And yet she did not brake, because suddenly all fear had drained away, and she was filled instead with a mad, unnatural pleasure. There was no need to slow down for the potholes – she was flying over them. The hedges were a green and flowery blur, the cows in the field mere streaks of black and white . . . The small stone house appeared in its nest of trees, and seconds later she was dumping her bike on the lawn, panting, exhilarated, her hair a mess. She checked her phone to see how long it had taken her. Two and a half kilometres in two minutes, two seconds. That morning it had taken her over nine minutes to cycle the three kilometres from her place to Carla’s.
For a brief moment Aoife was giddy with triumph. Two minutes! Then reality intervened. It wasn’t possible; she must have set the timer wrong. Still breathing hard, she dragged her fingers through her tangled hair. Hawthorn blossoms showered out. Her dress was still covered with mud from climbing into that icy pool. Down . . . Down . . . She had set the timer wrong. She took a deep breath, and walked into the house.
Her mother was in her usual place at the kitchen table, working on local farmers’ accounts, her dark blonde hair dragged back into a scruffy plait. The sink behind her was stacked with plates. She glanced up as Aoife passed. ‘I thought you were going to the cinema, sweetie?’ And stayed staring, pushing back her chair and standing up. ‘What on earth . . .? Hey, wait, don’t go – what happened to you?’
Aoife came back to the doorway. ‘We went for a walk and I fell in a bog hole.’ At some point she would tell her mother the whole story, but right now she needed to get her head in order. And she wanted a shower. ‘Is there any hot water?’
Maeve, shocked but half laughing, was coming towards her with her arms held out. ‘You poor thing. Are you all right?’
‘Grand.’
‘Oh. Oh my God.’ Now Maeve had both hands pressed to her mouth, eyes staring – she seemed to be becoming more shocked as the seconds passed, not less.
‘Mam, calm down, it’s just a bit of mud. Is there any hot—?’
‘Where did you find that?’
Aoife said, confused now, ‘Find what?’
‘That. That.’
‘Oh, you mean this.’ She touched the heart locket. ‘I dropped my phone in Declan Sweeney’s field and I found this when I was looking for it. Weird, isn’t it, how it turned up after all this time? I must have lost it when me and Carla used to play in there – do you remember we had this game called—’
‘Let me see it?’
Aoife unclipped the chain. ‘Are you all right, Mam? You look kind of . . . It’s nice, isn’t it, having something from when I was a baby? After all the photos were lost.’
Maeve didn’t answer; just took and studied the locket very closely, reading the name. Opened it. Kissed the picture of the baby. Closed it. Tears were leaking down her face.
After a while Aoife said, not knowing how else to break this strange emotional impasse, ‘It’s too tight on me now.’
Maeve looked up at her vaguely; the tears were still trickling, and she kept wiping them away with the back of her hand.
Aoife said, ‘It needs a longer chain. Do you have an old one lying around somewhere, if you don’t want to buy one?’
There was a long pause, in which her mother seemed to have a hard time understanding what she’d just said.
‘Mam, a chain? You know, so I can wear it.’
‘You want to wear this?’
‘Well . . . Yes. I’d like to. Isn’t that OK?’
‘Sweetie, it’s kind of a precious memory.’
‘I know it’s the only photo of me we have, but I’ll take care of it, I promise. I really like it, it’s so pretty.’
But Maeve kept the locket in her hand, turning away from Aoife like she was afraid of being robbed. ‘I’ll just put it away somewhere safe for now.’
‘Mam—’
‘Have a shower, Aoife, before I use all the hot water doing the washing-up.’
In the spotty bathroom mirror, she looked even worse than she’d realized. She had streaks of mud on her high cheekbones, like an ancient hero going into battle. The green dress was ripped under both arms. Her hands were badly scratched; on her right, new red scratches crisscrossed the long silvery scar she’d got from falling off her first bike and grabbing hold of a line of barbed wire – she didn’t remember that happening, but her parents had told her about it. She pulled off the dress, dumped it by the washing machine, and stood in the sputtering shower, shampooing. More cream blossoms poured out of her red-gold hair and swirled in a pale whirlpool down the drain.
