by Pat O'Shea
‘That is my intention, madam,’ the Sergeant replied stiffly.
‘Without evidence it becomes mere hearsay by a common informer, doesn’t it, Breda?’ said Melodie and she turned a very significant look in her friend’s direction.
‘Swedish people are not common!’ the Sergeant said severely.
Breda winked at Melodie. Then in perfect time, they snapped their fingers extremely secretly and slyly so that the Sergeant didn’t notice or even hear.
‘Go in and case the joint, don’t let us stop you,’ said Breda.
‘You are using the criminal idiom, madam; and with great fluency, I notice,’ said the Sergeant and he opened the glasshouse door and stepped inside. He paused to make a note in his notebook about Breda’s fluency in the criminal idiom and then he looked round the glasshouse.
It was bare.
Empty as a balloon.
Not one stolen object to be seen.
The Sergeant looked utterly crestfallen. When he came out, he was silent.
‘Well?’ sneered Melodie.
‘I’m keeping my eye on you two from now on,’ the Sergeant said darkly.
Unexpectedly, her whole manner changed. She became cold and terribly threatening.
‘If you are not very careful, Sergeant, my dear,’ she said and her words came like splinters of ice, ‘you could very easily find yourself Up The Amazon On A Rubber Duck. Be warned.’
The two women went inside the glasshoues and shut the door. He could hear them inside, sniggering.
As he walked away, he could hear that one of them was playing a tango on a tuba. He was too dispirited to even wonder where it had come from.
‘You’d want to keep your eye on those two,’ said a passing frog.
That’s it, he thought. I’ll never again touch another drop. I swear it. By the shiny buttons of my stainless predecessors, I swear it. Frogs talking to me. What next?’
The Sergeant went round the corner and had a good cry.
Chapter 9
PRESENTLY, the Sergeant wiped his eyes. He undid the buttons of his tunic and reaching inside, he produced a small, interesting bottle filled with poteen, which he had personally confiscated only the day before.
‘This’ll put fizz in me,’ he said.
He unscrewed the top while scanning quickly in all directions to be sure that he was unobserved and then he had two or three stiff belts.
‘A belt of this is better than five pounds spent at the doctor’s,’ he said.
Feeling much better, he remounted his bike and pedalled along towards Galway. He hadn’t gone very far when he saw a great number of hounds approaching. They padded quickly past him and he dismounted to watch where they were going. To his delight, they went to the glasshouse, where they were admitted at once.
‘I have them now, the rogues,’ he said.
He cycled back to where he’d had his good cry, parked his bike and then he went and knocked at the glasshouse door. This time, he gave his very official knock.
Melodie Moonlight opened the door.
‘I see you are fond of dogs,’ the Sergeant said with a smiling innuendo.
‘Blow your nose!’ snapped Melodie Moonlight authoritatively.
For the tiniest moment, a small reflex jumped in the Sergeant’s right hand, fleetingly eager to obey her command, but he controlled it without any difficulty.
‘Who’s there this time?’ Breda called out.
‘It’s that nosey Sergeant again, trying to work his way indoors for a cup of tea,’ Melodie responded.
‘That pest? He’s becoming as well-known as a begging donkey!’
These two could cause a row in ten convents, the Sergeant remarked to himself, but they won’t get me going this time. Aloud, he said:
‘Have you got licences for those dogs, Madam?’
‘Don’t brandish your nose belligerently at me like that!’ said Melodie in a ratty tone.
Breda came to the door. She scrutinized the Sergeant carefully and then turned to her friend.
‘Don’t you think he has a nose like a duck, Melodie dear?’ she suggested gently.
‘Plug up your gob or I’ll blister you!’ quacked the Sergeant threateningly.
He stopped, thought for a moment, and then allowed his eyes to slide together so that he might take a peep at his nose.
He hadn’t got one.
In its place was a duck’s bill.
It wavered for a few seconds and then it was gone and his own comfortable old nose had returned.
I’m seeing things, he thought.
