Call Me the Breeze Read Online Free

about having worked it out that I dropped another trip. And sitting there in my old caravan it was like looking out on a mystical country. ‘It’s just like Charlie’s garden, Mona,’ I’d say. ‘A garden that could have been.’
    Then I’d burst out laughing when I’d realize what I was actually looking at!
The Tinker Camp
    For the so-called ‘garden’ was nothing more than a couple of old tents with the canvas rotted away and any amount of other old rubbish, including bicycle frames and bedsteads, a broken pram, a burst mattress and a dying-looking piebald pony standing tied to a tree. Not to mention God knows how many car wrecks. With anything that might have been of value on them long since stripped and sold. Travelling tinkers came and went but the only one there on a permanent basis was Mangan. In the nights when they came, you’d hear them all arguing, playing Johnny Cash and Elvis, getting violent then, and drunker, as the half-starved mongrels howled along with the galloping music. Sometimes you’d get edgy and you’d find yourself shouting: ‘Can’t you play something else for a change? Can’t you play some other fucking song?’ and standing there twitching, not realizing how edgy —
    It was the acid, of course, mostly. Looking back that’s plain to see, but in those days you mightn’t attribute it to that. You’d think it was to do with Jacy and what kind of day you’d had in the pub. You’d be nearly in tears with frustration, trembling on the bed and repeating: ‘
Why won’t they listen? Why
?’
    As the dogs howled and the shrill, off-key rockabilly guitar scraped on through the night …
    (You can tell by the shaky writing just how edgy those days could be.)
12 July 1976, 4.15 a.m.
    The dogs the dogs the dogs! They never let them off the leash you see and that’s why they howl like fucking dingoes. It really gets on my nerves. Why can’t they let them off the chain for a while? Why don’tthey play something else? Why do they never play some other record for a change? I’m going to go out and tell them. Fuck them! Fuck them and their dogs! I don’t have to put up with this! I don’t! Oh, Jesus, I feel so cold
.
Nervy
    You could be particularly nervy, I remember, if a certain number of things were to happen. If Mona didn’t come home, say …
    That was what I was like the night they started up with this accordion, the dogs joining in, some fucker then screeching on a fiddle …
    All you could think of was that, when she did come home, you’d say: ‘I’ll never say those things about Jacy again. Ever.’
    ‘You’ll never love anyone else,’ she’d say. ‘You hear me? You won’t! I won’t allow it, Joseph!’ as she stroked your hair, and if you sobbed it would only be because she spoke the truth.
    But then in the morning it would all be quiet again with the tinkers having departed and not a sound to be heard, from the woods, across the fields and right into the town. No Johnny Cash, no accordion, no dogs. Peace and silence would reign once more. And you’d take the record by Spontaneous Apple Conclusion out of the drawer and, without even thinking, you’d lift it to your lips. And kiss it. Kiss it as you spoke the single word: ‘
Iowa
.’
Ten Men Dead
    I remember exactly when the argument started. We were all just sitting there, and the next thing you know they were at each other’s throats. When he heard about it, Austie went fucking mad. ‘Why didn’t you throw them out?’ he bawled at me. ‘They have no business arguing about things like that in here! We have enough trouble with the cops as it is!’
    It was to do with the Kingsmills massacre and the ten Protestant labourers who’d been assassinated on their way home from work.
    ‘That’s what we’ve descended to! A fucking sectarian murder gang! Well, if that’s what it is, it’s not my war and I want no fucking part of it!’
    Carson was a well-known Provo. But not any more, by the sound of it.
    ‘We