Exit Unicorns (Exit Unicorns Series) (14 page)

“Dear God,” Pamela breathed in wonderment.

“Seems possible here,” Jamie said dryly, spreading his coat on the damp rock and indicating that she should sit beside him. She sat and he pulled a thermos of hot chocolate out of a bag, poured two cups and handed her one. She clasped its warmth gratefully, unable to drag her eyes away from the sight before her.

“I used to come here when I was a boy and imagine what the Irish chieftains felt when they saw English ships coming, if they knew what it would mean or even felt the whisper of what was to come. They managed to evade the Romans by a simple trick of geography and I have to wonder if we wouldn’t have done better in the end if the Romans had been able to make it here.”

“Why?”

“Because we would have learned Roman ways, come to hand and heel the way the Saxons once did. We wouldn’t have been so different when change did come, we wouldn’t,” he closed his eyes as if quite suddenly the spectacle of sea and sky were too much, “have been so bloody, inalterably, hopelessly Irish.”

“Being Irish isn’t any sin,” she said lightly, wanting to pull him back from that dark place he seemed to journey to on a regular schedule.

“Isn’t it?” He turned and faced her and her breath quite suddenly hurt in her lungs and stomach. He was all gold, in every varying shade and spectrum, in heady darkness and blinding, all consuming light. Gold from bronze to sunlight, from first morning to last blink of day. Gold in his heart and head and hands. A fallen angel cursed by light.

“Who are you?” he asked softly, eyes pinning her carefully, like a butterfly to a clean, unlined page.

“No one special,” she said and turned her head away with as much effort as it would have taken to tear skin from bone.

“That seems as likely as unicorns on the moon,” he said, voice still speculative.

“Unicorns on the moon?”

“Aye, it’s what my Daddy used to tell me when a thing was impossible. When I’d ask about God or my mother coming back or any of the thousand other questions a child will ask. He’d say, ‘That’s as likely, Jamie, as unicorns on the moon.’ The problem was that I believed in unicorns and God and mothers who could come back from the far side of the moon. It was my father’s fault in a strange way; he fed me so full of fairy stories and enchantment when I was a child that I believed all sorts of things.”

“If he was anything like you I’d believe him too,” she said before she could stop to measure the wisdom of her words. “Tell me what he told you.”

“Well it all started because I was afraid of the moon when I was small. I’d this notion that it could come down and get right in my window at night and I’d just get lost or swallowed up in that light. So my father told me it was a world like our own, only the skies were the color of apricots in the day and plums at night. There weren’t any people, just unicorns, which of course explained why they weren’t to be found on our own planet anymore. See the dark body there?” He brought his arm into alignment with the path of her eyes and she nodded. “That’s Mare Tranquilliatis.”

“The Sea of Tranquility,” she said watching the great blue shadow that crossed the face of the moon.

“It was where the unicorns drank and held meetings, where they swam and gazed out at that blue green orb that always rode their horizon and wondered if such a place could harbor creatures of their own ilk. They were ruled by a triumvirate of benevolent creatures, ancient bearded unicorns who went by the names of,” he laughed, “Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo. I can’t begin to tell you how disappointed I was when I found out they were mere humans and that there were no seas on the moon, that it seemed most likely there was never any water there at all.”

“They were perfect names for unicorns,” she said, “all of them dreamers and your father as well it would seem. He gave you magic, that’s a pretty wonderful gift for a child.”

Jamie nodded as a small cloud scudded with velvet feet across the moon and left him in shadow for a moment. “I only wish he’d kept enough magic for himself, just enough to stay alive.”

“Perhaps a sea is a sea even without water, Jamie,” she said causing him to regard her intently once more. “Are creatures that live in our imagination any less real than a man who lives on the other side of the planet or down the street that you will never know?”

“A philosopher in our midst and one who believes in magic to boot,” Jamie said looking at her as if she were a riddle, one he didn’t quite know how to begin untangling.

