He tries to sit upright, his eyes still closed. A woman whispers, “Johnny it’s okay. Lie back.”
“I killed him,” he says, sinking back into a pillow, sweat on his back. He needs to tell Danni. She needs to know, to understand, to forgive. But who is this woman he is talking to?
“Killed who?”
“The boy. The child. He’s dead.”
“You’re dreaming.”
“No. He died. The bomb … but I didn’t mean … I didn’t … Pearson …”
“Shh. Lie back Johnny. Shh. Shh.” Her hands are cool. Her fingers brush his skin like chilled silk.
Who? he thinks.
“How did the boy die?” she asks softly.
“In the bomb. With the others. Pearson … he made sure … I killed them all.” He grips her hand. Danni? he thinks. “Mistake …”
“Of course,” she says. “Of course …”
His hands sweep frantically over his chest. “Get the powder off,” he says.
“It’s okay, Johnny, there’s nothing there …”
“Yes … yes … it’s pink.”
“No there’s nothing.”
“The fertiliser powder.”
His hand continue sweeping over his chest, trying to brush it off, until she grasps his hands and holds them still.
He is engulfed in heat. Only her fingers can absorb the fire. She presses them to him with a secret tenderness. Then he drifts into the heat, Angelo’s eyes rising towards him again out of the flames. He has to tell Danni the worst. He has to tell her about the child.
“The boy,” he says. “He’s here … looking …”
“No,” she says. “Not here.”
Perhaps she’s right, he thinks hopefully, and slips back into the centre of himself, from where he can no longer fight to emerge.
“We may need to get a doctor soon,” he hears someone say urgently, a long way off.
And then it’s gone. The storm blown out. The wind dropped. The eyes back beneath the sea. His eyes flicker open and he sees them, Stella and Danni, talking quietly together. He stares at them, eyelids flickering, stinging with the effort of keeping them open. He does not move his head but moves his eyes, swivelling them slowly to take in the panorama of the room. The movement hurts, the light burning his eyeballs, burning like an acid wash. He closes his eyes again. His body is heavy, his limbs weighted like rocks.
“Johnny.” The voice is a soft caress. He opens his eyes, screwing them up against the light. “You’re awake.” She sounds pleased. He wishes it were Danni who had spoken.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
He knows they will come eventually. It’s only a matter of time before they track him down. He is uncertain how long he has been ill – twenty-four hours? Forty-eight? He is too weak to get up yet but he has decisions to make. The first is to tell Danni about the gun. He waits until Stella goes for a bath. He is still lying on the two seater, barely awake.
“Danni,” he says. “Can you come over here?”
She sits on a stool beside him and he tells her, describing where it is hidden, the position of the box in the loft. It is only partly because he feels so weak that he asks her. More importantly, he doesn’t want it to be a surprise to her. He knows what will happen next and he needs to include her. She watches him gravely, her dark eyes absorbing him blankly, until he feels eaten up by her, exhausted with the effort of trying to read her.
“Will you get me the box?” he asks.
The fire spits and crackles in the silence.
She leans forward mechanically and thrusts a poker into the grate, shifting the burning wood with a controlled hostility.
“Whose house is this?” she asks stiffly.
“It was my grandmother’s.”
She looks at him coldly, as if he’s lying.
“She moved here from Dublin,” he says. “Remember I told you – that first night we had a drink at your hotel? She moved after she lost her husband. They were only just married.”
She says nothing but he catches an almost imperceptible physical reaction, a slight stiffening, a movement inwards into herself.
“And now?” she says eventually, dumping the poker with a clatter on the hearth.
“It was left to me. But you can see, there’s no way to live here and make a living. It was a small community even back then but now there’s almost nothing left.”
“Why haven’t you sold it?”
“Because it was hers. Because I loved her.”
His mouth is bone dry, his lips cracked.
“Can I have some water, please?” he asks.
As she moves to get a glass, he says, “You haven’t read it yet …? What I gave you – about my grandmother?”
She shakes her head. She had forgotten. She remembers now how she slipped the sheets into the front pocket of her case in the hotel room.
She brings a glass over and holds it to his lips but he takes it for himself and drinks.
“Slowly,” she warns.
“Thanks.”
He hands it to her and sinks back with some relief, his eyes roaming round the room. A shell, that’s all this house is now really, but he remembers it in his childhood, filled with the smell of peat smoke and the all encompassing presence of his grandmother. The tall, straight-backed stance of her when she moved. Many people thought her haughty. But Johnny always understood that she held herself so stiffly with the effort of trying not to crumple. Being a widow was her identity; it wasn’t just a part of her, it was what she was, a whole life summed up by the loss that defined it. She rarely spoke about it but she carried it physically and visibly. It stripped her of adornment, somehow, gave her a ramrod back and granite eyes and dry, gnarled hands like stumps of root ginger.
And yet there was about her stillness something that yielded, that was more than just formidable. The way she swept the hair from his eyes gently, with one crooked finger. The fastidious way she took the top off his boiled egg and ground salt between her thumb and forefinger over the top, and then gave it to him with a smile in her eyes rather then her lips. The way her hand hovered over his head on the pillow when she tucked him in at night. He adored her. And whatever was left in her that was capable of love, loved him back.
