The Ghost of Grania O'Malley (15 page)

She wished at once that she had answered, but it was too late. Through her window she saw the full moon sitting on top of the Big Hill, too bright to look at, and anyway, she thought, you mustn't look at the full moon through glass. It makes you mad. She closed her eyes.

‘Oh talk to me, Grania O'Malley, please,' she whispered. ‘Please, please. Just let me know you're there.' Barry surfaced and splashed in his bowl. She said her proper prayers, closing her eyes tight shut. ‘You've got to stop them, God. You've got to save the Big Hill. Please.' And she went on praying, until sleep overcame her.

* * *

Jack wasn't there when Jessie came down late for breakfast the next morning. Her father said he had gone off to play baseball with Liam. Jessie sat through Mass but could not concentrate. Either she was still fuming inside about Jack's treachery or she was watching the swallow high up in the roof, swooping down over the heads of the congregation and up to the rafters by the door, searching for a way out but never finding it. Her mother's knuckles were white under her forehead as she prayed. Jessie prayed to Jesus and to Grania O'Malley at the same time. She felt a little guilty about doing that in church, but she thought that Jesus wouldn't mind, that he'd forgive her just this once. As Father Gerald had so often said: ‘Jesus understands, Jesus forgives. All you have to do is ask.' So she asked for forgiveness, and went on praying to both of them.

They were all standing and chatting outside the church door after Mass when Liam came racing down the hill on his bike, scooted to a stop, threw it down and came running up the church path waving his arms and shouting, ‘It's sabotage! Sabotage! Someone's fixed the diggers.'

Father Gerald took him by the shoulders and calmed him down. ‘What are you saying Liam? What do you mean?'

‘Someone's fixed them. They won't work, Father. They won't start. None of them will.' Jessie and her mother looked at each other, a sudden bright hope in their eyes. Jessie felt a cheer of joy bursting to get out, but she held it inside her until she was alone with her mother in Clatterbang, and rattling along the road towards the quay, in convoy with everyone else.

‘It's the ghost!' cried her mother. ‘It's the ghost of Grania O'Malley, like Mister Barney told us. It's Grania O'Malley.' And the tears were running down her cheeks. ‘Well, don't look at me like that, Jess. It has to be her, it has to be.'

‘I know, Mum!' Jessie laughed above the clatter. ‘I know!' And Clatterbang coughed loudly and backfired.

Jack was there with everyone else on the quayside. The digger drivers in orange overalls were gathered in a huddle and talking to the Garda. There was a Garda boat moored out in the harbour. People were still coming from all over the island, in Land-Rovers, on motorbikes, on foot. Mrs O'Leary was standing in the road outside her pub, still in her fluffy slippers. Father Gerald hadn't even taken his surplice off and it was flapping about him in the breeze. The whole place was a buzz of excitement. It was Mrs O'Leary who came over towards them as they got out of Clatterbang. ‘Someone's fixed them, Cath,' she said. ‘They don't know what's the matter with them. They just won't work, not any of them.'

‘Well, it wasn't me, if that's what you're thinking,' said Jessie's mother, laughing. ‘I wish it was, but it wasn't. But I think there'll be a few here who'll think it was.' And it was true. Several people were glaring at them, Michael Murphy amongst them. They walked away from Mrs O'Leary over towards Jack. ‘If I told them who it really was,' Jessie's mother whispered to her, ‘they'd not believe me, not in a million years.'

Jack had seen them now. He was sauntering over to join them, hands deep in his jeans pockets, baseball bat tucked under his arm. ‘Hi,' he said, and he was grinning happily at Jessie. ‘Never seen anyone half as mad as those digger guys,' he said. ‘I'm going home. You coming, Jess?'

Jessie walked alongside him for some way, until they had left the houses well behind them, until she was quite sure no one could overhear them. Then she tugged at his arm and stopped him. ‘It was her, wasn't it? She came!'

‘Maybe, maybe not,' said Jack cryptically, and he wandered on. She tottered after him, dragging him to a stop again.

‘What do you mean?'

