Kiss the Bullet

by Catherine Deveney

  Retribution, he thinks. Atonement. Penance. Hell is not a black hole, a void; it is watching her pain.

  “Once,” she says, and it occurs to him that she is not particularly speaking to him though there is no one else in the room, “once … after he died … maybe two months after he had gone, I heard him cry in the night.” She shifts her head on the sofa, nudging a cushion away from her. The gun nestles against her stomach. “I went to his room and I lifted him from his bed and took him down to the kitchen. I gave him a glass of milk. And then we climbed the stairs again together. We played the counting game. One step … two steps … I heard his voice. I felt his fingers in my hand. Then I took him back to bed to tuck him up and I realised … I realised … he wasn’t there.”

  “Danni …”

  He is leaning his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands.

  “He wasn’t there,” she repeats. “But he felt so real.”

  He pushes his hair back, leaves his fingers knotted into it, gripping tight.

  “What did you do?”

  “I howled,” she says.

  His eyes close.

  “I came to Ireland to find you,” she says.

  “Yes.”

  “And Pearson put me in touch with you for his own reasons.”

  “Pearson always had his own reasons.”

  “Stella said Pearson betrayed you … that day … the day Angelo died. Marco.”

  He shakes his head. “It’s not my excuse.”

  “When I came, I wanted to kill you.”

  “I know.”

  “Part of me still wants to kill you.”

  Her fingers reach out instinctively to the gun, flutter over it.

  “Let me take the gun,” he says.

  “No.”

  She lifts her head slightly from the sofa.

  “How did you know?” she asks. “At what point did you know about Angelo?”

  “Not till the other day. Something Stella said. When she said you lost your son … but on some level I think I knew before that.”

  The light is fading. She is becoming an outline in the darkness. He stands up.

  “Where are you going?”

  She sits up further, hands reaching for the gun.

  “Just to switch the light on.”

  Her eyes blink against the light when he flicks the switch. She puts her forearm over her eyes, hears the drag of the curtains as he draws them closed.

  “The first time I saw you,” he says, “it was like I knew you. Like I’d always known you.”

  I felt that, she thinks.

  “Your eyes were so familiar.”

  Angelo’s eyes. He has carried those eyes for so many years inside his head. Could he live with them, he wonders. Then he thinks he cannot live without them.

  The black hand on the clock doesn’t pause for thought. It moves relentlessly and he wonders how much time is left. She is so still, curled in that chair, it is almost as though she sleeps. 2.15. Perhaps she does.

  Marco? He is no longer behind glass. His hand is raised and she raises hers to meet it, palms touching. He smiles at her.

  “Please move the gun from your stomach.”

  She looks up, confused. Johnny.

  “Please,” Johnny says.

  She lifts the gun automatically, then hesitates. He holds out his hand but she shakes her head and lays it on the arm beside her. She is not ready to give it to him. Things will be on her terms.

  She sits up, swinging her legs back round to the floor. She feels utterly drained. Everything inside her is battling, turning in on itself against her. She cannot understand why hatred never worked. She never wanted to be burdened with understanding.

  The truth, she thinks – and there is no time now for anything else – is that she is drawn to him. There are threads that she cannot untangle, that are so intricately knotted that she cannot find their source, their ending, their pathway. Maybe in some strange way they are linked by pain; he is the only possible link left to Marco and Angelo. And she is the link to his conscience.

  She is drawn to his darkness, his complications, his simultaneous capacity for danger and tenderness. She is drawn to his neurosis, to the hole inside him that will always disable him. He will always be damaged, as she will; their damage unites them. And if she is truly honest – she is drawn to the enormous possibilities of him. What did he say soul was? The capacity for something beyond yourself. Well then, he has soul.

  She is drawn to his blue, tiger stained eyes.

  It will never be perfect, she thinks, but the thought does not dismay her. Life isn’t perfect. Imperfection has ways to grow. Maybe the beauty of life is what you can reach for, strive for; learning to touch what is just beyond your finger tips. A sense of peace floods her. Marco.

  Johnny is watching her.

  He is almost like a sculpture, she thinks, or a line drawing. If she closed her eyes and drew her fingers over a row of faces like a blind woman, she could pick his out. She knows the angles of him intimately: his nose, his cheekbones, his shoulders. She has never allowed herself to drift into the fantasy of him. At times, she has hated him. But she knows she wants him. What she doesn’t know quite yet, is whether she can live with that truth.

  He is standing up, walking towards her. She watches, motionless.

  “Time to choose,” he says, standing in front of her.

  Life or death. Damnation or redemption. There is no way out of here separately. No way back to old lives for either of them. They have sniffed something live again, something that has been so long in coming.

  She feels the metal of the gun in her hand. A bullet through him. A bullet through her. Or they walk out together.

  She stands up from the sofa and faces him.

  He is right next to her. She can feel the heat of him. The sweet, musky heat of him.

  Johnny watches as she lifts the gun. He does not flinch. She raises it to his temple; he feels the metal cool and light against his skin. A small shiver.

  “Are you finally scared, Johnny?”

  “I have never been more scared.”

