Thin Air (5 page)

He decided not to drive in and went back to turn off the engine. He would be able to see more on foot, and he began by closely examining the ground. One or two of the prints there might have been made by a horse but he couldn’t be sure. As he dragged the gate shut again, it occurred to him that he was wasting his time. The cob could jump, he knew, but he probably wouldn’t. If he had lost Martina in this field he would still be here, stuffing his ugly face.

All the same, Gerard found that he had to look; had to be sure. He walked across to where a pair of parallel green banks marked the beginning of the ancient road known as the Old Line. It had always been a favourite riding place, even for him, as a boy. It was long and straight and soft and green. The horses seemed to find it as inviting as their riders, and always danced across the grass like racehorses going to the start. When he was young, if he opened Flaherty’s gate and Kelly’s gate Gerard could gallop for more than half a mile in a long, graceful curve exactly parallel to the lake-shore. But Flaherty’s gate was gone now and the gap closed up. The old road ran underneath the hedgerow and vanished. On the other side, Matty Kelly had ploughed up the land and reseeded it. Gerard had been shocked. He was still shocked, all these years later. Nowadays it wouldn’t be allowed.

There were only three or four hundred clear yards left of the Old Line, but even so it was still a fairly decent gallop. Martina often came here with the cob and Trish sometimes came with her, to give some young horse a pipe-opener. The banks weren’t high, but Gerard walked along the top of one of them anyway, to get the best possible look at the surrounding land. Dan Flaherty’s cattle lifted their heads from their grazing and watched him as he passed. There was nothing unusual to be seen, and the few horse prints that he did find were old and blunted by rain.

Joseph went down to the bungalow to tell Thomas. He hated going down there, hated the tacky new house, hated having a grandfather who lived out the back. He was afraid of finding Thomas dead; had been since Thomas told him that he had found his own grandfather dead when he was a teenager. He was also afraid of finding Thomas engaged in some kind of private and repulsive activity, like masturbating or pissing in the sink. He was particularly in dread of these things since last night.

‘Grandda?’

The back door was open and the dog came bounding out. Joseph rubbed its ears. He had never heard it bark and it crossed his mind that perhaps it couldn’t, for some reason. Maybe it was a freak. Maybe Thomas had had it de-barked. He wondered if there was such an operation and, if so, could his sister get it. He heard Stephen’s voice. ‘Imagine that! A woman that didn’t talk back!’ and was immediately ashamed for thinking it, especially in the circumstances.

Thomas came to the door, a cup of tea steaming in his hand.

‘Ah,’ he said, stuck for a moment, embarrassed because he could not, could never remember Joseph’s name. He was the quietest of all of them; the darkest and the most distant. Somehow they had never hit it off.

‘You’re about early,’ he said, in the end.

‘Martina’s gone missing,’ said Joseph. ‘The horse came home this morning without her.’

Thomas’s face seemed to collapse. ‘Oh, dear,’ he said. ‘That isn’t good. That isn’t good at all.’

He went back inside, pulled a chair out from under the kitchen table and sat down on it. That, Joseph thought, was a lot of help.

It wasn’t long before Gerard was quite certain that Martina wasn’t on the Old Line, nor had been. But he also knew that if he turned back before the end he would always be wondering. He dropped down on to the road again, remembering every step of it. There had been charioteers here once; real ones. An archaeological survey in the fifties had shown that the track had once run all the way around the lake, but for some reason the banks on the other side had been lost. They had found chariot hand grips and bits of wheel hubs. Celtic ones; Irish. Thomas used to say that charioteers still raced along the road on nights of the new moon. He said they went straight through the gates and hedges as if they weren’t there, all around the lake from one side to the other and back again. He said that if you heard them you should lie down and close your eyes and pray to Saint Patrick. He said he had heard them himself one time, coming back across the fields from the mart in Ennis with Jackie Flynn. But Jackie Flynn got annoyed if he was asked about it, so Gerard could never get the truth.

