Bog Child

by Siobhan Dowd

  ‘Stop,’ Fergus shrieked, springing up. ‘Stop!’

  The man in the machine didn’t hear, but another man walking towards the cut jerked his head round and stared at Fergus.

  ‘Stop! Please.’

  The second man made an arm signal, as if to say, You’re for the chop, and the JCB cut out. In the distance came the wail of a siren.

  Fergus moved forward so that the man in the JCB could see him.

  ‘Stop,’ he called again. His voice carried around the bog-land. ‘There’s a body in there. My uncle’s gone to get the police. That’s them now.’

  ‘The police?’ said the man in the JCB.

  ‘Body? What body?’ said the man on the ground.

  A police car came into view, then another. You could tell by their colours that one was from the North and the other from the South. They bounded over the mountain track and pulled up some distance away. Car doors slammed. Uniformed men got out and Fergus recognized Uncle Tally emerging from the back of the Gardai’s car. He pointed to Fergus and the JCB men, and the uniforms advanced over the bog-land, picking their way carefully, occasionally stumbling in the spiky grass. Uncle Tally trailed behind, his hands in his denim jacket as if oblivious to the treacherous nature of the ground.

  ‘Feck it,’ Fergus heard a guard say. ‘My boot’s wrecked.’

  ‘Bugger this,’ said an RUC man.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ said the JCB man. He’d climbed down from the machine.

  Fergus pointed to the body in the bog, the point of elbow, the neat twist of gowned torso, and jutting bone. Against the brown of the earth, and with the way the light fell, it wasn’t immediately apparent.

  ‘He’s raving,’ said the man on the ground. ‘There’s no body.’

  ‘There is. See.’ Fergus dropped down into the cut. His finger traced the body. ‘That’s a hand. And, look–a bangle. Gold, maybe.’

  ‘Christ. He’s right, Mick,’ said the JCB man.

  The police drew up, panting.

  ‘Uncle Tally and I,’ Fergus said. ‘We found her. We were up early, bird-watching.’

  ‘Bird-watching? Oh, yeah?’ said the man called Mick.

  ‘’S true.’

  ‘More like—’

  ‘Bird-watching,’ said Fergus. ‘And here’s her bone. Broken off.’

  Nobody spoke.

  Uncle Tally approached the cut and got a fag out but didn’t light it. ‘Somebody’s killed her and buried her here,’ he suggested. ‘And it’s thanks to Fergus that she didn’t get mashed up by your bloody JCB.’

  ‘OK, OK,’ said the man called Mick. He offered Uncle Tally a light for his fag and lit one himself.

  ‘How long d’you think she’s been here?’ said the Irish guard.

  ‘We can’t be sure it’s a she,’ said the RUC man.

  ‘But the bangle. And that gansey she’s wearing. Some kind of woollen nightie.’

  ‘Maybe it’s more of a shirt. A long nightshirt.’

  ‘I never saw a nightshirt like that on a boy. Not nowadays. It’d be pyjamas, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘And are we north or south of the border? That’s what I want to know.’

  ‘According to my OS map, there’s a stream hereabouts. And the North is one side and the South the other.’ The man who spoke was plainclothes, with an English accent.

  Uncle Tally spoke. ‘Fergus and I’ve been up here a few hours. Watching the birds. But we haven’t seen a stream. Just bog.’

  ‘It’s been a dry spring. The stream’s probably dried up,’ suggested the Irish guard. ‘I’d say the body’s yours, though. Going by the map.’

  ‘And I’d say it’s yours.’

  There was another silence.

  ‘Son, you’d better come up out of there.’ It was the English plainclothes, sounding quietly authoritative. He reached a hand down into the cut but Fergus shook his head. He flattened his palms on the top and leapfrogged up.

  ‘The poor wee girl,’ said the JCB man. ‘She looks about seven or eight. Less than my Mairead.’

  ‘We’ve a call out for the pathologist. But meantime, we’ll seal off the area. Is that OK with you?’ The Englishman spoke to the Irish guard.

  ‘We’ve a call out too. But our pathologist has to come from Galway.’

  ‘Galway?’

  The Irish guard shrugged.

  ‘Well, ours will be here before yours. We’ve brought some tape. Can we seal her off?’

