Kiss the Bullet

by Catherine Deveney

  Danni, she said her name was. But then, maybe you couldn’t believe everything she said. He tries to remember the last time someone had been in this room, a woman anyway. When he had to be with people, when he wanted to be with a woman, he made sure he went out into their world. He didn’t bring them into his. Anyway, it was a long time since … a long time. Women changed things. Wanted to see inside you. Eventually they needed a bit of you he couldn’t give. It was simpler not to go there.

  He adjusts the curtains back into place. She’s gone now but he thinks he can still smell her perfume in the room. Perhaps he imagines it, is simply conjuring up the memory of it. He sniffs tentatively at the air, looks around as if there will be some concrete difference to spot.

  He has agreed to meet her again.

  He needs to know what she wants, he explains to himself. He needs to know what Pearson wants. But that is not all of it. He looks down into the street, into the empty pool of light where she had so recently stood.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Danni lies on the hotel bed, trembling still though she is not cold. It is strange, the effect of being with that man, that stranger. The way he made Marco more real than he had been for years, when she hadn’t even been aware of him becoming unreal. Strange how Marco has come to life, how he walks and talks inside her consciousness. Ironic that meeting the man who took Marco’s life resurrects him, breathes him into being again.

  She was inside Marco’s murderer’s house. Actually inside his house. She starts suddenly, sitting up. Did she lock the hotel room door when she came back? She did. She knows she did but she gets up anyway. Locked. She unlocks it, then locks it again to make sure it is properly done. There is nowhere safe.

  She longs for safety, she thinks, lying back down on the bed. The feeling Marco used to provoke inside her. Almost from the first moment. Her eyes close, thoughts drifting. Marco and Roberto, two brothers in black shirts, serving in the deli owned by their parents. The hiss of frothing milk, and the sound of shoes on a polished wooden floor, and the gleam of glass cabinets stuffed with foods she never sees except in here: dark black olives floating in brine like polished gemstones, the ruby red of plum tomatoes flown in from the Naples market, their shiny skin dulled with a thin veneer of dust. The room is scent rich, a cacophony of smells, of rich dark coffee, and fresh, garlic stuffed mortadella, and hand baked crisp almond biscuits.

  She’s sixteen. Saturday afternoon and the brothers are sparring verbally when she comes in, the Glaswegian accents at odds with their dark Italian looks.

  “On yer bike, Roberto,” the younger one is saying. “Ahm no daein’ it again for you. It was the same last Saturday ’n all.”

  They turn and see Danni and the way Roberto looks at her makes her turn her eyes to the glass cabinet. When she looks up again they are both watching her.

  “Piece of strawberry cheesecake please,” she says.

  “Bet it’s not for you with a figure like that,” grins Roberto, leaning on the glass counter.

  “Aw, away and don’t embarrass yourself Roberto,” Marco says impatiently, pushing him out the way. “Your chat up lines are just pish.” He holds a hand up to Danni. “Sorry for the language,” he says, and she tries not to laugh.

  He reaches into the cabinet, lifts out a plate of thick creamy cheesecake and takes a knife from a plastic ice cream carton of water. The cake is for her mother’s birthday. She can’t afford a whole fancy cake but cheesecake’s her mother’s favourite anyway. Marco cuts enough for two slices and puts it into a box, ties it with curling ribbon and charges her for one. She smiles.

  “Thanks,” she says, and she walks to the door, aware of Marco’s eyes on her back. Through the shop window she sees Roberto flicking him with a tea towel.

  Two weeks later at a party she’s pinned against a wall by a wolfish looking boy who’s had too many beers. She’s desperate to escape. The boy is talking drunkenly and moving ever closer and then she sees the boy from the deli, Marco, and a minute later his arm is round her waist, guiding her gently away like she’s little Red Riding Hood, and he’s saying to the wolf, you don’t mind me stealing my girlfriend away for a dance do you? I’ve been neglecting her.

