Picture this

FOR SALE: Bridegrooms attire – suit etc. New and unused. £17 ono. Phone Belfast 765554.

            The copy for an ad in the Belfast News. Back in the day. Would have been about 1965 or so.  I could see the copytaker with her wee headphone set, taking down the caller’s details and thinking to herself ‘that’s unusual’. I can see her passing it on to her manager and him getting this wee copy over to the newdesk. I can see the news editor waving it about like had discovered a five pound note in the turn ups of his trousers. And there, hovering behind him I could see Brenda Nolan.  Whatever happened to her after she left that TV presenter job?

            But what I could really see now after all this time. was the corner of the street, the corner where I had first seen a man really cry.

            I can still visualise it all, even after these years have passed.  The neat hedges, the stuccoed houses with their bay windows, and the recently tarmacked pavement – they had got rid of the old paving stones and poured this black stuff dusted with little white bits of gravel.  It had the effect of making the streets seem permanently damp. There had been a recent rain and some of the cars, there were only a few in those days, had little curtains of raindrops on the windscreens. There was the telegraph pole on the corner. There was a church, there’s always a church, but all that could be seen of it was a spire protruding from the rooftops. I bet you, if  I were to go back there now, drive up the road and turn into the street where the church is, it would be almost unchanged. Everything as it was, more or less. In the physical sense, anyway.

            I noticed all this stuff because I had nothing else to do, cooling my heels waiting for Brenda.        “You stay outside and out of sight,” she had demanded. “I don’t want them to see your big hulking hobnailed boots and that Pentangle you’ve got round your neck.”

            “Pentax, it’s a Pentax.” I said.

            She gave me a forced smile, her little teeth showing, like she was a cat about to snap the neck of an errant sparrow. Brenda was a looker. Tall, but not too tall, with long blonde hair and always impeccably turned out in the latest fashions like one of the Beatles’ girlfriends. There wasn’t a one of the blokes in the newsroom didn’t have a notion of her. Trouble was, she was the original ice maiden. Heart like a steel clamp. Stare you down at 50 paces if you should so much as look at her. Of course, she was all charm with the punters. Butter wouldn’t melt and all that, but she would kill her granny for a story.

            And this was a story. Jilted brides were two a penny, but jilted grooms – how many of them were there?

            So Brenda was in the house and I was waiting for her outside while she got all the details.

            “So, I will go in by myself,” she instructed me after I parked the car.  “I’ll sweet talk the whole story out of them. Then I’ll whistle for you. Make yourself scarce until then.”

             I stationed myself a discreet distance away and prepared for the long haul. I put the camera in my bag, but decided it was pointless, anybody with an eye in their head could see it was a camera bag and no fella in Belfast would be carrying a bag unless there was a camera in it.  I walked up and down for a bit, glad that spring had arrived early that year and Belfast’s after-rain chill wasn’t cutting through you.

            I saw the other fella before he saw me. He was standing at the corner of the pavement by the telegraph pole, holding his hand to the wood, and looking left and right, like he was practicing the Green Cross Code. He was wearing a sports jacket and slacks, so probably not come from work. Hair cut pretty short for the times, I thought, though he was probably not much younger than me.

“’Bout ye,” I says. I don’t usually start talking to strange men in the street, but I was bored and not looking forward to hanging around for what could be hours with just myself for company.  So I added, “Are you lost?” I don’t know why I said this. It’s not like I knew the district, but I did have a map in the car.

            “Nah,” says this guy. “I live round here.” He nodded his head vaguely in the direction he had just come from.

            “Oh, right. Just having a constitutional, then,” I replied. “Weather’s getting better.”

            “Aye, you could say that.”

            His eyes snapped to my bag and there was a moment’s hesitation, but it could just have been that moment when two fellas meet for the first time, that momentary sizing each other up. Friend or foe, sort of thing. Someone has to do the honours, make the first move in working out how this is going to end up. Usually, to relieve the tension, somebody says, “Got a light?”

            Which is what he did, to my great relief. I had just finished off smoking a sneaky Embassy Regal and was wondering when I could justify having another. I had vowed to my girlfriend that I was going to cut down. June was a nurse at the City Hospital, and was always going on about the cancer ward, despite me asking her not to spoil the evening with horror stories. I had promised to cut down anyway because it was an expensive habit and we were supposed to be saving up for a deposit on a house. Out in Glengormley.

