Thin Air (11 page)

Inside the house Brigid was very quiet. She thanked Thomas for the tea that he gave her, but she didn’t drink it.

‘I expect there’ll be news soon,’ he said.

Joseph and Father Fogarty by-passed the reeds and returned to the lakeside where it became stony again. Rounding a curve of the shoreline they came to the small bay where John Mannion’s cruiser lay moored. Joseph scuffed out along the newly-constructed landing stage and looked down into the neat, clean little skiff that was tethered there. Its appearance was always one of the first signs of spring.

Fifty yards away the priest had climbed the steps of the Mannions’ split-level bungalow and was standing between Greco-Roman pillars, waiting for someone to answer the door. The big area below was a games room with snooker and ping-pong tables for the boys when they were home from boarding school. Joseph had never seen it but Stephen said that he had.

Mannion himself was a Dubliner and still spent most of his time on the east coast. It was rumoured that he had made a fortune out of software. Nobody really knew him at all, but his wife was a member of the ICA and was popular enough in the village.

It was she who now opened the door. Joseph couldn’t hear what she said but he saw her put a hand to her hair and the other one to her neckline, checking. She had a good body and did little to hide it. Joseph made a mental note to tell Steve that he wouldn’t mind playing with her in the games room. He smiled to himself and looked down into the murky water. From the lake-bed something white waved up at him.

He discerned that it was only a plastic bag, but not before the most awful, paralysing fear had leached all the strength from his knees. He turned and walked, slowly at first, faster as his legs recovered, back along the landing-stage. The door of the house was closed and the priest was skipping down the steps towards him. Joseph walked straight past him.

‘I’m going home,’ he said.

There were no flowers on the fuchsia but there were plenty among the ruined houses: primroses, violets, clouds of white thorn blossom, slipping towards pink. Popeye sniffed under the thick growth of brambles and elder that stood within the fallen walls and Gerard wished that he hadn’t been so hard on him. When he called him now he shrank away and refused to be directed. Gerard had to beat his way in himself.

Beneath the bushes a layer of rich leaf-mould covered the floors. A broad flag marked a fireplace; a broken lintel indicated a window. There was little else.

Thomas said that the houses had been empty for the whole of his life but that his mother could remember smoke in the chimneys of both of them. He said that it wasn’t emigration or hunger or changes in the land laws that drove the people out, but the houses themselves. They had been built with stones brought down from the fort and nothing but bad luck ever attended anyone who lived in them. One crop after another failed on the land. One child after another died. But it wasn’t until a man from one of the houses was killed by a bull that the occupants made the decision to move out. The houses fell in directly, he said, and some of the stones found their way back to the fort. You could never be sure with Thomas, but Gerard suspected that part of the story stretched even his credulity. All the same, there was something dark and mysterious about the atmosphere around the houses, and Gerard called up the dog and struck out for home. By now someone was sure to have some news. He wasn’t at all sure, though, that he would want to hear it.

Just as Trish was about to turn back, Specks swung into an open gateway and walked straight over a cattle grid. Trish sat still and waited for disaster; the slip, the clatter, the broken leg. But if Specks was aware that crossing a cattle grid was an equine achievement he gave no indication of it. He went on at the same pace, up a slight incline and around to the back of the small, neat bungalow that stood at the top.

He stopped at the back door and when Trish slid off, he shifted restlessly, his big feet only inches from the tidy beds and borders that surrounded the house. Trish growled at him and looked around, wondering what to do next. Before she could make up her mind the door opened and an old lady in a blue nylon housecoat came out.

It seemed as if the cob had been expecting her because he shifted forward and, quite politely, removed a brown bread-crust from her hand.

‘You’re not Martina,’ said the woman.

Trish nipped a sarcastic comment in the bud. ‘No.’

‘But that’s Specks, isn’t it? That’s you, isn’t it, Specks?’

She bent down, hands on knees trying to get closer to the level of the cob’s head, which was now not far from the ground. He was scraping the crust backwards and forwards along the gravel trying to break it. Trish took hold of it and he tore his half away.

‘I know who you are, now,’ said Trish. Martina had often told her of the aunt that she rode over to visit. ‘I’m Trish. I work for Gerard, with the horses.’

‘And where’s Martina?’ said the old woman.

She looked too frail to hear the truth.

