Falling Glass (32 page)

Killian returned to his caravan.

The girls were there and he said hello.

“We’re having a party tonight! A cay-lee,” Sue informed him. Her face was painted to look like a cat.

“That’s great,” Killian said.

Claire was holding a tambourine. “They’re letting me play the tambourine,” she said excitedly.

“Can you play anything, Mr Killian?” Sue asked.

“I’m afraid not, I can’t even whistle,” Killian told her.

Rachel kissed him on the cheek. “That’s a shame, Mr Killian, I suppose it will be my chance alone to shine,” she said mysteriously.

“Oh, really? Why, what do you play?” Killian asked.

“Yeah Mum, what do you play?” Sue asked.

Rachel touched her nose. “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

“Well, I better go shower, I can’t go anywhere looking and smelling like this,” Killian said.

“Wait a minute, the girls have been asking me about knives,” said Rachel.

“Yeah Mum, we want knives,” Sue exclaimed and even Claire nodded.

“I’ll see what I can do to rustle up a pair,” Killian said.

Rachel shook her head. “No, you don’t understand – I want you to talk them out of it. Knives are dangerous.”

“All Pavee kids have knives, they’re not dangerous if you know what to do. I’ll ask Donal to get one of the older kids to show them the ropes.”

Rachel folded her arms.

“Come on, Mum,” Sue insisted.

“It’s a spiritual thing with us,” Killian explained. “Iron from the heart of a sun, turned into an blade which is an extension of your hand.”

Killian pointed at the leafy deciduous woods on the hills of Islandmagee. “With a knife you could live out there indefinitely. You need to learn how to use it. You need the woodcraft. It’s important stuff. As important as letters in your world. My dad made my first knife on a forge. The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.”

Rachel wasn’t completely convinced. Still keeping her arms folded she turned to the girls and muttered: “We’ll see.”

Killian excused himself and went into the caravan’s tiny but extremely well-designed bathroom. He stripped off his dirty clothes and put them in the laundry basket that hung on the wall.

He turned on the shower, set it for cold and got in. Under the water he rubbed the stiffness out of his joints and the dirt off his skin. Washing away the black muck of the surrounding country. He opened his mouth and drank the water. It was fresh and good. Brown’s Bay had a freshwater well. He wondered if the Lough Swilly site would be so well set up.

Probably not, but at least Donegal was a good bit further away…

He turned off the water and grabbed for a towel. He looked on the rack but all the towels were out there on the washing line.

“This is all your fault,” he told the reflection. “Poor planning.”

He smoothed out his black hair with his hand and tried to dry his legs and chest with a facecloth.

“Come on!” Rachel shouted. “It’s starting.”

“I’ll see you out there.”

He lifted a T-shirt and dried himself with that and then put on some more of what must be Donal’s clothes. Blue jeans, yellow socks, sneakers and a hoodie that had one of the guys from
The Big Lebowski
on it.

He tided the caravan and before stepping into the world stopped to look at the barometer on the wall. For some reason, almost every tinker in his clan had a barometer glass in their caravan, as if being able to predict the weather was an essential part of being Pavee. The hand dial on Donal’s
barometer was pointed at STORM. The sky was telling a completely different story, but somehow that seemed about right.

When he got outside he was surprised to find that the sun had set over the water and pink fairy lights had been strung between the caravans.

A ceilidh band had formed, with Donal on the accordion and assorted others on fiddle, bodhran and mandolin.

A posse of kids were dancing like lilties on the grass as the tune switched from “Ghost Riders in the Sky” to “Whiskey in the Jar” to “Waltzing Matilda”.

Rachel was nowhere to be seen, but Katie found him in the throng and gave him a hamburger and a can of Harp. Katie was wearing emerald earrings of such Celtic Twilight gaudiness that they could only have come from a safety deposit bank job of the seventies.

“Do you still not dance ya big hallion?” she asked him.

He laughed and shook his head. “I never picked it up,” he said.

“There’s nothing to pick up, you just go for it,” Katie said.

