‘Of course not,’ Dara lied. ‘What did everyone do?’
‘If you’d stayed you’d have found out,’ he said and went into the boys’ room and closed the door.
Dara felt more alone than she had ever felt.
She thought about Mam saying that she loved her. It was a nice thing to say but Mam was right, it wasn’t much use at the moment.
The next evening they had all made separate resolutions.
Dara was not going to sulk. She wore a red shirt over her black bathing suit, and the silk rose that Kerry had
given her on her fifteenth birthday all those months ago behind her ear. She smiled at everyone.
Maggie had decided not to wear her good new dress. It had been overdoing it, they had all got annoyed with her somehow. She wore an old Viyella dress that used to belong to Kitty once, it was faded and shrunk now. It made Maggie look about ten.
Jacinta’s father had told her that he was prescribing himself headache remedies because of the continuous whine tone in her voice, so she had resolved to speak more cheerfully.
Michael had decided that it was not the end of the world if John Joe Conway said ‘Fine girl you are’ every time he looked at Grace. And that it only made
him
look the stupid one if he reacted all the time.
Tommy Leonard had decided that Dara
did
like him, she wasn’t sighing at him, she was sighing at everything around her.
Liam White thought that he might ask Maggie Daly to the pictures. She was so small he could even get her in for half price as an under twelve.
Grace made a vow to be much nicer to Michael. It was awful for him, his parents had turned into policemen and insisted that they all move in packs. Someone must have seen them. She shuddered to think what her own father would say if anything was reported to him. But then he was so busy and out so much he wouldn’t notice.
They sat swinging their legs on the bridge, the four girls, Dara, Maggie, Grace and Jacinta. The boys perched on their bikes and chatted to them.
Half a dozen others came and went, John Joe Conway
with his loutish laughs saying there was nothing to look at since the girls were all covered up.
There was no sign of Kerry.
Then they saw him walking down Bridge Street, the evening sun hitting his golden hair. He looked like a young god as he walked, in his open-necked blue shirt the exact colour of his eyes, and his white trousers gleaming. He looked like a cowboy in a Western, the good guy who had come in to save the town. Tonight he did not have the red car – he had left his bike slung casually against the railing of Slattery’s house.
He was coming to join the gang on the bridge. The evening could begin.
They had never seen Kerry swim in this part of the river. Up beyond the footbridge yes, long ago. But here was more public somehow. Up in the old place with the raft it had never mattered whether you could swim or not, it was wallowing and flapping about in the water from the bank to the raft and back.
But here it was altogether more showy.
They watched as Kerry kicked off his canvas shoes and slipped off his trousers. He was wearing his swimming trunks underneath. He stood in the golden rays of the evening sun, blinking. Then he threw off his blue shirt, and laughed at them.
‘It only gets worse thinking about it,’ he said as if he were totally unaware that all their eyes were on him. Lean and tanned, golden and confident, he stood on the parapet of the bridge and did one long clean dive into the River Fern.
Tommy Leonard thought gloomily that that was that.
There went his only chance of being good at something. Kerry O’Neill turned out to be much better at diving than Tommy. Wouldn’t you know?
Dara looked at Kerry in wonder. He was perched on the raft, the drops of water clinging to his tanned shoulders and arms making him look shimmering. He was so very, very handsome and he was smiling straight up at her.
‘Come on, Dara, let’s see you do it.’
Without thinking, Dara peeled off her red shirt, took the silk rose carefully from her hair and scrambled up on the wall of the bridge.
‘Careful, Dara,’ Michael said.
‘Move more to the middle,’ Tommy Leonard warned.
Dara dived in. She seemed surprised at herself when she surfaced, shaking the water from her face.
‘Great stuff,’ Kerry said, moving over on the raft to make room for her.
‘Very good, keep your legs straight, though,’ Jacinta called.
‘Is it very high?’ Grace shouted.
‘Not bad, don’t stop and consider it,’ Dara laughed.
In her smart stripy bathing suit Grace turned to Michael for advice. ‘What do you think?’
‘Why don’t we go down the side? We can dive from the raft,’ he said.
