Thin Air (23 page)

Gerard had missed mass, but he sat in the church for a few minutes on his own. Afterwards he found himself, almost by accident, in O’Loughlin’s, and he stayed there for most of the afternoon, watching a basketball match on Sky Sports. It made about as much sense to him as humping bales and silage around the place, feeding more cattle than his family would eat in ten years.

As the first colour of dusk entered the sky that evening, Mary was scrubbing potatoes in the kitchen when Sam knocked on the door and came in. He had been trawling some valley halfway across the county, for some reason, and had found an Aran sweater, thick and pale blue.

Brigid was sitting at the table. She looked up and shook her head. ‘No. That isn’t hers.’

Joseph appeared in the doorway. ‘She wouldn’t be seen dead wearing that,’ he said. In the deathly hush that followed his words, Sam slipped out again.

He went over to Trish’s. He found her in the yard, grooming The Nipper in his box.

‘I found a jumper,’ he said, ‘but it isn’t hers.’

‘That’s good,’ said Trish. ‘I suppose it’s good, anyway. I suppose no news is good news.’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Sam. He stood for a while, watching her over the stable door. ‘I walked over with it.’

‘With what?’

‘With the jumper. I walked over from Killinagh. That’s where we were searching. The others are still there. I probably won’t bother going back.’

‘But Killinagh is miles away!’

‘I came across country. About five miles, I reckon.’

‘I said you were cracked,’ said Trish. She patted The Nipper and took off his head collar. ‘I’d say you could probably do with a cup of tea.’

The Kellys dropped Kevin back from a comprehensive search of all the empty buildings in the area. The dinner was ready and the family sat down together.

Gerard had done a check on the winterage cattle and sobered up in the process. He was suffering the effects of coming down.

‘It’s over,’ he said. ‘All this searching. There’s no point at all in going on with it.’

No one answered. Everyone knew that he was right.

‘It’s time you were getting back to Stuttgart,’ he went on.

‘Oh, Dad!’ said Kevin. ‘I can’t possibly go back.’

‘You can, of course,’ said Brigid, in total opposition to her feelings. ‘And you must. There’s no sense in staying here.’

‘I can keep on looking,’ he said, but his tone lacked conviction. Everyone knew that he would go.

‘And we have to bring the cattle down from the mountain,’ he went on. ‘I’d better stay till you’ve done that.’

‘We have plenty of help,’ said Brigid.

‘I suppose I’ll be getting on home as well, so,’ said Mary.

Brigid nodded, careful not to show the relief that she was feeling.

Trish made omelette and chips. Sam sat at the kitchen table and smoked roll-ups. He had run out of draw.

‘You should go for a swim and see if the frogmen left any behind,’ said Trish.

‘I will some day,’ said Sam. He concentrated on his smoke for a moment, then said, ‘Are you happy, Trish?’

Trish laughed. ‘What kind of a question is that?’

Sam shrugged. ‘You don’t seem happy,’ he said. ‘Is this job what you want?’

‘Not really, I suppose.’ She dropped the chips into the hot fat and they fizzed furiously.

‘Can I come and help bring the cattle down?’ said Aine.

‘You can, of course,’ said Gerard. ‘You can come with me in the pick-up, and Joseph and Trish can walk them down.’

‘I don’t want to go in the pick-up,’ said Aine. ‘I want to ride on Specks.’

‘Ah, now,’ said Gerard, ‘I don’t think so. Not this time.’

‘I’d mind her, Dad,’ said Joseph. ‘I could hold him and she could ride.’

Gerard’s jaw went tight and the colour rose in his cheeks.

‘Why do you do it?’ he said.

‘Do what?’ said Joseph.

‘Why do you keep contradicting me, whatever I say?’

‘I don’t!’

‘There you go again.’

Around the table, the members of the family found themselves taking emotional shelter, ready for the coming storm. But Brigid refused to.

‘I’ll come myself,’ she said. ‘I haven’t ever done it before. Me and Aine and Specks will follow them down and Trish and Joseph can run and stand in the gaps.’

Gerard stared at Brigid as if she had two heads.

‘You’re mad, woman, do you know that? Stone mad.’

