by Nina Dreyer
John turned his back. Dug his nails under his cuff links to adjust them. Stop shaking. Not the shaking again. He shook his head in a sharp jerk to dislodge the tinny whine in his ears.
‘… please, John. You’ve got to listen. Dear boy.’
John stared at the bay window, his blurred reflection lashed by hail. He brought a trembling hand to his face, slowly, feeling for cold blood.
‘It’s your attitude I don’t understand, John. Ungrateful. You survived, didn’t you, you should be grateful to me…’
John thought of his mate Harper, squelching through a trench in the pissings of rain, stopping to shake hands with a dead hand protruding from the shaken earth, gallows humour, grim laughs, and then Harper’s grin suddenly distorting and him falling back, wiping his hand on the soiled front of his tunic, crying and hissing for breath.
‘War is an ugly business,’ he heard Sid sigh, ‘so it is, but what you have to understand, John, my lad, you can’t let this all get to your head, you’re turning into a bloody mess, you’ve got to keep your sense of perspective…’ Sid’s voice droned on distantly.
John thought of his first sergeant, Moley, huddling under the ripped tarpaulin, showing John all the tricks and medallions and charms that would keep him from getting buried alive during the next round of shelling, when the earth itself would rise in a great wall. Buried alive under the thunder of artillery. Their greatest dread. Moley’s plump fingers flittering back and forth as he showed John the medallions and photographs and charms and pins, the same ones, over and over in a special order, just so, the special order of the Universe uncovered in charms.
He thought of Sennott.
‘… not right in the head, not right, are you even listening to me?’
Sennott, wailing in his cell about the great beast that would rise from the earth, roiling from the fields of torn corpses, with iron teeth, clothed in gas, come to crush them all. Sennott, thirtieth or thirty-first man condemned to death at the court martial. He’d gotten lost from his unit during a gas attack and had run for shelter in a ruined barn. Cowardice in the face of the enemy, they’d said. Sennott, barely nineteen, screaming for his mother. Sennott, crying when he realised he’d eaten the last of the biscuits and jam his mother had sent him, and there wouldn’t be any more packages from home. Sennott, lying half-dead on his wooden cot in the cell as John held his head, pressing his thumb through the boy’s cheek to force his jaw open as he poured rum down his throat. Sennott, carried by the men to the post.
The post.
Rising before the pock-marked wall like a blasted tree in No Man’s Land and Sennott tied to it, dead drunk, reeling to one side, unable to see or understand, with a white strip of fabric pinned over his heart, fluttering in the icy wind of dawn. And himself. Himself, lifting the sabre. Himself, screaming fire.
‘John!’
He blinked, spun around. Blinked again. He could still taste the gun smoke in the back of his throat. Everything around him began to feel faintly unreal, the room, the swirling oak carvings on Sid’s armrest, the sound of hail on the window, the dappled light of the lamp, the green carpet, the walls, his own breathing, surreal, like a drifting daydream about to shatter, and John thought of that man in the blue coat, reaching into his coat for the grenade, and himself, himself firing through the man’s shielding arm.
Sid hovered, half-standing, leaning heavily on the arm rests. ‘You’ve got to listen to me, John…’ He continued to speak, his wrinkled lips pinching and twitching, the tongue rolling and flapping behind them.
John ran his hand over his hair, over his ears, over his hair again. ‘Shut up,’ he whispered. Then he drew breath and shouted, and his voice felt stinging as vomit in his mouth. ‘Shut! Up!’ He kicked Sid’s chair, hard, then again. ‘Stop fucking talking! You’re talking shite! You’re only talking shite, keep your fucking mouth closed,’ he roared, kicking and kicking at the leg of the chair, as Sid trembled and flailed, ‘you’ve got no fucking clue, would you like me to tell you what it was like, would you? Would you like to know what you did to me?’
Sid fell back in his chair, lifting an arm feebly over his face, mouth open wide and pulled out of shape.
‘It’s alright,’ John rested his hands on the armrests and leaned over the old man, ‘and do you know why it’s alright….?’
Sid cowered and looked up at him with milky eyes.