“I’m too afeard of looking like an eejit,” said Killian.

“Honey child it’s too late for that,” Katie laughed.

“Hey!” Killian protested.

“Oh, I wired the money to Karen. She was thrilled to bits. She was asking a million questions about you.”

“What did you say?”

“I told her you were an international man of mystery.”

“That sums it up nicely.”

“Well, I’m away so I am,” she said and grabbed a fourteen-year-old kid and wheeled him into the throng.

After three more songs and a round of poteen almost everyone was dancing. Killian got another burger and another beer and walked a little bit away and sat on a dune and watched them.

Was it only a fortnight ago that he was worrying about his houses and his term paper at UU? How silly. How trivial. Where he was from money and property weren’t things to be worshipped.

He lit a cigarette and lay back on the marram grass.

More songs.

More dances.

The meditating sea.

The cool sedge.

Music rippling in the night air.

Killian saw Tommy Trainer carrying a double bass.

“How do you get that thing under your chin?” he asked.

“Hilarious and original. Listen mate, you better get over there sharpish, your bird’s up next,” Tommy said.

Killian followed Tommy back to the camp.

Tommy set up his double bass next to a solitary fiddle player. The dancing area was cleared and people were sitting in a semicircle.

There was an expectant lull before Rachel came out in a long golden red dress. Her hair was curled and had daisies in it. She sat on a stool and when the violin played an A she sang as haunting a version of “She Moved Through The Fair” as he had ever heard. Her voice was elfin, haunting, old, as if she was an eyewitness to the events in the song.

She finished the final chorus and the hush of the crowd was followed by applause.

Donal stepped into the jerry-rigged spotlight.

“Okay folks, sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, but we’ve an early start in the morning, so finish your drinks and get the weans to their cots after one more round of ‘The Star of the County Down’.”

The crowd groaned and heckled but after the “County Down” finished they did as he said.

Killian found Rachel and kissed her.

“You were wonderful,” he said.

“Ten years training, so I’d better be. Me da’s money wasn’t completely wasted,” she replied.

“No, it wasn’t,” he agreed and kissed her again.

The girls were exhausted and went to bed without a fight.

They shared a cigarette on the deckchairs outside.

“I like it here,” Rachel said.

“Me too,” Killian agreed.

Rachel stared at him and smiled. “What was
that
look?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“Come on, what?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I think you romanticise this life. What do you see when you look at these caravans and these people?”

“Why, what do
you
see?”

Killian didn’t answer but he shook his head ruefully. The truth was that he romanticised it too. It was his childhood and he was an adult now.

She didn’t belong here.

He thought back to his decision at the graveyard. They’d part soon. Him and her. There was no other way.

“I don’t know, Killian, I’m just a wee, middle-class girl from Ballymena, you know? I didn’t want to be in a big flipping melodrama.”

Killian laughed and finished the cigarette. “You don’t know the half of it. My whole life has been about melodrama.”

They went back inside.

The girls were safely down.

They lay together on the bed.

Her song and the moment and the remark about her da killed another opportunity to tell her about the murders in Ballymena.

It would have to be in the morning then.

He was annoyed at his cowardice but not that annoyed. He was lying with the star of the ceilidh and the most beautiful girl he knew.

He kissed her and she held him. It was the more perfect because of the bitter sweetness of the moment. He told her of the Pavee, of their passions and their belief that the great enemy Death was conquered only if you lived, really lived when you breathed the world’s air. You fought and you ate and you breathed and moved under the stars and that was enough…

They made love until they were drenched with perspiration.

Exhausted they fell asleep in one another’s arms.

He dreamed of fire and woke up in the cold.

The tide was out.

The rain had stopped.

Everything seemed fine.

The dogs however were telling a different story.

Two of them were barking and Cora, the next door neighbour’s border collie – the smartest of the lot – was growling. Killian shook Rachel. “What is it?” she asked groggily.

“Trouble. Where’s the gun?”

“In the dresser. What’s the matter? I don’t want you to shoot anyone.”

