But then, before uncrumpling it, stopped. He had said so painfully, This really hurts. Sounding almost angry with her, as if she didn’t – couldn’t – possibly understand . . . Eyes blurry, she shoved his number back in her pocket again. If this situation was hurting him anywhere near as much as it was hurting her, she should let him go . . . Oh God. She needed to talk to someone who loved her in a simple, uncomplicated way . . .
Carla.
Carla should be back from school by now.
Aoife didn’t have to scroll for the number – it was the only one stored so far. Carla picked up on the second ring. ‘Hi, Carl!’
‘Jessica, hi! You’ve got a new phone!’
‘It’s Aoife, ya fool.’
‘How are you feeling, Jessica? Any better?’
‘It’s Aoife. Are you in?’
‘Hang on . . .’ Carla’s voice faded into the background, then came back. ‘Sorry, Jessica, we’re just about to eat so you can’t come round.’
‘Carla, it’s Aoife.’
Another pause, longer this time. At the other end of the phone, the sound of movement, a door closing. Aoife, her phone to her ear, got off her bike and leaned it against the five-barred gate.
When Carla spoke again, it was very quietly. ‘Are you still there?’
‘Yes. This is Aoife, by the way.’
‘I know that.’
‘Well, that’s a relief. So, what’s going on?’
Another pause, and more movement. A tap running. Clearly Carla was in the toilet, and running water to cover her voice. She came back on the phone. ‘To be honest, my mam’s a bit angry with you. I’ve tried telling her you were in a mental hospital and Shay only found you two days ago, but she still thinks you and him probably spent the whole five months together because of how you left at the same time and came back at the same time, and so now she thinks you’re still lying to me and that’s made her even angrier and now she says I can’t see you at all. Sorry.’
A feeling of resigned sadness swept over Aoife. Since junior infants, Carla’s house had been Aoife’s ‘other home’. Almost every other day she had eaten or even slept there. Dianne Heffernan even liked to joke that she was Aoife’s ‘other mammy’. But now Dianne, as well as Maeve, felt the need to protect her human daughter from this strange, unknown girl who was Aoife.
‘Oh, I see.’
Carla said, ‘Obviously, I will see you . . .’
‘Well, obviously.’
‘But just not here. Are you well enough to leave your house?’
‘Carla, I’m not really that ill . . .’
‘Of course you’re not – not any more, just so long as you take your medication! Have you taken it today?’
Aoife sighed. Maeve thought this was a good thing. ‘Yes.’
‘Perfect! Then you’ll be grand. I’m going to Killian’s in an hour – why don’t you meet me there, if your mam thinks you’re OK to be out by yourself? I’ve explained it all to him as well, and I’ve told him you’re not scarily mad, and you’re getting over it anyway, and he’s really sympathetic. So we don’t have to talk about it at all – we can just hang out and chat about normal stuff.’
‘Oh, Carla . . .’ She did so want to see her, but the thought of meeting Killian made her cringe. Whether the builder’s son believed Carla or Dianne, either way he was bound to find the whole Aoife thing pretty damn hilarious – however ‘sympathetic’ he was pretending to be for Carla’s sake. ‘I’d love to hang out, but not tonight.’
Carla sighed. ‘OK, I guess it is a bit too soon for you to be out and about in the normal worl— Ha ha, in Kilduff, I mean.’
‘Sure.’
‘No, wait, don’t go yet – listen. Listen.’
‘I’m still here.’
‘About Mam. She loves you. She’s just – hurt, you know? And trying to protect me even though she’s completely wrong.’
‘I know.’
‘Aoife . . . ?’
‘Yes?’
‘She’ll come round when she realizes you really, really believe you’re a fairy. And she won’t mind that – it’s not like she’s not used to it with Auntie Ellie. And even if everyone else thinks you ran off with Shay, they’ll get over it. As soon as you’re feeling completely better, you and me, Killian and Shay – we’ll all go out together. As a foursome. People will get used to it. They get used to anything in Kilduff, and they’re only delighted to have life made interesting for them. What do you think?’