            I fished out a box of matches and offered them to him and my new companion in turn offered me a cigarette. And we made conversation, as old friends might do, puffing away on our smokes.

            I noticed that he was really dragging on his, like a man in a trance. Sucking deep on the cigarette till his cheeks hollowed out, like he was trying to ease some sort of pain.  His face was a bit yellow, jaundiced almost. Dark eyes. I had seen my uncle look like that when he came out of the hospital after treatment for his alcohol problem. That had left its mark on Uncle Matt’s face, giving him a slightly haunted look, as if something was always nagging away at him.

            We chatted about football. Turned out he was a Distillery supporter. I was surprised about that,  since this was a Protestant area. You always know the geography of the city, its colours, Orange or Green, even if you’ve never been to every district. Its just something you learn, without even noticing.  I supposed that this area was perhaps a wee bit lighter shade of Orange than others. A few less flags on the Twelfth, sort of thing.

I thought it better to change the angle a bit, in any case.

            “Do you play yourself? I’m in a team with a few lads from work.” I asked him, careful not to reveal which work I was talking about, not at this stage in the game anyway. “Just a kickabout really. Some lads can play but the rest of us, we’re a bunch of tubes.”

            He laughed then. “Ach, yeah. I know the form. I used to play five a side with the Boy’s Brigade.”

            OK, I thought, safely back on Protestant territory. You wouldn’t be in the Boys’ Brigade if you were a Catholic. I thought he might go on, but he stopped there a bit suddenly. I had squished the butt of my cigarette out on the pavement and his was already gone, so I offered him one of mine.

“Thanks,” he says. “Me ma says I should pack it in.” He looked at the roofs of the houses opposite, like there was something there he needed to think about. There was a seagull wheeling about and he seemed to want to follow it with his eyes.  “She says l’ll smoke myself to death, at this rate. Three packets of twenty a day.”

            The standard measure of the smoker’s addiction, like pounds and stones, inches and yards, bushels and chains, is how many packets a day.

            “I used to just do maybe less than five singles,” He shook his head, sadly. 

            In my experience, people don’t move up the scale like this just any old way. Gradually, you could easily edge up doing 40 or even 50 ciggies a day. But jumping from 5 to 60 is a bad sign. I knew better than to respond with anything that might be interpreted as criticism. But what I said next was worse.

            “Ach, well you know. I’m cutting down myself. Bit pricey, the fags. Me and my girlfriend are saving up. To get married.”

            The next thing I know is that this fella is crying. Big racking sobs, shoulders heaving.

            I  was gobsmacked. I just didn’t know what to do or say, except “Are you alright?”

            He didn’t answer, but just carried on sobbing and shivering. He even dropped his cigarette in his distress.

            “Are you OK?” I said again, hopelessly. Here I was in the middle of the street with a guy who was sobbing his guts out. I was worried someone would come along and wonder what was going on.

            Worse was to come, though. Suddenly, he turned to me and put his head on my shoulder. Jesus Christ! I had no idea where to put my hands or anything. Eventually I patted him on the back like you might do to a dog or a child and said. “Don’t worry …”  I realised that I didn’t even know his name. “Er..mate. I am sure it will be OK.”

            He carried on crying. In the end I got him off me by offering him my hanky, after checking it was reasonably clean.

            He snorted into it and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.

            “They stole her, you know,” he said.

            “Who?” I had no idea what he was on about. But I was relieved that the tears had stopped. My next move was important. I didn’t want to set him off again. “Have another cigarette, it’ll make you feel better.”

            He ignored me.

            “The nuns took her.”

            Humour this guy, I thought. It was possible he’s a mental case and I, like the bloody twit I am, have just befriended him. I looked around to see if anybody was about. Not a soul, except a woman on a bicycle coming towards us. I hoped it might be a district nurse. They often came on bikes and a nurse would know what to do. But the cyclist just ignored us and pedalled laboriously round the corner and out of sight.

            “OK, OK,” I said at last.  “The nuns have taken who exactly?”

            “Annemarie. My fiancee,” he said.

