The Insect Rosary (10 page)

Nancy had made it to the window and had crouched on the commode chair. It didn't smell or anything, but I just didn't like touching it. If this was my bedroom I'd put it somewhere else. Like the silo.

I bent down behind Nancy and lifted my head to the same height as hers, but just to the side. We'd crept in here before, mostly to look in Mum's suitcase, but there was a great view from here of the monkey puzzle tree. The one in front of our window had become familiar, but this had different twists. As from our window, there was no good view of the driveway, because of the trees. But the field to the left of the house looked wide and sloping in a flat way and we could see the stone pile in the corner, and Donn, Jackie and Tommy standing near it. There were sheep in the field as well, of course, and Bruce had lain down, almost flat to the ground, watching them.

‘Can you see what they're doing?' I asked.

Nancy had her head just to the left of me and I was sure she could see more.

‘They've got a bag on the ground,' she said.

I said, ‘That's Bruce.'

‘Behind Tommy, not in front of him. It might be black, but I can tell the difference between a bag and a dog.' She rolled her eyes. ‘I can't see what's in it. Tommy looks angry though.'

He did. His arms swung between Donn and Jackie, over to the road and back to the stones. None of the sound of his voice travelled to the house, or not through the shaking glass, in any case.

‘Should we tell him? Jackie, I mean?' I said.

‘I'm not interrupting them. You can.' Nancy looked as if she was going to dare me. ‘I think you should.'

‘Not a chance.' I tried to make it sound as final as I could because once she started to push I found it really hard to say no. ‘You're the one he likes.'

She sat down on the commode chair and I stayed in a half bent position.

‘I think you're wrong about seeing Ryan's bag.'

‘Yeah, you said.'

‘Mum said he phoned from London. Ryan is totally fine. It was just a bag.'

‘And the gun?'

‘I don't think you'd recognise a gun. It was probably a spanner.'

Nancy smirked. I knew that was the version that Sandra would hear. Clever Nancy and stupid Bernadette. I think if Ryan had phoned – well, I would just have known.

She turned to look out of the window, her head recklessly higher.

‘They'll see you.'

‘They won't.'

Jackie was talking the most now, but his palms were upturned. He didn't look angry. Donn was still standing with his arms crossed, one foot in front of the other. I couldn't see him rock his weight from one to the other, but I would bet he was. I had seen him do that when priests were in the house, especially when Sister Agatha had abandoned him in a corner with a particularly cross one.

Tommy was pointing to the bag on the ground now. Donn put his hands up, palms towards Tommy, and started to nod. Jackie shrugged, like he was sorry for something, and picked the bag up. It only went up a little, like it was really heavy, and he put it down again. We heard Sister Agatha calling his name from the gate near the back of the house, next to the cows. He turned and Donn put his hands to his mouth.

Jackie held his hand up to Sister Agatha and began to walk, backwards, to the gate. Tommy and Donn stood still for a while. When Jackie and Sister Agatha were out of sight, they quickly acted together to drag the bag into the hole between the stones in the corner of the field.

‘Come down,' I said. ‘They'll be coming back now.'

Nancy pushed me out of the way a bit to stare down. ‘I don't think Bruce likes Tommy, you know.' Then she gasped and ducked too quickly, banging her head on the arm of the chair.

‘He saw you?'

She nodded, one hand to her head. She checked for blood on her fingertips, but there was no cut, no distraction. We'd been warned and now we'd been caught. I bit my fingernails and we then we both jumped as we heard Sister Agatha's footsteps on the stairs.

‘Where are youse?' she shouted.

We left the room, our heads low. She didn't seem to notice which room we'd come out of as Nancy closed the door behind us.

‘I'm off to the hospital with Jackie. Florence is in the kitchen so you need to come and mind her. Donn will be back in soon and he'll fetch your tea. OK?'

We looked at her.

‘OK?'

We nodded.

‘Agatha,' I whispered, ‘is Tommy staying?'

‘No, he's gone. I wouldn't . . . He's already gone.' She ran back downstairs, ‘And stay out of my room!'

Donn was in charge. I wasn't sure how I felt about that. We'd had dinner, but could he cook? No man cooked in this house.

‘You're going to have to cook,' I said to Nancy.

‘Maybe you'll have to kill what I cook,' she sneered.

Sister Agatha ran back. ‘And three rosaries each to pray for the safe delivery!' And was gone.

‘Bern, I haven't seen my beads for ages.'

I knew where they were, but I didn't want to say.

She kicked me. ‘Bern! Where've you put it? You must have mine too.'

‘We left them in the stable.'

Now

Bernie had laughed at the thought of retracing their dad's car wheels.

‘You never liked those trips, Nancy. You always wanted to go shopping with Mum.'

‘So? I'd like to see them now.'

‘All that time I wasted looking at them. There's a whole modern country here and he wasn't interested in anything built less than a thousand years ago. We'll go off somewhere else. Maybe see what's on at the cinema in Belfast.'

Nancy saw her look sideways at Hurley. She was clearly conscious that it might upset him, but was it a deliberate or accidental clumsiness? Bernie hadn't looked Nancy in the eye since she failed her test.

