Heartstones (5 page)

Chapter Four

As Phoebe drove away from Rosslare, the flat khaki landscape and utilitarian industrial parks made her wonder if Ireland had been the right place to escape to after all. Where were the stone-walled craggy fields and thatched white cottages of her memory? Where were the sheep and donkeys and statues of the Virgin Mary? Had it all been devoured by the Celtic Tiger? Or maybe they were not true childhood memories at all, but images from films and books – an Ireland of fiction and fantasy that had never really existed.

This post-boom landscape seemed inhospitable and unwelcoming. For miles Phoebe didn’t see a living person. Her battered Morris Minor passed cars and lorries on the dual carriageway, but the constant movement of their windscreen wipers obscured the drivers until she wondered if she could be the only human being on the sodden island.

As she headed west the landscape softened and began to undulate a little. Industrial estates were replaced with a succession of small grey towns. The road narrowed, edged with hedges threatening to burst out in green; here and there a snatch of sea, a wooded hillside, ivy-covered walls obscuring country estates, hens pottering on the grassy verge. A man in a flat tweed cap wobbled on a bicycle as he waved to a woman in her garden. Phoebe laughed out loud as she realised he was followed by a donkey, trotting obediently behind him, attached to his handlebars with a rope.

Past Cork the rain stopped, the clouds parted to reveal a setting sun, and Phoebe’s heart began to lift. The towns grew prettier; brightly painted shops and houses were strung along the road, even the churches were wedding-cake colours; pink or white or virgin blue. The landscape grew mountainous, the roads grew smaller, twisting sharply around rocky outcrops and climbing steeply up hills before dropping with a gear-defying plummet down the other side. The patchwork of green fields seemed to be stitched together with dry-stone walls or hedges raked by ocean winds.

The sea was always to her left, breakers crashing against high cliffs or rolling onto beaches on an incoming tide. She saw a surfer riding the first spring waves and in the distance little dots of fishing boats bobbed on the horizon.

For a few moments she let herself believe that David was with her, that they were setting out on holiday together in the car he used to call her Miss Marple-mobile, chatting about the journey, admiring the view; soon she would show him her childhood haunts and walk with him along the beach at Carraigmore.

The sudden shriek of a car horn and a screech of tyres made Phoebe realise that she had drifted on to the wrong side of the road. A 4x4 had had to swerve to avoid her and as she glanced in panic at her rear-view mirror she could see a man’s hand gesticulating out of its window. Taking a deep breath she determined to banish all thoughts of David until she arrived.

At last, in fading light, Phoebe saw a sign to Carraigmore which led her off the main road and down a narrow, pot-holed lane. She passed a caravan park next to a small estate of holiday homes, flat-fronted and neatly thatched – a large sign read: ‘Sea View, Traditional Cosy Irish Cottages, with authentic turf-burning stoves’. Out of season they looked cold and empty and Phoebe reckoned the only view you’d get of the sea would be from the roof.

‘
Welcome to Carraigmore, we like a cautious driver’, was positioned outside a surprisingly large and modern-looking primary school and adjacent medical centre, and from there an orderly line of fir-hedged bungalows led into the village, each garden neater than the last.

Nothing looked familiar to Phoebe until she saw the magnolia tree. Thick white buds adorned the bare branches like candles on an elaborate candelabra. It stood in the garden of an imposing Victorian villa. Phoebe was pretty sure that this was where her grandparents had lived when her grandfather had been alive. Then it had been the surgery, now it had two entrance ways and looked as though the large house had been divided.

Phoebe drove slowly on, a vague sense of anxiety growing. In her memory Carraigmore had been a bigger place and she’d been certain she’d find a hotel or a B&B without any trouble – now she wasn’t so sure. A string of pretty cottages, washed in different colours, preceded a parade of shops: Murphy’s Butchers, Molly’s Hair Hut, Carraigmore general store, Rainbow’s End Gifts, Fibber Flannigan’s Pub. The street seemed deserted, no sign of life at all. Phoebe drove on towards the grey smudge of sea at the bottom of the hill.

She passed the cottage where they used to stay when Phoebe was a child. The boathouse had been too small to accommodate them so every year they’d book into the Black Rock B&B. Whitewashed with a slated wall at its sea end to protect against the Atlantic weather, it looked just as it had when Phoebe had last seen it, except the fuchsia hedge was gone and the front garden had been tarmacked to accommodate an expensive-looking Range Rover. There was no B&B sign now, only a plastic triangle in the window saying that it was part of Carraigmore’s neighbourhood watch scheme. The old schoolhouse next door also provided a backdrop to a large 4x4, and the flicker of a television set through a long arched window suggested its conversion to a family home. Next to that the grey stone Protestant church now wore a sign advertising its own conversion to Carraigmore’s Art and Craft Centre.

