Kiss the Bullet Read online

  “I’m not ashamed,” I said. My voice trembled.

  My mother reached out a hand to my face.

  “A high price,” she said, running a finger over my cheek. “I always said you’d pay a high price.”

  The tenderness of her touch cut me in a way her anger never could have.

  “I loved him mother. I loved him …” I felt the tears spilling now, my nerve gone.

  “I know you did,” my mother whispered. She reached out to hold me and I lay my head on her shoulder like a child.

  “Don’t tell your father,” she said, her voice calmer now. “I’ll deal with him. Y’hear me, Mary?”

  I lifted my head and nodded, reaching out to hold her hand, and the two of us sat in the kitchen that was warmed by the oven, crying silently together, the tears running a salt track through the flour on her cheeks.

  My father would not look me in the eye after my mother told him. He would leave the room when I entered and I’d hear the bang of the kitchen door, see his head bobbing past the window on his way to dig the land. I’d look up and mother would pull a wry face at me, as if to say, “Ignore him, silly auld fool that he is.”

  I wondered had she ever felt about my father as I did about Michael? He was not a poet, my father. Mountainous shoulders, like a range stretching across his upper body. Hand like shovels, calloused, nails ingrained with soil. Mother was his translator. Your father thinks … she would say, when no one had heard him utter a word. I remember though, the day there was talk between my brothers about a young local woman, and how beautiful she had grown, and my father said gruffly, sure there was never any woman more beautiful round these parts than mother had been. And mother with a sink full of washing had simply smiled quietly and when she looked up at him they exchanged a glance like they had a secret that nobody else knew. So maybe she did. Feel about him the way I did Michael.

  He never mentioned the coming baby once. One of my brothers, Seamus, was furious when he heard, told me I was no better than a whore, and my father looked up sharply and said that was enough of that. And the room fell quiet and we said nothing more, though Seamus refused to look at me. Seamus was always a prig. He had notions of the priesthood and it was the best place for him, a place where his principles wouldn’t get dirty.

  I wanted a boy. I wanted Michael. I was certain the baby I carried was a boy. I even carried him low they way they say male babies are carried. When the pain started I rode it, waves of it, thinking of Michael, and then it intensified, becoming so unthinkingly vicious, so remorseless, that nature felt malevolent, until eventually it clutched at my belly like a screw tightening beyond its own possibilities, and I was frightened then, beyond any fear I’d ever known.

  “Sweet Jesus …” I shouted, clutching the back of a chair.

  “Mother …” and I saw the compassion in her eyes as I looked desperately at her, willing her to help me, to take it away.

  She helped me to the bedroom and sent the men folk outside. I heard her speak quietly to my father on their way, telling him to fetch the doctor. Then another wave of pain winded me and I felt the heat flood my cheeks and the sweat break out on my body. The doctor when he came wanted to examine me but I kept panicking at each wave of pain and begged him not to come near me. I sensed his exasperation with a pain he neither empathised with nor approved of (I had made my bed and must, quite literally, lie in it), and he stood stiffly while I groaned. When he leaned over me, I saw the line of dirt round the crisp whiteness of his collar.

  When he finally examined me, he turned dismissively to my mother.

  “It will be some hours before the child comes. I will look back in the evening.”

  I whimpered into the pillow in despair.

  “No,” I said. “No … mother …”

  She leaned over me and smoothed back my hair.

  “Hush, darlin’,” she said, and then she looked rather coldly at the doctor and said stiffly, “I will show you out.”

  The night was dark outside the windows by the time he returned, the stars hammered solidly like nail heads into the inky blackness. I told my mother not to close the curtains because there was no one to see in, and because I wanted to see the world as my baby entered it. I was so frightened, and everything was so out of control, that it felt like the universe was some kind of monster out there and I wanted to keep in touch with the familiar. I wanted to keep in touch with the spirit of Michael that had drifted into it.

