Inch Levels
Authors: Neil Hegarty
About
Inch Levels
Patrick Jackson lies on his deathbed in Derry and recalls a family history marked by secrecy and silence, and a striking absence of conventional pieties. He remembers the death of an eight-year-old girl, whose body was found on reclaimed land called Inch Levels on the shoreline of Lough Swilly. And he is visited by his beloved but troubled sister Margaret and by his despised brother-in-law Robert, and by Sarah, his hard, unchallengeable mother.
Each of them could talk about events in the past that might explain the bleakness of their relationships, but leaving things unsaid has become a way of life. Guilt and memory beat against them, as shock waves from bombs in Derry travel down the river to shake the windows of those who have escaped the city.
For my mother and father,
and for John
An Invitation from the Publisher
TIME TO KILL
September, and the Donegal countryside had already turned to autumn. The summer just past had been warm and wet, and the hedgerows and verges had become heavy with growth. But the grasses were fading and bleaching with the season: and now, late in the afternoon, they were bowed, soaked and dripping with a day’s rain. In the ditch, a stream gurgled on its way downhill towards the lough. The rain, though, had lately stopped and the sky was clearing from the west: a pale, clean blue and the air cool and fresh.
And there was Christine Casey, aged eight, cycling home slowly from school.
There was no hurry this evening. Dinner would be a little later than usual: her mum had a meeting to go to in town. So Christine was cycling slowly.
Patrick Jackson saw all this. He watched the scene unfold from behind closed eyelids. Today, a weakening autumn sun was shining through the window onto his bed, onto the sky-blue counterpane, onto hard, white walls, onto his loose skin and prominent cheekbones. It shone onto the translucent skin on his eyelids, and turned his vision into a screen, a wash of dusty pink. But in his mind the scene was harshly lit and immediate: and he was following the girl along the lane that was dim and dripping and shaggy with a summer’s growth.
As if he was tracking her, snuffling along in her wake. He had done it so many times by now: following her track, the lane, the soaking hedges and gurgling ditches, aware of the fragrant air, the sinking sun, the gradually diminishing light.
Patrick watched. He knew the way this would turn out. There was only one way.
He kept his eyelids closed tightly, as the autumn sunlight tracked slowly along the walls.
He knew that the child’s bicycle was found minutes after she was taken – there, in the wet ditch in the shadow of the hawthorn hedge. Not by her mother, or by her father, but by the farmer who worked the fields on either side of the lane, the farmer who hadn’t been doing his job properly on the hedging and ditching front. The farmer who saw her bicycle as he passed along slowly, saw its front wheel gleaming, prominent in the midst of the grasses, in that dusky lane.
This farmer stopped to look around the ditch, filled with a summer of growth and with detritus, with litter and aluminium cans, with water flowing. He looked around. The hawthorn, with its thorns and heavy bundles of red berries, caught and tangled in his hair and lifted the tweed cap off his head. He looked, and an instinct bawled at him to leave this place and get to a telephone: he snatched his cap and ran.
His words were reported faithfully the following day, by the newspapers eager to seize on anything that passed for news. Later, Patrick – in the newspaper archives at the Central Library – read these reports and brought them terribly to life. He committed them to memory.
Additional details.
They missed at first a number of other items. They didn’t find her schoolbag, for example, until later that same evening. Quite late – after ten o’clock, when the autumn darkness had long since settled in the lane. But a gibbous moon was sailing in the frosty sky and casting a slick of white light on the waters of the lough: and it was just about bright enough for her father, her uncles, a few local men to fan out, to keep looking, to check the fields. The women – the mother and her two older daughters; the house filling slowly as news spread – waited at home. The lane had been scoured earlier in the evening – but her father took it into his head to look again, to really search. It grew darker as he walked along slowly: at points, the hawthorn hedges almost met, creating a rustling ceiling of twigs and branches.
The man had a switch in his hand – an old walking stick that had once belonged to his father-in-law, smooth, long, polished – and he stabbed and swished at the hedgerow and the wet grass as he went. In this way he found his daughter’s schoolbag: she had not, it seemed, fastened the buckles, because a mathematics textbook was lying in the hedgerow, a furry-paged yellow jotter, a biro, a long pencil, its end chewed and bitten.
Of Christine herself, of course, no sign.
The police arrived and the lane was sealed. Early the following morning, specially trained officers arrived – but in fact there was little or nothing by way of evidence to be gleaned: no trampled greenery, no broken twigs, no indications or clues at all. No footprints, no tyre marks. Neither did the abundance of lemonade bottles, crisp packets and plastic bags lodged in the hawthorn hedges hold clues: this rubbish had evidently been there for some time. There was nothing at all, in fact, to indicate how the girl had been snatched.
