Thin Air (15 page)

Trish brought Thomas a blanket despite his protests and put the gas on high and lit the fire as well. Under Thomas’s instruction she dug out bottles of stout, and cut slices of rubbery brack from a loaf and spread it with vegetable butter, yellow and slick.

As the room heated up, Popeye stretched out and began to relive, or perhaps to revise the hunt of the hare.

‘It’s a bad night,’ said Trish.

‘’Tis,’ said Thomas. ‘Very bad.’

‘I got a fright.’

‘Why wouldn’t you?’ Colour was beginning to return to Thomas’s cheeks. He refilled his glass from a fresh bottle. Trish was relieved to see that he wasn’t quite ready to give up on life. But he wasn’t really quite with her, either, not quite on the surface of the planet. They listened to the wind coming in off the lake, until Popeye yelped and sat up looking bewildered, then relieved and then embarrassed. Trish rubbed his head reassuringly and they listened to the wind some more until Thomas said: ‘Something is mad out there anyway.’

‘What is it?’ said Trish.

‘Oh, you wouldn’t know,’ said Thomas. ‘There are all kinds of stories about the lake. And about the island.’

‘Martina told me a lot of them,’ said Trish, ‘when we’d be out riding together. About Cormac and the bull and the city under the water.’

‘’Tis how he still hunts the bull,’ said Thomas. ‘On nights like this. That’s what my mother used say. If you listen you can hear him blowing his horn and the bull bellowing and sometimes you can hear hounds.’

Popeye pricked up his ears and looked towards the door and Trish laughed. ‘He can hear them, anyway.’

Popeye barked and stood up as the door flew open and Gerard swept in, driven by the wind at his back. Trish jumped to her feet in a reflex action, her heart in her mouth. When Gerard saw her he froze, and the wind blew in and caused the gas heater to gutter and the fire to billow smoke into the room. Then his features hardened and he closed the door. Trish put a hand to her heart and exhaled.

‘You gave me a fright.’

‘I was just seeing how Dad was getting on. Are you all okay?’

‘Grand, sure,’ said Thomas. ‘Any news?’

‘Nothing.’ He was soaking wet and haggard. Trish looked into the fire, knowing that the events of that recent night had no relevance now; ashamed all the same of being the object of his desire.

‘My lamp is running out, Dad,’ he went on. ‘Can I borrow yours?’

‘Work away.’

He took Thomas’s torch from beside the door and left his own dripping on to the floor. Trish would have taken the opportunity to get company on the way home but she was afraid that she would be taken up wrong. When Gerard was gone she felt awkward about being there with the old man. She would give it a few more minutes and then make a run for it.

Joseph dreamed that he met Stephen and Martina in the pub. They were going out together. They all leaned against the bar, having a great time, but Joseph suddenly realised that what he was drinking was piss and he felt sick. The other two were gone. He went to the jacks at the back. It had a big window and he could see Stephen walking down the motorway. He had a bridle slung over his shoulder.

Joseph sat up in bed and fumbled for the light but it was already on. His earphone cable was twisted around his neck and he was sweating and cold at the same time. He felt desperately sick.

Aine was checking the good hiding places in the house. She had already looked under the coats in the porch, inside the broken freezer and in the hot press. She had looked in the bottom of the dresser even though Martina was probably too big to fit into it any more, and under the sofa where her mother was sleeping, and inside the big corner cabinet. Upstairs she had searched under her own, Martina’s, and her parents’ beds. Martina wasn’t in any of those places. There was only Joseph’s room, which she would have to leave until the next day, and the big linen press in the bathroom. She had just opened its door when she heard footsteps coming rapidly down the landing. Reacting without thought, she slipped into the cupboard and pulled the door closed behind her.

Through a crack she saw Joseph burst in and lean over the toilet bowl, heaving. The sound was dreadful; the smell was worse. She held her breath. Joseph blew his nose and coughed, then flushed the cistern. Aine breathed through her mouth and watched as Joseph unzipped his fly and pissed into the bowl. When he was finished he seemed to turn towards the cupboard and make a face at her, but he didn’t stop. When he left, he turned out the light.

