Himself(34)

‘Just a minute.’

Tom could be anywhere, she thinks, watching. She shudders.

Up on the roof of the caravan, as prone as a bathing lizard, Tom observes the light on Shauna’s hair. He’s almost close enough to see the pale hairs rise on her forearms and the curve of her turning cheek, her freckled clavicle.

Mahony sees that there’s a kind of system in place: shelves have been built from floor to ceiling to hold the delicate bones of small mammals, lost buttons and carefully folded sweet wrappers. Hundreds of brass hooks stud the ceiling from which shredded orange nets and old tights hang. Mahony picks up a jar containing long rancid strands of grey hair.

‘Mahony, please, I want to go.’

Mahony puts the jar back; he’ll come alone next time.

As he turns to leave, something catches his eye.

A yellow yo-yo tucked on a high shelf just above the door, between a lead soldier and the handle of a skipping rope.

Mahony lights a fag and says nothing. Shauna knows she’s annoyed him and she could kick herself, really bloody hard.

‘Do you want to go back and wait for him?’

‘No, we’ll just go home.’

‘I’m sorry, it just didn’t seem right for us to be there.’

He keeps his hand in his pocket rolling something around and around. Shauna turns her mind apart for something to say and finds nothing. So she reaches out and touches his arm.

It’s so easy. Here’s his mouth on hers. One touch to unlock him and now he’s bending to kiss her. His spit tastes of cigarettes, stale and thrilling; his hand presses strongly into the small of her back. If her legs give way he’s got her.

He pushes his tongue into her mouth until she pulls away just a little.

It’s so easy. A groan and a word and he’s walking her up against a tree. She wonders how many girls he’s been with. She sees that it’s a well-rehearsed dance for him. He expects her to step alongside; she doesn’t need to know how – he’ll lead. He pushes his hand up her dress with his eyes at close range, half-closed and unseeing.

He’s moving against her. She’s up against the tree, his lips are on her neck, he’s opening buttons, calling her ‘Baby, ah baby’, with his Dublin accent hard and low. She hardly knows what to think, only that her face is scarlet. Mahony pulls away and Shauna opens her eyes to find him staring straight ahead.

Ida has wandered out through a tree and is standing with her arms folded and her face blank.

‘For pity’s sake,’ Mahony says.

Ida sticks her pale fingers in her mouth and mock-gags as she skips past them.

And Shauna stands there with her mother’s good dress all up around her waist and her knickers round her knees in the middle of the forest.





Chapter 14


April 1976


It is raining in Mulderrig. The heatwave has stretched, exhaled and picked itself up off the town all in one afternoon. And the rain has returned.

At first it fell lightly, uncertainly, as if it were testing itself, on the curious noses of cats and cows turned upwards to see if this news of rain was really true.

But the trees knew, and so did the bees, for they know all things.

Soon the rain grew confident, pattering on cobbles, bouncing along the tractor tracks carved in the hard-baked ground. Then, heavy and certain in its benediction, the rain began to fall steadily, blissfully, unlocking the smell of the ground.

The rain falls too on the roof of the village hall, dancing over the clogged gutters, ringing the ancient rusty school bell and running down between loose tiles to drip down the wall in the ladies cloakroom.

Inside the main hall Michael Hopper is sculling across the floor with the look of a creature of quarry about him. To his credit he’s moving fast for a man whose knees are flittered with rheumatism. He almost clears the open ground before he is fastened to the floor by the steamrolling tones of Mrs Cauley.

‘Michael Hopper, I’ll have a word with you.’

And there she is, coming in through the double doors dressed in a high-necked coat of apricot lace, like a fortified wedding cake. She has her talons hooked over Mahony’s arm, who is walking next to her with the air of a conquering hero, a fag upright in his mouth and his shirttails hanging.

The drip on Michael’s florid nose stiffens to a sudden watchful stillness. ‘Is it you, Mrs Cauley?’

‘It is, Michael, and can you tell me where my cast members are?’

Michael Hopper looks rapidly from side to side as if connecting up the various parts of his mind.

Mrs Cauley fixes him with a dreadful glare. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, Michael, but there is no wedding, funeral or hurling match to account for a wholesale absence from the first rehearsal of my annual fundraising production.’

Michael Hopper curses his knees to hell. ‘Will I go and have a look about the town, Mrs Cauley?’

‘You do that. And mind you send Father Quinn in here to me, if you happen to turn him out from under a stone.’

‘It’s Father Quinn you want specifically?’ Michael’s nose reddens.

There’s a dangerous light in her eyes. ‘Isn’t he the man in the know, Michael?’

Michael Hopper hotfoots it out of the door.

She looks about herself with disdain. ‘Will you look at the filth of this place? He’s not even set up the chairs. If there was work in the bed, Michael Hopper would sleep on the floor.’ She sets her chin at a grim angle and squints up at Mahony. ‘I smell a rat.’