On the Edge of the Loch: A Psychological Novel set in Ireland (23 page)

As the months passed, the rigging and set-building skills she’d honed in her studio proved invaluable and never failed to elicit Aidan’s fascination. Together they made a difference every day, easing suffering, restoring hope to the ill and the fearful, nurturing bodies and hearts that in turn nurtured others, and they kept people alive who otherwise would have perished. In conditions of severe hardship, what they shared lightened all the burdens and led her to her spiritual realisation.

Eleven months, that’s how long it lasted, she told him. Then time ran out: February 11th 1991, in Baghdad City, during the Gulf War. American smart bombs crumpled the Amiriya shelter. Eight hundred civilians, maybe one thousand, were gathered inside, praying under the thunder for long lives.

Fifteen minutes before the bombs hit, she and Aidan had finally succeeded in coaxing the last group of mothers clasping children to follow them down into the shelter, to safety. She’d stay with them, she had promised, until the planes were gone, the thunder past, until it was over and they could go back to their homes. But it was never over. Never would be.

The bombs came. First, a flash. Then a sucking roar. The shelter turned white-hot, blew apart. Concrete slabs the size of cars crashed down, mangled everything beneath them, crushed women and babies, men, children, teenagers, left holes to see the heavens through. Then the fireballs, hissing like demons, turning people into puffs of smoke, leaving bits of black flesh where infants suckled seconds earlier, evaporated in a chasm of chaos. Hundreds mutilated, crying, bleeding, dying, dead. Everywhere, parts and pieces of people, clumps of ash.

In the middle of that hell was the face of Aidan Harper. Black, matted, bloody. An image that had not been healed by her surviving, still there in every detail. She saw him as she lay strapped to a stretcher, being carried over rubble and bodies. Just feet from her, his head protruding from under a slab of concrete: black and raw, his silver hair scorched off. A face bearing no anger, for none had ever lived in him. A prankster. Greyed with soot and ash. Her cry, she recalled, drowned out the wailing of that world, a cry of spiritual death, again and again, on and on until it blocked out the whole inferno and accompanied her into delirium.

Now, three-and-a-half years after that violation of innocents she could still smell the burning flesh, taste the soot in her mouth. Up until recently she was sure it would never leave her.

Hours after the bombs, in a hospital on the outskirts of Baghdad, she awoke concussed, heavily sedated, her body bruised, superficially burned and lacerated. Inside her a fierce siren was still blaring, for Aidan. He was with the four hundred and thirty dead, all of whom had been freed from what she had been spared to bear. Evacuation came two weeks later, first to Germany, from there to Dublin, and later to County Mayo.

For more than two hundred of the dead there were no bodies, no identification. Nothing of Aidan’s was recovered, no journal or ring or watch. Not even an urn of surrogate ashes was provided to eulogise or scatter.

Throughout the following months she had pleaded with the Iraqi authorities for assistance. Too much annihilation, they said, too much human disintegration to establish that an English relief worker ever entered the Amiriya shelter. Aidan’s agency offered their condolences. All they knew about him or could find were the few details he had written on his application thirteen years earlier: Born 1947 in Highfields in the English midlands; moved to Ely to attend Cambridge University, graduated 1970; no current address; next of kin a half-brother, sixteen years older, had been living in Argentina, address not known, no contact information; no other relatives; no assets; no bank account; no will; no last wishes in the event of death. Apart from that, just glowing tributes from colleagues, warm recollections and reminiscences. All unwanted, she said, too unbearable.

* * *

Lenny leaned back from the table, opened out her hands. That was it. And here, she said, September 1994, she was alive, able to talk about it for the first time, with a man who had brought this unbelievable lift to her life.

Tony’s expression acknowledged her. He offered no words for none felt right or worthy. The horror of his past seemed lighter now, more easily borne. Other innocents had suffered and stayed standing. And, like him, she was a survivor, now setting alight in him a reverence he had denied her. Once again it came to him that fate must have brought them together; perhaps they sensed in each other some parallel of pain or affinity. In both their lives death had cheated them. Only God, if he existed, if he wasn’t a murdering sadist, could ever, could ever -

‘You okay?’ she intruded.

He nodded, suddenly self-conscious.

