Condoms
written by: Seán Óg Ó Murchú
They all laughed at me. All the dinner ladies. It started with your one, I’m after forgetting her name now… Smelly Nelly’s ma. A wet little tear trickled toward her tattooed cheekbone. She was roaring red. Her harsh, wheezing laughter sounded like a black taxi tackling the Whiterock Road, her throat destroyed from all the fegs she used to be hoofing into her. She called over the other dinner ladies then, an army of them. Or maybe it was the curiosity of her horrid laughing that brought them over… I can’t remember.
“Tell the girls what you’re only after asking me there ni wee mawn.”
I looked between herself and the girls. Jesus Christ, I said in my own mind, Mental Mick is after stealing all my crayons that I’d been hoarding for myself there before the break, and I nearly pissed myself this morning had that smelly cunt Mrs. Moyes not let me out of class to go to the bog, and now I have this crowd, harassing me! What a day I’m having here.
I put my hand out to receive my dessert, and Smelly Nelly’s ma clutched it back into her breast. Withholding it from me until I repeated the question that I had asked her in private. Tony Blair bought me that, I thought, you cuntbag. Tony Blair bought me that caramel square with the public purse because my ma loves an auld gargle, and doesn’t go to work, and you, with your fingers tightened around it, I N L A on each one, green with time…
“Tell the girls, son. Tell them what you asked me there.”
“What’s a condom.” I didn’t ask it. I said it, dry as a bone. They all roared at me, cackling like a squad of Halloween decorations.
Eventually, I was eating my roast beef. My crushed caramel square was on one side of me, a glass half-full of barely diluted juice was on the other, all subsidised by the taxpayer, like a king. Then Smelly Nelly’s smelly ma comes back over with a new dinner lady, the one who ended up killing herself because of what happened with her fella that time, “Tell her what you asked me earlier wee mawn.”
Fuck me, I thought. “What’s a condom.”
Smelly Nelly’s ma succumbed to another wrinkle, the dinner lady who killed herself did not. Her hand went straight to the crystalized, crucified, Christ hanging above her chest, and a look of disgust in me spread across her face. I recognised the look. My ma had given it to me loads of times, like when she would be scouring the gaff like a mad thing for a drop of wine and I’d ask her for some dinner, or when she was that heavy, sharp-eyed, angry drunk, and I’d tell her that the heating had run out. The look warmed my belly. I welcomed it. She was the only dinner lady that didn’t laugh at me. “What business has a primary four-year-old to be asking questions like that? You filthy-mouthed wee free-stater.” Wow, I thought, she’s just like my ma. “I think you should ask Mr. Barret that question, and may God forgive you, but he won’t, because that’s very bold of you to ask that.”
God can fuck himself, I said to myself, as I marched down to the staff room to find Mr. Barrett. There’s no God in the Murph. That’s what Chicken’s big brother told me anyway. There are five years between them. He’s called Birdshit, because of the poliosis on his crown. Chicken was called Chickenshit then, just because he’s Birdshit’s brother, but it’s since been shortened. Thank God says he. I met Birdshit when I first moved into Ballymurphy from Cork, two years previous, when I saw him killing a ladybird in the field beside the playpark. “Hey!” I protested fiercely, “You can’t do that. That’s one of God’s creatures.” He laughed at me then, and said, “God can fuck himself. There’s no God in the Murph.” He mocked my foreign accent then and pushed me to the ground, the cunt. Chicken didn’t mind me, but Birdshit hated me since that day. He would call me a culchie and throw bits of smashed-up brick at me on the way home from school. Chicken would be often with me and get pelted with a fair few missiles himself.
The only time the torment would cease was when we caught bees. This was a communal effort, it required patience, timing, and collaboration. Around the bush behind the blue gaff, there’d be five or six of us, Chicken, Mental Mick, and me, then Birdshit, and his mates. We acted as operatives with military precision. The crowd of us would have empty bottles of fizzy pineapple and knock-off Iron Bru, the little ones. The sugary remnants of the juice would attract the bees and the odd wasp into the bottle before we’d close the lid on them. We’d have a few leaves put into the bottles for the bees’ comfort, and to eat, if they fancied it, and we poked the plastic with a pin so the little fellas could still breathe handy enough.
One of the operatives had a very special, very important job. He had to drink all the fizzy pineapple and the knock-off Iron Bru. While he waited for the piss to come on, we filled my ma’s empty vodka and beer bottles, that we’d taken from the bins, with little stones. Then, when he needed the piss, he unleashed it into the glass bottles. For each operation, we rotated this role amongst ourselves.