  The boy is looking confused but is too befuddled with drink to work it out. And she’s saying, girlfriend? What was that about? He says, you’re not going to make me a liar are you? I’m a good Catholic boy. She’d laughed then, and all these years later she can feel the ghost of that smile on her lips while this man Johnny’s voice is ringing somewhere in the distance.

  They were so young. She remembers Marco one Friday night, fuelled by a few illicit beers. They had been for a day out, were walking back for the last train when he jumped up on the narrow edge of a high bridge that crossed fast flowing water, swollen with heavy rain, beneath. The edges of it had crumbled away and there could only have been a solid width of about two inches on which to stand.

  “Get down,” she’d said at first, not believing he would really walk the span of the bridge with a drink in him, but he kept going, laughing and singing at the top of his voice.

  “I love Danni,” he shouted into a velvet night sky.

  “Marco don’t be an idiot,” she had hissed, walking on the road side, but he laughed still and when he reached the middle she didn’t dare distract him by saying anything at all but stood rooted to the spot watching him wobble. Oh my God, she whispered to herself, hands flying to her mouth. His hands were outstretched and in the semi darkness she saw the white froth of the water, and saw his hands wave wildly, and his body bend towards the water side before rectifying his balance and continuing with a suppressed giggle.

  He jumped off at the other end, laughing and hooting triumphantly. He had grabbed a lamp post then and whirled round with his head bent back to the sky shouting, “I AM INNNNN … VINCCCC … IBLLLLLLE,” exultantly and deafeningly. And she had run to him then, bashing her handbag off his body as he spun, and shouting, “You bloody idiot, Marco! You could have drowned!”

  Marco had caught her hands then and laughed, and he said,

  “Rubbish Dan! Can’t you feel it? Tonight I feel like I am going to live forever.” Then he’d pulled her to him and kissed her under the light, surprised to find the salty tracks of tears on her face.

  Sleep evades her. She has gone beyond tiredness into a contradictory state where exhaustion and agitation co-exist. Being here in Ireland has given her a sense of purpose, of being alive again after years of simply existing. It feels like waking up and realising that you have no memory of ever having gone to sleep in the first place, that you simply slipped out of consciousness without agreeing to.

  She turns over in bed, tries to pull Marco’s face out of the darkness, then Angelo’s. Keep them in mind, she thinks. Remember what it’s about. Focus. She has found herself standing almost outside herself and asking what she’s doing here, if she’s really here to kill or just to explore the parameters of her unresolved grief. But there is no doubt that since she determined to come to Ireland she has felt Marco around her like a real physical presence. Something tangible, she thinks, not mystical not spiritual. None of that stuff. She has turned sometimes, thinking there is someone behind her, only to find an empty space.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  His flat is filled with the smell of strong black coffee. For the first time in years Johnny is aware of breakfasting alone. His tastes are simple, meagre even. Coffee, a single slice of toast scraped with butter. Perhaps, he thinks this morning – and it is a surprise to him that he is even noticing – his tastes have become too Spartan. Why does he never, just for a change, replace the toast with, say, a croissant, flaking buttery pastry with seeded raspberry jam? A pain au raisin at the weekend? But he does not like indulgence.

  A thin October sunshine trickles through a browning canopy of trees as he walks for the bus. Sitting on the upper deck he does a double take when a petite figure with short dark hair emerges from a baker’s shop near the university. For a moment he th
inks it’s her, Danni. He sees her face several times that day, suddenly whirling out of the pages of a textbook towards him when he thinks about her in the library. Coming into focus out of a crowd of students at lunchtime.

  He tells himself that of course he understands why this is. When you regulate a life as much as he has regulated his, anything that impinges on your world, on your reality, will take on a greater significance for you than for the ordinary person. A woman who turns up unexpectedly at his door, for reasons he does not understand, and who is attached in some way to the bloody entrails of his past … well it is not surprising that she should unsettle him. As he gets older, he tries to understand: himself, other people, the world … Understanding takes away fear. When he decided to study properly for the first time in his life, it was natural for him to choose psychology and literature.

