Himself(91)

Mrs Cauley counts to ten.

‘I’ll have you free in a moment. I’ll try it again in a minute now.’

Mrs Cauley looks at Michael in despair as he scratches the big red bulb of his nose and ponders.

‘I think the best thing would be if I go back to the car and see if I can find a bit of rope,’ he says. ‘You stay there, Mrs Cauley. I’ll be no sooner gone than I’ll be back again.’

Michael turns and wanders through the trees.

Mrs Cauley wishes for a lend of Bridget’s gun.

Mahony sees the dead girl up ahead of him through a thicket. She’s sitting on the ground with her back to him.

He calls out to her in a whisper. ‘Ida. Fuck. Ida.’

She doesn’t move.

Mahony climbs around the thicket and, moving closer, sees that she’s holding her yo-yo to the place where her heart would have been.

She stares straight past him with her eyes fixed on a distant point, as if she doesn’t see him, as if he’s the dead one.

‘Ida?’

She speaks to him without moving her eyes. ‘You shouldn’t play in the forest today.’ Her voice drifts up reedy, as if through layers of static.

‘I need your help, Ida. I’m lost.’

She dims and flickers.

‘Ida, please.’

Ida jumps up and runs through a tree. She stops and looks back at him over her shoulder without a smile.

Half a mile into the forest they are rushing through dead leaves and stumbling over tree roots. And there it is, the flash in the bracken and Shauna calling out.

‘It’s him, it’s him.’

Bridget takes the shot.

At the sound of the gunshot Ida stops in her tracks.

She covers her ears, her eyes wide.

The echoes fade and Mahony stands and listens. The forest is still, with a breath-holding silence, a shocked speechlessness that pulses about the trees.

Without thinking, Mahony holds out his hand. ‘Let’s go, Ida.’





Chapter 58


May 1950


Orla waited in the clearing.

Francis had lost one of his booties, so she rubbed his little foot warm.

She put her hair down and made a tent of it for him, his face and her face together under it.

She swore that his eyes were turning brown now, just like hers, just like his daddy’s.

She touched his tiny face. He was the whole of her world, right there.

She waited in the clearing, not knowing how late it was getting.

They were alone but for the flash of a long-limbed hare turning mid-flight, her eyes distended with ancient panic. They were alone but for the bees bumping over the wood sorrel. They were alone but for the shiny-backed beetles threading the moss that swaddled the tree roots. And the man who had stepped into the clearing with a sack and a shovel.





Chapter 59


May 1976


Under the tree canopy, in the early evening sunlight, Mahony follows a dead girl through the forest. Now and again he imagines he hears a footfall alongside them, tracking them. His neck hairs agree. They lift as if under some unholy gaze.

Maybe Ida feels it too. She keeps close to him, turning often to look back at him and sometimes stopping to listen with one faded little shoe lifted mid-step. She holds her yo-yo tightly in her hand; from time to time she kisses it.

Then the forest becomes familiar.

Mahony sees the river just the other side of the clearing.

But this time it’s different.

It is too still: the still of a lake, or a pond; a bright ribbon reflecting the sky.

Ida crouches on the riverbank, rubbing her yo-yo up and down her sleeve and humming a ferocious little song to herself.

Mahony knows his way now, but he hesitates. Ida is looking straight past him, smiling. And all at once she is up on her feet, laughing with delight and patting her dimpled dead knees as a dead collie comes running through the trees towards her.

The first blow catches Mahony on the back of his head and he’s on the ground without a thought in his mind other than to turn over onto his knees and get straight back up again. Jack stands waiting.

And Mahony remembers.

To his credit Mahony lands a few punches on Jack, for he’s lost the head and thinks of nothing.

He wants to kill his daddy properly now.

And God, Mahony’s tough. He can take the full weight of a fist that could shatter jaws and roll eyes blind.

But Mahony will keep falling; they both know it, knocked over and stumbling backwards in a comic dance. Touching his face in confusion, as if it doesn’t belong to him any more. He must’ve bit his own tongue, for when he opens his mouth he’s swearing blood.

But he will keep getting up, with the help of a fallen tree this time, watching his bloody fingerprints smear up the trunk with mild surprise.

Then he’s down, with a sharp white pain as Jack kicks him in his back, again and again and again.

A voice in Mahony’s mind counts him down.

Then Jack stops and smiles and bends down with his palm out. As if he’s remembered something, as if he wants to shake Mahony’s hand. The fight is over, says Jack’s smile, we can go home now, it was all a big mistake.

Mahony lifts his hand up to him. Jack walks away and picks up a shovel.

Time slows.

Mahony looks around him. There’s more than enough time to see a crow fly low over the water or a newt turn in the mud. Or to watch the light shimmer in the branches above. Or to see Ida flit across the river, running after the dead dog and howling with glee.