Exit Unicorns (Exit Unicorns Series) (15 page)

“Anyway, my first thought was I wanted a decent meal. Nothin’ with potatoes either. Ye’d think even an Englishman could cook somethin’ so simple as a potato properly but the ones we got in prison were boiled to glue an’ scorched so they tasted like ashes in a man’s mouth. We ate them every day, mornin’, noon an’ night an’ the taste of them became like bile in my throat. Other men dreamed of iron bars an’ women but me I dreamed of those damned potatoes. An Irishman’s curse maybe,” he smiled ruefully, “an’ I was determined to never eat another one. So I found a restaurant, a little French place with the sidewalk tables, because on that first day I didn’t want to be inside not even to eat nor sleep. An’ I ordered myself a meal with a nice piece of meat an’ some vegetables an’ when the waiter comes he puts down the plate an says, ‘zee chef apologisees but ve have no rice so he bakes you a potato instead.’ Well I tell ye I laughed so hard I thought I’d pass out from it. I’m certain they thought I’d gone right off my nut.”

“Was it a good potato?” she asked smiling with him.

“Likely it was,” he said eyes traveling her face from forehead to eyebrow, to eye and nose, to linger on cheekbone and lips and come to rest in her eyes again.

“And the rest of the meal?” she asked tapping her fork on the table and going to great pains to avoid his frank, open gaze.

“’Twas strange,” he said an undercurrent of regret in his voice, “I felt as if people were watchin’ my every move, it was like I couldn’t do the simplest things properly, like chew an’ handle my cutlery. I was sure every move I made fairly shouted, ‘this man has been a convicted felon for five years now and an Irish one at that.’ But ye see it was all in my mind for someone, be it guard or other prisoner, had been watchin’ every move I made for five years, an’ seein’ somethin’ suspicious in all of it. A man couldn’t take a piss without someone thinkin’ he was tryin’ to hide somethin’ up his backside—” he stopped abruptly, “I’m sorry, I’m not used to bein’ in the company of a woman an’ my mouth is still a bit rough.”

“I’ve heard worse,” she said lightly.

“Anyhow it was a waste of the bit of money I had for the food, fine as it was, tasted like sawdust in my mouth. I ate it all anyway because it seemed as if I’d been hungry for five years an’ never able to stop that gnawin’ feelin’ in my gut, though logically I knew it had little to do with hunger.”

“And where did you sleep that night?”

“Cardboard city. Ye’ll not have heard of it?” he asked in response to her quizzical look. “It’s where all failed Irishmen sleep in London. Under the Charing Cross bridge in cardboard boxes, too afraid to stay an’ yet more afraid to go home an’ admit they’ve failed at whatever thing called them away from Irish shores in the first place. A bunch of homeless, luckless Micks. I felt more comfortable there than I had since I left my own home. I shared a bottle of Powers whiskey with an old man from Cork, who’d been livin’ under that damn bridge for twelve years. I said he could come home with me, that I could manage his passage over an’ didn’t he long to see Irish shores again? Well he looks at me for a long time without speakin’ like I am ten kinds of fool an’ then says, ‘do ye not know boyo that an Irishman who leaves Ireland can never go home again?’ An’ I, havin’ the courage of whiskey in my veins says he’s an old liar an’ doesn’t the boat train leave every blessed day for those exact shores? An’ he gives me a look, this old drunk without even the grace of his own teeth in his head, as if to say I’m a very stupid Mick indeed an’ says ‘I suppose youth is an excuse for ignorance an’ for not knowin’ there are several kinds of leavin’ an’ some that ye can never go back on.’ I suppose it’s true,” he shook his head, “though I don’t entirely want to believe it. I’d like to think there’s a way home for all of us, including myself.”

“But now you are home and everything is new. It’s a chance to start fresh.”

He swallowed the last of his coffee and grimaced, “ ‘Tis a very American attitude if I may say so.”

“You may, if you explain what you mean by that.”

