Himself(59)
As he looks around, he feels a bit on display here. Surely it’s only the birds watching up in the trees, or the odd badger or squirrel having a good laugh at his antics?
They should wait and see his breaststroke.
Mahony climbs down the bank and lowers himself into the dense silt that smells like sump-water, and dear f*ck it’s cold.
But at least it behaves like water should, for Mahony had half expected a quicksand to grip him and suck him straight down. But the river lets him move into it with no more retaliation than to draw green-flecked tidelines on his thighs and stomach as he wades in deeper.
He strikes out and swims towards Denny’s Ait.
And the river changes.
It’s as if the river is fighting against him. An undercurrent rips below the surface and he cannot swim through it, however hard he tries.
Mahony steps out of the water, sleek and shaking, pale and cursing. He pulls his clothes over wet skin and picks up his boots.
As he walks back through the forest he hardly notices the ferns wave and flatten behind him. Once or twice he glances over his shoulder, perhaps sensing something. But seeing nothing, he carries on his way.
Chapter 27
May 1976
Just out of town, up on the brow of a hill, lies a cottage nearly as ancient as the dolmen it has sight of just across the field. Mahony draws nearer to it, carrying a bag that has trailed an unholy stench all the way from Rathmore House. At the gate he puts the bag down to untie the rash of difficult knots, for Bridget Doosey doesn’t encourage visitors and it is testimony to her clean-living lifestyle that she can still throw her leg over her garden gate whenever she herself wants to come and go.
Hidden eyes watch Mahony’s meandering progress from gate to turnip patch, from turnip patch to runner-bean wigwam. For there is more life in Bridget Doosey’s garden than you can imagine. Maybe it’s due to the nearness of the dolmen, or maybe it’s due to the real love she pours into the good black soil, but a lot more than rhubarb grows here.
Mahony spots her, headfirst in a flowerbed. ‘Your garden’s a picture, Bridget.’
Bridget squints up at him. There are stripes of soil across each cheek as if she’s been trying out camouflage.
‘Fish heads.’ Mahony flaps the bag at his side.
‘You’d better come in then,’ says Bridget, with a feral look in her eyes.
The house is dark with a foxy musk smell, a smell that rolls out along the hallway in place of a carpet. Luxuriant patches of many-coloured cat fur adorn every surface. Constellations of saucers moulder about the place, showing dried milk rings or licked smears of tripe. Some of the feline residents greet Mahony and his irresistible cargo. Others just watch benignly from a felted card table or a cobwebbed window ledge. Bridget pushes forwards, kicking furry pelts aside as she goes.
‘Come through to the kitchen.’
As she opens the kitchen door Mahony considers burying his nose in the bag in order to save his life. For the smell that issues from Bridget Doosey’s kitchen is antique and complicated, rich and vile. It’s a thousand boiled fish spines and a hundred fossilised cat craps. It’s decades of damp washing, rancid fat and stale dishwater.
Bridget beckons Mahony past a cracked Formica table, thick with cats, to a cooker painted with grease. She points to a lidded pot flecked with fish scales. Mahony knows this to be the epicentre of the smell.
‘Tip ’em in there. I cook ’em up for the creatures to aid the digest. All those lovely salty-eyed fish snouts. Now, I suppose you’ll be wanting the cup of tea and the bit of softness, won’t you? I have a half loaf of fruit bread that’ll still be decent if I give it a bit of a scrape.’
‘Ah no, I won’t need a thing. I just came with them from Shauna. I’ll be off now.’
‘You won’t. You’ll sit down there and drink a cup of tea with me.’
She leans forward and pats his arm. ‘I have the list you wanted.’ She searches amongst the cats on the table and liberates a crumpled piece of paper from under a sleeping tortoiseshell.
Mahony casts his eye over it. The title reads: Men from Mulderrig (between the ages of 15 and 80) and its Environs with the Use of a Vehicle During the Summer of 1949.
Mahony nods and, keeping his breathing shallow, folds the list and puts it in his back pocket.
Mahony has an ashtray at his elbow, a mug of whiskey in his hand and a young white cat with pink-rimmed eyes nuzzling against his ear. It reminds him of Shauna, so he gives it a little stroke, for he’s enjoying his visit now, as Shauna said he would, despite the fish heads.
Bridget is getting used to him too, for although she continues to break wind extravagantly she has stopped looking around herself in surprise.
‘You have the garden lovely.’ Mahony lets the slim white cat slip onto his lap, where she settles, spiralling down to the size of a pair of boot socks.
Bridget nods, with a terrible glint in her eye. ‘I do, but there’s no getting away from the fairy host issuing forth every night across my rhubarb.’ She lowers her voice. ‘That dolmen is a gateway to the underworld you know.’
The dead old woman by the back door glances up to the heavens and takes hold of a faint broom. Mahony recognises Mother Doosey from the graveyard; she twitches the corner of her mouth in greeting. Cats scatter as she cuts a path through the kitchen.
‘So you leave out a saucer of milk out for the good people, Bridget?’