But Grace wanted to do the high dive.
Once up there it looked very far.
‘Stop thinking about it!’ Dara called.
This was good advice. In a splash Grace was beside them in the water. She looked back up at the bridge.
‘I never thought I could dive that far,’ she said in wonder.
And so it was that they all managed it. It was the only summer when they were all able to jump or dive from the bridge itself. They all remembered summers years ago when some people went from the high bridge, but there was never a summer surely where everyone was able to do it.
Little Maggie Daly realised that. It looked like a million miles.
‘Try a jump first,’ Liam White encouraged. ‘Once you’ve done the jump it’s easy to do the dive.’
‘Is it deep enough?’ Maggie asked fearfully.
‘It’s over twenty feet,’ Liam laughed. ‘That’s enough water for you, Maggie.’
Quivering with determination that she would not be left out, Maggie clambered up on to the wall.
‘Hey, Maggie, it’s too high for you,’ Kerry called.
‘Come down the side,’ Grace shouted.
Maggie took no notice. She leaped out as far as she could and appeared from the huge splash she had made still quivering. She climbed on to the raft beside Dara and Kerry.
‘It’s not that cold,’ Kerry said soothingly.
Maggie was shivering not from cold but from fright.
Now they had all done it, even Maggie, and in the evening light, pleased with themselves, they climbed back up again. Dara straightened her legs, Tommy Leonard did a back flip which Kerry said was terrific and insisted on getting Tommy to teach him.
Suddenly Tommy felt important again.
Grace told Michael that she thought he dived better than either Tommy or Kerry because he had more style and less showing off.
Jacinta said they could get a much better angle if only
they could have a proper springboard attached to the bridge.
Maggie climbed up again. This time she was going to try a dive. Just as she was poised to go her foot slipped.
Maggie Daly fell at an awkward angle, not into the deep water that flowed under the bridge. But to the side where her head hit the corner of the raft with a sickening crack.
For years afterwards they remembered that sound. It was so sharp. It was like the crack of a rifle shot, or of a big twig snapping on the mossy earth up in Coyne’s wood.
And they looked unbelievingly as Maggie lay splayed half in the water and half over the raft.
At a very awkward angle indeed.
It wasn’t the blood coming from the corner of her eye that was so frightening. It was the way Maggie lay.
As if her neck was broken.
They didn’t have to go for Jacinta and Liam’s father. Dr White heard the screams himself.
He was coming out of the presbytery where he had been talking seriously about Miss Barry’s limited life expectancy if she were allowed to continue in her present ways.
His heart lurched when the sound of panic and crisis reached him. He started to run. As he ran he knew the thought that was going through his head like a refrain was unworthy. Please God let it not be Liam or Jacinta. Please God not Liam or Jacinta. Please God.
Charlie who worked in Daly’s was coming out of Conway’s pub when he heard the commotion.
Charlie was a man who frightened easily. He ran back into Conway’s and ordered himself a brandy.
‘That’s not like you, Charlie,’ Mr Conway said.
‘There’s been an accident on the bridge,’ Charlie said.
Mr Conway lifted the flap and ran out from behind the bar.
‘Mother of God may it not be John Joe,’ he cried, and ran down Bridge Street to see if he could find his big bostoon of a son John Joe, whom he had given three blows in the ear earlier on.
He saw John Joe running up towards him and his face flooded with relief.
John Joe was crying, fighting for words.
‘It’s Maggie Daly,’ he cried. ‘They think she’s dead. She can’t be dead, can she?’
Mr Daly was given a sedative. Dr White was able to get him on to a bed and to roll up his sleeve while it was injected into his arm.
Mrs Daly was different. Her face was white and still. But she was calm to the point of being unnatural.
‘It was the will of Our Lord,’ she said in a matter-of-fact way. ‘He wanted Maggie this evening. Tonight she is with our Blessed Lord and his Holy Mother. She is in a better place by far than Mountfern.’
Martin White looked at her angrily. How could a mother be so philosophical? What kind of God would want Maggie by dashing her to her death from a bridge at fifteen years of age with the complete understanding and acquiescence of her mother? A vein started to throb in his forehead.
