Thin Air (21 page)

Of all of them, only Gerard took sustenance from the mass.

‘We cannot hope to understand the will of God,’ he said one day as they drove homewards. Each of the others searched their mind for an answer of some kind. Not one of them could find one.

The New Agers set up their own centre of operations in Trish’s kitchen. They smelled of wood-smoke and chronic dampness but once she got used to that, Trish quite liked their coming and going.

She did the stable jobs in the mornings and managed most days to lunge or school one or two of the young horses. In the afternoons she tacked up Specks and joined in the searches. Every day she took a different route, following any negotiable track or boirin that she found. She even took the cob on to Brigid’s mountainside one afternoon, but his reluctance to cross the difficult ground suggested to her that Martina never brought him further than the gate.

Specks enjoyed it all, as happy going out as he was coming home. But they uncovered nothing.

If Aine was around when Trish came back from her afternoon ride she would get up on Specks and go around the paddock or even the jumps field. Sometimes Trish supervised and sometimes she left the two of them to get on with it. More than once she went to look for them and found Specks standing idle, snoozing, while Aine leaned forward with her arms round his neck, talking to him. She loved the heat and the smell of him. He was so big and solid and gentle. She liked it that she could get him to do some of the things she wanted but she liked it as well that there were things he wouldn’t do, like going too fast, or over jumps that she wasn’t quite certain about. If she put her ear in exactly the right place she could hear the hard ‘lub-dub’ of his heart, slow and consistent and safe.

One day Thomas found her like that.

‘Don’t be telling him any secrets now,’ he said.

She sat up, dreamy and smiling.

‘Why not?’

‘Because he won’t keep them, that’s why.’

‘He will, so.’

‘No, he won’t. He’ll tell them to the apple trees in the orchard.’

‘He will not.’

‘He will. I’ve heard him whispering to them.’

‘Well then,’ said Aine. ‘So what if he does?’

‘So, they’ll be written in the apples, then, in the summer time.’

‘Huh?’

‘When you cut the apple across,’ said Thomas. ‘It’ll be written all through it like a stick of rock. Aine loves whoever it is. Aine thinks her grandda is a right eejit.’

‘I don’t!’

‘I’m delighted to hear it,’ said Thomas.

Aine got Specks going again, around the field. Thomas sat on an oil drum and watched.

Only Gerard didn’t like Aine riding Specks. He didn’t admit it, but somehow, irrationally, he blamed the horse for Martina’s loss. He told Brigid that he didn’t want Aine riding him. Brigid said nothing, but Joseph was listening.

‘You can’t wrap her in cotton wool, Dad,’ he said. ‘She has to get on with her life.’

‘You’d know, I suppose,’ said Gerard.

‘He’s right, Dad,’ said Kevin.

‘I suppose,’ said Gerard.

Joseph went up to his room. He loved Kevin but he hated the way his parents idolised him. He had always been the saintly one, and in his presence Joseph felt smaller than ever, no matter what he did.

The wind blew around the lake. It buffeted the tall, square surface of the big house, and whipped round the corners and over the roofs of the smaller ones. At night the rain padded across the fields and along the hedgerows and the standing horses listened to it and smelled the earth’s saturation and shifted their feet in the holding mud.

The lake collected the endless rain and held it, invisible as its other secrets. A moorhen educated her chicks in the shallows. Fish were jumping again. Only they knew how deep the middle was.

The fish and the frogmen.

Thomas looked out in the early hours of a sleepless morning and hoped that the new life hadn’t come there at a price.

Time ran out for Brigid. She could no longer resist the pull of the mountains. One morning she set out before her sister got up and went into town on her own.

When she came back she walked down to Thomas’s house. It was raining slightly. Two swans sailed by close to the shore, then stopped and, one after the other, stood on their heads in the water.

Thomas was listening to the radio, but he turned it off when Brigid put her head around the door.

‘Come in, come in,’ he said. Popeye joined the welcome, fawning and yawning. Brigid stood awkwardly inside the door.

‘I won’t stay,’ she said.

‘Ah, do. You’ll have a cup of tea.’

‘I just called in for my stick.’

