Blood Sisters (7 page)

Katie shook her head. ‘It’s nothing at all to do with Jimmy O’Reilly. In any case it would be practically impossible for me to prove that he took bribes from criminals in return for dropping charges against them,
and
he knows it, so these days we’re just frosty to each other. Polite, but frosty. In fact, we’re so frosty that Kyna Ni Nuallán wondered if we were having an affair.’

‘If you are, I’ll give him a beating.’

‘Of course I’m not. I’m allergic to the man.’

‘All right. So what is it you’re scared of?’

Katie took hold of his hand and squeezed it. ‘I’m scared of history repeating itself. You came back because you missed me, but what’s going to happen after a few months when you realize that Cork is still as small and narrow-minded as it ever was and that it’s still raining and it’s still a struggle for you to make yourself a decent living?’

‘Katie, I’ve thought about that, believe me. But like I told you, Nils and Nathan and me had a long discussion about it, and for the time being they’re happy for me to run their European and Middle-Eastern and African sales from here. I can also set up my own freelance sales business on the side.’

‘And you really won’t miss San Francisco?’ she asked him.
Tell him you’re pregnant
.

‘Of course I will. I’d be lying to you if I told you I won’t. I’d also be deceiving you if I said that I won’t have another shot at persuading you to come out and live there. You’d love it. But in the meantime, if the condition for living with you is living in Cork, then I choose to live in Cork.’

Katie closed her eyes for a moment.
Tell him you’re pregnant
.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I only hope you feel the same way in the middle of February, when it’s really damp and cold and you haven’t seen the sun for so long that you’ve forgotten what it looks like.’

‘Don’t you worry, sweetheart. I was a prick before, resenting the way you arranged that job for me at ErinChem. But it’s surprising how distance makes you look at your life in perspective. From six thousand miles away, I could see that you loved me and that you’d only been trying to make it easier for me to stay here. I could see that there was no way that you were going to quit the Garda – not
then
, anyhow, and maybe not yet. But I can wait for you, Katie. Maybe it does rain a whole lot. But I have an umbrella and I can put it up and stand underneath it and wait for you for as long as it takes.’

Tell him you’re pregnant
.

The clock in the hallway chimed nine. Katie said, ‘Oh – nine o’clock – I want to see the news. I’m wondering if the TV people managed to get down to Nohaval to film those horses. Horgan told me their van got bogged down on some farm track somewhere.’

‘Why don’t you sit there and watch the news and I’ll bring you some of my amazing stew?’

‘All right,’ agreed Katie, tucking her feet up under her. ‘But just a dooshie bit, okay?’

John stood up, but then he leaned over her and lifted her face in both hands and kissed her. God, she loved that blue-black colour of his irises. Looking so intently into his eyes was like staring into deepest outer space, glittering and mysterious.

‘I love you, Katie Maguire,’ he told her, so close that she felt his breath against her lips.

Tell him you’re pregnant. That was what you needed to tell him, so tell him
.

I can’t. Not now. The moment’s passed.

The moment is never going to pass, girl. You have to tell him
.

I can’t.

So what are you going to do? Get rid of it and
never
tell him?

I can’t do that. Wherever it came from, it’s a human life. It’s a baby.

That depends on whose life is more important. Do you seriously mean to tell me that you’re going to give up this one chance of happiness for a child you never asked for, and never wanted, and was conceived because you were lied to?

The nine o’clock news came on and Katie reached over for the remote and turned up the sound.

‘Good evening and welcome. Tonight’s main headline... twenty-three racehorses are found dead on the beach at Nohaval Cove. Gardaí say they were thrown from the eighty-five-metre-high cliff top. When they were discovered by a local couple walking their dog, one at least was still alive.’

‘Jesus, that’s loud!’ called John, from the kitchen. ‘Are you sure they can hear you in Sligo?’

Katie folded her arms and stared at the screen, although she wasn’t really listening to the news bulletin. All she needed was the volume. Anything to drown out the argument inside her head.

* * *

In bed that night, John turned over and held Katie very close. She could feel the bone-like hardness of his penis through her nightgown, against the small of her back. He stroked her shoulder and ran his fingers into her hair. God, she was aching to have him inside her.

