Figures of Fear: An anthology (6 page)

At the end of
CSI: Miami
, Kate twisted herself into her sheets and her blankets as she always did and went to sleep. Michael sat up a little longer but he was beginning to feel oddly light-headed, as if he had taken too many flu tablets.

He switched over channels, and found that he was watching the same nature program about east African fishermen that he had watched last night, or
thought
he had watched. Here was the same wet shoreline, and the same fisherman walking slowly towards the screen, holding up that spiny devil firefish. Michael switched the television off while the fisherman was still a hundred yards away.

He lay in the darkness for over half an hour, not moving. There was no wind tonight and no rain, only the throbbing of the oil tankers. The river amplified the deep drumbeat of their engines and sometimes he felt as if the whole house was throbbing, as if everything was going to be loosened, nuts and bolts and dovetail joints and screws, and finally shaken apart.

He closed his eyes. When he opened them again it was daylight and the sun was shining through the windows and he was walking along the corridor at The Far Horizon Hotel, past the framed photographs of the
Lusitania
survivors.

He heard Kate let out that sweet high cry of pleasure. He heard Sean say, ‘
Sissikins
’. He looked in horror through the open doorway and saw their reflection in the press, Kate with her fingers buried in her curly red hair.

He ran downstairs and out through the door and into the wind and the sunshine. He felt as if he had been in the same head-on crash that had killed his father and mother on the N25 at Churchquarter. He was too shocked even to cry. He was still sitting there when Sean came out with his shirt untucked, his cheeks flushed, his upper lip beaded with clear perspiration.

‘What’s the matter with you, boy? I thought you were going swimming.’

He didn’t answer. Instead, he stood up and started to walk quickly towards the beach. He prayed that, this time, Sean wouldn’t follow him, but without even turning his head he knew that Sean was only ten yards behind him.

He reached the dunes and sat down. Sean circled around him, kicking the sand.

‘We should dig ourselves a hideout, like.’

‘No,’ said Michael.

‘Don’t be so soft. We could pinch some bottles of beer from the bar and we could sit in our hideout and drink them and nobody would know.’

‘No,’ Michael repeated.

Sean picked up a piece of driftwood and started to dig. ‘You’re not going to help me, then?’

‘No.’

‘All right then, please yourself so.’

Sean went on digging and the wind began to rise, keening through the grass like the banshees that were supposed to wail whenever an O’Connor was close to death. When Sean had excavated a tunnel into the side of the dune that was more than four feet deep, Michael stood up and said, ‘Stop, Seanie! Don’t! Don’t dig any more! It’s too dangerous!’

Sean waggled his head and crossed his eyes and stuck out his tongue. ‘You’re a header, Mikey. It’s a hole in the sand, that’s all.’

‘Just stop it. I’ll go tell Da what you’re doing, else.’

‘Go on, then! What do you think
he’s
going to say? We’re on a seaside holiday and I’m digging in the sand. What else are you supposed to do on a seaside holiday?’

Michael stepped up to him and tried to grab the piece of driftwood away from him but Sean hit him on the elbow with it, hard, right on the funny bone.

‘If you don’t want to help, then you can bog off. I mean it. And if you try to do that again I’ll drop you.’

Michael stayed where he was, rubbing his elbow. He had got into fights with Sean dozens of times, and Sean had always beaten him, because he was a year older and at least a stone heavier. He should have turned around and walked away and left Sean to the fate that was waiting for him, but he knew that he couldn’t.

Sean dug and grunted and dug and grunted. Michael sat down on the side of the dune while the sun began to sink and the cloud shadows fled across the beach. Eventually Sean came crawling out of the tunnel, sandy backside first. He scrabbled sand out of his hair and said, ‘I’m a genius! The greatest hideout digger ever known! All I have to do now is make it a bit more wider. Talk about
The Great Escape
!’

‘No, Seanie!’ Michael shouted, standing up again, but his voice was snatched out of his mouth by the wind, and Sean was already elbowing his way back into the tunnel.

In three long leaps, like an astronaut walking on the moon, Michael bounded across the side of the dune and seized Sean’s ankles, twisting his fingers into the laces of his rubber dollies so that he couldn’t get himself free. Sean bellowed, ‘Let go of me, you gowl! What the do you think you’re feckin’ doing? Let go of me!’

