Exit Unicorns (Exit Unicorns Series) (52 page)

“He couldn’t have done anything.”

“No, but that won’t stop him from raking himself over the coals for it. It looks as if he put up a damn good fight as it was; I’ve never seen a more savage, sadistic beating in my life. But still as I say, if she manages to come through it I suspect he will as well.”

“She’ll come through it,” Jamie said grimly.

The doctor patted him on the shoulder, “Seems as if she’ll hardly be able to help it with so many stubborn men in her corner.”

“Aye well, one can only hope, can’t one?”

The man who had attended to all the ills of the Kirkpatrick family for two generations, who had been present at all tragedies replied,

“Hope is half the battle, Jamie.”

Pat slept for a very long time and Pamela refused to leave his side until he awoke and knew she was safe. Jamie, having assured himself that each would survive until his return, informed Pamela that he would be gone a short space and that if she could supply him with a key he would pick up a few odds and ends in the way of clothes and toiletries for her. She had handed him the key without speaking, merely fishing it from the pocket of an old cashmere coat that had belonged to Colleen.

He conducted what little business he had to in his office and, supplying a few terse orders, memos and instructions to his secretary, he made his way back through the clog of Belfast afternoon traffic. It was near two o’clock when he walked up the crumbling path to the red door. He could think of any number of events or occasions that might have at one time or another, for one reason or another, brought him to the other side of this door but this one had not ever occurred to him. He had failed and miserably so to keep an eye out for her, miscalculating the danger that lay in wait for anyone, regardless of reason, who ventured behind this door.

It was, on the other side, neat and clean, smelling faintly of lemon polish and bleach. The furniture was sparse but worn and comfortable looking. An ancient radio that sat on a equally ancient table, was, other than the remains of a broken lamp, the only adornment in the living room. The kitchen was clean as well, its table made by hand and used, he guessed from the style, by several generations. The entire place had the feel of a small, hardworking bunch of people making the best of dismal surroundings. At least there was, he thought wearily, even in its emptiness, some sense of lives being lived, not merely ghosts scratching at the windowpane.

Pat’s room, the first he poked his head into, was spare as a monk’s cell, the bed neatly made, a small cross hanging above it, the cheap blue beads of a rosary that was the domain of every Catholic child hanging over the bedpost and, on the wall opposite, a poster of Jim Morrison holding out his hands in supplication, the sixties version of prayer to a higher power no one could admit to needing or believing in. Beside the bed, a small stack of books, two on Eastern philosophy, loans from his own library, a copy of
Ulysses
and one of Jack Kerouac’s Beat classic
On the Road
and two volumes of the poetry of Jack Stuart. Jamie smiled at that, Jack Stuart seemed to have become the demi-god of the young Republican movement and one could not speak to any of them without being liberally quoted at and to from the small body of his work. Jamie moved on to the next room, beginning to feel rather like Goldilocks stumbling about the bears’ home.

It was Casey’s. No mistaking the smell of cigarette smoke, blanketed as it was under the smell of cleaning fluid and a whiff of varnish. Small carvings lined a shelf nailed to the wall, songbirds in a variety of incarnations, some with breast and beak stained cherry and gold, some with feathers just emerging from the wood. The wood indicated a fine and painstaking touch, the work of a man who had once had a great deal of time to concentrate on detail. His eyes avoided the bed, her scent was here and he didn’t need any tracery of hair on a pillow to confirm her presence. The sheets he knew would smell ripely of strawberries with only the smallest bitter undernote of that plant’s greenness.

A small window looked out into a patch of backyard the size of a man’s handkerchief. Someone had tried to brighten the scenery with a ruffle of material printed in pink and red cabbage roses, but it only served to further delineate the particular bleakness of the view.

He found a suitcase that must have survived from Victorian times so battered and otherworldly did it seem. In it he packed what he, as a man unused to the details and rituals of everyday female life, thought was necessary, which is to say he packed everything he saw. Sweaters, skirts, jeans, underwear which refused to stay folded and slipped and slid about as if it had a life of its own. The suitcase was bulging before he was even half-done and, unable to find any other sort of container, he had to take an armload of slippery sweet-smelling things out and dump them in his car. This earned him a very odd and narrow look from the woman next door who was just shuffling up her lane, a bag of food under one arm and a wailing baby under the other.

On the second trip, he grabbed some of Pat’s things, torn denims, neatly mended socks and thoroughly disreputable looking t-shirts and jerseys. Neither of them would be coming back here for at least several days. Just as he was giving a last shove to this variety of items it struck him that he ought to take a few of Pamela’s personal articles that she’d used to brighten up her room, something that might give her a touch of comfort in the days to come.

