Exit Unicorns

by Cindy Brandner

  “And hasn’t since,” Jamie agreed grudgingly. “I do wish,” he continued, voice rather too convincingly light, “that the child would see fit to tell us where she’s from and how she came to be here.”

  “All I know is I found her in the gypsy camp dancing for her dinner and she seemed a suitable distraction,” Yevgena said mildly, “besides she’s told you the same story she told me. I think it’s her way of saying that we should mind our own business.”

  “Yes, well I’d rather not have some rabid pack of brothers descending on my head when they find out she’s living here.”

  “I think you’ll find, Jamie, that there are no brothers or any other relations to bother you. Call it a hunch,” she added as Jamie looked at her sharply.

  “I think the more relevant question,” Jamie mused, “is to ask why she would lie about her origins, what purpose could it possibly serve?” He rose to take Yevgena’s bags and escort her to the car.

  “Jemmy, perhaps for now, let her have her little mystery. If someone comes looking for her then the mystery is solved, if no one does,” Yevgena shrugged, “then she is safe here for the moment.”

  Jamie walked Yevgena to the car where the mist of a cool morning still hung in the air, gelling and rolling off the black-barked oaks and dripping off the scarlet berries of the rowans.

  Yevgena pressed her knuckles into his jawline, smoothing out the muscles the way she had when he was a child. “You will be alright my darling boy?” Jamie nodded, knowing it was half-statement, half-question and that he wouldn’t be able to give her an adequate answer just yet.

  “Don’t worry about me,” he said in his best blarney tone, “I’ll be busy, it’s not like you haven’t left me with my hands full.”

  “Worrying about you is a full-time job,” Yevgena said as she slid neatly into the car. Jamie shut her door and smiled down at her open window, mouthing the words ‘I’ll be fine,’ as the car slid down the drive and out of sight.

  Jamie Kirkpatrick had been the only son of a lonely father. While not actually an occupation, it was a role that occupied most facets of his life—valiant son unable to save unhappy father. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, not Jamie’s, not his dead mother’s and not even, it would seem, his father.

  Jamie had tried, from a very early age, to make happiness, to giftwrap and present it to his father on birthdays, Christmases and every bloody day that rose and set before and after. Approval, every child’s dream, every child’s nemesis, seemed the surest way. It had, even now as he looked thirty-two full in the face, never ceased to be an avenue of fruitless endeavor. The best grades in school, the bloodiest injuries in sports, the dreams a father and son could share and build. None of it had done. His father, kind and loving, had been somehow absent, a shade that had never quite managed to be fully born. And now having put the barrel of a gun in his mouth, he was fully absent. It wasn’t, as everyone seemed to be certain, Jamie’s grief that was likely to destroy him, it was his anger. A man’s life was his own to do with as he wished, to take or to give as he so chose, but his father might have told him first, might have warned him ten years ago before he, Jamie, ruined his own life. His father, who had looked at him once with bitterness in his face and gall in his mouth, “such devotion to duty Jamie, you should have been a Jesuit after all, you’d do them proud.” The irony of that as his father had pushed Jamie’s shoulder to the wheel.

  If only he’d said, ‘Laddie, I think at some point I’ll end all this,” then Jamie could have thanked him and not wasted ten years of life trying to keep the pieces together for a man who didn’t want the picture completed. His father had chosen to lie down in guilt, but had through the force of filial love commanded his son to keep walking, to take the burden and face the mountain. Jamie, twenty-two, freshly graduated from the English department at Oxford, dizzy with dreams and expectation, had turned his back on all those things he was too young to even know he desired and shouldering his father’s burdens walked, if not willingly, at least open-eyed into the fire.

  Twenty-two and head of an international export business that he didn’t want. He had however, decided that if he was to do it, he would do it right. The Kirkpatricks had made linen and whiskey for three hundred years, each the best in its class, each a symbol of status and savoir faire the world over. Linen and whiskey could be made cheaper in all parts of the world, but none made it better. The linen with a thread count so high it felt like silk on the skin, the whiskey a painstaking process of separately malting forty-two small batches of whiskey to be combined into the special blend that comprised Connemara Mist. It was aged in oak barrels to give it its distinctive mellow taste.