“Kepler once said that we don’t question why the birds sing, we presume they were created for the very purpose of singing and so we shouldn’t ask why the human mind puzzles over the heavens, why we spend a lifetime asking
why
, even though we know there’s no answer. It’s what we were created for, to ask why to all the questions that have no answers. So perhaps we shouldn’t question unicorns on the moon, perhaps we should just believe in them.”

Silence held them for long moments after that, a silence that was not fraught with strangeness, nor expectation, nor the need to say vacant words merely to fill space. Pamela wasn’t certain how it had happened or when but she was comfortable in his presence now.

“When you have the moon, you can’t have the stars,” she said thinking aloud.

“Hm?” Jamie inquired, reverie disturbed.

“I was only thinking that when the moon is at its brightest you can’t see the stars as well so for all intents and purposes when you have the moon you can’t have the stars and vice versa.”

“It’s quite an interesting mind you possess, Miss O’Flaherty,” Jamie said putting the lid back on the thermos of hot chocolate and draining the dregs of his cup. “Do you suppose you’ll ever tell me the truth about how you acquired it?”

“It’s simply a part of me,” she said lightly.

“The story you told me about Nova Scotia and ancient parents, it’s just a story isn’t it? It’s no more real than unicorns on the moon, is it?”

She looked up at him and found with his eyes on her, there on his lonely hilltop where he’d dreamed as a boy, she could not lie, nor was she quite ready to tell the truth. “No it isn’t,” she replied quietly.

Creeping back with much more care over the rocks, hand firmly held in Jamie’s once again, she found the nerve to ask a question that had been bothering her for days.

“Why won’t you take your father’s seat in Parliament?” she asked and regretted it instantly for he dropped her hand, her few simple words having shattered the fragile bond they’d begun to build on the hilltop.

“Why would you ask that?” His eyes were hard and unflinching in the light, wind blowing strands of gold across his forehead.

“Only because everyone else seems to be asking it,” she said, the words sounding halt and lame to her own ears.

“Such as?”

She swallowed, intimidated by the look on his face. “Such as your friend, the one who came the other day, the one who looked quite ill.”

“Eavesdropping were you?” Jamie’s voice was pure acid.

“No, he told me the situation as he was leaving, said I should try to talk some sense into you because he’d no luck in doing so.”

“I see,” he said tersely, “well I apologize then, but he shouldn’t have told you. It’s all just wasted effort because I’m not going to take it.”

“Why not?” she asked daring to look him directly in the eye.

He gave a short bark of laughter. “Did no one ever tell you that it’s not polite to ask all of the questions all of the time?”

“No.”

“Alright then the truth of the matter is I don’t have the head for the job. I’d take every problem and injustice home with me and if I couldn’t right it would eat me up. I know I cannot do it, it’s very simple really, I just wish people would believe it.”

“Having the head for the job isn’t what matters, it’s having the heart for it,” she said softly.

“Oh Pamela, what am I to do with such an innocent? Perhaps dear girl I don’t have the heart either.”

“I believe that you do.”

“That sweetheart,” he said sadly, “
is
about as likely as unicorns on the moon.”

‘
No Jamie’
, she thought as they resumed their course along the rim of the sea, slowly tracking inland until the lights of home became apparent, until there was no excuse for her to continue holding his hand,
‘you falling in love with me, that’s about as likely as unicorns on the moon.’

When Pat’s brother answered the door, Pamela had to squelch the desire to turn and run. He unnerved her in a way few had in the course of her young life, unnerved her and made her feel as if she were perpetually naked, both physically and mentally.

“Is Pat here?” she asked, trying to avoid his eyes and finding herself staring at his buttons.

“No, he ran out of here on some emergency for the Young Communists,” he smiled lazily, “I take it yer not on the security council.”

“Obviously not,” she said stiffly, wondering why she could never think of anything witty or even halfway intelligible to say to this man. It annoyed her deeply.

“Could you please tell him I was by?”

