Thin Air (2 page)

Stephen doubled up with mirth. Joseph went bright red.

‘No thanks, Mrs O’Neill,’ he said.

She shook her head disgustedly and went out.

‘We do, Ma, we do!’ Stephen called after her. ‘We want Pop Tarts! Big, juicy ones!’

‘Shut up, Stephen,’ said Joseph. But they were both laughing, giggling helplessly, dropping towards Mrs O’Neill’s fitted carpet.

Aine bailed with a cut-down Coke bottle while Thomas rowed.

‘There’s no need,’ he said. ‘We could row out and back ten times and she still wouldn’t sink.’

But Aine bailed anyway, because it made her feel safer. She didn’t stop until she felt the prow scraping shingle as they pulled up against the shore of the island. Then she stood up, wobbling.

‘Can we drive, next time?’

There was a causeway at one end of the lake, built in the eighteenth century by the landlord of the time. It was still used by Anthony Daly, the current owner, for getting cattle on and off the island.

‘Hardly, I’d say,’ said Thomas. ‘You can’t drive, and I can but I won’t.’

He stepped out of the boat into the shallows. Stones slipped and slithered beneath his feet. The water didn’t quite reach the top of his wellingtons. He steadied himself, then hefted Aine up on to his hip.

‘God. What a weight.’

‘Bicycles, then,’ said Aine.

‘Oh, that’s right. There was some talk of bicycles, wasn’t there?’ He sloshed through the water and dropped his granddaughter on to dry land. He was winded to the point of distress but he was not about to admit it. Aine sat on a rock and waited while Thomas tied the painter to an out-hanging branch. By the time he had finished he had enough breath to speak again.

‘Bicycles and birthdays,’ he said. ‘A bicycle with horns, wasn’t it?’

‘Bull horns,’ said Aine.

‘A bicycle with horns,’ said Thomas. ‘What next?’

He sat down on another rock. Aine got up and kicked along the beach. Now and then she picked up a stone and looked at it carefully and turned it over and looked at the other side, and then plunked it into the lake.

Thomas took out his pipe and began to poke at its crusty black innards.

‘How can a stone have a signature, anyway?’ said Aine. Thomas put his pipe back into his pocket and stood up.

‘Find me a flat one,’ he said, ‘till we see can I skim it.’

Stephen bought fags at the Korner Stop and they smoked in the main street. Stephen was open about it. Joseph held the cigarette backwards and tried to look casual. The smoke scorched his palm and turned it yellow. They dropped the butts and stood on them before they got to Mick’s house.

‘We can’t put it on yet!’ he hissed, closing the kitchen door on his mother and younger brother. ‘Are you mad or what?’

‘When, then?’ said Stephen.

‘Tonight. They’ll go down for a drink. They always do on a Friday.’

‘But that’s hours!’ said Joseph. ‘I can’t stay that long.’

‘Then you won’t see it, will you?’

‘Shit!’

Mick hustled the others out of the house again and back into town. The sun sent slanting rays among the buildings. Mrs Reilly passed along the street, heavily laden with Korner Stop carriers. The boys moved aside as she wheezed and scuffed and rustled past.

‘Give me a fag, Stephen,’ said Mick. ‘Are you staying, or what?’

Aine and Thomas skimmed flat stones until they got a Book of Records score. Thomas said it was sixteen, but Aine said she had counted all the little bubbly ones at the end and there were twenty-two. Thomas conceded and lit his pipe.

‘I’m going up to the fort,’ said Aine.

‘Good for you,’ said Thomas. ‘Must be great to have young legs.’

‘Will you wait here?’

Thomas pointed with the mouthpiece of his pipe to the old church on the shoulder of the hill. Only the gable was standing and the sun was golden behind it.

‘I might be up there,’ he said, ‘and I mightn’t. You’ll find me anyway.’

Aine didn’t doubt him, but turned and began to climb the steep hill towards the summit. Part of the way up she stopped to catch her breath. The broad sweep of the lake between her and the mainland was bright with evening gold. The shadow of the island fell across the other half and left it black as sump oil. There was a city down there somewhere, Thomas said. Aine wasn’t sure whether she believed it or not. On the mainland something glinted; her mother’s car, creeping down the boirin. All the windows in the house shone with gold as though the sun were inside it. Her mother stopped the car and got out of it. Aine called and waved, but she was much too far away. Her mother went inside.

