Thin Air (14 page)

‘You could light it yourself if you weren’t so stupid,’ said Thomas.

Popeye pricked up his ears and listened intently.

‘Or perhaps if you weren’t so smart,’ said Thomas.

Trish had forgotten that Specks was in the jumps field and she got the fright of her life when she came across him beside the far gate. With his red coat and white flecks and spots he was more ghostly than a grey. His tail was to the wind and his head to the east. Trish spoke to him but, to her surprise, he paid no attention to her at all.

The gate was all tied up with twine so she climbed over. The ground was rutted on the other side but her night eyes were still improving and she could see where she was going. The mares had gathered at the other side of the field where two good hedges met and gave some shelter. They didn’t move as she approached. They didn’t even look at her.

She found it strange. It was as though the entirety of their attention was focused on something that she could neither see nor hear. The old mare didn’t even seem to notice as Trish threw the wildly flapping rug across her back and felt around beneath her belly for the straps. When she had finished she stood back. Still the horses hadn’t moved. They were relaxed yet concentrated, but on what? On their own metabolisms, perhaps, on the business of keeping warm. Or on the wind; the sounds it brought from wherever it originated or the signs of its intentions? Or something else?

Trish was struck by the realisation that in that hour, in that storm, she did not exist for the horses. She was not part of their umwelt. This world was not her world of ropes and sticks and jumps. These rules were not her rules. Some other truth existed in this darkness, which was here long before her and would be here long after. She did not know its name, or whether it was terrible or beautiful or both. She was blind, but the horses were not. They knew and they communed and she had no significance.

But if Trish didn’t know that power in the night, she knew the terror that came in its wake. Suddenly and inexplicably the darkness was full of menace. Whatever had taken Martina was out there still, unknown and unnamed and watching. It was all the childhood terrors that were banished by lightbulbs, by the rational mind, by the false security of a booming economy. She turned on her torch but it was worse than useless. Whichever way she turned, the nameless threat was behind her.

Gerard looked into the pots at the cold potatoes and congealed bacon-grease. He scraped away some of the fat and cut thick slices for sandwiches.

In the sitting room,
Kenny Live
was just ending. Brigid looked up briefly as Gerard came in with the tea-tray, then turned back to the television.

‘She’s sure to turn up, isn’t she, Ger?’

‘Of course. Of course she will.’

‘Where could she be?’

Neither of them, for all their wishing, could come up with any possibilities.

Gerard poured tea. The ads ended and a traditional music programme started. They both watched for a while, but neither of them saw.

‘What did the police ask you?’ said Gerard.

Brigid sighed and rubbed her eyes. ‘Some strange things,’ she said. ‘I think they wanted to be sure that she hasn’t just run off with some young man.’

‘My God. What made them think that?’

‘They didn’t think that. They just wanted to consider it.’

‘And did they?’

Brigid shrugged. ‘They asked if she was happy.’

‘What sort of a question is that?’ said Gerard. ‘Of course she was happy.’

Brigid walked across to the television and turned it off. She stood for a while with her back to Gerard, trying to focus, searching for courage. Behind her he munched and slurped. She found the sounds repulsive.

‘I don’t think she was,’ she said at last.

‘Was what?’

‘I don’t think Martina was happy here. I think that we just didn’t notice.’

‘Oh, God,’ said Gerard. ‘What kind of talk is that? How could you say that? She had everything she wanted. She would do anything for us.’

‘Yes. She was good, all right. I won’t deny that. But I don’t think it means she was happy.’

‘This is ridiculous,’ said Gerard. ‘Just because she came back from that training college? Just because she couldn’t make up her mind what she wanted to do?’

‘No. Not because of that.’

‘Why, then?’

‘I don’t know. I think she was afraid. I think she had no confidence.’

Gerard was angry, and Brigid realised for the first time that he always became angry when someone didn’t agree with him. If he couldn’t win an argument with reason he would win it with force. He had to be right.

‘So we’re going to analyse her now, are we? Shall I phone a psychiatrist?’

Brigid said nothing.