Then began the slow, careful process of transferring the bees from their nice, green, plastic surroundings, into the piss and stone-filled glass weapons. I did feel bad for the bees, and still do now, but there was no God in the Murph, and besides, this was the secular doctrine of blood sacrifice. These bees were giving their lives for a great cause, albeit unwillingly, but still, it was the greatest cause of all – The establishment of a thirty-two county, independent, socialist, Irish republic!
Chicken’s da had told us that the Shinners had sold us out and would never reunify the country. I didn’t know what a Shinner was, but I knew, because Chicken’s da had told me, that they were partaking politically in the partitionist Dáil Éireann, and in the British institution of Stormont. The Shinners had come for him, he said, on Halloween in ’92, when they shot Sammy Ward, but he got away from them just in time.
So anyway, the bees went into the piss-bottles, and we brought them, bog roll stuffed into the tops, around to the green facing the Springfield Road, where the Brits butchered us in ’71. This was a perfect location for the capstone of our operation, the pigs couldn’t stop in the middle of the Springfield Road, so they’d have to go all the way to the top of Ballymurphy and turn in to get us, and sure by that time we’d be long gone. Safety would be provided by our familiar territory. We were the West Belfast Flying Column. We’d lie in wait, and when the RUC jeep… Or it might have been PSNI by then I’d say… sure it makes little difference I suppose… When the pig jeep drove up the road, we’d fling the bottles, the vodka ones first, they were bigger, and you needed to be closer to the road to hurl it over the fence, then the rest. The glass, stone, bees, and piss would smash into the side of the Land Rover usually, but the odd time, with a bit of luck, the windshield would take a clattering off us too.
After a while, they’d cover the windshields with the cages when flying past where we lived, and they’d stick those big dopey cameras on the roof of the yoke. We couldn’t believe it, the British State was afraid of us, a load of young fellas. They were taking precautionary measures when passing us, like South Armagh. We ran the fucking place. It was Bandit Country, Free Belfast Corner. Chicken’s da was delighted for us.
I’ll never forget the look on Chicken’s face, and Birdshit’s as well, when the pigs raided their gaff on Christmas Eve, and dragged their da out of it. They didn’t see him outside gaol for another ten years after that. Birdshit told everyone that he was inside because he was in the IPLO. Chicken would tell me the truth later, he was in the IPLO, that was true, but he was inside because he raped a woman in the New Lodge in early ‘92, which was the real reason the Provies were after him, and the kilo of hash the pigs found in the gaff done him no favours.
So off I went anyway, following the dinner lady that killed herself’s marching orders down to see Mr. Barret. I was hoping I’d maybe get a good look at the staffroom, but it was unlikely. Nobody had ever seen it properly; it was a top-secret space. However, I could go back and lie to my classmates. I could tell them that I had seen it. I could tell them I was invited in, that we all had tea and scones, and Ms. Lavo gave me a smoke off of her joint. I could tell them anything I wanted. I once told them my ma wrote Harry Potter, and one time, when Mental Mick asked me who my da was, I panicked and pointed at the mural facing school, and said it was the fella painted on it. Mental Mick looked up at the man’s flowing, brown share of hair, his white smile, and chocolate eyes, and, rightfully doubtful, he said, “Your da is Bobby Sands?”
Mr. Barrett was the only teacher that wasn’t a woman. Which is why I’d been sent to him specifically. He was never my teacher, thank God. He was a prick, a short one, and had a big nose that did more running than I did in the yard. He had bouncy hair and a shit convertible. Mental Mick saw him in the bogs in the Sliabh Dubh pub years later. Mental Mick was off his head and kept calling him Kevin, his real name, over and over again. Mr. Barrett slapped him in the mouth and told him that his mother was a well-known whore.
Mr. Barrett slid out of the smallest gap he could manage to fit through between the staff room door and its frame. I tried to peek in and could see only an emerald-green carpet and an array of ladies’ shoes. I knew then that Smelly Nelly was spoofing when she had said that her ma brought her in there after school, she told us the carpet was red. The lying cunt. Mr. Barrett’s body blocked my view and he closed the door with his arse. God knows what was going on in that place. “I’m on my break, kid.” His mouth was full of brown bread, egg, and onion. “What is it?”
“The dinner ladies sent me to speak to you because I asked them what a condom was.”
“Fuck sake.”
“What?”
“Why did they send you to me?” He flung his head over his shoulder to sling his bouncy hair back out of his eyes, then shamelessly performed a wet, rumbling sniff, and swallowed the phlegm along with his lunch. “Do they not know I’m having my lunch? I’m not on break duty today.” I looked at him blankly, I had no idea what break duty was. “Look, if you want to know what a condom is, go home and ask your da, tell him you want to know about the birds and the bees, sound?”
“Aye.” I was saying ‘aye’ by that stage, to fit in.
