In and Out of Time

I didn’t want to wake up.

“You have to,” the angel on my shoulder told me. “You’re meeting Victoria and Hannah. You planned this. Remember?”

I remembered, but that didn’t mean I was looking forward to it. Victoria wanted to go out this weekend, which in itself is not a bad thing—but she wanted to go to the Ulster Folk Museum, which was a great distance away. We would have to take a bus (3 pounds!) and then pay for entrance (8 pounds!). Besides, I still had a cold to nurse, and I had a hacking cough that was worrying me.

Pulling out my phone, I texted Hannah and told her I was rethinking today’s plans. It would be nice, I thought, to sit at home for a day, and do all of my assigned reading. There were a hundred and sixty pages left of Moll Flanders to read, and three chapters in Anthropology, and I had laundry to do, which was best done early, when no one was awake.

A few cagey text messages later, I went out into the hallway with a book and prepared to wait until Hannah came out. She appeared momentarily, ready for the day, her brown curls cascading over her black coat. “You don’t look sick,” she said, narrowing her eyes at me. “Come on! Get up! Get your coat!”

“But Han-nah.”

“Go on! Get ready!”

I wrinkled my nose at her, but obeyed. Two angels were wrestling in my head, pointing out all of my ills and woes and homework, and the other saying, Hannah and Victoria are the two closest friends you have in Belfast, are you really going to abandon them?

Shut up, I told myself. I did not listen.

We met Victoria in front of the Treehouse, the centre of all Elms Village activities, and then proceeded to walk an hour to the River Lagan.

Earlier I wrote about being left in the TitanicQuarter, which is just across the River Lagan. That I walked that far was incredible; what was even more amazing was I did not feel tired for the long walk. We made it to the Laganside Buscentre in good time, and soon we were barrelling our way through Holywood, towards the Ulster Folk Museum. About a half hour later, we were standing on the side of a highway, walking towards the museum.

Many of you are familiar with Greenfield Village, and that is kind of what the Ulster Folk Museum is, although it’s smaller and less organised. We had arrived early as well, and there were few people there; besides the friendly man who sold us our ticket and penalized us for every Americanism we used, there were only scores of children running around and shrieking. Tentatively, we explored the buildings in the “town,” and stopped for a luncheon of Irish Stew and Australian Root Beer. Afterwards, we slowly made our way out to the farmlands, where we visited the forge and helped fan the fire, and petted a donkey, its fur warm from the sun. The chickens clucked, pleased to make our acquaintance, and the sheep eyed us carelessly from afar—although one ram did nuzzle Victoria’s fingers furiously, almost getting its horns caught in the fence.

It was all strangely empty and timeless. I felt as if I was slipping through time, and had not quite come out at the other end, so that I was moving around a frozen landscape and would soon come across a woman picking apples, trapped in the act, or a lone farmer out in the fields, hand still shielding his eyes from the sun. As we slipped into a small forest and crossed a bridge over a stagnant stream, the feeling increased, although instead of humans, I imagined fairies sitting at the bottom of a hawthorn tree, smiling viciously at us.

At the end of the little grove of trees was a red mansion, and as we looked on, I suddenly felt as if I was living in Jane Austen’s world, and all of a sudden the entire country would come sprawling outside of its doors, all clucking and gossiping about the ball at Netherfield, and I would soon seen Elizabeth and Jane Bennet, and all of their sisters, and perhaps from the terrace I would spy Bingley and Darcy...

We wound back, following a phantom car to all of the different stops, and then eventually found ourselves in the post-office. A man with blue-gray eyes and thin lips greeted us, and let us try our hands at a sort of quill pen; I splattered the page the way a primary student might, while Hannah did her best to imitate the great calligraphists of the past, and Victora tried to make the ink turn a dark gray. The man told us how important the Folk Museum was, because they often got tours of students in who would ask, “Is that a real fire?” or did not know where eggs came from. “It’s hard for me to understand,” he said, “because I’m connected to the old times; I remember. But these young folk, it’s so easy to get impatient with them, because they haven’t had the experiences I’ve had. I have to remind myself of that.”

