Exit Unicorns

by Cindy Brandner

  ‘Sometimes it will be all ye have an’ it will have to be enough.’

  ‘Just let him be alive Daddy and it will be enough, just let him be alive,’ he silently prayed.

  They made shore, Casey’s strength so drained that he couldn’t stand and had to crawl onto the pebbled beach pulling his brother by the collar with one hand. He bent over Pat, searching for signs of life and finding by the moon’s cold light, none. He pinched Pat’s nose and sent his breath into his brother, trying to close from his mind the last time he’d done this. How helpless and tiny Pat had been then, a baby who simply forgot to breathe. Common enough, but in Pat it had gone on long after the time when the brain should have seen breathing as an involuntary function. Pat had been three and Casey seven and it had been Casey who turning against him in their shared bed had felt the unnatural stillness. Had leaned over him and seen morning’s light strong against the delicate and purling blue of his brother’s face. He had given Pat breath then and it had been enough to save him, he only hoped it was now.

  ‘Borrowed breath, stole from death.’ An old child’s rhyme came unwanted into his head. How many times could you cheat death and not have to somehow ante up the balance?

  He blew again, counting carefully between puffs, putting his ear to Pat’s lips and hoping against hope for some small flutter of breath. There was none.

  “Don’t do this to me, Patrick. Don’t you dare goddamn do this,” he gritted his teeth and took a deep breath, forcing it as hard as he dared into his brother’s lungs. There was still no response. He compressed Pat’s chest, hoping to force water out of his lungs and turned his own head to the side, towards the water, to listen for anything, even the smallest gurgle to give him hope.

  Staring directly at him, with what appeared to be head and shoulders above water, was a being of such terrifying whiteness that he knew it had never before been blessed by light. It was of a distance that he could not distinguish singular features but it appeared almost human, long strands of kelp-like hair plastered to its neck. He could have sworn it was looking directly at him but it did not seem to have eyes, at least not of a sort familiar to those who live above ground. There was a strong and undeniable sense of being stared at however, of one species meeting another whose kind was long gone from the planet.

  “Thank you,” Casey whispered, afraid to startle it, worried that the breaking of silence might provoke it to some action. It had been this creature, this strange being of lightless water, who had saved his brother’s life, who had pushed them both with fearsome strength towards that thing it did not understand.

  Its head tilted back on the heavy neck, face bathed in lunar radiance, a thing of gleaming, glowing white. The mountains and water surrounding it gentle gradations of winnowed blue. Sound issued forth from it, sound so small and forlorn, a strange and exquisite cry of loneliness that made every hair on Casey’s body stand quivering. The cry of the last of its kind, stranded here out of time and season.

  Beneath him, half-forgotten, Pat coughed, lurched to the side and vomited a stream of water. Casey made certain he could breathe before glancing swiftly back at the dark, bottomless lake. There was no sign of the creature, not so much as a ripple on the water to betray its return to the place of profound darkness it had emerged from.

  “What was that howlin’?” Pat asked, still coughing, though he’d managed to struggle up to his knees.

  “Just a lost soul,” Casey said softly, knowing there was no way to speak of what he’d seen, no words to describe a creature that should not exist during this tick of the earth’s clock. A white creature of impenetrable solitude who had risked its life for a glimpse of the moon. Who had wanted to feel, just once, the blessing of light upon its face. However many thousands of years separated its kind from his own he could understand that. How you could risk shattering your own soul just to feel the wash of moonlight on your skin.

  “Are ye alright?” Pat asked, upright now and looking quizzically into his face.

  “Fine,” he said faintly. Meeting his brother’s eyes, Casey knew Pat had seen it too and that neither of them would ever speak of it to the other.

  “Where shall we camp for the night?” Pat, shivering in his soaked clothes, had returned to the realm of practicality.

  A small cloud sifted across the face of the moon, a bit of out-flung ether, enough to cast a shadow. Casey shivered in turn and felt superstition, primal and unsheathed, settle on his bones.

