Kiss the Bullet

by Catherine Deveney

  The smell of her. He breathes in deeply as if she’s there and he can smell her perfume: a heady mix of exotic floral sweetness and heavy low notes of spice. He wonders what it’s called. It’s substantial. Like Danni herself. He pictures the way the short glossy curtain of dark chestnut hair falls against pale skin, the serious intent of her eyes. The almost cold passion of her. And then that part of her that is missing, that gives her both her toughness and her vulnerability. He imagines too much. He thinks about holding her, touching her, about breathing her in, about losing himself then finding himself again in her.

  So many years of this existence that until she came here, he no longer even realised the lack in it. There had come a point in prison when he decided that the only thing you could control in life was your own mind. Own it, contain it, control it. Control your thoughts and your needs and your desires. And if you controlled it enough, you didn’t need anyone else in the world. You could rely entirely on yourself; no one else mattered. That was strength.

  He got used to suppressing everything. In prison it had been something of a comfort that even when you were locked up, your mind was your own. Even if they killed him, they couldn’t own him. When the door thudded shut for the night, when he looked at the bars on the outer windows, he knew there was a part of him that no one could ever possess except himself. A space that no one could reach, a kind of infinity. Sometimes he thought that his mind was like space, a resource that not even he knew the limits of.

  When the intelligence officers visited him, offering him a deal for information, he looked at them from a place far away. Inside his head, he counted bricks on the wall. “Is he on something?” he heard one of them murmur to the other. In the recreation hall later that day, Aidan McCann, who had been convicted with him for the Lands Road bombing, had sat down beside Johnny. “I heard you had a visit.” Johnny glanced up at him but said nothing. “Have you ever wondered,” McCann said, his feet splayed in front of him, “what Pearson said when those guys came calling?” Johnny’s insides had tumbled in shock and when they settled, everything in his head was in place.

  He’d always suspected he was banged up in here because of Pearson, but he’d assumed Pearson had done it just to prove he was in charge. Johnny lay back on his bunk that night, his arms behind his head. He wished he had a cigarette. It was hard tonight to keep control of his mind. The walls were closing in. He wanted to smash anything he could get his hands on. Pearson was an informer. He was sure of it. After they joined the Provos, Pearson had risen rapidly through the ranks, quickly being recruited to the nutting squad. Johnny remembered the story about him insisting on shooting some poor bastard who had sold petrol from his garage to military vehicles, but all the while it was a cover …

  Yet, it was in prison that he learned not to hate Pearson. Of course it was almost impossible at first because if it hadn’t been for Pearson he wouldn’t have been in there, banged up for a terrorist attack he had nothing to do with. Typical Pearson. Bent even as an informer. But Johnny, his head scrambled with guilt over Glasgow, had to admit there was a kind of twisted justice in it: never imprisoned for an attack he did commit, incarcerated for one he didn’t. Karma.

  Anyway, hatred was too enormous an emotion to release into that space inside his head, in case it expanded, filling it all up and leaving nothing for him. It would leave him out of control and if there was one thing he promised himself it was that he would never again be in anyone else’s control but his own.

  Six years. A man can learn a lot of discipline in six years. He would set tasks, goals. Small, silly things. Tea without sugar. Toast without butter. Not eating for a day. No meat for a week. It was a drive for control, for self sufficiency, but there was another element to it. Perhaps an even deeper element. Making his life frill-free was a kind of atonement, a punishment that he knew he deserved. He couldn’t have explained it but he knew in some vague kind of way that it was connected to a need to break free from the burden of his own guilt.

  It was in prison that the studying started. He lost himself in knowledge and that, too, freed him. An enormous release when eventually he read Yeats and Joyce and Doyle with his own understanding, with the confidence of an educated man. Books were another discipline, a mind’s training. He had his books and his music and most important of all he had himself. And in the end he decided there was no other option but to rely on himself.

  It wouldn’t be honest to say he didn’t miss women, physically, emotionally. The soft curve of them, as elemental as the roll of this land he loved so much. The curve and the straight, not just physically but mentally: a different way of looking, a different way of thinking.

  He misses the sensuousness, the colour and the scent, the feel of silk, the instinct for physical indulgence. He misses the sex. He even misses the arguments, the feeling that he has to take account of someone other than himself. Of course, women had the capacity to fuck him up, same as they did any man. But he missed being fucked up. It was hard not to feel castrated when there was no possibility of women in his life. The way he lived now, it was hard to feel like a sexual being of any kind. And yet until Danni came, until she turned up on his doorstep, it was just another discipline, another control. If you’d have asked him, he’d have said he had it mastered. That he barely thought about it any more. The fire of the fight had gone out and maybe that’s why Danni has taken him by surprise.

  The streets are deserted, the puddles icing at the edges. The cold air cuts at his chest. Behind him, the low hum of the city’s gritters cuts through his thoughts, the swish of their brushes as they spread salt.

  She is not like Roisin, he thinks.

