Exit Unicorns (Exit Unicorns Series) (9 page)

“No,” Casey replied in a chastened voice.

“No, we are not,” Brian agreed, “an’ so Casey tell me— for what did I stand in the street with my father’s blood on me? So that I could raise another generation to go out an’ make war? For no better reason than anger? I want you an’ yer little brother to be safe an’ to grow to see yer own sons grow an’ prosper, I do not want to raise another generation of men who die before their sons are out of nappies. An’ yet,” Brian looked sad and old in the dim twilight that entered their kitchen, “an’ yet when I look at ye boy I’ll be damned if I don’t see the shade of my Daddy on yer face an’ in yer limbs.”

“Then what,” Casey asked quietly, “are yer nights about, Da’?”

Brian had taken a long moment to reply and when he did the words were those of a defeated man, “Because, an’ may I burn in hell for this, I cannot help bein’ my father’s son.”

“An’ I cannot help bein’ mine,” Casey said.

Brian had watched his eldest carefully after that, knowing that the boy was biding his time and waiting for his moment. Knowing too that when all was said and done he could not choose Casey’s road for him. He had a motor running in him, the boy did, a motor that would roar into life when he found what he was looking for and Brian was afraid that he knew, too exactly, what that thing would be.

Brian had worries of his own at this point. The Irish Republican Army had begun on their Border Campaign by then, a series of skirmishes that would never amount to a war but would disrupt the surrounding countryside, causing destruction and death. Beginning in December of 1956, it would run through to February of 1962 and would cost the British government one million pounds in outright damage and ten million pounds in increased police and military patrols. Six Royal Ulster Constabulary would lose their lives and eleven Republicans would forfeit theirs as well. In the South, there was an additional 400,000 pounds per annum in increased patrols and the money needed to re-open the Curragh internment camp. Belfast, with too many Catholics in a very vulnerable and tenuous position, was not included in the war. Brian was grateful for this as it kept Casey away from the action that the boy seemed only too eager to take part in. However, with his ties to the South still strong, Brian was called on in his capacity as weapons expert and tactical guide several times. He’d not much faith in the campaign itself, seeing too clearly the disorganization, the blunders and near farcical cock-ups that seemed to take place in far too many instances. It was one such blunder that would lead to his downfall.

It started as a favor for Seamus, who insisted that there had been too many injuries and aborted attempts at bombing customs huts, by reason of a young and inexperienced weapons contingent. Brian could get in and out, trigger the explosion and there would be no loss of life, merely property damage. Brian had done as he was asked and the next day he and another fellow, dressed as Dominican priests, had crossed the border without difficulty and found shelter in a nearby village. There they spent a good part of the day in agony as there was a man in the next house dying and they fully expected to be called on to administer last rites. The gig was given up, not by a lack of Latin, but rather by the need for nicotine. Brian’s young partner had gone to a local shop and requested a brand of cigarettes only sold north of the border. It was enough to tip off the local constabulary, who swooped up and arrested them within minutes.

The next two months found Brian living within the confines of the Curragh internment camp. As such things went it was not so terrible a place to be, the food was plentiful, there was tea to be had and the prisoners were encouraged to take exercise. There were four huts with approximately ten men to a hut, each with its own OC and chain of command. Brian, rather reluctantly, became the OC of his own, with the job of keeping up the morale of his fellow inmates and preventing the in-fighting which was becoming a problem within the ranks of the IRA.

Escape was a thought which haunted his waking and sleeping hours. There were certain logistics to be worked out which would require some careful planning. There were five sets of fences surrounding the camp, two sets between the camp and a six-foot deep, eight-foot wide trench which was booby-trapped with flares and tripwires. Then if one was lucky enough to surmount these obstacles there were three more sets of fences, four elevated sentry posts at each corner of the camp, manned by armed guards with the added luxury of strolling guards patrolling the perimeter of the fences, a revolver in one hand and an ammonia grenade in the other. Brian, if not exactly cheered by the odds against him, was not entirely dismayed by them either.

The opportunity for escape or rather the means of it, came to him one day while he was shampooing his hair in the shower. A clean man by nature, Brian knew he would raise no eyebrows by requesting a shower each day. The window in the shower had two not altogether sturdy bars, which when wiggled and prised gave way rather easily. Two showers later, a squeaky-clean Brian had his out. He requested his shower in the evening and given permission, went in, turned on the water full blast and shot out the window.

