by Paul Lynch
THE CITY ENCLOSED in a tumult of rain. The bustle of the streets quietened down as people sought reprieve, huddled in doorways and under eaves where they cursed the weather or hid beneath the dripping tarpaulins of marketeers. They watched too with suspicion the fleeing figure of Coyle, wondered what kind of trouble he was up to, and no sooner was he gone than they were arrested by the sight of another, a towering man in pursuit hardly running at all it seemed but walking.
Coyle turned upon the butchers’ shambles and pushed into the crowd, a runnel of offal gut and blood veining at his feet. A man with a knife stood sharpening it on stone, his cheeks blazing like fresh red chops, and he looked at Coyle, watched him suck on shallow breath as he stood by his stall and then he turned again to his stone. Coyle pressed on, threaded the thin crowd, past the entreaties of butchers and the marbled sarcophagi of hanging carcass meat and went in the direction of Bishop Street towards the gate that would lead him south out of the city. He looked behind him and a carriage swung in front of him and then he saw Macken standing sentry under the archway. Coyle stopped dead in the street, two small boys beside him rolling bottles, and he stared at Macken but the man was nosing a newspaper and Coyle turned on his heels, ran down a narrow street where the bustle of the city took reprieve in its shaded silence and he tried the brass handle of a door and found that it opened into an unlit empty room and he stole inside and stood there.
HE WATCHED THE CUTTER leave the tavern with his head tilted in laughter and he followed him down the street. The rain had worn away the lingering fingers of fog and the sun strode sharply. The Cutter was talking to another man as Coyle stole alongside him, took him by the elbow, come here a minute he said, and steered the man incredulous off the street. The Cutter waved to the other man and he followed Coyle who took frequent watch over his shoulder.
Yer some fella for running off, said The Cutter.
I need yer help.
I can’t give you no money.
I need you to get me a ticket for a boat. I’m paying so I am.
Which one?
Any one. The first one that’s leaving. Here.
Coyle took out a wad of notes and put a five-pound note into The Cutter’s hand. He stood looking at the money. The difference is for yourself. Coyle closed the man’s hand around the money. Just go over to one of the agencies and get me a ticket for the first boat that’s sailing. I donny care where for.
Where’ll I find ye?
By that wooden hut over there.
The Cutter looked at Coyle and tipped his cap. Just for you, he said. Seeing as I know that you’re not from Ballymagan. Hoor of a place. Wouldna do nothin there for nobody.
HE SAT ON A BOX, hiding by the wall of a redbrick warehouse among barrels and boxes, and bunkered down into coughing. His coat was hitched over his head against the slanted rain. The Foyle now divested of fog and the water leaning north like an invitation. He watched a cargo steamer being loaded and launched and then guided by tug upriver. Slug trail of white water and then the boat shrank from sight.
The screeching around him of rats and he saw one brazen before him. It hunched downwards vertical on a barrel to nose at his feet, stretched and straightened with its pelt the color of moss. Black-beaded eyes and earthworm tail and he watched it nosing the dirt and loose grains, the scuffling scratch of claws on boot leather. Are you looking at me queer fella? Man and creature eyed each other for a moment and then the rat was gone.
He watched the Murmod come to life. Saw officials board and the crowd began to swarm around the boat, swallow whole a horse and cart to coalesce into a single knot that hived towards the gangway, cases and casks hitched up over their heads and small children being carried. Everywhere the din of hawkers selling their wares, food and drink and other such comforts, shysters and moneylenders working the crowd and pickpockets quick on their feet.
He guessed an hour go by. Near everyone from the quays on the boat, relatives and friends and who knows what else to clutter the deck and go below to the holds to say their goodbyes and none of them by the looks of it wanting to leave. The bladed rain stopped and he looked up to see a cloud bank burl from near-black to white, the Foyle spangled in new sun. He watched the gulls swoop and plummet the ship’s three masts and glide down to rummage the quays. A horse and trap turned around to leave and when it pulled away he saw Faller in its wake. Jesus. He picked him out from the far side of the crowd standing with Gillen, watched him pace up and down and then the crowd moved and his view was blocked. He strained his neck to see. Goddamn ye.
