‘Nice to see you dressed up, old-timer.’
Well, it’s important to make the effort now and again.
‘You never did before,’ I say. ‘What’s with the magic spear?’
But Bob doesn’t answer.
‘I messed up, Bob,’ I tell him. ‘I’m all out of rope.’
‘Níl saoi gan locht,’ he says.
‘There’s no wise man without fault,’ I acknowledge, as Bob pats my arm with his free hand.
I drive the blue Sierra to the central tunnel section. I stop the car under the bridge and pull the handbrake. I open the door and I run from the car, and I’m climbing up stone and am almost over the damned wall when a white heat bursts from the earth.
The death of Cúchulainn
I DON’T KNOW HOW LONG IT IS BEFORE I KNOW THAT I AM NOT DEAD. I am lying in the road that runs west from the central crossroads. There is a peculiar silence and the air is strange. I try to stand, and I am surprised when I can. I check my arms and legs, and they are still there. The Glock is still tucked in my belt. Something is wrong with my face and my side, and my hearing, too, but I’m not sure what. My left leg is torn and I can see flesh and blood.
I move away from the town centre. My left leg is not working and I am dragging it along, but I am moving, and I take the first side street and then another and then another. A car has stopped in the road facing me, and a silver-haired man is in the driver’s seat. He doesn’t see me at first; he is watching the dashboard panel. I move to the front passenger door, open it, and sit in.
‘Drive,’ I tell him, but he recoils, with his eyes and mouth wide open. I’m not sure what to do, so I don’t do anything but look at him. He recovers and steadies himself with a shake, and takes the steering wheel in both hands.
‘Drive,’ I tell him.
He speaks, but I can’t hear him too well. He speaks again, and I watch him. I think he is saying something about a hospital.
‘Drive,’ I tell him again, and point to the Glock, and wave in the direction away from town.
He is calm now, calmer than a man could be expected to be in this event, and he rolls the car off with another shake of his head.
‘Thank you,’ I say to him, and he shakes his head again.
I know I have to get out fast before a security blockade closes the town down, so I direct him to drive out of town on the Ballygowan Road and then to take the A1 south. We get free of the town, and after a while he adjusts the car radio and listens intently to the news report he must have had on when I got into the car. He speaks to me. I watch his mouth and read the words.
‘Was that you?’ he asks. ‘Did you plant that bomb?’
‘No,’ I try to tell him, but I don’t have the breath to explain further. I’m not sure if the words are leaving me or if they are only in my head and all he is getting is used air. ‘Big mountain,’ is all I can say.
Something in the way I look or speak, or try to speak, I think persuades him, and he remains calm as he asks, ‘Then why do you need that gun? And why do you need to get away?’
I try to answer, but can’t. ‘Big mountain, no rope,’ I tell him.
My head is hurting and I am feeling sick. I open a window and throw up out onto the road. He is speaking again to me, and I turn to read the words.
‘You need a hospital, son,’ he says to me. ‘If not, you are going to die.’
Son. It is a kind man who would use that address in a circumstance such as this. I look inside my coat. It’s a mess. I know some of the blue Sierra is inside me. I feel a wetness, too, on my face. How did this all go so wrong? I am all out of plans. I don’t know how all this happened. I don’t know what to do. It is difficult to breathe. I try to relax, but it doesn’t help. I just can’t get enough air.
I check his fuel gauge and again point him south. We approach the border on back roads I know well, and I direct him into Dundalk from the north-west through the outlying roads of the town. It is Saturday. I hope she will be home. We stop at 16 Níth River Terrace. I try to get out, but can’t. I try again. I make it, but I cannot straighten, and I struggle to push through the gate. I drag my heavy body to the low wall that separates the front and rear gardens, but I can go no further. I go to the ground and try to rest with my back to the wall. My head hurts bad, bad, bad. I see the kind man’s car, but he is gone, and I see a black shape fall on the pillar of the front gate. I’m sure it is a raven. Somehow, amidst all this chaos, it registers that this is not good. I’m sure the thing is watching me. My head hurts so much, and there is a big fire in my chest and nothing is working right and I can’t get air, and I know my lungs are finished. I see some movement to my side and try to turn, but my head is heavy and my neck won’t work. My head has fallen to my chest and I cannot lift it. From the edge of my vision, I see the silver-haired driver coming from the front of the house, and then suddenly Aisling is with me. Sweet hallelujah! If I could do anything in the world now, just one thing, I would sing this beautiful girl a song. But I can’t. I see her as she looks at my face and then at my side, and she is panicked and shouting, but I cannot hear and I can barely get a word out.
‘Aisling.’
She is speaking to me, and crying, and shouting towards the house. But I don’t hear anything. She is holding my head, pleading with me. I know she is calling for help. But I have watched men die. I know I won’t live. I know there isn’t time.
‘Isn’t life a bastard, Aisling? Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.’
I deliver the line in my throaty Al Pacino New York Italian. I look to her, but she hasn’t heard me, and I know the words haven’t actually left me. She would not have got my Michael Corleone joke anyway — it’s probably not a good time to be funny. I can’t get air. I try to smile to her, but I don’t think my face is working.
‘It got all messed up, Aisling. It got all messed up.’
She is speaking to me, but I don’t hear her voice.
‘Aisling.’
I try to raise my hand to touch the side of her face. I can’t. I try to lift my hand to her belly, to our baby. I can’t.
‘You are some lunatic,’ I tell her, but there are no words left in my body. I smile to her, but there is no movement left in my body. Nothing is left in my body. I am not working. Nothing is working. And there is no air. I hear music. It is a cello. It is ‘El Cant dels Ocells.’
‘I hear it, Aisling. I hear it. How mad is that?’
