Thin Air (25 page)

The newscaster had moved on. In the Four Courts a former Christian Brother had been found guilty on sixty-four counts of abusing children in his care over a period of fifteen years. The cameras showed the court building. Gerard shook his head and looked up to where the statue hung of a dead man on a cross. He looked at Aine, who was staring straight at him, her face betraying an anxiety he had never seen before. She looked away and down at the bike.

‘It has fifteen gears,’ she said.

Brigid put her head around the door. ‘Dinner’s ready.’

They all began to get up. ‘But no one’s having any,’ Brigid went on, ‘until I get a go on that new bike!’

She stepped into the room. She was wearing a pair of Joseph’s tracksuit pants.

‘Mam!’ said Aine, her face brightening with embarrassment.

‘Come on,’ said Brigid.

Joseph met them in the hall and followed them out. Everyone watched as Brigid stopped and started and wobbled her way to confidence. She wouldn’t get off until Joseph mock-wrestled the bike from her and rode it around himself. Aine stood in the middle of it all and yelled.

‘It’s my bike! I want a go!’

But she wasn’t too serious. She liked what was happening.

Gerard and Thomas stood back, watching. Thomas lit his pipe.

‘You’ll have to watch your step now, Gerard,’ he said. ‘Now that your woman is wearing the trousers.’

But when Gerard looked across at Brigid he saw that she had retreated again, back into that awful strained silence that was becoming all too familiar. She was watching the kids larking with the bike, but that wasn’t what she was seeing.

When Thomas went down to his house after dinner there were two swans standing at his back door. The sight of them sent a shiver down his spine.

‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘Not yet.’

They moved aside to let him through, then walked off slowly towards the water.

Trish was just finishing up in the yard that evening when Gerard came out. He looked over the half door at the two fillies.

‘Time those two were out,’ he said.

They put head collars on them and led them dancing along the little green alley which ran beside the field where the mares were and into a further paddock, well hedged and green. There they turned them loose and watched as they raced and bucked around the open space.

‘I don’t want Aine near that cob unless you’re minding her,’ said Gerard.

‘Fair enough,’ said Trish. ‘But I can’t be expected to know where she is at every moment of the day.’

The fillies were standing still in the centre of the field, their heads high, their blood up, snorting at nothing.

‘I hope you’ve been able to forget what happened,’ said Gerard.

‘What? With Specks?’

‘No, not with Specks.’ He sounded exasperated. ‘Between you and me. That night.’

‘Oh.’ Trish nodded. She found that she had, pretty much. ‘Misunderstanding,’ she said.

The fillies, as one, dropped their heads, wheeled round and hared off again as if their lives depended on it.

‘You shouldn’t have hit old Specks, though.’

‘What?’

‘Today. There was no need for that.’

Gerard turned and began to walk away. ‘When I want your advice, Trish, I’ll ask for it.’

If it hadn’t been for the tragedy at work in all their lives, Trish would have given him her resignation on the spot. As it was she followed at a distance in impotent rage. Behind her she could hear the fillies, still playing with the wind.

Sam called round to see Trish the next day. He came on a High Nelly bicycle with Sturmey Archer gears and curved handlebars. Trish was moving the manure heap with the tractor and buck rake from the paddock wall to the corner of the jumps field. When she saw Sam she stopped and turned off the tractor. They were delighted to see each other.

‘Great job you have,’ said Sam.

‘Wonderful.’

Sam gestured towards the manure. ‘I’d give my right arm for that lot,’ he said.

‘What would anybody want with your right arm?’ said Trish.

He made a mock swing at her with it.

‘I don’t know what he does with it,’ she went on. ‘He hasn’t touched it since I’ve been here.’

‘How long is that?’

Trish shrugged. ‘Too long. I’m thinking of leaving.’

‘Not yet, I hope,’ said Sam.

‘I suppose,’ said Trish.

Sam took out the makings and began to roll a cigarette.

‘Do you want a cup of coffee to go with that?’ said Trish.

‘No, ta. I’m on my way in to get my dole. I was going to ask you if you wanted to come and have dinner with me. I was going to see if I could get a bit of fish.’