‘It’s all right, Martin,’ Sheila Whelan was gentle at his side. ‘Everyone has to mourn in their own way.’
‘This is grotesque,’ he whispered.
‘No, isn’t it great that she has this kind of faith?’
‘It’s not faith, it’s hysteria. Her child is dead, she hasn’t shed a tear.’
‘You’re always very good to people here in this place, don’t start making judgements on them. Not now.’
It was a timely warning. Martin White looked gratefully at Sheila Whelan. He spoke now in his normal voice.
‘I’ll leave you with Mrs Daly, Sheila, and I’ll try to sort out the children. They’re almost all in shock.’
He left the Dalys’ house, walking through the little knot of people who had already gathered around the door to sympathise.
The children were in Fergus Slattery’s house.
Miss Purcell had made cups of tea and opened a tin of biscuits.
Dr White had told them to get out of their wet things and put on their clothes.
He had asked Fergus and Miss Purcell to get them rugs and blankets. Fergus had turned on two electric fires. One at each end of the room.
He had been coming out of his house when he heard the screams. He was at the bridge in moments, at the same time as the doctor. His eyes had met Martin White’s, and the doctor had shaken his head.
‘Get them into your house, Fergus, and let someone tell Seamus Sheehan to come down.’
Fergus shepherded the children into his house and sent them off to various rooms to change.
Then he went to telephone the Ryans. John wasn’t there. Kate said it was his only social engagement in the year, a meeting of the county Historical Association. As a published poet and a man finishing a book about
Fernscourt, he was now highly regarded there.
Fergus cut across her pleasantries. ‘I have your twins here in the house with me. They’re fine, they’re both here.’
She caught the tension in his voice at once. And knew something terrible had happened.
‘What is it? Tell me immediately,’ she said.
He did. Without frills. She would hear within minutes. He wanted her to know that what could be done was being done, and that he would look after Dara and Michael.
‘God, why does it have to be the night that John is out, the one night in the whole year? Will I come up there? Eddie could push me.’
‘No, there are too many people up at the bridge. There’s nothing you can do. The children are all right here. I know it’s hard, but stay where you are.’
She saw the reason in this.
‘I’ll ring Patrick,’ she said firmly. ‘Otherwise he’s bound to get a garbled version too, above in the lodge. Are his two there?’
‘They’re here,’ Fergus said grimly.
He looked at Grace and Michael clinging to each other wrapped in a blanket, Grace unable to stop shivering and refusing to be parted from Michael even to the point where she could remove her wet bathing suit under her dress.
Kerry was sitting on a chair, his handsome face drawn with shock. Tucked into his side, almost under his arm, was Dara Ryan, white and still disbelieving what had happened. Kerry absently stroked Dara’s dark hair, which had a curiously inappropriate artificial rose stuck in the side.
Fergus didn’t like to see the young Ryans so firmly enmeshed with the O’Neills. But this wasn’t a time for such thoughts. He tried to put the haunting little face of Maggie Daly – those huge worried eyes and all that massive hair – way out of his mind. What could have possessed a frail nervy little thing like that to jump from a high bridge? And why didn’t some of the others stop her? Looking around the stricken group in his house Fergus realised that this is what they must all be thinking too.
The night seemed to go on for ever.
John Joe Conway’s father excused himself from the bar and went into his workshop at the back. There would be need of a small coffin.
John Joe followed him out and railed at him. Why did his father always have to think of business, and making money, when someone was dead, for God’s sake? John Joe kept saying the word over and over because he couldn’t believe it.
His father was short on explanations and excuses.
‘What would you like us to do with Maggie? Leave her lying there looking at the sky? The only thing we
can
do for the dead is to give them a decent burial. If this is ever going to be your place, John Joe, you’ll have to learn that.’
‘I don’t want to run a business, I don’t want to be grown up,’ John Joe said.
His father gave him a long look. ‘I know, son, it’s not the greatest thing in the world being grown up and being in business. But look at the alternative.’
For the first time in their lives John Joe Conway and his father looked at each other with something like understanding.