by Jess Kidd
To his credit Mahony lands a few punches on Jack, for he’s lost the head and thinks of nothing.
He wants to kill his daddy properly now.
And God, Mahony’s tough. He can take the full weight of a fist that could shatter jaws and roll eyes blind.
But Mahony will keep falling; they both know it, knocked over and stumbling backwards in a comic dance. Touching his face in confusion, as if it doesn’t belong to him any more. He must’ve bit his own tongue, for when he opens his mouth he’s swearing blood.
But he will keep getting up, with the help of a fallen tree this time, watching his bloody fingerprints smear up the trunk with mild surprise.
Then he’s down, with a sharp white pain as Jack kicks him in his back, again and again and again.
A voice in Mahony’s mind counts him down.
Then Jack stops and smiles and bends down with his palm out. As if he’s remembered something, as if he wants to shake Mahony’s hand. The fight is over, says Jack’s smile, we can go home now, it was all a big mistake.
Mahony lifts his hand up to him. Jack walks away and picks up a shovel.
Time slows.
Mahony looks around him. There’s more than enough time to see a crow fly low over the water or a newt turn in the mud. Or to watch the light shimmer in the branches above. Or to see Ida flit across the river, running after the dead dog and howling with glee.
Something jumps out from the undergrowth and onto on Jack’s back. He hardly falters; it’s as if he’s been expecting it. He drops the shovel.
Thomas Sweeney is far smaller in real life than a bogeyman ought to be. He is ancient and shoeless and bleeding heavily from a gunshot wound to his shoulder.
Jack shakes him off and punches him through a drift of leaves.
Now that Thomas is in touching distance he reaches out to Mahony. Strings of spittle fall from the old man’s mouth and his words come without letters in them.
Mahony can see the stubble on his chin and the fine white hair on his head. His grandfather frowns and looks at him in desperation.
‘I know,’ Mahony says to him. ‘I know.’
The old man’s frown softens, as if he’s just comprehended something. He reaches out to Mahony, his fingers bow-nailed and filthy, and his smile toothless and radiant.
Jack picks the old man up with one hand and leans him against a tree. He takes a knife from his pocket and thumbs out the blade.
Mahony lies at the edge of the world and looks up at the passing shadows of the birds and the clouds moving above. Jack is kneeling next to him, he has his hand on Mahony’s wrist, as if he’s feeling for a pulse, and his voice is low and calm. He sounds just as he did when they sat alongside each other in Kerrigan’s Bar. It could be a joke he’s telling him, or it could be something profound, about this being the end.
In the distance a woman shouts out, her cry strident in the peace of the forest.
Jack stops talking and looks up.
At the side of the clearing Bridget slows her pace and raises her gun for the second time.
Mahony closes his eyes.
He sees her walking towards him, through the clearing, in her too-big shoes, with a twist of a grin, with her dark eyes on his.
She is familiar and lovely, everyday and unforgotten. Mahony knows at once every detail of her: the sound of her voice, the timbre of her laugh and the smell of her hair. He knows her sudden temper and her slow soft tears and the way she moves, with a careless kind of grace.
Now, at the edge of the world, Mahony remembers everything. She holds out her hand in a gesture of supplication, of apology. She smiles down at him, her face lit with love. A dim gleaming rose of the forest.
Jack takes Bridget’s shot like a well-thrown punch. He stumbles forward, his face confused, tears in his frank blue eyes. As if he’s grappling with the agony of memory, like a guest drunk at a wake.
He makes it to the river’s edge, where he rocks a moment, his face lifted to the sky, before he lets himself fall, before he hits the water.
Chapter 60
October 1977
In the forest, past the clearing, is an island longer than a fishing boat and as wide as a bus. It has been hiding under the water all along. And now it has a crow on it.
She picks her way over its gilded surface. As if on cue the sun comes out, burnishing the offerings embedded there. All the warm colours of metal are represented: gold, copper and bronze.
Like most crows she remains unimpressed, even by supernatural magnetism.
She hops over horse brasses and candlesticks; she pecks at christening cups and belt buckles.
In the middle of the island lies an unbroken circle of wedding bands.
It marks a spot.
The crow, with her head on one side, stares at it with her sharp black eye, as the tide changes, as the water rises.
Chapter 61
October 1977
Even in Mulderrig, time passes, although not as you’d notice. A year or so can steal by when the rhythm of your days and nights is quiet and unremarkable. So that now, when Mrs Cauley looks up from under her poker visor, she sees the land let loose its furious display of autumn colour.
