We present the shortlisted stories from the RTÉ Short Story Competition shortlist 2023 – read Breathe by Robin Livingstone below.
About the story: "I was a young journalist around the time that plastic bullets started to take their deadly toll," Robin says, "and have both personal and professional experience of the devastation wrought by a supposedly 'non-lethal' weapon. It’s an issue that has stayed with me as I’ve grown older."
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He’s 17 but looks 15. He’s wearing a blue Fred Perry polo, Wranglers, a pair of cherry-red Doctor Marten shoes. Because it’s the summer side of May he’s got his jumper knotted around his waist. He’s so skinny the only time he ever had a pair of RUC handcuffs on he slid his hands in and out of them to pass the time in the back of the Land Rover.
He's staring into the face of a British soldier through two panes of scratched see-through plastic: a six-foot shield and the visor of a riot helmet. He thinks the guy’s got blue eyes, maybe a bit of green. He spits at them anyway, although he really doesn’t see it as spitting in the soldier’s face because the spit hits the plastic and slides slowly down, over and through the cracks and gouges of a hundred riots. He hopes the soldier understands that.
All along the 50-foot line of soldiers across the blocked road there’s one-on-one spitting, swearing and pointing going on, intensely intimate amidst the noise and the clamour. Behind the front line on which he stands there’s a crowd of maybe 10,000 with H-Block banners and hunger-strike placards. They’ve tried to get to Belfast city centre a couple of different ways only to be met with lines the same as the one that’s stopping them now. He’s seen it all before and he knows how it ends. He's no interest in getting to the city centre, neither have his scattered mates. All they came here for is a riot, and spitting and swearing aren’t going to start one. He goes to every march and rally but never listens to a speech, never knows what’s being applauded, what’s being cheered.
So he starts kicking the soldier’s shield, just like others in the front line are doing now; taking two steps back and lunging forward with the sole of his shoe, hoping the soldier will notice he’s wearing DMs. The soldiers fall back a bit, using their shields like matadors’ capes to fend off the kicks. The first bricks sail over the shields and clang off the roofs of the armoured vehicles behind the line; he takes the first plastic bullet bang as the starting gun.
The crowd behind him is thinning and running, three or four of them limping. He’s too close to the shields to be a target but he needs to get away from here and so he leaves his post and runs back, runs at a crouch as near to ninety degrees as his body and his speed will let him. The bangs are non-stop now, the bullets thunking off walls and tarmac and into bone and flesh. They’re not supposed to fire them over waist height, but they’re whizzing three feet over his flattened back too. He’s near the corner now and round it he can see the crowd reassembling in Divis Street; he’s nearly out of the guns’ reach and as his run slows and he straightens up a little he feels a punch on the ribs, three inches below his left shoulder blade. But he’s not that bothered. It’s like a punch a classmate would hit him during a lunchtime mess-about, he thinks; he’d probably tell him to knock it on the head and then forget about it.
Round the corner and he’s walking now. The crowd has regrouped, launching stones and bottles at the line of soldiers from cover. He’s trying to find something to throw and at the same time hoping to spot his separated friends. He coughs without opening his mouth and he feels it’s productive, like he’s caught a bit of unexpected phlegm. He spits it out and the gob flashes bright red in the sunshine. He feels an electric jab of concern lance from his brain down through the back of his face and into his chest. That was a fuckin live round, wasn’t it? Straight through the heart. He looks up and the Divis Tower and the Belfast Hills are lurching as if he’s seeing them through a porthole in a storm. He drops to one knee.
Somebody has shouted that the wee lad’s shot and they’re around him now and he’s on his side, the blood leaking from the side of his mouth on to the road’s white centre line. Their shouting sounds to him like shouting he hears at the swimmers: detached, comforting; echoing, alienating. It occurs to him to put his hand to his heart and side and there’s no hole in his chest where a live round would have come out. He’s encouraged both by his presence of mind and the absence of an exit hole and he holds on to the hope he’s just given himself. If a live one went through your heart you’d’ve been dead before you took another step he’s thinking as they lift him by arms and feet and put him in the back of a black taxi.
In the A&E a doctor is slicing a horizontal hole just under his left armpit. He knows what’s going on because the nurse with the red hair and the upside-down Tissot watch told him two minutes earlier. They’re cutting him open so they can spread his ribs and pass a tube into his lung and suck the blood out. The tube isn’t going into his lung really, it’s going into the space between his lung and his chest wall that’s supposed to be empty but which is now full and blocking his breathing. A potential space, she called it. He had wanted to ask her if a space could be potential, if a space was only space if there was space. But it sounded stupid in his head and so he didn’t.
