by Noel Scanlon
“I think I’ve given you all the gossip now, sur,” he said with calculated casualness. “Oh, except for Mr and Mrs Brown.” He peered at me through the spray to see what effect the name had on me.
But if Augustus John had inherited cunning from its frequent and necessary practice along that wild and hidden coastline, I was not without a share of that quality myself.“And who, might I enquire, are Mr and Mrs Brown?” I said masking the shock and apprehension which I felt.
“Who are they?” Augustus John asked rhetorically. “Only the mother and father of Miss Rosemary Brown, one of your gurls.” He paused. “She is one of your gurls, isn’t she, reverend?”
I remembered the funeral pyre, the body burning, the seagull dropping something into the rock pool beside me. What really had it been?
I didn’t answer.
“Well,” Augustus John went on, “these are her parents and what’s more they’re right here in the village. Or at any rate near-about.”
I nearly suffered a cardiac arrest. I frequently receive threatening letters of one sort or another from parents. But this was something worse. Far worse.
“I knew you’d be glad to hear about them,” Augustus John said hypocritically, peering into my tortured face. “It seems,” he went on, “that the Browns are real rich Yanks and they have a dead set on visiting their daughter. They wanted me right or wrong to take them out to the island yesterday.”
Did Augustus John know that the girl was dead and cremated or was he only guessing? I had no way of knowing exactly when he had crossed over to the island.
“You mustn’t do that,” I said in a strangled voice. “Ever.”
For answer Augustus John made a great show of trying to light a cigarette in his cupped hands; he wanted fully to savour his moment of power, to increase the suspense, twist the knife and further fray my tattered nerves.
“Of course I’m on your side, sur,” he said piously. “But these Browns were very insistent. You know what they said? They said their daughter was held out there on your island by force. Imagine them saying a thing like that now.”
“Of course,” Augustus John went on, “I told them that you were a grand class of a man who wouldn’t hold anything, not even a dog, by force. Oh, it’s the great character reference I gave you.”
“Did you indeed.”
“Well, sur, them Yanks are not the sort that gives up easy like. I had the devil’s own job with them. But I managed to put them off. For the moment.” He said this with a martyred air so expertly combining the offer of protection with the threat of its withdrawal that I was well prepared for what came next.
“They offered me money. A lot of money.”
“But, of course,” I said acidly, “you refused it.”
“Bejaysus, sur, it’s very quick on the uptake you are.” Then with a crooked smile. “But then you know where my loyalties lie, don’t you, sur?”
With as good a grace as I could muster, I got out my cheque book and, while Augustus John held it for me, wrote a cheque for a sum so high that I would be ashamed to disclose it. Before handing it over, I said, “These people aren’t in the village now, I take it?”
“Of course not, sur,” Augustus John assured me eyeing the cheque. “Of course not. I saw to that.”
I gave him the cheque.
“Bejaysus, sur,” he said with the true warmth and sincerity that only actors and liars seem to be capable of, “but it’s the understanding man you are. And you can depend on me to look after your interests against all comers. Me and Dominic here.”
His assurances gave me scant comfort.
A little later we scraped in beside the mainland pier.
Dominic leaped ashore with that extraordinary nimbleness of his and secured a line to a bollard. Between them they helped me ashore.
I left Chris’s list of supplies for the store with Augustus John and began to make my way through the drizzle towards the little post office.
I felt uneasy and apprehensive. There was something new about the atmosphere, something threatening, some eerie additive.
CHAPTER 5
Blackshell village was very small indeed.
It consisted of a few whitewashed houses though this does not mean that any of them were white. Far from it. Whitewash had once been lackadaisically applied but was now falling off and what remained was overlaid with the brown soot which combined with rain to run down all the gables — in any event the whitewashing never extended higher than one could reach with the sweeping brush used for its application. These houses were built in odd positions and at odd angles by the side of the road, in a field, partly up a slope, without any thought for design or aspect. They looked as if they were hiding secrets, dark secrets that could not stand the light of day.
The village was backed by a vast bogland on which a few dwarf-like black cattle were attempting to keep themselves alive. This bogland in turn ran into mountains. The whole area jutted out into the Atlantic and was more or less totally cut off, being accessible only by a narrow potholed road. When I had first seen it I had thought this remoteness attractive but that day it seemed to me that the people of the area were trapped, imprisoned physically and in other more sinister ways.
As I walked up the main street I was aware of children watching me from behind a ditch. They ducked down tittering when I looked in their direction.
The door of the little post office creaked open as I entered.
A group of people were standing lounging around in the manner of people who have too much time to spare and too little to do with it. From the various books they clutched, I gathered that it was dole day and they had all been drawing the dole, which seemed to be payable through the post office. The people were gossiping as I entered but immediately they saw me, they all stopped talking simultaneously as if their tongues had suddenly frozen.
They had never been friendly but they had never been like this either. They looked at me with narrowed eyes as if I was some sort of apparition. What had they heard about me? Suddenly, and for the first time, I had the ominous feeling that something awful but of significance to me was being hidden from me.
