A Lonely and Curious Country Read online

  ***

  “Hello my dear”

  “Hello to you too Tom Breathnach”

  He had a smile on his lips. He looked rocken. Elemental. The smooth face of seacarved stone - flushed cheeks and wet black hair filled with movement.

  “How was it?”

  “Glorious. I'd say one of the best days the sea has ever seen.”

  He put Lucy down in her mother's arms, and wiped his head with a tea towel.

  “How are you feeling? Better?”

  “Much better. Needed the nap. But the headache's gone, as well as the stomach pains. Feeling much better really. And how was Lucy?”

  “Ah great. Her little blue eyes were stuck on the water.”

  Putting a cigarette to his lips he sparked the flames of the cooker briefly, and bent down to light the tip. Puffing out, he looked calmed, settled.

  Nora put Lucy's hands around her thumb.

  Tom leaned on the cooker and spoke again:

  “Imagine seeing the sea as a baby. Seeing it for the first time. What would you think?”

  He exhaled, and the smoke curled into the air like icy lines on a frostdewed window.

  “It always makes me wonder actually, when you're down there, down past Joe's road, and up past the old lighthouse. You know, down where the sea's made the stone so tangled, like knotted hair. When you're there, and it's just you and Lucy and the lapping of the waves, and the whole world behind you. What must it have been like? Way back when. To have been the first person to go out and see it. To see the sun break through the clouds, over the water. And not a candle or stitch of cloth to your name.”

  “I know what you mean”, Nora said. “Is it any wonder we have old stories of giants and witches, and God and the saints?”

  Lucy gurgled in Nora's arms, hands twitching with new control.

  “I went down to the cove as well, gave Lucy a bit of sand to run through her fingers. Get a bit of texture into her paws.”

  Nora could feel the tiny grains between her skin and Lucy's, held in perpetuity. Spots of rockglue joining their hands together.

  ***

  Black flies filled the chipped brown mug. Flecks of light flicked off their twitching wings, like sun through sandglass. A dark hand appeared, shuddering. Haired nails at the end. It grabbed milk from a bowl, running through its fingers and filled the mug. Now brought to dark lips drinking deep.

  Nora heard the crunch and saw wings, jutting out between curved fishhook teeth, like a pike's jaw almost. Looking closer, and the wings changed, to fingernails, eyelashes, toes, ears. An eye. She put her hands among the teeth, opened the slack soggy jaw further and further, until like tar it fell away in her hands. She dug deeper.

  To her right and left, black crows crawled beneath dark soil, beaks filled with muck and worms, drowning in the sullen earth. It was getting warmer and warmer the deeper she went, and soon she felt a beating pulse. A dull thud in the dirt, like a hammer from miles and miles above. Smashing the surface - beating through eternity.

  Jesus the heat was almost unbearable now. But she had to dig deeper. Clawing through, tombed in a dirty sodden womb she had to break through until finally. Air. A gleam of light reflecting from a small corrugated shed. A black scorched symbol on the door. Two vertical lines crossed by a horizontal. As straight and perfect as if God himself had written it.

  She opened the door and saw she was at the edge of a bog. Paudie O'Brien was curled up in the distance, on his haunches at the bog's edge. Naked, he looked at her, a black spiraled mark beneath his eye, almost glowing in the depth of its darkness. His hands were in the bog, up to his wrist, and he was pushing something down, down beneath the surface.

  But her eye was drawn to the figure behind Paudie, standing quietly. Tall, at least 15 feet, lumpy and misshappen, but always changing, slightly. Black as dirt from head to toe, clumps falling off his body. Moving slowly, suddenly. Imperceptible almost. As if through time not space - existing here in one second, there the next.

  An inward nose, no eyes, but shadows that dwelled in sunken holes. His black mouth was open and quiet.

  In his right hand he held a sceptre made of ash. It was adorned at the top by a rough wooden circle. Looking closer, Nora saw it was a withered brown eye, fenced by a widening gyre. It grew larger and larger, turned and creaked. She closed her eyes, as tightly as she could.

