Thin Air (20 page)

S
OMETIMES THE DAYS AND
nights got mixed up. Brigid wasn’t sure of the order in which things happened, or whether some of them happened at all, but time slid by and there was no stopping it. Wild horses, galloping unsteadily, carried her along. Waking was a horror, sleep was lost, prayer was a dim memory. She had little or no power over herself or those around her, and they had minimal influence upon her. For the moment at least, she had to be where Martina was, and if that place was between the planets; if it was the place where fairies reside or gods or other ethereal beings, so be it. And if it was not easy to be there, she knew that there was nowhere that would be easier. As for what others thought, she didn’t care.

In the darkness of the night Brigid and Gerard lay together but separate. Their bodies touched but their minds did not. Gerard dreamed of fish and things that floated and decayed in an oily gloom. He could not breathe, but he could not die, either.

Brigid dreamed by day, not by night. But once, as she waited for dawn, she felt a hand alight gently on her arm and she knew it was Gerard’s. The touch was full of kindness and consolation and Brigid experienced an enormous sense of relief. But it was an illusion. He had turned in his sleep on to his back and his elbow had come to rest on her arm. His mouth was open. As Brigid looked at him he began to snore.

Thomas was woken by the sound of his own breathing; slow, distant, rattling, like waves breaking on a pebbly beach. He sat up and coughed. The fire was dim and he was growing cold. His thoughts surprised him. He couldn’t go yet. Not with all this going on. He couldn’t go yet because of Aine.

On the island the primroses died away and orchids flowered, and spring gentians. Wind and rain closed in again. Between them, the family kept the farm ticking over. Just about.

The days that passed were watched and numbered; Day Four, Day Twelve, Day Seventeen. Soon after that, time started to be measured in weeks, but it made no difference to the family. Their meagre hopes could no longer anchor them. In their different ways, they were all swimming hard against the currents of the Styx.

Whether his parents wanted him to or not, Kevin came home. Around the same time, Brigid’s sister Mary was deputised by her other siblings to come and stay. Between them, Kevin and Mary took over and did their best to manage the tragedy. The house became a centre of operations again.

Kevin brought new energy and new ideas. He got posters printed with Martina’s photograph and had them pasted up in all the neighbouring towns and villages. He contacted the Missing Persons helpline and sent them details for their files, and he drummed up interest in the media.

Gerard agreed to go on the radio to talk about what had happened and put out an appeal for information. He remembered similar items he had heard and was quite certain that he would remain composed and not break down like others did. Those people were looking for attention and sympathy. He wasn’t like that.

He didn’t break down, but he didn’t speak, either. A trembling came over him as soon as he was in front of the microphone, and Brigid had to manage the interview on her own. They were all sure that something would come of it, but nothing did. The waiting grew worse, not better.

People returned, and the searches resumed and widened. Ground was covered and recovered. The map was hatched and cross-hatched, highlighted, blocked, and finally blackened. The New Agers were among the most consistent of the searchers. They had no jobs or farm-work to claim their attention and their various building projects and their craft-work would wait. It was often quite late in the day when they arrived, but they put in long hours around the fields and tracks and mountainsides and were often the last to return at night. But Mary didn’t like them with their doggy clothes and roll-ups and bits of string. She didn’t say anything to the others in the house except how marvellous it was that they turned up every day, but she made the New Agers so uncomfortable about their smokes and their muddy boots and their food preferences that they became wary of her and began taking their tea and their smokes outside. And one damp day, Trish discovered them there and invited them into her house.

Gerard’s life began to be ruled by the souterrain. The energy that he expended in not thinking about it exhausted him and he often became stuck during a chain of thought that was leading him, as they usually did, towards it. When Kevin suggested a new search of the island he agreed that it was a good idea but declined to join it. While Kevin and the others were gone he could hardly tear his mind away from them until they returned. They had been there for most of the day, walking all the shoreline and rowing Thomas’s boat around the shallows, but they had found nothing. There was no mention of the souterrain or its stones. Gerard could not bring himself to ask.

