The Changeling (14 page)

‘Grand, so. Fair enough.’ But he still didn’t sound as if he completely believed her. A strange struggle was taking place in his face – his mouth twisting and eyelids flickering. It was as if some other inner self were fighting to get to the surface of his skin. He blurted out in a harsh, strangled voice, ‘How old are you?’

‘Eighteen!’

Instantly his face cleared; he smiled and said pleasantly, ‘That’s grand, then.’

Aoife took a deep breath; relaxed. Maybe this was the same as when she forced Dave Ferguson to sell her the car – maybe once she’d given John Joe the key, a deal had been done that couldn’t be broken, despite the best efforts of his rational mind to fight back. ‘So, is Shay still here?’

John Joe strolled cheerfully to the front of the car. ‘Nope.’

‘He went for the bus already?’

‘Nope.’

‘Then . . .’

He jerked his chin in the direction of the mountains bordering the sea. ‘Back the bog, lambing. Working off what he owes me. Although now you’ve given me this, I suppose I can let him off.’ He raised the bonnet. Then, after a moment’s pause, walked round the car and looked in the boot. He stared at her. His mouth was making odd shapes again, eyelids fluttering. He said hoarsely, ‘Where is it?’

Aoife wondered anxiously what could be missing out of the boot – the spare wheel? ‘Maybe it’s still in the garage. I could get it for you . . .’

A red flush was crawling up John Joe’s neck, reddening his jaw line. He slammed the boot and thumped it with his fist, leaving a deep, frightening dent. ‘I
said
, where is it?’

‘I don’t know what you’re—’

‘
The engine.
’

She glanced, startled, towards the open bonnet. The space where the engine should have been was empty.

The crimson had reached John Joe’s strong cheekbones. He smashed his fist on the car again and again. Huge dents and cracks kept appearing – he had incredible strength. ‘What are you doing trying to cheat me with this heap of junk! You wait here till that thieving brother of mine comes back and then I’ll show him he can’t make a fool of me!’ He lunged for her. ‘
Come back here!
’

She fled past the barn, between the wrecks of cars, over the wall into the fields, the three dogs snarling and snapping after her. ‘Home! Go home, dogs!’ They obeyed her, dropping back. Less than a minute later, Aoife had reached the mountainside. Rather than zigzagging to and fro to ease the climb, she ran straight up the heathery slope. When she stopped at the top to look down, John Joe’s small blue figure had come to a halt in the middle of his fields, the dogs clustered around him. She had outpaced him with ridiculous ease. She had just run half a kilometre up a nearly vertical slope, and she was not even out of breath. It was like having wings on her heels. It was as if she could fly . . .

Could she?
Could she?
If she was the fairy child . . . And she
had
to be – she had driven a car with no engine, and nothing rational could explain that away . . . If she was the fairy child, maybe she could fly. She had done so when she was little, on the day she arrived. According to her father’s story, she had smashed the light bulb in the room.

Aoife raced across the heathery summit, holding out her arms like wings. Her green hoodie billowed out in the wind. She took a running jump. The blustering air caught her and carried her towards the edge of the cliff; she landed on all fours just before being swept right off, grabbing at grass, heart pumping with fright. The cliff face plunged hundreds of metres below her to the wild Atlantic. At its base, the ocean crashed on jagged rocks, sending up huge glittering clouds of spray. The skeletons of careless sheep were littered on thin green ledges all the way down.

Not the safest place to test her invisible wings.

Heart still pounding, she scrambled back to her feet and hurried west along the edge of the rolling land. The cliffs grew higher and steeper the further she ran. Far below her, the ocean roared and sucked. Gulls screamed and circled in grey flocks. The wind tore at her, threatening to push her to her death. She had to find Shay. She had to warn him that in trying to make things better with John Joe, she had ended up making things a thousand times worse. His brother thought they’d been trying to make a fool of him. God knows what he would do to Shay this time. She had to warn him not to go back to the farm.

Where was he, in all this wind-swept wilderness?

She would never find him.

Yet when she crested the next summit, he was right there, a few metres away from her, kneeling near the edge of the cliff in his faded jeans, a baby lamb in his arms.

