Exit Unicorns

by Cindy Brandner

  He stood there until he heard Casey’s voice groggily call him.

  “Yes?” he poked his head into the bedroom.

  “Ye may as well come lie down man, she means it.”

  “I can sleep on the couch,” Jamie said.

  “It’s like sleepin’ on the Cliffs of Moher,” Casey yawned one long-lashed eye looking blearily at him, “dangerous an’ none too comfortable. There’s room enough, I shared a bed with Pat half my life, I won’t even notice yer there.”

  After a wash in hot water and scrubbing his teeth, with a toothbrush laid out for him, until his gums were raw, Jamie found himself stretched out next to the deeply asleep and snoring form of Casey.

  Surprisingly he slept well and woke only once in the middle of the night when Casey left the bed and limped down the hall. He could hear the sound of a brief conversation and then Casey was back in the bed.

  “She meant it then?” Jamie asked.

  Casey sighed, “Aye she meant it, though ye can’t blame a man for tryin’. She said someone in my condition ought to be more careful. I’m thinkin’,” he grunted as he shifted from his back to his stomach in the bed, “it’s goin’ to be a long an’ cold week in this house. She had a message for the both of us as well.”

  “Hm?” Jamie could feel himself slipping again into sleep’s luxurious tunnel.

  “She said the two of us are not allowed to play together anymore.” Casey laughed, “an’ I think she was only half-jokin’.”

  “Casey?”

  “Hmm?” came the semi-conscious answer.

  “What that man said about the guns, I don’t know where they are. But why didn’t you ask me?”

  “Mm,” Casey rumbled sleepily, “a man is entitled to his secrets Jamie an’ I trust ye with whatever they are.”

  Jamie was grateful for the darkness that touched his face and hid his eyes.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Lover, Make Me Forget

  She was home long after dark had fallen and Belfast lay under fog, heavy and impenetrable, with only the odd sulfurous orange light finding its way through. The Ardoyne was even more depressing than usual, dark buildings thick with condensation streaming in dirty rivulets down their sides. Her feet ached and her throat was stretched tight with the prickle of unshed tears. It had been a long day. Since leaving Jamie’s employ, she’d worked at a meat-packing plant, on her feet for eight solid hours a day. It was back-breaking, mind-numbing work and she suspected that her hands would smell of blood all the rest of her days.

  The house was wedged in darkness, complete and silent, yet still a ripple of unease fluttered its way up her backbone as she let herself in the door and put down her bag. She took a deep breath, slowly letting it out, trying to ease the knot in her chest without actually opening the floodgates. Though she could have a good cry, she supposed, and there was none to question her. Casey, gone on yet another trip the details of which seemed to be shrouded in mystery, was not due back until late tomorrow afternoon.

  She put the kettle on the stove to boil and made her way up the bedroom, dropping her skirt to the floor, unbinding her hair from its knot and rubbing her scalp in an effort to relieve the prickly tension. She was just reaching for the wooden chair where she’d thrown her worn jeans the night before when she heard a sound like the sibilant hiss of a snake uncoiling. She froze there, her hand halfway in the air, poised like a petrified dancer. There was a suffocating lack of light in the room, the fog outside shrouding even the faintest bit of outside light.

  “Who’s there?” she said, hearing her voice treble out and falter.

  “Where’ve ye been, darlin’?” Came the reply, calmly, smoothly, oil untinged by the water of emotion.

  The voice was disembodied, but a second later there was form as a flame struck out, ghostly wisps of smoke dissipating into the air, reaching with boneless fingers to curl their tendrils, deceptively tender, through her hair and into her skin.

  “Casey,” she croaked. She reached for the light, but then hesitated. There was no move from the other side of the room and she knew suddenly that were she to pull the string on the light it would illuminate nothing. The words spoken would be uttered in the anonymity of darkness.

  “Where’ve ye been?” came the words again, terrifyingly calm.

