Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series) (63 page)

She turned toward the stairs, heading up to get dressed and then halted and turned back. Jamie looked at her enquiringly.

“Why didn’t you go directly to her?” she asked. “This is a very roundabout route to their house.”

Jamie flushed, looking slightly guilty. “I was on my way past. I had business in Armagh yesterday and it went later than expected, so I stayed over and set out early this morning. I heard the news on the car radio.”

“Really?” she said politely, but knew the doubt was clear in her voice.

She dressed, roused Lawrence and sent him down the lane to Mr. Guderson’s, and got in Jamie’s car. So that they now stood, speechless with shock, on the narrow pathway that led to Pat and Sylvie’s front door. Or rather, had.

Wisps of tear gas still floated on the air, and both she and Jamie were breathing through their coats which they had put up over their faces before even opening the car doors. A pall hung over the entire street, which looked like a war zone. Shell casings littered the narrow sidewalks, traces of the soldiers who had rampaged through the lanes and small homes. Broken glass traced glittering paths through the rubble. Remnants of shattered windows and petrol bombs that would have been one of the weapons employed in retaliation. Both armies, the ostensibly legal one and the outlawed one, had been here and left behind their particular calling cards.

Jamie blinked through eyes that were tearing, and walked up the path. There was no need to knock, for there was no longer a door to knock upon. He put a restraining hand on Pamela’s arm as she came up behind him.

“Let me go in first.” He stepped through the doorway, beyond which lay a silence that didn’t bode well.

A minute later his golden head appeared in the gloom of the entryway. He beckoned to her, his face grim.

She followed him to where Sylvie was sitting at the little kitchen table, head in hands, while around her lay the wreckage of the soldiers’ foray into her home.

The devastation was complete; there wasn’t an inch that hadn’t been torn up, defiled, broken, or smashed. It must have taken some special effort to smash the porcelain of the kitchen sink, but it had been done so thoroughly that there were only broken off chunks remaining—hanging precariously off the pipe that had been pulled away from its mooring, rendering it also, quite useless. Water was an inch deep on the floor, broken dishes, bent utensils, and shredded linens littered throughout it.

“Dear God,” Jamie breathed out and Sylvie’s head jerked up from the table, her expression a distillation of the ruin that surrounded her. Her face crumpled further when she saw the two of them standing in what had once been her kitchen.

Pamela went to her and put her arms around her. She held her tightly, rocking her, knowing words were pointless. When Sylvie had quieted, and a measure of calm was restored to her, Pamela began to thread her way through the damage, picking up the odd bit of crockery and linen that she thought might be salvageable.

Sylvie gave a wan smile. “Well I’ve the comfort of knowing there’s nothing else for them to destroy. They’ve got my man and they’ve ruined the little we had here,” she sighed, “what else can they take?”

“Don’t even ask that question,” Pamela said grimly, putting the head back on a figurine of the Virgin Mary. “I’ve a feeling they’re only getting warmed up.”

“We still hadn’t finished cleaning up from the last time,” Sylvie said wearily. “Guess it’s just as well. They’ll likely be back in a couple more months anyway.”

“You won’t be here if they do. You’re coming out to live with Lawrence and I,” Pamela said firmly, ignoring Jamie’s look of surprise over Sylvie’s head. “We’ll pack up whatever isn’t entirely ruined and bring it with us.”

She handed Sylvie a tissue from her pocket, feeling a brisk determination sweep through her. It was only the thin edge of the fury that was boiling behind it, but she wasn’t about to indulge her anger in front of Sylvie.

“Miracle these survived,” she said, pointing at a small collection of china figurines on a bookshelf.

“They’re glued down,” Sylvie said. “We’re learning our lessons in odd ways. Not that it matters now. They might as well have torn the walls down while they were at it.”

“No,” Pamela said firmly, “no, they don’t get this too.”

“Don’t get what?” Sylvie asked, lifting her head up from her hand.

“This,” Pamela indicated the wreckage around her with a sweeping gesture of her arm. “They don’t get to have your home.”

“There’s no home left,” Sylvie said bleakly, “and if Pat doesn’t come back—” her sentence was cut off in mid-stream by Pamela’s hand grabbing her chin none too gently.