She went upstairs to her bedroom wrapped in the towel and rummaged for a T-shirt and jeans. While in the shower, she had received nine texts from Carla:
killian message me from ifone!!!!!!!
on Facebook!!!!!!!
hey text me
killian message me again!!!!!!!!
killian thinks film terrible
txt!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
hey text me
txt
dinner
Aoife left it till later to text back. Dianne Heffernan always put her daughter’s phone on top of the dresser when the family was eating, and the beep of an incoming text would only be a torment to Carla. She brushed the space bar of her ancient PC, waking her Facebook page. In between texting Carla, Killian had managed to post a clip of a leprechaun jigging at the foot of a rainbow, pulling gold out of his pockets. Darragh had liked it a few minutes ago. The birthday film was a romantic comedy. The lads must be getting bored.
Darragh posted:
I saw a goblin today
Aoife typed:
Where? In the mirror?
and got an instant ‘like’ off Killian.
She thought about deleting the leprechaun post, but there was no point getting defensive. She’d made a mistake about the child. She’d just have to live it down.
She sat cross-legged on her bed with her back against the wall, pulling her guitar into her arms. Eminem, Nirvana and Lady Gaga gazed down from tattered posters. So much history on these walls – photos of herself and Carla, same as in Carla’s bedroom. Old drawings of Manga characters, done in national school. Other singers’ song lyrics, her favourites, written out by hand. One or two of her own, but she hadn’t put her name to them.
She started picking out a tune that had been running through her mind for days. She hadn’t had any words before, but now she sang under her breath:
‘Drifting like a ghost in the water –
Could have been anybody’s daughter . . .’
And shivered. Was that the answer to what happened today, rising from her subconscious – had the child been a ghost? Maybe a little girl had drowned in that pool a long time ago.
Stop. There was no child.
Aoife heard her father come through the front door downstairs, struggling under a heavy load, dropping it in the hall. More old books, no doubt. He had been at a car boot sale in Clonbarra, and he wouldn’t have been able to resist buying boxes of cheap second-hand hardbacks. James O’Connor was obsessed by the old stories – ancient Irish tales that nobody else under the age of eighty gave any thought to now. He was a carpenter, but the collapse of the building trade in the recession had left him plenty of time on his hands to read. He had so many books now that he had run out of shelf space in the back room. Tattered volumes were piled everywhere in the house, including up both sides of the already narrow staircase.
‘James?’ Maeve called her husband into the kitchen. He went in; she murmured something, and he shut the door.
After a few minutes he cried out – a deep painful cry, as if horribly wounded.
Aoife leaped down the stairs, into the kitchen. ‘Dad, are you all right?’
Her parents were standing in the middle of the room with their arms around each other. Her father’s shoulders were bent and head was lowered, resting against his wife’s cheek.
‘Dad, what happened? What’s the matter?’
Looking past him at
Aoife with a weak smile, Maeve said, ‘Nothing’s the matter, darling. Did you finish your shower?’
‘Yes, ages ago.’
‘Then go and dry your hair.’ Her mother’s hand was folded into a soft fist, resting against the small of her husband’s back.
‘It is dry.’
‘Finish drying it properly, sweetie.’ A glint of gold was visible between her mother’s fingers.
‘Mam, is this to do with me finding my necklace and it having my baby picture in it?’
Her father trembled. Maeve tightened her grip on the heart locket, hiding it from view. ‘Nothing’s to do with anything, sweetie. Go dry your hair.’
That night, Aoife was woken by small icy fingers squeezing her wrist. Still half asleep, she moaned: ‘Who’s that?’
‘Come with me.’ The freezing fingers tightened. ‘You have to come with me.’
Aoife opened her eyes. The ghost child was kneeling over her, staring down at her. Aoife screamed, but no noise came. She tried to free herself, but couldn’t move.
‘Come with me,’ said the little girl.