‘I’m not sure.’ said Trish. ‘I was just riding the horse and he brought me here.’

‘Good old Specks! You came to see Lena!’ Specks began to make for the lawn but Trish restrained him.

‘Let him,’ said Lena. ‘Come in and have a cup of tea.’

When Joseph got home he went straight upstairs to his room. He turned on his portable television but there was nothing he wanted to watch. For a minute or two he sat on the bed, listening to the sounds of the house, then he stood up again and took a dog-eared magazine from its place behind his shirt-drawer. Again he listened. Then he plumped up his pillows and settled himself on the bed. The magazine fell open co-operatively and he leaned back.

Downstairs Father Fogarty waited. Brigid found him there when she came up to the house with Aine. The sun was still bright but there was a nip of frost in the air. It was time to light the range.

Gerard drove back up the track to the fork and stopped. He left the dog in the pick-up and walked the hundred yards down to the quarry, where a startled heron lifted on to broad wings and flapped out over his head.

The water stilled as he approached its edge. A couple of silt-filled barrels rusted in the shallows but there was no sign of any recent activity there. He wondered what the young lads got up to these days. It seemed to be all computers and videos; indoor stuff, all inside their heads. Joseph had been his shadow when he was younger; his right-hand man, up on the tractor, up on the horses, wide-eyed and willing and worshipful. Now he hardly knew him. Didn’t know what he thought or what he liked or what he wanted to do with his life. Nothing, it seemed.

Gerard stepped closer to the quarry and looked into it. The water was murky. In the soft mud underneath it, indistinct pond life moved. The end of a flat strap emerged from a tangle of green weeds a couple of feet from the edge. Gerard held his breath as he reached for it and pulled it clear, but it was ancient and slimy; had been there for years. He threw it back and washed his hands in the wriggling water. He was glad that Joseph didn’t get involved with the place or places like it. He also wished that he did.

‘Martina!’

He had brought her here, once, to look at the tadpoles. It seemed like yesterday, but it was years; a lifetime, perhaps. She was about three, a tiny thing in a short frock and fine pigtails. She had clung to his trousers for the first ten minutes, afraid of the gloomy water, reluctant to explore. But after that it had been he who had to keep a grip on her.

‘Martina!’

The quarry walls echoed his voice back to him, round and round and round.

Lena laid the table with side-plates and knives and spoons.

‘I won’t have anything to eat, Mrs,’ said Trish. ‘A cup of tea in my hand, that’s all.’

Lena ignored her and opened the fridge. She took out ham, lettuce, tomatoes, butter, pickled beetroot. Trish noticed that there was a box of corn flakes in there as well and smiled at the wall.

‘I’ve no sweet cake,’ said Lena. ‘I gave the last of it to Specks yesterday.’

‘Yesterday?’ said Trish.

‘I think it was yesterday,’ said Lena. ‘Maybe it was the day before.’

Trish didn’t like to push. The old woman was very thin and frail.

‘Biscuits,’ she said, pouring them out of a tin on to a plate. They were so soft that they drooped over each other, but Lena didn’t seem to notice.

‘Where is she, then?’ she said.

‘Martina?’ said Trish. ‘She’s … Well, we’re not sure. She didn’t come home last night.’

Lena sat down. The kettle, which seemed to Trish to have been on the hot plate of the range for half an hour, had eventually come to the boil.

‘Didn’t come home?’ said Lena. ‘Why not?’

‘We’re not sure,’ said Trish. ‘Was she definitely here yesterday?’

The kettle continued to boil furiously. Lena made drying motions with her hands in the skirt of her housecoat.

‘Is today Saturday?’ she asked.

‘It is,’ said Trish. She could imagine the days stretching back, one blurring into the other with sameness. It was a sentence she wouldn’t have wished on her worst enemy.

‘It was, em, let me see, now.’ Lena was like someone taking an exam. Trish felt sorry for her.

‘I was in at the doctor’s in the morning. Paddy Barry brought me in. He’s very good. Then we had some soup there, in the hotel. So if it was after that I should remember it, shouldn’t I?’

She noticed the kettle at last and got up to make the tea. Trish let her take her time, and it wasn’t until they were both finishing their ham sandwiches that Trish brought Lena back to the matter in hand.

