The Loney

by Andrew Michael Hurley

A gale battered Moorings all night long and I woke several times and clutched the rifle. Sometime in the small hours there was an almighty bang and in the morning I woke to find that the doors to one of the outhouses had been taken clean off and lay several feet away, scattered like playing cards.

  Hanny was up and dressed already, standing at the window, stroking the stuffed hare. He set the hare down on the windowsill and put his fingers to his lips. He wanted to see Else.

  ‘Yes, Hanny, we’ll go back today,’ I said. ‘But you might not be able to see the girl. They might not let you.’

  He kissed his fingers again. And rubbed his belly slowly like Else had done to soothe the ache of the baby inside.

  ‘I said, we’ll go back.’

  This seemed to satisfy him and he picked up the hare again and looked out of the window at the outhouse.

  ‘Do you want to go and see?’ I said.

  There was no one else around. Monro lifted his head when we came into the kitchen and I gave him some of the biscuits Father Bernard had left on the table to quieten him down. I wanted to have the outhouse to ourselves first, before it became everyone’s discovery.

  We walked across the yard, trampling over the heavy wooden doors, and stood at the gap where they had once been.

  Inside was an ark of stuffed animals—a hundred or more. These were the unsold, uncollected, unfinished works. Botched jobs. Seconds. The cold and damp had taken its toll and there were rows and rows of shrunken squirrels and rabbits. A poodle’s head had sunk in on itself like an old balloon. In the far corner we found a tandem being ridden by two mangy chimps. Neither of us wanted to touch them, so we fetched a broom and pushed them off. They fell stiffly to the floor, still grinning, their hands like claws, as though they had been frozen solid.

  Hanging from the ceiling were dozens of bird skeletons, hawks of some kind, trussed up by the feet and left to decompose. Why he hadn’t stuffed them too, I didn’t know. Perhaps he had died before he’d had time, but there were so many of them and the way they were hung they seemed more like the hare and the rats Hanny had found stretched out on the fence. Proof of a victory of some kind.

  Although the floor was littered with their bones and feathers, the smell of rotting was strangely absent, as the air had been allowed to move freely through the gaps around the wooden doors and out of the barred window set just above head height on the far wall. There was a chest of drawers underneath it with bootprints on the top where the taxidermist had stood to look out of the window. On the floor, almost obscured by dust and spiderwebs were spent bullet casings. This must have been a firing step, though what he was trying to shoot, I didn’t know. The hawks, perhaps, as they came out of the woods.

  ‘Look in the drawers, Hanny,’ I said and rattled the handles to show him.

  He took hold of the top drawer and yanked it open. Spiders darted away, following the dark into the corners. Inside were dozens of old spanners wet with rust.

  ‘Try the next one,’ I said.

  And here we found what I’d hoped was there. Under a thin cotton sheet were boxes and boxes of bullets. Hanny went to touch them, but I held his sleeve.

  ‘Let me get them,’ I said, and took out the nearest box and opened it. The bullets were set in a metal clip and were sharp and cold.

  ‘You mustn’t let anyone know that they’re here, Hanny,’ I said. ‘This is a secret now. We’ll take them down to the pillbox on our way to Coldbarrow.’

  He stared at the bullets and I closed the drawer tightly.

  ***

  Eventually, everyone came to look and wandered between the animals with curiosity or revulsion.

  Miss Bunce stood in the doorway and refused to come in.

  ‘It’s awful,’ she said. ‘Poor things.’

  David put his hands on her shoulders and steered her away.

  ‘That’s a decent-looking machine, mind you,’ said Father Bernard, nodding at the tandem that the chimps had been riding.

  Hanny and I managed to haul it out and pushed it around the yard. The tyres had perished and the gears were clotted with rust but it didn’t seem as though it would take much to be able to ride it again and Father Bernard only put up a mild protest about his clothes getting dirty before he fetched his tool box from the minibus.

  Before long he had the tandem upside down in the kitchen on sheets of old newspaper and was taking apart the cogs and gears, his usually well-slicked hair flopping in front of his eyes. He seemed to be in his element as he knelt down with a spanner in his hand. More at home with nuts and screws and other pieces of greasy metal than giving out communion.