John leaned close enough to see the wiry grey hairs sprouting from Sid’s left ear. ‘Because I saved them all,’ he rasped. ‘They were all going to die anyway, do you see?’
Sid’s face contorted in horror and disbelief.
‘None of them would have survived the next assault. Broken, shattered men. I saved them all.’
It was true. It really was.
He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, steeling himself against the raw pain in his broken arm, the blistering ache in his head, the acid burning in his mind. ‘Much better to be shot cleanly at the pole than it is to be buried alive, or drown as you lungs dissolve, or be shredded by shrapnel. I saved them. And now they’re at rest in the afterlife, on the far side of the outer darkness, in the eternal light. All in peace. All my comrades. All the dead.’
It was true.
He exhaled deeply.
Marion was wrong. It really was true. He felt it. He was sure he felt it. He tried to calm his heart, to reach the edges of that incandescent silver light with his mind. But all he saw now were red pin-prick ruptures on the edge of his vision.
‘And do you know what they’d all say to me?’ John ground his teeth. ‘They’d say, look what you’ve come home to. Look at the fucking welcome you got. Dublin shelled and bombed. People spitting at you in the street. Murder gangs shooting us in the back, us, we who genuinely fought for our country, who risked life, limbs and sanity for our country, men like Rothman, gunned down like dogs. The dead would say end this fucking so-called rebellion. Kill the Shinners.’
John’s pulse pounded in his temples. Marion’s words again. You have to stop now. The IRA have marked us both for death. He’d be damned before he’d let anyone mark him for anything. They’d already tried once. But Marion. The thought of Marion splayed on her bedroom floor, shot in the heart, blood soaking her silken night gown, and himself come too late, kneeling over her, his twin reflections in her dead eyes.
The thought festered in his mind like gangrene.
He’d reduce every gunman’s nest to a smoking crater before he let that happen. Burn them all alive. Burn down Dublin, burn down every town and village in Ireland before he let the Shinner traitors harm her. The words from their last seance echoed at the edge of his consciousness. Hate, hate, hate. Burn, burn, burn.
John licked his lips, tasting blood and whiskey. ‘You’re worried about a bit of wailing from the prisoners in the basement, a few fingernails ripped out, but what the hell does your opinion matter, Sid?’ He raised his voice, lashing his arm wide. ‘You never fought for anything, not like me, not like Rothman, not like my dead men, and if you ever bothered to actually fucking listen to the dead, if you’d ever really fucking cared, you’d hear them too,’ he growled, ‘slaughter them all, they’d say, kill the Shinners. And who am I to deny the wishes of my dead comrades?’
He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles and glanced down. Sid blinked, staring at him with an expression like someone who’d died of shock.
Chapter Thirty
Marion crept through the hallways, searching for John, brushing her fingertips along the wallpaper. A hailstorm lashed the windows, howling over the old house and clattering the roof shales. Old oak floorboards chilled her stockinged feet as she inched along, feeling for the trail of his anger.
She’d heard John roaring in a distant room, Sid’s voice thundering back. Only garbled echoes of an argument muted by thick walls, but the little she’d heard had made her feel cold to the very marrow of her spine. She stepped over the shards of a shattered plaster bust, all the while holding her breath for the sound of a single g
unshot in a lonely room
Under a closed door, the faintest glow of light.
She slowly turned the ornate brass handle, and the door creaked open.
Her breath caught in her throat.
John sat on the floor, slumped against a black iron bed frame. His eyes were closed, head leaned back. By his right hand, the tin of syringes, the phial of morphine. An empty bottle of whiskey. A revolver. A black cigarette lighter.
‘No,’ she whispered, ‘no, no…’ She crept closer and nudged the revolver out of his reach, then knelt by his side. His shirt was open. Black bruises and cuts covered his chest under the tight gauze dressings pinning his broken arm in place. Blood and whiskey stained the bandages.
Marion lifted a shaking hand to his mouth and exhaled in relief when she felt his warm, shallow breathing against the palm of her hand.
Still alive.
A gust of storm rolled over the house, whining in the cold chimney.
