Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series) (28 page)

“Are ye certain ye can’t wait? My friend’s place is just up head of the lane here.” Robin said, casting a quick smile across one broad shoulder at the inebriated Scot directly to his left.

“No, I can’t wait.” Neil grunted slightly to emphasize his point.

“Alright then, if ye say so.” Robin stopped the car and as the engine died, the uneasy coil slipped its knot in Sandy’s belly once again, for the night seemed terribly quiet. Still he’d a cramp in his bladder that was only going to depart along with the water and whiskey he’d consumed. Donny slid across the seat and out the door, catching his boot on the frame and lurching forward into a ditch.

Sandy’s first impression was that it was considerably colder outside than had been the cramped quarters in the car’s back seat. His second was that it was black as the devil’s thoughts out here away from the city lights. Dark and silent. A shiver pressed itself like a spasm of quicksilver up his spine, and spread frost-like out along the sheathes covering his nerves. The primal brain telling the conscious mind what it should have known all along. That something was very, very wrong with this situation.

It was then that he saw the other two men; the two he’d thought had given up following and gone home. The men who stood now, in the dark, mere shadows, rifles slung taut over shoulders, leveled at waist height, fingers blunt on the triggers.

Robin had gotten out of the car. Sandy could see the flash of his teeth in the dark and hear Neil’s zipper grate as he fumbled it down. The taste of fear, hot and bitter as scorched iron, flooded his mouth. The three of them were unarmed, their senses dulled by drink. He thought he might be sick and then swallowed the nausea. He didn’t want to be found covered in his own vomit. His parents deserved better and so did Fiona.

He gave his last thoughts to her, even as he heard the slick hiss of a pistol emerging from cloth. He hoped she’d find a good man to marry, someone solid in a low-risk profession, not, please God, another soldier. Then he remembered the way the hair at the nape of her neck was like duck down and smelled softly of the scent she wore.

The first report from the pistol was muffled and Sandy felt the air beside him crumple as Neil fell first to his knees, then face forward into the brittle heather that covered the ditch. He’d given Fiona an armful of the summer’s first heather only last July, how many months ago was that?

Donny was screaming now. Poor kid, he was only eighteen. Just a baby. They shouldn’t let babies into the army; they didn’t understand the risk. Then just as suddenly Donny stopped, mid-scream, his last words on earth ones of piteous terror. That left only himself. Sandy swallowed hard and straightened his back.

The barrel of the pistol slid cold into the soft and fragile hollow where the spine, with its ropes of blood and spiralled strings of vessels, exploded into ten thousand million nerve cells. But Alexander didn’t scream, nor beg for mercy. There would be none to witness it, but for his own sake he would die as a soldier, asking no quarter, knowing there would be none granted.

He waited for the click of the trigger, wondering if he’d hear it, or if the bullet would do its work first. And then realized somewhere through the terror that had jumbled his senses that the man behind him was singing. The song came to him slowly, confused as he was by the odd turn of events.

‘The breeze of the bens
Is gently blowing,
The brooks in the glens
Are softly flowing;
Where boughs
Their darkest shades are throwing,
Birds mourn for thee
Who ne’er returnest.’

“Come Sandy, do ye not know the songs of yer homeland? Sing the chorus with me man, for sure ye know it.”

The man’s compatriots had seemingly melted back into the night, for he knew without being able to look that they were alone and that the cat had, for some unaccountable reason, decided to play with the mouse. Sandy knew he was not dealing with an ordinary madman, but one who enjoyed the kill for its own sake and not just the political statement.

“I said sing with me, Sandy. Ye know we can make this hard or we can make it quick. It’s yer own choice. Die standin’ with yer dignity intact, or die beggin’ for mercy in a pool of yer own blood. I’m inclined to the former as I’ve other places to be, but if ye’d prefer it the other way I’ll spare the time.”

If Sandy had no one to consider but himself he thought he would have taken the second option just to inconvenience the bastard, but for the sake of his mum and dad and Fiona he’d take the quick death. He didn’t want them to carry the double burden of knowing his death had been long, drawn-out, and painful. And so he sang.

‘No more, no more,
No more returning,
In peace nor in war
Is he returning;
Til dawns the great Day
Of Doom and burning,
MacCrimmon is home
No more returning.’

Its dirges of woe
The sea is sighing,
The boat under sail
Unmoved is lying;
The voice of the waves
In sadness dying,
Say, thou are away
And ne’er returnest.

