‘Now & Ever Shall Be’ by James Conor Patterson
In 1972, a nine-year-old boy bursts through the front door of a house in Raymond Kelly Park. He’s clutching a box of John Players which he’s been sent to fetch for his granny. He comes through to the living room, where a group of adults are sat around an overflowing ashtray. Granny, he says. Peadar’s alive. The woman stops crying. She looks at the boy. That morning she’d been visited by two paratroopers who told her that her son had been killed in a bomb of his own making. They threw a piece of charred German army jacket on the ground beside her and walked out laughing. No, the woman says to the boy. No, son. He’s dead.
The boy tries again. But Granny, I saw him when I was coming out of the shop. This was true. The boy had seen him, albeit dressed as a woman and crouched behind the front seat of a Volkswagen Beetle. By the time the boy had reached his granny’s, Uncle Peadar was across the border and wouldn’t return for another five years. During which time his father would die, his wife and kids would leave him, and he’d develop a drink problem. What are you talking about? the woman says, pouring herself some tea. Your uncle was blown up by a bomb this morning.
It later transpired that the piece of coat – which had, in fact, belonged to Peadar – was being worn by a friend of his on the morning of the bomb. The boy tells me this, years later, over a bottle of Bourgogne. ‘Regulate’ by Warren G is blaring from a TV in the corner of the room. It’s four in the morning. He hasn’t changed a bit, the boy says chuckling. The man’s a fuckin’ lunatic. And I have to agree: Uncle Peadar is a lunatic. At 75, he’s still welding fences, scaling ladders, and once or twice has even ended up in A&E for knocking his back out. The boy pours himself a glass of wine and turns to me, 45 years older. You’d best be off to bed, he says.
Da has dozens of stories like these, though by now they’re so woven through my own personality that to untangle them – mine from his – would enact a kind of violence of its own. Half-truths. Allusions. Things whispered about after a few too many beers. Forty years ago Joan Didion wrote that we tell ourselves stories in order to live. I’ve since come to realize that we tell our stories to other people in order to live; it’s the stories we tell ourselves which eventually kill us off.
One night when I was thirteen, my favourite cousin came to stay. We’d both just discovered alcohol, and after raiding my parents’ whiskey supply from the garage, we decided to stay up listening to Eminem and watching slasher movies. We must’ve fallen asleep, because later that evening we were both suddenly jolted awake by my da’s screaming. Fuck! Fuuuck! Next we heard my ma getting up and trying to calm him down. It’s just a dream, love, we could hear her murmuring through the walls. Go back to sleep before you wake up the lads.
This wasn’t uncommon. Having people over merely brought it into sharper focus, though when the subject was broached later, Da would simply laugh it off with cryptic asides about ’Nam flashbacks. Like most people who grew up during the worst of the Troubles, my da’s stories have a tendency to take place on the periphery. Something is always held back, which makes me feel duty bound to acknowledge that his survival can’t be taken for granted. Growing up working class and Catholic in 1970s Newry can’t have been easy.
In August 1974, Newry’s Frontier Cinema screened Enter the Dragon for the first time. A tidal wave of prepubescent hyperactivity and angst subsequently unleashed itself upon the town. Shins were bruised. Eyes were gouged. Noses bloodied. And in one particular incident, a young fella broke his leg after attempting a tornado kick off the top of a communal garage in Barcroft. It should be mentioned that the film in question coincided with a more wide- spread popular kung fu craze in Ireland and the UK at that time. 1974 saw Carl Douglas’s ‘Kung Fu Fighting’ top the charts, the David Carradine TV drama Kung Fu move strongly into its second season, and the much loved – if culturally insensitive – Hanna-Barbera cartoon Hong Kong Phooey go into production.
Whatever the reason, when Da finally got round to seeing it, it blew his mind. 1974 was an unusually hot summer, and many people’s abiding memory of the time seems to be that there were hundreds of wasps drowning in jam-jars all over the town. Da could give a fuck. Let the stings fall where they may as he faced off with the kid from next door in a battle of good against evil. High kick to the thorax. Low blow to the bollocks. Roundhouse to the midriff, then ... wallop. My granny’s living room window exploding around them like hail.
