Bog Child

by Siobhan Dowd

  ‘What?’

  ‘A holder of a provisional licence, Mam.’

  She cuffed him and laughed. ‘You’re a wicked tyke, Fergus. Now scoot and get cracking on those books.’

  Four

  That evening, Da came home as the table was being laid for a fry. He slammed the Roscillin Star down on the sofa and cursed, and his thick grey eyebrows scrunched together.

  ‘Was it a bad day at the garage, Malachy?’ Mam said.

  ‘No. We’d a fair bit of trade.’

  ‘So what’s eating you?’

  ‘You’ve not heard the radio? Two more dead,’ he said. ‘After sixty-one days of starving.’

  ‘Mother of God.’

  ‘They’re letting them all die. Bobby Sands was only the start.’

  ‘The Maze is a place accursed.’

  ‘It’s not the Maze, woman. It’s Long Kesh.’ He plumped down on a chair.

  ‘The Maze, Long Kesh. What’s the difference?’

  ‘You might as well call Britain the mainland, Pat.’

  Mam pulled out the table from the wall. ‘I’ve a fry done.’

  ‘Is that all you can say?’

  Mam got the fold-up chairs for the girls and arranged them between the wall and table. ‘Where are those two hoodlums?’ She went to the back door. ‘Th’rese, Cath,’ she hollered. Then she arranged the last knife and fork at Da’s place. ‘No point us starving too.’

  ‘Jesus. Women.’

  ‘OK. So the hunger strike’s a tragedy. All over a few old clothes.’

  ‘It’s not about clothes.’

  ‘It is about clothes.’

  ‘It’s what the clothes mean, Pat. If you don’t wear prison garb, you’re a political prisoner. And if you’re a political, you’re not a petty criminal. And that’s what the Brits make out they are.’

  ‘What matter is it what they think?’

  ‘Next you’ll be saying your woman Thatcher over’s right to let them die.’

  ‘I’d never say that. She should let them wear what they want, if it would stop the insanity. Now sit and have your tea.’

  Da grunted and sat down. Fergus joined him. ‘I heard Uncle Tally say “the mainland” the other day, Da.’

  ‘Was he having a rise?’

  ‘Don’t think so. He was just saying how he was planning a trip over later this summer.’

  Da chuckled. ‘You’d be tarred and feathered out of Drumleash if you were anyone else saying that but Tally. How he gets away with it’s a mystery.’

  ‘Da. Uncle Tally and I, we found a body. In the bog.’

  He was just finishing the story of his day on the mountain when the girls burst through the back door.

  ‘I’m famished,’ Theresa wailed.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ Mam got their plates from where they’d been keeping warm under the grill.

  Fergus winked at the two of them. ‘You’re flushed like you’ve been running, Cath,’ he said.

  ‘We were playing “Save All” with the Caseys,’ Theresa said. ‘And Cath saved Seamus. And then Seamus kissed her. And I saw him at it.’

  ‘You did not.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Whisht,’ Mam said. ‘Eat your eggs before they set solid.’

  There was a silence as everyone ate. Da put down his knife and fork and looked over at Fergus. ‘That was a strange day you had, Fergus. I wouldn’t be surprised if that bog child of yours turned out not so old after all.’

  ‘Why d’you say that?’

  ‘I remember an old story about another body being found up there on the mountain. Forty years back or more. It was the wife of a local man. Up until then, he claimed she’d left him for another man and gone to England.’

  ‘A body?’ said Theresa, her eyes wild with excitement. ‘Did you find a body, Fergus?’

  ‘I did.’ He’d to tell the story all over again.

  ‘I want to go and see it. Mam. Da. Can I? Please?’

  ‘And me,’ said Cath.

  ‘You can’t, either of you,’ Mam said.

  ‘Oh, but—’

  ‘No buts.’

  ‘We saw the Caseys’ granda when he was laid out, didn’t we, Cath?’

  ‘Yes. He was all waxy.’

  Da thumped the table. ‘No buts. Like your mother says. This is a child, maimed and murdered. Not a decent body.’

  There was silence. Cath’s face was an image of tragic loss, while Theresa made a grimace that would curdle cream.

  ‘What d’you make of the hunger strikers, Fergus?’ Da said to change the subject.

