Thin Air (4 page)

The dog set out again, but Thomas called him back. Reluctantly, he followed the old man into the house.

There was no more giggling. The action had moved to a huge, ancient mansion owned by the two dark men and their father. Somewhere in the house, the blonde woman was taking a bath while the old man watched in hiding. In the meantime, his sons were sorting out the dark woman in the cellar. She was spread-eagled on a four-poster bed, tied hand and foot. While one of the men looked on, the other slipped a sharp knife up the inside leg of her shorts.

Joseph was torn between conflicting pressures, one at his groin, the other somewhere inside, untouchable. He knew that it should be all wrong, what he was watching, but the woman was giving little fearful animal gasps and cries, tossing her head from side to side, her eyes half closed, her breasts arching upwards.

He squirmed on the sofa, somehow succeeding in keeping his hands off his cock. He could hear Stephen’s heavy breathing beside him and he wanted to look, to see if he had a hard-on, but he couldn’t tear his eyes from the screen. The woman was completely naked now; all her clothes cut off. In her struggles to free herself, she thrust up her pelvis. But the man with the knife stepped away and, as the woman squirmed and grunted, the other brother stepped forward, undoing his flies.

The barman flicked the lights on and off and called time. It was Gerard’s round and he watched another twenty pound note reduced to small change. It was too late, now, to go back and check the other pubs for Martina. He didn’t know what all the fuss was about. The girl was nineteen, after all. She was an adult. She’d be furious if she thought her dad was going around asking for her. And quite right, too. Wasn’t she well able to take care of herself?

Brigid found herself thinking about Kevin and wishing that he was still at home. She could imagine him there beside her, watching the television in companionable silence, providing the solid male presence that she seemed to need in her life. Gerard no longer provided it. She couldn’t remember when he had changed; become cold and rejecting. A long time ago. Years. And as for Joseph, he hardly seemed to be there at all. He was like a shadow, a person without substance. She didn’t understand him. Her own blood, but none the less a stranger to her.

She had intended to stay up and watch the late film, but now she found that she hadn’t the energy. As she got up, the sleeping child stirred and sighed and stretched into the empty space. Brigid moved the thumb out of her slack mouth and covered her with the patchwork quilt from the back of the sofa.

The two men had finished with the dark woman and disposed of her. Now they had shifted their attention to the blonde one. Joseph was so excited that he was afraid he would come in his pants. From the way Stephen was sitting, he suspected that he already had. On his other side, David was rigid and pale.

‘You dirty little bastards!’

Joseph sprang up with a reflex action and turned to see Mick’s father, Brian, standing in the doorway. He had the impression that he had been there for some time, looking over their heads at the screen.

‘Who brought that into this house?’

Joseph’s hands were dangling in front of his genitals but he knew he was hiding nothing. Mick’s mother was staring straight at him, straight through him. He turned and bolted through the kitchen and into the bathroom. Mick’s father roared down the corridor after him.

‘Come back here!’

But Joseph slammed the door and slid the bolt across. Cold water. He turned on the tap and tried to splash himself. The water soaked his shirt, his jeans, everything, but it had no effect on the problem. Tears of fear and humiliation fell down his cheeks.

From the sitting room he could hear the rise and fall of angry voices; loud questions, mumbled answers. There was a rapid drumming sound which might have been his own pulse and might have been heavy footsteps in the hall. He could tell that the little brass bolt wouldn’t hold for long if someone gave a half-decent shove. The water in the tap was becoming hot. He turned on the other one, ran it on to his hand and tried to rub it on to his cock. The moment he touched himself he came, doubling up with the intensity of it, shooting spunk past his own chin and on to the soap-smeared mirror.

‘Joseph?’ Someone called down the hallway.

His breath caught in his throat as the spasms continued, an eternity of terror and shame and ecstasy.

‘Joseph! Come out of there!’

‘Just a minute, Mrs Burke.’

His voice sounded old and tired. He was exhausted and disgusted. He looked at himself. There were white globs of spunk on the mirror, and there was no toilet paper.

