‘Over the few days that followed, we talked a lot. It was good to have somebody to bat these thoughts around with, someone who understood the need. I could have talked to you, I know, but the truth is that I’d have felt ridiculous. I suppose I didn’t want to compromise what we had going. And I didn’t want you seeing me as some kind of a flake. Because men view things differently, don’t they? I’m not saying all men, but generally speaking. There’s an inbuilt pragmatism. With Liz it was easy to talk, I think because neither one of us cared much about looking foolish in front of the other, but also because, essentially, we were both chasing some kind of explanation, at least at first. Anything, however far-fetched, that would allow us keep a semblance of logic. We ran through the various possibilities. A prank, somebody’s teasing taken a bit too far, a cable running under the floor that might explain away the vibration in the glass, some kind of mass hallucination brought on by the combination of alcohol, circumstance and the inevitable supernatural associations with a Ouija board. All seemed vaguely plausible, but none felt right, and finally, realising there were no easy answers to be found, we instead set about trying between us to recall the exact wording of the messages that had come through. And we uncovered something.’
‘The one in Irish.’
She paused, studied me openly. ‘That’s right. An bhfuil cead agam teacht isteach. Liz was terribly worried about it. She’d written it out on the night and held on to the notepad. And it seems that her translation skills were just the tiniest bit off. She’d read it initially as the spirit or whatever it was, the Master, asking for permission to join us, which of course we all accepted as part of the game and even, to our shame, on some level probably welcomed. My own recollection of Irish is limited to about fifteen words, so there was little I could offer in the way of assistance, but I’ve looked it up since and her interpretation was reasonable enough, given the circumstances. Unfortunately, though, it does seem that, if taken in a larger sense, the words can also be seen to suggest something slightly different. A more accurate translation of the phrase might be, “Can I enter?”’
A shudder ran through me. Just for a second, I was back in the cottage, around the table, watching Maggie’s face yellowed and shifting in the candlelight.
‘Subtle differences are still differences,’ Alison went on. ‘Even on the phone, I could tell that Liz was upset. And worried, too. It was in her silences. A kind of weight. Because the new words seemed so full of implication. That same day, she got in the car and drove out there, and she tried visiting a couple of times more, but on each occasion found the house empty. The first time, she only went to the door of the cottage, but after that she searched the surrounding area, even went down onto the beach and called out. But she received no answer.’
Outside, it had begun to rain. It came in scuds against the glass and gave the light a wearying heft that made me want to finish or abandon the tea and return to the warmth and safety of bed. On the radio, news again broke through the music, the same genderless voice as before spouting the same words I’d already heard: political white noise, bank debt, a suicide bomber somewhere far away, an earthquake in one of the northern Indian cities, measuring seven and a half on the Richter scale, the damage already estimated in the low to mid hundreds of millions. I listened anyway, out of some misplaced duty, and wondered when exactly we’d started counting casualties in dollar terms rather than in the number of dead and injured. The grease from my breakfast had begun to congeal, coating the flat of the plate with a waxy skin. When I looked up, Alison was watching me, her chin resting on one fist. I wanted to reach out for her and hold on tight.
‘What are you thinking?’
I shrugged. ‘What’s there to think?’
‘That we should drive down.’
‘What? No. We only have a few days, Ali. I can think of better ways to spend the time.’
‘Come on. I know you don’t mean that. And it’ll be different with two of us. It’ll give you an easy mind, having two perspectives instead of one. It’ll help you to make sense of things. You’re troubled. Deny that all you want but I can see it. And Maggie is our friend.’
‘I’m overreacting, that’s all.’
‘Well, so what? Even if you are, it’ll be a day out for us. A nice drive. And we’ll be together.’
For a few seconds I said nothing. Then I sighed.