‘My,’ said Melodie admiringly. ‘Aren’t we pale blue today!’
‘And those ribbons in your hair—aren’t they madly wicked? How very pagan of you,’ said Breda and she smiled a secret smile.
The Sergeant drew his truncheon and took a step forward to assert his authority. As his foot moved, a flash of white caught his eye.
He looked down.
With horror he saw that his legs, his own beefy, well-muscled, hairy legs, were wearing dainty white ankle-socks and his feet were in buckled hornpipe shoes. As his gaze travelled upwards, he found that he was dressed as a little girl in a pale-blue frock with puffed sleeves and a tie belt, and instead of his truncheon, there was a skipping-rope with wooden handles and tinkle-bells, in his great, big fist.
Resting on his broad chest were the ends of two fat, flaxen plaits, tied with lavender ribbons. He touched one of the plaits, found that it was real and felt all the way up to his head, where he discovered that his Garda headgear had somehow changed into a cotton sun-bonnet.
Worst of all, one of the legs of his pretty pink knickers was hanging down below his knee, exposing all his frills to the world, because the elastic had given way.
‘The leg of your drawers is hanging down, Sergeant,’ Breda said vulgarly.
Oh mother! I’m bunched altogether now, he thought sadly. Thanks be to Providence, the lads can’t see me like this. The young Gardai would be sniggering at me, and then they’d be whistling after me and after that, they’d be laughing and mocking and pointing openly, until I’d be driven daft.
Angrily he went to throw away the silly skipping-rope. To his confusion, it was a truncheon again and he was very properly dressed in his uniform. He touched the peak of his cap for reassurance.
It’s that blasted poteen! It’s giving me visions, he decided, and felt a little comforted, his flummoxed brain not allowing him to realize that the women were playing a part in his discomfort and were even remarking in words, the changes that were taking place. He thought it was all happening inside his own head.
He struggled to carry on doing his duty.
‘Now you two! What about those dogs? Are they licensed or not?’ he asked crossly.
‘You won’t be told, will you?’ Melodie said with an impatient wave of her hand.
The Sergeant found himself Up The Amazon On A Rubber Duck.
He paddled madly with his hands towards the distant bank of the river before the piranha fish found out that he was there.
Chapter 10
‘WELL, here I am Up The Amazon On A Rubber Duck and the light bad. I haven’t felt this weird since I won a medal at a Feis,’ he said.
He reached the river bank.
Ireland seemed so far away; the vegetation round him was exotic and composed of secrets.
‘All I can do now is follow my nose and see where it takes me,’ he said and glanced round nervously.
Some seconds later, his nose was back in the Garda Barracks in Eglinton Street, Galway, with the Sergeant at his usual close distance behind it. He was sitting by the fire in the duty room. Hastily, he inspected his appearance to see if he was himself again. Finding that he was and that his trouser-legs were dry, he let out a sigh of relief.
A young Garda entered, holding a mug of tea.
‘Gimme that,’ the Sergeant said.
Startled, the young Garda handed him the tea.
‘Didn’t you go yet, Sergeant?’ he asked. ‘I thought
you were off out in the country somewhere, doing your duty?’
The Sergeant swallowed the tea in almighty gulps.
‘Where’d you get that idea?’
‘I thought that a young Swedish rock-climber phoned in from Annaghdown to report something about flying furniture?’
‘Flying furniture? Don’t make me laugh! Do I look the kind of eejit to be taken in by a half-baked hoax like that? Thought made a fool of you, my lad, didn’t it? Nip outside now and see if me bike’s all right and don’t be talking out of turn.’
The young Garda turned to go—poking out his tongue when he thought he was out of the Sergeant’s view.
‘Keep that tongue where it belongs!’ roared the Sergeant.
‘Sorry, Sergeant.’
‘If it ventures out again—I’ll tie it in a knot round your nose.’
‘Yes, sir.’
The young Garda went outside thinking: He’d run his mother in and out of a hole after a fox, that fella. He has no mercy.
