Kiss the Bullet

by Catherine Deveney

  “It was silly of me to come to you,” she says, as much to herself as to him.

  “No … no… it’s …”

  “I’ll be fine. I panicked.”

  She picks up her bag.

  “I’m in a hotel, a public place.”

  Johnny raises his eyes and looks at the ceiling.

  “Don’t ever underestimate what Pearson is capable of.”

  She looks at him with such coldness that a frisson run through him.

  “I know exactly what men like him are capable of,” she says, and walks to the door.

  When she has gone, he opens his notebook on the table, places his books carefully in front of him. The essay title is written in his small squashed hand, the letters huddled together in heaps, leaning this way and that against each other, whispering secrets, jockeying for room. He reads the words, but his mind is elsewhere. He can make little sense of the concepts.

  Perhaps he is too old now, he thinks, has left it too late for serious learning. But he does not feel old. He leans back against the plastic framed chair he bought from a charity shop, wriggles against the discomfort of it on his back. A wave of despair washes over him.

  He is hurtling towards fifty and has achieved nothing. Meeting someone new makes him look at his life as an outsider would. A man with a criminal record, released as a result of the peace process, living in a rented flat with no career behind him and few prospects in front of him. No wonder she’s hostile. He frowns at the page in front of him. Or is there something more? He closes his psychology books over.

  After he left school, there had been an aimlessness about him that, combined with an anger over Pat’s death, made him dangerous. His ma sensed it. Go away to university, she urged him. Sure, didn’t he have the qualifications to do it? She wanted him out of Belfast, he knew that much, wanted to break the spell of this place. “I’ve lost one son,” she told him. “Don’t make it two.”

  But he couldn’t leave Pat in a Belfast cemetery, stiff in the cold ground, leave British soldiers patrolling his streets. Inside, he knew his ma was right, that to make something of his life he had to get away from here, and away from Pearson, and live in a place where the horizon was further away, not closing in on top of you. And part of him wanted to. But he couldn’t do it, leave this place he loved for other people to save or destroy. He had a right to have a life here and he would rather stay and demand it than sell out for an easy one someplace else.

  He got a job in a warehouse for a while, humping boxed electrical goods into lorries for delivery. Pearson was curious about the job, Johnny’s movements there– even asked if there was other work going – but he never seemed to work regular hours like the rest of them. Yet he always had more cash. His life seemed to expand constantly while Johnny’s shrivelled.

  “I’ve got a proposition for you,” he told Johnny one day, and as he outlined his plan, suddenly the reason for all those questions became clear. He wanted Johnny to help with a job at the warehouse.

  “No,” Johnny said instantly.

  “Nobody will know it’s an inside job. We’ll tie you up, threaten you with a gun … all that stuff.”

  “No chance, Pearson.”

  Pearson’s eyes hardened, shrivelling into glittering little raisins, the way they always did when he was denied.

  “You’ve got a brain, Johnny, but you’ll always be a small town boy.”

  Pearson did the warehouse anyway, without warning him, on a day Johnny wasn’t working. He was heart-sick of the job and had been on the point of jacking it in but he didn’t dare give in his notice for a few months. It would stink of an inside job. He had Pearson by the throat up against the wall over it.

  “Don’t shit in my back yard,” he told him.

  Pearson brushed him off. It was to fund an IRA weapons consignment, he said. And maybe it was, but it was to fund Pearson’s flash car and his fancy apartment first. Work with me and I’ll give you a cut, Pearson said. We’re good together. Fuck off, Johnny had retorted.

  The truth was that after joining the IRA, Johnny’s life was mapped out. You didn’t live a normal life when you were a volunteer. The police knew his every move. He was searched constantly, sometimes twice a day. He became unemployable. Even Pearson got pulled in sometimes, though the others joked he was Teflon coated. It was years before Johnny figured out why the police didn’t trouble Pearson more. Hard to believe how slow he was to recognise the truth.

  All those wasted years, he thinks.

  He gets up listlessly, walks to the kitchen and flicks the switch on the kettle, stares through the window until the sudden rush of heating water fills the room. He makes a coffee he has no real appetite for, takes the steaming mug back to the table.

  And now he’s back. Full circle. He wants to make a different contribution to Belfast now. He thought the time was right. But maybe the time is never going to be right. On impulse, he reaches for a volume of Yeats in the bookcase behind him, flips to ‘Easter 1916’. How many times did he read it during the years inside?

  Too long a sacrifice

  Can make a stone of the heart.

  He murmurs the words aloud. He thought his own heart had petrified long ago. And maybe it was easier that way. An image of Danni flashes into his mind. Easier than this.

  He loves words. He looks at them sometimes on the page in front of him, lines from a new novel, or from an old familiar, favourite poem, and he feels they are almost mystical. So individually insignificant; together so powerful. Small squiggles that can amuse or arouse or anger or inspire, that pull your emotions in every direction.

  The first time he heard ‘Easter 1916’ was in that ridiculous school meeting of Pearson’s. What twisted charisma Pearson had in those days. More charisma than insight as it happened. Pearson had no idea Yeats was against violence. Johnny picks up his pen and doodles, writing elaborately in the middle of the page, the words that he read over and over in prison.