  “But not of death?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither.”

  His eyes don’t leave hers.

  She presses the gun harder.

  “Bang, bang,” she says.

  And then she lowers it.

  “I said love wins.” His voice shakes slightly.

  “And desire,” she says.

  She does not have the strength to turn down what he offers. She is not finished with life.

  He holds out his hand, and she hands the gun to him. Then he reaches out and runs one single finger gently down her cheek, over her lips, falling off the edge of her chin and down her neck. She catches his hand and holds it because she wants to, and for the second time in her life, she steps into a future that she could never have dreamed of.

  READING GROUP GUIDE

  for

  Kiss the Bullet

  including an interview

  with the author

  and

  suggested topics for

  discussion

  A – Interview with Catherine Deveney

  1) What were the inspirations for Kiss the Bullet?

  There were two inspirations – almost disparate trains of thought that suddenly fused together. Sometimes writing fiction can seems like a kind of alchemy, a process in which the base ingredients transform into something else entirely.

  The first was reading a news story about a woman who was going to marry the man who had killed her brother. It really got me thinking about how powerful chemistry can be, and how it can overrule so many other instincts. It also got me thinking about the limits of love. Would it have made a difference if an elderly parent had been killed? Or perhaps a partner? What about a child? When it comes to falling in love, what is unforgivable?

  The second inspiration was visiting Kilmainham jail in Dublin, a powerful museum which tells the story of the early rebels of th
e 1916 Easter rising. There are many stories held within the walls of Kilmainham, but one in particular touched me. There is a tiny whitewashed chapel in the jail, and it was here that Joseph Plunkett, a poet and journalist, and one of the leaders of the rising, married his fiancée Grace Gifford. They were given just minutes together and hours later, Plunkett was executed. I sat in the chapel and tried to imagine them standing before that altar, knowing what lay ahead of them.

  The story of Kiss the Bullet is not the story of Joseph Plunkett and Grace Gifford, but this bleak, true event triggered my imagination and sparked the novelist’s usual train of thought: what if this happened … and what if that happened … Terrorism seemed to provide an interesting backdrop for my story about the limits of love. If Danni’s husband and child had been killed by, say, a drunk driver, she would have only weakness – or perhaps addiction – to forgive. But how would it change things if the killer had taken your loved one deliberately, for a cause? Is that possible to forgive? Perhaps not if the killer feels no remorse. But what if he, too were tortured by events?

  We have seen, with Brighton bomber Patrick Magee for example, that friendships are possible between bombers and the families of their victims. Johnny argues that love is stronger than hate and that can only be true if love has redemptive qualities. It was that possibility I wanted to explore in this novel.

  2) Your day job is interviewing people for Scotland on Sunday. How do you reconcile your fiction and your journalism – and do they help or hinder one another?

  Journalism has been my apprenticeship for fiction writing, and yet the demands of each are very different and can seem conflicting. Generally, everything has to be as concise as possible in journalism and, contrary to some popular misconceptions, you have to work with fact and can’t make up the material! It does sharpen your approach to language, though, making you more conscious of what is redundant and the job each word is doing for you.

  Fiction is almost the opposite: ideas need to be given space to grow and develop and you have to colour in every part of the picture rather than giving a quick, impressionistic sketch. I love the liberation that fiction brings, the freedom it gives you to make things up and lose yourself inside a story that you have created.

  I don’t think I would have become a novelist if I hadn’t been a journalist first. I have been exposed to so many different people and situations that I simply wouldn’t have encountered if I had stayed in my original job as an English teacher. I don’t think I would have had the depth of experience, the understanding of how people think and feel and behave and react in different situations, if I hadn’t been a journalist. I have interviewed families who have lost a loved one to murder, but I have also interviewed a murderer, and that gives you an insight it’s hard to get anywhere else. A lot of my interviews now are with celebrities, but often I prefer interviewing ordinary people with extraordinary stories. You learn so much about human nature.

  There is one particular lesson that journalism teaches you that can be very useful for a novelist. Truth is not a fixed point. Before I did the job, I was probably quite black and white in my approach. I thought truth was something you uncovered. Then I realised that two people can tell you two conflicting things about a situation and both can be telling the truth as they see it. Understanding different perspectives, and the complexity of truth, is a good start for a fiction writer.

  3) You explore extreme emotional themes in your fiction. Why do they fascinate you?

  As a journalist, I have been very privileged to talk to many people who have found themselves in extreme situations. I say ‘privileged’ because it is often when people face terrible challenges that you see the most inspiring things the human spirit is capable of. I have interviewed people who have experienced terrible events. People whose family members have died through accident, illness, addiction or suicide. People who have been beaten or raped or abused or tortured or violated in the worst ways imaginable. In all of these situations, you turn up nervously, half expecting them to be broken. They so very rarely are. In my work, I have said that it often feels as if something redemptive nestles at the heart of tragedy, like a jewel half buried in mud. Those who dig for it find something that at the height of their despair, they never expected to find. They often become bigger, kinder, more empathetic, more generous. I once asked a woman who had lost everyone close to her, how her experiences had influenced her as a person. She said, “If these things hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have been as nice a person.”

