Herself Alone in Orange Rain

by Tracey Iceton

  Two moments collide, electrified wires touching, crossing, sparking: a horse, black and beautiful, eyes dark and pleading; a man, naked and bruised, lips trembling and pleading. I crouch, stroke, expect the silky texture of a coat, touch clammy, pimpled skin. I calm with sweeping caresses. In my other hand the gun’s grip is warm. I rest the muzzle again the back of the skull. Fire once. The arm I soothe flops against my knee. I brush it aside and turn to the second man, brace for the second shot.

  ‘Caoilainn, for Jesus sake, say something.’ Patrick’s shrill voice recalls me.

  ‘The shot, it was me firing.’

  The film in my head is paused on the image of two dead men. The frame twitches, held in place by an invisible thread. The thread snaps. The film rewinds; dead men stand, cars reverse, coffins rise from the ground, bullets return to barrels: Mairead skips backwards, turns and hugs me.

  I throw off the bedcovers. A chill ripples across my bare legs.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Patrick demands as I strip the tape holding the drip in place.

  ‘Going home.’

  ‘The doctor said you should stay.’

  I yank the tube from my arm. A scarlet jewel swells up. I obliterate it with my thumb and swing my legs off the bed.

  ‘Where are my clothes?’ I stand, the muscles in my thighs quivering under the sudden load. I sway.

  Patrick grabs me, pushing me back onto the bed. He bends his face to mine.

  ‘Caoilainn.’ His eyes are bright with tears. ‘It’s my baby too.’

  ‘I just want to go home, Patrick. Please.’

  He rests his forehead against mine. ‘Fine.’

  Ballygawley—22nd March, 1988 (evening)

  While I was shooting two men, ending their lives, inside me a new one was humming, growing. Mine weren’t the only bullets but they were the first, the fatal, ones.

  We don’t talk on the drive home. At the cottage Patrick offers his hand but I pull myself up, using the car door for support, and stagger, unaided, inside.

  The house is damp with the cloy of decay. A vaseful of decomposing lilies putrefies the air. I stumble into the lounge and drop onto the sofa.

  ‘Do you want tea?’

  My mouth is still dry, my tongue rough. ‘Please.’

  He clatters around the kitchen. The kettle whistles. He returns with two mugs, lights the fire and sits beside me.

  ‘You remember,’ he says.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Caoilainn.’

  ‘What the hell are you sorry for?’

  ‘I just meant… Mairead… I know how close you were.’

  Mairead. She shouldn’t have been on that mission. It was a fucking mistake. I’ll never know whose. Grief and anger grip me, crush me. Muscles tense, lungs stutter, fists clench. I feel myself petrifying from the inside out.

  Patrick sighs. ‘I love you. I’ll take care of you. We’re in this together.’ His words set off a seismic shudder that threatens to crack my stony core. I hold myself rigid.

  ‘You’re in nothing and the only thing I’m in’s a fucking mess.’

  ‘Don’t say that.’ He lays a hand on my knee. ‘It’s a chance for something good to happen.’

  ‘Were you at MacBrádaigh’s funeral?’

  Patrick drops his gaze.

  ‘So you know.’ I hold up my bruised knuckles. ‘How can there be anything good for me?’

  ‘It’s not for us to decide.’ He takes my hands, wrapping them tenderly in his.

  ‘Bollocks it isn’t. I chose this life, the consequences are mine alone.’

  ‘No!’ He crunches my hands, telegraphing pain up my arms. ‘You chose to fight but you didn’t start the war. And you can’t end it, either. But you can survive it.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Marry me.’

  ‘No.’

  I send Patrick away; I can’t see anything cowering behind him. As his Mercedes skitters over the gravel his shoulders hunch and shake. He lifts a hand from the wheel, rubs his face. Watching him hurts, pain I deserve. Three phone calls and I’ve cut myself off, telling Danny to stay in Belfast, getting Liam to keep the unit away, asking Brendan to hold the Army at a distance. They think it’s grief; I don’t correct them.

