Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series) (53 page)

“Will he be alright down here?”

“He’ll do,” Casey said, and gave her a gentle push up the stairs.

The room was a little one, set darkly under damp-stained eaves. The bed, in accordance, was narrow. Casey eyed it, one eyebrow cocked dubiously, even as he yawned.

“We’ve slept tighter before,” Pamela said, shucking off her sweater and jeans, and sliding between the musty smelling sheets with a shiver.

“Aye, so we have, but I’m thinkin’ sleep had little to do with it at the time.” He yawned again and rubbing his face with one hand, followed her into the narrow bed. His body was hot against the chill of her own, and she snuggled gratefully into his length.

“Do you think we’re safe here?” she asked, knowing from the rhythm of his breathing that he was still awake.

“Aye, safe as can be managed at this point. Can’t see what the bastards would want with me anyhow, I’ve only just come home.”

“Have they ever needed a reason before?” she asked pointedly.

“Mmphmm,” Casey grunted wearily, “no I suppose they haven’t. Now darlin’ let’s get some sleep, it’s been a long day an’ unless I miss my guess, tomorrow will be longer still.” He kissed her shoulder, punched up his pillow a bit, and settled with a sigh. Two years of sharing his bed told her he’d be asleep in seconds. She hadn’t even counted to twenty before she felt the deep, even rise and fall of his chest behind her.

She herself was tired, but her eyelids refused to close. When she forced them shut, knowing she desperately needed the rest, the image of Casey being manhandled by soldiers seemed to be imprinted on the back of them.

She rolled onto her back, careful not to disturb him. The tiny garret room was sliced in two by moonlight. The wash of it fell half on Casey, leaving his other half in darkness. He was peaceful in his sleep, face soft in a way it never was during the daylight hours. At moments such as this, she didn’t regret bringing him back. Despite circumstances, he seemed to have found an odd sort of peace.

His left arm lay down the side of his body, hand loose and relaxed on his hip, each hair delineated, fine as a whisper, in the silver light. He seemed suddenly fragile, as if a breath would scatter him, that if she were to merely blow out gently, he’d disperse in moonlight and shadow like powder.

She rolled another quarter turn, put her ear to the solid wall of his chest, and holding her own breath, listened. His heart was steady, slowed by sleep. She let her breath go carefully, in pieces, a bit at a time until the ache in her chest eased, and then closing her eyes, fell asleep.

She awoke hours later to him above her, moonlight gone, his body moving against hers in need and urgency. She opened wordlessly, wrapping her comfort around him, answering him in kind with need of her own. It was quick and ungentle, an act of reassurance in the dark. As if each of them singly was necessary to the survival of the other.

They fell back to sleep without having uttered a word. When they next awoke there were soldiers on the stairs.

IT HAPPENED SO QUICKLY that she was never able to piece it together coherently in her mind later on.

She snapped out of sleep to the sound of shouts, a deep rumble on the stairs and Casey bolting out of the bed as if he’d been shot. He threw the sheet back over her body, grabbed his pants and shoved his legs into them rapidly, casting a desperate glance at the window as he yanked up his zip.

“Fock, fock,
fock,
” he said as his fingers refused to cooperate. Someone started to pound on the door then with the heavy ominous thud of steel against wood.

Their eyes met over the sound of splintering as the door began to cave in to the demands of a rifle butt.

“Take the boy an’ go to Jamie,” he said bluntly. “I’ll get word to ye as soon as I can.”

She began to protest but the words died on her lips as the door flew open and the small space became a whirlwind of violent movement.

They took him as he stood, shirtless and shoeless, thumb bleeding where he’d caught it in his zipper. Hands cuffed behind him, rendering him as defenseless as possible.

“May I be so rude as to enquire why yer doin’ this?” Casey asked with, all things considered, an enviable amount of cool.

