The Last of the High Kings (6 page)

It was Jenny's turn to wash up, but that didn't really mean anything. It wasn't that she objected to taking her turn. She didn't. The problem was that when Jenny tried to wash up or to do anything else that required a certain amount of application, it somehow never got finished. No matter how hard she tried to concentrate, her mind just wouldn't stay where she put it. There had been too many occasions when the others on the clear-up squad had stood waiting, tea towels in hand, while Jenny gazed absently out of the window or stared in wonderment at the detergent bubbles. It was far quicker and far less stressful for everyone if someone else took over.

It had in the past caused serious friction. On one occasion, when Hazel was fourteen, she had threatened
to leave home on account of the unfairness of it all. But by now everyone had gotten used to it, and there were few hard feelings. Jenny was Jenny, and nothing anyone could do was going to change her.

J.J. had cooked, so he was relieved of cleanup duties. He left Aisling in charge and followed Jenny, as casually as he could, into the sitting room. She was underneath the TV, taking the plug out of the wall. J.J. sat on the sofa and picked up Aisling's incomprehensible textbook and wondered how to bring up the subject of goats in a casual way. “Who was that goat I saw you with today?” didn't quite fit the bill. He tried a different tack.

“I think you forgot about school again today, didn't you?”

“I think I did,” said Jenny.

“Where did you go?”

Jenny pointed up in the direction of the mountain.

“And did you meet anyone up there?” said J.J.

“I did,” said Jenny.

“Who?” said J.J.

Jenny thought about this for a moment or two. She had tried to tell J.J. about the ghost once before, but he had told her there was no such thing as ghosts. She had told Hazel about the púka, and Hazel had said
something along the same lines but with added insults.

“I met some archaeologists,” she said. J.J. sat up. “Archaeologists?”

“Five of them,” said Jenny. J.J. remembered hearing something about a dig, but it had been a while ago and he had forgotten all about it.

“They are going to try to excavate the beacon”—Jenny went on—“but they won't be able to.”

“Why not?”

Jenny thought hard. “Because somebody there is no such thing as won't let them.”

J.J. frowned at her. “Somebody there's no such thing as?”

“And anyway,” said Jenny, eager to move on, “they would only be disappointed. They think there's an old tomb or something in there, but there isn't.”

“How do you know?”

Jenny was getting tired of the conversation. She began to fidget and glance toward the hallway, longing for the refuge of her bedroom. “The ghost told me,” she said.

“I see,” said J.J. He was beginning to realize that there was no point in asking Jenny about the goat or anything else for that matter. She inhabited a different world from the rest of them, and as far as he
could make out, it was imagined afresh every day. Besides, she was edging toward the door.

“So what is under the beacon then?”

Jenny had to think about that question as well. The ghost could hear and understand when she spoke to him, but he had no voice, so he couldn't speak back to her in words. He spoke to her in thoughts instead, and sometimes there were Irish words in among the thoughts that she understood, and more often there weren't. But there were usually images. If she tried to look at them too hard, they vanished, just as the ghost himself did if you looked straight at him. But if she let the images rest gently on the peripheries of her mind and waited, they usually became clear sooner or later. It was a skill that had taken her some considerable time to acquire, and Jenny found herself wondering why there were no exams in school on talking to ghosts.

“Jenny?” said J.J.

“Hmm?”

“What is under the beacon?”

She could see it quite clearly in her mind's eye, but it had come from the ghost with no word attached. She made a stab at it.

“A chopper,” she said, and while J.J. stared at her in stunned amazement, she fled.

“It's not going to work,” said Aisling to J.J. as she got into bed beside him that night.

“It has to,” said J.J. “I can't see any other option.” He moved over to give her more space. “Besides, she's getting madder and madder. Do you know what she told me this evening?”

“What?”

“She said there's a helicopter under the beacon.”

“Oh, dear,” said Aisling. She tried to keep a straight face, but J.J. knew what was coming. Aisling's emotions were always close to the surface. She got angry easily, she cried easily, but most of all, she laughed easily, and this was the thing that J.J. loved best about her. She burst into a fit of the giggles, and J.J. couldn't stop himself from joining in. It was a long time before they
were finished with laughing, and it was another long time before Aisling remembered what it was they had been talking about. When she did, her face became serious again.

“It just seems there are so many things that can go wrong,” she said. “What if they don't believe that it's Hazel's baby? What if they examine her?”

“Why should they?” said J.J. “There's nothing criminal about having a baby. Why wouldn't they believe her?”

Aisling sighed and turned to face him. “Maybe,” she said. “But what about Jenny? They'll think we murdered her or something.”