Wire cutters, acquired through a lengthy and tortuous negotiation with a nineteen year old internee who doubled on the outside as a metalworker, facilitated his way through the first two fences. It was when he was very carefully navigating the intricacies of the trench that he realized he was not alone. Pete Kelly, he of the wire cutters, was directly behind him, bellydown in the mud, ready to take the trip across the trench.

“What the fock d’ye suppose you are doin’?” Brian had hissed, infuriated at the gall of the boy.

Pete Kelly had smiled the feckless smile of nineteen and replied, “I would suppose I am escapin’.”

Brian had little choice then but to take the boy with him, it was either that or abandon the plan altogether. He was to regret the choice he made for the rest of his life. Brian cleared the trench safely but Pete, made overconfident by clearing the first two fences, tripped a wire and sent up a flare. Within minutes the perimeter was a hail of bullets drenched in ammonia fumes. The wire cutters were lost in the ensuing panic and Brian, dragging an injured Pete behind him, had to tackle the last three coils of fencing with his bare hands.

The miracle of it all being that they made it, aided by dumb luck and the not altogether enthusiastic efforts of the guards who could have at any moment shot the both of them stone dead. Instead Peter, blinded by the ammonia, was shot in the leg and able with Brian’s help to more or less run when they cleared the last fence.

They made it to a byre some six miles down the road, where Pete, now gushing blood from his leg and unable still to see through streaming eyes, collapsed and could go no further. He urged Brian to go on ‘as there was no use the both of them being captured, an’ perhaps he could slow the bastards up a bit.’ Brian, being who he was, stayed. He tied off Pete’s leg as best he could, fearing an artery had been struck and then put the boy flat on the floor following this position himself. The police were most likely to let loose a barrage from chest or waist height, they’d not escape capture but they would escape death by lying low.

The ear-splitting fire of bullets came a half hour later and Brian laying silent on the floor, waited it out. Afterwards there was a bit of chatter, a shout or two and then the sound of trucks pulling away into the night. Brian, astonished, waited a full fifteen minutes knowing snipers could be waiting outside to pick them off like wounded geese.

Outside he checked the area thoroughly and realized there was no one lying in wait. He went back in to retrieve Pete and saw that unlike himself Pete had not been bound by unnatural luck that night, a bullet ricocheting off a beam in the byre had struck him neatly in the temple, leaving only a small trickle of blood in its wake. Pete was dead. Brian, mindful that luck was likely to run dry at any moment, said a brief prayer over the boy’s cooling body and fled into the night. Two days later, he was back in Belfast, never quite understanding what had transpired that night in the byre.

It was for him the end of the fighting and the end of all things signifying it in his life. He chose to live the rest of his life quietly, in what peace could be bought or bartered for in the realm of souls. It was to be brief. In early 1961, four men entered his house in the wee hours and dragged him off to an unidentified house somewhere north of Belfast. He would never tell another living soul what happened in the five days they kept him and he would never be a whole man again. A year later, he would die from a blast of gelignite handled improperly. Accident, was what his oldest son would tell the youngest and Pat, for Casey’s own comfort, would pretend to believe it. Pat knew though that his father had gotten out of the business of bombs some time earlier and had not gone back. But for Casey, who was his last blood link on earth, Pat would and could pretend.

In Brian’s will there was enough money and a request that they take it and go to America. Casey would not go and Pat could not be persuaded to leave without his brother.

Casey, against every wish his father had ever had for him, joined the ranks of an IRA that once the Border Campaigns fizzled to an end, was almost entirely defunct. It seemed that all signs pointed to the end of the IRA. In a sense, this would prove to be the truth; the IRA as it had existed in its previous decades and incarnations was over but from its ashes would rise the deadly military force of the Provisional IRA.

Acting with permission of a tiny cell group and the force of his own grief and rage, Casey set off a bomb in a London tube station. No one was hurt but the damage was estimated to be near 50,000 pounds. Nineteen years of age and unrepentant in the face of judge and sentence, he landed himself five years in the British penal system, not the pleasantest of places for anyone, less so for an Irish Republican militant.

Pat, fourteen and very much alone in the world, was taken in by an old lady who, from time to time, looked after boys in trouble, boys on the run, or in Pat’s case a boy with nowhere to turn. Pat stayed until he was eighteen and then in anticipation of his brother coming home, took up residence in a Catholic housing estate, one that trembled on the brink of the Shankill Road, the dividing line between Protestant and Catholic settlements in Belfast.