She sits on the veranda of Rathmore House, watching for the day’s end, waiting on a good sunset. For a while still the sun will pour warm honey on her wheelchair. It will pool on the table before her, glancing the rim of her whiskey glass and shining up the patterned back of the topmost card of the deck that waits near her hand. She looks out over the forest, where all the mad colours of the trees brawl: vivid drifts of rust and copper and rich bolts of burnt sienna and raw gold.
This is Mulderrig’s last great show of the year.
Now the air tastes of bonfires and dark days, now the land is forgetting warm winds and soft days and remembering bitter skies and keen dawns.
This is a grand time for goodbyes. Mrs Cauley knows that better than anyone and better than the man standing before her searching for a few right words. So when she lifts her glass, she is toasting him. And when she smiles, it’s a benediction.
‘You’ll be all right, so?’ He shields his eyes, looking back at her and into the sun with the light flooding his face.
And there is his smile, the same and different and immeasurably dear to her. With a new scar that twists his top lip on the upward rise. It’s ghosting to white now. A smile almost scoured out, but stitched well and well healed. Only now it is rarer and more cautious, as if it still hurts a little.
And there are his eyes, narrowed against the light, the same and different. With lines at the corners and a softness that wasn’t always there before.
‘You’ll be all right?’
Mrs Cauley nods. ‘Don’t I have Doosey for my every need? She’s in there now behind the door with her ears flapping, waiting on my call.’
Mahony glances in the kitchen door; there’s the flash of a floral apron as Bridget ducks. He laughs.
She smiles. ‘It was a gas, wasn’t it?’
And he’s there with her and for a moment he’s holding her, nearly on his knees, with her desperately small in his arms.
But then he’s standing and shouldering his rucksack.
Mrs Cauley looks up at him with a fierce love in her eyes. ‘Fair play to you, Mahony, fair play to you.’
In the pantry Bridget needs a tablecloth to dry her tears.
Mahony throws his bag in the back of the car and starts the engine up. A vehicle that once had its own notions of when to stop and start now behaves like a perfect lady. But then with Mahony as her new owner there are no longer chickens on the dashboard or ferrets in the footwell.
As for the Eldorado? Tadhg has almost forgiven him.
Mahony joked that she had as many dents in her fender as he had. But as Mahony’s body healed he had worked on her too, and he had worked a variety of magic, so that now you hardly notice the damage to her lovely lines. And no longer perfect, Tadhg drives her wherever the hell he wants.
Maho
ny turns out onto the road with the sun behind him.
On the veranda Bridget Doosey wipes her nose with the hem of the tablecloth and downs a dry sherry. ‘Oh, my grief, I’ve lost him surely.’
‘Pull your beak in, woman,’ says Mrs Cauley. ‘Can you blame him for becoming restless? You’ve said yourself that a fatherless man is always searching.’
Bridget takes up a pack of cards. ‘He knows where his father is: he’s at the bottom of the Shand.’
A smile haunts Mrs Cauley’s face. ‘And isn’t it a wise man who knows his own father?’
Bridget shuffles, deals, puts down the deck and arranges her cards. Mrs Cauley waits.
Bridget looks up and stares at her. ‘It wasn’t Jack.’
Mrs Cauley laughs. ‘So that’s why all the wives of Mulderrig are still having unquiet dreams?’ She takes up her cards. ‘Well, I’d say that’s grounds for another investigation, wouldn’t you, Doosey? I’d say it’s time to give this town another good shake.’
A slow grin spreads across Bridget Doosey’s face. ‘You really are a horrific, meddling old bitch.’
Mrs Cauley tips her visor and surveys her cards. She has a great hand.
Mahony switches the engine off and gets out of the car. He takes a can from the boot and makes his way to the clearing, sometimes climbing over fallen branches, sometimes wading through flurries of bright leaves. He walks slower now, there’s a drag to his left leg, but he holds himself easy through it, so you could say it was almost deliberate, a bar-room saunter, a pirate’s landlocked roll. Sometimes he stops and puts down the can and looks around himself. Above him leaves spiral down from breeze-caught branches and crows sweep the sky and blacken the treetops.
Now and then Mahony imagines he catches a glimpse of pale blue in the bracken or hears a faint line from an angry little song, although he knows he is alone now.
In the months that have passed the forest has grown in around Thomas Sweeney’s place. Mahony can see traces of other visitors. Local kids no longer held at bay by Jack Brophy and the threat of Tom Bogey. The door of his grandfather’s caravan is hanging off and his mattress has been dragged outside and disembowelled.
Mahony puts down the can and climbs up the steps.
