Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series) (93 page)

Movement at the corner of his peripheral vision caught Pat’s attention. He looked up and time stopped, poised itself on the fulcrum of a pin, and then exploded outward into history; the burn of cordite in the air, the motion of the sniper rising over the wall as the man crawled as close to the ground as he could manage and still keep moving. These things became memory and event even as they happened. Something surged in Pat—blind animal rage, the taste of it red in his mouth, the smell hot on the wind.

“Christ have mercy,” he breathed to himself before crawling out toward the man. The ground in front of him was instantly peppered with bullets, the dust blinding him as it kicked up into his face. Someone grabbed his ankle from behind jerking him back, scraping his knees in the process. He kicked his leg free and started forward again, blinking the grit from his eyes.

The man was still crawling, dazed, uncertain which direction might offer some safety. None did. The first bullet to hit him drove him to his chin, his mouth a round ‘O’ of shock. Still he pushed himself along, cheek scraping the ground, eyes unblinking with bewilderment. His body jerked one more time and then he fell full length against the cold stones.

Despite the futility of it, Pat had to try and reach him. He stretched out close to the ground, wriggling more than crawling. The man’s face was turned toward him, mouth open, trying to form words, pale blue eyes wide with pain.

Bullets sprayed the ground in front of Pat again, dust choking him, eyes streaming from the smoke. He tucked his face into the collar of his coat and pushed forward. A bullet grazed past his ear with a high-pitched whine, singeing his skin in passing. He moved again, was within feet of the man when the pavement exploded in his face. A burning pain sliced across the side of his head, flattening him to the ground instantly. His vision filled with a haze of smoke and fire, then went black.

When he came to he was lying flat, fingers just touching the scraped knuckles of the man he’d crawled out to save. A sudden silence had enveloped them, as though the chaos were very far away. Maybe, he thought dazedly, the bullets had temporarily deafened him. From somewhere a breeze blew across them, ruffling the man’s thin pale hair, animating that which was no longer alive. For it was too late. The look of profound surprise had changed into something far more permanent.

Pat closed his eyes, willing himself to stay still, despite the overwhelming instinct to run and hide. He knew if he moved he was dead, it was that simple. Now all he could do was pray that no one was crazy enough to try and come after
him
.

Someone did try, though.

He heard the footsteps, careful and slow. His rescuer was a middle-aged man, wearing an anorak and a pair of navy trousers that he’d likely worn to church that morning. His dark hair was thinning in front, and his narrow face was anxious as he approached Pat and the dead man, his arms held up high in a gesture of peace to the soldiers. Pat willed him back, his mouth forming the word ‘no’ in silent desperation.

“Tis alright son, we’ll get ye out of—”

The shot came from behind and spun the man around so that he faced the wall he’d left behind. The exit wound opened out into an arc of blood and bone as he fell to the side, his head only a few feet from where Pat lay. The blood was warm on Pat’s face, the smell of copper so strong that it took all he had not to retch onto the slick rectangles of pavement beneath his face. The taste of it was leaking into his mouth and he could feel tiny fragments of bone cutting into the back of his left hand.

Behind him a wail rose, high and thin on the chill air, a keening for an entire people, for a nation shot down while trying to get up off their knees. He thought that if one cared to look, one would see hope rising, ghost-like, on that wail, abandoning all those that were lying below.

How long he was there on the pavement, the chill of the stone leeching into his body, the lifeblood of another drying tight on his skin, he never knew. It felt like forever, as though the world might have passed through an age, progressed a thousand years or fallen back a thousand, before he heard the voice of redemption in his ear.

“Come on laddie, we’ve got to get you out of here.”

“Father Jim?”

“It’s me, alright. I’m goin’ to have a look at your head before we move you.”

“It’s only a graze,” Pat said, though the amount of blood that had flowed into his face since he’d been hit frightened him.

Father Jim probed around the wound, causing Pat to take a sharp breath.

“Does it hurt badly, then?”

“Stings like the devil. I’d be more worried if it didn’t hurt though.”

“You’re right, it’s a shallow graze, they always bleed the worst for some reason. We’ll get you a stretcher.

“No, I can walk,” Pat said, “I was only scared to move for fear they’d shoot again.”

“I think they’ve stopped,” Father Jim said, though he didn’t sound entirely convinced that the carnage was over.

Pat pushed himself up onto legs that were the consistency of poorly set jelly. He stumbled over to a brick wall and leaned into it, dazed, the cut on the side of his head still trickling blood. He blinked, trying to take in what was before him, numb with incomprehension. A slight haze still hung over the courtyard, the wind unable to clear the bullet traceries out of the air. Around him, people kneeled, sat, stood dazed and horrified, some still half choking on the whiff of CS gas that had blown their way. From where he stood, he could see two bodies that were unmistakably dead, and more wounded. The young boy who’d been shot through the lung was now lying on a stretcher, with Father Jim praying over him.

Pat wiped a hand across his forehead, clearing the blood from his eyes, then limped over to the boy. He was on his back, a large dark pool of blood congealing beneath him. His eyes were a dark brown and stared sightlessly at the sky above. A fringe of brown hair, neatly trimmed, fell over his forehead. Christ, he was just a baby.

“Is he—”

Father Jim nodded, then drew a jacket up over the boy’s face. “Yes, he’s dead and about all of sixteen years if he was a day, God help us.”

The priest stood, face gray and exhausted with shock. “You’d best let me look at your head again, lad, it’s still bleeding.”

“I’ll do, there’s people need your help more than I.”

“Quit being such a stubborn bastard, and let me have a look.”

He winced slightly as Father Jim parted his hair to have another look at the wound. “It’s shallow enough that you won’t need stitches. You were damn lucky, another millimetre to the right and you’d be dead.”