  Mummer tutted and fussed until she finally stood over us with her arms folded.

  ‘Boys,’ she said. ‘Will you please let Father have his breakfast now. There’s too much to do to be spending the day messing about with that bit of junk.’

  ‘It’s quite alright, Mrs Smith,’ said Father Bernard. ‘It’s nice revisiting one of the few genuine pleasures of my youth.’

  She looked irritably at his black hands and the smudges on his face, as though she was, at any moment, going to spit on a handkerchief and start wiping.

  ‘Well, everything’s on the table, Father,’ she said. ‘We’ll wait for you to say grace.’

  ‘Oh, don’t let me stop you, Mrs Smith,’ he said. ‘I might be a wee while, getting all this oil off my hands.’

  ‘All the same. I think we’d rather do things properly, Father, even if it means eating things cold.’

  ‘As you wish, Mrs Smith,’ he said, looking at her with a curious expression.

  I’ve thought about that look quite often as I’ve been getting all this down. What it meant. What Father Bernard had let slip just at that moment. What he really thought of Mummer.

  A line of dominos, spinning plates, a house of cards. Pick a cliché. He had realised what I’d known about Mummer for a long time—that if one thing gave way, if one ritual was missed or a method abridged for convenience, then her faith would collapse and shatter.

  I think it was then that he began to pity her.

  ***

  Father Bernard went off to clean himself and Hanny and I went into the dining room to wait for him. Everyone was sitting around the table watching Mr Belderboss. He seemed in a brighter mood than he’d been in the previous night with Father Bernard, though I got the impression he was deliberately distracting himself from thoughts of his brother with the object he was examining. It was a small, brown earthenware bottle with a cork stopper in the end and a gargoyle face crudely scratched on one side.

  ‘It was on the windowledge, you say?’ said Mr Belderboss.

  ‘Yes,’ said Farther. ‘Stuck between the bars.’

  ‘Oh, put it down, Reg, it’s absolutely hideous,’ said Mrs Belderboss. ‘No one wants to see that at the breakfast table.’

  He looked around at the others and then went back to studying the face on the jar.

  ‘I don’t see anyone complaining, Mary.’

  Mrs Belderboss made a noise of exasperation that Father Bernard caught as he came in through the door.

  ‘My, my, Mrs Belderboss,’ he said. ‘That sounded like a soul in distress.’

  ‘Oh, you tell him, Father,’ she said. ‘He won’t listen to me.’

  ‘About what?’

  She gestured to the bottle Mr Belderboss was looking at.

  ‘He’s obsessing again.’

  ‘It was in the quarantine room, Father,’ said Mr Belderboss. ‘Between the bars on the window. There’s definitely something inside it.’

  He shook the jar and handed it to Father Bernard.

  ‘Sounds like liquid of some sort. What do you think?’

  Father Bernard put it close to his ear and listened as he moved it from side to side.

  ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘There’s definitely something in there.’

  ‘Ugly thing, isn’t it?’ said Mr Belderboss.

  ‘Aye, it is that.’

  ‘What do you think it is?’ aske
d Farther.

  Father Bernard passed it back to Mr Belderboss and laughed and shook his head.

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Father Wilfred would have known,’ said Mrs Belderboss. ‘Wouldn’t he, Esther?’

  Mummer handed Father Bernard a plate but didn’t look at him.

  ‘I’m sure he would,’ she said.

  ‘He’d a doctorate from Oxford,’ said Mrs Belderboss, leaning towards Father Bernard, as he began buttering a slice of toast.

  ‘Cambridge,’ said Mr Belderboss, without taking his eyes off the jar that he was now turning round and round in his hands.

  ‘One of those places, anyway,’ said Mrs Belderboss. ‘He was a very clever man.’

  ‘And so well travelled,’ said Mr Belderboss, shaking the jar gently next to his ear.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Mrs Belderboss. ‘I’d have given my eye-teeth to have gone to some of the places he did. You were very lucky, Joan.’

  Father Bernard looked confused. Mrs Belderboss leaned towards him again and smiled at Miss Bunce across the table as she explained.

