so it was all Kylie wants to be a model and Anna wants to be on TV and he just said yeah they’d be good at it all right and I knew then he’d suffer for that, it was as if he’d scalded her with acid, Jesus Christ, it was like he’d killed her dead. The competition between those girls! Good luck ever working out who’s friends with who and what does be going on with any of them. When they were wains it was all about dance moves and hairstyles and now it’s about who’s got the best arse and the biggest lips and this from girls of seventeen years of age. I pity poor Paul for it because he can’t put a foot right. In my view Patricia is as gorgeous as any of her friends—certainly Kylie, God love the girl but she hasn’t a feature. I said to Paul that Kylie would have better luck as a crash-test dummy than a supermodel and we had a good laugh at that, God forgive us, but then I told him don’t you be saying that to Patricia either, for the love of Jesus, we’d never hear the end of it.
What’s true and I don’t care one jot if I’m biased is that if the casting people are on the lookout for local talent they couldn’t do better than Patricia. She played Aladdin—the boy part—in the panto last year and even without the makeup, which they rightly banned for sensitivity reasons after that whole to-do last year, I swear you’d have thought she was a wee Arab boy. She even got the part over Terri Harkin’s youngest, Alex, who’s a wee they-them, so I was particularly pleased, even though I fully support her visibility and God love them they need awareness too, sure it’s the modern day and you need to be kind, but Patricia just has the goods, and I know I’m her mother but that girl has the goods.
The latest now is they’re casting, and the producers were very pleased with her tape and want to see her for a whole host of parts. The house is elated to say the least and the only sad part, I thought, was that she and Kylie got a look-in but Anna didn’t, but it turns out Patricia has taken against Anna for some reason so it hasn’t made a dent in her happiness, to be honest she might even be happier that Anna didn’t get her dream which is nice for her in a way. I’ve given up worrying about anything else, sure they’ll be thick as thieves again by tomorrow and anything you say, for or against any one of them, can and will be used against you in the court of Patricia McDaid.
All of a sudden I’m flavour of the month because I’m so ancient she thinks I can give her all the information she wants.
Of course, now she’s decided her best bet is to know all about what it was like in the bad old days and particularly how it was for young girls, and all of a sudden I’m flavour of the month because I’m so ancient she thinks I can give her all the information she wants. She talks to me like I’m the last survivor of the Titanic, like she’s only just realised that she was living this whole time with a relic from the Ulster Museum, like anything I’ve ever done has actually mattered. And the things she’s asking, my God do they teach these kids anything at all. I mean this morning she was asking me how we got to school, as if we were dodging bullets the whole trip, and Paul couldn’t help himself then telling her we went to bed on a heap of sandbags and wrapped our Christmas presents with barbed wire and she writing it all down like a thick, we had to laugh. But then she takes me aside and says it’s all about recording history through drama and using art to tell stories and you’d think she was on the couch with Paddy Kielty talking about the struggle of her craft. So there we were in the front room for an hour going over the whole thing and she with the pencil in her hand taking notes, asking me if I’d ever been bombed or shot and me having to tell her my life story stuck without anything to say because I couldn’t believe she was interested in any of it.
And there’s me trying to explain what the army checkpoints looked like or how a bomb site smelled, almost as if I was telling her what the world was like before mobile phones or those times when she was a wain when she and her brother would ask us if we lived around the dinosaurs or when exactly it was that the world stopped being in black and white. And then she’s asking about the killings and what happened to this one and that one and thon, and by the end of it I have her pencil in my hand drawing protest routes and the whole time she’s at me about atrocities and massacres and I don’t know why but the way she’s saying it like she’s someone on the news, or an English person, like she’s a tourist or some fella from the UN on a fact-finding mission, and it all had me grabbing the tissues wondering how it could be she didn’t know, how my whole life I’ve tried to stop her from hearing any of it as if I was trying to protect her and not be like some of the other people round here who’d boil the ear off you never giving over about every last thing that happened, as if they and they alone were God’s one true perfect martyr and we didn’t every one of us go through the same thing.
And wouldn’t you know it, eventually she had me talking about Jamie Devenney, both of us blubbering on the couch and me stroking her hair and remembering when she was just a funny bold wee girl fretting about monsters under her bed and now it’s me worrying about the monsters out there she’ll be set free to encounter.
I wouldn’t say I get emotional about any of it at all nowadays, I’d say my philosophy is I leave the past in the past and there were people who had it worse, God knows, but there was something about remembering what happened to Jamie and the way she didn’t even know his name, she read it from her notes like she’s seen it in a book, and she says is he one of the fellas on the wall and I say aye, one of the fellas on the wall and I say but he was a beautiful boy, you know and tell her all about how the whole neighbourhood were mad after him and she says you wouldn’t know it from the picture. I told her sure that was a whole story on its own. Sad as everyone was when he got shot, I said, there was more uproar when that mural came up and everyone saw Jamie who was our wee pop star, our wee dreamboat, looking like a bank manager or a bus driver, not that there’s anything wrong with people in those professions but he was movie-star good-looking so he was.
And I meant all this to be funny because by this point my tears needed drying, but it came out angry and I found the whole thing wrong somehow, like this wasn’t a story or a page in a book or a scene for some innocent child to be play-acting, this was a thing that had happened, these were people. Patricia God love her was studying all this and wondering what to make of her lovesick heart-broke mammy snotting into a bog roll and trying to get my words out, and I wondered there and then if awareness is all it’s cracked up to be if you can’t tell the whole story, but there’s no way the whole story could ever be told, and every film I ever seen about any place or any war was probably filled with stuff the people from there would hate, things they couldn’t stand, and is this what we’re making for ourselves, a rod for our own backs, a great big heap of shite to raise a bit of awareness of what, of my life of my people.
The thought of that boy and that I’d seen him at a dance two nights before and always felt that maybe there was something there to keep an eye on between me and him, not some deep spiritual connection don’t get me wrong but a wee throw of the eye, a sense that we had a story to tell between us sometime if the time ever came, but all that was thrown away and forgotten about because some cunt soldier shot him in the head in front of the whole street, and now I see him up on that wall every day, just another fading mural like that one down the road of Sinead Bradley’s brother and a couple others but I never knew them quite so well, and there’s one wee fella who has one on the far side of the estate whose name I always forget and I feel the worst for him because it’s been too long now and I can hardly go round asking.
