Thin Air (26 page)

But Anthony didn’t come near them and nor did his cattle. He had moved them down to fresh pasture and was letting the island rest for a week or two before he put the sheep in. The work, once it began, was uninterrupted.

‘You see?’ said Gerard. ‘See where the stones have been moved?’

Gerard lifted the fringe of grass. Joseph could see nothing.

‘I’d say they just settled, maybe,’ said Joseph.

‘Settled!’ Gerard was incredulous. ‘After hundreds of years? Settled?’

Even as he said it, Gerard knew his son was right. He also knew that doubt, like a demon, was at work in his mind and he would never rest in peace until he had searched the interior. He picked up the crowbar and thrust it down between two stones, in a manner that put Joseph in mind of a man driving a sword into a dragon.

One by one, the stones came out. Joseph put his back into the work. He helped at haymaking and at moving cattle, but not with anything else. He had memories of Kevin working with his father; building walls and fences, riding the horses. Maybe that was it, the reason his father had no time for him.

But he knew it wasn’t just that. It was something more fundamental; something that had always been there. He wasn’t like Kevin; never would be. Kevin was like his father, always on the front foot, facing the world square on. Joseph was a skulker at the back, full of dreams, preferring darkness. There was no understanding between them.

None of the stones was too heavy for a man to lift, but it would certainly have been a lot easier to put them into the hole than it was to get them out. They were wedged tight, assisted by gravity, and their smooth, muddy surfaces were almost impossible to grip. It was hot work, and tiring. About halfway through the job Gerard called a halt, and led the way down among the trees, where they ate their lunch. In no time the Coke and the tea were gone.

Joseph took the empty flask and bottle to the well. As he leaned over it he caught a glimpse of movement, a speckled fish that darted into the cover of the weeds in the depths. He watched quietly for a long time but it did not move again.

‘I saw the fish in the well,’ he said to Gerard when he returned with the water.

‘You’re as mad as your grandfather, so you are,’ said Gerard.

They returned to the hole and worked on, stripping down to their T-shirts in the spring sun. They took more time with the deeper stones, working them up the sides gradually, using their bodies as props. Joseph laboured through his exhaustion, relying on marrow and sinew more than on muscle. And as the day wore on his father’s words became less critical and his tone less scornful and, although there was no praise, the work became smoother and more satisfying as they learned to pull together.

When the last stone was gone and the few shovelsful of loose earth thrown out of the bottom, there was still a couple of hours of daylight in the sky. They took another break, sitting at the edge of the hole eating bruised bananas and squished chocolate bars. Afterwards they were still hungry. Their dinner would be ready. Gerard could see the house and Aine bombing up and down the drive on her bike. Behind her a man was cycling down, his knees angled outwards like an insect. That hippy again. He seemed to have practically moved in.

Joseph was looking down into the hole, at the heavy stone lintel at one side and the shallow crawl space beneath.

‘I’m sure no one has been in there, Dad,’ he said. ‘There’s no way.’

Gerard knew he was right. But he had to see. ‘Sure, we have it open now,’ he said.

Joseph shrugged. Gerard’s legs felt as if they were filled with hot wax. There was no more time for procrastination. He reached across for the lamps and handed one to Joseph.

‘Right,’ he said.

He slid down to the bottom of the hole. Joseph stayed where he was on the rim.

‘Right, so.’ Gerard dropped on to his knees and peered into the darkness. He shone the torch in. All he could see was the flat tunnel and his mind was besieged by the image of dark water, waiting to drown him. He straightened up again, his chest constricted with fear.

‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘Oh, Jesus, no way.’

Joseph couldn’t believe it. It had never, never occurred to him that his father might ever fail. He stared at him until he realised that he was ashamed and looked away. But he was already moving, stripping off his T-shirt and sliding down the wall of the hollow. Lithe as a snake he twisted on to his belly and began wriggling through the crawl-hole. The lamp in his hand blinded him. He turned it and its light met the wall ahead. When he reached it he turned the beam up and stood. It was just like the other souterrain with its low barrier and long, stone-lined chamber.

