‘The fresh air will do me good.’
Her mother laughed, maybe softened up by the hundred euros, pulling out her ancient yellow leather purse. ‘Oh, go on then. You sure you don’t mind walking that far?’
‘It’s not that far. I need to clear my head. What will I get?’
‘You choose – your money. Lamb chops?’
‘And cheesecake?’
‘Perfect.’ Maeve opened the purse. Frowned. Hunted through the different compartments. ‘What the . . .? I must have put it . . .’ She dug around in the pockets of her old green cardigan. ‘God, this is so annoying. I know I put it somewhere safe, I know I did.’
‘Oh, Mam—’
‘Don’t say anything! Just help me find it!’
Aoife picked up the purse from the dashboard. ‘Will I . . .?’
‘Feel free.’ Maeve was rifling with increasing anxiety through the driver’s door pocket, pulling out old letters, tissues, sweet wrappers.
Aoife checked through the untidy purse. In the zipped section were a lot of coins, but none worth more than twenty cents; in the wallet section were shop receipts, stamps, three raffle tickets, a library card, and the crushed skeleton of an oak leaf. ‘Try the floor. Maybe you dropped it.’
Maeve got out of the car and checked frantically around in the foot well, then under the seat. Nothing but old newspapers. ‘Oh God, this is a total nightmare . . . I can’t believe I’ve lost it. I feel so stupid – I’m such an idiot. I’ll still pay you back tomorrow . . .’ There were tears in her voice.
Aoife said hastily, ‘Maybe it’s in the back?’
‘Why would it be there?’
‘I don’t know – you had the window open, maybe it blew there?’
While her mother searched the back seat, now almost sobbing, Aoife quickly took another hundred euros out of her pocket and ‘found’ it in the glove compartment.
Maeve stood wiping her eyes with the corner of her cardigan. ‘Well done, Aoife. Thank God . . . I remember putting it there now, that’s my safe place in the car . . .’
‘Will I go to the shop now?’
‘Yes! Quick before I lose it again!’
CHAPTER SEVEN
The rain was still holding off, and a watery sun was breaking through. Strolling up the flowering lane, flies annoying her head, Aoife flicked through the remaining eleven hundred-euro notes.
She couldn’t even begin to understand it.
Maybe everything else that had happened to her in the last couple of days could be explained away. Imagining she could bicycle so much faster than normal could be down to the timer on her phone not working. Secretly believing that she was responsible for Shay Foley crashing his brother’s car, just because she’d wanted him to turn right? OK, that had to be delusional. Like the way she believed, deep down – no, far from deep down – that she’d shoved Sinead into the desk and poked Killian in the stomach without touching either of them. (An entertaining idea, but surely way too good to be true.)
But the twelve hundred euros was not an illusion. They existed. Her mother had seen two of these notes – had held one of them in her hand. Shay had seen the money too, when she offered it to him to buy his brother a car.
Because that was what it was for . . .
A new determination filled her. She wasn’t going to tell her mother about this. She would have liked to give Maeve more than a hundred euros, but she couldn’t risk her mother deciding that when it came to this amount of cash, finders wasn’t keepers. Yes, now she thought about it, she was pretty certain Maeve would hand the money over to the guards.
Reaching the garage, Aoife turned into the yard. Shay’s brother had beaten him, and nobody else seemed to care. She wanted to help him. She needed to help him. This money was the answer to her prayer. Didn’t people pray for all sorts of things? Health, love, good exam results? Why not money for a car? Maybe it was crazy to believe that it was literally a gift from heaven, but for now she was going to go with it.
Dave Ferguson’s garage consisted of two petrol pumps, a tin-roofed shed where he did his repairs, and a small shop selling bits and pieces to do with cars, motorbikes and push bikes. The owner was in the yard, prostrate under a green post office van. Aoife crouched down to speak to him. ‘I need some new tyres for my bike.’ It seemed an easier place to start than just coming straight out with wanting to buy a car.
‘Five minutes . . .’ He hit something fiercely with a wrench.
