Black Harvest (14 page)

Ten minutes later he came off the phone. “I’m sorry your parents won’t be back until tomorrow. Perhaps it would be better if you didn’t stay here tonight. The O’Malleys are back and they could easily—”

“No. We’ll be OK here,” Colin said firmly. “We’ve discussed it between us and we all want to stay. We can get things ready for Mum and Dad. It’s settled, isn’t it, Prill?”

She nodded. Twenty-four hours ago she’d been determined to leave the place and never come back. But it was different now.

When Father Hagan had gone, the boys went outside to have a look at Oliver’s hole. With Jessie plodding slowly after her, Prill wandered round the bungalow, delighting in the ordinariness of everything.

Mrs O’Malley must have been in while they were at Ballimagliesh. There were fresh sheets on the beds and a jug of wild flowers on the kitchen table. All the windows were open and she could smell fields, mixed with soap, furniture polish, and home-made bread. Everything looked welcoming; even the peculiar steel armchairs with their crackly leather covers felt more comfortable. She flopped down in one, and looked through the enormous plate-glass window at the view of cliffs and sea. Now her father was coming she hoped they would stay on. She might even get to like Dr Moynihan’s strange pictures in time; they were all blobs and cubes and violent colours, with names like “Dawn” and “Man Sleeping”.

“Come on, Jessie,” she said, getting up with some difficulty out of the strange chair. “You must practise walking. You’ll get fat otherwise.” It was most odd having to persuade a dog like Jessie to go for a walk, but she wagged her tail thoughtfully and followed Prill outside, taking a biscuit in her mouth to eat on the way. She only did that when she was pleased.

They went up the farm track together, staggering a little, like two babies learning to walk, or like people recovering from flu. “We must thank Mrs O’Malley for that loaf,” Prill told Jessie. “Who knows? We could even cadge something else to eat, if she’s been baking. I’m really starting to feel quite hungry.”

T
HE DAY BEFORE
the Blakemans went back to England a burial took place in the chapel ruins above Ballimagliesh Strand. When Father Hagan appeared at the gate that led into the overgrown graveyard a small group of people were waiting for him, the O’Malleys, Donal Morrissey, and David Blakeman with the three children. The priest had assured her that it didn’t matter, but Mrs Blakeman thought Alison might make a lot of noise and ruin everything, so she was waiting down below, on the beach.

Father Hagan walked through the grass towards them followed by four men carrying a coffin. When they reached the small pool of water that Prill had found, he knelt down, dipped his hand in, and made the sign of the cross. Then he walked on again slowly and stopped at last before an open grave.

Instinctively everybody moved back. The Morrissey headstone had been dug out and laid flat on the ground. Under their feet was a yawning hole and there was a smell of fresh earth and grass. Birds flapped about overhead and a seagull balanced itself on one of the graves, very close to Colin.

It was a highly varnished coffin with brass handles. A plate on the lid said “Morrissey – 1848”. It was strange to be so near to it. Last year Colin had gone with his parents to Grandpa Blakeman’s funeral but it wasn’t like this. Then all he could think about was his funny, tobacco-smelling grandfather being sealed up in that awful container, shut away from them all, for ever. He tried to tell himself that today was different, that this was about a meaningless collection of bones, but when the service started he no longer knew how he felt.

Father Hagan only spoke for a few minutes, first in Latin, then in English. “
Dona eis requiem Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.
Give them rest, oh Lord, and let light perpetual shine on them.” As she listened, Prill’s eyes filled with tears.

When it was over, the men lowered the coffin into the ground on thick ropes. John and Kevin O’Malley bent down and threw handfuls of earth on it, but Donal Morrissey remained upright, swaying slightly as the soil pattered on the polished lid. The farmer’s wife tucked her arm through his and walked slowly away with him, along the footpath towards the village.