  “As far from the water as we can get,” he replied.

  Chapter Twelve

  Altar Boys and Angels

  What advantages were possessed by an occupied, as distinct from an unoccupied bed?’ James Joyce had asked it first, Jamie pondered it now.

  Joyce had answered— ‘the removal of nocturnal solitude, the superior quality of human (mature female) to inhuman (hot water jar) calefaction, the stimulation of matutinal contact, the economy of mangling done on the premises...’ and so forth. Practical reasons certainly and not without their own homely romance but not entirely applicable to a man silly enough to bring a nineteen year old, rather forward thinking, much too attractive girl away for the summer in some misguided notion that he was saving her from herself. Saving her for himself might have been more accurate, though Jamie, with some days of summer still facing him, didn’t want to look too closely at his motives.

  At home, in the sprawling interior of Kirkpatrick’s Folly, he had not thought of what close proximity might mean. What living in a three bedroom, low-beamed snug of a cottage might actually be like. The result of which was they spent a great deal of time out-of-doors.

  The cottage, for it couldn’t actually be properly considered a house, was flung down by a harsh hand in the hollow of two long, sloping hills, which bore a close resemblance to an old woman’s sagging breasts. It was situated on a long, narrow ribbon of farmland, complete with cows, sheep and a small dairy. A working farm where he’d spent his summers as a boy, learning the value of working with one’s own hands. As the years progressed, he’d spent less time here, though he always tried for at least a few weeks in the summer. Hard work cleared his head, enough of it and he wasn’t able to think at all. He’d found refuge in that state before, he wondered if that’s what he sought now. If so, it wasn’t helping a great deal. Sleep seemed not the only appetite whetted by the clear air and long, sunny days.

  Their days had acquired a rhythm that hugged the land and animals. Up at dawn with the cows, followed by a breakfast they took turns making. Out again to work in the garden, both flower and vegetable. Jamie, who had understood the soil and its moods from a very young age, found in Pamela an avid student of horticulture. He taught her what plants were hardy, which fragile, which flourished in shade and which in sun. He gave her the Latin names, showed her what was poison in large amounts and healing in small. How to coax and encourage the haughty plants, when to behead the roses and when to leave them to die on the stem.

  Lunch then and a few free hours in the afternoon, during which time he conducted what business he could from this remote corner of the world, made decisions at his kitchen table that would affect hundreds of lives, and tried not to think about how much he needed a drink.

  Pamela spent her afternoons walking around the lake that sat in a bowl at the lowest point of the property, horseback riding, or pretending to read the Republican literature he’d given her while actually idly daydreaming in the hammock.

  He watched her now as she ambled and skipped along the shore of the lake. Montmorency (a stray dog who’d shown up on the first night and refused to leave since) following in her wake, a bright-brindled, lollop-eared, sun-stippled gadfly. He was quite possibly the ugliest dog God had ever seen fit to set onto the earth and Pamela loved him to spoiled distraction. The affection was returned in unstinting full measure, doubled and trebled with the tongue lolling abandon only canines could manage, causing Jamie to wonder if dogs didn’t
have it all sewn up in a way humans could never aspire to.

  Sitting at the table, papers ruffled by a slight breeze that came in the open door, he closed his eyes, felt the elements as they touched her singly, the sand soft-sucking at her toes, the pop and snap of shell-souled creatures. Delicate, luminous, exposed to shrivelling air. And what of air, air that sought with unfeeling digits declivities hot and healing and played wimple-fingered through swirls of silken hair. And light, solar light laying skeins of distilled sunflower down forearm and flank, kissing here, blinding there.

  ‘Behold the handmaid of the moon.’ Moon or sun, did it matter? She had become for him a coruscation of flame, beauty that stood on the razor edge of terror, light that he could only just bear.