Overhead, two thin candles fluttered in an old brass sconce, nailed to the wall. No gas or electricity in this ancient part of the house. Marion slipped the bottle of morphine into her pocket, took the metal syringe and raised it to the fluttering flames. The needle was burnt black, a single drop of blood trickling down its side.
She glanced around. The room was bare under the high ceiling. Peat smouldered in a small grate. John’s jacket lay crumpled on the floor. A cold draft rustled the heavy grey curtains. In the corner, a small porcelain wash basin. A stark mahogany wardrobe. On a night table, a stack of faded cloth-bound novels. On a rosewood dresser stood three photographs in frames of burnished gold.
Marion picked one of them up and held it to the light. John leaning on a heathery hillside, dressed in a knitted sweater, smiling his crooked smile, a billowing scarf round his neck. How young he looked. By his side, another young man. Hazy autumn sun in their wind-swept hair. Hunting rifles slung over their knees. Seven dead rabbits lay at their feet.
She set the photograph down. A golden glint caught her eye.
In a black velvet box on the dresser lay a gilt pin, like a narrow brooch. She leaned closer. It was shaped like a cavalryman’s sabre, with a shamrock in the middle. The letters SIH carved in the leaves of the shamrock. It gleamed in the weak light.
‘It’s a sweetheart pin.’
Marion started and spun around.
‘From our regiment,’ John said hoarsely. ‘South Irish Horse.’ He inclined his head and gazed at her, a lock of black hair falling over his forehead. His face was deathly pale, the bruised gash on his cheek turning the shade of port wine. Dried blood stained his chin. ‘The other lads sent them to their wives and girlfriends back home,’ he murmured. ‘Corrigan ended up pinning his onto a prostitute in Armentières. Harper used his to clean out his pipe. Moley sent his to his mum. I didn’t have anyone to send mine to.’
Marion went to the wash basin and sloshed a crisp white cloth in the water, wringing it hard. Cold drops trickled down her wrists. She could feel him following her with his eyes.
Kneeling by his side, she gently, carefully began rubbing the dried blood from his face.
John closed his eyes and leaned his head towards her hand. ‘I want you to have it,’ he whispered, ‘the sweetheart pin. I want you to wear it.’
Swallowing hard, Marion smoothed the damp cloth over his pale lips.
John sluggishly raised his unbroken hand and stroked a few loosened locks of her hair. ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered, ‘for hurting you.’ His arm slumped back.
Marion breathed it in with a flutter in her throat. An apology. Like a little medal proving she deserved such things as apologies.
‘I dreamt the villages were burning,’ John said. His voice was becoming slurred, as if his tongue was swollen.
From downstairs came a crash and a slamming of doors.
Marion tensed, gripping the bloodied washcloth tightly, staring at the door.
Muffled voices, some angry, some whimpering, some reciting curses like chants, heavy boots scuffling and kicking, trampling down stairs.
‘Up in flames,’ John breathed. ‘An orange glow in the sky. Carncormac. Carnderrig. Ruane’s Hill. I’d a friend there when we were young. Sean McKee. We hunted rabbits. Went fishing. He used to joke that we’d got the same name. Sean is the Irish for John. He gave me a puppy from his dad’s litter. A little border collie. It slept in my bed.’ He leaned his head back and sighed. ‘Got trampled during one of Sid’s hunting parties. I cried and cried behind those willows out back. Out behind the stables.’
Marion ran her fingers through his black hair. ‘It’s alright,’ she whispered, her throat tightening.
‘And now he’s in the basement.’
‘What? Who?’
‘Sean,’ John murmured, furrowing his brow, ‘caught with the others. Hiding rifles in his shed. Planning an ambush.’
Marion froze, the bloodied cloth paused mid-air.
‘They all started hating me while I was away.’ John lowered his head.
‘But he’s your friend, John, you must let him go-’
‘That corporal, he’d his furlough coming up. Crying for water with his legs blown off. You know? And Rothman.’ John pulled himself up a little and fixed her with a dark stare. His pupils were unnaturally constricted, to the size of pinpricks. ‘But I will never, ever let them harm you. Not ever.’
Marion felt a chill prickling over her scalp.
