"Rumpelstiltskin" by Kevin Mc Dermott

The dog settles herself in the front seat, her head on the armrest, dozing. You flick through the radio stations until you find something you like - Bob Dylan’s ‘A Simple Twist of Fate.’ From Blood on the Tracks. You love that album. As hard as nails. And then you’re off on one of your little Mastermind runs. ‘Dylan’s breakup album. His first wife, Sara Noznisky.’ 

No wonder you had no friends in school. ‘Sir, Sir, Sir, I know.’ And you haven’t improved with age. Telling that young barista the other day how to make a macchiato. The look she gave you. Mansplainer.     

You didn’t say where you were going beyond bringing the dog out for a walk. What was that about? You were glad Ellen, your wife, was reading her book and didn’t press you. You don’t want her thinking you’ve developed a new obsession. 

The roads are quiet. Not surprising, given it’s nine o’clock on a Sunday night. What kind of time is that? An interstitial time? A betwixt and between. ‘Interstitial!’  You love your big words, don’t you? 

You turn down the road that bisects the golf course, deep now in the leafy suburbs. You say ‘leafy suburbs’ out loud, as if quoting from a property brochure. It amuses you. 

You lean forward. The turn should be coming up soon. The dog bestirs herself. How does she sense when you’ve nearly arrived? Look at her! She puts her front paws on the dashboard and looks ahead and then at you and then ahead again, her tail going nineteen to the dozen.  All she is short of saying is, ‘What’s up?’ She whimpers with impatience and strangles a bark.  

‘Settle down, Rum,’ you say, rubbing the top of her head, settle down.’ 

Does she sense your excitement? Is that it? 

‘Are you excited?’ you ask and shake your head in wonderment at yourself. You turn into the cul-de-sac and pull up.  

‘Come on,’ you coax as Rum hesitates about jumping down onto the footpath. And then she does, and is off, pulling on the lead, her ears back as if she senses a fox or a cat. You trot to keep up, checking the road as she races across to the trees planted behind the stone wall. They form an urban woodland. You let her explore and she stops to pee on the grass. Ahead, parked up, is what looks like a campervan, with GARDA on the side. 

‘On their holidays,’ you say aloud to the dog.  You pass the van. There are lights on, but the windows are high and you cannot make out if there is anyone inside. 

Beyond the van, the wall and the trees end, and you step onto the footpath. The embassy is on the far side of the road, no more than fifty yards away. There are barricades outside it. A Garda car, with its distinctive blue and yellow markings, is parked across the entrance. You take out your flag and tie it around your neck like a scarf. 

On the footpath, facing the embassy, a solitary gentleman wearing a Fedora is standing still, holding a night light. You walk towards him and he turns and acknowledges you with a nod. 

‘May I join you,’ you ask.

‘By all means.’

You settle the dog, and she sits down and looks across the road. 

A Garda appears. To you, she seems improbably young. You wonder if she was in the camper van. She stands next to you. ‘Lovely night,’ she says, and you agree.

You ask if there was much of a crowd earlier at the rally, but she has only come on duty, so cannot tell you. 

The young Garda compliments the gentleman on the nightlight he is holding. She thinks it’s very moving and dignified. You agree.  

The gentleman explains that it was his granddaughter who suggested he bring one of the nightlights from her Granny’s grave with him. 

‘It burns steadily for a hundred and eighty hours,’ he says and shows you the battery compartment.  ‘It’s a perpetual light’. 

You stop yourself asking for more details. You’ve heard too many pandemic stories, pandemic deaths, with their lonely goodbyes and miserable funerals. 

‘Well, the candle is a lovely idea,’ the young Garda says. And the three of you fall into companionable silence. 

After a while, the young Garda steps towards you to pet the dog.  ‘She’s lovely, so she is, and so good.’

You smile. And the dog looks up, pleased with herself. 

‘What’s her name?’ 

‘Rumpelstiltskin’. 

The Garda laughs. ‘Are you having me on?’

‘Well, Rum, for short,’ you say. ‘She was a rum little creature when we got her.’ 

The Garda smiles, though the joke seems lost on her.  

‘What kind of dog is she?’

‘A rogue,’ you say, rehearsing one of your dad jokes. ‘We got her from the pound. We have no idea, really - a bit of this and a bit of that.’

Rumpelstiltskin is content to be the centre of attention.  

The young Garda seems so innocent. Everything about her seems to say, ‘I am on your side.’ You feel paternal towards her, in her yellow, high-vis jacket that looks three sizes too big on her, as she pets your dog.  

And here you are, on a Sunday night, outside the embassy. Keeping vigil. 

You think back to the time before. Before the maps started appearing on the TV, showing the infected regions in red. Before it became an obsession with you, checking the progress of the virus every day, wondering how long before it would take hold in Ireland. You were anxious about Ellen, about her underlying condition, about your underlying mortality. And then the virus and the restrictions came. You checked the numbers infected every day, twice and three times a day. Checked the hospital admissions. The numbers in ICU. The number of people your age suffering and dying. 

And you could not convince yourself that enough was being done; that the health system could cope; that your body would hold up. Try as you might, you could not shift the weight that pressed on your chest, or the feeling in the pit of your stomach. And you knew the coloured image of the pathogen was make-believe, that green planet with its corona of red spikes. That alien invader. For god’s sake. But it haunted you all the same, didn’t it?  The way that visit to the plague island in Venice had haunted you for years afterwards. 

