Exit Unicorns

by Cindy Brandner

  “Having the head for the job isn’t what matters, it’s having the heart for it,” she said softly.

  “Oh Pamela, what am I to do with such an innocent? Perhaps dear girl I don’t have the heart either.”

  “I believe that you do.”

  “That sweetheart,” he said sadly, “is about as likely as unicorns on the moon.”

  ‘No Jamie’, she thought as they resumed their course along the rim of the sea, slowly tracking inland until the lights of home became apparent, until there was no excuse for her to continue holding his hand, ‘you falling in love with me, that’s about as likely as unicorns on the moon.’

  When Pat’s brother answered the door, Pamela had to squelch the desire to turn and run. He unnerved her in a way few had in the course of her young life, unnerved her and made her feel as if she were perpetually naked, both physically and mentally.

  “Is Pat here?” she asked, trying to avoid his eyes and finding herself staring at his buttons.

  “No, he ran out of here on some emergency for the Young Communists,” he smiled lazily, “I take it yer not on the security council.”

  “Obviously not,” she said stiffly, wondering why she could never think of anything witty or even halfway intelligible to say to this man. It annoyed her deeply.

  “Could you please tell him I was by?”

  “Yes’m, I will,” he said grinning, which only annoyed her further. She walked swiftly towards the gate, knowing, in a way that both infuriated and pleased her, that he was watching her do so.

  “Pamela, stop will ye!” he caught up with her on the narrow laneway, shoving his arms into a coat and halting in front of her. “I got a job today an’ I thought I’d go have a meal an’ celebrate, would ye care to join me?”

  ‘No thank you, most kind of you to offer but I have plans this evening already,’ was one variation on the theme playing in her head. What actually came out of her mouth was, “I’d like that.”

  Thus she found herself, one rainy half hour later, seated at a grubby table in a fish and chip shop, which existed under the rather lofty name of ‘Finnegan’s Wake’.

  “Best fish in Belfast, I’ll guarantee,” he’d said and unlike his brother had not felt the need to apologize for the seedy ambiance of the place.

  It was, indeed, very good fish and he was very good company. With a tongue as glib and silver as his brother’s but without Pat’s innate humility, Casey was a consummate teller of tales, able to infuse tragedy and comedy into the space of one small sentence. He was also discomfortingly direct. A game, Pamela mused after a particularly brutal set of questions dealing with his brother that two could play.

  “What was prison like?” she asked, and had felt some small flicker of triumph when it stopped him cold. The small flicker was abruptly smothered by a trickle of fear though as he narrowed his eyes and with a smile that had nothing to do with humor asked, “What is it that ye want to know?”

  She would have done well, she thought fiddling nervously with her water glass, to remember who it was she’d sat down with. ‘Bring a long spoon when ye sup wid the devil,’ Rose used to say. It hadn’t made a great deal of sense at the time, but it was beginning to now.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she did her best to assume an airy tone, which came out with a wobble and squeak. “What were your days like?”

  He considered her carefully, dark eyes boring hard into her own. “Up at dawn to bathe an’ dance, high tea at three an’ bridge on Thursday evenings,” he said coolly.

  “I was serious,” she said stung by his sarcasm.

  “It’s not,” he took a softer tone, “a story one necessarily wants to share with a pretty girl.”

  She blushed and he raised his eyebrows over the top of his cracked coffee cup.

  “It could have been worse,” he set his cup down gently, as if it were made of eggshells. “I’m a big man aye; it went much worse on the small ones, if ye’ll take my meanin’.”

  “Being beaten you mean?” she leaned onto the table meeting his eyes without fear for the first time. Curiosity, she was to acknowledge later, was inevitably her downfall.

  He cleared his throat and looked down where one broad hand was splayed across the laminated surface of the table. “Aye, amongst other things. Being beaten is hardly the worst thing that can happen to a man.”

