The White Horse Trick (15 page)

‘Not me, not me!’ he blustered, waving the keys in front of his face. ‘You can’t do that to me!’

The two dogs were advancing on Aengus, their lips drawn back over ferocious teeth, their hackles raised.

‘Honestly, Dad,’ said Jenny, in that scathing tone that teenagers reserve for their parents. ‘Dobermans?’ And she turned them into two fat Labradors, which made a brief, friendly investigation of everyone and then collapsed to the floor, panting happily.

‘Who . . . who are you?’ Aidan stammered. He was trembling so violently that the keys, still held in front of his face, jingled like wind chimes.

‘Sorry,’ said Aengus, stretching out a hand. ‘Aengus Óg. And this person here is my daughter, er . . . erm. . .’

‘Jenny,’ said Jenny.

‘Jenny,’ said Aengus. ‘Exactly. But I wouldn’t be able to tell you what she’s doing here.’

‘Yes,’ said Aidan. ‘I know Jenny.’ He acknowledged her with a nod, which she declined to return.

‘But tell me this,’ she said, gesturing towards the dogs. ‘Why shouldn’t we do that to you? I think a pig would suit you very well, from what I hear about your activities around here.’

‘Ah,’ said Aidan, fumbling at his key ring with hands that still trembled, and selecting a single key, which he held up to show them. It meant nothing. He might as well have been showing them one bristle on a hedgehog. ‘Because I have something of yours. And if you turn me into a pig you’ll never know where to find them.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Jenny. ‘If you were a pig, we’d still have the key.’

‘Yes, you would,’ said Aidan. ‘But what use is a key if you don’t know what it opens?’

‘Oh, to hell with this,’ said Aengus, whose one and only interest was how to get his hands on some tobacco. ‘I didn’t come here to play treasure-hunting games.’

‘No, no, indeed you didn’t,’ said Aidan. ‘And I would have arranged a far better reception for you, Aengus Óg, but I didn’t expect you to arrive so soon.’

‘Expect me?’ said Aengus. ‘Who told you I was coming?’

‘Well . . .’ Aidan spluttered. ‘I just . . . I assumed . . .’

‘You assumed what?’

A voice came through the grille in the door. ‘Everything OK in there, boss?’

‘Yes, yes,’ Aidan snapped. ‘Stop fussing!’ He turned back to Aengus. ‘I just assumed you had come in response to my note.’

‘Your note?’

‘I sent some people across into Tír na n’Óg looking for you.’

Aengus was beginning to look dangerous. ‘You think I came because of that? You think you can summon a god with a note?’

‘Oh,’ said Aidan. ‘No, no, of course not. I wouldn’t begin to presume . . . er . . . to assume—’ He stopped, tongue-tied, and then went on, ‘So why did you come, then?’

Aengus roared so loud that the kittens fled underneath the sofa and the dogs stopped panting and looked guilty.

‘I just want a smoke! What does a man have to do around here to get a bit of tobacco?’

Aisling had gone back to investigating the music and was searching through a new box. This one was less interesting than the last one, with lots of exam pieces and books for beginners. She did her best to block out the din beside her. The Dagda’s fingering was nearly perfect and he was singing along tunefully, but he had dragged Pup in again and his efforts were painful to listen to.

JJ was investigating the fiddles that had been brought across. The first case he opened contained a massproduced Chinese instrument plastered in livid red varnish. He shuddered and slammed the lid. The next one held an old German instrument that would probably make a half-decent fiddle with a proper set-up. But the third held a delightful surprise. It was one of his own instruments, made when he was in his fifties. It was unmistakable, not only because of the particular Strad model he’d copied, but also because this one had been made on special order for a musician in Galway, and instead of the regular scroll which completed the pegbox it had a lion’s head.

The bow that was with it was a good one, too, and would have cost a small fortune when it was bought. Like the cello bow it was completely hairless, but unlike the cello bow it was well worth the effort of rehairing. JJ thought about the white horse down beside the Moy road and wondered how it would react to having a few hairs pulled out of its tail.

Pup was bored to tears. He had quite enjoyed listening to the Dagda playing the whistle, but this singing malarkey was driving him up the wall. He didn’t believe any of JJ’s guff about life passing by on the other side and people turning to dust. He knew he could go back and look for his brother and he had every intention of doing so. But he had been around enough dangerous men in his life to recognize that this bearded character had a lot of power, and it wouldn’t do to get on the wrong side of him. So he could see no alternative but to keep on humouring the Dagda and trying to copy the sounds emerging from the beard.

