Kiss the Bullet

by Catherine Deveney

  “Mummy, mummy, mummy,” the child screams and Danni know that it is not Angelo, and the knowledge is the trigger of a pain that will never leave her.

  “Angelooooo …” She wails, her head tipping back. The water has reached her ankles; she stands helplessly as it rises against her like a tide.

  “Angelooooo!” And then she runs again, heart hammering, into the water and the blood and the screams, into the oblivion of a tomorrow she could never have imagined.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Danni closes her eyes and leans back on the sofa, trying to blot out the shrillness of the sound. The phone rings so consistently that she has begun to hear it inside her head even when it isn’t ringing. Roberto, Marco’s brother, has come round to man it, to answer the door and open post, to make her food. He never questions her, never asks what she wants, which is a relief.

  “Eat,” he says simply, handing her a plate.

  She can’t deal with the stilted expressions of sympathy, the condolence cards with their angels and crosses and doves. Their talk of peace angers her. She opened a card one morning and felt such a surge of rage at its benign message that she picked up a jar of jam and hurled it against the kitchen door. The glass shattered, and she watched in shock as the clumps of red fruit slithered slowly down the wooden door towards the floor. Did she do that?

  She felt ashamed, then, her cheeks flushing as she crossed slowly to the sink for a cloth. The water trickled warm on her fingers. Such a confusion of emotion, the anger and the fear and the horror of this growing black hole at her heart. She crossed back to the card, raised it with wet fingers. “May the joy of happy memories bring you peace in your heart.” How can she find peace when her child has been violently plucked from the vine and thrown back into the earth to rot? When Marco’s vitality has been snuffed out so prematurely, a firework only half lit, fizzling before it had a chance to soar?

  After he died, the press made much of the fact that he was one of their own, an investigative journalist, that he specialised in the Northern Ireland troubles. They liked that irony. The press always liked irony, Danni thought, heating coincidence in a crucible of such intense emotion that it liquefied into something of almost supernatural significance.

  There were headlines about the fact that Marco had travelled into the heart of the Belfast troubles, met top level terrorists on both sides of the divide, and yet was killed in his own safe back-yard in Scotland’s only ever Irish terrorist attack. Why, the headlines demanded, had the Irish republican fight moved its focus from London, and included Scotland in its campaign, when some were pressing so hard for peace?

  It distressed Danni to see Marco’s picture alongside those stories, marking him out as victim. Marco was the story teller, not the story. Seeing his picture in the paper he once wrote for castrated him somehow, stripped him of that visceral energy that had always attracted her. A power all the more vigorous because it was casually wielded. Marco was not a victim. He simply was not. The IRA might have taken his future but she refused to let them have his past.

  Strangely, she had not worried for his safety. She had scoffed at his supposed invincibility but secretly relied on it. When he travelled to Belfast, he kissed her as casually as if he’d been going to the corner shop and she felt him in no greater danger than that. Marco was lucky. He felt it. She felt it. She simply could not imagine him not being there and later she realised it was simply her way of rationalising the sense of loss that had run like a wood grain through her life. The only way she could contemplate his loss back then was to mark it as something inconceivable.

  The doorbell again. Danni closes her eyes. She hears Roberto open the door, the low murmur of male voices in the hall. Perhaps whoever it is will go away without speaking to her. The sitting room door opens cautiously with a creak.

  “Traynor!” she says, getting up out of the chair and smiling genuinely.

  They hold one another for so long that they begin to rock gently together, Traynor whispering quietly in her ear.

  “I’m so sorry Danni. I can’t believe it. I don’t know what any of us will do. I’m so sorry.”

  Roberto stands awkwardly behind them, arms folded, eyes to the floor.

  Marco had not travelled alone to Belfast in recent times. He had been teamed with Eddie Traynor to work on a major investigation, researching links between the funding of terrorism and Irish crime rings. Both Marco and Traynor had a maverick streak, an independence, that singled them out as good journalists. They weren’t pack hunters. So there was some resistance when their editor first instructed them to pool resources and work together on the investigation, and they had sniffed round one another like two mongrels, marking out their territory with ill disguised animosity.

  In fact, they worked well together. Each brought good contacts that the other respected. Marco had been working for years on stories about weapons acquisition within the provisional IRA, investigating links with America, Libya and the KGB. Traynor had scoops on IRA links to a number of bank and warehouse robberies. They had, at first, tentatively shared contacts and resources but each came to admit that they achieved more together than either would have done alone. They were close: less than brothers; more than friends.

  Danni found her own niche in their camaraderie. She lost track of the times she would put Angelo to bed, fall asleep on the couch waiting for Marco to come home, and then hear two voices when the front door opened.

  “Traynor, do you not have a bloody home to go to?” she’d shout sleepily. Marco would come in and kiss the top of her head where she lay and when she prised her eyes apart, Traynor would be standing sheepishly waving a carrier bag of Chinese food.

  “I come bearing gifts.”

  “Any spring roll gifts?”

  “Yep.”

  “You can stay then.”