And then the virologists began to say we were winning, the vaccines were working, the strains were weakening. You wanted to believe them, wanted to convince yourself that the fire had been extinguished and the house stood yet -  

‘Do you come here often?’ The young Garda interrupts your thoughts.   

You smile in response to her smile. ‘When I can, but only for a few minutes at a time. Me and Rumpelstiltskin.’

‘She’s a protest dog, so.’

You look down at her. ‘Yeah. My little protest dog,’ you say, proud as can be. 

A car goes by. The driver slows and looks at you and honks the horn. 

‘Drives the residents mad all the cars sounding their horns,’ the young Garda says. 

The old gentleman laughs quietly. He stamps his feet and moves around. ‘We have friends in Kyiv,’ he tells you. ‘That’s why I am here.’ He looks at you, his face open and sympathetic. ‘And you?’ 

‘Because it seems so close, I suppose,’ you answer. 

Once you would have thought, this couldn’t happen here, to us. But now, after the pandemic, anything seems possible. And this is happening in Europe, not in some unknown elsewhere. This war is here. 

You think these things but don’t say them out loud. You don’t admit how much the war weighs on you. Ellen says you tell her nothing. She says you’ll burst one day with all that’s bottled up inside you. You try sometimes, you do. You don’t want to be silent. But you can never find the words. You open and close your mouth, but nothing comes out, the words churning around and around in your head. You sigh and bite your lip. 

You’ve taken to going for a dip in the sea on mornings when the sun shines. And if you go in, Rum goes with you. The water is icy, and you’re not impervious to it, like the seasoned swimmers. It does help calm the nerves. Though, in all honesty, you’re turning into a nervous wreck. 

You turn from your thoughts and stand still. And, in the lambency of the night light, it is almost beautiful, and you almost forget why you are here. 

‘You know they’re watching us,’ the gentleman says, ‘probably listening, too.’ 

And he nods to the buildings across the street, with their invisible eyes and ears.  

‘Let them look, and let them listen,’ you say, with theatrical bravado, and the dog looks up at you.  

‘There are spies working there,’ the gentleman says. ‘It’s well known. Underground bunkers, no less. Russian contractors over to build it.’   

You look across at the compound and consider the possibility.  

‘What do you think is happening now, at this very moment, in Mariupol and Kyiv,’ the gentleman asks. 

Neither you nor the young Garda have an answer. You think of the interview you read with a young woman, a Kyiv resident. ‘Where will I go?’ she said. ‘Where will my father go? I do not want our roots torn out forever.’ It got to you, didn’t it? ‘Our roots torn out forever.’ And here you are. And you wonder if it’s possible for three strangers to send a message across a continent? Is it possible for a night light in Dublin to shine hope in Kyiv or Mariupol? 

‘Jesus,’ you say to yourself, ‘what kind of sentimental drivel is that? Get a grip.’ 

You look up at the sky. Up there, there are orbiting satellites taking photographs of the bombs aimed at Kyiv and Mariupol. That’s what is possible. 

A second Garda appears, talking on a radio. He goes to the Garda car and moves it from the entrance. Behind it there is a barrier. And behind that what looks like a wedge-shaped cheval de frise. You shake your head. It bothers you, these barricades on a suburban street in Dublin. The Garda gets out of the car and opens the first barrier. The second retracts into the ground. A car approaches from inside the compound.      

You untie the flag from your neck and hold it square. You advance to the edge of the footpath. You position yourself so you’re in the eyeline of the driver.   

‘Shame, shame, shame,’ you shout, as the car exits from the compound. You are filled with a rage that rises from God knows where. You continue shouting. And the dog takes her cue from you and starts to bark.  And she looks from you to the car, your little protest dog. And then, the car swings left and accelerates away. And Rumpelstiltskin growls and leaps forward. And the lead slips from your hand. And she chases the car, barking. 

And then you sense more than see what happens next: the car coming from the opposite direction. The screech of brakes. The sickening thud that reverberates in your body; Rumpelstiltskin’s astonished howl; her pitiful whimper. 

You run to her. Fall to your knees. You cradle her head in the crook of your arm. You make soothing sounds. She looks at you with frightened eyes. 

‘Sorry, sorry, sorry,’ you repeat over and over. Her coat is soft to the touch. Time slows to an impossible slowness. You stroke Rumpelstiltskin, the faintest breath coming out of her nostrils, her soft belly rising and falling, faintly. You double over with pain until your cheek touches hers. The young garda is standing over you now. She touches your shoulder. She speaks softly but you cannot make sense of her words. 

You raise your head and look at her pleadingly. ‘I never told my wife where I was going,’ you say. ‘I never told her.’ 

And the old gentleman is rooted to the spot, holding the perpetual light.

Kevin Mc Dermott is a Wicklow-based writer. He is the author of six novels for young adults. His writing for radio includes plays, feature-length documentaries, essays and short stories. His poems and stories have been published in journals in Ireland, the UK, and the United States, and broadcast on RTE. He is an Arts Council Literature Bursary awardee, a Fulbright-Creative Ireland Professional Fellowship Scholar. He is a Pushcart 2024 nominee. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UCD. @SingMeCreation