He was laughing now. ‘It wasn't my idea,' he said. ‘It was your dad's. He doesn't believe in ghosts, not like us. He came to me and he said, did I know how to gum up the digger engines? I told him I could, anyone could, but first you got to find out a few things. So I went and asked that digger guy to show me his engine. You were there, right? Found out all I needed to know. Then, last night, your dad and me went and did it. I tried to wake you, but you were asleep. All you have to do is take off the distributor heads, and then pour a whole lot of sugar in the gas tank, and presto, nothing works. Told you, when it comes to engines and stuff, I can fix – or gum up – just about anything.'

‘You did it?'

‘I told you, me and your pa.'

‘So it wasn't the ghost. It wasn't Grania O'Malley.'

‘I guess not,' said Jack, and then, ‘are we friends again?'

‘I could hug you,' Jessie said. ‘I could really hug you.'

‘OK by me,' he said. And so she did. She felt like

skipping all the way home, but she couldn't. She laughed instead, prattling on and on about how it served them right, about how she couldn't wait to tell her mother what had really happened. Jack said very little until they were nearly home. Mole came trotting down the road to meet them. Jack ran his hand along his back as he walked along beside him.

‘It won't stop them, Jess, you know that,' he said, trying to break it to her as gently as he could.

‘What do you mean?'

‘Well, it'll maybe stop them for a day or two, but they'll soon fix it again. They've got to take them all apart and clean out the sugar – blocks the fuel injection. But once they clean them out, they can start them up again. We haven't won the battle or anything, Jess. We just put it off for a while, that's all.'

10
THE LAST STAND

THE DIGGER ENGINES HAD TO BE STRIPPED down, cleaned and reassembled. Jack went down to the quay after school each day to watch the mechanics at work. There were rumours, he said with a wicked smile on his face, that some ‘bits' had mysteriously gone missing. But in the end, as Jack had predicted, their jubilation was to be short-lived. The missing parts were being helicoptered in from the mainland. The diggers would soon be on the move again.

The children were in school on the Wednesday morning when it happened and, much to Mrs Burke's annoyance, they all ran to the windows to look as the helicopter flew low overhead. That was just before lunch. She was still trying to settle them down to work after afternoon playtime when some of the children began to hear a rumbling, like distant thunder. For some time Mrs Burke managed to keep them at their desks. But when Father Gerald was seen hurrying along the school lane, then everyone was at the windows again, necks craning, and there was nothing more she could do about it. The diggers were on their way. They could see them now. The roar of the engines was rattling the windows, and the classroom itself seemed to be throbbing and pulsating, so much so that Jessie had to clap her hands over her ears to stop them hurting.

She was the only one who stayed behind in her place. She did not need to see. She did not want to see. She looked up out of the window at the Big Hill, and through the mist of her tears she thought she saw someone standing there, right at the very top. She went over to the window. The figure was still there, and beckoning her. She knew at once who it was, and she knew at once what she had to do. She blinked her eyes to rid them of the tears, to see better. When she looked again, there was no one up there.

By this time, every child was fighting for a place at the playground fence. Mrs Burke couldn't stop them, and Miss Jefferson didn't want to – she was too excited herself. It was Liam who opened the gate, and then they were all running down past the abbey ruins towards the road. There they were, all four giant Earthbusters trundling towards them along the coast road, a yellow convoy, billowing black smoke, orange lights flashing; and behind them a long line of Land-Rovers and pick-ups. In the fields on either side, the sheep scattered in terror, blundering into each other in their panic.

The children just stood and gaped, flailing at the pungent exhaust smoke and turning away to cough. Then Marion Murphy began to wave and cheer, and very soon they were all at it, all except Jack who had noticed by now that Jessie was not there. He went back inside the school to look for her and found her still standing by the window, still gazing out. She turned as she felt him behind her.

‘It's what Mum always said,' she said. ‘Ever since this thing with the Big Hill began, she's always said it. You want something badly enough, then you've got to do it yourself. No use waiting for someone else to do it for you. You believe in something, then sometimes you've got to fight for your beliefs, you've got to fight for what you care about, like Grania O'Malley did, like you did when you fixed their diggers. Well, now it's my turn.'

‘What do you mean?' Jack asked.

‘I thought Grania O'Malley would do it for us, but I was wrong. Maybe she's done all she could, maybe now she wants us to help ourselves. So that's what I'm going to do, help myself.'

