Eight Nothing,

Eight Nothing,

Nothing Two,

Eight.

*

I come in near the end of the first hunger strike. I mind attending mass in H3 one Sunday morning and seeing men what looked like they were a hundred year old. Brothers bent double, led in by their twin, shrouds wrapped tight around the two of them, in Bible time. Other men touching their pale white skin. Touching the white skin pulled tight round their faces, and looking in their dark eyes, and weeping there too. The first hunger strike was led by a man name of The Dark: Brendan ‘The Dark’ Hughes. He was like Tommy. One of these Irish guys what look like fucking negroes. That’s what they called him: Darkie or The Dark. But everything takes on new meaning in The Place Of Endless Echoes.

The Boys were being led by The Dark. They were being led by The Dark across The Dead Zone. And there were communications between the dead. From the dead that had crossed over into other regions of The Zone. In December we receive notice that three women in the Armagh prison had joined us in the hunger strike. Three women were approaching. Three shades, coming through from the other side. The priest talked to us about the agonies of Christ Jayzus. How Christ Jayzus will be in agony until the end of the world. But the world had already come to an end. We had left the world behind us. And now there was only a final suffering, a final monumental sacrifice, before we would have no more of this world and every single one of us, echoes, in time. If you could enter the eyes of a dead man, the black, inscrutable eyes of a dead man, at mass, in H3, in the years of the hunger strike, then you would come to know that heaven and hell are just party games played for the benefit of the living.

Part Five: The Ocean and the Shore

The phone rings, in the middle of night. It’s Tommy. It’s a game of Tommy calling me from the other side, and I sit on the stair, and I pick up the phone, in the dead of this Belfast night, and it’s the same silence on the end of the line, the same fucking silence as ever. But now someone is trying to speak. Tommy? Is that yourself, Tommy?

Answer me, Tommy.

Moira’s out of bed. Get back to fucking bed and close that fucking door behind you.

Someone’s crying. A woman’s voice is in tears at the end of the line.

Kathy? I says to it.

Kathy, is that you, honey?

Xamuel, it says.

Xamuel, I’m in trouble.

Xamuel, they are going to kill me.

Xamuel, I’m in trouble deep.

They? Who are they?

The ones what are going to kill me, she says, and the voice, it is Kathy’s.

Nobody’s going to kill anybody. Not while I’m around.

(muffled noises on the phone)