“Don’t you dare say it Sylvie, don’t you dare. Our men are coming home if we have to go break them out of whatever hellhole the British have dragged them off to.”

She released Sylvie’s chin and began to pick up shattered bits of china and glass, piling them onto a half-broken picture frame whose missing photo Sylvie had found razored to bits and thrown in the toilet.

“We’ll glue together what we can and put the rest in the dustbin. Did the bastards leave any of the cleaning stuff?”

Sylvie didn’t answer, just watched dazedly as Pamela stuck her head into cupboards and under the sink, emerging triumphantly some moments later with a cracked bucket and mop, a container of bleach and some matches.

“What are the matches for?” Sylvie asked, a glimmer of worry at the determination in Pamela’s face.

“What we can scrub clean we do, what we can’t remove their filth from—we burn.”

“Burn?” That had gotten her attention. “We can’t just burn things in the back garden there’s laws...” she trailed off at the look Pamela gave her.

“Laws, Sylvie? Do you really think there are any laws after what happened today? We are the only law, Sylvie, we will decide what’s to be done and what’s not. It’s that simple.”

Pamela became a one woman hurricane after that. Sylvie helped half-heartedly, but the tears that she now could not hold back, made it hard to see what she was doing and Jamie finally pushed her firmly toward the couch and made her sit.

“Let her do it, she always cleans when she’s upset,” he said.

“She looks soft, but she’s tough as nails,” Sylvie said half-resentfully, half-admiringly.

It took several hours but between them Pamela, Jamie, and Sylvie were able to get the small home back into a semblance of order. It wasn’t pretty, but it was liveable. Jamie had called in a favor and a plumber was coming to replace the sinks later that day. A locksmith was already replacing the smashed locks.

There were the things that could be fixed—sinks, floors, walls and cupboards. Things that could be replaced—china, utensils, picture frames, a mattress that a soldier had urinated on, and clothing that had been torn out of drawers and off hangars. But what, Pamela thought, placing the few plates and cups that had survived in a cupboard, of the things that could not be replaced nor fixed—the fear, the sense of violation, and the knowledge that as an Irish person on an Irish street in an ostensibly Irish city, you were not safe nor did you have rights, even within the walls of your own home.

“Ready to go?” Jamie asked.

“If you don’t mind,” Sylvie squared her shoulders and took a deep breath, “I think I’m going to stay here. When Pat comes back I want his home to be waiting for him. And if I leave now I’ll feel as if they’ve won, and I won’t have that.”

“Good girl,” Jamie said, “just don’t be foolhardy, if they come back get out right away. Come to my house.”

“I will, I promise,” she said, fighting to keep the tremble out of her voice. She stood in the doorway, small and fair, appearing even tinier by virtue of an old sweater of Pat’s that she wore wrapped about her. As if she could keep some ghost of his strength beside her by wearing his clothes. Pamela understood the act, the attempt to keep the fear at bay, and to move forward for yourself as well as the absent man. She, after all, slept in an old jersey of Casey’s every night.

Sylvie waved, backbone straight and a defiant smile on her face. Maybe there was, Pamela thought, a way through the fear and violation after all. The strength of the human spirit never ceased to surprise her. It was the one thing no enemy had ever been able to flog out of the Irish.

The total arms haul secured by the army came to some 100 weapons, a similar number of homemade bombs, about 250lbs of explosive waiting to be made into bombs, 21,000 rounds of ammunition, and eight two-way radios. Thus the search had, in the army’s purview, been justified, regardless of the means to that end.

Arms, though, had not been the only intent of the search. It was a rough-handed sack and pillage operation meant to scare the natives into behaving themselves. It didn’t quite have the intended effect, for the horror and anger it would leave in the Catholic community would exact a far greater price upon the occupying force. The stain of it would bleed forward into the years ahead, creating bitterness where once had existed a guarded tolerance.

Though the British would not officially admit it, they were now openly and brazenly at war in their own province.

Unofficial wars by definition are messy things and none more so than the war that had existed in Ulster for eight hundred years. It was updated occasionally with new players on the stage, many of the old cast having died or simply faded into the oblivion that endless fighting creates. New props were introduced from time to time in the form of anti-tank rockets, surface-to-air missiles and bigger, tougher tanks that rumbled through the narrow streets like behemoths in a nightmare landscape.