  All changed, changed utterly;

  A terrible beauty is born.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Danni tries to remember the name. Susie? No, Sarah. Something with S. She stops trying, lets her mind go blank. When she was with Myra that night, Pearson asked about a friend, another girl … where she was. S. S. S. Stella! Stella. Where was she, Pearson had asked, and Myra had replied that she was outside the pub.

  When she returned to the hotel from Johnny’s flat, a bouquet of flowers had been waiting for her. Plain white funereal lilies. A white card. Mr Wasp. She takes them and breaks the green stems in the middle, watches the white gummy fluid run over her fingers, then crams them into the bin.

  She has told herself that it is no great loss for the police if she does as Pearson has told her to and stays silent. After all, what does she know? But alongside that insistence, there has been something in her head all day, fighting to be remembered. A detail about that night that may be important. The Vauxhall car with the baby seat, the man who toured round and round and round. The last thing she saw out of the back of the taxi, the car slowing again as Myra stood under the lamp, smoking.

  What if that detail is important? What if another girl dies and she knows she has done nothing to prevent it? She could, after all, speak to the police without mentioning Pearson. But if they ask her what she was doing there in that street, what does she say? Why is she in Belfast? And she knows one thing: she cannot get to the police without Pearson knowing. And he will not believe that she has said nothing about him, even if it’s true.

  Back in the hotel room, she lies on top of the bed, thinking, thinking. How can something so simple as being in the wrong place at the wrong time cause her so much danger, so many rippling repercussions? But this isn’t only about her. It’s about Myra. Dumped in a rubbish bin, the entrails of a life flowing into potato peelings and empty milk cartons. Disposable woman, disposable life. There is a debt to be paid to Myra, she thinks, a woman whose life didn’t matter. Her death will matter. Danni of all people knows how muc
h death matters.

  Stella. That was it.

  She knows she shouldn’t do it. She also knows she will.

  Pearson was wrong. There are flowers for Myra. Out in the lane propped against the wall, a small assortment of posies and single blooms, and a bouquet from the supermarket, wrapped in rain-spattered cellophane. She hears the rustle of the paper as the wind ripples through it, a whispered elegy in the dark back alley for a woman who died amongst rain and mud and human ugliness. Danni bends forward to squint at the inscriptions in the fading light. “Myra, you are with the angels now. Watch over us all from heaven. Sleep tight. Stell.”

  All those euphemisms. They stir her up. Make her feel cynical and embarrassed and alienated all at once. And yet somehow compassionate too. On some level she wants to feel those things, to believe in angels. Angels and heaven and long sleeps. People who would never talk that way in life start tiptoeing round that kind of language when confronted by death, because how else do you make it bearable? How else do you pretend that there’s order and reason and purpose? Heaven and angels, thinks Danni, watching rain drops form a small puddle on the bouquet wrapper.

  And when it’s a child … Jesus, when it’s a child. A week after she buried Marco and Angelo, she went to the cemetery for the first time. She had placed a wind chime on Angelo’s grave, and she heard the ethereal tinkling from the rain-strummed chime as she rounded the hill. It pleased her somehow, as if Angelo sang to her as she came near. The bouquets lay in a mound. One of the messages she read talked of heaven’s playground, and being the smallest angel and the brightest star, and suddenly the sentimentality of it became unbearable, and she looked at the mound of flowers, browning now and beginning to fester, and felt more desolate among those words, kindly meant as they were, than she had ever felt in her life.

  “Danni …”

  His voice is gentle but she jumps.

  “Shit!” Her hand flies up to her chest.

  “Sorry …”

  “What are you doing here?” she demands.

  She calms slightly.

  “How did you know I was here?”

  “Danni, you need to understand how easy it is for someone like you to be followed without knowing about it.”

  “You followed me?”

  “Pearson will have someone watching you. You should go back to the hotel now.”

  She glances round instinctively.

  “There’s no one here.”

  “You thought that when I was here. What are you doing?”

  She tells him about meeting Myra, that first night she went to see Pearson and he shakes his head.

  “Don’t get involved.”

  “I am involved.”

  “Go back to the hotel.”

  “No.”

  The rain begins to fall afresh, tip tapping on the cellophane, sparkling in the street lighting.

  “I have to speak to her,” she says. “I have to ask about the Vauxhall.”

  She notices that, just as he had back at the flat when she told him she wasn’t going home, he tries his best to persuade her but accepts her answer. She frowns. He is a man who understands compulsion.

  “I’ll walk you.”

  “No need.”

  But they walk anyway, to the end of the road, see the lights of the pub on the opposite corner.

  “Perhaps she won’t be out … after what’s happened,” says Danni.

  “And perhaps she will,” he says quietly. “When you have a habit to feed …”

  There’s a young girl, no more than nineteen, standing just down from the doors. She has long blonde hair, spiked softly round her face and huge doe eyes. It’s obvious she’s on the game and yet her face … her expression …

  She watches as Danni approaches, Johnny beside her.

  “I don’t do couples,” she says tensely, her eyes flicking uneasily between the two of them. She looks like a child, thinks Danni.

