Every day, every night of our lives, we’re leaving little bits of ourselves, flakes of this and that, behind. Where do they go, these bits and pieces of ourselves?
Raymond Carver
I went back to Belfast recently to sort out the boxes I’d cleared from my parent’s house; the same boxes I’d sorted out several years ago by abandoning them to the world of industrial estate storage. I had no idea what was in them let alone which bits and pieces would be coming back with me and while those symbols of a previous life remained unseen, there was still the present to be getting on with.
Housepaint, card, 1982
55cm x 85cm
Heading up to Tyrone and seeing my ever-jolly aunt, now in her 80s. An evening in the glorious Crown Liquor Saloon with my kickabout mate of more than 50 years, still his generous and content self. Seeing the peacelines slicing through Ardoyne and the Falls and how Belfast now shows itself to the world - plastic and rubber bullets produced from taxi drivers’ pockets and bounced off walls for the benefit of the startled tourists. Every street was a small and ghostly piece in a jigsaw of memory. Houses now stand on the corner where once clumps of scalp and bloody hair lay scattered as our school coach slowed on the way to the playing fields. Nearby a nondescript pavement that one afternoon was awash with the blood of a prison officer. A year older than me, he was killed as he waited at the bus stop where our scruffy footprints now stained the floor of the bus home. And then down into the city centre where the mothership of a rebuilt art college has eaten up the northern edges of a still fractured city centre.
Later, in the quiet greyness of a south Belfast retail park, I find my oversized boxes. What little they hold had been easy to ignore after all. Dreary Country & Irish albums (my mother’s), bloated early-80s 12’’ singles (her son’s), the Sacred Heart picture I was afraid to dump; two tiny gold-rimmed, shamrock-decorated wine glasses (now seeing nightly duty in London) and my limited art output from teenage years to art college. Work that had been or should have been well forgotten. Though one painting stood out, just not for its quality.
We were rarely in that main room in Foundation. Like a middle management away-day icebreaker we were to escape preconception by exploring limitation - using household paints and brushes on an absorbant unsympathetic grey card, we had 15 mins to paint the life model (who may or may not be wearing a solitary glove, it seems).
We were also the errant child that wasn’t allowed near the grown-up Belfast campus. Exiled to the loughshore outside the city, we huddled in freezing jacked-up portacabins on the edges of the Ulster Polytechnic playing fields. Both our tutors were painters. Denis McBride, heavily moustached, tweed-jacketed and in his early 40s, and Moore Kenny, younger and balding but with long unkempt hair that hung over his shabby greatcoat. They’d occasionally swing by to say a few words before heading back for another smoke and cup of tea in their snug brick office. Like a bad 70s cop show we thought they’d been teamed together through an administrative error or as a punishment by their brutal academic bosses.
Of the two Moore was the more sympathetic, with an empathy and a gentleness that wasn’t obvious in his ebullient, swaggering pal. I‘d no idea then how 3rd-level education worked and, despite going to Chelsea a few years ago, I still don’t. So when he’d disappear for long spells it meant little. Until one day we heard that the peelers had picked him up, walking along the nearby 10-lane-wide motorway. In his pyjamas and holding a mug of tea he was carted off in their heavily armoured Landrover to the pyschiatric hospital outside Belfast.
Months after, just as I’m leaving the painting exercise, Moore appears. There’s some work out on a table and he zooms in on an innocuous black and white monoprint. He’s talking at speed, elliptical comments, over and over. The hidden symbols, their sexual undercurrents, that speak to him and him alone. And the violence there too - why can’t we see that? He’s becoming more animated. Big gestures now, the coat flapping, a mental energy becoming physical and the faces of the few girls nearby have changed from wary to scared. I’m not too sure about it all either. Then from nowhere he produces a cup full of cornflakes which he scatters over the print as he goes quiet. And you’re 19 and think, well, maybe that’s just what happens at art college. Even in Belfast.
We never saw him again.
Two years later I’m at the art college in Belfast and he is walking down the corridor towards me. We stop to speak but from the few words he says I’m aware there’s still an edge of unpredictability there. As we part I wish him well.
A month afterwards he walks across the dual carriageway and into Belfast Lough.
Yes. Where do they go, these bits and pieces of ourselves?