  Fergus speared a sausage. ‘They’re very committed,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t do it.’ He munched on the meat and swallowed. ‘I wouldn’t last a day without food.’

  ‘Thank God Joe’s not part of it,’ Mam said.

  Da nodded. ‘It’s an odd thing, when you thank God for your son not having to make a sacrifice like that.’

  Mam grunted. ‘Sacrifice? Some sacrifice.’ She reached over to Cath and forked a grilled tomato from the plate’s edge towards the centre. ‘Eat up, Cath.’

  Fergus chewed on the last bacon rind and listened to the clock on the mantelpiece tick. Soon, it seemed to reassure, you’ll have the grades and be away. Over the roads and hills to the ferryboat. Across the sea and to the mainland. Away from this.

  As soon as he put his cutlery down, Mam reached over to take away his plate. ‘Sacrifice is what Jesus did. He saved us all. Who did Bobby Sands save?’ she said. ‘Who?’

  Nobody answered.

  Five

  After tea, Da went down to the village for a pint. The girls watched TV. Fergus offered to help Mam clear away, but she whisked him out of the kitchen, back to his studying.

  He groaned, but returned to the tiny front room and sat at the drop-leaf table. His Nelkon and Parker physics textbook, the size of a doorstop, was open at Young’s Modulus. He stared at the formula, doodling spirals in the margin.

  His mind wouldn’t settle. Expansion, temperature, fixed load. The words floated in his head like lazy gulls. He got up and went to the record player, tempted to put something on. He picked through Joe’s LPs. The Jam. Stiff Little Fingers. London Calling by The Clash, his own favourite. Then Joe’s all-time favourite, Imagine by John Lennon. He’d the grooves nearly worn away at this stage. The cover was frayed and torn. Lennon’s glass lenses staring through the blotched clouds as if he was already a memory in a photograph album when the shot was taken.

  ‘Oh Yoko,’ Fergus hummed, remembering. ‘Oh Yoko.’

  When Lennon was gunned down last December, Joe had spent the night in a vigil in this room with the candles burning and tracks blaring. Two days later, the police had come for him.

  ‘That doesn’t look like studying to me.’

  Fergus started. Mam was standing in the doorway, a glass jug of water in hand. He put the record away.

  ‘Mam–that water.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Bring it over.’

  ‘It’s for watering the geraniums. Not for you.’

  ‘I want to show you something.’

  She sighed and put the jug down by his side. Fergus picked up his pencil and plunged it halfway in.

  ‘What d’you see?’

  ‘I see a pencil, half in, half out. It’ll drip over the polished wood when you take it out.’

  He lifted the jug to her eye-level. ‘Look at it harder, Mam.’

  ‘Red. HB?’ she suggested.

  ‘No, Mam. See. It’s bent. Where it goes in the water.’

  ‘So it is.’

  ‘That’s refraction for you.’

  ‘It’s not really bent. It’s an illusion.’

  ‘Illusion or not, Mam, it’s how the light behaves, going from one medium to another. Air then water.’

  Mam’s face brightened. ‘Clever clogs.’ She took the pencil from him, wiped it on her jeans and handed it back to him. ‘Carry on with that studying.’

  He groaned and turned back to his
physics book, while Mam went out to the porch with the jug. He slammed the tome shut. ‘Force equals mass times acceleration,’ he said, as if that explained everything. He shut his eyes and thought of an arrow speeding through the air, then a hand, dealing a heavy blow on the head of a kneeling, terrified girl.

  The girl in the bog. Somebody murdering her.

  He bit his lip. He couldn’t get those little hands, the spools on the finger-pads, the coiled metal of the bangle out of his mind. In his head there was a strange explosion, as if his brain had collapsed like a clapped-out star. He threw down his pencil and shut his eyes.

  He heard his teacher at school, Mr Dwyer, tuttutting. Three Bs and you’ve a place for medicine in Aberdeen, Fergus McCann. A whole new life. A whole new world. He opened his eyes and the curtain fluttered in the darkening evening breeze. He switched on the desk light, picked up his pencil and reopened Nelkon and Parker back at the beginning of the chapter. He pressed his hands into his eyeballs and began to read.

