(4 of 9)
Like Paul, Bernadette seeks no revenge against the other side, not even the army men who ride the Saracens. She points out that they are not much older than herself. She does have Protestant friends, but it's difficult because of the neighborhood she lives in. The Livingstones are residents of Lenadoon, where Julie's death is memorialized by a white cross on a small green. The neighborhood is loud with graffiti: DON'T LET THEM DIE; TOUTS WILL BE SHOT; and in bold white letters across the jerry-built walls, WELCOME TO PROVOLAND. In a sense the Livingstones are a Provo family, since Bernadette's two older brothers, Patrick, 30, and Martin, 24, are serving time in the H block; one of them is up for murder. But Bernadette has her own politics: "I don't support the I.R.A. because I know what death is."
That is true two ways. Bernadette may be the youngest in her family, but Julie's death has imposed a different sort of death on her. Now her mother clings to her like death, and Bernadette must stay home with her mother and talk with her about Julie, for that is all her mother wishes to talk about. Julie used to write her name on books around the house. "Things like that bring it all back." Bernadette sounds less complaining than amazed when she says, "I can hardly get out—you know?" She has cause to be amazed. In a single shot she has been propelled into adulthood, while her mother, in Bernadette's view, has retreated to the past, and, for the time being at least, has locked her daughter in with her.
"Do you think of Julie yourself?"
"All the time," says Bernadette. "She's everywhere."
Not all Belfast children have been touched by the violence.
Lynn Lundy of Stella Maris smiles and says firmly, "I haven't seen anything, and I don't want to." Yet death is democratic. Eight-year-old Jonathan lives in a big house on the best side of town, and until recently the closest he came to danger was hearing a big boom one night and having a bad dream about it. The major complaint in his stately neighborhood was the stink from the nearby offal factory. Now the complaint is more topical. A few weeks ago, the Rev. Robert Bradford, M.P, was shot to death in a suburban community center not far from where Jonathan lives. Bradford's daughter Claire, 7, is Jonathan's playmate. When the incident was explained, Claire had difficulty comprehending why her father had to go to heaven to talk to people when there are so many people to talk to down here.
What has happened over the long years is that chaos has become normal, and in its normality lies a basic feature of a child's life in Belfast. Alexander Lyons, a Belfast psychiatrist, points out that in a chaotic world, antisocial behavior is acceptable. That is why he finds so little of what might be termed "emotional disturbance," in the clinical sense, among the Belfast children, since, in a way, the whole place is emotionally disturbed. The kids play war games, but there is nothing unique in that. Indeed, their war games are made more normal by the fact that the grownups play them too.