  He wonders why he makes the comparison. Why should she be like Roisin? He loved Roisin in his way, though sometimes he felt as if he loved her like a child instead of an equal, with a kind of parental indulgence. Certainly by the end. He lusted after her; of that there was no doubt. He wanted to have her. But with Danni he wants to see inside her. He wants to understand her and absorb her. His yearning is beyond discipline.

  The cold is beginning to bite. He walks faster, not hunching against the chill, but opening himself up to it. Trying to control it with his mind. Not far now to the flat. He is not consciously thinking about what he must do next about Pearson but he is aware that it is ticking over inside his head. He knows that there is no alternative. Pearson is protecting someone and that means that ultimately, he is protecting himself. And the thing about Pearson is that he will protect himself to the death.

  Whoever Pearson was shielding when he got rid of Myra is important to him, to his business. Until Johnny knows who it is, he can do nothing and he and Danni – and Stella of course – are in danger. He needs to find out who it is. And maybe the only way to find out is to go and work with Pearson, the way Pearson always tried to get him to do. That would be the ultimate test of discipline.

  He has boxed the thought inside his own head, unwilling to examine it, but he knows the reality of it. He closes the door of the flat, and switches on the gas fire immediately, pulling a chair close to it, allowing the heat to turn his skin pink but still feeling frozen at the centre. There will be no more requests to Danni to go home. He knows it is pointless. Something else keeps her here. He does not know what it is, but he does know it will need to run its course. He also knows he wants her here.

  There is something between them. He knows it. She knows it. But she keeps fighting it and he doesn’t know why. He is not imagining it. He knows he is not imagining it. It is as if she is simultaneously drawn to him and repelled by him.

  Slowly he bends forward and takes his shoes off, capturing cold toes in his warm hands, massaging the feeling back into them. He keeps his coat on, tucks his feet up into it, then lays his head down on a cushion on the arm of the chair and gazes into the flame of the fire. He sees the curve of her lips as his eyes close, the sensual fullness of lips that he has yet to kiss. She is here in this room, in his sleeping, in his waking, in his longing.


  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  He is wakened by a banging at the door, a closed fist thump that beats low like a distant drum. He jumps up, disorientated, heart thumping, neck stiff from sleeping in the chair. The fire hisses still, the room thick with heat. He squints at his watch as he hurries to the door. 8 a.m. The thumping continues steadily.

  Danni. Stella. He looks from one to the other. Danni is paler than ever, dark eyes black-rimmed with shadows. Stella is shivering in a black miniskirt, long bare legs ending in a pair of pointed toe stilettos. They are plastic; the scuffed toes showing patches of white where the coating has chipped and peeled back. He is confused still with sleep.

  “Can we come in?” Danni says.

  “Sorry,” he says, finally coming to and standing aside.

  Stella follows Danni into the living room.

  “It’s lovely and warm in here, so it is,” says Stella gratefully, and huddles over by the fire. Danni stands, arms folded, watching Johnny. He creases his forehead in a questioning frown at her but she doesn’t respond.

  “I’ll get some coffee,” he says. “Stella?”

  “White,” she says. “And can I have two sugars?” She asks like a child who might be refused.

  He is aware of Danni following him into the tiny kitchen.

  “I had nowhere else to bring her.”

  He nods, eyes scanning her face. She stares back at him, eyes serious, and he knows she is emotionally stripped. She wouldn’t be here otherwise. He puts down the bag of sugar he’s holding.

  “What’s happened?” he asks quietly.

  “Stella came to the hotel last night. I got a call from reception at 2 a.m. saying she was there. I didn’t want to go down at first in case it wasn’t really her. But then they put her on the phone and I spoke to her, told her to come up to the room.”

  He barely reveals his response, but she knows from the tiniest movement of his body, the way his eyes lose contact momentarily with hers, what he’s thinking.

  “I’m glad I gave her the hotel name,” she says defiantly. “Where else was she going to go? She doesn’t have anyone.”

  “What did she say?” he asks, refusing to be sidetracked.

  “That Coyle and Pearson got hold of her.”

  “Are yous two talking about me?” Stella’s voice comes quietly from the doorway and Danni spins round.

  “What did they say Stella?” Johnny asks.

  “They wanted to know what I knew. If Myra told me anything before she died.”

  She breathes deeply. “That guy Coyle’s a psycho. He took out a cigarette lighter and kept flicking it in my face, asking Pearson what would happen if he put the fire onto my hair. Would it all go up or would he need to douse it in petrol first?”

  Johnny knows the way that goes. In his own way, Pearson knew how the mind worked and he trained the people round him to know. Fear grows in the mind, not the body; the brain makes a wonderful hothouse. Plant the idea in there that something really bad is going to happen and the seed takes root, watered by the imagination. Johnny had always thought Pearson liked that better than the actual physical violence. Once it became physical there may be a rush of adrenaline, but then it was kind of over.

  On the other hand, Johnny thought, Pearson wasn’t frightened to use violence either.

  “Johnny?”

  He glances up at Stella.

  She’s holding out her arms with her sleeves pulled up. Her arms are livid and sore, covered in burn marks from the cigarette lighter. Not bad enough to need treatment. Just like a series of burns you might get in an ordinary domestic kitchen. A warning shot.

