Eden Burning (27 page)

“Oh my God Rose. Get out of here.” Matt whispered. “I was insane asking you to come here.”

“Don’t be stupid.” Rose squeezed his hand.

Rose lifted her head into the air like a snake as she coiled her lower body around Matt. “Stop. For God’s sake stop.”

The man with the rifle indicated with a nod to his friend to retrieve the pick axe. Edward had turned on the floor to lie on his back. The head of the pick axe caught him mid stomach. He squealed, curling onto his side.

“Get out of the way or you’re dead meat. There’s no place for a soldier lover here.”

“Don’t you see what you are doing?” Rose slid off Matt onto the floor.

Edward clutched his stomach and started to sob. Max lay unconscious, unmoving on the floor. Matt moved his hand to try to touch Rose’s hand. Rose rolled onto her knees and from there got shakily to her feet and approached the man closest to her who was holding the butt of the rifle with his two hands. He was only in his twenties with thick dark hair falling over his eyes. Rose lowered her voice and almost whispered in a trembling stutter, “How does a country which wins freedom in blood know what freedom means?”

“Who do you think you are, you bitch? Mother fuckin’ Theresa? This is a war. These are soldiers. Didn’t we only an hour ago bury Mickey Hannah? Did they give him a chance
when they opened fire on him? He wasn’t even bloody armed. It’s easy to be brave when you have a gun in your hand. Let’s see how brave they are now. They knew when they joined the British army what it’s all about. Get her to fuck out of here. I don’t care what you do with her. We’ll finish here what needs to be done.”

Rose knelt on the ground and took hold of Edward and Matt’s hands. Edward squeezed Rose’s hand in silence. Matt rubbed the inside of the palm of her hand with his thumb.

“If you want to kill them, kill me first.”

“Be careful what you ask for – you know they say that you might just get what you ask for.”

One of the men pushed forward to pull Rose’s hand free from Edward’s grip. Edward struggled to hold on, pulling himself into a sitting position as Rose was dragged away by her feet. Matt let her hand go gently. A man raised a rifle, pointing it first at Rose and then slowly moved it to the left and aimed it at Edward. He pulled the trigger. Edward’s head thudded against the bedroom carpet. His navy blue anorak, dripped with crimson blood onto the ground. Matt crawled onto his knees and attempted to stop the bleeding from Edward’s neck. A rifle butt lifted high into the air, swung like a golf club, clacking Matt directly on the left ear. Matt fell heavily on his right shoulder. Max wriggled on the ground towards Matt.

“Aaaaaaaagggghhhh!” A woman jumped from the windowsill, lifted the pick axe from where it had been thrown on the ground and hit Max across the back with the blunt side.

Rose closed her eyes as she was grabbed by the collar of her raincoat, then lifted like a cat and pitched onto the uncarpeted landing floor outside the bedroom. She fell hitting her head on the wooden flooring. Edward’s blood had mingled with hers seeping now into the unvarnished wood. A hand clutched at the
roots of her hair. Her head was lifted six inches of the floor and then banged again onto the wooden floor.

“Maybe that will knock some sense into you.”

Rose couldn’t see what was happening now. Everything was blurred as she squinted to see who was now beside her.

“Come with us, you fucking soldier lover.” A woman hissed into her ear pulling her again by hair into a sitting position. Rose didn’t know how she got downstairs. She remembered her body thumping against the stairs and the banister. She had no idea how many women there were or how many hands pulling at her raincoat. One of her shoes came off and bounced downstairs, lying on its side near the open door. Three buttons burst open on her raincoat, scattering like sparklers left, right, one hitting the ceiling.

The next fully conscious moment Rose had was of stepping onto broken glass with her shoeless foot as she was dragged across the wasteland. Two women carried her by the arms. Her legs dragged behind. They let go of her arms and she fell heavily onto the frozen mud. “Walk, you bitch. We’re not carrying you.” A hand dragged her to her feet. She took a few steps and fell. She opened her eyes slowly and through a haze she vaguely saw two women looking at her.

“Give me a fag. We’ll be here all day waiting for her.” She saw a woman with peroxide hair, flared jeans, a long Afghan jacket, puffing on a Benson and Hedges cigarette. Rose struggled to her feet. The helicopter blades rattled overhead.

