The Loney

by Andrew Michael Hurley

  Gregson had christened it Sunny Vale; then it was Rose Cottage, Softsands, Sea Breezes, and lastly Moorings by the taxidermist.

  ‘It must have been lovely, though, in its heyday,’ said Mrs Belderboss, pushing aside the curtains a little more. ‘What with that view and everything.’

  ‘Clever landscapers, the Victorians,’ said Farther.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Mr Belderboss. ‘The view was all part of the prophylactic, wasn’t it?’

  ‘There’s something timeless about it,’ said Mrs Belderboss, looking out at the sea. ‘Don’t you think?’

  ‘Well, it’s a very old part of the country,’ said Mr Belderboss.

  Mrs Belderboss rolled her eyes. ‘It must be the same age as everywhere else, you fool.’

  ‘Oh, you know what I mean,’ he replied. ‘Untrodden, then. Some of the yew trees up in the woods must have been ancient in the time of Bede. And they do say there are places around here that haven’t been set foot in since the Vikings came.’

  Mrs Belderboss scoffed again.

  ‘It’s true,’ Mr Belderboss replied. ‘A century in this place is nothing. I mean, it’s quite easy to imagine that that book,’ he said, nodding to Miss Bunce’s hands, ‘could have been read by some poor little consumptive only yesterday.’

  Miss Bunce put the book down and wiped her hands on her duffle coat, as Mr Belderboss went over to the other side of the room, enthusing over the seascapes of tiny ships under colossal stormclouds that the taxidermist had spent his last years painting. His brushes were still there in a jam jar. His palette had a dry crust of dark oils. And under the dust a rag, a chewed pencil, some loose, pre-decimal change all contributed to the uneasy feeling I always had when I stayed at Moorings, that the taxidermist had merely stepped out to smoke one of his expensive cigars and that he might return at any moment and pop through a door like one of the three bears in the old book, to find a Goldilocks sleeping in every room.

  Chapter Five

  The room Hanny and I shared was at the top of the house where the rooks scrabbled across the slates for the insects in the moss. Every so often, one of the more daring would come to the window-ledge, quite unperturbed that we were watching it, and rake its pencil-sharp beak down the glass with a horrible squeal to nibble out the things living in the decaying woodwork of the frame.

  Only when I banged on the window did it finally disappear, flapping away in a peal of grating laughter and sailing in a smooth scoop back up to the others in the woods. Hanny was sad to see it go, but I couldn’t let it stay there. Mummer didn’t care much for those kinds of birds. Crows, ravens, jackdaws and the like. She would even shoo the jays and magpies out of the back garden in London. There was an old saying in her village that they prevented the sick from getting better, and that when they gathered in numbers a death was imminent.

  ‘Sorry, Hanny,’ I said. ‘We can go and look at them later if you like.’

  He took his face away from the window, leaving a little oval of condensation.

  ‘We ought to unpack,’ I said and nodded to the duffle-bag at his feet. He bent down and handed it to me, looking over my shoulder, his face suddenly brightening at the abundance of interesting junk in the room.

  I suppose it was like looking at it anew for him, but to my eyes nothing much had changed. Only the water stains on the ceiling had grown. The dark patches had assumed the shapes of foreign countries, and a succession of tide lines showed how the empire of dampness had expanded year on year since we’d last been.

  I put Hanny’s clothes away for him, hung up his coat on the back of the door and set his Lives of the Saints book down on the bedside table. At Pinelands they encouraged them to do these sorts of things for themselves, but Hanny was too excited by what was in the room to care about anything else and took the various objects down one by one to look at them: all the colourful stones and shells, the splints of driftwood, the bottles, cuttlebone, hornwrack, dried twists of coral, mermaids’ purses. There was a whole shelf of scrimshaw: whale teeth polished to the delicacy of bone china and engraved with intricately detailed pictures of schooners and battleships. Against one wall was a chest of drawers that contained specimens of birds’ eggs, each one labelled with common and Latin name and the date it had been found. Some were decades old.

