Paperboy by Tony Macaulay

around the corner, where no middle-class mate’s eyes would spot my modest mode of transport. I once got a lift with a friend from the Antrim Road whose father was a jeweller who drove a BMW. He left us off at the front gates of the school, and I waved goodbye to him as he drove away, with a certain ‘he’s my father, you know’ look on my face. Wee Thomas O’Hara had just got off the bus across the road and observed this pretentious behaviour. He said nothing, just looked straight at me and rolled his eyes.
    But bigger circumstances conspired against me, again and again. Street unrest, Ulster Workers’ strikes and hunger strikes exposed my secrets at school, as well as disrupting my newspaper deliveries. Being late, or not being able to get to and from school at all because of burning barricades was a bit of a giveaway. Worse still, having to walk to school wearing no school uniform – so as to avoid the danger of having your religion written all over you – tended to expose the secret of the area you lived in. The days that half a dozen kids, usually including Thomas and me, were the only ones in class not in uniform were like those bad dreams where you go to school in your pyjamas.
    On one such day, I overheard a cocky classmate, Timothy Longsley, whose brother played in the glorious First XV rugby team, whispering conspiratorially in Chemistry to Judy Carlton (who I fancied): ‘He lives in one of those rough areas where the bigots burn the buses, you know.’
    â€˜Who do you think you’re lookin’ at?’ I shouted aggress-ively across the test tubes. I felt like a piece of phosphorous that was just about to ignite in oxygen.
    â€˜None of your f**k-ing business!’ Timothy snorted back. He had stabbed me with an obscene ‘ing’. His daddy was a lawyer and his mother wore a fur coat and too much make-up at the School Prize Giving, where his brother always got a prize for Latin.
    Judy Carlton looked at me sympathetically, but not without a certain sparkle in her lovely blue eyes. I noted this, admired her lips and filed this reaction away for future analysis. I resisted my urge to assault Timothy with a conveniently lit Bunsen burner, as I thought it would just prove his hypothesis. Anyway, I knew this would not be an appropriate course of action for the only pacifist paperboy in West Belfast.
    Sometimes it seemed that there were always secrets to be kept, no matter where you went. At orchestra practice at the School of Music on Saturday mornings, I met lots of other Catholic kids who went to grammar schools on the Falls Road. That really threw me. I had assumed that because the Falls was the Catholic version of the Shankill, they wouldn’t have grammar schools in their streets either. I didn’t know why there were no grammar schools on the Shankill Road. No one seemed to mind anyway.
    It was at the School of Music that I met Patrick Walsh. He played the violin better than me, but his voice hadn’t broken yet. While I languished in the back row of the second violins, Patrick was given solos at the front of the first violins. He went to St Malachy’s Boys Grammar School on the Antrim Road, where priests taught them maths. St Malachy’s was the nearest Catholic school to BRA, so the teachers in both establishments arranged that we would never get out of school at the same time: they were afraid, it seemed, of what would happen if we ever met each other. Patrick was from Andersonstown where the IRA ruled and the kerbs were painted green, white and orange – which was the opposite of red, white and blue.
    One day, during a break from the musical massacre of one of Beethoven’s finer pieces, Patrick asked me, ‘Do you go to Belfast Royal Academy?’ His lip seemed to curl up slightly as he said the word ‘Royal’. I had never heard anyone say ‘Royal’ before without obvious deference, so I thought this was