King of Morning, Queen of Day (25 page)

“With watch and ward we sought to thwart her power,

But all along the power was in our midst.

In our company she found one like herself

Of latent gift, a rose that bloomed unseen

To waste its fragrance in self-dissolution,

The beast was here among us all along.”

Then, as if scenting a change in the wind, Gonzaga added, “Ereh fo tuo teg ew fi aedi doog a eb dluow ti kniht i.”

I
T HAD TAKEN DAYS
of psychological warfare, but she had persuaded Damian to take her to the Arcadia Ballroom. To hand your coat to the cloakroom attendant and bay cigarettes from girls with trays around their necks and step out under the glitterball was to undergo a rite of passage into Grown Up Stuff. Rozzie and Em went to the Arcadia Ballroom with their respectives, and their plush descriptions of that soft-shoe pleasure dome had made her prickle with envy. She would never have gone on her own—people would have thought she was
that
sort of girl. But as a couple, it was more than respectable, it was a social necessity. Jocasta aided and abetted in the deception. Caldwell
mere
and
pere
must never suspect if difficult questions and more difficult answers were to be avoided.

The band played “Moonlight Serenade” as she hoped they would: cat-sensuous, purring clarinets and muted saxes. The Harry Hall Orchestra sat in white tuxes and Brylcreem behind sequin-studded frontals. H. H. himself conducted flaccidly and shot twenty-four-carat smiles at the dancers moving in crowded orbits, dappled with glitterball freckles. Jessica pressed close to Damian. She was shocked and delighted to feel a hard lump in his number one best pants.

“Oh, you naughty bugger, what’s that I feel?”

“It’s, shall we say, my professional credentials?”

Jessica was considerably more shocked than she would have been if what she had felt had been mere erectile tissue.

“You mean to say that you are in here carrying a…”

He put his hand over her mouth.

“You never can tell…”

The dancers wove through a fog of mentholated cigarette smoke. A crooner crooned something into a squat microphone. Couples applauded. The night and the music played on. A cord of sexual tension wound tighter between Jessica and Damian. She looked at him and felt something in her chest struggle to tear free. The power of her emotion frightened her, and that edge of fear made her hunger sharper. They left the dance before the last waltz to make the last tram. They sat on the open top deck in the heat of the night, smoking, communicating at a level beyond speech. Jessica rested her arms on a railing and looked out at her city, purpled, mellowed, by the hot summer night.

“You think you have your life all set, that nothing’s ever going to change, and then it changes, all at once. All of a sudden, things happen and life becomes very complex.”

“What do you mean?”

She did not answer immediately, but rested her cheek on the brass railing and watched the city roll past. “Complex. Like you see all the things you’ve ever wanted for your life falling through your fingers and you can’t keep a hold of them anymore.”

“You come away with me, and you can be anything you want to be.”

“Don’t piss me about, Gorman.”

“I’m not. I’m serious. Come with me.”

“Oh? You keep saying that—come away with me, to the waters and wild, to Sligo and a new life, just us, together, forever. Daydreams, Damian, daydreams. Life is not like this.”

She returned to a number twenty asleep, the house all dark save one sliver of light under Jasmine’s door. The sliver expanded into a wedge. The Shite stood, arms folded, faintly intimidating in flannelette nightie.

“Go to bed, you spying little frigger.”

The Shite was defiant, unassailable.

“No, I won’t go to bed, I won’t. You won’t make me.”

Jessica made to push her sister back into her roomful of teddy bears and toy horses and Girls’ Brigade pennants.

“No one likes you, Jessica. No one likes you, don’t you know that? You tell lies and swear and no one likes you because you have to be different from everyone else. You can’t be the same, you have to be different, better. The boys don’t like you; they all talk about you and laugh. Bullshit Caldwell, they call you, did you know that? None of them will go out with you. The only boy you can get is a murdering IRA man.”

“Shut up!” Jessica hissed, fearful of lightly sleeping parents, but The Shite was speaking with a voice and inspiration of her own. She had discovered she could hurt her sister and was wielding her newfound power with vindictive abandon, twisting the knife.

“No one likes you. I don’t like you—I don’t like you at all.”

