Shadows & Tall Trees 7

by Michael Kelly

  Tom phones to ask whether he should pick up Max the usual time on Saturday. “I don’t see why not,” she says.

  She answers the door to him. “Hello, hello!” he says. “How are you? You all right? Where’s my superstar?” He’s in a bouncy mood, that’ll make it easier.

  The moustache is full grown now, and when she kisses him, she feels it bristle, she can taste the sweat that’s got caught in the hairs. “I’ve missed you,” she says.

  He looks properly poleaxed, he looks like he’s having a stroke. She’d be laughing if this weren’t so important. “I’ve missed you too.”

  “Come on,” she says, and she takes his hand, and pulls him in over the threshold, “Come on.”

  “Where’s Max?”

  “He’s in his bedroom. Don’t worry about him. Come on.”

  They go upstairs. Tom hasn’t been upstairs in nearly a year; he’s never been allowed to stray further than the hallway and the downstairs toilet. Even now, he still isn’t sure he’s got permission to enter what used to be their bedroom. She smiles at him, pulls open the door.

  “Wow,” he says.

  There are candles everywhere and there’s soft lighting, and she’s found something pretty to drape over the sheets, she thinks it might be a scarf or something, but it looks nice. There’s a bottle of wine on the dressing table. “Do you want some?” she asks. “Get you in the mood?”

  She can see he’s already in the mood, he’s been that way ever since the kiss on the doorstep. And she supposes she should be a little flattered by that, but really, does he have to be this easy? He makes one last attempt to sound responsible. “But what about Max? I mean, is he … ?”

  “I told you,” she says. “Don’t you worry about him for now.” She lies down upon the bed.

  He pours himself some wine. He asks whether she wants. She doesn’t, no, not any more.

  She takes off her clothes, it doesn’t take her long, she is ready. He takes his off too. Seeing his naked body for the first time in ages, she still feels a rush of the over-familiar. There’s nothing new to be gleaned here. Well, she thinks, that’s Max’s genes right there.

  He says, “I’ve missed you. Look. I wasn’t prepared. I haven’t brought any protection? Do you have any protection?”

  “Oh, come on, Tom,” she says. “You think I can still get pregnant at my age?”

  “I don’t know,” he says.

  “I’m still on the pill. Of course I’m still on the pill. Hurry up, and get inside me. I’ve missed you so much.”

  He’s on top of her, he’s excited, it doesn’t take long.

  He rolls off her. “Thank you,” he says.

  “That’s perfectly all right.”

  “I love you.”

  They lie there for a bit. She wonders, if she says nothing at all, whether that will make him get up sooner. She starts to count the seconds go by in her head. It’s the like the Drowning Game. How long till Tom gives up and breaks to the surface?

  He gets up. He drains his glass of wine. She watches him, he’s so sweaty and limp. “Listen,” he says. “Listen.” She raises her eyebrows, just to show that she’s listening. “That was … I don’t know what that was. But I should tell you. I’m with someone. It’s early days, but I like her.” So, the moustache was for a girl, what funny taste she must have. “And I don’t know. I mean, is this just a thing? Or is this something?”

  It’s almost amusing. She says, “It’s just a thing, Tom.”

  “Right. Because it doesn’t have to be.”

  “No.”

  “I mean, I’d break up with her. If you’d like.”

  “No,” she says. “That really won’t be necessary.”

  “Right,” he says. “Right.” And he puts on his clothes.

  She actually feels sorry for him. Up to the point where, now dressed, he stoops over her awkwardly, and tries to give her a kiss. She turns her head away.

  “I’ll go and find Max then,” he says. “He’s in his room? I’ll go and find him.” And he tries to give her a sort of smile, and then thinks better of it, and he leaves.

  Now he’s gone, at last he’s gone. She can put up her hand to her belly, she can stroke it and nuzzle it, and she likes to think how soon—please God, soon—the belly might grow, it’ll warp and distend. She gives her body a playful little shake, and she fancies she can hear new life sloshing around inside. And she listens out to hear what sort of scream will come from Max’s bedroom.