Aine sat in the darkness, still hardly daring to breathe. She was sure that Joseph had seen her and that now he was angry and waiting for her outside in the dark hall. The wind buffeted the house. The cistern hissed as it filled. Aine was sitting on a folded blanket and her feet were on two more. Holding her breath, she tugged one out and wrapped it around her and tucked her thumb into her mouth. She thought of Martina; could not imagine any place for her in the black, roaring world of the night. The blanket was scratchy. Aine wriggled into comfort and closed her eyes and saw a white swan which ran across the water and flew into the sun.

Joseph left his light on. One of the ear jacks had broken off his walkman. He dropped it down beside the bed and stared at the white ceiling for a moment, then got up and began to search again for the lost magazine.

Thomas’s lamp lasted for a cursory search of the orchard. Defeated, Gerard returned to the house. His coat was heavy with rain. When he hung it on the back of a chair, the chair fell over. He left it there.

Brigid was asleep in the sitting room. If she had been any kind of a decent woman she would have stayed awake and kept the fire going, waiting for him. His own mother would have. There would have been hot soup on the range. If Brigid had been any kind of a decent woman she would have had kindness for him. Any man had a right to that.

He dropped into an armchair beside the dead fire. His wet clothes soaked the upholstery. He peeled off his socks and dropped them on to the hearth, where they made a puddle on the tiles.

What had that policeman meant by ‘encountered’? Who had she encountered? What did he mean? Gerard shivered but the energy to get himself upstairs and undressed was not there. He crossed his arms and sank deeper into the chair. The light seemed to dim and without standing up he somehow moved the chair to the window, where the waters of the lake were deep and dark and where a drowning dog was grasping a bridle, dragging it down, dragging down the white hand which still clung on to the reins, trying to pull it back towards the surface. Failing.

Gerard gasped and opened his eyes, still beside the fire and under the bright triple bulbs of his own cut-glass centrepiece. He wrenched himself out of the chair and went into the kitchen, where he put on the kettle and got out of his wet clothes.

Joseph stripped the bed, dragged the mattress off the base and pulled the base away from the wall. There was thick dust down there, a few missing socks and underpants, his geometry set,
Marvel
comics with their pages set in crumpled fans. He picked up the geometry box and kicked the rest of the stuff around. The magazine was not there. He pulled the base out further, exposing a crate of dusty Lego and more comics. Frustrated, he shoved the base home and put everything back together again. For the sixth time he checked behind the shirt drawer.

‘You bastard!’ he screamed into the empty room. The injustice hurt. He didn’t want the damned magazine. He wanted to destroy it.

In the kitchen, where he sat beside the range wrapped in a spare duvet, Gerard heard Joseph’s anguished cry. His first reaction was rage; the boy shouldn’t make a noise like that at night. When he calmed down he was sorry. He ought to go and see what the trouble was, but he couldn’t. He was afraid that the rage would return and sabotage his attempts at friendship, at fatherhood, as it had done so many times before. It was easier to forget.

Thomas threw another few sods on to the fire and turned off the gas.

‘Help yourself to another bottle there, Trish,’ he said.

Trish was glad of the excuse to stay. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Course. Make a sandwich for yourself if you want one.’

‘Do you want one?’

‘No. No, but help yourself.’

Trish reached for the bottle opener. ‘How did the bull come to be on the island in the first place?’

‘Ah,’ said Thomas. ‘That’s a long story.’

‘Will you tell it?’

‘I don’t know, mind. I don’t know if it’s a story for the night that’s in it.’

Thomas stayed quiet for a moment, then seemed to have changed his mind.

‘Before Cormac came, Airmed, who was a daughter of Diancecht, had a sidhe on the island. It’s said that people who were sick could go to a holy well that was there, and she would come out by night and heal them. But all that stopped when Cormac came.’

Trish poured beer into their glasses and Thomas waited until she had finished before he went on.

‘He was a proud and bloodthirsty man, you see, and he would hear of no power greater than himself. Bit like one or two of our politicians today.’ He paused for a moment, as though for her laughter, as though it was a line from a play, well-rehearsed and reliable. ‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘Cormac was out hunting one day and his hounds ran down a beautiful doe and held her while Cormac caught up to them. He drew his knife and was about to kill the doe when it began to call out. “Save me, Cormac, don’t harm me!” Cormac was amazed, and put away his knife and called his hounds off and where the doe had been a beautiful woman was standing instead. A bit like yourself.’