Aine stopped going to school, but Joseph hated being at home all day and found life easier with a routine to follow. His Irish teacher took him aside one afternoon. His name was Mr Pettigrew but most of the students called him GAA Joe on account of his fanatical support of Gaelic games and all things Irish in origin.

‘I’m sorry about your sister, Joseph,’ he said. ‘No news, I suppose.’

‘No, sir.’

‘How long is it now? A few weeks?’

‘I don’t know, sir.’

‘Very sad, very sad. Please God she’ll turn up.’

‘Please God,’ said Joseph.

There was a moment when Joseph might have made a successful escape, but he missed it.

‘The world is going mad, Joseph,’ said Pettigrew. ‘Yeats foresaw it, you know.’

‘He did, I suppose.’

‘He did, you can be sure. “The falcon cannot hear the falconer. The centre cannot hold.”’ He paused, and Joseph nodded gravely.

‘It is almost upon us you know,’ he went on. ‘We must rediscover the old gods, the vigorous spirits of the Celtic world? We must resist greed and individualism, Joseph. We must make a stand against the rough beast before it’s too late.’

Joseph nodded, glad that there was no one else there to conspire with. The slightest sideways glance would have been enough to induce a fit of laughter.

‘I hope that I am wrong, Joseph,’ GAA Joe continued. ‘I hope your sister will turn up alive and well. But I am afraid … Well, let’s keep hope alive, shall we?’

When Joseph was back in the classroom with the others, Mick asked what had happened. Joseph shrugged.

‘He’s pure nuts,’ he said. ‘Thinks some animal out of one of Yeats’s poems has eaten Martina. Or something.’

Aine was careful to be good. The adults who came into the house made a bigger than usual fuss of her, then forgot her entirely. She stayed out of the way and watched a lot of television, and didn’t ask the questions that she knew no one wanted her to ask. She listened to the confident chat and felt the underlying urgency. Every tone was earnest, every suggestion careful, every parting apologetic.

But she was all right. As long as she knew where everyone was, and as long as she didn’t forget, she was all right.

Gerard went out to do a few jobs around the farm. When he came back in at eleven o’clock, he huddled up against the range, knowing what it was now to feel cold, whatever the weather. The search parties for the day had already departed. It was beginning to be a pattern, but Gerard was not willing to admit that he didn’t want to be a part of any more searching, for fear of what he might find. Instead he just disappeared from time to time.

Brigid was where he had left her, still in her dressing-gown. Mary had made her a cup of coffee.

‘Would it help to talk to Father Fogarty?’ he asked. ‘Or maybe a doctor, or a counsellor of some kind?’

Brigid shook her head. ‘Not unless they know where Martina is,’ she said.

Joseph dreamed about the souterrain. In his dream he was down in the depths of the earth and there was a bull, huge and black and raging with elemental power. He was terrified of it and tried to run out, but it was right behind him and he could feel its furious breath heating his spinal chord. And then it was upon him.

He thought he was dead, but nothing happened. He was leading the bull by the ring in its nose, out of the souterrain and across the island. Some long-standing problem was solved by it. It made him feel great.

When he woke he was surprised at the dream, because he had forgotten that the souterrain existed. There was another one a couple of miles away on the other side of the town. He had gone down it once with Kevin and Mick. It was years ago, now; he could only have been about seven or eight. Both of the others were afraid to go first, so he did. He remembered it as clearly as if it was yesterday. The first part was like a steep cave going down. After about ten feet it levelled out at the entrance to the first chamber. That was where the fun began. There was only one way in and that was through a crawl-hole. Beyond was an ancient and absolute darkness.

He had lit a candle. The others were above, peering down. They didn’t think he’d go in. He didn’t think he would, either. But at that moment, almost without his volition, he became someone else. A boy with a mission. The one with the courage to go into the underworld and find the lost treasure. He got down on to his stomach and wriggled forwards. It was much, much further than he had expected and stray fears hovered at the edges of his mind; of a hand grabbing his ankle, of a rock-fall trapping him in the darkness. The candlelight struck a wall in front of him. For a moment he thought it was a dead end. Then he looked up. He stood.