‘I'd really like our families to spend some time together.' Nancy waited. ‘Maybe another day we can plan something.' She turned to Donn. ‘Can we borrow the car?'

‘You can,' he said. ‘I don't need it today.'

‘Are you insured?' asked Bernie.

‘I'm sure we'll be fine.' Nancy hadn't talked to Elian about not having any insurance and assumed he had weighed up the option of staying in or risking it. She wasn't going to bring it up if he didn't.

Hurley said, ‘Mom, Donn said I could work with him today.'

‘Donn works every day. He'll still have work for you tomorrow.'

Hurley looked at Donn, who nodded.

‘Always more to do tomorrow,' he said.

‘And you should wait a couple more days before you get really dirty. The bandage is off but it isn't quite healed.' Nancy picked up her bag from the table and looked at Bernie. ‘Have a good time.'

Bernie nodded. Elian and Hurley followed Nancy out to the yard.

‘Got the map?' she asked.

Elian rolled his eyes. ‘Map. I haven't had to find my way by map for how many years? What kind of country doesn't have proper mobile coverage? GPS isn't some strange new-fangled idea, it's vital to all sorts of things.'

Nancy sighed. ‘Do you have the map?'

‘Yes, yes, I do.' Elian lifted it from the floor of the car and slowly began to open the pages with a rough flick.

‘Do you know where we are?'

‘Yeah.' He kept on flicking.

Nancy started the car and pulled out of the yard.

‘We'll be near enough to Belfast to get some reception, I guess. You can get all of your emails through in one go, and I bet there won't be more than one that's worth replying to.' She stopped at the end of the lane. ‘I'm turning right, if you want to find us on the map.'

‘Great.'

‘I'll just wait till you're sure.'

Hurley sighed, ‘Can we just go?'

She pulled away. The sky was bright, although there were thin clouds, and the wet roads shone. At the end of the road she turned right again, not bothering to check with Elian. She knew the way to Belfast roughly and hoped that their destination would be signposted so that she didn't have to ask him anyway. He was flicking randomly through the pages now. It covered all of Great Britain and she was pretty sure that he was in Scotland, now Northumberland. She tried not to look, tried to keep her eyes on the road. Drive on the left. The hills swelled and subsided to the right, mists formed and cloud shadows thickened. It was green, as Elian said whenever anyone asked him how he was finding it. Very green.

Hurley was slumped against the window, looking up at the sky. What would he say? Very grey, it's all very grey. It was good how he'd started to talk to Donn. He hadn't exchanged a word with the girls and seemed to take all of Bernie's questions as part of a test he couldn't possibly pass so wouldn't bother. Nancy didn't blame him. He was fine though. He seemed fine. At home there was so much tension, so many questions to ask him at the end of every day – did you get in trouble, did you manage to stay in class for a whole lesson? It was nice not having to check on him, but she felt as if she didn't really have anything to say either.

School was stressful and knowing that he had no friends made her cry at night. Doctors and behavioural therapists and educational psychologists made up the majority of her contacts. Work had slipped from her mind and she sat for days at the workbench without picking up a pencil or a pair of scissors. Her ambitions had become fuzzy and the less she talked about it the less Elian remembered that she had a job too.

‘No, I can't take him for that appointment. And it's not like you're busy.'

I am, she wanted to protest, I am busy. There's so much to do and organise and I'm disappearing into the role of carer.

‘I escort Hurley and I justify Hurley and I apologise for Hurley, but there are other things that I want to be doing.'

‘But they can wait, can't they? If I don't go to work we don't eat. That's what it comes down to.'

Soon she needed the car so much that she had to drive Elian to work, Hurley to school, pick him up and drive him to one appointment or another, and then collect Elian, who was too tired to cook, again. Her time, the time that really belonged to her, had shrunk back and back until she didn't know what to do with it anymore. She was just a facilitator for their lives.

 

They walked across to the Giant's Ring from the car park. Elian read aloud to Hurley from a brochure he'd borrowed from Bernie.

‘It's about two hundred metres across with an internal ditch. That's what makes it a henge, Hurley. Late Neolithic or Early Bronze Age. What does that mean? How old is that, Nancy?'

Nancy walked away. ‘Same as Stonehenge.'

‘When was that though?' Elian shouted after her, ‘It's your history! How would I know?'

Take away his phone and suddenly Elian's stupidity was revealed. It reminded her of the days before smartphones. What was that? When did that happen? Strings of questions emerged which Nancy wouldn't have minded answering so much if she had any certainty that he would remember the answers. Instead the same question came up again and again.

‘You've asked me that,' she'd say.

‘No, I don't think I have,' he'd reply, quite certain.

He clearly hadn't had any questions to ask at the farm, his mind stilled with Bernie's noise, Bernie's children. Now he started on Hurley.

‘Surely you've done this period at school, Hurley.'

Hurley shrugged. ‘No.'

‘You must know. The Neolithic, what do you think? You've heard of Stonehenge, right?'

Hurley shrugged again.