“Good man. The birds and the bees, don’t forget that. He’ll know what you’re on about.”
When Mr. Barrett and I parted ways, he went back inside the staffroom and finished his sandwich. At some point, he spoke to Mrs. Moyes about the little free state fella in her class, coming up and asking him what a condom was. Soon after, he was out in the yard looking for me, to have a wee word.
“Sorry, kid,” he said, visibly uncomfortable, “I didn’t realise the situation, with your da and that, sorry.”
Fuck off, I thought, I am not getting the birds and the bees off of this fella, this little, fluffy arsehole. I knew all about riding and tits and fanny anyway. Chicken was feeding me valuable information on the matter that he was receiving from Birdshit, who knew all about it. He even gave him a blue movie on video, and a magazine with all sorts of dirty madness in it. In fact, I said to myself, I probably know more about riding than you do, Mr. Barrett.
“I understand that there are certain important conversations that you want to be having, about your body and that.”
Jesus Christ, here we go.
“We can arrange for you to have these conversations, as I say, they are important.”
No, God, please no.
“We’re going to get Father Dee in to have a yarn with you about it anyway.”
Father Dee? What the fuck? Why would he be dealing with it? Father Dee was the parish priest; he was ancient and smelly, and he drove a red, ’89 three-door Micra. The auld dolls in the Murph loved him, and they loved gossiping about his alcoholism. He was famed in the parish for giving worshipers a glass of wine on a Sunday, instead of a sup off it. He ended up going through so many bottles that, believing there was a huge number of worshippers attending his masses to be drinking so much wine, Mother Teresa and her nuns came to see the Murph to witness what she thought must have been an incredible catholic stronghold. Of course, once Mother Teresa came, everyone in the parish made sure to be at mass, and her expectations were satisfied. In fact, she was so impressed that she decided to live there a while. During that period, however, Father Dee stopped giving out glasses of wine; there was hardly enough, and he feared Mother Teresa had she known his antics. That’s the real reason the people of Ballymurphy were so happy to see the back of Mother Teresa and her sisters.
In 2011, Father Dee’s house was broken into in the early hours by a crowd of young men. Birdshit was one of them. They didn’t expect the auld priest to even be awake at the time, never mind him trying to fight back and get them out of his gaff. Fair play to him, people used to say. The following morning, an ’89 three-door Micra was found burnt out on the foot of Sliabh Dubh. Father Dee was found beaten to death in his own home at eighty years of age. Birdshit and his mates did time for it. Except for the one that got off handy because of his ‘considerable honesty, conviction, and contribution to the investigation.’
But anyway, the only person worse than Mr. Barrett to have that conversation with was Father Dee. I couldn’t understand why they had to get the church involved. I’d be making my first holy communion later that year, which is inherently awkward as it is. Father Dee putting the body of Christ onto my tongue, after telling me what a condom was, and presumably advising me against ever using one, was going to be a nightmare. And anyway, I didn’t need to know what a condom was, I only asked for a dare. Mental Mick dared me to ask Smelly Nelly’s ma what a condom was and act stupid like I didn’t know.
Mental Mick lived with his nanny. His da died in a car accident the day he was born, then his ma jumped into the Lagan for herself when he was three. People say that she’s still in there, that they never found her body. Mental Mick was named after his erratic, destructive behaviour. He was called mental because he was a mad cunt and hadn’t a fuck to give. He was a fine hurler when he wasn’t suspended for fighting, and he was a fine shoplifter for himself as well. In primary six, he was taken out of school and put into the home for bad boys. By sixteen, he was ramming stolen cars into the sides of pig jeeps and selling coke out of his nanny’s gaff.
When we were nineteen, Mental Mick messaged me on Facebook. I hadn’t heard from him directly since primary school, I had just heard stories of him and seen the videos of him hooding in stolen cars. He messaged me looking for money. He had taken a bit of tick off of the UDA, he said, and someone stroked him, and if he didn’t pay up by midnight, the boys were coming to his nanny’s gaff. They didn’t care if she lived in the Murph; they were coming over the wall and dragging him back over the other side with them. He told me he knew that I’d never have enough money to pay it all for him, but if I could contribute at all to the three grand of debt, then he’d really appreciate it. I read his message and didn’t reply.
So Mental Mick dared me to ask what a condom was anyway, and I did it because he would have said I had no balls otherwise. We were both well aware of condoms and their function. That summer, Chicken, Mental Mick, and I all dragged a bath from a skip in New Barnsley, into the big bushes at the bottom of the Sliabh Dubh River. Christ, it was heavy, but we got it there in the end. We were building a hut, blocking off the entrances to the bush with pallets we had stolen from the Orangies’ side of the mountain. It was going to be our fortress, the bath lay in a secluded patch of land at the bottom of a small hill, between a native tree and the noisy river. We could get up to all sorts of mischief and nobody would even know we were there.
