by Siobhan Dowd
Fergus nodded. ‘She said to make yourselves at home.’
‘How’ve you all been?’
‘Fine. Thanks for the card.’ He looked at Cora. Her eyelashes fluttered.
‘It was nothing,’ Felicity said. ‘Come on, Cora. We’ve to dash into Roscillin straight away. Professor Taylor’s organized the meeting there. Can you join us, Fergus?’
Fergus thought of the phone, ready to ring at any time with news of Joe. ‘How long will it be?’
‘A couple of hours. That’s all.’
‘Then yes. I’ll come.’
Cora got in the back seat of the Renault, saying nothing. She sat to the side, propped up in the corner. She might as well have been on planet Pluto. Felicity chatted on as she drove. Fergus’s mind wandered.
‘What’s your opinion, Fergus?’
‘Sorry. What?’
‘D’you think we’d be better off burying her?’
‘Who?’
‘Mel, of course.’
Fergus felt foolish. ‘Maybe.’
‘I think the idea of displaying her is despicable.’ It was Cora’s voice, almost the first thing she’d said since arriving.
Felicity’s hands rose from the steering wheel. ‘Professor Taylor wants her in a museum case, for all to see. I want her kept privately, not for public view. In a few years’ time there’ll be all sorts of new tests we can’t do now. A burial would be a waste. Wouldn’t it?’
A burial would be a waste. Fergus thought of cells breaking down, transforming themselves into other kinds of life. He thought of the plot under the great Scots pine. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said.
Nothing more was said. Sunlight streamed down as they drove around the lough. The water was clear and inviting.
‘Don’t people ever swim in it?’ Cora asked.
‘The lough?’
‘Yes. The weather’s warm enough.’
Fergus turned, smiling. ‘The water’s icy,’ he said, ‘in all weathers. It’s deep. And full of monsters.’
‘Ha-ha. I think I’ll try it later.’
‘You’d freeze,’ Felicity said. ‘I don’t want you going down with another cold.’
‘I won’t get another cold. Besides—’
‘Joe and I used to swim in it,’ Fergus said to stop the mounting argument. ‘But then we were nutters, the pair of us.’
‘Joe?’ Cora asked.
‘My brother.’
‘I didn’t know you had a brother.’
‘I have.’ But for how much longer? Fergus stared out of the window, grimacing. Two white bombshells flew down and hit the water surface. The swans were back again.
‘Where is he?’
Fergus nearly said Rome, then thought better of it. ‘London.’ He turned round to face Cora. ‘The water gave us ice-cream headaches,’ he said. ‘You know. The kind where the top of your nose and temples hurt.’
‘Ouch. Maybe I’ll stick to the Mediterranean.’
The atmosphere in the car lightened, as if a fresh front had come in. They drove into Roscillin town.
‘We’re meeting in the main hotel,’ Felicity said. ‘Do you know it?’
‘The Roscillin Arms?’ It was a Protestant hangout if ever there was one. A Catholic wouldn’t normally be seen dead in the place. ‘It’s on the high street. You can’t miss it.’
‘Professor Taylor and I have prepared a slideshow in the conference room. Today and tomorrow afternoon we’re running over all the finds, discussing our theories. We’ve two government men coming up, one from Dublin, the other from Belfast. Plus we’ll be thrashing out where Mel should go now we’ve finished the investigations. North or south.’
‘Or underground,’ added Cora.
They got out in the hotel car park, round the back of the building. It gave onto a pretty garden that Fergus had never seen before. A well-kept lawn was dotted with young crab-apple trees. Around the edge ran a stream, over which two tiny wooden bridges beckoned.
‘Mam?’ Cora said. ‘Can I come in in five minutes? I want to see the garden.’
‘OK. There’s time. What about you, Fergus?’
Fergus grinned foolishly. ‘Maybe I’ll show Cora around.’
Felicity raised an eyebrow. The garden was minute. She smiled. ‘Fine. See you soon.’ She strode away, a black briefcase with golden clip-locks under her arm.
‘Anyone else walking into that hotel with that briefcase…’ Fergus said.
‘What?’
‘They’d be strip-searched.’
