Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series) (92 page)

“How many—how—”

He shook his head. “Don’t know yet—more than one, less than a hundred. Ye know how these things go, Jewel, there’s no telling until some of the smoke has cleared.”

“How did you hear?”

“News came over with the boat. When the coal came in this mornin’ it was all the talk.”

“We’re leaving then?” she said, voice stiff.

He looked up. His face was drawn, mouth sharp cornered, stubble a deep violet against the white of his skin.

“Pat was there, Pamela.”

“You can’t be certain of that,” she said, knowing her voice didn’t quite carry the reassurance she sought to give him.

“Ye know he would be. He can never stay clear of trouble for more than a day or two. He’d have been there.”

“But you don’t...” the words died on her lips at the look in his eyes.

“They didn’t know so much about what had happened, an’ the news was all confused like, but one thing everyone seemed certain on, an’ that was it was mostly young men that had died. Maybe a few older ones, but the rest between 17 an’ 27.”

She put her hand to her mouth to stifle a cry of horror; he needed her to stay calm and clear headed right now.

“There had to be hundreds of people there.”

“I know, an’ it’s likely he’s fine, holed up somewhere plannin’ his latest insurrection, but until I see him with my own eyes, I’ll not be certain. I have to go home, Jewel.”

“And what if you’re caught? If the army comes for you, what then?”

He gave her an apologetic look. “I’m sorry, darlin’, but I’ll have to risk it.”

She nodded, mentally beginning the packing of their belongings, but found she was rooted to the spot, unable to move her feet, as if the conduit between thought and movement had temporarily suspended itself. They had to go back, that was clear. Casey would not rest until he was certain that Pat was whole and safe. Yet she dreaded it—the risk, the thought that soldiers could come and wrest her husband away from her yet again.

“Jewel.”

She took a deep breath to steady herself. “Yes.”

“I’m sorry. Given the choice I’d have kept the two of us here for as long as possible.”

“I know,” she said, but despite the firmness of her tone, could hear the doubt clearly expressed. She knelt down and took his hands in her own. “He will be fine, I know it.”

“Aye,” he said quietly. “I know it one minute an’ then I don’t the next. What if—”

“No,” she put her fingers to his lips, “we’re not going to ask that question.”

He nodded, but the traces of fear and doubt still lingered in his eyes.

Inside she packed their few belongings, while outside Casey battened down the windows and put the sacks of coal under shelter to be used by the next occupant of this small safe house. She uttered up prayers as she moved about tidying—that Pat hadn’t been in Derry, that if he had he was unharmed, while all the time a serpent of fear writhed in her belly.

The day slipped slowly away to the sea, strange minutes of silence and lukewarm mugs of tea. Neither of them could summon an appetite and Casey alternated between staring intently into the blue eye of the fire, and pacing relentlessly round the outside of the small cottage. By mid-afternoon the wind picked up, shredding the fog into spectral fingers and Casey’s head turned toward the sea with tense expectation. It was then she heard the distant chug of a boat engine.

Before night fell, they were on their way back to the mainland.

Part Six
History’s Prisoners

THE WIND COMING OFF THE RIVER FOYLE that day was particularly cold. Pat, standing to the side of a rambunctious group of boys, dug his hands into the pockets of his coat and shivered. Despite the chill of the air there was a current that warmed the crowd, the sense of being in attendance at a moment in history that rests upon a pivotal fork in the road. Trouble was expected; after the events at Magilligan last week, it wasn’t likely that the Army would let another ‘illegal’ demonstration slide past.

Some three hundred soldiers had broken up the small anti-internment protest near the Magilligan camp the week earlier. Thus, today Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association had put special emphasis on the need for a peaceful demonstration. Ivan Cooper, one of the local MPs, had stated that the IRA in Derry had agreed to withdraw from the area prior to today’s demonstration, in the hopes that there would be no reason for any altercation with the Army. Still, there was the frisson of edgy anticipation that had accompanied every public gathering in Ireland since the People’s Democracy March in the fall of 1968. Pat still bore the scars of that march, compliments of several police batons to his head when he’d stuck an Irish flag in the Derry wall. However, he’d also met Sylvie as a direct result of that march, so felt the scars were a small price to have paid.