‘Sorry for the tears. I’ve never spoken of these things, to anyone. Except Leo, just parts of it; he’s a good man. Thank you, Tony, for letting me go on like that. You’ve no idea how relieving, how energising it feels.’

‘I do know . . . more than you might think. Anyway, I did nothing, just listened.’

‘You did an unbelievable amount.’

They agreed to talk later, that they’d said enough for now. In warm sunshine they linked each other down the paved lane that formed the last of the Killadoon trail. Occasionally she stopped and squeezed his hand in both of hers. At the end she wrapped him in a long unexplained embrace.

They lingered for a long while in the grounds of Horslips Hotel, in and out of superficial conversation. He decided against asking the questions he most wanted answered: Why had she gone away? Where to? To whom? Why the medications? A better time would come.

Later, they left the hotel, arms around each other’s waist. ‘I’ve got a surprise,’ she whispered with a look of mischief. ‘Follow me.’

‘Where?’

‘Just follow.’

* * *

She led him into foliage outside the grounds, then under dense overhanging trees. The wind rattling and the sounds of creatures scurrying about brought back the banshee stories of his boyhood, and unnerved him.

‘Excited?’ she asked.

‘Dark in here. Feel better to know where you’re taking me. What you’re planning to do with me.’

‘Don’t tell me you’re afraid. You are! You’re shaking.

‘Not afraid. Just like to know.’

‘You can’t know. It’s a surprise. Soon you’ll see.’

They passed through giant ferns and red-berry briar, then came abruptly upon a blue, rippled loch. Five feet below them, three small row boats banged together, tugging at their moorings. Tony’s eyes journeyed across the water, beyond a pair of pincer headlands, to a raging ocean, the Atlantic, and to a small green island about a mile off shore.

‘Loch Doog,’ Lenny said. ‘Once sacred to the ancient Druids. Doolough Lake, to give it its Anglicised name. The island is Intinn Island. This is the secret side of the loch. That’s how I’ve always thought of it. And guess what.’

‘There’s a monster in the lake?’

‘Loch, not lake, you’re in Ireland,’ she said, smiling. ‘Keep guessing.’

‘There’s a monster in the loch.’

‘No, that’s Scotland. But the brown boat is ours. Let’s row over to the island, Tony. It’s spectacular. Really superb. You’ll love it.’

He stalled, but drawn on by her excitement he suppressed a strange spookiness in him, dismissed it as one more legacy of a past he had yet to put right.

On the water he found a rhythm for the drop and pull and lift of the oars, and quickly worked out how to point the prow. The boat bore out to the farthest edge of the loch, through the pincer headlands, and into the Atlantic. His physical strength and discovered seamanship managed easily the swirls and currents. At Intinn’s wooded shoreline he steered under a canopy of branches, broadsided against the bank, and tied up.

The island was breezy and overgrown, darker than it appeared from afar, gnarled trees and briar everywhere. Close to where they landed he was taken immediately with a railinged square of rampant weed, two mottled headstones standing in its centre.

Lenny took his hand, led him along a shoreline of tide-pools and weed-coated boulders, all glistening in the afternoon sunlight. Farther down the shoreline broke left onto a pristine cove of white sand and turquoise water. Half-way around the cove a rocky promontory jutted out to the Atlantic, and beyond its tip, as though de-coupled by time, a 25-foot-high needle-like rock rose out of the depths. He closed his eyes and took in the dream.

‘Wake up.’ She pulled on his sleeve. ‘What do you think of my surprise? Isn’t this heaven. It was here, these waters and islands, that inspired John Synge’s plays.’

He hadn’t taken in what she said, he realised now. His mind was sailing away still, over alabaster sands and craggy rocks and alcoves into an endless blue; he was being seduced for the first time by the splendour of being alive.

Then intrusions of isolation whipped him back to that long-ago world, an unlit cell, dreaming of escape, of freedom, of a fantasised woman, of Ireland, obsessions that sustained him through more than three thousand days and nights. And by some mystery of fate it had become real. So often he’d seen it in his mind, he’d touched it and smelled it, this very scene. And here was. Freedom. Home. Ireland. A green island. And this woman called Lenny Quin.

‘Well, what do you think?’ she said, this time calling for a response.

‘Totally incredible.’ He tried to disguise his introspection, for he carried things she could never know, what she would not comprehend; and he knew that words would never explain the ordeal or the dream that had forged his life.