Sean struggled and twisted and kicked at him, but Michael held on to him and tried to drag him backward. He wasn’t strong enough or heavy enough to pull him more than a few inches, but in the end, Sean grew so furious that he struggled his way out of the tunnel himself, and stood up, and punched Michael on the left cheek. Michael staggered backward and fell over, rolling down the side of the dune and landing on his back, winded. Up above him he saw ragged white clouds, and seagulls.

Sean shouted, ‘You’re a feckin’ eejit, do you know that? You’re the biggest feckin’ eejit I ever knew! I wish to God that my da and my ma had never took you in, you gimp!’

He stalked back toward his tunnel, but as he did so it collapsed, with the same soft thump that Michael had heard so many times in his dreams.

Sean stood in front of the dune with his arms spread wide. ‘Now look what you’ve done! Now look what you’ve feckin’ done! I spent all feckin’ afternoon digging that hideout and that’s it!’

He kicked at the sandy depression where the tunnel had been, and then he came back down the dune and stood over Michael and kicked him in the hip. ‘Gimp,’ he repeated, and then he started walking back along the beach towards the hotel.

Michael sat up, dabbing at his cheek with his fingertips. His eye was beginning to close up already. But he turned and watched Sean shrinking smaller and smaller and thought:
I saved him. I hate him but I did the Christian thing and I saved him, even if I made him so angry. I don’t need God’s forgiveness any more. I don’t need Sean’s forgiveness either.

He hadn’t felt such inner peace in years. He closed his eyes and the wind gradually died down and the sea whispered softer and softer. Soon there was absolute silence, except for the surreptitious ticking of a clock.

Somebody laid a hand on his shoulder and said, ‘Michael? Michael? You must have fallen asleep. Come on, Michael, we have to get to Togher before seven.’

He opened his eyes. He was sitting in a brown leather chair in a gloomy oak-panelled room, lined with bookcases. Through the windows he could see that the clouds were deep grey and that it was raining.

He looked up. Father Bernard was standing over him, smiling.

‘I must be working you too hard,’ said Father Bernard. ‘Maybe I should let you have a day off. Maybe we should
both
take a day off, and do some fishing. The salmon are running in the Blackwater.’

Bewildered, Michael turned his head. Beside him, on a side table, there was a half-empty cup of milky tea and a copy of
Bethada Náem Nérenn
, the lives of the Irish saints, open at the life of Máedoc of Fern, with a thirty-cent-off coupon from Valentino’s the pizza parlour as a bookmark.

‘I’m sorry, Father. I must have dropped off.’

‘Never mind. But we should be making haste now. We don’t want to be late for the needy of Saint Arran’s, do we?’

‘No, Father.’

Michael stood up and brushed biscuit crumbs from the front of his soutane. He couldn’t think why he felt so disoriented. He couldn’t remember coming into the library or where he had been before. He couldn’t even remember getting up this morning.

‘How’s the eye?’ asked Father Bernard.

‘The eye?’ Michael reached up and touched his left eye. It was swollen and tender, and it felt greasy, as it if had been smeared with butter to relieve the bruising. ‘I don’t know. Better, I think.’

Father Bernard laid a hand on his shoulder and steered him across the room. On the panelled walls around the door frame hung several hand-coloured engravings of fish. A salmon, a gurnard, a John Dory and an ugly-looking tropical fish with staring eyes and feathery spines.
Pterois miles
, the devil firefish. Michael was sure that he had seen this before. Not just here, in the library, but somewhere else, although he couldn’t think where. A house, somewhere in the city. A bedroom, where somebody else was sleeping beside him.

But then Father Bernard steered him out into the corridor and out through the front doors and into the rainy street outside, where his old blue Honda was parked.

He climbed into the passenger seat and the doors slammed and he forgot where he had seen the devil firefish before, for ever.

At the same time, which was five eighteen in the morning in New York, Kate was woken up by Kieran starting to grizzle again. She eased herself out of bed and out of the bedroom and walked across the living room to Kieran’s crib. She lifted him out and he was hot and damp and smelled of pee.

‘There,’ she said, jiggling him up and down. ‘Is it those nasty teeth again?’