            That’s when the penny finally dropped. I was talking to the bloke who was selling his marriage togs! I have to admit a slight smile crossed my face at the thought that Brenda Dolan was in the house having tea and digestive biscuits and I bet she was getting nowhere with the Ma and Da,  and here I was with the man himself, ready to spill his guts out.

            And spill he did. He told me he had been doing a line with this Catholic girl for 18 months. That both sets of parents had been opposed to the liaison at first but his folks had come round to her.         “Annemarie was a lovely girl,” says your man. “She had beautiful manners My ma noticed that.” 

            But her parents had forbidden her from seeing him. They imposed a curfew. She had had to ring  from call boxes to make secret assignations. They had decided to get married but she hadn’t dared tell her parents about the wedding plans. Instead, she had pretended that the romance was over. “Christ, that was hard,” he said. “Not seeing Annemarie for weeks on end.” Every time he said her name, he winced, his face screwing up with the effort of keeping the tears away.

            But somehow her parents had found out. A priest had come round to his door to warn him off. His dad had spoken to the priest, heard him out, out of respect, but had sent the prelate away with a flea in his ear. “Them two young people can make their own decisions and there isn’t a power in the land that will stop them.” He had been proud of his father for saying those words. The fella started to weep again.

            I couldn’t believe I was hearing all this. Where the hell had I put my notebook, the one I used to take peoples’ names down when I was taking their picture? You daren’t risk getting a name spelt wrong. People would ring up and give you hell. It was hard, especially with all those Mac names McLoughlin, MacLoughlan, McLochlin, Jesus, there was no end to the variations. So you had to get every letter down on paper in the right order. I asked him his first name and hoped to hell I would remember it. The advertising people back at the News would have the surname, of course.

            “Keith,” he said.

            “So what happened next, Keith?” God, I could be a reporter myself, with this line of questioning. Couldn’t be that hard. All I had to do was remember what he said.

            But it was a while before he answered. First he started snuffling, then the racking sob started again and then he let out a howl that would not have disgraced a wolf. It was loud enough to have the place in uproar, but there was silence. That street could be the desert for all the attention that was paid to this poor man’s suffering.

            Eventually Keith came to himself and carried on.

            “A week ago, she rang me at work. I should have known something was up. I didn’t hear the pips when she put money in the call box. She said she was ringing from the priest’s house and I knew it was all over.”

            He started sobbing again. I could barely hear the next bit, through the wailing and snuffling.

            “She said she couldn’t marry me and I had to let go and she was going into a convent to forget all about me. Her voice was like a robot’s. Like she was reading the words. She sounded so bloody cold.”

            He seemed relieved now. Like he had let it all out so that it wouldn’t hurt him any more. He looked at me and blew his nose on my hanky and said.

            “God, I am sorry about all this. Look at the state of me, crying like a wee baby in the middle of the street to a complete stranger.”

            He gave me the hanky. I waved it away. “No bother. Keep it.”

            My hand went to my camera bag. This was my chance to fire off a couple of shots. I had him eating out of my hand.  I was sure he would do pretty much anything I asked,  because he acted so grateful for the chance to talk.   A few pics now, back to the office, write it all up. Or even get Brenda Dolan to do it. That would be great, telling Miss High and Mighty what to write in her copy!

            But almost as soon as I had experienced this feeling of elation, it ebbed away. What sort of double dyed in the wool shit would take advantage of this poor guy? Hadn’t he suffered enough without being made a laughing stock as well? What would his pals or his boss at work make of his story being splashed all over the front page of the News. Look at him, he is a husk of a man already.

I just couldn’t do it. So I just patted Keith on the back and said, “Here’s the rest of the fags. You need them more than me.”

            I stood and watched him walk away. Back to his room, back to his lost dreams and his broken heart. Fucking religion.

            It wasn’t long before Brenda Dolan came bustling up behind me, her face red with frustration. “I couldn’t get a blasted thing out of that wee woman. I must have drunk three cups of tea and eaten three slices of her lemon cake but all she talked about was her new settee or the colour TV. Not a word about the wedding. Never answered a single question. That woman could have been a politician.”

            “Ah, well, bad luck,” I said. “No story, then.” I made a point of looking up at the sky. Clouds were gathering over the rooftops, bringing an early dusk. “We had better get back to the car sharpish. Looks like we going to have a downpour.”

 END