‘What, tonight?’

‘Is tonight no good?’

‘Tonight is fine.’

‘Great.’ Sam lit his cigarette and pedalled off. Trish laughed. The bike suited him.

‘What time shall I come?’ she called after him.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he called back. ‘I don’t have a watch.’

Brigid saw him cycle away towards town from the mountainside. She had seen the hare again and had watched where it seemed to disappear among the rocks. She was examining the place now, but could find no hole large enough to take a hare. What she did find, however, was an ornamental gold pin of the kind once used to secure a cloak at the neck. She turned it over in her fingers. The stem was plain but the head was finely engraved with spirals. She didn’t know enough about such things. It could have been dropped last summer by a tourist or a thousand years ago by some member of the Celtic nobility. She couldn’t remember why it should matter which. It seemed a lot less important than the hole that she was looking for and couldn’t find.

She dropped the pin into her jacket pocket and forgot about it.

Sam’s caravan seemed bigger inside than outside. It was neater, too, than Trish had expected. About a third of it was the bedroom, curtained off with a threadbare Persian rug. The rest was for cooking and sitting.

There was no electricity. A wood-burning stove stood on a large flagstone. Its pipe went out through a tidily sealed hole in the wall. Candles of various shapes and sizes and ages stood in heaps of melted and remelted wax.

‘Make yourself at home,’ said Sam.

Trish couldn’t, though. She could never live in such a cramped space.

Sam stoked up the stove with small logs, then went out to get more for the evening. Trish looked more closely around her. There was one built-in seat with a foam cushion and two chairs. One was hand-made from hazel rods bound with plaited grass. The other was a stacking plastic one covered in paint stains.

There were Celtic designs all over the walls; spirals and sunbursts and more complex interwoven animals and snakes. Some of them must have required considerable skill to draw. In the corner, a set of narrow shelves went from floor to ceiling, full of books. When Trish looked more closely she found that every second title seemed to have Celtic in it somewhere.
Celtic Art
,
Celtic Design
,
Celtic Mythology
. In between were the writings of Yeats and Lady Gregory and countless volumes of fairy tales and folklore.

Sam saw her looking at them when he came in. ‘That’s what brought me here, really,’ he said. ‘All that stuff.’

‘Why?’ said Trish.

‘Do you want the short answer to that or the thesis?’

‘The short answer.’

‘Okay,’ said Sam. ‘I don’t know.’

Aine pedalled up to the top of the drive on her bike, then turned and pelted back at top speed. She stood up on the pedals at the bumpiest bits where the bike juddered and bucked, then sat down and pedalled again. Beside her house she jammed on the back brake and skidded to a spectacular halt.

Thomas saw her coming towards his house, legs like little pistons, face set in fierce concentration. She went whizzing past the house and crunched to a stop on the shingle, her front tyre touching the water. Popeye raced up to congratulate her and she bowed to him, gracefully. Thomas hunted for biscuits for her. She delighted him more every day. He wasn’t sure how she felt about her sister’s disappearance but he wasn’t too worried about her. It was clear that she intended to squeeze every last ounce of zest out of her life.

Gerard stood outside the house and watched her go up and down. Since the incident with the horse he was reluctant to let her out of his sight. He had said several decades of the rosary in penance for not missing her sooner that day and in thanks for the safe outcome. Her birthday party on the following day had been a riotous affair, like a celebration of her survival, or a rebellion against the grief that still fogged up the atmosphere of the house.

He saw Thomas come outside and talk to her. They went in together, leaving the bike on its stand on the shore. Beyond it Gerard could see the island. It meant only one thing to him now, and that was the souterrain: The thought of it made him feel sick. He would have to do something about it. He could not go on living in fear of it.

The thought, as it came, was almost a decision to act. But he could not do it alone. He was going to need help.

Aine watched
Father Ted
with Joseph in his room and they both fell about the place laughing. Afterwards they gathered their dirty laundry and took it down to the back kitchen.

Their mother had always done their washing for them, but it seemed that she had resigned. Neither of them knew how to work the machine.

‘I bet Martina did,’ said Aine, then corrected herself: ‘Does.’

