Bird of Passage (35 page)

Kirsty wasted many fruitless hours in the village post office, looking through whatever phone books they had, Scottish directories mostly. She found a few O’Malleys. She even dialled a few numbers. Nobody who answered knew anything about Finn. She had to face the unpalatable truth that, after his brief, disturbing resurrection, Finn had disappeared again, as surely and perhaps as deliberately as on that first occasion. He had never intended to be seen. Wherever he was now, it was obvious that he had no thought whatsoever of contacting her again.

CHAPTER  TWENTY SEVEN

Finn drove south from his rented house in Inverurie, spent the night in a guest house and went over on the car ferry from Stranraer to Belfast. He was fortunate. The sea was calm, even though it was winter, much calmer than it had been that night on the rig. The big, powerful vessel ate up the miles. He was travelling alone. He didn’t want to book any hotels, so he had decided to take pot luck with accommodation. In fact, he hadn’t really wanted to plan this trip at all. He had been steeling himself to make it for some time, ever since the disaster. It had seemed an inevitable next step. Something he had to do, before moving on. But planning was another matter. He had told nobody he was going away, not even the woman who came in a couple of times a week to do his cleaning. He had just got up one morning, packed a small bag, left a note for her on the kitchen table, and gone.

It was when they were passing Ailsa Craig that it started, images jostling for place in his mind. Francis, standing beside him, watching the sea, jumping up and down to keep warm. Micky Terrans with his tweed caps and smart waistcoats – what had become of him, he wondered? - and the stoical boy he himself had once been, suffering it all without complaint. How had he managed to suffer it all? How had he survived intact? Had he survived? Really? There was something irretrievably lost, and it wasn’t just the gaps in his memory. Was it the capacity to love and be loved in return? Was that it? You mustn’t love anything or anybody too much,  because if you did, it would be taken away from you. Was that why he felt so little, about anything?

 It occurred to him that it might have been better to make the longer sea crossing from Holyhead. He would have had time to think, time to adjust. This was almost too swift, even though there would be a long journey at the other side. But they had always travelled to Stranraer, all those years ago, so it had been the first place to come into his mind. And besides, he associated the Dublin-Holyhead crossing with his father, and he didn’t want to have to think about his father. Not this time. Perhaps never. This trip was about something else entirely.

 He went to the onboard cafe and bought himself a mug of coffee and a Danish pastry, cramming it into his mouth without thinking. Then he went out on deck again, pulling up the collar of his coat against the cold. Nobody else had ventured out and the icy wind was a blade over his face. But he wanted to watch the horizon, wanted to see Ireland changing from a misty illusion, to see it resolving itself into solid ground.
And still I live in hopes to see, the Holy Ground once more!

 ‘Oh, Jesus,’ he said, under his breath, although he had given up believing in Jesus, Our Father, or the Blessed Virgin Mary, a very long time ago. He stayed out on deck until summoned below by the tannoy at the journey’s end. And then he drove south, stopping briefly for a snack in a main street cafe in a small border town. The place seemed sullen and ugly, blighted by old hatreds, the air tense with suspicion. With every mile he drove further south, things seemed less dour, but he couldn’t decide whether this was his own perception or some genuine lightening of the mood.

That afternoon, he reached Dublin, where he checked into a small but expensive hotel near St Stephen’s Green. The receptionist was disposed to be friendly, but he was politely noncommittal. He couldn’t be bothered with conversation. He took a shower, lay on the comfortable bed for half an hour and watched television. The programme was about antiques. An elderly woman was selling off family heirlooms so that she could pay for a trip to Disneyland for her grandchildren. He switched off the television and lay back down, listening to the muted sounds of traffic from outside.

Dublin. He was holding his mother’s hand and they were going to visit somebody. His mother had few friends in the city but on this occasion, they must have been invited out. He remembered her fastening his jacket. ‘Chin up,’ she said. ‘Chin up, Finny.’ His jacket was too small for him, he was growing so fast. But she wound a scarf, round and round his neck, and over his face. It was striped because she had knitted it from odds and ends of wool.

‘That’ll keep out Jack Frost,’ she said. ‘He’ll never nip your nose through that!’

