GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2022/23
SONYA GILDEA
‘ A 1000 hours a day …’
HE SWUNG THE RIFLE OFF HIS HIP IN THIS SWEET KIND OF NON-MOVEMENT, so that it was pointing at her friend’s face; close, at eye level. It was a pivot, at the elbow, all one motion, single handed. Her friend had stopped talking, had thought, in some parallel, it was a joke, and laughed. Nervous, yes, but still, funny surely.
The rifle swinger, his free hand on the head-rest of the bus seat in front, didn’t move now at all. His booted feet – the cause of the first misunderstanding – planted firmly in the aisle of the stopped bus. His uniformed self: dark, winter green khakis and combats – the cause of the second misunderstanding. He tilted his head so slightly to the side. Like listening out for something further away. Like a tick. Like, he was here and in this other place at precisely the same time.
There was a necessary quiet in the full bus. A certain, self-preserving non movement. Even – she wanted to think – fabric stilled; clothe, paper, hair. A little sound vacuum.
She remembers when she was young her father saying, just stop moving. That’s all. A friend of his, a drummer – a kid at the time – had cracked open a coke can in the back seat of a Ford transit – and the border soldier shot. Not him. It turned out, but an airborne ricochet reflex. The hand, the trigger finger is always on the trigger, her father had said. A noise, and boom – off it goes. Doesn’t matter who or the why. The body just reacting. The finger pulls toward self. Toward the chest cavity.
And, her father had said, these men are children. Mostly. Boys. They can’t see you. Rigid, he said, with fear. Terror. They’re not actually behind their own eyes.
Her friend seemed to think the rifle pointing at her was a mistake. A silly one. Something of lightness, and panic, that would stop shortly.
She, on the other hand, felt if the gun were to go off, that it was leaning fractionally more toward her friend’s left cheekbone. Marginal. Under the eye socket, is what she thought.
She herself was not moving. Indeed, had stopped once the bus did. Auto-reflex. Fluency of an older language. There’s all life before, all life (picks up again) after – but during, it is a thing suspended. There are – though never spoken – rules. Everyone knows. Everyone reads all the extraneous information of the happening like code, like image data. Damp, overcast. Poor visibility. Hot, clear skied, dry aired. It is part of this small island and how we once criss- crossed its many border check points.
Her friend, it turns out, did not know this. Did not, it turns out, know any of it. Could not, now that she thinks about it. Her friend was from the very south. Unleft. Unhemmed. Entirely its own place and purpose. This situation, the rifle to her face, the stopped and crowded bus, engine idling, people waiting – was, all in, new to her. So much so, that her friend had missed the exact point at which you step fully into the fiction. She was now on the other side of an invisible door she hadn’t heard close.
Everyone on the bus, the many people in all the seats on ahead, were in the fiction. Had moved into the happening of this scene a thousand times. They also knew – it could be felt in the additional tension, a little extra electricity to the whole thing – that the girl was, all in, without any knowledge.
The girl, she was fourteen. So, a child. Both were fourteen. Travelling late June, an Expressway coach bus from Cork to Dublin, Dublin to Donegal town. The Diamond Square. In time for June 23rd, St John’s eve, bonfire night and the disco at the parochial hall out the Wood Road.
*
Shared freely, loyally, there is common ground on three (perhaps four) key points between our Irish/English/UK brethren/sisters. Specifically, music. Specifically, football. Always, Family. Scattered, adrift, there. Here. In part, in all. Tracking back and forth.
No matter what part of the island you live on, you have – invariably – and still do – a Premier League team. Man Utd, Arsenal. Spurs. They are, remain, your life long team. You sometimes inherit your love of them from your own mother, father, your uncle.
Your fellow Spurs, Chelsea, Liverpool fan sees no national divide. A shared club. A bond sure as family.
Music. There is a point of agency that is neither English nor Irish nor British. Owned entirely outside of these things. It is as much yours as you are theirs.
Friends travel to, they live and work in London. Manchester. Glasgow. Belfast. Gigs are mutual. You travel there. They travel here. You move. They move. Bands play here and there the same. By Ferry, by M1. In the north and the south, equally meant.
At the time of the rifle, they were in fact, listening to music on the back seat of the Expressway long-distance bus. Leatherette seats, sticky in the muggy warmth. Music that was perhaps too loud. Though, only in retrospect. They listened to music that belonged to those older than they were. They were expert at divining what was most needed and how to secure it, hear it, bring it back, be of it. It was in the way they thought, in how the world was shaped, and the way in which they were shaped to it.
The summer weather would have given itself to music of buoyancy. Something with an undertow of anger and therefore, always, on the outskirts, loss. Though first, nearly always, was just the feeling of making time, at speed, on the road.
This day, they’d been listening to the Clash, and earlier, out of Dublin, Magazine. Barry Adamson. The Light Pours Out of Me.
