When he got outside he was surprised to find that the sun had set over the water and pink fairy lights had been strung between the caravans.
A ceilidh band had formed, with Donal on the accordion and assorted others on fiddle, bodhran and mandolin.
A posse of kids were dancing like lilties on the grass as the tune switched from “Ghost Riders in the Sky” to “Whiskey in the Jar” to “Waltzing Matilda”.
Rachel was nowhere to be seen, but Katie found him in the throng and gave him a hamburger and a can of Harp. Katie was wearing emerald earrings of such Celtic Twilight gaudiness that they could only have come from a safety deposit bank job of the seventies.
“Do you still not dance ya big hallion?” she asked him.
He laughed and shook his head. “I never picked it up,” he said.
“There’s nothing to pick up, you just go for it,” Katie said.
“I’m too afeard of looking like an eejit,” said Killian.
“Honey child it’s too late for that,” Katie laughed.
“Hey!” Killian protested.
“Oh, I wired the money to Karen. She was thrilled to bits. She was asking a million questions about you.”
“What did you say?”
“I told her you were an international man of mystery.”
“That sums it up nicely.”
“Well, I’m away so I am,” she said and grabbed a fourteen-year-old kid and wheeled him into the throng.
After three more songs and a round of poteen almost everyone was dancing. Killian got another burger and another beer and walked a little bit away and sat on a dune and watched them.
Was it only a fortnight ago that he was worrying about his houses and his term paper at UU? How silly. How trivial. Where he was from money and property weren’t things to be worshipped.
He lit a cigarette and lay back on the marram grass.
More songs.
More dances.
The meditating sea.
The cool sedge.
Music rippling in the night air.
Killian saw Tommy Trainer carrying a double bass.
“How do you get that thing under your chin?” he asked.
“Hilarious and original. Listen mate, you better get over there sharpish, your bird’s up next,” Tommy said.
Killian followed Tommy back to the camp.
Tommy set up his double bass next to a solitary fiddle player. The dancing area was cleared and people were sitting in a semicircle.
There was an expectant lull before Rachel came out in a long golden red dress. Her hair was curled and had daisies in it. She sat on a stool and when the violin played an A she sang as haunting a version of “She Moved Through The Fair” as he had ever heard. Her voice was elfin, haunting, old, as if she was an eyewitness to the events in the song.
She finished the final chorus and the hush of the crowd was followed by applause.
Donal stepped into the jerry-rigged spotlight.
“Okay folks, sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, but we’ve an early start in the morning, so finish your drinks and get the weans to their cots after one more round of ‘The Star of the County Down’.”
The crowd groaned and heckled but after the “County Down” finished they did as he said.
Killian found Rachel and kissed her.
“You were wonderful,” he said.
“Ten years training, so I’d better be. Me da’s money wasn’t completely wasted,” she replied.
“No, it wasn’t,” he agreed and kissed her again.
The girls were exhausted and went to bed without a fight.
They shared a cigarette on the deckchairs outside.
“I like it here,” Rachel said.
“Me too,” Killian agreed.
Rachel stared at him and smiled. “What was that look?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“Come on, what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I think you romanticise this life. What do you see when you look at these caravans and these people?”
“Why, what do you see?”
Killian didn’t answer but he shook his head ruefully. The truth was that he romanticised it too. It was his childhood and he was an adult now.
She didn’t belong here.
He thought back to his decision at the graveyard. They’d part soon. Him and her. There was no other way.
“I don’t know, Killian, I’m just a wee, middle-class girl from Ballymena, you know? I didn’t want to be in a big flipping melodrama.”
Killian laughed and finished the cigarette. “You don’t know the half of it. My whole life has been about melodrama.”
They went back inside.
The girls were safely down.
They lay together on the bed.
Her song and the moment and the remark about her da killed another opportunity to tell her about the murders in Ballymena.
It would have to be in the morning then.
He was annoyed at his cowardice but not that annoyed. He was lying with the star of the ceilidh and the most beautiful girl he knew.
He kissed her and she held him. It was the more perfect because of the bitter sweetness of the moment. He told her of the Pavee, of their passions and their belief that the great enemy Death was conquered only if you lived, really lived when you breathed the world’s air. You fought and you ate and you breathed and moved under the stars and that was enough…
They made love until they were drenched with perspiration.
Exhausted they fell asleep in one another’s arms.
He dreamed of fire and woke up in the cold.
The tide was out.
The rain had stopped.
Everything seemed fine.
The dogs however were telling a different story.
Two of them were barking and Cora, the next door neighbour’s border collie – the smartest of the lot – was growling. Killian shook Rachel. “What is it?” she asked groggily.
“Trouble. Where’s the gun?”
“In the dresser. What’s the matter? I don’t want you to shoot anyone.”
“Let’s hope I don’t have to. Wake the girls, get shoes on them, I’ll go see what’s happening.”