They walked for what seemed like a long time, down cobbled streets. His mother was wearing her brown coat and a headscarf with a coach and horses on it. He remembered a dark staircase with steep stone stairs, and his mother holding his hand and helping him up, counting. He had always liked to count stairs. Stairs and street lights. ‘Here we are, my little soldier!’ she said, at the top.

They stepped into a warm room full of the gorgeous smell of cooked meat. He was very hungry and the smell made his mouth water. They didn’t eat much meat, as a rule. His mother’s meat and potato pie was mostly potatoes. The woman who lived here helped to unwind his scarf and take off his coat. She sat him down on a hearthrug, in front of the fire, and gave him some wooden building bricks to play with. He could feel the heat of the coals, burning his cheeks. The soft voices, talking about grown up things, soothed him, made him feel sleepy. They were smoking, and the blue wisps from their cigarettes drifted towards the chimney. The colours of the blocks were all faded, and the edges were worn so that you couldn’t build them up properly. They tumbled down all the time, so he laid them flat and made a road with them instead. A stripey cat stalked over and looked at him, then stretched and yawned widely, arching its back and showing needle teeth and a pink mouth. The cat’s breath smelled faintly fishy.

‘Don’t mind Frisky,’ the woman said. ‘He won’t touch you, so.’ She was comfortably fat and her clothes were too tight for her. Her chest was like two dumplings, spilling out over the top of her sweater. When she hugged him, he could smell a faint scent of coal tar soap. Her name was Phyllis, and she was his mother’s friend, but he couldn’t say her name. He called her Phissie. She didn’t seem to mind. She gave him tea with lots of milk and sugar, the way he liked it, baby tea she called it, which made him feel cross because he wasn’t a baby. And then she took a big piece of corned beef out of a pan, real beef, which she had cooked herself, all pink and juicy and sweet smelling, and she cut generous slices off it and put it between two thick slices of white bread and butter, and set it in front of him. The heat of the meat was making the butter melt and soak into the bread.

‘Eat up, Finny,’ said his mother. ‘Phyllis makes the best corned beef sandwiches in all Ireland, if not the whole world.’

‘Will he have mustard?’ asked Phyllis.

‘I don’t know.’

She put a little mustard on the tip of her knife and let him lick it, but he didn’t like the taste of it. It nipped his tongue. So he shook his head. ‘No thank-you, Phissie!’ He took a mouthful of his sandwich to take away the sting of the mustard. And when he finished that, she made him another one. And he finished that too, licking the crumbs off the plate.

‘I wouldn’t like to have the feeding of him.’ said Phyllis.

The luscious taste and the scent of the beef had lodged itself in his mind. Finny. He had forgotten that his mother called him Finny. The woman in the convent hadn’t called him Finny. He had been Finn, there. Just one more thing to disturb him. He had not been back to see her again, although she wrote to him, from time to time and he sent her the odd letter or postcard in return. It was easier to put things on paper than to have to deal with her at first hand.  At Christmas, he sent her parcels of useful things: toiletries, sweets, books. Sometimes, when there was a woman in his life, he would delegate the task to her. But he never kept his girlfriends for very long. They got tired of him and went away. ‘You’ll go to any lengths to avoid commitment!’ the last one had said, flinging clothes into her suitcase. She had infiltrated her clothes into his house over the few months they had been lovers. But he had never invited her to move in with him, never given her any reason to suppose that the arrangement was other than casual and temporary. Why did women always expect more? He had nothing to give. Nothing whatsoever. He took what he needed and gave nothing in return. They always thought they would change him, but they never did.

In his hotel room, he showered, dressed and went out into the city for a while, but there was almost nothing that he remembered until he walked down to Bewleys, where the smell of coffee and baking, where the sight of the stained glass windows, bright jewels in the wintry street, brought his mother vividly into his mind again. He ought to go and visit her. Her letters were short and neat. She didn’t have much to say to him. God bless you, she wrote at the end of each note. God bless you, Finn. Who was he to turn down blessings? He went into a bar, drank a couple of whiskeys, ate a bland lasagne and went back to his hotel, where he slept fitfully, his dreams full of uneasy fragments of the past.

