Taken Away

by Celine Kiernan

  ‘I’ll visit, Lacy. Wild horses couldn’t stop me, and that’s the truth.’

  Nan nodded without smiling, and the women disappeared around the bend in the stairs. James Hueston turned to me, about to speak, and I held up my hand. I felt my anger with him written all over my face. ‘Not here,’ I hissed, and I gestured at the door as much as to say, Outside.

  Out we went. As the lights came on upstairs and all across the top of the house, we headed into the garden with Dom trailing behind us, silent and blank as a wall.

  COLD COMFORT

  I LED THE WAY under the apple trees and out into the front garden. The breathless quiet that had descended when James and Nan first saw each other still had its hold on the night. The sky was a brilliant bowl of stars high above the purple silhouettes of the hurdy-gurdies. I was like a cold cyclone at the centre of all this peace, my anger so violent that I felt like I was spinning. I turned sharply in the middle of the garden and found myself face to startled face with James Hueston, who had expected me to bring him to the gate, I suppose, and was brought to a jarring halt by my sudden turn. Dom slouched at the back wall, looking up at us from under his hair.

  ‘What in God’s name was that all about?’ I got right up in the old man’s face, so he had to draw himself back a bit. I could see him force himself not to blink. I was reminded instantly of the brutish men of the day before and how they had pushed this poor old man around. But, my God, I was angry, and despite the uncomfortable echoes I found myself poking him in the shoulder with a less than gentle finger. I just couldn’t seem to hang on to my temper anymore. James Hueston had pushed my last button.

  ‘You listen to me, Mister Hueston.’ A jab to the shoulder and the old man fell back a step. ‘I don’t need you to tell me that life goes on. Alright? Because I haven’t lost anything.’ Another jab and another step back. Dom straightened and came forward from the wall. I kept my face close to James’s. ‘Dom’s just stuck.’ Jab. ‘He’s just stuck.’ Jab. ‘And all we have to do is get Francis out of him and everything will be okay!’ Another vicious jab, and James was three more steps closer to the wall. ‘Don’t be looking at me with big eyes and giving me sympathy speeches, because they’re bullshit. I haven’t lost anyone. Dom’s coming back.’

  My hand was grabbed suddenly, and the searing pain of Dom’s icy touch cut through my anger. He bent my jabbing finger so far back that I thought he’d tear it from the root.

  ‘You touch him again and I’ll snap it right off, you hear me?’ His white face was right up against mine and I could see blue marbling threaded under his skin, feel the frost on his breath. I forced myself to nod as I stared into his ocean-black eyes. ‘It’s not Shamie’s fault,’ he grated. He gave my finger one final twist before releasing me, and I staggered back a step or two, cradling my screaming hand.

  My heart was hammering away in my chest and my whole body was howling fight fight fight. I wanted to hold someone down. I wanted to pump my fist into their face. I wanted to grab them by their throat and squeeze ’til my hands were tired. I wanted to make someone pay and pay until they gave me everything back.

  ‘Dom’s not dead,’ I snarled. ‘He’s not.’

  Dom held my eye for a moment, making sure I didn’t fly at his throat or something, and then he turned to James, his voice softening in brotherly concern. ‘You alright, Shamie?’ He reached to touch James’s arm, and the old man flinched back in fear. Dom paused in mid-gesture, his face crumbling. James stared at his hovering hand, back to Dom’s face and at his hand again. Dom finally dropped his hand to his side, looking lost.

  James Hueston scanned him up and down, taking in every detail of Dom’s terrible condition in a way he hadn’t been capable of ’til now. He shook his head, his eyes filled with that awful bloody sympathy. ‘Fran,’ he said finally, ‘it is you in there, isn’t it? What have you done to that poor boy?’

  ‘His name is Dominick,’ I growled. ‘It’s Dominick. Don’t be calling him Fran. His name’s not Fran.’

  James Hueston turned that bloody sympathetic look on me, and I wanted to slap it from his face. ‘Son,’ he said gently, flying in the face of my rage, ‘your brother isn’t here anymore. He’s gone.’

  I flew at him, my hands clawed, but Dom flung an arm out without looking and stopped me. It was like running into an iron bar set in concrete. I just bounced off him.