He wasn’t the only one who was coming to the end of his tether. JJ had gone some distance away and was restringing the lion-head fiddle with new strings from his fiddle case, but Aisling, who had perfect pitch, was suffering badly. Pup’s desperate efforts were straining her nerves to breaking point. So when she came across a simple piece of music in the beginner’s box, it gave her an idea.

‘Dagda?’ she called. ‘How would you like to try your hand at a trio?’

‘Any particular brand?’ said Aidan to Aengus.

‘Yes,’ said Aengus, and named it. ‘And I need a lighter as well. Mine got wet.’

‘I think I may be able to oblige you,’ said Aidan.

Donal suspected that he could. Tobacco, along with sun block, sugar, tea and toilet paper, had long ago been removed from the lists of army rations and saved for the sole use of Aidan and his guards.

‘You wouldn’t mind fetching it?’ Aidan asked him, selecting a key from his enormous bristling bunch and carefully working it free. ‘Container number thirty-seven. Just below yours, I think you’ll find.’

Donal took the key and Jenny went with him to the door. He squeezed out under the curious noses of the goons and she pushed it closed behind him and slid the bolts home.

‘Nice to see you, Jenny,’ Aidan said. ‘You haven’t changed a bit.’

‘Nor have you,’ said Jenny. ‘You always were a nasty, selfish little brat.’

‘Sometimes that’s what it takes to survive in this world,’ said Aidan glibly. ‘Where do you think our Donal would be now if I hadn’t built this place and taken care of everybody?’

‘Probably playing his squeeze box with Mum and Dad,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why he stayed here for so long.’

‘Don’t you believe it,’ said Aidan. ‘Donal loves power as much as I do. Why do you think I put him in charge of the army?’

Jenny couldn’t answer that. It didn’t fit with her memory of Donal, or even what she had seen of him since she got back. He didn’t look or act like a hardened army general. But that, apparently, was what he had become.

It was pouring with rain again outside, and Donal was soaked to the skin before he got to the other side of the central compound. The goons, snug in their waterproof jackets and hoods, watched him suspiciously as he passed between them towards the ‘dry’ wall of the castle compound. That wall was where the most precious things were stored – the things that could not withstand dampness. An ingenious heating system, powered by a bio-mass boiler, circulated through the containers and kept the contents in a dry and warm environment.

Aidan’s ones held, among other things, dried and tinned food, tea, coffee and cigarettes, duvets, pillows, and large quantities of new clothes and shoes. Everything
he stored there was either edible, tradeable or comfortable. But the contents of Donal’s container were none of those things. In Gort’s pathetic market they would have had no value whatsoever. He had picked them all up for next to nothing at the time of the End of Imports. When the cities and towns were looted, Donal’s treasures were left behind, untouched and unwanted. He’d had the field entirely to himself. All he had needed was a van.

He climbed the ladder and opened container number thirty-seven. The atmosphere in there was still perfect, conditioned by the pipes that ran along the walls and across the floor. But Donal knew it couldn’t be maintained for much longer. The boiler required a lot of fuel to keep it running, and that fuel – logs and sticks and sods of turf – just wasn’t there any more. It wouldn’t be long before Aidan would be forced to shut it down, and within weeks of that happening these stacked goods would begin to decay.

He walked down the twin aisles, reminded of the supermarket shelves of his childhood. In here were boxes of paper, envelopes, sellotape, medicines. There were packets of pasta and rice and beans, seeds and dried fruit and nuts, all double- and triple-protected by layers of plastic boxes. There were crates and crates of tinned stuff, all decades past its sell-by date. A lot of it would be inedible by now, but some of it was still good, and the castle diet was supplemented by twenty-year-old baked beans and rice pudding and peaches. Donal slid a
plastic-wrapped block of A4 paper into the poacher’s pocket of his jacket and emptied a box of ballpoint pens in beside it. He took a few boxes of aspirins, opened one, and popped a couple of tablets into his mouth. He felt like a child in a sweetshop and looked around for other things to pilfer from his brother, but there was nothing else he could see that he needed.

It wouldn’t do to be away for too long. He found a plastic bag and filled it with tobacco and cigarette lighters, then left the container and locked it up behind him.