  WE CAN WALK IT OFF COME THE MORNING

  Malcolm Devlin

  AS FAR AS STANDING STONES WERE concerned, the one they found that New Year’s Day was both impressive and disappointing. Planted deep in the middle of a sheltered field on the eastern flank on the hill, there was an undeniable scale to it. It was a good fifteen feet of stark grey granite, eight foot wide and eight foot deep, reaching up out of the mud like a pointing finger. Despite this, there remained something industrial about it, something prosaic. Its faces were too smooth, its edges too defined, it felt crudely at odds with the soft and sodden landscape that surrounded it.

  “Is that it?” Jack said. He sounded disappointed but also resigned. It was unreasonable to be angry when they had been promised no more than a point on the map. Still, it was anti-climactic. It was just a stone, standing in a field, brusquely surprised anyone should have searched for it at all.

  Aleyna didn’t answer. She approached the stone, and regarded it with the reverence she assumed such a monument must deserve. The shape of it was certainly monolithic: its uppermost edge a dark, straight line against the unvaried grey of the sky. As an afterthought, remembering something her father once said about how she would press her palms against the ragged barks of trees when she had been a child, she slipped her hand from her glove so she could feel the texture of the stone without impediment. For some reason, she expected there to be an inexplicable warmth to it: some mechanical hum to set it apart from the muted chill of the afternoon, but it was cold beneath her fingertips, made stark and frigid by the rain and the wind. The texture was barely perceptible beneath the growing numbness of her hands. A gentle lunar landscape of shallow contours but no more than that. She stepped back again, disappointed more with her own perception than with the stone itself.

  Jack waded back into view.

  “I read book once, when I was a kid,” he said. “And in it, there was this stone up on the moor somewhere and if you walked around it three times, it would summon up a rabble of little goblins who would chase you down and stab you with spears.”

  “So don’t walk around it three times.” Aleyna took another step back. The field was heavy with the rain and if she didn’t keep moving, she had the sense she might sink into the mud and never move again. A hell of a way to start the year.

  Jack lifted one boot, planted it back then lifted the next. He looked absurd, like he was treading grapes in wellington boots. “Thing is,” he said, “I know the moor the book was talking about. And they’ve built a road around it now. All the way around it like an island. So whenever I pass by that way, I always wonder if driving around it would count as walking around the stone? Or do you have to be right up close? Maybe distance itself didn’t matter at all. Because these days, there must be thousands of commuters going one way or another around this thing, and at some point they’ll have to have gone round it three times, right? Maybe not all at once, but eventually, right? Thousands of them. So do they all get chased? Do the goblins come out and go: ‘Fuck me, traffic’s bad today,’ and then just get on with it anyway?”

  He joined her in front of the stone, reaching out to it with his gloved hand.

  “I can just imagine them. All broken and dying at the side of the road. These armies of goblins throwing themselves into the traffic and getting killed like all the foxes and deer and badgers. Goblin road kill. What chance does something from a fairy tale stand against a rush-hour’s worth of Transit vans?”

  Aleyna laughed despite herself. “Well, I don’t
fancy my chances outrunning anything in this,” she said.

  Water pooled around the base of the stone and even in the grey light, she could see the faint green of the grass beneath it, rocking in a gentle current like pondweed.

  She glanced back down the field where they had come and saw how the edges were now completely lost in the fog.

  “We should go back,” she said.

  Jack nodded.

  “Might be able to catch the others up,” he said. “Tell them what they missed.”

  He plunged his hands into his pockets and jutted out his elbow, inviting Aleyna to take his arm. She rolled her eyes before complying. He leaned over to kiss her but she pushed him back with her free hand. He felt stubborn and solid, not quite standing-stone solid, but immovable in his own way.

