Luke reached out and touched Past Danny on the forehead – he was performing the trick Danny had first accomplished on his father in the cottage in Wexford, reaching inside his head with his fingers to directly sample the memories that lay inside.
Danny remembered that exact moment in the delivery room – an immense coldness and sense of panic had gone through him. He’d put it down to finally realising that he’d become a parent and that his life had changed. Perhaps in a large way that remained true. But he also remembered what had happened next.
He took a moment to recall the necessary skills he’d learned during his Ordeal, then his hand joined his son’s in probing the mind of his younger self.
Entering his father’s mind had been, undoubtedly, one of the stranger experiences of his life, even by the rather skewed standards of the last few days. It was nothing, however, compared to the unmitigated oddness of plunging headfirst into the raging, turbulent rapids of a mindscape that was his and yet not his. Memories overlaid on memories, experiences on experiences. He slipped under those waters.
Panic … not good enough as a father … Dad gone … out of the blue … no-one knows … don’t talk, never show it … glad you did, glad you left … life is better … no responsibility … better off gone … weakness … so small in my arms … I’m going to let him down …
It took everything he had to fight his way back up to the surface and deliver the message he had already delivered.
No. No you’re not. It’s going to be all right.
Luke retracted his fingers as if burned. His eyes flashed with anger. ‘Stop it! You’re changing everything! This isn’t how it’s supposed to go!’ he protested, sounding so childlike that it physically pained Danny not to be able to reach out and reassure his son.
‘I saw what you were thinking – I was an accident! Neither of you wanted me born. You!’ and he rounded on Ellie, pointing a shaking finger at his mother. ‘You hated me because getting pregnant ruined the way your father looked at you. Steady Ellie, gone!’
To Danny’s astonishment, Ellie nodded at this. ‘I get it,’ she said. ‘You’ve looked inside our heads. She’s shown you a compilation DVD of our worst bits.’
As if at some invisible command, the maternity scene around them melted away, and reformed itself into a tiny little living area. Danny recognised it instantly – Ellie and Maggie’s apartment in the Queen’s University Halls of Residence. At first he thought it was empty, but after a few seconds, he was able to make out a soft sound coming from the tiny little bathroom.
He walked toward it, past his son, past Ellie, who made no move to follow him. She seemed to know what he would see there and had no desire to witness it herself.
It was Ellie. Slumped in a foetal position, her back to the toilet, legs folded up against her. A home pregnancy test lay beside her. Another was in the sink above her. She was sobbing. Defeated.
‘The happy news,’ Luke said.
Danny took it like a shot to the stomach. He’d gone over the moment he’d received that text from Ellie a thousand times in his mind. It had never really occurred to him to think how she had felt when she’d realised she was pregnant – on some level he had assumed that she had simply dealt with it.
‘What did you expect?’ Ellie said. There was no trace of shame in her voice. ‘I was twenty years old. Halfway through a degree. Single. Broke. I wasn’t thinking beyond the next weekend and I liked it that way. Then I’m late by a day, then two, then four. Next thing I’m going to be a mother? What’d you expect me to do?’ she asked again, looking at her son with mounting anger. ‘I knew the second that blue line appeared that my whole life was going to change. I didn’t underestimate that. I was saying goodbye to how I had lived every single fucking day of my life up until that moment. And, yeah, I was terrified of how my da was going to react when I told him.’
‘I was a mistake,’ Luke said.
‘No,’ she replied quietly. ‘An accident, yes. Not a mistake. Never a mistake. And if you’re showing me this,’ she gestured to her younger self, ‘to make me feel guilty … well, sorry, but I don’t. I was giving up a lot and I was fucking well entitled to be scared and to grieve a little for what I was going to leave behind. But I fuckin’ did it, Luke. I didn’t choose when you came, but I chose you. Don’t tell me that the Queen of the Damned didn’t give you a quick tutorial on the other options open to people who think getting pregnant is a mistake?’
