Thin Air (17 page)

‘Even on a Sunday?’

‘Especially on a Sunday.’

Trish stuffed folded newspaper into her own helmet to get it to fit Aine, then tacked up the cob and let them off together in the paddock. Specks stood at the gate for a while, ignoring Aine’s feeble kicks and watching Trish sweep the yard.

‘He won’t go,’ said Aine, petulantly.

‘He will, once you show him that you really mean it.’

Aine got mad and gave three huge kicks, practically jumping out of the saddle. Specks gave a martyred sigh and moved off.

Thomas walked along the shore with Popeye but turned back when he saw the bright boats and their dark crews. A pair of swans stood on the bank beneath a tall sycamore, watching Popeye carefully. He kept on the safe side of Thomas. He had experience with swans.

Thomas hoped that they would stay. For as long as he could remember pairs had nested among the rushes along the shore. He had always taken great delight in the cygnets swimming along in a line like little grey ducks. But last year he hadn’t seen any. He was afraid that it was another sign that the lake was becoming incapable of supporting life. For there were many. There had been no wading birds for years, now. He couldn’t remember the last time he had seen a grebe, and he missed the annual visits of the lapwings, more spectacular than starlings in their flocking displays.

And it seemed that there were hardly any fish. There were angry meetings in the village where farmers defended their right to use all the nitrates they wanted and local business people, who made their entire year’s income during the short tourist season, insisted that something had to be done. Environmentalists, most of them incomers to the area, came on board and confused the issue further. The argument divided the community, each side suspicious of the other. Some of the farmers quietly capitulated and joined the EU Rural Environment Protection Schemes which made it worth their while to farm in a way that didn’t damage the environment. But others did not.

The divers put on their flippers and their cylinders and their masks. One by one they dropped backwards off the edge of the dinghies and vanished.

Peter Mullins introduced Gerard to a Detective Costelloe, who was in charge of the underwater operation. He wasn’t in uniform. He was friendly, explaining how the search was carried out, how long the men could stay under, how they were trained for their job. It was designed to take Gerard’s mind off what they were down there looking for, but it didn’t.

‘You must have had some kind of a tip off,’ he said.

Costelloe looked surprised.

‘Ah, no,’ he said. ‘Nothing like that.’

Gerard shook his head. ‘It’s a lot of divers to be dragging out on a Sunday just on spec.’

Peter Mullins looked at his feet, then glanced over each shoulder in turn, then moved a step closer to Gerard.

‘’Tis sort of a joint operation, you could say,’ he said. ‘’Tis a bit hush-hush, you know.’

‘What kind of a joint operation?’ said Gerard, too loudly for Mullins’ liking. ‘Is there someone else missing?’

‘No, no,’ said Costelloe, stepping in quickly and trying to defuse Gerard. ‘Nothing like that, nothing like that.’

‘What, then?’ said Gerard.

Costelloe shook his head. ‘Nothing like that at all.’

Soon afterwards, Sergeant Mullins left. They were conducting door-to-door interviews, looking for sightings. Costelloe’s walkie-talkie bleeped and he moved out of Gerard’s earshot to talk into it. Gerard looked around at the familiar faces still hanging on. With a terrible shock he wondered if he ought to be suspicious of any of them. He felt dreadfully alone.

Joseph stood beside the church and looked down on the frogmen. He had a good view from there. He could see the men in their dark suits beneath the water, at least for the first couple of feet. They were not a bit like frogs, despite their flippers, but one of them moved a bit like a seal or a dolphin, undulating his body. There was something attractive about it and Joseph dreamed about doing it himself, except that he would discover that he could breathe down there without those cumbersome cylinders, like the guy in
Waterworld
. He would be called for whenever there was any trouble underwater. He could go down to great depths, deeper than anyone had ever been. He would discover a beautiful girl held hostage in an underwater kingdom. He would breathe for her. Into her mouth.

But not Martina.

She was not down there, or not alive, anyway. There was no underwater city, despite what Thomas said. If Cormac ever existed he was a hairy man with a sword who kept hairy cattle, and he was long dead.