It was nearly dark – too dark to go down to the beach and look for the boathouse. Spots of rain started to speckle the windscreen. Phoebe turned back up the street and parked outside Fibber Flannigan’s. The pub looked very quiet, no one going in or out, heavy curtains drawn at the windows making it impossible to see if any lights were on. Getting out of the car she noticed a flaking board leaning up on the wall: ‘Food and drink available here. Voted Best Pub in Carraigmore; Kerry Farmer’s Gazette 1996.’ Phoebe glanced up and down the deserted street. It seemed to be the only pub in Carraigmore. Maybe the landlord could tell her if there was a place to stay nearby. Cautiously she pulled the heavy wooden door, half expecting the pub to be locked up on a cold, mid-week evening in March. The door opened and Phoebe braced herself for all eyes instantly to turn in her direction, all conversation to stop at the appearance of a stranger.

Instead Phoebe’s eyes widened as she took in the scene in front of her. The bar was packed – people squeezed tightly into every available space, men and women pressed shoulder to shoulder, some even standing on chairs and tables, several perched on a long bar at the back, all eyes focused, intently, not on her, but on one wall. The room was silent, as if a collective breath had been taken and was being held. A fog of smoke lent a ghostly effect to the scene (the smoking ban obviously hadn’t made it so far west). Phoebe stared, her hand still holding open the door, she had never seen so many people make so little noise. Then suddenly a huge cheer filled the room, people jumped up from tables to hug each other, sloshing pints of beer in excited toasts, the line of men and women perched on the bar stood up on it and started an impromptu conga and a young boy standing on a bench began banging on an Irish drum. Phoebe was pulled over the threshold of the door and found herself hoisted off the ground by a pair of thick hairy arms and kissed roughly on the lips.

‘One to twenty-three, one to twenty-three! Can you believe it?’ the heavily bearded protagonist shouted into her startled face, before releasing her and repeating his performance all over again with another woman on his other side.

 The crowd started up a slow melodic chant of ‘Carraigmore, Carraigmore’, swaying as one huge mass, making it impossible for Phoebe to move forward towards the bar.

‘What’s going on?’ she asked a girl wedged in beside her.

‘Carraigmore 1-23, Kilcummin 1-12. Isn’t it fantastic!’ The girl raised her arms into the air and started to chant along with everyone else, ‘Carraigmore, Carraigmore’. The chant turned into a song, someone started playing an accompanying flute; Phoebe thought they were singing a traditional Gaelic lament until she realised it was Robbie Williams’s ‘Angels’. She noticed a huge television screen practically filling up one wall of the bar, burly men were wandering around against a bright green pitch, pulling off their shirts and punching each other with manly camaraderie.

‘Is it a rugby match?’ she shouted to an elderly man sitting hunch-backed on a stool to one side of her.

‘It’s football, of course,’ he shouted back, then he peered at her. ‘You’re not local, are you?’ It was a statement rather than a question. ‘This is
the
football not your English girl-guide stuff – Gaelic football, the true national game of Ireland, as played by Brian Boru himself!’

‘Oh,’ said Phoebe nonplussed, but before she could ask any more the man had stood up and, standing surprisingly straight, began loudly to sing.

‘Sinne Fianna Fáil

A tá fé gheall ag Éirinn …’

Though Phoebe hadn’t a clue what the words meant she recognised the tune from hearing her father sing it long ago – the Irish National Anthem. Within seconds ‘Angels’ petered out and the whole room was standing upright, fervently joining in with the old man.

Phoebe used the opportunity to squeeze through the crowd to get to the bar.

When she finally made it through the throng she looked up and down the space behind the counter but the only face she could see was her own reflection staring out of an etched mirror advertising Power’s Whiskey. Disturbed by her dishevelled appearance, Phoebe turned her gaze to a large collection of old tin advertising signs for Guinness and Harp larger; she had a feeling that they had been on the walls for decades rather than having been put up recently for fashionably retro effect.

Suddenly she noticed a pair of eyes peering up at her from between the pump-handles.

‘What can I get you, miss?’ the tiny figure asked.

