Then the picture changed to heaven. It was heaven. He knew it was heaven because of gold walls and lamps. Jesus was there and his pet fox was there too. There were angels flying around with trays of biscuits and orange. There was music. It was play time in heaven and they were all there, the woman and the child and the priest and his mother. The child picked up a bucket and spade and began to play on a bit of sand by the edge of a lake. He wanted them to talk to him but they wouldn’t. The priest was in shorts and he had a tan. His mother was on a deck chair knitting, keeping an eye on the child. He tried to break into the screen but it wasn’t glass, it wouldn’t break, it was gooey like putty. Then the woman came out of a doorway and looked straight ahead and then turned her back on him. Her hair was loose and it had grown, it was down to her ankles. There were animals and there were birds, thrushes and a load of blackbirds. His fox trotted across to where the child was playing and he called to it ‘Ruben Ruben’ and it spat at him.
When it got to be dusk in heaven, the sky became navy-blue, people started yawning and white garments floated out for his mother, the child and the woman, a pyjamas for the priest. Beds were wheeled in, wooden beds with acorns on the headboards. The child got into a little bed and the woman leant over it and kissed it and then rubbed its tummy the way she used to down at home. He knew that she’d talk to him once his mother and the priest had gone down to sleep. He moved closer and closer so that she could hear.
‘Will I go to heaven?’ he asked. He asked three times. She turned and looked at him. He thought she was going to say something nice. Her eyes were a fruity green like the lights in a slot machine. She screamed suddenly and one eye slid back into her head and an angel that must have been a surgeon, squeezed the two lids together and began stitching them with fawn thread. Tears began to run down her face and then they were not tears, they were drops of blood and she wiped them with her hair. She got into bed next to the child and the music finished and there was nobody in the room, only him and he was wide awake now.
He began to bite bits of the mattress, tore minute strips and began to plait them together, his eye on the peephole, and he was happy because he was moving on, away from there.
The court was told of it first thing the following morning. Dr Macready stood before the judge and said he had unpleasant news to relate, the defendant had made a serious suicide attempt the night before, had tried to strangle himself with bed covering in the hospital after Eily Ryan had appeared to him crying. He said he had examined the neck and that the marks of the strangulation could be seen very clearly as they extended three quarters of the way round his neck and were blistering. He said it was why the defendant was not wearing a collar and tie as he usually did and was asking permission to have the defendant excused from the court because of finding the trial so stressful, hearing people talking about him, and about his mother and her attempted suicide. As he was saying all this O’Kane began to laugh and now he was in a full spate of laughter at the people looking at him, curious, appalled, while Dr Macready tried to point out that it was not laughing laughter, that it did not mean that the young man was feeling good, far from it, that instead of being repulsed by it, they should look on it as the laughter of the damned.
‘He is not fit to plead, your honour,’ he said and the judge deliberated and called for an adjournment to give him time to consider the matter.
Crossing the floor the judge stopped and said that he hoped in his heart that the case would not drag on as it had done, it had opened wounds that were too deep, too shocking, too hurtful, it had been a human haemorrhaging and the country was depleted from it.
He appeared in court one last time as his life sentence was read out but he sat, dead to it, dead to the woman in the jury who sobbed openly at the verdicts, dead to the mother who for fifty-two days had sat with the stillness of an archetype, in her brown clothes, her brown hair tied back in a bun, and who simply said to those comforting her, ‘I can go home now and be alone.’
Aileen
Sure it was a Thursday on account of my being late going to bed after the bingo night. Ben was playing with his Lego when the doorbell rings and Queenie the landlady called up, ‘The guards are down here in the hall for you.’ I knew she was raging at having the guards around again, thinking all that was over and done with and that we were nice respectable people now. I jump up and put a few clothes on and Ben follows me out onto the landing.
‘Has that child toys to play with?’ the guard calls out. He’s sheepish looking, a new recruit.
‘Of course he has toys to play with,’ I say.
‘You might want to give them to him,’ he says and I take the hint and push Ben back into the bedroom and close the door.
He is wringing his hands to get it out - ‘I have bad news for you. We heard it over the nine o’clock news but we thought it was a hoax . . . they found your brother, dead, in the early hours of the morning . . . you have to come down to the sergeant.’
‘Don’t be raving ... I saw him less than a week ago and he looked okay except that he had gone from a size sixteen to a size twenty-two . . .’
‘It was a peaceful death.’
‘Did he get his hand on tablets or did he cut his arms trying to get out a window?’
‘He died in his sleep . . . they changed his medication and it seems he reacted to it ... it was one chance in a million.’
‘So he’s out of their way now,’ I said.
‘It seems, it was a very rare phenomenon,’ he droned on.
‘They doped him up, that’s what.’
‘His heart stopped . . . Miss . . . they tried resuscitation.’