Alone, the Sergeant sat cogitating and feeling cowardly.
‘After all,’ he said finally, they hadn’t got any furniture in that glasshouse and as for dog licences—a minor offence. We mustn’t lose our sense of proportion here. And nothing on earth would get me near that glasshouse again; facing two such sarcastic little judies for the sake of furniture stolen from that gobdaw of a Manager. There’s always some poor woman with drink taken—I’ll go after them, instead.’
Immediately he was struck by the unworthiness of this thought and he cast it out of his heart.
For the present, however, he sat and brooded, while the cowardice in him struggled with the anger in him, but the thought that simmered most deeply in him was, sadly: Wait ’till I get my hands on that damnable poteen-maker, I’ll see that he gets a long stretch!
‘The bike’s all right,’ the young Garda said, re-entering.
‘Get on with your work!’ the Sergeant said fiercely.
Chapter 11
IT had been such a long, tiring day.
Pidge was glad to sink into the feather mattress, feeling his limbs as heavy as stone in the soft bed. A strong drowsiness came on him and his eyelids closed and opened and closed again, very slowly, as he drifted into a beautiful daze of sleep. He thought it the most wonderful feeling in the whole world.
After a little while he felt his mind spinning off into a dream. There was a slow whirling of his being, as if he were inside a silent and gentle tornado that was taking him off on a journey of delight. It lifted him up to a great height and he was swimming like a dolphin in the sky and then it laid him back on the cushion of his bed, like a snowflake landing on water.
In his dream he heard a sound.
It was a cold, hissing, tinkling sound and it came from the landing outside his bedroom door. He sat up, eyes wide open.
There was something coming in under the door: a thin, snaky tendril of fog. It crept into his room, keeping low on the floor. It began touching things and creeping into things. It whispered to itself as it crept towards his chest of drawers and then it insinuated itself through all the cracks, until it had been in and out of every drawer. It withdrew then, and paused as though to think before turning towards his wardrobe, as if it had an intelligence and could make decisions for itself.
Pidge felt his skin prickle. He was almost breathless with shock.
He hoped that he was still dreaming because one always wakes up from a dream. More than anything, he wanted to wake up.
‘If I wake up now, it will be gone. I must wake up! I hate this dream, if it is a dream. It’s horrible!’
Someone touched him and in his mind he had the notion that a small voice was saying: Pidge!
There was no one else in the room, just a little golden moth resting on his wrist where he had felt the touch. In his mind the voice went on:
Don’t be afraid.
‘I can’t help it,’ whispered Pidge, ‘I hate it.’
When it leaves—follow it.
‘What? No! I can’t.’
Follow it through the saying-glass. You’ll be quite safe.
The moth fluttered across to the window where a second moth waited for it.
Two of them, thought Pidge. Like there were two swans at first.
The fog finished searching the wardrobe and it began to swirl round the floor seeking under the floor boards. In seconds it was satisfied that nothing lay hidden there; it approached the bed and began sensing the covers. Pidge shut his eyes tight.
After some time he opened one eye to see if the fog had come any nearer to him and he found that it was just withdrawing back to the landing, whisking away under the door.
He reached under the pillow where he had, for safety, put the presents left for him by Boodie and Patsy; and he scrabbled about until his hand closed on the scrying-glass. It still seemed a very ordinary thing. After giving it a quick shake, he watched the artificial snow inside it as it swirled and rolled. In a moment, the little snowstorm had vanished, and he could now see a picture of the landing in the small glass globe. The fog was moving there and it was going in under the door of Brigit’s room. He followed its movements in the glass. He saw the inside of the room and there was Brigit fast asleep and well snuggled under the bedclothes. He was almost certain that she wasn’t in any danger; the fog had shown that it was only searching when it had left him unharmed. Brigit was so deeply asleep, she would never know that it had been there.
Inside the scrying-glass, the scene changed. It showed him the stable and there, standing in the bright light that came from the moon, was the new mare.