  ‘Miss Bunce was lucky enough to accompany Father Wilfred on his trip to the Holy Land last summer. As his personal secretary no less.’

  ‘Really?’ said Father Bernard, looking at Miss Bunce. ‘Well, well.’

  Miss Bunce flushed slightly and scraped off a clod of butter from the block in the middle of the table.

  ‘Mrs Belderboss makes it sound grander than it was, Father, but it was a wonderful experience,’ she said.

  Mummer suddenly remembered there was something she had to do and went out of the room.

  It was still a bone of contention with her that Miss Bunce had been picked to go to Jerusalem with Father Wilfred. It wasn’t because she hadn’t been asked herself—she could hardly have accepted anyway, what with the shop to run—but because it was Miss Bunce who had.

  She put on a front but had soon become utterly sick of the endless talk about the trip and had sat sour-faced through the slide show that had done the rounds of people’s houses during the autumn of 1975: Father Wilfred coming out of the tomb of Lazarus. Father Wilfred standing outside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Father Wilfred walking along the Via Dolorosa. Father Wilfred in Al Bustan, waist deep in a crowd of poor, grinning Palestinian children wanting sweets as he tried to find the garden where King David set down the Psalms.

  After a while, she came back in with a tray of tea cups and during the silence as she set them out on the table, there was a knock at the front door. Everyone looked up. Father Bernard wiped his mouth and went to see who it was. We heard him speaking to someone in a tone of surprise and then the door to the dining room opened and Clement’s mother appeared, dressed in a long coat—the hem of which met the tops of her wellingtons—and carrying a sack of firewood. Everyone watched as she moved backwards across the room, dragging the sack towards the nook beside the fireplace.

  ‘Don’t you want some help, Mrs Parry?’ said Mr Belderboss, looking towards Father Bernard, who shrugged in a way that suggested he had already asked her and she had declined.

  ‘Nay,’ she said and looked up at us. She wasn’t wearing her glasses anymore and her eyes were a bright blue.

  ‘Where’s Clement?’ asked Mrs Belderboss.

  ‘He’s out,’ she said, dusting off her hands.

  ‘Oh,’ said Mrs Belderboss. ‘Well how did you get here?’

  She lifted her wellingtons in turn. ‘Shanks’ Pony,’ she said.

  ‘On your own?’

  ‘Aye,’ she said.

  ‘Oh.’

  Clement’s mother put her hands in the pockets of her coat and looked at the wood she had brought in.

  ‘That should be enough for now,’ she said. ‘As long as it dunt get any colder.’

  She went to the door and Father Bernard opened it for her.

  ‘It’s alright,’ she said. ‘I’ll see me sen out.’

  Father Bernard watched her as she went down the hallway and out through the front door.

  ‘I thought she was blind,’ Mrs Belderboss said quietly to her husband.

  ‘Well, perhaps she had an operation,’ he replied. ‘They can sort out cataracts nowadays can’t they?’

  ‘Is that what you think it was? Cataracts?’

  ‘I don’t know. Probably.’

  ‘That’s astonishing,’ said Mrs Belderboss. ‘It was so quick. We only saw her the other day.’

  ‘You see what I mean about this place,’ said Mr Belderboss looking around the table. ‘A constant surprise.’

  ***

  After breakfast, I went upstairs and fetched the envelope of money from under the mattress. Mummer was still annoyed about Mrs Belderboss bringing up the Jerusalem trip and was so distracted by all the preparations she needed to make for the visit to the shrine that she agreed we could go out for a few hours.

  Hanny wanted to take the tandem. I told him it was broken and pinched the tyres until my fingers met, but he still didn’t understand.

  ‘Father Bernard said he would mend them,’ I said.

  Hanny grasped the handlebars and rocked the bike back and forth, looking at me expectantly.

  ‘No, Hanny. We can’t ride it yet.’

  As a compromise, I let him push it from the kitchen out into the yard, but he was soon distracted by a hare running off down the lane and he left the bike against a stone wall and chased after it. I went into the outbuilding and took a box of bullets out of the drawer. The box was too big, so I took out one of the clips and pushed it deep down into an inside pocket. I would stow it away in the pillbox when I got a chance. And then I could fire the rifle. Send a bullet out over the sea. Practice my aim in case Parkinson and Collier came.