  A storm blows into the valley, drumming the slates into submission, draping the cottage in a rain-grey shroud. I curl up at the window, watching droplets racing each other down the pane, falling into a growing puddle on the windowsill that drowns them. For as long as the storm lasts there are always more raindrops willing to race for the victory line that destroys them as soon as they reach it.

  By morning the sky has cleared, the storm exhausted by its own anger, and I’ve endured: survived. I sit outside in the dappled dawn, marshalling thoughts that skirmish to overpower me. I rank them, call roll:

  Patrick loves me.

  This would make him happy.

  I want him to be happy.

  I love him.

  I’ve fought for so long, no surrendering.

  The fight is unfinishable.

  I’ve already surrendered to it.

  There’s been too much death, too little life.

  This is my penance.

  And my revenge.

  It’s not a no-choice choice; it’s a free-choice one.

  Dublin—3rd April, 1988 (Easter Sunday)

  Patrick checks us into the hotel. I take his car to the safe house where Brendan is waiting for me.

  In a bright clean living room, surrounded by polish-fresh furniture and watched over by the Virgin Mary, we drink tea.

  ‘How are you?’ he asks.

  ‘Fine.’ Nausea tugs at my stomach.

  He offers me a cigarette.

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘You’ll be there tomorrow?’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Grand.’

  I sip the tea, swallowing before the taste can settle on my tongue, gagging me.

  ‘It’s been an awful few weeks, so it has,’ he says.

  ‘Was Gibraltar a set up?’

  He taps ash into a saucer. ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘We’ve a collaborator?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘But you won’t say who you’re suspecting?’

  ‘I won’t.’ He frowns at me. ‘Collusion’s a serious charge to lay.’

  ‘It’s a serious betrayal,’ I reply. ‘Treason.’

  ‘You want to watch who you’re saying that to,’ he cautious. ‘You don’t want to light that fuse and have the bomb go off under you.’

  I reach for my cigarettes, sliding the packet between my fingers but resisting drawing one out.

  ‘Take me off active service.’

  ‘Don’t knee-jerk. There’re plenty who still believe in military action. We’re not done yet.’

  ‘I am, for a while, anyway.’

  He pinches the bridge of his nose. ‘Ah, how long?’

  ‘About nine months.’

  He coughs; tea dribbles down his chin. He wipes at it. I light the cigarette that’s been tormenting me, take a deep drag and revel in the nicotine buzz.

  ‘Jesus, really?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘But you’ll come back?’

  ‘Depends on what I’ll be coming back to: for.’

  ‘Fair enough. Well, good on you.’

  He sees me to the door, shaking my hand. ‘If you ever need help with anything you know where to reach me,’ he says.

  ‘Thanks.’

  The crowd in O’Connell Street is a blend of tourists and locals. Milling among them, hiding in plain sight, are Oglaigh na hEireann members, congregated in Dublin for the Easter Commemorations. A few faces I recognise; others recognise me and I know them by their stares.

  We stand near the GPO steps as Haughey, the incumbent Taoiseach, reads the Proclamation. I imagine Daideo, sixteen, fair and full of fight, standing there alongside Pearse, his long war just beginning. I take Patrick’s hand and tow him through the throng to the site where Nels
on used to leer down on the Dublin peasantry. Today nothing marks the spot except my own faded memory.

  ‘What are we looking at?’ Patrick asks as I sweep the bare ground with my eyes, crane my neck to the blank sky and trace a running star of light that plumes into an orange cloud.

  ‘The past,’ I reply. ‘Not much to it, is there?’ I tug his arm and we walk on.

  After eating in an Italian bistro we wander the city, stopping when my stomach revolts against tomato pasta, ejecting my dinner into the nearest gutter.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Patrick asks, rubbing my back.

  ‘Fine. It’ll pass soon.’

  We reach the Garden of Remembrance and wander over twilit lawns, darkening to Connemara green in the failing light. Behind them the Rotunda Hospital rises proudly. From a high window a face, shadowed by the glow of florescent lighting, peers down on us.

  ‘That’s where he was, after the Rising.’ I point to the window.

  ‘Your granddaddy?’