“We don’t have to explain anything to you, you Fenian bastard, we’re entitled under the Special Powers Act,” said the soldier, who was busily yanking on the handcuffs to ensure they were tight enough. And who then stuck his gun roughly under Casey’s nose as an added point of emphasis.

Pamela sat frozen on the bed, sheet clutched to her chest, and watched as they dragged her husband down the stairs and away from her. Once they cleared the stairs, though, and the last soldier had turned away and down, she moved solely on instinct, letting its swift hand guide her to her abandoned clothes and then to the smooth black box she’d hidden under the bed the night before. She grabbed Casey’s shirt and coat and ran down the stairs, where khaki backs were only now funneling their way out the door.

Lawrence was yelling, and she could hear a scuffle begin at the bottom of the stairs.

“Lawrence don’t,” she heard Casey say in a sharp tone. There was a thump and then the soldiers pulled Casey out through the door.

Time shifted, its focus narrowed, the aperture she always sought in these adrenalized moments outlining the morning with a sharp finger. The camera was loaded with fresh film, ready to go, ready to aim and shoot, ready for its defining moment—this moment—even if she wasn’t.

In the narrow street dawn was beginning its soft-shoe crawl, mellowing the cracked pavement, the shabby row houses, and the tiny patched gardens with their fading blooms. A muddy-colored lorry straddled the width of the lane, chuffing like an out-of-breath hippopotamus, a giant child’s toy set down in a space too confined and dangerous for its girth.

Automatically, as it had begun to do in these situations, her brain separated itself, like taking a box out of a box, leaving the original in its place and moving the latter over parallel to the original, though slightly askew. Photographer versus wife, picture taker versus the woman who wanted to scream in the street, who wanted to take the rifles these olive boys wore slung so casually over shoulders and narrow hips and turn them on their owners. And so the entire scene, (five minutes in real time, eternity on celluloid) laid itself out for her in freeze frame.
Click,
Casey cuffed now to the side of the lorry, morning light washing him over rose and silver and gold, half-naked and barefoot in the street; an Irish man in an Irish street in the twentieth century, hard to countenance and yet there for the
clicking,
there for the taking. Take the shot, take the picture, leave the pain, it interferes with the work, work now, bleed on the weekends, in the nights, in the quiet, that’s what Lucas had taught her.

Click,
British boy in uniform, scared stiff, because you can’t trust the Irish, bastards have always been so goddamn unpredictable, they’ll kill you as soon as look at you, feed you tea in one hand and poison in the other. He scares her, this one, fear makes him nervy and he keeps glaring at Casey who looks back with one of those impenetrable black looks she knows only too well. It was like running into a brick wall, full tilt, one of those looks—a point of no return ‘this might be your game now but someday we’ll be in no man’s land and then the field is wide open’ kind of a look.

Click.
Another soldier, tramping through the garden of some horticulturally avid old-age-pensioner, crushing forget-me-nots underfoot, snapping hollyhocks with the stem of his gun, just another jungle boy in the jungle. A hard northern face, a Geordie from up near the line, couldn’t predict these ones, sometimes they were nearly as disenchanted and disenfranchised as the Northern Irishman and sometimes they knew how to hate just like the Irishman, so they were much more dangerous than their southern cousins.

“Get the fuck back in the house,” he said to her, voice low but carrying like a poison-tipped arrow in the morning. Hard man, hard voice. He’d chosen the right occupation.

Click.
Another man being dragged into the stillness, half-asleep, confused, yelling and thrashing, getting a hard kick for his pains and subsiding retching on his knees as the soldiers cuffed him to the lorry.

“Mornin’ Liam,” Casey said as calmly as if they were merely passing in the street. And yet there was a steely undercurrent, a tone that made the man, cuffs biting hard into his wrists, stand up slowly, take control of his breathing and face his captors calmly.

Click.
Liam’s wife, Mary, standing in the street, clutching a threadbare housecoat about her soft frame, nine months gone with their fourth child, her mouth a round ‘O’ of silent tears.