We came back to the hut one Saturday afternoon, and there it was. We all peered over the edge of the bath, down at the dried-up, crusty, cum-filled, condom, lying in it. “What the fuck is that?” I said, curiously disgusted by it.
“Condom.” Said Chicken as he snapped a branch off the tree.
“What’s a condom?”
“You don’t know what a condom is?” Mental Mick teased, “I’m scundered for you.”
“Fuck up Mick you probably don’t know what it is either!” I snapped back. I had to snap at people, I had to assert myself. People generally seemed eager to tease me because I was from a place outside the Murph, it didn’t matter if it was Cork or Columbia, I wasn’t from there.
“Who you talking to? You wee free state rat. Course I know what a comdon is.”
“It’s condom,” Chicken cut in, diplomatically, “You use them for riding, my brother showed me my da’s ones before. I don’t know what you’re supposed to do with them, looks like you blow them up and spit in them or something.” With that, Chicken picked it up with the branch and flung it into the river.
For weeks, every Saturday morning, we’d find a condom in the bath, sometimes two, and one time a girl’s thong was left behind. Some dirty pair of bastards were coming in and riding in our hut! We were disgusted. After a while, the hut became full of condoms and baggies and lung bottles, and it was clear we were no longer the masters of the fortress. It had been infiltrated. Chicken and I tried to get in at one stage and we were stopped by Birdshit and his mates. Birdshit gave his younger brother a smack that day, and told him to fuck off, with one hand on his scruff and the other cradling a three-litre Frosty Jack. On the way home, Chicken shouted at me for not backing him up, I didn’t speak a word to him. I was petrified of his brother, and I had sunken into silence with shame.
Mental Mick went to the hut on his own one Saturday morning after falling out with his nanny. There was a loose section of the fence in his nanny’s back garden that led directly to the foot of Sliabh Dubh. He walked up along the river until he reached the bush and slid on his hole down the hill. At one time, when it was our fortress, the pallets would block the view of the bath, and you had to lie down and squeeze under the high pallet to get into the hut. That was before the pallets were kicked down and set alight. Mental Mick simply had to push his way through a small bush to get into the hut and get a view of the woman in the bath. She was naked, and her fingertips were stained with dry blood. He approached her slowly, and gently pressed his hand on the cold, thin flesh of her shoulder. Her arms and feet were sticking out of the bath, and there was a condom between her thighs. Her chin was touching her chest, with her hair covering her face so that he couldn’t see it. He told me later that the thing he regretted most was lifting her head back to see her face, the slice across her throat, and the blood that had spilled down onto her chest.
Mad Mick told nobody until it was already in the news. He couldn’t bring himself to touting, as he saw it. Chicken’s da had told us, “Never ever tell the RUC nothing, ever. Loose lips sink ships.” he said. So Mad Mick said nothing to anyone about the woman that he found in the bath in the hut. The woman that had been raped and murdered of a Friday night. When it was on the news then, he told Chicken and I about it. We consulted Birdshit to see what he thought we should do. That’s when he told us how a condom was used and told us to shut our mouths about what Mental Mick had seen. “You don’t need to be telling anyone anything, right?” He told us, “It’s on the news now, so it’ll be sorted out. Don’t forget what my da said happens to touts.” Touts get shot, that’s what his da said. They never found the person who did those things to that poor woman, but there are some people in the Murph that often say they know who it was.
It must have been traumatic for Mental Mick. Looking back, I can see the tragic story of a boy who grew up with no parents, who was growing up in pain, around unanswered questions, and living with his nanny off her pension, when he found a woman’s corpse in a bath, in the hut we had built for ourselves. He was crying for help. When he spoke back to Mrs. Moyes, when he called her a square-headed, thundering hoore, when he told Mr. Barrett to suck his hole that time, what he was really saying was; I’m in pain. Teachers in our school didn’t notice things like that. Like they didn’t notice the bruises my ma would be sending me in with, or the busted lip, or the broken nose. The last I saw Mental Mick was just last year, he was lying on Castle Street, gaunt, and full of heroin. His skin was peppered in scabs, and his eyes were nearly completely white and hanging out of his head; he was broken.
I saw Chicken in An Teach Beag, not long after that. He was visiting his brother up in the gaol that afternoon. I was glad to see him looking healthy and asked him what he was doing with himself. “Labouring,” he told me, “All the money is in Dublin, mate. I stay with my ma up here at the weekends, then they put me up in a hotel just outside Ballymun Monday to Thursday. Should see that place mate, shithole. Are you working yourself or what are you at?” I told him then that I had been beekeeping for two years. He laughed at that.