“One more time Sandy for the chorus, ye’ve a decent voice for the music. If ye’d been born on Irish soil we might have made somethin’ of ye.”

Sandy swallowed hard over the bile in his throat, willing it to keep working, willing himself to keep standing.

Above him the night was bitter and black with not a star to be found. Inside his boots his feet were aching with cold, toes already numb. Cold toes were an odd thing to worry about, he thought, when he knew he’d be dead within seconds.

‘We’ll see no more
MacCrimmon’s returning,
Nor in peace nor in war
Is he returning;
Till dawns the great day
Of woe and burning-,’

Alexander McCrorey, a lieutenant in Her Majesty’s Royal HighlandFusiliers, did not hear the shot, nor did he hear Robin Temple, voice arcing sweet and aching into the night, finish the song they had sung together.

‘For him, for him
There’s no returning.’

Turning back toward the road the man with the forget-me-not eyes crossed himself and walked away from the still warm bodies of the three young Scots behind him. He did not look back.

THE WEST BELFAST YOUTH CENTER, which admittedly only existed in a theoretical sense, stood on the fringes of the Beechmount Housing Estates. In previous incarnations the building had housed a cobbler shop, a grocery and, most recently, a storage facility for repossessed furniture and electronics. It was rundown, bought for a song, and needed more repair work than the Coliseum. It did, however, possess the benefits of a wee apartment above stairs and was, for the foreseeable future, the place Pamela and Casey called home.

Casey was, at present, cursing volubly at the doorframe leading into the tiny kitchen, having just hit his head on it for the second time that morning.

“Jaysus Murphy, did a midget build this damn place? Last night I got tangled up in my damp shirts.” He fixed his wife with an affronted glare. “Anyway woman what possessed ye to hang them over the stove?”

“There isn’t anywhere else to hang them,” she said, kissing his bare shoulder as he squeezed past her to the table, where eggs, sausage, and toast were awaiting his attention.

Pamela waited for the tea to finish steeping before joining him. Under the tiny table their knees bumped. Casey sighed. “It’s like bein’ friggin’ Gulliver in the land of the Lilliputians. I don’t know how much longer I can manage this. I’m bruised from head to toe.”

The table, where they sat eating their breakfast, was flush to the wall and next to the only window that graced the north side of the flat. It was a small window, likely the original from when the building was constructed. Despite its squatness, and a peculiar wavy quality to the glass, it provided an unobstructed view of Kirkpatrick’s Folly, the ancestral home of James Kirkpatrick, so named for its hodgepodge of architecture. A Georgian front and Victorian rear, not to mention the Edwardian study; it was the result of a marital dispute several generations previously over design. Casey had merely given the view a gimlet eye. Pamela took this as her cue to leave the topic of Jamie alone, though she found herself stealing surreptitious glances out the window several times a day.

The morning was particularly clear and she could see the western corner of the house, where Jamie’s study sat. From this vantage point she could only see the spire that adorned its roof, but could picture the entirety of it plainly in her mind. Built completely of glass and wrought iron, in the fresh morning light it would sparkle like a trapped star.

She poured out Casey’s tea, and pushed the cream jug toward him. “Drink your tea man, it’ll restore your spirits.”

“Will it then? I don’t think there’s room for them in here.”

Despite damp spirits, Casey set to his breakfast with a hearty appetite. He’d found a temporary job on a construction site and was working long hours.

She munched absently on her toast, watching the morning sun gild the topmost chimney of Jamie’s house a soft gold. The grounds would be fully awakened from their winter sleep now, and everything would have that shimmery green mist of spring about it.

“Are we goin’ to talk about it then, or are we goin’ to pretend the man doesn’t exist?” Casey asked suddenly, breaking in on her reverie.

“What?” she asked startled into slopping her tea onto her plate.

He gave her a pointed look from under dark brows.

“I’m not blind, an’ there’s only the one house on that hill.”

“Sorry,” she said ruefully, “it’s only I feel awkward not having gone to see him yet.”

“Ye needn’t worry on that score,” Casey said, helping himself to more eggs. “He’s only just come back the three days ago. Pat said he was going up to see him night before last.”

“Oh...well then perhaps I ought to wait.”

“For what?” Casey asked practically. “Yer the nearest thing to family the man has. I think he’d be insulted if ye stood on ceremony. It’d be rude not to go an’ see him Jewel, I understand that. I might not particularly like it, but I understand it. He must know we’re here by now, he and Pat are pretty tight these days. Why don’t ye do it today, ye’ve no other plans, do ye?”

