Inch Levels

by Neil Hegarty

  He was no better than anyone else in this scenario.

  ‘Too late now,’ he said.

  *

  ‘It wasn’t intentional. Have we a deal?’

  A silence, and now Robert looked up.

  ‘Margaret. Have we a deal?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes. Yes. A deal.’

  Because Robert had seen what was coming. She seemed to have some notion that he could not read her, that he had lived these years with her without learning a thing about her. The set of her jaw, the set of her shoulders: they told a story; and so he had got ahead, had moved round the house, turning off lamps, leaving just the one burning. The girls were asleep, the scene set – and better for it to be played out in the darkness. That way, he had a little protection from the expressions tracking across her face: the relief as she said her piece, and the change when he said his.

  ‘Inch Levels,’ he said. ‘You can imagine the rest.’ He breathed. ‘But if you stay with me, I won’t have to go to the police, I won’t have to blow the whistle on myself, I won’t have to do that to the girls. Stay with me,’ he said, ‘and we’ll carry on; and nobody need ever know; and our girls can get on with their lives.’

  Hardly – and he felt it himself. It was hardly likely: he was buying himself a little time; that was all. There was not much of it left: he couldn’t carry on much longer. But that, he could see now, that was all he was after, really: the time and the dignity to do this at his own pace. He deserved neither of these, and he knew this too: time and dignity were, after all, exactly what he had failed to offer the little girl. But he would keep his face; he would do it at his own time.

  The next morning, she escaped from the house.

  Which meant that soon, Patrick would know too. This was disagreeable, but was a price worth paying. It was permissible; Patrick could do nothing, would do nothing to shake his sister’s life. Robert still retained control. He would relinquish it at a time of his choosing.

  He took his daughters to netball, he returned home, he filled the kettle, he switched on the radio for the news. And heard that the child’s mother was dead: that she had drowned herself the previous evening at twilight.

  *

  A couple of hours to himself, to walk. Now he looked up at the green copper onion dome of the church that rose like a mosque a few hundred yards away to the left. He could sit there.

  The traffic was picking up: people didn’t really walk in this town unless they had no choice in the matter, and walking the length of the unpicturesque Strand Road in particular seemed to invite attention. The inmates of car after car looked and glanced and stared and stared again as they glided past, noticing: probably, his gait, his pallor. His guilt? – perhaps that, too. He entered the church grounds: nowhere to sit, here – no inviting wooden bench, worn and smooth with use, nothing like that – the church steps would have to do. He hoped a priest would not appear in the church grounds: bad timing if one did, sniffing out the rank, malodorous scent of a sinner, and making tracks to save his soul before the Devil got there first. Well, Robert thought: I’ll take my chances with that one.

  He sat, then, heavily on the granite steps that led up to the main doors. He could feel the chill of the stone almost at once begin to strike through the seat of his trousers. He thought about Margaret, about the radio news of the previous night, about the little girl. This was deadly serious. Now he had told the story to someone else; now, perhaps, the clock was ticking.

  And then what? And then what?

  *

  ‘Bless me, Father,’ said Robert, ‘for I have sinned.’ A pause, then, ‘I can’t remember, ah, how long it’s been since my last Confession.’

  This was a bad idea; and the priest’s tetchy response from the shadows on the far side of the grille, seemed to confirm the fact.

  ‘Well, you must have some idea, son. Is it – what? Days, weeks, months?’ A pause. ‘Years?’

  Now Robert paused. ‘Years.’

  Yes. This was a bad idea.

  ‘Years,’ the priest sighed. ‘Well, go on then.’

  How long since he had examined the inside of a confessional? He sat silently in the warm darkness. Outside – not close enough to be overheard, so long as he kept his voice down, but close enough – the coughs and sighs and cleared throats of sinners waiting patiently in a queue. Well, they might be waiting some time.

  ‘Go on, son,’ the tetchy priest repeated.

  Something – he hadn’t examined what it was, not yet – had pushed him through the heavy wooden doors. He had walked the length of the nave: the confessional in use was – wouldn’t you know – against the back wall of the west chancel: miles and miles, it seemed, to walk, the hard soles of his shoes clack-clack-clacking all the while on the stone floor. The little lines of confessants took him in, before shifting a little further along the smooth pew: placing him, probably, with unerring ease in the local firmament. And now here he was in the shadows of the confessional, in a place that had formed none of his calculations half-an-hour before. And the priest was silent: realising a trifle late, maybe, that he had a task on his hands.

  A long silence.

  ‘The thing is, Father –’

  Another silence, and now the priest broke it, delicately this time.

  ‘Tell me what you’ve done, son.’

  ‘That girl, Father. The Casey girl, from up the road.’

  Robert was whispering. This knowledge: it came in waves. How could it be, when his head was screwed on and his brain was functioning and when there was nothing, nothing obvious, wrong with him: with all this, he thought, how can I just keep on moving through my days, doing my work and eating my meals and sleeping at night, and all as if nothing was wrong?

  How could it be that this knowledge can be shoved aside, for the most part, as if it never existed at all?