  It was their little comic ritual that they repeated often, but almost immediately after Marco’s death, Danni feels there has been some subtle shift in their old, easy rapport. It doesn’t work now that Marco has gone. He was the silent element facilitating it. He didn’t need to say anything; he just needed to be there. They used to sit, the three of them together, talking politics, arguing over Irish Republicanism. Marco, with his Catholic background, had been more instinctively supportive than Danni and Traynor. Yah dirty Prods, Marco had joked if things looked like getting heated, but that was Glasgow for you, a city that always wanted to know if you were a Billy or a Tim. The three of them had shared the Chinese food by passing it round in the tin trays without bothering about plates and talked and bickered companionably. But their roles were clear in those days. She was indisputably Marco’s and she and Traynor could chat, argue and flirt mildly in the security of that knowledge. Now, almost immediately, she finds herself calling him Eddie. It seems less intimate than Traynor.

  “I’ve asked around, Danni,” Traynor is saying, and she suddenly comes to, her interest quickening, “and as far as I can tell, it’s some kind of mistake or maybe an internal battle that’s going on. There was certainly clearance given pretty high up in the organisation for a bomb in Glasgow but not on this scale. I think it was meant to be a shock, a warning that if there’s no agreement, there’s going to be an escalation.”

  A mistake.

  Danni is staring at him, trying to make sense of his words.

  “How can you know what … how can you know …?” she stutters.

  “There’s a contact I made not long before this happened,” Traynor continues. “He’s a major figure in the Belfast criminal world but also a senior IRA member. Part of the nutting squad.”

  “The what?”

  “Internal IRA discipline. Anyone guilty of betrayal or indiscipline in the IRA is dealt with by an internal court. They’re the ones who deal with knee cappings and executions and stuff. You have to be trusted to be part of it. This guy is part of the nutting squad so he’s a senior source. He also undertakes jobs to fund IRA activity, though as much goes into his back pocket as it does into t
he IRA. He’s part of the active unit that I think is connected to the Glasgow bomb and …”

  “Hold on Eddie … wait, wait, wait …” Her heart is thumping. “Part of the active unit connected to Glasgow?”

  “Yes.” He’s not following her.

  “You know who’s responsible for Glasgow?”

  “Well … not definitely … but I have a pretty good idea.”

  “Have you told the police?”

  Eddie frowns.

  “What? No, of course I haven’t.”

  “Why not? Danni’s eyes are boring into him. “Why the hell not?”

  “Danni, I’m asking questions for a story,” he says gently. “I’ve been asked to investigate the bombing for the paper.”

  The pain inside her feels boundless, engulfing, like a wave. Marco reduced to a few lines in a story that if there was any justice, he should have been writing. Not Traynor. Not bloody Traynor.

  “So?” she says belligerently. “So what? Is that all Marco is to you all at that paper now. Another story?”

  Traynor looks winded.

  “No, of course not.”

  “Prove it. Tell the police what you know. Or give me the names and I’ll tell them.”

  “But Danni, a journalist can’t ask questions and then reveal their sources to the police. That’s not the way it works.” Traynor’s voice is gentle. He looks at her with a furrowed brow, appealing for reason. “You know that. You know that.”

  “I know that I want Marco and Angelo’s murderers behind bars.” Actually, she thinks, I want them dead.

  Traynor watches as she gets up out of her chair and walks to the window. Roberto has sat silently throughout the whole exchange but moves to put one arm round Danni’s shoulder.

  “Christ, Danni, if I passed on information to the police, I’d be a dead man,” Traynor says quietly, at her back. “A dead man walking.”

  Danni has begun to tremble. She bites her lip, trying not to say the words aloud. “I don’t care,” the voice inside her head is saying. “I DON’T FUCKING CARE.” And then, with the speed of an echo, a more dispassionate voice whispers, “Grief is making you a monster.”

  The silence says everything that needs to be said. Roberto is motionless beside her. She doesn’t turn round but a moment later, she hears the click of the door and sees Traynor disappearing down the path. There is something in the crumpled walk that prompts a stab of guilt. Poor Traynor. He cannot help it. He is simply not who she needs him to be.

  The phone rings in the night. Does it ring in reality? Does she pick it up from beside the bed? She is sure she does. She hears it rock in its cradle when she reaches for it in the dark, banging against the wooden bedside table. She feels the coolness of it against her face as she holds it to her ear. Silence. She is not frightened. She knows. “Marco,” she says. Does she say his name aloud?

  She can hear a voice stutter in the distance, a victim of a faulty connection. The line hisses like a wind blows through it. If she is honest, the voice is indistinguishable but she knows. This is no stranger. She knows. “Try again,” she urges. “I can’t hear you. Try again. Speak to me.” A wave of muffled sound. She presses the receiver hard against her ear. “Love?” she says. “Did you say love?”