On the day that Pat explained Irish history to his class, his brother had awakened for the first time in five years on Irish soil, had bid a polite goodbye to the girl in his bed, bathed, dressed and gotten on a plane for the Middle East and had begun by that simple act a ripple in the very fabric of their lives, a ripple that would continue to grow and build until it became a tidal force. Twenty-four, clean-shaven, hair freshly cut, he appeared nothing more than a handsome, extremely charming young man to the air hostess he flirted with for much of the flight. In some ways, that’s exactly what he was.

“Humbert Humbert,” said Jamie, “is not a role I ever particularly fancied playing.”

Yevgena, buckling her suitcase, took a moment to reply, “Jemmy, at nineteen she hardly qualifies as Lolita and you are not a likely candidate for dirty old man either.”

A triangle of green peeked out at her from under a white-sleeved elbow. “Then why do I feel like one?”

“That,” said Yevgena sliding into a leather coat, “is a matter between you and your conscience. I,” she glanced at her watch, “have a plane to catch.”

“Are you certain you don’t want me to take you to the airport?” Jamie asked for the tenth time.

Yevgena, sighing as only a Russian can, replied for the tenth time, “Jemmy I am perfectly content to have Liam drive me as the dear man always does. Quit trying to escape that poor girl. It was you, after all, who gave her a job and, without anyone else’s coercion, offered her shelter under your roof.”

Jamie, lying prone on a cream-silk couch, let out a sigh that in its length managed to convey injury and desolation in equal parts. This invited nothing more from Yevgena than a roll of her eyes. He sat, his sigh quite earnest now and rubbed the crease in his forehead.

“Head still aching?” Yevgena asked, eyes surveying him in detail.

“No, strangely enough it stopped aching when your little friend appeared on the scene.”

“And hasn’t since?” Yevgena asked, patting powder down the slim line of her nose and then snapping her tortoiseshell compact shut.

“And hasn’t since,” Jamie agreed grudgingly. “I do wish,” he continued, voice rather too convincingly light, “that the child would see fit to tell us where she’s from and how she came to be here.”

“All I know is I found her in the gypsy camp dancing for her dinner and she seemed a suitable distraction,” Yevgena said mildly, “besides she’s told you the same story she told me. I think it’s her way of saying that we should mind our own business.”

“Yes, well I’d rather not have some rabid pack of brothers descending on my head when they find out she’s living here.”

“I think you’ll find, Jamie, that there are no brothers or any other relations to bother you. Call it a hunch,” she added as Jamie looked at her sharply.

“I think the more relevant question,” Jamie mused, “is to ask why she would lie about her origins, what purpose could it possibly serve?” He rose to take Yevgena’s bags and escort her to the car.

“Jemmy, perhaps for now, let her have her little mystery. If someone comes looking for her then the mystery is solved, if no one does,” Yevgena shrugged, “then she is safe here for the moment.”

Jamie walked Yevgena to the car where the mist of a cool morning still hung in the air, gelling and rolling off the black-barked oaks and dripping off the scarlet berries of the rowans.

Yevgena pressed her knuckles into his jawline, smoothing out the muscles the way she had when he was a child. “You will be alright my darling boy?” Jamie nodded, knowing it was half-statement, half-question and that he wouldn’t be able to give her an adequate answer just yet.

“Don’t worry about me,” he said in his best blarney tone, “I’ll be busy, it’s not like you haven’t left me with my hands full.”

“Worrying about you is a full-time job,” Yevgena said as she slid neatly into the car. Jamie shut her door and smiled down at her open window, mouthing the words ‘I’ll be fine,’ as the car slid down the drive and out of sight.

Jamie Kirkpatrick had been the only son of a lonely father. While not actually an occupation, it was a role that occupied most facets of his life—valiant son unable to save unhappy father. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, not Jamie’s, not his dead mother’s and not even, it would seem, his father.