Crossing the green, the busybodies began peering out from between their curtains, the two terriers that spar all day were at it and the Minnie one on her new bicycle scooting up close to us so as to hear what he was saying. Him repeating the same rubbish about a peaceful death and the very rare phenomenon of my brother’s heart.
When I got to the hospital they didn’t want me to see him in the morgue. I insisted. A warder held my arm -‘Let go of me . . . let go of me,’ I said. My brother’s hands and everything else was tucked in and all I could see was his bloated face. I leant in over him and talked to him. ‘Have you legs, have you arms, did they dope you up?’ The warder was right behind me in case I did anything extreme.
When I came out I told the doctor that my brother’s last wishes was to be cremated. The doctor said cremation was okay by them. I waited and waited for the ashes and when they didn’t come I rang up and was told that there was some confusion. I rang and I rang and eventually I was told that our father wanted the ashes. I shouted down the phone, I said, ‘I’m the one that was close to him, him and his father were daggers drawn for years.’ They said they’d have to think about it. In the end I had to go up there again to get them. They were in a little box. They’d halved them. That was my brother’s lot, halved in life and halved in death.
Grotto
The sun broke into the showers and lit them with a rainbowed radiance and the showers carried on, festive, larky, bluing the road and spattering watery diamonds on the plastic bags around the silage and on the top bars of iron gateways. The sky was pink and lilac and powder blue; stone walls and patchwork fields, then more ragged undulating country, hazels, poplars, forts of oak, hilly mounds. O’Kane country.
Dr Macready had been thinking of him since he came west a week before for a court hearing, O’Kane, the lost prodigal son that he believed he could have saved if he had been given time. He thought of him often, the ravelled mind that hopped around like it was on a hot spit, running from hate to love, to murder to repentance, fantasy and truth all one. Once, in a moment of searing clarity, asking for his brain to be taken out and washed and then buried thousands of feet in some bog where neither man nor machine could dislodge it.
‘But you’d have nothing then,’ he had said to him.
‘I’d rather nothing ... I want to be out of my skull ... I want to be empty,’ he had s
aid and repeated during those endless hours when they tried to pick out the pieces of his life, the milestones large and small that culminated in the abyss. In less furious moments he would talk of the places with their funny little names and the piers where local people who didn’t hate him but feared to let him indoors, would leave tea and bread for him. Dr Macready remembers him re-enacting walking backwards in his cell, remembering the winds he walked in, backwards, on account of their being so strong, so cutting. Now he was in that territory that he knew only from O’Kane’s lips and reams of evidence.
It was Friday and he was heading home. He realised that he had taken a wrong turning but didn’t bother to turn around, believing that eventually he would come onto the dual carriageway and the city.
Coming up to a crossroads, the name sprang out at him - Cloosh Wood. His absentmindedness had brought him there. Parking the car by the entrance barrier, he felt not fear but a city man’s confoundedness at the stoicism of those living and trothed to such a friendless place. The path was easy to follow, mementos all along the way like stations to a sepulchre. There were bits of mirror, ribbon, broken rosaries, sea shells all whispering their whisper - ‘This way, this way, ladies and gentlemen.’
When he got there he found to his surprise that he was not alone. A woman knelt in prayer, her body bent over, then at moments stooping to kiss the earth. He coughed so as not to frighten her and waved his hand in a reassuring gesture. It was obviously where the woman and child were slain, quite different to the rest of the forest and the sight of it moved him. A garden had been planted, rose bushes, dwarf trees, wild flowers and their little belongings - a gnome, a tortoiseshell comb, a vintage toy car and a nail brush with the likeness of a frog on its handle. Two tiny white crosses with their names painted on them seemed so child-like and belonged not to death but to moonlight and enchantment. On a lintel of stone a bog oak carving. Pine trees in a half circle, their branches soft and empathising in a semi sway. From one branch there hung a set of chimes.
Eventually the woman turned and looked in his direction and he whispered if by any chance she was a relative. She shook her head. She was wearing a head scarf which she had drawn over her face and a country coat, like a man’s coat. Her eyes had that startled, highly strung look that he had often seen in patients.
‘A sad place,’ he said.
‘The women of Ireland want his blood,’ she said quite quickly and repeated it with such force, such emphasis that he thought, as she stood, that she was about to strike him.
‘And what will they do with his blood . . . baptise it . . . bottle it ... sprinkle it ... put it in the tabernacle?’ he asked over-calm.
‘Who are you? Some do gooder?’
‘No ... I treated O’Kane ... I was one of the doctors during his trial ... I was one of the few people at his funeral.’
‘His death was too good for him ... he should have been hanged from these trees.’
‘You will not believe me but I heard him once express great sorrow . . . great guilt, over everything that happened here.’