  He had lashes like a girl, soft, thick and long. It was oddly poignant against the strong, almost brutal lines of his face. She had to resist the impulse to reach over and brush the pad of her thumb across his eyelids.

  “Then tell me something else,” she said, “something you can share with a girl.”

  “Well,” he looked out the window where the gray drizzly mist was fast dissipating into a black drizzly mist, “it seems most of my memories are prison now, as if my life before wasn’t quite real or doesn’t count for much anymore. Does that make sense to ye?” His eyes came up and met hers then looked swiftly away, but she’d read vulnerability there in that one flash instant.

  “It does,” she said steadily.

  He considered his coffee cup with great care. “The first day out was a strange one, I was certain everyone could read where I’d been on my face an’ by my clothes an’ even in the way I walked. I was like an alien seein’ the wonders of this world for the first time. I hadn’t felt the rain or the sun in any real, proper way for six years. It’s as if when ye are contained within those walls even the air an’ light is not free, ‘tis as if it loses some of its substance an’ purity by comin’ over those barriers an’ down onto the concrete ground. So, perhaps ye can understand that I was a bit giddy, near drunk-like on the freedom, but scared as well. Even misery is a comfort if it’s what ye are used to an’ we human bein’s are entirely creatures of what is rather than what might be. ‘Tis only in dreams that we believe in what might be.” He smiled shyly and she saw clearly what he must have been like before and that the boy was still there even if he could not, at present, acknowledge him.

  “Anyway, my first thought was I wanted a decent meal. Nothin’ with potatoes either. Ye’d think even an Englishman could cook somethin’ so simple as a potato properly but the ones we got in prison were boiled to glue an’ scorched so they tasted like ashes in a man’s mouth. We ate them every day, mornin’, noon an’ night an’ the taste of them became like bile in my throat. Other men dreamed of iron bars an’ women but me I dreamed of those damned potatoes. An Irishman’s curse maybe,” he smiled ruefully, “an’ I was determined to never eat another one. So I found a restaurant, a little French place with the sidewalk tables, because on that first day I didn’t want to be inside not even to eat nor sleep. An’ I ordered myself a meal with a nice piece of meat an’ some vegetables an’ when the waiter comes he puts down the plate an says, ‘zee chef apologisees but ve have no rice so he bakes you a potato instead.’ Well I tell ye I laughed so hard I thought I’d pass out from it. I’m certain they thought I’d gone right off my nut.”

  “Was it a good potato?” she asked smiling with him.

  “Likely it was,” he said eyes traveling her face from forehead to eyebrow, to eye and nose, to linger on cheekbone and lips and come to rest in her eyes again.

  “And the rest of the meal?” she asked tapping her fork on the table and going to great pains to avoid his frank, open gaze.

  “’Twas strange,” he said an undercurrent of regret in his voice, “I felt as if people were watchin’ my every move, it was like I couldn’t do the simplest things properly, like chew an’ handle my cutlery. I was sure every move I made fairly shouted, ‘this man has been a convicted felon for five years now and an Irish one at that.’ But ye see it was all in my mind for someone, be it guard or other prisoner, had been watchin’ every move I made for five years, an’ seein’ somethin’ suspicious in all of it. A man couldn’t take a piss without someone thinkin’ he was tryin’ to hide somethin’ up h
is backside—” he stopped abruptly, “I’m sorry, I’m not used to bein’ in the company of a woman an’ my mouth is still a bit rough.”

  “I’ve heard worse,” she said lightly.

  “Anyhow it was a waste of the bit of money I had for the food, fine as it was, tasted like sawdust in my mouth. I ate it all anyway because it seemed as if I’d been hungry for five years an’ never able to stop that gnawin’ feelin’ in my gut, though logically I knew it had little to do with hunger.”

  “And where did you sleep that night?”

