Kiss the Bullet

by Catherine Deveney

  She is not, normally, an anniversary kind of person. It isn’t the missed today that matters so much, but all the thousands of missed yesterdays leading up to it. So she tells herself, and yet … in the early hours of this morning, she had stood in the kitchen, unable to sleep, watching the new pink dawn creep stealthily across the old night sky, remembering the morning light rising all those years ago, just after Angelo was born. A new beginning.

  On the screen, a masked youth aims at a target and fires. In a disguised voiceover, he explains his rejection of the peace process, the justification for violence in his search for national identity. Identity, Danni thinks bitterly. Where was Angelo’s right to identity? Today, he should have come of age but he has no face, no shape, no substance. No story. The speaker’s anonymity enrages her, the camera close-up lingering on thin lips that speak through the slit of the balaclava, on eyes that can only seem unyielding when surrounded by the aggression of the black woollen mask. “Who the fuck are you?” she yells suddenly at the screen.

  God knows the peace process had been hard enough. In 1994, two years after Marco and Angelo died, news of an IRA temporary ceasefire was announced and she would never forget the feeling that swept through her. It was good news, she insisted to herself. Good news. But really it felt like watching someone you loved die painfully from cancer, only to be told the next day that a cure had finally been found. The ceasefire hadn’t lasted.

  When it broke down in 1996, and she watched coverage of bombings in Manchester and the London docklands, she felt secretly ashamed of that earlier moment of ambivalence. She hadn’t wanted this.

  So when the 1998 peace process moved to a positive conclusion, she tried desperately to be glad. But it was hard. Too late, she thought, watching the politicians gather on the steps of Stormont, the Northern Ireland parliament, after the Good Friday agreement. Too bloody late. The prisoners could be released, and the parliament could be constituted, and the talk could be of optimism and peace and moving on, but she didn’t want to move on, only back. Where was her new dawn?

  Marco and Angelo were the sacrificial lambs to peace. The people who had to die to make it possible. Well, if you offered Danni a choice – peace or her husband and son back – she’d choose her family, and both sides could get on with blowing each other to bits as far as she was concerned.

  She had balked at the proliferation of programmes on “reconciliation”. It was a word that meant nothing to her, prompted only a vague feeling of disdain. Religious words had that effect on her.

  She resented the psychological tyranny of people who had only ever paddled around in the shallow waters of forgiveness trying to tell her how important the concept was. Let them swim out to the deep waters, feel the currents of her experience, the power of it, and then let them try and tell her. Why should the people who murdered her husband and her son be forgiven? Terrorists stole her life. The emotional terrorists who told her how she should feel about it could go to hell.

  She had forced herself one night to watch one of these programmes. “A series that brings together people from different parts of the world who have reason to hate each other,” she had read in the paper. “A fascinating investigation into the depths of human hatred and the capacity for redemption. Is reconciliation possible for a Rwandan Hutu and the Tutsi whose entire family he butchered to death? Or a black South African and the white policeman who “legitimately” shot his brother dead? Mark Henderson brings another high concept series to our screens with the help of psychologist Ray Brandon and grief counsellor Derek Turner. Tonight’s programme shows an IRA man confronted by the widow of one of his victims. Unmissable.”

  I can miss it, Danni told herself. But she couldn’t. She had been simultaneously repulsed and mesmerised. She looked at the ex-terrorist, his pasty, white faced flabbiness filling the screen and her consciousness, a man in a cardigan with thinning hair and a belly that hung over the waistband of his trousers. Guilt and grief didn’t take away his appetite then, she thought sourly. What you were. What you are. Can there ever really be a difference? Can you really stop being capable of an action once you have done it? There was a tear forming in the pouch beneath the man’s eye. “I never meant …” he said. His voice dropped to a whisper. “I never meant him to die …”

  The camera had cut to the victim’s widow. Danni watched her immobile face, set like stone and blanched with tension. The crows feet around her eyes were covered in face powder as if the lines have been hewn from dusty rock, but then two muddy black lines formed tracks down her cheeks, tears and mascara running in rivulets down the grooves. She was looking at the man intently and it was clear that there was some inward implosion going on.

  “Oh don’t,” Danni muttered in exasperation under her breath. “Don’t …”

  But suddenly the woman on screen held out a hand to the man and he grasped it like a lifeline and began to sob.

  “Oh fuck off,” Danni had thought, snapping the remote control at the screen before throwing it onto the sofa, unable to torment herself any more with feelings that she couldn’t pretend to have.

  Anger is familiar to her, an old companion. People say you’ll feel better, be less bitter, if you let go, but she’d rather carry the burden inside her. Sometimes the only thing left to hold onto is pain. The only thing left to remind you that you are alive. After eighteen years, she’s used to bitterness being part of her. Maybe the rawness of the hatred is gone but not the hatred itself. It holds her life up, supports the structure of who she is, like the girders supporting the span of a bridge.

  What did he look like now, she wondered, the man who killed Marco and Angelo? How old would he be? She looks at the screen and sees the evidence of his replacements: a row of balaclava clad youths, a new generation of an old problem that, unlike Marco and Angelo, simply won’t die. Just as the Provisionals had been born from the old IRA, so now the dissidents were rising from the ashes of the Provisionals’ hard-fought peace.