“That one on the corner will do.” A second woman wearing high black paten stiletto shoes with a pink bow on the front and no stockings, pointed to a lamp post on the corner of the street.

Rose raised her head to see where the woman was pointing. She saw the lamp post and sighed in relief. They are going to tar and feather me; not kill me. She struggled to her feet.

As she approached the lamp post, she couldn’t help herself falling again and as she fell she managed to steady herself catching hold of its thick metal trunk. It felt strangely comforting, solid and steady. She held it with two hands, breathing deeply as a dwarf sized, thick bellied woman, pulled a thick rope around Rose’s waist. The peroxide woman helped her to roll it higher around Rose’s chest and neck. Rose’s arms were at her side. Her head fell to one side.

“Scissors,” the dwarf woman demanded, taking a pair of large dress making scissors from the peroxide woman.

Rose heard the helicopter again hovering closer overhead. By turning her head only a few inches to the left, she could see it hovering closer and closer to the roof of the house. A soldier descended like an ant on a rope towards the roof.

The dwarf woman took the scissors and pulled at Rose’s black hair. She caught the few strands of hair from inside her collar and began hacking at the shiny black mass as the smoke from her cigarette wafted over Rose’s face. Rose felt the pointed tips of the scissors piercing her head as she watched handfuls of hair falling in clumps onto the pavement.

“The tar.”

Silence as a bucket of warm tar poured over Rose’s head. Rose closed her mouth and eyes, holding her breath as the tar slid down her face. She felt the edges of the plumes of the feathers smothered in tar gently slither down her face almost as a caress when two high velocity shots rang out from inside the derelict building. There followed a splattering of machinegun fire.

Rose dropped her head onto her chest as the shots faded. She moved her head slightly to the left, coughed, spitting tar into the air as the helicopter landed. She took a deep breath.

The peroxide woman shouted “Good on you boys.” She spat at Rose’s face. “Job done – no thanks to you bitch. The next
time there will be a bullet with your name on it if you don’t wise up.”

Rose closed her eyes feeling the tar cooling on her head and face. Crow’s feathers crawled along her neck. The crunch of the women’s steps on the gravel path grew fainter. Her heart thumped. She tried to swallow but could only cough, her chest quivering, then in spasm projecting tar and feathers into the air as her shoulders shuddered and her hands mottled blue. Rose consciously took a breath. The air felt pure, cold, and clear, like the first breath of her life. Her body started to shake more than quiver. It scared her how this body, which no longer felt like her body, would react to the next second, minute, hour. She could feel the air now entering her nostrils – finding itself a small pinprick of access to her throat. She focused on this point of contact, then the movement of the air and its rhythm rather than the sense she had before of being drowned in tar. The fact that she was breathing and could find this tiny path of access to air was a lifebelt.

Rose’s head hung forward, her arms tied behind her, her body roped to the lamp post. She was alone. She felt the coldness of the air congeal once again the tar around her nose. She struggled to breathe. She kept her eyes closed and heard the familiar drone of a Saracen approaching. Rain lashed against her head, sinking into the rain coat. The rain turned to sleet. Eyes closed, Rose felt a strange heat within her stomach, as though someone had lit a small fire from tinder in a rain forest.

A breeze passed over her as the rain withdrew. She was exposed kindling tinder. The flame from the tinder burst into an immense penetrating flame. She burned inside with a sweet, intense fire. Her body felt on fire. She didn’t care. She was no longer aware of breathing – the burning was her breathing. In the midst of the fire within, she felt the touch of peace, a cool,
smooth, round pearl of stillness forming in her stomach. It grew and spread throughout her body – with a shiny, silk, white, beauty – a stopping of time within a pearled peace.

A Saracen tank screeched up beside her. A soldier jumped from the tank, cutting the ropes. Rose slid to the ground. “Thank you.”

He caught her hand. She noticed that his hand was gloveless, soft and warm.

“Did you know them?”

“Yes.”

