The Troubles Read online

  The housing development feels saturated, both in the incapacitating rank of unkempt men and also in the decrepitude of declining brickwork with subsequent mold and leaks sprung throughout. I have done my best to take shallow breaths, as the two distinctly pungent smells battle perpetually to expunge the other. With no respite available and routine acceptance of the interior’s human pollutants, I have become accustomed to being woken up by splashes of cool rain water on my brow and have evolved sleeping habits along with my housemates, to pulling heavy woolen blankets over my face. Initially the claustrophobia had resulted in my waking up panicked and gasping for breaths, but over time I have grown accustomed to these lesser living conditions. I am a soldier, along with the boy sleeping but two feet next to me, and I am a comrade to the father of five on my right. We are all making the same sacrifice and no one dares complain.

  CHAPTER 38: An te a thabharfas sceal chugat tabharfaidh se dha sceal uait (The person who comes with a story to you will bring two away from you)

  Kiera Flanagan…”Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors; we borrow it from our children. We are more than the sum of our knowledge, we are the products of our imagination.” –Ancient Proverb

  My belly presents itself as bountiful and slightly swollen, a gentle naked curvature just above my pelvis, not yet noticeable whilst I’m clothed. I stand fully naked before the bathroom vanity mirror, the billow of steam from a freshly drawn bath glistening over the slight bows of my peachy skin, like dewdrops in a morning dawn. My fingers caress my perceptively round and fertile breasts and shudders erupt as pregnancy hormones amplify the feather light pleasant feelings. The sensations are both maternal and erotic and with a woman’s confidence, I grasp the protrusion of my crescent moon stomach and directly regard the woman in the mirrored glass; she smiles back at me with delight and mischievous, parroted satisfaction. Yes, I am filled with a delirious joy; perhaps all the ecstasy filled encounters when Alastar calls upon me have left me drunk. My hardened earnestness to leave Belfast in the horizon has been replaced by a incessant desire to lie on freshly-loved-upon bed sheets and have frivolous, foolhardy chats about my mates profound love for felines or my affinity for clumsy accidents with all delirious conversations erupting into giggles and further interrogations from a bemused naked man and a his blushing paramour.

  ‘’Why do you not touch a drop of whiskey to dull the ache, Alastar?’’

  ‘’Ya are intoxicating enough Kiera.’’ My naked man pulled me on top of him with an obvious desire.

  ‘’When we are apart, Alastar, we must not lose ourselves in loneliness.’’ I am concerned that our love affair will soften and distract him when he is exposed and most vulnerable.

  ’’I understand the sentiment love, and will compel meself to remain strong in yer absence.’’

  ‘’When we are apart we must turn to our gods.’’ I had whispered. “They are the only absolute in this world.’’

  It is now February and although spring is but months away, the day’s dawn is delayed in darkness and our shared breakfasts are yet to be had in daylight. I return to the kitchen and just watch as Alastar cracks two brown speckled eggs into a cast iron frying pan. His shoulders are hunched and although his back is to me, my forearm hair prickles with an electric current just his presence gives me. I tip toe with socked feet across the bowed floor and fork one hand around his taught abdomen, snaking the other in an attempt to circumnavigate his taught girth. As I clasp my fingers together he rests his lazy left hand against mine brushing his thumb across my knuckles. I rest my cheek in the concave space between his shoulder blades, rocking forward to allow him to support all my weight. “Mo chuisle how was yer bath?’’ His eggs have scrambled in the brief moment of our embrace as without much effort he pulls me before him with my back to the stovetop. With his empty hand he turns off the gas burner and takes a bite out of his breakfast. Suddenly, the sulfuric scent of eggs makes my stomach queasy and as he absently places his wet mouth upon mine I feel a panicked surge of bitter bile erupt. With no food in my empty stomach acrid bile scours my esophagus and my taught abdomen curls and wretches like a python strangling a much larger prey. ‘‘Aghh bloody hell that smarts.’’ My words are warbled and shaky as I steady myself over the kitchen sink and deposit morning sickness down the corrugated maze of drainpipe my father had once installed.’’ Thank the Lord, Da fixed these pipes when he did or we’d have a mighty fine mess.’’ Da had retrofitted and renovated every faulty plumbing line in such an efficient fashion that my pride for his competency had not revealed itself until now, as tears dripped from my eyes onto the bile soaked basin drain.

