Kiss the Bullet

by Catherine Deveney

  It was too soon for either to have faded with Marco. And then there was that incredible gratitude. She never examined how much of her love for Marco was gratitude. The day her mother died, Danni felt completely alone. Then Marco came and stood in the pale lemon hospital corridor with his arms round her, the human traffic continuing to pass them in both directions with curious sidelong glances, and she felt if Marco weren’t there she would simply be mowed down with the relentlessness of the world. Trampled. They had stood, like an island in the flow, and Marco had murmured in her ear, “I am here Danni,” over and over, and then he had added, “always.”

  But he hadn’t been. How many times she had remembered him whispering, “always”. How much of a betrayal the word had seemed after he had gone. Three weeks after he died, when everyone had disappeared and she was left in the empty house alone, she had taken hold of a framed photograph of him and thrown it into a drawer. “Well fuck you then,” she’d said, banging the drawer shut so hard the whole cabinet had shuddered. A fortnight later, she had taken it out silently, wiped it with a damp cloth, placed it up beside her bed, and there it had stayed ever since, in the same spot, for eighteen years.

  She had, as a young woman, been immensely proud of the way Marco looked. He was substantial, muscular. She pretended to be oblivious to the way other women eyed him, flirted with him, even while she was there. Once, when he was angry with her for something – she cannot even recall what, though she can recall so clearly the aftermath – he had flirted back and she had caught his eye across the room, raising her eyebrows and giving a look of such wry defiance that he had laughed out loud. Disconcerted, his new companion had turned to see what amused him so. Come and meet my wife, he had said, and the woman had shaken Danni’s hand with limp enthusiasm and disappeared soon after.

  “Let’s go home,” Marco had whispered and she had known by his tone exactly what he meant.

  Marco’s appetites were of the earth, somehow. Maybe it was partly because food had played such an important part in his Italian upbringing. Where she reached for a packet of instant, he chopped and whipped and rolled and diced. Hot chocolate made with real liquid Belgian chocolate. Pizza dough that swelled to plumpness under a dusting of flour. At first she had been embarrassed going shopping with him, the way he had sniffed tomatoes before buying them, and handled fruit to test its ripeness, with a display of sensuousness that had seemed so at odds with the Presbyterian indifference of the other shoppers, who took whatever was nearest them as their just desserts. Marco had seemed so vibrantly alive.

  And so what is she to make of Johnny, so opposite to Marco with his blue eyed, wolfish sharpness, his angular elegance, his otherworldliness and austerity. The strange, compelling line inside him that divides gentleness and danger, that simultaneously protects and threatens. He is a man to be feared whom she is not frightened of. They fit together, she thinks suddenly, and then immediately denies the thought to herself.

  But she has thought it. It is admission. She pulls the car into a deserted layby at the top of a hill, listens to the purr of the engine as she looks down into the valley below, sees the lights from a cluster of houses that cling to the edge of the hillside. As she looks down it feels suddenly precarious and she wonders what it would be like to paraglide from up here, to simply launch herself into space and hear the rush of wind in her ears, the nausea of anxiety in her belly, the excitement of uncertainty in her heart. And for a moment she thinks maybe she’s done it already.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Johnny is watching from behind the sun-bleached beige curtain of the sitting room when she arrives back. He does not let it drop; Danni is aware of him watching as she unloads a shopping bag from the car.

  “Where were you?” he asks edgily when she opens the door. “I was worried.”

  He is a terrible colour, she thinks. Grey and glassy eyed.

  “No need,” she says shortly, and moves to the kitchen to put the food away.

  He listens to the sound of tins sliding on shelves and doors banging.

  “Where’s Stella?” she calls.

  “Lying down. Not feeling too good.”

  She appears at the door, a carton of milk in her hand.

  “Physically?”

  “More than that, I think.”

  She turns away to put the milk in the fridge.

  “I’d better go and see her.”

  “No, wait … I want to talk to you first.”

  “I don’t think I should leave her alone too long …”

  “Just for a minute.”

  She hesitates.

  “Please … sit down for a minute … No … here … beside me.”

  She perches uneasily on the edge of the sofa avoiding his gaze.“What?”

  “Danni, I think you feel something for me, the same as I do for you, but I’m getting confused. You blow hot and then cold …”

  Oh my God, she thinks.

  “Why are you looking like that? I don’t understand why you keep seeming to push your own feelings away …” She stands up.

  “I have no feelings about you whatsoever. I need to go to Stella.”

  “Danni … your husband … is that …?”

  He does not finish the stumbling questions, watches instead the shadow of expressions on her face. Is it anger or sadness that ripples fleetingly across her face? He wants to bring the expression back to examine it, but already it is gone.

  “Was he ill?”

  She says nothing.

  “What happened to him?”

