Thin Air (22 page)

‘It ends on a freeze-frame image of a horse that has been killed. I cried my eyes out when I saw it.’

Trish had never met a man who cried, or admitted that he did. She didn’t know what to think. She made more coffee and Sam rolled another joint.

But neither of them was a great idea. The joint made Trish paranoid and she remembered that no man was in the clear as far as she was concerned until the mystery of Martina’s disappearance was solved. She became withdrawn and monosyllabic, and Sam soon left to walk the mile and a half across country to his caravan. Then after he had gone, the coffee kept her awake for hours.

Gerard dreamed that he went down into the souterrain. He was pushing and wriggling down into the hole, like a worm or a mole, and he was nearly there, nearly at the inner chamber. But a dark flood of warm, salty fluid came against him. He was blocking the hole and it couldn’t get out. His head was in the fluid and he couldn’t breathe. Nor could he turn in the narrow tunnel. All he could do was try and reverse, but as he did so he realised that there were miles and miles of tunnels behind him and he would never make it.

He woke in a sweating, palpitating panic. If Brigid had been there he might have reached for her. But she wasn’t.

She was downstairs in the dark kitchen, standing at the empty sink, watching the slow beginnings of dawn outlining the hills. There were lights up there, gentle, blueish ones, but she could only see them with the corners of her eyes. If she looked straight at them, they disappeared. But it didn’t mean that they weren’t there.

The next morning Gerard drove Brigid into town to see a counsellor that the family doctor had recommended. She was like a zombie in the car, and in the waiting room where they had to sit for forty-five minutes.

‘You all right, Brigid?’ said Gerard.

‘Grand, sure,’ she said.

‘It’s just, you might like to talk to someone, that’s all.’

‘Of course.’

‘I thought you might like to talk to someone.’

It was him who needed to talk to someone, Brigid thought. But she didn’t really care.

Trish had finished the mucking out and had long-reined the colt she was breaking. She was taking a coffee break when Sam arrived with six of the other New Agers. There was a woman with them that Trish hadn’t met before. She was small and thin and had hennaed hair.

‘She’s Janice,’ said Sam. ‘She has come up from West Cork. She’s a psychic.’

Trish shook the cold little hand.

‘What does that mean?’ she asked. ‘What do you do?’

‘All kinds of things,’ said Janice.

‘We’re going to have a bit of a session if that’s all right with you?’ said Sam.

‘What’s a session?’ said Trish.

‘Well. We all join hands and Janice guides us and we all concentrate on Martina. With a bit of luck—’

‘With a bit of help,’ Janice corrected.

‘With a bit of help, yeah. With a bit of help from Janice’s guides we’ll get a picture of where she is.’

Trish turned and busied herself at the sink to hide the amusement on her face. ‘Are you going to do that here?’ she said.

‘With your permission,’ said Sam.

‘With your blessing,’ said Janice. ‘Maybe you would join us?’

‘I don’t think so, somehow,’ said Trish, the smile still threatening the edges of her mouth.

‘Perhaps you could help us in another way, then,’ said one of the other women. She was one of the regular searchers. Her name was Cloud Dancer. She was very English and very earnest, as though she had a driving need to convince everyone of her integrity. She dressed in wraparounds and shawls and carried a huge bag made from heavy brown velvet.

‘We need an article of Martina’s clothing,’ she went on. ‘So that Janice can tune into her energies.’

The others all nodded. Sam had gone into the front room with a bundle of hazel and oak twigs and Trish could see him lighting a small fire in the grate.

‘I couldn’t do anything about that,’ she said. ‘You’d have to ask her mother.’

Janice shook her head and said, ‘No. It would not be right to involve her mother.’

She spoke with great authority for someone so small. Again the others nodded and approved.

‘Well I haven’t got anything,’ said Trish. ‘And I’m not going over to the house, poking around.’ She was beginning to get a bit irritated with it all and it showed in her tone.

‘No, no. It’s cool,’ said Sam, from the front room. ‘We wouldn’t ask you to do anything like that.’

Trish was remembering that she did, in fact, have not one but several pieces of Martina’s clothing in the house. She was remembering that they often went out together, for a drink or to a disco, and they often exchanged clothes. She was wondering how she could have come to forget that.