  ***

  They beat the shit out of Paudie when they brought him in.

  “But what'd I do?”

  Bang. Wallop. Another clobber to the jaw.

  “Cut it out now Paudie. What the fuck have you done with her.”

  The blood drooled out of his mouth, bubbles of saliva down the middle.

  “Ah but sir. I've done nothing.”

  “Paudie.”

  “Fuck youse lot”, and he spat at Inspector Moran. A red gob landed on his cheek, beside a sweat-dropped moustache.

  It was another five minutes of mauling Paudie got before they began to talk again.

  “Paudie, you'll hang for this if you don't talk. And that's before we mention what'll happen after. You're going straight to Hell Paudie, you're not going to get anywhere even near St. Peter if you don't put that poor woman out of her misery.”

  “Ah sir, I've me own life to be worrying about. Sure wasn't it only last week that cunt Maureen left her dog do his business in me front garden - why aren't you after her? It's a hard life sir, keeping things going when you've no-one to care for you.”

  Moran gave him a final punch, breaking Paudie's nose. Paudie looked at him as if he'd finally woken up.

  “You were seen walking down Joe's road the night that Lucy Breathnach went missing. We have multiple witnesses who will testify against you. You're done for Paudie. Repent. Let us help you, if not to save your life, then surely your soul.”

  It was hard to explain, but Paudie seemed to grow bigger

  “Ye fucking cunts going on about ye're souls. What use have I for a soul.”

  If Paudie'd thought he'd got a beating before then, he was dead wrong. An hour later, Inspector Moran brought Paudie to his cell, dribbling out the side of his mouth, spitting curse words through swollen bloody lips.

  ***

  The day that it happened, Nora knew, as soon as she woke, that Lucy was gone. She didn't know how, but she knew. Later she thought that maybe she was so used to the house, right down to the settling dust atop each surface, that a balance had been upset. Fragments of the air left to settle that should have been met with quiet small breaths.

  Panic didn't overcome her until she looked over the ridge of the cot, and saw its empty carriage. Blankets folded, undisturbed. As cold as the dirt in the ground outside the window. She didn't wake up Tom.

  She looked around the cot. Footprints, dirt, mud, anything. Nothing.

  She looked at the window for scratches cuts, fingerprints hair. But is was bare, clear, reflecting her pale face back at her.

  When she woke Tom, they would search for weeks, starved of sleep and food and rest. But they both knew that morning, grief gestating in their breasts, that she was gone.

  Nora would think back over that morning endlessly. This morning was no different. She was sat in their bed, after everything, this whole sorry mess had settled down, and the world began to turn at its usual rotation.

  “I feel as though a razor has come across my eye and removed a milky film.”

  Tom lay awake, his eyes staring at the cracked ceiling.

  “Tom, I'm glad. I'm glad she's gone. What is all this really? All this meaningless conversation, a constant waiting, and for what?”

  “Nora,” Tom started, but she cut him off.

  “When I was younger, I thought, and with you and her, that there was something, some spark, some meaning to all this. But I see now there's nothing. We may as well be cattle, bags of meat on two legs, just breathing. That's all. And, Christ, I'm just glad. Wherever she is. Because it doesn't matter - any of this.”

  “You can't keep talking l
ike this, Nora.” They were both exhausted.

  “No. This means nothing. I don't even feel for her. I see you, and I just don't know Tom - just how far we all are. We're all just waiting, waiting for it all to pass, and just counting down the grains and the tears until they're gone. Until there's nothing left, and your lungs are so sore with the sadness you're inhaling, and trying to get out. That you just stop. See all this waste for what it really is.”

  Tom said nothing.

  “At least her life mattered”, Nora said, whispering with fury. “He wanted her, and now she's gone beyond us all. There's nothing more to say.”

  There wasn't and they both stared, starved with gaunt emotion.