  It was as if his life was being presented on a screen: and that he was watching it, as just one more member of the audience.

  This was how he had managed to get through his conversation with Margaret the previous night: yes, by playing his trump card; and then by taking a mental step back, by allowing the scene to play out, almost as if he was not even involved with it.

  This was the way it had been for him, ever since that afternoon in the middle of September – what, more than a month ago now. He sat in the close darkness: I’ve watched a month slipping past, he thought, as if nothing much had happened in my life. Only sometimes did this – whatever it was, this screen, this barrier, like the grille between his face and that of the priest – only sometimes did it seem to break, or vanish before his eyes; only sometimes did reality flow in. Like now, he thought: this morning, with another death to reckon with, too.

  He leaned his forehead against the grille. He thought – for a moment of the girl’s mother, that woman who had walked into the sea the previous evening; and then of his wife. Margaret’s face, shadowy in the darkness the previous evening. I’m leaving you, she’d said. And then of her mother: of Sarah, harsh and hard and filled with secrets. Whose approval would have meant something to him: but that had never been given.

  And it was then: only when he thought of Sarah; then, only then, did the tears come, silently.

  ‘Say what you came to say, son,’ the priest said, almost inaudibly; there were, after all, ears wagging not two feet away. And Robert did.

  It was me, Father. I killed her. It was me.

  ‘It was me.’

  On the far side of the grille, the priest sighed again. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Say what you came to say.’

  *

  A calm September day. Clearing skies, at last, after a morning of drenching rain; and the hedges dripping; water lay in potholes and flowed in the ditches as he drove. There would be a frost tonight: he could taste the cool air, the coming tang of early ice. It was his wife’s birthday: an ordeal of a family meal awaited him.

  The road home took him across the upland and down again,
then home by the coast road. He hadn’t planned to be here at all: a late call from a potential client deep in the countryside, who wanted her garden turned around and wanted a few ideas, a price. ‘You go,’ said the boss man, ‘and quote low; don’t scare her off.’ And he had, though suspecting that in fact she wanted only some ideas, and not really a price at all, much less a job done by the firm. Enough to put anyone in a grim mood; and the sight of the clearing sky lifted his mood only a notch. He hated being the prey of the tight-fisted and calculating, and that’s what this afternoon was really about.

  And yes: dinner with his in-laws tonight. A birthday dinner, for Margaret’s birthday. They had insisted. ‘We can do something ourselves, later,’ Margaret said – though the truth was that they seldom went out, just the two of them. They preferred the bolstering of company; they both did.

  Tonight, Patrick would be there, a sneer barely hidden. Dark as sherry, they said, with the iron content. You could draw the water right here. Set you up for the day. The sentence slid into his mind, uttered long ago on a sultry evening in Hampstead. The whole occasion got up to humiliate, to put him in his place.

  And the mother-in-law. ‘A labourer, is it? Well, it takes all sorts.’

  Yes. As a family, they knew how to put people in their place.

  Robert turned off the road – itself a country road, a minor road that dived downhill from this point, finally emerging in the main square of the town there below. Not that there was likely to be a traffic jam – but he knew another way, marginally faster, that would bring him out on the coast road on the near side, the Derry side, of the town, that would shave a minute or two off his journey home. He swung onto the lane, then, that branched off here. To his left, now, the sea: Lough Foyle spreading flat and wide and blue at the bottom of the hill, and the town pier and the town itself, climbing its hill. The clearing sky above, and the setting sun shining on the black cliffs on the far side of the water; a glint of gold, a waxing moon, a tang of frost in the air. Then the hedges rose up and cut out the view, climbing above his head to form a sort of tunnel: green and dripping and dark.

  There was a girl ahead of him: a young girl on her bicycle. On the way home, presumably, from school. He slowed.

  *

  There seemed to be less coughing outside now, less sighing, less rustling of plastic shopping bags and occasional hollow thumping, as of patellae against church furniture. Most of them, the true believers, presumably knew a heavy-duty sinner when they saw one: maybe they began to think about upping sticks and heading home as soon as the heavily varnished confessional door closed behind him with its little, satisfied click, maybe they weren’t ready to hang around the slightly chilly church for what remained of their Saturday.

  Or maybe they were all ears, who knew?

  Robert had paused in his story now – to draw breath, to arrange his thoughts, the narrative to come. The priest hadn’t moved: for a startled moment, he wondered if his companion had fallen asleep – but no, hardly. They must get training, he thought, to stop such things happening.

  ‘And what happened then?’ the priest murmured. Possibly this was the most engaging Confession he’d heard for ages – though, given that this was Derry, probably not.

  And then what? And then what?

  *

  He pulls over. Finds himself pulling over.

  A world of difference between the two – so which one was it?

