Thin Air (6 page)

But what? Brigid ran through possibilities in her mind but there was nothing dangerous at all that she could think of. There were no snakes, no poisonous creatures or vicious ones; no bogs, no briars, not the slightest chance of strangers. Yet still she stood, reluctant. The sun rose higher and dispelled the shade. Time was pressing. If she crossed the glade and climbed the next shelf, she would be high enough to get the view across the valley that she wanted. If she wasn’t going to do it, she should turn and head back now, and waste no more time.

On the edge of her vision something moved. Brigid looked up and around. The grey hills seemed to shimmer and pulsate, as though they were alive and alert; aware of everything that was happening. Brigid tried but failed to erase the impression from her consciousness. Nothing seemed to make any sense, but at least things could hardly get any worse. The bottom had already fallen out of her world, Brigid took a deep breath, pushed through the perimeter of low bushes and began to descend.

Trish and Aine set out to search the surrounding fields. They started in the orchard behind Thomas’s house where Specks lived, then continued on around the boundaries of the farm and along the lake-shore until they met Joseph and Thomas and Popeye coming back the other way.

‘No luck?’ said Thomas. Trish shook her head.

‘God, I don’t know,’ he said. Aine took his hand and he squeezed hers.

‘Don’t be worrying,’ he said, but she knew that he was.

Trish looked out across the lake. She had the stories from Martina and Thomas, or some of them at least. That the lake demanded a sacrifice every seven years. And, worse, that Cormac Mac Ruadh came out by night looking for a bride to drag down to the watery city in the depths. The ones that didn’t measure up to his expectations he let go again, to float up to the surface. But when he found the right one, she would never be seen by mortal eyes again.

‘She couldn’t be in the lake, anyway,’ said Joseph. ‘Sure she couldn’t?’

‘Course she couldn’t,’ said Thomas. ‘How could she?’

Dan had got up at last. He was standing at the door in vest and braces looking from Gerard to his truck, which was lying across the road where he had left it, in the middle of a three-point turn.

‘How’re you, Ger?’ he said. ‘What’s going on?’ In the shed, the frustrated barking turned into sustained howls.

Brigid inched carefully down into the glen, holding on to the stems of hazel, straight and strong. Once she grew accustomed to the shade she was surprised by how bright it was, and how green after the grey rocks above. Every stone was coated in soft moss and between them the ground was covered in shamrock and wild strawberry. Brigid stood still. Narrow, purposeful paths wound between the trees. Not far from her feet was the earthy opening to a lair of some kind, and a musky scent hung in the air above it. The place frightened her. Even though she had been born and brought up in town, she believed that her years on the farm had brought her to an understanding of the countryside. Now she knew that she was wrong. The atmosphere in that mountainy place was as alien to her as a foreign land. She was an intruder there; she did not know the language or the laws or the currency. Nor could she be certain about what she was doing there, even though it had all seemed so clear a few moments earlier. Martina was lost, but wherever she was, it certainly wasn’t in here.

Specks was still loose in the yard when Trish and Aine got back. He was licking his saddle and Trish took it down from the gate and brought it into the tack room. The first thing she saw when she went in was a New Zealand rug, neatly folded, exactly as she had left it.

She swallowed down a rising anger. The rug belonged to one of the older brood mares who had been suffering from pneumonia. When the weather was mild they took it off her during the day, but she still needed it at night. Clearly Gerard hadn’t bothered to put it on her the previous evening. It was typical of his negligent style.

Aine was waiting for her in the yard. As Trish closed the tack-room door she said: ‘Do you think it was Specks’s fault?’

‘No way,’ said Trish. ‘Was it, Specks?’

The cob huffed at her pockets and she patted his neck. Aine reached up for a handful of his mane and bent her left leg at the knee. Trish bumped her up. Specks showed no sign of noticing and followed Trish to the feed shed.

‘Whose fault is it, then?’ Aine asked.

Trish closed the shed door to stop Specks walking in behind her. He turned his head and sniffed at Aine’s foot.

‘We don’t know if it’s anybody’s fault,’ said Trish, emerging with a double handful of nuts and dropping them on to a clean patch of concrete. ‘We don’t know what’s happened, or if anything has happened, so we can’t say if it’s anybody’s fault, can we?’