Cora stared at him. ‘You’re not serious?’
‘Yes. This hotel–it’s strictly a Unionist affair.’
‘Unionist?’ Her eyebrows nudged up against her fringe.
The way Cora had dragged out the ‘U’ of ‘Unionist’ was worse than her rolled ‘r’s. Felicity’s jaunty figure vanished around the corner.
‘Christ, Cora.’
Her arms were folded across her waist, but her eyes goaded him on. He made a grab, she dodged, feinted, then he caught her. Soon his mouth and arms and lungs and ribcage were full of her. A hard knot in his belly exploded. The old Cora was back, laughing and mocking him. He lifted her off the ground. She thumped his back and shook herself free. Next she’d scampered off over one of the little bridges. He chased after her, caught a handful of her T-shirt and pinned her to himself. ‘Cora.’
‘Fergus. Just the one.’
‘One good one?’
‘OK.’
The one good one over, Fergus fanned his face. ‘H’lo there, Kissus Maximus.’
‘H’lo there, Resumus. We’d better go in.’
‘OK.’ When they got round to the entrance, Fergus gripped her elbow. ‘Cora,’ he whispered, wiggling his eyebrows.
‘What?’
‘What d’you call a fellow who used to be mad-crazy for tractors and isn’t any more?’
Thirty-nine
The hum of the hotel kitchen’s extractor fan came in through the open window. Professor Taylor had closed the curtains to darken the room and they sat in two semicircle rows, watching a progression of slides. There were shots of the bog, a cross-section of the soil, a view of the cut, then of Mel’s body, first as Fergus had found it, then after it had been transported to the abattoir.
Then came the close-ups: the bangle, the spools of the fingertips, the tiny slit on Mel’s back, the bonnet with its strings, a close-up sample of her shift. The weft of the fabric was subtle, clearly a thing made by hand.
‘The bangle alone,’ Felicity said, ‘would have constituted a major discovery. It is beautifully made, slender, and of a style the expert has recognized as similar to another find, from France. Or, as it was then called, Gaul.’
There was a collective intake of breath. ‘It’s not Irish?’ the man from Dublin said, sounding put-out.
Felicity tilted her head. ‘Celtic, rather than Irish, perhaps.’
‘Celtic is an umbrella term,’ Professor Taylor interjected. ‘But in reality the swirls and spirals and crosses we think of as quintessentially Celtic reappear in designs all around the world.’
Quintessentially? The man was on his academic high-horse. All pretence of collaboration was gone. The room bristled with archaeological rivalry. Felicity and the Belfast professor, the best of friends normally, were each trying to outdo the other and emerge as the legitimate authority on Mel.
‘The bangle is older than Mel,’ Felicity said. ‘It was a precious thing, handed down perhaps from mother to daughter. Who knows? Perhaps Mel’s own mother gave it to her just prior to her execution.’
‘You mean sacrifice,’ Professor Taylor countered. ‘And the idea of her mother giving it to her is just romantic speculation.’
‘Where do you think the bangle came from?’
‘I don’t make any assumptions. But I’d say it was a precious object belonging to the tribe or clan as a whole. Their putting it on the victim’s wrist was part of the ritual of sacrifice.’
‘If it was a sacrifice,’ Felicit
y said.
‘The stomach contents! The place where she was found. It fits the Iron-Age pattern.’
‘Maybe. But in my opinion, we’ll never know for sure. We know how Mel met her death. We may never know why.’
The next picture was of the love knot Mel had held in her hand. ‘It’s hard to resist seeing this as a token from somebody Mel loved,’ Felicity said. ‘For me, this was almost the most exciting find of all. It’s an instance, surely, of a continuity of sensibility over the centuries. Love knots such as these were popular until Victorian times. Maybe soon they’ll have another vogue.’
There was spellbound silence. The next picture on the screen was of Mel’s face. Fergus was struck again by its serenity.
‘She’s a beauty,’ Professor Taylor said, as if talking of a pet pony.
Felicity pointed a ruler to where a strand of hair had escaped the bonnet. ‘We can’t be sure of her hair colour. A quality of the bog has reddened it. But from a dissection of the hair strands, we think she may have been fair-haired.’