  “Kiera what is wrong, love?’’ The blackened cast iron pan thudded to the ground reverberating in a ringing clang and floorboards cracked from the forceful impact with strewn bits of messy eggs scattered across the freshly sanitized flooring.

  ’’Ya are goin’ to be a Da Alastar!’’ His green eyes ignited with both surprise and a touch of suspicion.’’ Ya don’t believe me?” I exclaim bewildered.

  “Nay, it’s just that it hasn’t been so long…’’ he mumbles obviously blindsided

  ‘’Ya must be daft! It only takes one time, mate!” I am now flushed crimson hot both from the vomiting and my irritation.

  “Please Kiera, calm yerself down. Ya just laid it quick, but mo shiorghra, I love ya and…’’ He places his large palm upon my burgeoning belly bump. “I thought ya were just getting’ plump.” I smile and pummel him playfully on the chest.’’ Kiera, I’m being moved to West Derry. Ya know, I’ve quit me job at Harland and Wolf Shipyard. What are we to do for money?’’

  ‘’I don’t know, Alastar. Why are ya being moved to West Derry? This ‘tis news ta me. Why didn’t ya mention that earlier?’’

  His eyes look distant as his gaze solemnly is directed through the kitchen window into the enclosed backyard. “I’m sorry me love, but I didn’t know we were with child.’’

  ‘’We?’’ My question lingers in the air sounding more like a dare.

  ‘’Of course we, but seriously Kiera, one of us needs a bloody job or all of our stomach’s will ache with hunger and ya now need to eat for two.’’

  ’’Okay, should I go back to the aerospace factory?’’

  ‘’Nay absolutely not! It is too dangerous for you now in your fragile state!”

  ‘’Well what then?’’ My voice pitches with the foretold responsibly quelling all previous, naïve romantic illusions. My arms wrap around the man I love and with fatigue and an inability to argue as right now neither one of us has the constitutional reply to remedy the other’s fears. My flushed cheek rests comfortably on Alastar’s firm pectoral muscles and his breath eases in and out gradually as this physical gesture has calmed him.

  “I love ya, Alastar. I do! Yer me one eternal love.’’ I whisper a light blessing softly, not so he can hear it but just to affirm my devotion aloud. “Please keep yerself safe. I can’t do this alone.’’ He bends his long tree trunk of a neck and his features meld in a descent of gravity. He doesn’t say a word but habitually every day and night since I have stared at his handsome face when animated in conversation and passively suspended in sleep, my etched memory has given me intuition of his true emotions. I can see an empathic sadness as he reacts to my fears of being alone. The loss of my parents has been apparent, a gaping wound since the beginning of our affair. His heart breaks for me with a compassionate and stoic gaze of concern and protectiveness. He places his chin upon my crown, the weight bearing down as his arms provide a safeguard. Finally I rest.

  Time elapses until the clock strikes noon and we both jump, startled and half sleeping from the warmth our entwined bodies have generated. “So Alastar, are ya gonna leave me today?’’ I whisper, coyly fingering with his collarbone in a flirtatious manner.

  “Nay Kiera, I’ve got to marry ya before yer belly gets found out.’’ />
  “Today?’’ I lean back now fully alert and shocked with my heart pounding in my ears and my face flushed. As I look into Alastar’s wide and pleading eyes I can see his cheeks crest salmon pink from my reaction. “I mean, Alastar, I want to marry but it must be the right way.’’

  ‘’Why not just the two of us. Let’s go to the priest and have it done.’’

  ‘’Which church?’’ I retort in quiet frustration. He looks away and begins to laugh aloud, his unintentional theistic blunder having caught us both off guard.

  CHAPTER 39: Ni gnach cosaint ar dith tiarna (Rarely is a fight continued when the chief has fallen)

  Alastar Taggart…’’Yer Protestant priest will not marry us!’’ I gape down at my trembling, visibly irked fiancé, who, though she has pledged her love for me, looks fragile and green in pallor. I understand her well enough by now to know that her agitation will erupt like a volcano for the stress of our dueling religion’s exclusionary tactics might be exacerbating our child’s future.

