Thin Air (19 page)

She went into the sitting room to look for the book. Her mother was sitting beside a cold fire. She reached out for Aine when she saw her but Aine pretended not to see and searched out the book from beneath the pile of RTE Guides.
Fairy Stories
by James Stephens. She looked at some of the coloured pictures inside then turned to the first story. It wasn’t easy to read, but she was determined.

The fire was lit by the time Peter Mullins came round that evening. Brigid looked frightened when he came in and went off to make a cup of tea, even though he insisted that he didn’t want one. Aine stayed very quiet on the sofa.

‘There’s nothing in the lake, anyway. Nor in the quarry.’

‘There’s something in the lake,’ said Gerard. ‘But no one will tell me what it is.’

Peter looked pointedly at Aine and then down at his feet. ‘No bearing on this case,’ he said.

‘Aine, go and help your mother,’ said Gerard.

She didn’t even try to resist but took the heavy book with her. Brigid wasn’t making tea. She wasn’t even in the kitchen. Aine found her on the upstairs landing, looking out of the window at the lake. There were frogmen still working there, out in the middle. On the surface of the water a dozen brightly coloured balls were bobbing around like lost footballs.

‘What are they?’ said Aine.

‘Markers,’ said her mother. ‘Buoys.’

Neither of the words fitted what Aine was seeing, so she ignored them. They went downstairs and while her mother made the tea Aine said: ‘Tuan Mac Cairill went to sleep one night and dreamed he was a stag, and when he woke up the dream was true and he was a stag.’

‘Really?’ Brigid sounded a little like a robot.

‘He did. And then he was a boar, and after that he was a hawk and then a salmon. A woman ate the salmon and that was how he got into her tummy and then he was born as a man again.’

Brigid smiled, dimly.

‘Silly, isn’t it?’ said Aine. ‘You don’t get pregnant like that, do you?’

‘You never know,’ said Brigid. ‘You never know what might happen.’

Aine had hoped that she wouldn’t say that. She had been nearly sure, but now she would have to watch what she ate.

She tried again.

‘Do you think that was how Our Lady got pregnant?’

Peter Mullins put his head around the door.

‘I’m off now, Mrs,’ he said. ‘I was saying there to your husband that it mightn’t be a bad idea to get a few sleeping pills from your doctor. Your nerves must be in an awful state.’

Brigid made no reply but looked anxiously towards Gerard who was standing behind the sergeant.

‘Ah, no,’ said Peter. ‘It isn’t that. We haven’t found anything. It’s just the waiting, you know. Not knowing.’ He smiled at Aine. ‘You’ll look after them, sure, won’t you?’

He was gone without his tea, but Aine made it anyway for her mother and father, quite proud of the new responsibility she had been given.

‘He says there’s no more looking they can do,’ said Gerard. ‘They said they’ll put out a report and a photograph and she’ll be on some missing persons list or some such. But they have no leads. Nothing.’

Aine bustled importantly with cups and spoons, and put milk in a jug to be specially good. Abruptly, her father began to laugh. He laughed until tears came into his eyes.

‘What?’ said Brigid. ‘What is it?’

But he was unable to answer, helpless with laughter, alleviating the tension of the last days. Aine started laughing herself and even Brigid could not prevent a few smiles. When Gerard finally pulled himself together enough to be able to talk he was still in thrall to the humour of it.

‘Do you know what they found in the lake?’ he said.

‘No,’ said Brigid and Aine together.

‘Drugs. Black fecking plastic bales of drugs.’

He started laughing again. Aine couldn’t see what was funny. She thought drugs were very serious. Brigid was just shaking her head. And suddenly Gerard was serious again.

‘So much for their fecking “joint operation”. I don’t believe the bastards were looking for Martina out there at all.’

Joseph and Thomas were watching the recovery operation from the shore. Earlier they had rowed out in the boat and only narrowly avoided getting arrested. Some of the same frogmen were working there but they were under orders of Customs and Excise now, not the police.

An army Land-Rover pulled up beside Thomas’s house and a pair of young lads got out. They stood at a distance from Joseph and Thomas as though they were scornful of civilians.

‘How much of it is in there?’ said Thomas.

The taller of the soldiers shrugged his shoulders.