A parting among the bodies and then Coyle saw the back of Faller walking towards a cargo steamer that was being loaded further down the quays. He looked down at his nails, picked the black dirt from under them and he ran his hand down the length of the dull blade in his pocket and sat a while thinking.
GILLEN WATCHED THE disappearing back of Faller, turned and saw to his right the black silhouette of a sailor spidered on a web of halyards. He watched a group of young children disembark from the boat and scatter like leaves in front of a red-eyed woman who turned and stood waving. And then a man protesting was dragged scudding on his heels by two officials off the boat. The man stood on the quays and waved his fist and stood shouting. Crew tarried near the gangway and the Murmod was near ready to depart. And then Gillen saw Coyle coming towards him, the man with his hands in his pockets and his hat and head down low but he knew the cut of him, watched him push through the crowd, the man not lifting his head and making towards the gangway where he was stopped by an official and Gillen looked quickly over his shoulder to see if Faller was watching.
FALLER STOOD AT THE OTHER end of the quays watching stevedores loading a cargo ship. He could see Macken at the other boat. He lit his pipe and sucked on the smoke and looked towards the clotted sky, the clouds an uncertain wash of white, and he sniffed the air, inhaled the smell of hops and heard the squeaking of axle. A cart trundled behind him, a stonemason whistling tunelessly, and as it passed he saw a boy and a girl sitting atop slabs on the back. The boy held the girl’s hand on his lap and when he saw Faller he let go of the hand and Faller stared back.
Faller walked over to a sailor and tipped his hat to him, asked him where the ship was going. Glasgow, the man said.
Are you taking any passengers with you?
Not today, the sailor said. Full load of freight.
Faller turned and saw a tramp hunching on a limp towards the pair of them. The sailor saw him too and walked off.
Master. Go on give us some tobacco.
Faller looked at the man, saw gums housing a handful of teeth, eyes wide in supplication and cloth wrapped around damaged-looking feet, and he sucked on his pipe and blew smoke in the man’s face. Dance for it, he said.
The man grimaced and blinked.
I said dance.
The tramp’s face dropped and the man stood still as if summoning some reserve from tired bones and he turned his head and looked around to the quays behind and looked towards the stevedores and saw that no one was watching. With intake of breath he began to dance, a stiffening stumble that lurched awkward from heel to heel with his arms hooked to his sides, danced with his head locked straight and his eyes on the man who was asking and Faller smiled back down at him and then sucked on his pipe and said put some back into it will you. The tramp took a breath and danced wilder still, danced wincing on a limp, spit on beard, knees unfurling legs that were spindled and spent and the cloth bundles unfolding from his blackened feet, the man hobbling and hurling backwards across the quays with his head thrown to the sky, turning and turning.
Faller turned and walked back to Gillen and found him as he had left him. The ship was fully boarded and a scattered crowd stood waiting for it to depart. He watched sailors reel the Murmod’s mooring onto deck and saw them begin to lift the anchor.
He paced back and forth and stopped and turned to Gillen.
No sign of him?
Naw.
Walk back up to the gate and
lend that blind bastard your eyes, he said. Gillen turned and began to walk and stole a glance over his shoulder. Faller was putting his pipe in his pocket and stood facing the boat.
Faller walked around taking in the scene in front of him and then he stopped with his hands on his hips. He watched people waving from the quay and he looked at the wooden bridge spanning the Foyle and then he walked towards the crowd. Out in the water, seabirds flurried hungry around a fishing boat. He looked up at the Murmod, watched the paddle-tug take the strain of the ship on its tow rope as the ship slid forward into the waters. He looked again at the faces lined up on the boat, men and women and children, some sodden in emotion and others not sodden or waving at all but standing stone-faced, and then out of the crowd he picked a face, the profile of Coyle walking quickly to get across the deck, and Faller smiled.
THE MEN ASSEMBLED their belongings and left the city on horseback. The sky the color of gunmetal and the rain pressed down upon their sitting trot, beading their oilskins and Faller oblivious to it on his black steed. He rode out north in front of Macken with Gillen lagging behind, the man wearing a purple bruise on his face, and they followed the road for a number of miles. They turned off the road at Glendoagh upon a bridle path and Macken nudged his horse alongside Faller’s and asked where they were going.
