All right young man, she said. If you’re good, I have a special treat for you.
She brought him out of his cell to the Formica table, where she had prepared a full fry, which he pushed away at first but then he speared the sausages and broke the skin of the eggs and dunked the fresh bread and ate with an anger that gave him a stomachache. When he looked at his empty plate he imagined it full and then he threw his prison blanket across it and groaned and tried to stop the hunger pains and all the quiet, necessary shiverings.
* * *
RANGED IN A NOTEBOOK in parallel columns:
* * *
AT THE TABLE he looked at his meals, pushed the food around on his plate. Every day there was news of an impending reconciliation, but always the talks broke down and even the radio announcers sounded tired. The newspapers printed cartoons he didn’t understand. He tried to read the editorials and the word breakthrough became ambiguous to him.
He was reminded of a winter thaw years ago in Derry that had raised the rot of a neglected greyhound. When the sun began to shine the stench had risen.
He decided he would not take food. When his mother wasn’t watching, he swept the chicken and rice off his plate and he stuck only to water. He lay back on his bed and tried to form a manifesto in his mind — he would not eat until all his uncle’s demands were given in to: the right to wear his own clothes, to have parcels and visits, to have remission restored, to refrain from prison work, to have free association. He didn’t understand all the demands but he whispered them aloud to the night anyway and fought the pangs in his stomach. He woke with his mouth dry.
At breakfast he took his cornflakes outside and dumped them in the long grass.
On his bed that afternoon he stretched out his torso and thought about how flat his belly was becoming. The boy looked for clues to his uncle’s body in his own: the chest concave, the ribs taut, the arms bare and rippled. His mother caught him staring in the mirror but she said nothing. He left abruptly, wandered along the cliff face, and spent hours in an abandoned Vauxhall down near a cove. He sat at the steering wheel, faced the shattered windshield, and began driving home, down narrow country roads toward the city. The gear lever rattled in his fingers. The accelerator touched the floor and he was tremendously skillful with the clutch. He broke through roadblocks and avoided the pursuit of a black helicopter. A crowd of masked men waited for him on the side of the road. He picked them up and they traveled east toward the jail for their own breakthrough.
At dinnertime he asked if he could eat outside on his own, and when his mother agreed he walked out, feeling lightheaded, with a dull throb in his stomach now. He threw the plateful in the grass beside the morning’s cornflakes, most of which had already been picked over by seagulls.
* * *
THE GIRL STOOD above the vat of oil, waiting for it to heat. She had a pretty face and he was embarrassed when she looked at him a second time. Outside the church bells struck eleven chimes. He had been on hunger strike for thirty-four hours now. A picture of the Italian football team was hung above the rack of sweets. A statue of a saint was taped to the cash register. His palms were sweaty and he switched the coins from hand to hand. You’re the first customer of the morning, she said to him. He nodded and looked at his reflection in the stainless steel frontispiece of the counter. It made his face alternately fat and thin. He rose up and down on the tips of his toes and scrunched his face violently, then stopped when the girl behind the counter giggled.
When he finally came out of the chip shop he was weeping, the vinegar so pungent that afterward he could smell it on his hands for days.
* * *
THE KAYAK WAS OUT EARLY. He saw how the old couple plied gracefully through the water and right then he hated them for their solitary joy, for the tandem rhythm they struck, for the way they knew each other’s moves in what he was sure was silence.
He felt like a lone sniper at dawn, looking down on them.
They were a hundred yards out, moving parallel to the headland. The waves rocked the boat up and down; it could have been the single beat of a cardiac machine. Farther out, there were whitecaps that broke early, but the kayak never moved off its course, the blades cutting the air, the nose sideways to the breakers. It was startlingly yellow on the water, as if the sea had decided to give it more color than it deserved and only the old couple, in their drab clothes, diluted that color, the man in a blue work shirt, the woman in a gray dress.
The boy said to himself: Bang. Bang.
On the step of the caravan his mother watched him out of the corner of her eye. He had been badly constipated after his hunger strike but he had not told her the reason why. She had given him medicine that had caused him to throw up, but now he told her that he felt much better, that he would like to take a walk into town.
She reached into the pocket of her jeans and dug deep and came up with a fifty-pence coin, which she handed to him.
Fifty pence?
Yeah.
What am I going to do with fifty pence?
Get in half the trouble you will with a pound.
The boy chuckled.
Fair enough, he said.
He ran down the hill, knocking at the brambles with a switch of stick. At the foot of the hill the chill of the early summer day cut through his shirt, and he hugged his arms around himself.
Out on the water the kayak had become a tiny speck.
In town there were some older teenagers at the back of an alley and he spied on them from the window of the video arcade. The light from a blue neon sign pulsed upon them. They too wore black drainpipes and white shirts, but their hair was shorter than his and they had sideburns. He smiled when he saw that they wore black armbands. He wanted to go outside and tell them that his uncle was on hunger strike — they would look at him with a certain awe and feel a shiver and know him to be a hard man. They would share their cigarettes and give him a nickname. He would show them his penknife and lie about how he once sliced a soldier from neck to stomach like a gutted deer.
One of the teenagers looked around furtively and the boy was startled to see him bring a bag of glue to his mouth.
The boy turned immediately and put his fifty pence into the machine. It lit up. He played with a bead of sweat beginning at his brow, but the teenagers in the alleyway kept their faces to the plastic bag. He wondered what it was like to get high. Back home he had never seen any of his friends taking drugs — once there had been a pusher in the house next door and she had ended up with bullets in both knees. He would listen to her coming along the street and her crutches struck the ground, a shrill metallic language. Late at night when she played her stereo he could hear the crutch tapping out a rhythm against the floor, but when she kept dealing the vigilantes kicked her door down, put two bullets in her elbows, and two more in her ankles for good measure, after which she disappeared altogether, and people said she’d gone to England, where she was dealing from a wheelchair.
He stole another look at the alleyway.
They breathed the bag in and out and it looked to him like the beat of a strange gray heart. Between hits of the glue they smoked cigarettes and one of the youths nonchalantly left a lit cigarette behind his ear and the smoke curled up above his head.
The boy patted his pockets and cursed himself for spending all his money on one game, but he controlled the machine for two hours until his fingers began to ache, and when he looked again to the alleyway the youths were gone. On the ground lay a ring of cigarette butts and a patch of vomit. At the far end of the laneway was graffiti that said: SMASH THE H-BLOCK. Beyond that were the words: BOBBY SANDS M.P., R.I.P. He saluted the graffiti and wished he had some spray paint so he could put his uncle’s name in high strong letters all around the town.