“I thought we had a body?” The sergeant puts his cap back on, then tips it up off his head, pulls his hair back before setting his cap down again.
“We can’t uncover it until we can secure it for preservation.”
The sergeant lifts his walkie-talkie off his belt and says something into it that Michael can’t hear. He turns and gestures for one of the men to come over. The taller of the two inspectors steps over the trench, bridging it. He stands beside the sergeant and they converse for a second before the sergeant goes back to the walkie-talkie. Michael finds himself looking down at the turf wall, measuring the slant of it, as if waiting for it to move.
“There was a girl missing—”
Michael looks up sharply. The sergeant is talking to him. “1982, around about these parts, body never found.”
Michael shakes his head. There was no evidence of a recent burial and the hand looks like tanned hide—that takes at least a hundred years.
“When can we bring it up?”
Michael does the math. Jack needs enough time to get out here from Dublin, and first he’ll have to secure a
temperature-controlled fridge if the one at the National Museum is on loan. Dúchas and the Bord will need to sign off permission. “It might be three or four days.”
“What’s the name of your Museum man again?”
“Jack Hopkins,” Michael says.
The sergeant brings the walkie-talkie to his mouth. “Get Jack Hopkins on the phone will ya?” He listens for a second, then drops the walkie-talkie back onto his belt in one swift move. Steps up to the edge of the string perimeter. Looms there a second, looking at the wall of peat, the orange plastic flags.
“We’ll keep a guard posted in a car overnight and I’ll be back in the morning. Will you be here for a bit until I can send someone back?”
Michael nods.
“It’ll likely be Charley who comes.” The sergeant jabs his thumb towards the young inspector beside him. “It’ll just take us an hour to get organized.”
Then, as if it’s just sinking in, the sergeant says, “It’s an odd thing, that.” He’s looking down at Michael, and at the flags, at the ground between them. And for a second or two there’s no sound but the distilled voice of the Garda on the mobile phone by the trench, the croak of a nearby frog, the flags rustling in the wind.
The True Love Show
THE house is in a state. Deirdre hasn’t slept soundly in the ten days since she’s been home from the hospital. The baby is colicky, up at all hours, probably wondering,
where am I?
Deirdre feels the same. Her mother’s house is not hers. There’s a familiarity to it but also a formality—things are in their place; a whole life packed neatly in boxes, tucked away in the drawers. Standing over the baby it occurs to Deirdre that she could have this life if she wanted it. Her mother’s life. Raise the baby alone in Spiddal. But then Deirdre’s son might have
her
life, and she wants more for him than that.
Ben, Eric, Nolan, Tadg … the baby without a name starts to roar. Deirdre drops her
2000 Best Baby Names
book and walks to over to where he’s laying on a large square couch cushion in the middle of the living room floor. She rubs his belly with her hand, sings “Blackbird” up and down, going over the chorus again and again until his face relaxes and he slips back into sleep.
In the early afternoon Deirdre turns on the television. Flips channels. Finds “The True Love Show” on RTE. Three women in closed booths are made to answer a male contestant’s questions about their likes and dislikes. Deirdre used to watch the show before she went to work full-time at the travel agency, and then again when she was working half days in the last stages of the pregnancy. The man can’t see anything of the women but their legs. Today, one of the girls is wearing trousers. Deirdre assumes he won’t choose her on that basis alone. He gets twenty-one questions and then has to pick his most likely true love. “Question four,” he says. Deirdre makes out a Limerick accent. “Where’s the best place to go to get out of the rain? Number one?”
She’s quiet for a second and then shouts out “Spain!” The audience erupts in laughter.
“Number three?” He skips right over the trousered girl.
“The bedroom.” The audience yells “woo.” Deirdre stands up and turns the TV off, looks over at the baby. He’s clenching his fists in his sleep.
She hasn’t seen the will yet, but Deirdre knows this house is hers and everything in it. She walks over to the old oak sideboard, looking at the baby to see if he stirs. The sides of the top drawer stick until she yanks it open. Inside are writing papers and pens, old postcards Deirdre sent from Cyprus, France and New York, bundled up in an elastic. The TV listings from two weeks ago with four shows circled in pen. Sellotape, coupons cut from the paper. A long crow feather in the back corner. An address book with two dozen names.