Rose could hardly breathe never mind explain how she knew Matt, Max and Edward. How they called themselves the Crouch Brothers because they spent more time on their knees than walking. Matt the tallest with dark black straight hair, blue wide eyes, a wide nose, thick lips, broad shoulders, square hands. He radiated solidity and strength. Max, at least six inches shorter than Matt, with light brown hair, green eyes, always a little bit nervous, with a slight stutter. Edward was the smallest, fine boned, frizzy blonde hair, hazel eyes with a trace of blonde eyelashes and a delicate small mouth. He had the best sense of humour of them all. He had a way of looking at you with eyes that stayed so still, unblinking, that seemed to grow larger with every second of watching. He smiled at Rose with those wide open eyes which Rose couldn’t help laughing into. Her laugh was infectious and before you knew it Max was holding his stomach and Matt patted Max several times on the back, as though he was a horse who had won a first place rosette.

The first time she had seen the three of them had been only three months before, yet it seemed a long time. They were on duty for the first time on the school patrol run, guiding the girls from the Convent of Mercy as they walked down the Ballysillan Road onto the Crumlin Road into Ardoyne. They were having
fun with each other and it was infectious – Rose laughed out loud and Matt turned and looked at her and winked. Rose remembered that her face blushed crimson and she looked at the pavement for at least ten minutes before she looked up again. Matt hadn’t stopped looking at her. He winked again. Rose was careful that Clara and the others walking in front didn’t see her smile back at him. From that day she had always walked the first stretch of the journey home at the back of the group. Matt and she learnt to communicate without words. They looked at each other the way horses do. They didn’t talk, didn’t tell lies, didn’t cheat but saw something in each other below the surface which was real. Rose’s heart pounded in her chest in anticipation of seeing Matt when the last school bell was rung each day. Sometimes, as they neared Ardoyne, Rose would give Matt a knowing look and move forward to have a few words with Clara so no-one would guess what was going on. By the time she crossed Brompton Park, onto the Crumlin Road, she rarely looked back at Matt, but looked straight ahead, more often than not finding herself singing.

“One survived.” The soldier lowered his eyelids and dropped his chin onto his chest.

“Who?”

“Matt.” The soldier rubbed his mouth with his glove.

His face went hazy in front of Rose. He reached forward, grabbing Rose by the elbow as she fainted. When Rose opened her eyes, she saw the soldier holding a bottle of water to her lips. She sipped, closing her eyes, listening to him.

“We need to get out of here. Emotions are running high. They will bring the snipers out.” He shook his head as though he could read her thoughts. “It was never straightforward. There were too many civilians. We did our best.”

Rose climbed into the Saracen tank and a soldier handed
over her abandoned schoolbag. “We found it by the front door. Matt said it was Rose’s. You are Rose, aren’t you?”

“Yes. I am.”

“Where do you want us to take you?” The driver asked.

“To Holy Cross Church. The Woodvale Road side. “

A young eighteen year old soldier with thin lips, wide open blue eyes, holding his rifle between his legs, looked steadily at Rose as the Saracen moved along the Falls Road.

“Thanks for what you did. Matt talked about you. He was right about you.”

The Saracen tank moved slowly up the Shankill Road, passing the Black Beetle, then along the Woodvale Road, to pull to a halt at the back of Holy Cross Church. Rose stared at the floor, only moving her eyes to the soldiers’ boots which didn’t move an inch in thirty minutes.

Before she stepped down from the Saracen, a soldier handed Rose a white cotton towel to cover her head. She turned it into a turban, took off her coat and folded it over her arm and then jumped from the back of tank. She watched for a moment as the Saracen moved slowly around the roundabout, turning onto the Crumlin Road. She quickly climbed the stone wall with its iron railing into the grounds at the back of the church. She had never been so far back in the Grove before. It was easier than she thought to push through the brambles, the lime and oak trees, to emerge close to the front door of the monastery. There was no-one round. Once she reached the familiar pathway leading towards the Crumlin Road, she ran. There wasn’t anyone at the bus stop. As she opened the gate, she rested her gaze momentarily on the Saracen waiting outside the bookies, before fumbling in her pocket for her key and twisting it in the lock. She slammed the door shut behind her. The towel dropped to the floor.

“Lily. Lily. Are you home?”

She ran along the hallway opening the sitting room door.

Lily sitting on the sofa dabbed Prussian blue oil onto a canvas. She was absorbed in filling the upper left corner with gentle brush strokes creating an evening sky. She leaned forward and touched the canvas with her right hand, making circles in the paint, breathing gently as Rose threw open the door. Lily jumped to her feet, leaving the canvas quivering on its easel. The paintbrush fell from her hand. “Mother of God, what on earth happened to you?”