Kiss the Bullet

by Catherine Deveney

  “And you know the beauty of that, Johnny boy?

  Johnny sees Pearson lift his gun. His own sits on the chair in front of him still but he simply sits back calmly, does not move for it.

  “What?”

  “I never miss. I never hit the floor when I mean to hit a man.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  The gun is in her handbag, nestling against her purse, a pink lipstick, and a handbag mirror in the shape of a shell.

  He is her quarry. If anyone kills Johnny, she does, not Pearson. She won’t have that taken from her.

  “Stay in the taxi and go home, Stella,” she says, getting out of the cab.

  Stella scrambles out, refusing even to answer her.

  “Take your shoes off then,” Danni says as she pays the driver.

  “What?”

  “Do it!” says Danni quietly. “You can be heard a mile off.”

  The taxi driver stares out of the window at her and then takes off, shaking his head.

  Stella leans on Danni’s shoulder and Danni whips the stilettos from her, running to the entrance of Johnny’s block with them. Stella hobbles in stocking soles after her, reacting silently to the pain of pebbles beneath her toes.

  “Danni, Pearson’s probably not even going to be here,” she whispers. “I think you’re overreacting.”

  “We’ll see.”

  She takes a deep breath, leaning on the wall at the bottom of the stairs. They move silently to the first half landing and Danni stops, her stomach lurching. She grabs the banister and turns to Stella.

  “The–door–is–open,” she mouths silently.

  Stella’s eyes flick up the stairwell. She sees movement from Danni, and looks back, to see her take Johnny’s gun from her bag. Stella stills. Her eyes darken, reasoning, assessing, her brain making the myriad of split second calculations that it can under pressure. She points at the gun.

  “Let–me–see–that,” she mouths at Danni.

  She’s unzipping her skirt, silently stepping out of it, then pointing at the gun like she has spotted something wrong with it. Danni looks in bafflement. What the hell is she doing? Stella nods her head reassuringly while holding out her hand.

  “I’ll–give–it–back,” she mouths in reply.

  Danni looks up the stairwell frantically, then feels Stella’s tap on her arm. She watches as Stella carefully, carefully takes the gun, still pointing at something Danni cannot see. Danni looks uncomprehendingly at her.

  “What?” she mouths, and even though it’s silent, Stella senses the desperate urgency. Stella feels remarkably calm. If anyone’s going to do any shooting here it will be her, because her life’s tainted already. And anyway, Myra was hers, or as close to hers as she gets. Once she has the gun, Stella flees silently. Up the stairs, away from Danni, two steps at a time, legs free now from the restriction of the skirt that sat tight round her hips. And Danni can do nothing but follow, her entire body screaming with silent ferocity.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  Johnny notices how steady Pearson’s hand is as he lifts the gun. No tremor, no fear, no regret. You can’t learn empathy as an adult.

  Turmoil inside his head. Fragments of energy, shooting stars of thought, exploding, dying, disparate and connected … the last place you inhabit, inside and out … this sad, barren place. He wonders what part of this last exploding energy contains him, his essential self. What will depart last?

  Grey metal of a handgun rising, rising, and he’s thinking about this place, not that it is no place to die but that it wasn’t any place to live. That he’d sucked the colour out of his own existence. It was what he’d figured he’d deserved, and maybe he wasn’t far wrong. His gun is still on the chair. He could reach for it. All those years ago, in the warehouse, when he was nineteen and he thought he was going to die, he would have taken any chance. But he is not nineteen. He looks up, sees Pearson’s hand steadying, a deliberate aim, a focus …

  The shot comes. He hears it magnified inside his head, sees blood and is bewildered. A thud. Blood, trickling, a black powder rash from the bullet sprayed in a sick, peppered tattoo over the side of the head. Screams he cannot recognise or make sense of, high pitched, hysterical. Another shot, desperate fire, filling the room, filling his head. He should be dead now. Is he dead? Is there some confusion that the blood is over there and he is here? His mind dull, saturated with sensation, drowning in it. Senses fighting and tumbling. A rainbow of lilac and red. Lilac shirt, red blood.