‘It’s just that she’s fragile, you know? And she has always been so blind in chasing happiness. The last boyfriend, Pete, was some piece of work. One of those tailored types, everything designer. Supposed to be some kind of a financial whizz-kid, probably up to his tonsils in this current mess. Probably a good percentage of the cause, I’d say. It wouldn’t at all surprise me. But Maggie thought the sun set with him. When I found out he’d put her in the hospital I slipped a crowbar under the front seat of my car, just in case I happened to get lucky. Looking back, maybe it was a good thing that I didn’t find him. In my entire life I never committed even a single act of violence, but there were a few days around that time when I think I might have been capable of something terrible. Christ, Ali, you should have seen her. The swelling turned her eyes to slits. He’d kicked and punched her, took out teeth, broke her arm, ribs. Assaulted her sexually, too. One of the nurses told me, in confidence. They knew from the bruising. A depraved attack, was how the nurse described it. She’d spoken in a whisper, said it was among the worst she’d ever seen. The nurse spared me the details but the horror of it had numbed her expression. Maggie and I never discussed it, and I never let on that I knew, but she wasn’t stupid. She was passing blood and for a while they were extremely worried about her kidneys. If I hadn’t known it was her in the bed the first time I walked in, if the nurses hadn’t assured me, I don’t think I’d have even recognised her. That’s how bad she looked, how beaten. And she just lay there, calm and still, accepting of it all, as if she deserved no better. I can still see the marks of his thumbs on her throat, red welts from where he’d tried to strangle her. So, yeah, I suppose I am worried for her. I always worry, because she’s just so incapable of recognising danger. Even if there’s nothing wrong with that house and that place, I don’t think she’s safe. The isolation might be good for her art, and the landscape is so wide open and so wild it probably does inspire her and give her the time and space and freedom that she needs to work, to explore her depths or whatever it is that artists do. But cutting herself off from the world can’t be healthy. I know her. If we’re not careful, if we don’t do what we can to help, she’ll break beyond the point of repair.’
*
The drive down to Cork acted as a balm. The outer world barely penetrated, apart from the radio, which we kept tuned to an oldies station and turned low except when something decent came on – Creedence, Bob Seger, Neil Young, maybe something by the Stones – and then either Ali or I would crank it up a click or two beyond comfort level and we’d sing along to the parts we half-remembered, making a mess of everything but loving it, loving being together, laughing our way through. Our reason for being on the road didn’t fade but felt as if it could, for a while, anyway, be put aside. I kept glancing at her, wanting to see the hidden parts of who she was, and to be able to decipher the happy thoughts that fish-hooked the nearest corner of her mouth towards a smile. Sometimes she’d reach up to tuck a strand of hair that had worked its way loose back behind her ear, but mostly she sat with her hands folded in her lap, fingers loosely entwined, her jawline tightening whenever I spoke, a barely perceptible gesture that accompanied her absolute attention.
By Urlingford a smothering mist had descended, one that significantly hindered visibility but lent something quite pleasant to the late morning. I kept well inside the speed limit and there was no further discussion as to what might lie ahead. We no longer needed those words, now that we had committed ourselves to this. Instead, we talked mostly of our own situation, slow-dancing, careful with our steps. When I needed to be back home, what the rest of my year looked like, how w
e could best work the gaps in our respective calendars. The fact that she could be in London in little more than an hour, or that I could get to Dublin, seemed to stoke our optimism. I knew that I’d have a few days at the beginning of November, if she could arrange for cover at the gallery, but there was also the very slim possibility of a weekend somewhere in between. And outside, beyond the rain-dappled glass, the wind fell away. The towns we passed through took on a drab, spectral stillness, and the fields, paled by the swollen mists, softened beyond any depth or definition.
For sustenance, we stopped at a small place in Cashel, a café with bohemian delusions, the décor keeping to bright yellows and hearty pinks, ordered a first and then second cup of good coffee to wash down the ham, cheese and chutney submarine sandwiches. It was a pleasant and necessary diversion, the chance to sit and relax and for fifteen or twenty minutes act like normal, happy, well-adjusted human beings. We ate, staring out at the drizzling street and imagining aloud how it might be to live here, in a town like this, and never know anywhere else, the way people of certain generations did, or must have. Ali suggested that some could be content with such a life, while others would only ever feel imprisoned, that it depended on the individual heart. But for us, the road kept calling.