Don’t ever project your own emotion into the frame, Lucas had told her, don’t become a part of it. When you take a shot with your emotions entangled, you cloud the clarity of your subject, you see them from a limited perspective. Our job is to get the story, he’d said, not become a part of it. Otherwise what we see is a mirror reflection, not the subject as they really are.

Click.
Casey’s face, unsheltered for a moment, a look meant only for her, a private communication here in the street, with tense uneasy soldiers standing all round. She lowered the camera and walked towards him with neither haste nor deliberation.

“I’d say goodbye to ye,” he said low as she approached, “I don’t know when—”

She shook her head slowly. “I know.”

How many of these personal communications had passed between them before? A hundred? A thousand? A turn of the hand, a slant of the head, the flicker of an eyelash, a torrent of words in an instant, all without sound.

She stretched up on her toes, her cheek meeting his just as a blistering orange sun hissed above the horizon. She could feel his heat, even in the chill of morning, the dull burn of his unshaven cheek against her own. Then she drew back slightly, put her mouth to his, biting down on his lower lip.

“Open yer mouth,” he said in a low voice, and she did as bid, as if it were the most natural intimacy in the world to kiss one’s husband open-mouthed in the street while he stood cuffed to an army vehicle, with soldiers pointing guns in their direction.

“Hey there, break it apart,” said a gruff voice to her side.

She pressed her face harder against Casey’s in response, feeling the bone beneath the skin, and the blood that flew on its well-ordered way between the two. Then pulled back to meet his eyes. They were dark, fathoms deep, and soft. And for a moment, only a flash, she could feel him against her as he had felt that first time they’d made love, a private universe of two, blood to bone, two restless objects made of the stuff of stars. Then the long cold oiled barrel of a rifle inserted itself between them and Casey’s face changed imperceptibly, and without a flicker of muscle or betrayal of skin he was once again the hard man in the street. And she the abandoned wife.

Then, all at once, they loaded them into the truck, Casey, Liam, and four dazed looking young men who appeared half asleep. Stunned by the shouting, the guns in their backs while the warmth of their beds still evaporated from their skins. She stood with Lawrence, arm wrapped securely around his shoulders, as much to detain him as to comfort him.

Casey looked back only once, the morning sun gilding him with liquid fire, a stray breeze ruffling the ends of his hair. His eyes met hers across air and light, and it seemed as if the whole world moved in slow motion as his head tilted to the side and he blinked once, a small smile lifting the left-hand corner of his mouth. And then he was gone.

“Where are you taking them?” she asked through gritted teeth, aware of the soldier beside her, the Geordie with the hard jungle face.

He smiled, revealing pointy teeth in a sharp face. “To hell.”

Then he walked off whistling a jaunty tune, swung himself up onto the tail end of the lorry, slapped its side sharply, and yelled to the driver.

The vehicle rumbled in a higher pitch, as if protesting this early morning duty, and then with a grinding of gears and a lurch, they were gone.

She swallowed hard over a throat thick with fear, and felt the small flat plastic-wrapped packet bite hard into the roof of her mouth, where Casey had pushed it during their kiss, the taste of his tongue still on it. She knew before she spit it out into her waiting hand what she would find.

Under the plastic wrap, a sheet of thin paper, folded again and again until it was no more than an inch square. And upon it, etched in Casey’s bold, decisive hand was the address of where it was intended to go, one letter, two strokes. A falling curve, and an up tilted slash.

A simple, black-inked ‘J’.

THIRTY-ONE HOURS AFTER he’d left on a mission of futility, Jamie returned home. He was red-eyed, exhausted, and gripped in the claw of a fury unlike anything he’d before experienced. Internment had been expected, the streets rife with rumor for weeks, but as with many of life’s uglier events, the reality had turned out to be a bit of a shock. He’d run into so many metaphorical brick walls in the last twenty-four hours that he felt physically bruised.