  He says nothing but the muscles in his jaw tighten as he looks at her arms.

  “Did you tell them?” he asks.

  “What?”

  “Did you tell them what you knew?”

  “I had to when he was burning me. I said Myra told me about someone really senior in the law but I didn’t know the name, had no idea who it was.”

  “And …?”

  “They didn’t believe me.”

  Johnny watches her silently. She doesn’t know how lucky she is that they didn’t believe her. Otherwise, she’d be dead by now. They needed to keep her alive and frightened until they found out exactly how much she knows – and who else she has told. They know she has talked to him and Danni. That puts them all in danger now. He turns from the two women, aware of their eyes on his back as he pours water into mugs.

  “Here,” he tells Stella. “You take these. I’ll put some toast on.”

  Danni turns as Stella walks by her, as if to follow, but Johnny lunges for her arm to stop her from following Stella. He wants to talk to her alone. She turns sharply at his touch. There is a moment, when things happen unexpectedly, when the truth simply enters the brain subconsciously, before the brain filters and censors its own emotions. And she feels it then, in that moment, a surge that floods her when she looks at him unguardedly, like her blood is trying to flow too fast through narrowed veins. He sees it, and she knows it, and she turns from his seeing.

  “Danni,” he says softly.

  “What?”

  She tugs her arms down out of his grasp.

  “We have to get out of here.”

  He sees the fear flicker in her eyes.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You are going to have to make a quick decision here, Danni. They will be back for Stella. You can be sure of that. It’s not over. And they know we’ve been with her. We’re next. And I’m telling you, Pearson won’t stop with a few burn marks.”

  He watches her taking it in, calculating, but she makes no display of emotion.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “I’m not going home.”

  “No.”

  “So where …?”

  “Leave it to me. I’ll take you. Don’t ask me where it is, just trust me to take you.”

  “Stella …”

  “You have to decide, Danni. Stella is a danger to you. She’s a crackhead and she’s going to bring you down.”

  “I can’t leave her.”

  “That’s fine Danni, your decision. But make sure you know what you are deciding. You’re going to be holed up in the middle of nowhere with Stella going through withdrawal. No drugs, no medical help, and Stella going crazy. Do you understand that?”

  She puts her hands to her face, buries herself into them, guarding herself, her feelings, from him for a couple of seconds.

  “Danni …”

  She does not move.

  “Danni …”

  He starts towards her but becomes aware of movement in the hall and hesitates. Stella hovers at the doorway.

  “The coffee’s going cold …” she says helplessly.

  Danni’s hands drop finally from her face.

  “And you …” she says to Johnny, ignoring Stella for the moment.

  “Where are you going to be?”

  “Here.”

  “How can you stay here?”

  “What’s going on?” says Stella.

  “I need to stay here to keep an eye on what’s happening,” says Johnny.

  “You can’t …”

  “I need to go to Pearson.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Work for him. Or pretend to.”

  “Don’t be so bloody stupid!”

  “What’s happening,” says Stella plaintively. “Will you tell me?”

  “Listen Danni, it’s the only way. Once you’ve been in Pearson’s life, he doesn’t let go. He wrote to me all the time I was in … all the time I was away from Ireland. Told me he wanted to see me when I came back, wanted me to work for him. That’s why he sent you to me. He always finds connections, ways of burrowing back in. And if I go to him and say you’ve gone home, that I want to work for him, he’s not going to think that I know anything, is he?”

  “It’s too risky.”

  She checks herself then. What is she doing? Why should she bothe
r about him? That unguarded moment earlier … the way she responded … it was nothing. She looks at him coldly.

  “Please,” Stella says. “What …”

  “We need to leave in a couple of hours,” Johnny is saying.

  “Up to you,” she says. After all, she doesn’t care if Pearson tears his arms and his legs from him like the insect he is. It’s all he would deserve.

  She becomes aware of Stella then, shivering again, her teeth chattering, marking out a tattoo of fear.

  “Come on,” she says gently, putting an arm, round Stella and leading her into the sitting room. “We need to talk.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  It occurs to her as she sits in the hotel bedroom with her case open but packed that she could simply head to the airport and go home. That she doesn’t need to go any further with this. It’s not her problem. But there’s something about being on a path that makes you keep on going simply because it’s there. It’s human nature. Just to the corner to see what’s round it. And then, when there’s another corner to impede vision, just as far as that. Then to the tree. That would be a good place to turn and go back. Just to the tree. Well maybe to that big rock. And by then you’ve lost your way back. You keep on going because you have to.

  Where is he? Her fingers tremble slightly as she pulls the zip on her case. She has slipped the pages Johnny gave her into a pocket on the front. There has been no opportunity to read them yet. She checks the room one last time, the cupboards, the drawers, underneath the bed. She looks at her watch. Only a few hours of daylight left at this time of year. She goes to the window and pulls back the curtain slightly, looks down on the hotel car park. She thinks about the way Johnny looked earlier when they talked about hiring a car. “Danni,” he’d said, “I don’t have any money but I’ll borrow some. Give me an hour.”