  “Cardboard city. Ye’ll not have heard of it?” he asked in response to her quizzical look. “It’s where all failed Irishmen sleep in London. Under the Charing Cross bridge in cardboard boxes, too afraid to stay an’ yet more afraid to go home an’ admit they’ve failed at whatever thing called them away from Irish shores in the first place. A bunch of homeless, luckless Micks. I felt more comfortable there than I had since I left my own home. I shared a bottle of Powers whiskey with an old man from Cork, who’d been livin’ under that damn bridge for twelve years. I said he could come home with me, that I could manage his passage over an’ didn’t he long to see Irish shores again? Well he looks at me for a long time without speakin’ like I am ten kinds of fool an’ then says, ‘do ye not know boyo that an Irishman who leaves Ireland can never go home again?’ An’ I, havin’ the courage of whiskey in my veins says he’s an old liar an’ doesn’t the boat train leave every blessed day for those exact shores? An’ he gives me a look, this old drunk without even the grace of his own teeth in his head, as if to say I’m a very stupid Mick indeed an’ says ‘I suppose youth is an excuse for ignorance an’ for not knowin’ there are several kinds of leavin’ an’ some that ye can never go back on.’ I suppose it’s true,” he shook his head, “though I don’t entirely want to believe it. I’d like to think there’s a way home for all of us, including myself.”

  “But now you are home and everything is new. It’s a chance to start fresh.”

  He swallowed the last of his coffee and grimaced, “ ‘Tis a very American attitude if I may say so.”

  “You may, if you explain what you mean by that.”

  “Well it’s only that ye are an optimistic bunch, perhaps that comes from bein’ such a young nation, though yer lessons have been bitter they’ve not been so many as Ireland’s. The name of this establishment for instance, ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ ‘tis typical of this land that we would cultivate the greatest writer of the twentieth century an’ then ban the majority of the man’s work an’ turn around an’ use his fame to sell things to anyone who isn’t Irish. Or that we don’t teach our own history in our schools, but present Irish history only in the context of how it relates to the history of the British Empire an’ that’s as the thorn in the great side of imperialism. Or that we’ve been stripped of our native tongue an’ to actually be able to speak it with any fluency has become something of a specialization. We can be a bloody backwards lot.”

  “I wasn’t talking about nations I was talking about you, your own life and fate.”

  He gave her a strange look, weary and a bit bitter. “My life an’ my country’s life are one an’ the same.”

  “And where does your brother fit into that picture?” she asked quietly.

  “Ye pull no punches do ye? Pat is my little brother an’ someone I will protect with my own life if necessary.”

  “He’s not so very little.”

  He waited until their coffee cups were refilled before responding. “That’s a fact I’m well aware of. In my head, I knew he was nineteen years old and likely to be all the things that come with the age, but in my heart he was still fourteen an’ grievin’ our Daddy’s death, he was still someone who needed his big brother to look out for him. I suppose that if he had been I’d have been able to keep my promise to my Da’. But he’s not a child as much as I might wish it.”

  “No he isn’t,” she agreed.

  Casey paid the check then, giving her an amused glance when she suggested she pay half, and they walked out into the rain, where streetlights, orange and grim, were the only stars visible.

  “I think maybe I resent my brother a bit,” Casey said out of the corner of his mouth, the other side occupied with lighting a cigarette, “I can’t believe how well he’s done without me. Makes me feel a bit obsolete, I mean,” he said to her raised eyebrows, “here I come home expectin’ this gawky teenager with spots an’ no social graces an’ I find this tall man who’s runnin’ dissident organizations an’ has a gift for drawin’ none of us ever suspected an’ is entertainin’ naked women in the kitchen.”

  “The light,” she said, grateful for the dark that hid her furious blush, “was best in there.”

  “That,” she could feel his grin without having to see it, “I will tell ye, threw me for the hell of a loop.”

  “It was entirely innocent.”

  “I don’t know if there’s anything entirely innocent about drawin’ naked women, but it’s certainly a pleasant way to make a livin’.”

  There was really no appropriate way to respond to that so Pamela wisely refrained from doing so.

