GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2024/25

GERARD McKEOWN

‘Drumcree Ballee’

WARREN WAS STAYING THE NIGHT: Mum had insisted. She worried I’d no friends because I had none round the estate. There was that one time those two brothers from the next row asked me out for a kickabout at the garages. I called in for them a couple of times after that, but their da always said they weren’t in, even though someone in another room was blasting Scooter. Warren was my best friend at school, by default.

I’d stayed over at Warren’s house in Galgorm once, just before school broke up for summer. When Mum asked what his house was like, I said three storey, which she took as a dig, because our house was a bungalow. Then I said seriously rich, because Warren’s family were seriously rich, not just compared to us, compared to anyone, but especially to us. Mum said she bet they had a gold bidet to wash their arses. Still, when I brought Warren to stay over, Mum bought a whole chicken to roast for dinner.

I’d warned her not to quiz Warren about who my other friends were. She stuck to simple topics like what do your parents work at, and what he’d been doing with his summer?

‘I wish my mum cooked chicken this tasty,’ Warren said at the end of the meal. ‘You have to let me do the washing up.’

Mum, of course, refused.

‘Why are you saying no?’ Warren asked. Then he turned to me. ‘Do you leave the washing up for your mum? No way.’

Mum looked impressed with Warren. All through dinner he’d been like that. He had his polite, friendly patter down perfect. It was like watching him with teachers. I’d be having to do the dishes from now on, but tonight Mum told us to go and have fun. She put the dishes to soak and went to watch her programmes in the living room, while me and Warren hung out in my bedroom and played the Sega Master System I’d got last Christmas. Sonic the Hedgehog had come free with it, but if you left the cartridge slot empty another game loaded. Alex Kidd in Miracle World. Warren had already completed Sonic on the Mega Drive. Instead of giving the Master System a chance, he started on about how going from 16-bit to 8-bit was like putting stabilisers back on your bike. 

I waited a few goes before switching away from Sonic, just so it didn’t look like his slabbering had got to me. When I stuck on the Alex Kidd game, Warren laughed his head off, saying this was worse than a Commodore 64. I kept playing, getting to the bit where Alex Kidd plays rock, paper, scissors against the first end of level boss. Warren went into a rant about how rock may beat scissors, and scissors may beat paper, but there was no way paper could beat rock, and anyone who disagreed should go use a piece of paper to fight someone who has a rock.

I turned the computer off and tried to get a picture on the TV. I didn’t watch TV in my room, and the channels weren’t tuned in. Any time a disjointed voice made it sound as if I was about to get a picture, the screen stayed filled with black and white fuzz. 

‘Sunday night TV’s crap anyway,’ I said, switching it off.

Warren studied the stacks of cassette tapes on my shelf. ‘Fuck me. Do you not have any CDs?’

‘Just tapes.’

‘You should buy CDs. You can skip all the pish tracks.’

I was jealous of how Warren could switch his personality when no adults were around. In school and around parents, he was the clean-cut boy with good manners. Out of their earshot, he swore like he got paid for it.

I didn’t want to say I couldn’t afford a CD player. I had over a hundred C90s, two albums per tape, one on each side. Packs of ten cost a fiver. I gave tapes to Warren to copy me albums I wanted. Just before term ended, Warren offered to lend me a CD of Ash’s 1977. I did my usual of saying I’d give him a tape to record it for me and made an excuse that I couldn’t take care of CDs; they’d come back scratched with the liner notes all coffee rings. Warren said he couldn’t be bothered; I could borrow the CD or do without. He did this in front of everyone in the lunch queue. It felt as if he was sharing an inside joke with them. I was half tempted to take the CD and scratch fuck out of it, but he wouldn’t have copied anything for me after that.

‘We are! We are!’ someone outside in the alley sang. ‘We are the Billy Boys!’

The singer rattled the tall, corrugated iron sheet of our garden fence as he walked along the alley.

‘I thought the lyrics went, “Hello! Hello!” Warren said.

‘Never paid much attention to them. Not by choice anyway.’

Warren gave me a funny look, as if he knew a conversation we could be having, but he was happy to skip it for now.

‘Do you have anything other than Sonic or that Alex Mack game?’ Warren said.

‘That’s all, unless you want to play chess?’

‘Fuck yeah. Didn’t know you played.’

I dug the chess set out from below my bed and opened the board onto the carpet. I balled a black pawn in one hand and a white in the other.

‘Choose,’ I said, holding my fists out.

Warren tapped my left hand, which was white.