“What did you say happened to him?” she asks suddenly.
“Hmm?”
“Your grandfather. Her husband …”
“He was shot. He was a political prisoner.”
Danni folds her arms, like she’s building a physical wall between them.
“I see.”
“I doubt it.”
Danni’s eyes narrow like a cat’s, the brown of them infused with the orange glow from the light.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Danni …” He shakes his head impatiently.
“What?”
“Every time I try to talk to you about something important … Why do you do that? It’s like you just … close me down. Or you look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you hate me.”
She is startled, the lightning fork of surprise striking her face before she earths it.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she says, walking to the window and looking out with her back to him.
No matter where she goes she feels his presence, she thinks in despair. She’s weary with the effort of resistance. Looking at him, turning from him, ignoring him, confronting him … it doesn’t matter. She leans her head on the glass, looking out into the garden, the overgrown grasses rippling with the winter wind. And all the while he’s seeping into her pores; she’s breathing him in like some deadly substance. Her back prickles with the sense of him behind her, watching her.
“Tell me,” she says turning back to him. “Tell me what you wanted to say.”
He struggles to sit up. He looks so thin, thinner even than usual. She can see he feels weak, his limbs unsteady. And then he seems to lose his fight.
“Just read the pages I gave you,” h
e says, his voice defeated. “I can’t say it any better than that.”
“Maybe I don’t want to read it.”
He shrugs, closes his eyes.
That was petulant, she thinks, a shiver of regret rippling though her.
She sits down, hesitates.
“What’s it about?” she asks diffidently.
He is silent for a minute and when he speaks, he does not open his eyes.
“My grandmother lodged it at her solicitors with her will before she died. She wrote it so that we would understand why my grandfather died … what had really happened. And I think maybe she wrote it for herself, like she wanted something in black and white that showed he existed, that he mattered … Oh just read it,” he says finally.
The heat from the fire is warm on his closed lids. Then his eyes flicker open suddenly.
“The box,” he says, “the gun …”
She says nothing but gets up and leaves the room. This is her opportunity. Didn’t she want a gun? Now one’s being handed to her. She has never been more frightened in her life.
She looks at the gun, sleek and black and deadly, and thinks it has its own strange, kind of beauty. A terrifying beauty, seductive in its danger and its power. She puts out a finger and touches it gingerly, like it might live, breathe, move. She holds her breath.
An impulse, a tremor, a shiver; someone walking over her grave. She is out of control, wrapped in fear. She looks at this … this … thing and she feels terror. She is frightened of what she is capable of. Frightened of what she is not capable of. Could she do it? Could she use it? Could she kill?
She puts a hand out to it and lifts it, proves to herself she can touch it. It cannot move without her. It is an instrument of her impulses. Of her will. It is only capable of what she is capable of and she does not yet know what that is. She lays it down.
She closes her eyes, her hand laid flat now on top of the gun. Has she come all this way to fail? Is she too weak, too cowardly, too lacking in resolve …? Faced with the reality of the gun, the deadly innocuousness of it, she feels uncertainty. They didn’t feel uncertain, she thinks bitterly. The terrorists. When did their humanity stand in the way of their certainty? She feels a sudden surge of resolve, like an electric current, an impulse, and she reaches out to it, trying mentally to grasp it.
Help me, Marco, she thinks desperately. She needs purpose and meaning and certainty. Her hatred was something solid to hold onto and she is lost without the comfort of it. It filled her horizon, blotted out the view. Now it is growing thinner, dissolving. It confuses her the new view on the horizon, the colours and the light and the shifting sense of perspective. The world is simpler in black and white.
But the gun is black, she thinks, looking down at it. Black, and darkly beautiful. Capable of whatever she is capable of, a reflection of her soul.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
He is uncertain how long he sleeps. Half an hour perhaps. An hour. The sky is turning grey and cloudy outside when he wakes and Danni is standing in front of him in an outdoor jacket. Then he notices the metal box with the gun. She has placed it on the cover next to him.
“We are running out of food. Now you have brought the car back, I’ll stock up. Where’s the nearest place?”
“Wait until tomorrow. I’ll go. We have enough for tonight.”
“No.”
Her voice is so flat, so definite, he hesitates.
“I need out of here. Alone.”
“I’m not sure it’s safe …”
“I really don’t care.”
He gives her directions and closes his eyes again while she searches for the keys. When he opens them again, she is gone.
She parks and takes the papers out of the envelope, sees the spidery scrawl of a signature next to the typewritten text.
Mary Seonaid O’Connor.
Her eyes scan down the text.
I became a bride as a copper sun set in bands of burnished gold over Kilmainham jail; a widow before it rose again …
She reads with resistance and with trepidation. She reads with empathy and then with fear of her own growing understanding. She reads until the light fades, until the quiet cold creeps furtively round her, until a dead woman comes alive.