While waiting, she wandered around the yard. There was a rusty Toyota for sale at seven hundred and fifty, a small Honda for six hundred, and a very old but very beautiful cream-coloured BMW convertible, with no price on it – the vintage car she had seen Dave Ferguson tinkering with yesterday afternoon. She peered inside. It had red leather seats.
‘Like her?’ Dave Ferguson had finished with the post office van and was now standing at her shoulder wiping his oily hands on a rag. He was bald, red-faced, and wore small wire-framed glasses – just like his brother Thomas, Sinead’s father.
Aoife said, ‘The seats are nice.’
‘They are nice, surely, and there’s nothing more essential to a car than to have nice seats. Who needs an engine?’
‘How much is it?’
‘You’re after buying a car off me, are you? How old are you now?’
‘Fifteen. But could you sell it to me, just to have?’
‘Good joke. Now, what size of a bike tyre did you say you were after?’
‘What if I paid a thousand in cash, right now?’
Dave Ferguson laughed, shoving the blackened rag into the pocket of his overalls. ‘Done. Yours for a thousand euros.’
Aoife experienced a strong stab of satisfaction. ‘So it’s a deal?’
‘Surely it’s a deal. Now about those—’
She pulled out the sheaf of notes.
There was a long, long pause, during which Dave Ferguson stopped chuckling, went even redder than normal and lit a cigarette. Aoife waited, holding out the money. Deep down, she was certain that the garage owner would have to stick to the deal they had just made.
After several lung-filling drags, and a coughing fit, he flicked the half-smoked cigarette into a nearby puddle. ‘Nope. Not possible. Your parents will murder me if I let you spend all your savings on a car. Especially this one.’
In one way, Aoife was relieved. So she couldn’t just make something happen, just by wishing it. Yet still she kept on patiently holding out the envelope towards him, hoping he would change his mind in the normal way. ‘A deal is a deal.’
‘Not with someone your age it’s not . . .’ Yet even as Dave Ferguson was saying ‘no’, his left hand was moving towards her. He glanced down at it with a frown. ‘Look, I can’t take your money . . .’
‘A deal is a deal,’ repeated Aoife, dropping the thousand into his outstretched palm. He groaned and turned redder still as his fingers gripped it.
In the shop in Kilduff, she broke into the remaining hundred-euro note to buy nine pink lamb cutlets and a strawberry cheesecake, then, because she was starving, a packet of chocolate Hobnobs. She set off home with the shopping bag in one hand and two new bike tyres over her shoulder, eating her way thoughtfully through the biscuits.
Buying the car for a thousand euros had been amazing, and had felt like the right thing to do at the time – but now she wasn’t so sure. The garage owner had clearly felt terrible about selling her the BMW, even though she’d assured him that she wouldn’t be driving it herself. When she’d tried to pay him for the tyres as well, he had insisted on giving them to her for free. Had she tricked Dave Ferguson, somehow? She had paid with real cash – yet it still felt wrong, as well as utterly bewildering. For another thing, it was ridiculous to pretend that the money was a gift from heaven. God was mysterious and never behaved in such a direct, uncomplicated fashion – not according to Father Leahy, anyway. In fact, if she was to believe the priest, God usually answered prayers by doing the exact opposite of what He was specifically
asked to do.
Maybe he’s the phoney one . . .
Yet it was also ridiculous to pretend to herself that there was a rational explanation for her finding the money in her pocket. There was no getting away from the fact that she had wanted the money, and it had instantly appeared.
Sticking the last biscuit into her mouth, she slipped her hand into her trouser pocket. Empty. Shifting the shopping bag to her other hand, she tried the other pocket. Nothing. She made a big effort to imagine a million euros, in one huge colourful note. And tried again. Nothing. She wasn’t sure if she was more relieved or disappointed. Disappointed, to be honest.
