Falling Glass (2 page)

“The Aboriginal what of the what now?”

“The Aboriginals believe that we live two lives. A life here on Earth in what we call the real world and a life in The Dreaming which is really
the real world, where everything has a purpose, where we are more than thinking reeds, are part of some great scheme of things. And in The Dreaming certain places are special, certain landscapes, certain settlements. Belfast is one of those places. The neolithic people thought so. To them it was a holy site. Pristine birch woods in a river valley only just freed from a retreating ice sheet a mile thick. The Celts weren’t interested in Dublin – it lacked a significance in their cosmology which is why they let the Norwegians have it. Belfast lies at the confluence of three holy rivers. In Irish it means Mouth of the Farset, one of those sacred streams. Do you see what I’m saying?”

The man in the Rangers shirt nodded sagely, “So, you’re Australian then?” he asked.

Killian sighed inwardly. Some instinct had told him that this was going to be a mistake. Even before the plane had entered the airspace of Newfoundland he’d begun to have doubts. You can’t go home again and the New York of crack wars, quadruple-digit homicide rates, David Dinkins, Mike Forysthe and 50,000 illegal Micks was long, long gone.

He abandoned the pub, the pint and the man and hoofed it downhill to the subway stop on 242nd Street.

He found a
Daily News
that had a picture of Dermaid McCann, Gerry Adams and Peter Robinson having a pint with the President.

They were drinking Guinness.

Obama’s grin had
Get me the hell out of here
written all over it.

Killian yawned. He was dog-tired and in the morning he had a job to do in Boston that could well be the death of him.

The train finally came after an epic wait.

It was now after midnight.

“Happy Saint Patrick’s Day,” the driver said on the intercom.

“Aye, I suppose we’ll see about that,” Killian muttered to himself.

Chapter 1
go down fighting

C
URSING THE DOG’S NAME, SHE TOOK THE GUN BARREL FROM HER
mouth and set the 9-millimetre on the kitchen table.

The metal had felt good. Like it belonged there. A cold, perfect piece of engineering.

She sat on her trembling right hand and stared at the weapon.

Ice crystals were melting on the Heckler and Koch’s polymer grip and running over the magazine as it lay on the yellow and green Formica,
waiting
.

Seconds ticked past in long increments of raw time.

She found herself fixating on the disarmed hammer safety and trigger lock, imagining the terrible power of the chambered round. In an instant it could all be at an end. Click. A chemical reaction. An expanding piece of molten lead. Big Dave would kick in the door and take out her kids, the peelers would arrive from Coleraine and find her note, Tom or Richard’s lawyer would wake him with the good news, hacks would drive up from Belfast and someone would put that stock photograph of her with the blonde hair on page one of the bloody
Sunday World
.

But she’d be out of it.

To be dead in the black earth, to be alive only in yesterdays…

The P30 had eight in the magazine, one in the breech – that was the one she could ride into nothingness.

Thresher barked again. If it had still been raining, of course, she wouldn’t have heard him at all. Tonight she might really have done it. Wouldn’t have thought so long and hard and let the barrel slide off her tongue.

But not now, now she was on alert in case this really was something.
Someone
.

She killed the lights, picked up the gun and went to the door.

She cracked it open and listened.

Surf in the distance, cars on the road, a football match on a distant radio.

“Thresher?” she whispered but he was quiet now. “Thresher, where are ya, ya big eejit?”

She breathed the night air. It was damp, cold. She looked up. The clouds had blown through and the star-field was rich. The Milky Way, the crescent moon, Orion.

She knew about the stars. She’d taken astronomy at Queen’s for a year before dropping out. Of course none of Richard’s lawyers ever mentioned that in their depositions. They preferred to paint her as the gold-digger, the cultchie, the junkie…

Her nails were digging into her palm. She unclenched her fist.

She closed the caravan door and went inside. Sat back down at the kitchen table. The P30 was still in her hand. A microsecond. That’s all it would take.

She reconsidered for one beat, two…

She shook her head. “No,” she said aloud. She safetied the weapon, put it in a plastic bag in the freezer, closed the fridge door.

