by Nina Dreyer
‘Shut your mouth.’ John took a deep drink from the bottle.
‘But…’
‘Shut your mouth,’ he said slowly, ‘and leave. Now.’
‘John…’
‘Leave now,’ John roared, ‘are you fucking deaf? Get out of my sight!’
George stumbled out of the room, pressing his handkerchief to his mouth.
Charlie paused in the doorway. ‘There was a letter, too. From Sid. I thought… I left in on your desk.’
John sat behind, alone in the deepening silence, listening to the thin whine in his ears, staring at the whirling ashes in the fireplace.
Hours later, John limped through the dark Salon hallways. Above him, a light bulb hissed and flickered. Pain like a surgical saw jarred through his left arm, his fingers screaming like bared electrical wires.
He went to the cluttered old back parlour, picking his way unsteadily past jumbled antique furniture, the dusty old globe, the bookcases stuffed full of mouldering occult periodicals. With a crackle of his lighter, he lit a candle and raised it. The flame gleamed on the black Chinese screen with the painted silver cranes.
Behind the screen, on its low table, stood his trench radio.
John slumped down in front of it, resting his unbroken hand on the cracked field-green case. He undid the leather straps.
There were barriers in his mind. He knew that. Thin membranes separating past from present. And now he felt them beginning to burst, pin-pricks of pain and dread, and if he didn’t fight back, the memories would come crashing over him like a swell of the bottomless Atlantic ocean.
His ears were still ringing, a high-pitched whine like an incoming grenade. He could still feel it, the ground shaking from artillery fire, shells whizzing, walls of earth rising over him. Then darkness, your mouth and nostrils clogged with soil.
He looked down at his right hand.
It was trembling. He shook his head, hard. No. Stop trembling. Stop it.
He swallowed back the thought of that man in the blue coat, that Fenian on the street corner, reaching into his coat to hurl his improvised grenade, his face flushed with excited hatred.
Wincing with pain, John began to undo the bandages around his broken left arm, tugging at the pins to expose the inside of his elbow, dark purple already. The medics had set his bones with a slow crunch while he bit down so hard on a splinter of wood that it had cracked between his teeth.
The image of the man’s skull exploding over the cobblestones, bone splinters and black blood splattering over puddles reflecting a pale sky. Still water shining sharp as steel under a white sky, like the water-logged shell craters of No Man’s Land.
Gasping through clenched teeth, John bent down, grasping in the shadows under the table, and took out a heavy glass phial and a battered tin case with a flaking red cross painted on its lid. He’d kept it since the war.
Inside it, a set of metal syringes.
He took one and passed its gleaming needle through the flickering candle flame until it blackened.
The corporal lying on his back in Dame Street, crying for water, his legs blown off.
He plunged the needle into the large glass phial. Poison: Morphine Sulphate.
He pressed the needle into the bent of his elbow. The shadows of candlelight flickered on his bluish veins.
A single bead of blood.
He plunged down on the syringe and leaned his head back.
Slow-burning warmth began to spread from his broken arm towards his shoulder, thick as syrup and sweet as love.
As the heat spread from his elbow to his shoulder to his chest, he closed his eyes and searched deep in his mind for a memory of peace.
The cathedral at Ypres.
A hazy late summer day.
John had craned his neck, shielding his eyes from the slanting sun to gaze, awe-struck, at the ruins of golden stone, sun-bleached through centuries, columns stretching towards the streaks of summer sky through the collapsed vaults. Harper had cursed and spat at this sacrilege, lighting a match for his last smoke by scraping it against a ruined pillar. Corrigan had snorted in agreement, nudging the mountain of rubble with his boot, and Moley had pointed to the tracery in the one surviving window and told them it was from the early fourteenth century. Moley, with his soft face and his darting eyes, forever gnawing on his lower lip. Another memory flickered through John’s mind. Crouching deep in the wet trench with Moley, shaking his stiff shoulders under the wail of the gas alarm, pressing the gas mask more tightly to Moley’s round face, and Moley vomiting from terror inside the gas mask and choking, eyes bulging.
