Controlled Explosions by Claire McGowan

Ballyterrin, Northern Ireland, June 1998
    The town was burning.
    Sergeant Bob Hamilton felt the heat on his face, scorching through the sides of the armoured jeep – someone had held a light to the line of cars dragged across the road. When the flames went up, licking and hungry, you could hear the shouts. Pure joy. Like weans burning grass under a magnifying glass. That was the worst, how much they were all enjoying it. He raised a hand to his head, mopped the sweat off on the sleeve of his uniform. Hottest day of the year and they were gussied up in full riot gear inside the oven of the jeep. Four grown men – five if you counted the other. The smell of sweaty oxters and burning tyres. The jeep rocking to and fro as the crowd battered it, pushing, shouting. Every time a stone hit, Bob flinched. It was hard not to.
    ‘Which is it this time?’ The man next to Bob had to shout to make himself heard over the noise outside. He looked round at the police officers, who all stared straight ahead into their visors, ignoring him. ‘Is it going ahead or is it cancelled? What are they angry about?’
    No one answered.
    Bob could hear the weariness in his own voice. ‘This parade was meant to go ahead.’
    ‘So why aren’t they moving?’
    One of the other officers grunted. ‘Because there’s a feckin’ bomb in the way, that’s why.’
    The man perked up. ‘A bomb? Really?’ He reached for his tape recorder, holding it higher.
    ‘There’s a suspicious device on the route.’ Bob gave the official version. ‘Bomb disposal are in. It’ll be made safe, it’s just … causing a wee bit of tension.’
    Someone laughed, a short, bitter bark in the confined space.
    The man with the tape recorder swung round for a second at the sound, then back again, like a dog with a bone it couldn’t crack into. ‘So these are Protestants out there? Orangemen?’
    Journalists. Always trying to make sense of it, why one half of the population wanted to walk down the road in orange sashes, beating drums, just because they’d done it for the last three hundred years since some battle had been fought on that site. Why the other side, after all this time, had decided they didn’t really want men in sashes and bowler hats coming down their road, and in order to make this point were setting the town on fire and planting bombs on their own streets.
    The truth was, it didn’t make any sense. It wasn’t even a very interesting street. A row of houses and a bookie’s on the corner, a run-down corner shop. The giant plastic ice cream outside it had bent over in the riot, and looked like it was about to melt all over the pavement. Bob knew the feeling.
    He tried to explain. ‘They’re some of both. Catholics who didn’t want it going ahead, Protestants annoyed at the hold-up.’ Personally he thought they were all scum, anyone from either side who’d set fire to the place they lived in. It was their town. Not much, but all they had. For the past three days, if you looked out the windows of the police station, at the sun reflecting on metal jeeps and plexiglass riot shields, it had seemed as if all of Ballyterrin was on fire. The town was in stand-off, some parades going, some parades cancelled, someone angry with every decision, and like as not showing that anger by setting fire to a few cars or trashing a few shops or even firing a few wee shots at the police. Businesses had put down their shutters and closed, roads were blocked with burnt-out cars, and half the town gone away on holiday to escape it. The Twelfth Fortnight, they called it. Traditionally it was the Catholic population fleeing overseas, letting the Orange Order get on with it for a few weeks, marching their marches and singing their songs and beating their drums. This year, with the Good Friday Agreement just signed in April and the new Parades Commission getting involved, well, things were … mixed up.
    The journalist, some English fella with an accent like grating