  ‘Seal away. Our tape’s the same colour. It makes no odds.’

  The police shooed Fergus and the JCB men and Uncle Tally away.

  Uncle Tally motioned with his head for Fergus to move off down the track some distance, so they could talk alone.

  ‘It’s a detail, Ferg. We’re stranded. I’d to leave the van in the town car park before I went into the guards. I didn’t want them nosing around our bags of peat. Then they made me escort them here in the police car. With the siren wailing, anybody who saw me would have thought I was off to Long Kesh prison. I ask you. And my van sitting in the middle of Inchquin, with thirty pounds worth of turf.’

  ‘You could walk back, Uncle Tally. Once off the mountain, you could thumb it.’

  ‘You’re joking. Who’d pick up a fella like me in a godforsaken place like this? Bandit country!’

  Fergus laughed. ‘I can hear the drums over the next hill, Unk. The natives are getting restless.’

  Uncle Tally grunted. ‘We’re bloody stranded.’

  ‘We could run down the mountain. Inchquin’s only ten miles.’

  ‘Away you go so, Marathon Man.’

  ‘Unk?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Have you heard of any girl–or child–gone missing lately?’

  Uncle Tally thought. ‘No. Not lately. Years back, there was a lassie that vanished over Dranmore way. But she was older. Thirteen. And it turned out she’d only run off to go on the game. The scamp. I reckon whoever murdered this wee one drove her body up here from miles away. She’s probably not local at all. Maybe not even Irish. Who knows?’

  ‘I’d say she’s Irish.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Did you see the bangle?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The metal was twisted into strands. Like something Celtic.’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘Poor wee mite. But tourists buy that tat too.’

  The plainclothes policeman approached them. ‘We’ll need you to make statements,’ he said. ‘What you were doing, when you found her…that kind of thing.’

  ‘There’s not a lot to say. We were up here early, bird-watching—’ Uncle Tally began.

  ‘And then I spotted her,’ interrupted Fergus. ‘I saw her in the earth. It was like camouflage.’

  ‘Camouflage?’

  ‘You know. Soldiers in combat fatigues. Or birds in the field. Camouflaged so you can’t see them.’

  The RUC man’s eyes flicked heavenwards. ‘I get the picture.’

  ‘I saw the bangle first. Then her hand. Then her body. And then…the bone. Cut off.’

  ‘And then what? Did you touch her?’

  ‘Maybe. Just on the cloth.’

  ‘And I drove down to Inchquin to alert the guards,’ said Uncle Tally.

  ‘Why Inchquin? Why not Roscillin, over?’

  ‘Well, we thought we were south of the border.’

  The plainclothes man had a sharp chin and thick dark hair that flapped in the breeze. ‘And I’d say you were right. But Paddy over there says that as you crossed over from this bridleway to where you found her, you crossed back over the border, to the North.’

  ‘You don’t say?’

  ‘Are you Northerners yourself?’

  Uncle Tally nodded. ‘We’re from Drumleash, Fergus and myself.’ He gave the officer their full names and addresses.

  ‘Are you still at school?’ the officer asked Fergus.

  ‘I’m on study leave. My A-level exams start soon.’

  Th
e officer tapped his pen on his notebook. ‘And you, Mr McCann? What do you do?’

  ‘This and that. Bar work. Work’s hard to come by these days.’

  ‘A fine fellow like yourself? You should join the RUC.’

  ‘I may be Irish,’ Uncle Tally said, ‘but I’m not a lemming.’ He guffawed at his own joke. After a moment the plainclothes joined in.

  Another car drove right up to where they were standing. ‘It’s the pathologist,’ the plainclothes said. ‘He’s driven from Londonderry double-quick.’

  A plump man in his fifties got out, carrying a battered holdall.

  ‘That was fast, Jack,’ said the plainclothes.

  ‘Hi, Duncan. Where is she?’

  The two men walked away over the bog-land towards the body. Uncle Tally put a hand on Fergus’s shoulder.

  ‘I don’t like this police stuff,’ he whispered. ‘Let’s go.’ ‘Unk. No. Not yet. I want to hear what the pathologist says.’ Before Uncle Tally could stop him, Fergus wriggled free and picked his way to a few yards from the cut. He lay flat to keep out of sight and listened to what the officials were saying.