“Well it’s only that ye are an optimistic bunch, perhaps that comes from bein’ such a young nation, though yer lessons have been bitter they’ve not been so many as Ireland’s. The name of this establishment for instance, ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ ‘tis typical of this land that we would cultivate the greatest writer of the twentieth century an’ then ban the majority of the man’s work an’ turn around an’ use his fame to sell things to anyone who isn’t Irish. Or that we don’t teach our own history in our schools, but present Irish history only in the context of how it relates to the history of the British Empire an’ that’s as the thorn in the great side of imperialism. Or that we’ve been stripped of our native tongue an’ to actually be able to speak it with any fluency has become something of a specialization. We can be a bloody backwards lot.”

“I wasn’t talking about nations I was talking about you, your own life and fate.”

He gave her a strange look, weary and a bit bitter. “My life an’ my country’s life are one an’ the same.”

“And where does your brother fit into that picture?” she asked quietly.

“Ye pull no punches do ye? Pat is my little brother an’ someone I will protect with my own life if necessary.”

“He’s not so very little.”

He waited until their coffee cups were refilled before responding. “That’s a fact I’m well aware of. In my head, I knew he was nineteen years old and likely to be all the things that come with the age, but in my heart he was still fourteen an’ grievin’ our Daddy’s death, he was still someone who needed his big brother to look out for him. I suppose that if he had been I’d have been able to keep my promise to my Da’. But he’s not a child as much as I might wish it.”

“No he isn’t,” she agreed.

Casey paid the check then, giving her an amused glance when she suggested she pay half, and they walked out into the rain, where streetlights, orange and grim, were the only stars visible.

“I think maybe I resent my brother a bit,” Casey said out of the corner of his mouth, the other side occupied with lighting a cigarette, “I can’t believe how well he’s done without me. Makes me feel a bit obsolete, I mean,” he said to her raised eyebrows, “here I come home expectin’ this gawky teenager with spots an’ no social graces an’ I find this tall man who’s runnin’ dissident organizations an’ has a gift for drawin’ none of us ever suspected an’ is entertainin’ naked women in the kitchen.”

“The light,” she said, grateful for the dark that hid her furious blush, “was best in there.”

“That,” she could feel his grin without having to see it, “I will tell ye, threw me for the hell of a loop.”

“It was entirely innocent.”

“I don’t know if there’s anything entirely innocent about drawin’ naked women, but it’s certainly a pleasant way to make a livin’.”

There was really no appropriate way to respond to that so Pamela wisely refrained from doing so.

“Where are we walking to?” she asked some time later after they’d passed several nameless buildings and faceless streets.

Casey stopped and looked around. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m so fond of wanderin’ now that I’ve got no walls stoppin’ me that I forget most people have a destination in mind when they’re out. I’m not certain of where we are, though if ye give me a minute I’ll sort it out. Where is it that yer headin’?”

“Up there.” She pointed at Jamie’s house on the hill, distant enough to seem a fairy castle, twinkling with light, mythical and impossible to reach from the cramped dank laneway they stood in.

“Christ,” he let out a long, low whistle. “That’s where ye live?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes,” she replied, wishing for some reason she couldn’t yet define that she’d not told him.

“Ye’d need a map to get from here to there.”

“It’s not so difficult, you take the Shankill up as far as—”

“That’s not what I mean an’ I think ye know it,” he said his tone softer by far than the words.

“I can’t really help where I live.”

“Can’t ye?” he asked and then lightning fast smiled and lightened the atmosphere by several degrees. “I’ve talked yer ear off an’ been so rude my Da’ would be ashamed he’d raised me an’ ye’ve not said a word about yerself.”

“I told you where I live.”

“Aye an’ that only deepens the mystery doesn’t it? Everyone in Belfast knows who lives there an’ I imagine he’s not yer uncle.”

“He’s my friend, the best one I’ve ever had,” she said quietly, a thread of anger running beneath the surface of her words.

“I imagine he is,” Casey said and there was no judgment in his voice. “Shall I walk ye home?”

“No, it isn’t necessary, I know the way perfectly well.”

“The question was only for politeness sake, I wasn’t actually askin’,” Casey said firmly, “I’d like to think I’m not the sort of man who’d let a wee girl walk home alone in the dark.”

“Wee girl,” she said indignantly.

“Aye, my brother may not be so little as ye say but you,” he glanced over his shoulder, “are.”