‘Pale-skinned, blue-eyed, fair-haired,’ Professor Taylor rhapsodized.
‘An artist colleague of mine,’ Felicity interrupted, ‘has drawn a picture of Mel, an impression of how she looked when alive.’
She shifted on to the next slide. You could have heard a pin drop. Fergus leaned forward, gripping the edge of his chair. A charcoal drawing appeared on the screen, showing a young, merry girl, bonnet half on, half off. Something of her dwarfism was apparent in the round vitality of her expression, or maybe in the way her arms and shoulders made the head seem a little larger than life. The artist had captured the essence of the dead girl’s visage.
‘Oh my God,’ he whispered. ‘That’s her. Mel.’
Cora’s hand briefly found his and squeezed it. She leaned over and whispered, ‘D’you like it?’
‘Yes.’
‘I did it.’ The words were just loud enough for the silent room to overhear.
Felicity chuckled. ‘I should say the artist in question was Cora O’Brien. My daughter.’
There was a round of enthused clapping.
Professor Taylor cleared his throat. ‘To cut to the chase,’ he said, ‘our various radiocarbon-dating procedures gave us the year that Mel was killed as AD eighty. Early Roman times, as far as Britain was concerned.’
‘But not for Ireland,’ Felicity said. ‘Tacitus reports his father-in-law, Agricola, as saying that “Hibernia” could be conquered easily, but that the collective Roman will was not there. Ireland, although a trading partner of the empire from early times, was never colonized. The borderland between our current counties of Leitrim and Fermanagh was largely unaffected by the changes under way in Britain.’
‘How accurate is the date?’ someone asked.
‘There’s a margin of error, always,’ Professor Taylor said. ‘But we did two separate tests. We dendro-dated a wooden stump found nearby, which we think may have been part of the gallows from which the girl was hanged. Remarkably, they both came out at the same year. The Iron-Age date, the noose, the burial in the bog all point to a pattern of human sacrifice, prevalent at this time.’
‘But why?’ The government man from Belfast spoke. ‘Was it some primitive religious thing?’
There was silence.
‘I don’t think so,’ Felicity said. ‘I think religion was just the façade. As it sometimes is today.’ There was a tense silence. Professor Taylor clicked the slideshow on to a final artist’s impression done in charcoal. Cora had drawn an Iron-Age village: round huts, a fire, dogs, penned animals, people walking around in simple robes and skins. He snorted as if it was the Hollywood version of the time, a far cry from reality.
‘There is probably more to Mel’s story than we’ll ever know,’ Felicity continued. ‘My guess is that some crime within the clan was committed at a time of terrible hunger and want. And Mel, by virtue of her dwarfism, was scapegoated.’
The quiet man from the North cleared his throat. ‘Interesting. But is there evidence?’
Felicity nodded. ‘Some. I looked up several ancient sources and discovered that there are reports of a severe winter in AD eighty or thereabouts–a protracted winter, one commentator said, with “fogs and red rain” across much of Europe. And Mel’s stomach revealed a poor-quality last meal. And there is other evidence of malnourishment. I am sure that her death was related to an ancient famine.’
Two sparks collided in Fergus’s mind. ‘I have it!’ he exclaimed from the back.
People whispered, turning round.
‘I should have introduced Fergus McCann,’ Felicity said. ‘He is the lad who discovered Mel and stopped the JCB from going in and destroying her. We are all in his debt.’
There was another round of clapping.
‘What were you going to say, Fergus?’ Felicity said.
Fergus’s ears burned. But he got the word out. ‘Pompeii.’
Professor Taylor flipped to the next slide, which was blank. A rectangle of plain yellow light brightened the white screen.
‘Pompeii?’ Felicity said, puzzled.
‘AD seventy-nine, the year before. Don’t you see?’
There was silence. Something dawned on Felicity’s face.
‘You mean—’
‘Volcanoes are famous for producing severe winters afterwards.’ Fergus’s voice stumbled over itself with eagerness. ‘The high content of sulphur in the atmosphere blocks the sun. If the prevailing winds brought the volcanic ash northwards, it might have been the cause of the bad winter you spoke about. The one in which Mel died.’
