Kiss the Bullet

by Catherine Deveney

  “No, the money’s here.” She’d pulled out a wallet and handed it to him and he’d looked at her strangely.

  “Fancy job, Danni?” he’d asked quietly. “What do you do?”

  “Fancy insurance policy,” she’d said, unable to keep the bitterness out of her tone completely. Then she’d smiled tightly to cover it. “And you know what I do. I’m a writer.”

  “Insurance?”

  His voice was alert, curious.

  “I’m a widow.”

  “Jesus,” he’d said softly. “I …”

  He glanced at Stella who was sitting curled up in his armchair like a terrified child, lost in her own fears. Pearson isn’t the only challenge for Stella. She knew there would be no chasing dragons where she was going.

  “Not now,” Danni said shortly and she’d gone to put an arm round Stella to get away from him. But he watched with his arms folded and she knew he’d ask again.

  She lets the curtain drop. A bottle of water sits beside her case and she sips from it, despite not being thirsty. A quick glance at her watch. Back to the curtain. Her phone beeps and she makes a dive for her bag. What’s happened? Text message. She flips open her phone. Traynor. She opens the message with some irritation, resenting the intrusion. Worried. Why not in touch? Please phone. She snaps the phone shut then thinks better of it. She’d better reply and keep him off her back. No worries. Reception poor. All well. Call soon.

  She moves back to the window. A steel grey Fiesta turns into the car park and she is suddenly alert, like a runner on the starting block. Dark hair. It’s him. She gathers her things, pulls the handle up on her case, half runs down the hotel corridor with it, the wheels trundling behind her.

  Stella is already in the back of the car eating a sandwich, looking more cheerful. She sticks her head out of the window while Johnny gets out to help Danni put the case in the boot.

  “Johnny got us some food,” she says, waving a carrier bag out at Danni. “Want a sandwich?”

  “Maybe later.”

  Stella has kicked her shoes off and stretched her legs out in the back seat. She empties an open bag of sweets into her lap.

  “What colour do yous want?”

  “Where are we going?” Danni asks quietly.

  Johnny swings out into a stream of traffic.

  “Somewhere in Donegal. Best you don’t know names,” he says.

  “How long will it take?”

  “Couple of hours.”

  Stella falls asleep after an hour, head lolling back, mouth slightly open. When a soft snore rumbles from the back, Johnny glances at Danni and they both smile. Danni turns to the side window, looks out at the light dripping slowly from a bleeding sky. The hills pass, the grey roll of the land, tree branches skeletal spectres waving in the semi-darkness. She hears the rush of water, peers out at a frothing fall tumbling down steep rockface. Johnny switches on the radio low and it hisses and splutters.

  “A fifty-year-old man was shot dead in a remote part of Donegal last night in what is believed to be a reprisal killing by the Real IRA, a splinter group of the Irish Republican Army. James Patrick Feeney, a Belfast based electrician, was accused of being a British informer in the 1980s. Sinn Fein leaders have distanced themselves from the shooting, saying it was the work of dissidents and would not be allowed to railroad the peace process. Violence has escalated recently with a sharp increase in both small bomb explosions and the number of punishment beatings in both Catholic and Protestant communities.” The radio crackles loudly and Johnny reaches out and snaps it off tersely. Silence fills the car.

  “What are punishment beatings exactly?” Danni asks.

  Johnny glances from the road to her face.

  “My leg,” he says wryly. “That’s a punishment beating.”

  “What?”

  “Pearson.”

  “He attacked you?”

  “No. He organised it.”

  “I’ve never really understood …” she says, and then breaks off. That’s not true exactly, she thinks, looking out at the speeding darkness. She’s never wanted to understand. She’s never before wanted to subdue her grief enough to understand this country and its troubles because if she understood then … No. There’s never been room in her grief for understanding. For knowing. Still isn’t.

  “What do you get beaten for?”

  Johnny shrugs.

  “Something. Nothing. Everything.”

  “But you …”

  “Nothing.” He screws up his eyes against the headlights of an approaching car.

  “Get them down,” he mutters, and then he slows to let the car past.

  “Is it like that guy on the news?”

  “Sometimes. But sometimes it’s just another layer of so called justice. Areas where people don’t trust the police and they leave it to the paramilitaries to sort out what they call the anti-social element.” He smiles wryly. “Joyriders, burglars, that kind of stuff. And sometimes … well, sometimes it’s just people in a mixed marriage or …”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Then there’s people like me. Where it’s just a grudge attack really, wrapped up in something else.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I didn’t do anything. But two of the boys in our cell were picked up by the police with explosives in the boot of the car before they used them. How did the police know? Pearson hinted that it was me who tipped off the police. Of course, there was no proof but the suggestion was enough for a warning.”

  “So why did he drop you in it?

  Johnny shakes his head dismissively, as if it’s a question of little significance. “I have my own theories on that. But control mainly. To show he’s boss. Just Pearson being Pearson.”

  He takes his eyes off the road for a second, glancing at Danni. He can tell she doesn’t understand.

  “I have no proof but I think at that time, he had done a deal with the British intelligence services.”