I have a man to see.
Macken nodded and slipped behind and the group rode on. They sidled a forest that swallowed the light and passed a forge where the beating of anvil pealed like a muted bell. The clanging stopped and a bearded man leaned out on the jambs to watch the backs of the riders.
Lowering sky and the rain fell relentless and then Faller began to slow. He turned to a tapering path beat down by foot and the men rode on behind. Sedge scrunched under horse weight and the land opened to the bog, the encroached horizon of slumping dun hills and then they were riding upon the moss. The peatlands were sheeted in brown and yellow and dotted with the lone whites of sheep. A turf barrow nosed a pool in rotting and they passed patches of heather scalped, opened turf banks slaned like cliffs cut in miniature to a sea of wind-waving moss. To the west a tarn, a brooch of silver around the low neck of a hill. To the north a house isolate and they rode towards it. They met a black-faced ewe that stood stubborn and then skittered out of their way and the house rose into sight and then they were upon it, the place empty and bearded with growth, and then they rode on past it.
To hills beyond they went, Gillen watching sullen the backs of the men. He saw Faller come to a stop and watched him take out his pipe and he caught up with Macken and the pair stopped alongside Faller.
They sat in silence under the banks of sky, in their ears the hiss of rain and the empty whisperings of wind.
Faller lit his pipe, sucked on it and spoke with the pipe hanging in his mouth.
You saw him didn’t you? he said.
Gillen looked at Faller whose eyes were fixed ahead upon the wilderness and he looked at Macken whose back was turned towards them. He swallowed and then hitched up his voice.
You asking me?
The youngster’s words scattered on the breeze.
Faller spoke. Yes you did. You saw him and you let him board.
The words seized the air around Gillen, tightened the breath in his lungs, and he looked around him.
No man went past me that I didn’t see.
The words fell from his mouth, tumbled without the fixative of certainty to fall upon the moss and strew away, a waver in the man’s voice belying the truth of what told. The conversation now appeared to be over and Gillen fumbled with the reins on his horse and he began to whistle, an aimless tune of hollow indifference, and Faller sucked on his pipe and sent smoke in long drafts to reach out and encircle entire hills. He looked at Macken and nodded to him and Macken fixed his hat and took hold of the reins and nudged his horse forward to ride on. Gillen sat behind and waited for Faller and saw that he was not yet for moving and Faller turned to him and nodded for him to ride on behind Macken and Gillen kicked his horse forward.
PITTED THE BOG WAS with silver pools of rain that spread like the markings of some beast that prowled its prehistory, the wetlands older than the footfall of man and indifferent to such wanderings. Gillen rode alone midway between the men and took to watching the sky, was watching the great gray swirling banks of it and a chink of light that broke through the heavens to pillar in gold the top of a hill when the bullet from Faller’s gun entered the left side of his head, the trajectory of the ball uncoupling half of his face with it to spread upon the bog, the sound of the shot traveling slowly behind to reach ears already dead.
The clatter of shot sent Gillen’s animal onto its hind legs, the dead weight of the man slumping harness-caught above the ground. The animal danced nervously then settled and Macken turned around to see the body of his colleague hanging from the horse and he rode over to it and leaned over and spat. Slowly Faller reloaded his gun and reholstered. He looked at Macken.
The fucker took the boat, he said. He nodded to the body.
Feed him to the sheep.
LAST SIGHT OF LAND, a voice said. Coyle followed the others to the deck to see but the ship was enclosed by fog. He had thrown the knife into the sea and watched from on deck the boat push up the Foyle, the sea a slate of gray animated in the rain. He sleeved away his tears. The wee child without me. This is not what I wanted at all.
The air on the deck hung quiet in the snarling murk but for the chatter of sailors at work while the passengers stood in small groups silent. They strained their eyes expectant towards the land just left, this land known lifelong to feet, loam for curling toes, a mass of ground fixed solid to the earth and immutable to mind but for the wearing of memory as relentless as the sea, but there was no shoulder of land to lean on, no buttress of rock, no green-fringed cliff nor sight of fields, just the wash indeterminate of gray, the land, the sea, all sky.