‘So what did you do when you got back from town? Yesterday?’

Lena looked at her with a blank expression behind which light slowly dawned.

‘I’m awful stupid, you know,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t here at all. Senior citizens’ day in the community centre. Every whole Friday.’

Her face was child-like in its delight. She had passed her exam.

Throughout the afternoon the searchers came and went. Maureen’s sandwiches got finished. The teapot was filled and emptied, filled and emptied. Sam taped together a load of the photocopies to make a master map which was pinned to the wall and shaded in, bit by bit. When Joseph came downstairs again, looking anaemic, he elected to take charge of it, provided that he didn’t have to go out again.

Father Fogarty left to make a few calls before evening mass. In a gesture that clearly moved him profoundly he left Brigid his own personal copy of the Bible, still warm from his pocket and very much creased and battered. After he had gone, Brigid put it on the table and looked through it. There were many notes and underlinings. She read a few favourite passages then put it aside. In the context of her current situation Thomas’s fairy stories made far more sense.

The phone rang and Joseph answered it. It was ringing more and more frequently as word of Martina’s disappearance spread and people wanted to know the latest news. Brigid listened as she washed up for the fourth time that afternoon.

‘No. No news. Nothing.’

His tone was flat and betrayed no feeling. Brigid wondered if he had any. She sighed, remembering Martina again. It happened every few minutes and was accompanied by the same stab of panic, the same hopeless casting around in her mind for unexplored possibilities, the same sense of unreality. Somewhere there was an answer, a solution that would free her from the fear that was mushrooming out of control in her consciousness. Facing it was fruitless. The only relief lay in turning away from it, in avoiding thoughts of Martina. Increasingly she found herself taking refuge in that part of her mind that she had not visited since childhood. There was comfort in its archetypal simplicity, its infinite reach, its lack of resemblance to the washing-up world.

The missing daughter world.

She looked up at the mountains. For years she had stood at that window and not seen them. Now they would not let her go. Next time she would climb higher, and see more. But for the moment, she was grounded. She had left her stick at Thomas’s for safe keeping. Gerard would burn it if it was here, or one of the hippies might take it and hang a spotted handkerchief from it. Brigid laughed at the idea and then, like a flagellation, remembered Martina again.

Gerard came in with Popeye.

‘Any news?’

‘Nothing.’

Gerard shrugged out of his jacket and collapsed into a chair.

‘Where the feck can she be?’

Brigid handed him a cup of tea. Popeye found a warm corner beside the range, followed himself in three tight circles and was asleep before he hit the ground.

‘Shall I shade in the island, then?’ said Joseph.

‘What?’

‘The map.’ Joseph showed him. ‘Did you cover the whole of the island?’

‘Oh, feck off with your colours!’ said Gerard, getting to his feet again. ‘What are you doing standing around the kitchen, anyway? Do you not realise what’s happening?’

Joseph blushed and backed away from the wall.

‘Shade it in, Joseph.’ Brigid was as surprised to hear herself speak like that as Joseph was, and Gerard.

‘Go on,’ she said. ‘You’re doing a job that needs to be done.’

Gerard stared at her, not sure whether he could trust his senses. He pushed the mug of tea away.

‘I’m going out again,’ he said. ‘I can’t sit around the kitchen and the girl still out there somewhere.’

Brigid nodded towards the map where Joseph was at work again.

‘That’ll show you what’s been covered and what hasn’t,’ she said.

‘I don’t need any map,’ he said, pulling his jacket from the chair back.

‘Do it your own way,’ said Brigid. ‘You always do.’

Gerard walked out of the house and got into the car. His heart was pounding and his face was burning. Between rage and terror he was all but paralysed. Somehow he managed to put the car into gear and drive slowly up the boirin. He had no idea at all where he was going. Nor had he any idea how his life could have been thrown out of kilter so completely. He tried to remember yesterday and Martina’s presence in it, but he couldn’t bring life to his recollections. There was only a generic memory of her; of jeans and big sweaters. It seemed to him now that he took no more notice of her than of a radio in the background. There had to be more than that. Some unusual interaction, a conversation they had been having, a shared joke perhaps. But all that would come to his mind was the adrenalin-charged memory of his struggle with Trish in the muddy field, the fury that followed, the blaze of murderous intent that was coupled with the desire in his loins.