Did I ... do that? Da asked his friend, noticing that the house across the street was on fire. For much as he would like to have believed that some mag- ical chi energy had just flowed through his leg and caused an explosion, the reality soon became painfully stark. Twenty-seven-year-old Brendan Mulligan had been setting a detonator charge on the kitchen table of the house opposite when it went off prematurely. Afterwards, he ran out onto the foot- path with strips of melted flesh clinging to his face and collapsed dead on the road. This happened in full view of my da and his friend, neither of whom looked away. Sometimes when my da wakes up screaming, he still sounds like an eleven-year-old boy.
Not that it’s Da’s fault, of course, though trauma like this has a tendency to ripple down the generations. When I was fifteen I experienced my first panic attack. I was in the Gaeltacht at Machaire Rabhartaigh and was walking along the beach, when I suddenly took the head staggers and felt like I was going to die. My breathing quickened and there were blurred edges around my vision, and because I was surrounded by my peers I kept trying to focus on not making a fuss. I just let the death roll play out until I emerged from it or sat down on the sand to be washed away by the sea. Y’alright mucker? said one of the lads from west Belfast. Yer lookin’ a wee bit pale on it.
These attacks continued at regular intervals throughout my teenage years, sometimes accompanied by bouts of serious depression. Another incident took place when I was on a lads’ holiday in Albufeira, aged nineteen, and the fallout was so bad that I thought about dropping out of uni. A group of six of us were staying at a beachside villa near the Areias de São João, preparing for a night out, when the notion struck me that I was going irreversibly blind. We had just sat down to dinner in a tapas restaurant when floaters appeared in my peripheral vision and the feeling of death rose in my throat. When the waitress approached I kept thinking just say chicken over and over again, though the words wouldn’t form. In my panic I stood up and went out into the street, threw up a ball of saliva, and made my way back to the villa with- out stopping to explain what was going on. For the next twelve hours I lay curled on my side with the air conditioning on, unable to answer the calls or texts that pinged in from my friends. I just lay there, paralysed into thinking that nobody in the world could possibly feel this way and that I was unique in how utterly batshit I was.
It was Da who taught me how to channel these attacks. To make myself a chamomile tea in the immediate aftermath, followed by two Quiet Life tablets, and repeat the mantra: What’s the worst that could happen? If embarrassment is temporary and death is outside of our control, then trying to affect the outcome of either is a waste of energy. In fact, it might be more accurate to say that instead of asking what’s the worst that could happen, Da taught me to accept that the worst might indeed happen at any given time. It’s how we navigate through the worst that brings serenity.
These attacks are something I’ve carried with me into adult life, though they can’t be directly explained by any trauma. I’d go as far to say that there’s some residual guilt attached to the fact that I’ve never faced much real adversity in my own life. Where Da has something concrete to pin his illness on – beyond heredity – mine feels kind of useless. Unwarranted. I’ve never watched anyone die violently, and the initial triggering of the attacks – from the time when I was fifteen – doesn’t satisfactorily explain why I’ve been battling anxiety for most of my adult life.
There’s also an added element of guilt from the fact that, by choosing to explore the relationship between Da and I – or by taking, in other words, something as elemental as family and using it as the source material for a piece about trauma – the question becomes: do I have any right to talk about this? How do I talk about the people I’m closest to without betraying some small part of them? Our stories aren’t merely our own, after all, and personal histories belong as much to the players in our lives as they do to us.
On the other hand, if we never talked about our lives with other people we’d never talk about anything at all. Ownership of experience is a fluid thing, and behaviour is more than just the preserve of the perpetrator. There are actors and there are the acted upon and there are those who bear witness to the action. So who, ultimately, owns the story?
