Free The Street and other stories by Gerry Adams Page A

earnest. Slieve Donard was but a hulking shadow behind me. I couldn’t see it. Here I was in Newcastle, on the beach. On my own, in the dark. Drunk. On Christmas Eve. Waiting for a bloody Orangeman to come back for me so that I could go home.
    The snow was lying momentarily on the sand, and the water rushing in to meet it looked strange in the moonlight as it and the sand and the snow merged. I was suddenly exhilarated by myinvolvement with all these elements, and as I crunched the sand and snow beneath my feet and the flakes swirled around me, my earlier frustrations disappeared. Then I chuckled aloud at the irony of it all.
    The headlights of the van caught me in their glare. My Orangeman had returned.
    “You’re soaked, you bloody eejit,” he complained when I climbed into the van again.
    He, too, was in better form. As we drove home it was as if we had never had a row. We had a sing-song—mostly carols with some Beatles numbers—and the both of us stayed well clear of any contentious verses. On the way through the Belfast suburbs Geordie sang what we called “our song”.
    O Mary, this London’s a wonderful sight,
    There’s people here working by day and by night:
    They don’t grow potatoes or barley or wheat,
    But there’s gangs of them digging for gold in the street.
    At least when I asked them that’s what I was told,
    So I took a hand at this digging for gold,
    For all that I found there I might as well be
    Where the Mountains of Mourne sweep down to the sea.
    We went in for a last drink after we’d clocked out at the store, but by this time my head was thumping and I just wanted to go home.
    As we walked back to the van Geordie shook my hand warmly.
    “Thanks, kid. I’ve learned a lot this last week or so, and not just about County Down. You’re dead on, son,” he smiled, “for a Fenian. Good luck to you anyway, oul’ hand, in all that you do, but just remember, our kid, I love this place as much as you do.”
    “I know,” I said. “I learned that much at least.”
    He dropped me off at Divis Street and drove off waving, on across the Falls towards the Shankill. I walked up to the Falls. That was the last I saw of Geordie Mayne. I hope he has survived the last twenty years and that he’ll survive the next twenty as well.
     
     
    I hope we’ll meet again in better times. He wasn’t such a bad fella, for an Orangeman.
    * One for the road

Up the Rebels
    Seamus had become institutionalised. He had been serving terms of twelve months, or six months, or three months in Belfast Prison for as long as he or anyone else could remember. It had gone on for so long now that he had forgotten how to cope with even the simplest realities of life outside. Three meals a day, a bed in a cell and the absence of decision-making on any issue, from going to the toilet to what to eat, had made Seamus into a passive, if likeable, human zombie.
    Every time he finished one sentence, back he came again within a week or so, to do time for some equally trivial offence. His family, who were both well-to-do and well-respected, were embarrassed by his behaviour. Once they even sent him from the family home in Armagh to Belfast for examination by a psychiatrist. Seamus, for his part, was so disturbed by this experience that he stole the psychiatrist’s car and promptly ended back in the relative safety of Belfast Prison again.
    That’s when I met him. I was on remand at the time he returned to his old job as orderly in A Wing. He used to “bump out” the wing three times a day, and when I was on my way from my cell on the bottom landing or sitting in it during lock-up, I used to see or hear Seamus “bumping” his way up and down the well-polished floor. “Bumping” meant polishing the tiles which stretched a hundred yards from the “circle” up to the end of the wing, and Seamus had been doing it for so long that he now took a certain pride in the dull red glow which was produced by his endless to-ing and fro-ing.