Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

         So walking became my bond with the external, eternal, earth-redolent Ireland. But there was the other, the Ireland of people. Still the naïve outsider, when neither walking nor attending lectures I became an habitué of the few local bars of any distinction, less so now of the Harbour in Portrush, whose literary milieu was of no interest to my new, unliterary companions, and in some of these pubs I became so ill-advisedly outspoken, metamorphosing with the help of drink from timid mute to barroom bore, that my bungalow in Portstewart acquired a reputation as a haven of terrorists and conspirators and IRA bomb-throwers.  The RUC, the local police, were notoriously anti-Catholic. The administration of the university was composed mostly of staunch Unionists and imports from the British “mainland.”  My social life shrank. Not only was the social life—the “craic”—in the pubs somehow not as convincing as previously, but it was 1972, the worst year of the Troubles. Bombs started going off, and bomb scares were becoming a weekly occurrence, even at the university, where on one occasion an ex-customer phoned in a bomb scare to the pub so he could hide in the loo and emerge at his leisure to finish everyone’s drinks. Heaney never came back to the after-hours readings at the Harbour, and Kieran Nesbit emigrated to Canada. I frequented other hostelries. The Crown, that stained-glass Victorian chamber of marvels in Belfast, where The Informer was filmed. Harrigan’s in Derry’s Bogside, still with the bullet holes from Bloody Sunday in the walls. The Sea Splash, in Portstewart, with the implicit waves breaking over its outdoor pier. Many more in Dublin, where I started spending more time on weekends: Neary’s, The Long Hall, Mulligan’s, the Abbey Mooney’s...all stations of my long-ago Irish joy. But every day the bombs and the troops and the sidelong glances reminded me that I was living among fools who elevated provincialism to the level of a science and who certainly didn’t give a toss for my literary pretensions or magnetic personality.

      So I moved to Edinburgh.

*         *         *         *

      I haven’t lived in Ireland since, although I’ve been back a number of times, and I’ve staked out my claim, via my Killoyle novels[1], to a fictitious Ireland that encapsulates all that I miss and love about her and all that I’ve taken to heart from long absorption in her literature. But I’m not done with her yet, nor she with me. We’ll never let each other go. If I never set foot on Irish soil again I’ll still be hers forever,[2] perhaps more so than if Dad’s plans had worked out and he'd become a global dispenser of electronic bells and I’d turned into an average Irish salaryman who’d have gone through the drill of (say) going to depressing comprehensive school and depressing university and experiencing depressing first love and marriage and even more depressing first employment and life’s endless string of depressing disillusionments and for whom even Celtic-tiger Ireland would be a mere place, a mere paycheck, and a long depressing commute home every night and a place to escape from during the summer hols…so much for the Beckettian Irishman I might have been. But my year in Ulster, and my good companions there, and the good times and the bad I managed to engineer, and the reading and writing I’ve done all my life on Ireland: in Ireland I found my voice.

     Now cue the pipes, and set sail with me for Scotland the Brave.

[1] First I wrote a footnoted apprentice piece about the goings on in an English cathedral town and called it St. Anselms. Its structure and characters are proto-Killoyle. There were weasely wastrels, a flashy vulgarian, a lonely sexpot, an estranged couple, an awkward Japanese car salesman, a morose Indian student, and nothing much going on beyond and beneath the teeming exigencies of everyday life. It was a worthy debut, but I knew it had no chance of ever being published; so I shifted the locale from England to Ireland and, invested with the name Killoyle from an old shipping manifest glimpsed online, proceeded to invent that city, its history, and its inhabitants, from the scraps of the dreamland in which I dwelled–and dwell yet. Killoyle was first published in 1997, and six or seven times since, in English and German. The Great Pint-Pulling Olympiad came in 2003; Killoyle Wine and Cheese in '06, in German.

[2] I can imagine how an unsentimental unprofessional Irishman like John Banville or the late John McGahern would cringe at this, mistaking it for Irish-American blarney of the worst sort. Sorry, Johns, but it’s the God’s own truth, and you’ve never done time as a non-Greek neo-American of Franco-Swiss upbringing, Italian disposition—but Irish ancestry.