‘We are! We are!’ the same guy sang walking back down the alleyway. ‘We are the Billy Boys!’

‘Either he’s loud or your walls are thin,’ Warren said.

‘Ground floor bedroom,’ I said, brushing off his dig.

I’d never seen the singer’s face, but I recognised his voice. He regularly sung The Billy Boys while walking past our house, usually around the time the local pub closed. Nice fellah, I’m sure. Hard man too, but he knows he’s safe round here.

‘Do you think he knows any other songs?’ Warren said. ‘Or any other lines?’

I’d love to be able to say the most interesting thing that happened that evening was I learned about castling, because when Warren moved his castle across three empty spaces and tucked his king in on the other side of it, I was sure he was cheating. We had a short argument about the move that was interrupted by a round of, again, The Billy Boys.

‘Hello! Hello…’

‘He got it right that time,’ Warren said.

‘… you’ll know us by our noise / we’re up to our knees in Fenian blood / Surrender or you’ll die.’

‘Hang out the window and tell that hoor to fuck up,’ Warren said.

‘Better leave him to it. He’ll be back every night if he knows it bothers me.’

Warren won our first game. I would have blamed him for cheating, because of the castling, but I did the move myself, saying if it was okay for him, it was okay for me.

‘Different rules for me and you,’ he said, then he laughed. Taking most of my pieces as he won had improved his mood.

‘Set those up again,’ Warren said, getting up to go to the toilet.

I had the board ready when he came back.

‘Do people in your estate not work?’ he said.

‘No idea. Why?’

‘They sound pretty hyped up for a Sunday night.’

‘Thin walls?’ I shrugged. I got up to go to the toilet, but really, I wanted to listen to what it was like at the front of the house. To me, it sounded no different than usual. When I got back to the room, Warren was sniffing a wee bottle.

‘Have you ever done poppers?’ he said, half-hushed with a big red face, as he reached me the bottle. ‘My brother gets them from a sex shop in Belfast.’

I took a big sniff and spent the next thirty seconds giggling at nothing, while the poppers tinted my vision a pishy yellow.

Warren put the poppers back in his pocket and sat down at the chess board. ‘If I win again, we’ll have another sniff.’

‘Feeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeniiiiiiiiiiiiiiiaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaans!’ came a shout from the square behind the back of our house.

‘It’s almost like he knows,’ Warren said, not taking his eyes off the chessboard.

‘He’s reading the graffiti on the side of the house,’ I said, taking my move.

‘What graffiti?’

‘FENIANS is sprayed on the side of the house in blue paint.’

‘Fuck. Can’t believe I missed that. Why don’t you wash it off? It’s like having a target on you round here.’

‘They started off putting Hang IRA Scum stickers on our drainpipes. I picked those off. Some wanker wrote Fenians on the back gate with a permanent marker. I painted over it. Then some local hero took a spray can to the side of the house. I heard the rattle of the can in the middle of the night when I was lying in bed.’

‘You should have gone out and caught him at it.’

‘Would you go out at two in the morning? I was fourteen at the time.’

‘Yeah, but you look older. Whoever it was might have thought you were an adult.’

Mum knocked my bedroom door. She was all smiles for Warren but called me out to the living room.

‘I think there’s some ruckus going on outside,’ she said. ‘Can you bring up the news on teletext?’

The houses in the estate were L-shaped bungalows. The living room and my bedroom looked out onto the same small, square back yard, so mum had no doubt heard that wanker shout Fenians. Apart from that, I hadn’t heard anything different than usual, but I keyed in the numbers on the remote for regional news and waited while Teletext came up. The twelfth was next weekend. Maybe people in the estate were warming up for it. Teletext wasn’t saying anything out of the ordinary, so I went back for the rematch with Warren.

‘Better not be smoking up there,’ Mum said, half-joking, I hoped.

Back in the bedroom, Warren was standing beside the curtains, as if he was listening to what was going on outside. Warren didn’t know the estate, but mum did, and her worrying was making me worried. There were other voices in the square now. No one congregated there usually, not at this time anyway.

‘Could I use your phone?’ Warren said.

‘We don’t have a phone.’

Warren gawked as if I’d admitted shitting myself, with a face as if he really had shat himself.

‘Where’s the nearest phone box?’

‘Bottom of the hill.’

‘No offence, but I’m phoning for a lift home.’

‘Why?’ I knew why, but I wanted him to say it out loud. From out in the square a shout of ‘Fenian Bastards’ saved him the trouble.