  ‘Aye. Wonder what he’d make of this.’

  Patrick loops his arm around my waist. ‘I’m sure he’d be glad to know you’re safe.’

  We circle the garden twice then head for Parnell Square, Sinn Fein HQ.

  ‘Sure you won’t let me come in with you?’ Patrick asks for the third time.

  ‘No.’

  ‘What are you going to say?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.’

  ‘Is that a good idea?’

  ‘Don’t worry.’

  ‘How can I not?’ he asks.

  ‘It’ll be grand, Patrick.’

  ‘I’ll wait up.’

  He kisses me and we part at the door, him lingering to watch me cross the threshold.

  The back room is filled with Republicans, some constitutionalists, others physical force men and women and a few who, I suspect, straddle the line. I sit towards the back, marking faces I know and wondering which of them I might not really know at all. Hughes is there. He nods at me, takes a seat nearer the front. A minute later Kevin joins him. Martin appears and sits across the way. The Sinn Fein leadership file out and line up behind the long table, Gerry Adams in the centre, flanked by his advisors. The meeting is called to order and opened with a minute’s silence in honour of the 1916 dead and more recently fallen comrades. I think of Mairead. ‘Thank you for the days, those endless days, those…’ I’ll always wonder, never know, why she was taken.

  The speeches commence, grand rhetoric, calling for resistance, promising hope, inspiring courage: familiar rallying cries. Puny words, sounds that die as they’re born.

  The floor is opened to questions. Arms spring up. Someone asks about election prospects. Someone else raises the party’s welfare policy. A female voice enquires about the role of women in the party. Slick political ripostes regress me.

  I’m fifteen, clutching a placard I painted myself and chanting a slogan put into my mouth…

  I’m eleven, sitting on a wooden floor in a packed town hall with a view of afros, afghans, cornrows and headscarves…

  I’m six, squeezing a hand covered with henna tattoos and following bell-bottom jeans through a sea of people…

  I’m four, feeding the ducks in the park with my grandfather…

  ‘When the power of love overcomes the love of power there will be peace.’

  ‘The government is the problem, we can be the solution.’

  ‘Nothing about us without us.’

  ‘If things aren’t fair, fight to make them fair.’

  The elastic yo-yoing me to and fro snaps. I’m dropped into now.

  The woman who tabled the female agenda is still holding the floor. She’s stood up. I don’t recognise her. She’s asking about our children’s future. What future? What fucking future? She’s satisfied with platitudes. I seethe silently. Someone redirects her question, asking about the current situation, future strategies.

  ‘Our position is clear. It will never, ever change. The war against British rule must continue until freedom is achieved,’ Adams says, his baritone rolling heavy over the audience.

  I stand. Adams’ eyes fall on me. He smiles and gestures for me to speak.

  I swallow the urge to puke. ‘Aye but what kind of freedom? Freedom from what, to do what?’

  There is a very loud, dumb silence.

  I’ll never get the answer I need here because the only person I’m certain understands the question is the person asking it. And it’s taken her twenty-six fucking years just to get that far.

  This is how it ends; not with the banging of a gun but with the popping of a bubble.

  I head for the way out. Audibly purposeful footsteps trail me. I squash down panic and force myself to walk, not run.

  In the street I turn to face my pursuers: Brendan and Kevin. I don’t untense.

  ‘What was that about?’ Kevin demands.

  ‘We’re either doomed to repeat the past or obliged to break with it,’ I tell him, ‘Dead one way, damned the other. Let me know when you’ve fucking decided which it’s to be. I’ll be waiting: ready.’

  I pat Brendan’s arm then stroll back to the hotel where Patrick waits for me.

  Ballygawley—15th April, 1988

  Tommy, Joe and Ciaran are gutted when I tell them I’m taking leave but they understand, wish me well. Connor and Briege are chuffed. While Briege is offering me Saoirse’s baby things I hear Connor in the background telling her she’ll have a wee cousin to play with. I choke on the burning in my throat. She should have sisters or brothers, not a pretend cousin related only by a severed strand of the past. Danny’s grand about it too, my worries that he’d consider it a betrayal of Aiden dissolving as soon as he smiles and hugs me. He comes with me to tell Frank and Nora. Their exclaimed congratulations are too bright; I can hear the faint resonance of Nora’s grief for Aiden in her words and Frank’s remorse for me in his. I hold his gaze; he shuffles off to make tea.