  Six

  In the dark, we slept in a line. Mam at the wall, then Da. Then the pale wool curtain that floated in the night breeze. Then my own self and a gap and my brother Brennor and a gap and then the small ones. Wherever a gap was, it stood for a child that had died. And we dreamed as a family. Brennor would wake up and say how the moon had fallen down in the night and he’d caught it and climbed up a tree to put it back. And Mam would say she dreamed the baby in her belly came out a fat white goose. And I’d tell my dream, which was of a crooked wheel rolling down the mountain and it growing bigger like a ball of snow and flattening every last living thing. And Da’d say we were all deranged, except maybe the small ones, because they’d slept soundly, like the good wee ones they were.

  ‘Didn’t you dream anything, Da?’ I asked.

  He put on his jacket and smiled. ‘Maybe I did. But not of wheels or moons or geese.’ He put his hand on Mam’s round front. ‘Honk, honk,’ he went. Mam cuffed him.

  ‘What then?’ I asked.

  ‘I dreamed of you, Mel. Walking round the hut in a circle, chattering, and time forgetting you. And your hands dancing like birds but nothing in them.’

  ‘And what did the dream mean, Da?’

  Da winked. ‘It meant you’ve a floor to sweep and wheat to chaff. Remember?’

  Fergus awoke in the morning silence. A girl in a white shift was laughing, her hands fluttering, a dream of a dream. The image faded. Cath must have cried out in her sleep again. The walls were paper-thin. He sat up and listened. All seemed quiet.

  It was a Saturday, he remembered. The clock said 6:10. Between the curtains, sun crept in. He smelled crispness in the air.

  It was a running day, definitely.

  He got up, stripping out of his pyjamas. Within seconds he was in his shorts and sweatshirt. The sweatshirt was bright red, with a black puma running across it hell for leather, slinky and fast. It had been a birthday present from Mam and was now well-worn.

  He brushed his teeth in thirty seconds. On the bath’s ledge was Joe’s watch. He picked it up and put it on.

  Once out of the house he pattered softly from the close and down the street. He turned off, past the primary school, and headed down along the last bungalows to where the road turned rural. Here he stopped.

  He could see his breath. The birds were deafening.

  He bent and stretched, feeling his hamstrings tug and his heels tingle. His back felt like he’d been lying like a corkscrew all night.

  He started to run. It was a slow ascent. The mountain drew him like a magnet.

  God. Why did I do this? His legs were heavy. Every breath felt like his last. When people asked him what was the worst bit of a run, the answer was always the same: the first mile.

  The road wound up a hill and then turned into track. He’d to vault a gate and then zigzag along the path through the Forestry Commission. Even after a dry spring, it was a place of pine cones, moist earth and secrets trembling among the evergreens.

  His breathing became more assured. Sharp-IN-huh-huh-and-OUT-huh-huh… His legs gave under the soft ground. An affronted blackbird clucked a warning. Pieces of the last twenty-four hours hovered in his head. Uncle Tally and the flask of sweet black tea. Mam and the bent pencil in the water. Da coming in and flinging down the Roscillin Star. The girls and their flushed faces. And again, the clods of turf, the cut, the white, jutting bone, the gleam of gold. And the spools on the finger-pads.

  You’re fine and dandy as you are. That’s what my mam said.

  The childlike voice of his dreams came back to him as he broke from the forest cover, up onto the high ground.

  Running on the spot, he turned round. Drumleash was way below. An arm of the lough curled away into haze. He whooped out loud at the joy of being above it all.

  Freedom. This is what it feels like.

  He could pick up a minor, dead-end road if he circled the hill, or he could head straight up and over, but this meant scrambling rather than running over rocks and gorse. He wanted to keep the steady rhythm, so he made for the road. It involved passing a border checkpoint, but it was seldom attended.

  He hopped over a stream to get to the tarmac. The watercourse had dwindled to the size of a pipeline. He splashed his face and drank some scoops. Once on the road, he picked up pace. He could hear the wind whistle past his ears, mixed up with faint baas of sheep. Above, a flock of birds drifted like bits of ash. He smiled. He was five miles into the run. This was the magic middle of things, where moving felt the same as staying still.

  He approached the border checkpoint, a tiny wooden hut. He was so used to passing it with nobody challenging him, he got a shock to see a silhouette, rifle in hand.

  He slowed as he drew near. It was the pale, freckly young man he’d seen on duty the day before on the main road.