  Danni slumped against a wall, her fingers gripping the side of the door like she’ll fall of the edge of the world if she doesn’t hang on. Stella, white and trembling, shaking and shaking till the gun drops from her fingers. He sees them both but cannot process them, looks down at himself, and realises all blood is external to him. And Pearson lying, eyes open, seeping lilac into blood and blood into lilac.

  Stella is skirtless still, vulnerable, a broad ladder in her tights climbing up her thigh. Danni sees the white skin in the gaps of the tan ladder, realises with an adrenaline shot of fear that blood is dripping from an unknown sky, big rain drop splodges of red splashing down onto the white landscape of Stella’s skin, rolling onto the tan tights. Where’s it coming from?

  Pearson is dead, eyes staring. But he had fired back as he fell. Stella is swaying, eyes fixed and glassy, a chalky whiteness rising through her face, the gun falling from her hand to the floor. Her eyes desperately seek out Danni and Danni lunges forward to her, sensing the imminent fall. But Johnny is there already, arms circling Stella, catching her, cushioning her. She’s grabbing hold of him like he offers her salvation.

  Then Danni spots her salvation. Johnny’s gun is sitting on the chair still where he left it.

  * * *

  They had spent the whole evening with Stella at the hospital and they had both known, as they sat silently either side of the bed, that though Stella would make it, the ordeal was not finished. The gun was in Danni’s bag and the knowledge of that was like an extra presence in the room.

  There was a police guard on the door of the private room but he was there for Stella’s protection. When Parker arrived, Danni had watched his every move silently, eyes following him, as he spoke to Johnny.

  “You’re not going back to the flat for the night?” he’d said, merely shrugging when Johnny insisted he was. Forensics had finished with the place. They weren’t going to hang around for long when the corpse was Pearson. Stella prosecuted? Highly unlikely.

  He would put a policeman on the outside door of the flats, Parker had said. Just in case they needed him. Neither replied. Parker had glanced between the two, as if aware of unspoken tension. He would need to talk to them in the morning, he said abruptly. Don’t go anywhere.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  That opening note! Like a muted gun shot, Johnny thinks. The music is thumping loud in his chest like a tribal drum and he looks at her and thinks that however it began, this is where it ends. He sees the anger that makes her hand tremble with the effort of containing it, and he tries to shrink inside himself, make himself small and neutral and passive. He barely recognises her; whatever emotion she feels right now is beyond anything he has seen in her before. She has a gun. The bullets are the least of it.

  “Don’t move,” she says, articulating the words precisely, voice tight as a drum. The gun is pointing at him, exactly as he has prepared for … and yet part of him is still surprised. The way a person’s death can surprise you, even when they are terminally ill. The music beats round round him, beats inside him. He feels the tension of it building into a wall, brick by brick. Like the tension between them.

  Her eyes look sensitive, as if the light hurts them, the unnatural brightness of fever or exhaustion. He knows how vulnerable that mixture of emotional and physical tiredness makes you, the way it places you on the edge of a trap that can spring at any moment.

  She can do this, he thinks calmly. Her loyalty is ferocious enough. He thinks wistfully of what it would take to
earn that loyalty. He glances up at the clock above her. 1 a.m. The second hand ticks steadily around the clock face as they sit without speaking.

  The words of the song snake into his consciousness. “Do you plan to let me go, for the guy you loved before?” Danni’s eyes blink.

  “Are you capable of murder, Johnny?” she says, and the contemptuous way she uses his name pierces him.

  “We’re all capable of murder.”

  “You should be scared then,” she says.

  “I’m not scared.”

  “Could you do it? Could you pull the trigger?”

  He doesn’t answer

  “Yeah, well we know the answer to that already,” she says, and her eyes don’t lift from his face.

  “You don’t …” he begins and stops. “You don’t know what you are capable of until you are truly desperate.”