  “At work. Betty’s been feeling poorly and so I worked the last half of her shift as well as my own. My feet are killing me and I’ve left the kettle on the boil so—” she broke off suddenly feeling the resounding silence swallowing her words whole before they could be heard or felt at the other side of the room.

  “Well then I suppose a woman who’s walked half of Belfast in a day deserves to have sore feet.”

  “Pardon me?” she squeaked out indignantly.

  “Well forgive me but I believe it was you I saw standin’ on the doorstep of Jamie Kirkpatrick’s house not an hour ago, lookin’ like a dog who doesn’t know whether or not to wag its tail. Tell me I’m mistaken, that it was all a trick of the fog an’ my eyes, darlin’ an’ I’ll believe ye.”

  “Even if you know me to be a liar?” She asked, exhausted by subterfuge and half-truths.

  “Even then,” came the reply.

  “It was me as you well know.”

  “Do ye visit him on a daily basis or only when yer husband is out of town?”

  “Only today and if you’d stayed to see, you’d know that I never so much as rang the bell.”

  “So why were ye there?” There was something remorseless in his voice that insinuated without the slightest effort. He would be a brutal interrogator, she suspected, feeling once again the tightness grab and claw at her throat.

  “I needed someone to talk to,” she said quietly finding that it was easier somehow to tell the truth here in the dark.

  “About what?”

  “You.”

  There was a deep breath expelled in the corner and then his voice, tired, somehow defeated, “I think we’d best turn the lights on, don’t you?”

  She felt him move, the air stirring the very slightest bit, no more disturbed than by a cricket’s passing. Had he known how to do this his entire life, been born with the ability to move in silence like a ghost, so one was never entirely certain if he’d passed or not. The light came on seconds later and she forced herself to look at him, frightened as she was of meeting his eyes. There could be no hope for lies now.

  He was exhausted, that was at once apparent. There were rings under his eyes, a beard that made him look like a cross between a pirate and the devil and a great, overwhelming emanation of fatigue that said he had not slept in days.

  “Why would ye go to Jamie to talk about me?” he asked, no anger in his face only a need, a desperation that was matched by her own to be held, to find oblivion.

  “I couldn’t think of anyone else.”

  “An’ why now, why this sudden urgency to talk about me?” His voice was flat, gentle and she almost gave in then to her desire, to be taken in his arms and told soft and tumbled lies that would hold the day at the door, until she saw, with a flash, what was happening. Inside her something curled itself tighter, refusing light.

  “When did you get back to Belfast, Casey? Or did you ever actually leave?” she asked fighting hard not to tremble, not to fly across the room and strike his face.

  He gave her a hard look for a moment and then something crumbled and she could see he had made the decision to tell her the truth.

  “I was in Derry for the first two days an’ then an emergency came up an’ I’ve been back in Belfast since.”

  “You’ve been back in Belfast for two days and you saw no need to come home,” she said quietly.

  “No one was to know that I was back.”

  “Am I on the list of those not to be trusted now?” she asked angrily. She turned trying to find her jeans through the red mist that cl
ouded her vision. The bastard, how dare he! Then suddenly cold realization gripped her and she turned back to find him watching her carefully. “Where did you stay all that time?”

  “With Seamus,” was the reply.

  “ I went to see Seamus today,” she said uneasily.

  “I know ye did,” he said, looking down at his hands which lay flat against his thighs.

  “Were you there listening?”

  “No, I was gone on business.”

  “But he told you, didn’t he?” she asked, tears of frustration boiling up into her eyes.

  Casey nodded looking half-apologetic. “He’d no choice but to darlin’.”

  “No, of course he didn’t, you men never do, do you?”

  “He gave me the gist of it but said he’d leave it to ye to fill in the holes.”

  The kettle was screaming now, the sound rising higher and higher, like someone trying to burst their own heart with agony. She went down the narrow staircase into the kitchen, each step precise and careful as if to release any of the control she had on herself would guarantee permanent madness. She shut the flame off, removed the kettle and then taking an envelope out of her bag, walked back up the stairs to the bedroom.