‘Hard to say,’ he said.

‘You must be expecting trouble.’

‘Not really.’

Thomas laughed. ‘If I had a big gun like that, I’d be expecting trouble.’

He returned to the house and Popeye followed with a few anxious, backward glances. For a while Joseph watched on his own, self-consciously, then Trish wandered down.

‘How’s it going, Queen Wellie,’ said Joseph.

‘Not so bad, Wanking Walter. And yourself?’

Joseph blushed and looked away.

‘What’s going on, lads?’ said Trish to the soldiers.

‘Not a lot,’ said the shorter of the two. Trish noticed that he had a pierced ear.

‘Lost your earring?’ she asked.

He grinned and shook his head.

‘’Cos I’ve a few in the house if you want one.’

He shook his head again and neither of them spoke for a few moments and then they both spoke at once, which made them laugh. Trish thought that she could get to like him, despite her hatred of uniforms, but he got official and stiff and said that he was on duty and shouldn’t be talking to anyone.

Trish moved away, surprised by how embarrassed it made her feel. Out on the water the activity had ceased and the frogmen were hanging off the sides of the boats as if waiting for something to happen.

Father Fogarty came to the house to give the family communion.

‘I hope you won’t think me presumptuous,’ he said, ‘but I can understand that it was difficult for you to get to mass today.’

‘We’re honoured, father,’ said Gerard. ‘It’s good of you to come.’

The priest spread a small cloth on the table in the sitting room and set out the host. Brigid watched Gerard during the brief service. His face was grave and still, as though he was really in contact with the mass and its meaning. She wished that she was. She couldn’t even remember what it had felt like. It was mumbo-jumbo, without meaning. She had trouble taking communion, struck by the priest’s arrogance in coming here, his assumption that he was wanted, that he had something to offer. As he handed out the wafers, they all heard the sound of the helicopter overhead.

Thomas heard it, too, but he stayed where he was. The radio was on in the kitchen and was reporting the drugs find. It referred to the fact that the police had discovered the drugs while searching for a missing teenager. It was sensationalist and cruel. Thomas hoped that Brigid wasn’t listening.

It wasn’t the same helicopter. This one belonged to the Irish Customs. Aine ran down the boirin after it as the priest drove away. It seemed newer and bigger, but it probably wasn’t.

A pantechnicon lorry and a forklift truck stood on the causeway. Three men in overalls waited beside it. The helicopter wasted no time but dropped a line to a waiting frogman, who dived and attached it to something beneath the water.

Gerard came down to watch. Aine ran from Trish’s side and grabbed hold of his hand. He stood between Joseph and the two soldiers and he didn’t acknowledge Trish at all. She felt awkward, unwanted. She had been too nice to the soldier boy and not nice enough to Gerard. She stayed where she was, a little behind the others, but determined not to be frozen out of it.

The divers resurfaced and waved to the chopper crew, who began to winch up the load. The bale emerged black and dripping from the water. When it was well clear it was carried across to the truck and lowered gently on to the causeway behind the lorry.

It was dramatic and engaging. For a few minutes at a time, Gerard found he was able to forget about Martina.

Thomas rejoined the group at the shore just as one of the bales burst and scattered smaller packages into the lake.

‘Jaysus,’ said Gerard. ‘Now we’ll have some fish kill.’

‘Not a bad way to go,’ said Joseph.

‘Hi lads,’ Thomas called to the soldiers. ‘Have you empty bottles?’

They laughed.

‘Better than any poteen,’ Thomas went on.

‘Can’t they bring their own bottles,’ said Gerard. ‘We’ll charge them at the top of the road. We could get the lake drained fast, that way.’

It was a bit close to the bone and they all fell silent. Trish was suddenly disgusted by the whole operation and went back up to the yard to check on the horses. Afterwards she sat in the armchair while she waited for the kettle to boil. When she woke up it was dusk. The helicopter was gone and the lake was silent again. It was all over.

T
HOMAS AND POPEYE WENT
out as night fell. The sky was rapidly darkening but the surface of the lake was bright as though it had collected all the light of the day and was hoarding it.