Recent research further complicates this idea of ownership with what has since been referred to as epigenetic trauma. In 2015, at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, a genetic research team led by Dr Rachel Yehuda carried out a study of the relationship between the actual memories of thirty-two Holocaust survivors and twenty-two of their children. The study concluded that, not only can trauma be passed from generation to generation through the abstracted media of storytelling and archive, but through the genetic imprint and psychological profile of the parents themselves. Which means that history is a nightmare from which we cannot awaken. Which means that we’re stuck with the load of not only our own, but our forebears’ misery as well.
Taken in context, as Lyra McKee pointed out in an article for The Atlantic in 2016: ‘In the 32-year gap from 1965 to 1997, 3,983 deaths by suicide were recorded. In the 16 years after the 1998 peace agreement, through the end of 2014, 3,709 people died by suicide – roughly the same number over half the amount of time.’ In other words, if we apply the concept of epigenetic trauma to the north of Ireland, the Troubles have fucked up the post-GFA generation potentially even more than the generation who experienced the most violence. Put another way, intergenerational or epigenetic trauma can be collectivized more generally as our natural state of being. It might, at this stage, be so deeply ingrained in the national psyche that to remove or ignore it would do more harm than good.
In the case of my own family, talking has allowed for any suffering to strengthen into a kind of defensive bond. My parents are fiercely protective of my brothers and I, and knowing where they both came from, my brothers and I are fiercely protective of our parents. As Prof. Siobhan O’Neill from University of Ulster observes: ‘Being parented by people who’ve been traumatized and everyone around you has been traumatized, you are going to be affected by that, even if you’ve never seen anything.’ In other words, my brothers and I are affected because my parents have been affected. When they suffer, we suffer too.
Of course, Da’s story is more complex and multifarious than I’ve been able to lay out here. As someone who is both profoundly literate and deeply in touch with his own emotions, he’s also more than capable of telling it himself. The fact that he’s been able to matriculate from a housing estate which was once a no-go area for the British Army to a career as an economist with a doctorate from Kingston University is remarkable. By twenty-six he was lecturing full time at Coventry University and by twenty-eight he was European Policy Advisor to the Grampian branch of the Scottish Government. Trauma is only ever part of somebody’s story, and whether we pass it on or not, it often belies the true, vital nature of who we are.
I can almost imagine Da reading this and murmuring to himself – to me – So what? Worse things have happened. Indeed, worse things happened to him. So much so that to enumerate them here would only be to tell a fraction of his story. Riots. Searches. Fights. Near-death experiences. Trauma is the price people like Da pay for their resilience, and there can be a hesitancy in even acknowledging that they have suffered any hardship at all. Not allowing oneself to be defined by negative experiences allows for a different narrative to take shape, and in many ways Da’s reluctance not to be cowed by his past is admirable. But he shouldn’t have to. The Troubles have scarred so many people that the past regularly leaks into the present – often with devastating consequences. Perhaps we need to have more extensive conversations about what that means for the future, otherwise our collective trauma will remain self-reinforcing. Put another way, if we don’t start respecting each other’s pain, nobody else will.
The more we open ourselves up about these things, the less power they have – the more we can unlearn what we’ve already inherited. It’s too easy – especially for men – to revert to type and cocoon ourselves away from real engagement with the world. To avert our eyes to the page of a book or slide into a pair of earphones, so that everything around us becomes our own private sensory deprivation tank. Talking allows for the trauma to spill out in a way that doesn’t become messy for other people later on. A kind of verbal trepanning. We owe it to our kids to get rid of as much baggage as we can and keep diluting the trauma until it shifts into a more abstract register. A register we eventually come to refer to as history.
Note: Some names have been changed to protect identities.
From issue #11: spring/summer 2021
About the Author
James Conor Patterson’s work has appeared, or is forthcoming in, The Guardian, The Irish Times, New Statesman, Poetry London, The Poetry Review and The Stinging Fly. In 2017 he received an ACES bursary from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and in 2018 he was Writer-in-Residence for the C.S. Lewis Festival in Belfast. In June 2019 he received an Eric Gregory Award from the UK Society of Authors.