‘You’re safest staying put,’ I said. ‘If they see you leave here, they’ll think you’re a Fenian too.’

‘I’m from Galgorm.’

‘Even worse. Rich and a Fenian.’

‘But I’m not a Fenian.’

‘Why are you coming out of a Fenian’s house?’

‘Because I don’t give a shit about that stuff.’

‘So not a Fenian, but you hang around with Fenians?’

‘No offence, but I’m heading.’

That Warren started walking towards me, had almost passed me, saved him from the half-brick that flew across the room, spraying glass and cheers from outside. I ran into the hall and threw the cloakroom door open. Mum appeared from the living room.

‘They just smashed my window,’ I said, answering the question I could read on her worried face. ‘Should we all go into your room?’

‘I’m sorry Warren,’ Mum said, sounding as embarrassed as she was scared.

I wrenched my hurling stick out of the back of the cupboard. ‘If one of them comes in, they’re getting a rattle with this.’

‘It just came up on teletext,’ Mum said. ‘There’s rioting going on throughout the North.’

There was something in the way she said the North that urged me to flinch, as if she should have phrased it differently in front of Warren. Practice had taught me not to acknowledge these things. As if my reaction would be judged more than what someone else had said.

‘It’s Drumcree this weekend,’ Warren said, then looked about him as if he was admitting something he didn’t want us to know. ‘Remember the riots last year? That’s what’s happening now.’

Mum, house proud even in a crisis, made us wait in the hall while she gave her room a quick once over.

‘You are a Fenian,’ Warren whispered. ‘Since when do you play hurling?’

‘I played it at primary school,’ I said, only thinking for the first time that maybe Warren wasn’t as neutral as I’d thought. ‘What about you? How’d you know it’s Drumcree this weekend?’

‘How do you not know?’

‘I actually don’t give a shit about stuff like that.’

‘You’re Catholics living in a loyalist estate. You should make a point of knowing what’s going on.’

I turned the hall light off, half so no one outside would be able to tell we were in this part of the house, but also because I didn’t want to acknowledge the truth in what Warren had said. In the dying half-light, I could just about make out the expression on his face saying, you know I’m right. Despite the stickers, the graffiti, and the taunts from other kids, Mum and I had an attitude of, if we don’t bother no one, hopefully, they won’t bother us.

‘I’m still leaving,’ Warren said. ‘They’re not going to beat up a teenager.’

‘Good luck with that.’

Someone wiggled the bolt of our gate. A thud hit the front door, which though thin as a lollipop stick, was held firm by a double-barrelled Chubb lock. Warren moved in behind me. I took a step towards the front door, just one, telling myself to be careful, because this was really happening. As I watched my hands raise the hurling stick like a lightsabre, I couldn’t believe how ready I was to wrap it round the head of whoever came through our door.

‘We’re safer out here,’ Mum said, as she came back into the hall. ‘Something just hit the window in my room.’

My head swivelled round, half-expecting to see her face covered in blood.

‘It didn’t break,’ she said. ‘Sounded like it hit the frame.’

‘Have you anything Warren could use?’ I said.

‘Can’t I just hide in a cupboard?’

Mum and I laughed, both of us trying to keep it quiet, as if Warren had made a joke, because we really needed a joke. 

Something I’d never told anyone was that since we’d moved in, I’d heard people at night, about one or two in the morning, not just drunks singing, people hurrying along the alley and through the back square. It was regular, or too often, and too many people to just be random. A fellah at school once said something about night-time manoeuvres through his estate. I wondered if he meant paramilitary. He hated me, and I’d only overheard him say it, so I’d no way to find out more, but could the people I heard at night be UVF or UDA, or whatever the loyalists were in my estate? Because the people outside might not just be dickhead drunks, they could be full blown terrorists, with guns and bombs. Some of them might even have killed people. I was only sixteen, but Warren was right: I’d been shaving since first year. I’d had to take my birth certificate to the bus station to get a special ID made because the drivers didn’t believe I was under eighteen. People didn’t talk to me round the estate, so for all the people outside knew, I was an adult. Beating the shit out of an adult would be fair game in their circles, so would kneecapping, or worse. They wouldn’t ask to see my ID.

Another kick landed on the door. A cheer went up from whoever was with them, but the door didn’t budge. I looked around but couldn’t see anything to use as a barricade. My arms were sore. Did I have time to lower the hurl before they got in?

‘Will your neighbours not call the police?’ Warren said.

‘These are the neighbours.’

I’d only said that because it sounded like a cool line. I didn’t know who these people were. Truth is, I’m sure decent folk lived round here too. That didn’t mean they’d become targets to protect us.