  On the floor and on top of the long wardrobes were Victorian curios under dusty glass domes that had always frightened me to death when I was a child. Exotic butterflies, horribly bright, impaled to a stump of silver birch, two squirrels playing cricket in caps and pads, a spider monkey wearing a fez and smoking a pipe.

  There were music boxes and broken wind-up toys, grinning marionettes and tin humming tops, and between our beds sat a clock on which the hours were indicated by little paintings of the apostles. Mummer thought it wonderful, of course, and when we were children she told us the story of each of them: how Andrew had elected to be crucified on a saltire; how James was chosen to be with Jesus during the transfiguration and how he was beheaded by Herod Agrippa on his return to Judea; how Matthias had replaced the treacherous Judas and converted the cannibals of Ethiopia.

  They had all suffered and toiled so that we could do the same. For God’s work should never be easy.

  I touched Hanny lightly on the shoulder and he turned around.

  ‘Mummer says I’ve to give you a bath,’ I said.

  I mimed washing under my armpits and Hanny smiled and went over to a shelf where there was a stuffed mallard.

  ‘You can’t take that in the bath,’ I said.

  He frowned and held onto it tightly.

  ‘You’ll ruin it, Hanny.’

  I fetched some towels and he followed me down the landing to the bathroom. He insisted on bringing the duck with him and sat it on the rim of the bath while he lay there in the foam listening to the wind playing in the pipework and the drains. He nodded and listened and then nodded again.

  ‘It’s just the wind, Hanny,’ I said. ‘It’s not talking to you.’

  He smiled at me and slipped under the water, sending a mushroom of bubbles to the surface. He stayed there for a moment longer than I was comfortable with, and then, just as I was about to reach in and pull him out, he resurfaced open-mouthed and blinking, his mop slapped down over his ears.

  I got him out after half an hour. The water was cold and the suds had all dissolved. I dried him slowly in a ritual drummed into me by Mummer. One of the many she insisted Hanny and I follow for the sake of our health, like cleaning our teeth with hot water and cutting our fingernails every other day.

  Once he was completely dry, I helped him on with his pyjamas. But he had stopped smiling. His whole body was stiff and uncooperative, making it difficult to get his arms down the sleeves and the buttons done up. I noticed that he was staring past me at the darkening sky outside and then I understood what was wrong. He had realised that we were staying here and he didn’t like it. He wanted to go home.

  I settled him into bed and let him pet a stuffed hare that he’d taken a fancy to, hoping it might send him off to sleep. He held it close to him and stroked its ears as I went and sat by the window and tried to look beyond my reflection to the sea, which was rapidly fading in the dusk.

  The room went suddenly silent. The rooks had stopped croaking. A stillness settled around the house and over the fields, and everything seemed watchful and timorous.

  The night crept in at The Loney, in a way that I’ve never known anywhere else. At home in London, it kept its distance from us, skulking behind the streetlights and the office blocks and could be easily knocked aside in a second by the rush of light and metal from the Metropolitan Line trains that flashed past the end of our garden. But here it was different. There was nothing to keep it away. The moon was cold and distant and the stars were as feeble as the tiny specks of light from the fishing boats way out at sea.

  Like the shadow of a huge predatory bird, darkness moved slowly down the hillside, past Moorings, across the marshes, across the beach, across the
sea, until all that was left was a muddy orange on the horizon as the last of England’s light ebbed away.

  ***

  I was about to draw the curtains when I saw someone cross the lane that led up to the house and then start across the fields where the Panzer lay. A moment later someone else followed carrying a large haversack and once he had caught up with the first, I saw them both head over to the hedgerow on the far side. Farmers, I thought, taking a short cut home. I looked to see where they were going, but it was too dark and the rain was teeming down again.

  Behind me, I heard Hanny getting out of bed and scratting about on the floor, rubbing his hands over the bare wood and knocking here and there with his knuckles.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I said. ‘You should be in bed. Mummer will be cross if you don’t go to sleep.’