Trish laughed. ‘Get away with your old plamas and tell the story.’ She noted that his colour was good now, revived more by the talk than by the fire or the beer.

‘Right, so,’ he said. ‘Well. Cormac had no intention of letting the beautiful woman go. “I’ll spare you from my knife,” he said, “if you will consent to become my wife.” “I’ll be your wife for a year,” says she, “and I would consider that a fair exchange.” So Cormac agreed. After the year was up she said to him that it was time for her to return to the sidhe, but he wouldn’t consent to it. He put a chain around her ankle and tied the other end to the doorpost of his house and then he went off about his daily business. But when he came back, there was the chain still tied to the door post and no woman on the end of it.’

Thomas paused for effect and took a swig from his glass.

‘Cormac asked the women of the household if they had seen his wife. They said that they had not, but one of them said that she had seen a hare disappearing into a hole in the hillside near the well. So Cormac set men to dig her out of the hill, but no matter how hard and how long they dug they could not find the sidhe and as night fell they went back to the dun to sleep.

‘But that night the fairy woman came to Cormac in his chamber. She begged Cormac to leave her alone. She had returned to her own lord in the sidhe and would never leave his side again. Cormac took out his sword and struck at her, but she turned herself into a swan and flew out of his reach. He swore that she would never return to her faery lord and ordered his men to block up the well and to throw stones down into the entrance to the sidhe where they had been digging that day.

‘God.’ Trish shuddered and realised why Thomas had said it wasn’t a great story for the night. Being trapped underground had always been one of her greatest fears. Like being buried alive.

‘It was after that the trouble began with the bull. That very night there was a roaring and a bellowing the like of which was never before heard in Munster. The whole island shook with the thundering of hooves and the crashing of rocks as though it were being knocked down from the inside. Cormac’s men and their wives pleaded with him to take away the stones again but he would not consent. And all through the night the roaring went on and the white swan flew round and round the island and would not settle.

‘The following day all seemed to be quiet and the fairy woman came humbly back to live with Cormac in his dun. And as time went by it was clear that she was with child, and Cormac was well pleased. But when the day came for her to give birth, the midwife and the serving women came out of her chamber in an awful state, for it wasn’t a baby that had been born to her but a bull calf.’

‘Yeuch!’ said Trish. ‘Freaky.’

‘Freaky all right,’ said Thomas. ‘No sooner was the calf born than the mother turned back into a swan and flew away out of the window. The womenfolk said Cormac should kill the calf but he was a stubborn man and he kept it. For a year it lived outside his dun and grazed with the other cattle. In the second year it began to grow into a mighty bull, the best he had, and Cormac put a ring through its nose and tried to tame it. But the bull fought with him and bolted and the rope got twisted, and before he knew what was happening the bull had dragged Cormac across the island and over the edge into the lake. And neither of them was ever seen again.’

‘My God,’ said Trish. ‘And is that them out there again tonight, still battling it out?’

‘It is,’ said Thomas. ‘It is, exactly.’

‘And what happened to the swan?’

‘Sure, isn’t the swan on the lake to this day?’ said Thomas. ‘Didn’t I see her this evening myself?’

‘You did not!’

Thomas laughed and emptied the dregs of the last bottle into his glass. Popeye got up, a little stiffly, and went to the door. Thomas followed and let him out into the storm.

‘You’re on your own tonight, lad,’ he said.

Not long afterwards Thomas went off to bed and Trish kipped down on the couch with Popeye. In the big house, Gerard sat at the kitchen table with the duvet round his shoulders and finally lost his battle against sleep.

In the surrounding meadows the horses and the cattle stood firm against the bellowing storm until, at last, it tired itself out and retreated to wherever it had come from.

J
OSEPH WAS WOKEN BY
his mother who put her head around the door and said: ‘Is Aine here? Have you see Aine?’

It was like a nightmare repetition of the previous day. Brigid went off without waiting for an answer and Joseph heard his father’s voice downstairs calling for Aine.