WHEN I WAS WEE GIRL I heard the story of the riders and I wished with all my heart it werna true. But Mary Crampsey said it was and she knowed everything so she did so I believed her. She said that kind of thing went on years ago, happened to her second cousin who lived up near Binnion, and I used to think all the time about it after that. I’d lie there at night in me bed and if it were a windy night and the window was rattling I’d be afeared it was them coming to get me. Sure I was only a young un then. It took me a long time till I could shake it out of my head. I mean just the thought of it—what would they be for doin with you? I used to wonder but I was afeared to ask anyone and later when I became a grown woman I understood rightly. Knew what it was to a woman that a man could do.
Mary said they’d come in a gang on their horses and they’d go into your house in the middle of the night and they’d just take you, pick you up over their shoulder and carry you off pillion into the dark. Off you’d be taken to some other parish where you would never be seen by your family again. She said there was one time the riders were caught and that was how she knowed about it. It was that time with her second cousin Peggy Crampsey, now dead so she is—what was it now, oh she got the cough—and she was saved because her father was quick to his wits about it. He was comin home from a wake sluiced with the drink and he found them goin into the house and he kept a huge cudgel of a stick in the yard and he beat the men off her so he did.
When I thought of that story for years after I’d be awfully afeared. To me that was the worst kind of horror. And it was only later I realized what they were up to. There’s men who have a need and I know that surely and I know sometimes there’s men who donny get married and they got that need carried around with them all stored up. I can understand that they got to do something with it. And not everybody has the kindness in them. So to me it makes some kind of sense. Terrible and all as it is I can understand it, I can see there’s a reason for it.
But what I couldna get my mind around was the reason we were being turned out. I asked about afterwards and nobody could tell me anything. Nobody wanted to talk and thos
e that did said nobody knew. We owed nothing so we did and the land was useless to him. And I gotten then to wonder that it must have been something that Coll went and done. And then one time, soon after the second wean was born, I met Wee Paddy Doherty and he told me that I should go find Bridie Butler who kept the big house for the Hamiltons. She had ears for everything he said, and there wasn’t nothin that she didn’t know. If anybody could tell you, he said, it would be her.
Part II
THE FIRST DAYS PASS AND HE DREAMS DARK, SICKNESS deepening into him, and he lies between two worlds. The eyes of strangers he sees bunked in the shadows and he knows the look of suspicion, knows that a man’s sickness is not to be meddled with. He turns throughout the day, days becoming night twisting like a knife and night darkening into some kind of void that puts a hold on time. He lies there buckling in the grasp of it, the world no world now. Sometimes he loses sense of the pain, the vise that clasps tight his chest, the teeth tearing deeper at his lungs. He forgets the weakness that has claimed his body and he drifts sleep-haunted. She comes to visit him but he cannot be sure if she came at all but he talks to her and she feeds him water and mops his brow, she who is his mother and his wife, the cold cloth on his burning forehead, and when he opens his eyes he sees also it is his friend.
He dreams he is in his bed and the fire asleep to find that Hamilton is on top of him, their bodies writhing, and he gulps air panicked in the roaring darkness, the man grappling silently to pin the limbs of his body, a head burrowing into his trunk as if he had the rabid power to break sternum, rip ribs apart, and he’s beating against the other man’s chest with his fists, hands coiled with murder, the two men in the act of killing and he grasps at Hamilton’s throat or pulls at his mouth, a twisted toothy rictus. In the tussle he sees into the man’s eyes but they are sightless ghostly orbs and he sees between the weave of the man’s hair the perforation of skull, a lacquered rim of dry dark blood and inside the man’s head a blackened void beckoning. Disgust drives him to kill the man again and again, pounding him with his fists and he reaches and finds a knife and jags the man’s chest with it and another time he is reaching for a hammer and when he is free of him sometimes he looks at the face of the dead man and sees the face of his own brother and sometimes just as he is finished Hamilton rises inexorable to meet him and the two lock all over again.