  “Pearson! But that … that doesn’t make sense.”

  “It makes perfect sense. The intelligence services were working constantly to get inside the IRA. They used whatever they could to get volunteers to become informants. It wouldn’t have been that hard with Pearson. If he was taken in for some bank or warehouse job, there’s no question he would trade information to get himself off the hook. He had lots at stake and few principles.”

  Danni leans her elbow on the car door and rests her head. There are so many layers to this. In the back, Stella stirs, half lifts her head.

  “Are we there yet?

  “Not yet. Go back to sleep,” Danni says softly over her shoulder. Stella’s head rests back down on the seat.

  “I’m cold,” she mutters.

  “Here,” says Danni, and hands her over her jacket. “I’ll put the heating up a bit.”

  Stella snuggles down into the jacket.

  “You know what you’re in for there, Danni?” Johnny says sombrely, jerking his head back towards Stella.

  Danni shakes her head impatiently.

  “How can I? Anyway, there’s nothing I can do but deal with it as it comes.”

  She stares into the tracks of the headlights, reluctant to admit even to herself how frightened she actually is. She changes the subject.

  “What happened the night … when your leg …?”

  For a minute she thinks he won’t answer, that he is ignoring the question.

  “We were at home … Roisin and I …” he says eventually, changing down a gear to negotiate a bend. “The doorbell rang. Roisin went to answer it. I heard her scream. Next thing, four guys in balaclavas are in the room.”

  She says nothing, waits. Is that all he’s going to say? She tries to steal a glance without turning her head. His face is set like stone.

  “There’s always a group …”

  She can hardly hear him, reaches out, with a glance over her shoulder at a sleeping Stella, to turn the fan down on the heater.

  “Always a group?”
/>   “In punishment beatings.”

  “What happened?” she asks.

  “Roisin was screaming. One of them grabbed hold of her and wrapped his arm round her mouth. I made a grab for him but two of the others pinned me down.”

  He makes it sound matter of fact, like there’s no emotion left to be had in the telling of this tale. Somehow it only serves to emphasise the fact that it’s pulled from his guts.

  “One pulled a gun.”

  Danni holds her breath.

  “I heard the shot ring out …”

  “They shot you?”

  “Roisin first. Made me watch, pinned down with my arms behind my back.” The muscle flexes in Johnny’s cheek but his voice is steady. “You’ve heard of kneecapping.”

  “I’ve heard of it …”

  He nods.

  “They don’t actually shoot your knee, usually. They shoot you on the back of the thigh. That’s what they did to Roisin. Trouble is, sometimes it ruptures a major artery.”

  “And you …?” she asks, her voice barely above a whisper.

  “I was struggling so hard I managed to move, just as they shot. They actually did get me in the knee. There was so much noise and movement and speed that …”

  He frowns, remembering.

  “Roisin,” she says. “What happened to her?”

  “She nearly died. It was after that she … it was the final straw really.”

  Danni looks at him curiously.

  “He must hate you. Pearson, I mean.”

  Johnny smiles, a half smile.

  “Yes and no. You don’t understand Pearson yet.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Love and hate are part of the same thing with Pearson. I’m like family: I’m his. Or so he thinks.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Danni’s head is resting against the car window, her eyes shut. Exhausted, Johnny thinks glancing at her. His eyes feel strained with the onslaught of car headlights, his head bombarded with memories.

  How old were they, him and Pearson? Eight maybe. Nine. Ten. Johnny had watched, wide-eyed, when Pearson had run past his da as he sat in the garden in a deck chair with a bottle in his hand, and a pile at his feet. The auld man had shifted his foot marginally, with malevolent subtlety, and Pearson had been decked in a rugby tackle fall, landing on the grass winded, belly first, like a mistimed dive on water. His chin had slid painfully along the grass, grazed with blood and mud, and he’d looked up, howling, with that look, a silent plea urging him to say it wasn’t deliberate.

  “Stop your bawling,” his auld man had said, “and let it learn you something.” He pointed a finger at Pearson. “Always be on the watch.”

  Pearson’s ma, tiny, thin as a pipe cleaner doll, wired rigid through the centre, came out.

  She had led Pearson away silently, neutrally somehow, without reproach but without tenderness, dusting him down and cleaning him up. On the outside anyway. She barely glanced at her husband.

  “There’s something not right about you,” Pearson senior muttered at his son’s retreating figure, his face contorted. “Not right,” he repeated, stabbing a finger into the air after each word.

  And Johnny had wandered off home, puzzled at the ways in which the world seemed different in Pearson’s house.

  He saw an old photograph of Pearson’s ma when she was young once and was shocked. Laughing into the camera, the face animated, lit from the inside somehow. She was actually pretty. The strange doll-like quality was daintiness then. God knows what optimism had drawn her to her husband, what misguided hope of protection, but it faded over the years with the bruises. All that was left of her by then was a frame from which everything had been stripped: all flesh, all colour, all spark, all hope.