Ended her conversation with death.

She walked the length of the caravan to check on the girls.

The nightlight was casting a pink glow over the buckled aluminum walls. Sue’s blanket had fallen to the floor. She picked it up, replaced it. Claire was sleeping like a rabbit, curled on all fours, hunched. The barking dog hadn’t woken either of them.

Rachel stared at them, trying to feel love rather than resentment.

But she was so damn tired. Tired of lying, hiding, running.

“Good night,” she whispered and went back to the front door.

She opened it and took a last look out. “Go ahead, Richard. Send your men, I don’t think I even care anymore,” she whispered sadly.

She locked the door and put the chain across.

She tiptoed to her room – the only real bedroom in the caravan – and sat on the fold-out bed. The blankets hadn’t been tossed in a week. They gave off an odour.

She reached for her fags, opened the box, discovered that it was empty.

Rain began to fall on the metal roof.

Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding…

“Christ,” she muttered.

Surely the girls would be better off without her. Rachel looked about her –
this
, this was madness.

She fished in the ashtray and found a ciggy with an inch left in it.

She flipped Big Dave’s Zippo. The tobacco tasted of sand. She blew smoke at a midge and lay back on the sheets.

The roof dissolved.

Pine trees. Constellations. An arrow of cloud intersecting with the moon. There were poppies along the granite wall and a wind bringing the smell of fennel, saffron and boggy emptiness.

She turned off the nightlight and stared through the lace curtains at the caravan park. A green phosphorescence was playing on the TV aerial of Big Dave’s caravan. She’d seen it before and she watched while it fizzed there for a moment – if fizzed was the right word – before dissipating into the black air. Most everyone was asleep now. Dave was on earlies and the football match appeared to have finished. Stu and that girl of his were probably the only ones still up, amped out of their minds or cooking blue belly to sell in Derry, or to her.

She finished the smoke, climbed under the sheets.

Darkness.

And when the traffic on the A2 died away, quiet.

She couldn’t sleep. Yes, the methamphetamine was still in her system but she hadn’t pulled an eight for years.

She was lucky these days to get four.

He
wasn’t the problem. She no longer thought about Richard or
that
Sunday morning…No, the problem wasn’t the past but the present. Money, Claire, truant inspectors, Sue, lawyers, private detectives, the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Drugs.

Rachel tugged the sheet over her face.

Wind.

Rain.

And, finally, at around two, a few hours of erased existence…

Photons from a different star.

Prayers seeping through the bedroom wall.

She stirred. The room was heady, the smell: eucalypt, pine, seaweed. She lifted the sheet from her face. Rubbed her eyes. Her fingertips were soft. Uncalloused. Unworked. She noted this with neither satisfaction nor regret. Work was for workers.

She lowered her legs to the floor. She looked for her watch but remembered that it had fallen off her wrist in town. Always sly, the Rolex had seized its chance to keep forever its knowledge of date and time, second and minute. Perhaps it was even a bold attempt on the watch’s part to set her free of such notions. She smiled, she liked that, but it wasn’t true – the watch was a present from Richard, it was his ally not hers. And it wasn’t even funny. She could have hocked it for five hundred quid in Coleraine.

She yawned, pulled back the curtain.

Blue van, red van, van so old it had lost all its colour, VW Beetle.

She pushed the window open. A cold wind from the Atlantic. She shivered.

The prayers from the Jehovah’s Witnesses next door continued. Seven of them crammed into a caravan same size as hers.

She grabbed the dressing gown from the back of her chair and put it on. She opened the window a little wider and listened to the babble.
The chanting was neither a pitch for the Lord’s intervention nor even His understanding, but rather a simple plea that the Almighty hear them. That’s all they wanted. Just hear us, Jesus, know that we exist.

“Well, I can certainly hear you,” she said, getting off the bed.

She slid open her bedroom door and checked on the girls.

Claire was reading
Little House on the Prairie
at the kitchen table; Sue was still out for the count.

“Morning,” she whispered.

Claire didn’t look up.

“Morning,” she repeated.

“What?” Claire said.

