Free The Street and other stories by Gerry Adams Page B

He used a bumper, which is like a brush but bigger, with a wooden box where the brush-head should be. The box was weighted down with bricks and its base covered with blankets. Itwas heavy and tedious work pushing and pulling this contraption over the tiles, all the time trying to coax a shine from them. Seamus didn’t seem to mind. The screws didn’t really bother him except when they wanted their tea made or some menial task performed. When they did require his services, he complied with a slow yet unhesitating obedience. Sometimes one or two of the nastier ones would poke fun at him, but he was so much a part of the place that everyone usually took him for granted.
    On Sundays, during mass in the prison chapel when the political and the ordinary prisoners came together, we would pass him cigarettes, and at night when we were locked up and he was still bumping up and down the silent, deserted wing, we would slip newspapers under our cell doors for him.
    He was always extremely cautious about associating too openly with us. We were fairly rebellious, holding parades in the prison yard, segregating ourselves from loyalist prisoners and dealing with the prison administration only through our elected OC. We were continuously on punishment, being subjected to loss of privileges and petty restrictions.
    As he bumped back and forth, Seamus was a silent, indifferent observer of the daily battles between us and the screws. Or so, at least, it appeared to us. Then one day a screw spilled a bucket of dirty water over Seamus’s clean floor.
    “If you don’t keep this place cleaner than that,” the screw guldered, “I’ll have you moved to the base.”
    Seamus looked at him in dumb disbelief and then, with tears trickling slowly down his face, he went on his hands and knees at the screw’s feet to mop up the water which was spreading like a grey blemish over his floor. The screw was a new one, and that incident was only the first of many. It got so bad subsequently that poor Seamus was even afraid to accept our cigarettes, and we found the newspapers which we slipped into the hall for him still lying there when we slopped out the following morning.
    There wasn’t much we could do about it. We willed Seamus to resist, and our OC went as far as to make a complaint about thescrew, whom we all spontaneously ostracised. But we were beginning also to despise Seamus for showing no signs of fighting back, and in his own way he seemed to be blaming us for his troubles.
    And then Seamus rebelled. I was coming from the toilet at the time. He stood only a few yards from me, bumper at hand, looking at a group of screws loitering outside the dining hall.
    “Fuck youse!” he screamed, his words echoing along the wing and up along the tiers of the high glass ceiling.
    “Fuck youse!” he screamed again. “Youse think youse are somebody, ordering me about. And you,” he rounded on me with a vengeance. “Fuck you, too, and your cigarettes and your stupid bloody newspapers. I’m sick of youse all and your awful bloody floor.”
    At that the wing exploded into noise, with prisoners banging their cell doors, rattling the bars and generally making a hectic, frantic and frightening clamour.
    “Tell them to bangle their floor, Seamus.”
    “C’mon, Seamus, let it all out.”
    The screws, caught unaware by the suddenness and the ferocity of the din, moved hesitantly out of the wing and into the circle. There, safe behind the heavily barred gates, they looked up towards where Seamus and I stood, unescorted and alone, in the middle of the wing. The closed cell doors stared blankly at us, the floor stretched sullenly to meet the prison walls, and the noise continued unabated from all sides. Down at the circle the screws had drawn their batons, and one of them was phoning for assistance.
    “Shit,” said Seamus to me, a slow, sheepish grin creeping across his face as he surveyed the scene and heard the shouts of encouragement ringing out from all