Kiss the Bullet

by Catherine Deveney

  Sometimes when life felt bleak back home, she thought there was no existence that could be worse than the one she was living. But there was. There was this. Trapped inside a world that is constantly shrinking, a world with no view or vision, one that can only look inwards and not outwards. It’s as if there’s an invisible boundary line drawn round this property. Back home, she thought she wasn’t part of the world any more. Now she sees she was and she wants to walk back into it. She wants to walk right through these woods, hear the rustle of her feet in fallen leaves, run her fingers over the pine trees and sniff the sticky resin on her fingertips. For a long time, life has seemed inconsequential; now it seems precious. She didn’t know how much she wanted to live.

  The wood is surprisingly shallow, opening out after only a few minutes’ walk. She’d had no idea, standing mainly in the dark on the back step, of the shape of the landscape round her. Gentle hills that roll into a sheltered glen, a white house, a fairytale house with a bright yellow door, clinging to the side of it in the distance. A secret world, opening out unexpectedly from the darkness of the trees. Ireland. She sees it for the first time, brushed with the decay of autumn, the land hunkering down against the onslaught of approaching winter. Ireland. This is what he fought for. She breathes deeply.

  She wants to hate this land but she can’t. The hills roll in front of her and the wind sings round her, whistling its tune through the stillness. The song is an invitation to love and there is something immediately old and familiar about this landscape that draws her in and makes her part of it. The rash of yellow gorse across the horizon. The stain of browning pink foxgloves, withering in the ditches, delicate bells ringing silently in the breeze. Beautiful but deadly poisonous. A bitter combination.

  She becomes aware suddenly of a distant noise, looks round trying to locate it. A ruined farmhouse sits in a dip below her and she realises it’s the thud of the wooden door, banging rhythmically against the frame. She scrambles down the incline. The loose, corrugated iron roof rattles as the wind ripples through it and out into the rustling braches of the trees waving at its side. Danni gently pushes the front door open, stepping over a jumble of rotting wood and piles of fallen masonry into an old sitting room. A fireplace survives, the cracked floral tiles edging round the base and damp stains rising high on the walls, spreading like spilled tea across the remnants of faded, peeling paper.

  Danni looks through the glassless windows at the panoramic sweep. Who had lived here, in this beautiful wilderness, had farmed it and tended it, had eked out a survival until there was only ruin left? Who had loved it until love was no longer enough? A country was its people as well at its land; they were a unity. The word grated in her mind. Unity. She would not think of it. She closed her eyes in the stillness and when she opened them again, a brief winter sun caught one side of the glen and the world seemed both strange and lovely all at once, pulling her in a way she could never have imagined, so that for a moment, a fleeting moment, she understood why beauty and ugliness stood side by side, and how a landscape could pierce you clean until you wept blood and water from the wound, and vowed to die for it.

  In the living room, Stella is lying on the two seater, eyes open and fixed on the slumbering fire. Danni goes and sits on the floor next to her. Only then does she see Stella’s cheeks are wet. A tear runs silently and plops into the groove of the corduroy sofa beneath her face. Danni takes hold of her hand.

  “You’re doing well, Stella,” she says softly. “The worst bit is over.” Stella has stopped hallucinating, stopped being sick, but for the last day she has been in the grip of a lethargy that is almost as alarming.

  “It won’t ever be over.”

  “You need sleep and food and normality, Stella and then …”

  “I can’t have normality,” Stella interrupts. She drags her eyes from the fire briefly, a flicked glance in Danni’s direction. “The shaking has stopped but the craving hasn’t. And I’m still me, Danni. When I leave this place I’m going to go back to where I was and who I was. I can’t stop being me.”

  “You have choices.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “Tell me, then.”

  “I’ve been on the game since I was fourteen. Nothing can ever wipe that out. Nothing can take away what I feel inside about it. You can’t change what you have been.”

  The words pierce Danni. Hasn’t she said them herself? Isn’t that what this journey is all about? What does she say to Stella?

  “Yeah, but you can change what you will be,” she hears herself say.

  Her stomach lurches at her own words. Are they true?

  Stella shakes her head. “I’m going to need to wipe it out again. I know that. Myra and I used to talk about escape but you can’t ever escape what’s inside your own head.”

  Ain’t that the truth, Danni thinks. She should be combating this, convincing Stella that she can do it. Giving her a reason to try. She just can’t think of one.

  “What happened when you were fourteen?” she asks. “How did you get involved?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I’ll check my diary but I don’t think either of us is going anywhere.”

  Stella gives a wan smile.

  “I’ll give you the short version. My mother ran a brothel. When I was fourteen one of her clients said he wanted me. So she sold me to him. She said I’d better get used to giving men pleasure because if I couldn’t do that, I’d have no use in life.”

  “But you said your mother was …”

  “I know what I said …”

  Danni, still holding her hand, gently rubs her fingers.

  “It’s what you wanted her to be?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Did you love her?”

  “My mother? Oh my God, yeah. Yeah, I loved her. Your mother’s your mother isn’t she? I mean, she can do what she wants but somehow you just keep on creeping back, hoping that this time things will be different. You know, that she’ll love you back. You can’t accept it as a kid, can you? That your mother doesn’t love you, I mean.”

