Provisional Wording

I’m standing watching my brother Davey line up the penalty shot to decide the match.  We’ve been up the Green playing soccer for the whole of a steamy August afternoon, stopping only to sprint home for big gulps of cold water outta the kitchen tap; splash your face and hair, get yelled at for wetting the tiled floor; maybe run upstairs for a quick feet wash; then right back to the Green for the next match. 

Now it’s all down to this one penalty.

If he scores the penalty, our team, Marian Row and Riverdale, will beat Saint Bridget’s Crescent to win the Green Cup. 

It’s just a thing we made ourselves to fill up the boring summer holidays weeks.  Some of the lads’ll be going to secondary school when the holiday’s end, but not me, I’m only going into sixth class.  Once the lads go to secondary school, they don’t want to be playing in the Green no more; they want to be up the town, standing at Parsons trying not to get caught staring at girls’ arses.

I didn’t understand why they’d be looking at them, but then last year two teenagers were making fun of us for not knowing what “the ride” was.  I said it ‘twas riding a horse or a donkey down at the beach: I know, ‘cause it costs 20P to go up and down the beach in Kilkee on the back of a brown-shiny mule, that with every step it walks makes a nice warm squish of its saddle against your bollocks.

When they told us what “the ride” was, I didn’t believe them. 

That’s disgusting – sticking your willy in there!

I couldn’t even think about something like that.

Davey does the Liam Brady, hands on hips, staring at the goalie, penalty taking move.  Then he looks down at the ball slowly, then back up at the goal – which is just a few of our jumpers piled as the posts. 

The final of the Green Cup, that came after every team played each other twice, ended in a 17-17 draw.  Now it’s down to penalties – just like the World Cup. 

When we knew it was going to penalties, all the lads were trying to sneak the jumpers in closer together to make it easier for the goalies.  I like that cause I’m a goalie; not cause I’m good at it, it’s just that I’m worser out the field.  Me feet don’t do what I tell them.  I can trip fellas pretty good.  Sometimes I get away with it, cause I do try get me foot on the ball real quick, as if it was a fair tackle. 

The lads say I’m no good at soccer, but that I’m too thick to let anyone get apast me.  They put me in goals, so the match isn’t stopped all the time for fights.  That’s fine with me; goalies can do anything they want once the ball comes into the box.

Davey, stalking around a lot the way the professional players on the Match of the Day do, raising up his shoulders to takes a deep-I’m-about-to-take-a-penalty breath.

I can’t watch.

My stomach starts to go, telling me I’m scared. 

Not scared that he’ll miss: I don’t actually care who wins.  It’s just a stupid game that went on for so long and had so much cheating that you couldn’t say who really won. 

But I’m scared that something terrible is going to happen next.

Me stomach is always going like that.

A knock on the door; too much silence in the house; the principal sticking his head into the classroom; Da’s face when he walks into the house from work – everything makes me stomach go.

I turn away and stare at the graffiti on the wall that holds Baynes’ Hill from falling out onto Pound Road.

“NO EXTRADITION” – it says, painted in white on the pebble-dashed wall, the paint kinda-sorta dripping off each letter from where the paintbrush was too wet.

Them words showed up on the wall one morning a few months ago, but it’s only now, trying to stop me stomach from going that I ever bothered wondering what EXTRADITION meant.

And who painted it?

And why?

I mean I knew it had to have something to do with the IRA, ‘cause everything that’s not regular has to do with them, except maybe the odd thing the Travellers do.  But the Travellers usually do funny things, kinda-sorta funny-smart things that make the Settled people – that’s what they call us that live in houses – all tut-tut and sigh loudly.  Like the time the council gave them a house, and they ripped out the doors, cabinets, windowsills and burned the lot in the fireplace.  Then they washed their feet in the toilet bowl and filled the bathtub full of shite.

The IRA aren’t funny at all.  Da says, they’d put a bullet in your head as soon as they’d look at ya.  That’s why the Gards got an Uzi submachine gun sent down from Dublin.  Da does bring it home sometimes.  It’s fierce cool in its little briefcase that everything fits into just perfect.  We even get to take it apart and clean it, but we’re never allowed to touch the bullets.  Da keeps the clip full of bullets in the inside pocket of his blazer, where he keeps important stuff, like his black leather wallet.

“Sure if you weren’t careful with that bleddy thing, you could riddle half a Marian Row,” he twist-nods his head fast – his hair, Brylcreemed back hard and black, seeming to slice through the kitchen air, as he stands over us, supervising us cleaning of the submachine.

I try to figure out what EXTRADITION means.  The ‘extra’ part is easy, it’s the ‘dition’ I can’t figure out at-all-at-all-at-all.

It’s something to with prisoners.  I know that ‘cause on the news they’ll say so-and-so “originally from the Falls Road, Belfast, is being held on suspicion of membership in the Provisional IRA and weapons offences, while the British Government is seeking to have the suspect EXTRADITED.”

Maybe that means they want to come down and beat the shite of him for a few hours like they do to Catholics up in the Castlereagh RUC station?

That would be a good thing to stop.

