My life partner and I are one half each of our home, the north of Ireland/Northern Ireland – as you prefer. Though far from the same, we fit mostly. Sometimes we can’t bear being close. We battle for the last word, want never again to have to listen to each other, not to have to consider the other portion. It might be a relief were it to end.

Once, in the North, couples were harassed and some were killed for being in inter-faith relationships. Certain people chose to emigrate across the water or over the border. The year after we voted in favour of the Good Friday Agreement, the summer before I began university, a Protestant woman called Elizabeth O’Neill died when a brick hurtled through her living room window, followed by a pipe bomb, which exploded in her hand. She was killed because she had married and borne the children of a Catholic man. She was killed by loyalists. Her family invited a Protestant minister and a Catholic priest to jointly conduct her funeral. It couldn’t bring her back. Mutual violence and erasure continued.

D and I were born a year apart to the month, him in Altnagelvin Hospital in Derry City, and I in Mid-Ulster Hospital in rural L’ Derry. He was born a Catholic, and I was born a Presbyterian. We were raised on opposite ends of the Glenshane Pass. Until his teens, he knew only one Protestant family, who’d lived in a crumbling mansion. When he told me that, I scarcely believed him. I found it impossible to imagine.

We ‘mixed’ in the countryside, where I lived. There were even ‘mixed’ marriages. I studied, swam and partied with the children of those marriages, as well as ‘pure’ Catholic and Protestant children.

I met D in the Islington bar that inspired George Orwell’s perfect pub, The Moon Under the Water. At once, I noticed an absence of abstraction that’s rare enough in the English spheres I occupy. The world appeared more tangible in his presence. I made sense again. Unusually, I relaxed. Words arrived unguarded. I could say almost anything. He had never before been nervous on a date, but I didn’t at first realise it was a date.

Soon we lay, our legs entangled in the dark of morning, listening to the London rain battering the window.

‘Not very long ago,’ he said, ‘we could’ve been dragged from our bed and shot for this.’

It hadn’t occurred to me. A boy in my class sprang into my head. He had no dad, only a devoted granda. That boy’s family had received death threats to try and coerce them into moving from their village because they were of the wrong religion. Sometimes you’re so eager to locate decency that you overlook the obscene. Obscenity was quotidian in our childhoods, though we were also experiencing all the usual things.

We went silent. Unshyly, he placed a hand on my naked stomach. His palm prickled the goldy hairs sown through my skin. He whispered, ‘Easy does it, goddess.’

‘No, don’t say that.’

After, he turned, blinked slowly and shut his eyes.

I looked at the unfamiliar face. He was asleep. I rolled around and wriggled back until my body contacted his. The duvet crackled. He made a humming noise, maybe pleasure. This warm man didn’t smell wrong. I wasn’t planning on ever dying for love, nor of letting anyone die for me. Those times looked to be gone. He and I recognised each other. The native contradiction was here between us. We knew what was at stake. He, too, was aware that peace was a dream, not entirely present. Underneath, home remained unsettled, irate, pained. At least, we were no longer killing each other as much. Neither he nor I had forgotten that it could all come back. It could all come back. . . I had no premonition then that people would soon be toying with its return. I reached over his body. My forearm banded his face with shadow. His lips pursed. This could be it. Fuck.

Before we’d left Ireland, we had each vowed that we’d never end up with somebody from home. When he emigrated, he went to Scotland. I left for America, then England. He went to Cambodia. I went to France. By coincidence and design, we kissed all sorts from elsewhere.

I’d been given a sheltered childhood and adolescence. I was lucky to have plenty of space around me. My apprehension was balanced by a sense of potentiality. Good and exciting things were possible. Bad events happened adjacent to me or just out of sight.

Youth was more brutal for him. He was part of a community that was oppressed and radicalised in a city that was segregated and occupied by the military. Serious and inescapable things happened near and to him.

It was most intense in the cities, but our whole region was militarised and pervaded by rival paramilitaries. A precarious and stressful homeland sometimes.

‘You two are like Romeo and Juliet,’ someone joked. 