  “There,” she said shoving the innocuous white gummed paper under his nose. “Did he tell you that as well?”

  Casey opened it slowly and after glancing at the contents held the envelope out to her. “Ye do as ye wish with it, run as far as it will take ye.”

  He held the envelope towards her still, a glaring accusation between the two of them. Then finally when she would not take it, he let it fall and spill onto the floor, and she watched silently as their freedom scattered a hundred different ways.

  “I asked him to order you to leave, to throw you out of the damn country if need be and he said he would if he could but that it wasn’t his place anymore. Just what,” she looked up from the thousands of pound notes that carpeted their bedroom, “ the hell did he mean by that?”

  He rubbed his forehead wearily and closed his eyes for a minute before answering. “He can’t order me, darlin’.”

  “Why is that Casey?” her voice was steeled, its persistence needle sharp.

  His face was unguarded as he met her eyes and she saw with a sudden terrible clarity how he would appear as an old man and knew just as certainly that he would never survive to be that old man.

  “It’s because he takes his orders from you, isn’t it?” she asked in a bare whisper. “Doesn’t he?” her voice began to escalate and she felt her carefully constructed control shatter and fall to the floor where it waited to cut her and leave her to bleed slowly to death. Her next words came out wearily; so far away from her it seemed that she could barely hear them. “Doesn’t he?”

  Casey’s very posture gave her the answer she sought. Her knees buckled under her and she collapsed to the floor, pound notes crinkling and rising, sticking to her skin, suffocating her nose and mouth. It stank, the curious way money always does, metallic and sulfurous, leaving its stench on anything it touches. It smelled, she thought dimly, like old blood, the kind you tried to wash out but it just wouldn’t leave, the stain somehow just getting darker and bigger. She could hardly breathe for its smell sticking in her nostrils, but this did not, strangely enough, panic her. She heard things as though from a great distance. People did these sorts of things when they were in shock, didn’t they? She could feel the air move back and forth above her and someone saying ‘Oh Christ, nononono...’ and knew it was herself. The thing inside was curling tighter and tighter, refusing the light and knowing that it could not run far or fast enough now. The truth that she’d so ignorantly thought she needed, could not survive without, was here, out on the table the way she’d demanded and she could hardly stand the sight of it. She turned her face slowly, feeling the filth of the money coat her skin and knowing that somehow she would never be clean of it again.

  “Were you ever going to tell me that I was married to the head of the IRA?” she asked rather calmly, all things considered.

  “I’m tellin’ ye now.”

  “Yes, I suppose you are,” she said feeling a strange desire to laugh hysterically, laugh until she was unconscious, unfeeling, uneverything. Shock again, she supposed.

  She heard Casey get up and leave the room, heard various rustlings and clatterings in the kitchen and then his firm step around her prone form and the scent of tea and something far stronger.

  “Come on darlin’ sit up; ye can keep yer eyes shut fer the rest of yer life ‘twon’t change a damned thing.”

  “Fucking prosaic Irishman,” she muttered and pushed her way onto her knees, as exhausted as she would have been from a twenty-four hour shift at the plant. The steaming cup he put into her hands was short on tea and long on brandy. Two stiff swallows put a little strength back into her muscles and loosened the knot in her chest slightly.

  “Better then,” he said softly, hunkering down amidst the crumpled piles of money beside her.

  “Better,” she agreed without enthusiasm, as the brandy poured its balm through her veins. She shifted, the money filling the air with its accusing crackles, uncomfortably aware of Casey’s proximity, aware that he was waiting for some sign, some word from her, to allow him the knowledge of what his first step should be. She’d be damned if she’d give him the pleasure. Instead, she fixed him with a hard, unblinking green stare, to which he replied in kind with a hard, unblinking black stare. For the first time he faltered before she did, eyes dropping down to stare sightlessly at the heavy calluses on his hands.