With a desperate effort, Aoife heaved herself sideways, frantically trying to shake herself free. The child came scrambling with her across the bed, beseeching: ‘Come with me! Come with me!’
She got her hand to the bedside light; the moment it flashed on, the child sprang from the bed, raced across the floor and scrambled out of the window into the starless night. Aoife lay in a tangle of sheets, sweating, shivering, her heart hammering.
A terrifying dream.
The window had come loose from its catch and was creaking in the night breeze. As soon as she had her courage back, she got out of bed. Rain was blowing in, wetting the curtains. When she reached out into the dark to pull the window shut, cold fingers caught at hers.
She pushed them away with a cry. Wet leaves swept around in the rainy wind. The ash tree outside her window sighed and the rain rattled heavily on the slates above her. No moon, nor stars. The black garden stretched to the black wall. Beyond were invisible fields. The sudden downpour had released the sweet scent of hawthorn from all around, and the smell of it made her feel dizzy, like she’d been spinning in circles and suddenly stopped.
CHAPTER THREE
Aoife studied her father out of the corner of her eye, from under her lashes. He didn’t often come with her and her mother to Sunday Mass, but today he had seemed to feel the need for God. He was even listening to the sermon, his dark brown eyes fixed on the priest.
When she’d found her father’s picture in the locket, it was the first time she’d ever seen him with black hair – as far back as she could remember, his hair had been a thick silvery grey. Nor had she ever seen him cry – until yesterday, in the kitchen, with her mother’s arms around him. By this morning, he seemed to have recovered from whatever dark upsetting memory the locket had brought back to him. As the priest droned on, he caught Aoife’s eye and smiled. She smiled back.
Father Leahy blew his nose, and turned a page. ‘There is no other,’ he carried on in his flat, snuffly voice. ‘There is no God but Me.’
A subversive lyric drifted into Aoife’s head:
Your God says he’s the holy one,
But you know he’s not the only one . . .
Yes, she liked that. She needed to remember that and put it in a song.
I think he’s just the lonely one . . .
The words were still running through her head when she went up to take communion, and as Father Leahy placed the wafer on her tongue, she found herself raising her eyes to his gaze. Maybe he’s the phoney one . . . The priest’s eyes widened; he snatched his fingers away as if he thought she was about to bite, and quickly sketched the sign of a cross.
Instead of returning to her pew for the rest of the Mass, Aoife carried on past it up the aisle and straight out of the church into the fresh air. She felt shaken – had Father Leahy really flinched from her, as if she had bared her teeth at him like a dog? You know he’s not the only one . . . The persistent lyric was beginning to annoy her; it had set itself to a chirpy tune.
To block it out, she turned on her phone, and texted Carla:
U dead yet?
Carla had woken up that morning with a cold, presumably from getting soaked in the hawthorn pool the day before. But she must have gone back to sleep, because she failed to text Aoife back.
Restless and still troubled by the priest’s reaction, Aoife wandered the gravelled paths between the graves. The sun was warm on her head, and there was a scent of mown grass. An old man in a black jacket was tidying away dead flowers – John McCarthy, whose nephew owned the small supermarket. The old man was a heavy drinker and steadily losing his mind; he had taken to telling everyone that his nephew’s wife was a witch, although that didn’t stop him going there for his Sunday dinner. Aoife read the gravestones as she walked. Familiar Kilduff names: Heffernans and Burkes, Fergusons and Dohertys. A rake of O’Connors – her father’s family, the remains of which were spread thin around the world in Canada, Australia, Hong Kong. She realized suddenly that she was reading the stones because she was looking for the grave of a little girl, one who might have drowned out on the bog. She stopped looking. Then carried on.
Instead of a little girl, she found:
HERE LIES MOIRA FOLEY,
BELOVED WIFE OF EAMONN FOLEY,
BELOVED MOTHER OF JOHN JOE AND SEAMUS FOLEY.
Shay’s mother, laid to rest eleven years before, around the time Aoife’s family had moved home to Kilduff. Under his name, another inscription:
HERE LIES EAMONN FOLEY,
BELOVED FATHER OF JOHN JOE AND SEAMUS FOLEY.