I don’t know about that. It didn’t end well for them. It’s fairer to say that from early on we saw where fixity leads so we are choosing uneasy doubleness. D’s presence reminds me that I am semi-wrong. This operates in both directions. When it works, we contrast and complement each other, our us contains our opposite. However, our arguments are incandescent, wide open and all out. Too often, bewilderment has curled up, spun through us. All’s distortion then. We lose sight of each other. He believes he hates and fears the thing I was born and had no say in. I’m not ashamed of my origin. No one should be.

This relationship is causing us to grapple with questions and burdens that belong to us and don’t. Even if they did shape our brains, can we really claim to have inherited them in full? Back and forth we go, daring each other to better fathom ourselves, who and what created us. We are attempting to decipher a puzzle that’s perhaps unsolvable.

My childhood recollections include pieces of the day we learned that a family friend Bob Glover had been assassinated in a car bomb. He had just dropped his daughter to primary school. That bomb was beneath the car as they drove from home and as he waved her off outside. It was waiting as many parents waved goodbye to their children. Bob’s daughters were our playmates. Was someone following him, anticipating the moment? It was thought to have been someone local, who knew the family. Nobody caught. The grievers at the funeral came from both religions. Father Denis Faul called him ‘a good man, who has given valuable service to the community.’ In an interview, his mother said: ‘They put Semtex under his side of the car and that went up, and the car went on fire and there was a massive explosion. You know, I’ve had deaths in the family but there was always something there, there was a body there and you saw a body and that was very final, but we never saw Robert. They brought a coffin home and they said, “This is Robert’s remains.” I think that was really the heart-rending thing, that we never even saw him to say goodbye to.’

What were those words with which one sought to justify the killing of non-combatants? What were they again? They’ve come back. Soft. Legitimate. Collateral. They’re always being used somewhere in the world.

Thirty other civilians died that year, including six-month-old Nivruti Islania, fifteen-year-old Seamus Duffy, a young German woman of twenty-six called Heidi Hazell, twenty-six-year-old David Dornan, thirty-eight-year-old Patrick Finucane, forty-eight-year-old John McAnulty, and seventy-two-year-old Ernie Rankin. I wish I could list every one of those souls, without their names losing meaning and decomposing into sounds.

An alternative selection would give a different and simpler story. I could choose only those killed by the police, army and garda, AKA the State/States. I could speak only of the victims of the Republican paramilitaries, or only of the victims of the Loyalist paramilitaries. Because of infiltration and collusion, that approach would be foolish and cynical. There’s no hierarchy in dead bodies and mourned human beings. The dead aren’t ours to categorise and rank. We aren’t entitled to appropriate or elide them. My skin crawls when I encounter this, and I encounter it often of late. We must let in all the dead and remain conscious of all of them. Or so I believe.

D sends me a link to an online article from the BBC, a media organisation he says he despises because of biased coverage of home when we were kids. Under the guise of impartiality, they portrayed Catholics in a particular light. ‘They betrayed the truth,’ he has repeated, flame in his eyes. The headline of the article is: ‘Mega close-up pictures of sand!’ Someone has photographed grains of sand from American, Japanese, Hawaiian and Irish beaches. Beneath the microscope, each handful of sand is a gorgeous, heterogenous array of uniquely shaped and psychedelic precious stones. They resemble tiny sweets, nature’s own inedible Pick-n-Mix. Unfortunately, the article doesn’t show any images of the Irish sand. Being self-interested and always attentive to home, I want to see those.

On the internet, I discover a ‘sand gallery’ from Inishmore, one of the Aran Islands: pearlescent white, ecru, ashen grey, granite, ribbed maroon, a palette predominantly black, white, grey, brown, and much soberer than the Hawaiian sand, with its many pretty coral reef hues. I marvel at how these minute hard bits combine to make an environment that’s fine, squishy, flowing, one tone then another, the surfaces rearranging, parts lit or shaded from the sky above.

D wrote a book about the River Foyle in Derry City. It was completed before we met and published on the cusp of the pandemic. The Foyle is the site of deaths, intended and accidental, of numerous members of his family.  As he was composing the book, his then-partner (not Irish) teased him by nicknaming it Cry Me a River. This book contains a list. The chapter in which the list appears gives the book its title, Inventory. This list of killings from ‘a fraction of the opening years of our Troubles’ evokes mayhem. Many, many innocents were killed. A person may have been accused of being a terrorist or collaborator and been neither. A person might’ve been a victim and perpetrator at the same time. Someone may have claimed to be a civilian while carrying a gun or building a bomb they meant to explode. Nothing was clear, except killing and wounding.  