‘The saddle,’ said Cloud Dancer. ‘What about a stirrup or a girth? That the horse was wearing when she disappeared?’

‘You’re all cracked,’ she said.

They carried on anyway, lighting incense and covering the floor with rugs and bedspreads that they had brought with them. Trish finished her coffee and went out to start work again. The broken martingale was hanging on the back of the tack-room door. She took it in. Sam was in the kitchen, searching through his knapsack for a map. She gave him the martingale.

‘Thanks. Perfect,’ he said. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to join in?’

‘No,’ said Trish. ‘No way. Do you really believe in all this stuff?’

Sam thought for a minute, then said, ‘I will if it works.’

As Trish went out again she realised that she liked him.

‘So, Brigid,’ said the counsellor. ‘You must be having a terrible time.’

Brigid shrugged. ‘I suppose I must,’ she said.

He had told her that his name was Tom, and she couldn’t remember what the second bit was. He was short and sandy and flat-featured. Brigid didn’t take to him at all. She didn’t remember giving him permission to use her Christian name, but she tried not to let it matter. She could endure him if she had to.

‘I suppose the worst of it must be the not knowing.’ When Brigid didn’t reply, he went on: ‘I mean, about what has happened to Martina?’

‘I suppose,’ said Brigid.

‘What sort of things go through your mind? What do you think might have happened to her?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Brigid. ‘Why should you think that you can help me?’

‘Well,’ said Tom. ‘It is my area of expertise.’

‘Missing people?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘Have you lost someone yourself?’

‘Well, no. But I understand the kind of problems that people face at such times.’

‘How?’

‘I beg your pardon?’ said the counsellor.

‘How do you understand,’ said Brigid, ‘if you have never experienced it yourself?’

‘It’s my business to understand,’ he said, and Brigid could hear the annoyance in his tone, even though she was sure that he was successfully hiding it from himself. ‘It’s my training. People often find that by talking about their difficulties they can come to terms with them and feel better.’

‘I don’t want to feel better,’ said Brigid. ‘I want to know where my daughter is.’

The Nipper was wearing a track in his bedding, going round and round and round. Trish took him out in the cavesson. He danced all the way down to the lake-shore, then refused to go into the water, then leaped in, soaking himself and Trish in the process. Then he sniffed and pawed, and waded in circles around Trish, then flubbered at the water with loose lips. Trish laughed and he did it again. He had more brains than most people, that horse, but Trish was afraid that he didn’t have the constitution to match. She didn’t know what would happen to him. She didn’t like to think about it.

Eventually they both kept still enough for a fish to rise a few yards away. The ripples spread and washed around their legs and they both watched them until they stopped.

‘People are quite often left with feelings of guilt,’ said the counsellor. ‘In cases like this. Problems that were never resolved. Conflicts, perhaps.’

There was a window in the office but a Venetian blind was drawn down over it and Brigid couldn’t see anything between the slats. She was trying to listen to what Tom was saying, but she didn’t seem to feel anything.

‘Did you get on well together?’ he went on. ‘Did you have arguments?’

Unbidden, a string of images flashed through Brigid’s mind. Martina lifting a pot from the range and turning towards her. The quick energy she had, the natural strength. She lit a cigarette, the same brand that Trish smoked, and Brigid told her to take it outside. She did. Into the rain.

‘She never argued with me,’ said Brigid, but she saw no reason to tell Tom that she wished she had.

Thomas watched Trish and The Nipper from his kitchen window. The girl was very strong. She had never expressed any emotion at all about Martina’s disappearance, despite the fact that they had been so close. Women were different, these days, he knew that. He hoped that they weren’t getting too strong for their own good.

‘My relationship with Gerard?’ said Brigid. ‘Relationship?’

Tom nodded. He waited with professional patience, but Brigid was stuck. Relationship. She looked at the word from all angles, but she couldn’t make it mean anything. Eventually she left it parked where it was and allowed her mind to wander off and commune with the green air beyond it.

And Tom, for all his training, could think of no reason for fetching her back again.

When Trish got back from the lakeside the New Agers were piling into the back of their ancient Transit. Cloud Dancer was in her usual place at the wheel. Trish wondered why she wasn’t called Van Driver. She decided not to ask. Sam came over.

