Himself(44)

Ida skipped through the trees with her toy in her hand and there he was.

A man with a sack and a shovel, kneeling on an island in the middle of the river.

Ida stared and stared. The island was longer than a fishing boat and as wide as a bus. The wet silt sparkled. It was all true – it had been down there all along, just hiding under the water watching the old bones swim round it!

And now it had a man on it.

The man wasn’t a stranger, she knew him all right, although he wasn’t wearing his cap or his smart coat. He looked up at her, unsmiling, then he glanced down at the sack by his feet.

The sack moved, she was sure of it – a sack full of kittens, Ida just knew.

With ears too big for their little pointed faces and tails so small they’d wrap only once around her finger.

She would take them all, really she would, on her life she would. They’d never bother him again, the kittens. She would feed them milky tea with a spoon and kill mice for them. They would ride to school on her shoulders and sit in her desk all day. At night they would sleep around her head like a furry halo. They would be brindled and tabby, grey and white, ginger and black. They would be tiger-striped and leopard-spotted. With combed-out whiskers and pink paw pads. She imagined herself smiling down at them. All the nearly drowned kittens in the world looked up at her and purred gratefully.

But when she opened her mouth to tell him, the words got stuck.

The man pretended a smile.

Ida had seen a great deal that day: the light on the water and on the green branches, drowsy bees in the wood sorrel and glossy beetles in the moss. And a low-tide island you’ll see once if you’re lucky and twice if you’re blessed.

But Ida wasn’t lucky and the man wasn’t blessed. He had waited for eighteen years. He had studied the weather and the tides. And now he would shore up his troubled lover’s grave and return the things he had taken from her. He would hold her in his arms again if he could, there in the middle of the river, with the water shrinking from him and the stones shifting under him.

For nightly, still, she came to him: she rose up out of the Shand, shrugging off her cape of silt. A river goddess, worn as smooth as an ancient carving, wearing waterweeds and dropping diamonds with every step. Her footprints dented rocks.

On the riverbank the little girl stared and stared.

He picked up his shovel.

‘Come here to me, Margaret,’ he said.

As Ida turned to run she dropped her toy, but it was only as she hit the ground that she realised her hands were empty.





Chapter 18


May 1976


‘Now, I’d say this one was more of a warning,’ says Bridget Doosey. ‘Gelignite, you see. A drop more and we’d have seen some real damage.’

Mahony surveys the letterbox. The wire has blasted out and the plastic coating has melted onto the doormat. There’s a plume of smoke damage along the wall and the coat stand is charcoal. Skeletal umbrellas lean in a blackened umbrella stand.

‘Poisoned cats and letter bombs are a strange field of expertise.’ Mahony offers her a cigarette.

She takes one and he leans forward to light it. ‘The field of attempted murder is more commonplace than you think.’ She exhales. ‘Call it a hobby of mine.’

‘So Mrs Cauley did right to call you?’

‘Of course, I know my onions.’

Bridget picks up a charred piece of paper from the blackened tiles. ‘Guess who.’

It has his name typed on it.





Chapter 19


May 1976


Mahony has walked for hours, keeping out of the forest and circling back up to Rathmore House by way of the open fields, for he needs time to think. The clouds are blowing in from the Atlantic, so that when Mahony sees Rathmore House, behind an ancient horse chestnut and just over a stile, the light makes the stone as colourless as rain.

He almost doesn’t see her, on the road up ahead of him, crouched on her hunkers. Her face is in profile and with her upturned nose and heavy-lidded eyes she is as sweet and pale as a graveyard angel.

‘Pooky Snail, put out your horns,’ Ida lisps as she stabs a pale finger through a snail. She tuts, stands up and puts her hands on her hips. ‘Pooky Snail, would you ever put your feckin’ horns out?’

‘Ah, he’s asleep, look it,’ says Mahony, and picks up the snail to show her.

‘He’s not asleep. He’s dead.’

‘You’re right of course.’ Mahony pitches the empty shell over the wall.

They walk together, Mahony in his leather jacket and Ida in her scuffed shoes he can see the road through. She reaches her arms up to him and Mahony’s heart turns over. ‘You know I can’t carry you, chick.’

Ida folds her arms and flutters down at the side of the road with the impeccable grace of a prima ballerina. She takes something out of her cardigan pocket and holds it up. She licks her finger and rubs an imaginary smudge from it. Mahony swears that for a moment the yo-yo glows brighter in her hand.

‘You got it back then?’

Ida nods and Mahony notices that she looks just like her mother. She has the same stiff, serious little smile as Róisín. She starts to wind up the string.

Mahony sits down next to her. ‘Do you remember how you lost it?’

She grimaces. ‘Mammy said I wasn’t allowed to go into the forest on me own, but I did. She said I wasn’t to go near the river, but I did that too. I went up to play acorn boats, but he was already there, drowning kittens at the river. Where I showed you.’ Her eyes widen as she remembers. ‘The island, I saw it! The water had all run away.’