Thin Air (9 page)

Was there a boyfriend? Martina was nineteen, nearly twenty. If there wasn’t a boyfriend then there ought to have been. Maybe there was and she had been keeping him a secret. Maybe this whole thing was an elaborate ruse to cover an elopement.

Without thinking about it, Brigid had begun to descend, holding on to the rocks at either side to steady herself. She was remembering an incident that had happened a few years before and it was making her very uncomfortable.

Martina had been sixteen and had just finished her Junior Cert exams. She got a summer job in a hotel in Limerick and moved into a flat there with a few of the girls she worked with. It all seemed to be going fine until Gerard called in on them one morning without warning. The door was opened by a young man, and that was the end of Martina’s job.

Gerard had refused to hear any explanations. He stayed in the street until Martina came out and then he put her in the car. Then he waited until they were at home with Brigid before he launched his attack. He called Martina a whore, a slut, dirty and disgusting, not fit to be seen by decent people. Brigid had stood aside, her support for her husband not active but assumed. Martina had not come to her for shelter but absorbed her humiliation alone. She didn’t go back to work that summer. She hadn’t worked since.

Brigid tried to remember what she had felt at the time. She knew that Gerard had gone over the top, but then he often did, particularly at Joseph. She saw his temper as a weakness in him and forgave him for it, assuming that the children did, too. She remembered her intention to speak to Martina afterwards, but she couldn’t remember doing it. One hour had drifted into another; one day into the next. As time had drifted through and past her for all the rest of her married life. Where had it gone?

She found herself back in the glade. Somehow she had come down most of the cliff-face on automatic pilot. Her own thinking was shocking her. The truth was that she had said nothing. She had not challenged her husband or consoled her daughter because she was a part of the same culture; the same authority. She shared his fear and disgust of women’s sexuality. She despised it in herself as much as in her maturing daughter. Gerard’s voice had represented her voice. He had spoken for her.

The air in the glade was fresh and cool after the dull dry atmosphere of the rocks. There was a damp, mossy fragrance like mountain streams. Even the light was crisp and clear. Nothing moved. It was no longer threatening in there. It was peaceful.

Brigid sat down on a moss-covered stone and loosened the strict, dusky-pink blouse that was buttoned tight to her throat. A blackbird called from a nearby bush and was answered almost immediately. Brigid sighed deeply and leant against a cluster of narrow hazel limbs. She wondered how it could have been that all her life she had accepted values that were damaging to her; adopted them wholesale and without consideration. In doing so she had diminished herself and her daughters, and everything that was feminine in society except for self-sacrifice. She had a sudden, lucid vision of herself among a line of girls going into school to be taught there that they were sinful and grasping; the cause of all evil.

The glen made her think of fairies, so green was it, so otherworldly. She imagined herself sitting cross-legged, wearing a pointed hat and smoking a little pipe. She began to laugh, and realised that she was crying. She hoped that Martina had eloped, but she feared that she had not.

As Gerard drove off up the boirin, Popeye turned around in the passenger seat and looked back, as though he was having second thoughts.

‘Sit down,’ said Gerard. ‘You’ll survive.’

Popeye gave him a bunt on the cheek with a wet nose and continued to look back. Gerard wiped the wet spot. He didn’t like dogs and had never kept one, even for the children. Once a skinny bitch had strayed in to the farm, her coat mangy, her dugs dangling. He threw stones at her and shouted, but the kids fed her when he wasn’t looking. A couple of days later, he caught her in the night when the children were asleep, and tied her into a sack and threw her into the lake. Throughout the whole operation the bitch shook from head to toe but didn’t once make a sound. Despite himself, Gerard hadn’t slept that night. It still made him feel queasy. He could never do such a thing again.

Popeye gave a little whimper like a sigh and turned to face the front. Gerard hoped he wasn’t going to be troublesome.

Trish replaced a few nails in the loose shoe. It was a duff job but good enough for the moment. It would last until the blacksmith came again.