  “If they see us—,” she said.

  “They’ll have damn good eyesight,” Jack said.

  They set off down the field, heading back to the corner from where they had entered. The mud was marshy underfoot, the standing water rushing in to fill the heavy footprints they left behind. Joined together, the going was awkward, but neither saw fit to go it alone.

  “So what do we tell them?” Jack said.

  “We’ll tell them we saw the standing stone,” Aleyna said. It had been the whole point of the expedition after all. They’d poured over the map at the kitchen table searching for something to mark the day, something to clear their heads after all the drink from the night before. It had been Kevin who had spotted the monument, marked in blackletter script in the middle of an otherwise unpromising looking pasture. The walk had been longer than anyone had anticipated, following the narrow, minor roads up the hills, which rose deceptively steeply on the opposite side of the main road from the cottage they had hired. While it wasn’t exactly raining, the clouds had lowered to envelope the landscape and the air they walked through felt dense with poised moisture. It lingered before them, allowing them to drench themselves just by moving through it.

  Lou had given up first, complaining of a headache and the likelihood she might wind up sick as well. Kevin had gone with her, measuring his own gallantry against Jack’s like they were drawing straws. Turning back down the path, the two had diminished into the blankness and Aleyna had watched them go, a faint notch of panic opening up within her. They disappeared with such a gentle precision it looked like the climactic scene fading out at the end of a film and she had to fight the urge to run down the path after them to make sure they were still there.

  “We’ll tell them it was magnificent,” Jack said. “A secret Stonehenge, lost from view in the beautiful Oirish landscape.”

  The accent made Aleyna wince. Jack might have looked local, but he certainly didn’t sound it.

  “They won’t believe us,” she said.

  “They will. We’ll tell them that when we stood in the middle of the circle, the stones made the wind sound like it was singing to us.”

  “There isn’t any wind.”

  “Then maybe the stones themselves were singing to us.”

  “You’re full of shit.”

  “So’s this field, and yet here we are.”

  “Jack.” She broke away from him so she could vault the stile, casting him a dark look as she did so.

  He grinned at her. The rain had plastered his fringe to his forehead, making him look younger. He had his holiday beard on: a week’s growth of red whiskers that gave him a pleasant and scruffy nonchalance she couldn’t quite square with the clean-shaven and office-suited Jack she was more familiar with.

  “Kidding,” he said. “I’m just loathe to admit they might have been right about turning back.”

  “We could just say it was nice,” Aleyna said.

  Jack shook his head, clambering over the stile after her. “There’s no magic in nice,” he said.

  The path down the hill was mostly gravel, ground deep into the mud. Hazy shapes of demarcated farmland ascended in steep embankments on either side, knotted cords of hedgerows and low stone walls frayed into the whiteness. They walked onwards and the dogged clouds followed them, water running freely down the path in a steady stream.

  Aleyna’s coat had long since soaked through, it was woolen and heavy and completely the wrong sort of thing to wear for a walk of this nature, but then the weather hadn’t seemed quite so miserable when they’d started out from the cottage and by the time they were halfway up the hill, it would have been far too much of a fuss to ask to go back for something more sensible. Worse still, it would only have cemented the second thoughts about the enterprise that Lou had already started to entertain.

  Jack started whistling through his teeth. The tune almost recognizable, but out of reach until he spoke again.

  “Do you think these are the actual Cork and Kerry mountains?” he said. “I always figured they were different things. Like the guy was walking through one and then the other. It never really occurred to me the county border might run through them.”

  He didn’t wait for an answer, he just carried on whistling as before, but something struck Aleyna about what he had said.

  It felt appropriate they should be walking along a border in the hazy, hung-over gap between the years, having left one behind and yet not quite committed to the next.

  “Borderlands,” she spoke the word aloud, and while Jack didn’t reply, Aleyna smiled to herself as though there was something satisfying, something spell-like about the phrase.