  He opened his eyes and saw her turn, wave at him and continue on her way. Oh yes, light. Angel, if I had the courage to reach out my hand, would you have the sense to see that it does not grasp but only warns you, turns you away? That my currents would drown you even as they pushed you far from me? For I am afraid here on my hill, in my exile..

  ‘Touch me. Soft eyes. Soft, soft, soft hand. I am lonely here. O, touch me soon, now... I am quiet here alone. Sad too. Touch, touch me...’ Joyce again, bloody man had understood too much about ineluctable human yearning. About the dreams of the cripple.

  And what did she dream? He knew too well. Her dreams were written plain, lay swimming in heavy-lidded eyes and indolent limbs. She dreamed her dark-eyed boy, the one who brought fire in his hands and flood with his heart.

  And what of his own role? There was, in this play, no part for the paternal. He had tried to father that which no longer needed nor wanted to be fathered. He’d been a reluctant actor at best. No, it was greed that had brought him here, greed for the things he’d seen in her eyes, the flush in her cheek, the pretty cravings that played across her consciousness and showed themselves plain in her movement and expression. Yet he could not quite bring himself to return her to Belfast, to what waited there for her, to the loneliness that would again be his companion when she was gone.

  He returned with a sigh to the papers before him. Three of the huge mechanical looms needed replacing at the linen mill. Four of his best men at the distillery were nearing retirement and he’d no one of equivalent skill to replace them and a middle-aged woman, Penny McGee, mother of five children, had been hurt badly and would require the setting up of a compensatory package and would likely not be returning to work any time in the near future. These things were small matters, dealt with easily. Retirement funds were generous and Jamie’s grandfather had long ago set the custom of the gift of a trip to any destination a man might wish upon retirement. The Kirkpatrick tradition held that you looked after your workers and they would look after you, a theory that had stood the test of time and benefited all over the years.

  He rubbed the crease in his forehead and idly flipped the pages of The Irish Times. Generally, he tried to avoid news from home during his weeks here, it was time out of time and he needed no reminder of what troubles lay at home. The same troubles for hundreds of years, technologically updated, dressed in different clothes, but wrapped in the same despair, futility and frustration they had always come bound in. But this summer, between the lines of ink, he could smell smoke. The north was beginning to smolder, threatening to ignite and torch them all in the process. It was, as such matters were, only a matter of time.

  In Derry, small tongues of flame were already beginning to lick at the tinder of age-old hates. Pretty Derry, with its famous walls, winding river and green fields, its very name a point of divisiveness. Londonderry to the Protestants, Derry to the Catholics, who wanted no reminder in their city of the bastion of imperialism across the sea. Men had been beaten, and badly, for using the wrong name in the wrong pub.

  Derry was an obvious flashpoint. The last stronghold of the Protestant, the place where they had beat back the Catholics three hundred years before and not let them forget it since. Derry where the Apprentice Day March was strutted along the walls to anthems of bigotry and pennies were thrown down into the slums of the Bogside. It had always puzzled Jamie this, that men who lived in relative harmony despite religious and political differences all year could turn into beasts of an entirely different nature during one mad week each summer.

  Lucien Broughton had been present at both the marches in Derry and Belfast. Jamie had to admit the man knew his business, knew where he had to establish a foothold. The speech he’d given on the lawns of Stormont was still being talked about a week later. His rhetoric had been carefully honed, filled with small tidbits for the subconscious. There had been nothing overtly hateful, even the Times had taken a hopeful slant on it. This worried Jamie more than if the man had been blatantly vile; there was something that smelled very bad about the whole situation. There was a picture of the Reverend, arms spread like an avenging angel, face wearing the look of a mad, medieval saint. Jamie felt a small ticking fear begin to turn over right then in his heart. As much as he did not want to be some inadequate replacement for the hope his father had given a community, he wondered if perhaps he’d made a dreadful and irrevocable mistake by refusing to enter the fight against Lucien Broughton.

  “Jamie.”