In the evening, Aoife cooked the chops for dinner herself, and it was the best meal she could ever remember eating – maybe because she was yet again so incredibly hungry, even after eating the whole packet of Hobnobs. But her parents also declared themselves amazed by her cooking. They seemed to have fully recovered from the strange shock that the locket had given them, and talked cheerfully and aimlessly to each other about the upcoming elections and where they would go for a holiday in the sun, if only they had the money (Aoife quietly checked her pockets again – still nothing).
Afterwards, Maeve stayed in the kitchen to work at the table, humming tunelessly as she battered away at the keyboard of her laptop. ‘Got to get this finished and printed out for Declan, or we won’t be eating like that again for a while.’
Aoife went into the back room to watch television. Her father was already sitting in the armchair by the empty fireplace, television off, reading one of his ‘new’ second-hand books.
She knelt at the hearth. ‘Do you want me to light a fire for you?’
He looked up from his page. ‘Do you think we need one? It’s a warm evening.’
‘I know, but it’s nice for the smell of the turf burning. I’ll just make a small one.’ She took two pieces of turf and a firelighter from the wicker basket. While she set the fire, she glanced at the broken spine of the old leather book. ‘What’s that you’re reading?’
‘The Lebor Gabála Érenn. A good translation from the Irish.’
‘What’s it about?’ Aoife had never given her father’s hobby much thought, or wondered why he was so fascinated by the old stories – it was simply the way he was and always had been in her memory of him, just as she couldn’t picture him without silvery-grey hair. Now she wondered if there might be something he had come across in his books that could explain what had been happening to her. She had flicked through the odd volume, taken from the piles of second-hand books on the stairs, and she knew ancient Ireland was full of strange goings on: St Patrick battling snakes and giants, and beautiful St Dympna plucking out her eyes and causing a holy well to spring up from where she threw them down.
‘You haven’t heard of the Lebor Gabála Érenn?’ Her father half closed the book, showing her the cover. ‘It’s the ancient history of the Irish fairies, the Tuatha Dé Danann.’
‘Oh. Right. Fairies.’
He laughed. ‘I take it you don’t believe in such things.’
‘There is a limit to what I can get my head around. I am fifteen.’
‘Well, grown-up girl, your great-grandmother was a firm believer, and she was eighty-eight when she died.’
This time, it was Aoife who laughed. ‘OK.’
Her father said suddenly, with a very sad, straight look at her, no humour in it at all, ‘She didn’t like my parents buying this house, you know. They only got it cheap because it was built on a fairy road.’
That was news. ‘Seriously? When me and Carla were young, we were always playing at—’
‘I know it. Your mam kept having to drag you back home before you disappeared over the hill.’
She was still amazed by his revelation. ‘I never realized the road was like a real thing. I thought we’d made it up. I must have heard you talking about it. Why didn’t your nan want your parents to buy this house?’
‘Because the road would bring the fairies to our door, and she was a Mayo woman, and afraid of them. She thought they were dangerous, evil creatures.’
Aoife looked away, stirring the fire with the poker. She felt unsettled now, and strange. So the fairy road had been more than a game. ‘From what I’ve heard over the past few days, it sounds to me like your nan was right.’
‘Have people been teasing you about leprechauns again?’
She looked up, surprised by how upset her father sounded about it. He was leaning forward in his chair, staring intensely at her. ‘Dad, chillax! I can cope with a bit of slagging. Anyway, I didn’t mean that, I meant I heard a couple of stories about real fairies.’
‘Real fairies?’ He still sounded suspicious.
‘Well, you know what I mean – real as in not little men wearing green coats and pointy hats.’
He settled back in his seat. ‘And what did these great experts on Irish folklore tell you?’
Aoife threw another piece of turf on the fire, and sparks of orange drifted up. ‘That sheógs lure human children out across the bog to drown, and lenanshees suck the life out of anyone they fall in love with, and banshees steal human babies and sell them to the devil.’
‘No!’ Now her father seemed even more upset, his dark eyes large and shocked. ‘Don’t listen to that sort of rubbish, it’s all—’
‘Dad.’
‘. . . superstitious nonsense—’
‘Dad. Like I said, I’m fifteen.’