Felicity whistled through her teeth. ‘You mean, indirectly, Mel might have been another victim of Vesuvius?’
‘Poppycock! Mere speculation!’ exploded Professor Taylor. The room erupted, almost as if it was a volcano itself, with loud exclamations, chatterings, chair-scrapings.
Cora’s elbow nudged Fergus’s, making every little hair on his arm stand upright. ‘Now you’ve done it,’ she chortled. ‘They’re all at loggerheads.’
Arguments were breaking out everywhere. The government representatives, Professor Taylor, and the teams of student collaborators seemed to be beside themselves. Somebody turned the lights on, another person opened the curtains. Cora tugged his arm. He thought of the neat little bridges over the stream where they had kissed, then of the long, hard winter that had ended in Mel’s death, the ash spewed from the faraway volcano, wreaking havoc directly and indirectly. ‘The meeting will resume tomorrow,’ Professor Taylor bellowed over the rising din. People shifted from their chairs. Felicity sorted out her papers and put them back into her briefcase. Across the room, her eyes met Fergus’s. Her lips twitched. She winked. Then she mouthed three words. We did it.
‘Let’s go,’ whispered Cora. ‘Before the stampede.’
Forty
There was time for a hurried kiss out by the crab-apple trees, then Cora pushed him away. ‘Mam will catch us,’ she hissed.
‘Would it matter?’ asked Fergus.
‘Dunno. Maybe. Maybe not.’
Then Felicity appeared, beaming. She invited Fergus to the archaeologists’ evening meal. He pictured the phone in the hall at home, ready to ring any time with news of Joe and nobody there to hear it. He was suddenly exhausted.
‘I’ve things I have to do,’ he lied. ‘I’ll catch the bus back to Drumleash.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Certain.’
Cora’s face was impervious, as if the kissing in the hotel garden had never been. ‘See you later,’ she said. They exchanged glances. Something unsaid flashed in her eyes, but what it was he could not decipher.
On the bus home, the road had never seemed twistier nor his fellow passengers more raucous. Three girls were taking off Abba songs with bad Swedish accents. A gang of lads shoved each other in the aisles. He’d a sense of the whole planet teetering, seesawing, nobody knowing or caring where they’d end up. The slideshow flickered in his head, image after image of Mel–her
wounds, her clothes, the remnants of her forgotten life. Click. The spools on her fingertips. Click. Her love knot. Click. Her laughing, living face. Click. Joe swimming in the lough, squealing with the cold. Click. Joe in his prison cot, an emaciated hand hanging down. And at last the shining blank, the empty rectangle of light.
Joe, he thought. Don’t go.
But in a terrible moment he felt Joe slipping from him, beyond the reach of pleas or arguments, prayers or priests. Nothing could bring him back. The bus took a tight corner. The passengers clung to the rails. There was laughter, exclamations. A grapefruit from someone’s shopping rolled down the gangway. The mountain crumbled to earth, inch by inch.
It’s only a matter of time, Fergus thought. For everything, everywhere.
The lough surface shivered, as if in fear of its final evaporation. He imagined Joe’s emaciated arm rising from the water, like the hand that caught Excalibur when King Arthur died. The gleaming limb held the sword by the hilt and waved a last farewell. Then metal and flesh sank into the deep, never more to be seen in this world.
‘Oh, Joe,’ he whispered. ‘Joe.’
Forty-one
The phone call from the prison came at seven o’clock. Tea had been cleared away. Da sat with the Roscillin Star in his chair, tapping his foot on the lino. Mam was drying the last glass. She put it down on the draining board.
‘You get it, Fergus,’ she whispered.
Fergus went to the hall and picked up the phone. His teeth were clenched. His heart shrank into itself like a frightened animal.
‘H’lo?’ he managed.
‘Is that Mr McCann?’
‘It’s Fergus McCann.’
‘It’s the prison doctor here.’
Fergus grimaced, winding the receiver wire in and out of his fingers.
‘It’s about Joe.’
‘Is he alive?’
‘He is. But there’s been a change.’
A change of heart. A change of plan. What change?
‘He’s passed into a coma.’
‘A coma?’