Nancy walked towards the stones to get out of hearing. She could picture the pages her father had shown her, of the wooden posts driven into the ground in circles around the stones. Two hundred and fifty trees, making a new, manmade forest to denote new, manmade ideas. Maybe they would have made a ritual pathway and instead of jogging for the stones as she was now, the approach would be made indirect, respectfully circling them before arrival.

She touched the stones. There was nothing magical in the contact, it was just an acknowledgement of their age and her presence. This is why she would never return to Stonehenge, fenced off, precious, but would willingly go back to Avebury. It wasn't communion or prayer or magnetic powers, but just being through touching.

She walked around the side of the chamber. She could probably fit in there, between the stones. The thought of hiding from Elian, watching him look around for her with increasing anxiety made her giggle. When she crawled out or, worse, was found, she'd feel bad, though. Especially if Hurley was worried. She didn't think Hurley would be worried. She turned to watch him now, leaning with her back against one of the upright stones. He was separate from Elian who was holding his phone above his head, as if it would be any use to get a signal so high that he couldn't read what was on it. Hurley was walking the embankment, slowly as if he was the only person there. He was, she supposed, as far as he was concerned.

Nancy ran her hands over the rock and laid her head against it. She remembered this silent touching from other stones she'd visited, other outings she'd been dragged to, complaining that ‘stones are all the same'. She missed this random and thoughtless history when she was in America. They despised ageing and erased it, claiming newer was bigger and better. It wasn't. How long would her house last when they left it? A decade or so, and then the nineties would become a vilified period and the new thirties or forties would offer something more sprawling or more compact, more insulated or weather resistant. She would never get used to the lack of bricks in their houses, those strange American people she was still bewildered by. The thunderstorms shook the walls and the roof jumped as the massive raindrops hammered against it. It was a house that denied the outside. The windows weren't designed to open – that's what air conditioning was for. She'd set up her separate space in the basement, refusing all of Elian's desires for a rumpus room for the boys. Elian built a man-shed instead.

In the basement the only electric outlet fed a single lamp, angled over her workbench, and a radio tape deck. That was it – no TV, no fridge for beers and no pool table. No rumpus. If it was hot she opened the window and if it was cold she wrapped up. If it was really cold, as those Michigan winters often were, she might swap the radio for a small electric heater, but usually she moved her current projects to the kitchen table where they could be examined better. Only since all the trouble with Hurley, there hadn't been many projects. Her source of ideas, her love of shape and colour, had faded into ideas that were half formed and then discarded. The thought of planning ahead, crafts for Easter at Christmas, for summer at Easter, for Halloween and Thanksgiving and Christmas in the summer, made her feel vertiginous. She began to dream of falling, uncontrollable plummets into nothingness. And all the time, the thought, what do I do next, what can I do next, what comes next?

The plan for this trip came out of that, if she was honest. Maybe she needed to see trees that weren't pruned, grass that was not cut. Maybe she needed to walk out of her house and keep on walking without being made to feel odd or weird or some kind of socially incompetent reject. They'd been for drives in the countryside when she first met Elian and she thought he was joking when they didn't arrive anywhere, but home. A ‘road trip' was just that, a trip along roads, to look at what they passed, like the buffalo. She asked if they could go somewhere and get out of the car. He drove her down the I-96 to Canada and let her get out of the car just long enough to realise how much more she liked Canada than the US. He hadn't told her that she needed a passport to get back into America until this point because ‘he'd never been stopped, not once'. And they had ended up in the only queue that was being stopped and she had to attempt an American accent. Elian laughed all the way home and she thought she would never forgive him.

Another time, when Hurley was a baby, they took the I-96 in the other direction. At Lake Michigan they stood on the shore, and that's when she realised it. There was nothing she wanted to see here. The land around the lake was flat, the view went on for miles. Behind her were forests and swamps all the way to Canada. She was with a man who thought a fun day out involved cruise control and seat-belts that rode over her to do themselves up. I have no choices, she thought. I want to go home. Elian told her that would be the worst time to go home, that she had to ride it out and wait until it didn't seem home anymore.

For a while she clung to the way she initially liked the weirdness of drive-in banks and sushi and massive shopping malls bordered by even larger car parks. She'd liked the way that everything in America was exactly how she expected it to look from watching TV, all the low slung eateries along the endless straight roads. By the time Hurley was three she found herself paralysed in supermarkets unable to buy any food because the choices seemed too many. An hour and thirty minutes were wasted in front of the milk aisle, trying to find a bottle that didn't have added vitamins or reduced fat or extra cream. She was still standing there when Elian arrived. She never found out who'd phoned him to tell him where she was.

‘I'm allergic to America,' she said.

‘Don't worry, we have pills for that,' she heard.

 

The noise of children drew her back. Hurley had left the wall and was heading towards her. A group of boys headed over the embankment and formed goalposts with their jackets. She shivered to see their bare arms. Now she saw, too, the half dozen dog walkers and the child climbing up the stones behind her. Elian was still waving his phone at the clouds.

‘Shall we go?' she said to Hurley, head bent down to his chest. He nodded. He was so quiet, so calm. She could relax and just like him here. This place suited him. She wanted it to last forever. With or without Elian.