A Terrible Beauty

'Let me tell you something, Siobhan, every journey is an adventure. When you take that first step out of your house in the morning, you never know where fate is going to take you.'

'I think I can walk from here,' she told him, in sudden urgency, and tugged at the door handle. The lights changed to green and the man turned right, over the river, and up to MacCurtain Street, which would take them back eastward.

'Please, stop. I want to get out.'

'Impossible, I'm afraid. This is one of those journeys that, once begun, has to continue right to the very end. No dawdling, no diversions. Keep right on to the end of the road, as the song goes.'

'Really, stop, please. I want to get out.'

The man ignored her. Already flustered, Siobhan began to hyperventilate. They had to stop at the pedestrian crossing just outside the Everyman Theater, and she beat on the window with her fists, trying to attract the attention of the van driver who had drawn up next to them.

'Help me!' she screamed. 'Help me!'

But the van driver was talking on his cell phone, and he obviously thought that Siobhan was simply fooling around. He gave her a wink and a nod of his head, and then the lights changed and they were off again, past Summerhill, past the railway station, and out along the road which ran close beside the wide glassy waters of the River Lee.

The man drove very fast, with only one hand on the wheel. Siobhan wrestled with the door handle again, but he reached across and snatched her wrist, gripping it painfully tight. 'You can't getout, Siobhan, so I wouldn't even attempt it. Sit back and enjoy the rollercoaster. This is an adventure, darling? much more exciting than going to college and designing coats! You can design a coat any day. A coat, for Christ's sake! But how often do you come face-to-face with fate?'

'Let me out!' she shrieked. She kicked and struggled and her cheeks were hectic with panic. 'Let me out! Let me out!'

The man wrenched the steering wheel first to one side and then the other. The car slewed across the road, narrowly missing an oncoming truck. There was a shrill chorus of protesting tires and a cacophony of car horns.

'You want to die so soon?' the man demanded, and there was an extraordinary note of triumph in his voice.

'Please stop. Please let me out.'

He wrenched the wheel again, and this time the car hit the nearside curb and one of its hubcaps flew off, and bounded into the bushes.

'What do you want?'Siobhan screamed at him.'What do you want?'

The man steered them deftly across the Skew Bridge-left, then right, tires howling, across the railway. 'What do you think? I want everything that you can give me, my darling Siobhan, and a little bit more besides.' He lifted her hand up and crushed it triumphantly between his fingers.

She took three or four shuddering breaths, like somebody stepping waist-deep into cold water. She was trying to stay calm, trying to stay calm. Her mother had always said to her that no matter how threatening men could be, she should never lose control of herself, never get hysterical. They wanted you to go off the edge. It gave them an excuse for raging back at you, for hitting you. Her father used to hit her mother, every Sunday morning, after mass, with monotonous regularity, and she never heard her mother even so much as say 'don't, Tom, don't.'

The man said, 'I could introduce you to all kinds of pleasures?all kinds of sensations?feelings that you never could have imagined. I could give you such ecstasy, Siobhan, you'd be begging me for more. But there's so little time for that, these days. Everything's hurry, hurry, hurry, isn't it, and far too many years have rolled by already.'

'I won't let you hurt me,' said Siobhan, trying to be defiant.

'Excuse me, you don't have any say in the matter. If I want to hurt you, I will.'

'I want you to let me out of the car.'

'What? So that you can call the cops and have me collared? I don't think so, my darling. This is much too important. I need only one more life, and then I can have everything I've ever wanted. The day is nearly with us, Siobhan. The greatest day ever in romantic history. And all of the glory will be yours. Well, most of it. Some of it, anyway. A little.'

They passed Tivoli Docks, with its tall triangular cranes reflected in the river, and then he turned up the long, steep hill toward Mayfield. Siobhan began to slump down in her seat, lower and lower, as if she were trying to hide.

'You mustn't be scared,' the man told her. 'The only thing to be scared about is to die a nonentity. And that certainly won't happen to you.'

'I'm late,' said Siobhan. 'I'm late for my fashion class. They'll be wondering where I am.'

The man released her wrist and ran his fingers deep into her wiry, coppery hair, tugging at her roots, massaging her scalp. 'This is a different path, Siobhan. This is a different way to go. When you woke up this morning you thought that your life was going to be just the same as yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. But, believe me, it isn't.'

He took his fingers out of her hair and sniffed at them. 'It's strange, isn't it, that redheads smell so different from the rest of us? Like foxes, I suppose.'

After a while, as they approached the crossroads at Ballyvolane, he reached down and groped beneath his seat as if he had dropped something. When he sat up again, he was holding a brand-new claw hammer, with the price sticker still on the handle. Siobhan glimpsed something shining, but she didn't understand what he was going to do until he swung his arm back as far as he could and knocked her dead center in the middle of the forehead.