  “Maybe she did love you in her own way.”

  “No.” She shakes her head but doesn’t look up. “I don’t think she was capable of it, to be honest. No surprise, I suppose. My father was one of her clients. Said she should have had me aborted but she left it too late.”

  “Do you still see her?”

  Stella shakes her head.

  “She’s dead.”

  “I’m sorry …”

  “I cried for days. You know, because … nothing could make it right now. And she would never see me make it. There’s not the same incentive any more.”

  “Do it for yourself, Stella.”

  Stella closes her eyes tightly, shutting out the world.

  “I kid on …” she says, and her eyelids flutter, “I kid on it doesn’t bother me … doing this. But it kills me. My head’s done in with it. Can you imagine what it feels like, to say to yourself that you can’t go any lower? A junkie and a prostitute.”

  Danni looks at her ashen face, poor and wasted, and thinks she could be both ten years older than she is and ten years younger. Just a child.

  “Stella, you’re not even twenty. You can be anything you want to be. Nothing’s fixed in life.”

  She believes that. She suddenly realises she believes it. And how does that change what she’s doing here?

  “It’s okay for you Danni. You haven’t had to deal with this stuff,” says Stella.

  Danni finds herself smiling inwardly, ruefully. She can’t even be angry. Stella is so young.

  “We all get dealt different hands, Stella. I’ve had my own things to deal with.”

  Stella’s eyes open and she looks at Danni tentatively.

  “What things?”

  “Just …” she says and stops, shrugs. The fire is dimming. She kneels in front of it and stokes the ashes, puts more peat on top, and a log, and watches the flames lick round it.

  �
��Please don’t do that,” Stella’s voice comes from behind her, quiet and pleading.

  “What?”

  “Don’t have me tell you everything and then refuse to say anything yourself. Please. It makes me feel like … like nothing.”

  Danni sits back, leaning against the two seater.

  “It’s not you Stella … it’s just … I never … I guess …” The room falls silent. She senses Stella waiting. “When I was twenty-two, I lost my husband …”

  “Oh Danni I …”

  “And my three-year-old son …”

  “Oh my God …”

  She is aware of Stella sitting up slowly behind her. She glances round briefly at her. The corduroy pattern from the sofa has left an imprint on Stella’s cheek she has been lying so long.

  “What happened?”

  “A bomb … IRA …”

  “I wondered why … what … How long ago …?”

  “1992. Eighteen years.”

  The flames have begun to build into a blaze. A spark spits outwards, landing on the carpet and Danni quickly brushes it with her fingers, leaning forward to put the grate over the fireplace.

  “My little boy’s name was Angelo,” she says suddenly, sitting back and wrapping her arms round her knees. “And he had the most beautiful eyes you’ve ever seen.”

  “You must miss him,” Stella says, with such poised simplicity she seems suddenly grown up.

  “Like a limb,” Danni whispers. “Like a space that never gets filled.” She puts her face on her knees, her dark hair falling forward. Stella stretches out a hand, strokes her hair gently just once, a gesture of such exquisite tenderness that Danni thinks she will simply break into tiny fragments, too small ever to be pieced together again.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Belfast, November 2010

  He wakes with a headache, a throbbing behind his eyes that becomes a thump on the top of his head. Banging like a broom on the ceiling, the way ould Mrs Chisholm used to bang on their ceiling to quieten them when they lived in the old Keswick Street flats. Before they moved. And his mammy would look harassed and shush all the children then and tell them to stop their squabbling. Johnny was always the quiet one. He’d watch when the thumping started, mesmerised by the way it reverberated in the room, the way the floor shook beneath their feet.

  He turns over in bed, feeling dismal. He’s coming down with something. The room seems bare and chilled, the bedclothes that he barely noticed before are dead and insipid, the colours spilled beyond their boundaries from frequent washing. The walls have the pistachio wash of an institution and he doesn’t even have a single picture on them to brighten the place. A bed without a headboard, a chair with a lamp on it, and a chest of drawers. Jesus, it’s just as well he’s never brought anyone in here, he thinks. Like Danni … He shuts the thought down.

  He sits on the edge of the bed. He is tall, broad, but every curve of his ribcage is visible. His skin is bleach white. Dark hair falls almost to his shoulders. He pushes himself up, head thumping dully, pads naked down the hall to the kitchen despite the cold. The frost has gone. There’s rain hurling at the windows. He pours himself orange juice and swallows over a couple of paracetamol, wipes the spill from the carton with a cloth that he chucks into the sink without rinsing. No discipline today. Other things on his mind.

  Our Lady of Fatima is a modern church at the edge of a Belfast housing estate. From the outside it’s squat and ungainly and inside it’s everything he would hate if he ever stepped foot regularly inside a church. Which he doesn’t. In here there are none of the soaring roofs and grand arches of the churches of his childhood, none of the fine figures captured intricately in the electric blues and purples of elaborate stained glass. In here, a wooden cross, a square-jawed, modern Madonna. Didn’t people know what beauty was any more?