Inside the caravan there’s a powerful foxy smell. A dark musk reek, as if a wild animal has been kept inside against its will. Mahony’s boot heels skitter on broken glass: all that’s left of the shelves of jars.
Someone has pissed in one corner and someone has tried to light a fire in another. Mahony can see where the bottom of the curtain caught and smouldered and went out again, leaving a melted edge of blackened lacework.
The floor is rotten, the wood bloated with rain and the laminate sloughing off in strips. In a couple of places Mahony can see right through to the ground below. He kicks aside bottles and fag ends and sits down in the doorway.
For a moment he thinks of a yellow yo-yo and an upturned nose, scuffed shoes and a serious smile. Secrets and untold stories, lost toys and found treasure. Spittle and sounds without letters, and the animal panic in a dying man’s eyes.
He looks out at the clearing; the bathtub Ida once danced in is still there.
When Mahony has emptied the can of petrol he throws a lit match. The flames catch and leap. They run up the side of the caravan and over the roof. They catch the timber floor and blacken the window. The curtain twists and is gone.
Mahony drives into town as the light fades. He drives at a fast walking pace with the window rolled down and his elbow out.
Down past Roadside Mary, her ruddy face benign in the setting sun, watching over Desmond Burke, who sits looking out over the rooftops. As the car passes, Desmond stands. Mahony doesn’t stop and Desmond doesn’t want him to. Mahony watches him grow smaller in the rear-view mirror, standing at the side of the road.
Mahony drives past whitewashed cottages, where washing jackknifes on clothes lines and dogs bark at nothing. The town is quiet at this time of day, with the mammies inside getting the dinner and the daddies inside waiting to go out for a jar. The dead too are nowhere to be seen. They have drifted up into dusty attics to creak and settle with the floor joists. Or retired to disused guest rooms or dark neglected corners.
There they lie, watchful and forgetting.
In the village hall Mrs Moran switches off the urn and hangs the tea towels out to dry. For a moment she fancies she hears a noise coming from the broom cupboard, a rhythm maybe, a pattern of words, like someone speaking poetry. But it’s only the radio, left on low.
Mahony drives slowly through town.
At the Post Office and General Store, Marie Gaughan pulls down the shutters and walks rolls of chicken mesh inside. Later she’ll balance the books and dust the onions, count the stamps and tidy the eggs. She’ll hang her tabard on the hook behind the storeroom door, pull up her stockings and head off up the hill with her carpet slippers in her handbag.
Mahony drives slowly through town.
In the library of the parochial house, the new priest wonders at the fog rising from the fireplace, the dampness of the easy chair, and the newt scurrying in the fringes of the hearthrug. Fortunately, he doesn’t believe in magic.
In the kitchen the cabbage waits in the sink for washing. In the oven the priest’s chop lies forgotten. Róisín Munnelly stands by the back door, waiting.
Mahony drives slowly through town.
At the corner of the road a big girl wearing the last goodness out of an ugly dress grins and waves. And there’s Tadhg standing outside Kerrigan’s Bar with his arms folded having changed a difficult barrel and threatened a cellar rat with his deadly tongue. He has the lights on already in the saloon bar and the door propped open ready for a good night’s drinking.
Tadhg raises a hand solemnly to the passing car. He has been setting his red face up to the dying light and thinking of Bridget Doosey, the tilt of her fedora and the savage glint in her eyes.
By the painted pump in the middle of the square the old ones look up and look down again. Maybe there’s a hint of a wink there but really it’s almost time to call it a day.
In a moment Mahony will be gone, leaving Mulderrig’s living and dead to their reveries, and if they see him leave, well, they let him go with a nod or a wave, a blown kiss or a silent prayer.
When he’s nearly out of town Mahony stops the car and turns to her, sitting silently beside him in the half-light with her windblown hair over her face and her hands held small and calm in her lap.
‘Are you ready?’ he says.
She remembers what Bridget said and smiles. ‘Is it blast-off then?’
He smiles back at her and Shauna holds him with her eyes.
When they reach the open road he’ll take her hand as she watches the town fall away behind them.
Acknowledgements
I am deeply grateful to Susan Armstrong and Louisa Joyner, and the teams at Conville & Walsh and Canongate for making this book possible – thank you for your support, encouragement and belief. Thank you also to Russell Schechter and St Mary’s University for starting me off and continuing to cheer me on.
To my friends, family and all those who have contributed their time and advice (you know who you are) I owe a big debt of gratitude. You have helped me in a thousand different ways and although I have thanked each of you in person I thank you again here for being part of this story.