Aoife collapsed beside him on the sheep-cropped grass. He didn’t seem even to notice her – he was so utterly focused on what he was doing, stroking the soft curls of the new-born lamb. The lamb looked dead. The ewe, its mother, kept nudging it with her nose, bleating miserably. Once more he ran his hands over its curls, and this time it was as if a bolt of energy had shot through the tiny body. It raised its head and uttered a vigorous cry. Shay set it down and it sprang towards its mother and the pair of them walked away together. Then he sat back on his heels and smiled at her lying beside him.

She scrambled into a sitting position. ‘I need to talk to you. I’ve done something really bad.’

A slow steady sweep of his green-brown eyes across her face. The bruise on his cheekbone had already vanished. The cut on his curved mouth was a thin dark line. He said lightly, ‘Bad? You?’

‘I drove to your farm.’

He was startled into seriousness. ‘You did
what
?’

With a flicker of smugness, Aoife said, ‘You’re not the only one who can drive.’

‘Did you run into John Joe?’

‘Yes, and I told him I’d bought him a new car because it was my fault that his old one got wrecked.’

‘Oh, for . . . What were you
thinking
? Aoife, you have to be careful around him. I told you, he doesn’t know his own strength.’

‘You’re not kidding.’

He looked horrified. ‘What, did he—?’

‘No, no, he was fine with me. But he smashed up the car.’

‘
What? Why?
’

‘He got annoyed when there was no engine in it.’

Shay looked at her blankly, trying to work out what she was saying. ‘You mean it got banjaxed when you drove—’

She said indignantly, ‘I drove it perfectly well, thank you!’

‘Then . . .’

‘The engine wasn’t
there
. Like, completely not there. And your brother got pure thick about it. So you have to keep away from him. He thinks we were trying to pull some stupid trick on him. But I wasn’t, I swear. I thought it had an engine in it, I really did.’

He continued looking at her for a while, then turned to gaze out over the Atlantic, clasping his arms around his knees, the wind ruffling his hair and Mayo shirt.

After a while Aoife said quietly, ‘I’m not lying, I swear.’

‘I didn’t say you were lying.’

‘I know, but that’s what you’re thinking.’

Shay remained staring out over the sea that crashed against the cliffs so far below.

She moved closer, kneeling right beside him. If he wasn’t going to believe her anyway . . . She said recklessly, ‘Do you want to know what else? John McCarthy in the shop said the money I paid with in there yesterday turned to a dead leaf, and so did the fifty euros I gave Sinead, and he said it was fairy gold. Same with that money I used to buy the car – it turned into leaves and that’s why Dave Ferguson called the police this morning. I gave a hundred to my mam, and there was nothing left in her purse but a dead oak leaf. I saw it myself.’

He glanced at her; his sun-browned skin had paled beneath.

‘I found photographs of me as a little girl in a drawer which came unlocked when I touched it. Least, I thought the little girl was me. But my parents said she was their real daughter, and I was the changeling the fairies left in her place. That’s why they moved to Kilduff permanently, so that no one would notice they had the wrong child.’

He shuddered. ‘Don’t listen to them. They’re lying to you.’

‘But why would they lie? And how else are all these things happening to me? I think they were telling me the truth.’

‘No, they’re mad.’

‘Why do you think they’re mad? It was you told me about the sheóg!’

‘I told you what my father said. And he was mad himself, Aoife. He thought my own mother was a fairy.’

‘Ah . . .’ So old John McCarthy had been telling the truth. ‘Tell me.’

Shay wrapped his arms around his knees, tightening his arms until the muscles showed, staring out to sea again.

‘Shay? Tell me. Why did he say she was a fairy?’

He cast a wild, sad look at her. ‘Aoife, who knows why he thought it? Because she was so beautiful, maybe.’

‘He loved her.’

‘Sure, he couldn’t take his eyes off her. He was forever painting her. And then, at the same time, he said she was burning him up and killing him.’

‘Ah . . .’