The baby lets out a gurgle but Deirdre, walking over, sees he’s still sleeping, pink feet kicking up once before falling back down. “A fighter, aren’t ya?” Names. She’s been thinking about names. His skin is fair, and the almost invisible arcs of his brows are cherry blond. There’s the tuft of a curl, one wisp, on the back of his head. Liam Conroy—the father.
The stairs creak, one after another, as Dermot mounts them. Once on the porch, he knocks, looks back at the steps to see if they’re about to go, notices rotted wood on the bottom one. Deirdre answers the door, and seeing Dermot, opens it wide. “Jesus, I’ve been meaning to ring ya. Come in.”
He goes past her, tries not to look at the breast-milk stains on her shirt.
“I’m a state. The house is a state.” She speaks quietly, leads Dermot past the living room and into the bright yellow kitchen. “But that one’s sleeping, thank Christ.”
Dermot puts a paper bag on the table, looks at the dirty plates stacked by the sink. “I brought some scones from Keating’s. Didn’t know if you’d been out.”
“No, I’m not really out on the town yet,” Deirdre replies, indicating her shirt, track pants. “But we did get a drop-off from my friend Marianne. And Margaret Keating came by.”
Dermot puts his hand on the back of the kitchen chair. Now that the scones are delivered he’s not sure if he should stay. “I’m just by to look in on you. Maybe I should go.”
“Listen, I’ve really been a wreck but I should have come by to thank-you—” Deirdre uncrosses her arms and Dermot looks over to the living room. Sees the baby wrapped up in a
blanket on a cushion in the middle of the floor. “You saved my life, I swear. I thought I was going to lose it.”
“Can I see him?”
“Aye, the tyrant.”
Deirdre leads Dermot into the living room and they lean over top of the baby. His face is a darker shade of red than the upholstery under him, and his sausage-like arms are stretched out to either side.
“He’s big isn’t he?” Dermot guesses.
“Just over seven pounds.” Deirdre wants to reach down and pick him up but knows better. She puts a finger over his hand instead.
“Has he a name?”
“Not yet.”
Dermot straightens and looks towards the door. “I think you’ve a rotting step. I can come by this week and replace it.”
The baby turns his head and it lolls sideways, a burble of spit between his lips. He kicks his feet once and then settles. Deirdre watches him, bends down, pulls the blanket back up over his blue pajamas.
“I’m due back in Dublin in a week, but thanks, if you ye a chance. My da built the porch for my mother. I’d say the whole lot is going.” Deirdre looks up from the baby and meet’s Dermot’s eyes. “I hear from Keating that your Canadian is back.”
“Aye, Abbey.”
“And she’s half your age.”
“She is.”
“Keating’s quite the gossip, God love her.” Deirdre shrugs. “Well, are you happy?”
“I am.”
“That’s the stuff.” She puts her hand on his arm. And Dermot is surprised at the intimacy of the gesture. Nothing at the wake—not her skirt up, not his hands on her—carried this kind of empathy.
“Will you sell?” He nods to the living room.
“It’ll pay for a flat in Dublin and I’ve been renting.”
“He’s a good baby?”
“I’m not sure there is such a thing.”
Bellowing in Greatness
CUTTING across Deirdre’s yard, Dermot heads for the bay road. Thinks he might meet Abbey on her way to the Spar. She was flipping through the papers at the cottage this morning when he left, said she was going to type up a CV then head into town for groceries.
The film crew has come and gone again. Yesterday there were trucks all along the road and the church yard was turned into a cemetery. Mottled styrofoam gravestones and fake grass lining the bluff behind the rectory. Feeny’s door painted yellow, a sign that said “Prim’s Flowers” mounted overhead. Buckets of roses, irises, and snapdragons were set up around the butcher shop door and inside a backdrop was hung over the counter. All to film the Dublin actress with the Kerry accent as she stopped, reached out her hand, touched the lilies.
The construction workers at the corner grocery are back at it—the concrete two storeys high and covered on one side in scaffolding. The tinny sound of a radio, muffled conversation, comes from inside the walls. The
scrape of a cement trowel on the near side of the building. A Punjabi fellow Dermot’s met in Hughes eats his lunch on a pile of cement blocks. Dermot raises a hand in greeting and the man nods back.
Two doors down, Dermot passes the tourist office, closed until June. The blinds are partly drawn, the chairs and tables gone. Brochures are stacked on a desk at the back of the room. A defaced Fine Gael poster stapled to the pole outside catches Dermot’s attention. An ad offering gardening services in fine handwriting is pasted beside it, alongside another ad propounding discount airfare to Japan.
