Thin Air (7 page)

Gerard couldn’t tear his eyes away from the island. Despite his resistance, a ghoulish flood of memories was being unleashed and he was in their grip. There was supposed to be a money-hole somewhere underneath the old wall that ran along the bottom of the north-facing slope. Thomas said that Cormac Mac Ruadh, the chieftain who had built the fort, had buried his gold there and set a trusted warrior to stand watch over it. At Cormac’s request, the warrior swore to guard it, dead or alive, and there and then, Cormac struck off his head. The story told that his spirit, in the form of a man with a bull’s head, still waited there, and if anyone ever came close to discovering where the money-hole was, a terrible fate would befall them. Thomas said that two of the archaeologists involved in the dig had met with mysterious deaths, but Anthony said that they never went anywhere near the island at all.

As he finally turned to drive away, Gerard realised that he had always preferred Anthony’s versions of the truth to Thomas’s.

Thomas got back into the car, disturbing Joseph’s dreams, causing him to sigh and sit up. They were outside Anthony Daly’s house on their way round to gather all the neighbours.

‘Dan has already phoned him,’ he said. ‘He says there’s no need for us to go around. Everybody’s letting some other one know.’

Joseph reached forward and made another attempt to find his favourite station on the car radio. Thomas wished he could take to him.

‘Can you think of anywhere else we should look?’ he said.

Joseph found the wavelength at last and leaned back in the seat, looking out towards the lake, seeing nothing.

‘Are you on this planet at all?’ said Thomas.

‘Yeah,’ said Joseph. ‘Course I am. Are you?’

Thomas started the engine and they drove home in silence.

Brigid saw Aine on Specks and went over to her just as Trish completed her circuit of the field.

‘Do you really think it’s safe to do that?’ Brigid asked.

‘Do what?’

‘Leave the child on the horse.’

‘Specks is all right.’

‘You could be wrong, you know,’ said Brigid. ‘We don’t know yet what has happened to Martina.’

Trish patted the cob noisily on the shoulder.

‘Specks is safe as houses,’ she said.

He stretched out to investigate Brigid. She pushed his nose away and reached up for Aine, who slid off into her arms. Trish’s anger spoke inside her head as she unbuckled the horse’s head collar and pushed him away to graze. ‘He’s an awful lot safer than some people not a million miles away from here. Ever think of getting him gelded, Mrs?’

Brigid cut across her thoughts. ‘Is he supposed to be in here?’

‘No,’ said Trish. ‘But there won’t be any jumping done today.’

Specks wandered off to a muddy patch of ground and dropped himself carefully, knees first then haunches. He rolled clean over first time, then back, then back again.

‘That makes him worth three hundred pounds more than we paid for him,’ said Aine. Brigid took her hand and led her out through the gate. She wished she hadn’t said that to Trish, who knew far more about the horses than she ever would. She had no reason to mistrust the girl, but she did, and had done from the day she took up the job.

Trish watched them go, the woman clumsy in her silly shoes, finding the muddy going difficult. She expected to feel the familiar resentment at unearned mistrust, but surprisingly she didn’t. She pitied her.

Aine turned round and waved. Trish waved back.

‘We phoned around the hospitals, Mrs Keane. She isn’t in any of them.’

Brigid turned.

‘Me and Aine,’ said Trish, in case she had been wondering.

Gerard’s pick-up drew up at the front of the house, closely followed by Thomas’s Golf. Brigid hurried in, leaving Aine to drift in more casually behind her.

‘Any news?’

Gerard shook his head.

‘Oh, Gerard,’ she said. She thought he might reach out to her, hold her, offer her comfort, but he never had, and it was clear that the current crisis changed nothing. He went on through to the kitchen and pulled out the frying pan. She followed him.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Making breakfast.’

‘How can you make breakfast?’ For an instant she thought it was a joke, and looked towards the door, expecting Martina to dance in and say ‘Boo!’

‘How can you make breakfast?’ she repeated.

Aine slipped away to the sitting room, away from the gathering tension.

‘There’s an explanation for all this somewhere,’ said Gerard. ‘In the meantime, we have to eat. Has anybody been on to her friends?’

Brigid shook her head.