“Of course they won't!”

But J.J. was anxious about that part as well. He wondered whether the Gardai kept records and, if so, for how long. His family had a bit of a history where unexplained disappearances were concerned. There was the priest Father Doherty, who some people still believed had been murdered by J.J.'s great-grandfather following a row about a flute. His remains had finally come to light in the souterrain at the time of J.J.'s own mysterious disappearance. J.J. knew where he had been for that missing month, of course, and he had let Aisling and his parents and Hazel into the
secret. But the authorities never did solve the mystery, and if there was another Liddy disappearance, they might start raking over old coals and asking awkward questions.

He put an arm around Aisling. “We can call it all off if you want to,” he said. “It's still not too late.”

“But if we call it off, you won't get your wood.”

“I can live without the wood.”

“But I'll be stuck at home with Jenny for another five or six years, and you'll be off gallivanting around the world with your fiddle.”

There was another alternative, but J.J. was reluctant to suggest it. He could stay at home and work on the fiddles without the chiming maple from Tír na n'Óg. It would be a compromise, and he might not make much of an income; but Aisling could go back to work, and between them they would make a living. It was the principle of the thing that flushed J.J.'s cheeks with anger. Aengus had promised him the wood and hadn't delivered. Why should J.J. be the one to compromise?

“It'll work,” he said to Aisling. “It has to.”

They lay in silence, and after a while J.J. became aware that Aisling was struggling with tears. He rubbed her shoulder.

“What's up?”

Aisling shook her head. “It's Jenny,” she spluttered through her tears. “She's the weirdest child in the world, and she drives me up the wall; but that doesn't mean I won't miss her when she's gone.”

The púka never went anywhere near the beacon, but Jenny could usually see him from the top of it, standing on the horizon with his back to the wind or browsing among the rocks. Sometimes the wild goats came along, on their way from one part of the mountain to another, and occasionally the white goat joined them for a while, though rarely for long.

Jenny had been waiting for the archaeologists since soon after dawn. Their tents were still there, and so were the twelve white canisters that hadn't been there yesterday when she left, but there weren't any people. Jenny had no watch, so she couldn't be sure what time it was; but she had a suspicion that they wouldn't be coming today. She couldn't be sure, but she had an idea it might be Saturday.

Someone else came up there to join her, though. J.J. and Donal. It was around midday when they arrived, to judge by the sun.

“We brought a picnic,” said Donal, gesturing toward the knapsack on J.J.'s back. He was cheerful now, but he hadn't been when they set out. J.J. had prized him away from the computer with a combination of bribes and threats. He couldn't understand why the children, with the obvious exception of Jenny, didn't get outside more. He hated seeing them transfixed in front of TV and computer screens. He wanted them to share his pleasure in scrambling around on the wild, stony mountainside.

“No sign of the archaeologists then?” he said to Jenny.

She shook her head.

“Any ghosts?”

“Just the one,” said Jenny. “The usual one.” J.J. nodded. “And what about púkas? Any púkas?”

Jenny wasn't sure how to deal with that question. It sounded as though J.J. were making fun of her. She scanned the horizon, but as it happened, the white goat was nowhere to be seen.

“No,” she said. “Not that I can see.”

Donal was unpacking the knapsack. “It's cool up
here,” he said. “Can I come up here instead of going to school, like Jenny does?”

“No, you can't,” said J.J. “No way.”

“Why not?” said Donal. “It's not fair. She never—” He broke off and glanced around sharply, his eyes wide with surprise.

“What is it?” said J.J.

“Nothing,” said Donal. “I just thought I saw—”

“What?”

“Nothing,” said Donal again. He carried on unpacking the picnic, and J.J. watched him uneasily, but if he saw anything else, he didn't mention it.

“Did you know we were sitting on a helicopter?” J.J. asked him.

“A helicopter?”

“According to Jenny anyway.”

“I didn't say that!” said Jenny indignantly.

“What did you say, then?”

“I said a chopper. For chopping.”

“Oh, that kind of chopper,” said J.J. “I see. Like an ax? For chopping wood?”

“Yes, it's like a little ax,” said Jenny, “but it's not for chopping wood.”

“For chopping what then?” said J.J.

Jenny shrugged. “People, I think.”

Donal handed around sandwiches, and for a while the three of them munched in silence. Jenny had no objection to their company, but she didn't like J.J.'s mood and the way he seemed to be teasing her. She wasn't very good at judging what other people were thinking, but she could tell there was a reason for J.J.'s questions and that something was making him uncomfortable. She hoped that he had finished now and that he would want to talk about something else, but after a while he came back to the ghost again, in the same mock-humorous tone.

