I WOULD LIE AWAKE FOR HOURS, WHEN I WAS A LITTLE BOY, holding out against surrender to sleep, listening to the helicopters drone above our neighbourhood. After the government dismantled the border checkpoints in the late 1990s, including one at the end of our street, the watchtower the last part to go, a curious series of visitations took place. They began as a deviation in the hum of a city night and steadily grew. Even though it was mechanical, it had purpose, intention behind it. As the source of the sound grew closer, a light would grow in the corner of my room, next to a pile of books, beneath the switch, enlarging, then turning wild and tesseract on the ceiling.
It became clear the hum that I was hearing was the sound of pursuit. A hunt was on. Boy racers. Joyriders. Hoods stealing from their own. Paramilitaries on some mission. The cops and the army were hot on their trail. If the runners got to the border, the authorities could not follow. I often reached the window just in time to see the red tail lights of a car vanishing into the mist. If they made it over that borderline, they were safe, protected by a partition invented by colonists earlier in the century. But the curve leading up to our housing estate and beyond to freedom was elongated and easy to misjudge, especially if you were driving at high speed in the perpetual rain of a continent’s edge. Some did not make it.
On several occasions, I found myself inside those cars, with acquaintances, friends of friends, hitchhiking. Only once had I the naivety to ask: “Jesus, lads, how can you afford a motor like this?” to a howling hyena chorus, betraying my greenness in a town where being streetwise was not just currency, but a matter of self-preservation.
There was much to deal with. Handbrake turns in industrial estates that sent the entire planet spinning backwards on its axis. The abrupt fairground terror of a chase from the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Then the G-force of the sudden halt at the unlikeliest moment and all four doors open, everyone scrambling in different directions, only slowing down when back in the maze of streets, and you were left with no company but your own pounding heartbeat.
If we reached the border, there would be a long trek back, trying to avoid the police by minimising time on the roads, passing sleeping farmsteads and bemused cattle and clambering over stone walls and entanglements of barbed wire. The next morning, to suspicious glances from my mother, I’d insist the night was uneventful.
We lived in Derry, in British-controlled Northern Ireland, not