Allihies lay some three hours further on. The mist thickened as we neared the coast, a veil heavy enough to obliterate the landscape and reduce the mountains to smoke and shadow. When I brought the car to a stop, there was total silence. The world was still. We sat there, hot and tired, mentally bracing ourselves for what might come, until a smell of burn began to permeate the freshened air. For a second or two my mind flashed with a panicked thought for the engine, but this was different, less immediate, the greenish stench of charred timber.
Alison unclasped her seat belt. ‘Something’s on fire.’
I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Something was.’
We got out and hurried down the hillside, holding hands to keep from falling and with our free hands pressed to our mouths. The air around us had the soft white look of spun sugar, all false, clotted purity, its illusion ruined by every taken breath. Then the blackened trace of the cottage pressed into view. I stopped, causing Alison to step against me. Her breath laboured dryly against my neck, and I caught some of her unease to multiply with my own and tightened my grip on her hand.
‘Christ, Mike,’ she whispered, as if afraid of being overheard. ‘What happened here?’
Her words, coming from so close and hard as they were, caused an itch deep inside my ear. The charred stench felt complete in its invasion, its stinging sharpness realigning the shape of her face, and almost certainly my own, into a domineering rictus. And because there was no wind at all, you could hear the waves breaking soft hushes against the beach away in the distance off to our right.
‘Do you think she got out?’
It was the question I had not allowed myself to consider. I wanted to say yes, of course, but when I tried to speak no words came. The roof of the cottage was gone, the thatch burnt to grit, the beams collapsed inward. Beside me, Alison began, very softly, to cry. I put my arm around her shoulders, kissed her cheek, which even during those few seconds had already become coated in a skin of ash, and held her. But only for a moment. Because I had to know.
Instead of entering directly, I circled the premises. The devastation was immense. The roof had mostly fallen in and the chimney collapsed. The glass had exploded from the windows, ash coated the walls, and the back door was gone. I leaned against the jamb and called Maggie’s name, but my voice, too full of scrapings, didn’t feel like mine, and the sound lingered for longer than was right in the bitter air. The heat’s immensity, which must have reached the levels of a furnace, had broken things down at a chemical level. The result was evisceration. I called out again, and again the name hung there, the sound of it hopeful, almost curious, and then detached, free of all feeling, all emotion, and then, finally, forlorn. When it passed, I put my handkerchief to my mouth, started inside and, with caution, aware that the walls could at any moment come in on me, began to work my way through the rooms. But there was little to see. In the kitchen, living room and bedroom, everything had been taken by the flames: all the furniture, her clothes, her paintings. The damage was so complete that I had trouble remembering it as it had been. Shards of crockery crunched beneath my feet, and the few remaining roof beams groaned like old sailing ships resigning themselves to a windless drift. Though the fire had clearly burned itself out several hours earlier, its heat held to the more confined spaces, a cloying, suffocating reek of sulphur. Only the second bedroom, the smaller of the two, which Maggie had never properly gotten around to decorating, had been spared the worst of the blaze, and in there, incredibly, a few canvases survived intact, propped face-inward against the side of a child’s pale oak chair. Three were of medium size and two were slightly smaller, maybe twelve inches by eighteen, and I gathered them up and hurried outside, carrying them at angles across my chest.
Alison stood waiting, twenty feet or so back from the house. We didn’t see one another until I’d come very close, and the flattened grass must have muffled my footsteps because I startled her into a small scream, even though she’d been expecting me with every breath. I put the canvases down, and she hurried to me and held me. The stench of the fire clung to my body and hair, and I felt as if I’d taste of it forever, that no matter how much I washed I’d never be free of it again. After a moment, she took the handkerchief from my clenched fist, found the cleanest corner and began to wipe the grime from my eyes, nose and mouth. I stood there and let her, gasping and waiting for my head to clear. I was sweating heavily and had begun to feel very cold.