There’s no anaesthetic but the cutting isn’t sore, not even a bit; it’s not even sore when the doctor puts a finger through the hole and then starts wiggling the tube through the ribs. It’s just that now he wishes the nurse hadn’t told him the details because the thought of all of this must be worse than the real of it. And that tube’s going in any second and he’s been told not to worry if his breathing gets worse for a while because that’s normal. If she hadn’t told him all this he’d just be staring at the wall without any idea of what’s happening and he probably wouldn’t even think about his breathing when the tube went in. And that’d be better, he thinks.
When the tube goes down the feel of it in there makes him breathe panicky breaths. And when there are voices outside and the nurse with the red hair leaves the cubicle quickly his breathing gets more panicky. She’s back in five seconds with him still panting and the doctor telling him everything’s fine. She’s got a huge man in a pinstripe suit with her and he’s holding a clipboard. She tells the doctor that it’s the police and they want to know who’s on the trolley and while the doctor’s still engrossed in the tube-hole and the glass bottle that the blood is draining into, he tells the man to get out, without looking up hardly. His breathing is steadier now and he thinks it’s because that pinstripe suit business distracted him from thinking about the tube in his lung – or the tube in the potential space that’s now a space in front of his lung. But he doesn’t know.
The nurse with the red hair is standing beside his bed on the ward and talking ninety to the dozen. It’s starting to get dark outside and his family have been and gone. She’s telling him about the policeman in the cubicle and about how after a riot they take the names of people brought in with plastic bullet injuries and charge them with riotous behaviour so they can’t bang a claim in. She thinks the peeler was Special Branch because all those Branch men are big and fat and wear stupid suits like that. He looks at her and thinks she might be from up where he’s from, the way she’s talking. She tried to stop him going into the cubicle, she says, but in he went anyway, cheeky big ballix. And she says she told the peeler he had interrupted a surgical procedure and that was really bad craic and that wasn’t the last he’d be hearing of it. She’d bet anything that was the end of the matter, she says, and she sounds proud about it and he hopes she’s right.
It's a chest ward and it’s mostly old men full of phlegm and catarrh and when they’re not standing or sitting up, when they lie flat and sleep at night and the weight of their lungs presses down, they sound like the woodwind section of an orchestra tuning up. And so he sleeps only for short periods and when he sleeps he dreams vivid dreams, mad dreams. Gaping, butcher’s-window exit wounds in his chest; his maggot-ridden lungs making mouth organ wheezes as they rise and fall; a writhing tube spraying bloody mucus. Sometimes he puts on the bedside light and lies staring at the glass bottle his blood’s draining into and he wonders how much is coming out and how it’s getting replaced. Can’t be losing that much, he thinks, or they’d have given me a transfusion. Or maybe that tube’s a two-way and he’s being transfused while he’s being drained. He tells himself to ask a nurse about it, but he never does.
They’re taking the tube out after a week and he’s glad it’s the same doctor and the same nurse. She makes a joke about the police coming back and when the doctor laughs while bending to examine him he can feel the light blast of warm breath on his ribs and armpit. Same drill, he’s told: bit of discomfort maybe; a little panic perhaps; perfectly normal; give it a few seconds and it’ll all settle down. The doctor tells him that it’s coming out any second and he wishes he’d just do it without telling him because the waiting gives him time to think about things that he really doesn’t want to think about. He’s looking at the wall and he can feel the tube moving around inside. He feels like he’s breathing through his heart now and his heart’s speeding up and his lungs can’t keep up with it. The tube lightly scrapes his ribs as it flops out and he still can’t tell his lungs from his heart, everything’s just… in there. And on the white wall he can see the blue-green eyes of a soldier through a spit-flecked riot shield and he can see his red DMs flash forward in the May sunshine. He can see himself on one knee beneath the Belfast Hills and Divis Tower.
Then his heart slows down. He’s breathing with his lungs again. And they’re stitching up the hole beneath his armpit.
About the author: Robin Livingstone has been a journalist on a local newspaper in Belfast for 35 years. He has a passion for Irish wildlife and the outdoors and is greatly attached to his blackthorn and binoculars. He is married with three children and is currently besotted with his first granddaughter.
Breathe was read on air by Marty Rea at 11.20pm on Thursday 19 October, RTÉ Radio 1, as part of Late Date.
Read more stories from the shortlist on rte.ie/culture, hear updates on Arena on RTÉ Radio 1, and tune in to Arena's RTÉ Short Story Competition special which will go out live on RTÉ Radio 1 at 7pm on Friday 27 October 2023 from Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire, Co. Dublin, with all 10 shortlisted writers in attendance. Judges Claire Kilroy, Ferdia MacAnna and Kathleen MacMahon will discuss the art of the short story and the stories from this year's shortlist with host Seán Rocks, there'll be live music and performances from leading actors, and we'll find out who's won the top prizes.
Why not join us in person? Audience tickets are now on sale via the Pavilion Theatre.
And for more about the RTÉ Short Story Competition in honour of Francis MacManus, go here