  By the time the baby was born, the terror was tinged with horror and exhaustion and deep, deep grief, and relief and love and hate, and I was drowning, drowning in an experience that was beyond me, that made me see the world in a new way that could never be rubbed out, however much I tried. I saw for the first time and I wanted to forget what I saw, to be the person I was before, and I cried for the new order of the world and the girl I lost somewhere in the darkness of the old.

  The baby was placed, bloodied and blue, on my stomach and I felt the life in it slipping and wriggling like a stranded fish, and in the shock I didn’t know how to hold it or what to do. Then I heard my mother say, a beautiful little girl Mary, and I looked at her and whispered, no, in horror. I saw her face freeze in a kind of distress when I said, a boy, it’s a boy, mother. She tried to smile at me and she said, a little frantically, no a girl, a beautiful girl, look at her, how perfect she is.

  “Take it,” I said and my mother lifted her and wrapped her in a sheet, but I turned my face to the wall when she offered her to me. My mother held her close and crooned to her and I stared at the wall until my eyes hurt. I felt the soft, slack belt of skin round my stomach and the trickle of blood and an ache inside that I wasn’t sure was physical.

  “You’ll need to put her to the breast quickly,” the doctor advised and my mother nodded.

  For the next few days I fed her and handed her back to my mother, refusing to hold her to me. The shock of the birth and the crushing disappointment overwhelmed me. Michael had left me. For good now, he had gone. And the irony was that only my father brought me to my own beautiful daughter, Niamh. He tiptoed in one night and I looked at him, my eyes burning, and he said nothing but laid a hand on my head and pushed the hair back, then peered at the baby as my mother held her. They both smiled.

  I watched him from the bed, saying nothing, and I saw the big shovel hands reach out to my mother, and she placed the baby in them lengthways, Niamh’s tiny body cupped against his palms, and I felt it, the mountainous tenderness of him, vast as his hulking body, and the dam inside me broke.

  My mother was right. There were those who turned against me and my baby. There are none so righteous as the religious self righteous, and none so religiously self-righteous as the Irish. I knew what I had to do the morning I took Niamh to the corner shop and a woman spat at me as I walked past. A middle aged woman with a squashed face like crumpled cushions, and thin lips without a trace of lipstick. And the best of it was that she carried on her way into the church for morning mass without a backward glance.

  I looked at the thin circle of foaming spittle on the pavement and knew that I would leave. My mother was heart sore when she heard my decision and my father seemed to shrink a little at the idea of Niamh being taken from him. She was his pride and his joy. I took my daughter to Donegal to remove myself from the tight smiles and the sneering disapproval, and the barely disguised hostility. But as Niamh later came to know, I had other reasons too.

  The Easter declaration Michael read in 1916 called for equality between men and women. No matter that De Valera refused, against the orders of Pearse and Connolly, to allow women fighters in the Boland Mill Garrison that day. They fought elsewhere and I came to believe I too should play my part. When Michael gave his life, I wanted to continue his struggle so that he did not die in vain. But by then, of course, I knew what loss was, and I could not impose the possibility of such loss twice on my daughter. I joined the women’s league, Cumann na Mban, for a time, but impressed as I was with the fighting spirit of M
aragaretta Keogh, who was shot dead outside the south Dublin union, I knew that as a lone parent with a small baby to care for, my part must be a different one.

  I gave in whatever ways I could: allowing the cellar of my house to be used as an arms store, providing a safe house for volunteers of the IRA, taking in the wounded who were brought to me. I could do no less, for my whole life was spent trying to create a reason why I had to lose Michael. I wept the day the Free State Treaty was ratified. It was signed with the blood of the dead, stained with the tears of the bereaved. Michael did not die for half a cause, for half a solution. I knew then that the blood of Ireland would continue to flow, that the children and grandchildren who I hoped would be free, would, by necessity, in their turn be part of the struggle.

  My part is nearly over. I have a sense of anticipation, of excitement, that I will see Michael again. He was taken before he had a chance to make his mark in your lives and it is up to me to try to stamp an impression of him on you. Never forget him. Honour his memory. Fight on, that his death might have meaning.