‘I’m supposed to be grateful you didn’t have me aborted?’ Luke returned.
Ellie looked around the apartment. ‘You think you’ve seen everything you need to see?’ she snapped back. ‘Why not skip us ahead a few hours?’
To Danny’s surprise, the apartment around them darkened. Night had fallen outside and Ellie was now sitting with her mother on the sofa. Christina looked as if she were trying very hard to make as little contact with the furniture around her as she possibly could.
Danny watched Luke; studied him intently. The man (child? all of the above?) before him didn’t seem quite as sure of himself as he had before. Perhaps it was the reality of seeing his mother and father in the flesh, really there this time, and have them react to what he was saying, able to answer him back.
How lonely, how crazy-making must it have been to have witnessed your mother and father arguing over your baby self, unable to touch, or do anything but influence the environment in the most minute ways?
‘You’re what?’ Christina was saying.
‘Mummy, don’t start, please. I don’t think I could handle the lecture now.’
‘Well you’d better start getting ready to handle the lecture!’ Christina declared. ‘When your father hears about this, he’ll … oh! It’s just going to break his heart. You’re his Steady Ellie! Your degree, your career – all ruined!’
This outburst finished, and with no reply from Ellie, Christina composed herself with some difficulty and exhaled. ‘Who’s the father?’
‘Danny.’
‘Oh for fuck’s sake!’ Christina said. It was the first curse word Danny had ever heard the woman use. He muttered something distinctly uncomplimentary, not exactly under his breath.
‘He doesn’t know yet. No one does. Just you.’
Christina was silent for a few seconds after her daughter said this. An awful suspicion began to form in the pit of Danny’s stomach. By the look on her face, Ellie’s mother was working up to something, something that didn’t take a massive leap of imagination to anticipate.
‘No-one ever has to.’
Both versions of Ellie stiffened when Christina said this. Danny looked at Past Ellie and had to admit that, as bad as she’d looked in the delivery suite, she now looked even worse.
Luke’s expression had changed. He wasn’t watching this with the same air of sullen detachment that he had previously adopted. He seemed involved.
‘You’ve so much to lose,’ Christina said. She moved closer to her daughter and, after a momentary hesitation, put an arm around her daughter. Ellie gratefully sank into her mother’s embrace. Danny ached to hold her. ‘To give up everything you want to do, for the sake of one silly mistake.’
‘If you call my child a mistake one more time I will never speak to you again,’ Ellie said softly. Danny saw Luke flinch as if the words had physically struck him.
‘Ellie,’ her mother said, putting just a touch more steel into her voice. ‘Think about this. This isn’t an option you can dismiss without at least giving it some thought.’
‘I can’t,’ Ellie said.
‘Medically it’s safe. Is it religion? I never thought–’
‘It’s not that,’ and Ellie sat up and took a shuddering breath. ‘Mummy, Granda Quinn left Dad and Uncle Dermot. Just upped and left them. He couldn’t handle being a parent, so he decided to cut and run.’
Listening to this, Danny felt cold fingers grip at his heart. ‘Granda Quinn’ had done no such thing, at least not of his own volition. He thought back to Dermot and th
e moment the little downtrodden man had taken Tony Morrigan’s life. Danny was no closer to forgiveness for that horrific act, and he doubted he ever would be, but it was an uncomfortable reminder all the same that any notions he’d once held of there being a clear-cut good vs evil split in all of this had been unceremoniously pissed on from a great height.
As for Luke, he remained rapt, hanging off his mother’s every word.
Christina continued. ‘I don’t see what that has to do with any–’
‘It has everything to do with it,’ said Ellie. ‘It wasn’t Dad’s fault that his father couldn’t handle being a parent. And it’s not my child’s fault that I still feel like too much of a child myself to handle the news that I’m pregnant with anything but terror.’
Luke’s never seen this memory before. That had to be it. This was new information for Luke, and he was drinking it down greedily, struggling to process what it meant.
