Exit Unicorns (Exit Unicorns Series) (54 page)

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 and 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.

“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?”

“Does it hold water?”

“It does,” Casey said with some satisfaction.

“Then I love it,” she replied firmly.

In West Belfast in 1969 tubs were somewhat of a rarity, a luxury with which only the newer homes came equipped. Families made do with handbasins and washtubs screened modestly behind a makeshift sheet on Saturday nights. Pamela, used to the opulent facilities at Jamie’s house, had found it a bit of a hardship, but hadn’t complained. Casey however, wanting to provide her with such small luxuries as he could afford, thought it a stroke of divine intervention when he stumbled across the particular treasure that lay before them now.

“Wherever did you find it?”

“In a heap of scrap metal, if ye can believe it.”

“I can hardly imagine,” she said faintly.

“Of course,” he continued proudly, “it didn’t look the way it does now. ‘Twas just an old corroded tub someone had tossed out. I’ve a friend that used to work in a porcelain factory though an’ he knows a bit about restoration. He’s also a bit in the way of bein’ an artist as ye may have noticed.”

Pamela, eyeing the naked cherubs lasciviously munching grapes that adorned the tub, was inclined to ask if the friend had apprenticed at a French brothel, but bit back the temptation.

The tub in question was a remnant of the Victorian era, an enameled, rolltop, cast iron, ball and claw footed wonder. Its arrival had occasioned quite a stir in the neighborhood, particularly since it had taken an hour to squeeze, push and cajole the monstrous thing through the door. Word of its arrival spread and by the time Casey and the poor man who’d delivered it had it halfway through the door, the street was full of curious onlookers. Its decoration had raised eyebrows, with some mothers clapping their hands over the tender eyes of their children.

It sat now in state in the center of their small front room, overwhelming the modest furniture like a peacock squatting down amongst a flock of scabby sparrows.

“We can’t leave it here,” Pamela said, wondering if she’d only imagined the half-naked imp, drawn sitting on top of one leg, winking at her.

“We’ll have to,” Casey said, “a big old cast iron tub like this full of water weighs a ton, it’d crash through the bedroom floor.”

“We’ll not be able to sit in here, our knees would bump up against the tub,” she said practically.

“We don’t sit in here anyhow,” Casey replied even more practically. “Besides,” he grinned, “there’s room for the both of us in there if we’ve a wish to sit in the parlor. Shall we christen it?”

“Now?”

“No time like the present,” he said cheerfully, “I’ll go get the bucket an’ fill it.”

He disappeared into the kitchen and she could hear him humming happily to himself, the creak of protest as the water came bubbling up through the tap and the clank of a bucket into the sink.

She wished vehemently that Pat would come home and by his presence put a halt to the proceedings. But Pat, since the night on the train, had made an art out of avoiding her. He couldn’t, even when pressed, meet her eyes. He’d made a brief appearance when Casey came home and between the two of them, they’d managed to concoct a feasible story about the car accident that had supposedly broken Pat’s arm. Casey, beyond a small lecture on driving too fast in other people’s cars and expressing relief that Pat had not killed himself, said little. However, he watched the both of them carefully as they spun their lies. Pat had left shortly after that, arm still inert in a sling, saying he’d things to do. Where he slept, what he did with all the hours of his day, she didn’t know. Part of her was glad, his guilt, so thick and palpable, sat between the two of them, making it hard to breathe. She was afraid it would betray them both and bring down the fragile house of cards they’d built in Casey’s absence. It angered her as well that he by his guilt might ruin all she’d done to protect his brother.

Casey had been home five days now and had, not unexpectedly, expressed a desire to make love to her. She’d managed to avoid it by claiming she had her period, hoping he didn’t remember the pattern of her cycle from before he’d left. He’d accepted it though and contented himself with holding her in their bed at night.

The doctor had warned her that while physically her body was ready for normal adult relations again, mentally and emotionally it could take a far longer time. Time that she did not have. Time that she could not beg, borrow nor steal.

Several buckets of water and a scoopful of bath salts later and she knew the last grain in her hourglass had dropped down.

“Ah, this is bliss,” Casey said with a sigh, breathing in a great lungful of rose-scented air. “If the boys on A-wing could see me now. Are ye certain ye won’t join me?” he asked in a wheedling tone.

“In a minute, let me do your hair and back for you first,” she said, clenching and unclenching her fists behind her back in an effort to still their shaking.

“Before I forget there’s a wee package for ye on the table, it was tucked away in the pocket of my bag an’ I’d missed it durin’ my unpackin’,” he said, taking the soap she handed him. A hard white cake of hand milled French soap out of a basket of things Love Hagerty had sent her with his compliments.

The wee package bound in plain brown paper turned out to be a faded, gilt-lettered copy of ‘The Great Gatsby’.

“Thank you,” she said, oddly touched by the tiny volume in a way a grander gift would not have done.

“I remembered ye sayin’ it was yer favorite an’ ye didn’t seem to have a copy anymore. I found it in a rack of books on a sidewalk in Boston.” He soaped his arms and throat, wrinkling his nose at the strong floral scent. “Have we got any of that brown peppermint stuff ye buy at the chemist?”

She fetched the soap and kneeling behind the tub, lathered the breadth of his shoulders slowly, reacquainting herself with the contours of his body.

“I read the book on the plane comin’ home,” he said, leaning forward to scrub vigorously between his toes with a soapy cloth.

“Did you like it?” she asked, trailing one finger over the nodules of his spine.

“He’d a pretty way with words yer Fitzgerald did,” he put a hand over his shoulder for the soap and she placed the pungent brown cake in his palm.

“He was a very sad man,” she said softly, thinking of poor, bruised Fitzgerald and his mad wife, his alcoholic pen twisted into silence by bitterness at the end.

“I tend to like an’ endin’ with more resolution,” he continued, swishing his feet about in the water to rinse them and then laying back, propped them up on the end of the tub where they dripped extravagantly onto the floor.

“Death,” she paused to drizzle some of Love Hagerty’s expensive shampoo onto her hands and apply it to Casey’s wet curls, “is about as resolute as it’s likely to get.”

“Aye,” he sighed happily as she worked the soap into his scalp, “ye’ve a point but Gatsby didn’t accomplish anything he’d set out to do, he just kept hangin’ about Daisy waitin’ for something to happen.”