‘Have you found her?’ said Trish.

‘We got a picture of a rocky slope near a strange-shaped hill and we found it on the map.’

‘Don’t forget to bring a picnic.’

‘We won’t,’ said Sam. ‘Is it all right if we hold on to the strap for the moment?’

‘I don’t see why not.’

‘Want to come with us? Plenty of room.’

Trish shook her head and Sam rejoined the van.

Inside the house, on the kitchen table, Trish found a little hand-made card with dried flowers on the front and ‘Thanks’ written on the back.

Gerard had dropped Brigid at the house and was moving some bales across from the hay shed to the stable yard when he saw the hippies drive off in their van. He finished loading the transport box. The next step was simple. All he had to do was to climb up on to the tractor and start it. But somehow he couldn’t. He got stuck. He could see no reason for doing it.

The actions of his life circulated in his mind. Feeding cattle. Selling them to someone who would kill them. Breeding more cattle to feed and to sell. Growing grass to feed them. He was struck by a memory of a programme he had seen on the television. Ireland’s oldest archaeological site was older than the Pyramids. But it wasn’t a tomb or a temple; it wasn’t a monument of any kind. It was a place in Mayo called the Ceide Fields. Three thousand acres of stone-walled fields, so old that they were covered by more than two metres of peat bog. Evidence that for as long as there were people in Ireland there were cattle.

And cattle were still central to Irish life, the basis of rural existence. Everywhere Gerard looked he saw scatterings of them on the hills and meadows, but he couldn’t think why. Dimly, he remembered the need to eat and to feed the family.

The family. It was no longer quite clear to him what the family was. They were all adrift, like satellites, but there was no centre. What was to prevent them all abandoning their orbits, vanishing into the vacuum of endless night, as Martina had?

The hay, the tractor, the yard. The hay, the tractor, the yard. Gerard had heard of people whose lives had lost their meaning. He had never believed it. He had seen it as an excuse for giving up, copping out, embracing the role of the victim. But he was still stuck half an hour later when Trish rode past on Specks.

‘Are you all right, Mr Keane?’

He looked up and a shock ran through him.

‘What time is it?’ he asked.

Trish looked at her watch and he looked at his.

‘Can you manage everything here?’ he asked.

‘I can, surely,’ said Trish.

‘Thanks.’ He said it as though he meant it. ‘I’m going to go to mass.’

Trish rode along the main Ennis road as if she was going to visit Lena, but half a mile before her house she turned right into a narrow lane which led up towards the mountains. It was one of the few times she had ever met with resistance from Specks, who clearly had his heart set on Lena’s sweet cake. He stopped and tried to turn back, but under pressure from Trish he soon gave up. By way of consolation he snatched a mouthful of grass out of the hedge and covered his bit with bright-green froth.

The New Agers could hardly have found a more beautiful place for their settlement. The lane was bounded on both sides by high hedges of hazel and hawthorn, behind which the mobile homes and caravans and makeshift wooden houses were practically invisible. The land was poor, all rock, which was why it had been cheap enough for them to be able to buy it from one of those rare farmers who didn’t care who he sold to. Trish was surprised. The word locally was that the place was a mess, an eyesore, but she couldn’t see it. Some of the buildings were a bit of a shambles, made from scrap timber and re-used corrugated iron but there was no litter, no plastic, none of the rusting cars that often took up space in country farmyards. Here and there a patch had been painstakingly cleared and cultivated. One holding had a polytunnel which was considerably bigger than its owners’ caravan. Another had a couple of milking goats tethered in the hazel scrub. And at one place a horse called out to Specks, who stopped dead and called back.

Trish craned her head until she could just see, through the bushes, the horse tethered in a clearing. She was heavy, a real work-horse, but young. As Trish watched she walked around her anchor and called again. Specks answered, his whinny shaking his whole body and Trish’s too. She kicked him on and hoped that the mare wouldn’t break her tether.

Most of the dwellings appeared to be deserted, but there was smoke rising from one stove pipe. Outside that caravan two small children in thick, hand-knitted jumpers were playing with matchbox cars in a pile of grey sand. Their clothes and faces were grubby but they looked robust and clear-skinned. To her surprise, Trish found herself wondering if one of them was Lucy.