  He stands at the back like a visitor, all the instincts of his childhood fighting with adult resistance. He’s not sure whether to dip his finger in the holy water font and make the sign of the cross. Or whether to genuflect at the pew end. Instead, he stands at the back with his arms crossed. He gently massages his temples, the pain still pulsing behind his eyes. He thinks he’s alone at first until he suddenly realises there’s someone sitting in the corner of the very front pew, reading. A man in his fifties, the soft flab of indulgence straining the black shirt and suit, spilling over the neck of his white clerical collar. Johnny walks to the front of the church, stands waiting. The priest looks up.

  “Hi,” he says, smiling. “Can I help?”

  “I’m looking for Father Jim McConnell.

  “Well you’ve found him, so you have.” He looks at Johnny and the smile becomes more tentative, fading gradually from his lips.

  “Can we have a talk in private?”

  The priest stands up.

  “Come through,” he says leading him into the sacristy.

  They walk in silence. Johnny stands in the middle of the room and folds his arms. McConnell looks at him expectantly.

  “Myra MacIntosh,” says Johnny quietly, watching him. The pale flabbiness of McConnell’s face seems to blanch further, then, momentarily, crumbles inwards: quivering, gelatinous, amorphous, before he tries to regain control. He says nothing, but Johnny sees his breath quicken.

  “You knew her then,” says Johnny sardonically.

  McConnell sits down suddenly on the chair and Johnny eyes him. He looks like he could have a bloody heart attack in front of him.

  “Who are you?” says McConnell. “Police?”

  “Jesus, no,” says Johnny with a short, instinctive burst of amusement. He watches the change of expression on McConnell’s face sharply. “I wouldn’t look too relieved yet,” he says.

  “What do you want?”

  “To talk to you about Myra.”

  “I don’t know you,” says McConnell gruffly, standing up, “and I barely knew Myra MacIntosh either so I think it’s best if you go.”

  “If you know what’s good for you,” says Johnny with such quiet menace that it halts McConnell in his tracks, “you will get your arse back down on that seat, or your bishop, your parishioners, and everyone else will know exactly how well you knew Myra MacIntosh.”

  McConnell hovers uncertainly.

  “That’s blackmail.”

  “Ten out of ten and three Hail Marys, Father.” Johnny crosses to a small radiator and leans against it. He feels cold and shivery and his head is thumping. He looks at the priests podgy hands, sees the tremor, and feels a certain pity.

  “Look,” he says, “I’m not here to judge you. God knows I’m in no position. I need information and then I’ll go away and I won’t come back.”

  “I only had sex with her once,” says the priest, refusing to look him in the eye. He covers his face suddenly with his hands, pushing them up onto the top of his head and halting there, his fingers knitted into his hair and his head bowed. “Bloody stupid weakness.”

  Johnny watches him, saying nothing.

  “Bloody stupid weakness,” he repeats to himself. He glances up at Johnny.

  “It’s alright when you’re twenty-five and full of it,” he says bitterly. “Full of your own sense of vocation. Full of God and self sacrifice. And you look at women and know you could have one if you wanted to. Then you get to thirty-five and you’re spending your evenings with other men’s families. Baptising their kids. Officiating at their sons’ and daughters’ weddings. Wanting their wives. When you go home it’s to a parish priest who’s half sozzled on whisky and loneliness and you look at the future and get scared. Really scared. You end up thinking, what have I got of my own? Nothing. At forty-five you’re beginning to turn into that parish priest and at fifty-five … well you look at women now and know you couldn’t have them any more even if you wanted to.”

  There’s something stirring in Johnny as McConnell talks, an uncomfortable half fear, the memory of his grey, faded old bedding this morning, the curve of his emaciated ribs, the sense of isolation that made
him feel he was in a bubble world, inhabited only by himself. He wants McConnell to stop talking.

  “I was just curious the first time,” McConnell is saying. “You know? I was driving by quite innocently the first time. And I saw Myra … and she looked …” he shakes his head. “I kept thinking about it … about her … and I just couldn’t get it out of my head. I went back a week later and then …” His voice trails away into nothing. “When you spend your life denying sex, sexual provocativeness is kind of … irresistible,” he adds.

  “So you became a regular?” Johnny asks.

  “No … well yes … but I … at first I told myself I only wanted to help her. Talk to her. And I did the first few times. Told her I was only in the area to try and help any girls who wanted to be helped. I wanted her to come to the church.”

  “What happened to change things?”

  “Typical Myra … she made sure things changed. She was so direct.” He looks distressed for a moment. “I genuinely liked her,” he says, his eyes appealing to Johnny for some small sign of forgiveness. “But she saw right through me, you know? She said to me, Father … She always said Father so sarcastically … Father, you’re going to have to make up your mind if you want to save me or fuck me.” He shifts uncomfortably. “I apologise for using that language but that’s what she said.”

  Johnny smiles faintly.

  “I took her number and one night I called her. Arranged to meet her. We had sex in the car. I’m not proud of it but I’m not … not a bad man. Not a bad priest, even.”

  Johnny looks around the room at the accoutrements of the church, the prayer book, a statue of Our Lady on a sidetable with a rosary in front of it.