Morphine warmth spread through John’s body. He closed his eyes and exhaled.
The pain washed away like the tides of a tranquil sea under dim moonlight.
It hadn’t been all bad, the war. They’d had rum rations. Rum to make you howl at the moon, rum to put white-hot fire in your head. And songs. They’d had songs.
The song echoed in his mind now, the song they’d belted out under the rain-splattered tarpaulins in the trench, with water up to their knees, him and Harper and Corrigan and Moley and all the men of their company, huddling over shared mugs of rum, if you want the old battalion, I know where they are, they’re hanging from the old barbed wire, I saw them, I saw them, hanging from the old barbed wire…
John reached for the whiskey bottle, knocked it over, and began crying.
Not for himself. For all of them. His dead comrades. Corrigan and Harper and Moley. If only Corrigan was still here. John wouldn’t be so fucking alone all the time.
Sniffling and wiping tears from his nose, he flicked on the trench radio.
The glass valves glowed dimly.
John leaned closer and pressed the cold headphone to his ear, straining to hear the crackle and hiss of the airwaves behind the ringing in his ear. Heaven. He’d hear them again, soon. Whole again, resting in pale golden light. Not screaming anymore. Not screaming like Corrigan had screamed when they pulled his boots off and John had to grasp his jaw and force his head back so he wouldn’t see his foot, his trench foot, like a swollen blue cauliflower with blackened, bloated toes hanging off it. It was all wrong. John had crept into No Man’s Land to pry a new pair of boots from a corpse for Corrigan to wear, but Corrigan had spat that he’d die before he put on German boots.
Tears trickled down John’s face, dripping on the polished black table. He pressed the headphone more tightly to his ear. ‘Corrigan,’ he whispered, straining to listen. ‘Are you here?’ Soon. He’d hear their voices again soon.
Something brushed his shoulder. Something warm and soft.
He looked up.
Marion’s face, blurred behind a veil of tears.
She didn’t say anything. She just laid her hands on his shoulder and smiled sadly at him. He gazed up at her, morphine-love and morphine-heat burning away the memories. He felt as if she could see inside his mind, see all of his past, and that the glow in her eyes was the light of forgiveness.
John drew his unbroken arm around her and pulled her close, pressing his face into the soft velvet of her waist, breathing in the scent of her gown and skin, lavender and lilac and cold night winds. ‘You came back,’ he said, slurring, wondering if she could hear him. His tongue felt stiff and swollen.
He closed eyes as she ran her hand through his hair, over and over again, soothing, her little fingers warm against his scalp. ‘They spat at me when I came back from the war,’ he mumbled. ‘They spat at me in the street.’
‘I’m sorry, John. The Shinners stabbed you in the back. They’re all traitors,’ he thought he heard her say, ‘but I love you. I’m here with you, and together, we’ll find them all and slaughter them.’
He felt sure that was what she’d said. Almost sure.
The headphones fell from his hand, the dead radio still crackling.
Chapter Twenty Five
A grey dawn was rising. Marion half-ran through the still-dark city, over puddles splattered by trams and military truck
s, clutching her fox fur collar and ducking from broad, dripping umbrellas. The sky was leaden, an icy wind rustling through bare branches and cold chimneys.
Her back and arms ached. Last night, she’d struggled to pull John away from his radio and onto a couch to rest. She’d seen his phial of military-issue morphine and placed it by his side, stroking his black hair from his forehead. And she’d picked up the fallen headphones and slowly, hesitantly, pressed them to her ear. She didn’t know why she’d done that. It had frozen the blood in her veins. Behind the hiss of the frequency, she’d heard a voice, distant in death. One word. Help. Then another. Burn.
She tightened her grip on her collar and arched her shoulders in the cold wind.
The pale man would be sitting now in that cavernous meat hall, measuring out John’s life like a thread to be cut. You couldn’t plead with the pale man. He seemed to have a mind like a stone, smooth-worn by cold waves.