Shortly after meeting D, I read his book. The ‘opening years of our Troubles,’ he wrote. Our people lost. Our people murdered. Our people injured in body and psyche. We who did it. We who were capable. We who had it in us. We who could never have done it, who had it done to us. We who ache and have gotten stuck there. We who struggle to leave it alone, even those of us who were hardly present, only children. The chapter ends: ‘If ghosts did exist, they’d be everywhere.’

It’s a lack of difficulty or complication that he and I suspect, the omission of inconvenient factors, a view of the island as just one thing or the other, a flattening and straightening and clarifying that denies the intricate, obscure and crooked nature of our piece of Earth, how it metamorphosises from one moment to the next, how you could nearly have a taste of every variety of weather, beating sun and cloud and hailstones in one afternoon, in fifteen minutes.

Last time we were home together, we took a walk from Portballintrae. You stroll along a boardwalk over sand dunes, alongside a small golf course, between it and the basalt headland. You are raised well above the beach. You direct yourself toward the far end of the bay to a fancy turreted mansion, converted into apartments. You’re led onto a small railway track, before you bear left and pick your way down to the shore. We sauntered back along the sand. We walked west. It was too hot, but it’s always breezy at the ocean’s edge in Ireland. Bit by bit, I removed my anorak, sweatshirt, shoes, and tights. We slopped through the encroaching, swirling shallows.

Our walk ended when a river cut us off, poppling down into the Atlantic. Every dog halted to drink, knowing that the water was not yet briny. Here, I bathed my feet. Well ahead of its owner, a plump blonde retriever cantered down from the bridge and sunk everything of itself, except eyes and ears, into the fresh river, where it stayed, blissfully cold. The river bent obligingly around the shape of the dog. We stood a minute and chatted to the owner, a woman who had moved to the coast since the pandemic to spend her retirement there. We crossed back over the bridge. A young couple passed us, going the other way. I had never seen a woman in Ireland clothed as the young woman was clothed, in a pretty flowered dress with a white lace cap over her dark hair. She resembled a Mennonite.

From the other bank, at a higher relief, we watched the river plunge into the ocean. The River Bush slides down from the Antrim Hills, a modestly named mountain range. We are sometimes prone to understatement. Our mountains are hills. Our thirty-year-long ethno-nationalist conflict, the latest iteration of a much longer discord, is called the Troubles. We watched the fresh water meet the salt water. A tributary of the river, Saint Columb’s Rill, supplies the water vital for the production of Bushmills Whiskey. The water is used for each phase of the making: the malting, mashing, fermentation, distillation and bottling. The water quality influences the flavour, aroma, and balance of the whiskey.

The English name whiskey evolved from the Gaelic, either the Old Irish term uisce bethu or the similar Old Scottish term uisge beatha. Monks of the Early Middle Ages translated it from the Latin agua vitae, water of life. Depending on which product, the Bushmills Distillery ages and finishes their whiskeys in either Bourbon barrels, port wine pipes, or in casks previously used for sherry, vermouth, Madeira, Pomerol, Sauternes and Caribbean rum.

In peak season, Bushmills is a hectic Unionist village. It receives tourists from all over the world. Of its 1,250 permanent residents, most are Protestant. According to the 2021 census, 2.7% were Catholic. There is a visceral economic disparity between those who holiday there and those who live in the council estate, which appears neglected. During the spring of 2024, a young man was found crucified on the fence of a public car park in the village. He was taken to hospital in a fire engine, his hands still attached to the sections of fence. Police said the injuries may be life-altering and described it as a ‘paramilitary-style attack.’ I believe it was linked to drug-dealing. There’s plenty of that.

Before his death, D’s father sent him a special gift to mark his fortieth birthday, a bottle of Ten-Year-Old Single Malt Irish Whiskey from Bushmills, distilled three times. A love of whiskey is one of few things they had in common. His story to tell.

In Wicklow, Ireland, there is an abundant valley where two rivers – the Avonberg and Avonmore – flow into each other and dance. The Vale of Avoca inspired a poem by the Irish Romantic poet Thomas Moore, ‘The Meeting of the Waters’.  