‘Oh, yes. But, sure, the tea is in the pot.’ He pulled out a vinyl-backed chair for her and she sat down.

‘Nearly in the pot, anyway,’ he said, putting on the kettle.

He collected the stick from the front room where he had put it for safe keeping. Brigid took it gratefully and looked it up and down, as though to make sure that it hadn’t come to any harm. After that she seemed to relax a little.

Thomas put out a cup and a plate for her.

‘Will you have a piece of toast?’

‘No thanks.’

He put two slices of bread in the toaster. ‘You might,’ he said.

Brigid returned her attention to the stick.

‘Do you believe the stories, Thomas?’

‘God,’ said Thomas. ‘There’s a question, now.’ He emptied the teapot into the sink and washed away the tea-leaves. ‘I don’t know did anyone ever ask me that before.’

‘I’m sure they did,’ said Brigid.

‘I wouldn’t be sure. They were always just there, part of life. You accepted them the same way you accepted God our Father and Holy Mary.’ He laughed. ‘I’m not even certain that we were supposed to believe in them. They were for a certain part of your mind, if you take my meaning. You’d be hungry for them and they’d be given to you and then you’d be hungry for more of them.’

Brigid nodded. She was hungry for them, or for what lay behind them, creating them.

‘But do you believe them?’ she asked.

The toast popped up. Thomas put it on Brigid’s plate and pushed the butter towards her.

‘Eat that, now,’ he said, ‘and don’t be asking so many questions.’ Brigid grinned and obeyed. Thomas made the tea and poured it.

‘I don’t know whether I believe them or not,’ he went on. ‘But I’ll tell you one thing. My mother believed them and my father did, too, and they weren’t any the worse for it. They weren’t stupid, either, even though people today might try and make out that they were. They knew a lot of things that I have forgotten and that you’ll never learn.’

He turned his face away from her, afraid of betraying a passion and a grief that he rarely admitted. If Brigid noticed she didn’t react, but finished her toast and sipped her tea. When Thomas recovered his composure he said, ‘If people don’t ask for the stories they’ll be gone, and they’ll never come again.’

Brigid nodded. She stood up and reached for her stick.

‘I do believe them,’ said Thomas.

‘So do I,’ said Brigid.

On the same day, later on, the sergeant phoned and said that Gerard was wanted at the local station for a few minutes. Gerard said he’d be right there and made for the door, but his innards liquefied and he had to visit the toilet first. He was sure they had found something.

Brigid was remembering what it felt like to be wet. She was remembering the mild, damp days when she would linger on the way home from school to get the most out of the day. Everything was different on those soft evenings. The grass smelled different and the plants in the hedgerows; even the road had a wet smell and a dry smell. The earth was replete, plump with rain but not heavy as it could be on the real rainy days that made your bones cold and sent you indoors. The good days always looked worse when you were looking out on them from indoors. Then, when you went out, because you had to, you didn’t want to go back in again. Brigid seemed to remember having more energy on those days; walking faster and running further, but she couldn’t be sure that it was true. She would run now, if the going wasn’t so dangerous. She felt she could almost remember how.

The sergeant led Gerard into a small, concrete-walled room at the back of the little station. It had a single, high window and felt like a cell, even though it had a table in it. Two men in jeans and casual jackets were in there, one at the table and the other standing. They looked like thugs. Gerard felt fear clutch at him. He was offered a seat and he took it. The sergeant went out again and Gerard felt dreadfully alone.

‘Have you found something?’ he asked.

The man at the table shook his head. ‘Afraid not,’ he said. ‘This is Detective Neylon and I’m Detective Inspector Clifford. We’re down from Dublin, just having a little look into the case.’

He smiled and Gerard smiled back, uneasily.

‘Nothing to worry about,’ Clifford went on. ‘We’d just like to ask you a few questions, that’s all.’

Brigid walked over the rocks in her new boots and tried to remember when it happened, the voluntary hobbling. It was associated in her mind with drainpipe skirts and nylon stockings; with her maturity, her womanhood. But she was no longer sure what that meant. When she had first married and come to live at the farm she had been willing, even eager, to lend a hand with the outdoor work. But she hadn’t been good at it, and then she had become pregnant with Kevin, and then, somehow, it hadn’t seemed appropriate. She drove a car. She stayed indoors. She had spent her life waiting on others.