He set off at an easy pace though she had to half run to keep up with his long strides. “You have to take the street on your left up here,” she said breathlessly, trying to stay abreast of him.

He glanced sideways at her, dark eyes amused, “I know the way.”

“Bloody bastard,” she whispered stopping in the middle of the street to catch her breath.

He halted, giving her a minute to catch up. “I’ll say this ye may be a Yank but ye’ve the tongue of an Irishwoman in yer head.”

This time she didn’t bother to whisper.

You couldn’t tell a woman about prison, they were too fine for it. At least this one was. And it seemed as much as there were nights you’d like to unburden yourself and stop living with the nightmares, you couldn’t tell your brother either. Your brother who saw you as some living embodiment of the struggle. How to put into words anyway what you’d seen, done and been in the last five years? It was, for the most part, beyond words. How every day was a fight for your life, in a way that even people who lived in war zones could not understand. How you had to battle to keep your mind, soul and body from being torn apart.

When he really thought about it, which he tried not to do, he knew he didn’t want to tell anyone. The beatings, the questioning that went on for hours, questions that both you and your interrogator knew there were no answers for. Answers were not the point, blood and pain were. Body searches, rectal exams that so humiliated a man that he would weep later in his cell. He’d learned the hard way to separate his mind from what was being done to his body. He’d gotten fairly good at it. They’d left him little choice in the matter however. If the mind wasn’t hard and honed to the consistency of steel, the bastards knew it and they would use it to take you down, they would use it to kill you. And that was just the screws.

What the prisoners could do was something else entirely. They knew you in a way the screws could not. They could take a man’s mind and bend it hard, bend it until there was no hope for survival, until the outside world seemed of no more consequence than a child’s storybook. They had tried especially hard with him, ‘the little fucking terrorist’, they’d called him. ‘We’ll show you real terror you Paddy bastard.’ And they had. He’d only been a boy when he went in, a boy who’d made a tragic mistake but he was a man now. It wasn’t the method he’d have chosen but it had been most effective.

He missed his Daddy, missed him purely and without anything to break the fall of grief. He hadn’t wanted to be the grownup one, hadn’t wanted to look into his brother’s face and know he was responsible for a life other than his own. So he’d fixed it, blown up a train station and gone to jail, telling himself it was for a higher cause. It was just fear though. It hadn’t always been that way.

He remembered believing in life, the way you believe in God or fire. When his father told him about the stars and how they were great roiling fires in the sky, it had made sense to him, he’d never pictured them cold and aloof like diamonds the way so many children did. Made sense that God’s light would be fire—vast, consuming fire burning itself out over billions of years in the center of infinity or nothingness, which regardless of your optimism or pessimism, was the same thing. He couldn’t reach back to find the place where he’d stopped believing in, well pretty much anything. Some places you could not revisit if you wanted to keep going, if you wanted to make it through another day with any semblance of normality still within reach of your fingertips. You just couldn’t. You went through the motions, he was hardly unique in this respect and he knew it, everyone did it in their own way. Living, the way he’d believed he would when he was young and foolish, was too frightening, a freefall into the unknown. Knowing with his primitive brain that he might never hit bottom or that if he did he’d die from the impact, both literally and figuratively.

He was seven when his father had given him the one piece of advice essential to survival. It had been a night from one of those long ago autumns and they’d stood outside and his Da’ had pointed to the sky and said ‘that and this’ he swung his hand down and pointed to the ground, ‘is sometimes all ye’ll have boy an’ it will have to be enough.’ At seven he hadn’t understood, his father’s words, stark and ungentle, had merely made him uneasy. Now he understood and though it had served him well over the last few years, it still made him shiver in the primal regions of his body. Night was when infinity was present and infinity seemed too vast to contain something as simplistic as heaven. So he picked one star, Orion’s lucida, the warrior’s shoulder which must bear the brunt of war. Red Betelgeuse, forever away, visible from earth only because of its spectacular vastness, four hundred million miles across, swallowing planets and entire galaxies with the appetite of a star who feels death’s imminence shadowing it across time and space. His father had been right, sometimes it was all he had, the same sky and earth as his brother, the knowledge that man is made to be broken and even stars die.