The previous evening he’d gone for a drink with a couple of friends to the Rocking Chair Bar, which was notorious as the place to pick up current information on both Army and IRA activity. British intelligence being what it was, he’d left with many assurances that today was to be a peaceful day of it. Still he’d awakened that morning with a vaguely uneasy feeling, due in part, he knew, to the fact that the paratroopers were coming to Derry for the day.

The Paras were the elite corps of the British Army, hand-picked, trained to total discipline, with an infamous reputation for their combat ability. It didn’t make sense to send such a crack bunch to a little demonstration in Derry. It was this that was at the root of his restless worry. In his experience, the Brits rarely did anything without some larger plan in mind. He just couldn’t quite get a grasp on what piece of the puzzle the Paras were meant to fit.

On the other hand, he knew what to expect from the march itself. The stewards, like impatient shepherds, would harry everyone into shape, then all would march toward confrontation where there was likely to be some form of violence—CS gas, cracked skulls, rubber bullets, outrage at the expected and more grievances to nurse. Then the paper cup of lukewarm tea and the trudge home in the gloaming to live over the events of the day, and see if you and your mates had made the evening news. Part of him was repelled by it and part of him knew it was necessary. Yet another part, which had grown considerably during his time in Long Kesh, wondered if it made a damn blind bit of difference.

For a country that had been at war for eight hundred odd years there was little evidence to be found of a war zone, and yet, he supposed, if there was a flashpoint in the cradle of Ulster, wee Derry was it. Divided Derry had been the nexus for conflict since William of Orange’s victory over the papist James II in 1690. Derry, which, despite a population comprised largely of working class Catholics, hadn’t seen a Nationalist mayor in fifty years. Where blood had run in the streets over election results, and people had died for exercising their democratic rights.

For a minute, he saw all the blood that had been spilled in this tiny city, as though the dank walls and depressed streets were some mythical and priceless jewel that could restore a people to itself, if only the sacrifice were large enough.

The march started out much as he expected, the crowd, ragged about its edges, moving out from the large grassy area of Bishops Field which lay under the shadow of the vast Creggan housing estate. Banners flapped in the wind above hunched shoulders and ruffled hair—
Civil Rights for All, Release all Internees
and
End Special Powers Act
were just some among the many that furled and fluttered, giving the moving mass a festive air. Still the uneasy feeling grew stronger, spreading out through his stomach like slow moving ice water, as the crowd wended their way down toward Brandywell along the Lone Moor Road. Like some slow-moving beast eating all in its path, they gathered more marchers at every corner, the edges of the crowd shifting and absorbing the newcomers, while the stewards fought like collies on the fringes to keep the flock moving in a half-assed orderly fashion.

His eye was drawn to a little girl watching from the roadside as they passed. The January sunshine gilded her red hair with a watery glow. She raised a hand and waved to him, he waved back and she grinned, her gapped smile warm as fire, yet the ice in his belly resisted the thaw. He looked back once as they rounded the corner into Williams Street and saw that she was still up on tiptoe waving.

They were down the steep incline of the street now, and it was there that the first soldiers were seen. A large detachment on foot, flanked by Saracens. Pat sighed and moved forward. There was never a more certain sign of a society’s failure than the sight of soldiers and tanks in the streets. He looked up; the Guildhall Clock Tower was clearly visible. The time was three forty-five and the world was about to come open at the seams.

There were boys popping about like fleas on the rubble strewn barricades; ones who’d come out for trouble and the chance of knocking a soldier a good whack with a stone. Hands shoved in their pockets, high on the balls of their feet in anticipation of the uneven battle to come.