  Jamie’s father had kept a somewhat steady hand on the tiller, kept the sales even, the bank balance neither falling nor climbing for the years he’d run the companies. Jamie though, sensing in the postwar economy a new world market for the taking, had gone out of his way to sell Irish. The Romantic Ireland, the Ireland of Yeats, Synge and Joyce, the soft green pastures uncut by highway or high-rise, the wide empty sugar sand beaches and the dear little cottages furled in peat smoke. The long-legged, jittery racehorses, the Georgian gentility of green and gold Dublin, the pewter mist folding into purple mountains that seemed the stuff of fairies and leprechauns. When you bought Kirkpatrick linens or Kirkpatrick whiskey you were buying a piece of what your ancestors had left behind, you were buying a dream. A dream Jamie knew, that was wrapped in shamrocks and tied up with dollar bills, a dream that bore little resemblance to the truth.

  The reality of rural Ireland was one of dying villages, rundown shops and men who often clung to bachelorhood well past the point of being any earthly use to a woman. It was a land of old men and women, a land that time had forgotten. A land that saw 40,000 of her people emigrate each year, never to return. The cities were often worse, elegant ruins became rundown housing for the poor with inadequate plumbing, heating or space. Diseases that other western nations had obliterated still rode, like spectral horses, through the streets of Irish cities.

  Jamie, with a certain amount of longing for the land that time forgot, knew what Ireland really needed, what the Irish needed were jobs. Jobs that meant they could stay in their own country, raise their children on Irish soil, send them to school for free, get proper medical attention and have a little left over to hope with, to dream with. So he, in place of his own dreams became the seller of dreams. Selling Ireland to the rest of the world to buy it back for her own people. It was, some days, almost enough to make him forget what he’d left behind.

  The Seller of Dreams. He’d been called worse. Paddy, Mick, Bogtrotter and several variations on that theme. Colleen used to call him ‘you beautiful mick bastard,’ in affection and frustration. Colleen had been the one thing he’d done for himself, the one time he’d put what he wanted before the needs of his father.

  He’d known Colleen from the time she was eight and he was ten. He’d wandered off from his father one day, waiting for him to finish a conversation with a man and found himself, several harrowing hours later, in a mean and lean part of Belfast he’d never encountered before. It had been Colleen, small and sprightly, a silver-eyed elf who’d found him and taken him home to her mother like a stray puppy.

  ‘An’ what have we here Colleen?’ Mary MacGregor had asked, work-reddened hands on hips.

  ‘Jamie,’ Colleen had said as if, very simply, she’d known him the entirety of her life.

  ‘Well young man, ye look hungry, sit yer backside down on that chair an’ we’ll feed ye.’ Jamie had nodded gratefully and taken the appointed chair. Moments later a steaming bowl of stew was placed under his nose alongside a plate of fresh bread. He ate like one half-starved, Colleen across from him tucking into her own bowl of stew. Her mother looking on now and then as she busied herself about the stove. Colleen smiling encouragingly through the steam above her bowl. He’d never felt so comfortable or welcome in his life, not even in h
is own home. He’d almost wished that his father would not find him, at least not for a little while.

  Of course, his dad did find him but it wasn’t until the evening, long after he’d decided he’d marry Colleen when he grew up and live in the rundown little flat forever. Eventually he did marry her but, as was inevitable, he took her to live in his world and he was to always think perhaps that was where he’d been very, very wrong.

  Colleen Colleen Colleen, eyes gray as the moon, a smile to light the world and his, his for the asking, his for the taking. Perhaps God never meant for people to have that which their heart desired the most, perhaps that, right there, was the ultimate sin. For it seemed to Jamie that if He let you have it He damn well found a way to take it back.