He stopped; pulled a self-deprecating face. ‘Sorry. I know you’re too sensible to believe in the old country stories. Your great-grandmother had my head wrecked when I was a boy. I had to do a lot of reading to find out the truth about the Tuatha Dé Danann.’ He nodded at the shelves of books, the tattered volumes piled in every corner.
She arched her eyebrows mockingly at her father. ‘There’s a true story about the fairies?’
He mimicked her expression, peering at her over his glasses. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio—’
‘Yeah, yeah – so what’s this “true” story, then?’ Aoife settled herself cross-legged on the hearth rug. ‘Impress me, Professor O’Connor, with the results of your extensive research.’
‘Well, then, I will.’ He reopened the volume on his lap. ‘This is one of the best accounts of the Tuatha Dé Danann. It was written about a thousand years ago.’ He pushed his glasses back up his nose. ‘Here’s the story of their arrival in Ireland.’ He cleared his throat and read aloud:
‘They landed with horror, with lofty deed,
in their cloud of mighty combat of spectres,
upon a mountain of Conmaicne of Connacht . . .
Without ships, a ruthless course
the truth was not known beneath the sky of stars,
whether they were of heaven or of earth.’
‘Sounds like they came from outer space.’
‘No, they were from the earth.’ He smiled at her with sudden warmth, the way he had when she was little and he was about to tell her how much he loved her. ‘They were magical, Aoife – beautiful to look at. Tall, slender. And immensely powerful. A true fairy race.’
‘Cool beans. So, where did they go?’
‘Into another world.’
‘There’s another world?’
‘Many other worlds. Under the ocean to the west are the blessed isles. Under Munster lies the land of the dead. But under Mayo and the rest of Connaught lies Tír na nÓg, the land of the young, and that’s where the fairies went.’
‘And what’s it like down there?’
Aoife’s father was no longer gazing at her but somewhere over her shoulder, towards the window that faced out onto the garden. ‘It’s a beautiful world where no one grows old or dies. Where life is eternal, and death has been defeated.’
‘Something like heaven?’
‘Something like that, please God.’ He looked down at the book again, but he wasn’t reading it; his eyes were nearly closed, like he was dreaming.
‘Dad?’
She was going to say: Do you really believe in fairies? But it seemed a bit too much like asking him if he was mad, so instead she said, ‘That’s a lovely story.’
There was a strong scent of rotting hawthorn. She sat up and turned on her lamp. The sickly stench was coming from the toy rabbit, which had been under her pillow since she’d brought it home from the bog. Hawthorn blossoms seemed to have got into its leaky body, replacing some of the stuffing.
What had she been thinking of, bringing the dirty thing home with her? God knows what wildlife it was crawling with. Getting up, Aoife rummaged through her drawers for an old T-shirt, mummified the rabbit and pushed it to the back of her jewellery and make-up drawer.
Later, the scent of hawthorn grew even stronger. She got up again, to shut the window. She didn’t need to turn on the lamp this time, because there was a silver glow in the room – yet as she reached out to close the window, she saw that it was a black, moonless night.
For a moment she couldn’t bring herself to turn back into the room. She had a sudden terrifying thought that if she did, she would see a pair of glowing fairy eyes gazing at her from the dark. Not one of her father’s fantasy angels, but a creature of the night, of the old country stories . . . She turned quickly, and there was nothing. Yet there was still a silvery light in the room. The PC screen was dark, as was her phone.
Aoife went back to the bed, and when she moved aside the duvet, she realized that the light was coming from her own hands. She looked closer. The veins were shining through her skin, as if her red blood had been drained out of them and replaced with liquid, shining silver.
She must be dreaming.
In her dream, she got back into her dream-bed and closed her eyes.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘Come to me.’
Aoife lay rigid in the dark. A child’s voice had woken her. She raised her head very slightly from the pillow, listening. No creak of movement in the room. Maybe the leaves of the ash tree whispering against the half-open window . . . She must have been dreaming again.
‘Come here to me.’
The Changeling Page 7