  “In every month of 2010,” the presenter is saying, “there have been terrorist explosions in Northern Ireland that have failed to get much attention on mainland Britain. Young republicans are becoming frustrated. In recent weeks, the government has announced that the threat level from an Irish-related terrorist attack has now been officially raised from ‘moderate’ to ‘substantial’. Indeed, the head of MI5 has warned the public not to assume that the only terrorist threat comes from Al Qaeda, and that a dissident Republican attack on mainland Britain is becoming increasingly likely.”

  Where was reconciliation now? Danni thought. When it all kicked off again? She ran her finger down the remote control, picking at the plastic. There’s no way she would sit in a room with the man who killed Marco and Angelo. Then suddenly, in the midst of her anger, she realises that is exactly what she would like to do. Sit in a room with him. Just the two of them. Take away his props, his black uniform, his balaclava. Strip him of his anonymity and look into his eyes. Was he still active? And if he was? What would she do? What would she do? She shivers slightly. She would want to kill him.

  She snaps the ‘off’ button on the remote control, the black balaclava face on the screen disappearing into a dot. If only it were as simple to make people disappear. Suddenly she has a thought. If a murderer can supposedly repent and become somebody else, somebody new, could she, Danni, who has never harmed anyone in her life, become somebody new too? Could she kill a man?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  She goes to her desk as usual to work, sitting frowning in front of her computer screen but feeling no inspiration. Her research notebooks are spread in front of her but she can’t translate any of it into real thought. She is writing a biography of a famous English writer who now lives in Hollywood and Danni has only recently returned from America. Her brain should be overflowing. But she finds her pen hovering over the spaces in her notebook, doodling.

  She needs to talk to Traynor. And she knows with the cool, almost brittle perspicacity that had always amused Marco (y
ou’d have it too if you hadn’t been spoon-fed all your life, she’d goad him) that Traynor’s unease over his old pal’s widow, and the way he maybe hadn’t quite seen her as right as he might have, would come in handy now she needed a favour. She could utilise his guilt.

  The rain is slashing against her window, low grey cloud closing down like a helmet over the house. The world seems smaller, darker, with little horizon to see beyond the straggling plastic bag that has been blown into the hedge at the bottom of the garden, and flutters pitifully against the driving wind wrapping it tight around the centre branches. She might as well be that bag, she thinks, impaled on a force she has no control over and trapped into moving in one direction only.

  When Marco and Angelo died, there was a sense of needing to survive, of making it through just this bit, and now this, and this, and this. And each survival was a kind of relief until she realised that there was nothing else ahead but a series of hurdles to jump. When she was through one, another would leap up ahead of her. There was no free run, no sense of having made it. She was trapped in the constant effort. And maybe she had stopped resisting the fact that there was nothing more, had simply put her head down against the rain and battled ahead. Until now. Something has changed. She turns from the rain spattered window to pick up the phone. It is not possible to simply continue life as it is.

  Her doctor thinks she’s depressed. He’s one to talk, she thinks. Morose old codger with an undertaker’s lugubriousness and fern green cord trousers that are permanently covered in dog hair. Last time she was there, for something completely unconnected, he insisted on running a variation of Goldberg’s standard depression test on her. Now, he’d said, could she just answer yes or no to the following statements.

  “My future seems hopeless,” he said, and then looked up at her expectantly, above his glasses.

  “Yes” she said, and he nodded.

  “I feel trapped.”

  “True.”

  She doesn’t want to hear her own answer to these questions, resents him for asking them.

  “My sleeping pattern has been interrupted.”

  “No,” she replied, defiantly.

  He looked up again over his glasses, a vague disapproval present in the slight arch of eyebrows.

  “My sleeping pattern has been interrupted,” he repeated mildly, like he’s giving her another chance to think.

  “Only a little.”

  He ticks the ‘true’ box.

  “I find it hard to make decisions,” he continued, and she felt a lump forming, hard and bitter, in her throat. She looked at his hand hovering over the yes box. Yes or no, she thought, fighting unwelcome tears that were gathering like storm clouds inside her.

  “Oh, I can’t decide,” she said wryly, and instinctively. He smiled and put down his pen. Listen, he said, his professional manner slipping into a comforting outpouring of fellow feeling, when his wife died he thought he’d die too with the loneliness. Has she ever thought about a pet … a pooch maybe? She had looked down at the film of hair over his trousers and then up into his hang dog face.

  “Not since I last watched Greyfriar’s Bobby.”

  But he is right. Something has to change. In the first weeks after the bomb she used to think, if she could just get through the identification of the bodies. If she could just get through the funerals. Then, if she could just get through the first month, the first year, the first Christmas, the first anniversary. And now eighteen years have gone. She’s been too busy surviving, making it from one obstacle to the next, to realise she hasn’t been living. She’s pushing forty and there is nothing behind her, and nothing ahead of her, but that empty space she ran into on the day of the bomb.