‘And what if Danny doesn’t want to know?’ Christina said. ‘What then? You’ll be a single parent. You’ll have to drop out of university. Lord knows when you’ll be fit to resume your studies. Is that what you wanted, Ellie?’
‘No,’ Ellie said. ‘No, Mummy, it’s not what I wanted. But it’s what I’ve got, and I’m taking responsibility for it.’
Mother and daughter froze in place.
‘You see?’ Luke said in bitter triumph. ‘From your own lips! I wasn’t what you wanted!’
‘Haven’t you been listening this whole time?’ Ellie asked him. ‘Getting pregnant now, at this time? Of course it wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to be in a good job. I wanted to be in a stable relationship. I wanted a written fucking guarantee from the Archangel Gabriel that labour would last four seconds and feel like eating a fucking jumbo Fruit & Nut bar! What does it matter what I wanted? When you came along, none of it mattered. I had you. I had Danny. And we tried. We tried the best we could.’
‘Yes,’ Luke said. ‘I saw.’
The scene changed once more, this time refusing to settle on merely one vignette from the past and instead moving fluidly between several: the night Ellie had broken down after being unable to produce sufficient quantities of breast milk; early morning feeds where Danny had been reduced to tears in trying to diagnose why Luke was refusing to take the bottle he had been screaming for; snatches of conversations, some so recent Danny flinched upon witnessing them.
‘It’s not my fault you didn’t finish it. I didn’t finish my degree either, in case you didn’t fuckin’ notice. I had to get that wanker of a job. There’s not a lot of applications out there that say we’ll let ya in with half a degree.’
‘You had to get that job. You didn’t have to do anything.’
‘Yeah? Well you didn’t have to get fuckin’ pregnant, did ye?’
Danny saw himself pulling away from Ellie’s touch on the morning they’d been taken from him, the day his life had gone straight to hell. He hated himself for pulling away from her, wanted to reach out and throttle himself for doing it, especially when he heard his arrogant younger self proclaim, ‘I don’t know if I can do this.’
Remarkably, as they watched the grim scenes unfold, he and Ellie had drawn closer together. Though it was far from easy to witness, somehow it felt like watching someone else’s life.
Ellie began to move her arms this way and that, conducting the orchestra of space and time around them. He doubted if she was even conscious of the easy expertise she had already shown, but he wasn’t about to bring it to her attention in case it broke the spell.
‘Okay, mister,’ she told Luke, her voice now reeking of that particular maternal brand of don’t-fuck-me-about. ‘Let me show you how we tried.’
It was Regent Street, again. Baby Luke was sitting up in the midst of his blankets, gumming mightily on some unidentified object, watching television with wide eyes. Something on the screen scared him; his face crumpled and he began to wail, and within seconds, there was Ellie, scooping him up and twirling him around and sssssshing him, cuddling him to her chest and rocking him. She sat with him and still he cried, upset by whatever it was he had seen, until she talked and tickled and teased and peekaboo’d him. Within moments she was using his tiny little hands to stroke down her face, singing some nonsensical song or other …
It was night-time, and he was being sick, throwing up great milky curds of bottle and baby rice, tears streaming down his little face, and Ellie was there wiping and cleaning and sssssshing like some sort of mummy-slash-Hindu-goddess; arms seemingly sprouting from nowhere …
They were playing with a toy mat with shitloads of buttons and the cow was going ‘moo moo moo’ and Luke giggled furiously every time his mummy went ‘moo moo moo’ …
He was sitting in the front of a supermarket trolley and, when she was sure none of the other mothers were around to look at her funny, she was racing him down the aisles making him squeal with laughter …
They were together, all three of them, and mummy and daddy were fighting sleep because it was after midnight, but sitting between them, right in the middle of the sofa, was wee fat Luke, absolutely full of life. When daddy’s eyes dared to close, those little chubby fingers would poke and prod and touch daddy on the face and mummy would half-laugh, half-sigh …
BELFAST / OTHERWORLD, NOW
‘Enough!’