  ‘What did you see?’ Dom asked James. ‘When you met me in the garden, you saw something. You were going to say something to Pat . . . you wanted to tell us something, and then their mother came out and we all had to pretend.’

  I shuffled up beside Dom and the two of us looked at the old man with equal intensity. I didn’t envy him, out here alone with us, the hunched and staring freak-twins: one of us on the edge of violence, one of us a black-eyed monstrosity. To his credit, James didn’t step back. He held his ground and met our eyes. I think he was searching for the words least likely to set me off.

  ‘Last night I woke up from another dream,’ he said. ‘We were in Passchendaele again, me and Lorry. It’s always Passchendaele these days. Only things weren’t the same. Things were weird . . . ’

  I ground my teeth in frustration. ‘Jesus Christ! What the hell has that got to do—’

  James snapped his eyes up to me and I stopped. I clenched my hands and my teeth and forced myself to shut up. ‘It started off as just a memory,’ said James. ‘One of those moments that stays with you all your life. I often think of that day. It were a rare moment of peace in that terrible battle. We were drinking tea, Jolly brought me tea . . .I started to sing . . . ’

  ‘The Panis Angelicus,’ I murmured, my fists loosening, my mind filled once more with the buzzing of flies, the pull and crack of sun-dried mud on my face, the stench of rotting bodies and the petrol-scented tea.

  James nodded, apparently unsurprised that we’d been sharing dreams. ‘But as soon as I started singing, it all changed, and suddenly it was all very strange. Lorry fell down. Water came out of his mouth . . .He tried to tell me something.’ James glanced at Dom. ‘Something about Francis.’

  ‘He told you, He’s found somewhere to hide,’ I said. All the belligerence drained from me. My stomach did its now familiar lazy flip. We both turned to stare at Dom and he backed slowly away, his eyes moving from one to the other of us. His hands came up slightly, as if to ward us off.

  ‘I didn’t mean it,’ he whispered. ‘I didn’t . . . ’

  ‘When I woke up,’ continued James, ‘Lorry was there as usual, glaring at me from the corner of the room. I’m used to him being angry – he’s always angry – but this time he was bloody furious, and for the first time in years, he scared me.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ cried Dom. ‘What do you mean, Lorry was there?’ He stepped forward, and now he was the one with the dangerous edge to his voice and I was the one stepping protectively in front of the old man.

  ‘Son,’ said James, ‘Laurence has been with me every step of the way since the day he died. I don’t know why – maybe because we were such good friends; maybe because I was there when he died. Who knows? But he’s followed me ever since. There’s not been a night I haven’t woken up to see him standing at the window or glaring at me from the corner of the room, anger radiating off him like a curse. I thought for years that he was angry with me. But he’s not. He’s just angry. He’s just bloody furious. All the time. It’s like that’s all he has left, maybe all that’s actually left of him: his rage.’

  Dom’s face fell. He was beginning to understand – and so was I. I turned to him. He shook his head; he stepped back.

  ‘The man on the cliff,’ I said, ‘the soldier. That was him. And in the garden. The phantom . . . ’ Dom continued to move away from me, backing slowly towards the deep shadows of the arch. ‘The phantom who was chasing you . . . the bad man . . . that was Lorry. That was Lorry, you bloody idiot. It was Lorry all along!’ Dom continued to shake his head and retreat. I yelled after him, blindly lashing out in my f
ury. ‘You’ve been running away from your own bloody brother, you git! You stole Dom for nothing! You bloody coward! You coward! Why didn’t you just bloody look, why didn’t you bloody listen! It was your brother! How could you not know?’

  Dom turned clumsily at the arch. He staggered briefly and then ran back under the apple trees. The shadows swallowed him, and I made to follow. James Hueston grabbed me by the arm, his fingers surprisingly strong. He twisted me around to look at him, thrusting his angry face into mine this time, making me fall back with the weight of his anger.

  Shut up,’ he said viciously. ‘Let the poor bugger go.’ We ‘glared at each other for a moment, then James released me with a little shove so that I stumbled back. His expression softened instantly. ‘Of course he didn’t know. How could he? All these years he’s been looking for a gentle, laughing ten-year-old boy – not a furious man, not an English soldier.’ He hesitated, reluctant. ‘Maybe you wouldn’t recognise your twin, either.’