“Yes’m, I will,” he said grinning, which only annoyed her further. She walked swiftly towards the gate, knowing, in a way that both infuriated and pleased her, that he was watching her do so.

“Pamela, stop will ye!” he caught up with her on the narrow laneway, shoving his arms into a coat and halting in front of her. “I got a job today an’ I thought I’d go have a meal an’ celebrate, would ye care to join me?”

‘No thank you, most kind of you to offer but I have plans this evening already,’ was one variation on the theme playing in her head. What actually came out of her mouth was, “I’d like that.”

Thus she found herself, one rainy half hour later, seated at a grubby table in a fish and chip shop, which existed under the rather lofty name of ‘Finnegan’s Wake’.

“Best fish in Belfast, I’ll guarantee,” he’d said and unlike his brother had not felt the need to apologize for the seedy ambiance of the place.

It was, indeed, very good fish and he was very good company. With a tongue as glib and silver as his brother’s but without Pat’s innate humility, Casey was a consummate teller of tales, able to infuse tragedy and comedy into the space of one small sentence. He was also discomfortingly direct. A game, Pamela mused after a particularly brutal set of questions dealing with his brother that two could play.

“What was prison like?” she asked, and had felt some small flicker of triumph when it stopped him cold. The small flicker was abruptly smothered by a trickle of fear though as he narrowed his eyes and with a smile that had nothing to do with humor asked, “What is it that ye want to know?”

She would have done well, she thought fiddling nervously with her water glass, to remember who it was she’d sat down with.
‘Bring a long spoon when ye sup wid the devil
,’ Rose used to say. It hadn’t made a great deal of sense at the time, but it was beginning to now.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she did her best to assume an airy tone, which came out with a wobble and squeak. “What were your days like?”

He considered her carefully, dark eyes boring hard into her own. “Up at dawn to bathe an’ dance, high tea at three an’ bridge on Thursday evenings,” he said coolly.

“I was serious,” she said stung by his sarcasm.

“It’s not,” he took a softer tone, “a story one necessarily wants to share with a pretty girl.”

She blushed and he raised his eyebrows over the top of his cracked coffee cup.

“It could have been worse,” he set his cup down gently, as if it were made of eggshells. “I’m a big man aye; it went much worse on the small ones, if ye’ll take my meanin’.”

“Being beaten you mean?” she leaned onto the table meeting his eyes without fear for the first time. Curiosity, she was to acknowledge later, was inevitably her downfall.

He cleared his throat and looked down where one broad hand was splayed across the laminated surface of the table. “Aye, amongst other things. Being beaten is hardly the worst thing that can happen to a man.”

He had lashes like a girl, soft, thick and long. It was oddly poignant against the strong, almost brutal lines of his face. She had to resist the impulse to reach over and brush the pad of her thumb across his eyelids.

“Then tell me something else,” she said, “something you can share with a girl.”

“Well,” he looked out the window where the gray drizzly mist was fast dissipating into a black drizzly mist, “it seems most of my memories are prison now, as if my life before wasn’t quite real or doesn’t count for much anymore. Does that make sense to ye?” His eyes came up and met hers then looked swiftly away, but she’d read vulnerability there in that one flash instant.

“It does,” she said steadily.

He considered his coffee cup with great care. “The first day out was a strange one, I was certain everyone could read where I’d been on my face an’ by my clothes an’ even in the way I walked. I was like an alien seein’ the wonders of this world for the first time. I hadn’t felt the rain or the sun in any real, proper way for six years. It’s as if when ye are contained within those walls even the air an’ light is not free, ‘tis as if it loses some of its substance an’ purity by comin’ over those barriers an’ down onto the concrete ground. So, perhaps ye can understand that I was a bit giddy, near drunk-like on the freedom, but scared as well. Even misery is a comfort if it’s what ye are used to an’ we human bein’s are entirely creatures of what is rather than what might be. ‘Tis only in dreams that we believe in what might be.” He smiled shyly and she saw clearly what he must have been like before and that the boy was still there even if he could not, at present, acknowledge him.