John grazed his cold fingertips over her throat. ‘I shouldn’t have said you were an enemy,’ he slurred. His voice was becoming hard to understand. ‘You, you understand me. Better than anyone. Know what it’s like, being hated.’
‘John, no,’ Marion said, ‘you must stop now…’
She was losing him. ‘Please. Listen to me.’ She leaned closer, gripping his face and kissed his cold, unmoving lips. He was slipping into unconsciousness, his head lolling to one side, a sliver of white under his half-closed eyes. He mumbled something with a gravelly intake of breath.
Marion got to her feet, wiped her eyes on her sleeve and took his unbroken arm, grasping under his shoulder, heaving and hauling with all her might to get him onto the bed, her heels slipping over the rug.
The old mattress creaked. John groaned as she managed to shove and push until she got him lying on his back.
For a moment, she stood listening to his deep, slow breathing.
Then she turned to leave, the morphine and syringes clinking in her deep-cut pocket.
She paused by the dresser and took the little velvet case with the pin. She slipped it into her pocket and leaned her forehead against the cold door frame, pressing her eyes tightly shut.
‘Marion,’ came his voice. In the deep shadows, she saw him reach out to her. ‘Marion…’
She went and climbed on the bed, curling up on her side with her arm over his chest. She would stay awake. She’d watch over him.
‘Always loved you,’ he whispered, his voice thick as treacle and opium, his eyes flickering under his lids. But she wasn’t sure who he was talking to. A hot tear trickled from her eye to the corner of her mouth.
Marion had fallen into a fitful sleep, her left arm numb underneath her, her right arm clutching John’s chest. Dream-babble and dream-faces gurgled through the undercurrents of her mind, and she was back in Vienna, tossing and turning in clammy sheets, delirious with grief and laudanum, and Erich was there in the door, but he had his back to her, so she couldn’t tell him about it, she couldn’t tell him about the war dead, the glint of the ashtray flung at John’s face, the tables rattling, all rattling like the ground in an artillery barrage. The dream-images warped and turned in her mind, spinning over and over, and she had to tell someone, tell them that John broke his heart at the pole at dawn, me boys, and at Passchendaele, yes, she thought in her dream, Passchendaele, Passchendaele, Passion Dale, she’d live with John in Passion Dale and they’d nestle together in the grey mud, the sickly-yellow sky shielding them both as she wrapped her legs around John’s waist
and his shoulder pressed into her face, the weight of him lovingly drowning her in the flesh-warm shell craters and the bellowing smoke of the…
She snapped her eyes open.
Someone was pounding on the door.
Frowning, Marion fumbled in the darkness for a snippet of reality, for something solid and real, shaking the dream-visions from her mind.
The last candle had burnt down, a thin wisp of smoke curling in the darkness. She rose on an elbow. John was gone. But he’d draped his coat over her. She pulled herself up and hugged it tightly, digging her nails into the coarse wool. It smelled like him, his skin, sweet tobacco and stinging whiskey.
The pounding continued. A muffled voice.
The door swung open. The glow of a torch light crept across the wallpaper, the floor. A man stood in the doorway. Black leather coat. Rifle in hand. A Black and Tan.
Marion scrambled back, her heart jolting.
The man shone the torchlight in her face. She shielded her eyes.
‘You’re wanted,’ he said, ‘come along. Now.’
Chapter Thirty One
Marion staggered along with the Tan, catching her feet on the old runner carpets, struggling to shake the sleep from her mind and wincing in the sharp glow of the torch light.
The Tan led her through a high doorway.
Marion glanced around. A large hall, bare and cold. The very same room where they’d held their last seance. Little antlers lined the walls high above. Cobwebs billowed in the cold draft. Sparse furniture lined the walls, covered in linen sheets.
A glimmer caught her eye. Moonlight glinting in the shattered crystal ashtray on the floor. Nobody had come to sweep it away.
Brock stood in the middle of the room, heaving over the table, rummaging with his reports and photographs and telegrams. His short greying hair bristled on the roll of flesh over his uniform collar. Marion imagined him as he must have been during the war. Miles behind the lines, his hair plastered back with embalming fluids, thick hands fattened from meat grease. With one shove of those hands over the map table, thousands of men commanded into the scythe of machine gun fire.