‘Ooh, er,’ said Aine, as Specks’s head went down to pick up the nuts.

‘You’re all right,’ said Trish, returning to the feed shed. ‘Just sit up straight.’

The Nipper was banging furiously at his door, maddened by the sight of Specks eating. Trish came out with a full bucket and a scoop. Aine sat up, balanced herself and began to plait a few strands of mane at Specks’s withers.

‘What if somebody knew she was missing and never said anything?’ she said.

‘Why would they do that?’

Aine shrugged. ‘But if they did?’

‘Nobody would do something like that,’ said Trish. ‘Why would they?’

She went into The Nipper’s box and pushed past him to the manger. She knew by the way he moved, even before she felt the white leg.

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ she said. But she said it under her breath, aware that Aine was just outside the door.

Gerard phoned the hospital from Dan’s dark and grimy kitchen. The dogs snuffled at his legs and his groin from behind and shrank back slyly each time he turned round.

Dan moved around heavily in the adjacent bedroom, unconscious of his grunts and farts. The hospital took ages to answer, and then ages to find the woman who should have been at the admissions desk. Gerard turned his back to the wall and let fly a kick at the dogs, who slunk into an aggrieved huddle beside the cold, greasy range. Above them, a dozen joints of rank, home-cured bacon hung from a beam. It was years since Gerard had been in the house. It hadn’t changed at all.

With an effort of will, Brigid remembered her purpose. Quietly, holding her breath, she stepped forward on to the floor of the glade. Wild garlic bruised beneath her feet and filled the air with its pungency. The delicate leaves of the shamrock bent and sprang back. A yellow-breasted bird with a coal-black cap chattered on a branch. Brigid was just beginning to breathe more freely when a loud report, sudden as a gunshot, froze her to the spot. She looked around but she could see nothing. She was out of her depth or tuned to the wrong frequency, and she was frightened.

The sound came again, and this time she identified it as a brisk snort. She knew the sound, and all at once she located its origin. Thirty yards further on, the ground began to slope steeply up as it met the foot of the next craggy shelf. Among the mossy rocks, considerably higher than Brigid, a wild goat was standing, looking straight at her. Brigid stared back, disarmed. She wasn’t surprised to find goats there. They often came down into the lower meadows and had to be chased off the good land and back up into the rocks. What did surprise her, however, was the poise and confidence in the creature’s bearing. This was not a servile farmyard animal but something quite different. No one owned her. No one ever would. This place was her place. This time it was Brigid who was trespassing.

The goat was brown and white. She stood absolutely still. And then, as though her brain had suddenly cracked some visual code, Brigid could see them all. There were black ones and white ones, a grey kid and a piebald one and one that was almost the same colour as Specks. All of them stared at her, their yellow eyes narrow and remote. Smoothly, in complete agreement with one another, they moved off. They were lean and strong and agile. Brigid did not count them.

Instead she turned and started to make her way back out of the glade the way she had come. Some sort of insanity had brought her in here and she was wasting her time and her energy.

Trish put a head collar on Specks and he followed her out through the gate of the yard and down the edge of the turn-out paddock. Aine sat as if she was in an armchair. Four neat plaits hung down on to the cob’s shoulder and she was working on a fifth. Trish led them through the gate into the jumps field, then gave the rope to Aine.

Specks’s head went down and he began to graze. Trish left Aine to battle with him about it and walked on into the field. She looked closely at each jump as she passed it, keeping an eye out for the bridle. A fall at a jump would be an obvious place to lose one.

The admissions woman eventually came on to the line, just as Dan emerged, fully clothed from the bedroom. They both spoke at once. Gerard turned to face the wall again. Dan kicked the dogs outside and filled the kettle noisily. Gerard put down the phone.

‘Not there, anyway,’ he said.

‘I’ll tell you what you’ll do, now,’ said Dan. It was typical of him, always knowing best. Gerard turned away to hide his irritation.

‘You’ll go on home,’ Dan went on, ‘and get a bit of breakfast for yourself. By the time you have that done, I’ll have a few of the lads gathered down at your house.’