“Well, you just have to like me, because we’re sisters.”

“No, we’re not,” gasped The Shite. “You’re not really my sister. That’s what the nice hurdy-gurdy man with the monkey told me. You’re not my sister at all—not a real sister, like Jo-Jo is, and Mummy isn’t your Mummy and Daddy is not your Daddy and you’re not really their daughter.” The Shite froze, hands to mouth, conscious that she had crossed the line between righteous indignation and calculated cruelty; moved into a region where cause and effect no longer behaved in strict ratio to each other—a state of minute action and colossal reactions.

Jessica’s face was pale, as if drained of life by a vampire. Her lips moved faintly.

“What? What? What are you saying? What are you
saying?”

Hearing the swelling strain of hysteria, The Shite slammed her bedroom door with a sob of fear. The sound of key turning in lock was uncannily loud.

The telephone rang.

Numb to everything but the demand of the ringing telephone, Jessica went downstairs to answer.

“Hello? Caldwell residence.” Her mother insisted she call it that. It lent an air of gentility.

“Hello?” A woman’s voice, incredibly far away. “Is that Jessica?”

“Who is this?”

“Is that Jessica?”

“Who is this?”

“Is that you, Jessica?”

“Yes, this is Jessica. Who is this?”

“This is your mother, Jessica. Your mother.”

“Hello? Hello? Hello…”

“Your mother, Jessica. Your mother.”

The heat in the hall was stifling.

“What is it?”

“Remember, Jessica.
Remember.”

The line went dead,

“Hello? Hello! Hello…”

Seated on the threadbare carpet, worn by the passage of many lives, she
remembered.

It had been as if her life were a broken bridge and she had stood on the edge of remembering, looking across the gap too wide to leap at the part of her life that was unremembered. Then the words were spoken and they were the keystone that completed the broken arch, and she was free to cross over into the unremembered and remember it. One foot after another, she had made the crossing and all the lies that had made up her life rose before her like startled birds. She saw, she heard, she touched, she remembered.

She had loved them with a child’s intuitive, uncritical love, and all the time they had known it had not been their right. They had not deserved Mother-love, Father-love. Mother. Father. Sisters. She ripped away their names, their titles, and left them pure identityless faces, bundles of formalised relationship without substance. One short, clean stroke had cleaved the threads that bind individuals into a family.

Adopted.
Adopted.
The great whirling machinations of betrayal. The fanlight above the door cast a brightening rose of light across her; short summer’s night at its end.

W
HEN SHE WOKE IN
the morning they were there. She struggled out from under the Army greatcoat, picked the straw from her hair and clothes, opened the shuttered hay barn window, and they were waiting for her. The birds. The field before the barn was white with massive, malevolent, yellow-eyed gulls; the hedges and telegraph wires were heavy with starlings. Rooks rattled their wings in the branches of the trees; on the telegraph poles, ravens fluffed their feathers and clacked their beaks. Every eye was fixed on her. She watched more glide in through the low dawn mist to join the vigil. She heard Damian moving in the still-dark recesses of the hay barn, preparing for this day’s journey.

“Damian, come and look at this.”

He looked up, saw her silhouetted against a rectangle of morning sky.

“Jesus God, would you get away from that window! You want everyone in the county to see you?”

“I was right. They are following me.”

“For God’s sake, girl!” In one blink of movement, he crossed to the window and pulled Jessica away. She sat down heavily on a hay bale.

“You bastard, you hurt my arm!”

He closed the window.

“I thought we had an understanding; we can’t compromise on security. You want to get away, you follow orders. My orders.”

“I’m not so sure I want to get away so bad with you issuing your orders orders orders all the time.”

“You seemed sure enough yesterday.”

“Yesterday was yesterday. Today I am tired and cold and hungry and I feel filthy and this is no fun at all, Damian.”

“It was never part of the agreement that it had to be fun.”

“God, I must look awful. I need to do something with my face. Go away. Just go away. Leave me alone, all right?”