  It’s also true that I have occasionally seen people broken by tragedy, and their bitterness can be a very sad and uncomfortable thing to be around. In Kiss The Bullet, Danni is almost at that stage – but not quite – and when life holds out an unexpected opportunity to her, she is forced to examine what she really wants to be. If she wants that opportunity, she has to reach almost beyond herself to achieve it. Danni thinks she is emotionally dead, but she’s not.

  Obviously, extreme situations provide great drama for fiction. But it is also in those situations that you really get insight into what you are capable of, and what your life is really about. That’s what fascinates me. The veneer is stripped back and only the naked truth is left.

  4) People talk about time healing grief. but in your novels there is a sense that the sadness doesn’t disappear – it just goes somewhere else. Do you agree?

  Grief and loss are so much a part of life that I find it hard to imagine writing any story that doesn’t contain them in some form. It wouldn’t seem realistic to me. In my first novel, Ties That Bind, loss changes everything – temporarily – for several of the characters. In Kiss the Bullet, Danni nearly loses a sense of who she really is because of it. Time doesn’t take the grief away but it teaches you how to live with it. It gets absorbed into who you are, becomes a layer that you wear like an invisible skin.

  In many ways, we don’t want to let go of grief because it’s our last connection to people we have loved and lost. If they have gone, and the pain has gone, what’s left to prove they existed, that they mattered? The tricky bit is to keep that live connection without letting it destroy you.

  Grief is one of the most formative experiences in life and I think it can be very closely connected to creativity. All that emotion seeks a release. I sometimes think of grief as a furnace. You get blasted by intense heat for a time and in that extreme temperature you become molten, malleable, ready to be shaped into something else. Afterwards, when you have cooled down, you can find yourself in an unfamiliar new shape, the old you fossilised inside. My stories deal with that process.

  Sometimes, that new shape can be more rounded. I wrote my first fiction after my own father died. I found pain sharpened my perceptions and I simply saw the world differently. Sometimes, I think of fiction almost as my dad’s parting gift.

  5) In the midst of tragedy, you often include a very simple moment of kindness or empathy. Do you believe that the goodness of humanity prevails?

  It’s all too easy to get dispirited about the terrible things human beings are capable of, and to believe that there’s more bad than good in us. But I do think that the heights of people’s capacity for love and generosity can be every bit as extraordinary as the depths of their capacity for evil. In Kiss the Bullet, Johnny tries to point that out to Danni, telling her about a French woman who risked her own life to save a Jewish child from Nazi soldiers. Was the French woman’s love less potent that the Nazis’ hatred?

  As an interviewer, I find myself drawn to people’s weaknesses more than their strengths. Perhaps that’s because I think that it’s in our weaknesses that we are at our most human. Supreme confidence in people can be formidable. It can even be amusing. But I rarely find it appealing.

  I’ve come to believe that what matters in life are those moments where you achieve real empathy, and real honesty or connection with another person. A moment where your guard can come down in some way. I try to capture some of those moments in my fiction.

  6) Both your
novels have Irish themes or settings. Where does your interest in Ireland come from?

  When I was growing up in Glasgow, Ireland was a frightening place. I only saw it on the news when bombs went off. I certainly didn’t want to go there.

  Brought up a Catholic in a city where religious tribalism was part of the landscape, Ireland just flicked my ‘off’ switch. I had enough of that at home and didn’t want to engage with it. But many years later, I would travel there for work, interviewing both Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley Junior. At the time, I described it as being like looking at one of those pictures that contain two images, and which one you see depends on which angle you look from and what’s inside your own head.

  I also married a man with strong Irish connections and went to Donegal for the first time. I was smitten, and I also grew to love Dublin. My switch definitely flicked to ‘on’, my curiosity piqued by this beautiful country where the people were warm, engaging and humorous yet had been embroiled in so much violence and turbulence. It was hard to understand how all the pieces fitted together.

  Ironically, my grandfather was Irish but sadly he died before my father was born. My father therefore knew nothing of his Irish roots and when he investigated his family tree, looked only at his mother’s Scottish ancestry. Recently my brother has investigated our Irish family, but when we were growing up the only thing we knew was that my grandfather had worked as a Red Indian in Hengler’s circus, which seemed a very romantic tale to us! I am Scottish through and through, but now when I land in Ireland, there is a little part of me that feels like I’m going home.

  7) Have you been too sympathetic to the IRA in this book?

  I don’t think so. Personally, I have no sympathy with violence that targets innocent people for a political cause. But I have tried to show the conditions in which violence flourishes, and the reasons why conflicts intensify. I also try to show the opportunism that goes alongside that, and how politics can be an excuse for criminality. But you have to separate those things out. Pearson is a damaged man, but he’s damaged by personal circumstances, not the political conflict. He’s a thug and a criminal and he enjoys violence for its own sake. But Johnny isn’t a bad man. He’s highly principled and takes a particular – if misguided – route because he can’t see any other way open to him. Crucially, he believes he’s at war and he behaves as people do when they are at war. That is his truth.