  They grew up together, the two of them, Jamie spending what time could be stolen, bought and borrowed under the fond eyes of Mary MacGregor and her middle daughter. Seven kids and Colleen was number four, three above and three below her. ‘Nondescript,’ was the word she’d tossed at him when he’d asked her how she felt about her position in the family. ‘The only thing special about me Jamie was that I found you,’ she told him later still when life had seen fit to break her heart for the third time in seven years. ‘Three strikes and you’re out, isn’t that what they say in American baseball?’ she’d said to him over closed suitcases, closed doors, closed chapters and then she’d taken herself away, for good and for always and gave herself to a man she’d never be able to see or to touch and therefore would never hurt her.

  He still couldn’t really absorb it; Colleen had been his, not God’s. His in a way that she could never belong to God. He couldn’t even close his eyes without seeing her like golden webbing on the back of his eyelids, half-reclining on their bed, sweetly unselfconscious, because there was nothing to hide from Jamie, ‘come here you beautiful mick bastard,’ curling her fingers in invitation and he, young, so young, eager, in love, mad with it, unbelieving that this woman, this pale moon and water creature would allow him the liberties she did. Divine heat, so powerful that it felt sacred, religious, frightening even at times. He’d been in a state of grace for that short space, pure and without sin, or so he’d thought. There, within the sacristy of sheets, limbs and skin, he had believed love inviolable. A lucky bastard, for once. It was the way he tried, strenuously, to remember Colleen. Other pictures interfered, Colleen lying still and diamond white, death’s hieroglyphs traced fine and swirling upon her face, pools of blue-black blood laying silent beneath her upturned hands, a self-crucifixion gone awry. That had been the day she’d discovered she was pregnant with Stuart.

  ‘I cannot do this again, Jamie,’ she said simply, calmly, when the doctors had brought her around and informed Jamie of his impending fatherhood.

  Third time lucky, he’d told himself with enough grim determination to almost believe it. Three strikes and you’re out, he should have listened to Colleen, for she’d the wisdom of blighted motherhood on her side. Unlucky bastards, he and his three sons, unlucky bastards all.

  ‘I cannot do this anymore,’ she said again, after Stuart. ‘I have seen too many little blue coffins and I cannot hope anymore. I may, just may be able to stay sane if I leave now, but if I stay I will surely go mad.’ So, he’d let her go, thinking that sanity was highly overrated. His own sanity seemed determined to stay as hard as he tried to drink it away, work it away, fuck it away. His own holy, or unholy as it were, trinity. Drinking, working, fucking. Drinking at night until he could find oblivion in a scant few hours of sleep, working until he thought his brain would crack in half, company doubling its profits, then trebling and him not giving a damn about any of it. Pissing the money away on booze and women. There were plenty of women, he was beautiful, rich and wild, a combination that raised blood pressures and lowered knickers. He’d actually bought a deserted Pacific island for one woman on a weekend he’d no memory of. Fucking to Oblivion, the required journey for the only destination he longed for. Yevgena had been wrong, there’d been a lot of women, just none that he’d allowed under his skin. He did all the permutations, fucking, screwing, shagging, banging and any other crude metaphor one could think of for the Black Act, the Dirty Deed, the Sheet Shimmy, the Horizontal Hoochie-Koochie, he just didn’t make love anymore. A night for each of them, never more than once, no matter how sweet and suppliant, no matter the tears and recriminations, no matter the pounding, thrusting, slick, sweating white goddamn heat of it. Nomatternomatternomatter.

  Paddling so hard and wondering why he didn’t just let himself drown, people had pissed away their lives on less pain, less heartbreak, less black sucking fear. Other people had, why not him? Why oh why not? Because it would be letting down the team, the one comprised of the raging son and the sad, mad dad. As if his father was breathing his breath, standing on his feet, circulating his cursed blood. Well the sad, mad dad had really let the team down this time. At the time of his father’s death, some echo of self-preservation had kept Jamie from the ocean.