  “And although I wouldn’t have a problem being wedded by yer’s without me properly being a Catholic… meself and yer baby would not be recognized without us being baptized as such and…’’ She absently clouts her right foot to the floor with the distribution of weight a dull echoing of thick wood. ‘’We…” She clasps her belly signaling to the slight bow of girth beneath her shirt. “We will not be baptized by either church. I will not be yer wife and live in Belfast without ya either.’’

  I just stand there for a moment briefly distracted by the loose bunch of curls that is framing her perfectly oval face like an ornate bronzed frame of a masterpiece. I yearn to gather my hands into her hair and pull gently bringing her cupids bow lips up to receive a hearty dose of my twitching mouth.

  ’’Alastar, are ya listening to me?’’ Now both of her hands have bunched into tiny fists and are resting at the crescendo of her arced hips. “Either ya stay in Belfast or we go to Derry with ya.’’ The urgency of my beloved pregnant fiancé’s condition and the commitment I have made to the Official IRA might have been easily sorted out if perhaps leaving the IRA to start a family would have been feasible, but the moment Gerry Adams had surreptitiously blackmailed me with his knowledge of her I had been theirs. If they challenge me to anything at this point, murderer I would be. They could torture me and a martyr, I would be. Kiera, and now our viable bloodline is all that matters. One may assume my sacrifice seems impulsive, but when I am with her nothing else in this broken city touches me; her constructed shroud of kindness and unwavering joy provides the isolation and reprieve I have desired, perhaps always needed, but never had the proper context to receive.

  The proverbial beatings and everlasting cavalry boots to the back of many young men are far in the distance. Safe is my soul although I have witnessed atrocities so feral my mind cannot absorb the memory in an attempt to preserve my sanity. Kiera has given me the love my mother never did for in her absence there was a void of sentiment, positive or negative. In this moment I do not wish to disclose why I have been asked to Derry or that a car bomb lies claimed and prostrate in my future.

  Her gray pristine, cloudless eyes plead innocently up at me and I maneuver the freshly retrieved nine mm pistol in my back leather boot with the heel of my ankle connecting with the cold metal of the barrel. I do not like lying to Kiera but this deception will be one of omission as I sigh aloud, “I’ll stay with ya in Belfast.’’ She cannot come to Derry for it is too dangerous in so many ways and I have no trust of the IRA leadership that would use her as a bargaining chip as Gerry Adams had previously alluded to.

  “How ‘bout Lanary Sloan then.‘’ Kiera’s smile is probing and slightly speculative.

  ‘’Ya mean to marry us?’’

  ‘’Aye! Perhaps we should be married as our great-great-great-grandparents were.”

  ‘’Go even further back in time then, sweetheart.’’

  ‘’Well let’s change our brethren’s chained pattern. Who’s to stop us?’’ I, for a brief moment, consider my father, who at this moment, I presume to be three sheets to the wind and if he were able to formulate conscious thoughts they would be of sorrow and of my abandonment. This is the first time I have addressed the weight of guilt I feel for simply loving Kiera as my romantic nature had been so tarnished by the women who sired me from exhaustion and who sought freedom beyond familial responsibility.

  ‘’Shall we ring him then?’’ Kiera rouses me from my self-pitying stupor and walks to her rotary telephone. Blush, pink fingernails absently stroke the dial as she awaits directions to the numbers to rotate.

  ’’Aye, perhaps he is home.’’ I take three elongated strides with my footfall landing me face prone to her classically fine boned structure. Her delicacy reminds me of fine china, so immaculate in its form, that I fear my grasp will ravage her. I take the phone and dial the number I have memorized, whispering to Kiera, “ya best find a dress for ya to wear.’’

  Gleaming, she responds with a jubilant nod of the chin, “I bet ya will fit one limb into Da’s suit.’’ She laughs, stretching her arm from my hip to the floor and while prostrated to me there is that coy smile. My desire surges quickly but is quelled by the gruff voice at the other end of the receiver. Formally, I announce myself and in the matter of a few minutes, have convinced Lanary to wed Kiera and I.