Brigid dozed. She woke when she heard Trish’s car pass along the boirin at the back of the house. She woke again when Gerard’s car pulled in, and again when he got into the bed beside her. And she woke once more when she heard the back door open and close, and footsteps come quietly upstairs. It had to be Martina.

After that, she slept soundly.

T
RISH OPENED HER EYES
at first light. Something had woken her, but she couldn’t tell what. She cast around for the dream she had been having but there were only bad feelings, and she remembered that she had been trying to decide whether to go or whether to stay. Several times over the past twenty-four hours she had made up her mind that she was leaving, but each time the initial euphoria was replaced by anxiety. She had formed attachments here. She had nowhere else to go. As often as she decided to leave, she decided against it. And when she found herself in that defeated state of mind, she began to wonder whether she had been responsible for what had happened; whether she had, in fact, led Gerard on without realising it. Women, after all, were usually to blame for these things.

She turned towards the pale blue light at the window, just as the sound came again. This time it was quite clear, the chink of a loose shoe on the concrete yard at the back of the house. There were horses in the boxes there but there shouldn’t be any in the yard.

For a while she stayed where she was. The horse would be all right and there was nothing else to get up for at that hour. But as soon as her mind was free of distraction it returned to the same old circumambulation. Would she or wouldn’t she? Should she or shouldn’t she? In sudden fury with it all she threw back the bedclothes and got up.

The stabled horses were awake and looking out over their half doors. The two fillies were still clinging together anxiously like a beast with two heads, and The Nipper was as hungry as ever. He whickered and knocked the heavy door with his knee but, for once, Trish ignored him. The sound of the loose shoe had come from Specks, Martina’s roan cob, who was standing outside the yard gate, looking in. He had a saddle on but no bridle. His martingale was broken and trailing from his girth. Trish’s blood ran cold.

Aine was wrapped up in the patchwork quilt watching early morning cartoons when Trish poked her head around the sitting-room door.

‘Hey, Aine. Is Martina around?’

Aine shrugged and turned back to the television, but she listened to Trish’s quick footsteps going up the stairs and the creak of floorboards overhead. There was one last, quiet moment and then the peace was shattered. Her parents’ voices lifted in bewilderment, then anxiety, and white terror swam into the house.

Brigid burst into Joseph’s room.

‘Have you seen Martina?’

‘What? No!’

‘What are you doing here, anyway? I thought you were staying at Stephen’s’

‘I came home.’

‘I thought you were Martina coming in. Why did you come home?’

It all seemed to be a continuation of last night’s nightmare; the fury of the Burkes, the long walk out along the dark road. Joseph didn’t want to have to face it. He said nothing and turned over to go back to sleep.

‘Get up, will you? Help us to look for her!’

‘Where?’

‘I don’t know where! Everywhere!’

Joseph jumped up, energised by a note of panic in his mother’s voice that he had never heard there before.

In the sitting room, Aine heard her father and Trish go out of the back door and over the boirin towards the cottage. She pulled on her socks and was hunting under the sofa for her runners when her mother came in.

‘Did you know that Martina was out riding yesterday?’ she asked.

Aine froze. She had known. Thomas had said it.

‘Did you?’ Brigid’s voice was high; frightened.

‘No,’ said Aine. ‘Why?’

But Brigid was gone, out through the kitchen and beyond the back door to catch up with the others. Aine’s face was flushed with fear. She found her shoes and pulled them on.

‘Oh, Jesus,’ said Gerard. ‘Oh, Jesus.’ He walked around Specks, who watched him uneasily. Now that Gerard had seen it, Trish pulled the saddle off and threw it up on the gate.

‘Poor old Specks,’ she said. She had never liked him; said he was an ugly old cob, but she didn’t blame him for it. Despite the bit of white that showed in his eye there was no badness in him.

Brigid had come up to the gate and was looking at him.

‘The saddle was on him,’ said Trish. ‘But no bridle.’

‘No bridle?’ said Brigid. ‘Dear God. What on earth has happened?’

‘It’s possible he was tied up somewhere,’ said Trish. ‘If he pulled loose he might have left the bridle behind.’

Gerard nodded. ‘It’s possible,’ he said. ‘Or if she fell and held on to the reins she could have pulled it off.’