‘Why don’t you do that, then? Instead of flapping around like a headless chicken and worrying about what other people are doing?’

Joseph came in and went straight to the cupboard. He pulled down two packets of cereals and put them on the counter-top. Thomas came in more slowly.

‘Any news?’

Brigid got out milk and closed the fridge. Gerard opened it again and got out rashers and sausages. Both shook their heads. Joseph poured two different cereals into a bowl. Brigid left the milk in front of him and went out to the phone.

Aine liked the programme that was on, but she couldn’t sit still. She bounced on the sofa even though it wasn’t allowed, and when no one came in to stop her she bounced harder, then ran across the room and jumped on to it, then did it again. A terrible kind of energy possessed her and she ran and jumped and ran until she was too tired to do it any more, and then she went back into the kitchen, red in the face with her own heat.

None of Martina’s friends had seen her. When Brigid came back into the kitchen, Gerard went out to phone the Guards. Joseph was standing over the fry and Aine was standing at his elbow, looking into the pan.

‘Can I have that one?’ she asked, pointing to a long sausage with a little crisp nodule at the end.

Joseph gave her a wink. ‘You want the one with the knob on?’ he said. ‘We’ll have to see now, won’t we? Have you been a good girl?’

Aine shrugged. She knew it was a joke but it made her feel uncomfortable all the same.

‘Haven’t buried any sisters lately?’ Joseph went on.

‘Joseph!’ Brigid strode over and took the fish-slice from him.

‘What?’

‘How can you talk like that? This is serious. Don’t you realise that?’

‘She’ll turn up, for God’s sake! What can have happened to her, after all?’

In the silence that followed, Brigid dished up the fry and Thomas buttered bread and stacked it in the middle of the table. His lips had a blueish tinge which would have worried Brigid on another day. Joseph stood with his hands in his pockets looking sulkily out of the window. Aine watched as her mother gave the sausage with the knob on to Thomas, but she didn’t dare say anything.

Gerard phoned the sergeant’s house but he was out. His wife said that she would tell him when he came in, and that in the meantime he ought to find a good photograph and get on to HQ in Ennis. Gerard said that he would, and he sat for a long time on the chair in the hallway trying to work up the courage. It seemed too serious, somehow, or melodramatic. It would move Martina’s absence into another category. He couldn’t bring himself to do it.

By the time he went back into the kitchen, the others had finished breakfast. As though he had disturbed something, everyone began to move at once. Joseph cleared a chair for him and began to gather dishes. Aine dragged Thomas into the sitting room to watch television with her. Brigid pulled on rubber gloves and began to run water into the sink. From there she could see the mountains, pale and grey against a paler, greyer sky. She was aware of a sense of defeat, as though she had tried to scale them and turned back. But that wasn’t what had happened. When she thought of it, of the hazel and the wild goats, it set her nerves on edge again. But she remembered why it was that she had wanted to get up high, and it was suddenly more important than ever.

She took off the gloves and dropped them in a pile beside the unfinished dishes.

‘I’m not staying here,’ she said. ‘I just can’t.’

Aine tried both the channels. There was a boring black and white film on one of them and pop music on the other. She had posters all over her walls and stickers all over her school copies, but she wasn’t really interested in the music the bands played. She turned it off and tried to turn Thomas on instead.

‘Daddy says Specks is a tinker’s cob,’ she said.

‘Does he?’

‘Yes. Is he?’

‘No. He just says that because he doesn’t like him. He says it because Specks is the kind of horse the Travellers like.’

‘Why did you buy him?’ said Aine.

‘Because Martina was frightened of the young horses here.’

‘I wouldn’t be.’

‘No. I dare say you wouldn’t.’

‘But why Specks?’

‘Because he was quiet and good.’

‘Yes, but why Specks?’

Thomas was on the verge of impatience when he realised what the child was asking.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘You’re looking for a story.’

Aine nodded

‘But, sure, you have heard that story a hundred times.’

‘Tell it again.’

‘I won’t,’ he said, but he was smiling and she knew that he would.

As soon as Brigid was gone, Gerard began to feel restless.

He finished his breakfast quickly and dropped his plate into the abandoned suds. Joseph was clearly in a dream. He was standing with the dishcloth in his hand, wiping the same bit of the table over and over again. Gerard swallowed a rising anger. He knew that he should try to renew his relationship with the boy. He also knew that he couldn’t do it now.