Not that he didn’t know what the truth was. He was sure that Thomas didn’t believe the stories himself, but felt under some sort of ancestral compulsion to hand them down to anyone who would listen. A chill went through him and he looked out over the lake to where the island stood, bull-like, in its own early-morning shadow. Gods. Fairies. He had never been able to work out which was which, or whether they were the same things, or who it was that had been banished to live under the ground when the Milesians had come to rule the surface of the land.

He had come to the end of the field. He looked across into the next one, but there was no reason to go any further. Martina couldn’t have anyway, unless she had jumped the cob over the hedge. He turned and started back the way he had come. Surely to God the girl had turned up at home by now. She was probably sitting at the range, drinking a hot cup of tea. Maybe she had hurt her leg. Or her head; got a knock, perhaps. On the road.

He broke into a run. Why was he out here, wandering around the fields when he hadn’t even thought of phoning the hospital?

As soon as the others had gone, Trish thought of it. Her brother had died of tetanus when he was seventeen and she had been a realist ever since when it came to life and death. She had no problem imagining Martina in a hospital bed; comatose, brain-damaged. She parked Aine in front of the television in the cottage while she phoned; first Ennis, then Limerick, and finally the Galway Regional. Martina wasn’t in any of them.

Brigid turned off the metalled road and drove up a long, gently curving boirin which ran between green, sloping meadows and on up into the grey crags where the winterage lay. She drove slowly, watching carefully, finding no clues. Grass grew in between the stony tyre-tracks and Martina was in the habit of cantering all the way up. It was the main reason that she was always so willing to ride up there to check on the cattle. Brigid tried to imagine the thrill of it, of speeding along the track on horseback, but she failed. It had never appealed to her. She admired the horses from a distance but had always been afraid to get too close.

The track narrowed as she got higher, but remained passable for the Kadett right up to the end. There was a space to turn, a gate, and on the other side of it, a concrete water trough fed by a trickling spring. Other than that there was nothing. Just rock. As Brigid got out of the car the sun appeared over the easternmost hills, casting sudden shadows, creating contrast. Brigid opened the gate and went through it and past the dribbling trough. A cattle-path led on upwards, winding among the spurs and faults of the grey crags. The going was awkward enough, and Brigid was fairly certain that Martina always left Specks tied to the gate when she walked in to look at the cattle. The limestone was flaky and criss-crossed with grikes, some a few inches deep, others twenty feet or more, their dark depths concealed by ferns and mosses that grew on their walls, far beneath Brigid’s feet. Even where a thin covering of soil allowed for the growth of coarse grass there could be holes. Brigid had always considered the shoes she wore to be sensible, but now she wasn’t so sure. The heels were not high but they were narrow and unstable. Already her ankles were beginning to tire.

She walked on, rounding a shoulder of rock which hid the trough, the car, all signs of civilisation from her view. The path now seemed less like a path and more like an invitation, a tendency perhaps, the most obvious way forward. She was now quite certain that a horse could not have come up here, but once started she couldn’t turn back. Just around the next turn, or the next …

She found that she was walking with an urgency that hurt. There were pains in her thighs and in her calves, and her pulse was racing at her throat. There was now no hint of a track at all. Instead there was a desire to be up high; to reach a vantage point and to look out over the landscape from it; to be able to see everything. Brigid was surprised by herself, by the soundness of the instinct that had led her there, and she stopped to look back.

She had climbed into shadow again, on to a flat area of grike-covered pavement, one of a number of terrace-like levels that stepped their way up the mountainside. Vegetation was minimal around her, but ahead, between where she stood and the next craggy terrace wall, was an area of low hazel scrub, waist-high perhaps. It was grey as the rocks around it, except where a taller ash tree rose out of it, and then it was white. In a few weeks’ time everything would be bursting with green, but it was hard, now, to imagine it.

A raven flew over, its wings so noisy in the air that it frightened her until it came into view. She watched it as it circled above the place where the car was and came back over her head again. She was certain that it was looking at her; checking her out. It gave her the creeps. The whole place did. It was dry and lifeless, ancient and cold. Godless.

She shivered, pulled her light jacket around her and went on.

Thomas and Joseph walked up to the yard just as Trish and Aine returned from the house.

