The overwhelming majority of Belfast people do quiet, respectable, mildly sociable things, like everybody. Everything looks absolutely normal: the bakery, the post office, the park where the old ladies walk their dogs.
And then this curtain parts and a glimpse is caught sometimes of the merely bizarre, sometimes of the blackly awful. A soldier with a rifle cocked walks backward out of the bushes of the park.
You come home and your little street has been cordoned off because they're going to blow up a car which has been left there without number plates. Someone tells you that the bright-blue wheelie-bins in the next borough are a political statement: the council had to withdraw dark green ones.
You spell out a word to someone who's filling in a form and she looks up and smiles: "You said `haitch' instead of `aitch', " she says. "You must be a Catholic." With that, you realise that she must be a Catholic or she wouldn't have risked the remark.
And that's the oddest thing of all, the way the word "Catholic" rises from the general din. "Another Catholic has been shot . . ." "A Catholic taxi-driver escaped death earlier today when . . ." A newcomer from the South, almost completely unaware even of being a Catholic, is astonished, stunned even, trying to imagine a class of people called "Catholics". Some little thing inside you shifts.
I met a young Dublin man in Belfast. I had just been to Mass and I was telling him how surprised at myself I'd been - at how very much I'd wanted to go and how much it had meant to me. He said it was one of the main things he had noticed: none of his friends at UCD bothered about religion one way or another, but the same kind of young people in the North really cared. "Protestants too," he said, "they take it seriously too."
I wonder how seriously they take the murder of fellow-Christians. In their sermons and so on, what do Dr Paisley and his like say, if anything, about the recent murders of Catholics? Murdering Catholics is something you'd expect a Christian pastor to have something to say about.
The priest had something to say at Mass. I'm entitled to listen to him, even though I don't belong to his suffering community. The name "Catholic" is not the same on me as on the dead men. All the same, I was born into a Catholic culture and I would describe myself as a woman Irish Catholic if I had to start describing myself from the beginning. (Belief is a separate matter.)
I go to Mass in foreign cities for the comfort of its familiarity. I would look forward to going in Belfast, even if Catholics were not being murdered for being Catholics.
Of course, Belfast Catholics are not being murdered because of transubstantiation or the Virgin Mary or anything else to do with Catholicism as a collection of beliefs and practices. "Catholic" is shorthand for a politico-social entity and it is a word for "other".
I don't know what vague image goes through the murderer's head when he and his friends bend over some table in some loyalist drinking-club somewhere and say: "Isn't that guy in the paintspray shop a Taig?" and begin to plot a murder.
The image can't have any relation to the quiet and ordinary people coming along the Sunday-morning, seagull-invaded streets to the church at Clonard. They took their places in the old pews amid the profusion of Victorian frescoes and lamps and stained-glass and statues and shrines the same as anywhere - the same as people who look like that have walked into churches like that and knelt and then settled themselves like that, all my life.
The difference was in what the priest said when he began his sermon. "What are we to do?" he asked, "what are we to do?"
He began with the slogan the murder gangs announced they were using. ACAT. All Catholics Are Targets. When there are demonic forces abroad, he said, using slogans like that, what are we to do? I found myself leaning forward to hear the answer, straining to hear what he might say, longing to be advised - "Oh tell us, Father, what are we to do?"
Of course, the priest doesn't know anymore than anyone else what Catholics endangered by unbridled sectarian hatred are to do. The preceding week, three Catholics had been murdered for being Catholics. That happened to be Christian Unity Week.
He urged us not to lose faith in Christian unity and not to stop praying, and he told us with real joy that there was a Presbyterian in the congregation who had come to Clonard to share in our worship and lead us in the Prayers of the Faithful. Indeed, this was a striking thing, for me at least, but even if it is the long-term answer, it isn't the short-term one.
I understood from that movement of my body - leaning forward to be told what to do - one of the reasons why Northern Ireland is such a patriarchy. If you're just one of the common people, you're vulnerable. You need a protector. The virtues attributed to women - communality, collectivity, the construction of shared spaces in which the young can grow - are impossible to value when argument comes out of the barrel of a gun. When a man going about his ordinary work can be shot for no gain to the murderer except, presumably, the adulation of his Catholic-hating peers, you need something stronger than him to stop him.
You need, in fact, the power of the state. You need the benign and impartial patriarchate called the police, but when you come out of Clonard monastery and walk up the Falls Road you are walking through a modern town where there is no police. The RUC is not assented to. Not at all. On the lamp-posts it says: "RUC OUT" - and this is passionately meant.
A completely non-controversial group who happen to be from west Belfast had an office party in their workplace at Christmas and it was interrupted by a bomb scare. The RUC came to search the building. The group wouldn't let the RUC in.
As far as they're concerned, the RUC will take note of who is in which office, where the entrances and exits are and so on and will use the intelligence themselves to oppress or will pass it on to the very loyalists who made the bomb threat. The group wants extra security after the bomb threat. They won't accept it from the RUC. They're trying to get government help to meet the cost of using a private security firm.
You go on with your quiet respectable life with your notion of the abnormal changed. It isn't the murder rate. That is "acceptable", as they say. It isn't even that it is Catholics who were murdered, exclusively, that particular week. It is that a Southerner has no experience of absolute alienation from the very bases of civic life. Can it be that Clondalkin during the worst riot is a society and Belfast at its most peaceful is not?