“Not as such.” She looked around the flat, which she’d planned to tidy into some semblance of order. If escape was being offered she was more than happy to take it.

“Then go.”

She eyed him as he stood and retrieved a shirt from the clean stack near the radiator. He neatly avoided her gaze though, shrugging into his shirt and buttoning it up. Jamie wasn’t quite the point of tension he’d been early in their marriage, but the mention of him could still make the air vibrate with the words that weren’t being spoken.

She stood and skirted the table to where he stood. Sliding her hands down the front of his shirt, she savored the smell of his freshly bathed skin.

“Does it bother you that Pat and he have become good friends?”

“Mm—well I’d be a liar if I said no—but he’s kept an eye out for the wee bugger these last years, an’ I appreciate that.”

“You’re going to have to accept the fact that Pat’s a grown man, entitled to get into trouble if he wants to.”

“Aye well, even when he’s gray as a goose he’ll still be my little brother. He’s our daddy’s stubbornness. Has to right wrongs whenever he sees them.”

“Oh, and you wouldn’t have any experience with that yourself?”

He made a derisive noise deep in this throat as he tucked his shirt into his jeans and reached for his coat. He took a last long slug of tea from the cracked mug he favored, and then bent over to kiss her.

“I’ll be back late tonight—promised Pat I’d come to the meeting with him—so I can get a better idea of the plans for the drop-in center.”

In exchange for the use of the tiny flat, Casey had agreed to run the drop-in center on a temporary basis. Or it might be more accurately stated that Pat coerced him into it, after plying him with several glasses of Connemara Mist the third night they’d been back in Belfast.

“I think Jamie gave him a case for purposes of bribery,” Casey had said the next day as they stood contemplating the low-ceilinged, dingy bargain he’d struck. “He provided the lion’s share of funding for this venture, though my brother’s not so much said so; but Pat seems to have his way with most of the decisions. Only Jamie would give him that much leeway.”

Despite his initial misgivings, Casey had begun to show signs of enthusiasm for the project as Pat laid out his plans for eventually reviving this entire portion of the city.

“Well he’s maybe a wee bit optimistic, but the lad has a dream an’ he’s chasin’ it, can’t fault him there. It’s nice to feel I might be doin’ somethin’ that makes a bit of difference to someone else. An’ I’ll not come home reeking of fish.” He sniffed his hands, wrinkling his nose up, convinced that he still hadn’t rid himself of the smell of the cod he’d pulled, filleted and gutted over the last eleven months.

After Casey left, Pamela loitered about a little in her robe, drinking another two cups of tea and contemplating the Belfast horizon. Kirkpatrick’s Folly had been her home when she’d first come to Belfast and the man who lived in it the only friend she’d possessed in the world at the time. He’d also been her first love, unattainable as gold at the end of the rainbow but nevertheless the man to whom she’d first lost her heart. The man she’d gone away with, ostensibly as friends, the first summer she’d known Casey. The man to which Casey thought he’d lost her. Much had changed since then, for all of them. Her correspondence with Jamie over the last two years in Boston had been sporadic at best.

Jamie’s life, what the papers and magazines didn’t splash about, was very private. And very complicated. Though there were precious few who knew the truth of just
how
complicated. She was one, and even she had no idea what he was up to at present, nor how far into the fire he had his irons. Politically or personally.

Being back in Belfast provided more than one complication in her life. More than anything that fear was centered around Casey—despite his intentions to the contrary—getting sucked back into the vortex of the Provisional IRA.

The Provos had become
the
IRA since the split within the ranks of the Official Army in late ’69. The Belfast Republicans had long felt disenfranchised from the ‘lads in the South’. When Catholic Belfast burned during the riots in August of ’69 and the South neglected to send help of any kind, it only confirmed what the Northerners had always suspected—they were on their own. During a December meeting in Dublin the Army voted to recognize the two Irish governments and Westminster. To many this was a slap in the face to the core of Republicanism which had never recognized the separation of Ireland into Republic and Ulster. By the time of the Ard Fheis on January 10, 1970, the writing was on the wall. When the vote to drop abstentionism was passed, 257 delegates walked out and met at a pre-hired hall and thus the Provisional Army was born. A split Casey had predicted and prepared for during their last months in Ulster, before their home had burned to the ground and he had, for a night, believed her dead.