The postmistress, a small, tight-lipped woman, ostentatiously made the sign of the cross on her flat breasts and faced me as if she was facing the Devil himself.
“May I have my mail?” I asked politely.
Without speaking or taking her eyes off me, the postmistress reached down and dumped a small sack on the counter. Incoming mail was decreasing but was still substantial. Something about our community had caught the popular imagination of the younger generation.
In the frigid, hostile silence, I took the sack and said, “Thank you,” and went to the door. As I left, I could hear the voices starting up in a continuous cackle as the momentarily frozen tongues were loosened and, out of the corner of my eye, I saw every single solitary person bless themselves in unison.
From the post office to Carmody’s Annexe was only a short step. But the atmosphere I walked through deepened my feeling of uneasiness. A band of donkeys wandered past apparently wild and, by the way their hoofs were turned up, uncared for. Vaguely luminous moving blurs of white in the bog appeared to be sheep.
I caught sight of one or two figures peeping out at me from behind houses or the ubiquitous clamps of turf. There was something vaguely malign about the silent, furtive figures.
Approaching the store, I could see outside it clumps of masonry where some shed had just been demolished. The masonry had been left lying where it had fallen. Stacks and stacks of empty beer bottles and barrels, plastic sacks of artificial manure, wooden pointed fencing stakes and various hardware items were thrown about any old way. This was the one and only general store off which was also the one and only bar and snug, though there were, apparently, other shebeens or drinking places hidden in dark cottages.
The atmosphere of the store was dark and musty and, while the post office had had a small turf fire, Mr Carmody, presumably for reasons of economy, di
dn’t go in for heat of any sort, his only concession to the weather being in winter-time to keep his overcoat on all day.
As I entered the store, he and Augustus John were deep in conversation, their heads close together, something that surprised me as Augustus John had always told me he didn’t like Carmody. They were both examining the contents of a plastic bag which Augustus John had brought over in the currach.
I hung back in the shadows by the doorway as Augustus John said, “They’re nice big ones. From right up the hill. They’re just what you want.”
Reaching into the bag Mr Carmody drew out a large orange-coloured mushroom. He broke off a piece and began to chew it.
At that moment they spotted me. The bag was concealed and Augustus John disappeared.
“Welcome, welcome,” Mr Carmody said, but there was no welcome in his voice. His eyes roamed curiously over me, taking in every detail. “Augustus John was just discussing your order with me.” This was patently untrue and I wondered why he felt the need to make excuses. He went on, “He’s gone out the back to get the missus to make it up.”
Out the back was a shadowy recess I had never been in. The missus was a short dumpy woman who, Augustus John once told me, went to Mass every morning on her bicycle and was, as he put it, awful religious altogether.
Mr Carmody’s eyes were drawn towards the concealed bag of mushrooms. It was as if they constituted some vice, some irresistible temptation which my presence was preventing him from indulging in.
“How are the young ladies getting on out there?” he asked slyly. It had always been clear that Mr Carmody fancied the girls both individually and collectively.
“I wonder,” he went on, “you don’t bring them across for the trip.” There was an edge to the way he said this, a hint of maliciousness, of something he knew but would not say outright which annoyed me. “Parents nowadays seem to let young girls do anything at all they like, anything at all.”
I didn’t respond.
“Of course, I suppose after all your travelling, you think our views behind the times. You think we’re just backward country folk.” He glanced sidelong at the collection box for the African Missions which stood among the numerous other collection boxes on the counter.
“Not at all,” I said. I was surprised by Mr Carmody’s attitude. He had always adopted a strong camaraderie when talking to me. I had always suspected it to be false. But it was certainly preferable to the confrontation which he was now evidently seeking. His changed attitude seemed to be an extension of the change I had already noticed in the landscape.
“That’s what you think all right,” he went on with a hostility that surprised me. “But I’ll tell you something. There are certain things we know more about than you do. Certain things we’ve known about for generations.”
“What things?” I asked sharply.
“You’ll find out soon enough,” he said. “You may know all about India and them black heathens out there. But you don’t know anything at all about Blackshell.”
He started as if he had suddenly come to, and caught himself on. For a moment he resumed his old personality. “I can never keep this place tidy,” he said absently, as if there had been no exchange between us. “Isn’t it in a dreadful mess?” His hands trembled and began to scrabble like frightened little animals among the hodgepodge of grocery and hardware items that littered the counter.
I watched in fascination while the scrabbling hands gradually left the top of the counter and dived underneath it. They came up with a piece of fungus and popped it into Mr Carmody’s mouth. I had the odd feeling that the hands were acting on their own independently of the rest of his body. The piece of mushroom had an immediate effect.
It was the first time I was to see the effect of fungi which were to be such a plague to us. A change came over Mr Carmody. He went on smiling but his smile became vulpine. Instead of his usual dithery personality he exuded aggression. He seemed to darken the whole area around him, to lend a touch of menace to the shadowy rows of shelves behind him. I began to wonder about the fungi. Did they contain some drug? Some hallucinogenic drug?
