Himself(62)

On the final page there is a clearing in the forest, and a stage.

An audience has gathered. All the inhabitants of Orla’s forest are here: the fox and the satyr, the hare and the moon-faced owls. The bees are seated, with their wings folded neatly along their backs, and the mild-eyed heads bob gently in the orchestra pit. The trees at the edges of the clearing lean in a little, as if they are listening politely. Their branches are crowded with attentive crows.

The stage has red curtains and is swagged by a garland of flowers and fruit, the likes of which Mrs Cauley has never seen in nature. She holds up the script and looks closely. Each fruit is an eye: green, brown, blue. They nestle amongst the foliage, some frilled with lashes, some narrowed, some closed.

At the side of the stage lies a baby, swaddled in rose petals on a bed of ivy. At the centre of the stage stands a girl with open arms, a red curve of a smile and a halo of black hair.

Mrs Cauley wipes her face on the bed sheet. What could she have given this girl, after all? Stage lights and sequins, props and costumes, gloss and sparkle. She thinks back to the woman she was then, when Orla met her. Her sparkle a little faded, her gloss a little tarnished.

Running west, away from Dublin, the sea had stopped her. She had wavered for a while, then drifted along up the coast until she had somehow got stuck.

At first she had missed what she had left behind with a grief that threatened to unwind her. Some days she’d put on her brightest lipstick, pack her case and drag it back into the hall. She would sit there for hours, dry-eyed and rigid, between her past and her future. She felt them both, one on either side of her, whispering in her ear. Some days she even found out timetables, settled her bills, said heartfelt goodbyes.

But it was all an act; she could never go back.

She would never leave Mulderrig. But Orla . . .

She closes her eyes and sees Orla still, stepping off a bus, a boat, a train, into some new city, with her brutal eyes and her startling smile, with her brand-new baby and her second-hand coat. It is springtime, morning, and the weather is kind. And Orla has time to set the world on fire.





Chapter 29


May 1976


Out on the coast road Róisín sees Mahony ahead of her. She hasn’t the breath to call out to him. But then he’s turning, looking behind him, waiting for her. He’s heard her chain click or her wheels on the road. Before she knows it, to spite Mrs Cauley, and despite herself, Róisín is off the bike and up against him.

They leave her bike against a hedge and walk on together, hardly realising they’re holding hands or that a fine soft rain has begun to fall.

By the time they reach Orla’s cottage the clouds have begun to turn inland and the sky is growing clear again. The sun picks out the gable, lighting each wet stone.

The cottage is small and low set. Bordered on one side by open fields and on all others by the hem of the forest, which skirts around the back of the house and looks to be sidling nearer yearly. The roof has long caved in and a young ash tree grows up through the middle of the house. The front door stands ajar, held open to the weather by a lush clump of weeds.

The sunlight follows them inside and Mahony sees how it illuminates the rich patterns of mould and damp, moss and lichen that cover the walls. The burnt leg of a chair is propped in the fireplace, the mantelpiece is swagged with ivy and the hearth is littered with matted feathers.

Mahony could walk from one end of his mother’s house, his house, to the other in ten steps.

To the left of him there’s a windowless room that smells like a cave. The roof is still intact and a sturdy lock is rusted on the door. At the other end of the cottage there is a smaller room with a hole in the wall, where the breeze from an empty window stirs the leaves around the floor.

They sit together in the middle room on Mahony’s jacket. Róisín draws up her knees for something to hold. Their hips are touching and sometimes their arms and shoulders touch too.

They don’t speak about loss, although it is there with them in the broken room. There’s no mention of pain, but that’s present too. Róisín wears the frown she shares with her daughter. Mahony regards her with his mother’s eyes. They see the dead written on each other’s faces. They don’t mean to, but they do. Even now, drawn together in the stillness, they are not quite alone.

Mahony looks at her hand in his; she’s waiting for an answer.

‘So they want to get rid of me out of the town?’ he says.

Róisín nods.

‘Do you think they’ll manage?’

She studies him closely and shakes her head.

Mahony kisses her.

The sun slants through the roof and onto their faces. They lie together with the smell of wet stone and earth all around them and the sea birds calling out and the wind playing over the blasted cottage.

Róisín has her hand curled on his chest. He puts his fingers in the well she makes with hers and they stay like that until she sits up and pulls her dress round her.

With this action she lets the world back in. The grief they had put out of their minds returns and insinuates itself between them. Pity will follow, and regret: here they are, pawing at the door.

Mahony drives them away; he concentrates on plotting the curve of Róisín’s spine, the shape of each stacked vertebra and the freckle just under her shoulder blade. But then he sees how frail she is, how naked, her skin pale, her shoulders narrow. She is shivering in the breeze up off the sea. He wills her to get dressed, but she just sits there with her arms around her knees. Perhaps she is listening. If you listen you can hear the waves crash and fall in Mahony’s cottage.