Snatched? That she was snatched seemed more and more evident. The police knew from experience that this child was most likely dead already; soon, everyone knew it. Such crimes: they hardly ever happened; they were all about opportunity when they did. Now the parents must be told that there was a very good chance the girl, or her body, would never be found. They were told to brace themselves.
All this Patrick knew. All this had been in the papers: voluminous accounts, details, lists and facts. Every last detail shivered in his mind.
Later, after five days, another thing happened. A pair of dog walkers took their favourite walk – the walk they took when they had a little time, as they did on this Saturday morning. They parked in the car park in the middle of Inch Levels, where a footpath set off east and west in the shadow of the sea wall, straight across the flat fields.
And Patrick could picture this scene too. He had visited, treading in the footsteps of these walkers: the season had moved to winter by the time of his visit, but he could imagine the September colours they had experienced, the falling leaves, the berries and the light. They had turned west, these walkers, towards the shore of Lough Swilly, a mile or so distant, towards Inch Island and the gaunt silhouette of the castle on its spit of dry land above the water. There were mute swans lying here on the sea, and white-fronted geese in the fields, digging into the black soil and ripping the grass out by the roots: hundreds, thousands of the creatures; and more would arrive as winter came on. It was a sight to behold.
Now, at the end of September, the hedges and overgrown slopes of the sea wall were dense with sloes and glossy rosehips and the last of the blackberries. These walkers had anticipated this: they had brought a plastic carton, to fill with berries on the way back. Now they walked, an energetic couple, and their portly old golden Labrador nosing and sniffing and waving her tail a few steps ahead of them; and the path stretched ribbon-straight under their feet and the causeway marched to their right. This was reclaimed land, but saturated with water after this wet summer, threaded with brimming ditches and little rivers flowing towards the lough.
And there was the brick-built pumping station, surrounded by young birch and ash and humming to itself.
‘Listen to it! – and winter not even here yet. Imagine if it failed,’ the husband said to his wife. She laughed.
‘It won’t fail while we’re here.’
They walked on.
‘What did you see?’ the papers asked them later.
They saw the blue hills to west and east and south; and the smoothly rounded summit of Inch Island to the north. At length the lough spreading out before them and the end of their path, a few picnic tables and the low wall of the causeway across to the island; a gravelled access road, flat, green fields and shining water on which swans floated. They might have walked further: the path along the causeway to the island and the castle and back: another couple of hours, all told. But the Labrador was fat and lazy: and instead of walking further, they intended to drink their tea and eat their sandwiches here at the edge of the lough, before retracing their path back to the car. They shed their anoraks, then, and sat down with a grateful exhalation; what a mild day. The man opened the foil packet of sandwiches and called the dog, intending to feed her bits and scraps, but she was nosing by the water and ignored him.
Eventually he hauled himself up and walked across the gravel to the water.
‘What did you see?’
Still clothed, and sodden of course, and simply floating there; bereft, naturally, of much humanity, hardly a shred of it, now.
‘That was almost the worst thing,’ he said.
That was what they would carry with them, they said, the pity and the pathos of the sight. She was not to be touched: they knew this; they knew the score. And what to do next? To stay, to go? To have one keep watch over this bundle, while the other runs, pants, stumbles back along the straight path to the car, then drives the twenty minutes to Buncrana and bring help? Who should stay and who should go? In the end, the woman stayed, with the Labrador as doubtful support should something go wrong; and the man rushed away on his mission.
Later, the woman described the brief period – this forty-five minutes or so, not very long at all, considering what a lonely spot this was – during which she waited with her dog for the police to arrive. What do I do? she thought. What does someone do under such circumstances? Keep the dog away from the water’s edge, of course: but that was easily managed; she put the beast on the lead. Go to the water’s edge herself? No, on balance: she had imagined herself as having a stout constitution, but this was a situation, a sight, quite outside her experience; and the tears were, besides, already pouring down her cheeks. Not much good stepping any closer.
So she stayed put, watched the path anxiously, listening for the sound of a car, of footsteps. Her senses, she said, seemed heightened: the air smelled and tasted of the moist greenness of this landscape, of brackish water; she heard a swan honk and another swan answer, their cries travelling towards her over the surface of the water; in the distance the pumping station hummed ceaselessly, maintaining the delicate balance between land and sea, drawing away the water that would otherwise seep in and drown this place. Out on the lough, she saw another bird: it dived and, after two or three minutes, came to the surface; the water rippled with its activity. She felt – shock, certainly, but also shame at being unable to do anything for the child floating in the lough, unable to assist in scrabbling, clawing back a little dignity and humanity in extremis. The woman sat, instead, and listened and gazed out across the water.