Poor Shay, losing his mother and then his father in the same year.
‘That’s not Moira Foley in there.’
Aoife nearly jumped out of her skin.
John McCarthy was reading the gravestone over her shoulder, arms folded and elbows sharp in his old black jacket. ‘People say she was after jumping off that cliff, but they’re wrong.’
She got her breath back under control. ‘She killed herself? But that’s so sad!’ No wonder Shay was so quiet at school, never talking to anyone, keeping his own company.
‘Do you not listen? I said, that’s what they say. But she never did. If she had, the sea would have given her body up in the end.’
Surprised, she looked back at the gravestone. ‘But it says she’s buried here.’
‘Fool’s talk. ’Tis a log of driftwood. They fairies do love to play tricks on human fools with logs of wood.’
‘Oh, I see.’ People were trickling out of the church. ‘I think my parents are coming now . . .’
John McCarthy caught the sleeve of her hoodie in thin urgent fingers. ‘A fairy, that’s what she was. A lenanshee. A fairy lover. Eamonn knew it about her, God rest his tormented soul. He told everyone who would listen, even as he was painting and painting her portrait over and over again. “My wife’s a lenanshee,” he would say. “I’m not long for this world, and as for her, she was never of it.”’
His hand seemed so thin and brittle, Aoife didn’t like to shake it off. ‘I didn’t know Shay’s father was an artist . . .?’
‘But he wasn’t. A farmer was what God meant him to be – it was she who made an artist out of him, and it killed him. Your lenanshee is one dangerous fairy. She steals your heart and burns you up. Beware of the leannán sídhe, Aoife O’Connor. Stay away from the lover from the otherworld.’ He tightened his fragile grip on her arm. ‘Do you know what it is to have a grá?’
Aoife said faintly, ‘To want something really badly?’
‘Badly. Yes. Very badly. A grá is no ordinary, comfortable, fireside sort of a love. It is a mad love, a wild love, a hunger, a longing, a terrible insatiable desire that cannot be turned aside. If a lenanshee ever takes a grá for you, Aoife O’Connor, your life will be as short as a candle in the wind. My own nephew is married to a lenanshee, and look at the state of him – he can’t work in the shop, he’l
l barely eat or drink, he’s an old man at thirty, and all he does is write poetry. Poetry.’ John McCarthy made a noise of disgust, whistling through his yellow teeth. ‘What good is poetry to a man? It feeds no one. It burns you up. You know what a lenanshee even is?’
‘Don’t they cry outside people’s houses when someone is about to die?’
‘You don’t know much, do ye?’ His eyes were bulging blue marbles in his lined brown face. ‘That one’s not a leannán sídhe, them’s a bean sídhe. A banshee. A woman of the fairy hills. She steals human babies to sell to the devil, and leaves fairy babies in their place. You can always tell a fairy baby. Bright red hair and evil in its heart. No souls, see, which is why they’re no good to the devil. My grandchildren – every one of them is from the otherworld.’
‘There’s my mam and dad now – I have to go.’ Relieved to have an excuse to get away, Aoife ran to join them. Sinead’s mother was talking to Maeve; Sinead shot Aoife a most un-Christian glare. Aoife changed direction sharply, and went to her father’s green Citroën.
When her parents got into the front of the car, Maeve said rather stiffly over her shoulder, ‘Mary says you made everyone late for the film by saying you saw a little figure running across the bog, but no one else saw anything and it turned out to be nothing.’
Aoife winced. ‘I was going to tell you about that. Sorry.’
‘Mm. It would have been handy to know in advance. I felt a bit ambushed.’
‘Sorry again.’
James kept glancing at Aoife in the rear-view mirror as he pulled out of the square. ‘So what was it you saw, do you think?’
Aoife sighed and leaned her head against the window. ‘Nothing. A lamb, maybe. Can we stop talking about it? People kept making stupid jokes about leprechauns. It was awful embarrassing.’
The Changeling Page 3