Phoebe looked down at the girl in front of her. Surely she was no more than nine years old. In her arms she held a squirming Jack Russell as though it were a baby; it gave one last frantic wriggle and escaped to the floor. ‘We’re all out of white wine,’ the little girl continued, ‘but we’ve a special on double shots tonight and a free packet of smoky bacon crisps with every gin and tonic.’ Then she leant across the bar until her feet were off the floor and whispered conspiratorially, ‘The crisps are past their sell-by date, but only by a few weeks.’

‘Thank you for telling me,’ Phoebe whispered back as she lowered her head towards the girl. ‘I just wondered if your mum or dad was around.’

‘My mum’s dead and my dad’s depressed,’ the little girl was still whispering. ‘I like your hair.’ She reached out and pushed her finger inside one of Phoebe’s long curls.

‘Leave the lady’s hair alone, Honey.’ A woman with a foreign accent appeared beside the child, a sleek dark bob framing high cheekbones and full red lips. ‘I’ll serve her. You put the glasses away.’ The little girl slid back down to the floor, giving the woman a cheerful smile before disappearing to the other end of the bar. ‘Good girl.’ The woman turned back to Phoebe. Her voice was thick but silky smooth, like melted toffee; Phoebe wondered if she was Polish. ‘Slovakia.’ The woman said as though she’d read Phoebe’s mind. ‘Everyone always think I am Polish.’ She smiled at Phoebe and pushed back her glossy hair with long fingernails decorated with tiny twinkling stars. Phoebe wondered what such a woman was doing behind a bar in a small-town Irish pub; she looked like the sort of woman Phoebe always wanted to be, tall and elegant and glamorous instead of small and chaotically unkempt. ‘You bring the good luck with you tonight,’ the woman went on. ‘Carraigmore has not beaten Kilcummin for over thirty years.’

‘They’re all certainly very happy.’

‘We are all happy tonight. What can I get you?’

The national anthem came to a rousing finale and there was a sudden surge towards the bar. Phoebe felt herself being crushed by the rowdy crowd behind her.

‘Hey, you guys, there must not be pushing,’ shouted the woman behind the bar, her accent getting thicker with her exasperation. ‘First is come, first is served, and right now it is this lady.’ The calling and pushing grew even louder, the woman’s requests for quiet ignored. Suddenly a high-pitched screech brought the room to total silence. The little girl stood on top of the bar, a silver whistle in her hand.

‘Thank you, Honey,’ the woman said smiling at the little girl. ‘Now please get down and go and tell Fibber and Mrs Flannigan to come and serve this bad-behaving lot.’

‘I don’t want a drink, thank you,’ Phoebe said as the woman returned her attention to her. ‘I just wondered if there is a place to stay in Carraigmore, a hotel, or B&B, or somewhere like that.’

A stocky, badger-haired man appeared, his muscular arms already pulling pints in response to orders from the desperate throng.

‘There’s nowhere like that round here,’ he said. ‘Your best bet’s over twenty miles away, and I’m not sure if they’ll be open till the season starts.’ Though his expression was serious, blue eyes twinkled in his ruddy face. ‘Katrina, can you get three Heinekens for Rory O’Brian over there and a Galway Hooker for Tommy Kean?’ He winked at Phoebe. ‘That’s a pale ale to the uninitiated.’

‘Of course, Fibber, three Heinekens and Tommy’s Hooker coming up,’ the beautiful woman leant across the handpumps and kissed Fibber’s cheek. He stopped pulling the pint in his hand and smiled back at her with such affection that Phoebe had to look away. As she did so she found herself being scrutinised by another woman now serving at the other end of the bar, a much older woman with tight grey curls, thick make-up, and a cascade of diamante hanging from each ear. She stared at Phoebe but didn’t return her smile.

Phoebe turned around to leave the pub, prepared for a long night of searching for a place to stay.

‘You can stay here,’ Phoebe turned back to the bar; the offer was from Katrina but Fibber was nodding eagerly beside her. Phoebe started to protest.

‘Yes, why don’t you stay here?’ Fibber said. ‘It’s late and cold and we have a spare room upstairs. You’re very welcome to it.’ He called over to the older woman. ‘Isn’t she, Ma?’

‘What about the child?’ the older woman called back. ‘Isn’t she staying here tonight?’ Her narrow eyes now focused on a dark stream of Guinness pouring into a pint glass in her hand, lips pursed tightly, either in concentration or irritation.