  Her voice, when it comes, is barely audible. “I know everything there is to know about desperation.”

  He nods calmly and the gesture seem to inflame her.

  “Not frightened, Johnny? Why aren’t you scared? You think I won’t do it?” She supports her right arm with the left and raises the gun slowly.

  His mouth dries.

  “The only thing I think, Danni, is that you could and you might.”

  “So why no fear?”

  “I’m not scared of dying.” As long as it’s oblivion, he adds silently. But he’s frightened of living, of going back to the way things were before she came.

  If he had said she couldn’t do it, she thinks calmly, if he said she wasn’t capable, she’d have squeezed the trigger there and then. The certainty makes a surge of heat sweep through her body, a prickle of sweat break out on her back. She is not sure if the surge is fear or triumph.

  She feels powerful. It is not altogether unpleasant, though the irony does not escape her. Is this how they feel? The balaclava men? In control.

  “Tell me something,” she says suddenly, “you IRA people, you’re all religious folk aren’t you?”

  His eyes are pinned to her fingers. If it goes off, he thinks, she will kill herself too. He is sure of it. He senses her recklessness. She is not afraid of dying either.

  “Do you believe in God?” she says.

  “Do you?”

  “No.”

  She shakes her head dismissively. Where’s God been in her life, she thinks impatiently. She watches as Johnny lowers himself slowly into a chair.

  “But that’s irrelevant. You,” she says. “You lot. You’re the believers. With your bombs and your bullets. I don’t get it. When you go up to your … to your fucking heaven …” Her voice has a tremor.

  Johnny rests his head against the back of his chair. He closes his eyes, imagines spinning in space and time, falling headlong into a black hole. A speck in the universe, drifting like the stray black embers from a fire. Trapped consciousness engulfed by space. By nothing.

  “What do you say?” she says. “Are you scared of meeting Him?”

  He open his eyes and she’s standing still. Arms by her side, gun pointing at his face now.

  “Or is it okay, because God’s on your side? Is he a Tim? Is he a Republican, Johnny? Did he whisper in your ear to save his holy emerald isle from the Prods?”

  He says nothing.

  “So do you believe in him?” she persists. “You still haven’t said. Don’t tell me you don’t know?”

  “Sit down,” he says.

  “I’d rather stand.”

  Thump, thump, thump. The handle of a broom on the ceiling below. He feels the vibration ripple through the floor. The music’s not that loud but it is so late. He waits but does not move. He sees her tense, watches her eyes dart from the floor to him. “Turn it down,” she says, glancing up at the clock. 1.30 a.m.

  It occurs to him that perhaps this is the moment, that she wants him to turn his back on her. He does not flinch. She must come to this her own way. As he turns, he remembers the feeling of blood trickling unexpectedly down his hand in the nightclub, and wonders if pain from a bullet is instant or delayed. Not that he is frightened of pain. Not pain she has inflicted. In a strange kind of way he almost relishes the idea of embracing it, surrendering to it. It would be a release, like cutting open his own veins and watching the poison drain with his blood. Part of him understands self-harm. Sacrifice.

  But the shot does not come. He sits down, the music playing softly in the background.

  “I don’t know about God,” Johnny says quietly. Words, he thinks … how can he find words? But they’re all he has. “But I believe … I believe in soul. I believe in something inside that’s bigger than the rest of you. Something that reaches for more, for something beyond yourself. Something that strives to be better than you are. An instinct that’s more generous, more loving, more … just more … than you know yourself to be.”

  Her eyes flicker uncertainly.

  “What if there isn’t more? What if there’s only meanness and hatred and murderous … murderous …” She cannot continue.

  Sadness twists inside him watching something inside her that he knows he helped create.

  “Is there a person alive who’s beyond redemption, Danni? Pearson maybe? A person who’s completely evil? Maybe. Maybe there is. I don’t know. But you know what? I wouldn’t like to be the judge of it.”

  “I would,” she says. “Judge and jury.”

