Bog Child (21 page)

‘For me?’ he whispered, ghosting a fingertip over the tresses of her hair. ‘Really for me?’

Forty-five

Fergus waved the green Renault on its way down the high street. He saw it circle the mini-roundabout by the police station and gave a last salute as it went up over the brow of the hill. Then it vanished.

For a long time he stood on one of the wooden bridges behind the hotel, staring at the waving weeds in the little stream. When it started to rain, he put the folder inside his Che Guevara T-shirt and made a dash for the nearby chip shop. He found a fifty-pence piece in his pocket and bought some chips, dowsed them with vinegar, wolfed them down. His lips stung and his fingers tasted of salt. The shower passed.

The bus came right away, and when it set him down in Drumleash, he walked up the main street towards home. He passed Finicule’s and smelled its familiar scent of wood-grain and beer. He popped in to find Uncle Tally sprawled on a chair, reading the paper. The ancient wireless over the fag machine blared out the local Republican show. Irish words merged with Irish reels.

‘Hi there, Unk.’

‘Hi, Fergus. Will I pour you a Guinness?’

‘OK. A glass, only.’

Tally poured them both a half-pint. Fergus drained the beer nearly in one go. ‘Unk?’

‘What?’

‘The bog child’s going south. To Dublin. And as for Joe, we’re bringing him back from the grave.’

‘What on earth d’you mean?’

‘The doctors are feeding him while he’s unconscious. Through a drip. It’s our decision.’

There was a long silence.

‘Aren’t you glad? He won’t die, Unk. He’ll live.’

Uncle Tally’s face was inscrutable. He looked at a spot over Fergus’s shoulder, at something that lay beyond. ‘Glad,’ he said tonelessly. Then, ‘No wonder your da didn’t call in as he promised. I thought maybe something had happened to Joe. But I didn’t expect this.’

Fergus frowned, puzzled. ‘But—’

‘Fergus?’

‘What?’

‘Don’t forget the driving test. Tomorrow afternoon.’

Fergus slapped his forehead. ‘Christ. I
had
forgotten.’

‘I’ll be round tomorrow afternoon, two sharp?’

‘OK.’

‘Don’t be nervous. After the A levels, it’s nothing. We’ll go over the manoeuvres beforehand, the three-point turns.’

‘Right.’

‘It’ll be a breeze.’

The voices on the radio were laughing, the afternoon light in the bar grew golden. Fergus yawned.

‘Want another, Fergus?’

‘No. I’d better get back to see if there’s news of Joe.’

‘Mind how you go, Fergus.’

‘Goodbye, Unk.’

Uncle Tally began pouring another glass for himself from behind the old wooden bar. ‘Goodbye.’

Walking up the close, Fergus saw the family Austin back in the driveway: Mam was home. The dahlias in the front were brilliant after the rain shower. He let himself in, noticing some mail on the doormat. Mam hadn’t seen it: she must have come in round the back. He picked up the envelopes and walked through the kitchen into the garden beyond, and there she was, drinking tea in her flowery dressing gown and suede slippers, looking quietly out towards the mountain. He felt as if he was made of a thousand and one beads in a kaleidoscope, tilting round, dropping into a brand-new pattern every five minutes with every encounter.

‘How’s Joey doing, Mam?’ he asked.

‘Oh, Fergus. There you are. He’s turned a corner. A definite corner,’ she said. Her voice wobbled. He saw what she saw–the anaemic hospital light, the white of the sheets, the wires and tubes and little bleeps.

He stood beside her, a hand on her shoulder. ‘Will he be all right? Will he recover?’

Mam’s hand found his. ‘It’s too early to say. We’ve to wait and see. That’s what the doctors say.’

Fifty-two days of fasting.
He remembered what he’d read back at the start, courtesy of a gleeful Republican commentator in the
Roscillin Star
:

For the first three days, the body uses up the glucose in the body. Then it uses up the body-fat. After three weeks, it runs out of body-fat. After that the body literally starts to eat itself.

Joe. Is there no end to the consequences?

‘We’ve to hope for the best, Mam.’

She nodded. ‘I’m away to bed, Fergus. I’m wrecked.’

‘OK, Mam.’

‘What are you doing?’

He looked down at the envelope topmost in his hand and saw it was addressed to him. ‘Dunno.’

‘Don’t go running up that mountain, Fergus.’

‘Why not?’

‘According to the news on the radio, there was an army vehicle blown up near the sentry hut earlier today. Four soldiers died.’

She tilted the rest of her tea onto the lawn and drifted through the kitchen door, waving a weary hand.