He scanned the area; the barricades that blocked Rossville Street, the main thoroughfare coming into the Bogside, putting the crowd’s back to the Free Derry sign where Catholic Derry began and British rule held no sway. The uneasy shiver in his spine had grown considerably as the crowd progressed up from the Bogside. He eyed the horizon that wrapped chill and gray around city stone and grassy slopes. He thought he saw a shadowy figure high on an abandoned building, but when he turned his head, the shadow was gone.

On the platform, Bernadette Devlin was speaking, assuring everyone that it was a perfectly legal meeting and there was no need to panic, when a volley of shots erupted from behind the crowd.

The growl of armored cars filled the air and the sudden thump of soldier’s feet as they poured out of the vehicles. There were at least twenty and they rushed forward, rifles up and cocked. Pat felt as though he were frozen in place while madness swirled around him. Then the air was rent in two with a series of sharp cracks.
Christ—
that wasn’t the sound of rubber bullets, Pat thought. The ice water in his stomach rushed through his whole body and his legs unlocked, moving of their own accord.

“Those are real bullets!” someone screamed.

“Disperse, disperse, disperse!”
came over the loudspeakers, panicking the crowd further as everyone rush pell-mell in a thousand different directions under the report of rifles that were shooting to kill, not control.

Blocked by troops releasing choking clouds of CS gas, rubber bullets and dye at the end of Williams Street, the crowd surged back toward the open area near Free Derry Corner. Between was the waste ground of the Rossville Flats car park and the open area behind. A huge mass of unarmed humanity now out in the open, whose flesh was all too vulnerable to the bullets that were flying down from the walls.

Moving through the crowd, Pat risked a quick glance up at the clogged artery of Rossville Street. People were still bunched like panicked cattle trying to make their way through to some sort of safety. The panic was in the Paras’ favor, no one could tell where the shots were coming from, and so all were clear targets as they ran in complete panic. The only cover might come from the walls and rubble in the forecourt of the Rossville Flats. There were soldiers directly across in Glenfada Park, he’d seen them, rifles at the ready, eyes scoping the crowd, just waiting for an excuse.

He made his way across the street. It was like moving through a maelstrom of screaming, terrified souls who’d just discovered the gates of hell were opening beneath their feet. He made it, though, pushing as many as he could with him, yelling at them to find cover rather than running about in the open.

He yelled at a boy walking slowly across the open ground of the forecourt, in clear view of the rifles. He recognized him as one of the boys who’d been near the barricades, laughing as though they were on a grand lark.

“Come on man—move toward the wall!”

The boy turned, face a blank. “I think I’ve been hit, I—it hurts to breathe.”

The front of the lad’s sweater was soaked with blood; even now it dripped into the weave of his Sunday trousers. There was blood leaking from the corners of his mouth as well. Lung shot.

“Christ have mercy,” Pat breathed, and then took the boy by the arm and pulled him toward the dubious safety offered by the high walls of the Flats. The boy collapsed twice, and Pat finally hooked an arm across his chest and pulled him, half running, half crawling as bullets singed the air blue around him.

He saw Father Jim standing up from the side of an injured man and took the boy directly to him.

“He’s been hit in the chest,” Pat said, laying his burden down against the brick wall. “Can you help him?”

Father Jim was already kneeling, peeling back the boy’s sodden shirt. He shook his head. “I’ll do what I can,” the priest said grimly, “but he needs to get to hospital. I think the bullet’s gone through his lung.”

Pat knew the odds of getting the boy to the hospital in time weren’t in their favor. Right now it looked as though the soldiers were preventing any aid from coming into the area. So he would have to get out to relay information, and to find a way to bring help in. It was impossible to go back down towards Williams Street. Gas was still heavy in the air, slight whiffs of it floating up to sting eyes and throats. The only possibility seemed to lie with getting out past the Free Derry wall. He was gauging the distance and trying to decide if he should make a run for it when he saw a flutter of white across the forecourt. A man was walking out slowly, white handkerchief aloft, trying to reach a boy who was lying wounded near the middle of the open ground. Some primal instinct must have warned him that he was caught in the crosshairs of a soldier’s rifle, for he dropped to his knees and began to crawl, still heading for the wounded boy.