‘That’s right, Doctor,’ Gerard went on, a parody of himself in his righteous fury. ‘Our daughter had everything that she wanted in life but she didn’t like teaching so she threw herself into the lake. Is that it?’

He was losing it. Brigid walked away, heading for the kitchen, but he pursued her.

‘Did you tell the police that? Did you? That our daughter was wasting away with misery and just waiting for an opportunity to—’

Brigid cut across his tirade. It was the first time in her life that she had done such a thing. ‘Do you think she’s in the lake, Ger?’

He was stunned. ‘What?’

‘Do you think she’s in the lake.’

He deflated, painfully. ‘I don’t know what to think.’

A gust of wind hit the front of the house like a shock wave. For a long time neither of them spoke. Eventually Gerard said: ‘It would be better if she had, wouldn’t it?’

‘Had what?’

‘Run off with some fella.’

Rain hit the window like a handful of gravel. Without a word Gerard went out to the kitchen and put his wet coat back on.

Thomas’s house was nearer than her own; just the other side of the orchard. Trish held her breath as she passed among the trees. They were losing their blossom to the wind. By the fistful, by the bucketful it blew like white moths across the feeble beam of her torch. The black terror still pursued her, with claws always inches from her shoulders, beak poised at her throat. At Thomas’s back door she didn’t wait for an answer to her knock.

He was sitting up in bewilderment as she came through to the sitting room, but it was clear that he had been dozing in his chair. Popeye was curled up in a shivering heap. He got up reluctantly to greet her and brought orange ashes on his paws.

‘I’m sorry, Thomas,’ she said. ‘I got a fright. Can I sit down for a minute?’

‘You can of course. Longer, if you like.’

Thomas’s voice lacked it usual strength and it was only then that Trish realised how pale he was and how cold it was in the room. She felt his hand, then went into the kitchen for the bottle-gas heater.

Gerard swung the beam of the sheep lamp up around the girders of the hay shed. Biddy was up there, the little black bantam, a throwback to the days when Martina had kept a few hens. Biddy’s fondness for the high perch had saved her life when the fox came and took the rest. Aine called her Biddy Banty and fed her from her hand. Gerard said she was a nuisance, sitting up there every night and shitting down on top of the bales. Once he caught her picking up spilled horse nuts in the corner of the feed-shed and made to wring her neck and have done with her. But she was so tiny, her body so thin and light, that it was like killing a song bird. He had let her go and she had looked up at him with a bland, indifferent eye that suggested he had done her no favour. And though he complained about her whenever he saw her, he knew that he would miss her when she was gone.

The horse box was shoved in under the hay-shed out of the weather. Gerard shone his lamp into it and under it. He walked round the buck rake and the transport box parked beside it then began to climb the bales. There were a couple of hundred left out of the thousand or so that they had made in the summer. Most of them had gone on the horses. The few cattle that weren’t on the mountain were fed on silage.

There were gaps between the hay bales and down beside them at the edges of the barn. Gerard shone his torch into them and kicked at anything suspect. A wiry cat shot out and vanished into the darkness. Gerard came down again and went round the back to where the remaining plastic-wrapped silage bales stood. Behind them a heap of empty bottles and paint tins leaned against a breeze block wall. Nettles grew up through the heap, thick and dark. Gerard trampled them down and shone the light over the wall and into the sludgy ditch on the other side where the run-off from the septic tank was supposed to drain away. Rank grass and rushes grew out of it. It was in bad need of half an hour with a shovel.

He walked on around the back of the stone buildings where an unkempt hedge leaned over and met the gutters and made a dark tunnel. There were more paint tins in there, and the white plastic bottles and tubs and drums that agro-chemicals and pharmaceuticals came in. The tunnel gave him the creeps. He went through quickly and around the other side into the low, damp building that had once been a pigsty. It was full of other kinds of junk: broken fridges and washing machines and a couple of valve radios, their wooden cases rotting. He had a long-standing intention to take a trailer-load to the dump. One day he would. The place smelled of rats, but there was nothing out of place.