  “We shall do it by the Yew tree I’ve gone ta many a day ta contemplate.’’ I am omitting that the last time I had visited the sacred place I had been vacillating between unconsciousness and consciousness. With a complying grunt that is most definitely accompanied by a nod of the bearded man, our arrangements have been set.

  Kiera and I are dressed in our formal wear and are seated as close as physically possible in the back seat of Bobby’s 1949 robin blue Fiat with its rusting edges truly giving it the moniker of cracks in the eggshell. Kiera’s curls have been pulled into a French braid, which brushes the nape of her neck and ropes down to the small of her back. My hand strokes the softness trailing down her spinal column and I massage the knotted musculature of her shoulders.

  ‘’Hmmm that feels mighty.’’ She murmurs quietly as the engine is deafening Bobby’s eavesdropping capacity. Her humbly clad feet rest gingerly upon a wood bound, straw broom stick, which will be used at our feverishly executed ceremony for the gesture of jumping across it signifies the leaving our old life and the embracing of the new. Placed deep in the recesses of the mothball scented jacket are the silk ribbons, which will be bound and intertwined between my wife’s hand and my own; the literal origin of tying the knot.

  Lanary Sloan greets us standing like an Egyptian pharaoh garbed in a Celtic Druid linen robe eclipsed in shadow from the cloak of the great, green leafed yew tree. Balmy, teatime light filters through leaves to bask his silver hair with a faint glow, as his statuesque, lean body is framed perfectly in the center of nature’s masterpiece. The tableau is reminiscent of our human, titular role in the ecosystem beyond manmade walls.

  Linear cascades of raindrops spilling from the branches are the last remnants of the morning’s rain shower. Though the downpour hastened in veracity there still was no sun to behold in the sky. The slate grey of the afternoon was obfuscated by a bursting palate of varying shades of green, forged from the bellowing pastures that radiate with fertile splendor in this perpendicular amphitheater.

  ‘‘It’s a mighty fine sight.’’ A whistling Bobby scrambles quickly to stand on the lower ground a few feet below the undisturbed six foot h man whose eyes stare fixedly upon Kiera’s movements. Lanary’s lack of emotive expression makes me queasy and the unease only increases as Kiera walks light footed over moss and craggy rock to stand between a gracious and endearing Bobby Sands and our priest.

  CHAPTER 40: Sliocht sleachta ar sliocht bhur sleachta (May you have children and your children have children)

  Kiera Flanagan…Soon to be Kiera Flanagan Taggart

  ’’To the fir on me left and the man on me right, may the day rise with ya and
ya can be tethered and bound eternal.’’ Lanary Sloan’s brusque deployment into the commencement of our wedding ceremony leaves me trembling with adrenaline and as a surge of energy seeks a release in me, Alastar begins to unravel a brightly colored silk ribbon to commence the tradition of hand fastening. Lanary speaks clearly to the two of us as though we are his subjects assuring us that our hasty decision will not be ill fated. “Marry when the year is new, always loving, kind, and true. When February birds do mate, you may wed, nor dread your fate. Though ‘tis not a Saturday, the day tis of no importance.” His deep, indented blue eyes gesture to the length of silken ribbon that is draped over my fiancé’s palm. A foot before me, Alastar stands, and as his moss green eyes seem to caress mine, I am made aware, with the gusts of wind, the faintest intake of breath. I smile reassuringly at my future husband and as carefully as with a seamstress’s fluidity, he begins to weave the wine red ribbon from the base of his thumb to his prone index digit finger and with his free hand he places my right hand upon his now entangled fingers. With palms intractable, nimbly, I bind my hand in a similar tantamount fashion until we are both entwined in a satiny, soft, woven padlock, signifying our wedlock. With a tender kiss to our conjoined fingertips, Alastar motions to Lanary. The cloaked man who has been a silent witness to our ritual presents a worn book from behind the concealment of his heavy garb, not unlike a magician’s gesture. Alastar’s loving gaze rests on a yellowing, thin page and as he preemptively reads the words before him, his eyes glow brilliantly and the premonition of a tear illuminates his eyes like ornamental bejeweled green jade.