Exit Unicorns

by Cindy Brandner

  “I will come back.”

  Chapter Eleven

  To Hell or Connacht

  Having fasted five days and nights in order to draw closer to the presence of his Lord, Lucien Broughton was in body and soul as white and empty as the scourged innards of a wentletrap shell. He believed he had at last received an answer to the question he’d posed God some days earlier.

  With an answer in hand, a man could proceed to action, clearly, brilliantly and expediently. Rising up off his knees and ignoring the blood that began to leak through the scabs, he surveyed himself in a full length mirror. He looked well for his deprivation, incandescent, as though he burned from inside with a pure, scorching light, which indeed he did.

  Naked, he took stock. Skin without flaw, a white so unearthly that at certain angles there seemed a silver tint to him. He despised messiness in other people, did not allow it in himself and could not understand why anyone else should. Not a ripple of muscle, a bump of bone, a wavelet of tendon displayed itself through the gilt covering of his skin. It was to his advantage this; it caused people to misread him, to underestimate his power.

  This age he lived in was messy, violent and filled with contradiction, all of which displeased him. But things could be changed to suit, shifted to fit, broken in order to achieve alignment. It was only a matter of having a skilled hand upon the rudder and a firm mind behind it. Lucien knew he had these things in abundance. God had intended that it should be so, he had intended that his son, his pale and perfect son, be a man of destiny. God was the mind, Lucien the vessel.

  Still naked, he walked to the window, surveying the city around him. Grander cities there were, larger cities, shinier cities even, but this one was his. Of a size and temperament to make the task of seizing hold the reins and guiding it to a better future, so much the easier.

  He breathed deeply, taking in the air of evening, the colors as they lay lambent and molten, layer upon lacquered layer in bronze, gold, crimson and purple. July was only around the corner. In Ireland, summer was the season of rage and July its burning epicenter. The Marching Season was upon them in all its slashing orange, drumgutted glory. He himself was to lead a crowd of thousands, to finish on the lawns of Stormont with a ringing oratory no one would ever forget.

  There had been rumors, suggested by the foolish, that perhaps it was time to stop the parades. That such aggressive and open hostility only stirred the sectarian pot, adding more poison to the bubbling, heaving, ready to boil over mess that was Northern Ireland. But it was a Protestant statelet with a Protestant government and no Unionist government in their right mind was going to cancel the event that was a two and a half century old reassurance of their superiority. It would be insanity and political suicide all in one move. In times of trouble, people needed reassurance, dressing in their father’s sash and beating the drum gave them this. And there really was no more effective method of polarization to separate the two communities that in other times and seasons had come dangerously close to melding.

  Lucien eyed the sun as it sank well into its evening descent. Time to dress. To don the vestments of his calling. He’d a meeting with the B-Sots, as he called them, or ‘Benevolent Sisters of Temperance’ a name, which he thought, had a rather profane popish smack to it and then he was to offer prayer and verse at the Orange Lodge, Chapter 46 later in the evening.

  Lucien smiled, a pleasant smile, which brought a glow to his pale blue eyes and made old women sigh. Even for a Man of Destiny things couldn’t be moving any closer to schedule.

  He took a last look over the city, raising his eyes to encompass the outlying hills and the smile, well practiced, faded quickly from his face. For on the hill, reflecting all the colors of sunset, refracting and winking like an obscene jewel was the house of James Kirkpatrick.

  Perhaps there was, after all, one fly in the ointment.

  A week after Pamela’s departure for Scotland Casey was fired from his job. He’d finished his shift that day and was looking forward to a pint with a few fellow workers when he was called over to the shift foreman’s office.

  “Kevin said ye wanted to see me,” he said, ducking under the low doorframe.

  “Aye,” the man sighed and turned from the blueprints he had rolled out across his desk. He needn’t have said a word. Casey could read what he had to say all too clearly from the discomfort in the man’s face. He’d be damned if he’d spare the bastard the misery of it though.

  “It seems, Casey,” the foreman twitched papers and pens about in front of him, “it seems that we will have to let you go,” he cleared his throat nervously and Casey suddenly saw that the man was afraid, “for the present time.”

  “I’m fired then,” Casey said mildly.

  “Well, not technically, no—” the man was actually sweating.

  “Just to clear things a bit,” Casey said slowly as if he were talking to a dimwitted child, “when I get up in the morning I will not be coming here an’ come next Friday there’ll be no pay for me an’ yet somehow I’m not technically,” he drew the word out like sticky toffee, “fired.”

  The foreman swallowed nervously once or twice. “It’s a possibility that we’ll need you back in the autumn.”

  “Bullshit,” Casey said wearily, seeing the game very clearly for what it was. “Who is it needs a job then, boss’ nephew, his wife’s cousin, his auntie’s bingo partner?”

  “This isn’t about nepotism,” the foreman said testily, pen drumming a nervous beat on the table.

  “Really? Then what have I done to lose my job? Have I been late, slacked off, taken long breaks?”

  “No,” the foreman agreed hastily.

  “Then what is it?”

  The man took a long, shaky breath and spent several seconds studying the nub of his pen. Casey sat down.

