He stayed and helped, for her hands, comprehending what her mind had yet to, would not cease to shake and she, holding them clasped tightly in front of her, seemed afraid to let them go.
He washed her tenderly, as one does an infant, with concern and care. He noted the blood—black, blue, violet and crimson that had dried on the skin of her thighs, the bruises and scrapes on her back and front, the welt rising on her jaw, the raw split on her lower lip, the swelling on the upper one and knew what it signified. These things he witnessed and put aside one by one, saving the anger for later, knowing it had no place here and now. It would serve neither of them this night.
After he had washed and rinsed from her what physical traces as could be removed with soap and water, he wrapped her in a large towel, patting her hair down with another.
“Would you like to lie down again?” he asked handing her the nightgown.
She shook her head slowly but firmly, “No I’ve got to go to the hospital, I have to be there for Pat, I have to be there if...” her voice faltered, her eyes came up and met his for the first time that night, “he can’t be alone, Jamie.”
“Of course,” he replied quietly, leaving unspoken the words both of them felt with utter clarity. Pat must not be alone, for no man, even if it is meant, should die alone.
“He won’t die, but he’ll wish he had for a week or two,” the doctor said acerbically. “The internal bleeding wasn’t as bad as I’d originally feared and the bones seem to have set up nicely. He’s young and he’ll mend well. But,” he sighed and gave the two faces before him a weary regard, “the arm is broken very badly, in five places and it may never function fully again. The breaks weren’t entirely clean and the bone was near mashed in some spots. I’m keeping him in for at least two days,” he gave them both a stern look, “for observation and to be certain the internal bleeding is fully stopped. After that he’ll need constant supervision and help and someone to administer pain medication on a regular basis.”
“He can stay with me,” Jamie said firmly, “we’ll hire a round the clock nurse if that’s what’s needed.”
“I can do for him,” Pamela said, voice low with determination.
“That will be something for the two of you to work out,” the doctor raised his eyebrows at them.
“Can I see him?” Pamela looked up at the doctor with dry, burning eyes and Jamie wanted to say ‘no’ there on the spot.
“Yes, but only to rest his mind that you are safe and sound, a few minutes at most.”
“Thank you,” she said as if the doctor had just granted her a reprieve from the gates of purgatory.
“Nurse,” the doctor stopped a long-nosed fearsome looking woman on her way past. “Nurse Browning will take you to your friend.”
Pamela, with a small smile of gratitude, followed the nurse, who after quickly and circumspectly taking stock of her visible bruises and cuts, indicated with a gentle nod of the head that Pamela should come with her.
“Do you think it’s wise to allow her to see him?” Jamie asked as soon as Pamela was out of earshot.
“Yes, the both of them need to ease their minds a bit, he woke up just before he was anesthetized and tried to get off the operating table, he was shouting for her, certain that she’d been taken off the train by those bastards who beat him. I tried to reassure him but he was certain I was lying and I can’t say I blame him after the night he’s just had.”
“But he will be alright?”
“Physically yes, his mental and emotional rehabilitation will rest a great deal on how the girl recovers from all of this. If anything is to halt his healing it will be the guilt he feels over not being able to prevent what happened to her.”
“He couldn’t have done anything.”
“No, but that won’t stop him from raking himself over the coals for it. It looks as if he put up a damn good fight as it was; I’ve never seen a more savage, sadistic beating in my life. But still as I say, if she manages to come through it I suspect he will as well.”
“She’ll come through it,” Jamie said grimly.
The doctor patted him on the shoulder, “Seems as if she’ll hardly be able to help it with so many stubborn men in her corner.”
“Aye well, one can only hope, can’t one?”
The man who had attended to all the ills of the Kirkpatrick family for two generations, who had been present at all tragedies replied,
“Hope is half the battle, Jamie.”
Pat slept for a very long time and Pamela refused to leave his side until he awoke and knew she was safe. Jamie, having assured himself that each would survive until his return, informed Pamela that he would be gone a short space and that if she could supply him with a key he would pick up a few odds and ends in the way of clothes and toiletries for her. She had handed him the key without speaking, merely fishing it from the pocket of an old cashmere coat that had belonged to Colleen.
He conducted what little business he had to in his office and, supplying a few terse orders, memos and instructions to his secretary, he made his way back through the clog of Belfast afternoon traffic. It was near two o’clock when he walked up the crumbling path to the red door. He could think of any number of events or occasions that might have at one time or another, for one reason or another, brought him to the other side of this door but this one had not ever occurred to him. He had failed and miserably so to keep an eye out for her, miscalculating the danger that lay in wait for anyone, regardless of reason, who ventured behind this door.
It was, on the other side, neat and clean, smelling faintly of lemon polish and bleach. The furniture was sparse but worn and comfortable looking. An ancient radio that sat on a equally ancient table, was, other than the remains of a broken lamp, the only adornment in the living room. The kitchen was clean as well, its table made by hand and used, he guessed from the style, by several generations. The entire place had the feel of a small, hardworking bunch of people making the best of dismal surroundings. At least there was, he thought wearily, even in its emptiness, some sense of lives being lived, not merely ghosts scratching at the windowpane.