He pulled on the hoodie, jeans and sneakers and slipped outside the caravan. It was a clear night and the moon was so bright you could see the hills in Scotland. The hairs on the back of his neck were up.
He found Cora who was still growling into the darkness. She was rigid and her tail was high above her body and her bright eyes were staring at the dark meadow next to the horse field.
He went two caravans down and banged on Donal’s door.
Donal answered it immediately. He was fully dressed and carrying a twelve-gauge. He looked at Killian.
Killian shook his head.
“Aye,” Donal agreed. “And I have a feeling it’s going to be a bad one.”
chapter 17
the killing of the tinkers
KILLIAN SNIFFED THE AIR. THERE WAS AN ACRID TINGE AS IF from an oil slick or a chemical spill out at sea.
“What’s that smell?” Donal asked.
“I was going to ask you the same question.”
“I don’t know,” Donal said.
“Cora seems to know,” Killian said.
Donal broke open the shotgun and loaded a couple of shells.
“It’s only birdshot,” he said. “I don’t think we’ll be in the business of trying to kill anyone.”
Killian wasn’t so sure about that. He took the clip out of the Hechler and Koch and counted slugs. Thirteen out of a possible fifteen max which wasn’t bad. He reloaded the clip and chambered a round.
Donal stepped out of the caravan and went over to Cora.
She was straining at her rope, desperate to go.
“Not a fox?” Killian suggested.
“We’ll see,” Donal said.
He let Cora go and she ran across the car park into the overgrown meadow next to the horse field.
Two beats.
Three.
Then there was a scream. A man’s scream and another man yelling, and a gunshot.
“Everybody up!” Donal yelled and starting rapping on caravan doors.
“What’s going on?” Killian asked.
“Women and children onto the beach! Men and boys by your houses!” Donal yelled. “What is it?” Killian asked, straining to see into the meadow.
The dogs were all going crazy now and the horses panicking.
Before Donal could give him an answer, the first of the petrol bombs came sailing out of the darkness in an arc of white phosphorescence. It smashed short of the caravans in a whoosh of flame.
“What the fuck?” Killian said.
Three more molotovs came tumbling from the night, two also landing short but the third hitting a caravan roof and bursting into flames.
There was a cheer from the field and a man deep within the meadow yelled: “Tinkers go home!”
“Fuck off gyppo thieves!” another called.
From the cheer Killian guessed that there could be twenty of them.
There was chaos in the camp now. Children were screaming, dogs barking and half the adult men and women were still drunk from the ceilidh. No one even attempted to fight the fire incinerating the top of the caravan.
“Rachel!” Killian called and he saw her standing at the entrance to Donal’s caravan with a red shawl around both girls.
“What’s going on, Killian?” she yelled.
He ran to her. “Get the weans down to the water.”
“What’s happening?”
“It’s an attack.”
“Is this about us?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
The girls were trembling.
“Is it going to be okay, Mr Killian?” Sue asked, looking at him sternly.
“Aye, it’s going to be okay,” he said patting her on the head and gently shoving Rachel towards the beach. Rachel picked them both up and ran with them to the water, congregating on the strand with the other mothers with children; the women without kids were going to stand by their men in the camp.
“Go back to fucking Poland, ya gypsy bastards!” a man yelled in the dark as another round of molotovs and petrol bombs arced through the air. Two exploded short in the field, one went long into the sand, but one hit the side of a caravan stowing in its window and exploding inside.
“Was there anyone in there?” Donal asked.
“Nah, I think wee Connie’s on the beach,” someone said optimistically.
Two more molotovs came gultering in, one hitting a car, another going straight into a chicken coop, setting it on fire.
“They’ve got the distance now,” someone said.
A burning vodka bottle curved a steep parabola through the night air and smashed a yard from Killian’s feet. He was knocked over and he hit his head on a plastic oil drum and, dazed, he swatted at the constellations and the sickle moon.
Fire surged across his ankles.
The moment elongated itself as those moments do: children screaming, men cheering, the smell of the sea and of burning.
“I’m on fire!” he yelled as the yellow flames shot up his leg, but Donal already had his coat off and threw it on him.
The smothered fire stopped immediately.
Donal pulled Killian to his feet. His trousers were scorched, his head was throbbing, but he was almost completely unscathed.
“Are you okay?” Donal asked.
“I think so,” Killian said.
“Are you sure?”
Killian had moved on from his own needs to the needs of the clan, to the needs of Rachel and Katie and the girls. “We’ve got to do something. They’re murdering us,” he said.
Donal looked at him. “Will you come with me into their lines?” he asked.
“Aye, I will,” Killian said. “Let’s go, we’ve got guns,” a little Pavee fellow said next to him.
“They’ll have guns too more than likely,” Donal said.
Of course they will, Killian thought, fucking skinhead cowards. But there was no choice; to stay here was death.
“Come on lads!” Killian shouted.
“No, after the next wave,” Donal said and grabbed him by the arm.