I could not imagine growing up not knowing where eggs came from, or the difference between a real and fake fire; these are things I feel as if I’ve always known—but, then, I grew up surrounded by a farm, and fed with eggs from Aunt Connie’s chickens. But I could imagine this as a concern, because I know it is a concern in America, too; that the young are forgetting the past. I’m certain I seem ignorant to many of the older people I know.

We finished up the day in a sweet shop, buying candies at 60p a bag. Victoria went for the mints, and Hannah the bonbons, while I got jazzies; we all ended up buying some vanilla fudge, which mixed pleasantly with the Root Beer we had had for lunch, with its strong aftertaste of liquorice and vanilla together. The man there teased us as well. He was wearing a gray pinstripe suit, and had a thick silver ring on his left hand. I wondered if he was married; he seemed so young. So many of the Irish do.  He asked us where we were from, and offered us free bonbons and a sweet so sour, there was a warning label on the side of the can, claiming that if one ate too many of them, their mouths would bleed. Victoria popped one in her mouth and held it there for thirty seconds, proving her a brave soul.

We left then, to catch the bus, and skidded down a slippery stairwell, grown out of a growth of bushes. The stone stairs had been coated with moss and rainwater, and the branches of the bushes were trying desperately to reclaim their old territory. We slipped our way to the bottom, and there waited for the pink Ulsterbus that would come and pick us up.

It was soon there, and we were speeding again down the highway to Holywood. And there I saw a meatwagon, with its boxy shape, and two police officers in florescent yellow. They looked solemn and grave, as the police always do when by the meatwagons. Shortly thereafter I saw three officers by another meatwagon, these ones in black, radioing in.

That was when I noticed the bus had slowed down.

What has happened? I wondered, for police do not congregate like this when there is nothing going on. I leaned back in my seat and started to imagine crimes Agatha Christie would be proud of, ones that Hercules Poirot would have loved to solve. Two more yellow police officers stood by in the road as our bus scraped by, and suddenly I heard...music.

There was a parade, coming towards us, their pale faces just as solemn as the policemen’s. In the front was a boy with a flag reading PROTESTANT BOY’S CLUB, and all of the boys who followed were wearing the same maroon colour, their faces grim and set as they played their flutes and drums. This was a parade, then. My first parade.

I was not afraid. The only danger in parades comes when they are large parades, numbering more than the twenty-odd numbers there beside our bus, and when the parades leave their territory to enter another. I knew we were safe in Protestant territory, where no one would feel slighted by their own marching down their streets.

The bus continued to crawl by, and soon we realised that there was another parade, this one of people in blue, ahead of us. We went our slow way until at last the blue parade turned down a side-street, and I listened to the sound they made until we were out of sound and sight. 

"I'm glad you made me come," I said. 

Victoria and Hannah looked pleased. 

As soon as I was home, I made my weary way to the laundry room. It was busy and full at eight in the evening, but I managed to find a washer and put my things inside. I settled in on one of the seats and buried my nose in Jamaica Inn, revelling in the betrayal of Francis Darvey, and listening with delight to what Mary shunned, of the gods of old, and the Celts who wandered the moors of England, the craggy tors and mists that lifted for no man. And, too, I mourned for Mary, who went with Jem Merlyn, starting the cycle of violence and crime anew, even though the betrayer lay dead by the seaside.

I was roused from my book by several people, asking for help: for change, for soap. One Asian girl had no idea how to wash her clothes at all; she did not know Irish money, or that you need soap to wash clothes. I gave her some of mine and showed her the coins to use, and told her how to wash and dry her clothes. I was surprised that her mum hadn’t thought to explain how to wash her clothes before she left home; my mum had given me a crash course before I left for Madonna. But I liked helping her. It makes me more confident in my own skills, especially because as I was helping her pick out the change she needed, I remembered the man at the sweets shop asking me if I’d gotten the change down yet and I’d said, “No, not at all,” and yet...perhaps I have a better grasp on it than I thought.