The Little Red Chairs (16 page)

‘I have four kids and one on the way … I want no trouble with police … police send me home,’ he says as he takes from the glove box an old Bible held together with Sellotape. He starts to read from Psalm 91, reads it slowly and tells her to repeat the words after him, which she does –

You will not fear the terror of night

Nor the arrow that flies by day,

Nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness.

Music is pouring from the house, it is like a disco in there. She is getting more terrified, asking crazy, unrealisable things. Suddenly Tyrone has a brainwave. It has come from God. It has come from her holding the Bible. She has the woman’s means to save herself, to save them both.

‘Life reside on the tongue,’ he says and then, ‘Be sweet … Be gentle … Do not argue … God love woman and he save you … God made woman for Adam to be happy. Eve have emotional mind … Adam have logical mind … Bring them to emotional mind … talk to them … you have soft voice, remind them that women follow the body of Christ to the tomb … all the Apostles they say they are men … how come they do not follow the body of Christ to the tomb … Ask them to have pity … Be wise with them and their craziness pass.’

The albino has come out.

‘Gold lounge,’ he says as he pulls her out of the car. A song, loud and brazen, is one she vaguely knows, having heard it in TJ’s – ‘When I’m with you, baby, I go out of my head, I just can’t get enough …’

She stands on the threshold, thinking that at this very last minute, fate will intervene.

*

Mona was edgy and unable to sleep. She had this awful presentiment, just as she’d had twenty years previous, when her husband didn’t arrive back from the Galway races and she knew before Plodder Pat even knocked on her door that Tim was already dead at the wheel. She tried prayer and she tried pacing and eventually, she had to go down to the pub and make herself a hot port. No use blocking it out any longer, she would have to act on her intuition. It was not curiosity, more a general anxiousness that made her open the letter Mujo had left for Dara, his friend. The heading was that of an asylum centre in Dusseldorf and the handwriting was laboured.

This is my story,
it began.
One New Year’s Eve, I learnt of what happened to my family. A lady told me. She thought I knew, but I didn’t. The day soldiers came to our farm, I hid in one of the beehives that was empty. There was shouting and crying and then the lorry drove away and my uncle and my mother were taken. Many days later, I am found in the beehive, but my memory gone. Someone from Red Cross they bring me away. I know that my uncle is dead, but I believe that my mother is still alive, that she is waiting for me and that we will find one another.

Then pasted onto a separate sheet of paper was evidence, copied from a court document.

A hot day. Guards all stand with machine guns. Hundreds of men in one room beaten and afraid. A father is told to send his son into the next room, where men were taken for more severe beatings and didn’t always come back. Unless father send his son in, no one in camp will be left alive. A second name is called and the two young men are pushed into beatings room. My uncle is sitting on a metal table all bloody. Guards already slash him with knives, and guard is pouring water over him in order to keep him alive, so as to kill him again. The young men recognise my uncle, they were friends from the same village, they play basketball together and belong to same pigeon club. One was ordered to hold him down and the second ordered to crouch and bite his balls off and unless it was done no one in whole camp would be left alive. They smear oil all over the lips of the one who is ordered to bite. He did what he had to do. Guards shouting, ‘Bite harder bite harder.’ My uncle nearly unconscious did not die just yet. Guard bring pigeon and my uncle put his hand out to stroke it, he think it a pet. Then the guard stuff it into his mouth, feathers and all. ‘Bite harder,’ he shout until my uncle truly dead. The two men ordered to deal with the body.

Mona was stone cold. She read it several times. God or no God she must do what she had to do.
Fidelma must not have this beast’s child
. How clearly it all came back, a fresh morning when, after another sleepless night, she had taken a walk over to the river. Fidelma was getting out of her little Citroën, holding a big bunch
of lilies, having probably driven to Sligo to get them, white lilies with sienna-coloured stamens, ecstatically happy. A woman in love bearing a gift. Knowing that for years Fidelma had wanted a child, Mona guessed, ‘I think it has happened for you.’

‘It has,’ Fidelma said, and embraced her and swore her to secrecy. The child’s father was not Jack, but a different man altogether and she was under oath not to say. She ran, hugging the big bunch of flowers as if it was already an infant she held to herself. Mona guessed correctly when she saw her let herself in the side door of what was once her shop, as Vlad always arrived very early to meditate. Seeing Fidelma so ruefully happy she felt she could not betray her, as a childless woman herself she could not do that, because she like everyone else knew nothing of the man’s history. Now she had to do something worse. She would go to their house as soon as it got light and call Fidelma out on some pretext or other and tell her what they had to do. They must go to England, God or no God, that child could not be allowed into the world.

*

It is a large room with a clay floor that smells of animals and dried dung. The light from the big torches gives a merciless glare. They are in their shirt sleeves and dancing a sort of conga, swinging and head butting as the albino pushes her in.

‘How are you feeling right now?’ he asks.

‘She’s feeling randy … She’s a Hot Mama and a Rich Bitch,’ another answers. They then begin a sort of excuse-me dance in which she is thrown from one to the other, like a rag doll. They are chatting her up, sometimes insultingly, sometimes not.

‘You miss your boyfriend?’ the Medico asks.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

He drinks then from the vodka bottle and passes it to his friends and she asks for some because she needs to be drunk, to get through this. What she believed was that they would rape her, but she was wrong. It is Vlad they want, it is him they have come to revenge themselves upon.

‘I thought you were blood brothers,’ she says.

‘We were … We the “Preventiva”, we guard him, protect him, move him safe … We lose everything, our fathers, our comrades, our lands … then peace, lousy peace, and he take the spoils. He do business … black market, cigarettes, gasoline, booze … He have cement and wood to build houses, many houses … We have nothing. He big boss … he cover his own arse and not ours.’