Gerard bottled an impotent rage.

‘The way we’ll have the whole place covered,’ said Dan. ‘And then we’ll be sure to find her, God bless her.’

Gerard nodded and went out to the car. Despite his annoyance with Dan he knew that he was right. He needed to relax, be methodical, take things a step at a time. But as he completed the turn and drove away he was aware of the island behind him exerting some kind of force. It sent shivers down his spine.

When Brigid emerged from the hazel a brown hare, gilded by the sun, loped off across the rocks and vanished into the hillside. Brigid made her way carefully back. At every step a different kind of flower seemed to be growing out of some little toe-hold in the limestone. Brigid said their names like a rosary and felt comforted. Only once did she look back. The goats were at the top of the next step on the mountain, standing against the skyline, watching.

At the far side of the jumps field a circular track had been beaten out of the grass by the passage of many hooves. This was where Trish and Gerard lunged the young horses and got them jumping. Trish didn’t like the system. She felt that Gerard put the jumps up too high too fast and, although the horses usually developed a tremendous athleticism, most of them came out of the education over-anxious and inclined to refuse. Trish preferred to start the youngsters more slowly, over trotting poles and brush-piles, gradually progressing to low walls and barrels. But Gerard was impatient and said they couldn’t afford to spend that amount of time. The horses got educated his way.

Just as everything else had to be done his way. The woman that Trish had trained with ran a tight ship; everything tidy and orderly. The horses learned at their own speed and their needs came above those of everybody else. Trish had loved it. But Gerard’s operation couldn’t have been more different. It was a rusting hulk; undermanned and leaking.

Trish stopped at the edge of the lunging ring and looked back across the field to where Aine had won the battle with Specks and was riding him round in a tight, left-handed circle. Trish was fond of her; fond of all the children in the family. It was a shame that people had to have parents.

As soon as he was out of sight of Dan’s house, Gerard stopped and turned round in his seat. The island was still brightening in the morning sun; becoming green and fresh. But the feelings it engendered in Gerard were uniformly unpleasant. Monks had lived there once, and when he was a boy he had teased his brother Peadar about their ghosts. He had given them names and different-coloured cowls, and he described them all so vividly that Peadar swore he could see them as well. With a shock, Gerard remembered how he had felt when Peadar said that; how a monstrous fear had loomed at the edge of his consciousness. What if they had actually become real? What if the clear delineations of the actual world had broken down and left the human race open to an invasion by its own imagination? It had scared him far more than it ever scared Peadar. He had suddenly seen Thomas’s stories everywhere; in the ground, in the water, in the fallen stones of the monastery and the cottages and the fort. Unable to cope, he had relegated them to a sealed cell in the deepest recesses of his mind where they still lay, unregarded and untold, corrupt and terrifying. He suppressed them with television, with drink, with the solid, patriarchal comfort of the mass. But as he watched the island now they threatened to emerge, and fear crawled up his spine.

Specks was tired of walking round in a circle. He stopped and put his head down to graze again, pulling Aine forward so that she either had to let go of the lead rope or fall off down his neck.

‘Trish!’ she yelled. ‘I need another rope!’

‘Let him eat,’ she called back. ‘You can ride him properly later.’

Trish sighed and returned to her search. One of the jumps on the lunging track was very high, getting on for four and a half feet. It was clear that while she had been away on her day off, Gerard had been pushing somebody very hard. She remembered the heat in The Nipper’s leg and swore under her breath. It was the last straw. As soon as things settled down, she would be out of there and gone.

Brigid drove back to the main road, but she wasn’t ready to go home, yet. Instead, she took another mountain lane and turned on to the unmetalled famine road which ran for several miles along the mountainside parallel to the lake. The fierceness of her concentration was making her tired and confused, and just as the light glanced off the pale rocks and hurt her eyes, so her own thoughts were beginning to cause darting pains in her solar plexus.

There were several good vantage points along the road, but Brigid didn’t get out of the car again. When the boirin rejoined the tarred road she drove straight home. The back door of the house was open but there was no one about. Despite the sun which blazed down outside, the kitchen was cold, and its silence was unbearable. Brigid turned on the radio, looked at it for a moment, then went back outside.