  He pointed to the floor.

  ‘What?’

  He pointed again.

  ‘No, you can’t go downstairs, Hanny.’

  He smiled and pulled me by the sleeve so that I knelt like him next to the grubby pink rug in the centre of the room. He turned it back and underneath there was a floorboard with a knothole pushed through. It was where we used to hide things we didn’t want Mummer to see. I’d forgotten all about it.

  ‘Can you open it?’ I said and Hanny jammed his finger into the hole and lifted up the board. It creaked against the others but came out easily enough and Hanny shuffled forward and peered into the hole.

  ‘Reach in, Hanny,’ I said and mimed with my hand and Hanny stuck his arm into the cavity and felt around. A penknife came out, mottled with rust and blunt as a brick. The pornographic photographs Billy Tapper had pressed into my hand that day we saw him in the bus shelter. One, two, three, half a dozen stuffed rats that Hanny took out and threw into a pile without so much as flinching.

  Reaching further than he’d been able to do the last time we came, he brought out a leather strap. He pulled it and something large banged against the underside of the floorboards.

  ***

  It was an M1 Garand. I remembered from Commando that all the Yanks had them in the war. Bullets came in a metal clip that slotted into the top and jumped out with a loud ping when all the rounds had been used up—an unfortunate signal to the enemy that you were out of ammunition, but the rifle’s only fault. It could put a bullet through an oak tree.

  Protected by the bedsheet in which it had been wrapped, its wooden stock was still polished to a chestnut gloss and made of solid, sural curves like a muscle extracted from the leg of a racehorse. The sight mounted on top looked as if it would pull in a thousand yards or more.

  God knows where the taxidermist had got it from.

  I dusted down the barrel with my sleeve and we took it in turns to hold it. Then, uncertain what else there was to do, we laid it on the bed and looked at it.

  ‘This is ours now,’ I said. ‘It belongs to you and me. But you mustn’t touch it without me. Alright?’

  Hanny looked at me and smiled.

  There was a knock at the door. I quickly covered the rifle with a blanket and sat down on top of it.

  It was Father Bernard.

  ‘How are you boys?’ he said, looking around the door. ‘Have you settled in alright?’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘Do you mind if I come in?’

  ‘No, Father.’

  He stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. He wasn’t wearing his dog collar and had his shirt sleeves rolled up over his ham-hock forearms that were surprisingly bare.

  ‘Can I tempt you to half an hour of gin rummy?’ he said.

  I shifted uncomfortably, feeling the rifle digging into my backside. I realised that I had no idea if it was loaded or not, or if it was possible that by sitting on it I might inadvertently pull the trigger and blow Father Bernard’s kneecaps off.

  ‘I don’t know about you boys,’ he said fetching a stool from the side of the washbasin. ‘But I’m not tired at all.’

  He sat down and produced a pack of cards from his shirt pocket and handed them to me, moving the Lives of the Saints book off the bedside table to make room.

  ‘You deal, Tonto,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  He rubbed his hand over his mouth and we started playing, silently at first, though it didn’t take long before he was onto the stories about the farm where he grew up, and then I could relax a little.

  It was by all accounts a fairly miserable hovel on Rathlin Island, some barren speck of rock I’d never heard of between the Antrim coast and the Mull of Kintyre full of guillemots and storm petrels and razorbills. Mist and bog. Endless grey sea. It’s easy to imagine the sort of place.

  The only thing of note about it was that it was where the spider supposedly egged on Robert the Bruce to clobber the English, and there that the English replied by massacring the McDonnells. Even the children. Apparently you could still find blood stains on the rocks that the sea refused to wash away.

  So little happened on the island that memories were as long as the savage winters that were the starting point of most of Father Bernard’s stories.

  ‘Would you listen to that rain?’ he said, looking towards the window. ‘It reminds me of the winter our stores were flooded out.’

  ‘When was that, Father?’

  ‘Oh, I was only a wee boy. I can’t have been any more than eight or nine.’