The Blakemans stood and watched the men shovel earth into the grave. Colin stared down, his hands behind his back.
Oliver peered forward curiously, like a bird. Without thinking, Prill had taken hold of her father’s hand. It was too solemn a moment for happiness but inside she was calm. She knew for certain that the peace that had come to the Morrisseys was theirs too.

It was only later, when they sat on the beach eating a picnic, that Prill said what everyone was thinking. Father Hagan didn’t look very comfortable somehow, perched on an old bath towel, munching a ham roll, and still wearing his shabby black hat. “Do you think he sleeps in it?” Oliver giggled.

“Why should it have happened when it did?” Prill said. “And why to us?”

The priest was peeling a hard-boiled egg. He took his time over it, then sent Oliver off to get some salt. “Prill, dear, I don’t really know. I’ve thought about it. One possibility is the fact that the new bungalow was only finished a few weeks before you arrived, and you were the first people to live in it. Nobody had lived on that spot since the Morrisseys died, and you were a family, like theirs. You had a small child too. Do you see?”

She shook her head. “But what about the dreams, Father Hagan, and the rottenness of everything? What about those awful nightmares?”

“I know. But sometimes, when there has been violence and great hardship in the past, the power of it reaches out and touches people. What the Morrisseys endured somehow came into your lives, just for those few days. You suffered with them, their pain was your pain. Even when they were dead, and in
the pit, you felt the decay, the sense of death.”

Prill said nothing. She drew patterns in the sand with one finger, and chewed her lip.

“Just look at Alison,” Colin said loudly, thinking that Prill was about to burst into tears. “Look at her hair. She’s got yoghurt in it, strawberry yoghurt mixed with sand. Ugh! She’s a human disaster area.”T hat made Prill laugh. Then he added, “Perhaps she made it happen.”

“Your little sister?” the priest said. “How?”

“Well, don’t little kids come into ghost stories sometimes? You know, the kind where things get thrown around? Aren’t they supposed to activate things, like chemicals or something?”

“That can’t be it,” Prill said emphatically. “It got worse when Mum went to Sligo with her, much worse.”

Father Hagan wasn’t looking at Alison but at Oliver who was running along the beach throwing sticks for Jessie. Colin remembered how he had hated the dog at the beginning of the holiday, and thought how different he was now. He was quite brown. He’d stopped fussing about his clothes and insisting on wearing shoes. He wore some old cut-down jeans of Colin’s and a baggy T-shirt advertising Whipsnade Zoo. His small, bare feet made dents in the wet sand. They would miss him when he went back to London.

“I don’t know,” the priest said. “You could be right. But all kinds of people take babies with them on holiday, and go to places where things have happened in the past. Why should little Alison be special?” His eyes followed Oliver back up the beach. “It could be something quite different. You know, there are people – quite rare, of course – who see more than the rest of us, people who are, well, very sensitive to the feeling of a place. They can often understand its past, and tell you things about it, without ever having been there or anything. They can even tell what’s going to happen in the future. That sort of person can stir things up quite innocently, without knowing a thing about it. They don’t have to do anything, they’re just
there.
”

Colin and Prill knew Father Hagan meant Oliver, but neither of them said anything. He spoke briefly to Mum and Dad, shook hands with everybody, and set off up the cliff path. “I’ll just look in on old Donal now, thought he looked a bit shaky this morning, didn’t you?”

Mrs Blakeman was packing up the picnic. The last three weeks had been sunny and warm, with the odd wet day, but there had been no more of that stifling heat. It was late afternoon now but the sun was still strong. It shone down and made spiky shadows out of the rocks, striping the sand. Then Prill felt cold drops on her face. Rain was starting to fall softly, from a peach-coloured sky.

Oliver came running up with the dog. “Are there any sandwiches left, Auntie Jeannie?” Then he looked up. “Oh heck, it’s raining. Oh well, I suppose there would be a rainbow. It’s sunny and wet both at the same time, and that’s when you get them. So my father says.”

And there was, the clearest he had ever seen. They all stood and watched it form, a shimmering arc over the peaceful sea.