  Jamie knew Yevgena had a sharp eye, always had, for the obvious and the not so obvious, he knew why she’d brought this girl, this lick of flame, this heat and need and God-awful fragility and set her down like a sacrifice on his doorstep. He knew and had been utterly suckered by it anyway, just as Yevgena had known he would be. This girl who seemed to have been born yesterday, because he knew that there was no farm in Nova Scotia, no rundown little farmhouse with old, silent parents and a dog with a black patch over one eye. Oh yes, such a place probably existed but not for her. No cold, lonely, misted up northern patch of earth had grown her. It just didn’t happen that way. All that fine, white skin and perfumed hair, all that length of leg and wit of mind hadn’t been fired and brought forth upon a harsh, barren bit of rock. She was lying, but, he’d credit her, she did it like a trooper.

  ‘Tried for years and then when she’s fifty she gets pregnant and there I was, nine months later,’ she’d said, smiling and popping the last bit of a jam sandwich in her mouth. Her appetite was voracious, as if she was afraid she’d never see food again, as if in the very recent past it had been a limited resource and she’d come to know hunger rather too well. Liar, liar, beautiful liar.

  Odd, she was the first woman to stir desire, to make it break like a sickness in his veins and she was the first he had turned down. He’d wanted to make love, with all the elements there, mind, body, soul but drunkenness, for once, had prevailed. He’d slept, there beside her and had been sober when he awoke and had no desire to remedy the fact. It worried him, that.

  Insanity, that was her game he supposed, the sort of insanity that youth insulates itself with, known in less cynical circles as innocence.

  She’d learn, everyone did, he’d been severely infected with innocence himself once. She’d learn that there was an eleventh commandment that negated the previous ten. Hope Is the Only Sin.

  Four weeks after Pamela O’Flaherty had taken shelter under his roof, Jamie, for a variety of reasons, found himself sorely in need of a drink. However, for quite possibly the first time in its history, the House of Kirkpatrick was without refreshment of the alcoholic sort. He searched each floor, including the cellar, where there was nothing more potent than wine to be found and even resorted to crawling on the floor looking under furniture and fixtures. The result of which being himself, standing in the middle of the study floor, cobwebs tangled artistically through the gold of his hair, utter fury flushing his face.

  “What do you mean you got rid of it all?” he said, thinking with lover like longing of the twelve cases of Connemara Mist that only this morning had graced his cellar.

  Pamela, head bent over her recently begun studies, took a moment before looking up. There was, Jamie noticed, very little in the way of repentance in her face.

  “I took the tops off and poured it down the sink, believe me it took up a lot of my day and Maggie is still complaining about the stink of it in her kitchen. “D’you know the Latin word for dr
unk?” she asked, brow furrowed over her books again.

  “Ebrius,” he replied automatically, almost missing the insult. “Now look,” he said trying to keep his voice steady, “you’ve no right to go rooting through my things and disposing of my belongings. If you are to go on living here we’ll have to set up some basic rules.”

  She closed her books with deliberate precision and looked him directly in the eye. “Do you suppose,” she said tartly, “that the Romans had a term for piss-artist?”

  “I—what—pardon me?” Jamie spluttered.

  She sat back, quite relaxed and waved a hand around indicating the study. “I thought, seeing as you’ve such a taste for dead poets and dead languages that you’d be more comfortable if you could hide behind dusty words.”

  “More comfortable with what?” Jamie was feeling flustered and more in need of the absent drink by the minute.

  “Your title, the name of your occupation. A man who practices law is a lawyer, one who teaches is a teacher, one who drinks, seemingly as his life’s work, is a piss-artist, at least that’s what they call it where I come from.”

  “And just where exactly is that ?” Jamie asked, voice like splintering glass.

  “I’ve told you,” she said hastily, “Nova Scotia.”

  “Well it’s quite an education you got down on the farm isn’t it? Latin, Greek, philosophy, psychology, classics, all that and,” his hands shot out lightning fast and grabbed her own, “you managed to keep such pretty white hands. How did you do it?”

  “Goat’s milk,” she said smiling, fingers curling up over her palms, “it does wonders for the complexion.” She pulled her hands smoothly out of the grip of his own, “It’s supposed to be a real tonic for the nerves as well, you might,” she picked up her books and made to leave the room, “try it for your own, you seem to be shaking rather badly.”