  ***

  An eye, plucked from a baby's head, stuck through by a rusty nail. The nail, peeking out through the splinters of a barbed wooden post. The post, stood still, atop a lonely green hill, looking over a sloping stonesided valley. First, no one noticed it. Then a fly, passing through, landed on its tiny black centre. Only a small fly, he took a while to cover the little orb. He felt the ridges of small frostened veins, and looked into the blue ethereal triangles of a still developing iris. He saw the tortions of an optic nerve torn in two, squeezed from its socket and split by brown steel.

  He then flew off, to land on cowshit, and trees and other things.

  A day later, a lonely sheep in a neighbouring field came to the top of the hill, to see if the grass was any better. She noticed the tiny eyeball, came close, and investigated with a long wet tongue. She thought of eating the little eye, of feeling the soft crunching between its grasshardened teeth. But she thought better of it. Better to stick to things that were green.

  It wasn't until much later, days later, when Murphy, the farmer who owned the field, came across it. By this time it was already withered and dry, hardening away without the cover of a lid. It looked like a little grey snail. But he called the guards, and said that it looked like part of the baby Breathnach had been found.

  ***

  Tom lay with his head on Nora's chest, listening to the slow small breaths of Lucy, four feet away. His hair was still wet from the trip to the cove with Lucy, but Nora could begin to see the shine of silver and golden sand on his crown.

  “Actually”, Tom said, “I forgot to tell you, something really odd happened on the way home. When I was leaving up from the sea, back up the trail to the road home, I got this terrible sense that someone was looking at me. A really strong sense.”

  Tom felt Nora's heartbeat softly quicken.

  “And Lucy was still awake at the time, and you could tell that she got it too, she went really quiet and alert, and sort of buried her head into my chest. It had gotten very quiet as well, but I looked around to where I thought whoever it was was, out to one of the fields just West of the cove that's jutting way out into the ocean, and makes the bay.”

  Nora nodded, her heartbeat was fast enough now, and she didn't know why.

  “And I swear, for about a split second, just in the corner of my eye, right before I was able to look properly, I swear I saw this tall, really tall actually, big black figure, right in the middle of the field, just standing there.”

  Nora didn't say anything.

  “Like right in the middle of the field. And the oddest thing nearly, was that the sense I got, or whatever it was, it was just so uneasy, because, whoever it was, was just so tall. Not just tall though, or fat or skinny either. Just misshapen, almost as if, and I know this sounds mad, but as if their body was always moving, like changing shape nearly, or losing bits and gaining bits. But black, and dirty, almost, from head to toe.”

  Lucy had fallen asleep, her breaths became deeper, each small lung filled slowly.

  “But, you know, maybe it was just my mind playing tricks on me, or the sun for a second casting a shadow on the big ash tree in that field. But I got such a sense of uneasiness for that split second. Anyway, it had left me by the time I'd got back to the road, and Lucy had gone to sleep by that stage too, but it was very strange I have to say. Sorry, it just came into my mind there looking at the shadow of the lilies in the window.”

  Nora didn't say anything, and they soon both fell asleep until well after the sun had set, lying on the leathered couch in the corner of the kitchen. Lifting their sore bodies, they brought Lucy to her cot, and each other to their bed, before all three drifted off to quiet, undisturbed sleep.

  ***

  Inspector Moran woke, as he usually did, with the stretch of the dull blade of sun as it crossed across his face. Rising slowly, he lathered some soap in a bowl of hot water, and shave with a blue safety razor, clipping the dull grey hair that blinked from beneath the folds of his chin. Once complete, he washed his face, before getting dressed, and driving down to the station. He opened the door, said hello to the sergeant at the desk, before asking how Paudie had behaved throughout the night.

  “You'd have got more trouble from a suckling lamb”, Sergeant Murphy replied. “Not a peep out of him.”

  “Sure we'll go down and see how he's getting on will we?”

  Paudie was in 7B, a cell away at the back of the station, far away from the other prisoners. As they turned the corner, Moran stopped.