Afterwards Specks slept while Trish tacked him up, using one of the jumping bridles in place of his own. He woke for just long enough to co-operate when she picked out his feet, then dozed off again. But as soon as Trish got up on him, he went off eagerly with a long, active stride, high head and pricked ears. She knew then why it was that Martina loved him. Everything was wrong; his conformation, his action, his dreadful blotchy colour. But his heart made up for his failings, and more. Trish gave his ears a friendly tug and let him go on a loose rein. She wanted to interfere with him as little as possible. She wanted to see which direction he would take.

At the top of the boirin he swung to the left without a moment’s hesitation and strode along, tossing his head, enjoying the slack rein and the sunshine. Trish took out a cigarette and lit it.

Gerard accelerated along the main road, looking neither right nor left. His blood was running hot and he was driving too fast. He had to jam on the brakes to make the turn down towards the island, and the dog fell forward against the dash and on to the floor. A cold sweat broke out on Gerard’s back. More slowly now, carefully, he drove between the high stone walls of what had once been an estate. The entrance into the old house was on his right. He glanced down it as he passed. Anthony had been doing some clearing in there, finally cutting up fallen trunks and branches that had blocked the avenue for years. It was clear right down to the house, which stood four square, heavy, still dark inside despite having no roof. Gerard wondered what Anthony was up to. Property values were increasing in the area, but Anthony would sell his own internal organs before he would part with a square inch of land.

A hundred yards further on, the tarmac abruptly ended and the road forked into two gravelly tracks. Gerard took the right-hand one, which brought him down to the causeway. The gate was at the landward end of it and, for reasons of their own, Anthony’s cattle had crowded around it. Gerard had intended to drive through, but the gate was tied shut with baler twine and the knots were so many and so complicated that it wasn’t worth the effort. He went back to the pick-up to get the dog, then climbed over the gate.

The cattle ducked their heads and blew steamy billows and walked backwards. A swan that had been sitting on the bank of the causeway walked into the water and swam away. From the other side of the gate, Gerard examined the knots closely. Anthony’s farm was large and wealthy, but most of it was held together with baler twine. There was no point in trying to work out who had tied these particular knots. It could have been anybody.

Gerard turned and went on. He was impressed, as he always was, by what a great piece of building the causeway was. The middle of it was still beautifully level after all the years and the sides sloped with a perfectly even camber down to the water. Anthony said that it had never been touched since it was built, but Thomas said that it was resurfaced as part of a famine relief project in the 1840s with stone drawn from the quarry and broken to small gravel by hand.

The quarry was there, all right, at the end of the left-hand fork in the road. Gerard and his brother, Peadar, had swum there and built tar-barrel rafts, even though they were told not to, and that it was more dangerous than the lake. They had made a death-slide as well, with a rope slung all the way across. Peadar had fallen off it and into the middle of the quarry one time. Gerard, watching, had been terrified until Peadar stood up and waved. The water only came up to his chest. There were deep parts, though, and that was why it was dangerous; you could never be sure where they were.

At the end of the causeway the land opened out into a broad, green field which rose gradually towards a copse of hazel, ash and oak. The monastic ruins were just visible from where Gerard stood. Proof of the arduous existence of the monks was embossed on the surrounding slopes. The ridges were grass-covered now, but they must have once looked like the raised beds that Thomas still dug every year to grow his few potatoes and his annual surplus of pigeon-pecked, wind-battered cabbage. He was a stupid old man, full of stupid old stories. They didn’t even make sense; they contradicted each other and jumped backwards and forwards over the centuries, from the early gods to the Normans and back again.

‘Martina?’

He stood quietly, waiting for a reply.

‘Martina!’

Nothing. Popeye looked at him as though he was mad, then raced off across the causeway, his nose to the ground. Gerard wondered whether it had been such a good idea to bring him. He was lean and powerful, bred to run and perpetually longing to prove it. If he put up a hare or a rabbit he could be gone until night-time, hunting up and down the island. Gerard didn’t need that kind of hassle.

At the end of the causeway the dog stopped and waited for Gerard then went off up the first field, quartering the ground. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea after all. If Martina was on the island, he was sure to find her.