  The air is cold outside but the sun surprisingly hot through the glass. Today he is reading about the role of the id, the ego and the superego in Freudian theories of personality. ‘The id,’ he writes in his notebook, ‘is contained almost wholly within the unconscious mind. It consists of man’s instinctive drives and natural tendencies. It is amoral, infantile, non-rational and demanding immediate satisfaction …’ His pen drifts to the margin, draws an outline of a watching eye. He lifts his head, glancing through the library window to a world that today, seems somehow to be in sharper definition.

  He agreed to meet her but not here. The room has become his own again after her intrusion, self-contained, a world apart. It smells of old wood and withering apples, warmed in a glass bowl by shafts of trapped, afternoon sunlight. If it feels emptier than last night, it also feels calmer. He wears the silence like a comforting garment, wriggling into its protectiveness with a measure of relief.

  He would come to her, he had said. At the bar of her hotel. Her hesitation was only momentary. She had taken an envelope from her bag, torn a ragged piece from the flap and written the address. When she handed it to him, their fingers touched and instinctively she snatched her hand back quickly. He noticed that moment and tried to make sense of it, but could not. 8 p.m., she said.

  He switches the television on while he makes some beans on toast. Local news. “The body of a brutally murdered prostitute has been found dumped in a metal bin and covered with rubbish in the city’s red light district. The woman, who was strangled and had serious burns, is believed to have been dead for up to thirty-six hours. Police have not named the victim and are trying to trace relatives …”

  Johnny takes a block of cheese from the fridge and grates it on top of the beans. The newscaster has moved on. “A three week amnesty has been launched by police,” he hears, “in a bid to reduce knife crime in the city …” He takes his plate to the table, shifts the bowl of apples from his line of vision so that he can see the television, and eats slowly, staring at a screen that he is no longer watching.

  He chews slowly, thoughtfully. She wanted to understand what had taken young men into the Republican movement, she had said. He wonders if he should take the copy he has of his grandmother’s testimony. Mary Seonaid’s words could say everything more eloquently than he ever could. But would Danni understand the threads of history that ran through those words, the threads that tied him to Michael Connerty and the legacy of Kilmainham? Would she understand that Republicanism was not just his choice but his heritage?

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The hotel bar is empty save for an elderly couple who sit with drinks in silence. The man’s blue shirt collar peeps out from a round necked patterned jumper, an assortment of swirling navy and blues. He has the silver shadow of evening growth on his face and he folds his arms over a domed stomach, gazing into the middle distance as if actually alone. The woman has a woollen dress, and neat, stubby heels, and a cherub’s bow of pink lipstick, like pressed sweetpeas, painted on her mouth.

  As she waits in a private booth against the wall of the bar, Danni eyes are drawn repeatedly back to them in a mixture of pity and horror. Perhaps after so many years together you simply run out of conversation. Is it that you know every thought, every opinion, before it’s spoken? Or just that you are too bored to care any more? Sometimes she looks at the elderly and tries to imagine her and Marco if they had been allowed to grow old together. But she never can. It’s like trying to imagine purple grass or red sky; it is simply not part of the natural order. Like trying to imagine Marilyn Monroe with a pension book.

  He may not come, she thinks. Perhaps it would be a relief. She hears the music from a function suite drifting into the bar, zooming in and out of focus as the doors swing open and closed, the faraway jollity of other people’s happiness. Then suddenly he’s there, standing in the bar, hair slicked back with rain, lost somehow, looking for her in the empty space. And she sees in that moment that he could put himself in the centre of a crowd and be alone, that he does not belong here, that perhaps there is nowhere in the world that he does belong. Despite everything, for a fleeting moment she feels strangely moved by the thought.

  “I thought you might not come,” she says awkwardly.

