When I was 18 I got myself pregnant. The other party denied any involvement whatsoever, so it must have been one of those ‘immaculate’ things we were always learning about as Irish children.
In the 1980s I was living and pretending to study in Belfast, where things lagged a little behind everywhere else and it certainly wasn’t done to produce babies where no babies were expected.
I couldn’t return to the deepest, darkest countryside to live with my parents and work in the local animal-feed plant, so I figured I’d have to stay and finish my degree. But because I was from the country, where women had a bit of an idea about themselves as physical forces made of muscle and bone, rather than just pretty skin, I became a bouncer at the Students’ Union of Queen’s University Belfast, for a while. It was easier to get a nightsitter than a daysitter, so my neighbour kept the baby while I worked.
She was a darling 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.
Each night I was on the doors at one of the bars in the venue. Entry was free to those with a student card and their guests, and the door staff were there to stop drink-smuggling and general bad behaviour. We weren’t allowed to smile. We weren’t to lean against the wall, either, and we weren’t to dance and we weren’t to drink.
Maguire: ‘We weren’t allowed to smile’
Drugs weren’t an issue then in Belfast. I told you we were a bit behind everywhere else. We were to watch everybody having lots of craic and getting off with each other, and with 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 at kicking-out time, like children leaving a birthday party, the tantrums would begin.
You’d see it winding up from a distance and catch each other’s eyes across the room. Your heart would beat a little faster, and your palms would get sweaty, and you’d clear your throat to make yourself feel a little more up for it, and you’d get a little closer, grateful to see the others stepping closer, too, a closing circle of eight or ten black-and-whites in the muggy, smoky darkness before someone put the lights on.
Face-in-face they’d stand, then chest-to-chest, then pushy-shovey, then off we go, Wild-West time, flying chairs and screeching women and a rugby scrum with no referee, smack-bang in the middle of the dancefloor, pushing backwards and forwards into tables and counters and speakers without order or plan.
We students’ union door staff learned that girls in Belfast fight a lot dirtier than boys
People would shrink back but hold tight to their glasses and chug the last of their drinks in case they lost them in the chaos.
We were to throw ourselves into the melee, bring the altercation to a close and eject the offending two or three. If you were a boy bouncer you threw 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 wouldn’t get done for assault.
Problem was, girls in Belfast fight a lot dirtier than boys in Belfast. We had been trained for half a day on how to hold people so they couldn’t swing a punch, but the training hadn’t covered how to hold people so they couldn’t take a large bite out of your arm or stab your instep with a stiletto heel or pull your eyeball out with a fingernail.
So when it was a girl fight we’d all generally let it wear itself out. The boy bouncers would stand at the periphery looking sheepish and we girl bouncers would manage the circle of hate. The boyfriends would hang back, too, looking frightened, and other girls would gather their coats and handbags and make disgusted faces and move away towards the loos or the doors.
This being the 80s in Belfast, the police were busy elsewhere, so it was pretty much ‘anything goes’ for students without a terrorist conviction. The worst injury I saw was a young man who’d been glassed. He had a great jagged slice in his face that he kept holding as the blood ran through his fingers, while saying, ‘Naw, naw, it’s dead on, I’ll just hev another pint sure, it’ll be grand.’
The other bouncers were as odd as I was, a real mixed bag. Some were there for the uniform, the power and the fights, and these were the ones I avoided, both male and female. You would see their eyes glint, now and again, with something other than humanity, and know they were not safe to be around.
They would be the ones who’d trade loot at the end of the night as the grey-faced cleaners pushed mops around the sticky dancefloor – knives and keys and banknotes and whatever else pilfered from the drunken boors they’d held in tight strangleholds together. They were the ones who broke bones, smashed faces – that kind of thing – and blamed it on the punters.
Then there were the Lads. No smiling? Regardless of the rules these bouncers leaned back on the doorframes with arms folded and lazy smiles. They flirted constantly with the punters, repelling Uglies and admitting Lovelies, expecting payment later in smiles at the very least.
This was the 80s, remember? Nobody saw anything wrong with this, except for the Uglies, of course, who shivered and shook outside while they waited for a decent bouncer to come on shift. Or else a blind one.
The Minesweepers were out for one thing only. Free booze. They’d lift unattended glasses and swig on the sly, and confiscate hip flasks and quarter bottles of ‘vodders’ to chug in the bathrooms on their break.
At closing time they’d scoot round the tables, polishing off anything from gin to sex on the beach – stubbed-out fag ends 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’d usually lost the capacity to feel pain and took to simply lying on offenders when their limbs gave out – dead weights who allowed the rest of us to get a safe hold.
As all workmates do everywhere, we found our set and stuck to it. I was with the Yuks, who were no one and nothing, just there for the job, watching the clock for closing time and the pay packet (£3.25 an hour, for 20-25 hours a week).
We had nothing much to say to each other but nothing much against each other, either, so we put in the time any way we could, and waited for our own to come, when we, too, would get to swill and bellow and bounce around to Van Halen and Def Leppard and wake up with mouths as dry as Gandhi’s flip-flop on the floor of a stranger’s bedsit.
It’s quiet now, where I sit, writing about that youthful noise and stink and threat. As soon as my pink-cheeked baby let me, I took a daytime job as a classroom assistant and got the hell out of Dodge. I never missed it. Primary-school kids are noisy, unpredictable and sometimes bite, but there’s never any force behind it, and no need to pin them to the ground and bounce their forehead on the floor to get their attention. The same may not perhaps be true of secondary-school kids – I’m not in a position to say.
Everything we do stays with us, of course, for all of our variegated lives.
The brightly coloured scratching, biting girls are woven into my writing and my nightmares over the years, as are the bouncers I stood with along the sweating, pulsing walls night after night after night – the misfits, the impoverished and the psychotic – all drawn to the job by their demons and all held for that short time in a tight union of connectedness against everyone else, against the happy, drunken, careless 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 until 14 April with free UK delivery, go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.