  “Where are we walking to?” she asked some time later after they’d passed several nameless buildings and faceless streets.

  Casey stopped and looked around. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m so fond of wanderin’ now that I’ve got no walls stoppin’ me that I forget most people have a destination in mind when they’re out. I’m not certain of where we are, though if ye give me a minute I’ll sort it out. Where is it that yer headin’?”

  “Up there.” She pointed at Jamie’s house on the hill, distant enough to seem a fairy castle, twinkling with light, mythical and impossible to reach from the cramped dank laneway they stood in.

  “Christ,” he let out a long, low whistle. “That’s where ye live?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes,” she replied, wishing for some reason she couldn’t yet define that she’d not told him.

  “Ye’d need a map to get from here to there.”

  “It’s not so difficult, you take the Shankill up as far as—”

  “That’s not what I mean an’ I think ye know it,” he said his tone softer by far than the words.

  “I can’t really help where I live.”

  “Can’t ye?” he asked and then lightning fast smiled and lightened the atmosphere by several degrees. “I’ve talked yer ear off an’ been so rude my Da’ would be ashamed he’d raised me an’ ye’ve not said a word about yerself.”

  “I told you where I live.”

  “Aye an’ that only deepens the mystery doesn’t it? Everyone in Belfast knows who lives there an’ I imagine he’s not yer uncle.”

  “He’s my friend, the best one I’ve ever had,” she said quietly, a thread of anger running beneath the surface of her words.

  “I imagine he is,” Casey said and there was no judgment in his voice. “Shall I walk ye home?”

  “No, it isn’t necessary, I know the way perfectly well.”

  “The question was only for politeness sake, I wasn’t actually askin’,” Casey said firmly, “I’d like to think I’m not the sort of man who’d let a wee girl walk home alone in the dark.”

  “Wee girl,” she said indignantly.

  “Aye, my brother may not be so little as ye say but you,” he glanced over his shoulder, “are.”

  He set off at an easy pace though she had to half run to keep up with his long strides. “You have to take the street on your left up here,” she said breathlessly, trying to stay abreast of him.

  He glanced sideways at her, dark eyes amused, “I know the way.”

  “Bloody bastard,” she whispered stopping in the middle of the street to catch her breath.

  He halted, giving her a minute to catch up. “I’ll say this ye may be a Yank but ye’ve the tongue of an Irishwoman in yer h
ead.”

  This time she didn’t bother to whisper.

  You couldn’t tell a woman about prison, they were too fine for it. At least this one was. And it seemed as much as there were nights you’d like to unburden yourself and stop living with the nightmares, you couldn’t tell your brother either. Your brother who saw you as some living embodiment of the struggle. How to put into words anyway what you’d seen, done and been in the last five years? It was, for the most part, beyond words. How every day was a fight for your life, in a way that even people who lived in war zones could not understand. How you had to battle to keep your mind, soul and body from being torn apart.

  When he really thought about it, which he tried not to do, he knew he didn’t want to tell anyone. The beatings, the questioning that went on for hours, questions that both you and your interrogator knew there were no answers for. Answers were not the point, blood and pain were. Body searches, rectal exams that so humiliated a man that he would weep later in his cell. He’d learned the hard way to separate his mind from what was being done to his body. He’d gotten fairly good at it. They’d left him little choice in the matter however. If the mind wasn’t hard and honed to the consistency of steel, the bastards knew it and they would use it to take you down, they would use it to kill you. And that was just the screws.

  What the prisoners could do was something else entirely. They knew you in a way the screws could not. They could take a man’s mind and bend it hard, bend it until there was no hope for survival, until the outside world seemed of no more consequence than a child’s storybook. They had tried especially hard with him, ‘the little fucking terrorist’, they’d called him. ‘We’ll show you real terror you Paddy bastard.’ And they had. He’d only been a boy when he went in, a boy who’d made a tragic mistake but he was a man now. It wasn’t the method he’d have chosen but it had been most effective.