‘Joseph?’ His father’s voice sounded small. He waited for a moment, savouring the feeling, king once again of the underground halls.

‘I’m in,’ he called. ‘It’s quite safe.’

He climbed the wall and dropped down. A couple of inches of mud had gathered on the floor, smooth as a tide-washed beach. There were no marks in it at all. Joseph walked through, shining the beam up at the coarse stonework, marvelling at its simple efficiency. For the first time he found himself wondering about the people who had built this place and he was seized with an urgent desire to learn. Completely fearless now he dropped on to his belly again to slither through into the next chamber.

Gerard took a deep breath and held it until he got to the end of the crawl-hole. He stood up by careful degrees, expecting the roof to be lower than it was.

‘Joseph?’

He shone the torch to the end of the chamber. There was no one there.

Gerard feared that he was losing his grasp on reality, and for an instant he looked into the florid potentials that lay beneath his rigidly held rationality.

‘Joseph!’ There was panic in his voice, and this time Joseph heard him.

‘It’s all right, Dad. I’m here.’

His voice was muffled and could have come from anywhere. Gerard scrambled over the wall and discovered the footprints in the mud. He began to follow them realising where Joseph had gone. Realising as well that no one had been down there for a very long time. Then something caught his eye.

It was lying at the edge of one of Joseph’s footprints, partly exposed, partly covered by the settled mud. He reached down and picked it up. It was cold and slimy in his hand, the little bull that he had hidden so many years ago up above the stones at the top of the hole.

Joseph discovered that the second chamber was the last. There was a fall of loose earth and small stones that might have concealed the entrance to another one but he had no inclination to disturb it. He followed his own footprints and slithered back into the first chamber again.

Gerard looked up and saw him emerge, his bare belly red-brown with clay, like tribal paint. He looked back at the little brass bull in his hand, trying to work out how it had got there. It was possible that it could have slipped gradually down among the stones or been washed between them by torrential rains. But no amount of help from rain or from gravity could have lifted it over that wall. Gerard wished with all his heart that Peadar was still alive to see this and to confirm his memory of it. Because although it was smaller than he remembered it was otherwise exactly the same. One of its legs was missing and one of the outsweeping horns was snapped halfway down. Otherwise it was perfect, and beautifully executed.

Joseph was beside him. ‘What’s that?’

‘A bull.’ At the same moment Gerard remembered why he and Peadar had hidden it and not shown it to anyone.

‘Look at the size of his mickey,’ said Joseph. He didn’t want to laugh but he couldn’t stop. Gerard tried to hang on to his paternal gravity but it was swept away by a wave of laughter. And long after the reason for it was forgotten, the man and the boy were still laughing. Their ringing voices, one high and one low, released the hollow hill from a thousand years of silence.

As May advanced Joseph settled in to work on his revision for the exams which were to begin in June. Gerard got the contractors in for the first cut of silage. With Trish’s help, Aine and Specks progressed to cantering and jumping the height of half a barrel. Sam spent more and more time at the cottage with Trish. He tidied it up and swept out the cobwebs and began the job of sanding and painting. Then he discovered Thomas and began raiding him for stories. Thomas grumbled and demurred and had to be persuaded, but he was never more alive than when he got into the flow.

Every time the wind blew and sometimes when it didn’t, Gerard heard Martina calling him. He no longer tried to follow the sound but it was like a ringing in his ears, like tinnitus. It maddened him. The one place where he was guaranteed not to hear it was in the pub.

There he changed, became one of the lads, a smutty teenager again, laughing at scatological jokes, talking suggestively about women and expertly about sport. He knew that everyone treated him just a little delicately. He also knew that his feelings were safe there, protected from exposure by the rules of male camaraderie. He might get sentimental about his mates from time to time, but Martina would rarely, if ever, be mentioned.

No more was known about her. Because of her absence, she was constantly present and not one of the family moved through an hour without her. She would always be there, not alive and not dead. But they all, none the less, carried on with their lives.

All except Brigid.