‘Yeah,’ said Joseph.

‘Grandda says Martina has turned into a swan.’

‘He does not.’

‘He does. He says she might have.’

‘He does not.’

Aine shrugged. ‘Do you miss her?’

Joseph sighed. ‘I don’t think about it really. Do you?’

Aine shook her head. And then, because she knew she was going to cry, she ran off through the house at top speed; up the stairs and along the landing and then back again. Finally, she burst into the living room where her parents were sitting in front of the television.

‘How do you turn on the washing machine?’ she asked.

Sam’s body was long and thin and pale. His skin was silky. He didn’t smell of wood smoke any more, or perhaps it was that Trish did, now, as well.

She hadn’t intended to stay; hadn’t smoked or drunk anything for the sake of keeping a clear head. But he had listened and heard when she talked about things she hadn’t told herself, yet: how scared she was, how lonely, and how she missed Martina. She didn’t know how she had succeeded in denying it for so long. She had never much liked working for Gerard, but she had stayed because of Martina.

‘She was my best friend,’ she found herself saying. ‘We did everything together.’

She had cried and cried, knowing that Sam didn’t judge her and wasn’t embarrassed by her tears. And when she had cried enough they had eaten the fish and laughed at the bones and looked at the darkness that had gathered outside the window.

Then a strange stillness had come down upon them.

It was more about friendship at first, but later their bodies took over and found that they suited each other well. They talked and made love until dawn. For the first time since she had started the job, Trish was late for work.

Now that the cattle were down for the summer, there was no more excuse for Brigid to go up to the winterage, but she went without one. It was changing up there. The gentians were at full strength, bursting with impossible blue, and the first bloody cranesbills were beginning to emerge between the rocks. The hazel was nearly in full leaf but somehow the woods were no darker, just greener. The first, delicate flowers appeared on the wild strawberries, struggling for light between the robust leaves of the garlic.

On one or two of the drier days, Brigid brought a sketchbook and colours with her to the woods, but she never used them. What she went up there for could not be taken home in a book.

It was another week before Gerard got around to acting on his decision to open the souterrain. What held him up was his inability to ask for anyone’s help. He knew that no one would refuse him, but he was certain that everyone would think he was mad. Around the middle of the week he struck upon the idea of taking Joseph, but dismissed it as ridiculous. By the weekend he had come to realise that he had no other choice.

On Saturday morning he went to early mass on his own and afterwards waited until the hardware shop opened to get new batteries for the sheep lamps. When he got home, Joseph was still fast asleep, his body appreciating the extra space that Aine had recently vacated.

‘Get up! Come on!’

Joseph sat bolt upright, clutching at the covers, peering around in bleary-eyed panic.

‘It’s after ten o’clock, for God’s sake,’ said Gerard. ‘Get up out of bed.’

Joseph swung his legs out and sat up, relieved that Aine was gone. He was still confused that the protective feelings he held towards her, the best he could find in his nature, had to be kept hidden. He rubbed at his sleep-slack face.

‘Now, Joseph! Not next week!’

‘All right, all right.’ Joseph groped around beside the bed for his jeans. To his relief, his father left. In a small act of rebellion he stretched out on the bed again for a minute that felt like an hour.

Thomas was horrified.

‘No good will come of it,’ he said.

But he let them take the boat, since they could get closer that way than they could by car, and he helped them load the pick and the shovels and the rusted bit of an old Kango hammer that Gerard used as a crowbar. He helped them push off, too, but he wouldn’t go with them nor let them take Popeye, even though he kept jumping into the boat.

‘He’ll only be in your way,’ he said. But the truth, if he admitted it, was a little more complicated than that. If anything came up out of that hole, it should be free to go wherever it wished.

It took two trips to get all the gear up to the top of the hill. Joseph took the heaviest tools and pushed himself to heart-hammering exhaustion, but if Gerard noticed he said nothing. At the side of the souterrain they stopped to get their breath and Joseph took a manly swig from the bottle of Coke they had brought. Gerard looked across the causeway to where Anthony’s house stood, pale against the drumlin behind it. He should have asked Anthony’s permission at least. It was his land.