“So why is the people chopper so important? Why doesn't the ghost want the archaeologists to find it?”

That was a hard question. Jenny had asked it before, but the ghost's answers had been very confusing. They involved people cutting down forests, and gruesome battles with enormous powerful beasts that Jenny had no name for, and families being driven from their homes.

“I don't know,” she said to J.J. “I don't understand it myself.”

“Oh, well,” said J.J. “I suppose we'll find out someday.” He threw the slops of his tea down between the stones and began to pack away the remains of the picnic. “I'm going to tramp along the top and go home
by way of Colman's church. Anyone want to come?”

Jenny was game, but Donal shook his head. “I'm going to play some tunes for Mikey,” he said. “Why don't you come with me, Jenny? You could bring your whistle.”

Jenny considered this. On the whole she favored the tramping option; but she was wary of J.J.'s mood, and she didn't want to answer any more questions.

“Okay,” she said to Donal. “We can look for my shoes on the way home.”

J.J. strode out across the top of Sliabh Carron. It was an eerie place, strewn with untidy reminders of past generations. Perhaps a historian or one of those archaeologists could have made sense of the broken stone structures that he passed every few minutes, but J.J. couldn't. He had no way of knowing whether this heap of rocks or those broken walls were two hundred or two thousand years old, but there was one thing he could tell: The people who had built them had done their thinking in circles and not in squares.

He breathed deeply. The air was cool and sweet, and he could feel the color returning to his cheeks. Like the children, he spent far too much of his time indoors. It was a kind of half-life, he decided. Only out here on the broad, scraggy pelt of the planet did he feel fully alive.

It was common enough around those parts for a tired old cloud to lose its way and blunder into the top of the mountains. J.J. saw one coming, and minutes later he was inside it, walking through a fine, sparkly drizzle, moving within a white dome of mist. The damp formed droplets on his clothes and his hair. It was his favorite kind of weather. It gave him energy. He could have walked forever through this soft, fresh day. This, he told himself, was what being alive was all about. Maybe giving up the goats had been his biggest mistake. Maybe he should give up touring and go back to farming. Not goats, perhaps—they were too much trouble—but if he had cattle he would have to get up on his hind legs and go out and check on them at least once a day. There wasn't all that much money in farming, but he could do that as well as the fiddle making. He looked down at the grass beneath his feet. His own winterage was useless, but this land up here was the finest winter grazing. It belonged to Mikey, and he let it out to Peter Hayes; but maybe they could come to some kind of arrangement. If J.J. had cattle up here, then he would have to walk up and see them every day, and at that moment he could think of no finer way to spend a couple of winter hours.

A vague feeling of guilt changed the direction of his thoughts. What was all that stuff about Mikey and the chopper? He tried to remember the conversation they'd had, but New Year's Eve was a long time ago. Surely he would never have promised to organize a helicopter? Mikey had clearly gotten the wrong idea.

J.J. stopped, and his train of thought derailed. Ahead of him in the mist, just visible at the edge of his small circle of vision, a huge white goat was standing. Not
a
goat, but
that
goat. If indeed it was a goat. For a long moment J.J. stood and stared at it. It stared back. J.J.'s mind returned to his visit to Tír na n'Óg twenty-five years ago and the encounter he'd had there with a púka.

“Don't talk to any goats,” Aengus had warned him, so J.J. hadn't talked to it, even when it changed its shape and towered over him and asked him all kinds of questions. But that had been the wrong thing to do, he had discovered later, and Aengus had only been joking. It was dangerous, apparently, not to reply to a púka if you happened to have the misfortune of being addressed by one.

Was this the same goat he had met in Tír na n'Óg? It looked very similar. J.J. cleared his throat but found it hard to speak. There was no one to see or hear him,
but even so, he felt self-conscious about talking to a goat. The whole thing was ridiculous. These hills were crawling with goats. Why should he suspect this one of being something different?

Because, he answered himself, he had seen it talking to Jenny yesterday. He cleared his throat again.

“Hello,” he said timidly.

The goat threw up its head and gave a sharp snort of alarm. For another moment it stared at J.J. Then it turned and walked quickly away. Within seconds it was completely hidden by the mist.

J.J. chuckled at his own absurd behavior. He felt lighter, enormously relieved to discover that the goat was just a goat and nothing more. Until, that was, he heard the most extraordinary sound coming out of the mist from the direction that the goat had taken. It boomed all around him, bouncing back and forth inside the cloud like thunder. It might, just possibly, have been the bawling of a lonely goat, looking for its herd. But it sounded to J.J. much more like a peal of sardonic laughter.