LITMIR.BIZ

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      ‘Neither, mate,’ Rex Mundi answers. ‘He operated with the anarchists and radicals and this one weird dude who was one of her comrades. He was a mate of that old blade on the wall up there,’ he adds, pointing towards Meinhof.

      On hearing this, Trout breaks into a smile, shoots up from his chair and points over to Rex Mundi. ‘Do not move! I’ve got something for you. It’s perfect,’ he says, before jabbing one of his fat fingers at PP. ‘And don’t you go stealing any of my dope while I’m lookin’ for it.’

      ‘Lookin’ for wha?’ PP asks indifferently.

      The temperature in the kitchen seems to have dropped by ten degrees the second Trout leaves and I am no longer suffocated by his stare.

      ‘So why the fuck is he called Trout and he has a brother called Mullet?’ Rex Mundi suddenly asks.

      ‘Their da is a Kraut,’ PP says.

      ‘So? Shouldn’t they be called Hitler or Goering then?’ Rex Mundi says.

      ‘Where are they today? I mean his ma and da?’ I add.

      PP shakes his head as if I have just come straight off the windy-lickers’ bus. ‘It’s Saturday, Ruin. Where do ya think they are? They’re down the motorway at Long Kesh seeing Mullet on a visit. They’re probably on their hands and knees with their rosary beads beggin’ him ta give up his dirty protest. It’s the best day of the week to be in Trout’s house, ta skin up some gear while they’re not in. Super Saturday. That’s when our Trout always stocks up on his dope. As for our Mullet, well he’s a real Action Man!’

      I am wondering how the fuck some poor bastard from the Federal Republic of Germany must think about ending up stuck here in this kip, with one son in jail and another floating from one hashish cloud to another and well on his way to joining his brother. I am thinking too that my dad would despise Trout and throw up if he knew we were here smoking his dope while listening to his sermons. I gaze up to Ulrike on the wall. Her face weirdly reminds me of the French teacher at St Mal’s, where I have only two months left of my ‘sentence’ to complete.

      After seven long years, I will be free from the stench of floor polish; free from cassocked Christian Brothers with their Embassy No.10 fegs cupped in their hands behind their backs; free from that rat-faced college president with his hysterical screaming pitch; free from the dead-on teachers in their moccasins and corduroy suits; free from the ‘Yes’ and ‘Pink Floyd’ fans who control the record players in the Sixth Form centre; free from the sniping sarcasm of the Latin teacher who insists we are a waste of taxpayers’ money; free to get out of that school and out of this town. Free to search for her. Free to find her again.

      Trout comes back into the kitchen with a present for my cousin. It is a white badge with a red star in the middle and the letters RAF written behind a sub-machine gun. He is definitely warming to Rex Mundi because of the exploits of his older brother Mick, who, while tripping on an acid tab, petrol bombed the Students Union at Queen’s University in protest over Internment 1971. Unbeknownst to Trout, Mick nearly topped himself in a West Berlin squat last summer after five days of cold turkey.

      ‘Here my friend, this is for you. It is in honour of your brother and Comrade Meinhof on the wall,’ Trout announces.

      ‘Fat chance he will put that on,’ I interrupt. ‘He won’t pin anything on that shiny biker jacket unless it’s the badge of Brighton and Hove Albion.’

      But Rex Mundi snatches the button badge from Trout’s hand and says, ‘Balls, Ruin! I will wear this one with pride. For our Micheal and for us too!’

      ‘Us?’ I loathe the way he has just said ‘Michael’ instead of ‘Mick’. Next thing you know he will be referring to his older brother in the Irish version ‘Mícheál’ as if that will impress our suspicious, belligerent host.

      ‘Yeah, us. The Red Army Faction on its way to Windsor. You’re coming too, Trout?’ the exile-returned continues.

      ‘Too fuckin’ right I am. We have chanting that needs to be filmed!’

      Suddenly, Padre Pio pipes up, ‘Ya haven’t got one of them hand grenades ta throw at the Orangemen, Trout? I’m game ta do that.’

      This only makes Trout flare up. ‘Shut fuckin’ up about any talk over hand grenades, dildo brain.’

      Dope is supposed to calm the nerves and leave you chilled out, but Trout has that nasty cold suspicious air about him. He is like some stalking predator that also thinks he is being stalked and it is me who he is glaring at again. I am expecting him to start hammering on about fence sitters, traitors, drinkers, cowards and renegades.

      ‘There will be no loose talk about these things in this house,’ Trout says with authority before firing a question at me.

      ‘So yer da saved yer cousins’ lives. That took balls I suppose, to go over to the east for a rescue mission. Now, no hard feelings here. What do you think the score will be today?’ He extends his hand across the table to shake mine.

      ‘2-0 to the Reds!’ I reply, only half in belief that this is really going to happen.

      ‘I think it will be tighter, Ruin,’ Trout says, uttering my name for the first time.

      ‘More like 2-1 or 3-2, but I can’t see us losing. Anyway, win, lose or draw we’ll wreck the fuckin’ place,’ he adds, while beginning another joint that he insists is only for our nerves on the journey down.

      Trout looks around the table with a knowing smile that makes me worry about buckets and spades and hand grenades as we hi-ho-hi-ho off to Windsor we go! Maybe he is just mad enough to smuggle a couple of exploding pineapples onto the Kop to be lobbed into a line of riot cops. Or worse still, he could hand them over to Padre Pio and get him to vault over the fence, onto the pitch and hurl them straight into the North Stand. Padre Pio will be up for whatever Trout has planned for him. Meanwhile, he is goose-stepping around the kitchen with his crotch-reeking index finger playing the part of a Hitler moustache, croaking, ‘Here’s yer da, Trout. Here’s yer Nazi oul da.’ Understandably, Trout delivers a well-deserved clout to his lunatic cousin’s head.

      4

      ‘THE SPEED OF LIFE’

      July 1978

      She didn’t dance. She shimmered. She almost stood still, quaking ever so slightly to the same song that DJ Derek put on for her every Tuesday evening after the band had put away their instruments and the punks had stopped pogoing. She quivered as if some force was coursing through her alabaster skin. She always wore the same tight white silk dress with Chinese script curling over it, over her body. She never slipped or slid on her spiked high heels and fishnets. Her dyed, jet-black hair was crimped and shaped in a Cleopatra cut, and her eyeliner swept out in a dramatic cat-eye. She was a moving hieroglyphic.

      She was the mystery of The Pound: she sat on her own, with one can of Coke at her table all night, and spurned forever the advances of all the young punks. She never got up for any songs belted out by the three-chord wonders roaring 1-2-3-4 at the top of every tune, or for any other tunes the DJ played before and after the live act. Her interest was singular: she only got up and onto that sticky, treacherous floor when the DJ played the opening instrumental track to Bowie’s Low. She was addicted to ‘The Speed of Life’.

      I had only ever seen her once before in ‘real life’. It was one grim winter morning a few months earlier on the number 33 bus as it made its way over from East Belfast. I guessed that she came from ‘the other side’ but knew instantly that she didn’t belong to them or to anybody. This is what drew me to her in the first place and why I felt compelled to summon the courage to talk to her that night. I won’t deny being helped along the way by the bottle of Merrydown I had knocked back in the Baby Subway before the gig. That night, even the risk of humiliation did not deter me. I waited until Bowie’s instrumental opener to Low was over to tell her that she had good taste in music, unlike most of them inside here or over in The Harp. I even found the balls to tell her that Bowie was producing his best ever material

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