"We were in prison together," Lynch said, smiling at the man's antics. "Well, it's just like in the play. If he hadn't been there it would have been unbearable. I'm really grateful to him."
The man made affectionate monkey noises and rolled his eyes; and now it was impossible to tell at what point the play ended and the lives of these men began.
It seemed to me a healthy sign that there were such plays being produced, but it was a play about a deranged society. I kept wishing that it had been a play about a real bomber, because it was a society in which everyone talked about persecution but no one took any blame.
No one admitted to crime in Ulster. The most they said was "Look what they make us do!" It was as if all the street violence were imaginary or else rigged by soldiers who (so it was said in Derry) coaxed children into starting riots. It was slippery, shadowy, tribal; it was all stealth. It was a folk tradition of flag-waving and the most petty expression of religious bigotry west of Jerusalem: the Linfield Football Club of Belfast had a clause in its constitution stipulating that no Catholic could ever play on its team. Apart from the bombing, it was not public crime anymore. It was sneaking ambushes and doorstep murders ("I've got something for your father") and land mines in the country lanes. Some of the worst crimes took place in the prettiest rural places — the shootings and house-burnings and the cattle-maiming — in the green hills, with the birds singing.
People said, "There's no solution… Ireland's always had troubles… Maybe it'll die out… I suppose we could emigrate…"
I kept thinking: This is Britain!
It was like being shut in with a quarreling family and listening to cries of "You started it!" and "He hit me!" And I felt about Ulster as I had felt about some south coast boardinghouses on rainy days — I wanted to tiptoe to the front door and leave quietly and keep walking.
But I was grateful, too. No one had imposed on me. I had done nothing but ask questions, and I had always received interesting answers. I had met hospitable and decent people. No one had ever asked me what I did for a living. Perhaps this was tact: it was an impolite question in a place where so many people were on the dole.
I had been asked the question in England and Wales. "I'm in publishing," I always said. Publishing was respectable, harmless, and undiscussable. The conversation moved on to other matters. "I'm a writer" was a fatal admission, and certainly one of the great conversation-stoppers. Anyway, with me in wet shoes and scratched leather jacket and bruised knapsack, would anyone have believed I was a writer? But no one knew what publishers looked like.
On my last night in Belfast, I was asked. I was at Mooney's, talking to Mr. Doran, and I had asked too many questions about his upbringing, his mother, his ambitions, the crime rate, his job—
"And what do you do?" Doran asked, risking the question no one else had dared.
Obviously I did something. I was an alien.
"I'm in publishing," I said.
Doran's face lit up. Not once in seven weeks of my saying this had anyone responded so brightly. But this was Ireland.
"I'm working on a wee novel," Doran said, and ordered me another pint. "I've got about four hundred pages done — it's right in me room upstairs. Let's meet tomorrow and have another jar. I'll bring me novel with me. You'll love it. It's all about the troubles."
The next day I tiptoed past Doran's room. I heard the flutterblast of his snoring. I slipped out of Mooney's and shut the door on Ulster.
18. The 16:30 to Mallaig
AFTER MY DAYS of being menaced by Belfast's ugly face, I went by boat and train to Glasgow and found it peaceful, even pretty. It had a bad name. "Gleska," people said, and mocked the toothless population and spoke of razor fights in the Gorbals, and made haggis jokes. Yet Glasgow was pleasant — not broken, but eroded. The slums were gone, the buildings washed of their soot; the city looked dignified — no barricades, no scorchings. Well, I had just struggled ashore from that island of antiquated passions. In Ireland I had felt as though I had been walking blindly into the dark. But Scotland made me hopeful. This sunny day stretched all the way to Oban, where I was headed.
On my way from Glasgow Central to Queen Street Station, I fell in with two postmen. They asked me where I had come from. I told them Ulster. They said, "Och!"
"It's full of broken windows," I said.
"Aye. And broken hids!" one said.
The other man said, "We got our Catholics. Ha' ye nae heard of the Rangers and Celtics fitba matches? They play each other a guid sux tames a year, but there's nae always a riot."
No alphabet exists for the Glaswegian accent — phonetic symbols are no good without a glottal stop, a snort, or a wheeze. I met rural-dwelling Scots who told me they could not understand anyone in Glasgow. The Ulster accent took a moment to turn from noise to language: I heard someone speak and then in the echo of the voice there was a meaning. But this did not always happen in Scotland: the echo was meaningless, and in Glasgow it was a strangled peevish hiccup, sudden and untranslatable.
I rode in an empty railway car up the Clyde, past tenements. I wondered about their age. They were striking in their size and their darkness — six stories of stone, looking like prisons or lunatic asylums. Had the Scots originated the tenement? Their word for these old blocks was lands, and they had been using the word since the fifteenth century.
We went past Dumbarton (Dun Bretane, "Hill of the Britons"), along the muddy rock-strewn shore, the Firth of Clyde. Across the firth was the busy port of Greenock ("birthplace of Captain Kidd, the pirate"). There were hills behind it. I always had trouble with hills. These were not so much risen loaves as smooth and sloping and lightly upholstered…
A big old man came through the connecting door, and though there was not another person in the whole railway car, he sat beside me. I put my notebook into my pocket.
"I hope you're not embarrassed," he said.
Not embarrassed, but something — perhaps startled.
"I'm going to Oban," I said.
"Good," he said. "We can talk." He was also going the hundred miles.
But he did most of the talking. He was very old, and even sitting next to me he was a foot higher. He looked like a Pope. He had a fat nose and big baggy-fleshed hands. He wore a long black overcoat and carried a small parcel of books tied with twine: detective stories. His name was John L. Davidson and he had been born in Lanarkshire in 1895. He said that occasionally he did feel eighty-seven years old. How long had he lived in Dumbarton? "Only fifty years," he said. He lived in the Dumbarton Home for Aged Gentlefolk now. Everyone he had ever known was dead.
He said, "I'm only seven years younger than John Logie Baird. Have you not heard of him? He invented the tellyvision. He was born here in Helensburgh."
I looked out the window.
"Over there somewhere," Mr. Davidson said. "His teachers at school didnae think he was very bright. They thought he was a head case. One day he decided to invent a tellyphone. He put a wire across the road, a tellyphone instrument at either end, one in his house and one in his friend's. A man was riding a horse down the road, didnae see the wire — and strangled! Hanged himself on the wire of John Logie Baird's tellyphone! That's a true story. But he never hanged anyone on his tellyvision."
We came to Garelochhead; we traveled past Loch Long. The mountains above it were dark and rough, like enormous pieces of dusty coal. They were surrounded by pine woods. The loch was blue-black and looked depthless.
"This loch is so long, so deep, and so straight, they test torpedoes in it," Mr. Davidson said. "You can shoot a torpedo from one end to the other — thirteen miles or more. Want to see something interesting?"