Jenny watched Aengus Óg, who was on his knees on the floor, trying to coax the kittens into coming out from under the sofa.

‘So what have you been up to?’ Aidan asked her.

That was difficult to answer. More than fifty years had passed here since she left to go to Tír na n’Óg, and she certainly didn’t have fifty years worth of news.

‘Oh, you know,’ she said. ‘This and that. And you?’

‘Just what you see,’ said Aidan, gesturing to his surroundings. ‘I don’t go out much these days.’

‘Why have you started kidnapping children, Aidan?’ she asked.

‘I’m going to get around to that,’ he said. ‘Let’s wait for Donal to come back first, shall we?’

Aengus had captured a kitten, which was hissing and spitting like water thrown on the fire. ‘It doesn’t like me,’ he said. ‘Why doesn’t it like me?’

‘You’ve got it upside down,’ said Jenny, and she was on her way over to rescue the kitten when a knock came at the door.

‘I’ll get it,’ she said, with a warning look at Aidan. She unbolted it and opened it a crack, then closed it again and called through the grille. ‘Everybody stand back except Donal.’

She looked again. The goons had withdrawn a few paces, so she let Donal in. He turned and slid home the bolts behind him. Aengus saw the tobacco under his arm and dropped the kitten, which twisted in mid air, landed on its feet and fled back under the sofa.

He reached for the tobacco but Aidan got there ahead of him and took it from Donal.

‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘We haven’t talked terms yet.’

‘Terms?’ said Aengus. ‘What terms? Do I have to sign for it or something?’

‘Nothing like that,’ said Aidan. ‘Sit down, sit down. Make yourself comfortable. Let me explain why it is I wanted to see you.’

The Dagda couldn’t read music, but the cello part only had four notes repeated in a simple pattern and Aisling was able to teach him how it went. Since she’d been deprived of her piano she had taken up the f lute instead, but for this little piece she decided to try the piano accordion. JJ got another bow from his case and tuned up the lion-head fiddle.

The piece had been designed, Aisling thought, rather than composed. It was incredibly simple and held no musical surprises at all. But its harmonies were sweet, and when they came to the end, the Dagda was inspired.

‘Again,’ he said. ‘Play it again.’

So they did, and then again, and then again. When the Dagda eventually allowed them to stop, he turned to Aisling, a look of amazement on his face.

‘You’re not going to tell me a ploddy wrote that?’

Aisling laughed. ‘Oh, I wish I had a piano. I wish I could play some of the pieces that ploddies have written. You’d love Bach, I know you would.’

‘Well, it can’t be much better than this,’ said the
Dagda. ‘Come on, let’s play it again.’ He lifted his bow and then stopped. ‘Is there a part in it that little fella could play?’ he said.

But the little fella, when they looked round for him, was nowhere to be seen.

‘I suppose you’ve noticed,’ said Aidan, ‘that things have changed a bit over here.’

‘Well,’ said Aengus, ‘the shops aren’t what they used to be, that’s for sure.’

‘They’re not, are they?’ said Aidan. ‘In fact, it’s worse than that. There isn’t even anything left for the shops to sell. There are no trees for firewood, no cattle or sheep to eat, hardly any wild animals left to shoot.’

‘Shocking,’ said Aengus, looking pointedly at the tobacco, which Aidan was holding firmly in his lap.

‘And the weather makes it practically impossible to grow food. I saw it coming, of course. I built up a fantastic stronghold here and laid in tons and tons of supplies.’

The braver of the two kittens emerged from beneath the sofa and Aengus made a grab for it. He missed, and it vanished again.

‘But even those are running out now,’ Aidan went on. ‘I’m sure you see my problem, Aengus. I have my household to run and my army to feed. We’re all facing disaster here.’

‘Come over then,’ said Aengus cheerfully. ‘Eat up what you have left and come over to my place. Bring everyone. If your bellies are full when you get there, you’ll never be hungry again. No time to get hungry in, you see?’

Jenny was surprised to hear Aengus say something as sensible as that. It seemed to her like an excellent solution to everyone’s problems. If the tyrant and his army were out of the way, then families like Pup’s might be able to hang on and make a go of it. But Aidan was not so impressed by the idea.

‘Never,’ he said, with absolute conviction. ‘There is no way I could go somewhere else and submit to someone else’s rules.’