But now she had boots. Nothing would ever be the same again.

The two detectives ran through the events of the day with Gerard, what he could remember of them. He had fed the horses and the springers beside the road, then gone up to the winterage to check on the cattle there. He had visited Thomas. He had lunged The Nipper. He didn’t remember Martina setting out on the cob. He didn’t know what time it had been. Later he had gone out to town for various supplies. Had his dinner. Gone out to the pub.

The detectives listened and nodded and asked the occasional question. Gerard relaxed a bit. They weren’t as bad as they looked.

‘What kind of relationship did you have with your daughter?’ Clifford asked.

‘Good. A good relationship,’ said Gerard.

‘Good in what way?’

‘Good, you know. We got on well.’

‘She’s nineteen, is that right?’

‘Nineteen,’ said Gerard. ‘That’s right.’

‘Most girls of nineteen are gone off into the world, wouldn’t you think?’

‘They would be, I suppose.’

‘Why was she still at home, then?’

Gerard shrugged. ‘She didn’t like the course she was doing. She came home again.’

Behind DI Clifford, the other man started to move. He came round to Gerard’s side of the table, very slowly, and ended up behind him, out of his sight. He was silent. Gerard could barely even hear him breathing. It made him nervous.

‘You were close, so, were you?’ said Clifford.

‘Well … I suppose … We were friendly enough, like.’

‘The first daughter, wasn’t she? Daddy’s favourite, perhaps?’

Gerard’s skin crawled. A different reality had come into existence. ‘She was my daughter,’ he said. ‘Of course I was fond of her.’

‘Why do you say “was”, Mr Keane?’

Gerard stood up and swung round to get Neylon in his sight.

‘What’s going on here?’ he shouted. ‘What are you two suggesting? You have no right to treat me like this, do you hear?’

The two men made no response at all, but waited for Gerard’s outburst to subside. By the time it had, he was shaking.

‘I’d guess that you’re used to getting your own way, Mr Keane,’ said Clifford. ‘Would I be right?’

Brigid walked through the hazel and on over the mountain. She found a way to the top for the first time, and looked out over Clare and Galway in three directions. The boots rubbed a bit, but small pains distracted her from the big pain, and were welcome.

She walked a mile across the uneven plateau of the mountain-top to where the great cairn stood. She had never climbed up to it before. It was much bigger than she had expected and she could only marvel at the race of people who had constructed it. From where she stood beside it she could look out over the sea, and from the sea and the shore anyone could look up and see it; the cairn on the mountain-top. She wondered if it was a message, a beacon of some kind. She wondered if it had served its purpose or was still waiting, for people, or for gods, who might come in from over the sea.

Gerard’s interrogation went on for another, gruelling half an hour. It was like a nightmare. He had never been so humiliated in his life. He did not speak to the sergeant as he left the station. If he could help it, he would never speak to him again. He got into the pick-up and drove some distance down the road before pulling into the side and turning off the engine.

For a long, long time he sat there, trying to reconstruct himself. How could they have asked those things? How could they have thought that? Couldn’t they see who he was, what he stood for, the values he upheld? He was shaking from head to foot. The fraternity upon which he had based his sense of identity did not exist. He wanted to go home, to be comforted by Brigid, but Brigid wasn’t Brigid any more. She had been into town that day and bought a big pair of boots. The world had been turned on its head.

One evening Sam stayed on in Trish’s house after the others had gone. They shared a joint and each of them shrank into themselves for a while, then Trish got up and made egg and chips and they ate together. Sam asked her why she worked with horses and why there, for Gerard. Trish found talking about it interesting, because she didn’t know some of the answers until she said them. She learned that she loved horses because of their power and their kindness, because they could overcome people with their strength but they chose not to. She was surprised to find herself speaking like that and was slightly embarrassed. But Sam seemed to understand.

‘I often think about the horses that used to carry men into battle,’ he said. ‘Did you see the film of
The Charge of the Light Brigade
?’

Trish shook her head.