Damian shrugged and went to hacking off hunks of crusty bread with a clasp knife. Jessica rooted out a hand mirror and sat examining her countenance. Realising the ridiculousness of what she was doing, she snapped the compact shut. Like her anger, it had been a mask for her apprehension. She had thought that in escaping she had hauled herself from an increasingly inexorable stream of events moments before it crashed over the falls into panic and chaos. She had thought that in running away she was taking control of her life. She had merely extricated herself from the torrent of events to find herself carried along by another. Perils of Pauline. Tied to the tracks, with the express approaching.

She was gone before the milkman’s cart came clinking on its rounds, taking only as much of her as she could indisputably call her own, stuffed into a carpetbag. No note; traitors did not deserve notes. With the milkmen and the breadmen and the postmen and the newspaper boys, she walked the Victorian red-brick avenue of Ranelagh and Rathmines until Hannah’s Sweet Shop put up its shutters and she could pencil a message for Damian. He would not call there until half past four. She would find some way to pass the time. The aged Miss Hannah passed comment about her being up early this morning. Jessica did not hear. Her head was full of the rushing, pounding wings of betrayal. She spent the day in Pearse Station, dividing the hours between having protracted cups of tea in the station buffet and watching the infinitesimally slow progress of the hour hand around the face of the station clock from a bench on the platform. The sun moved in concert across the glass roof. Pigeons lived up there, under the roof, in the girders and pillars. Every passing train set the ones new to life in the station flapping and beating at the grimy glass in panic, steam billowing about them.

Damian arrived with the weary end of the commuter rush southward for Booterstown, Blackrock, Dun Laoghaire, and points south to Bray. He saw the carpetbag, the stony fixity of her face. They embraced under the clock. Over bacon and egg sandwiches she told him about the lies, the years filled with lies and pretense and falsehood.

“I had to get away, Damian. What’s true, what’s false, who I can trust, who I can’t trust, who is lying, who is telling the truth; I don’t know anymore. I don’t know…

“Take me with you. You said you would, you said you wanted to, more than anything. Take me away with you to the hills and the mountains—somewhere where it will all stop hurting. You said all I had to do was say the word; I’m saying it now. Wherever you’re going, whatever you’re doing, I want to come with you. Damian… you’re all I’ve got.”

He was not looking at her. His attention, the attention of every southbound commuter, was fixed on the roof. It was covered, every last inch, with the round, feathered bodies of birds.

“Now, Damian. Now. We’ve got to go…”

She led him by the hand down the station steps into Westland Row, heels clattering on the cast-iron stairs. Above them, the birds rose from their roost in a rush and clash of wings.

It was full dark before a car would stop. Jessica was footsore and half delirious with hunger and fatigue from twelve hitchless miles along the Mullingar Road. Damian had ruled out public transport; the police were certain to have a description of Jessica, and bus and train stations were the first places they would check. Hitching lifts carried a degree of danger. With twelve miles gone and the night close and cold upon her, Jessica had sat down on her carpetbag and refused to take another step. Twenty minutes later the headlamps of Mr. Peter Toohey, travelling salesman of Tomelty & Malloy agricultural implements, Multyfarnham, had swept across the fugitive couple. While Mr. Peter Toohey, travelling salesman of Multyfarnham, made lewd innuendos about what a young couple might be up to on the Mullingar Road at half past eleven, Jessica surreptitiously tore at the railway buffet sandwiches she had stashed in her carpetbag and guzzled red lemonade liberated in the name of Irish republicanism from a parked door-to-door delivery van in Chapelizod. Damian instructed Mr. Peter Toohey to drop them at a featureless farm gateway just beyond Kinnegad crossroads, which Mr. Peter Toohey did, though not without questions, none of which were graced with an answer.

Only when Mr. Peter Toohey’s red taillights had vanished in the direction of Multyfarnham did Damian feel it was secure enough to mention the safe farm. “We’ll spend the night here, then go on tomorrow.” He helped Jessica over the gate.

“Where to?” They picked a careful course across a weed-infested cow pasture. The cows ruminated and farted with bovine gentleness.

“Sligo. I have friends there. They can shelter us while we decide what to do.” The barn lay across a second gate and field. From the farmhouse came the sound of the wireless and the yelping grizzle of suspicious dogs. Jessica stopped by the stagnant drinking trough.