The thousand and one beads that made up Fergus McCann swirled red and black. No pattern formed, just chaos. He was back at the bandstand, with the stately air playing. He was scouring the faces and this time Owain was there. His intent, pale face shone down on him. The silver of his trombone was liquid, like mercury. And his lips were speaking and playing at the same time. ‘
It’s a question posed by the music, Fergus
,’ he said. ‘
Being answered, but not as you expected. A feminine ending
.’

‘Owain?’ he whispered. He peered up at the mountain as if by some miracle of prayer he might make out Owain up there, in the little sentry hut, waving his SLR, but the mountainside stared back, relentless in its emptiness.
This place, Owain. It’s the beginning and end of all sorrow.
He opened the topmost envelope without thinking, and his future fell out of it, a B and a B and a B.

Forty-six

It was the first and the last time that I walked at the head of the clan’s procession. The rope was ready around my neck. I had on a white shift the women had made especially. Mam’s bangle sparkled on my wrist. Hidden in my hand was Rur’s knot of hair.

Rur walked behind me, with my family. I could hear Mam’s moans. I could hear the footsteps of the townspeople. In Inchquinoag forest I could hear every last leaf, trembling.

Padum, padum, padum, went my heart. It would surely explode and kill me before they did. Padum, padum, it said. I live. I work. I pump. This cannot be. I’ve a lifetime of beating still to do.

As we came to the place where the view opens up to the head of the lough, they let me stop. My home stretched before me in the dawn shadow. The hills cascaded downwards, embracing their descent. A skylark rose up, brown and small. It climbed its invisible staircase, crooning.

Death is not a reaper, like they say, nor even a friend. It is dark, fierce water, an inundation.

The person holding the rope gave the line between my neck and his hand a flick. I walked up the final stretch of hill. We came to the ordained place. A gallows, hardly higher than myself, had been erected. A block of wood was placed beneath in readiness.

‘Do you want a blindfold?’ the executioner asked.

‘No,’ I replied.

The prayer was said, the old prayer. Forgive us for what we have done, and for what we have failed to do. Brennor’s voice was loudest. I stepped up onto the block and turned towards them.

The faces were cruel, solemn, pitying, triumphant, sad, anguished. Brennor’s face and Rur’s face were side by side. One was ashen, the other broken. I foresaw the coming years of violence, the old grudges leapfrogging over generations, reappearing in different forms.

I smiled down a last time and turned away to the east. Rur, I prayed in my head. Have a care. I felt his breath on my neck. I smelled his smell. The merest rim of the sun nudged up over the mountain.

The metal slid home, fast and free. I took my last breath and let it go, jumping into the next day. Silver light fizzed and shot apart. Love fell in particles, like snow.

Fergus screamed in the darkness, then woke up. He’d a pain in his shoulder blade.

‘Mel?’ he gasped. The curtains billowed, as if possessed. He doubled up, groaning.

‘Owain,’ he whispered.

The news he’d seen before coming to bed had revealed the names of the killed, with one Private Owain Jenkins amongst them. He saw the Land Rover coming up the hill, then down, the awful sound of the explosion, and now the cells of Owain’s body, scattered over the mountain, breaking down and changing into something else.
The bog claimed a life for a life, so they say
, he remembered Felicity saying when they’d raised Mel from her resting place.

He got out of bed and looked out of the window. Outside was the half-light before dawn. The pebbledash of the wall over the way was grey.

Almost without thinking, he groped for his running shorts and trainers. He’d a need for air, action: anything but the nightmarish pictures in his head.

Out on the close, all was hushed. The only noise was of a streetlamp that blinked crazily, humming. Its bulb was ready to blow, its light pink-tinged. He shivered, picking up pace. His trainers tapped softly along the pavement.

Again he heard the noise of the old-fashioned sash window down at Finicule’s being opened. He paused, listening.

The sound wasn’t repeated. Uncle Tally, up early again. Or maybe unable to go to sleep.

Softly he ran past the school, up to the end of the tarmacadam. His head was like a slideshow again. Mel’s fingertips, with their beautiful spools. Cora’s hand, plucking the petals off the withered hydrangea. The little wound in Mel’s back. Owain setting his sights on something invisible in the air. The love knot Mel had carried in her hand. Joe’s palm pressed to the glass divider. Uncle Tally in the car, looking out to sea.
A reminder of death, Fergus.

He ran into the Forestry Commission, darting among the trees. He stumbled and fell among the pine cones, picked himself up and broke cover as the crescent moon dangled low in the sky, and the grey in the east turned blue.