  Niamh, these few lines are for you alone. You were my father’s pride and joy but you were also mine. If I was too deeply entangled in the fronds of my loss, if my living was badly tainted by your father’s dying, forgive me. Never be in any doubt that the reason I put my feet on the floor each morning was for you. And later, when your eldest son was born, when I held Johnny in my arms for the first time, I knew your father had returned in a new generation. I saw him reflected in Johnny’s eyes and I wept for the shadow that I saw there. Our fight now is yours.

  Eirinn go Brach.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Belfast, November 2010

  The music is thumping loud in her chest like a tribal drum and she looks at the man and thinks there’s nothing in the world like a good intro. Those pregnant opening notes when anticipation shimmers out of the sound like a heat haze. The sexy, bluesy, bordello quiver of, ‘Honky Tonky Woman’, say. Or this, Marvin Gaye’s ‘Heard it Through the Grapevine’. The beat of the drum is the beat of her heart. She can’t tell the rhythms apart. And then the rattle of the tambourine, shimmying out of that ominous pulse like a serpent from a snakecharmer’s basket, slithering dangerously across the room towards her. “Oo-ooh, I bet you’re wondering how I knew …”

  Danni can feel the heavy, lumpen outline of the gun against her leg. She should be frightened but she isn’t. It doesn’t matter if there’s an accident, if she rains blood into the atmosphere. Her … or him … Does it matter which? Inside her pocket, she slides a single finger along the metal in rough caress, her tongue simultaneously running against her lips. She knows nothing about guns. She wonders if she tilts the gun up inside the pocket, if she simply blasts through the material at an upward angle, where it will hit him, and if the release of blood will be violent. Will it seep or cascade?

  The music thumps still. The floor vibrates. She feels like she could choke on her own tongue, the way it swells in her throat like a sponge soaking up water. An inner tide of nausea rises in her gut. This is it.

  He is looking at her. Looking at her quietly, like he’s waiting. As if he’s in no hurry. She watches him cross the room, his injured knee crumpling inwards slightly as he walks. He turns the music up, up, up, to full volume and when he turns, he sees that she has taken the gun out. He takes the seat opposite her. She resents his calmness. The fact that he doesn’t seem to care. It’s like he not only knows about the gun but is deliberately providing her with a mask of music. She could blast him right now and nobody would hear the shot, could distinguish it from the thump of that drum. She could walk right out of here, out of Belfast, and go home. He’s making it easy for her. Unless he’s taunting her. He sees her hand move but does not flinch. His eyes don’t leave her face.

  The man is waiting for her verdict. She is still exploring her limits, her possibilities.

  “Oh I heard it through the grapevine

  I’m just about to lose my mind.

  Honey, honey …”

  Black as coaldust, she thinks, watching his hair flop forward so familiarly now, long, fine strands falling into his eyes. Perhaps a stray grey or two. The sleeves of his pale blue shirt are folded back neatly, revealing surprisingly muscular forearms considering his slenderness. Behind his chair, a bookcase stuffed full, piles of books turned on their side and stacked one on top of another. History books. Literary books. Irish writers, mainly: James Joyce, Roddy Doyle, Yeats. Black folders full of the small, neat, intense writing she has come to recognise at a glance. She sees what he was, and she sees what he is, and she feels confused. She wishes she could classify him simply, like a book. Small beads of sweat prickle on her back.

  Fear makes her angry. She despises her own hesitation. In the last few weeks her hatred, her determination, have rushed together like a river in spate at times, then at others dwindled to a pathetic trickle. It’s time for the indecision to end. Her finger curls round the trigger. Someone in the flat below is thumping on the ceiling with a broom handle.