  “I’ll not leave until I’ve had an honest answer. There are boys with less seniority out there, so I’d like to know why it’s me specifically that’s bein’ given the sack.”

  “There’ve been rumors...” the foreman said eyes still firmly fixed to the desk.

  “Rumors about what? Ye knew I had a prison record when ye hired me, I made no bones about that,” Casey said, willing the man to look up and meet his eyes. He did a moment later.

  “It’s not the past we’re concerned with, it’s the present company that yer keepin’ that has tongues waggin’. We keep no truck with those sort of dealins’ around here.”

  “I see,” Casey said rising stiffly, feeling older and heavier than he had only moments ago. “I wasn’t aware that my weekends an’ evenins’ were of any concern to the company.”

  “’Tis when yer activities could get the place blown up.”

  “I don’t bring my politics to work.”

  “The sort of politics ye practice have a way of followin’ a man wherever he goes.”

  “Do they?” Casey asked, moving towards the open door. Knowing that once it was behind his back it was closed for good and all. It was a hard lesson to learn about doors for every one you walked through represented an ending. There would be no job in the autumn, or any other season for that matter.

  Outside, his pals, the five token Catholics of the three hundred man-work force, stood together. Desperation as much as comradeship had drawn them to one another.

  “Will we still be havin’ that pint then?” asked Kevin Doherty, father of three blue-eyed girls and possessor of a new mortgage away from the neighborhood. A man who wore the tight look of one fleeing from something that cannot be escaped.

  “Aye,” Casey smiled, flipping his jacket over his shoulder, “it’s on me lads.”

  Not one to be daunted by the prospects of unemployment, Casey, the Monday after his dismissal took to the streets in search of another job. After a week of solid, unequivocal rejection, it seemed that something temporary might be in order. Window washing presented itself as an option
that would leave his afternoons open for a variety of activities. However, three days into the endeavor, having yet to wash a window, the only real opportunity for wages that had presented itself came from a lonely widow and had little to do with the state of her windows. He received a similar offer from an older gentleman when he took up house painting, an enterprise that netted him two jobs that were, in the end, just enough to pay for his brushes, paint and ladder.

  He began to spend more time at home than was good for the condition of his soul and to clean with an obsessiveness that bordered on the unhealthy. Pat, on one of his rare appearances, caught him cleaning the washroom grout with an old toothbrush for the second time in one week and voiced the opinion that perhaps he needed to find an alternative activity to occupy his time.

  “’Tis easy for ye to say,” Casey said scratching at the tip of his nose with one rubber-gloved hand, “yer not stuck in this damn place day after day.”

  “Nor are you,” Pat pointed out, “ye’ve been unemployed before an’ managed to find something to do, this is no different.”

  “In fact,” Casey said ignoring altogether Pat’s last statement, “yer never here. Ye breeze in, grab a bath an’ fresh clothes an’ breeze back out.” His eyes narrowed suspiciously, “Just where do ye spend all yer time?”

  “In Oriental massage parlors, where do ye think?” Pat retorted acerbically and left his brother to his grout.

  Casey caught up to him in the kitchen. “Will ye be around for dinner? I’ve made stew and dumplins’, the little ones with apple that ye like.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Pat said on an explosion of breath.

  “What?” Casey asked, all innocence, wooden spoon in hand.

  “Would ye listen to yerself? Yer like some nittin’ broody hen.”

  “What are ye tryin’ to say?” Casey slapped the spoon down.

  “I’m not tryin’, I’m bloody well sayin’ it! Christ Casey, I’m beginnin’ to feel like the flea that couldn’t get rid of the dog.”

  “Well thank you very much,” Casey said peevishly, picking up the milk Pat had poured and left on the counter and wiping the ring of condensation under it.

  Pat sighed and rubbed his neck, leaving a smudge of ink in the wake of his fingers. “Listen, I’ve got to go down to Tom’s tonight. We’re to finish up the pamphlets an’ then we’ve got to leaflet an area of about five square miles.”

  “For what?” Casey said, tone lightly disinterested.

  “We’re picketin’ the Housing Trust in the morning. Five houses have gone to Protestant families with one or no children an’ they’ve been bumped over Catholics who had larger families an’ greater need.”

  “Such is the way of our world,” Casey said laconically.

  “So we should just let it stay so?” Pat asked, grabbing an apple and some bread and stuffing it in his pockets.

  “No, I’m just sayin’ I’m not certain it’ll lead anywhere all this protestin’ and pamphletin’.”

  “People can respond to things other than the sound of a gun,” Pat said quietly.

  “D’ye think I don’t know that?” There was a transparency in Casey’s words, a desperation that made Pat halt for a moment, even though he was already late.

  “Tom’s uncle has offered us a few weeks work peat cuttin’ out west. Why don’t ye come?”

  “Can the revolution survive yer absence so long?”

  “It’ll manage,” Pat said, fighting not to rise to his brother’s bait.

  “An’ what about Declan, doesn’t he need yer stout slingin’ skills over the next bit?” For Pat had taken a part-time job as a bartender at Declan O’Ryans, a comfortable if not trendy establishment known for its good food and showcasing of local talent.