‘I’m in!’ he called.

The wall was waist-high, a part of the brilliant defence system which meant that no enemy could enter the place with their head intact. Joseph climbed over and dropped down into a stone-lined hall that stretched beyond the reach of his feeble light. Above his head, scorch-marks on the ceiling told of generations of children with candles. Beside the wall a coke bottle had been left by one of the more recent visitors, but there was no other sign of human occupancy.

The others scrambled in behind him, Kevin first and then Mick. They were bolder now but it was still his place, his triumph. It was he who led the way to the end of the chamber and through more crawl-holes into the next one, and the next, on into the bowels of the earth. He was king of the underground halls, and for months afterwards he would not let his brother or his sisters forget it.

A flush of embarrassment raced through him as he remembered that. He must have been an awful pain.

Brigid could not get to the hills those days. No one had said it, but there were no longer any hopes of finding Martina alive and it was unthinkable that her mother might stumble across her remains. She was encouraged to stay at home, and for the moment she put up no resistance. The hills would wait.

Mary made sure she was occupied. When there were no more scones or apple tarts that they could bake they went shopping. When there were no more clothes they could iron they cleaned out the kitchen presses and threw away rusted tins of baking powder and sweetened condensed milk, and then scoured the shelves with Ajax and put everything back in good order. Sometimes Maureen came over to lend a hand. They had great fun with it all, or so Mary kept saying.

Brigid put everything on hold and played along with them. As though her mind could be so easily distracted. As though anything could possibly fill the waiting that her life had become. But most days she kept an eye on the mountains and she got the message that the lark brought one day, of brightness and hope, of peace beyond the reach of coming and going and endless natter.

The men, when they came in, were worse than the women, because there was nothing they didn’t know. If they hadn’t got an answer to something then they invented one in order that everyone could go away comfortable and satisfied. Like children, making rules for their games. Strong walls for their houses. Certainties.

But where Brigid was, no certainties were. She listened for the lark and she waited.

Every time someone went shopping they bought something special for Aine. It was better than Christmas. There were all her favourite sweets, bars, little plastic pots of this and that. There was every keep-the-kids-quiet kind of thing: reading books, colouring books, pencils and pastels and paints, stickers and sticker books. Aine knew what they meant. She saw the uncomfortable look in Mary’s eyes as she handed over the latest paper bag. And in her mother’s as she saw the damage accruing but didn’t know how to stop it. Aine ate the sweets and littered her room with the presents.

She avoided her mother when that look came over her face that said she wanted to hold her and talk to her and make it all right. She went looking instead for Thomas and Trish and Specks. Thomas and Trish didn’t pretend; at least, not more than they always did. And Specks never pretended at all.

To keep his mind off the horror that still taunted him from beneath the ground, Gerard took refuge at mass and, on several occasions, brought the family with him. None of them wanted to go. None of them had the courage to say so.

Aine found it boring. Once a week was bad enough, but it was tolerable. More than that was torture. It was torture for Joseph as well. Father Fogarty seemed to single him out as though he needed some sort of special attention. A lot of his comments seemed too close for comfort. He couldn’t get rid of the impression that someone was watching him. He could never wait to get out of the place.

Kevin had long since lapsed. He went nowhere near a church in Stuttgart and never gave the matter any thought. He didn’t mind attending mass from time to time for his parents’ sake, but usually preferred to be out in the fields and the lane-ways, continuing his search.

As for Brigid, she went along because it was easier than not going. But it was as though her subconscious mind was in rebellion. Twice she fell asleep in the pews and once she started snoring. On another occasion her foot slipped as she was kneeling down so that she landed with a thud and was unable to repress a brief gale of laughter. It infuriated Gerard, but Brigid wasn’t worried. The church was behind her, now. She had found truth somewhere else.