She fetched her coat and bag from her hook and then called to him across the classroom. ‘You coming?'

‘You can't just cut school.'

Jessie looked around her and shrugged her shoulders. ‘Well, everyone else has,' she said. ‘Come on. We've got to hurry. We'll go across the fields. We can still get there before they do.'

Jack helped her through the fence at the back of the school and then over the ditch at the bottom of Miss Jefferson's wild-flower meadow. Once into the bracken beyond, they were on the track that would take them around the bottom of the Big Hill towards Mister Barney's shack. Jessie led the way, fending off Jack's questions with the same grim determination that drove her tottering legs. She would need all the energy she could muster, all the breath in her body. She could spare none for talking. All the while they could hear the rumble of the convoy as it wound its way out of sight, up the hill past the abbey ruins. Jessie could see them in her mind's eye coming up the road past the end of the farm lane. Panda would be going berserk. She smiled as she thought of him trying to sink his teeth into one of those gigantic digger tyres.

‘Jess, what's happening?' Jack was asking again, for the umpteenth time. ‘Where are we going?' But she hardly heard him. Her eyes were focused on the ground at her feet. She had to be sure she did not trip. Her heart and her mind were fixed on her plan. It might take fifty days. Fifty days, she'd heard somewhere, was about as long as you could go without food. You had to have water, but there was lots of water where she was going.

Without warning, her knees buckled and then she was struggling to get up. Jack was there, arms under her shoulders, helping her to her feet, then holding her steady. Cross with herself, she shook herself free of him and staggered on. Brambles tugged at her coat, tore at her neck. She bobbed and weaved, trying to dodge them and duck them. She coughed out a fly that she had swallowed and battled on.

It seemed an eternity before they emerged from the track to find themselves in the middle of the grassy clearing, the place where the tracks met. There was the main track up the Big Hill, winding its way through rocks and bracken to the top; and there, just across the clearing from them, stood Mister Barney's shack, the smoke rising from the chimney. They could see the yellow convoy quite clearly now. It had stopped down by the road at the bottom of the hill. And beyond the yellow convoy, nose to tail behind them, were the islanders in their Land-Rovers and pick-ups. And there were people on bikes, and on foot too, dozens of them, all hurrying along the high road and the coast road. The whole island was converging on the Earthbusters.

It was some distance away, but Jessie could see her mother. She was standing in front of the leading digger, talking to the driver. And then she was pushing at it, kicking at it, drumming her fists on it. Jessie's father put his arms round her from behind and turned her towards him. The diggers towered above them, snorting black smoke from their chimneys. Her mother had stopped struggling now, and her father was stroking her hair, then leading her away, her head on his shoulder.

‘That's your mom down there, isn't it?' said Jack. Jessie didn't reply. There wasn't the time. The diggers were on the move again.

Jessie couldn't run properly. She'd never been able to run, not like the other children could, but she was as near to it then, going across the clearing, as she'd ever been. She was going so fast now. She couldn't understand why she wasn't falling over, but somehow she wasn't. Somehow her body kept up with her legs and she didn't topple. Jack was having to run to keep up with her. She had worked out the exact spot to do it: where the main track up the Big Hill left the clearing. There were granite posts on either side, and boulders all around – it would be the perfect place. They would have to stop. They would have no choice. The diggers were still crawling up the hill. Jessie felt a great surge of joy as she knew for sure that she was going to make it to the clearing before them. There would be time enough too to catch her breath and tell Jack everything she had in mind, her whole plan. Nothing could stop her now. Nothing.

The driver in the first digger was the same driver who had talked to Jack down on the quay a few days before. He was still shaken by what had just happened down by the road. Until recently he had never given a lot of thought as to what his Earthbuster did. He had operated diggers all over Ireland and in England, motorway work mostly, and quarry work sometimes. He loved the power of them, the smell of them. There had been some talk back in Mrs O'Leary's pub where he was staying about the few cranks on the island who didn't want the gold mine. He'd laughed it off like all the other drivers; but after the machines had been tampered with that night, they had all taken it a lot more seriously. He was genuinely puzzled that someone out there hated his machine that much.