  I stay long enough to see Callum in from college. He clears the bed of textbooks, calculations and formulas so we can sit. At seventeen and a half he’s old and young enough to blush when I tell him. He manages a muttered, ‘good on yous,’ but doesn’t look me in the eye until I switch to asking about his studies. He’s a place at Queen’s come autumn, if he gets the grades. By the erectness of his spine and the fierceness in his voice I know he believes he will. I believe it too. Callum is the reason I regret nothing.

  There’s only Liam to tell now. I can’t stall any longer. My face is hot with shame at how I let our friendship collapse. I should never have doubted him but trapped in that maze of suspicions and fears I couldn’t risk following anyone, or letting anyone follow me. Outside, looking back in, I feel bloody stupid. I was so panicked over an exit I couldn’t find that I missed the one in fucking front of me. We’ve been friends so long. I don’t know what we are now. My mistake, but not my fault. War is hardest on the survivors.

  I pick up the phone, start dialling, fingers faltering over the simple task. It takes five attempts before I track Liam down, time I fill holding hypothetical conversations with him that heavy my anxiety about his reaction. Imagining him angry, disappointed, sad, I’m not sure which I dread most. Finally his real voice echoes down the line.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘It’s me.’

  Pause. Then, ‘How’re you?’

  ‘OK. You?’

  ‘Fine.’

  Silence. I wait for him to ask, realise he’s waiting for me to say.

  ‘I’ve something to tell you.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Hughes rang.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Pause. Then, ‘I’m happy for yous, you and Patrick.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Pause. Line, please? ‘Sorry I didn’t… I couldn’t…’

  ‘Sure, you’ve no need to apologise. I understand. You’ve had enough.’

  ‘Haven’t we all?’

  ‘Aye.’ Pause. Still pausing. Then, ‘Keep in touch, let
me know how you are, if you need anything.’

  ‘I will. Thanks. Same goes.’ Pause. ‘Liam…’ Pause. ‘Be safe.’

  ‘Always. And you.’

  The phone clicks as he rings off. I hang up, deflated. That was easier than I deserved it to be. We’ll not make a full recovery but there’s still breath in us.

  ‘Alright?’ Patrick asks, looking up from his newspaper as I enter the living room.

  I sink onto the sofa beside him. Everyone is happy for us: even me. ‘Jesus, you know, I think I actually am.’

  He chuckles, tosses the paper and curls around me.

  ‘About bloody time.’

  A mist rises, shading the world with an opaque wash, hazing details, fading colours. I live inside myself where poppy red blood flows, candy-floss pink cells multiply by dividing and life purrs with a steady, rumbling pulse. I become a closed system, needing nothing in, giving nothing out, a symbiotic circuit in which I feed off myself and myself feeds off me until we are ripe and contented.

  Things happen around me but they are external: superfluous. I move through them in a meditative state of full awareness but relaxed detachment, revelling in the pleasure of watching myself from the inside out as I eat, walk, rest. This is the state I’m in when Patrick and I get married. The vows are repeated in my voice, I give my hand for the ring and know this is what I want without attachment to the idea of it crushing down on me.

  I drift, my inflated belly breaking the water’s tranquil surface, keeping me afloat.

  Ballygawley—14th October, 1988

  The mist lifts. Colours deepen. Details are delineated. My son is born. As soon as he slid out of me, bloodied and screaming, I gave him his birthright: ‘Fáilte go hÉirinn, Cian Enda Devoy-Duffy.’

  Now he sleeps wrapped in a blanket knitted by Nora, dressed in a baby-grow sent by Briege and Connor, cuddling a teddy bought by Danny. But Cian Enda Devoy-Duffy is not their kin. The Fenian blood in his veins is mine, ancient and enduring, marked by Cian, echoed in Enda and underscored by Devoy.