  “I don’t know what to say, darlin’, it’s what I am, it’s what was expected of me, there was never another road to be traveled.” He looked at her with a kind of resignation in his face that she had never seen there before and, for the first time, she saw that it was true, even if only for him, there had never been any other way. Within his prison, she was beginning to catch a glimpse of her own.

  “Are you saying that your father expected this of you?” she asked and wondered for a moment if she’d pushed too far as anger flared in his face and was quickly suppressed. Then he sighed and wearily scratched at his beard with one hand.

  “No, I am not sayin’ that but I’ve told ye again an’ again, I am not like my father.”

  “No, you’re like your damned grandfather,” she said angrily “and we all know what a glorious end he came to, don’t we?”

  He sat down heavily and leaning against the bed let his head fall back onto its surface. “Pamela, I’m too tired to argue. I’m not my Da’ an’ I’m not my Grandfather. I’m me, an’ I’m doin’ the only thing I know how to do an’ that is to fight. I understand better than anyone what the costs of that are or could be. Ye’ve known who I was an’ what that meant from the first. An’ perhaps the picture I’ve painted of my Da’ was more for Pat’s sake then my own. Da’ was just plain frustrated with this ‘new’ IRA, said to me that all the societies, papers an’ lectures in the world weren’t goin’ to make a damn bit of difference. Sure an’ the only war he’d known was the border campaign an’ ye’ll know that was no grand success, but he believed that this new reformed army was only stalling because they were too afraid to step forward, to grasp the future by the throat an’ give it a good shake. Ye’ve got to understand that the Belfast chapter was a shambles then an’ is almost nonexistent now. Dublin was never real conscientious about keepin’ the Belfast contingent abreast of their doin’s. Ye see,” his gaze was locked solidly with hers now, his eyes burning with frustrations near to a thousand years old, “those Dublin boys with all their lofty notions don’t understand the Belfast soldier,” his voice echoed all the bitter resentment of the front-line man for those tucked cozily away at headquarters. He breathed out heavily, the dark circles under his eyes seeming to deepen perceptibly as he did. “But then, for what’s left of the Belfast army, Republicanism has become a social event, a s
eries of dates on the calendar to celebrate the births and deaths of heroes they never knew.”

  “They,” Pamela echoed, “why do you say they, Casey, you’re their leader are you not, don’t you consider yourself one of them?”

  “No, darlin’ I do not.” It was said quietly but emphatically and she did not miss the current that slid blackly, insidiously between the spoken words.

  “And Seamus?” she asked fighting back a nameless panic.

  “Nor does he,” he replied watching her face carefully for a reaction.

  “How many of you are there?” she whispered bleakly, horror washing through her in tiny rippling waves, building far-out, threatening to drown that thing inside her that even now shriveled in the breeze that warned of the impending storm.

  “Our numbers aren’t large, yet.”

  It was the yet that felt like a stinging slap in the face and thrust her into the harsh light of the room, this room that she had one day believed to be delivered from into the marble arms of milk and honey America. But that had been before she realized her husband was splitting a terrorist organization in two in order to force peace in the only way the Irish had ever understood, violence. Born to the gun, Jamie had said of Casey, and she had had the arrogance to deny it, she had listened to the poetry-fed idealism of Pat and believed that it could be the same for his brother and now knew that it could not. She remembered the night they had first made love and wondered if they hadn’t cursed themselves, somehow, there under the scorching light of the moon, lying on those black rocks, trying through passion to deny the finiteness of life. Lying on the names of dead men scored unflinchingly into eternity.

  “If ye want to go,” Casey said his voice purposefully flat, “the money is yers, Seamus saw to that. I would not begrudge ye the life ye deserve darlin’.”

  “And is that what I deserve Casey, to live without you? How am I to go, if you won’t? Did you think of that, you bastard, when you stuck this blood money in a goddamn envelope?” She crumpled the incriminating piece of white paper up and threw it at him. It skimmed his ear and landed impotently on the bed behind. “Did you forget my ticket to Disneyland, for this little fairytale I’m supposed to want to live?”