  The doctor slid on some mud and swore. He’d trouble getting down to view the body. Then there was silence.

  ‘So how long do you reckon she’s been there, Jack?’

  Fergus pushed the grass aside and saw an Irish guard drop to his knees at the side of the cut, as if in prayer. An aeroplane passed high overhead, a silent crucifix truncating the sky.

  ‘Bloody hell.’ It was the doctor’s voice.

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Poor child. And her skin intact.’

  ‘I know. She’s fresh. Is it days? Or weeks?’

  ‘Longer than that, Duncan.’

  ‘Not months?’

  ‘Centuries.’

  ‘Centuries? You’re having me on, Jack.’

  ‘It’s an archaeologist you need here, not the police.’

  ‘An archaeologist?’

  ‘There was another body, I recall. Found in similar terrain, down south. It turned out to be ancient. Iron Age.’

  ‘Never. Look at the state of the skin. The cloth.’

  ‘It’s a quality of the bog. It preserves things. Like a mummy in an Egyptian tomb.’

  ‘Christ. You’re pulling my leg. You have to be.’

  ‘Christ is right and no joke.’ The doctor’s voice was breathless as he struggled back up to the higher level. ‘Thanks. For all we know, this child might have walked the earth the same time as Your Man Himself.’

  ‘What man himself?’

  ‘Jesus Christ, who else?’

  ‘Jesus?’

  ‘We’re talking two thousand–odd years ago, Duncan. Maybe more.’

  ‘Which makes that bangle, the cloth, everything—’

  ‘Priceless. If I’m right, you’ve a sensation here.’

  ‘I knew she was on our side of the border. I knew it.’

  Three

  More police arrived and more arguments broke out about where the border was, but in reverse. The body of the girl had gone from a serious crime headache to a valuable find. Everyone laid claim to her. Fergus listened in silence; Uncle Tally kept his distance.

  It was gone noon when a guard remembered them and gave them a lift down from the mountain. They collected the van from Inchquin and drove back over the border. A different soldier was on duty, a big, bald fellow who looked fit to down ten pints of beer in as many minutes. He asked for Uncle Tally’s licence and read it over, holding it at arm’s length as if it had fleas.

  ‘God,’ said Uncle Tally. ‘Someone must have jogged Lloyd George’s hand when he drew that bloody border and left Drumleash on the wrong side.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘You’d have thought they’d put us Fenians in the Republic to be shot of us.’

  They drove into Roscillin with the bags of turf and sold all but three to Uncle Tally’s mate Frank, who ran a hardware business. They stopped there for some cans of beer. It was nearly three when they hit the outskirts of Drumleash.

  Da was filling up a posh blue Rover at the petrol station as they went by. Uncle Tally tooted his horn and Da looked up and raised his eyes to heaven. The village was peaceful otherwise. The modern Catholic church with its flying-saucer roof loomed like an abandoned UFO. Two sleeping dogs sprawled on top of each other outside Finicule’s Bar, the pub where Uncle Tally rented a room and served as barman.

  ‘I’m wrecked,’ said Uncle Tally. ‘I’ll drop you at your place but I won’t come in. Say hello to your mother and give her a bag of turf. Then she won’t be cross with me.’

  They turned into the close at the far end of the village and drew up at Fergus’s family’s white bungalow. In the afternoon sunshine the place wore a cheerful aspect. The roses were out. Outside the front gate was a sign saying B & B. APPLY WITHIN. Fergus could barely remember the last time there’d been a taker. They’d had a few Americans visit, looking for their roots, but when the violence escalated, custom had dried up.

  Fergus sprang out and heaved out a fat bag of turf. ‘Ta-ra, Unk.’

  ‘Fight the fight.’ Uncle Tally waved and drove away.

  Fergus dragged the turf round the back of the house and found his mother there, peg in mouth, hanging out the washing. The wind whipped her blonde hair across her face as she glanced over to him.

  ‘Giv urs a hind with thus shoot,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  She took the peg from her mouth. ‘Give us a hand with this sheet.’

  Fergus grinned. ‘Sure.’ He grabbed a flapping corner.

  ‘Where’ve you been all day, Fergus? You smell of beer.’

  ‘It was only the one.’