Chaos reigned all that autumn. The travesty of internment meant all bets were off, it was now clear that the British were not going to play fair. All the talk of peace and political solutions was just what it had always been—talk. The IRA, returning to its militant roots with the phoenix-like rise of the Provos, was taking no prisoners and asking no quarter. Neither was there any granted for the civilian in the streets, merely trying to survive such a society. A society where police were murdered in their own homes or on the job with frightening regularity. A society where banks were robbed at gunpoint, arson was commonplace and riots were an after school activity every weekday.

It was a society that was freefalling into anarchy, where the only coin of worth was that of brute force. The government sat upon its emerald hill, isolated from the city, paralyzed within the knots of their own tribal biases.

Soldiers patroled Catholic neighborhoods amidst the hollow clang of bin lids, ball bearings shot with deadly skill from slingshots and a miasma of hatred so thick that it could be smelled above the reek of cordite and tear gas.

No one could pinpoint where it had begun, or what the latest battle was about nor how, in the name of God, it might end. What no one really seemed to understand was that it was not a war anyone could win.

JAMIE PARKED THE CAR AT THE BOTTOM of his estate, and they walked up through the woods that spread out behind the house. He’d convinced her to stay to dinner. In an effort to elude the press he had chosen this way as the path of greatest avoidance.

The walk was a silent one. It was very still when they entered the woods that skirted the Kirkpatrick estate. Late afternoon sun slanted through the leaves creating a soft haze in the air, which was enhanced by the bone-deep exhaustion the both of them felt. Pamela followed behind Jamie, as he cut a path through the heavy undergrowth. Under her feet she could feel the pungent release of the half-decayed berries that had fallen from their stems.

Jamie stopped so suddenly that she knocked into the back of him. She half stumbled, but Jamie reached back and caught her by the elbow, steadying her before she could fall.

“What is it?”

He shook his head and moved toward the small creek that cut across the northwest corner of his land. She looked in the direction his eyes were fixed and put a hand to her throat.

The woman lay on her back, completely submerged, staring sightless into the vault of heaven. The odd bronze light of the day, muted here by the leaves into amber, cast a mask across her features. The current hadn’t been strong enough to pull her along, but had only stranded her here; the vee of one arm crooked about a rock that rose above the water’s surface.

There was no need to ask if she were dead, the expression of surprise on her features spoke eloquently enough.

Pamela’s vision was slightly hazed with exhaustion and so she saw as if through a vapor the waterweeds that waved gently between the woman’s fingers, the glint of a worn wedding band, and the faded pink flowers that were scattered across the print of her dress. Her photographer’s mind took note of other details; the woman was barefoot, a bruise the color of gentians flowering up her left shin, her face tinged blue under the rippling gold of the shadows. Her hands were rough, small transparent bubbles of air had affixed themselves to the ridges of skin, the way they would a worn piece of wood. The woman’s hair, a faded copper, waved in the tug of the current.

Blown by the wind, small bits of dandelion fluff skimmed across the surface of the water, creating the illusion of movement across the still face. Pamela shivered, clasped by a clammy dread.

She realized suddenly that Jamie stood beside her, gazing down upon the face of the dead woman.

“There’s a bullet wound just under her right ear,” he said. She bent down and looked closely, and certain enough there was a small neat hole, long since stopped bleeding, behind the woman’s ear. Jamie’s vision, even through the exhaustion, was preternaturally sharp.

“Why?” she asked, the question seeming to encompass the weeks that lay behind them and the uncertain future they were moving towards. Jamie, as always, understood the myriad meanings in the one word.

“A thousand reasons and not a one that makes any sense.”

The wind moved through the trees, causing the dry leaves to rustle against one another. It was a stark reminder that autumn was approaching swiftly, with its cold nights and chill dawns. The presence of death seemed to linger everywhere, biting into the marrow of her bones, reminding her of the fragility of life. It struck her suddenly that one could die even when needed by a husband, by children, by the very weft of the world around them. Much as Casey was needed by herself, by his brother, by Lawrence. Fear clenched her suddenly, sharp claws in her chest, like a frantic animal. It took her this way sometimes without warning—the terror that Casey would be plucked from the weave of his own life, that days might pass before she knew of it.