Pat nodded numbly, wondering why he’d been spared. It had been
that
damn close, and he’d walked away with a cut in his scalp, nothing more. It made no sense, particularly not when he could still taste another man’s mortality on his own tongue.

“I think the Paras have left,” Father Jim said, eyeing the walls warily. “So we’d best get on with it.”

For the next hour they assessed the wounded, patched them as best as they could with cloth torn from shirts and jackets, and got them into ambulances. The ones suffering from shock and fear they set on the road home, knowing there was little they could do for them in any case.

Finally they had cleared everyone off, and Father Jim was conferring with the last set of medics to leave the scene, his good wool coat long gone to cover an injured boy, his black shirt now three quarters red, hands and face smeared with dried blood.

Pat leaned against a post, eyes still smarting from the gas, throat raw and head thumping. How could this have happened? And why? Did the British establishment really hate the Irish so much that it would issue a shoot to kill order on a bunch of unarmed civilians? How could it be declared illegal for a man to have rights in his own country? He was so damn tired of questions that had no answers. Tired of not having the right to be a man who was allowed to walk free in the streets of his own land. The rage was still there, crimson as the blood that stained the streets in this wee town, and it frightened him, for he no longer knew of what he might be capable.

“Pat lad, are ye comin’? We’ve done all we can here.”

Pat nodded and followed the blood-soaked form of the priest from the killing ground.

LATER, WHEN THE DEAD WERE TOTALLED, they numbered thirteen, all male, all unarmed, all Catholic. They ranged in age from seventeen to forty-one, and left behind mothers, brothers, sisters, fathers, and wives and children that would never be able to make sense of that which had no reason. The wounded numbered eighteen and were, again, predominantly male, with the exception of Margaret Deery and Alana Burke, the lone women wounded that day. And then there were all the things seen by those who had escaped the bullets. A priest being led off at gunpoint, denied the right to give absolution to the dying. Boys with gun muzzles shoved to their foreheads, young men beaten to the ground and soldiers who stood by as people bled to death on the pavement.

As the news flowed out around the world, it became clear just how far apart the Irish and British were ideologically, politically and in basic understanding. This was apparent in the attitude, which manifested itself in one British military correspondent, who was in high spirits after the news came in and was heard to say of the Paras
“They shot well, didn’t they?”

For the Irish it was horror, a slaughter, a tragedy that was entirely senseless. For the British it was a regrettable mistake, but these things happened under pressure, civilians would just have to understand that. But what was portrayed as a technical disaster on British newscasts, flickering cheerily in British living rooms was, in Ireland, a crossing of the Rubicon from which there could be no turning back. The monster might hide behind smooth suits and plummy tones, gentlemen’s clubs and ancestral privilege, but its bloody teeth and claws had been felt and seen, and would not be forgotten.

In the House of Commons, Bernadette Devlin, the lone nationalist member in an alien Parliament, was denied the right to speak on Bloody Sunday, while wake was read over thirteen dead Irishmen by an Englishman who’d gone to the right schools, had the right accent and not a clue about the wee country across the water.

In England it was a minor event, unfortunate, but quickly swallowed by the business of crown and country. In Ireland, there were now few left who would say no to the men who preached physical force as the only medium that Britain could understand. And so the IRA flourished in the wake of a chill winter’s massacre, their numbers swelling through city and field and even over the border in the sleepy Republic.

Rage, both righteous and dissolute, had raised its head from slumber and the roar would be heard down through the corridors of history for decades to come.

THE POSTMORTEMS WERE BEING HELD at Altnagelvin Hospital. Father Jim explained this to Pat over an untouched breakfast and tea that was tepid in their cups. Neither could summon an appetite, nor had either slept since the horrific events of the previous day.

“The Archbishop wants me there as an observer. I’ve also been asked to help with the postmortem examinations. I’d like you to come and record the results. What I’m asking is a fairly serious task, as we cannot afford even one mistake. They are going to try and make it seem as if this was a provoked action, not the slaughter it really was. We need to make sure we have every fact straight and written down in duplicate. We can’t allow emotion to taint anything we say or do in this investigation. We’re going to have to play this out by rules they understand, despite the horror of the situation.”

“What difference will it make?” Pat asked dully, the taint of shock still flattening his words.

“You’re going to have to do something, or kill someone,” the priest said dryly.

It was the first thing that had made any sort of sense to Pat in many, many hours and thus he found himself present at the postmortems, taking the careful notes that Father Jim had requested of him.

“Shot on his knees,” the doctor said, the dry, medical matter-of-factness in his tone having a rather dreamy quality to Pat’s ear, after the events of the day. “Bullet entered through the right chest, traveled in a slightly downward trajectory, and exited through the lower left chest.”

“Amazing,” Father Jim responded, “when he was apparently up on a roof in sniping position.” The list continued on in much the same manner, a litany of atrocity that numbed minds could hardly comprehend.

“Age of deceased twenty-seven. Bullet entered through the left abdominal wall...bullet found lodged in the posterior chest wall. Bullet penetrated the aorta and inferior vena cava.....age of deceased twenty-two....age of deceased seventeen....Christ have mercy...”

Pat recorded the results with a blank mind, knowing he’d collapse here and now if he allowed himself to really understand what had happened in the square and on the rubble-strewn barricades.

“Shot in the back while lying on his face on the ground....wounds consistent with his arms being held above his head in a position of surrender at the time of the bullet entry...wound consistent with the position of crawling on hands and knees...bullet entered left buttock and traveled through his body, exiting near his shoulder...subject killed by single shot to the head....shot at close range...”