Joseph and Mick and Stephen went into Whelan’s Fast Foods and sat on stools at the side counter. Mick bought curry chips. Joseph scraped up the price of a Coke. Stephen laughed at the three straws and handed round the fags again.

‘Are you staying then, or what?’

‘I dunno, do I?’

‘Well I don’t know, do I?’

‘I have to give it back tomorrow,’ said Mick.

The doorbell pinged and the boys turned their heads in unison. The girl who came in glanced sideways at them, then fixed her gaze at the opposite wall.

‘Karen McCarthy,’ said Stephen, quite loud. Then, under his breath, ‘The titless wonder.’

Joseph burst out laughing with the Coke straw in his mouth and sprayed the lot of them.

‘You dirty bastard,’ said Mick.

Karen McCarthy continued to look at the white-tiled wall.

‘Hello!’ Brigid sang through the empty house. ‘Hello!’

The only reply was the soft whisper of a sod settling into its own ashes inside the range. Brigid held out her hand, judging by the heat how long the house had been empty. She opened the back door and called again, then returned. There was a pile of washing-up in the sink. Brigid had never asked Martina to look after the kitchen or to put on the dinner. On the contrary, she had often told her that she shouldn’t; that she should be careful not to allow herself to become a skivvy to the rest of the family just because she was around. But Martina always did it anyway, and Brigid had become accustomed to finding the dinner on the go when she got home. Despite herself, she was irritated.

The phone rang. It was Joseph, phoning from a call-box in town, asking if he could stay the night with a friend. Brigid agreed, relieved to have one less mouth to feed, and had put the phone down before she remembered that Gerard had ruled against it. Joseph’s Junior Cert exams were coming up in a few months’ time. He wasn’t supposed to go out until they were behind him.

Suddenly furious with everyone, Brigid stormed across the kitchen and opened the freezer. She dragged a gigantic pizza out of the depths and a huge, rumbly bag of frozen chips. Then she rolled up her sleeves and set about stoking up the range.

The island covered about a hundred and fifty acres altogether. Parts of it were wooded and other parts were craggy. It was roughly circular and no part of it was ever far from another, but it was very steep in places.

It had been inhabited since the Stone Age. Apart from the church and the fort there was a holy well, the huddled remains of a group of monastic cells and the roofless walls of several cottages dating from the times of the Penal Laws. Here and there the ground still held the memory of gardens in ridges and furrows, always running downhill, towards the lake. Aine passed through some of them as she climbed. The shapes were as familiar to her as her own hands and feet. Thomas had been bringing her here for as long as she could remember.

She crossed the remains of a foundation wall and climbed on up towards the fort. The route that she took was the same as always, passing the blocked-up entrance to the souterrain. Thomas had a story about it and why it was closed, but Aine didn’t like to think about it. The place sent a shiver down her spine. She gave the jumble of stones a wide berth and soon the first green wall of the fort came into view. She was panting from the climb, but was determined to get to the top without stopping. The last hundred yards was an ordeal but she pushed hard, and then she was there, standing inside the inner ring, looking out at the surrounding lake.

‘I’m up, Grandda,’ she shouted, expecting no answer and getting none. The fairy ring, her mother called it, but Thomas said it was Cormac’s Dun; Cormac Mac Ruadh, who was drowned by an enchanted bull and who was living still in the dark city beneath the lake, waiting for the day when his bride would come and join him.

Aine found a spot that was free from cowpats and sat down on the damp grass. There were daisies and violets, and clusters of primroses on the steeper parts of the banks. Martina said she wasn’t to pick the wild flowers because they were getting scarce, but Thomas said there would be wild flowers still when the people were all dead and gone.

Gerard was still singing the song that had been playing on his car radio when he went into the kitchen. Brigid looked up from reading the
Television Guide
. She got the smell of sweat and horses from him despite the carefully maintained distance between them.

‘When’s dinner?’ he asked.

‘I’m only in the door,’ said Brigid.

She cooked lunches in a hotel in Ennis. She had been doing it for nearly a year, now. It was the first paid job she had ever had.