One of the frogmen had brought something up out of the water and the others were emerging and gathering at the boat-side to examine it. Joseph couldn’t see what it was but he had a feeling that it was nothing to do with Martina. He looked across at the other boat but his view was obscured by bushes. He stood up and began to climb higher. He had never had much interest in the island but he was glad to be there now. It was like a place of his own, a quiet spot in a clamouring world.

Costelloe returned to Gerard’s side.

‘They’ve found some old bit of a sword or something,’ he said.

‘How old?’ said Gerard.

‘Ah, very old, now. Ancient, you know. I said to bring it in when they came, not to be wasting time.’

Gerard nodded. Detective Costelloe looked up at the sky, where light cloud drifted.

‘Could be worse, I suppose.’ he said.

But Gerard couldn’t imagine how.

Thomas wandered up to the stable yard. Aine called out to him.

‘Look, Grandda.’

With a considerable amount of kicking and flapping, she succeeded in walking Specks to the far end of the small paddock.

‘Watch, watch.’

She turned him round and kicked again. Obligingly, the cob jogged up to the gate.

‘Good girl, yourself!’

Aine hauled Specks’ head around and set out again.

Brigid left the car at the gate. The water in the tank was overflowing following the heavy rain. It made a muddy patch for a few yards around the tank, then disappeared between the rocks. Brigid circumnavigated it, conscious that yet again she was wearing stupid shoes.

She didn’t go up this time, but walked straight around the side of the mountain. To her left, above her, was rock, broken by the extension of her hazel gully until it gradually petered out. Below, to her right, the stony slopes gave on to several acres of small, rough meadows and thick, hazel scrub. One or two of the cattle were visible and Brigid made her way down to look for the rest.

As she did so, she realised that she had forgotten to bring the stick that she had found. She missed it as though it were an animate thing or perhaps, more pertinently, a symbol of her acceptance by whatever, or whoever inhabited the hazel woods. She was about to enter one of them now, but there was no point of entry on the tack that she was pursuing. Squat sentries of blackthorn stood guard, two or three deep in some places, barring her way. She could have pushed past them at the cost of a few pricks and scratches but somehow it would have seemed like an insult.

She followed the edge of the scrub for a while. There was an entrance for smaller creatures; a little path which disappeared into a tiny tunnel beneath the blackthorn. Brigid laughed at its neatness, feeling like Alice with the Drink Me bottle, too big for the world in which she found herself. But she went on and, sure enough, she found a way in. As soon as she was inside, the bushes stopped crowding each other and left plenty of space for her to move around. But now that she had become aware of it, it seemed that there was some sort of system in operation; a set of subtle rules for visitors. A path would end abruptly, blocked by a fallen branch or a boulder or a thorn bush. In most cases Brigid could have pushed or clambered a way through but, as at the edge of the wood, there was never a need. If she took her time, there was always a way that she could take that didn’t involve effort or force. For a while she just followed these paths, testing the hypothesis; proving it, delighting in it. A few drops of rain began to fall. They touched her skin like a tingle of excitement, like the promise of a baptism into ecstasy. She raised her face to the falling drops and stuck out her tongue to catch them, then nearly bit it off as her foot slipped from under her and she landed heavily on her rump.

Shamefaced she stood up and made silent apology for her presumption. She had found the cattle or, at least, very recent traces of them. It was cowshit that she had trodden in, and a very muddy pathway that she had landed on. Like a main road it marched through the woods. Heavy hooves had broken young bushes and scraped the moss from a stone here and there. The smell was rich and fetid. Brigid brushed ineffectually at the large, muddy stain on her clean, beige skirt and followed along the trail.

Joseph climbed towards the fort. Some time before he got there the wind began to bring him snatches of a bad smell. Something up there was dead. He hesitated. Surely a body wouldn’t begin to decompose so fast? He didn’t know. He wondered if he should go back and get his father.