One day when she went up to the mountain she noticed that the goats had gone. Sometimes on wet days they sheltered out of sight, but she couldn’t remember a dry day when one group or another of them was not spread out across the mountainside. Brigid hoped that no one had hunted them out of it.

She walked through the hazel and into the string of tiny meadows where the coarse grass was beginning to recover from the wintered cattle. The little fields had once been tended and kept clear, but now that farmers had more land they had less time for such work, and blackthorn was invading from every side, gradually diminishing the space. In a few years’ time the blackthorn would own this place and the hazel would close in behind it and wild things would live there. Brigid was delighted. There were few enough places in the world where wildness was winning.

A rock among the spreading thorns turned and looked at her. Such things were not so unusual lately, but this time it was not a hallucination. It was a goat kid, grey as limestone and nearly as still. Brigid waited, expecting it to spot her; expecting it to snort and bound away to its mother. But it didn’t. It watched her for a while down the neat black triangle of markings on its face, then it turned so it could keep her in sight as it continued to browse.

Brigid laid her stick down on the ground and sat on it. After a while the kid lifted its head, bleated pathetically, listened for a moment, then began to move towards her. It nibbled the dead grass-heads as it came. There was no sign at all of any other goats.

Brigid whistled a few bars of a sad little tune that came into her head. The kid listened and came closer. Brigid whistled again. She could see now that the kid was puny and sick. Its coat was dull, its belly bloated, its hind legs stained with scour. Brigid remembered the straggler she had seen on that other occasion, collected by the old nanny but probably motherless even then. It seemed likely that this was the same kid.

It came still closer, its nose reaching to define the air around her. If she had sprung from her crouching position she could certainly have grabbed it. She wanted to. She could dose it for worms and for gastric infection, she could feed it with the best of everything. She could heal it. But the kid had other ideas. Any life, any death even, was better than captivity. Despite its orphan status and its lack of education the kid was wise. Its searching nose caught Brigid’s scent and an ancient memory recognised it. Unnerved, it backed away and moved off, still calling plaintively from time to time; like Hamlyn’s crippled child, the one left behind. As for the other goats, it was clear that they were long gone, over the mountain.

Or into it.

Gerard was bringing black bales along the road from the silage meadows to the yard, one at a time. Later on in the evening, he decided, he would give Joseph a lesson on the tractor. It was high time the boy learned to drive.

A convoy of Travellers passed; three vans and a car. Gerard turned to see which way they went. They took the road which wound between the mountains, past the old church and the holy well and on beyond it to Carron.

Gerard reflected that he never seemed to have dealings with the Travellers these days. When he was young they had often called. Thomas had been on good terms with them and had kept old batteries and bits of scrap metal for them to collect. Gerard could just remember the time when they would mend an old bucket or pot, when they were called Tinkers, because that was what they did. What they did now he wasn’t at all sure.

As he was about to turn into the boirin he looked back again. A mile or so up the road he could see the vans pulling into the lay-by which served the path to the church. He had heard that they often went up there but he wasn’t sure why. He realised that although they were a familiar part of his environment, he knew nothing about the Travellers at all. It struck him now that they were like a separate strain of the same species, awaiting their age to flourish in the Darwinian scheme. Because he was suddenly sure that they would; that if conditions became impossible for the settled majority the Travellers could and would adapt and survive.

The thoughts were strange to him. He wasn’t accustomed to thinking like that and he wasn’t sure why it was happening. A brief image invaded his mind, of the poisoned lake rising to contaminate the land around it. He remembered his dream of drowning. Perhaps there was, after all, something in what the blow-ins and the other scaremongers were saying. Perhaps he would look again at the REPS schemes on offer.

Something in Brigid’s mind was stretched so tight that it hurt. She walked quickly through the woods, followed paths that she knew well now; paths that she had made. Her stick was like a third leg, balancing her, feeling the ground, taking a share of the weight. At the church she heard voices, someone on the track, but it was of no consequence. The church meant nothing to her now. She sought older, rarer nourishment than that.