Ballycarson Blues Read online

  “Just like the local politics,” was the common riposte of the enquirer.

  A generation later Wee Joe Forsale had succeeded his father as the host at the Iceberg Café in Irish Street, Ballycarson. Originally the café had been set up by its owner as a place of respite from the politics of the town where locals could go to discuss what really concerned them. Over time it became clear that the local politics did really concern the locals and the café became a place to discuss nothing but politics. Even the long-standing menu on the café wall mirrored the direction and development of the local political climate. In large black letters it read:

  “Today’s Special – The Same as Yesterday”

  With such a prominent position in the social circuit of the Ballycarson populace, Wee Joe Forsale had strong links with local Nationalist politicians, or at least those with strong stomachs. In addition, although he was a Unionist, Big David knew him well. Such contacts with the other side were best not advertised, so Big David had to keep the connection low-key. However, the cut that Big David received from the supply contract for salami for pizza toppings at the Iceberg Café provided sufficient cover. A lot could be hidden under those pizza toppings.

  Being of Italian extraction, Wee Joe Forsale was known to have an extensive collection of Dean Martin CDs and was rumoured to have relatives in Pittsburgh. If these weren’t enough to confirm close contacts with the Americans, anybody who was anybody or wanted to be anybody visited the café for deep fried pepperoni pizza when they came to the west side of Ballycarson. This put Wee Joe in an ideal position to provide information on any visitors to that part of the town.

  This time the undercover information provided to Big David by Wee Joe was most revealing. Earlier that week two men – one white, one black; both dressed in identical smart suits – had stopped by the Iceberg Café in a hired car. As they handed out no uplifting tracts and buttonholed noone on the pavement, they clearly were not the usual well-dressed mid-west American Evangelists, although that was what they purported to be. The rumour had immediately gone round that these men represented the dark and unseen side of the Peace Process in action. The rumour mill confirmed that the black guy was probably a Nigerian diplomat accompanied by his bodyguard on an undercover visit to inspect the destruction of an IRA arms dump. But this didn’t wash with Wee Joe. To his knowledge not a single bullet and not a single ounce of explosives had been handed in for years. Everyone knew the Peace Process had nothing to do with the disarmament of paramilitaries. In addition, noone was as conspicuous as an American trying to appear inconspicuous in Ireland. So too had the cover story actually provided by the two men proved unconvincing.

  “And what would you gentlemen be doing in Ballycarson?” Wee Joe had asked them as they waited for their pizzas to fry in the deep fat.

  “We’re here to look up our ancestors and to found a new Church,” said the black guy. “I’m from Baltimore. My name’s O’Reilly – Martin Luther O’Reilly.”

  “And my name’s O’Reilly too,” said the white guy. “Francis Xavier O’Reilly. But we’re not brothers, just first cousins. Our grandmother originally came from round here and landed in New York after surviving the Titanic disaster.”

  “O’Reilly. Oh, really?” replied Wee Joe Forsale. He didn’t believe a word. He knew that these particular pilgrims would be sending home not postcards to be read by religious superiors but briefings to be scrutinised by presidential advisers.

  With murals on his café wall dedicated to the maritime disaster, Wee Joe Forsale was the local expert on the sinking of the Belfast-built liner. He knew that passenger list backwards. If these guys’ grandmother had crossed most of the Atlantic in the Titanic, then Wee Joe Forsale had come up the River Lagan in a banana boat. In addition, he had seen all sorts of religious revivals and these guys clearly were singing from the wrong hymn sheet.

  However, with a view to being helpful, Wee Joe Forsale had directed them towards Councillor Finvola O’Duffy’s carpet and linoleum factory where the visitors could kill two birds with one stone. It was there that they could buy new floor coverings for the supposed new church in an establishment that claimed to have made some of the original floor coverings for the ill-fated transatlantic liner. The factory still did a very fetching and relatively inexpensive number in lifeboat-white linoleum.

  For Big David, more worrying news was to follow. Wee Joe Forsale reported that the two phoney religious carpetbaggers had duly visited the carpet factory. There they had ordered a forty-yard roll of carpet. Just like the perpetrators in other American political scandals, they had been caught in this attempt to cover up. The carpet was stated to be for the aisle of the new tabernacle and for important occasions such as weddings, funerals, parades, etc. However, the two Americans had wanted a waterproof backing and the length ordered was enough to run from the front door of the Hibernian Hall to the roadside in the street with no name. In addition to that, when they were offered the colour red, they declined and requested green!

