*

I get inside, and I shut the door, I’m exhausted, and I leave my crutches in the hall and start to climb the stair, on my hands and knees, dragging my bad leg behind me. There’s a banging noise, then another, somewhere out the back. Somebody is knocking pans together, bin lids, running from one house till the next. Something is up, the Brits are on their way. I’m halfway up the stair when the glass of the front door is bathed in light. I’m illuminated and half-blinded. I put my hand up to my forehead to shield my eyes and there’s a terrible roaring and a shaking, and the sound of machinery, and the door comes off its hinges and three figures, in masks, come blazing through. I’m dragging myself, backward, up the stair, and the first figure starts to undoing his belt, which is rape, oh Christ Jayzus, he’s going to fucking rape me, is my first thought, but then he wraps his leather belt around his fist and starts walking up the stair toward me, real … slow … like. He’s nearly upon me and I can see his eyes, his Irish eyes, are smiling. He takes his belt and he wraps it tight around my throat. Immobilised, paralysed by these laughing Irish eyes and this bright light, I’m taken like a dog by the neck and dragged down the stair, I can’t breathe, he’s choking me, but I can’t speak neither, and I’m grabbing at my throat, when a dark silhouette appears, a shade that raises its leg and brings it down on my splintered kneecap, which is a relief, to enter me, being, enters me, and it is simple, not complex at all, but is light and simple. The belt around my neck seemed to grow, and to extend, till a noodle or a rope is an umbilical, an umbilical running from Adam’s Apple, to absorb the light that is all around I’s, to take it into our body’s mirror, and to speak it.

As they dragged me toward the Land Rover I broke free and I floated up with my arms raised into the air, God’s Own Boys are the figures rising up, the umbilical to the throat is our bright connection, and the vans, and the ambulances, down below, are humbled, and the military vehicles spread out across Jamaica Street in the snow, are humbled, and the soldiers, are huddled, in groups, their guns aimed at the coffins, arrayed all around them, coffins arrayed, around the ways, and illuminated, by the lights of ambulances, on this borderline, beneath the frosted roofs of the old Ardoyne, gathered, as witnesses, in memory, poor bastards, in memory, now, forever, as I hovered above the rooftops of the Ardoyne and I cast my light down, on the imprisoned, and as the three figures moved to open the Land Rover door, I let myself go, a balloon with the light inside of me is a poor cast for a body, as I let go of the golden light inside of me, and let it come down