Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series) (15 page)

It was her turn to make an indecipherable Celtic noise.

“This article was about subatomic particles, see? An’ they were explainin’ how these particles didn’t occupy space or move through it in any way that was familiar or quantifiable. An’ the really odd thing—an’ this was the thing that struck me—was that these particles came in pairs that even when separated were affected by interactions happenin’ to the one. The scientists couldn’t figure out how—it made no sense—as information travelin’ from one half of the pair to the other would have to exceed the speed of light. Which we know is impossible. That left them with no answers, so they called it a phenomenon. Which I think is the name assigned to anything scientists don’t have the answer for. The conclusion bein’ that it wasn’t explicable in human terms, as it didn’t behave in a rational or orderly manner that could be classified. But it seemed to me that such a thing was very human, as so much of our behavior is inexplicable. Ye cannot slice a cell an’ divine by it why one man is a coward an’ another a hero. Some say it’s environment an’ experience, but I always thought it went deeper than that somehow.” He shook his head, as if absorbed momentarily by some inward melody, something only he could hear.

“Anyhow it brought back to me some of my schoolin’, both the formal an’ the informal,” he smiled ruefully, “there was, as ye may well imagine, a great deal of time for readin’ in prison. Well, I remembered a passage of some book that said matter could neither be created nor destroyed, an’ it went on some further way down the page to say that matter was really just another form of energy, an’ that energy was really tricky, as it could exist—even just the potential of it—in absolute nothingness. So I pictured it as this void, where something could be, an’ then just as swiftly, not be. An’ if that were so—an’ these men seemed to think it was—then it made definin’ where the borders of reality were a little difficult. Do ye follow me so far, Jewel?”

“I think so,” she said slowly, the hairs on her arms rising in the night air.

“Well if ye take it as a given of our story here, that the borders of reality are merely a matter of the creature perceivin’ them, then ye can follow the next bit of what I’m goin’ to say. We’re three dimensional creatures an’ so it follows that we live in a three dimensional world, right?”

She nodded and he paused to take another drag on his cigarette, the glowing red tip of it punctuating the dark that was gathering around the edges of the dying firelight.

“But suppose, darlin’, that a two dimensional creature existed in our sphere, an’ to be honest we’ve no way of perceivin’ that they don’t, what do ye suppose this cigarette end would seem to it?”

“Well I suppose that would depend on the angle of the ember, wouldn’t it, and whether or not this two dimensional creature was circumnavigating the cigarette?”

Casey snorted. “We’re not talkin’ about the Magellan of two dimensional creatures, just an ordinary run-of-the-mill entity, sittin’ firmly in place with no desire to move. Ye understand?”

“Ah,” she slapped a hand to her forehead, “I think I do, this is an Irish, male, two dimensional creature, nursing a pint of ale.”

“Woman,” Casey eyed her sternly, “do ye wish to hear the rest of this tale or not?”

“Pray, go on,” she said with mock seriousness.

Casey shot her a purely Irish look, cleared his throat and continued. “Alright then, suppose yer seein’ the burnin’ end as a two dimensional creature. Imagine there’s a knife slicin’ the cigarette an’ ye can only see where the knife cuts, not above it, nor below it and only on a flat plane out to the sides. But at the same time this figurative knife is cuttin’ at an angle, so what do ye see?”

“A red line for a split second and then nothing.”

“Aye, like a flash in the corner of yer eye, but when ye turn yer head, it’s gone an’ so ye presume there was naught there. Now, Jewel,” the red ember in question danced in graceful curlicues in the air with the movement of his hands, “supposin’ that we three dimensional creatures are that knife, we see neither above nor below and only on a flat plane out to the sides.”

“A fourth dimension.”

“If ye must stop there, then aye, let’s presume a fourth dimension. So three dimensional creatures drifting through four-dimensional space will see only shadows of things, an’ not the reality, because it’s outside the sphere of their dimension.”

“Are you saying ghosts exist in this hypothetical fourth dimension?”

“Well,” he drew the word out reluctantly, “I don’t know exactly
what
I’m tryin’ to say. Only that there are things, as yer Englishman said, between heaven an’ earth, that have no explanation, but it doesn’t make them less real.”

“Ghosts?”

