Exit Unicorns

by Cindy Brandner

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Dead Man Running

  Bernie McKoughpsie was a man running scared. Three of his mates had gone missing and it wasn’t likely they’d taken a notion for a holiday and gone off without telling anyone. People who disappeared in this neighborhood disappeared for good and all. Then this morning he’d been called and told that Danny was dead and if he was interested, he might find the body in an abandoned house just beyond the limits of the city. He’d taken a knife, hidden under his pant leg and a gun, newly acquired, with the profits of his latest job. The gun he left just visible enough for anyone who was interested to notice.

  Things had been going so well, ‘the job’ as he called it, paid well and required his services only sporadically. He’d bought new clothes, a leather jacket that made him look like a real swank and even gotten a car, a long shining symbol of blood-red status. There could be no doubt about it, Bernie McKoughpsie was somebody in his neighborhood, the men knew it as they gave his car a wide berth, the women knew it as they hung on his arms and every word he spoke. Cheap tarts the lot of them, but in quantity a man could not complain. He’d never actually known who he was working for but he was paid not to wonder too much. The job on the train had been worth five hundred quid to him and had been a pure pleasure. A man couldn’t keep a rat’s ass comfortable on the pittance the RUC paid. But now he was scared, everyone on the train that night was either missing or dead and he was extremely nervous about who was directing the scenes in this particular puppet show. He’d not heard anything about the boy they’d beaten on the train and there’d been no report of the rape. He supposed they were too scared or maybe the boy was even dead.

  It was really Duncan who disturbed him the most. He’d not seen him and Duncan’s mother, when questioned in a way Bernie felt was charming and subtle, claimed to have seen neither hide nor hair of him since that night.

  There were marginal factions, even in West Belfast, a community that was no stranger to desperation and failure, to bitterness and anger, which housed and sheltered the true misfits of society. The losers and vigilantes, the drifters and hard-core career criminals. Bernie wondered, not realizing that he was as marginal as they come, if it was upon the toes of one of these small but deadly organizations that he had unwittingly trod. If so, it wouldn’t be long before they came hunting him. He would be ready however, he thought smiling to himself and caressing the gray metal of the gun under the buttery leather of his coat.

  The house, isolated and empty, was not so hard to find. Bernie, having footed the last three miles because none of the rare cars that had happened past had been either brave or foolhardy enough to pick him up, was sweating from more than just fear.

  He approached the house cautiously; aware that there could be eyes at all angles training crosshairs on his silky, shining head. But with the cunning of all rodents, Bernie had a talent for smelling danger in the air and didn’t sense it here. Danny was in the kitchen of the deserted house, facedown, one shot to the back of the head, very tidy, minimum of fuss, get the job done and it was then Bernie began to feel the beads of sweat escape his hairline and trickle like ice down his face. It was classic IRA this, a death for a death, nothing personal, just a little note, economical in its lines that said, quite politely, ‘you are a dead man.’

  He fled the house then, taking no care in his panic to conceal himself in shadow. It was only hours later, curled like a snake in the corner of a dark pub, his hand cramped around his gun, that he wondered if he’d been working for the IRA all along. He knew what happened to informers, heard about British informants who, after they’d outworked their usefulness were thrown to the IRA as bargaining chips. He knew where men who walked both sides of the street in this neighborhood ended up. Whoever was pulling the strings on this job was likely to throw him back on the mercies of his compatriots, of which there would be none.

  He was, he knew, no more than a rat in a cage now, with no safe corners to burrow down into. They would toy with him until they saw fit to do as they’d done to Danny. They’d come faceless and voiceless and he’d never know whose dirty work he’d done.

  He stayed in the pub, nursing one drink, until near closing and then when the bartender’s back was turned, took with all the subtlety he could muster up, his escape through the back entrance. So intent was he on his own fear that he didn’t notice the man who’d sat with his back to him all night, drinking more slowly even than Bernie himself, get quietly off his stool and follow, just as quietly, the smell of Bernie’s fear out the door.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Losing Maude

  I would have called her Maude,’ she said at the end of the week, at the end of a week during which they pretended that everything was just the way it had to be. ‘I would have called her Maude.’ Six words to sum up a lifetime that wasn’t to be and to put a point on the blood, fear and grief of the entire week. It began in his office, with a fistful of pound notes and ended on a bench in a dark gray and dripping Hyde Park. ‘I would have called her Maude.’ Called her Maude if she had been the product of love and fecund dealings in a warm bed. Called her Maude if she had a father to whom a name could be put and an emotion assigned other than fear and loathing. Called her Maude if she’d been meant to see the light of day and breathe her first stinging breaths. But she hadn’t and so she became someone who would have been called Maude.

  It was a week earlier then, on a perversely sunny day when the world seemed to be slowly asserting itself once more onto an even keel, at least from Jamie’s perspective. A week earlier and Shannon, his red-haired, green-eyed walking travel advertisement of a secretary, had called into his office that there was a girl, without an appointment, that was most insistent upon seeing him. He had barely had time to look bemusedly up from the unending stock reports covering his desk, when Pamela, white-faced and in no mood to deal with cute secretaries shoved her way through the door.