Killian halted and nodded. He wasn’t thinking straight.
He looked around him. Perhaps only half a dozen of the Pavee men were sober enough to go with them and only one other had a shotgun, the rest armed with tent pegs, kitchen knives, baseball bats. Big Tommy Trainer was with them though and he had a tyre iron which Killian wouldn’t like to be on the other end of.
A barrage of six molotovs tore through the air, two hitting caravans and setting them ablaze, the other four dropping into the dunes.
Now four caravans were burning and the men in the field gave a mighty cheer.
Donal released the camp dogs from their ropes and they ran fearlessly into the attack.
Donal turned to them. “Now’s our chance, lads, let’s go!” he shouted with a wild sort of glee about him.
“Come on, lads! We’ll have to run!” Killian called.
With their dogs ahead of them they sprinted between the burning caravans, across the car park and into the meadow.
Tommy Trainer began screaming like a banshee and the scream got taken up by all the others including Killian himself.
“Fucking hell!” someone shouted ahead of them in the darkness and they could hear some of the attackers turn and leg it across the fields.
There was scuffling and confusion ahead but before the Pavee could close the gap completely a shotgun tore the air between them, flame shooting from the barrels and lead careening past them like white lightning.
“Keep going, lads!” Donal shouted and now they were close enough to pick out individuals.
Killian could see maybe ten or eleven men who had stood their ground. Four of them were armed with shotguns. One had what looked a lot like a pistol.
All were wearing balaclavas.
“Fire!” someone called and the four shotguns fired together, two sprayed wild, but a Pavee man fell to Killian’s left and he felt a pellet strike his shoulder that burned like hot fat.
Killian and the remaining Pavee kept running.
Two more of the men ahead of them turned and bolted. Four were desperately reloading their shotguns.
The odds seemed more even now.
A man on the far left of the meadow lit a molotov and with practised form leaned his body well back to throw it.
On the fly Killian took aim at him, squeezed the trigger and got him in the shoulder; the bottle dropped and landed on something sufficiently hard for it to break. It exploded in a lovely jet of horizontal fire that must have caught a jerry can or a plastic jug filled with petrol.
There was a bang and a simultaneous flash and the man and the bloke next to him were tossed backwards through the air.
“An rud a lionas an tsuil lionann se an croi!” Donal yelled.
“Aye,” Killian agreed.
But one of the men ahead had done a fast reload and from a crouch pulled one barrel of his shotgun getting another of the Pavee in the legs.
He went down next to Donal with a horrible scream, which left just four of them racing against double that number.
But Killian was close now, close enough to make every shot count.
“Thieving bastards!” the man directly in front of him yelled, which gave Killian sufficient warning to hit the dirt.
Both barrels sailed over the top of him.
Killian shot the man’s legs from under him, taking him kneecap style in the left patella.
“Jesus!” the man yelled and Killian scrambled to his feet, walked to him and shot him in the right kneecap.
He grabbed the man’s shotgun and tossed it away.
To Killian’s right Tommy barrelled into another of the shotgun boys, knocking him down and beating him with his own gun.
“I’m out of shells,” Donal said.
“Only three armed men left,” Killian said. “Poor fucks don’t stand a chance.”
His eyes had adapted to the moonlight and he knew the idiosyncracies of the gun.
He crouched, aimed and shot the nearest of the attackers in the fleshy part of the thigh. The man screamed and fell backwards in the grass. His companion accidentally discharged his gun right in front of himself catching his own shoes with a terrifying eruption of white fire and sparks. Before he’d even hit the ground big Tommy Trainer was on him, clobbering him with the tyre iron.
Only one gunman left and that fella wasn’t daft. He had dropped his weapon and was legging it Usain Bolt style for his auto. “Stop and get your hands up or you’re a dead man,” Killian yelled, took careful aim and sent a shot whizzing over his head.
The man stopped and put his hands up.
“Lie down in the grass and don’t move a fucking muscle,” Killian shouted. Killian patted the man down, confiscated his wallet and went to see the other
“I think that’s it,” Donal said, looking about the meadow.
“The armed men are all down. Get their guns and we’ve won it. The others won’t bother us for a bit,” Killian said to him.
Donal grabbed two shotguns from two of the prone men.
Tommy lifted a third shotgun.
Among the attackers everyone who wasn’t shot was running or crawling for their lives.
They were amateurs.
He went to all the other attackers lying in the field, searched them, ripped their ski masks off and, with what was left in his clip, put a bullet in each of their right kneecaps. Disabling them and maybe teaching them a thing or two about social iniquity, if not the quality of mercy. He emptied the Glock and nodded with grim satisfaction.
“Come back, you fucking cunts!” Tommy was yelling at the others who were distant forms in the far pasture.
Donal was looking at his new shotguns with grim satisfaction.
But still it had been ugly.
Six men were moaning in the field, four caravans were burning, the horses were running wild, the children in hysterics.
Falling Glass Page 26