The old dairy was full of feedstuffs in bins and bags, and bulk containers of veterinary medicines. Beside it the stone cowshed was another junk room. Gerard switched on the light in it and turned off the torch. He never threw anything away. There was a complete trap harness hanging against the wall and quietly rotting. There were jars and cans of nails and screws and nuts and bolts and staples and rivets. Spanners and chisels rusted in wooden butter-boxes and better kept tools hung in rows on a board. An old dresser was loaded with paint tins, all upside down so the skin would form on the bottom. There were brushes and scrapers and bottles of turps, rolls of wire and coils of rope and drums of cable. Everything was useful, or might be, one day. Gerard told Aine that he might not be able to build a space rocket with the contents of that shed but he’d certainly be able to fix one.

‘You would not.’

‘I would, indeed. Just so long as there was a decent bit of two by four handy.’

‘Two by four?’

‘Two by four. The basic building block of the universe.’

But as Gerard looked around him now, nothing had any relevance to the hole that gaped in his life. The realisation that he couldn’t fix it filled him with despair.

Brigid thought of the mountains; of the goats and the hazel and the hare. There was a vibrancy associated with them in her mind. It was a magic place, florid and bright, and something up there operated on a disused but still functional frequency in her being. A whole new world stood on her doorstep, just discovered, not yet explored. Her life of servitude here in the middle of nowhere, her monotonous, cabbage-smelling job would never rule her again. She knew that her daughter had somehow come to be governed by the same set of rules. Now that she was gone, Brigid didn’t want to play by them any more.

The embers settled in the fire and she sat up. She supposed that she must be very tired, but she couldn’t tell; couldn’t remember what tired felt like or, for the moment, the difference between waking and sleeping. Nightmares were no longer confined to one, nor was clarity a certain property of the other. Martina was lost. She was in some kind of never-never land. Brigid hoped that when she came home she would remember to bring all those odd socks with her; the ones that got beamed up by the washing machine.

She laughed and her laughter brought her back again to the fire-side, where the embers were dimming. Gerard was outside somewhere and she was frightened; frightened of being alone, frightened of his return. She hoped the children wouldn’t wake up because she couldn’t be a mother to them now. Where was Maureen with her bacon-fed bosom and her great, dew-lapped arms, always bare, always warm. Where was her own mother, the one whose image we should carry with us always, to enfold and encourage, to comfort and care. She was up on the wall in a pale blue cowl, smiling down upon a male infant sprung from her virgin loins. She was up to her elbows in Sunlight Soap, looking down her nose in disdain at her eldest daughter, and she spoke of the sins of Eve and said that God was male and divinity was male, and woman was second best in every respect.

With a sinking feeling she knew that she believed it. She knew that she had given Kevin the best of herself, and that Martina had been given little, if anything. Even now, the thought of her eldest son brought a warm glow to her heart and a little, involuntary smile came to her lips. Martina never evoked feelings like that. Martina earned grudging acceptance at best.

Brigid sat up again. The embers were grey. A gale was blowing around the house. She hoped that Joseph wouldn’t come down to sit by the fire. She didn’t know him any more. He was a stranger. His room was warm and musky like a burrow or a lair. He read bad books in there and looked at bad pictures. Already he was thinking like his father. She was afraid of him. Afraid of everything. Of Gerard coming back with drink on his breath and lust in his loins, bruising and persistent, on and on to some goal that she once knew but had forgotten. She remembered how fresh it had been, once. Fresh and new as the clean air in the mountains, waiting to be breathed.

It was cold. She curled up on the sofa and pulled the patchwork quilt down around her. When she closed her eyes she could see the round, dark, shadowy place inside her head where she didn’t want to go. There was something terrible there, something that sent adrenalin-shocks through her bones. If she stayed in the bright places, well away from it, she could survive. Her mind was closing its doors.

Gerard heard Martina’s voice on the wind, calling him. He stood stock-still outside the buildings and listened. It didn’t come again until he let out his breath, and then it did, distant, faint.

‘Dad!’

The rain ran down inside his jacket. He couldn’t tell where the sound had come from. He walked a little way along the boirin to be clear of trees and buildings, but he couldn’t hear it now. He waited for a while, then turned into a field at random and began searching all over again.