Jamie had tried, from a very early age, to make happiness, to giftwrap and present it to his father on birthdays, Christmases and every bloody day that rose and set before and after. Approval, every child’s dream, every child’s nemesis, seemed the surest way. It had, even now as he looked thirty-two full in the face, never ceased to be an avenue of fruitless endeavor. The best grades in school, the bloodiest injuries in sports, the dreams a father and son could share and build. None of it had done. His father, kind and loving, had been somehow absent, a shade that had never quite managed to be fully born. And now having put the barrel of a gun in his mouth, he was fully absent. It wasn’t, as everyone seemed to be certain, Jamie’s grief that was likely to destroy him, it was his anger. A man’s life was his own to do with as he wished, to take or to give as he so chose, but his father might have told him first, might have warned him ten years ago before he, Jamie, ruined his own life. His father, who had looked at him once with bitterness in his face and gall in his mouth, “such devotion to duty Jamie, you should have been a Jesuit after all, you’d do them proud.” The irony of that as his father had pushed Jamie’s shoulder to the wheel.

If only he’d said, ‘Laddie, I think at some point I’ll end all this,” then Jamie could have thanked him and not wasted ten years of life trying to keep the pieces together for a man who didn’t want the picture completed. His father had chosen to lie down in guilt, but had through the force of filial love commanded his son to keep walking, to take the burden and face the mountain. Jamie, twenty-two, freshly graduated from the English department at Oxford, dizzy with dreams and expectation, had turned his back on all those things he was too young to even know he desired and shouldering his father’s burdens walked, if not willingly, at least open-eyed into the fire.

Twenty-two and head of an international export business that he didn’t want. He had however, decided that if he was to do it, he would do it right. The Kirkpatricks had made linen and whiskey for three hundred years, each the best in its class, each a symbol of status and savoir faire the world over. Linen and whiskey could be made cheaper in all parts of the world, but none made it better. The linen with a thread count so high it felt like silk on the skin, the whiskey a painstaking process of separately malting forty-two small batches of whiskey to be combined into the special blend that comprised Connemara Mist. It was aged in oak barrels to give it its distinctive mellow taste.

Jamie’s father had kept a somewhat steady hand on the tiller, kept the sales even, the bank balance neither falling nor climbing for the years he’d run the companies. Jamie though, sensing in the postwar economy a new world market for the taking, had gone out of his way to sell Irish. The Romantic Ireland, the Ireland of Yeats, Synge and Joyce, the soft green pastures uncut by highway or high-rise, the wide empty sugar sand beaches and the dear little cottages furled in peat smoke. The long-legged, jittery racehorses, the Georgian gentility of green and gold Dublin, the pewter mist folding into purple mountains that seemed the stuff of fairies and leprechauns. When you bought Kirkpatrick linens or Kirkpatrick whiskey you were buying a piece of what your ancestors had left behind, you were buying a dream. A dream Jamie knew, that was wrapped in shamrocks and tied up with dollar bills, a dream that bore little resemblance to the truth.

The reality of rural Ireland was one of dying villages, rundown shops and men who often clung to bachelorhood well past the point of being any earthly use to a woman. It was a land of old men and women, a land that time had forgotten. A land that saw 40,000 of her people emigrate each year, never to return. The cities were often worse, elegant ruins became rundown housing for the poor with inadequate plumbing, heating or space. Diseases that other western nations had obliterated still rode, like spectral horses, through the streets of Irish cities.

Jamie, with a certain amount of longing for the land that time forgot, knew what Ireland really needed, what the Irish needed were jobs. Jobs that meant they could stay in their own country, raise their children on Irish soil, send them to school for free, get proper medical attention and have a little left over to hope with, to dream with. So he, in place of his own dreams became the seller of dreams. Selling Ireland to the rest of the world to buy it back for her own people. It was, some days, almost enough to make him forget what he’d left behind.

The Seller of Dreams. He’d been called worse. Paddy, Mick, Bogtrotter and several variations on that theme. Colleen used to call him ‘you beautiful mick bastard,’ in affection and frustration. Colleen had been the one thing he’d done for himself, the one time he’d put what he wanted before the needs of his father.

He’d known Colleen from the time she was eight and he was ten. He’d wandered off from his father one day, waiting for him to finish a conversation with a man and found himself, several harrowing hours later, in a mean and lean part of Belfast he’d never encountered before. It had been Colleen, small and sprightly, a silver-eyed elf who’d found him and taken him home to her mother like a stray puppy.

‘An’ what have we here Colleen?’ Mary MacGregor had asked, work-reddened hands on hips.

‘Jamie,’ Colleen had said as if, very simply, she’d known him the entirety of her life.