  The cottage was by the sea, half way down the Beara Peninsula. They’d spent the best part of the previous day jammed alongside each other in the rental car; Lou and Jack had taken it in turns to drive the coast road, passing through a succession of tiny communities pinned to the edge of the Cork landscape.

  “Michael Collins country,” Jack had said as the road twisted through the rocky outcrops. He pointed out signs to Clonakilty as they passed, and gestured to where he thought Bealnablath should be through the rear view mirror.

  Aleyna hadn’t risen to his guidebook wisdom. There was more to history than just the coordinates marking where something began and where something ended, it was the tangle in-between that resonated. She leaned against the window, watching the landscape roll past them. There was a beauty to it but it felt stark to her, a similar untamed rawness that she imagined of the sea.

  They’d spent the night of New Year’s Eve in the cottage, eschewing the local bars to drink together undisturbed. It had felt strangely decadent, taking all that effort of flying somewhere new just to ignore it and drink indoors like they so often did back home. They were the last of their circle of friends to succumb to the designated responsibilities of adulthood. They didn’t have kids, they didn’t have dogs and only Jack could claim to have a mortgage. Everyone else had peeled away as their thirties had eroded, their youthful priorities gently realigned to adult expectation, social calendars hijacked by nappies and inoculations and schools and savings schemes. Aleyna had looked around at the four of them who were left and allowed herself the private suspicion that given the choice, they may not have been the friends she would have chosen to be marooned with.

  Even so, they had a shared purpose for the evening. They worked their way through the wine and rum and whisky they’d stocked up with at the local shop, they’d smoked the weed that Jack had smuggled through the flight, packed tightly in a talcum powder tin and still smelling slightly of roses and old ladies. Although Kevin had tried to intervene, they had dined on the sort of junk food that holidays make acceptable: Pizzas and crisps and those sugary cakes that come off a production line in neatly sealed plastic. They watched midnight arrive on the local television station and they had stepped outside in the rain to toast the New Year. They had come all that distance, but they could have been anywhere really. Time found them, ticked them off and moved on, the passing year’s departure both momentous and anticlimactic. They stayed up until four in the morning, drinking and smoking and playing cards.

  The following afternoon, the sky had remained grey,
but the hills looked sharp and distinct and the landscape surrounding them seemed brighter and more alive after the rainfall. The greens and browns and yellows were richly saturated like raw and unmixed paints applied in great round swatches to a fresh blank canvas. There was a beauty to it certainly, but more than that, there was the promise of something verdant, something vital and alive.

  “Is this the way we came?” Jack said.

  The landscape had evened out as they descended the hill, the path rising a little so the embankments shallowed and hazy moorland stretched upwards on their right, and downwards on their left. The views on both sides were foreshortened by the mist, but there was a sense of unbounded space nonetheless, a hint of the infinite, hidden just out of view.

  “Yes,” Aleyna said. “I think so.”

  “Okay, then.” Jack kicked a loose pebble and watched it skitter ahead of them, coming to rest in the middle of the path, splitting the current of water into a pair of plaited streams. Perhaps unconsciously, he quickened his pace as though impatient to reach it again. “Has the fog got worse?” He held his arm in front of him as though it might help him judge.

  “A bit, maybe.”

  He glanced back up the path at her, squinting with concern.

  “Listen,” he said. “I know it’s probably too late, but do you want to swap jackets? That old thing is going to give you hypothermia or something.”

  That old thing.

  He started unzipping his Karimoor overcoat, slow enough she could stop him before he was done.

  “It’s fine,” she said when he was past half way. “Doubt mine would fit you anyway.”

  She smiled.

  “But I’m fine,” she said again. “It’s not cold, it’s just wet.” And horrible, she would have added, but she didn’t want to say it out loud in case it might make things feel worse. It wasn’t that bad. Not really. And the cottage wasn’t far away, and if Kevin had got there already, he’d have the fire lit …