  An electrical storm of sound blows up on the line, so loud she drops the receiver onto the cover. She snatches at it instantly, half sitting up, leaning on her elbow. Her eyes are open now and she is fully awake but when she puts the receiver to her ear it is as though no one was ever there. The dialling tone buzzes steadily. She falls back into the pillow without replacing the receiver. It sits hopelessly in her hand. Her eyes strain against the darkness and then she hears a voice, clear and crisp. Please hang up and try again. Please hang up and try again. Please hang …

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Their bodies are shrouded in muslin, a soft-focus lens through which to view the enormity of their injuries. Danni stands rigid at the door, until the seeping cold of the room reaches out to meet her, making her shiver involuntarily. It creeps insidiously round her, inside her. Preservation, she thinks. But still … her child … she wishes it was warm. Her instinct screams to turn the heating up, fetch a blanket.

  A box of tissues catches her eye, placed discreetly on a corner table just inside the room. It frightens her somehow, that anticipation of her grief, the certain knowledge by those who run this place of what she is going to feel when she passes through this door. Emotionally, everything is mapped out. She hovers still, not passing through the threshold. The stillness, she thinks fearfully, looking at the rock solid immobility of the shapes beneath the muslin shroud. Dead stillness.

  “You can change your mind, Danni. You don’t need to go in.” The police liaison officer at her back touches her shoulder as she steels herself.

  “I do,” she says, turning briefly to look at him. “I need to.” Her expression softens as she takes in his bear-like solidity, the ever present dark shadow of stubble round his chin. She thought him gruff when he was first introduced as ‘her’ assigned officer, surly even. Now, he is a reassuring presence.

  “Let me come in with you, then.”

  She shakes her head. “I want to go alone.”

  “Please Danni. Take my advice on this at least. I won’t say anything or intrude. I’ll just be there.”

  She hesitates.

  “Please.”

  Danni shrugs. The emotional effort of facing the room is too great to be sidetracked into some other tussle.

  It has been this way for days. The police just want to protect her, she understands that. But instinctively, she also understands that knowledge is less dangerous than imagination. A few days ago she had sat in the office of the Chief Constable’s office, her eyes drawn to the folder on the table in front of him.

  “Danni,” he had said gently, “We will support any decision you take but please take my advice seriously. I strongly advise you not to view the bodies.”

  “I have to.”

  “Take some time. I know you have come to see the photographs today but my advice there is the same. There’s nothing you can gain from looking at them.”

  “I have to,” she repeats.

  “You are certain?”

  She nodded.

  He opened the folder.

  “As I’ve already warned you, Danni, some of these are very difficult to view. If you want me to stop at any time, just say.”

  “I will.”

  She had reached down then, to her feet, feeling for her handbag. The Chief Constable hesitated as she took out her wallet, removed a photograph of Marco and Angelo together, and placed it carefully on the table in front of her. It is the last image she will look at, one of the two of them together, whole not broken.

  She said nothing as the Chief Constable handed her the photographs silently, one by one. She looked at each, refusing to flinch from a single one. She wanted to know everything. Everything. She would have no uncertainty haunt her in the coming years. She would never say inside her own heart, “I wonder if …”

  Marco. His body twisted awkwardly beneath him. She tried to view the images clinically, recognise why each one had been taken. This one to show the exact position of the body in relation to the explosion. This close up of his face for identification purposes. The left eye socket and cheek were a bloodied mass and she trailed a pinkie gently down the photograph, as if the blood flowed still and she could stem it. This … and whoosh, the air was sucked from her lungs making her gasp … this one was … She closed her eyes momentarily. Angelo. Her eyelids fluttered. To show, she said carefully inside her head, to show the separation of the right arm and shoulder caused by the blast. She placed the photograph with deliberation on the table.

  After three or four more, she had picked up her own photograph and willed the image of their smiles into her consciousness. Then she carried on relentlessly, taking each photograph, examining it, handing it back silently. She had gone home exhausted, beyond tears, unplugging the phone and
lying open eyed and unmoving on the sofa.

  Now, stepping through the funeral parlour room where Marco and Angelo lie, she feels the same unflinching determination that her love has to be strong enough to face what they faced, that she will share it in the only way she can. This is her time.

  She inhales sharply, a gasp that can not be contained, as she moves closer to the muslin shapes. She feels Pete’s presence behind her and moves forward to the coffins lying side by side. It is Angelo’s hands, his tiny, shrivelled little hands that shock her. She had always loved the dimpled fatness of those hands, the warm, soft, newness of them as they explored the world and patted her face and stroked her hair. Why are they shrivelled? Shapeless. Useless. His body is like some badly constructed doll, the life, the blood, sucked out into grotesque, plastic facsimile.

  Pete’s hands reach out to steady her.

  “Can I touch his hand?” she whispers, gazing into the coffin. Her hand hovers over the muslin curtain. She turns round briefly. “Can I touch his hand?”

  “Best not, Danni.”

  The bodies are pieced together. Pete’s hands remains on her shoulder and the warmth of his touch, the pressure of it, the energy, make her realise that Marco will never touch her ever again in her life and the simple truth winds her, drains the power from her legs. She looks at Marco, looks for him, and cannot find him. She has the sudden feeling that his absence here, from this room, means she will spend a lifetime looking for him.

  “My love …” she murmurs, surprised to hear her own voice.

  She crosses to him but does not touch him.