The fog was coming from her mouth.
I might have known it would be something to do with that one, he thought grimly.
He could see that the fog was made up of particles or atoms or something and they were all flowing out of her mouth in a thin, cold stream; a narrow white river filled with a kind of life and all of it moving in one direction, away from her. He found himself looking into her eyes and he pulled back from the scrying-glass in case those eyes would see him. They were cold and dark, the colour of wet granite; as cold and dark and grey as the winter sea. There were no pupils in those strange eyes and as he watched, they began to gleam; two ovals of hard shiny metal, where there should have been only softness and the gentle colour of brown.
As the eyes began to gleam, the fog changed direction and began to flow back inside the mare. Pidge watched spellbound and suddenly totally unafraid.
Soon it vanished completely and not even one wisp remained to show that it had ever been there at all. The mare came back to life and shook herself. The eyes were now brown but still with those red glints of tiny fires.
She walked to the stable door and stepped out into the night. She lifted her beautiful head and smelled the night air. She turned, searching out a direction, and started to gallop off across the fields towards old Mossie Flynn’s place and the glasshouse.
In spite of everything, it was thrilling to watch the magnificent way that she moved. It all seemed to be in slow motion and her mane and her tail streamed out and undulated behind her as if made of the lightest silk. It was a picture of beauty and movement. If only she hadn’t this strangeness about her, how I would have loved her, thought Pidge.
As she neared the glasshouse she slowed down and stopped.
She stood utterly still.
Something appeared to be coming out of her again and before Pidge could see properly what had exactly happened, a woman stood beside the mare.
She was tall and blonde and very beautiful.
She wore a long, filmy dress that floated around her like shadows on grass. In her hand she held a small, glittering object. She tossed it into the mare and the mare trembled slightly. Pidge suddenly knew that the little shining thing was part of the mare; it was what made her a living being. He also knew that the mare had been used by the woman like clothing and nothing had been the mare’s fault.
Poor animal, thought Pidge, as the mare
began to walk back across the fields. She was obviously worn out. Her lovely head drooped and she hardly had the strength to move her legs.
The door of the glasshouse opened and Melodie Moonlight and Breda Fairfoul rushed out. They seized hold of the fair woman with eager hands and cried:
‘Come! Come! Let us see you!’
The three looked at each other.
‘How beautiful you look,’ said Breda Fairfoul.
‘Exquisite,’ murmured Melodie Moonlight.
Something seemed to tremble in the air between them.
Laughter!
They giggled and laughed and shuddered, as if they would shake to pieces.
‘Beautiful!’ gasped Breda Fairfoul at last.
‘Oh, peachy!’ whooped Melodie Moonlight.
And then Pidge knew that they were laughing at the idea of beauty as the height of nonsense.
The fair woman suddenly stopped laughing. Her outline went fuzzy and shapeless and then she appeared as a skinny, grizzled old hag, whose face looked as if it was carved out of yellow soap. Her nose was like a walnut with long and strong black hairs that closely resembled prawn whiskers sticking out of her nostrils. Her moustache was a fringe of wiry white, stuck out in a nimbus round her mouth, like a chimney-sweep’s brush. She had at least five hundred warts, some—one on top of another, four or five times over. Her ears spiralled out of her head, looking like two pink, fleshy corkscrews and each lobe was as big as a duck egg. The eyebrows were two tufts of coarse red hair. Her eyes were purple and her eyelids hairless. Her teeth hung down over her chin; they were so long that they grew in tangles and they were as grey as Dead Men’s Fingers. Her hands were as big as dinner-plates, blackish-green with grey scales and her feet were twice as big as meat-platters, fat and glistening white with wrinkled edges. Her toes moved about in a hesitant way like blind worms, seeking.
‘Now you are more like yourself,’ said Breda Fairfoul.
‘But not entirely yourself,’ said Melodie Moonlight. ‘We have not the satisfaction of seeing your fullness of ugliness, which is known to deprive men of two thirds of their strength.’