Falling Gla.s.s.

Adrian McKinty.

It's no go my honey love, it's no go my poppet; Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit.

The gla.s.s is falling hour by hour, the gla.s.s will fall forever, But if you break the b.l.o.o.d.y gla.s.s you won't hold up the weather.

Louis MacNeice, "Bagpipe Music" (1937).

PROLOGUE.

ON 238TH STREET.

"My point, friend, is that this is not an affectionate homage. This is not an interior critique. This is not Jay-Z using, what I advisedly call, the N-word. This is a collection of cliches that actually undermines what it is supposed to be celebrating. This whole ethos is a paradigm in need of shifting. And the fact that it is generated by people, no offence, with only a tangential connection to the ur-source of that culture makes it all the more embarra.s.sing."

The barman nodded. "So do you want another pint then? One without a shamrock on the head?"

Killian sighed. "It's not even about the shamrock is it? It's the entire Vast moth-eaten musical brocade'. The whole shebang. This entire scene, brother, is, at best, a pastiche. But while we're on the subject of the shamrock, what's with the four leaves? Nothing could be simpler to remember. The Celts are polytheistic, they have many G.o.ds, Saint Patrick wants them to worship one G.o.d so he employs the shamrock to represent the Trinity: G.o.d the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. The Trinity Three leaves. A four-leaf shamrock isn't a shamrock, it's a four-leaf clover. Do you see? I mean, at the bare minimum we should both be able to agree on that?"

The bar man - bar boy really - nodded more firmly this time. "I'll get you another pint, without the shamrock. I didn't know you was from the old country itself so to speak."

"Thank you," Killian said.

"Although," the kid added, with a twinkle in his eye which Killian might have caught if he had been paying attention, "You've got to give him credit for the snakes."

"Who?"

"Saint Patrick."

"You're Irish?" a voice asked from behind him, in the blind spot - a dangerous place for anyone to be. Killian flinched and turned, his hand reaching inside his pocket for a ghost piece.

A big guy in a Rangers shirt. NY Rangers that is. Not Glasgow. Different thing all together.

"Yes," Killian said.

"Your accent's not Irish though is it?" the man said sceptically. His voice had a hint of crazy and his eyebrows were madder than Freddie Jones's in David Lynch's Dune.

"I'm from Belfast," Killian said slowly.

The man nodded slowly. "Oh, I see, so not Ireland, Ireland. Have you ever been to Dublin? That's a real Irish city"

Killian's fresh pint of the black stuff appeared on the bar in front of him a mere forty-five seconds after he'd been promised it - not a great sign. The barman however must have had concentration or even psychiatric problems because there on the top was another four-leaf clover masquerading as a shamrock.

Killian knew it was time to hit the exit. But before he did: "Dublin's a nice place but you have to remember that it was a Norse settlement for three centuries before it became an English town for seven centuries more. It's been an Irish city for ninety years. Are you familiar with the Aboriginal concept of The Dreaming?"

"The Aboriginal what of the what now?"

"The Aboriginals believe that we live two lives. A life here on Earth in what we call the real world and a life in The Dreaming which is really the real world, where everything has a purpose, where we are more than thinking reeds, are part of some great scheme of things. And in The Dreaming certain places are special, certain landscapes, certain settlements. Belfast is one of those places. The neolithic people thought so. To them it was a holy site. Pristine birch woods in a river valley only just freed from a retreating ice sheet a mile thick. The Celts weren't interested in Dublin - it lacked a significance in their cosmology which is why they let the Norwegians have it. Belfast lies at the confluence of three holy rivers. In Irish it means Mouth of the Fa.r.s.et, one of those sacred streams. Do you see what I'm saying?"

The man in the Rangers shirt nodded sagely, "So, you're Australian then?" he asked.

Killian sighed inwardly. Some instinct had told him that this was going to be a mistake. Even before the plane had entered the airs.p.a.ce of Newfoundland he'd begun to have doubts. You can't go home again and the New York of crack wars, quadruple-digit homicide rates, David d.i.n.kins, Mike Forysthe and 50,000 illegal Micks was long, long gone.

He abandoned the pub, the pint and the man and hoofed it downhill to the subway stop on 242nd Street.

He found a Daily News that had a picture of Dermaid McCann, Gerry Adams and Peter Robinson having a pint with the President.

They were drinking Guinness.

Obama's grin had Get me the h.e.l.l out of here written all over it.

Killian yawned. He was dog-tired and in the morning he had a job to do in Boston that could well be the death of him.

The train finally came after an epic wait.

It was now after midnight.

"Happy Saint Patrick's Day," the driver said on the intercom.

"Aye, I suppose we'll see about that," Killian muttered to himself.

CHAPTER 1.

GO DOWN FIGHTING.

Cursing the dog's name, she took the gun barrel from her mouth and set the 9-millimetre on the kitchen table.

The metal had felt good. Like it belonged there. A cold, perfect piece of engineering.

She sat on her trembling right hand and stared at the weapon.

Ice crystals were melting on the Heckler and Koch's polymer grip and running over the magazine as it lay on the yellow and green Formica, waiting.