He left his dinner uneaten and went out. The storm had been averted, but the family was as disturbed as if it had run its usual course.

As Gerard drove up the boirin on his way back to O’Loughlins, Cloud Dancer was driving the van down it. At Trish’s house the searchers got out and, along with several dogs, gathered in the kitchen.

Janice was disappointed that the sweater hadn’t belonged to Martina.

‘We’re glad, though, of course,’ she said. ‘But all the signs are now that there is no point in searching any more, not physically, anyway.’

The others nodded, relieved.

‘There’s nothing to stop more psychic searching, though,’ she went on. ‘And we must send good energy to Martina. Whether she is still in this life or beyond, she needs it.’

In the silence that followed Gerard’s departure, Brigid fussed with plates and dishes until Mary reminded her that the meal was not over. For a while they all ate in silence. Then Joseph dropped his knife and fork.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

Sam was the last to leave. As the others loaded up into the van he lingered for a moment inside Trish’s doorway.

‘I’m afraid they’re right, you know?’ he said. ‘About no more searching. We’ve done all we can.’

Trish nodded. There was a moment’s awkward pause.

‘I have a young horse,’ said Sam. ‘Lucy. I want to break her in and get her to pull a cart. I don’t suppose you’d help me, would you?’

Trish brightened. ‘Yeah. I’d love to. Any time.’

Sam bent and gave her a kiss on the cheek, then left. Trish watched the van as it pulled away into the darkness. Its rear windows were covered with stickers.

The horse was Sam’s. It was Lucy. That meant that the kids weren’t.

Brigid lay in the darkness beside Gerard. She thought about how she had once slept, like a well-regulated machine, as soon as she put her head down at night. Now she had forgotten how. Her mind manufactured all kinds of comforts and all kinds of horrors. She was becoming afraid of it. But she had nowhere else to go.

B
EFORE HE LEFT, KEVIN
wrote the number of the Missing Persons Helpline on the wall above the phone and his own beneath it. Beside them both he wrote ‘CALL ANYTIME!’

Then he left, which was a far more difficult thing to do than to stay.

Trish dreamed about a minotaur that thundered, bellowing, through labyrinthine halls underneath the house. She had always known that the labyrinth was there. What she had forgotten was how thin the floors were that she walked on. At any minute they could give way and she could drop …

She was woken from the dream by the sound of someone moving around in the yard and the horses shifting in their boxes and whickering. Just for an instant she thought that it was Martina and that the whole thing has been part of the nightmare.

She checked the clock. It was early. She got out of bed quickly and pulled on her clothes, then went cautiously out into the yard. It was raining.

Gerard was striding across the concrete with an almost regimental briskness, a bucket of nuts in his hand. As Trish watched he went into the boxes, one after another until his bucket was empty. She tried to judge his mood but found it difficult. He saw her eventually and nodded, brusquely. She nodded back and went into the house. The meaning behind his actions was clear to her now. Life goes on.

Everything was back to normal as far as Gerard was concerned. The winterage cattle were back home, out on the good grass beside the lake. Kevin and Mary were gone. The house was their own again. Their lives would return to the way they had been and everything would be all right. All they had to do was to keep going.

To her amazement, Gerard woke Aine at the old time, the time that was once usual. Life was still broken down as far as she was concerned; she was still stranded on the hard shoulder. But Gerard would hear no objections. She was to get up, have breakfast with Joseph and go to school. And she did.

Brigid didn’t go back to work, though. She couldn’t understand why she ever did it. She couldn’t understand why money mattered and why she would have done a thing that she found so dispiriting just for the sake of it. She stood in the kitchen in her dressing-gown and didn’t help at all while the others got organised around her. Gerard came in and out from the farm and raged at them to hurry. He located Aine’s uniform and bullied her into her shoes and jacket and packed lunches for her and for Joseph. Then he drove with them up the road in the rain to where they would each catch a different bus, going in opposite directions.

Around mid-morning, Trish watched Brigid drive off up the boirin and wished it could have been her. She was mucking out. The boxes seemed dirtier on damp days, the muck heavier. Now that Gerard had come out and taken charge again, Trish was remembering that she didn’t want to be here. A racing yard would be better, or show jumping. Somewhere there was people, and not just Gerard. She emptied yet another barrow-load on to the enormous quagmire of a muck heap and stood back. There was a tiredness deep in her bones that was unfamiliar. It was time for a change.