‘Is she–’
I shook my head, no.
‘You’re sure?’
‘She’s not in there, Ali.’
She started to say something else, stopped, and went again, ‘Is there any chance that she’s been–’
‘There’d be traces. The fire was hot, but it wouldn’t have melted bone. She must have gotten out.’
‘Maybe some of the people from the village came. If they’d seen the smoke or smelled the flames, they’d have had to, wouldn’t they? Maybe they dragged her out.’
‘It’s possible. But it looks as if it probably burned through the night. And we’re quite cut off out here. I’m not sure that anyone would have noticed. The smoke mightn’t have been visible from Allihies. More likely, she got out, probably before it really started to go, and is still around here somewhere.’
‘What do you want to do?’
I sighed. ‘What I want to do is go back to Dublin with you and lie in a bath for a couple of hours. Try to get some of this smoke off me and soak myself back to some state of normality. But what I need to do, what we need to do, is find her. If her mind really isn’t right, anything could happen. And in this fog, it won’t be safe for her to be wandering about.’
‘Good, then let’s stop standing here.’
The fog was all walls, and there was nothing to see in any direction. I tried to think.
‘First, let me just get these paintings to the car,’ I said, dropping to one knee and gathering the canvases. ‘The mist will destroy them if we leave them lying out here. Who knows, I might be holding a minor masterpiece.’
Alison nodded. ‘I’ll go ahead and check the beach.’
‘No. Come to the end of the path and wait for me. I’ll be two minutes. Less than that, even. I don’t want you going down there on your own. I don’t want us getting separated, not in this weather. And the ground is bad, pitted with hollows that you won’t see because of the grass. It’d be the easiest thing in the world to turn an ankle out here. And you definitely don’t want to be alone if that happens. Wait on the path and then we’ll go together.’
We walked back towards the slope then, she at my side and occasionally touching my arm, my own hands occupied by the canvases pressed to my body. Visibility seemed to be worsening and the whiteness now was a
lmost absolute. At the bottom of the path we stopped, and she leaned in awkwardly and kissed my mouth and then I hurried up the incline towards the road, and the car, keeping to the verge, conscious even then of worldly dangers. I opened the car door and laid the canvases flat across the back seat. Then, for a moment, I slumped against the side of the car. I was trembling. The world had a locked-room stillness, but I could hear the distant murmur of the ocean ebbing at the shoreline, and the sense of hidden things lurking with intent was very strong.
I hurried down the slope and stopped just where the ground levelled out. Alison was not where I’d left her.
‘Ali?’
The fog now felt barely penetrable. I strained to listen, sure that she must be near, possibly within an arm’s reach. I turned and called out, lifting my voice a little and then again a little more, not even attempting now to mask my desperation, not caring. But I was alone. The fading day played back nothing but its own beating heart, the soft, low, relentless slop of the tide. Panic rose inside me, and I roared Alison’s name again and again, and the voice that pushed up into the fog sounded only vaguely like mine, a hard rasping voice driven by terror and capable of seeing the worst even in its blindest state. Then, finally, away in the distance, I heard my own name, ‘Michael’, cracked in two, see-sawing in a childish, almost mocking way from syllable to syllable, and even through the smothering fog I was certain I recognised the voice as Alison’s.
I had to resist the urge to charge blindly out into the day. The compass points had turned themselves around. I took several deep breaths and dropped down onto my haunches, the only thing I could think of to do. My name rang out again, its sauntering swing the slow jab of a skipping rhyme, and I let it come at me and tried to get a sense of its direction. By the fourth call, I felt that I could place it, somewhere ahead and a few degrees to my right. I followed, slowly, deliberately not answering, cautious of my footing on the broken pathway. There were other sounds too, random stabbings that at times felt close enough to make me flinch or catch my breath, but I pushed them away because the greater voice kept on, familiar and then only half so, but drawing me forward, my name filling the distance like the unhurried flap of a boat’s foghorn.
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