She carried him across to the window and looked down at East 13th Street. It had been raining during the night and there were stacks of sodden cardboard on the sidewalk. There was no traffic, although she could hear a fire truck honking somewhere in the distance, and the warbling of sirens.

‘There, there,’ she sang, rocking Kieran from side to side. And then she sang, ‘
Chip, chip, my little horse. Chip, chip again, sir. How many miles to Dublin town? Fourscore and ten, sir
.
Will I get there by candlelight
?
Yes, and back again, sir
.’

She felt a hand on her shoulder, and then a kiss on the back of her neck, and then another kiss. She turned and said, ‘We tried not to wake you, didn’t we, baby?’

‘That’s all right, Sissikins. I couldn’t sleep anyway. Every time I closed my eyes I had dreams about Michael. I can’t think why, like. I haven’t thought about Michael for years.’

Kate reached up with one hand and touched his cheek. ‘Poor Michael,’ she said. She kissed the top of Kieran’s gingery hair and for a long moment Kieran was silent, as if she had given him a blessing.

THE BATTERED WIFE

H
alfway through the afternoon it began to rain, almost laughably hard, and they retreated under the canvas awning of the bric-a-brac stall.

‘You should leave him,’ said Heather, over the syncopated drumming of the rain. ‘You should pack everything up, take the kids and walk out. You could always come to Tunbridge Wells and stay with us until you find somewhere else to go.’

‘How can I?’ said Lily. ‘And why
should
I? Poppy’s only just started at Elm Trees – she’d be so upset if we had to move – and Jamie keeps wetting the bed as it is. Apart from that, damn it, Heather, half of that house belongs to me, and I’ve spent three years decorating it exactly the way I want it.’

‘But you can’t go on the way you are, Lily. One day he’s going to kill you.’

Lily didn’t know what to say. She knew that Heather was right. It was a gloomy wet afternoon in late September but she was wearing dark glasses to conceal her two bruised eyes. Two nights ago Stephen had come home in one of his moods. He had been drinking, although he wasn’t incoherently drunk, like he sometimes was. She had cooked him a chicken-and-tomato casserole, one of his favourites, but for some arcane reason he had interpreted this as mockery.

‘What? You think I’m some kind of a peasant, all I ever want to eat is chicken-and-tomato casserole?’

He had dropped the Le Creuset casserole on the kitchen floor, cracking the tiles and splashing her ankles with scalding red sauce, and then he had punched her, once, on the bridge of the nose.

‘Me – I would have called the police,’ said Heather.

‘Oh, yes. And then Stephen would tell them that he’s suffering from stress at work and how sorry he is and how he’ll never ever lay another finger on me.’

‘At least see a counsellor, Lily. Please.’

Lightning crackled behind the horse chestnuts that bordered the village green, followed by an indigestive grumble of thunder. Children scurried in the rain between the tents, screaming.

Heather said, ‘Why does it
always
rain whenever we hold a fête? You would have thought that God was all in favour of us raising money for a donkey sanctuary. His son went everywhere by donkey.’

But Lily wasn’t really listening. She was frowning at a woman who was sheltering under the cake stall opposite. The woman was wearing a grey knitted hat and a grey three-quarter-length raincoat, and she had a pale, drained face, with tightly pursed lips. She had a small grey Bedlington terrier with her, which repeatedly shook itself.

What Lily found unsettling was the way that the woman was staring at her, unblinking. She turned her head away for a few seconds, but when she looked back the woman was still staring at her.

‘Do you see that woman?’ she asked Heather.

‘What woman?’

‘
That
woman – the one in the grey raincoat, with the dog – next to the cake stall.’

‘What about her?’

‘She’s staring at me. She’s been staring at me for the past few minutes.’

Heather pulled a face. ‘Perhaps she knows you.’

‘Well, I certainly don’t know her. And look. She’s
still
staring at me.’

There was another rumble of thunder, but it was much further away now and the rain was easing off. After a few minutes, Lily and Heather stepped out from under the awning, and soon the aisles between the tents were crowded again. Lily tried to see if the woman in the grey hat and the grey raincoat was still standing at the cake stall, but she had vanished.

Before she picked up Poppy from Elm Trees, Lily parked on a double yellow line in the High Street to buy pork chops and runner beans and a fresh loaf of bread. She went into the off-licence, too, and bought two bottles of Merlot on special offer.