Shadows of Belfast

Chip Shop Set Alight

In a grey corner of Belfast, 1993, fifteen-year-old Jamie Kerr walked the alley behind the chippy with a packet in his coat. Cold seeped through the bricks, but his palms sweated as he approached a door marked with orange chalk. He knocked twice, paused, then once more. The door opened.

"You’re early,” muttered Davy, a broad-shouldered man with tired eyes. “That the stuff?”

Jamie nodded, handing over the packet, petrol-soaked rags and a crude ignition device. It wasn’t much, but it didn’t need to be. The takeaway down the road, Catholic-owned, would burn fast.

That night, Jamie stood across the road, watching as the windows exploded and flames danced in the sky. People screamed. Sirens echoed. Somewhere inside, a dog barked until it didn’t.

He didn’t sleep.

Jamie wasn’t stupid. He knew what the Organization was. He knew what they said about “protecting Ulster,” about “keeping the Fenians in their place.” His da said the same things, pint in hand. But none of that matched the image of a little girl being dragged out of smoke by firefighters, coughing into her teddy bear’s fur.

She looked like his sister.

The next morning, he skipped the usual meeting behind the estate and went to school for once. Half the class was missing. One boy, Mick O’Reilly, sat with a split lip and red knuckles.

“Didn’t they hit your uncle’s shop?” Jamie asked.

Mick nodded, glancing at him like he wanted to say more but didn’t trust the air.

At lunch, Jamie sat alone. The voices in his head were louder than the ones on the street: his mates calling him a patriot, his da calling him a man, that girl’s silence in the smoke. He walked home past the charred shell of the takeaway and paused. A woman—Catholic, surely—was crying softly as she sifted through ashes with bare hands. No cops, no news crews. Just her, and grief.

That night, Jamie left a note under Davy’s door:

“Don’t come looking. I’m done. We burned a family, not a cause.”

And then, under the cover of night, he crossed into the Catholic side for the first time in his life—not with anger, but with a hammer and nails. He spent hours fixing a wall they said was "ours" and "theirs," sealing cracks in something everyone else wanted to keep broken.

He didn’t know if it meant forgiveness. But it was a start.

Shadows of Belfast is the property of the Author and must not be plagiarised. Legal action will be taken against those who copy, download and/or use for monetization purposes.