They were also of an Irish teen generation who wore combats (fatigues, as named by the US) in, or as resistance. Often, from the old army surplus stores on city quays. The Coal Quay in Cork, Capel Street in Dublin. Second hand, much loved.
It is notable only in that there was a precise way of wearing a pair of combats – in how they met the high top of your boots – that was singular, distinguishing. Often docs. Black (rarely brown) or the much revered, ox blood red.
If you knew your beans, you pulled this off. Beautifully. Sensually. It was also an understood and understated intelligence. You had made decisions, musical and therefore, political allegiances.
You knew, at a downward glance, who was of the revolution (no matter the country) and who had missed it (no matter place of birth). It was every album cover, every bass player, every day.
It was learnt language. Shared, meant.
*
Crossing border check-points was also a learnt language. Unspoken. She’d had travelling parents. They moved, always. There was no first time. Driving at some speed into a measured, steady half-mile slow down, you know. The shift in the engine, the way in which motion changed and smoothed into something that lacked unpredictability. She felt it in the engine, heard it. Something that could, if such a thing existed then, have been identified by algorithm.
She is, will always be, in the window seat behind either her father, if he is driving, or her mother, if it is her. She, her sister and the baby. Already several hours in the car. Always, by the time this far north, several hours.
And so, no matter if sleeping, if shouting, if singing, if arguing, fighting, roaring, thinking, if playing, reading, kicking, crying, they change with the car changing. Their small bodies drain of unpredictability. She knows it like code. They all do – without looking up, without being told. The change already begun.
The childhood checkpoint stops. Rifled, uniformed. She watches from the back seat. The questions, inflection, the body language. How old they look and so young. Searching the boot of the car. The way her mother sits, calm, hands at ten and two o’clock on the steering wheel. Not leaning her shoulder toward, or favouring the open window. Her father handing out a driver’s license. The sound of the car boot opening, the click and clang into air. The muffled noise.
Warm days, heavy in uniform. Weighted. Bound. Young. Wet nights, under rain, eyes dark and lit. Cold. Unloved.
Sniper towers. Weapons, trained. Voices. Familiar. Unfamiliar. Strained. Walkie- talkie crackle.
And always, always for her, how it feels. All the different variations in how it feels. In response to and in keeping with degrees of perceived danger.
She gives nothing, raises no-one’s attention. It is a practiced invisibleness.
She was sent to live in Donegal in the far north west when she was one and half years of age. And when she left, she then returned every year for three months. She doesn’t know how often she criss-crossed this border. Countless times.
*
This is the thing. She remembers this one time only one way. It doesn’t change, though they have, of course. And times have.
She was fourteen. Her friend too. Both fourteen. Travelling June 22nd, an Expressway bus from Cork to Dublin. Busáras. Patrick Scott Mosaics. Moorish like Pillars of otherness. Dublin to Donegal town. The Diamond Square, air changed. In time for St John’s eve, bonfire night, the disco at the parochial hall out on the Wood Road. Robert Smith. The Cure. A thousand wasted hours a day.
On the stalled bus, rifle aloft. Her friend had – not surprisingly – recognised the combats hitting the high-tops of the soldier’s lace up military issue leather boots just so. A perfect hit. He was tall. The waist, slender. Fabric that falls from hips. Sweetly. Boyishly. The whole thing, instant. Familiar. Familial. Safe.
Her friend had laughed, looking up at the soldier. Out loud. And had said so. Had said, ‘look!’. And he swung the rifle, all one movement, off his hip and to her friend’s face.
She had waited, a beat, then two, her friend looking up at him, his eyes. Trying to read the situation. But he had stopped it. He had just stopped all the language of it.
Outside, soldiers milled under the bus, taking luggage, cases, bags and placing them on the roadside. The noise so far off. Their voices, the world of their voices still going on.
SONYA GILDEA is winner of the John McGahern Literature Award (2021) and the Cúirt International New Writer’s Award in Fiction (2015). She is recipient of an Arts Council of Ireland Literature Bursary Award (2021); was selected for Poetry Ireland Introductions (2021/22); and was awarded an IWC National Mentorship Award (2022/23). Sonya has published in The Stinging Fly, Tolka, New Irish Writing, The Common, The Cormorant Broadsheet, The Maynard, Crannog, and The Irish Times; as well as the anthologies Romance Options (Dedalus Press); This is What You Mean to Me (Poetry Ireland); Hold Open the Door (UCD Press); Washing Windows Too (Arlen House). Sonya is recipient of a DLR Arts & Creative Ireland Literature Bursary Award (2021); a Tyrone Guthrie Centre Artist Residency (2021); and an IWC Cill Rialaig Writer’s Residency (2022). She graduated with an MA in Creative Writing, UCD. She is writing the short story collection The Switching Yard and the poetry collection 500 Seconds. She lives in Dublin, Ireland.