  He’d merely nodded to Shannon who melted out of his office in the quiet way she’d perfected.

  Pamela, characteristically, wasted no time in coming to the point.

  “I need to get an abortion and I need your help to find a doctor who will do it.”

  “Not here in Ireland,” he’d said.

  “Of course not, in England.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “I wouldn’t ask otherwise.”

  It was nearly all there was to the conversation, a sterile conjunction of various vowels and consonants, as if they’d transacted business and set up the terms by which it would be conducted.

  ‘I would have called her Maude.’

  He dreamed of Stuart that night as he’d known he would and avoided sleep for long hours in anticipation of it, dreamed so vividly of his red-haired boy that he could smell him on his hands when he awoke—the smell of milk and angels. After, there were the phonecalls and favors pulled in, the finest doctor found, his services procured, a very discreet man, all the foibles of the toffee-nosed set were handled there. The man had actually said handled as if it were an action, just a bit of business to be settled. Inevitable that he would dream of Stuart.

  ‘I would have called her Maude.’

  A plane, a train and an automobile, all private, all discreet. That had become his verb, as if discreet were a viable action. And while he was perfecting the act of being discreet, Pamela was grimly silent, offering a smile now and then that pulled the skin of her face so tight against its bones that it seemed one must break and tear the other. Discreet and silent, a pretty pair.

  The clinic, a cream and beige affair on Harley Street, was also discreet and silent. Hushed became the adjective of choice. Hushed with the smell of antiseptic and chemicals, hushed with the quiet of death and regret. Hushed with the silent white mist of anesthesia, hushed with the effort of not thinking about what was actually being done, being committed under the rose-tinted oil based ceiling. Hushed with the feel of clean
sterilized cotton sliding up his arms and the smell of harsh detergent in his nose.

  ‘Most irregular,’ the doctor had said, looking down over his beaky nose, when Pamela had refused to go in without Jamie.

  ‘I thought irregularities were your stock in trade,’ Jamie had said smoothly, voice almost friendly, almost, but never quite. The doctor had blinked three times and nodded his assent.

  ‘I would have called her Maude.’

  Called the blood and bone and cartilage Maude. Called the silent scream that radiated in her eyes the entire time, called the knees in stirrups, the invasive instruments that rooted and pulled at the very base of her womanhood, called the pads of cotton gauze packed against the torrent of blood and tissue, called the small, jelly-like lump that was spine and heart and beginning lung and primal brain, Maude.

  She bled quite badly, more than was normal the doctor had said sounding somewhat put-out about it, as if her near hemorrhaging was a personal affront to him. If she wouldn’t stay over in the clinic then at the very least he must insist that they stay over in London for a night or until the bleeding subsided.

  He couldn’t take her to the good hotels, he was too recognizable in any number of them. So it was a middling one, where the landlady was a suspicious sort who looked at them as if she knew exactly what they’d get up to the minute the doors were closed. The truth, Jamie thought grimly, was actually more hair-raising than any fantasy she might have tricked out in her mind.

  He helped Pamela to the bed, covered her up and then made tea on the tiny hotplate the hotel provided. He closed the curtains on the dark drizzle of a rainy London afternoon and sat in the lumpy, stained armchair beside the bed waiting for Pamela to sleep or wake or say one word and break the horrible white silence that had gripped them both.

  The rest of the day and the following night passed in this fashion. Jamie went out into the drizzle that had become a downpour in the afternoon and got them some food, simple things they could eat without fuss, fruit and pastries. Light things to tempt the appetite Pamela did not have. He gazed longingly through the doors of an off-license but in the end passed on by.

  Pamela was asleep when he returned so he ate a little but found the food only nauseated him. He knew too well what it was his body craved, what his mind demanded as due for what it had witnessed today.

  He formed a makeshift bed out of the chair, a tatty footstool and his suit jacket balled up for a pillow. He dozed fitfully, whorling slowly down into dreams of his sons, Stuart small enough to fit into the cup of his hand, wrapped in baby Irish lace. Stuart luminous as a pearl backlit by the moon, bones shimmering softly under his skin like phosphorescent light on the surface of a primordial ocean. Alexander, tiny wrinkled body like warm slubbed silk, covered in pale golden down, looked like his mother only they never knew what color his eyes were because he’d never opened them. Michael, a celestial being, with the eyes of an old man, as if he’d been there many, many times before and was just too tired to make the journey again. Pretty, pretty boys, underwater angels. And he, Daddy, caught fast in the pain like a star stabbed hard and tight against the deluge of night.

  He awoke to the sound of muffled crying, emerging from sleep with a pounding heart and dry throat.

  She had tried not to wake him; all that was visible of her was her hair, a spreading black mist over the faintly grubby pillows and sheets.

  He was beside the bed on his knees, hand on her shaking shoulder before he even took a breath.

  “Are you alright, are you in pain? Pamela,” he said desperately, “you have to tell me what’s wrong.”

  “I—I—didn’t know it would hurt so much,” she said, teeth chattering around her tears.