Pat’s room, the first he poked his head into, was spare as a monk’s cell, the bed neatly made, a small cross hanging above it, the cheap blue beads of a rosary that was the domain of every Catholic child hanging over the bedpost and, on the wall opposite, a poster of Jim Morrison holding out his hands in supplication, the sixties version of prayer to a higher power no one could admit to needing or believing in. Beside the bed, a small stack of books, two on Eastern philosophy, loans from his own library, a copy of Ulysses and one of Jack Kerouac’s Beat classic On the Road and two volumes of the poetry of Jack Stuart. Jamie smiled at that, Jack Stuart seemed to have become the demi-god of the young Republican movement and one could not speak to any of them without being liberally quoted at and to from the small body of his work. Jamie moved on to the next room, beginning to feel rather like Goldilocks stumbling about the bears’ home.
It was Casey’s. No mistaking the smell of cigarette smoke, blanketed as it was under the smell of cleaning fluid and a whiff of varnish. Small carvings lined a shelf nailed to the wall, songbirds in a variety of incarnations, some with breast and beak stained cherry and gold, some with feathers just emerging from the wood. The wood indicated a fine and painstaking touch, the work of a man who had once had a great deal of time to concentrate on detail. His eyes avoided the bed, her scent was here and he didn’t need any tracery of hair on a pillow to confirm her presence. The sheets he knew would smell ripely of strawberries with only the smallest bitter undernote of that plant’s greenness.
A small window looked out into a patch of backyard the size of a man’s handkerchief. Someone had tried to brighten the scenery with a ruffle of material printed in pink and red cabbage roses, but it only served to further delineate the particular bleakness of the view.
He found a suitc
ase that must have survived from Victorian times so battered and otherworldly did it seem. In it he packed what he, as a man unused to the details and rituals of everyday female life, thought was necessary, which is to say he packed everything he saw. Sweaters, skirts, jeans, underwear which refused to stay folded and slipped and slid about as if it had a life of its own. The suitcase was bulging before he was even half-done and, unable to find any other sort of container, he had to take an armload of slippery sweet-smelling things out and dump them in his car. This earned him a very odd and narrow look from the woman next door who was just shuffling up her lane, a bag of food under one arm and a wailing baby under the other.
On the second trip, he grabbed some of Pat’s things, torn denims, neatly mended socks and thoroughly disreputable looking t-shirts and jerseys. Neither of them would be coming back here for at least several days. Just as he was giving a last shove to this variety of items it struck him that he ought to take a few of Pamela’s personal articles that she’d used to brighten up her room, something that might give her a touch of comfort in the days to come.
He chose a flask of scent called ‘Wine of Angels’, made by a very exclusive parfumier in London that he had visited once himself and wondered how she had come across it in her own travels or who, perhaps, had given it to her? Waterhouse’s print of The Lady of Shallot, the one he’d given her himself at Christmas, he took down from its place above the bed. Finally, he turned to her shelf of books, knowing that she, like him, derived comfort from the printed page. He chose a volume of Yeats, one of Byron, a dime store paperback that had a marker in it, sighed at the omnipresent collection of Jack Stuart’s latest work, skipped over it and took as his last selection a much thumbed, shiny with wear book. It slipped from his hand as he turned, an onion skinned flyleaf floating out like a translucent butterfly on a ruffle of summer breeze. He picked it up, opened the front cover of the book and froze at the sight of his own handwriting there before him.
‘To island summers, broken ankles and youth that is far too fleeting’ and below it a snippet of Wordsworth he’d always liked, then his signature and the date. The summer of 1962. He flipped the cover back, Les Miserables. He shook his head, remembering why he had come here, what circumstances had precipitated this visit and that he still had a long trip back to the hospital to make. He replaced the copy of Les Miserables on the shelf and headed for the bedroom door, then with sigh, turned back and tucked the book under his arm.
Pat’s first word, gritty and grained with blood and anesthetic, was her name. The mere sound of it filled her eyes with tears and stuck in her throat so painfully that it was several seconds before she could answer him.
“I’m here,” she managed to whisper, fearing he would panic if he couldn’t ascertain her presence at once.
He squeezed her hand with his own good one. She had placed hers in it so that he would know, even in unconsciousness, at some level that he was not alone. He then commenced a fit of coughing that sounded like his lungs were being shredded.
She turned, intending to go and find a nurse, but Pat’s grip on her hand was tight.
“Please don’t,” he said around the last gasping coughs, “I’m alright now.” His voice was little more than a whisper. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—” he broke on the words, a lone tear leaking out around the bandaging on his face.
“Don’t you dare, Pat Riordan,” she said, gritting her teeth in an effort not to join him in his tears. “Don’t you take the blame for what happened, there wasn’t a damn thing either of us could do. They almost killed you as it was. I won’t let you take the blame for this.”
She stroked the back of his hand gently, “The only thing either one of us have to worry about now is somehow keeping this from your brother.”
“How can we do that?”