Thomas went down to his house to look for his pipe and Aine went with him. At the door of the house a swan was standing. It hissed as they approached. Aine ducked in behind her grandfather. To her it was a very big bird.

Father Fogarty and Joseph walked along the shore, together but separate. The priest had already tried to get the boy talking on several different subjects but had failed. He tried again.

‘You were never interested in the hurling, sure you weren’t?’

‘No.’

‘Nor the soccer.’

‘Not really.’

‘Up there on the racehorses the whole time, I suppose.’

‘Sport horses.’

‘Oh. I see. Hunters and jumpers, that sort of thing, is it?’

‘That’s right.’

‘I thought your father kept racehorses.’

‘No.’

‘Oh. I see. You ride the hunters, then, do you? The show jumpers?’

‘No,’ said Joseph. ‘I hate them.’

The silence descended again, as though it had triumphed. They had been walking along a narrow shingle beach but now it came to an end and was replaced by a belt of dense, black reeds. Between them the water was scummy and dark.

‘Are we going through or what?’ said Joseph.

‘I don’t see much point, really. Do you?’

Joseph shrugged.

‘She would hardly have ridden through there, would she?’

Joseph shrugged again. ‘I don’t really know what we’re looking for,’ he said.

The priest was beginning to wonder whether the boy was the full shilling. He began to walk away from the water’s edge, looking for the easiest way to circumnavigate the reeds. The wellingtons that he had borrowed were too big. He felt clownish in them.

‘Do you really not know what we’re looking for, Joseph?’ he said.

‘My sister,’ said Joseph. ‘But we’re wasting our time.’

‘How come?’

‘She’ll turn up.’

‘How do you know?’

Joseph shrugged.

‘Do you know where she is, Joseph?’

‘No.’

‘Has she gone missing before?’

‘No.’

‘How do you know, then?’

‘’Cos she’s my sister. I just know.’

The priest wondered if he did. He led the way over a wobbly barbed-wire fence and got caught by the crotch of his trousers. Joseph turned his back but his shoulders betrayed his laughter. When it was his turn to cross he got hooked the same way and blushed crimson. Father Fogarty laughed openly. He thought it might break the ice but it didn’t. He spoke before the silence could settle on them again.

‘There’s a lot of stories about the lake, I hear,’ he said.

‘They say it claims a victim every seven years,’ said Joseph.

‘And does it?’ said the priest.

Joseph shrugged.

Reluctantly Brigid left the glen. As she climbed out over the green velvet rocks she found a stick lying across her path. It was not particularly straight as hazel rods go, but it fitted her hand and her height perfectly and might have been made for her. Brigid examined it closely. It was light as a feather and surprisingly strong. Someone had cut it at some time, but not recently. It was like a stick that a farmer might have used for herding cattle, except that no farmer or cattle ever came in there.

Brigid looked around her. Everything was still and silent but she could not rid herself of the impression that there was somebody there. She went on, using the stick to help her. It didn’t seem at all strange in that world that it should have been provided for her. She had asked for it, after all.

Gerard started on the lower, south side of the island, within sight of the lake-shore. He passed through the old graveyard with its handful of crude headstones then checked the walls of the church, inside and out. The dog was never still, searching here and there, leading the way on up the hill to where a stand of strong trees stood sentry around a waist-high cairn. Gerard had met an archaeologist in the pub one night and asked her about the cairn. She had been vague; said she couldn’t tell without seeing it, but some of those things were quite recent and could be as mundane as a field clearing or a pile of rocks thrown over a dead cow to keep the crows off it. Thomas, of course, had his own explanation, and it swam up now from that disowned part of Gerard’s memory. In ancient times the people of Clare were besieged by an enemy from across the sea. Gerard couldn’t remember what the name of the invaders was, but he knew that they had cat heads. They marched across Clare and overthrew all in their path, and the survivors beat a retreat until they ended up on the island and could retreat no further. When the time came for them to go down to the shore to make a last stand against the invaders, every man, woman and child picked a stone and they piled them together in a heap. Only those who survived returned and removed their stone. The cairn, with its hundreds of stones remaining, told the rest of the story.