  The mist had thinned a little and looking over the fields there was something different that I couldn’t quite place until I got further down the lane.

  Hanny had stopped running and held onto the wall, breathing hard and looking across the field at the hare. I stood next to him and watched as it cut a furrow through swathes of fresh green grass that seemed to have appeared overnight.

  ***

  Down at the beach and over the sea, the fog had lingered in the cold air and was so thick that we couldn’t see more than a few yards. We waited and tried to listen for the sound of the sea to gauge whether the tide was in or out. Hanny went and sat on a rock and picked off the dried seaweed. I moved a little further toward the water but was reluctant to go too far in case I lost Hanny in the mist. I looked over at him and he stared back and kissed his fingers.

  ‘I know, Hanny, I know,’ I said and picked up a stone and pitched it into the fog. It landed with a single thud, and walking a little further I could see that there was only a thin wash of water. The tide was receding. The weed on the rocks was still wet.

  ‘Come on, Hanny,’ I said. ‘We need to go now.’

  Hanny walked off quickly and I had to jog at times to keep up with him. When I finally called to him to wait, he stopped in the mist up ahead.

  ‘Hold my hand tight,’ I said.

  We had come to the last of the timber posts and there was half a mile of open sand that couldn’t be crossed as quickly. The tide had scrubbed away any tracks Leonard’s car might have made and even if I could have roughly remembered the route they had marked, a safe path yesterday could be quite the opposite now.

  ‘Hold my hand,’ I said again, but Hanny was too distracted and so I took hold of his arm and led him around the standing water.

  ‘You mustn’t let her kiss you again,’ I said. ‘The man will be cross with you.’

  He smiled.

  ‘I’ll be cross with you too.’

  He touched his lips again.

  ‘No, Hanny.’

  He stuck out his tongue and turned away.

  ‘Listen,’ I said, holding him by the shoulders and nudging his chin with my knuckle so that he faced me. ‘There are men who don’t want us to be here. Men who might hurt you. So we’ve got t
o be careful about what we do. We just need to give the money back and leave them alone.’

  He looked down at his feet.

  ‘Hanny, I’m serious,’ I said, hitting him a little harder this time. ‘I won’t be able to stop them if they want to hurt you.’

  He rubbed his chin and felt around in his coat pockets until he found the plastic dinosaur and handed it to me.

  ‘You don’t need to say sorry,’ I said. ‘Just don’t do anything stupid.’

  He held my hand and we carried on. Not for the first time I wished that I’d brought the rifle. The mist had turned the sands an ashen colour and was so thick that all sense of space was lost. Oystercatchers and gulls would sound far off one moment and then suddenly loud as they flew by. And from time to time there was a steady rumble that I thought at first was thunder or an aeroplane but realised that it was the sea churning its way over the sands, drawing out to its limit, like a bowstring.

  ***

  Leonard’s car was parked outside Thessaly when we got there. The place was Sabbath quiet. I knocked on the door, waited, and then when no one had come after a minute, I knocked again.

  Hanny had wandered away to look at the bell tower.

  I called him back, but he ignored me. I shouted a little louder, but he was too intent on opening the door and so I went over to try and lead him back to the house.

  It was impossible to tell from the mainland, and even from Thessaly one could miss it, but it seemed that there had once been another building there—a chapel, perhaps, by the fragments of stone archways half hidden in the bracken. What had happened to it, I didn’t know. I’d never heard of any place of worship on Coldbarrow. Perhaps they had got it wrong, or the old stories had succumbed to Chinese whispers as old stories do. Perhaps the Devil hadn’t built the tower at all but knocked down the church around it. Perhaps he had built Thessaly from the remains. They were of the same stone after all.

  Before I could stop him, Hanny put his shoulder to the door and it grated open enough for us to look inside. Water dripped and something fluttered up to the belfry where the wind murmured around the wooden scaffold that held the bell in place. I wondered if, long ago, they had crept in here to satisfy themselves that Alice Percy was really dead and had stood as quietly as we did now, looking up, watching her turning on the end of the rope, her bare soles curled in rigor mortis.