Paperboy by Tony Macaulay Page B

silence to say, ‘This looks like the sort of place they take you in the dark to put a bullet in your head!’
    His passengers laughed instantly, but only very briefly, because he didn’t join in. We thought he was joking, but of course he wasn’t. I, for one, felt offended, and the following year, I resented the same man through every page of Pygmalion . Of course, I knew from the front page of the papers every day that people like me and Thomas were getting bullets in their heads just for being Catholics or Protestants from the wrong sort of place. But this was the sort of place I came from, this sort of place was my home, and this was the sort of place where I determinedly delivered forty-eight Belfast Telegraphs each night in the darkness.

Chapter 5
A Rival Arrives
    I was at the top of my game, the pinnacle of my profession. I had mastered newspaper delivery. No hedge was too high, no letterbox too slim, no holiday supplement too fat and no poodle too ferocious. I had delivered through hail, hoods, bullets and barricades. My paperbag was blacker than anyone else’s, the blackest of all paperboys’ bags. I had alone survived, when all around me had been robbed or sacked, or both. Oul’ Mac even gave me eye contact.
    I had achieved high levels of customer satisfaction too. One day, when I was at the doctor’s with my mother and a boil on my thigh, we met Mrs Grant, from No. 2, who always gave me a toffee-apple tip at Halloween.
    â€˜Your Tony’s a great wee paperboy, so he is,’ she said, as she darted across the doctor’s waiting room, on her way to pick up a prescription for her Richard’s chest. The waiting room in the surgery had a shiny old wooden floor that you stared at while you waited, dreading a diagnosis of doom. It smelt of varnish and wart ointment.
    â€˜He’s the best wee paperboy our street’s ever had!’ the generous Mrs Grant added. ‘He’s never late, there’s no oul’ cheek and he closes the gate.’ The whole waiting room stopped coughing, and looked at me admiringly.
    â€˜Och, God love the wee crater,’ two chirpy old ladies in hats chorused in unison.
    This adulation momentarily anaesthetised the pain of my throbbing boil, which had brazenly blossomed on the precise part of my thigh where my paperbag would rub. The word was out: it was official. I was a prince among paperboys. It should have been on the front page of the Belfast Telegraph itself.
    But then it happened. As unforeseen as a soldier’s sudden appearance in your front garden, along came Trevor Johnston. A rival had arrived.
    Known to his friends as ‘Big Jaunty’, Trevor Johnston was older than me, taller than me and cooler than me. He wore the latest brown parallel trousers with tartan turn-ups and a matching brown tank top, from the window in John Frazer’s. John Frazer’s was the bespoke tailor to the men of the Shankill, whether it was flares, parallels, platform shoes, gargantuan shirt collars or tartan scarves you were after. This emporium of 1970s style was just across the road from the wee pet shop where I got goldfish and tortoises that died, and a mere black-taxi ride down the Shankill Road. From the moment you walked through the front door of the shop and got searched for incendiary devices, you could smell the alluring richness of polyester. It was where I always spent all my Christmas tips.
    It seemed that every single time I went to buy some new clothes in Frazer’s, there was Trevor Johnston, perusing the parallels. In fact, it was possible that he only left the place during bomb scares. A veritable fashion icon of the Upper Shankill, Trevor also wore a Harrington jacket with the collar turned up. I knew these were very expensive. My big brother had got a Harrington for his birthday, and it was twenty weeks at 99p from my mother’s Great Universal Club Book. When I said that I wanted one for my birthday too, my