Aoife’s heart swelled with sorrow. She opened her mouth to say, Me and Shay, we’re not seeing each other any more. Because it really hurts.
‘Aoife?’
‘It’s OK. I’ll call you later. Bye . . .’
Carla cried anxiously, ‘Hey, wait!’
‘What?’
‘I love you!’
‘Love you too, Carl.’
‘Take care of yourself. Don’t forget to take your medication. And if your mam says it’s OK for you to be out, I’ll be at Killian’s . . .’
As soon as Aoife got off the phone, she saw she’d received several texts from Maeve. Instead of reading them, she leaned her folded arms on the top bar of the gate, staring across the field. The rain had stopped for a while, and all was glimmering. There were sheep: peaceful humps of doing nothing. A strip of brighter grass ran across the far side of the field, from ditch to distant gate. The fairy road, cutting its way from her parents’ house across the land towards the distant mountains and the hawthorn pool. Blocked only by Lois Munnelly’s new-built bungalow, on the far side of the Clonbarra road. If she wanted to follow the fairy road all the way . . .
She supposed she would have to knock on Lois’s front door and ask permission to walk through the house.
But that would be too weird. And she didn’t want to go back.
She didn’t want to go home either, not right now. She got on her bike, and travelled on.
She didn’t take the fairy road, but somehow she found herself back at the hawthorn circle, anyway – heading left for Clonbarra then cutting right up the ancient bog road; dumping her bike on the verge; following the stony track across the bog; climbing the sheep-trodden pathways of the hill. The circle of tightly woven thorns was even more bare of leaves than when she and Shay had come home this way yesterday. The red berries had shrivelled in the cutting October wind. The thorns didn’t want to let her through, but she put up her hood, and pushed and struggled her way in – tearing strips out of her hoodie and trackie bottoms.
Inside, the black pool lay flat, surrounded by the blossoms of last summer. Sprinkled with the tiny brown boats of curling leaves. She lay flat on her stomach, on the rotting blossoms – the stench was rich and sickly – and, after a moment’s hesitation, dipped in her hand. And arm. Up to the elbow, before she could feel the soft mud.
Then sat up, wiping the mud off her hand onto the dead leaves.
Down.
But the pool was closed to her, as it had been before – back in May – when she’d seen the lost child out on the bog and chased after her into the hawthorn circle. Eva had been gone by the time she reached the pool, and by then the water had been shallow . . .
And that, she realized suddenly, was strange.
Caitlin and Ultan had been drawn back to the otherworld by their sheógs – the human children for whom they’d been exchanged. Ultan had ‘drowned’ in a bog pool and Caitlin in a well, before waking up again in the Land of the Young. Yet when she herself had followed Eva, her own sheóg, the pool had stayed closed to her. Why? Was it because Shay had already been in love with her – his desire protecting her from Dorocha?
He says he loves but cannot stay . . .
Oh, it was cruel.
Down.
She pulled off her trainers and trackie bottoms and slipped her feet into the pool. And stood up. It came to her knees. Her toes curled in the soft mud. She walked from one side to the other. It was a little deeper in the middle – halfway up her thighs. She dug around with her foo
t. Somewhere here was a gateway to the Land of the Young, that paradise buried beneath the wilds of Connacht. The world to which she belonged. The world where her fairy mother would not have shrunk from her, as Maeve had done, as if Aoife’s power was a dark and frightening thing . . .
If she could only remember her fairy mother, just a little.
Down.
But when she tried, here and now, standing at the gate between the worlds, only terrible memories and thoughts arose. The queen’s silver blood, spangled across the black sheets of her bed in the crystal minaret. Stabbed by the Beloved, in his jealous rage.
Down.
The red blood of the priest, her mother’s lover, running for ever down the city walls. Murdered by the Beloved, and blamed for her mother’s death.
Down.