But Eilis might understand. Eilis might persuade the pale man to stop. Marion’s heart beat too fast as she tried to think how she’d explain all this to Eilis, about the seances ending in flames and curses, about the war dead, whispering through the trench radio, the war dead, following you home. The seventy corpses at the pole. The vision of John in the heart of a dead battlefield. Eilis would understand. If she had any heart, she’d see why they must not let John die, not before he’d made peace with the spectres rooted in his shadow. And if she didn’t, then Marion would clasp her hands and plead, like the fairytale orphan to the cruel queen of thorns: spare his life, for my sake.
She turned a corner onto Eilis’ street. A thin moon hung above slate roofs, hazy in chimney smoke. Raindrops glinted in elaborate black garden gates and hung like crystals from naked hedges.
Marion stumbled to a halt.
A group of people had gathered by the Eilis’ wrought-iron garden gate. Behind them, the three birches glowed orange and yellow against the red-brown brick.
A young girl with white ribbons in her hair stood twirling a string of rosary beads. ‘A drunken accident, maybe. That happened last July as well, there was a mother in Galway, a mother of five, sitting on her garden wall-’
‘Well what do you expect, she should have stayed indoors and minded herself.’ A man in a brown cap flung his arm at the house. ‘Been making a show of herself for months.’
An older woman turned on him with a face like a bulldog. ‘And I pray for the day of our independence, when we’ll all see turncoats like you hanged by the neck, so help me God,’ she shouted, shaking an ivory cane in the man’s face. Several other people turned around, their angry voices erupting into an argument. Someone shoved the girl with the rosary beads, who began crying. Marion dodged the red-faced woman’s jutting elbows and ran towards Eilis’ front door.
She ducked into the gloom of the hallway and stopped.
A soldier and a policeman stood in the wrecked front parlour. They were tramping on Eilis’s floors with their muddy boots. She stared from one to the other, uncomprehending.
The policeman pointed at her. ‘Get that woman out of here! Now!’
Marion’s gut contorted. She felt dizzy, reeling, as if she had drunk a whole bottle of cloying cognac and stood up too suddenly.
She knew, then.
Her heart stood still.
All that was left was the faint scent of Eilis’s hair. ‘No,’ she said weakly, ‘please no.’
She turned into the darkened parlour and saw a pool of blood smeared across the floor, and in her mind’s eye she saw Eilis, lifeless, dragged across the floor, and her hair, her beautiful hair that she took such care to brush and curl and pin with glittering combs, dragged like a mop through a puddle of her own blood.
‘No,’ she screamed, her voice shrill with panic, ‘Eilis!’
Hard fingers dug into her right arm. ‘Come on, duckie. Clear off.’
Marion looked around, blinking, dazed, trying to wake herself up. ‘Where is she? Eilis!’
A soldier in a coarse brown tunic blocked her view of the stairs leading up to Eilis’s bedroom. She tried to claw her way past him. ‘Eilis,’ she wailed, ‘Eilis, where are you!’
The soldier tightened his grip on her arm. ‘Been shot, duckie. Right in her Fenian heart. Boom! Painless.’
Marion lurched forward and heaved for breath. Wrenching free from the soldier’s grip, she hurtled into the front parlour, her heels crunching over broken glass. Eilis’ Tarot cards lay scattered across the floor. She flung herself to her knees and swept them up, snapping back her fingers from the policeman’s iron-nailed boots.
‘I said get that mad yoke out of here,’ she heard the policeman bellow, and she clutched the cards to her chest as she was dragged through the hall and shoved from the front door, stumbling, her knees and elbows scraping on the dirty mosaic tiles.
The sky was a brilliant white now.
A breath of cold wind. Orange leaves swirled to the lawn from the shivering birches. Marion sat motionless for a long moment. She looked down. The cards were still in her hands, pressed stiffly. She found her fingers were frozen. She found she’d stopped breathing. A great, empty silence opened up in her gut. Move your hands, she thought. Move now. Breathe. Stand up. She drew in a raw sob, then another. Then slowly, shaking, she got to her feet. Her legs felt unboned.