When he came to the place where the lough opened up, he stopped. He turned back to look at the view. Ghostly curves cascaded down. The lough was a mere darkness. He deviated off towards the place where Mel was found and at last came to the cut where he’d waited that first day, the day of her discovery, when Uncle Tally had driven off to get the Gardai. He panted. Blood pumped. Then quiet came. Voices from that happy, distant morning wafted over to him on the breeze. ‘
You could make your own distillery, Unk.
’ ‘
But what would you distil?
’ ‘
The prayers, Unk. What else?
’ He sat down on the springy turf, gulping for air. As his breathing slowed, the hum of insects and the small conversations of early birds were audible. There was no sign of the creamy white kid or the sparrowhawk he’d seen that day.

He looked down towards the plain, the place he’d lived all his life. The past rolled out before him. The family trips, the laughs, the squabbles, the afternoons with Uncle Tally. He saw the recent weeks: the packets, exam papers, the counting-off of days as Joe fasted. The condoms and pills, himself and Cora lying like two question marks, and Mel, the laughing, living Mel of his imaginings. And he saw the funeral party around the Sheehans’ family plot, the men in balaclavas.

The Provos with the Drumleash slope to their shoulders. The man at the end, who’d reminded him of Joe. And then he knew.

The local bomb-maker, Deus. Thaddeus.

Part of him had known it all along. The smell of Christmas in Uncle Tally’s room had been of marzipan, almond-flavoured: the smell of Semtex.

‘Don’t tell your family, Fergus,’ he heard Michael Rafters pleading. ‘I don’t want the Provos getting on to me.’

At the time he’d thought Rafters meant Joe. But Joe had been unreachable, hardly conscious. He’d meant someone else. Then there was Mam, forever down on Uncle Tally. Now he knew why. Uncle Tally led, and Joe followed. ‘Tell Uncle Tally it was all for the best,’ Joe had said. It had been a message from comrade to comrade, not rivals in love. He recalled that visitors to Long Kesh were sometimes fingerprinted: not a risk Uncle Tally would want to run, and Joe would have understood. There was no Cindy in the case at all.

Uncle Tally, a bomb-maker, in it up to his neck, despite protesting his detachment.

The bottom fell out of Fergus’s world. Nothing seemed the way it had been before. He watched the sun rise without seeing. Skylarks began their song without his hearing. Then a cold, weary fury hardened in him.

We sin, Fergus, more by the sin of omission than of commission.
It was Felicity again, smiling in the darkness of the back garden with the stars spangled overhead. Then she was standing by the white screen of the slideshow, next to Mel’s merry, living face.

The image faded into an empty rectangle of light.

He groaned, picking himself up. He knew he had to speak out, no matter how remote the chances were that he would be listened to. Slowly he ran down the hill, through the Forestry, and back to Drumleash. Every step of the way he worked on the arguments. Uncle Tally, you could have killed an innocent bystander. Uncle Tally, Owain had a life to live, same as you or me. Uncle Tally, violence begets more violence.
Old grudges leapfrog over generations.
The sentences came and went, but all he could see was Uncle Tally’s face, implacable.

But when he reached Drumleash, all need for argument was over. At Finicule’s, the police had stolen a march on the day. An ambulance flashed, sirens wailed, walkie-talkies crackled. He blinked, breathless, a sharp stitch in his side. The side door to Uncle Tally’s bed-sit was wide open. Two constables were posted on either side. He craned his neck, trying to look up the narrow staircase, but saw only darkness.

He spotted an RUC officer he recognized from Roscillin.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

‘Stand back, stand back. We’re taking out the body.’

He heard a kerfuffle on the stairs. ‘Mind. It’s steep.’ ‘Keep him steady.’ ‘Lift at your end.’ ‘Christ. McCann was heavier than he looked.’

A stretcher appeared, covered over with the purple blanket Fergus recognized from Uncle Tally’s bed. The men bearing the stretcher slid it into the waiting ambulance without delay.

‘Jesus. What is this?’ Fergus whispered.

The RUC officer said, ‘Nothing you won’t hear about later.’

‘I need to know now,’ Fergus pleaded. ‘I knew this man.’

Finally the officer told him what had happened. The bomb-disposal experts had found a fingerprint on the device that had killed the soldiers yesterday. The match fitted the print that an undercover agent had taken off a glass a few weeks ago, from a pint of beer poured by one Thaddeus McCann. And that same Thaddeus McCann, would you believe it, had been shot dead while resisting arrest.