(Dorocha the Beloved. His midnight eyes.)
Shivering, she climbed out of the pool, dried her legs on her trackies and pulled them damply on again.
On the way back along the Clonbarra road towards Kilduff, speeding through the deepening dusk, she passed yet another large outcrop of hawthorn – she hadn’t noticed it earlier, but now there was a tractor parked in the road beside it and there were two farmers – one of whom she didn’t recognize, but the other was Declan Sweeney – regarding the large tree in the beam of the tractor’s headlights. As she neared them – slowing down to look normal – Declan was saying: ‘But it must have been here before. And you can’t chop it down even if it is after being in the way of the gate – it’s pure bad luck.’
‘Well, maybe it isn’t hawthorn.’
‘It is, Eoghan.’
‘Then how is there mistletoe with him? I’ve never seen a mistletoe wrap himself around a hawthorn tree.’
Aoife slowed down even further. Something flickered in her mind from yesterday: throwing aside the crown of hawthorn and mistletoe as she and Shay walked down this road. But it had been such a little, little thing . . .
Declan Sweeney suddenly noticed her watching and smiled shyly. ‘Welcome home, Aoife. Still love the lambs?’
Declan Sweeney always said the same thing to her, Still love the lambs? He’d brought a lamb to the house once, for her mother to show her – a long time ago, when she was very sick. Although of course, she knew now that child hadn’t been her. That had been the real Eva. The human child.
She bicycled on, through the purple dusk.
Halfway down the boreen, headlights suddenly threw Aoife’s shadow in front of her, and a horn beeped. She looked over her shoulder, then coasted into a gateway to allow her father’s Citroën to pass. He pulled up beside her, and stuck his head out of the window. ‘Thank the Lord – I’ve been all over Mayo and I thought I was going to have to go home to your mother without having found you. She’s been really, really worried about you.’ By the shake in his voice, it was quite clear that he’d been really, really worried himself.
‘It’s only about six.’
‘And dark. You’ve no lights on your bike – it’s not safe, my love.’
‘It wasn’t so dark when I left the house.’
‘Because you’ve been gone for hours. Aoife, we love you so much. Please don’t do this to us, running off without telling us where you’re going.’
‘I’m back now, aren’t I?’
‘You are, and don’t ever be afraid to come home. If the guards come, we’ll think of something to tell them, we’ll sort it out—’
A flash of frustration. ‘That wasn’t why I went out! There’s nothing to sort! I’ve sorted it already! The guards won’t come, because I did a deal with that woman and she has to stick to it! I told Mam that and she must have told you. Why won’t you both believe me?’ She was tempted to jerk the bike round and go powering off again.
As if he’d guessed her thoughts, he scrambled out of the small green car – with difficulty, as always, because he was far too big for it. ‘Stop, stop! Of course we believe you . . .’
She shrugged off his clumsy attempt at an embrace. ‘No you don’t! Maybe I should go back to the fairy world, where people understand magic . . .’
This time he refused to let her push him away, hugging her so tight she was squashed out of enough breath for speaking, and for a long while not saying anything himself. Until, in a voice thick with tears: ‘What do you mean, where you belong? This is where you belong! Oh, darling child. Come home to us. Come home.’
*
Maeve also held her for a long, long time on her return.
But still, there was tension in the house. Her father constantly going to the door to look out. Her mother flinching at every gust of wind in the trees. Nervously expecting the guards to arrive.
Later, in her room, Aoife pulled out her phone to read through her mother’s texts from earlier. All of them saying how much Maeve loved her.