The crowd had formed a half-circle around the garden gate. All eyes fastened on her. ‘Was she a friend of yours, pet?’ A newspaper man slunk out in front of her, waving a camera. ‘Come on, give us a quote, are you very upset? Are you crying? Here, look at the camera. Give us a good sob. Did you not realise she was dead?’
Marion tried to push past him.
‘What would you say to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland if you could say something right to his face? What would you say to General Mahon himself?’
Marion staggered forward, running her hand over her mouth. The crowd parted to let her through. The girl with the white ribbons shook her string of rosary beads in Marion’s face and moaned something in Irish.
‘Give us a quote, love,’ the newspaper man shouted after her, ‘come on, your one’s a martyr for old Ireland now!’
John limped to his office, carrying a bottle pressed in his elbow and wincing as he tugged at his bandages. Grey afternoon light shone through the vine-cluttered window, gleaming dully on the rows of bookcases. In the corner, the antique brass clock ticked. John crackled his neck and tried to yawn, to dislodge the ringing in his ears.
On the vast old mahogany desk lay a letter. He loosened the bottle cork with his teeth and tore open the envelope, shaking out a crumpled sheet. Sid’s handwriting, large and sloppy and full of curlicues and grace notes.
‘My boy: In our youths, we often make grave errors which we come to rue sorely in the twilight of our autumn years.’
John rolled his eyes, took a swig from the bottle and turned back to skim the letter with a sigh.
‘I had entertained the hope that the irrational impetuousness you exhibited when you foolishly went off to play soldier in August 1914 would have been burnt out of you by now, but no. Not only have you gone and put my house in serious disorder with the posting of these barking Black and Tan madmen, but grave rumours now reach me of your involvement in political matters of a profoundly unsavoury nature. And there is more. You will return home to Gorse Hall forthwith. That means now, John. You and I have matters to discuss beyond the ones outlined here. Matters concerning a certain Hun lady-friend of yours. Get rid of her this instant, John, cast her aside, and we might forget all this in the fullness of time. Yours, etc. PS: my cousin in the estate up Aughrim way still has an unmarried daughter. You will consider it.’
John scrunched the letter in his fist and tossed it aside. The old bastard would never give up until he got the last word, would he? Sitting there in safety well away from enemy lines, dispensing his ridiculous nuggets of wisdom. He thought of Sid, scowling in the dim gaslight of Kehoe’s pub those many weeks ago. You don’t believe there’s anything wrong with th
at Marion creature, but there is, and I’ll bloody well find out what it is for you and rub your nose in it.
John gazed at the window for a long moment, the light shining green through the rustling vines, and he swallowed back the urge to wreck Sid’s old desk, to shatter all his trinkets and photographs. It began to rain, drops trickling down the uneven glass pane.
Somewhere in the outer rooms, a door slammed.
A chill draft blew through the rooms, and a low, keening wail sounded.
John limped out of the office and followed the sound.
In the front parlour stood Marion, heaving, leaning both hands on the octagonal table in the middle of the room.
John tensed. ‘Marion? Are you hurt?’
Her hat was gone, and her hair had come unpinned on one side, dark strands plastered over her rain-glinting fox collar. She was crying breathlessly, her nose shining raw in a slant of cold light. She didn’t look up. In one hard movement, she swept all the glasses and bottles from the table, sending them crashing to the floor, and pulled the Ouija board closer.
‘Marion?’ John walked towards her, gulping back the tightness in his chest, eyeing her over for bloodstains or bruises. ‘What’s happened? Answer me, has someone harmed you?’
Marion pressed her hand to the traveller on the Ouija board and leaned her head back, eyes closed, tears spilling down her cheeks. ‘Eilis,’ she wheezed, ‘come back, you have to come back.’
John reached for her shoulder, for the loosened locks of hair. She spun around and flung the traveller at him, and he winced as it struck him in the chest.
‘She’s dead,’ she screamed, her voice echoing under the high ceilings, ‘they’ve murdered Eilis, she’s is dead!’ Marion collapsed to the floor in a crumpled heap of skirts, crossing her arms over her head and sobbing, rocking back and forth on her heels.