  Something about the way he said this made my knees turn to water. I remembered the whisper of ‘Pat’ in the sitting room, and I pressed my fingers to my cheek at the memory. ‘What did you see?’ I whispered. ‘Before Ma came out. What were you going to tell me?’

  ‘I weren’t sure at first. I thought . . . well, I thought your poor brother was just being haunted, like me. It takes its toll, and I guess I thought he were sick from it . . . but as we got talking, and he called me Shamie and he sang Fran’s song and . . . just so many little things. That cold.’ He shivered, and looked at me, the outrageousness of what we were discussing clear in his eyes. ‘God help us, it really is Francis, isn’t it? He’s inside that poor boy.’

  I nodded. He swallowed.

  ‘Last night, I woke up from the dream and Lorry was there, standing in the corner of the room, as usual, glaring at me. But he had a boy with him. A boy I never seen before, until I got here and I realised it were your brother. It were Dom.’

  ‘You had a dream about Dom?’

  ‘Lorry had him by the scruff of the neck. Poor lad was kicking and screaming. All I could hear was the sea . . .Normally when Lorry tries to talk all I can hear are those bloody Jack Johnsons exploding, but this time all I could hear was the sea pounding, a heavy surf filling up the room.’

  You were remembering,’ I whispered. ‘You were just remembering. ‘We saved you from the sea, and you dreamt about us.’

  ‘I weren’t dreaming, son. I’ve seen enough of Lorry these last decades to know when I’m dreaming. He were there. And so were your brother. It were like Lorry wanted to show me him; like he had dragged him from somewhere just to show me. Lorry had a good grip on him, but your brother were fighting like a dog; eventually he got loose and ran away. Lorry ran after him . . . and that was that.’

  I stared at him, my fingers still pressed to the memory of my own name whispered in ghost-breath against my cheek. Dom was a ghost. Francis had pushed him from his body, and now he was a ghost. Who had I sent away? Who had it been that called me? My mind turned from this thought. It just rolled over and went numb.

  ‘I don’t know what to tell you, son, except what I told you before. Life will . . . ’

  I held my hand up to stop James talking and began to turn away from him, my head full of buzzing.

  ‘I don’t know what to tell you . . . ’ he called after me.

  I left him alone in the sandy garden and as I passed through the arch and into the cold shadows of the apple trees, I heard the gate click behind him and a bottle roll away from under his feet as he shuffled home through the debris of the amusement park.

  HATE THE BOY

  ALL THE UPSTAIRS lights were off now, but the kitchen light still spilt out from behind the hydrangeas, cutting a luminous path through the gloom. I stood in the dark under the apple trees and listened to the sound of Francis crying. It was the hoarse, choking, hopeless sound of someone who knows there’s nothing that can be done.

  I had only heard someone cry like that once before, and that had been Dom – the real Dom. It had scared me then, and I had never heard crying like it since. Even when Grandda Joe died, even when Dad lost Grandad Peadar, the crying had been different. It had been done in the comfort of another person’s arms, with the knowledge that you were safe and protected and had nothing to be ashamed of. This? This was the lonely bitterness of guilt, and the understanding that you stood alone in a pitch-black world.

  We were twelve, when I’d first heard that kind of crying; we’d been fishing with Dad and Grandda Joe. The two men had walked ahead, carrying most of the tackle and the picnic stuff back to the car. Dom and I were trudging silently along behind, our own rods bouncing on our shoulders. We were pleasantly shattered, content to put one foot in front of the other and nothing else. The tar sucked at our feet, and heat-devils made the road shimmy and waver against the air. It was baking hot. The tall brambles on either side of the winding country lane hung breathless and still.

  We didn’t hear the car. The encroaching hedges and dead summer air conspired to flatten the sound, and it was on us before we knew it: a little pale-blue Ford Anglia with a lumpish shape at the wheel; here then gone in an explosion of sound and exhaust. The driver probably never even saw us, he was bombing along so fast. I shoved Dom one way and threw myself the other, and we ended up hung on the brambles like tinker’s washing, our rods slung across the branches of the hawthorn. We looked at each other across the haze of exhaust smoke, our mouths hanging open. Then I laughed, and Dom’s slow grin spread across his face, and we wordlessly peeled ourselves from the thorns.