I’m transfixed by these places of mingling, where separate entities converge, where a river clashes with the sea. One hasn’t yet cancelled the other. The discrete waters interact. At Runkerry Beach, where the Bush River meets the ocean, the salt water soon turns the spring water brackish, but there’s an area of uncertain bounds, where neither has the advantage, neither dominates.

That is how we merge, he and I. It’s from such a place that I write. To my mind, it’s where everything interesting and inquisitive develops – community, art, science, and genuine identity. We aren’t ever one thing. When an environment goes wrong, one element overwhelms all else. The ills of home and anywhere are incuriosity, coercive or deluded absolutism. Still, the salt sea transforms to fresh rain. The volatile cycle persists.

There won’t be uniformity in our region for a long while, if ever. We must tolerate the fact that we differ and coincide. Right now, there are ones much younger than I and him, who feel secure enough to celebrate and excuse a violence they never knew, who assert a unique victimhood while speaking for – or as if they were – their parents and ancestors, who disregard the pain of those with whom they disagree, and foster supposedly Utopian dreams of banishing the enemy, their neighbour. These seem to me illusory copes that occupy the realm of signs, internet soundbites and chants at gigs and marches. At least, I hope they are. They are reproducing tropes that have been used for centuries to alienate and degrade the Irish and Northern Irish, set us upon each other in bestial feuds.

Flawed compromise is unglamorous and hard to sell these days. Bold antagonism and unblemished victimhood catch eyes. But is this a performance for the insiders or the outsiders, an appeal to their own or to the gatekeepers of the so-called Establishment? And doesn’t it rely on safety, the distance we’ve travelled from livid war? You have to exclude such a lot. Ignoring difficult facts and paradoxes is neither innocent nor frank. Do those born since the ceasefire actually want to take up arms or is this partly cosplay? Will the yearning to resent and avenge ever be quenched?

We’ve been there. It was blight and anguish, dreadful and confounding, blood-drenched and impure, every faction hurt and tainted, day after day, seemingly ever to be continued. Humbling, wasn’t it?

In the present, here we jointly are. Like it or not, after all this time, we are incomplete without each other. At the age of twenty-two, I read The Phoenix and the Turtle, by William Shakespeare, the son of a glover. Since then, I’ve sometimes imagined us through that Englishman’s words: ‘Two distinct, divisions none.’ As an Irish person whose predecessors made the north of Ireland their home over four centuries ago, that’s how I view my countrywomen and men. While I’m not a fan of its absurdities and shortfalls, perhaps our strained and maddening symbiosis is the best condition available for now.  

I don’t know if we’ll make it. Doubt, being supernaturally flexible, seems the realistic option. Unless there’s some bright angle ahead we don’t yet see.

Who among us will relinquish false certainty and exclusive righteousness to allow each other to exist unencumbered and even to thrive? Is justice possible? I hope so, fear not. It would have to be for everyone. How could that be realised? Partial justice is another kind of injustice.

There has been a cessation of largescale political violence. No small thing. What else has altered? Have we changed in how we regard ourselves and treat each other? The region has so much to offer, yet there continues to be deprivation and inequality, whataboutery and sectarianism. Underneath all the good stuff—including better integration in places—a deadly culture of violence and concealment persists. Rather than trying to fix these problems, some are engaging with relish in a form of dehumanising theatre, luxuriating anew in a stale binarism, counting on the fact that they are protected from catastrophe and the theatre won’t become real for them.

D and I are one half each of our home. Though far from the same, we fit mostly. Sometimes we can’t bear being close. We battle for the last word, want never again to have to listen, nor to have to tolerate contradiction, yet the things we fight about have made us pivotal to each other. An understanding is growing. Our mutual recognition and ongoing entangled conversations bring solace and a fuller engagement with life as it is. Were we ever to end, we would lose a mirror.

---

Jill Crawford is from County Derry. Her short fiction has been published in The Stinging Fly, n+1 magazine, and Faber’s Being Various. She is a PhD candidate at Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University Belfast, and is also writing a novel called Soft Pow! She can be found on IG @jill_crawford and Twitter @crawjill