Exit Unicorns (Exit Unicorns Series) (10 page)

Paddling so hard and wondering why he didn’t just let himself drown, people had pissed away their lives on less pain, less heartbreak, less black sucking fear. Other people had, why not him? Why oh why not? Because it would be letting down the team, the one comprised of the raging son and the sad, mad dad. As if his father was breathing his breath, standing on his feet, circulating his cursed blood. Well the sad, mad dad had really let the team down this time. At the time of his father’s death, some echo of self-preservation had kept Jamie from the ocean.

Jamie knew Yevgena had a sharp eye, always had, for the obvious and the not so obvious, he knew why she’d brought this girl, this lick of flame, this heat and need and God-awful fragility and set her down like a sacrifice on his doorstep. He knew and had been utterly suckered by it anyway, just as Yevgena had known he would be. This girl who seemed to have been born yesterday, because he knew that there was no farm in Nova Scotia, no rundown little farmhouse with old, silent parents and a dog with a black patch over one eye. Oh yes, such a place probably existed but not for her. No cold, lonely, misted up northern patch of earth had grown her. It just didn’t happen that way. All that fine, white skin and perfumed hair, all that length of leg and wit of mind hadn’t been fired and brought forth upon a harsh, barren bit of rock. She was lying, but, he’d credit her, she did it like a trooper.

‘Tried for years and then when she’s fifty she gets pregnant and there I was, nine months later,’ she’d said, smiling and popping the last bit of a jam sandwich in her mouth. Her appetite was voracious, as if she was afraid she’d never see food again, as if in the very recent past it had been a limited resource and she’d come to know hunger rather too well. Liar, liar, beautiful liar.

Odd, she was the first woman to stir desire, to make it break like a sickness in his veins and she was the first he had turned down. He’d wanted to make love, with all the elements there, mind, body, soul but drunkenness, for once, had prevailed. He’d slept, there beside her and had been sober when he awoke and had no desire to remedy the fact. It worried him, that.

Insanity, that was her game he supposed, the sort of insanity that youth insulates itself with, known in less cynical circles as innocence.

She’d learn, everyone did, he’d been severely infected with innocence himself once. She’d learn that there was an eleventh commandment that negated the previous ten. Hope Is the Only Sin.

Four weeks after Pamela O’Flaherty had taken shelter under his roof, Jamie, for a variety of reasons, found himself sorely in need of a drink. However, for quite possibly the first time in its history, the House of Kirkpatrick was without refreshment of the alcoholic sort. He searched each floor, including the cellar, where there was nothing more potent than wine to be found and even resorted to crawling on the floor looking under furniture and fixtures. The result of which being himself, standing in the middle of the study floor, cobwebs tangled artistically through the gold of his hair, utter fury flushing his face.

“What do you mean you got rid of it all?” he said, thinking with lover like longing of the twelve cases of Connemara Mist that only this morning had graced his cellar.

Pamela, head bent over her recently begun studies, took a moment before looking up. There was, Jamie noticed, very little in the way of repentance in her face.

“I took the tops off and poured it down the sink, believe me it took up a lot of my day and Maggie is still complaining about the stink of it in her kitchen. “D’you know the Latin word for drunk?” she asked, brow furrowed over her books again.

“Ebrius
,” he replied automatically, almost missing the insult. “Now look,” he said trying to keep his voice steady, “you’ve no right to go rooting through my things and disposing of my belongings. If you are to go on living here we’ll have to set up some basic rules.”

She closed her books with deliberate precision and looked him directly in the eye. “Do you suppose,” she said tartly, “that the Romans had a term for piss-artist?”

“I—what—pardon me?” Jamie spluttered.

She sat back, quite relaxed and waved a hand around indicating the study. “I thought, seeing as you’ve such a taste for dead poets and dead languages that you’d be more comfortable if you could hide behind dusty words.”

“More comfortable with what?” Jamie was feeling flustered and more in need of the absent drink by the minute.

“Your title, the name of your occupation. A man who practices law is a lawyer, one who teaches is a teacher, one who drinks, seemingly as his life’s work, is a piss-artist, at least that’s what they call it where I come from.”

“And just where exactly is that ?” Jamie asked, voice like splintering glass.

“I’ve told you,” she said hastily, “Nova Scotia.”

“Well it’s quite an education you got down on the farm isn’t it? Latin, Greek, philosophy, psychology, classics, all that and,” his hands shot out lightning fast and grabbed her own, “you managed to keep such pretty white hands. How did you do it?”

“Goat’s milk,” she said smiling, fingers curling up over her palms, “it does wonders for the complexion.” She pulled her hands smoothly out of the grip of his own, “It’s supposed to be a real tonic for the nerves as well, you might,” she picked up her books and made to leave the room, “try it for your own, you seem to be shaking rather badly.”

Jamie, left cursing ten ways from Sunday, picked up a Waterford vase and hurled all twenty pounds of it at the fireplace. It made a glorious smash, though it wasn’t as satisfying as he’d hoped it would be. He sank into his father’s chair and finding no comfort there wished he didn’t need a drink quite so damn badly.

The ‘dollar-a-dance’ girl from Mulligan’s Stew and Brew on 42
nd
Street in New York had never actually seen a goat much less bathed in its milk. The milk she drank, served up by Hugh Mulligan himself, came in pint mugs and always held the aftertaste of stale beer. The cows who produced it grazed some two hundred miles to the south of where she lived in a seedy, one room walk-up. There were only four months separating her from that life, four months and a lifetime of dreaming. It was indeed, she thought wearily flopping down on her bed, a bloody long, long way to Tipperary, or the settlement one hundred seventy-five miles (as the Irish crow flew) to the northeast of it, more commonly known as Belfast.