The boat on the farm side of the causeway had moved further out into the lake. One diver was in it and another one hung by his folded arms on to the side. The other boat was visible now as well, rocking severely as a frogman climbed aboard. It was out in the middle of the lake where the water was said to be bottomless. How did they think Martina could have got out there? Joseph could see Gerard on the causeway, his head bowed close to that of another man, deep in conversation. There was no point in asking him. He would just be told to stop wasting his time.

The smell came again and curiosity tempted Joseph to climb on. The grass was short, still wet from the storm, slippery in places. The smell was evasive, sometimes there and sometimes not, until Joseph was no longer certain that he could smell anything at all. Up at the fort it was at its strongest, but apart from a patch of stained and trampled grass there was nothing to be seen. He stood for a while looking out over the lake, the fishman again, lord of it all. Then he set off to go home.

On the town side of the causeway a diver rose to the surface and threw something fairly heavy in over the side of the boat. Costelloe saw him and moved away from Gerard. Gerard watched the expression on his face, but it was inscrutable. Eventually he rejoined him.

‘Ox bones,’ he said.

‘Ox bones?’

‘Hundreds of them. Stacks of them.’

‘What are they doing there?’

‘We often find them. Some lakes are practically lined with them, sure. Ancient. From the last time there was mad cow disease in Ireland.’

Gerard missed the joke. He was watching as a diver in the boat played out a rope.

‘A hundred cart-loads of them came out of Lough Gur in Limerick,’ Costelloe went on. ‘Back in the nineteenth century. All the skulls were broken just here.’ He pointed to his own forehead. ‘Where they gave them a belt with something or other. To kill them, like.’

As if in illustration a long, hornless skull came up on the end of the rope. It was dark with sludge and decay.

‘But … What are they fishing those out for?’ said Gerard. ‘That’s not what they’re here for!’

Detective Costelloe looked towards the heavens. ‘Sure, they think they’re Jacques Cousteau, some of that lot.’

Brigid counted cattle. She didn’t know how many there were supposed to be, but she etched the number on to her brain. They all looked sleek and well, none the worse for the storm. Nor was she surprised by that. If she had been outside in last night’s weather she could think of no better place to be. Because apart from the thick growth of hazel and blackthorn there were all kinds of nooks and hollows where a warm-blooded creature might find shelter. Even on the bare pavement plain beyond the meadows there were erratics; huge boulders dumped by the last glaciers, eons ago. Brigid thought they looked a bit sad, a bit embarrassed at being left. She noticed a large band of goats out there, some grazing, others lying down and being used by their kids for climbing practice. Brigid had always assumed that they were vermin but the more she saw of them the closer she came to changing her mind. She remembered Martina telling her that all the wild goats in Ireland were feral; either they or their ancestors had been domesticated. She said that no matter how many generations of domesticity lay behind any individual goat, it would revert to the wild without any difficulty if the circumstances allowed. And it would survive.

For some reason the thought gave Brigid hope.

She was still walking through the meadows making sure that she hadn’t missed any cattle when she came across the ruins of Colmkille’s church. She knew it was there; she had visited it many times, but always from the other side where an OPW sign marked the pathway in from the public road.

It wasn’t on their land but it was close to their boundary. Brigid crossed the wall at its lowest point and walked through the coarse grass towards the stout, stone cross that marked the place. The church itself was no more than a few low walls which could easily have been mistaken for a ruined cabin or shed, but the more recent cross defined it and gave it an air of sanctity. Not far from its westernmost end a square flagstone marked the holy well. It no longer held water, but the stream that still ran through the bottom of it was considered by some to have healing properties, and the hawthorn tree which overhung it was adorned with votive offerings of red wool. On the opposite bank a single, plaster virgin was lodged among the rocks, her features blunted by weather and time. Brigid realised that she didn’t understand the significance of the red wool, nor did she know who put it there. It was like a dim echo coming through from ancient times, when Ireland was closer to Asia than to Rome.

The thoughts, like the rain, both chilled and excited her. They came from layers of her mind that had been long unused, like files in a dusty attic, forgotten. They pleased her, like the sudden discovery of an inheritance and she wondered about the people who had built this church and lived an austere and solitary life devoted to it.