  He started, scattering papers onto the floor, where a few caught the faint summer breeze and drifted dreamily out the door.

  “Yes,” he said more sharply than he’d intended, feeling like a child who’s been caught out with its hand in the cookie jar.

  “It’s a lovely day,” she said, leaning into the doorframe, tanned and slightly flushed from the sun, hair in an untidy ponytail, long legs bare and dusty.

  “It is,” Jamie agreed carefully.

  “It’s only that—well I thought a picnic would be nice. We haven’t had a picnic all summer.”

  “We haven’t?” Jamie said incredulously.

  “No,” she said almost shy, a long ringlet of loose hair blowing across her throat and causing Jamie to swallow hard.

  “Well then we must fix that now, today, in fact this very minute,” he stood, thinking it was quite possible he was about to take complete leave of his senses.

  “I’ll pack the food if you get the horses,” she said, and Jamie, knowing her idea of a good meal was an extra spoonful of peanut butter on her bread, was tempted to say no. There was such an eagerness in her face though that he merely nodded and headed out to the stable to get the horses.

  He had determined, some short time ago, that a man of his years and experience ought to be able to draw and keep the invisible line between propriety and the seduction of a teenage girl. No matter how aggravating and bewitching said girl was.

  It was rather easy to be noble, Jamie reflected wryly, when the object of your indecent lust was not in view and an infinitely more delicate matter when her lovely denim-bottomed self was only feet away adjusting the stirrups on her saddle. Looking altogether too alluring in her thin cotton shirt, the color of late summer delphiniums, her hair a slovenly mess of curls that served to make her look like a hungover nymph the night after a particularly decadent bacchanal.

  They rode in silence, the air heavy with thoughts unspoken but sensed nevertheless. Past a gurgling brown brook, through a field dark with dying heather, into a pine wood where the smell of sap, flushed out with the heat, was sticky and ripe on the air.

  Pamela, cantering slightly behind and away from Jamie, found herself in an altogether unwelcome flux of emotion. There were only a few weeks left to the summer and then they would be back in Belfast and she would have to make a choice. To stay under this man’s roof, to be wrapped in the warmth and headiness of his governance or to keep the silent promise she had made to Casey with a single kiss. She could not keep a foot in each world, not with the earth threatening to crack apart beneath her. She could not continue to pretend that she was in any way the equal of this man who rode beside her with effortless grace.

  His was a t
errible beauty, an aching, tearing thing that was best left alone. She could not stay, even if her dreams, pale in the light of reality had been tempered by respect and care. Even if—she gave a weak smile as Jamie turned, gilt eyebrows lifted, green eyes soft—even if the man could have her very soul if he but asked. For he would not ask, of that much she was certain.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” Jamie’s voice intruded on her musings causing her to flinch guiltily and flush. “Though perhaps they’re worth more. To judge by the look on your face I ought to have offered a hundred pound or so.” The knowing grin on his face hit a nerve and made her retort more stingingly than she’d intended.

  “Perhaps your Lordship there’s not enough money in all your overflowing coffers to make me spill my private thoughts.” So saying she flashed him a look of icy disdain and spurred her horse to gallop.

  Racing full tilt without a care for her safety was the only way it seemed she could outrun all the yearning in her soul. If only she could always go far enough, fast enough to obliterate the hold he had over her.

  She didn’t see the tree until it was too late to veer away, the young whip-like ends of its arcing branches catching her full across the face, blinding her and completely unnerving the horse who threw her instantly.

  Jamie was upon her in seconds. “Pamela are you alright? Blink if you can’t speak.”

  He felt the length of her body with light, deft hands. “Nothing’s broken.”

  “I—I,” she stuttered, trying vainly to draw breath, feeling as if a very large fist had mashed her kidneys.

  “I think you’ve knocked the wind from yourself.” Jamie helped her into a sitting position then rubbed her back in great broad circles until she at last drew in a shaky breath.

  “There now, there’s a girl, are you hurt anywhere else?”