“When someone says ‘good morning’ to you, it’s customary to respond,” she said.

“Sue’s sleeping, I didn’t want to wake her,” Claire muttered.

Rachel nodded. Always with the answer, that one, but she quickly saw another line of attack. Claire was sipping from a glass of orange juice. There were ice cubes in it.

“I thought I told you never to go in the freezer,” she said.

“Mum, please, I’m trying to read,” Claire snapped.

Rachel walked the length of the caravan and sat down opposite her daughter. There were two ways to go here: get angry and give her a punishment or ignore it.

She thought for a minute and then picked the latter.

“What’s happening in your book?” she asked with a benign smile.

Claire looked up. “They just got Jack back, okay?”

“Who’s Jack?”

“Their dog, they thought he was drowned – please, Mum.”

“Fine,” Rachel muttered and walked to the front door, ruffling Claire’s hair a little roughly as she went past. She undid the locks, opened the door, looked between the branches of the Scot’s spruce. A sky like irises, low clouds, vapour trails.

The sun had not yet cleared the trees to the east.

Dave’s paper was lying on his porch and his car was still there. He was, apparently, sleeping late.

She felt lonely.

Now there weren’t even stars. She rubbed her chin, scuffed her flip-flop on and off, on and off. She peered through the line of caravans to catch a glimpse of the ocean but there was only a gluey sea mist down there today.

She sat down in the door opening. At her feet an empty vodka bottle, a half-smoked cigarillo, a wine glass containing rain water and several watermelon rinds now covered with hundreds of black ants.

The prayers to her right suddenly stopped and after a minute the whole clan came out and began manoeuvering their way into the Volvo 240. Four boys, two girls. Eldest nine. Dad run off to England.

Rachel waved. Anna waved back.

“Rachel honey, after I leave the weans off, I’m swinging past the Spar. Need anything?” Anna asked sweetly.

She had a good heart, Anna. Rachel couldn’t bring herself to really like her but she had a good heart.

“Nah, I’m okay… Wait, no, I need some fags.”

“Sure. Usual?”

“Usual.”

The Volvo backed out, wove through the caravans and down the dirt track. A new Toyota Hilux was half blocking the way out, so Anna had to swerve over almost into the ditch.

“Some people, no consideration at all,” Rachel said to herself. Probably yuppie scum here to buy blue belly from Stu.

Rachel got up and transferred herself to the deckchair next to her house. She lifted one of last night’s wine glasses, plucked out a dead fly and drank.

Perhaps she dozed a little.

She woke with a start. The sun was higher, the mist had burned off. It was March 17 so it was never going to be warm but it was shaping up to be a—

Something was wrong.

“Claire?” she said.

No answer.

She stood. “Claire?”

“What is it?” Claire demanded from inside the caravan.

“Is your sister awake?”

“She’s in the bathroom,” Claire said with the verbal equivalent of an eye roll.

Rachel nodded to herself but it still didn’t feel quite…Something Claire had said, something about a dog.

She turned and looked at Dave’s house. The newspaper. The truck. Wasn’t Dave supposed to be on earlies?

She walked back to her own caravan. Looked in. Toilet flushing. Claire reading.

“Claire, darling, could you do me a favour and tell me what time it is?” she asked.

“Mother, please!” Claire said.

“What time is it?” Rachel asked more firmly.

“It’s eight, okay? Now can I read?”

Eight o’clock. Dave should have left an hour ago. She stared at the new Toyota down the trail. No one in the cab. The thing just sitting there.

And what about Thresher? Where was he?

“Thresher?” she called. “Thresher, boy.”

She waited.

Nothing.

“I’ve got a treat for you. Thresher? Thresher!”

No barking, no running.

“Thresher!”

A chill along her vertebrae.

She dropped the wine glass, tied the robe about her and ran back inside the caravan. She took the book from Claire’s hands.

“Mum!” Claire screamed.

She grabbed Claire’s wrist, squeezed.

“Mum, you’re hurting me.”

“Get dressed. Pack a bag. Everything you need. Grab my stuff too and get your sister dressed. Now!”

“What’s the matter?” Claire asked. She looked frightened.