Seconds ticked past in long increments of raw time.

She found herself fixating on the disarmed hammer safety and trigger lock, imagining the terrible power of the chambered round. In an instant it could all be at an end. Click. A chemical reaction. An expanding piece of molten lead. Big Dave would kick in the door and take out her kids, the peelers would arrive from Coleraine and find her note, Tom or Richard's lawyer would wake him with the good news, hacks would drive up from Belfast and someone would put that stock photograph of her with the blonde hair on page one of the b.l.o.o.d.y Sunday World.

But she'd be out of it.

To be dead in the black earth, to be alive only in yesterdays...

The P30 had eight in the magazine, one in the breech - that was the one she could ride into nothingness.

Thresher barked again. If it had still been raining, of course, she wouldn't have heard him at all. Tonight she might really have done it. Wouldn't have thought so long and hard and let the barrel slide off her tongue.

But not now, now she was on alert in case this really was something. Someone.

She killed the lights, picked up the gun and went to the door.

She cracked it open and listened.

Surf in the distance, cars on the road, a football match on a distant radio.

"Thresher?" she whispered but he was quiet now. "Thresher, where are ya, ya big eejit?"

She breathed the night air. It was damp, cold. She looked up. The clouds had blown through and the star-field was rich. The Milky Way, the crescent moon, Orion.

She knew about the stars. She'd taken astronomy at Queen's for a year before dropping out. Of course none of Richard's lawyers ever mentioned that in their depositions. They preferred to paint her as the gold-digger, the cultchie, the junkie...

Her nails were digging into her palm. She unclenched her fist.

She closed the caravan door and went inside. Sat back down at the kitchen table. The P30 was still in her hand. A microsecond. That's all it would take.

She reconsidered for one beat, two...

She shook her head. "No," she said aloud. She safetied the weapon, put it in a plastic bag in the freezer, closed the fridge door.

Ended her conversation with death.

She walked the length of the caravan to check on the girls.

The nightlight was casting a pink glow over the buckled aluminum walls. Sue's blanket had fallen to the floor. She picked it up, replaced it. Claire was sleeping like a rabbit, curled on all fours, hunched. The barking dog hadn't woken either of them.

Rachel stared at them, trying to feel love rather than resentment.

But she was so d.a.m.n tired. Tired of lying, hiding, running.

"Good night," she whispered and went back to the front door.

She opened it and took a last look out. "Go ahead, Richard. Send your men, I don't think I even care anymore," she whispered sadly.

She locked the door and put the chain across.

She tiptoed to her room - the only real bedroom in the caravan - and sat on the fold-out bed. The blankets hadn't been tossed in a week. They gave off an odour.

She reached for her f.a.gs, opened the box, discovered that it was empty.

Rain began to fall on the metal roof.

Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding...

"Christ," she muttered.

Surely the girls would be better off without her. Rachel looked about her - this, this was madness.

She fished in the ashtray and found a ciggy with an inch left in it.

She flipped Big Dave's Zippo. The tobacco tasted of sand. She blew smoke at a midge and lay back on the sheets.

The roof dissolved.

Pine trees. Constellations. An arrow of cloud intersecting with the moon. There were poppies along the granite wall and a wind bringing the smell of fennel, saffron and boggy emptiness.

She turned off the nightlight and stared through the lace curtains at the caravan park. A green phosph.o.r.escence was playing on the TV aerial of Big Dave's caravan. She'd seen it before and she watched while it fizzed I here for a moment - if fizzed was the right word - before dissipating into I he black air. Most everyone was asleep now. Dave was on earlies and the football match appeared to have finished. Stu and that girl of his were probably the only ones still up, amped out of their minds or cooking blue belly to sell in Derry, or to her.

She finished the smoke, climbed under the sheets.

Darkness.

And when the traffic on the A2 died away, quiet.

She couldn't sleep. Yes, the methamphetamine was still in her system but she hadn't pulled an eight for years.

She was lucky these days to get four.

He wasn't the problem. She no longer thought about Richard or that Sunday morning.. .No, the problem wasn't the past but the present. Money, Claire, truant inspectors, Sue, lawyers, private detectives, the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Drugs.

Rachel tugged the sheet over her face.

Wind.

Rain.

And, finally, at around two, a few hours of erased existence...

Photons from a different star.

Prayers seeping through the bedroom wall.

She stirred. The room was heady, the smell: eucalypt, pine, seaweed. She lifted the sheet from her face. Rubbed her eyes. Her fingertips were soft. Uncalloused. Unworked. She noted this with neither satisfaction nor regret. Work was for workers.

She lowered her legs to the floor. She looked for her watch but remembered that it had fallen off her wrist in town. Always sly, the Rolex had seized its chance to keep forever its knowledge of date and time, second and minute. Perhaps it was even a bold attempt on the watch's part to set her free of such notions. She smiled, she liked that, but it wasn't true - the watch was a present from Richard, it was his ally not hers. And it wasn't even funny. She could have hocked it for five hundred quid in Coleraine.