‘Sorrow!’ she shrieks and she is above him now, her arms dangling, her blue piercing eyes, asking him to recall the woman’s bruised limbs, her torn undergarments, her defilement before death, before meeting her God and a hundred yards away a priest, his head on a stone slab, a butcher’s block.
‘I do recall . . . but I want you to know that he did repent at that time ... he had had no food or liquid for over twenty days ... he was a changed man.’
‘Tripe!’ She shrieks it.
‘Madam, is it not better that he showed repentance than that he never showed it at all? Better to atone for one minute than live in a vortex of despair?’
She turned away and muttered, her breath rapid and rasping. It was in that taut silence that a breeze started up and dislodged a piece of paper from the wedge of the joined crosses. It blew this way and that as if deciding where it might land. Eventually it fell close to him and he unfolded it and read it. Then he offered it to her to read but she refused. He read it aloud, he wanted her to hear it - ‘Darkness is drawn to light but light does not know it, light must absorb the darkness and therefore meet its own extinguishment.’
He looked to see if there was any softening in her features, in her stance, but there was none. The silence was killing. He could feel it magnifying and confirming itself in their separate beings, their irreconcilable natures. Suddenly she put her hand out and she was swaying and he thought that she was about to fall - ‘I picture her when I come up here as if she is still alive . . . as if she is within calling distance,’ she says, her voice muted.
‘I know ... I do know that,’ he said and reached to steady her but without touching, knowing that she was aching for some kind of consolation, like desert earth empty for rain. Then the chimes started up, brazen, arbitrary, their strikes hitting and grazing one another, sudden jubilance in that hallowed place.
He led the way down, splotches of light and shadow from a harvest moon that seemed to follow them. It would be winter soon, that ground far too soggy, the steep track sheer with ice and snows and no mourners would venture up there for months to come.
After that it would be spring.
Scallywag
There was a boy and he was around four and he made a plan that he told no one, not even his friend Elmer. A big adventure. He was an only child and played by himself with sticks. He went that bit further from home each day and then one day he could only see just the slates and then the next day the copper beech tree brushing them and then he came on a fort and there were purple flowers nearly as tall as himself and he picked them and played wars with them, but they broke because they were not that strong.
The night he stole out there were thousands of stars and he crossed the fields and climbed over the town gate and walked and walked until he came to a big wood where there was all sorts of activity. It was buzzing. There was bats and game birds and badgers all doing the things they could do only at night; scaring each other and fighting and eating their suppers and rolling around in the leaves, basking and having fun. Hi Ho, Hi Ho, it’s off to play we go.
When it was time to sleep he got into a big bed of pine needles and thought I’ll be a potato, I’ll be a spud and snooze down here. He slept a beautiful sleep and there was no telling how long he slept and it didn’t matter.
Meanwhile there was major commotion at home, his mother, his father, the guards, the whole country out looking for him. They called in water divers because he loved going to the lake for picnics but he could only swim with arm bands. They were demented.
He came out of the wood, his clothes all crumpled and pine needles in his thick mop of brown hair. He could see the house with the roof gone, nettles and cows in the front garden grazing between the broken statues. Fawn cows and spotted cows. They just went on grazing, they didn’t pay any attention to him. Sometimes cows look cross and have glum faces, but these didn’t. He walked in and out between them. They were far taller than he was, their coats were silky and they had big soft pink diddies. It was amazing the amount of grass they could take in their mouths, but of course they spilt a lot of it. Their tongues were rubbery. A farmer came and said, ‘Are you the boy that’s missing?’
‘I dunno.’
‘Yes, you are, you scallywag.’
When his mother and father arrived with a guard and a man there was a big reunion, kissing and crying and his mother wrapping a tartan rug around him in case he caught cold. ‘Where were you?’ ‘Brazil.’ ‘Weren’t you afraid?’ ‘No.’ ‘Did you miss us?’ ‘No.’ ‘Just say you missed us a teeny little bit.’ ‘A teeny bit.’
They’d never know, they’d never get to the bottom of it and they shouldn’t.
Magic follows only the few.
Author’s Note
In April 1994, Imelda Riney, aged twenty-nine, and her son Liam, aged three, went missing from her isolated cottage in Co. Clare. Father Joe Walshe, a curate in Co. Galway, disappeared a few days later,
and when their burnt-out cars were found, suspicion pointed to Brendan O’Donnell, a local youth, home from England, on remand from prison. O’Donnell was captured after six days, having abducted another young girl, Fiona Sampson. Later, the bodies of the three missing people were found in nearby Cregg Wood; all had been shot at close range. Brendan O’Donnell was charged with their murders and in 1996 tried in the Central Criminal Court in Dublin. He was jailed for life. In July 1997, he was found dead by nursing staff, in the Central Mental Hospital in Dublin.
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