There was no evidence of the day’s activities. The lake was calm and still. Thomas had an image of the waters absorbing the memory of all that had happened. It wasn’t the first time that he had felt that the lake was all-knowing, all-remembering. If he only knew how to interpret, he was sure that those bright waters could tell him about everything; about Aengus and Oscar and Cormac and more. About the penal times, the famine, the civil war. About Martina.

He turned and looked up at the lights of the big house. What was happening was unfair. He was old and tired. If he could have given himself in place of Martina he would have. But he had tried that one before, when Gerard’s mother was dying of pneumonia. It hadn’t worked then, and it wouldn’t work now.

Brigid cooked dinner from the mountains of leftovers. She brightened while she was doing it and was delighted when Aine showed her the new dance she had learnt, even though she kept forgetting it and having to start again.

But after dinner she returned to her inner world and sat by the fire in silence.

Trish made herself a big, greasy fry. There was nothing on the television and she wished that she had stayed over with Thomas again. Out there in the darkness, no one was innocent until someone was found guilty. If something didn’t get sorted out soon she wouldn’t stay. She couldn’t live with this.

Brigid knew that she didn’t have to be on the mountains; not all the time. Travel to safety, to the bright places within, was always available to her. Provided that she didn’t let the people around recover the emotional grip that had made her their property for all these years, she would be all right. They were all the same, with their endless desires and expectations. The only one who had been different, she now saw, was Martina.

Joseph phoned Mick and learned the latest rumour. The Mannions had done a bunk; picked up their boys from boarding school and fled the country.

‘Are you serious?’ said Joseph, but he didn’t get to hear Mick’s answer before Gerard ordered him off the phone.

‘Someone could be trying to get through!’

Joseph looked into the sitting room and said goodnight. His mother whimpered like a child and looked up at him with frightened eyes. He turned quickly and ran upstairs. In his bedroom he tried to fix the Walkman again, without success. He listened to it with one ear. He wanted to masturbate but the pictures he was used to imagining scared him now, and disgusted him. He knew that Stephen could have had nothing to do with Martina’s disappearance but he couldn’t get the dream association out of his head. He was worried as well about his mother, who seemed to be on another planet. He wished he were Kevin. If he was Kevin he would know what to do. But he wasn’t, and he didn’t.

Gerard had the television turned to sport all evening, but he didn’t get to watch much of it because the phone kept ringing. Each time, the others would look up, then hear the usual patter begin and look down again. Aine read her book until she went to sleep.

Thomas settled in front of the fire. He slept little at the best of times, and these days barely at all. His heart seemed mostly to be sleeping, but occasionally gave a little jump or flutter to remind itself to keep going. He wished that Trish would come over again. For the first time in his life he could enjoy female company without feeling bashful or sinful, and he could see women for who they were instead of for what they might do for him. There was no end to learning in life. It was one of the exciting things he had discovered about growing old.

Gerard carried Aine up to her bedroom. Brigid stared at the empty room for a few minutes, then picked up Aine’s book and flipped through it. She was surprised that she had never paid any attention to it before. The text was by James Stephens and it had beautiful illustrations by Arthur Rackham; some colour, some line. A lot of the stories in it were familiar, but the style of the telling was new to her. She read a few lines at random.

‘In truth we do not go to Faery, we become Faery, and in the beating of a pulse we may live for a year or a thousand years. But when we return the memory is quickly clouded and we seem to have had a dream or seen a vision, although we have verily been in Faery.’

When Gerard came down he found his wife absorbed in a book; a children’s book. If you paid him he couldn’t have read a book at that moment. For the first time it occurred to him that Thomas was right. Maybe Brigid did need support in this. He was slowly coming around to asking her how she was when the phone rang again. And when he came back, she had gone to bed.

There was no end to learning, but there was still no way of knowing. As Thomas dozed and woke through the long, dark, dog-scented night he dreamed and he thought, not of the knowledge that he did have but of the knowledge that he didn’t. He would never be able to hear the stories that the lake told or the island, or the wind. He would never be able to contact the mind of another being, to speak and to listen without words, though he knew that the animals did it, and maybe even the birds and the fish. Specks knew what had happened to Martina but Thomas would never be able to learn from him. Nor would he ever be able to know; just know, the way a mind that was old and expanded ought to, somehow. He had lived a long time and he knew a lot, but it would never be enough.