But, ‘John,’ she murmured, reaching over her shoulder and clasping his fingers. ‘I’m really, really tired. Maybe in the morning.’

‘You really don’t have anything to be scared of,’ he told her. ‘I’m not going to leave you again, Katie. I’ve learned my lesson. I’m not going to leave Ireland, either. This is where I was born, this is where I was brought up. My cousins are still here. My mom and dad are buried here. In fact, I’m going to go to Ballyhooly this weekend and lay some flowers on their graves.’

Katie twisted herself around and kissed him. ‘I’ll say one thing for you, John Meagher. You really know what to say to turn a woman on, don’t you?’

They had been fishing all morning in the shallows of the Glashaboy River, trying to catch trout. The trout season was closed until 1 February, but they had hopped off from school for a day and they were bored and they were too well known in Dunne’s Stores to try and hobble a few bars of chocolate.

After yesterday’s rain it was a dry, fresh day and the surface of the Glashaboy was glittering. They had caught nothing so far, although they had seen six or seven small speckly fish among the weeds. Bradan blamed Tommy for the bait he had brought, which was small cubes of toasted cheese, the remains of his family’s breakfast.

‘For feck’s sake, you can only catch trout with things that they eat in their natural habitat,’ Bradan had told Tommy, when Tommy had first opened the grease-stained bag of toasted cheese to show him what he had brought. ‘Trout don’t eat cheese and in any case where would they get a toaster from?’

‘Well, yeah, I suppose you’re right,’ said Tommy with a frown. He looked around at the wide, wind-rippled river. ‘And, you know, like, even if they
did
manage to get hold of a toaster, they’re in water, aren’t they? They’d all be electromacuted.’

Bradan was thirteen and he had learned the word ‘habitat’ from attending at least three natural science lessons at school. Tommy, his friend, was eleven and still had difficulty reading any words at all. They lived two streets away from each other in Mayfield, but they could have been brothers. They were both tall and gangly-legged for their age, with wiry flax-coloured hair and pasty faces and buck teeth. Their long-suffering history teacher, Mr Coughlan, said that they could have been street urchins from a photograph taken in the 1930s, come to life.

‘What we need is worms,’ said Bradan.

‘Mind you, if they
was
electromacuted,’ mused Tommy, ‘they would all float to the top, wouldn’t they, and then we could catch them easy.’

‘For feck’s sake, Tommy, stop talking
buinneach
, would you? They don’t have a fecking toaster and even if they did, where would they plug it in?’

Tommy looked around again, as if he half-expected to see an extension lead lying on the grass next to the water’s edge.

‘We’ll have to dig for some,’ said Bradan.

‘What?’

‘Worms, you daw! What have you got that we could dig with?’

‘I have this,’ said Tommy, unbuttoning one of the pockets of his baggy cargo pants and taking out a stainless-steel dessert spoon.

‘That’s a fecking
spoon
! What the feck are you carrying a fecking spoon around for? Don’t tell me – your mam wouldn’t allow you to have a knife!’

‘No, my grandpa said I should always carry a spoon with me. Much more useful than a knife. You can do all sorts things with it like getting flies out of your drinks, or taking a few crafty mouthfuls out of a peanut-butter jar in the supermarket.’

‘Oh yeah, and I can just imagine the security guard coming up to you and saying, ‘Did I just see you taking a few crafty mouthfuls out of that peanut-butter jar with your spoon? And you’re going, “Mmmff? Mmmmm-mmh! Me?
Mmmwwoh
!”’

‘Ah, g’way.’ Tommy knelt down on the river bank and started to dig with his spoon into the mud. Bradan searched around for a stick so that he could dig, too. He was still looking when three large silvery-grey balloons soundlessly appeared over Glanmire Wood on the opposite side of the river. They were all tethered together, and as he watched them they rose higher into the air, clearing the treetops, and then they came floating across the river towards them.

Each balloon must have been about the size of a Zorb ball. They floated in complete silence, dipping and swaying slightly in the wind. But one of the reasons they were dipping and swaying was because they were carrying a weight. A figure was hanging beneath them, and although they were sixty or seventy metres distant, Bradan could see that the figure was suspended by a rope around its neck.