  ‘Hi there,’ the soldier called.

  ‘Hi,’ he said. He stopped, but kept his running legs going.

  ‘D’you have ID?’ the soldier said.

  Fergus panted. ‘No. I’ve nothing on me, just the door key. I’m out running.’

  The soldier smiled, his blue eyes crinkling. ‘You’re not the kind of traffic I was expecting.’

  ‘I’m not exactly gun-running,’ he said, putting his hands in the air. ‘Honest to God.’

  ‘I can see that.’ The soldier slung the rifle over his back. ‘Not a petrol bomb in sight.’

  Fergus let his arms drop.

  ‘You a Catholic or a Prod?’ the soldier asked.

  ‘What difference does it make?’

  ‘No difference. Just curious.’ His accent was hard to place, flat but with a catch at the end of each phrase.

  ‘I’m Irish. And Catholic. Only I don’t believe a bloody word.’

  The soldier grinned. ‘I’m a Pentecostalist. Which means you’ll burn in hell.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Don’t worry. ’S nothing personal. The Queen will too by our reckoning.’ The lad shrugged. ‘Anyway, I’m a fallen Pentecostalist. I’m off to hell too.’

  ‘That’s religion for you,’ said Fergus.

  ‘Yep. Bollocks.’

  ‘Crapology.’

  Fergus remembered that by Drumleash standards he was fraternizing with the enemy. But up here in the open, wild space it didn’t seem to matter. ‘You’re one side of the border,’ he said, drawing an imaginary line in the air. ‘And I’m the other. And please may I cross?’

  ‘Red rover, red rover, I’ll let you come over.’

  The lad stood back and beckoned Fergus up the road.

  Fergus passed. His teeth bit into his lip as he felt the boy’s eyes on his back. He turned.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

  The soldier shrugged.

  ‘You’re not supposed to tell me?’

  ‘I’m Owain, if you must know.’

  ‘Owen?’

  ‘O-wain. Spelled the Welsh way.’

  ‘You’re Welsh?’

  ‘From the Valleys.’

>   ‘The Valleys?’

  ‘Where the coal mines are.’

  Fergus nodded as if he knew where that was, although he didn’t. ‘I’m Fergus.’

  ‘Fergus? Isn’t that Scottish?’

  ‘It’s Scottish and Irish. I’m named after an Irish high king.’

  ‘Oh. Be seeing you, Your Majesty.’

  Fergus grinned and saluted. He ran on up the road. Even though he knew it wasn’t so, in his imagination the soldier was taking aim at the spot between his shoulder blades. He glanced back. The lad was lounged against the shed, his pale face lit in the sun, the gun nowhere to be seen.

  They’d cut you in ribbons for that below, he thought. Up here on the mountain, the Troubles didn’t seem to count. You could talk to whomever you pleased. He smiled. His legs were going strong again and the minor road fed him up to its final turning point. Then it was straight on along a ridgeway. Leitrim in its green trim came into view, and then the track arced back, so that Fermanagh, grey and flat, reappeared. Something about the lay of the land led him to the furthest brow, the place where on a map there’d be a triangulation point to mark the highest bit of land. From here it was a short diversion over bracken and bog-land to where the abandoned JCB sat silent and crooked on the slope. Taut yellow tape marked the cut. He ran up close. Over the body, a great tarpaulin had been erected. Dew glinted on the bog grasses like cut diamonds.

  He looked at his watch: 7:48.

  Including his stretching exercises and chatting to the sentry, he’d been running for just over an hour. But how much ground he’d covered, he did not know. He smiled. The drive had taken half an hour: you had to go all around the houses to get here. The milometer said fourteen miles. Maybe today he’d run as much as seven already, and given it had been all uphill, he’d done well.

  The tarpaulin around the bog child was pinned down. The place had an expectant feel to it. The archaeologists were on their way and the girl inside was waiting. He put his hand to the khaki-green side, itching to see what lay within. But the tarpaulin was weighted down and seamless. It was wrong to disturb her.

  He turned back and picked his way down the mountain, avoiding the sentry box. He sprang over the turf like a rabbit on anabolic steroids. From the west, swaths of tarnished cloud moved in. By the time he was back in the Forestry Commission, a steady drizzle had rolled in, cooling him. He lapped at the raindrops with his tongue and whooped.