  “7B, Murphy, are you sure?”

  “Yes sir”, Murphy shouted from down the hall, “sure didn't you put him there yourself last night?”

  He was right, Moran had dragged Paudie down the hall to the cell, and even turned off the light before leaving. But that still didn't change the fact that the cell was empty.

  And just like that, Paudie O'Brien was gone, never to be seen again.

  ***

  Years after Paudie had disappeared, Nora had a dream. At this stage she was nearly an old woman, and the events that defined her life seemed a distant memory. People rarely mentioned what had happened to her, but even when they did, they never went into the particulars.

  She was sat on her bed, back around the time Lucy had gone. The bed was empty, and Lucy's cot was in the distance. Paudie was sat in a chair beside it.

  Nora went to reach her hand out, but it was stuck, and slow, moving as if through glue.

  Paudie raised his finger to his lips slowly, and told her to shush. He reached to the ground, and with rotting charcoal drew a symbol on the ground. Two lines crossed by another. They both watched silently as the black fragments floated up into the afternoon light in the room.

  “Who are you to grieve?” Paudie said softly.

  “Why should you care what happened? It doesn't work in straight lines. It's different to how you think.”

  Nora understood.

  “Your life, anyone's life - you've only a lend of it. You've no purchase on it. So why would you care what I did.”

  As he spoke, Nora noticed his eyes were all black, and that he didn't blink. He remained calm, and Nora, in dreaming felt as though he spoke truth to her. She accepted, and was happy for it.

  “If I plucked your babies eye and fastened her mouth shut with the bone I threw out for the dog. Or if I brought her to the Bogman. That's not his name, but the name I have for him.”

  Paudie became noticeably more hushed now as he spoke.

  “If he wanted her, who was I to say no? I'm merely acting on his behalf. He's been here much longer than you or me, and he knows far more than we do about the real way of things. Your baby will live on Nora. I put her there meself, with him looking over my shoulder. I pushed her down. Deep into the ageless black. And she didn't scream, didn't wail, didn't cry, didn't say one word. She knew that was the way it was, and she let go of my thumb as left our time to enter a new.”

  Nora began to cry, joy breaking her heart.

  “Be proud. As much as you can be. She was a fine baby.”

  Nora was.

  ***

  The morning sun tracks time, thought Tom. Scorches the ground softly. How many suns have touched me? Bathed in golden light. How many moons for that matter, have I seen in the sky? Or slept under.

  He sat at the edg
e of the cove, his feet in cold water. Lucy was in his arms.

  ***

  In the deep dark of a country night a black cow slept in a field. Curled up on spindly legs, warm piles of flesh in the middle. Slow puffs of air curled from her wet nostrils, with hot hairy wafts of steam rising up from her meatpacked body. Rising and falling, she slept peacefully.

  It's hard being a cow. You spend all day working for the farmer, chewing the cud, getting fat, keeping the grass down, from sunrise to sunset. And when you're not working, you're being milked, pulled by cold hands that are never gentle with delicate udders. Then you're packed off to eat more, and get fatter and fatter and work and work. Until you drop dead from tiredness, or are sent to the butcher to be put out of your misery and fed to hungry children. To be born a cow in rural Ireland - what rotten luck when you think of how they're treated in other countries. If I were a cow, I'd be as bad tempered as the rest of them. But then again, there's not much difference between us and the cows.

  I don't know if all cows think like this, but I do know that this particular cow had other things on her mind when she was woken by the crack of a kick right in her belly. She felt the wind knocked from her, and trying to breathe, nearly fainted with the pain of splintering ribs that had burst her lungs. She looked around, panicked, and dazed, before feeling the pressure of hands at her bosom. With soft tension four long nipples were torn from her body.

  Bellowing, she fell, and ran blind from pain, over fences and into darkness, before she stopped at the edge of a bog. Unsure of where to turn, she studied the quiet black pool, mad with panic. But then another kick pushed her in.