The standing stone circle was reasserting itself around them. The silver Sword returned to Danny’s right hand and he knew that Luke would now be similarly armed.
Carman was back too. She had lost control over the propaganda visions, Danny knew. The later vignettes had all come from Ellie. Was she able to do that because of her faerie heritage?
Or was it just because, quite frankly, she was fuckin’ awesome?
‘You tried,’ Carman said, with a voice that could have been applied to squeaky hinges. ‘But deep down both of you wished that you could go back to how it was before your son came along. Your wish was granted.’
‘Why are you doing this to us?’ Ellie demanded, obviously deciding to change tack. ‘You’ve won. You’ve got your hell on earth going on out there. Why do you need my son?’
Carman seemed offended. ‘It’s Luke who needs me. He has power. He has a great future ahead of him. I can help him with that. I can be the mother he needs.’
Uh-fucking-oh, Danny thought. Absurdly, but before he could stop himself, he took a long step away from Ellie. If she wanted to rush Carman, he doubted anything short of an anchor the size of the Andromeda Galaxy could have slowed her.
‘You are not his mother you evil, hateful ugly fucking oul bitch!’ Ellie exploded. ‘I am his mother, and if you so much as look at him again I’ll fuckin’ kill you! Stick to your own sons!’
‘Mine are disappointments to me. But Luke … Luke can be my true heir.’
‘Oh aye, mother of the fuckin’ year, you are!’ Ellie spat. ‘Your kids disappoint you so away they go and let’s go steal somebody else’s, eh? You couldn’t mother your way out of a fuckin’ wet paper bag you oul cunt!’
Luke was watching the two women battle it out. One was a queen – glowing and glorious on her throne, every inch the model of fairytale perfection. The other was dishevelled, sweating and currently throwing out a word-speed of roughly thirty cunts a minute, which even Danny had to tip his hat to.
Luke was lost, torn. He looked wretched. The sword was no longer gripped tightly in his hand. His warrior’s stance had been abandoned. Everything he’d been brought up to believe – no matter how magical or how accelerated that bringing-up process had been – was being challenged. Everything he thought he knew about his family was collapsing around him.
‘Son,’ Danny said, getting Luke’s attention.
There was no rage, no murderous coldness on his son’s face now, only great swathes of confusion and loneliness. His childhood may have taken only days in human terms, but in looking at him now, Danny knew that Luke had lived every single day of those time-warped years alone and contained in this Petri dish o
f weirdness, trapped with only an insane megalomaniacal witch, her cadre of pet monsters, and a collection of bad memories swirling around him. Cold ghosts of days long past that he was doomed to walk amongst and powerless to interact with; a childhood exposed to visions that had ultimately created an enormously bitter, hugely confused young man, like A Christmas Carol run in reverse.
‘Luke,’ Danny said, extending a hand. ‘I love you, son. You’re my little boy, and you always will be. Come home.’
Carman was standing now. ‘It’s a trick!’ she thundered. ‘I warned you, Luke, that if you delayed too long over the kill they would do this! Strike! Strike now!’
Luke’s hands tightened around the sword once more. He raised it off the ground by a foot or so. Danny didn’t back away. He took a few steps towards his son, not to gain an advantage in another round of fighting, but simply to be closer to him. He dropped the silver Sword onto the grass with a soft thump. Weaponless, defenceless, Danny paused at arm’s length from Luke, and extended his hand once more.
‘I was your first word,’ he said.
Luke raised his sword hand. Carman moved like a cobra from her raised throne dais, skimming across the surface of the grass more than actually running. Her entire body was tense with hungry anticipation.
‘You will do as I tell you!’ she screamed.
Luke’s sword fell to earth. ‘No.’
Carman’s expression changed. His back to her, Danny didn’t see it happen, but his son and Ellie must have witnessed it firsthand, for he saw and heard their reactions. Ellie screamed while Luke’s eyes widened in fear. Danny felt Carman approaching and knew she’d be upon him before he would even get the chance to turn around.
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