‘That’s not my fault,’ she says.

‘You had fun, yes.’

‘Stop this game,’ she says.

‘We’ve only begun, bitch.’

‘Harming me won’t get you anywhere.’

‘We kill anything of his … we kill his cat,’ and he slides an imaginary blade across her throat.

‘Don’t kill it,’ she says, her hand instinctively going to her belly and in that moment she knows that she has admitted to being pregnant and instantly tries to backtrack. They are feeling her now, pawing her, asking if she has a Bambi tattoo on her belly, swivelling her round for a side view. Suddenly remembering Tyrone’s advice about being sweet with them, she says how she has seen the scan and how the skull has not yet formed, it is a little tadpole, it would not harm anyone.

‘Blahblahblahblahblah.’

‘Abort,’ she hears the word twice and it hangs in the air like it might have been spoken by an oracle, lurking in one of the unlit corners.

Then the sound of his cell phone, which is a mimicry of a yapping dog and the Medico picks it up, listens and puts it down abruptly. From a plastic bag he takes out an iron crowbar and dons a plastic bib across his front. She backs away. Her hour has come. She runs into a corner where they follow and hold her, arms and legs flailing, and the Medico shouts to keep her there. That room is pandemonium now, their shouting, her screaming, pounding music, all of it driving out to where Tyrone, though she cannot know this, is reciting from memory, Psalm 91.

‘I’ll give you money, I’ll give you my house, I’ll give you anything,’ she calls, but in vain.

‘Ask him not to do it,’ she says to the albino, thinking that because he is the youngest, he will break. He looks at her blank-eyed, as if looking at nothing at all.

‘You have a mother,’ she says.

‘I love my mother.’ He is affronted and says his mother’s name is Vyjella, which means Violet in English. He is told to undress her. He pulls down her skirt and then more slowly her tights and her knickers, then gazes at the white of her flesh and the thick nest of black hair, with the gaze of a bridegroom.

‘I do … I do it,’ he says all excited and then he grabs the crowbar and straddles her. She can see his legs in his blue jeans and she can smell him.

‘You will be sorry if you do it … I will haunt you forever,’ she says, not screaming now but with a conviction, so that he draws back, shaken by her words, and says to the others, ‘She witch … she mad.’

The Medico, furious at the time wasted, swaps places with him, takes the bar, holds it between her parted thighs and then rams it into her, slewing and tilting, then raking, as if raking earth. The pain is so violent that she cannot scream, only bleats of terror escape her and her screams are no more. The moaning of a dying animal, except she is not dying fast enough. Bound and held to that spot, she is calling on Jesus, on Christ, her hands pitifully outstretched, wantonly asking her killer to be her saviour. Half-lucid, half-crazed thoughts flit through her mind with each worsening thrust, and she remembers reading that at the very end, a dying person finds the courage to be brave, but no such courage befriends her. He is shouting for the torch to be held higher and for an instant, her sight is blanketed out by the glare and then it begins to happen, a slippage, as if all of her insides are being dislodged and from the two hooligans a shout of victory, as the blood comes churning out in fitful gushes. He withdraws the bar with the same savagery as he inserted it and flings it in disgust so that it hits then capsizes the second torch as both fall with a clang.

They are getting ready to go, the music suddenly turned off, shouting orders to each other as they pack their things. They leave her in utter darkness.

She hears the car drive away and all is quiet for a short time and then the scurries, rats, come to sup and she can hear their tongues lapping up the pools of warm blood.

*

The London flight has landed at the small airport and people have begun to trickle out. Tyrone lurks in a corner by the
Mavourneen coffee shop, trying to be invisible, unable to ring his wife, because they took his phone and all his money. He is waiting for Dara, knows that Dara and others went for the friendly game between Ireland and England.

Dara emerges with his mates, all in green, green jerseys and green scarves, and they scatter, some having mothers or girlfriends to collect them. He sees Dara come towards him bleary-eyed, all smiles now that he is sure of a lift home.

‘Ireland scored first … the place went wild … jumpin’ up and down … “Fields of Athenry” … a great game altogether … it was a draw but it felt like we won … ten of us in a hostel in Greek Street … Bed at four up at five … Great day altogether.’

‘Something bad happen … I think she dead,’ Tyrone says as they go out and Dara guesses it is to do with Vlad, as the news has been on every channel.

That drive is frantic, with Tyrone having to talk all the time, because unless he talk he will go crazy:

‘They hire me for whole day … evening we pick up the woman, she scared like a little sparrow. I see trouble but I must drive. Go go go they say. Road narrow. I slow down. One he grab me from behind, I say mercy man. Before that he okay, he ask me what meat I like, I tell him deer and antelope that live in the bush and eat the sweet things, eat the mango. Now he is maniac. I see big sheet of water and road ending in hollow. I ask God help me. They say stop, and I stop and they jump out. They take keys. Soon music come same as nightclub. Later they take woman, I hear screaming, many many screaming. I think she dead. I have problem to go to police, for fear I lose my licence, go to prison or are sent home. On way to airport they throw bags in lake and wash their faces, laughing laughing laughing.’

It was pitch dark as they entered the house and they could hear scurries.

‘I’m kinda afraid of rats,’ Dara says and they hold onto one another as they pick their steps to where the body is slumped in a corner. They can’t see, they can’t tell whether she is breathing or not. Tyrone flicks on his lighter, but the flame keeps sputtering as there is hardly any fuel left.

‘Quench it,’ Dara shouts and runs, returning with sops of hay that they set light to. It catches fire instantly, sparks flying up, a great phosphorous glare, to reveal a figure that is bleeding and as good as dead.