He chose a flask of scent called ‘
Wine of Angels’
, made by a very exclusive parfumier in London that he had visited once himself and wondered how she had come across it in her own travels or who, perhaps, had given it to her? Waterhouse’s print of
The Lady of
Shallot
, the one he’d given her himself at Christmas, he took down from its place above the bed. Finally, he turned to her shelf of books, knowing that she, like him, derived comfort from the printed page. He chose a volume of Yeats, one of Byron, a dime store paperback that had a marker in it, sighed at the omnipresent collection of Jack Stuart’s latest work, skipped over it and took as his last selection a much thumbed, shiny with wear book. It slipped from his hand as he turned, an onion skinned flyleaf floating out like a translucent butterfly on a ruffle of summer breeze. He picked it up, opened the front cover of the book and froze at the sight of his own handwriting there before him.

‘To island summers, broken ankles and youth that is far too fleeting’
and below it a snippet of Wordsworth he’d always liked, then his signature and the date. The summer of 1962. He flipped the cover back,
Les Miserables.
He shook his head, remembering why he had come here, what circumstances had precipitated this visit and that he still had a long trip back to the hospital to make. He replaced the copy of
Les Miserables
on the shelf and headed for the bedroom door, then with sigh, turned back and tucked the book under his arm.

Pat’s first word, gritty and grained with blood and anesthetic, was her name. The mere sound of it filled her eyes with tears and stuck in her throat so painfully that it was several seconds before she could answer him.

“I’m here,” she managed to whisper, fearing he would panic if he couldn’t ascertain her presence at once.

He squeezed her hand with his own good one. She had placed hers in it so that he would know, even in unconsciousness, at some level that he was not alone. He then commenced a fit of coughing that sounded like his lungs were being shredded.

She turned, intending to go and find a nurse, but Pat’s grip on her hand was tight.

“Please don’t,” he said around the last gasping coughs, “I’m alright now.” His voice was little more than a whisper. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—” he broke on the words, a lone tear leaking out around the bandaging on his face.

“Don’t you dare, Pat Riordan,” she said, gritting her teeth in an effort not to join him in his tears. “Don’t you take the blame for what happened, there wasn’t a damn thing either of us could do. They almost killed you as it was. I won’t let you take the blame for this.”

She stroked the back of his hand gently, “The only thing either one of us have to worry about now is somehow keeping this from your brother.”

“How can we do that?”

“I don’t know,” she said fiercely, “but we have to find a way, because this would kill him Pat and then he’d go out and do something crazy, you know he would. And how would that help any of this, it would only make it all worse. I won’t have him going back to prison or worse because of this. I won’t. I’ll look after it, you don’t worry about it, I’ll handle everything. We’re going to be okay, Pat, I swear to you we will. We just have to stick together.”

She lifted her hand from his own and gently cupped the side of his bandaged face, “You need to sleep now. Your only job is to get better, because that’s one thing I couldn’t bear Pat, is if you weren’t alright.”

She laid her forehead against the bed. “I’m just going to sit here and think, you go to sleep and I’ll be right here when you wake up.”

There was a long spell of quiet and she thought he’d drifted off when he said,

“Pamela?”

“Yes, are you in pain, should I ring for the nurse?”

“No I’m kind of numb still, it’s just—have ye ever been to California?”

“Yes I’ve been to California.”

“Lots of times?”

“Four times.”

“Could ye describe it to me? The nice bits, I think it would help me stop thinkin’ about—about—”

“Of course I can describe it to you, do you need water or anything first?”

“No,” he coughed slightly, wincing as the movement caught him in the ribs, “just tell me what the Pacific Ocean looks like.”

“It’s blue as you ever dreamed and then just a bit bluer and the waves that come in are a surfer’s dream. I used to go down to the shore in the morning and watch the surfers. It’s a religion with them you know, riding the waves, always in search of that one perfect crest, the wave that will take them to the limit into that ultimate place where everything is the moment and all of life makes sense and there’s no thought, only feeling. And the sand, the sand feels like silk under your feet and everyone has honey-blonde hair and treacle-brown skin and looks as if they could do toothpaste adverts in their spare time. The palm trees line the streets even in the big cities like Los Angeles and everybody looks as if they could be a movie star. I saw Cary Grant once you know and his voice was just the way it was in the movies he said ‘hello there, little girl’ and I couldn’t even say anything back I was so stunned just looking at him.”

“Go on,” Pat said groggily, “tell me more about how blue the ocean is.”

“It’s blue forever,” she said, “forever and ever and ever. Like violets and indigo nights and blue the way God is in your dreams. Someday we’ll go there together and you’ll see how perfect it all is. I’ll take you horseback riding at dawn on the beach and we’ll rent a little cottage and have fires at night and...” her voice wove on, intermingling with Pat’s breath which came easier and deeper with every word, until finally when she was absolutely certain he was asleep, she laid her head on the coarse white hospital sheet and let the tears fall unchecked.