“Let’s hope I don’t have to. Wake the girls, get shoes on them, I’ll go see what’s happening.”

He pulled on the hoodie, jeans and sneakers and slipped outside the caravan. It was a clear night and the moon was so bright you could see the hills in Scotland. The hairs on the back of his neck were up.

He found Cora who was still growling into the darkness. She was rigid and her tail was high above her body and her bright eyes were staring at the dark meadow next to the horse field.

He went two caravans down and banged on Donal’s door.

Donal answered it immediately. He was fully dressed and carrying a twelve-gauge. He looked at Killian.

Killian shook his head.

“Aye,” Donal agreed. “And I have a feeling it’s going to be a bad one.”

chapter 17
the killing of the tinkers

K
ILLIAN SNIFFED THE AIR
. T
HERE WAS AN ACRID TINGE AS IF
from an oil slick or a chemical spill out at sea.

“What’s that smell?” Donal asked.

“I was going to ask you the same question.”

“I don’t know,” Donal said.

“Cora seems to know,” Killian said.

Donal broke open the shotgun and loaded a couple of shells.

“It’s only birdshot,” he said. “I don’t think we’ll be in the business of trying to kill anyone.”

Killian wasn’t so sure about that. He took the clip out of the Hechler and Koch and counted slugs. Thirteen out of a possible fifteen max which wasn’t bad. He reloaded the clip and chambered a round.

Donal stepped out of the caravan and went over to Cora.

She was straining at her rope, desperate to go.

“Not a fox?” Killian suggested.

“We’ll see,” Donal said.

He let Cora go and she ran across the car park into the overgrown meadow next to the horse field.

Nothing happened for a beat.

Two beats.

Three.

Then there was a scream. A man’s scream and another man yelling, and a gunshot.

“Everybody up!” Donal yelled and starting rapping on caravan doors.

“What’s going on?” Killian asked.

“Women and children onto the beach! Men and boys by your houses!” Donal yelled. “What is it?” Killian asked, straining to see into the meadow.

The dogs were all going crazy now and the horses panicking.

Before Donal could give him an answer, the first of the petrol bombs came sailing out of the darkness in an arc of white phosphorescence. It smashed short of the caravans in a whoosh of flame.

“What the fuck?” Killian said.

Three more molotovs came tumbling from the night, two also landing short but the third hitting a caravan roof and bursting into flames.

There was a cheer from the field and a man deep within the meadow yelled: “Tinkers go home!”

“Fuck off gyppo thieves!” another called.

From the cheer Killian guessed that there could be twenty of them.

There was chaos in the camp now. Children were screaming, dogs barking and half the adult men and women were still drunk from the ceilidh. No one even attempted to fight the fire incinerating the top of the caravan.

“Rachel!” Killian called and he saw her standing at the entrance to Donal’s caravan with a red shawl around both girls.

“What’s going on, Killian?” she yelled.

He ran to her. “Get the weans down to the water.”

“What’s happening?”

“It’s an attack.”

“Is this about us?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

The girls were trembling.

“Is it going to be okay, Mr Killian?” Sue asked, looking at him sternly.

“Aye, it’s going to be okay,” he said patting her on the head and gently
shoving Rachel towards the beach. Rachel picked them both up and ran with them to the water, congregating on the strand with the other mothers with children; the women without kids were going to stand by their men in the camp.

“Go back to fucking Poland, ya gypsy bastards!” a man yelled in the dark as another round of molotovs and petrol bombs arced through the air. Two exploded short in the field, one went long into the sand, but one hit the side of a caravan stowing in its window and exploding inside.

“Was there anyone in there?” Donal asked.

“Nah, I think wee Connie’s on the beach,” someone said optimistically.

Two more molotovs came gultering in, one hitting a car, another going straight into a chicken coop, setting it on fire.

“They’ve got the distance now,” someone said.

A burning vodka bottle curved a steep parabola through the night air and smashed a yard from Killian’s feet. He was knocked over and he hit his head on a plastic oil drum and, dazed, he swatted at the constellations and the sickle moon.