  But it was Pearson’s auld man he could never forget. He sees him like it’s yesterday, a summer’s Saturday afternoon, emerging from the bookies with his shirt sleeve rolled up to his elbows, forearms like tree trunks, weathered brown and solid. Lumbering through the arched alleyway from the courtyard at the back of the pub, stiff-legged, like his body is too big to carry, too inflexible to bend. His fists carried viciously, rolled, like they’re permanently ready for action.

  Four sons and all of them the same as the auld man except Pearson, the runt of them, the small one whose power had to come from inside his head. Johnny got a shock when he saw Pearson’s father near the end, when the cancer had devoured him, the bulk gone but not the viciousness, the power shrivelled into a darkly glittering hatred. And at his funeral, the hulks of his boys lined in confused bafflement, the pipe cleaner doll in their midst, grey hair stiffened with lacquer, back stiffened with resolve, tight lipped and dry eyed.

  She was glad, Johnny knew. And Pearson was glad, and his brothers were glad, and Johnny wondered what kind of damage that did you inside when you felt glad your auld man was dead. At the funeral, he stood beside Pearson outside the church, and it was that day he realised that Pearson would never be normal, that he would always confuse love with ownership, and that somehow he, Johnny, was caught up in that twisted, car crash of confusion inside Pearson’s head in a way that he couldn’t fully understand. Pearson would never willingly let him go.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  The cottage is half a mile up a track off the main road. It sits angled in a dip, like its shoulders are turned from the wind. The white walls are grubby and paint peels from the flaking window sills, revealing chipped red paint beneath. The garden is neglected, swathes of dead ferns and grasses, withered and rotting, straggling into the metal fence that is bowed by time and wind and straying sheep. It’s the silence that strikes Danni first when she emerges from the car, only the sound of the wind in her ears, the closing car door sounding like a gun shot crack in the quiet. From far off, she hears the bleat of sheep carried on the wind.

  She turns back to the car to see Stella’s face at the window, white, agitated, disorientated from sleep. Stella knocks on the window, frowning at Danni as if she’s locked in.

  “It’s open, Stella,” she says, but she opens the door for her anyway.

  Stella slips her feet into her shoes. Stands out shivering in the cold.

  “Where the fuck is this?”

  “I don’t know, Stella.”

  Johnny takes a key from his pocket and unlocks the front door.

  “It’s not going to be hotel standard,” he warns.

  Inside it’s cold and cheerless, the light in the sitting room half hearted and blocked by a thick, dark lampshade that is coated in dust. The carpet is beige with a black pattern, threadbare and dreary. They all stand in silence. Johnny switches on a black standing lamp. Stella throws herself onto a beige corduroy two-seater and stares morosely around. She’s rattling now, Danni thinks.

  Danni walks into the kitchen, little more than a cooker, a sink, and a few cupboards with a small fridge tucked into a corner. She turns the tap. It takes a minute but the water coughs and splurts after a few seconds, splashing up on her. The air is so cold in here she can see her own breath when she breathes out.

  The cottage is traditional, originally all one on level but later renovated to give bigger rooms downstairs and create an upstairs with two small bedrooms, barely bigger than box rooms, and a bathroom. The walls of the bedrooms are grubby white and there’s little in them but beds, though one has a small table and a lamp.

  “I need to go soon,” Johnny says from behind her and she spins round. He has brought some bags from the car.

  “I’ll put the shopping in the kitchen,” he says. He rummages in one for a box of fire lighters.

  “I’ll light a fire before I go. You’ll need to keep it topped up. There is a load of wood by the back door.”

  “You’re leaving tonight?”

  He glances up at her.

  “I have to Danni. I need to be there when Pearson realises neither you nor Stella is there any more. I need to drive straight back tonight, be there to see him in the morning.”

  “You are pu
tting your life in danger getting mixed up with him again.”

  He doesn’t even look at her.

  “My life’s not worth much, Danni,” he says flatly, and walks from the kitchen to lay the fire.

  Not worth much. And how can she disagree with that?

  It feels like abandonment driving off. He can’t do anything else but he is aware of her watching from behind the curtain, following the line of the headlights rising and dipping all the way down the track to the road. He wonders at what point she lets the curtain drop.

  Little over six months ago, he thinks, he was in England. He had no intention of ever coming back to Ireland. Why is he here? He looks out at the humped silhouettes of hills in the darkness, a lick of silver moonlight on the river that runs by the main road. His mother’s death brought him back. And this. Ireland. A land, a love, a dream of a life that was. Nostalgia and longing and a hurt that could only be healed in the soil where his parents and his grandparents lay. This brought him home.

  He loved it and he hated it, but it was his, his dreams that vaporised over the hills, disappearing like sea haar in the warmth of sunlight. There comes a stage where it feels like all of life is looking back, that everything now is memories and nostalgia, a long goodbye to what has been. Except … except … that Danni feels like a new beginning in a morass of yesterdays.

  He drives the road faster on his way back, hugging the bends, seeing her face in every mile.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  The cupboard doors are banging in the kitchen, shuddering on the walls, the noise reverberating in Danni’s head like slamming coffin lids. Stella, sweating and shaking, slams them one after another with increasing anger. “There must be,” she mutters as Danni watches silently. “There fucking is. I know there is. Jesus, Danni, give me something.”