  “You’re in pain then? Is the bleeding very bad?” he tried to assert calm into his words through visions of blood transfusions and emergency surgery and endless prying questions that neither he nor she could afford to answer.

  “No, it’s not so much worse than period cramps and the aspirin took the edge off. No I mean I didn’t know that it would bother me so much.” She turned her face from the crush of linens and he saw that it was washed clean, faintly pink like a well-scrubbed child, her scar silvery white, with only the faintest traceries of angry red visible. “I don’t even know who her father was, Jamie,” she said.

  He reached out a hand and pushed the damp hair away from her face, smoothing it down over her ear.

  “Her?” he asked softly.

  She smiled weakly; a tear caught trembling on the cusp of her lip, “Just a feeling. I can’t stop thinking, who was she? Which of those boys on the train put her there inside me? Was it the one who smelled of his own urine? Or the one who backhanded me across the face, or the one who broke Pat’s arm—” her voice caught up on a sob and she rubbed her face miserably, “and why Jamie, why does it have to be her fault? The rest of us will live, those bastards on the train and me, me I’ll go on and on with a little ghost inside, oh Christ, Jamie,” she punched the pillow, “I can still feel that thing the doctor put up inside me, it was so big and cold. Why do they need something so big to get rid of something so tiny? Do you think,” her fingers curled tightly into the pillow until her knuckles were white and sharp against the skin, “she felt it?”

  Jamie wanted to lie, to tell her half-truths prettily cloaked in scientific supposition and emotionless words but found he simply couldn’t under the penetration of her eyes. “I don’t know sweetheart, I just don’t know.”

  “Will you do something for me?” she asked.

  He nodded, “You know I will.”

  “Just lie down beside me, it’s not as if I’m in any condition to seduce you,” she said, weakly attempting a joke.

  “Alright,” he replied.

  He lay down on his back, quite suddenly longing for sleep and she covered the space between them, leaving him only with the crush of damp cotton and warm flesh against his side. He took a deep breath, the smell of strawberries climbing up the cells of his nasal passage, the scent accompanied disturbingly by an undernote of iron and salt. It was a smell he knew from his dreams and his own humanity, the smell of blood.

  “What is it?” he asked some time later, when his breathing had established regular patterns and sleep was knocking softly with its white fist. She’d curled the tips of two fingers, the index and middle of her left hand, into the hollow at the base of his throat.

  “I just like to feel your heart beat,” she said.

  He slept then and did not dream.

  He awoke to a room gray and more dismal than it had seemed the night before and to the absence of warmth, the bed beside him smoothed with light hands, a tiny spot of blood bruising its unrippled surface.

  He found her outside in the cramped back garden, its meager space full of bare black branches and sodden brown foliage. She was standing, eyes closed, face held up to the rain.

  “I just wanted to come out,” she smiled, deepening the purple hollows beneath her eyes, “so that when I am a very old woman I can say that I felt London rain on my face.”

  “It’s hardly a world away and as the rain here is fairly incessant, I’m sure you’ll feel it again,” Jamie said, relief making his voice sharper than he’d intended.

  She shook her head. “I don’t think that I’ll ever come to this city again, Jamie. So take me to Hyde Park will you? So I can stroll through it once and pretend I’m a character in a Henry James novel.”

  He took her to Hyde Park, green and empty in the chill winter air and they strolled until the light deepened into a winter afternoon. It was there, sitting on a bench a bag of uneaten roasted chestnuts between them, that she said,

  “I would have called her Maude. Maude Gonne you know, never here, never will be, never was. I think it’s right that I should at least give her a name. Don’t you?”

  “I do,” he said.

  She slipped her hand into his a
nd he could not tell if it was the rain or tears slipping down her face, runnelling into the collar of her navy coat.

  “It’s time to go home, Jamie.”

  He closed his eyes, tasted the memory of scotch on his tongue and knew he would pay for these days in the long months to come.

  “Time to go home,” he echoed and thought quite uselessly that last night in a hovel of a hotel room that smelled insistently of fish and strawberries and blood he had felt more at home than he had ever felt in his beautiful, gilded albatross high upon its hill.

  “Home then,” he said and they stood, hands still clasped and left London behind, taking their ghosts with them.

  Lullabies never sung,

  Moon and stars never hung.

  Kisses not brought to bear

  Upon a cheek never there.

  Losing Maude.

  Fairytales never spun,

  Sugar beaches never run.

  Dimpled hand never held,

  Tiny troubles never quelled.

  Losing Maude.

  Frilly dress never worn,

  Crayon drawing never torn.

  Dancing steps never turned,

  All the bridges never burned.

  Losing Maude.

  Fancy’s fever never fed,

  Closet monsters never fled.

  Morning sun never seen,

  Mama’s baby never been.

  Losing Maude.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  The Scent of Violets

  “Well, what do ye think?” Casey asked eagerly.

  “I hardly know what to think,” Pamela replied honestly eyeing the oddity before her.

  “Do ye like it, then?”

  “Like seems a rather weak word,” Pamela said rather weakly herself.

  “So ye do like it then?”