  “No, it’s okay,” Danni says. “I’m looking for someone called Stella who works round this patch. “Just wondered if you knew her.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Do you know Stella?”

  She hesitates.

  “Why?”

  “I need to speak to her. Do you know her?”

  “I’m Stella.”

  “I want to talk to you about Myra,” Danni says.

  Stella’s eyes well up instantly.

  “You were good friends?”

  She nods silently, wiping a tear roughly with the heel of her hand.

  “Myra looked out for me,” she says eventually. “She was like a big sister to me.”

  “Aren’t you frightened being out here?” Danni asks curiously. “After what happened to Myra …”

  “It’s the first night I’ve been out since,” says Stella. “I said I wasn’t going back but I need the money. I’m only out for a couple of hours. I told Pearson. Another forty quid and that’s it.”

  Danni takes out a wallet. “I need to talk to you. I’ll give you the forty if you’ll come into the pub and talk to me.”

  Stella shakes her head.

  “You don’t need to give me money.”

  Danni hold out two twenty pound notes.

  “Time’s money. I’m stopping you earning. Take it.”

  Stella hesitates, then reaches out. “Thanks,” she says.

  Johnny goes to the bar while Danni ushers Stella to a corner table. Stella sits on a bench seat, her back against wooden panelling, the overhead lamp casting a warm, orange light over her face. She is shaking slightly and despite the glow from the light, her skin is grey and pasty with black smudges underneath her eyes.

  “Stella this is really important. I don’t want Pearson to know about this conversation.”

  “I wouldn’t tell that bastard anything.”

  Danni nods.

  “How long have you been with him?”

  “Year and a half. Myra said we were going to get out soon.” Her eyes fill with tears again and she puts her elbows on the table, covering her face with her hands.

  “How old are you Stella?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “Haven’t you got family … a home …?”

  “I can’t go back to my mum, you know? It would break her heart. I’m her wee girl … she …” She shakes her head.

  “She doesn’t know?”

  “No. Well … sometimes I think she does, somewhere inside her … but she hasn’t admitted it yet …”

  She looks at Danni, ignoring Johnny.

  “My mum’s a decent woman,” she says defensively. “Dead respectable and everything. It’s not her fault what’s happened. I couldn’t bear if she looked me in the eye and said she knew. I just couldn’t …”

  Her voice is full, so full it’s liquefying, brimming over. Out of the corner of her eye, Danni sees Johnny look down at the table. She clocks his body language, the emotional tension, thinks, fleetingly, that he is finding it too painful to watch Stella for some reason. She forces her attention back to Stella.

  “She cried when she found out about the drugs,” Stella is saying. “She kept saying to me, what did I do wrong? And I said you didn’t. It’s me. It’s always been me.” She sits back in her seat and looks at Danni, a look that is bare, stripped of artifice. “And now Myra’s gone …” she says.

  Stella’s desolation closes in on Danni. It has happened so often this week, that sudden feeling of becoming caught up, emotionally entangled, in things that had seemed so logical and uncomplicated, snared in a net of feelings that trap her like a wriggling fish, helpless and gasping.

  “Stella, I don’t know how to help you …”

  “You’re not here to help me,” Stella says, with a rush of such brutal clarity that Danni is silenced.

  Johnny glances at her and Danni meets his eye, then immediately looks away, ashamed of such an instinctively conspiratorial exchange. They are not together, here. They are strangers, just like she and Stella are strangers. Her life is her o
wn. She is not responsible for anyone and in turn, they can expect no part of her. She owns nothing and owes nothing.

  Stella gazes morosely at her drink. Danni looks bitterly at the wall, aware that she may have removed her gaze, but Johnny’s rests unwaveringly on her still. It makes her feel naked.

  “I need to ask you about Myra,” Danni says quietly. “About her clients. I spoke to Myra that night. The night she died.”

  Stella glances up quickly.

  “I met her on the street outside Pearson’s. She showed me the way.”

  Stella looks at her as if searching for something she missed.

  “You were seeing Pearson …?”

  “It’s a long story. But I’m the woman the police want to talk to. The thing is, Pearson has warned me not to go anywhere near them or …”

  Stella laughs, a short brittle laugh.

  “Yeah, yeah …” she says. “I know Pearson …”

  “The thing is Stella, I probably have nothing to tell the police except … well there’s one thing I wanted to check with you. When I was with Myra there was this car that went round and round and round and the guy was just staring at her … and if I thought it was the person who killed her, I just couldn’t … I’d need to go to the police. I couldn’t just leave it … I …”

  “What kind of car?”

  “Vauxhall.”

  “Oh him. Baby seat?”

  Stella barely waits for an answer.

  “Tosser,” she says dismissively, taking a gulp from her glass. “He’s down all the time, just watching …”

  “Could he be …?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “How can I be sure?”

  “You can’t.”

  Danni rubs her face with her hand. She doesn’t know how she has got into this mess, how one thing has led onto another so quickly. She looks at Stella who by the minute fluctuates between being a helpless child and a woman who knows so much of the wrong kind of stuff that it has begun to destroy her.