  ‘What happened, Father?’

  ‘My daddy, God love him, was a good farmer but he was a lousy roofer. He’d patched up the storehouse with old bits of wood, you see, and they just rotted away like everything else on the island. One night the whole thing went in and nigh on every scrap of food we had was ruined. I remember my mammy chasing a whole load of carrots and turnips that were floating out of the yard.’

  ‘I shouldn’t laugh,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t funny. We weren’t that far from starving.’

  ‘Didn’t you have animals, Father?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Couldn’t you eat them?’

  ‘If we’d done that we’d have been poor as well as hungry come the New Year market in Ballycastle. The animals were why we nearly starved. We had to feed them first, you know?’

  ‘Couldn’t you have got some food from somewhere else?’

  ‘Oh aye,’ he said. ‘The O’Connells from the farm over the way came around with potatoes and meat, but my daddy was too proud to take anything off them. He’d rather we all wasted away than rely on charity.

  ‘When my mammy found out, she was furious. It was the only time she ever raised her voice to him, and when the O’Connells came around again she took everything they’d brought.

  ‘You know, Tonto, it sounds daft, but I don’t think my daddy was quite the same from then on. I think it half killed him, sacrificing his pride like that.’

  I stopped dealing and put the pack of cards in the middle of the table.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘I’m going on. How’s school at the moment? Almost done now, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘Exams soon, is it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well make sure you work hard. Otherwise you might end up with a career in the priesthood.’

  He smiled and pulled his cards together, tapping them on the table.

  ‘Are you a good lad at school?’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘I was a wee terror,’ he said. ‘When they could get me to go, that is.’

  He fanned the cards in his hand and laid one down.

  ‘Mind you, if you’d seen the place, Tonto, you wouldn’t have gone either.’

  ‘Why’s that, Father?’

  ‘There were fifty of us in one room. Half of us hadn’t any boots to wear. And it was so cold in the winter that the ink iced over in the wells. Can you imagine?’

  ‘No, Father.’

  He frowned at my expression and then laughed.

  ‘Ah, I’m just pulling your leg,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t that bad. Apart
from O’Flannery.’

  He threw a card down onto the pile, before picking up another.

  ‘You’ll not have anyone like O’Flannery where you are, I’m sure. He was a very old fashioned sort of teacher. You know what I mean? A real hardliner.’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘Some of the other lads said he wore a cilice. And I wouldn’t have put it past him, the face he had on him sometimes. You know what a cilice is, right, Tonto?’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  He tapped his fingers on his cards and took his turn and then smiled to himself.

  ‘I laugh hearty at it now,’ he said. ‘But O’Flannery was an out and out bullyman. Even the mammies and daddies were frightened of him. He made sure he put the fear of God into you from day one.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Well, whenever anyone new joined the class, he’d always ask them the same question.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘It was to translate dura lex, sed lex.’

  He looked at me.

  ‘Aye, that was the face they pulled too. Right before he’d give them a whack on the arse with his cane.’

  He pursed his lips and shook his head.

  ‘You know, I can still feel it now. He’d hit you so hard with the old birch that all he had to do after that to stop us silly wee cubs in our tracks was to go to the desk and touch it. We shut up pretty quickly then, I can tell you.’

  ‘Didn’t you have other teachers though, Father?’ I said.

  ‘Aye, we did in the end.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  He laughed drily to himself.

  ‘Mr O’Flannery’s career was cut short let’s say.’

  ‘Why, what happened?’

  ‘The silly sod fell off the cliffs at Rue Point, photographing the puffins. When they told us on the Monday morning, all the lads cheered, and to my eternal shame so did I.

  ‘We were still cheering when the headmaster came in. I thought we were done for, you know. But he didn’t scold us at all. He knew what O’Flannery was like. What people thought of him. He just sat on the edge of the desk asking us questions about geography and science and mathematics. And do you know what? Between us we answered every single one. He must have been there for an hour and then he said something that I’ve never forgotten to this day.’