  She picks up her phone book, running a finger down the letter T to find Eddie’s number, telling herself she has nothing to lose. Here it is. He moved to the London office a few years ago, a move that was always coming. In that first week after Marco died, Traynor called in on her every day. In the first month, every week. In the first year, every month. After that it dropped to every few months until, by the time of the fifth anniversary, they were exchanging annual Christmas cards. Danni didn’t resent it. It was just the way life was. It was almost a relief in the end. At first Traynor was a comforting link to her dead husband but in the end he became just a painful reminder of what she had lost. Traynor’s life went on as before, and hers didn’t.

  The number rings out.

  “Eddie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s Danni.”

  “Sorry?”

  She half smiles into the receiver.

  “Danni Piacentini.”

  “Danni! God, sorry. How are you Dan?”

  “Yeah fine thanks, Eddie.”

  “Sorry it’s been so long.” he says awkwardly. “I’ve been meaning to phone … you know how it is …” His voice drifts off.

  “No worries,” she says. “I’m the same. Time just …”

  “Yeah.”

  “Still working hard?”

  “Big time. Crazy hours.”

  “You always were an ambitious bastard. Marco always said so.”

  He laughs. Their conversation always seemed to lapse into more comfortable territory with insults.

  “Saw your last biography of whassisname … the politician.”

  “Unforgettable was it?”

  He laughs again.

  “Joe Brennan.”

  “So you were the other person who bought it. I wondered how come there were two.”

  “Who was the first?”

  “Mrs Joe Brennan.”

  She laughs herself now, feeling inside her a tiny spark of something warm and nostalgic, like a nip of alcohol that burns comfortingly all the way down.

  “Eddie, I want to ask a favour.”

  “Of course. How can I help?”

  “I want you to help me with some Irish contacts.”

  Danni looks out into the garden, watching a small flock of sparrows swoop down into a deep puddle on the path.

  “Contacts?” Traynor asks non-committally.

  Danni half perches on the window sill. The birds are using the puddle as a bath, wings quivering, hovering over the water, pushing playfully against each other.

  “I want to go to Ireland to find the men who killed Marco.”

  Silence.

  At the bottom of the path, she sees the postman turning in from behind the tall hedge, walking up towards her door. The birds in the puddle fly upwards, wings beating furiously. Except there’s one, one last one, who plays on obliviously, who seems to look up and see suddenly that it is alone, and then darts after the others. Wait for me! She smiles at the comedy of it, her eye following the trailing bird until it catches the others.

  “Danni … I …”

  “I know it sounds odd,” she says, trying to sound as nonchalantly normal as possible. “I watched this programme the other night about the peace process and the emergence of young IRA dissidents.” Her mind is ticking over, working overtime, thinking, thinking … how would Marco have presented this to newspaper people when he wanted them to buy it? “Did you see it?” she asks.

  “Yeah. It was interesting. What …?”

  “Well, it got me thinking. What’s possible … what’s not …? What would I feel if I went to Ireland now and I met Marco’s killer? What does he feel about a new generation entering the fight? Is he still active? Of course, it’s eighteen years now so I’ve had a chance to think more objectively about it all, and yet I have a personal connection that would make an interesting piece.”

  The thump of the letterbox sounds in the hall. The postman crosses by her window and waves to her. She smiles back through the glass.

  “And I wondered,” she continues, “if you could persuade your editor to commission a piece from me where I go to Ireland and write about my journey. You know, even if I didn’t meet Marco’s killer, just confronting IRA men about everything that has happened.” Damn it, she shouldn’t have said that. Sh
e’s not interested in meeting IRA chiefs. Just the killer. She needs Eddie to track the killer for her.

  “It is a really interesting idea,” Traynor admits.

  He’s seeing the possibilities. She can hear it in his voice.

  But what if there isn’t only one killer, she asks herself. What if it can’t be attributed more to one person than another …?

  “Danni, are you sure you could handle it …? I mean … my God …”

  “Don’t worry about that. I can handle it,” she says, looking out as the breeze whips up, sending a shiver through the hedge. She knows Traynor’s concern will recede in a minute. He’s a journalist. He lives on emotional possibilities.

  “And of course,” she continues, “with the terror threat being raised recently, the time is right to look again at the peace process and exactly what it has achieved and whether it can hold. There’s the national peace process, alongside the personal peace process for me, laying ghosts to rest … all that. And with all your experience, Eddie, you could do a piece alongside it about the years since Marco died, whether real resolution is possible … your personal connection with Marco.”

  “Actually, Danni,” he says quietly, “that sounds really, really good.”

  Doesn’t it? she thinks.

  “We might not track down the people who killed Marco, though,” he continues cautiously. ‘It might have to be more symbolic than that.”

  “Yeah, but you never know. It would be great to get that personal connection – really powerful. And I wouldn’t be looking to name the person. Not even to know his name. I just need to meet him. C’mon Eddie. You know people at the absolute heart of the IRA. You’ve dealt with them for years. It’s worth asking isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, it’s worth asking.”

  “You always said you had your suspicions about who was involved anyway.”

  “I did, yeah.”

  There is an awkward silence, a sudden memory of Traynor’s crumpled walk down the path after Marco died, when she wanted him to tell the police who had been responsible for the bombing.