  “He always closes down for a few days durin’ the height of marchin’ season an’ he decided to close for three weeks an’ make a holiday of it, he’s taken the wife an’ kids to Greece.”

  “Oh,” Casey said, turning and giving the stew a dejected stir.

  “Come, why don’t ye?” Pat infused the smallest bit of wheedling into his request.

  “Out west, eh?” Casey said and leaning against the counter faced his brother once again. “Is it to be ‘to hell or Connacht’ for me then?”

  “It’s beginnin’ to look that way,” Pat said smiling.

  “Aye well, perhaps I’ll try Connacht. I’ve been to hell an’ didn’t find the temperature to my likin’. Now go on, ye can’t leave the revolution in Tom Kelly’s hands for too long, he’s like to lose it in the first five minutes.”

  Casey sat after Pat left, ate three bites of the stew he’d ladled out for himself and then pushed the bowl away with a heavy sigh. It was no good pretending. He didn’t want to eat, cared little for sleep and was about as settled as a dog with an arseful of porcupine quills. He could have pointed to any number of reasons and likely even convinced himself of their validity. The stagnation in the Republican rank and file, the fact that his brother seemed like the whirlwind at the center of some exciting event while he felt awkward, alone and an outsider in his own community. While it was true that in their neighborhood almost every household held a Nationalist sympathy or a Republican under the bed there were still those who walked past him in the street without a word. People he’d known since childhood, mothers who’d fed him bread warm from the oven. One old lady had actually spit at his feet the other day. Sometimes he wondered if he’d be able to leave prison behind. There were still moments when he thought he could smell the place on his skin, feel the grit of it under his nails and the darkness of it in his heart. All the hot water in the world wasn’t going to get rid of that. But when he’d held Pamela in his arms the other night, when he’d touched her face and kissed her, he’d felt a lightness inside, he’d felt clean, as if he held no taint from his past, no weariness that did not belong in a body so young. She’d felt like salvation, a fine and good thing that he could protect and care for, a beauty that would save him from himself.

  He stood, took his bowl to the sink and faced himself in the merciless reflection of window and dark night.

  ‘To hell or Connacht then,” he whispered to himself and found it difficult to smile.

  In May of 1968, a great concrete and steel edifice was erected in West Belfast. It was the first of its sort there, though unfortunately it wasn’t to be the last. It was called by the rather uninspired name of Divis Flats and it would rip the heart out of a neighborhood, opening vital arteries that would bleed despair and disillusionment for decades. It was also monumentally, undeniably ugly.

  The architects of the monstrosity hailed it as an opportunity for a new community, a time for the society of West Belfast to recast itself around the advantages of modern living, stating that having ‘a bird’s eye view’ would give the people who were fortunate enough to live there a ‘new and more meaningful social relationship between communities.’ The architects, of course, did not have to live there. There had been nothing wrong with the community of the old West Belfast, the housing had been rundown and needed replacing, but as far as the ties that bound one house to the next and one street to another, even the most stringent social planner would have been hard put to find a stronger, more densely woven population. People knew their neighbors and moreover, quite often liked them. They knew who was about to be born and who was about to die, whose father had fought in the war and whose had not. Whose paycheck was blued on the dogs or the drink, whose arthritis flared up in the winter, whose nerves were being lost on kids and bills, who was falling in love and who was falling out. They needed new homes, warm, clean, properly plumbed, well-built homes, what they did not need was a government imposed eyesore about which they were given neither choice nor vote.

  It was typical and they were used to it. The older generation had seen it in myriad ways; aspirations had come to ashes before and would again. There was no trial and error as far a
s the government was concerned there was only the trial of error upon error. The bottom line was the largest number of housing units for the least amount of money and to hell with a sense of community or security. The government had taken it upon themselves to make decisions for a section of the population they had no connection to, no understanding of and no fondness for. It was the way of things in Northern Ireland and had been for as long as anyone cared to remember.

  The young, mercifully or unmercifully, have no memory. And the youth of Northern Ireland were no different from their counterparts around the globe; they saw discrimination and sought to right it. They were, however, different from their predecessors in that they were the first generation of Catholics to have access to higher education and a hope at something more than a marriage with too many mouths to feed and the occasional flutter at the track to look forward to.

  To them, life had to be more than a mill that sucked you in and ground you down, spitting you out the other end soulless and hopeless. Life just had to be more than that.

  Pat, standing in the street and eyeing the block of concrete, felt as if he were shouldering a good deal of the weight of it. Over the last few weeks, he’d heard his father’s voice in his head a lot. ‘Don’t expect life to be fair an’, Paddy, for God’s sake, don’t ever give all yer love to just one thing.’

  It had seemed simple enough advice at the time and he’d followed it as best as he was able and he’d certainly never expected life to be fair. The result of which was he was in love with a girl his brother had boldly taken from under his nose, a girl who apparently didn’t understand Catholic guilt, at least not the debilitating Irish form of it. He was up to his neck in a movement founded on hope and youthful illusion and he had found another love and her name was freedom. It was true that he hadn’t gotten the girl. But he knew he had found something, his father’s way, his brother’s way were not for him, there were other avenues and he thought perhaps he’d found his.