“Aye, ghosts,” he leaned over to the side and stubbed out his cigarette, face drawn into the dark-inked lines it always assumed when a topic bothered him. He leaned back into the pillows and took a deep breath.

“Now, Jewel, I’ve never told a soul this story, ‘cause I thought I was mad at the time an’ that I’d only imagined it all in retrospect. An’ ye know, I’m not so overfond of talkin’ about my days in prison at any rate. Well prison, as ye can well imagine, is not a pleasant place for any man to be, but it’s altogether less so for an Irish Republican militant who’s incarcerated in a British facility. An’ truth be told, though I’d acted like a pig-headed fool an’ deserved the punishment I got, I was still a boy. An’ I was scared out of my wits an’ still grievin’ my da’ an’ the loss of my brother. An’ maybe these elements combined provided a rip in the fabric of reality—who’s to say?

“I think, too, that whatever thin thing it is that separates us from the animals, that civilizes us, it’s not so much in existence in prison. Humanity on the outside is a fragile thing. It doesn’t take a great deal to reduce us to violence an’ murder, but in prison even the pretence of that is gone, an’ it’s every man for himself.”

She shuddered. She could well imagine, a little too clearly perhaps, what life had been like for him. Nineteen and defiant on the outside, but still a boy needing his father’s love and assurance on the inside. His innocence and inexperience would have stuck out like a sore thumb as well. Tall, dark and by no means ill favored in the looks department, which would have attracted all sorts of unwelcome trouble for him. The sum of this equation meant he would have been a magnet for the uglier side of what prison life had to offer.

“Things didn’t go easy on me right from the start, but I’d expected some of it.” His tone shifted, his look faraway. “But there are things a man cannot imagine unless he experiences them. I’d no real notion of how brutal one human bein’ could be to another. I thought I’d seen all there was to see of hatred an’ anger an’ violence in my own streets. But in prison my education was,” he glanced at her quickly, “shall we say, to be broadened extensively.”

He gazed down, stroking absently at the quilt that covered the two of them, and she knew he’d gone back in his memory and did not register the squares of velvet and flannel, worked in shades of deep purple and lavender, but instead saw the high, dark walls of Parkhurst, clear in his memory as if they’d been outlined with charcoal and then burned into his synapses by tempered steel.

“It was October an’ near to the end of it. A time, my Daddy used to say, when the gates between one world an’ the next briefly stand open. About a week before Hallowe’en...”

It was autumn, and though he could not define it by the usual set of signs, he could smell it in the air, the smell of smoke and mellow sunshine with a whiff of decaying earth accompanying them. If he closed his eyes and breathed in deeply he could almost feel the crunch of leaves— amber, copper, brown, bronze and gold under his feet, releasing the silk-fine dust of death as they fractured under thick-soled shoes. At night, if he scrunched his large frame tight against the damp, mildewed concrete of his cell he could just see, through the barred window, a wedge of the moon and a scraping of stars. Autumn was the least spectacular of the seasons in the sky, the first magnitude stars all but invisible in the great galactic haze of the Milky Way, with only summer’s lingerings left.

His father had begun to teach him the names of the stars when he was four. Gave the words to his soft child’s tongue, where they rounded into natural forms and he could, even then, taste the sand and honey of their root language. Stars named fell from his tongue in streams, in buckets and cascades to form bright burning bridges in his subconscious for all time. Sometimes he thought the repetition of these things, the focus on something so far from earthly care and woe, was the only thing that kept his sanity intact.

He was on kitchen duty that morning, stirring the dirty gray industrial slop that passed for breakfast, reciting grimly to himself from the table of chief spectral classes. He’d just worked his way through examples of orange stars, ‘Arcturus, Pollux, Alpha Ursa Majoris’ and was beginning on the characteristics of red stars, ‘rich spectra showing many strong metallic lines with wide bands produced by titanium oxide,’ when he was hit sharply between the shoulders by something narrow and hard. He barely missed overbalancing into the porridge pot, cursing aloud at the same time, as he swung around to face his attackers.

They stood in a loose semi-circle, five of them, all gripping paddles identical to the one he held in his own hands.

Fear, his constant companion of late, hit hard, grabbing him in the knees and stomach. Just as quickly he put it to the side, his brain sizing up the opposition. Five men, none as large as him, granted, but, as he’d long ago learned, sheer number made up for a lack of size every time. They were familiar to him, prison being the small world that it was. Henchmen of the Baron of D wing, where all illicit items could be bought and sold, if you had the coinage, be it in prison currency or blood.