It was dressed in a long black habit, like a nun, and when it spun around on the end of its rope to face him, Bradan realized that it
was
a nun. He could see her waxy-white face, staring at him.

‘
Tommy
!’ he screamed.

Tommy had found a pale-pink wriggling worm and he was tugging it out of the peaty soil between finger and thumb. ‘It’s all right, Brade,’ he laughed. ‘It’s only a fecking worm! It won’t bite you!’

‘No, Tommy! Look, Tommy! Up there!
Look
!’

Tommy turned around and looked and immediately dropped his spoon and stood up, cupping his hands over his eyes.

‘It’s only a fecking
nun
!’ said Bradan.

Tommy stared up at the balloons as they came nearer and nearer. They floated almost right over their heads, and they could see the nun’s black button-up shoes dangling from beneath her habit. As she passed over, they heard a light pattering sound in the grass, and then on the stony path, as if it were starting to rain. Bradan held out his hand and a bright-red drop splashed into his palm.

‘Holy Jesus!’ he screamed, showing his hand to Tommy. ‘It’s only blood! She’s only fecking bleeding!’

He wiped his hand furiously on the grass and then knelt down beside the river and washed it completely clean.

The balloons bobbed and jostled and turned in the wind and the dangling nun swayed from side to side. Then they began to float slowly upriver. About a half-mile further upstream, the Glashaboy narrowed into the Butlerstown River, which ran up beside the main road to the village of Glanmire. The trees were taller there and the balloons were floating so low that there was every chance they would get caught in the branches.

‘It’s a joke,’ said Tommy, at last, still staring at them.

‘What do you mean, it’s a joke?’ Bradan retorted. His voice was still shrill. ‘Some fecking joke!’

‘It’s a
joke
, Brade. You know, like them zombie walks where everybody dresses up like they’re dead.’

‘If that’s supposed to be a joke, I don’t see what’s so fecking funny about it! Scared the shite out of me.’

‘So what are you going to do about it? Call the shades? We’re on the hop from school, Brade. That’s nothing but a joke and the only people who will get themselves into any kind o’ bother is us. “Why weren’t you in class today?” “Oh, we heard there was a dead nun floating down the Glashaboy on some balloons, bleeding like a pig, and we thought we’d better check that she wasn’t real.”’

Bradan kept on watching as the balloons drifted out of sight behind the trees, with the figure still slowly rotating beneath them.

‘I think we ought to call the shades. We can do it anonymous, like. They won’t ask who we are.’

‘It’s a joke, Brade. Forget it, would you? Look, my worm’s gone and disappeared now. I’ll have to dig it out again.’

‘But what if it wasn’t a joke? What if it was real?’

‘It’s none of our beeswax, is it?’

‘No,’ said Bradan. ‘I’m going to ring them anyway.’

‘Well, ring them. But if we get into trouble for hopping off school, then you have to lend me a borrow of your Xbox for two weeks solid,
and
your Wolfenstein game, and two Mars bars. And a backer on your bike to school every day.’

Bradan stepped into the river, as far as he could go before the water started pouring into the top of his rushers. For a few moments he could still see the tops of the balloons above the treetops, but then they vanished. He waded back to the bank and took out his mobile phone.

‘I still say it’s a joke,’ said Tommy. ‘Oh no, shite, look, I’m only after spooning the fecking worm in half!’

When she came out of her office toilet the next morning, Katie found that a beige manila folder had been left on her desk.

A sheet of headed paper from the Cork City Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions was attached with a paper clip. On it, the state solicitor Finola McFerren had scrawled,
With any luck, five years imprisonment!

She sat down and poured herself a glassful of sparkling Ballygowan mineral water. She hadn’t been able to stomach coffee lately, but she felt much better this morning and she had managed to keep her muesli down.

She opened the file. It contained the prosecution’s papers on the arrest of Michael Gerrety for sex with an underage girl and reckless endangerment of a minor. Gerrety had successfully avoided prosecution for years, even though the girls advertised on his Cork Fantasy website as ‘masseuses’ were nothing more than prostitutes, and he owned and ran more than seven brothels in the centre of Cork.