  Her heart leaps in her chest. She feels resentful that he won’t back off but isn’t this exactly what she came for? Is the confrontation finally here?

  “Did he have an accident?”

  “Yes,” she says tersely. “He had an accident.”

  “What kind of accident?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “We can’t move this on until you do.”

  “I don’t want to move it on.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  The colour rise in her cheeks. To feel some kind of chemistry with the man responsible for Marco’s death has been hard enough to admit even inside herself. That it should be obvious to him is a humiliation.

  “Believe what you like,” she says, turning disdainfully from him.

  “Tell me how he died Danni,” he says, and his voice has softened. “Is that something to do with why you are here?”

  This is why she came to Ireland. But the conversation in her head, the one she has rehearsed over and over and which ends with a gun shot – somehow it eludes her in real life. She doesn’t know how to make it happen. The words have gone. The certainty has gone.

  “He died,” she says slowly, “in an IRA bomb.”

  She almost feels satisfaction watching the shock spread across his face.

  “Now I understand.”

  “Do you?” she says, and there is a warning in her tone.

  “I am sorry,” he says finally. He is very still, his voice low. “Where?” he asks.

  She hesitates, and suddenly she realises she is not yet ready for this, for the final showdown. It has to be in her own time.

  “London,” she says, and turns abruptly.

  “Docklands?”

  “Yes.”

  She walks to the window. She’ll never get the truth about Glasgow if he knows of her involvement. But if she looks at him, he will surely know she is lying.

  “Why was he in London?”

  “He was a journalist.”

  She lets his voice hit her back. She won’t turn to him. Can’t turn to him.

  “There are things that have happened …” Johnny says, “that can never be put right. People have died so that things can change. I am sorry your husband was one of them. So sorry.”

  She knows his voice is willing her to turn to him but she refuses.

  “Too many people have died,” he continues. “And that’s why we can’t now resist change. We need th
e peace process.”

  “So now we just forget about those who died?

  “No we don’t forget them. We live for them. We live for ourselves and then we live some more for them. We make it work.”

  He is surprised by his own words. It is the opposite of what he has done himself. He has constricted his life, narrowed it, lived on the stale oxygen of his own guilt and confusion. And now he looks at her and he wants that to change.

  “When things change, the dead get left behind,” Danni says.

  Her eyes are stinging and she blinks, glad that he can’t see her.

  “There are dead both sides, Danni. Should I have forgotten my dead? Should I have forgotten Michael O’Connor? Or my brother Pat? Don’t you understand? The reason I joined the IRA was because of my loyalty to my dead.”

  “And you got your way by force.”

  “Got my way? You think so? My country is partitioned still. That isn’t what I fought for any more than it was what Michael O’Connor fought for. But we have reached a point where we can’t go on fighting forever. There is a chance for peace that has to be taken.” His voice drops. “And maybe in our private lives, people like you and me have to take that chance too.”

  “Yeah, and people like Pearson?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Danni,” he says softly, “every organisation, every workplace, in the world is made up of the good and the bad, and the principled and the unprincipled, and the downright misguided. Why would the IRA be any different? You think people like Pearson don’t seep into everything? Pearson represents nothing other than himself.”

  She turns from the window.

  “I need to know,” she says.

  “Know what?”

  “About the Glasgow bomb.”

  “Danni …” He shakes his head, burying it into his hand.

  “I need to know.”

  “I understand now why this is important but I can’t change it. I can’t … I can’t make it …”

  “I’m not asking you to change it. I’m asking what happened. What you did …”

  Johnny sits down, weary suddenly, a little dizzy. His limbs feel weak still.

  He has asked himself that question so many times. Was it a combination of circumstances … … a collision of conviction and bravado … a need to prove himself even to people he knew were worthless? Was he ruthless or careless? That bomb … did it encompass everything he wanted to walk towards or everything he wanted to run from? All he knows is that he would not plant it today. Was that a deficiency in him then or now? At what point was there something missing in him?

  “You are not going to tell me,” she says, into the silence rather than to him.

  “What good would it do?”

  His eyes drift to a picture on the wall, an old print of a fishing boat in a harbour, painted with the simplicity of a child, the colours stripped of any darker complexity. He has always loved that picture. It is the light; the sun shines with the untroubled brightness of childhood summers, streaming intensely, only illuminating, casting no shadows. Every time he looks at it, he wants to walk into it, into the truth of it.

  “You were there.”

  “I’ve already told you that.”

  “Were you alone?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Were you alone?” she repeats.

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Can’t?”

  “Won’t. Can’t.”

  “Did you plant it? Or were you just there?”

  Her heart is hammering. Just end it, she thinks. Once and for all. Tell her he killed them with his own hands. Free her. She feels a sudden rush of tears behind her eyes, a loss of control more powerful than anger.