These Troubles are everywhere now.  It’s funny that they just call them “Troubles;” not like Travellers-funny, but stupid-grown-ups-funny.

I mean there’s so many people getting shot, bombs going off, riots everywhere, and when you go near the Border, there’s heaps of soldiers, their faces blackened, hiding behind sandbags, pointing rifles and machine guns at your head.  And there’s so many IRA prisoners that they put them all together in Portlaoise Prison.  That was a bad idea, ‘cause last year, the IRA kinda-sorta took over Portlaoise the night of Saint Patrick’s Day.  They made the lights go off in the whole town and set a few fires so the Gards and the Fire Brigade would be too busy.  Then they drove a big lorry in the door of the prison.  The prison guards and the regular Irish Army, not the Irish Republican Army – it does get awful confusing – stopped anyone from escaping.

Still, with all these armies and guns and everything, it’s more like the “Troubles” is a war, and the sort of things Travellers do is ‘trouble.’ Like the time a Traveller ran into Donegan’s food shop and yanked one of them lovely looking juicy-brown chickens outta the glass oven that cooks them in a circle.  When the caught a few minutes later him and took what was left of the chicken back from him, he said: “Ya’ll have to wait for t’other half ‘til I shite it out!”  

But the Dublin crowd don’t care about Travellers, maybe they don’t have none up there.  It’s only the IRA they’re always on about, or, as the fella on the News, with all the cotton wool in his mouth to stop him from talking normal, calls them: “The Pro…vision…al IRA.”

What does Provisional mean?

Are they in favor of seeing better?

Now no one calls the IRA the IRA anymore; they all call them the Provos – that’s the short of Provisional.

Why do they always be making words us little fellas can’t understand?

An even more stupid one that they do is when a lad starves himself to death, they call it a Hunger Strike?  The first time I heard of a Hunger Strike I thought it meant that people wouldn’t do any more work until they got some food.  I heard it when Michael Gaughan from below in Ballina died in a prison in England.  And even then, it was a bigger lie, ‘cause he didn’t die from starvation, he died when they stuck a feeding tube down his throat.  Ten prison guards held him down on the bed, stretching his neck back over the frame so they could get the tube down inside him.  But they were too rough, and somewhere on his inside they cut him wide open.

“Now them prison guards should be prosecuted, just like Gaughan was himself,” Da said, slapping his hand off the arm of his tubular armchair, and us all sitting watching on the Nine O’Olock News – me waiting for the riots to come on.  “There’s no way ten fellas holding wan fella, an’ doing him that much harm can be legal.  I don’t care how many English barristers they can stack up in a courtroom against one good man telling the truth.  It’s wrong, and that’s all there is to it!”

Da’s all about prosecuting people when they do something wrong.

I do get prosecuted mesell a lot, for pissing on the toilet seat; for when I find where the biscuits are hidden and eat too many of them; and for fighting up the Green – that’s a hanging offense.

But at least prosecuted is an easy word to understand: Do something wrong – get hurt.

The other crowd that love confusing words are the priests.  The old people say “ishn’t it great now that Mass isn’t in Latin no more,” but sure above in the church of a Sunday morning, you wouldn’t know the half of the words the priest does be saying.  Even regular prayers are confusing: “Forgive us oh Lord our trespasses, and those that trespass against us.” 

Why would them above in Heaven be worried about trespassing?  Sure, that’s only going somewhere you shouldn’t go, like into some farmer’s field that has a big “NO TRESPASSING” sign on the gate.

And what if you don’t have a field for people to trespass in?  People in town don’t fields, so how can anyone trespass against us?

Maybe trespassing against us is if there’s a bull in the “NO TRESPASSING” field, and he runs up and tramples you to death?  You know like, how his hooves’d be trespassing through your body.

I never say anything about how the mass and prayers are all stupid-confusing to Da or to the priests; it’s too dangerous. 

See, one day Da was complaining about how people up the North could be killing one another over religion.

“Sure lookit,” he says, waving his hand hard and slow in the way that he really means something.  “Even if there is isn’t any God, wouldn’t the world be a better place if we all just lived the way Jesus said we should!”

No God?

How could there be no God?  Sure, we’re only here to be doing what He says so He can open the gate and let all the Catholics trot into heaven.

Course when you start to think about that, it kinda-sorta doesn’t make sense.  It’d be like working so hard in school you get the best results of everyone, but then there’s just nothing to do with your great results. 

Anyways, you can’t say any no God stuff to Da or the priests, not even in confession; they’d kill you stone dead.

So now I say nothing, but me stomach does go all the time; I’m afraid I’ll be found out and they might burn me to death – like they did to that woman below in France once upon a time.

Davey turns suddenly from his walking around with his hands on his hips, and runs at the ball, hits it hard, flashing it toward the goal.

Immediately he falls to his knees, throws his arms in the air – we won!

“OVER THE POST!” the goalie yells.

“No fucking way!” we all crowd in, faces red, fists clenched.

There’s a push and shove; a fist whacks a face; blood splashes from a nose; everyone jumps in – fists and feet flying.

I charge into the fight from my spot on the side, yelling:

“I’ll fucken EXTRADITE ya!”