  “Why would you think that?” He frowns. “I said …”

  “Yes, yes I know, but …”

  Their silence is different from the old couple’s. Taut, rather than slack, full of too much to say rather than too little.

  “You’re wet,” she says.

  He shrugs, lifts a hand up tentatively to his hair, running the water off the ends of damp curls with his fingers. She feels twisted inside watching him, warped with hatred, convulsed with the effort of concealing it. She keeps focused on his eyes, thinks the tiger skin patch that gnaws the edge of his pupil has grown bigger. She imagines it taking over the eye completely, a canker, a sign of his internal sickness seeking physical manifestation.

  She cannot any longer think where to begin.

  “What do you want to know?” he asks quietly.

  “Who you are.”

  “I told you my name’s Johnny.”

  “The Fox?”

  “That’s Pearson’s name,” he says impatiently.

  “Are you from Belfast?”

  “My family is originally from Dublin but my grandmother moved … well she moved out to the country …” He pauses. “And then my mother came here when she married.”

  “Why?”

  “Why did my mother …?”

  “No, your grandmother.”

  “She was on her own with her child. Her husband was … well it’s a long story but … her husband was dead and she needed to get away from Dublin.”

  “Needed to?”

  “Needed … wanted …”

  Perhaps he should give her Mary Seonaid’s pages now.

  A waiter appears at their side.

  “Guinness, please,” says Johnny. “Pint.” He looks questioningly at her.

  She looks up at the young waiter, addresses him directly rather than Johnny. He will never speak for her. He will buy her nothing.

  “Ginger beer and lime, please.”

  “I don’t know the best way to explain,” he says, “the best way to help you …”

  He looks at her for a clarification that does not come.

  “You said you wanted to know,” he continues slowly. “What motivated the IRA cell I was part of.”

  She merely waits.

  “You’ll have heard of the Easter Rising in 1916?” he asks.

  “Yeah.”

  She digs her nails into the palm of her hands. She simply cannot bear it if he launches into some bloody history lesson. Angelo, Marco … they weren’t a history lesson. They were hers. They were the first things in her life that felt like hers. Apart from her mother, of course.

  “My grandfather was shot in Kilmainham jail for his part in it,” Johnny is saying, and finally she flicks her eyes up to his face.

  “Kilmainham?”

  “In Dublin.”

  She knows nothing of any shootings in Dublin jails. She suspects he is lying.

  �
�That’s why my grandmother left Dublin.”

  “And that’s why you joined the IRA,” she says, with such unguarded sarcasm that he must surely hear it. Internally, she tries to pull back. She has promised herself discipline.

  “There were a lot of reasons for that,” he says, “and yeah, maybe that was one of them.”

  Maybe? There is no maybe about it.

  “We know their dream; enough to know they dreamed and are dead,” he says softly.

  “What?”

  “Yeats.”

  The waiter who returns with their drinks seems conscious of the strain, disappears quickly when he puts the glasses down. Johnny takes a sip, shuts down part of his brain. Simply barricades it. He sees her resistance, is in no hurry to continue. After all, he gave up long ago trying to explain his views. Why is he even thinking about trying with a stranger?

  Sometimes it is impossible to rationalise even to himself the simmering stew inside him. How can he describe the mysterious combination of dreamy aspiration and calculating cruelty, the tumbling, conflicting shadows of pain and guilt and determination, and sadness and pride, and principle and amoral obsession, and clarity and confusion, and terrible, terrible black regret. What explanation is there?

  He has come here for the wrong reasons, he sees that. Fool that he is. She has drawn him in a way that for so many years he had left behind. A purely feminine way, though God knows he gave up on women – on people really – a long time ago. Still, those instincts, they can catch you up, take you by surprise. Her eyes have the amber tones of malt whisky, he thinks, swirling amber in a sea of peaty brown. But whatever in those eyes pulled him here was an illusion. There can be no resolution to this conversation, no clarity of understanding between them. Already he is contemplating leaving.