Call Declan in Screeb. Go Ireland!
Dermot steps off the curb and looks down the road for Abbey. A Lada and a Volkswagen drive by, swerve into the other lane to avoid him. A warm wind coming in off the bay. The clouds over Inishmore opening up, sunlight sifting through them.
The first day Dermot walked onto the Trinity campus as a professor, the air was crisp and the leaves hung on the branches of the trees like banners. Dermot Fay. Professor Fay. He’d turned the words over in his mind, and self-consciously pulled his briefcase close to his chest, a battering ram against his nerves. The sheaf of papers inside was meticulous, poured over.
Today we start with the history of illuminated manuscripts in Ireland. Turn to page one
. And he’d unroll the class map above the blackboard, hit Ireland with the back of his hand.
When Dermot thinks of his time in Paris he’s embarrassed by how crude his doctorate work must have seemed. Bumbling over his French the whole time, explaining the Táin in broken sentences, giving the academics a good laugh with
Irish myths of battle and pissing contests. But when he’d explained the geography of the Cattle Raid as not just a setting but a map, as a memorized history of place, they’d sat up, listened. He’d said, “We travel as a way of physically remembering the past. We tell stories so we can locate ourselves.” And he’d analyzed the Táin verse by verse, described the place names in the Cooley mountains as a guide for safe travel, showed how commoners could traverse unfamiliar ground by following the footsteps of the heroes and armies that had gone before. He’d mapped out the land from the text and demonstrated that one could navigate that part of the country through story alone. “History doesn’t stand still,” he’d said, “but the land does.” A map in the guise of a story, one that took ten centuries to be written down.
Five years later, when they called him into the Dean’s office at Trinity, when he strode in, misguided, over-confident, almost swaggering, he was stopped in his tracks by Sophie, pale and hovering in the far corner of the room. The Dean held out a letter to Dermot, and on it he saw Sophie’s name as he’d written it, underlined. Dutifully he opened the envelope to be sure it was all there. The note folded three times over, creased across the doctor’s name, the address in London. The Dean and Associate Dean waited and the silence was palpable; Dermot would’ve choked on it if he’d opened his mouth. Sophie stood in the alcove, starting to show under the navy one-piece dress, a hurt look on her face as if somehow Dermot had demanded she come forward, as if it was his fault matters couldn’t be kept between them. Dermot watched as the Dean looked out the window at the end-of-term
students walking in haste from Berkeley library, cutting across the square. Bicycles zigzagged to avoid the slow-moving groups. Someone somewhere had lost a few sheaves of paper and they drifted across the stones. Class had ended and in a few minutes both Dermot and the Dean knew the square would be empty. And Dermot would be sent packing.
“I can’t say, Mr. Fay, what this means to us at Trinity.” The Associate Dean stepped closer to Dermot while the Dean turned from the window. “And Ms. Keegan,” he paused, puffing out his cheeks, “is arguably ruined.” Sophie was looking into her hands, clasping and unclasping them. Her hair was tied back in a ribbon, a pearl sheen that ran from her ponytail down the side of her cheek, settling on the top of her shoulder. Dermot wanted to set it back, or to pull it out of her hair, to show the two men in their suits, with their grim faces, what the girl was capable of. The Associate Dean pushed his wire rims in at the nose. He surveyed Dermot, who stood there still as a man facing certain execution. They’d always wanted him out.
“These are your dismissal papers.” Another envelope was pushed into his hands, even as the letter to Sophie was taken away, the Dean leaning so close to him that Dermot could see the stubble along his chin. “You’re to have no contact with Ms. Keegan and you’ll have no recourse to appeal the dismissal.” He looked Dermot up and down as if taking his measure. “You’ll be lucky if we can keep it from the Press.” The hiss of the word “press” said between clenched teeth. Sophie backing still further into the alcove, pressing up against the book that was set in it. To Dermot it looked like the open book was coming out on either side of Sophie’s head, as if it
was about to close, cup her ears. Her eyes were wide. A line from the Táin remscéla was suddenly in his head: “… and a cow’s eye apple.” Dermot tried to think back to how the verse started: “This was the Brown Bull of Cooley—dark brown dire haughty with young health”; and then later, the ode to the other bull, “he romps in rut, born to bear victory, bellowing in greatness, idol of the ox herd.”