She had spent three years dancing with old men, fat men, ugly men, smelly men and men of every sort other than decent. She’d crossed an ocean, traveled down dark, deserted country roads, been fondled, rubbed and propositioned by every down-on-his-luck, seedy wastrel on either side of the Atlantic, all this so that she could come here and discover that Jamie Kirkpatrick had no memory whatsoever of her. It was, regardless of the rosy light one tried to shine on it, less than flattering.

She had given him as many memory cues as she could without completely abandoning her pride. Last night she’d even tried the poem he’d written for her when she was eleven years old, she’d managed quite skillfully to work it into the conversation, only to have him say, ‘It’s merely a variation on a fifteenth century French poem and not,” he’d raised his eyes from the book he was reading, “a very good one.”

She’d only just managed to choke back the words, ‘Well you should know as you bloody wrote it’ and he mistaking her look for insulted injury had hurriedly backpedaled, “Well it’s not so bad. Here though,” he’d risen and fetched a blue cloth-bound book from the overflowing shelves, “this is the original,” he opened the book and smoothed the page down, “humble, charming and syntactically tight. Three syllables per line, never more, with the emphasis always falling on the middle syllable, listen:”

Ma mignonne
Je vous donne
Le bon jour;
Le sejour
C’est prison.
Guerison
Recouvrez...

Chills chased down her spine as the French fell off his tongue like Parisian snow, soft, sooty and not altogether wholesome. This close she could smell the individual notes that made up his particular scent, limes and sandalwood with an undernote of something very comforting, freshly baked bread or newly mown wheat fields or...

“So you see simple and yet really rather clever,” Jamie, having reverted to English, was looking at her oddly.

“Um yes, rather,” she said jumping slightly in her seat.

“Are you feeling alright?” he asked, looking absurdly paternal in spectacles and cardigan.

“Fine,” she assured him, trying to tame what felt like a horribly overeager smile.

“Mmphm,” he turned back to the book, “now your fellow while catching the gist of the poem, has his syllables all over the place, and seems to have thrown structure out the window with the bathwater. Could you just recite it for me again?” He’d taken out a pen and a piece of paper, and with black ink poised expectantly over the muted sand of the paper waited for her to begin:

My sweet girl,
Head aswirl,
I come to wish
A good day.
The bed’s constraint
Your blush does taint
Your constitution
Please recover,
So that I may
Cease to hover
Near thy chamber door.
Sweetmeats
To treat
Thy languor.
Indulge thy whim
Because of him,
Who says it must
Be so.
For if not
My dimpled nymph,
I fear to see
An elfin sylph,
In thy plenteous stead.

“See,” Jamie said pen still stroking across the page, “the syllables run the gamut from two to six, the emphasis is uncertain and the control non-existent. Still,” he smiled indulgently, “it’s a nice gesture. Though I must say there’s something a bit Humbert Humbertish about both of the poems, original and secondhand, it’s as if he can almost imagine himself licking the back of her knees or something. Rather inappropriate, though perhaps we’re mistaking the age of the addressee.”

“I was twelve,” she said stiffly, wishing to God and his impish angels that she’d never mentioned the poem. “And I had a broken ankle, so my
friend
,” she allowed the word to fall under the weight of emphasis, “made up stories and poems to amuse me.”

“Kind of him,” Jamie said jotting notes down the side of the poem, “but still,” he looked sharply over the top of the gold-rimmed, half-spectacles, “but still you were only-”

“Twelve,” she supplied rather testily.

“Hmm,” had been his only reply, then he’d sat down and begun playing with the poem, shuffling words, syllables, languages, mumbling to himself, lost in a world of ink and paper where words were master and slave to one’s pen. He’d not even noticed when she left the room.

Tonight had been a disaster. She shouldn’t have thrown his whiskey out but the truth was he did drink too much, a rather disturbing amount. At least then he didn’t ask too many questions. Questions, she saw quite suddenly, she’d no desire to answer.

She undressed and changed in the tiny bathroom across the hall, cleaned her teeth and after offering up a half-hearted thanks to God for the day, slid between the worn linen sheets, with their lovely scrolling ‘K’, just in time to hear a knock on her door.

“Yes,” she called out in a muffled tone as she discovered that her hair was wrapped around the buttons that adorned the pillowslip.

Jamie’s head popped around the door. “Just thought I’d check if you’re alright, need more blankets, anything of the sort?”

“No,” she said sharply as the pillow, with the aid of her fingers, wound ever closer to her head.

“Actually,” he stepped all the way into the room, “I came up to apologize, perhaps I’m not used to such blatant honesty, but that doesn’t excuse my own behavior. You’re right, I drink far too much and I plan to rectify that, though I may,” he smiled like a small boy, “need some help.”

“Certainly,” she said, tears stinging her eyes as the pressure on her scalp became more pronounced.

“Are you quite alright?” he asked, peering through the dim light at her.

“Fine, well actually my hair’s wrapped around this damn button,” she gave it a yank, “ouch.”

“Here.” He sat on the bed and with sure, deft fingers unwound her hair, strand by strand, from the offending button.

“I thought,” he said, “that if we talked in the evenings, played cards, games, it would distract me. And perhaps you could help me finish off some of my father’s work. He was translating some old Irish folk tales when he—when he—”