Gerard turned on the television and watched a troop of Australian teenagers chase each other across a sandy beach.

‘Joseph is staying the night at Stephen’s house,’ said Brigid. To her surprise, Gerard just nodded.

‘Do you want a coffee?’ she went on.

Gerard shook his head. ‘I’m after getting a load of feed. I’d better unload it. And The Nipper has gone lame on me again. I’ll have to take him down and stand him in the lake.’

‘How did he get lame again?’ said Brigid. ‘I thought you had him turned out.’

‘Well, you thought wrong, didn’t you?’ said Gerard. He went out into the back porch and Brigid heard him taking off his shoes and putting on his wellingtons. She closed down the damper of the range to let the oven heat, then pulled the heavy kettle on to the hottest part of the top. On the television, the Australians seemed to be helping each other to take off their clothes.

Thomas made his slow way up to the church and sat on one of the scattered headstones. Across the water he could just make out the shape of a man crossing the stable yard. It might have been himself, thirty years ago.

Abruptly the light changed as the sun dropped behind the grey summits of the westerly mountains. A sudden chill came with the change, and Thomas saw the man in the yard hesitate and look up before he looked up himself and caught the ponderous flight of a pair of ravens passing over.

On the hill-top, Aine felt the chill too and saw the ravens and heard their wings cutting the golden air, over and over again. She had been day-dreaming, and now the grass was suddenly cold and damp and her arms were all goose bumps. She pulled down the sleeves of her jumper and was about to set off back down the hill when something caught her eye. She wished that it hadn’t. She wished that she could pretend she had never seen it. She promised herself that she would come back tomorrow and look at it then. But it was too late. Something stronger than curiosity turned her face away from home again.

Thomas got up and pulled his jacket closed. He peered up towards the top of the hill, but he could only just see the edge of the outer fortification; no more. The child was surely all right. The flapping ravens were gone, the hill was sweet and green, there was still more than enough light to get safely home. He walked across the side of the hill, one leg longer than the other, to meet the child as she came down.

Aine took a few steps forward. Between the inner and the outer wall of the fort, a set of white bones was lying. She crept forward again. She had seen bones before, many times, but never bones like these.

Whatever owned these bones had died on its back. Its spine was long and straight, and at the end of it, long, straight legs stretched out, as of a creature that walked upright. But it wasn’t a human skeleton. The neck was twisted around at an impossible angle, and at the end of it was a cow’s skull, set in an agonised gape.

Aine stepped forwards, and then back. The bones had been picked clean, but here and there a few shreds of skin still clung, and the smell which rose from them was frightful. She made to turn away, but needed one last look. At the end of the legs, and of the inwardly bent arms, cloven hooves sat on the bones, like two pairs of ill-fitting shoes.

Thomas stood on the hill, waiting. The boat was below him, still snug against the shore. She had taken on a bit of water, enough to set the bailing bottle afloat again. He could see the man and the horse walking down to the opposite shore. They stopped briefly at the water’s edge, then walked on in and stood in the speckled shadow of some tall ash trees.

The weather was clear and still. There were a few clouds, but not of the type likely to produce one of the squalls for which the lake was notorious. Even so, Thomas was keen to get home.

‘Go up and see what’s keeping her,’ he said to Popeye. Popeye wagged his tail and sat down.

Stephen went home to see if he could blag some more money. Joseph sat with Mick in Whelan’s and tried to think of something cool to say. But all he could think of was his father and what he would say the next day. He was beginning to wish that he hadn’t come.

Aine came lurching and skidding over the brow of the hill, stopped like a hunted creature, looked around. She saw Thomas and raced towards him. Popeye met her halfway and circled them both as Aine launched herself at her grandfather and brought the two of them sliding down on to the grass.

‘There’s a dead thing up there,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what it is.’

‘Is it big or small?’ said Thomas.

‘Big. Very big. Very tall.’

‘A sheep?’

‘Bigger. It had cow’s feet.’

‘It was a cow, so, wasn’t it? Is it long dead?’

‘I don’t know. It smelled very bad.’

‘Long enough dead, then. Wouldn’t you think Anthony would do something about it, instead of leaving it to rot up there?’

They got to their feet. Thomas brushed himself down. The dog stood at a distance and sniffed the air.