There was also one from Carla, received only minutes before, which somehow she hadn’t noticed – this phone had a different and softer alert noise than her old one: she would have to turn it up.
at Killians, he says if you’re allowed, come round ☺☺☺
Killian was obviously keen to have a laugh at her expense. Another text popped in before she could think of a diplomatic reply:
he says he’ll keep quiet and go in another room and wont get in the way of us talking ☺☺☺
To her surprise, Aoife found herself beginning to think she had underestimated the builder’s son. After all, here he was with Carla, still going out with her after five months – nearly five months longer than he’d been in any previous relationship. And he was saying he’d keep out of her and Aoife’s way, just to please Carla. Well, good for him. But still, he was Killian . . . She texted:
no, you’re grand. ☺☺☺
And Carla replied:
ok if you not feeling the best ☹ love ya! ☺☺☺ stay safe I’ll see you tomorrow xxxxxxxxxxxx
While Aoife had the phone in her hand, she decided to input the number Shay had given her. Just in case. She dug out the piece of paper, then noticed there was something on the other side and unfolded it. It opened into an A4 painting of a girl with red-gold hair.
Her heart grew hot. The last time she’d seen this picture, Shay had seized the artist’s sketchpad from her and tossed it into the back seat of the old red Ford, saying: You don’t want to be looking at my old rubbish.
Why had he given her this? Had he wanted to show Aoife how much he cared about her? Or was he just getting rid of everything that could remind him of her?
Well, she was keeping this – it was beautiful.
In her still ridiculously tidy desk drawer was a roll of sticky tape. She stuck the picture to a clean patch of wall below her windowsill, picked up her guitar and sat facing it. The girl in the picture had her back to the artist, but she was unavoidably Aoife – and running up the hill towards the hawthorn circle, exactly the place where she’d just been.
She ran her fingers over the strings of her guitar, thinking of the lyric that had come to her earlier:
Around your wrist, a narrow line
of paler skin
because you once were mine . . .
And then added:
The windswept cliffs, the cool grey sea,
It hurts me when he looks at me
The words kept rising into her mind, like grey gulls over the edge of a cliff:
Looks at me and looks away
Saying he loves
but cannot stay
But finally, gazing at the picture right before her instead of at the picture in her head, she returned to the first lyric she had ever written about him:
I dream of this:
Under the hawthorns he raises me with a kiss . . .
The first lyric, and the truest.
CHAPTER SIX
‘How about some Weetabix and a banana? It’s so much healthier for you. You can’t live on sugar.’
‘Hector wants . . .’
Aoife rolled her eyes, and reached down the Coco Pops. She took the Weetabix
packet for herself and threw five into the bowl – she was always starving these days – and chopped in three bananas. ‘Come on, Eva – look at me, I’m eating loads of the healthy stuff for my breakfast.’
‘Don’t care!’
‘Don’t you want to grow up into a big strong girl like me?’
‘No! I want to stay the way I am for ever!’
Aoife paused, in the act of slopping milk into her bowl. ‘Really? Just four years old for ever?’
‘Yes!’
‘You don’t want to grow up?’
‘No, I’m a good girl, and Morfesa said I could stay the way I am for ever if came to his party . . .’ Eva hesitated, and looked confused, casting a glance around the kitchen as if expecting the old druid from the Land of the Young to suddenly appear in his white robes.
‘What party, honey?’ It was the first time the little girl had even spoken of the fairy world since coming home.
‘Nothing! I want cartoons!’ Eva shoved her bowl aside, scrambled down to the floor and disappeared into the hall, Hector tucked under her arm.
Aoife found her in the back room, furiously attempting to turn the television on by pressing a non-existent button – the way she must have learned to turn it on eleven years ago. ‘Here.’ Aoife found the remote, and got up a cartoon on Netflix. Eva scrambled into the deep wing-back armchair by the bookcase, and sat with her legs stretched out, heels just over the edge of the cushion.
Leaning on the back of the chair, Aoife looked down at the little girl’s blonde curls and wondered what Morfesa had said to Eva. Clearly, something about never growing up – but what was special about that, in the Land of the Young? Everyone there stayed the age they were, unless they were sent to the human world. She herself would still be only four years old if she’d remained at her fairy mother’s side. And with that thought came another memory of the queen – not a real memory, but one given her by Dorocha.
The Dark Beloved Page 6