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The two boys sit in low plastic chairs beside each other in a classroom of the Stella Maris Secondary School, a brick-and-stucco series of afterthoughts that could pass for a warehouse. Stella Maris is in an unusual position because it is a Roman Catholic school located in a Protestant area, and it holds a special place in modern Belfast history because Bobby Sands is an alumnus. Yet the Stella Maris students make no big thing of their connection to the hunger striker. A couple of boys were once caught playing a game called Bobby Sands, but that's about the extent of it. Ask Stephen and Malachy, both 15, what they think of Sands' decision, and they answer simultaneously, "Brave." "Foolish."
Joseph would undoubtedly say "Brave," and he would probably urge the same answer on Paul. But alone, away from Joseph, Paul is more himself.
"That business about revenge. Is that really what you want?" The boy looks helpless. "No. It doesn't matter who done it. Nothin's worth killing someone."
According to most accounts, Paul is a very odd, timid exception in a city that has become famous for its violent children. In fact, the reverse is true. There are plenty of violent children in Belfast, to be sure: kids who kill time stealing cars for joyrides or lobbing petrol bombs at the army. But they are a small knot of a minority. Most Belfast children are like Paul. They have not all suffered so directly from the Troubles, but their response to the Troubles is similar. They carry no hatred in their hearts, they show a will to survive, and they are exceptionally gentle with grownups and with one another. This seems especially remarkable when one considers the dark, moaning city of their home—the once clanging port that made great ships and sailed them down the Belfast Lough for the world to see. It is now shut tight like a corpse's mouth, its brown terrace houses strung out like teeth full of cavities, gaps and wires.
The wires hold. Belfast is rich in wire, coiled and barbed, and in corrugated iron. (You could make your fortune in corrugated iron here.) Great sheets of it are slabbed up in front of government buildings and on the "peace line" that separates the Catholic Falls Road from the Protestant Shankill. In the centers of the streets are "dragon's teeth"—huge squares of stone arranged in uneven rows to prevent fast getaways. Downtown in the "control zone," no car may be parked unattended. Solitary figures sit like dolls behind the wheels to prove there is no bomb. Armored personnel carriers, called "pigs" by the children, poke their snouts around corners and lurch out to create sudden roadblocks. The Andersonstown police station, like a fly draped in a web, is barely visible behind what looks like a baseball backstop. The fence is slanted inward at the top, to fend off any rockets.
"O' course, there's one place where the Prods and Taigs [Catholics] are at peace." The cabbie grins and points to the Protestant and Catholic cemeteries that abut each other. "Yet space is tight even there. The Catholics is spillin' over on the bogland. If you bury people in that, the coffins will pop out of the ground."