  She sits down on the armchair suddenly, as if her legs are giving way beneath her. He watches her, then leans forward towards her, his body alert.

  “There was a woman,” he says.

  He’s looking at her as if his life depends on her understanding, and maybe it does, but she’s not looking back at him.

  “A French woman … during the war. One day Nazi soldiers came to her apartment block and they seized her Jewish neighbours. They were being taken away to Auschwitz. And the French woman ran next door while the soldiers were there and grabbed hold of her neighbour’s child and pretended to scold her, saying, what are you doing in here? She hauled her out of the apartment and took her next door to her own home. She kept her, looked after her.”

  Danni raises her eyes to him.

  “That was soul,” he says.

  “Why are you telling me that?”

  “It’s a true story, Danni.”

  “Why are you telling me?”

  “What made her do it? What courage, what … heart … propelled her into that room to take that risk? I don’t know. But what I do know is that it would be awful if the hate of those soldiers was seen as stronger than her love.”

  “Hatred always wins,” she says. “Where it co-exists.”

  “No,” he says. “No.”

  She shrugs.

  Johnny takes a deep breath. His heart starts to pound. It is time.

  “He was your son, wasn’t he?”

  She looks up at him, shocked.

  “Who was my son?” she whispers.

  He knew all along? The secret she held with such bitterness? With such hatred.

  He swallows.

  “Angelo.”

  The name floats from his lips, hangs in the air like an object, drifts downwards like a feather in a breeze. Such an alien sound, he thinks. The unspoken name articulated after so long. The name that he has heard over and over and over again in his head but has never uttered. Angelo. Angelo Piacentini.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  The name disappears into the depths of her eyes. This is what the shifting shape of hatred looks like: dark and fragmented, a firebed that grows and builds, becomes red with heat, until flames of anger lick into being around the glowing coals. The heat is in her eyes and the darkness is dancing and suddenly as a flame leaps tall and savage, she thinks this is it. She can use the gun for Angelo.

  Then all of a sudden … there … there he is … his face … the milky white skin … she can conjure him finally, eyes glowing, the light filtering through the translucent hazel of his eyes. Limbs plump with the remnants of bab
yhood still, but growing steadily, sturdily, towards the transition into boyhood. He’s looking at her, not just with love but with trust, with that unquestioning acceptance, a fixed belief, that what she says is simply the way things are, because she is his mother. Her view of the world is his view, and she will not taint his innocence. Despair sweeps through her. Whoever she does this for, it cannot be Angelo.

  Danni takes the gun and curls up on the chair, placing it next to her stomach where she can reach it quickly, drawing her knees up round it. Christ, he thinks, imagining it exploding in her gut, and he closes his eyes momentarily. Jesus Christ if you are there at all, help me.

  The black clock hand moves with staccato rhythm towards the hour. 2 a.m. The future depends on her making her own decision. He tries to remove any emotion from his expression. But inside, he is not neutral. Inside he pleads with her, for her. Hold my heart in your hand. Feel the pulse of it quivering against your cupped palm. The rhythm of my life beats against your skin. My blood, warm and sticky, seeps lightly into your fingers like a bruise. I stain you. You contain me. His anguish rises silently to meet hers, an arc that forms across the space between them, like the rain-washed arc of a rainbow.

  Her gaze pins him. Shoot me, he says with his eyes. Shoot me if you must. If you can. Hold my heart in your hand. Hold it … hold it …

  His gaze sweeps over her small, brittle frame, compact and curled in the body of the chair. He has always thought she looks younger than her years but she suddenly looks a little older than before. Those shadows under her lashes, black and grey like a smudged winter dawn. And still he feels the pull of tenderness inside him, the catch of desire in his throat as his glance traces the snow white range of her cheekbones, blanched now of all colour, her pupils floating like blue tinged icebergs in the lakes of her eyes.

  “Yes,” she whispers, as if he has only just asked the question. “He was my son. My lovely boy.”