  Clearly, someone was intending to make a spectacular political entrance on the west side of town, leaving Big David’s east end out in the cold. Unless, that was, he could arrange an even more spectacular event on the east side of the Peace Wall. It was time to lift the blue phone and check the status of the new flute band uniforms…

  CHAPTER 12

  THE SALAMI FACTORY

  For the design and manufacture of the new flute band uniforms Big David had given the contract to a local concern whose name was known throughout Ballycarson. As a strategic choice it was an obvious one. In a town like Ballycarson where everyone knew everyone by name, you could not win power and influence by dealing with anonymous multinational corporations. So the contract was awarded to the X and Y Partnership.

  The X and Y Partnership was a marriage of science and religion. More to the point, it was a husband-and-wife team comprising the Reverend Patrick Xysomathumarsai and his beloved spouse, Ms. Williamina Wye. As a medical missionary from the former German colony Tanzania, the Reverend Xysomathumarsai had arrived in Ballycarson a few years previously with a name noone could pronounce. When asked to explain what his name meant, he indicated that in a now long-defunct version of his mother tongue it meant “preaching” as his family were marked out as preachers. Some doubted, but others believed the happy tale. So, reasoned even the believing locals in Ballycarson, if that indeed were true, Xysomathumarsai was indeed something easier done than said. Out of politeness, the man’s name was immediately abbreviated to “the Reverend X”. So too his spouse Ms. Wye, a local lass, had retained her maiden name not as an early symbol of Ulster feminist zealotry but simply because she had not been able to complete the marriage certificate appropriately with her husband’s surname. In any event the name “Ms. Wye” seemed appropriate for a scientist who was supposed to retain a questioning outlook on life.

  To say Ms. Wye was a scientist was really to put a romantic and unscientific slant on the true facts. In fact, she was an industrial chemist who had previously worked at the Ballycarson nylon factory prior to its takeover by an east European investor. The plant then stopped making nylon and started to produce odd chemicals for the local reformed paramilitaries who seemed to have moved into horticulture in a big way. Maybe they were seeking new green credentials, but they certainly ordered a lot of nitrate-based fertiliser. Not having the desired cross-transferable skills, Ms. Wye lost her job. Having been laid off, she now worked freelance. That had proved to be her big break as she turned from fabric creation to fashion design. She came to prominence with the design of the new aprons for the local Masonic lodges and the new butcher’s shop. For her new commercial concern the trade name employed by Ms. Wye was “Cover Up”. This was immediately noticed by Big David. Here was a skill he might be able to use.

  It was at the butcher’s shop that Ms. Wye first met her husband. The Reverend X had been in Ballycarson only for a few months when he was outraged at the news that Ballycarson was to witness the opening of a new sho
p entitled “The Joys of the Flesh”. To protect the populace from the anticipated sex shop he mounted a one-man protest outside, praying that the locals would be delivered from temptation. It was only when he witnessed a delivery to temptation that he realised the truth. When a lorry-load of salami and sausages arrived for unloading he discovered “The Joys of the Flesh” was the new butcher’s shop. He and some other enquiring and hungry passers-by immediately went into the establishment to buy lunch. It was the occasion of a life-changing experience. The eyes of X and Wye met over rashers of thick-sliced middle back bacon and trays of pigs’ trotters. From then on things looked up. Romance blossomed for the woman of clothing and the man of the cloth. Career prospects looked up too and the X and Y Partnership was introduced to Big David via a large order to manufacture aprons for the workers in the Ballycarson salami factory.

  After the Council, Ballycarson Salami Enterprises (known in the trade as “B.S.E.”) was the third largest employer in the town. In the private sector it was outstripped in size and importance only by the O’Duffy carpet and linoleum factory. Big David was the real power behind B.S.E., but the organisation was still fronted by its original founder, Frankie Alphabet. Frankie, now past retiring age, had not been entirely pushed out. He had been given the honorary title of B.S.E. President and was still allowed to make his presence felt.

  That magnanimity was typical of Big David. He didn’t want to muscle out the man who had created the firm’s original success story – the “Big Mick”. Each week the factory still churned out thousands of these frozen succulent beefburgers topped with homogenised lettuce shaped in the form of a shamrock. In their attractive green polystyrene boxes these were still selling handover-fist in Boston, Baltimore and Brooklyn and any other such location where homesick third-generation Irish-Americans longed for granny’s home cooking straight from the old country via the freezer. Just as with his racket with genealogical records, the business motto had to be “nothing knocks nostalgia”. And what was nostalgia except history, processed, shaped and packaged to present advantage? It was just like the meat trade after all.

  Now Frankie was in the twilight years of his power, but he still toured the salami factory every day in his battery-powered, orange and blue scooter for the disabled. He had a special basket on the front enabling him to pick up special deliveries for his staff. It clearly was a case of Frankie Alphabet remaining a butcher’s boy to the end of his days.