And then, finally, she lays the pages down and breathes deeply. Her fingers feel stiff. It is so cold in here. She switches on the engine, puts the heater up to maximum, and looks out at the hillside. Mary Seonaid O’Connor. How real her voice seems to Danni. Perhaps because they have something in common, losing their lovers to the same cause all those generations apart. Almost seventy years between the two men, she thinks, yet they died for a cause that will outlast both of them.
A woman of another generation, yet Danni understands her perfectly. Danni had Marco for longer than ten minutes after they were married, but on the other hand, sometimes that was all it felt like: ten minutes of a lifetime. She hears Mary Seonaid’s voice and she recognises it. She has shared those same hopes and disappointments and dreams.
Reading about Michael O’Connor makes her think back to a conversation between Marco and Traynor during one of those Chinese suppers they used to have. The old heroes of the IRA, Traynor had said, were men of principle, revered in their communities. But the new generation of IRA men had taken the struggle into new territories, attacked civilians, children even.
And Marco had replied mildly that in a war zone, frustrations inevitably build up. The nature of a war was bound to change the longer it continued. Traynor still thought the sense of integrity had gone. Listen, Marco had said, through a mouthful of chicken chow mein, if you’re in the boxing ring with a guy who continually knees you in the goolies, how long are you going to stick to the Queensbury rules?
Danni had smiled but his death ended her understanding. A few years after Marco died, there was a news item about the death of Gordon Wilson, whose daughter had been killed in the Enniskillen Remembrance day bombing. A Protestant father who lost his daughter but said he forgave her Catholic killers. They replayed the interview on television when he died and Danni had watched and wept for him, for his heart and for his humanity, and then she wept for herself because she could not share them.
The thought of it hardens her, even now. She hates the way she feels and she hates those who make her feel this way. It’s as if her intellect and her psyche are separating completely, peeling into different layers inside her. Intellectually, she can understand, of course she can understand, the way this struggle in Ireland has been passed through the generations. She is not the only one to have suffered. But rational understanding does not make it any easier to forgive emotionally.
Perhaps she would have little to say to Mary Seonaid after all. She got to keep her child, didn’t she? Danni didn’t. And as for Michael, he chose his own path. Marco did not. Every side has its dead, she understands that. But it is her own dead she weeps most for and unless they can be raised from the grave, it is hard to find generosity within herself. Easy to be generous when you have a surplus; hard when you have nothing.
A crown of dark clouds is settling ominously on the hilltop. The light is fading fast; it will be completely dark soon. The engine is ticking over still and the faint sound of water trickles somewhere in the darkness. She should go back now, Danni thinks. But she does not move. The photocopied pages of spidery handwriting are sprawled across the front seat of the car, as much in disarray as her thoughts.
She watches the central white line of the road until it spins into one continuous line in front of her, the miles eaten up by thoughts. Marco. Johnny. She’s beginning to have an understanding she doesn’t want, an insight she’d rather remain blind to. Since she arrived in Ireland, Marco has never left her. She has felt him in this land and yet somehow he has changed. He is a comforting, background presence rather than the main focus. She thinks of him with a kind of calmness and that frightens her. There comes a point where the only connection left to the dead is the pain of their loss. She doesn’t want to lose that.
She doesn’t want to say goodbye fully. And yet, if she is really honest it sometimes feels like her whole life has been about grief, that the possibility of something else is like winter sunshine on crusted frost. For the while that they both exist, there is nothing more beautiful, but ultimately one will destroy the other. She is not sure which she wants to lose.
Marco. His name has always been a Pavlovian trigger, floods her with gentle warmth. No, he has not gone from here, she thinks, as hills flash by and swollen rivers tumble. If she believed in that kind of thing she might almost think he brought her here, delivered her into new possibilities. And each time she rails at those new possibilities, he turns her gently back to face them. She knows that it is more Angelo who has blocked new life for her in the past. Marco was not her responsibility but Angelo was. And so the loss of Marco is tragedy in her life, whereas the loss of Angelo is tragedy combined with guilt. There was even a phase of her grief where she felt anger at Marco for not saving her boy.
After fifteen years, the pain of Angelo still stabs at unexpected moments. Driving behind a car and seeing a small, single, discarded Wellington boot in the back windscreen, thrown there after a walk on the beach, its partner languishing somewhere on the back seat where it has fallen. It’s the careless disregard that hurts, those with a glut of memories who can toss them aside and replace them easily. And then later, there was seeing senior pupils at her local school, the age Angelo would have been then, bags slung over shoulders, walking in shirt sleeves in winter. They were impervious, invincible. Over the years she has grieved not just for what Angelo was, but for what he would have become.
And he, Johnny, is the cause of it, she tells herself. He is to blame. But perhaps he wasn’t wholly to blame. Perhaps he was just there, swept up in events.
So why does he create such confusion in her? Something sat between them almost from the start. Even Stella could see that. Is he your man? she had asked. There is a blurring of the boundaries in Danni’s head that she doesn’t understand. She hates him and that is part of it for sure. But love is passion, and hatred is just a kind of distorted passion. If you asked her the ingredients of love she’d say passion and constancy and she knows the irony in that. That’s why love is a knife edge waiting to cut you up, because passion and constancy threaten each other’s existence.
Kiss the Bullet Page 21