‘Where have they all gone tearing off to?’ said Thomas.

‘They’re looking for her,’ said Trish.

Thomas shook his head as he opened the gate and went into the yard. He inspected the cob carefully, bending double to look at his belly and to run a practised hand down his legs.

‘There’s not a mark on him,’ said Trish.

‘No,’ said Thomas, straightening up slowly. ‘’Tis very queer.’

Specks nudged politely at Thomas’s pockets. Thomas found a few crumbling horse nuts and gave them to him. ‘And come here to me,’ he went on. ‘Was there any talk at all of going around to the neighbours? Of doing the thing right?’

Trish shook her head.

‘I might as well wait and see,’ said Thomas. ‘Have we looked around our own fields yet?’

Gerard closed the stiff gate and got back into the pick-up. The road was too narrow to turn in, so he drove on to the end, to where Dan Flaherty’s house was. As he turned the truck, he looked out beyond Dan’s little landing-stage at the still waters of the lake and was suddenly struck by a horror that he could barely comprehend. There were nine miles of shore, not including the island. Within riding distance there were a dozen places where a road or a track met the water’s edge. Every seven years, it was said, the lake claimed a victim. Gerard’s mind began to wander back towards the last one, but he diverted it; stopped the engine and got out. Dan Flaherty’s dogs were choking with fury and curiosity inside their closed shed, and his ancient donkey, still woolly from the winter, watched in amazement as Gerard passed by.

Brigid walked on towards the hazel scrub, stepping carefully, aware of how dangerously tired her ankles were becoming. She could see the process of erosion at work, where flakes of limestone had broken from the bedrock exposing fossilised mud-layers, some with shells in. She began to notice plants as well; the dark-loving ferns in the grikes, and anemones, and tiny, primitive rose bushes with millions of soft little thorns. All her life she had lived within sight of these mountains. She drove through them several times a week, on her way to Ennis. Now she realised that despite their growing fame as a tourist attraction, she knew nothing about them at all. The schools had brought all her kids on field trips and they had drawn pictures in their copy books. But she, herself, knew nothing.

There were three wooden boats upturned on the grass beside the landing stage. One of them belonged to Dan and the others to a nephew of his who brought fishing parties down from Dublin. The water was murky along the shoreline, but the bottom was just visible. In the summer the algae grew so thick that it covered the surface completely and nothing could be seen. Two dogs had died there the previous year from swallowing water in the shallows, and people were being advised not to swim there any more. All the local farmers had been asked to reduce the use of nitrates on any land that might drain towards the lake. Gerard knew exactly who would comply with that request and who would ignore it.

There were no hoofprints anywhere around. Gerard scuffed backwards and forwards for a while and threw a large stone into the water, watching the mud rise and settle, feeling child-like, feeling helpless. Out in the lake, the island was slowly brightening like a living thing waking up. Martina often rode out there, sometimes even walked across the fields and brought a picnic. It was one of her favourite places. The last time that they had ridden together, before Gerard came off The Nipper and damaged his back, before he had employed Trish, that was where they had gone.

Gerard had tried to persuade Martina to sell Specks and to help himself and Trish with the youngsters they were always bringing on. There would never be a shortage of riding and he had promised never to put her on anything hot or brainless. She had refused, said that she loved Specks; she felt safe with him and would never sell him. It was a stupid attitude. The cob was pig-ugly. He had a weak shoulder and a hollow back, and his action was so bad that it was a miracle he didn’t break his own legs. Even Trish agreed with that, though she reckoned that he was clever as a cat and always knew where his feet were. She thought she knew it all, Trish did, the little cow. But who was clever now?

Brigid had come to the edge of the hazel and was looking for some sign of a pathway through it when she realised that she had been quite mistaken about its nature. What she had taken for sparse, waist-high bushes were in fact the tops of much taller trees and bushes which had their feet in a declivity; a glen which dropped steeply down from where she stood. There was something sinister about the place. The descent, down ten feet of damp, mossy cliff was treacherous in itself. Worse, it seemed to lead into darkness. Anything might be down there.