  Of course Frankie Alphabet was not the man’s true name. But this was not an alias adopted purposely to draw a veil over a previous career in the paramilitaries – he had never been that sort of butcher’s boy. Frankie Alphabet was simply an abbreviation.

  Frankie Alphabet’s full name was “Franklin Delano Roosevelt Messerschmitt” or “F.D.R.M.” for short. Here was a man of letters. He had almost as many initials before his surname as most junior Council officials had qualifications after theirs. So the shortened version “Frankie Alphabet” was coined merely to save time in conversation whilst still acknowledging, with due and appropriate regard, Frankie’s baptismal linguistic extravagance.

  Frankie’s full name betrayed the fact that he had been born during World War II in the dark, hungry days of food rationing and before the emergence and importation into Ulster of Spam fritters with extra grease. He had received the citation of honour “Franklin Delano Roosevelt” as a demonstrative list of given names symbolising eternal and unswerving loyalty to the Allied cause. But the motivation behind the endowment of these names was not just the usual one. Frankie Alphabet’s father was no mere G.I. at the American camp located just outside the town. Instead, the list of names was intended to throw some cover over the tracks of his reputed true origin. It had been widely suspected that Frankie Alphabet’s father was really one of the German prisoners of war who had been out on day-release from the P.O.W. camp in Ballycarson to paint Council property. So the reference to the occupant of the White House provided the whitewash and the title “Franklin Delano Roosevelt” was intended to provide his mother with a shield against any allegations of disloyalty.

  However, there was no escape from the surname “Messerschmitt” as this was not only the German prisoner’s name, but also his occupation in Civvy Street, or whatever was the equivalent German Strasse. In addition, it was the type of plane he had been flying when shot down over Belfast. So the perennial joke on the shop floor of the salami factory was that Frankie had got off to a flying start in life, but his career had nose-dived just like his dad’s.

  In any event, all that was a long time ago because the German flyer, like many of his colleagues, stayed in the province after the war as the Allied bombing had left them with nothing and noone to go home to. This was the second wave of German substantial emigration to Ballycarson. And there the mid-twentieth-century German incomers had flourished. That was the perennial paradox of life in Ulster: it was only Irish history for which the locals had a long memory. They tended to forgive and forget the mistakes of others. Further to that, Frankie’s dad went on to marry his mum. Loyalty like that was appreciated in Ulster. If that were not enough to demonstrate commitment, they had a total of five other sons – all of whom still marched with the flute band, whilst Frankie, their firstborn, drove out in front on his scooter decked out with the flags of the United Kingdom and the German Bundesrepublik. Such open commitment to both nations went down well in the Ballycarson salami factory where half the workforce was local German and the remainder were locals of some other extraction.

  Keeping the workforce entertained at the salami factory was a serious business. In that regard things had got off to a relatively inauspicious start. In the beginning Big David had tried to cut costs by having Charlie Rae and his mother Senga serenade the sausage producers whilst the allegedly musical pair duetted on a Wurlitzer and a Glockenspiel.

  “Wurlitzer is a German name and the Germans are bound to like it,” reasoned Big David.

  However, the salami production figures spoke volumes or, more accurately, a lack of volume. There had been a catastrophic dip during the serenades. Charlie and Senga Rae were cut so more sausage could be sliced.

  A compromise was reached with the use of taped music. But because of the ethnic make-up of the workforce strict time limits were placed on the music played over the tannoy system to comply with human rights requirements. Every hour on the hour the music altered from maudlin Irish country and western (favoured by the locals) to anonymous, pseudo-cheerful Central European pop or Oompah music (supposedly loved by the Germans). Without regard to any intellectual property rights, the Big David organisation downloaded the music by satellite from the endless supply poured into the ether by the various exponents of the respective genres. As part of a job-creation scheme sponsored by funny money from some amorphous European source, shifts of DJs changed the CDs as the hours rolled by.

  And the recording industry spawned more jobs than just that. Not only did Big David provide the salami factory with recordings for entertainment, but he provided recordings for security. With his pre-recorded CDs of Pomeranian, Alsatian and Rottweiler barking, he supplied “automatic dog” recordings to businesses of all sorts. Linked to a trip switch, the sound system would click on and a suitable amount of snarling and barking would start as soon as an unwanted intruder tried to force a gate, door or window. Ballycarson Salami Enterprises favoured the absence of genuine dogs within the factory because it assisted in quelling some widespread rumours about the content of their products. There remained the potential for accident, however. When one of the DJs turned up after a heaving morning’s drinking, the automatic dog CD was played over the tannoy system instead of the normal country and western entertainment. “He must have had a rough night!” a worker was heard to remark.

  All this barking could have been hushed up but for the fact that there was an anonymous complaint made to the Council that the Germans were getting more than their fair share of tannoy airtime.