The Riot

You know that feeling? The one when something was about to happen, but you were considered too little to understand?

I wonder how he knew there’d be a riot?

My dad moved urgently. He was concerned, agitated … anticipating … and I think perhaps curious about what was going to unfold.

He, and our neighbour Frank, had talked quietly with each other, pointing, head scratching, before moving their cars … to a safer place.

We didn’t have a garage, our cars were usually parked by the kerb in front of our terraced houses.

Our street was where a dividing line might have been drawn between two communities.

Wellington Street — interesting who city planners named streets after!

People gathered in a Monet type blur of t shirts and torn jeans at the end of the street, maybe 100 metres from our home, where Wellington Street met North Street.

Some of them wore bandanas ( handkerchiefs ) covering the bottom half of their faces.

On the ground in front of them were milk crates. Some contained chunky rocks, stacked in a pyramid, others lined with bottles filled with yellow petrol, tufted with wilting, damp, grey rags.

The people had torn down a large metal gate/door that had once been the entrance to the back of the terraced houses across the street from ours, to use as a shield.

Some practiced throwing, to limber up. Others demonstrated in impressive mime, the protocol for lighting and hurling petrol bombs …

… safely …

Our window, became a front row seat, the police edged in from stage right ( house left ) in their riot gear. Inky green uniforms protected by full length, clear plastic shields, inching carefully towards the crowd at the other end of the road ( stage left ).

Frightened 20 somethings — on both sides.

My family stood far back from the large bay window of our family room, taking turns warning each other to keep back, while sneakily creeping a little forward themselves.

Bottles began to fall and shatter … fire hungrily licked the road, and the tops of the armoured cars. Rocks pelted shields …

… police moved forward, retreated, moved forward … shooting plastic bullets …

My mum’s hand over her mouth muffled a harrowed, ‘Oh my God’.

My parents pushed us back to safety.

The rioters pushed towards the police, with their metal gate.

The police pushed towards the rioters, with their shields and guns.

They clashed … then both retreated.

Stalemate.

Pause.

A drunk skinny man seized his chance to return home, beyond the police line. Straggly limp hair and matching beard, that looked like the strings from a well used mop while he meandered up the side footpath between ‘no man’s land’.

His arms were raised as he stuttered along, almost zombie like. Eager to sleep off the wage he’d almost certainly drank at “The Forester’s” club around the corner.

Maybe he’d watched one too many cowboy movies. But these sheriffs couldn’t stop to take prisoners.

They shot him.

They shot him.

Directly.

With a plastic bullet.

In front of us all.

He fell instantly to the pavement.

The battle reignited with a roar.

All of us pushed more … the police, the crowd, my parents, my brothers.

A family pushed out of their house across the road … to bravely tend the fallen man, but it was too dangerous.

As a child I’d concluded that the world had permanently changed. I can remember asking if it was going to be like that forever.

Because, when you don’t know how something like that can exist … can even begin, how can you know it will end? How would it end?

It didn’t take long though — before the rocks, and petrol bombs ran out.

Eventually, the crowd just fled. Leaving rocks, and char marks, broken glass, a bent metal gate ( that they never replaced ) …

… and the drunk man …

I was mesmerized. Traumatized. I see him there, even today.

Our neighbours kneeled beside him, and gently pulled up his shirt, tearfully yelling at the police to stay away.

The police orbited anyway.

He was alive, he was moving. Thank God he’d been so anesthetized.

His rib cage was already massively bruised in blues, reds, yellows. Like a rained on rainbow.

They pulled him to his feet moaning, and walked him home, moaning, his arms over their shoulders.

The police collected their spent plastic bullets, and helped brush the street.

[ My brother ran out to find a spent plastic bullet as a souvenir, shocking my mum. The police came calling for it, but he denied all knowledge. ]

All the neighbours stepped out and joined in, cleaning up this episode of Northern Ireland in the 80s, restoring ‘normality’.

Can you imagine everyone out brushing the street in your neighbourhood today, after a riot!?

To be fair, I only remember this one riot on our street — but, you know, when you have front row seats to a riot as a child, it’s an experience you never forget.

My dad retrieved his car.

We turned over to the TV page … and life resumed.

As though this never happened.

It happened.