  ‘It’s always only the one.’

  ‘It was really only the one. Uncle Tally and I, we went to get the turf. I’ve a big bag of it there. But then we got delayed. We found a body, Mam. Up there in the mountain bog. A wee, tiny child.’

  Mam stopped and stared open-mouthed, holding small Theresa’s dungarees to her chest. ‘A child?’

  ‘A child, Mam.’

  ‘God help us. She was dead?’

  ‘Of course, dead. Buried. But the JCB unburied her.’

  ‘Mother of God. Was she murdered?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mam. They think she’s ancient. Iron Age.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Iron Age. Two thousand years old or more.’

  He poured out the story, helping her with the washing between breathless sentences.

  ‘They’re waiting for the archaeologists,’ he finished. ‘What d’you think of that?’

  ‘Remember to shake the shirts before you peg them, Fergus.’

  ‘’S that all you can say? They think she was alive when Jesus was.’

  Mam hung up the last sock and her arms dropped to her sides. She sighed and started to cross herself. ‘A small girl like that, ending up on that godforsaken mountain. And her a pagan.’

  ‘She couldn’t have been a Christian, Mam, if she was born before Christ.’

  ‘I know. But it’s the thought of her, buried without a prayer.’

  ‘Maybe somebody did pray for her.’

  Mam sighed. ‘And maybe He heard them. Or maybe not.’ She pegged up the dungarees. ‘I’m glad they think she’s been there all this time.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It makes it further away. Less to do with us. With now.’ She picked up the plastic laundry basket. ‘We’ve enough troubles on our doorstep.’

  ‘S’pose.’

  ‘We do. I’m just back from visiting Joe. So I know.’

  ‘You went to see Joe, Mam?’ Fergus put a hand to Joe’s watch. ‘How was he?’

  Mam smiled. ‘He’s grown.’

  ‘Since last week?’

  ‘Not that way. I mean in his head. The way he speaks.’

  ‘Is he getting hassled in there?’

  ‘No. He’s been reading.’

  ‘Reading?’

&nb
sp; ‘Reading about science. About what happens when light hits a mirror.’ She smiled. ‘It bends, he tells me.’

  ‘It’s called refraction, Mam.’

  ‘Is that what it is? I didn’t understand. He’s mad keen to re-sit the science O level.’

  ‘Is he?’

  ‘He is. And look at you, Fergus. Brains to burn and the books unopened all day.’

  ‘I’ll do some later. Honest to God.’

  ‘Always later. Never now. You sound just like Joey. He promised me he’d get away to England for a job, if not next week, the week after. And now look. There is no later. Or none to speak of. He’s locked away for ten years.’ She flung down the empty laundry basket. ‘I’m worn out with the pair of you.’

  ‘Mam!’

  ‘You and Joe. Always up to mischief.’

  ‘Mam?’

  ‘I remember the two of youse trying to knock down the house. Banging at the back extension with spades bigger than yourselves.’

  Fergus put his arm around her shoulder. ‘Hoodlums, the pair of us.’

  She grabbed a shirt-tail from the line and dabbed her eyes. ‘Now look what you’ve done. If Theresa and Cath didn’t finish me off this morning, monkeying with my nail varnish, and you swanning off without a word and Joey locked away for a decade. I swear to God. I wish I’d stayed in Leitrim, where I was born, and never married into all this trouble.’

  ‘Oh, Mam. We’re a terrible brood. You should have drowned us at birth.’

  Her hand was on his hair, moving over the wiry ends. ‘Please don’t go the same way as your brother, Fergus. Tell me you won’t.’

  ‘I won’t. I’ve no intention.’

  ‘Every last boy in this village wants to be a bloody hero. It’s a waste. But you won’t, will you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’d know better, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, Mam. I would.’

  ‘Do your revision, then.’

  ‘OK, I will. But, Mam?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Can I go up the mountain tomorrow? With Uncle Tally? To see what they’re doing with the body? He says he’ll give me another driving lesson while we’re at it.’

  ‘You and your Uncle Tally. Like two peas in a pod. OK. Only put up the learner plates I bought for you this time.’

  ‘Do I have to, Mam?’

  ‘It’s the law.’

  ‘But it’s like telling the whole world in big letters, I’M A PROVO.’