  Johnny is unaware of it. He leans forward, resting his forearms on his knees, head bowed.

  He shakes his head.

  “Is that no? Or you’re not saying …”

  He shakes his head without looking up.

  Not even when the police interrogated him had he felt this way, had so much invested in his own answer.

  She gives up suddenly, walking by him to the door with a shake of her head.

  “Danni …”

  “I need to go to Stella.”

  She walks out, refusing to look in him directly in the eye.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  In the days after his recovery, Johnny has taken to spending hours watching from the upstairs window. Pearson must know where they are by now. Why hasn’t he come? Is he trying to unnerve him?

  There’s a padded bench seat that runs underneath the long window in the upstairs hall and offers a clear view right down to the road. He suspects this was why the house was renovated in the first place, that when Mary Seonaid started taking in injured volunteers to nurse, and allowed her land to be used for arms storage, the IRA had provided her with a look out.

  His grandmother used to sew up here, in what they called the upstairs gallery. When her eyes began to fail, she said the light was best. The bench seat then was covered in a white cotton fabric with green sprigs all over it. The walls were white and the staircase was painted apple green and it felt light and fresh, like sitting in an orchard. Now the fabric is dirty and in as much as you can see any relief colour in the general grime, the apple has turned into a dull khaki.

  Then, he would sit with his feet up at the other end of the bench while she worked. From up here you could see right down the track to the main road. He would watch through the window, gradually realising that the world that seemed so still out there was alive with wildlife, his city eyes gradually picking up the hare that loped amongst the long grasses, or the hawk that swooped from the skies on the nests of mice in the surrounding fields.

  “I want you to occupy Stella for a bit,” he tells Danni quietly when she comes upstairs.

  She looks at him sharply.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “What I heard from McConnell … I need to pass the name on.”

  She sits down suddenly on the benchseat.

  “To the police?

  “It’s the only way I can keep all of us safe.”

  “Who is it?”

  “A guy called John James Callaghan, the Director of Public Prosecutions for Northern Ireland …”

  “I think I heard his name on the news the night Myra died!”

  “Probably. He’s a campaigner for zero tolerance in the red light district. But obviously it’s better if only you and I know how the police get this information, where it’s come from. I don’t want Stella to know about any of it.”

  Danni kicks her shoes off and swings them up on the benchseat, hugging her knees. Just the way he once did, he thinks. All those years ago, before he made any of the choices that have brought him here again.

  “We need to get to the police before Pearson gets to us.”

  “Things have gone quiet now, haven’t they? He can’t possibly know where we are.”

  Johnny shakes his head.

  “Danni, I don’t want to scare you, but this is the most dangerous point of all. I … well, I blew it the other night. I’ve alienated myself from Pearson. He suspects I know, but he doesn’t have a single one of us in his sights to keep tracks on us. Right now he’s out there looking for us. And you can be sure he’ll find us sooner or later.”

  “How can he find us?”

  “You have no idea how many contacts people like Pearson have. How many contacts being in the Provisionals gives you. He knows the car we’re driving, the number plate. That car has been out on the road round here. You think locals won’t know there are people in the cottage? And there are mobile phone records – why do you think I didn’t phone you those first days when I went back to Belfast?”

  They hear Stella’s footsteps up the stairs. She stops half way up, looking up through the slats of the staircase to the two of them on the benchseat.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Just talking,” says Danni. “Do you fancy a walk?”
>
  “No!” says Johnny.

  Danni and Stella turn to him.

  “Sorry,” he mutters. “It’s not a good idea right now.”

  He looks up the track. There are headlights right at the end.

  “Put the lights out,” he says urgently.

  “What?” says Stella.

  Danni looks at his face and lunges for the upstairs switch. Johnny takes the stairs several at a time and puts out the downstairs lamp, then runs back up.

  “On the floor,” he says.

  “What the hell’s going on?” says Stella.

  “Please,” says Johnny.

  Danni sits on the floor with her back to the window seat and Stella slides down beside her. Johnny stands to the side of the window watching the car turn into the track and the headlights suddenly go out. He has difficulty making it out but when his eye picks it out, the car is inching forward and stopping. Inching forward and stopping.

  “What’s happening?” asks Danni.

  “The car headlights have been switched out.”

  He heads for the staircase.

  “Where are you going?” asks Stella, her voice shrill with fright.

  Johnny glances at Danni. “There’s something downstairs I need to get. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  Danni hears the sound of the cabinet drawer closing downstairs and in a moment he’s back, gun in hand. Stella begins to cry softly.

  “Oh my God,” she says. She looks at Danni. “Are we all going to die?”

  Danni takes hold of her hand and they sit on the floor, motionless, waiting, for the black outline of the car to move slowly, inexorably down the track towards them, the rutted pits making it lumber from side to side like a strange, black beast.