In the morning, he consulted his road map, and drove out of the city. It took him a long time to find the place, and his chief impression was of its deliberate remoteness. He understood why it had been almost impossible to escape from it. Why the older boys, who had tried, had invariably been brought back by the
Gardai
. At first, he drove through monotonous agricultural land, past farms, new bungalows,  affluent churches, villages set among fields and hedges, quiet streets with pubs, shops, signposts to the occasional tourist attraction, usually some prehistoric site or other . Sometimes a stately home, Or the remains of one. But gradually this civilised countryside gave place to something fiercer, more hostile, especially now, in winter.

He was in a wilderness of peat bogs with the wind blowing unhindered across them. He stopped, consulted his road map, drove on towards a line of low hills. A narrow road, with grass sprouting down the middle, wound along a valley. He could feel it swishing beneath the car.  Stunted thorns fringed the road. He had not passed another car for the last half hour. It was mid-afternoon, already. The sky was a uniform grey. At last, he found what he was looking for: the entrance to a driveway, twin stone pillars almost hidden from view by ivy and a dense blackthorn hedge. Sloes. They had gathered sloes where they could find them, and tried to eat them to satisfy their extreme hunger, but the fruits were bitter and had made them sick. If he had not had a map, he would never have recognised the place. His comings and goings had been infrequent. Once you were there, there you stayed.

He turned right and drove slowly along the uneven track, seeing almost nothing he remembered. But then, rounding a bend, he came upon what had once been the Brothers’ garden, its wall crumbling so that the inside was laid bare, a jumble of shrub, and bushes and ancient fruit trees. Nature had done its work all too well, and the once green lawns had been obliterated by a tangled mass of vegetation. Even now, in winter, it would be difficult to fight your way in.  He was almost cheered by the sight of so much disorder where once there had been perfection and plenty. He drove on.

Around the next bend, he saw the house and his foot found the brake. It was in a state of advanced dilapidation which gave it the look of some mediaeval ruin, although there was no great age to the building. It was a late Victorian edifice, perhaps one of those country houses built as a status symbol with new money and then adapted haphazardly over the years to suit its changing purpose. Neglect and abandonment had given it a sinister beauty. The roofs had been stripped, deliberately, it seemed. The windows were broken, perhaps by wind and weather, perhaps by country children, throwing stones. But who would venture out so far just to vandalise this place? Well, perhaps there were some who would, he thought. There was a crucifix perched on one of the gable ends. It looked pathetic. An anomaly.

He drove on for a couple of hundred yards, parked his car some distance away from the house and got out. His hand was shaking when he tried to put the keys in his coat pocket. His feet sank into mud as he walked towards the building, found a door swinging loose on its hinges, pushed it open and went inside. His heart was in his mouth. What did he expect? Demons, lurking in corners, waiting to snatch at him from the shadows? For sure, the place was disturbing. Terrifying even. The  rooms were leprous with damp, paper shredded off the walls like peeling skin, the floors deep in bird droppings, plaster fragments, all of it stinking of mildew. The very air of the place seemed sickly, heavy with decay but after all, there were no cries, no shouts, not so much as a whisper. Nothing human. And it was human beings who had rendered this place truly terrifying. The stairs were perilous and he did not attempt them. He just stood at the bottom, his hand on the banister rail, peering up towards the faint grey light of the upper floors.  But instead of demons, Francis came walking into his mind. Sweet Francis. He could almost hear him singing, the notes dipping and soaring like birdsong.  

The winter it is past, and the summer’s come at last, and the little birds they sing in the trees...

What had really happened to him? Had it been an accident? Over the years he had come to understand that memory could not be trusted. You told yourself stories, in an effort to impose shape and meaning on the chaos of your life. And then somehow, those stories began to seem like true accounts. He had not seen what had happened to Francis, but he had heard and he could imagine.  In one scenario, he saw Francis, blinded by his own desperation, climbing onto the polished wooden rail, and jumping off.  In Francis’ shoes, he could just about imagine that he might have done it. But there was a much more disturbing image that came to him from time to time, like a flashback to something seen, although he knew fine he had been in bed with the thin sheet pulled over his head, because that was what they always did on these nights. And he had seen nothing. Not with his own two eyes. Nevertheless, he could see it. Could see Francis, poor skinny Francis, vulnerable as a puppy, and quite as unable to defend himself. Francis, who was due to leave the school any day now,  on the point of escaping for good. Francis, his thin frame bent over the banister and then, savagely, tipped head first into the darkness below.