Tír na nÓg
I CLIMB CLOCKWISE ON A PATH OF WORN EARTH. THE PATH IS DARK under beech trees, and elm, ash, hazel, and hawthorn are scattered in outer ditches. Here and there, stone ramparts are built into the hillside. Through the trees, I look down on lush, green land. Great clearings are corralled by woods of oak and chestnut, and copses of pine, birch, rowan, and juniper scatter to mountains of purples, blues, and browns. In one clearing, a wooden trellis holds two or three dozen goats, and in another I see a golden wave of grain. Behind a clump of alders I glimpse the reflected-metal run of water, and from the water and through the alders a blond boy walks. Nearby, I see a family sitting in a meadow. I watch the father pull apples from a basket and wipe each one with a cloth he takes from his robe pocket before turning to smile at me. There is a large clearing in the near distance. A man is working among lines of fruit trees, and a woman is milking a cow in a fenced patch near a farmhouse where geese forage around a tall ash tree. The man sees me, gives a broad wave, and calls out. And though he is a way off, I hear the words clearly, as if the man has spoken from the near ditch. The man says, ‘So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen.’ I wave and walk on — I never did know what that meant.
There is a sudden movement in the air as something bursts through the hedge and drops before me. I pick the thing up from where it lands. It is a sliothar: the small, hard
ball used in hurling. A boy follows the ball through the ditch and onto the path. He is dressed in a tunic of white linen edged with a twist of red and gold, and wrapped around his shoulders is a tightly woven purple cloak. The cloak is pinned across his chest with a golden brooch, and a twisted golden torc sits around his neck. He carries a wooden hurley in one hand.
‘Well met,’ he says, through a look of expectation, challenge, and humour.
‘Do that again,’ I tell him, ‘and I’ll kick your arse.’
‘Yeah,’ the boy replies, still holding the look. ‘You and whose army?’
I throw him the sliothar, and he volleys it into the air and runs off in chase.
He turns his head to me whilst running away. ‘Catch me after and we will have a game,’ he shouts back, before turning again to chase the ball.
‘After what?’ I call to him, but he is gone and there is no answer.
I continue on the path and I see a girl sitting on a low wall, her head buried in a book. There is something about the girl that is familiar. She has long, dark hair, and her skin hints of other lands. She looks up from her reading as I near.
‘Hello,’ she says. ‘What will we talk about today?’
I don’t know what to answer, so I say nothing.
The girl laughs. ‘Come down to me after and we will swap some stories.’
‘After what?’ I ask.
But the girl just laughs again and returns to her reading.
At the top of the rise there is a clearing, and I step onto a grassy plateau. A single dwelling stands in the centre. It has a thatched roof, and tufts of white smoke push through the reed on the northern facet. The walls atop a ridge of stone are of oak beam, wattle, and earth, and from an east-facing opening I catch the flavour of a stew cooking. I walk around the dwelling, and look north and west and south. Farmsteads are sprinkled on a land of green and gold. I turn east and look out to a wide bay. The water of the bay is blue, and below me I see the silver curve of a river as it flows to the sea. To the north, a long, stretched arm of mountain cradles the bay, the lower hills are dark under wood, and beyond the near mountains are distant rocky peaks.
She sits beneath a single oak on the northern ridge of the plateau. She wears a cloak of green silk, and hung around her neck is the flat crescent disc of a golden lunula. She has hair of gold, and the long, golden threads fall in soft waves over one side of her face, resting lightly on her pale skin. She wears red boots, and they are tied in extravagant bows with green strapping. She looks to me. Her eyes are the lightened green of an August meadow.
‘Isn’t it great, Johnny?’
‘Yes, Cora.’
I sit beside her. I raise my hand to touch the side of her face as I kiss her.
‘You are unbelievably wonderful,’ I say to her.
‘You are not too bad yourself, Mister Donnelly,’ she says, and smiles.
She rests on me, and I hold her easy in my arms. It is joy itself to hold her. She moves closer, and I can feel her breath on my throat. It is pure pleasure.
‘Will we sing a song?’ I ask her.
‘Okay. What will we sing?’
‘Any song you want, you mad and wonderful thing.’
She smiles and holds my arm.
‘We’ll sing Liam Clancy.’
‘The very man, Cora. Which song will we sing?’
‘We’ll sing the whole lot.’
‘The whole lot?’
‘Yes, Johnny, the whole lot. Haven’t we all the time in the world?’
Acknowledgements
Thank you, Veronica Maye, Laura Susijn, Henry Rosenbloom, and Margot Rosenbloom. Thank you, Rina Gill and Bridie Riordan. Great women all; except for Henry, of course, who is a great man amongst great women. Thanks to everyone at Scribe. Thank you all for sharing the load, for lighting the path, for making it happen, and for your kindness along the way.
Contents
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright Page
Epigraphs
Principles
The Mass
The dinner
Delaney’s cabbages
The red bicycle
A black flag flying
Bob
Cúchulainn’s castle
Hopscotch
The meaning of life
Reading for Rosie
Chips and eggs, and milk
El Cant dels Ocells
A box of tricks
Soldiers’ Point
Lifting mist in grey country
The wedding
A mad and wonderful thing
Slime
The rise of Ochaíne
High hopes
The end of the harvest
Station Road
Wünderkind
Line of sight
Mila
Samhain
Barnacles
A Christmas carol
The slanted rain
The price you pay for empire
A question for Anna
A nun in the park
Broken skies
Boggy fields
Cause
Oisín and Niamh
The distance of fall
Three cheers for Johnny Donnelly
The pure in heart
Aisling
Pilgrimage
To whom we belong
Sirens
A day that started out easy
The death of Cúchulainn
Tír na nÓg
Acknowledgements
A Mad and Wonderful Thing Page 26