  The bird was in the middle of the road when we rounded the bend. It must have been hit by the car, or caught in its downdraft and slammed against the road. It was fluttering in an erratic circle on the hot tarmac, its movements too uncoordinated to even be an attempt at flight. My stomach turned over at the sight of its pained convulsions. Its gaping beak and emotionless, suffering eyes made my skin crawl in sympathy and revulsion.

  I lay my rod down on the verge and went and hunched over the bird, my hands out, my intentions uncertain. It flopped and spasmed and gasped. My hands hovered over it. I couldn’t bear the thought of touching it – feeling its broken bones, perhaps, grating under my hands; its guts coming out, maybe; or something awful with its eyes. I could have picked it up easily, but I ended up just shuffling around after it, my hands poised but useless.

  I was pushed gently to one side, and Dom hunkered down in my place. Unhesitatingly he put his hand down on top of the fluttering creature, holding her between the cup of his hand and the road. Her glossy head stuck out between the arch of his thumb and forefinger, the neck straining. Her bright-yellow beak was open unnaturally wide, the tongue poking far out. Her gold-rimmed eyes glittered. Dom took her head in his other hand, gently closing her beak within the grip of his fingers, then twisted his hands quickly in opposite directions, breaking her neck in one swift movement.

  I straightened too quickly at the sight. The heat wrapped around me, and I twisted away, staggering off to dry-retch into the long grass beneath the brambles. It was cooler there, in the shade of the tall hedge, and I stayed crouched with my hands on my knees, waiting for my heart to slow down.

  When I turned around, Dom was standing with the bird at his feet. He was looking at it, his arms hanging loosely at his side, his face blank. Then his chest jerked as if he was going to puke or hiccup, and he made a strange noise, and suddenly he was crying. His knees buckled just a little, and his head dropped back so that his mouth was opened wide, and he cried. It didn’t last long – a frightening thunderstorm, passing quickly in summer – but for its duration I remained scared and frozen, watching him as I’d watched that poor bird, too cowardly to do anything.

  Here in this frostbitten garden, in the dark, the crying sounded just the same. The same desolation. The same loss. Francis leant to one side of the kitchen door, his back to the wall. I stepped from the cold shelter of the apple trees and stood opposite him. The rectangle of li
ght from the kitchen was a golden border between us, and I could barely see him in the shadows. I watched, my jaw tightening, as he laid his head back against the bricks and let his grief consume him.

  He had stolen my brother. He had pushed my brother out into the howling world of ghosts, and now he stood there bawling with the same sorrow that Dom had shown when he had taken that poor bird’s life. But you did this out of cowardice, I thought. Without mercy. You are not Dom. I felt my thoughts grey over. My hands balled into fists.

  That day, when Dom had finally stopped crying, I had gone to him in a sudden rush of protectiveness and gratitude, and grabbed him. He’d been so surprised that he’d yelled. Then he had subsided into the hug, his arm twining around my waist. After a brief moment, he’d wiped his nose on the shoulder of my jumper and I’d pushed him off, swatting him in relieved disgust. We’d ignored the dead bird, retrieved our rods and continued on.

  There would be no continuing on today, no hugs, and I didn’t wait ’til Francis had finished crying. Instead, I strode across the bright splash of light, my fists raised above my head, and slammed them down on the tops of his shoulders with a cry.

  He grunted and fell to his knees, and I raised my arms again, bringing them down on his arched back in a double-fisted thump that vibrated up my arms to my teeth. He let himself fall to his side, wrapped his arms around his head and just went on crying. I brought my foot back in silent rage, fully intent on kicking him in the head. I’ve no doubt that kick could have killed him – I was mindless and blind – but, at the last minute, I stopped myself and punched him instead, hard on his back. The blow echoed hollowly in his chest and reverberated in my head. He did nothing, and some of the deafness of my rage faded as I realised he was still crying, huddled against the wall, heedless of my blows, weeping in long, groaning breaths as if nothing else existed but his grief.