‘Well young man, ye look hungry, sit yer backside down on that chair an’ we’ll feed ye.’ Jamie had nodded gratefully and taken the appointed chair. Moments later a steaming bowl of stew was placed under his nose alongside a plate of fresh bread. He ate like one half-starved, Colleen across from him tucking into her own bowl of stew. Her mother looking on now and then as she busied herself about the stove. Colleen smiling encouragingly through the steam above her bowl. He’d never felt so comfortable or welcome in his life, not even in his own home. He’d almost wished that his father would not find him, at least not for a little while.

Of course, his dad did find him but it wasn’t until the evening, long after he’d decided he’d marry Colleen when he grew up and live in the rundown little flat forever. Eventually he did marry her but, as was inevitable, he took her to live in his world and he was to always think perhaps that was where he’d been very, very wrong.

Colleen Colleen Colleen, eyes gray as the moon, a smile to light the world and his, his for the asking, his for the taking. Perhaps God never meant for people to have that which their heart desired the most, perhaps that, right there, was the ultimate sin. For it seemed to Jamie that if He let you have it He damn well found a way to take it back.

They grew up together, the two of them, Jamie spending what time could be stolen, bought and borrowed under the fond eyes of Mary MacGregor and her middle daughter. Seven kids and Colleen was number four, three above and three below her. ‘Nondescript,’ was the word she’d tossed at him when he’d asked her how she felt about her position in the family. ‘The only thing special about me Jamie was that I found you,’ she told him later still when life had seen fit to break her heart for the third time in seven years. ‘Three strikes and you’re out, isn’t that what they say in American baseball?’ she’d said to him over closed suitcases, closed doors, closed chapters and then she’d taken herself away, for good and for always and gave herself to a man she’d never be able to see or to touch and therefore would never hurt her.

He still couldn’t really absorb it; Colleen had been his, not God’s. His in a way that she could never belong to God. He couldn’t even close his eyes without seeing her like golden webbing on the back of his eyelids, half-reclining on their bed, sweetly unselfconscious, because there was nothing to hide from Jamie, ‘come here you beautiful mick bastard,’ curling her fingers in invitation and he, young, so young, eager, in love, mad with it, unbelieving that this woman, this pale moon and water creature would allow him the liberties she did. Divine heat, so powerful that it felt sacred, religious, frightening even at times. He’d been in a state of grace for that short space, pure and without sin, or so he’d thought. There, within the sacristy of sheets, limbs and skin, he had believed love inviolable. A lucky bastard, for once. It was the way he tried, strenuously, to remember Colleen. Other pictures interfered, Colleen lying still and diamond white, death’s hieroglyphs traced fine and swirling upon her face, pools of blue-black blood laying silent beneath her upturned hands, a self-crucifixion gone awry. That had been the day she’d discovered she was pregnant with Stuart.

‘I cannot do this again, Jamie,’ she said simply, calmly, when the doctors had brought her around and informed Jamie of his impending fatherhood.

Third time lucky, he’d told himself with enough grim determination to almost believe it. Three strikes and you’re out, he should have listened to Colleen, for she’d the wisdom of blighted motherhood on her side. Unlucky bastards, he and his three sons, unlucky bastards all.

‘I cannot do this anymore,’ she said again, after Stuart. ‘I have seen too many little blue coffins and I cannot hope anymore. I may, just may be able to stay sane if I leave now, but if I stay I will surely go mad.’ So, he’d let her go, thinking that sanity was highly overrated. His own sanity seemed determined to stay as hard as he tried to drink it away, work it away, fuck it away. His own holy, or unholy as it were, trinity. Drinking, working, fucking. Drinking at night until he could find oblivion in a scant few hours of sleep, working until he thought his brain would crack in half, company doubling its profits, then trebling and him not giving a damn about any of it. Pissing the money away on booze and women. There were plenty of women, he was beautiful, rich and wild, a combination that raised blood pressures and lowered knickers. He’d actually bought a deserted Pacific island for one woman on a weekend he’d no memory of. Fucking to Oblivion, the required journey for the only destination he longed for. Yevgena had been wrong, there’d been a lot of women, just none that he’d allowed under his skin. He did all the permutations, fucking, screwing, shagging, banging and any other crude metaphor one could think of for the Black Act, the Dirty Deed, the Sheet Shimmy, the Horizontal Hoochie-Koochie, he just didn’t make love anymore. A night for each of them, never more than once, no matter how sweet and suppliant, no matter the tears and recriminations, no matter the pounding, thrusting, slick, sweating white goddamn heat of it. Nomatternomatternomatter.