‘She left him because of it, when John Joe was five. She stayed away for seven years. But then she came back because she loved him still, and I was born, and my father went back to his painting, and telling her all the time that she was killing him, because she was from the otherworld. So in the end she said she was leaving again, and just walked away up the mountain. I was five and John Joe was seventeen. I wanted him to go after her, but he was so angry with them both and their craziness that he wouldn’t go. So I went to fetch her back myself. She didn’t seem to mind me coming after her, but she wouldn’t come home. She held my hand. She brought me all the way up here to the cliffs. She spent a long time standing on the edge. Then she said she loved my father and was sorry for killing him. She said that she didn’t belong in this life, that she didn’t deserve to live in this world. Then she laughed and said that if she really
was
a fairy, maybe she could fly, and asked me did I want to see if I could fly too, because I was more like her than my father, and maybe I could. But I was only five and I got scared and pulled my hand out of hers. And she jumped without me.’ Shay rubbed his hand across his face and groaned, from deep inside himself.

‘Oh God, that’s . . .’ There were no possible words for it. Aoife got to her knees and put her arms around him.

He glanced past her towards the edge of the cliff, where the long grass bent double in the wind. ‘I crept on all fours to the edge and I looked down. I hoped with all my heart that I would see her flying with the gulls. But there was nothing, only the sea breaking on the rocks. And I went home. And the coastguard were sent for and it took them a week to find her. And they did find her. So she never did fly, just fell. And my father died anyway, of the grief.’

‘I’m so sorry.’ She leaned her forehead against his shoulder.

He said softly, ‘You’re not a fairy, Aoife. Don’t ever believe someone who tells you that you can fly.’

She could feel the pulse of his skin through the green and red material of his Mayo shirt; it seeped into the coolness of her blood and warmed her. She raised her head and looked at him. His green-brown eyes were dark with unshed tears. The cut on his lip was a faint line. She touched her finger to it. He opened his mouth very slightly, and closed it on her skin: the lightest of kisses.

The instant his mouth brushed against her, a bolt of gold shot through her heart, a vision of rapture, of flying – perfect, weightless, free . . . She leaped to her feet, exalted. ‘It’s all true!’

Shay caught her by the sleeve, his face turned up desperately to hers. ‘It’s not!’

Aoife’s blood was fizzing, her skin on fire. ‘I can fly!’

He cried in horror, holding her tighter as she tried to pull away. ‘Stop!’

‘I can fly!’

‘No!’

‘
Yes!
’ She ripped her arm out of his grasp and fled along the grassy perimeter of the world, towards the west.

‘
Aoife!
’

He was coming after her, his feet thudding on the springy turf, but she could outpace him easily even though she was running into the wind. She was so much faster than him now, even faster than when they had raced each other to the hawthorn hill. Beside her, to her right, the hundreds of metres of crumbling cliff fell sheer to the ocean. Gulls plunged from rocky outcrops into space.

‘Aoife! Come back!’

I can fly. I can feel it.

‘Aoife! Stop!’

She could. She could. She knew it in the very centre of her heart. From the moment Shay’s lips had touched her skin, her blood had been flooded with a weird insistent clamorous joy:

I can fly! I can fly!

Although at the same time, in a softer whisper:
What if Shay’s right – what if I’m not a changeling, and all this is a fantasy of my parents like the lenanshee was a fantasy of his father’s? Then I’m going to die, like his poor mad mother died. I’m going to die, right
 . . .

Now
.

She turned and ran straight off the edge of the cliff.

CHAPTER TWELVE

At first it was all noise – the roar of wind in her ears, the screaming of the gulls, the shuddering crash of the ocean far below.

‘
Aoife
 . . .’ His voice faded as she fell.

She screamed for him in terror – ‘
Shay!
’ – but the speed of her headlong plunge stripped his name from her lips. The cliff face was rushing past her in a green-grey blur. The ocean was becoming brighter and clearer – huge inky white-streaked waves, bursting like snow against the base of the cliffs; rocks covered in red seaweed, rushing up to meet her, ready to splinter her bones to fragments and her flesh to pulp . . .

Fly! Let me fly!

Desperately Aoife spread her arms, and just in time she levelled out, slowing, gliding, the wind blowing through her clothes, the tips of the leaping waves spattering her feet, but not dragging her down . . . Rising upwards a little . . .

Flying!

A furious gust caught her and tossed her like a leaf, threatening to smash her apart against the cliff face; she scrambled in mid-air, flailing her arms, flipped over, lost her footing on the wind and fell again, headfirst.