The phone rang and he answered it. It was the sergeant, who took an eternity to offer plenty of concern and no help at all. Gerard did his best to remain polite, but it was almost more than he could do.

Brigid parked the car in the same place and climbed over the gate. The hazel was further away than she had remembered and the unexpected heat of the spring sun seemed to be magnified by the bare rock. At that moment it felt very much like a desert, despite the tiny pools of water that still lay in the shell-holes in the rocks, left there by recent rain.

She could hear a tractor moving in the valley below but, far from being a comforting sound it intensified the eerie atmosphere and increased the sense of isolation. She had intended to take the same route as she had earlier, but now she found that she was already further to the left than she meant to be. It was mildly irritating, but what was worse, and already causing problems, was that she had not had the sense to look for some wellingtons before she came. Her ankles were aching. For the first time she understood why walkers often used sticks. A stick now would help with balance, and with feeling out good ground. She wished that she had one.

‘Oscar took hold of the gold bracelet to pick it up off the ground,’ said Thomas, well into his stride by now and beginning to enjoy himself. ‘He gave it a good old tug but it wouldn’t come up.’ He mimed someone leaning forward and trying to pull something out of the ground. Aine watched, entranced.

‘Still it didn’t come,’ Thomas went on. ‘So finally he planted his two feet, like this, and hauled away. And you know what?’

‘What?’ said Aine. Gerard had come into the room and was hunting around on the mantelpiece for something, but neither of them took any notice of him.

‘Up it came,’ said Thomas. ‘Up it came, but guess what came with it?’

‘The bull,’ Aine cried. ‘It was a big ring through the end of the bull’s nose!’

‘The bull was on the end of it,’ Thomas confirmed. ‘And Oscar was in a right fix, wasn’t he?’

Gerard found the photo he was looking for among a pile of magazines. ‘Is that a good one of her, would you say?’ he said.

Aine and Thomas took turns to examine the photograph. It had been taken by Trish the year before, at the Galway Races. Martina was wearing a smart tweed trouser suit, the kind of thing she was never seen wearing at home. The wind was trying to blow her floppy hat away and she was laughing, hanging on to it with one hand and holding a long cigar in the other.

‘She didn’t usually look like that,’ said Aine.

‘What do you want it for?’ said Thomas.

Gerard didn’t want to tell them. He shrugged.

Aine didn’t like the photograph. It didn’t represent the warm, comforting Martina that she knew. That person at the races was someone else, someone not known to her at all.

‘Trish has some other ones,’ she said. ‘Better ones.’

‘We have better ones ourself,’ said Gerard. But when he came to think about it, he wasn’t sure that they did.

When he went back into the kitchen, Joseph was still wiping the corner of the table, over and over, as if he were stroking it. Gerard fought down the impulse to hit him. Instead he snatched the cloth out of his hand and hurled it at the draining board, where it sent a dozen knives and forks clattering to the floor. Joseph said nothing, but went into the sitting room.

‘Round they went,’ Thomas was saying, ‘Round and around and around until there wasn’t a tree left standing on the island, what with Oscar running and the great black bull running behind him. And once all the trees were gone there was nowhere else for Oscar to go but back to the shore. But when he got there, expecting to exchange the gold ring for a lift in the hag’s boat, what do you think he found?’

‘Nothing,’ said Aine.

‘Nothing,’ said Thomas. ‘That’s exactly what he found. The hag was gone, and the boat and all. And Oscar must have thought his final hour was come.’

Joseph picked up a magazine and dropped quietly on to a chair.

‘And it would have been,’ Thomas went on, ‘except that a speckled trout jumped up out of the water. And what happened to it?’

‘It turned into a horse,’ said Aine.

‘It turned into a speckled horse,’ said Thomas. ‘A speckled horse the very same as Martina’s Specks out there in the field. And it told him to ride on its back, so he did. And when the bull saw the horse with Oscar on top of it jump back into the water, it let go the gold ring for it was mightily afraid of the water and wouldn’t step into it at all. So Oscar got safely away from the island with the hag’s bracelet. And do you know who the horse turned out to be?’