Between the big house and the stable yard, Joseph stood, afraid to come too close. Aine was beside him, clutching at his shirt sleeve.

‘In any case, we’d better start looking,’ said Gerard.

Gerard sped off up the boirin in the pick-up, then abruptly slowed down. She could be anywhere. She could have been coming home; right under his nose. He would have to be careful.

He turned his head from side to side as he drove. The boirin was a mess. On the left, the boundary was a rusting straggle of barbed wire and broken sheep netting, through which brambles and nettles were growing and spreading in all directions. A few tumbled stones showed that there had once been a wall, but Gerard couldn’t remember it being there.

He did, though, remember putting up the white electric tape to keep the horses and cattle in. It was supposed to have been a temporary measure.

The farm was running down. Gerard had got out of sheep and into sport horses at exactly the right moment, before the grants came in and everybody wanted them. He had sold dozens of home-bred youngsters, and they had expanded, bought more stock and built the bungalow for Thomas. Everything was booming, growing, improving. But the market had flooded and Gerard hadn’t had the foresight to move quickly enough into anything else. The cattle were keeping everything ticking over, but there was nothing to spare; nothing for post and rail fencing. All the same, he had to admit that it would have cost nothing to clear up the mess; drag the rusty wire to the dump and burn the old posts. He could hear Thomas’s disapproval nagging away at the back of his mind. It would never have been neglected like that if he was still running the place.

He had come to a stop where the boirin met the main road and he sat looking left and right, wondering which way he was going. With a shock that sent acids cutting through his circulation, he remembered. He turned to the left, and as he did so he saw Brigid in the Kadett behind him, inching up to the junction, turning the opposite way. He was ashamed, certain that she knew he had forgotten, the way she knew everything about him; everything about everyone.

He crawled for a hundred yards along the road, scanning the hedgerows. It was difficult, even at that speed, and he wished he had brought someone with him. Where was she, for God’s sake? There must be some obvious answer, some safe and happy outcome. His mind ran down various alleys of possibility. They were all blocked.

Brigid turned right on to the main road and then immediately left again, up a single-track road that led towards the mountains. She was surprised that Gerard had not gone that way. It seemed the most obvious place to look.

They had cattle up there, about thirty of them, all bullocks, ranging on a hundred acres of hillside. The land didn’t look like much in farming terms, but Brigid knew they were lucky to have it. The area was limestone based, and the mountains were almost entirely bare rock. Some said that it was a natural process of erosion that had taken place over the millennia, and others said that it was the result of over-grazing by the livestock of nomadic peoples in more recent times. There might, in the end, be no way of knowing for sure, but the consequences were beyond doubt. The bald mountains acted as heat-banks, and along the sides of them alpine shrubs and flowers grew. On the best-sheltered flanks were areas where between the rocks, grasses and other fodder plants thrived throughout the year. These areas were generally left to the wild goats during the summer, but in the winter they could support small numbers of cattle without any supplementation at all. Except for water. Despite its high rainfall, the region was classified as desert, since it possessed hardly any natural reservoirs, and the run-off from the rocks passed directly into underground bores.

The place was famous. People came from all over the world to visit it, but for the life of her Brigid couldn’t imagine why. It was grey and dreary. Counting the cattle up there was just another chore on a list. One that she never undertook. One that Martina and Specks regularly did.

Brigid’s voice ran a commentary, a continuous loop inside her head. ‘It’ll be all right. It has to be. It’ll be all right, please God.’

She jammed on the brakes. There was a flash of colour in a gateway; bright blue and black, but even before Brigid stopped, she knew. It was plastic. Fertiliser bags and bale-wrap scrunched up together and stuffed down behind the gatepost. Brigid put a hand to her face and closed her eyes. Her heart was banging in her chest, frightening her. She gritted her teeth. The stupid girl was probably fast asleep in a comfortable bed somewhere. And when she found her, she would kill her.

Gerard got out of the pick-up and pushed open the gate into one of Dan Flaherty’s fields. It was badly hung and he had to drag it across the muddy ground, ploughed and pitted by the feet of standing cattle.