The sound of smashing glass came from the front of the house.

‘Was that my kitchen?’ Mum said running in to check.

‘My brother has a mobile phone,’ Warren said. ‘A big brick of a thing. Our family say it makes him look like the burnt-out assistant manager of a local Tesco. I wish to fuck I had it now.’

When people at school boasted about their expensive gadgets, I stayed silent. Warren’s story sounded like a boast, and despite the shake in his voice, he seemed determined to go down boasting.

Mum reappeared in the hall.

‘It wasn’t our window,’ she said in a hushed voice, moving in behind me. ‘Do you think other Catholics live round here.’

‘Maybe they hit the wrong house,’ I said.

‘When I die / don’t bury me in Erin’s Fenian valley,’ came a chant from the front street. It sounded like more were outside than I’d thought. ‘Just take me home / to Ulster let me rest / and on my grave inscribe a simple message / here lies a soldier of the UVF.’

They got more excited at the next part.

‘Here lies a soldier / here lies a soldier / who lived and died / for what he loved the best / THE UVF! / Here lies a soldier / here lies a soldier / here lies a soldier of the UVF!’

I was glad I’d my back to Mum and Warren, but I could feel their eyes on me. I wanted Warren gone. Not to put him outside. Just, if we had a secret hidey-hole in the floor that only fitted one, I’d want him bundled into it, because I knew every scrap of this story would leave the estate with what was left of him at the end of the night. It would be spread far and wide, but especially round school. I’d prefer to be here just me and Mum, because, although we’d never had it this bad, we’d put up with it in trickles since moving in: graffiti on the house; that Billy Boys singing wanker giving us a blast every week or two; weed killer poured over the fence onto the small strip of a back garden Mum’s green fingers had made pretty, and the bottle chucked in after to avoid any confusion. I didn’t want anyone at school knowing about that. The embarrassment was as hard for me as the danger.

My arms were burning. I lowered the hurl, ready to raise it again if another kick landed. The choir were now talking amongst themselves, not loud enough for me to make out what they were saying. How many could I take down with a hurl? It was heavy, but there was a thinness to it that made me think it could snap easily, snap before it had battered enough of them. And what if they had weapons of their own? Guns? Maybe I could swat the bullets away like in an action film. Getting shot didn’t look so bad in films. Sure, it stung, but you just wrapped a shirt round your arm and carried on. That was balls though. I’d never heard of anyone on the news saving themselves with a bit of cloth. The killings seemed like they were stopping. Now here were these dickheads. But were any of them killers? Did any of them want us dead? Would any of them have the balls to do it, or did they just want us gone?

‘Listen,’ Mum whispered.

I dropped my train of thought. There were still voices out the front, but they didn’t sound so close anymore. I took another step towards the door, taking care to stay to the side of it in case they smashed the pane of frosted glass. A dark blob, just beyond the door, partially blocked the familiar glow of the streetlight. It was tall, the shape of a person. What else could it be? I listened for a sound from them, but nothing. I watched the cloudy neon beams for any slight change, but again, nothing.

‘Peelers are on their way mate,’ I said, making my voice gruffer. My balls had already dropped, but I worried I still sounded like a child.

Again nothing.

‘Who you talking to?’ Warren asked. Mum knew to stay quiet.

The stillness of this figure made me want to move further back from the glass. I felt sure that whoever this was, they weren’t just an idiot drunk. My worst thoughts about terrorists condensed into this dark shape. The longer they remained, silent, knowing they’d been seen, while other voices disappeared, served to underline and enlarge that feeling. If they’d said, ‘Boo,’ I’d have screamed.

I opened my mouth to warn them again about the peelers, but that hadn’t worked the first time. I remembered a movie where a gunman, a soldier with a long-range rifle, used sound to tell where people were. I closed my mouth, wondering how far the sound of my breath travelled, and took a step back, feeling the soft bounce of my heel press down on the top of Warren’s trainer.

‘Ow,’ he said, pushing me forward.

I turned to give him a dirty look, hoping to silence him, but I doubt he could make out my face in the darkness. Turning back, I saw the dark figure hadn’t moved. I’d hoped he’d heard Warren’s childish voice and decided to leave us alone. The longer we stood there, the more I wondered if he was trying to scare us, or if he was debating whether to do something. I knew that by morning, late morning, or afternoon, he’d be gone. I didn’t know what would happen in the time in between, but I wanted him to go now.