Brigid’s waterproof was efficient but she couldn’t bear to have the hood up over her ears. The sound of the mountainside, even the absence of sound, was sacred. Soon water was running down her neck and her legs and feet were soaked, but her walking warmed her and she didn’t mind.

It was dryer beneath the hazel. Some of the little dens and nut stores were bone dry but the moss was damp like green sponge. Brigid didn’t sit down but kept on slowly wandering, following the open paths and shunning the closed ones, keeping to the hazel wherever she could.

She disturbed some goats who were trying to keep out of the rain, but there were no hares and very few birds. There was other life, though. She spent half an hour watching a strong little mouse move a store of nuts from one hiding place to another, feeling insecure about them, perhaps, or robbing someone else’s hoard. It worked with great diligence and though it often stopped and looked around and twitched its whiskers it seemed to have no awareness of Brigid’s presence. She wondered if she was invisible, if the sharpness of this newly-discovered world made her as insubstantial as she felt. ‘In truth we do not enter Faery, we become Faery …’

She wanted to believe that it was true. She wanted to believe that at any moment the hosts might come out of the hillside and invite her into their golden halls and that she might find Martina among them as the dead were said to be. But instead, the thought of her daughter caused reality to return with a whiplash of adrenalin. She must have jumped or gasped, because the mouse thief froze, and dropped its booty, and vanished with astonishing speed among the stones.

Brigid broke out in a sweat, but despite it she was cold. She walked on.

Aine was badgered mercilessly. At first it was a novelty, being the centre of attention, the only person in the school with a missing sister. But after a while it became tiring and then distressing so that she had to take refuge in tears and be rescued by one of the teachers. They considered sending her home, but when they phoned her house there was no answer. The crisis passed and she survived it. Life went on.

Brigid had learned from the goats and found a warm, sheltered corner among the rocks. The earth floor was dry, there, and covered with dusty goat droppings. Brigid barely noticed them. She folded her knees and propped her stick between them and wrapped her arms around the lot. She pulled up the collar of her coat and, though she wasn’t warm, she was tolerably cold.

She didn’t like what was happening at home with Gerard. It scared her. She said to him, ‘Let you be the earth for a change and I’ll be the lark.’ She climbed above the rounded, planetary bulk of him and was surprised by how light she was, and how strong, and how safe in the air. But she could not sing, not a note, and she knew it was because her daughter was dead and her heart was broken. She turned back towards the earth and began her headlong dive, knowing that she could pull up as she reached the ground.

Knowing that she wouldn’t.

She gasped and woke up, clutching at her precious hazel rod.

When Aine came home from school Gerard regretted sending her. She was pale and strained and he couldn’t imagine the effect all this was having on her. But she ate the toasted cheese sandwiches that he made for her and half a packet of marshmallow biscuits and when she was finished she put on her jacket again and announced that she was going over to see Trish.

Gerard let her go and, as he cleared up, his mind began to run around the familiar rings. Martina had run off with some young man and was living in sin in Dublin. She had fallen off the horse and was in some old person’s house with a broken leg or in a coma, but safe. Or she had encountered someone.

At that stage he baulked, as he always did. Like a recurring nightmare the mouth of the souterrain presented itself to taunt him. It would not go away. With a monstrous effort he wrenched his thoughts from it once again.

He stacked the dishes beside the ones still left from breakfast and wondered where Brigid was. In danger of getting stuck again he ran water into the washing-up bowl. It was cold. He turned it off and set about lighting the range.

Trish was riding a young mare in the jumps field, circling this way and that, trying to get her balanced. Now that life was returning to normal she had moved Specks back into the orchard where he had huffed at the fallen blossom and pretended to eat it. Aine guessed where he was and ran back to the yard to get a head collar.

Specks stopped rubbing his neck on a tree and watched her as she climbed in over the gate. He stood and waited as she ran up, and if he wasn’t exactly helpful as she stretched up to him with the head collar he wasn’t obstructive, either.