‘Devil’s Cove. My safe place,’ she said, tipping her face to the sun and salt-laden breeze. ‘Out there, the spike, that’s Finger Rock. You’re right, it is incredible, everything here; my feelings precisely. Since I was fifteen I knew I would always want to come here to die.’

‘Die? I don’t get it. Everything’s alive here. This place is alive.’

‘Where better to die than where everything is alive? You die but you don’t die. You can’t. You stay alive for always in the sand and the ocean and the sky. You never die.’

He arched his eyebrows and waited. Her detached seriousness discomforted him. Then her rich blue eyes re-opened and she smiled as though realising she had let something slip.

‘Come on,’ she said, playfully pulling him along.

They strolled to the middle of the cove. Away to their left sat the distant hills of Connemara; to their right, twice as far, a faint Inishturk Island. And there they eased down into the sand, soaking up the warm sun on their bodies.

‘Let’s go,’ Lenny said, leaning over him. ‘For a swim! Come on.’

‘Swim? We’ve no . . . You mean – ’

‘Why not!’ she said with a thrill. ‘Not a soul comes here.’

‘Might not be safe . . . It’s rough.’

‘Of course it’s safe. No current in here. You can see where it sweeps past, between the end of the promontory and Finger Rock. We don’t need to go near there. Oh please, Tony, come on, it’s a wonderful opportunity, come on, please, let’s go in.’

Again, his hesitation caused him to question how free he had really become. They’d already slept together; she’d seen the scars, and everything else. Nothing to be embarrassed about. So why, he thought? All that shit in prison maybe. Maybe not. The feeling was strange, like he needed permission. Joel had warned him he’d have to learn to permit himself. He didn’t need Lenny Quin for that; this was the original Anthony Xavier MacNeill, not something a stinking penitentiary had shaped. He’d do it.

Her sandy fingers touched his cheek. Then, hair dancing in the wind, she stepped out of her long cotton dress and flung aside her underclothes; and as she ran to the water his eyes ran with her in every slow-motion stride, ran with her all the way, through the shimmering light that mingled her into the scene; she was elemental, she was god-like, as one with the beauty before him as the sand or sea.

He sighed at his whiteness, then followed her, hoping she would plunge under before he caught up. The frigid shallows sent shocks through him. Freezing cold and frontally exposed, he feared, was no sight to show off; so as the chill bit into new regions he surrendered all of him to another chapter in his fateful dream.

He watched in wonder as Lenny moved with the poise she had on land. Farther and farther out she swam until her blond crown disappeared beneath the whitecaps for spells he thought of as much too long. She was a mermaid. Her grace underscored his own clumsiness, his panicky scrambling when his feet lost the bottom. Then after a while together their exertion sent them back to the comfort of the sand, where breathless and gasping they reclined on their stretched-out clothes.

‘Are you asleep?’ She stroked his hair minutes later as he lay face down. He smiled at her nakedness, then sat up and pushed his legs into his jeans.

‘Not as warm now,’ he said. ‘Maybe you should put something on.’

Her face revealed a different desire.

‘Sand all over me,’ he muttered, concealing that he had read her thoughts.

She shook out the bright calico dress and stepped into it. ‘This place is special, Tony; it’ll stay warm for a long while yet; you’ll see.’ She leaned back against one of the great boulders set into the beach and patted the sand beside her.

As he dropped into the spot he drew from his jeans pocket a tiny gold envelope, which he handed to her.

‘For me?’ She lavished it with wonder, then kissed him. Her fingers raised up a gold chain with a tiny Connemara Marble cross at the end. ‘Tony! I adore it! I’ll put it on now. I adore it. I’ll always wear it, I will.’ She settled in his embrace. ‘I could stay here forever like this, just you and me.’

His fingers threaded through her ocean-damp hair. At the same time, his mind wrestled with his uncertainties, and what his destiny might be.

‘Remember I mentioned a second surprise?’ she said. ‘Well I have one. But not yet. First, I want to know about a truly special man. Who is Tony MacNeill, really deep down?’

He shrugged, made a face. ‘Like anybody else. Not that interesting.’

‘Liar. That’s not who he is. Be serious, I want to know.’

‘What is it you want to know?’