  He looks down at the vibrating floor but he does not move. He does not turn the music down. He looks at her and then he leans his head back against the curve of his chair, closes his eyes and waits. There’s nothing like a good intro, it’s true. But it’s not where you begin that matters most. It’s where you end up.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Glasgow, 1992

  Danni sees her husband and her son always in the same way, trapped in the bubble of a December Saturday in 1992, a bubble that she can neither reach into, nor pull them from. They are standing outside a shop in Glasgow in the grey light of a winter afternoon, a light that is slowly being nibbled at the edges by darkness. They are Christmas shopping and later, they plan to take Angelo to see the lights of George Square. Danni is at the bottom of the street, walking to meet them. Garlands of multicoloured lights hang above them outside the shop, tapping their own rhythm as they beat on and off. Even from her place at the bottom of the street, Angelo’s face seems illuminated by them, as if the lights shine through the translucent pink apple of his cheeks that the cold has breathed into the milky whiteness of his skin.

  For Danni, Angelo is forever dressed now in a navy jacket with a bear on the breast, a red woollen hat, and a red woollen scarf wrapped tight around his neck. Afterwards, it became impossible to think of him in anything else. At the bottom of the road, she waves up to them but they do not see her, caught as they are in their own private moment. Marco is crouched on his hunkers beside Angelo, on the balls of his feet, resting on his heels. Angelo pulls something from a brown paper bag, but at this distance it too far to see what it is. But she sees Angelo drum his feet in excitement, a little dance of ecstasy at the contents of the bag. She feels a pang of exclusion from the moment, hurries towards it to be part of it, to enter the bubble.

  She never reaches it. In her imagination she tries to change history, to actually reach Marco and Angelo and pull them from that bubble into safety. Such a small change that would be needed to make things normal, to rub out what really happened. If she had not been five minutes late in meeting them, they would not still have been standing there. They would be safely in a café, Angelo pushing his nose to the glass of the cake cabinet to choose. She sees the next moment in slow motion, a longer, more painful version of real time. The noise of the explosion fills everything, reverberates through her, as her world is blown upwards, cascading into raining fragments.

  Later, Danni realises she does not see Marco again after that moment he knelt in front of Angelo. But she sees her boy, lifted like jetsam, blown upwards in a tornado of energy as easily as gathered leaves in an autumn wind. She sees the flash of red woollen scarf, the brown paper bag arcing into oblivion, and then all is lost in a mist of smoke and stour and falling debris. She would like to say she runs instantly but human nature makes her stop instinctively, turn her head, raise her arms to protect herself. There is a moment when her entire emotional system stalls, when the enormity of what is happening make
s her incapable of feeling anything other than a bewildered blankness. Later, that hesitation seems perilously close to a glimmer of betrayal.

  When the terrible primal screams fill the space around her, it jolts her into action and she moves instinctively towards them, running into the sound, running towards the space occupied by Marco and Angelo.

  As she moves further up the street, she becomes aware of water from a burst mains spraying into the air, running down the road towards her.

  Ahead of her, several cars are on fire, the flames licking into the jet of water, element against element. Danni’s feet crunch now on broken glass and she turns her head as a woman is carried past her by a wailing man, his face contorted in a frozen grimace of horror and fear. The woman’s clothes are torn, jagged fragments of glass embedded like miniature axes in her skull. If there is anything recognisable that breaks through the terrible blankness of her expression, Danni thinks, it is the reproach of the innocent.

  At first, she does not notice the water. It cascades and froths round her feet and eventually, she looks down and sees that her feet are soaking. Her eyes register what the rest of her cannot; she does not feel the wetness. Then she sees that the water is pink, that the bottom of her cream jeans are stained raspberry with diluted blood. It’s like a river now, gushing down the gutters at the side of the road, sweeping debris with it. Later, in her one and only therapy session, she tells the counsellor what she told no one else: that what haunted her most from that day was the sight of a severed hand rushing towards her, spinning in a swirl of bloodied water, as disposable as the discarded crisp packet that followed it.

  At the top of the street, where Marco and Angelo were standing, the windows have been blown out of the shop. A mannequin hangs grotesquely across shattered glass, as though impaled across the stomach. Next to it, a real person, though Danni is uncertain whether it is a man or a woman, blown against the shop frontage, human flesh discarded as disdainfully as plastic. From somewhere deep in the debris, a scream pierces everything, the thin wail of a child in pain.