  The light is – cut out. A dark, muddy green, through those damned hedges. They need cutting right back: so who’s the farmer around here? He needs a hiding, whoever he is. And the girl is too slow on her bike and is cycling, not in a straight line or anything like it, but rather swerving in one direction and then the other, the wheels swinging from one hedge, one ditch, to the other. At first – for the wind in her ears surely cancels out any other noise – she doesn’t hear his van approaching from behind; in fact, he is practically upon her. And then he sounds his horn: cruelly, for there is no need; he is in no especial hurry to get home, God knows, given the evening that looms ahead of him; and truth to tell, shouldn’t be driving on this narrow lane in any case; he should be on the main road. He sounds his horn – and the predictable happens: the girl swerves again, but sharply this time, uncontrollably; and both she and the bike end up in the ditch.

  He stops the van, gets out, intends to indulge his foul mood in a mouthful of ugly words – but she is up already and pushing her dark, straggly hair away from her face. ‘That wasn’t fair,’ she says. There is no heat in her words, no cheek, no lip of any kind: only the truth, delivered fairly, even politely.

  *

  ‘Haven’t you ever lost your temper?’ he murmured, in the darkness of the confessional.

  The priest said nothing.

  *

  He says, ‘What’s not fair?’

  ‘That,’ she says, and she points at her bike, its front wheel still turning in the ditch. ‘What you did. It wasn’t fair.’ She pushes her hair away. ‘You might have hurt me.’

  And it is more, suddenly, than he can take. He reaches for her, for both her shoulders, intending to teach her a lesson, to give her the kind of shake that she won’t forget. This is what he will remember, as his life turns silently on a pivot: the girl’s own silence as she tries to struggle free, to push his hands from her shoulders. She struggles but there is no scream, no call that anyone in the nearby fields might hear. Robert remembers these moments as silent: he plays them in his head, over and over, in silence. She struggles for a moment, but of course she is no match in strength for a grown, angry man. Not at first. He gives her the intended kind of shake, but – perhaps collecting what might hurt a grown man – she tries to run her fingernails down his face, to scratch him, to make him let go. She misses – but this is enough to unleash all the frustration and anger of his day, of his life: and he thrusts her back now, with force, with furious force; and she falls back and strikes her head violently against the tarred surface of this silent, green-roofed lane.

  And there it is. There she is, as the front wheel of her bicycle spins lazily in the ditch. No sound, no movement now – only the green, hazy light and the acrid smell of hawthorn leaves glinting minutely in the fading light.

  *

  ‘And what happened then?’

  Robert paused, moistened his mouth.

  ‘Father, you know what happened then.’

  The priest replied, with a touch of asperity even at this ghastly moment, ‘Indeed I do not.’ Less of your lip, was what he appeared to mean. Priests, as Robert well knew, tended not to lose sight of the importance of status, regardless of whatever else happened to be going on at a given moment.

  On the other hand, it was true: the priest did not in fact know what happened then.

  *

  No time, no time. The lane might seldom be used, but that didn’t mean that someone, anyone, might not drive or cycle or saunter past at any minute. No time to waste, and the thing to be done clear: within a minute, the back of the van is standing open and the girl – who after all weighs very little – deposited inside, and the door closed again. And that’s all there is to it. He hasn’t even had to waste time checking that she is indeed dead: his instincts are clear enough about the difference between life and death.

  That’s all there is to it. That, and presence of mind. Robert knows that certain precautions have always to be taken: and so he pulls the sleeves of his sweater over his hands before he picks the child up. No need for fingerprints. And within another minute, the lane is deserted again, and only the bicycle, lying in the ditch, is proof that anything at all has happened on this cool afternoon.

  Robert drives, then, south along the coast road: the tide is well out, and the flats are exposed, with a wading bird or two busily pecking at the rich mud. Close to the city, he indicates and turns right and up, steeply up the hill again, passing a lonely church, and then onto the hilltops once more. They are purple with heather at this time of year, and greying with the fading grass: behi
nd him the broad, glassy surface of Lough Foyle narrows to the river, and now in front of him Lough Swilly stretches sinuously north and south, silver in the evening light; and there he is, driving across the narrow neck of land pinched between. There is Inch Island directly ahead now, and the flatlands of Inch Levels: he knows where he is bound. Calmly, quite calmly, all the while. He knows – he knew from the moment the back of the girl’s head hit the surface of the road; so odd, the way in which the mind works – where he’s going, to a lonely, secret place: he knows when to turn off the main road and into the hills; when to turn again and then again, until at last he reaches the lonely car park in the shadow of the sea wall, there in the middle of these flatlands.

  And of course nobody there.

  No-one here. A bird calls in the distance, a high, piercing cry which echoes in the clear, cooling air; and the hum of the machinery in the pumping station; the glint of still water held back by the sea wall; the rush of a swan’s wings overhead. Again he pulls his sleeves over his treacherous hands and then – with effort; the girl’s body seems strangely less light now, more than a lead weight – gathers it together, half-lifting and half-pulling it from the van, and then lugging, carrying it along the straight track towards the water’s edge. A lead weight; and better simply to deposit his load into the water and leave, to get out of there as quickly as possible.

  At length, then, he comes to the water’s edge. Until this moment, he tells himself that this has been an accident, a moment of anger gone wrong: nothing – so he has told himself in the course of his short drive across country – he could have done about it, not really. Until this moment.

  For now, as he reaches the water, he feels a movement, a beat of life. A flicker of an eyelid.