Himself(11)

As quiet in death as she was in life, she watches Mahony sleep.

Long-departed cooks arrive, wiping their foreheads and fretting over lost platters and tough pastry. Perished gardeners drift by, trying to remember the right way to espalier a fruit tree. Housemaids collect in dark corners, their dead knees remembering the hard kiss of polished wood.

Mahony is sleeping and the dead are gathering.

As the night passes, deceased farmers appear with their hats in their hands and spectral sailors wash up from the moon-sparkling bay below to pad wetly across the floor.

Towards dawn, thieves and saints, chieftains and beggars, clerics and tax collectors join the vigil.

Pale children run about in the early morning light in dim-glowing smocks and short trousers that will guarantee cold legs for all eternity. Babies stagger and fall like fat comedians, or else crawl bawling through their unformed for ever.

Be still. The dead are drawing in.

They wring their hands apologetically. They wait for his eyes to open so that they can be seen.

They only want to be seen.





Chapter 4


April 1976


It doesn’t take her long to find him. When Mahony steps out into the morning with a hot cup of tea the dead girl is hopscotching along the veranda with her finger up her nose.

‘Will you play with me, Mister?’

‘I won’t. I’m drinking me tea.’

She stands on one faint leg, dangling a little scuffed shoe, slap-slapping it up against her sole of her foot. ‘I’ll show you a secret.’

Mahony’s hair is still wet from the water he’s thrown on his face, his eyes are swollen but he feels all right. Shauna is making breakfast; he sees her through the window lighting the range with a long match, stepping back in a well-rehearsed dance when a big brutal flame kicks up. He likes hearing the noises she makes as she moves about. She sets a heavy pan on the flame and wipes her hands on the arse pockets of her corduroy skirt. A twist of light-brown hair hangs down her back.

The dead girl puts her pinched little face on one side and grins. ‘Ah, go on, Mister.’

‘All right, but not for long.’

She tries to hold Mahony’s hand as they walk down the field towards the edge of the forest. She can’t of course, her fingers slip through his, but she doesn’t seem to mind.

At the bottom of the field Mahony leans against the gate while the dead girl pulls faces at the horses huddled nearby. They ignore her and stand with their flanks twitching in the early sun. It won’t be long before the day’s heat sets their backs steaming.

‘Come into the trees, will ya? An’ see the secret thing?’

Mahony searches his pockets for his cigarettes. ‘Tell me about it.’

She thinks for a moment. ‘I saw the dead girl’s knuckles. I saw ’em in a maybush. The branches have grown all ways into them.’ She threads her dim fingers together.

‘What dead girl? You?’

She looks at Mahony with horror and holds her hands up. ‘Not my knuckles, mine are here. I told you. The dead girl’s knuckles.’

Mahony’s heart turns crossways. ‘Can you show me?’

Her voice is very small. ‘I suppose so.’ She walks through the wall and down to the trees miming a great load on her back.

The dead girl moves quickly through the forest. Mahony sees only glimpses of her. Sometimes the hem of a blue spectral cardigan, sometimes a faint little knee. Sometimes he just hears her: a laugh snapping back through the air like a sprung branch.

Mahony ignores a suicide to the right of him, hanging from an oak tree like a twisted chrysalis. As Mahony passes, the dead man swings round and gurgles through his crushed windpipe; if he had words he would curse the lure of a good rope and a sound branch. Mahony keeps his eyes low and looks only for the little scuffed shoes, pale against loam and leaf litter, running deeper into the forest.

Then, all at once, she slows down and starts to creep forwards, miming exaggerated tiptoes. Mahony follows her silently into a small clearing haunted by crows. Some are perched cawing on the carcass of a lightning-blasted tree. Some dance on the ground with their ragged skirts held behind them. As Mahony approaches, the birds wing it up into the sky and swear blackly down at him.

Beyond the clearing is a river; he can see it through the trees. The dead girl runs towards it.

Mahony walks along the bank, on a pathway of sorts, tripping over ridges of dried mud, hemmed in by undergrowth, searching for the dead girl. Around him is the rank smell of a world dominated by plants.

Then he sees her, crouching by the side of the river, winding a strand of pale hair around her finger.

‘Maybe it’s Ida,’ she says.

‘Your name?’

Ida smiles over her shoulder then looks back at the river.

It has dried up in the hot weather. Shrinking back from its banks so that the mud flats at its edges are as noxious as bedsores, infected and fetid, cracked and oozing. Mahony sees that in places, at slow bends, behind fallen branches, the water is pooled and clotted with algae. The air is laced with midges.

In the middle of the river there is a shadow of a dark bulk, a heaped mass under the surface. Mahony picks up a stone, feels its weight in his hand and throws it. The sound is unexpectedly loud, as surprising as a gunshot, the contact of rock on rock without water or silt to cushion it.

Ida glares at him. ‘There’s a secret island under there. Don’t wake it.’ She lowers her voice. ‘If you wait until the river runs away you’ll see it.’