“Well lads, who do we have here then?” asked the one in the middle—the corporal to the Baron’s general and likely the man who would decide his fate in the next few minutes. Any talk would have to be directed at him.

“I’m mindin’ my own business, doin’ my job here, an’ not lookin’ for any trouble,” Casey said, keeping his voice polite but not allowing for the weakness of actual civility.

“Did I say ya could speak, ya Paddy bastard?” said the corporal, smiling nastily and revealing a row of rotting, broken-off teeth. He looked, Casey thought, like a weasel in need of dental work.

“I wasn’t aware I needed yer permission,” Casey replied as coolly as he could manage, though his intestines felt as though they’d turned to icewater.

“Ya need my permission to take a piss round here, boy, it’s only a right div as would forget that.”

“Aye well,” Casey said, half-turning back towards his cauldron of bubbling oats, “I’ll bear that in mind next time nature calls.”

“E’s a smart mouth on ‘im lads, an’ we know as what happens to smart mouths in here, don’t we.”

From the corner of his eye Casey could see the four henchmen nod as one—well-trained and likely bluntly stupid. Unfortunately, that made them all the more dangerous. They’d do as they were told and wouldn’t give a thought to consequences. He angled his back carefully, casting a quick look about him. Not an ally in the place, the other men in the kitchen had their eyes carefully averted, hands on their assigned tasks. He was alone, utterly and completely. The brain, wondrous weapon that it was in many situations, was of limited use when the physical odds were squarely against one. He’d have to do the best he could with size, agility and his paddle and hope to God they didn’t kill him.

Not only did they nod as one, they moved as one and he could feel the force of their coming in the air as it began to push against his skin. He tensed himself for it—muscles contracting, skin pulling back toward the sanctuary of bone, body trying desperately to find a fixed anchor in the sea of adrenaline that poured unrestrained through him.

They were almost to him now, he could smell their body odor—onions, piss and, oddly enough, rosewater. Then, again as one, they stopped dead, only a foot and a half away, close enough to grab, close enough to hit. He slid his hands lower down the haft of the paddle, cursing the sweat that slicked their path and wondered, rather wildly, if he would live to see the next hour.

He could feel the tremor of their muscles through the air, the violence that heated their blood as one, making of man an animal. He braced himself, knowing the first blow was always the worst. Then suddenly their eyes flicked to the left, and they backed away an inch or two, the expressions on their faces changing almost comically. He didn’t relax, but dared a slight intake of air. He knew something had put up their guard but couldn’t afford to turn and look.

“Somethin’ goin’ on here, lads?” Casey judged the gruff voice to be a few yards behind and to his right. It was one of the screws, a Welshman by the name of Manfred. He was known to be fair-minded and honest. He’d never treated Casey any worse or better because of his nationality. It was a gesture that was appreciated; most of the screws weren’t so unbiased. Casey dared a larger breath, the flood of adrenaline tapering down to a stream. He’d been given a reprieve, though he knew it wasn’t likely to last long.

“I asked a question, lads, if you’ve not an answer I suggest the bunch of you clear off and let this boy finish his work.”

Casey could feel the guard standing close behind him, his stick tapping rhythmically against a callused palm.

Wisely the four men backed off, the postponed threat still there in their silence, though. Casey let the haft of the paddle slide down, his arms suddenly the consistency of the sticky porridge that bubbled beside him.

“Thank ye,” he said quietly.

“Be careful laddie, those ones are not done with ye yet,” Manfred said, before casually strolling the length of the kitchen, as if he were out for a Sunday meander.

Casey returned to stirring the porridge, though every hair on his body remained alert and prickling. He remained wary throughout his pull of kitchen duty, through the cleanup, the scrubbing of the large pots, the mop up of the floor. He didn’t relax until he sat to eat his own breakfast. He was aware of other men milling about, but the hunger in his belly overrode all other sensations, even that of caution. He was, after all, only a boy, still growing, and seemed to be hungry all the time. The food prison provided doing barely more than taking the edge off the gnawing in his belly. He was just finishing up the last of a glass of milk when someone called his name. It was the surprise—the sound of his Christian name after months of not hearing it—that made him turn without thought.