The Street and other stories by Gerry Adams Read Free Book Online Page B

on the streets it couldn’t be long till things hotted up again. In the meantime we were not making ourselves too available.
    Conway Street, Cupar Street at the Falls Road end and all of Norfolk Street had been completely burned out on the first night of the August pogrom; further up, near the monastery, Bombay Street was gutted on the following night. These were all Catholic streets. Urney Street was just a stone’s throw from Bombay Street; that is, if you were a stone thrower.
    The drinks company Geordie worked for was taking on extra help to cope with the Christmas rush, and a few of us went up to the head office on the Glen Road on spec one morning; as luck would have it I got a start, together with big Eamonn and twoothers. I was told to report to the store down in Cullingtree Road the next morning and it was there that I met Geordie.
    He saw me before I saw him. I was standing in the big yard among all the vans and lorries and I heard this voice shouting: “Joe…Joe Moody.”
    I paid no attention.
    “Hi, boy! Is your name Joe Moody?” the voice repeated.
    With a start I realised that that was indeed my name, or at least it was the bum name I’d given when I’d applied for the job.
    “Sorry,” I stammered.
    “I thought you were corned beef. C’mon over here.”
    I did as instructed and found myself beside a well-built, red-haired man in his late thirties. He was standing at the back of a large empty van.
    “Let’s go, our kid. My name’s Geordie Mayne. We’ll be working together. We’re late. Have you clocked in? Do it over there and then let’s get this thing loaded up.”
    He handed me a sheaf of dockets.
    “Pack them in that order. Start from the back. I’ll only be a minute.”
    He disappeared into the back of the store. I had hardly started to load the van when he arrived back. Between the two of us we weren’t long packing in the cartons and crates of wines and spirits and then we were off, Geordie cheerfully saluting the men on barricade duty at the end of the street as they waved us out of the Falls area and into the rest of the world.
    Geordie and I spent most of our first day together delivering our load to off-licences and public houses in the city centre. I was nervous of being recognised because I had worked in a bar there, but luckily it got its deliveries from a different firm. It was the first day I had been in the city centre since August; except for the one trip to Dublin and one up to Derry, I had spent all my time behind the barricades. It was disconcerting to find that, apart from the unusual sight of British soldiers with their cheerful, arrogant voices, life in the centre of Belfast, or at least its licencedpremises, appeared unaffected by the upheavals of the past few months. It was also strange as we made our deliveries to catch glimpses on television of news coverage about the very areas and issues I was so involved in and familiar with. Looked at from outside through the television screen, the familiar scenes might as well have been in another country.
    Geordie and I said nothing of any of this to one another. That was a strange experience for me, too. My life had been so full of the cut-and-thrust of analysis, argument and counter-argument about everything that affected the political situation that I found it difficult to restrain myself from commenting on events to this stranger. Indeed, emerging from the close camaraderie of my closed world, as I had done only that morning, I found it unusual even to be with a stranger. Over a lunch of soup and bread rolls in the Harp Bar in High Street, I listened to the midday news on the BBC’s Radio Ulster while all the time pretending indifference. The lead item was a story about an IRA convention and media speculation about a republican split. It would be nightfall before I would be able to check this out for myself, though a few times during the day I almost left Geordie in his world of cheerful pubs and publicans for the