“You should get off that island,” a voice said. I had to check that it really came from Mr Carmody it was so different in timbre from his normal voice. It added with venom, “That island doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to those that have been living there from time immemorial. Get off it. You’re interfering with what you know nothing about.”
I was taken aback. Not only did what he had said make no sense to me but his face had begun to work in a repulsive manner.
He took up a large flat bacon knife from the counter. He looked at me and I could see raw hostility in his eyes. And this was more than any normal hostility that he might have felt towards me as a stranger who had taken land and set up a community of which he might disapprove. This was something dark and alien looking out through his eyes as he chewed the mushroom, shreds of which hung from the corners of his mouth. He raised the bacon knife looking about for something to hack at.
At that moment Augustus John and Mrs Carmody came in carrying various cardboard boxes.
In the harsh, stern, distant voice she used when she had the distasteful duty of addressing me, Mrs Carmody said, “There’s a gentleman to see you in the snug.”
CHAPTER 6
Snug was about the most inept term imaginable for the smoke-filled room I entered. Old John Jameson signs hung askew and dust-covered on the walls. The only table was a beer barrel with a wooden top and the seating arrangement a few battered sugan chairs. A man wearing not only a suit but a shirt and tie, a type of apparel rarely seen in these parts, rose out of one of the sugan chairs and, approaching through the turf smoke, seized and squeezed my hand in familiar fashion as if I were his long lost friend.
I hate to be approached in this over-familiar manner. I would have got rid of the man immediately except that he caught me at a very weak moment. Mr Carmody’s odd behaviour had shaken me. Besides, since leaving my introspective isolation, it was taking me time to get over my nervous reaction at when being confronted by the outside world.
“O’Reilly,” the man said boisterously. “Chief reporter of the Western Herald as I suppose the lady of the house told you.”
“I’m afraid she didn’t,” I said, looking at him with some bewilderment and avoiding eye contact. Probably he could no more than see me in the gloom of the snug, a gloom accentuated by the mist now lapping up against the tiny sunken window which was the sole source of light.
“What’ll you have?” he asked indicating his own glass which contained an outsize whiskey.
“I don’t drink alcohol,” I said stiffly.
How had this fellow known I was coming to the mainland? Had Augustus John, despite all his protestations, informed on my movements? Distrust and suspicion loomed in my mind.
“Make yourself comfortable anyway,” O’Reilly went on and, though a reporter was the last person in the world I wanted to see, I allowed myself to be seated in a sugan chair. “I think it’d be easier to get to interview the Pope than yourself,” O’Reilly said, screwing up his eyes in order to get a good look at me.
“I don’t give interviews.”
“Oh I don’t want anything the like of that! Only a bit of a chat. Haven’t I been waiting around in this hole for nearly a week with no one prepared to tell me more than their name and sometimes not even that. You’d think they had something to hide, the way they go on. Whereas in fact nothing ever happens here. Your arrival is the first bit of decent local news for the paper to print apart from the usual deaths and marriages and the like, since the whole job lot of them ran off that island of yours decades ago. That was worth a column. But I was only a cub reporter at the time.”
O’Reilly took a swig of whiskey and replaced the glass reverentially on the improvised table. Dominic’s sheepdog came in, smelled about the chairs, raised his leg, peed and trotted briskly out again.
“You have my sympathies dealing with these peo
ple. They’re an odd lot surely. And not exactly welcoming to the stranger. And a stranger is anyone whose people haven’t lived here for several centuries at least.” As if it had just occurred to him he added, “How are you making out there on the island anyway?”
“Very well, thank you.”
“I suppose you’re getting in supplies now for the season. When the gales get up that island can be cut off for weeks at a time. You’d be very isolated then. If anything was to happen.”
“Yes,” I said, “I suppose so.”
“Would I be right now in saying that you’re a commune of people trying to get away from the rat race? A thing I’ve often thought of doing meself.”
“No,” I said. “We are a religious sect.”
“Of course, of course,” O’Reilly said, nearly falling out of the sugan chair with the vehemence of his agreement. “These girls now. Would they ever be likely to be coming ashore?”
“No.”
“If you ever felt like bringing one or two of them across we’d pay well for an interview. You wouldn’t believe all the interest there is in your community. People keep ringing us up from all over. Even from America. It’s a story that could build into something big.”
“No doubt,” I said. “But our policy is to avoid publicity.”
“The girls,” he went on, reaching for his whiskey, “you say aren’t allowed to the mainland. Why is that now?”
“They are in retreat,” I said. “They are the equivalent of nuns in your religion. They are free but choose to be bound.”
He pounced on that. “A closed order.” He let the air whistle softly between his teeth and waited for me to go on. I didn’t. I just sat and looked up at the stained wooden rafters where smoke from the fire was eddying about.
After a pause, O’Reilly said, going off on a different tack. “There are Druidic remains out on your island, as I suppose you know, going right back to the old Gaelic folklore. I’d go out and see for meself only I’m not a sailor. Every time I as much as set foot on a boat I get as sick as a dog. Have you noticed those Standing Stones yourself?”