When I was 18, I got pregnant. The other side denied any involvement, so it must have been one of those ‘impeccable’ things we used to learn about as Irish kids.
In the 1980s I lived and pretended to study in Belfast, where things were a bit lagging everywhere and it was certainly not common to produce babies where babies weren’t expected.
I couldn’t return to the deepest, darkest countryside to live with my parents and work at the local feed mill, so I thought I should stay and finish my studies. But coming from the country where women had some idea of themselves as physical forces made of muscle and bone, rather than just beautiful skin, I became a bouncer for a while at the Students’ Union of Queen’s University Belfast. . It was easier to get a night sitter than a day sitter, so my neighbor kept the baby while I worked.
She was a sweet old lady who never seemed to sleep and said she enjoyed the company – it was my daughter or a cat, she told me, and she was allergic to cats.
Every night I stood at the door of one of the bars in the venue. Entry was free for student cardholders and their guests, and door staff were on hand to prevent bootlegging and general bad behavior. We weren’t allowed to laugh. We were also not allowed to lean against the wall, and we were not allowed to dance, and we were not allowed to drink.
Maguire: ‘We weren’t allowed to laugh’
Drugs were not a problem in Belfast then. I told you we’re a little behind everywhere. We got to see everyone having a lot of fun and hanging out with each other and each other’s girlfriends and each other’s boyfriends and drinking shots and lots of whiskey and getting red in the face and… Then, usually during kick-off, like When kids have a left the birthday party, the tantrums started.
You watched it spin from a distance, catching each other’s eyes across the room. Your heart beat a little faster, and your palms became sweaty, and you cleared your throat to make yourself feel a little more excited, and you moved a little closer, grateful to see the others coming closer. also a closing circle of eight or ten shades of black and white in the muggy, smoky darkness before someone turned on the lights.
Face-to-face they stood, then chest-to-chest, then pushy, then off we went, Wild West time, flying chairs and screaming women and a rugby scrum without a referee, bang in the middle of the dance floor, without order or plan pushing back and forth against tables, counters and speakers.
We student union workers have learned that girls in Belfast fight much dirtier than boys
People recoiled, but held their glasses tight and downed the last of their drinks in case they lost them in the chaos.
We had to throw ourselves into the fray, end the altercation, and send away the offending two or three. If you were a boy bouncer you would throw yourself into boy fights and if you were a girl bouncer the idea was that you would throw yourself into girl fights and the Union would not be punished for assault.
The problem was that girls in Belfast fight much dirtier than boys in Belfast. We had spent half a day training on how to hold people down so they couldn’t hit you, but the training hadn’t covered how to hold people down so they couldn’t take a big bite out of your arm or stab you in the instep. with a stiletto heel or pull your eyeball out with a fingernail.
So if it was a girl fight, we usually let it all wear itself out. The boy bouncers would stand on the edge and look sheepish and we girl bouncers would control the cycle of hate. The friends also hung back and looked scared, and other girls gathered their coats and handbags, made disgusted faces and walked away to the toilets or the doors.
This being the 80s in Belfast, the police were busy elsewhere, so for students without a terrorist conviction it was pretty much ‘anything goes’. The worst injury I saw was a young man with glasses. He had a large jagged gash on his face which he continued to hold as blood flowed through his fingers as he said: ‘No, no, it’s dead, I’ll definitely have another pint, it’ll be great.’
The other bouncers were just as strange as I was, a real mixed bag. Some were there for the uniform, the power and the fighting, and these were the ones I avoided, both men and women. You saw their eyes glint with something other than humanity every now and then, and you knew it wasn’t safe to be around.
They would be the ones to swap loot at the end of the night while the gray-faced cleaners pushed mop pads across the sticky dance floor – knives, keys, banknotes and whatever else was stolen from the drunken peasants they held tightly together held. . They were the ones who broke bones, smashed faces – that sort of thing – and blamed it on the gamblers.
Then there were the Boys. No smile? Regardless of the rules, these bouncers leaned back on the doorframes with arms folded and lazy smiles. They constantly flirted with the gamblers, repelled Uglies and admitted Lovelies, and expected at least a smile later.
This was the 80s, remember? No one saw anything wrong with that, except of course the Ugly Ones, who shivered and shook outside as they waited for a decent bouncer to come into the service. Or else a blind person.
The Minesweepers were only after one thing. Free drinks. They lifted unattended glasses and sipped slyly, confiscating hip flasks and quart bottles of “rags” to chug in the bathrooms during their break.
At closing time they walked the tables polishing off everything from gin to sex on the beach – stubbed cigarette butts in the glass or not. In a scrimmage they were worse than useless, flailing and falling everywhere.
But on the plus side, they tended to have staying power, as they usually lost the ability to feel pain and switched to simply lying on the offenders when their limbs gave out – dead weights that allowed the rest of us to safely to get something to hold on to.
As all colleagues do everywhere, we found our set and stuck with it. I was with the Yuks, who were nobodies and nothing, just for work, watching the clock for closing time and the pay package (£3.25 an hour, for 20-25 hours a week).
We didn’t have much to say to each other, but we didn’t have much to each other either, so we passed the time as best we could, waiting for ours to come, when we too would start swishing and roaring and bouncing. around to Van Halen and Def Leppard and wake up with a mouth as dry as Gandhi’s slipper on the floor of a stranger’s bedroom.
It is quiet now where I sit, writing about that youthful noise and the stench and the menace. As soon as my rosy-cheeked baby would allow it, I took a job as a classroom assistant and left Dodge. I never missed it. Primary school children are loud, unpredictable and sometimes bite, but there is never any force behind them, and there is no need to pin them to the ground and bounce their foreheads on the ground to get their attention. The same may not be true for kids in high school – I can’t say.
Of course, everything we do stays with us throughout our varied lives.
The brightly colored scratching, biting girls have been woven into my writing and my nightmares over the years, just like the bouncers I lined the sweaty, pulsating walls with night after night after night – the misfits, the impoverished and the psychotic – all drawn to the work of their demons and all for that short time in a tight union of bondage against everyone else, against the happy, drunken, carefree people of the world.
Roisin Maguire’s debut novel Night swimmers is published by Serpent’s Tail, £16.99. To order a copy for £14.44 with free UK delivery until April 14, visit mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.