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An Excerpt from my Memoir The Vatican of The Hollies - thevaticanofthehollies.com

You will never remember the exact hour and minute when a cold pane of glass under pressure flexes to the point where it shatters, but you will remember the moment. The room stretches to accommodate the cacophony, it pushing into far corners, rebounding there only to gorge on itself. It takes you to the floor, prone; you’re panting, the pounding of your heart is loud in your skull. A window is dying, and shards of once pristine glass are lacerating curtains and nicking flesh. Nothing is usual nor clean then, but all is as expected. This is number seventy. Maybe seventy-one. Thereabouts.

Something – a pipebomb, a brick, a grenade – has landed below the picture of the Madonna and Child, or under Dad’s collection of 33s, and only momentarily is it the focus, because that has already happened, that’s here, somewhere. But now you’re anticipating the explosion, or the smell of petrol fumes becoming evident before the suffocating decompression as oxygen depletes the second the room erupts into flames.

So you wait here for a moment, as shards fall from the window frame to the sill.

AND YOU ARE INDEED FORCED INTO TAKING AN UNUSUAL PERSPECTIVE, YOU HERE IN THIS MOMENT, YOUR HEAD ON THE FLOOR AS A GRENADE SILENTLY 3-2-1’S, OR A PIPE BOMB FUSE BURNS.

But you see carpet, obscured by your closeness to it. And the backs of shoes, where the upper meets the sole, the Heel Seat is what they call it, surfaces one never contemplates until one has the opportunity to do so, say, during those moments you’re waiting for a grenade to blow your bollocks off. Only Manolo Blahnik will have studied stitching on shoes quite as intensely as you will do then, though he won’t have feared for the physical integrity of his testicles when doing so, one might guess.

You come to when all goes silent, as shards of glass have flowed where they will, and breezes come waltzing inside. Then you move, and fast, and urgent, seeking something, flipping furniture, throwing cushions, yelling, instructing, demanding.

THE TV BLARING IN THE CORNER OFFERS UP A SOUNDTRACK AND ITS FLICKERING LIGHT, STEADFASTLY ATTENDING TO ITS DUTY OF SUSTAINING NORMALITY – THIS GLOWING ORACLE NO RESPECTER OF TRAUMA – LIGHTING THE WALLS WITH MONTY PYTHON SKITS, OR THE A-TEAM, OR THE ADVENTURES OF A DASTARDLY COYOTE WITH UNFETTERED ACCESS TO A FUCK TON OF ACME DYNAMITE AND ACME ROCKET LAUNCHERS, AND SPORADIC YET NOT INFREQUENT ACCESS TO A CATATONICALLY RIGID, ETERNALLY FAMISHED, AND APPARENTLY BLINDINGLY OBLIVIOUS FLIGHTLESS BIRD.

Someone finds a brick, maybe a bottle, then Dad shouts “Right, boys! Move!” and we do it again, our thing; we exit The Vatican to seek Protestant phantoms already evaporated on the breeze, their spirits whipping up the waters on Belfast Lough, all evidence away on a dark tide.

Behind us, in The Vatican, a normality returns for Ma and the girls, the wretched sort that dawns on us after any early-evening jumpstart to our days. But it is welcome, reassuring.

THE TV PLAYS THOUGH THE HOLE WHERE ONCE WAS A WINDOW. COMMERCIALS AIR FOR LAUNDRY DETERGENTS, PEPSI, BAYWATCH, NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL MUSIC VOLUME 9!

A vacuum cleaner roars, and glass shards rattle up its tube. Dogs bark, and with the wind right you hear cars entering the junction, engines revving into second, into third, into fourth, into silence, all gentle reminders of life continuing.

We brothers walked oil-stained alleys to where streetlight fades, seeking phantoms there. We waited for each other’s headshot, because that’s what we do, we wait to die as we pause on a precipice long enough to ensure we looked anything but chicken shit Fenian fucks.

Behind us, from inside The Vatican, came the low boom of an explosion. Then, moments later, through the ragged hole left in the window, a sound that meant we were safe, that we had made it another night.

MEEP MEEP!