‘Back up a little,’ I whispered, turning to Warren and Mum. It was less a whisper than me forming the words with my mouth and using only enough air necessary to carry the words to their ears.

I hoped that each time I turned back to the door, the dark figure would be gone. I raised the hurl slightly, to feel the weight of it, to see if my tired arms could handle it. Could I swing it hard enough to hurt this weirdo? Maybe adrenaline would paralyse me, like it did in fights at school.

The dark shape rippled against the neon. The bolt slid back, and the hinge creaked, as the gate swung open. The black figure stepped out onto the pavement and closed the gate behind him, taking his time to bolt it. The shadow disappeared. His slow and deliberate clops on the pavement told me he wasn’t in a hurry.

It took me a minute to lower the hurling stick, letting the bas rest on the welcome mat.

‘Do we still have that sheet of board in the cloakroom?’ I asked.

Mum sighed. ‘Let’s worry about that in the morning.’

‘What if someone climbs in the window?’ Warren said.

‘You saw it yourself. It’s too jagged,’ I said, hoping I was right.

‘Can we check?’

I tapped the bottom of my bedroom door to nudge it open, then I jumped into the room, the hurl again held like a samurai sword.

But the room was empty, except for the chips of glass covering the floor. Not even a breeze had come in from outside. A rock, a half-brick, sat pride of place in the middle of the carpet, just short of the bed.

‘Fuck it, we can’t sleep here tonight,’ I said, then realised. ‘Sorry Mum.’

‘Let’s sit in the hall and play cards,’ Mum said. ‘I’ve a deck in the living room.’

I went to follow her, but she told me to wait there; the hall was the safest part of the house if anything started again.

‘Listen, back in school,’ Warren said. ‘If anyone starts onto you about Drumcree and marches and stuff, don’t bring me into it. I don’t like those rioting fuckers either, but I’m not making myself a target for dicks round school.’

‘Don’t worry. I won’t tout on you,’ I said, ‘unless I hear something about me having a hurling stick.’

‘Why do you live here? You should have known what it’s like from wankers at school.’

‘I told Mum, but I didn’t have a say in coming to live here.’

‘Why don’t you keep your head down at school when all this shit starts up? Seriously.’

‘I can’t. Not with my name. You hear the way people start shit with me when I’m minding my own business.’

Mum reappeared with the cards. In the darkness, the dim orange streetlight provided enough light for us to see their faces. Mum suggested Gin Rummy, probably because there was less talking with it than Jack Change It. ‘Gin,’ was all anyone would occasionally say, then we’d go back to listening for sounds outside. Winning a hand didn’t feel like a victory; it just meant it was someone else’s turn to deal.

When the morning light suggested sleep could be safe, Mum made up a bed for Warren on the living room sofa. I slept in her bed, while she drank tea in the kitchen. Warren woke before me. Mum wanted to see him to the phone box, but I told her I’d go.

I clocked the padlock on the gate as I walked out the front door. Probably that shadowy dick. Cleaving the padlock in two with a hammer burnt up some of the adrenaline still whizzing around my body.

‘If I’d thought last night, you could have used this,’ I said to Warren.

He just looked at me. He didn’t talk on the way to the phone box, as he walked slightly behind me.

The estate felt safer in daylight, at least to me who was familiar with it; it looked more like I knew it, unfriendly, rather than dangerous. None of the other houses we passed had broken windows. Warren waited by the phone box for his dad. He told me to go back home, but I wanted to wait.

‘Look, don’t take this the wrong way, but you shouldn’t be here when my dad arrives.’

‘Sure,’ I said, wanting to take a second before walking off. ‘See you in school.’

Mum did her sums and got a landline installed. I wouldn’t let Warren know. It was only supposed to be for emergencies. I didn’t know if Warren and I would even be friends come September, especially now he’d seen there was more to my unpopularity than some dicks slabbering, that it was dangerous and could be dangerous for him.

Taking a detour back to the house, I wanted to see what other damage had been done. As I walked up the back hill, I could see the long stretch from the main road into the estate. A burnt-out car sat at the mouth of it. Warren’s dad would see it as he drove in, and Warren would see it as they drove away.

How would Warren tell this story? His friends and neighbours back in his estate would hear it. Warren and his dad would dine out on it for years, alternating between their individual parts, until the burnt-out car revealed itself at the end. Maybe in their stories it would still be on fire. Maybe they would see it get torched as they drove away, as if to reinforce somehow that the danger had been so real, their escape so lucky, and Warren, that clean-cut good-mannered boy, had been so brave.