“I don’t know,” she said fiercely, “but we have to find a way, because this would kill him Pat and then he’d go out and do something crazy, you know he would. And how would that help any of this, it would only make it all worse. I won’t have him going back to prison or worse because of this. I won’t. I’ll look after it, you don’t worry about it, I’ll handle everything. We’re going to be okay, Pat, I swear to you we will. We just have to stick together.”
She lifted her hand from his own and gently cupped the side of his bandaged face, “You need to sleep now. Your only job is to get better, because that’s one thing I couldn’t bear Pat, is if you weren’t alright.”
She laid her forehead against the bed. “I’m just going to sit here and think, you go to sleep and I’ll be right here when you wake up.”
There was a long spell of quiet and she thought he’d drifted off when he said,
“Pamela?”
“Yes, are you in pain, should I ring for the nurse?”
“No I’m kind of numb still, it’s just—have ye ever been to California?”
“Yes I’ve been to California.”
“Lots of times?”
“Four times.”
“Could ye describe it to me? The nice bits, I think it would help me stop thinkin’ about—about—”
“Of course I can describe it to you, do you need water or anything first?”
“No,” he coughed slightly, wincing as the movement caught him in the ribs, “just tell me what the Pacific Ocean looks like.”
“It’s blue as you ever dreamed and then just a bit bluer and the waves that come in are a surfer’s dream. I used to go down to the shore in the morning and watch the surfers. It’s a religion with them you know, riding the waves, always in search of that one perfect crest, the wave that will take them to the limit into that ultimate place where everything is the moment and all of life makes sense and there’s no thought, only feeling. And the sand, the sand feels like silk under your feet and everyone has honey-blonde hair and treacle-brown skin and looks as if they could do toothpaste adverts in their spare time. The palm trees line the streets even in the big cities like Los Angeles and everybody looks as if they could be a movie star. I saw Cary Grant once you know and his voice was just the way it was in the movies he said ‘hello there, little girl’ and I couldn’t even say anything back I was so stunned just looking at him.”
“Go on,” Pat said groggily, “tell me more about how blue the ocean is.”
“It’s blue forever,” she said, “forever and ever and ever. Like violets and indigo nights and blue the way God is in your dreams. Someday we’ll go there together and you’ll see how perfect it all is. I’ll take you horseback riding at dawn on the beach and we’ll rent a little cottage and have fires at night and...” her voice wove on, intermingling with Pat’s breath which came easier and deeper with every word, until finally when she was absolutely certain he was asleep, she laid her head on the coarse white hospital sheet and let the tears fall unchecked.
Jamie watched the moon set and the stars slowly rotate across the sky through the glass walls of his study. His mind sought order from the chaos of the day, picking out the constellations, naming them in Arabic, filing them by distance and magnitude. It was an old game, making the brain use logic, facts and mathematical equations to stoke its linear paths and force it to run on a smoother, straighter road. Most nights he sought comfort in words, but tonight he could not have borne poetry. Only the great aching void of night offered any solace.
“Trouble sleeping?” said a quiet voice behind him.
“Haven’t tried yet,” he replied mildly. She moved across the floor and came around his chair, her robed figure solid against the ephemeral sky of night. “Why aren’t you sleeping, didn’t the pills work?”
“I didn’t take them.”
“You really ought—”
“I’m not ready for oblivion yet,” she said sharply and then in an altogether different tone, “I’m sorry Jamie, I didn’t mean to snap. I know you’re only trying to help.”
“You may snap
as much as you please, you may yell and scream at me if you think it’ll help, you can even hit me if it gives you some relief.”
“It’s alright Jamie, I’m not angry, at least not on my own behalf, but I could murder them for what they did to Pat.”
“What do you feel on your own behalf?” he asked quietly.
She shook her head. “Casey said to me once that he’d never met a woman who didn’t have shame about her body, that didn’t feel that nakedness was somehow wrong. It was something he liked about me, I think, that I didn’t feel any shame.”
“Liked?” he prodded gently.
“My body was always just this living thing, mine, a part of me, something that gave me pleasure and sometimes pain but just intimately mine to give if I so chose. But yesterday, those men made me feel shame and now I don’t know if my body will ever be mine again. Does that make any sense?”
“Yes. When my sons died, there wasn’t a damned thing I could have done to save them and yet I’ve never stopped feeling guilty. It was never the sense of the thing only that I’d failed them before I’d even been given a chance.”
“I knew you’d understand,” she said, the smallest bit of relief in her words. The quiet of night held them for a time after that, the moon, softly white, drifting and spinning, the stars spiraling in the nebulae, the gossamer arms of the Milky Way turning, spilling, whirling. Circles revolving within circles in the great primordial dance and dealings of stardust.
“Jamie,” she said after a long while.
“Yes?”
“Maybe you can’t hold me in your heart, but could you see your way to holding me in your hands just for a little while? Until daybreak?”
He stood and took her in his arms, wanting for the first time since he’d laid baby Stuart in his coffin, to stop and still the world, to throw away the clock and make time cease its run.
Above her head, silky soft and smelling of heartbreak, the moon was fading, its pearls ground to powder and he knew with a terrible certainty that he was never going to be able to find unicorns on it again.
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