Bog Child (4 page)

Seven

Back home, he flopped on the sofa, his legs dangling over the arm, with beads of rain and sweat running down his face and limbs. The mantelpiece clock chimed nine o’clock. Mam appeared.

‘There you are. Look at the cut of you. You’ve destroyed yourself for your studying.’

‘I’ve done my weekly revision, Mam. It’s Saturday.’

She yanked his red sweatshirt. ‘Take it off, Fergus. It’s minging.’

Theresa and Cath drifted in, still in their pyjamas.

‘
The dead arose and appeared to many
,’ Fergus joked.

‘’S pissing down,’ yawned Theresa.

‘Theresa McCann!’ said Mam.

‘That’s what Da says when it rains.’

Fergus laughed. ‘We should all move south to the Mediterranean, Mam. The sun. The sea.’

‘Too right,’ Cath said. ‘It’s boring here.’

‘We’d go swimming every day,’ Fergus suggested.

‘Swimming?’ said Theresa. ‘Can we, Mam?’

‘You were at the pool only the other day.’

‘
Please
, Mam.’

‘I’ve no time to take you.’

‘Fergus could!’

‘He’s his study to do. And he’s going driving with Uncle Tally later. He can’t do it all.’

‘Aw, Mam!’ Fergus groaned. The thought of the laws of stress and strain made him weak at the knees. ‘Like I said, it’s Saturday.’

Theresa and Cath were swarming around him.

‘Please, Mam,’ said Theresa. ‘Ferg can study this afternoon.
After
his driving lesson.’

Mam sighed. ‘You girls. You never stop.’

‘I’ll sharpen his pencils,’ Cath offered. ‘
Please
.’

‘OK.’ Mam held her hands up in surrender. ‘Off you go. But I want you home by dinner. And, Fergus?’

‘What?’

‘Don’t let them stay in the water too long. I don’t want Cath’s bad ear back.’

By the time the bus dropped them in Roscillin, the rain had lightened but was still spitting. There was hardly anybody about. An ancient wreck of a man, fag hanging from mouth, shuffled past, as skewed as a knotted-up lamppost. A younger woman stood in the middle of the pedestrian crossing, her inside-out umbrella hanging limp at her side, looking up as if she was Saint Sebastian and the raindrops were the arrows. The police station bristled with barbed wire, awaiting the end of all things.

Jesus, Fergus thought. The place was a blight.

At the pool, though, there was a cheerful crowd. Maybe it was the novelty of the flume, put up after the last bomb as if in compensation. There were lads going down it backwards. A gaggle of grown girls swooped down, their bikini tops a-quiver. Fergus grinned at the sight of Mary Keane from school. He’d had no idea she was so endowed.

Fergus went to the main pool and swam a length. Theresa and Cath were hell-bent on the flume and he had peace. He followed the line of the lane, goggles on. For a few strokes it was as if the legs and arms worked perfectly together and he glided effortlessly from one end to the other. But when he turned for the next length, the magic left and he felt the strain and the water resisting. He was tired. The warmth of the water made him drowsy.

They took me up the mountain and it wasn’t fair.

The little voice was in his head again, the child time forgot.

Theresa and Cath in their pink and orange swimsuits ambushed him in the shallow end. He’d to swim between their legs three times each. Then he’d to time their underwater swimming against the big clock at the end of the pool. Theresa had it down pat, but Cath kept surfacing as if she was too scrawny not to float. Then he’d to play ‘Whale Spouting’ and ‘The Monster from the Deep Lagoon’. Then they went off for another go on the flume.

His eyes stung with chlorine. He heaved himself out, changed, and sat up in the spectator area, looking down at the pool, waiting for Cath and Theresa to finish. He saw them go down the flume, arm in arm. Their ponytails flew backwards and their pale legs streaked like flying fish.

He sat back and smiled at the mosaic fishes on the ceiling. A fat guppy winked at him lazily, improbably purple. He felt his lids closing as the echoes of the voices rose and clashed and began to fade. His arms and legs tingled with the day’s exertions.

Somebody help me. Please. Somebody…

The little-girl dream-voice again, from another place, another time. She was running in a white shift, down the mountainside. Then she changed into a creamy, white goat-kid.

‘Fergus! The very man.’

He snapped open his eyes. Michael Rafters, an old school friend of Joe’s, was edging his way towards him along the row of seats.

‘D’you mind if I sit here?’

Fergus nodded. ‘Feel free. Haven’t seen you in an age.’

‘You here with your family?’ Michael asked.

Fergus pointed to where Theresa and Cath were queuing for another go on the flume. ‘My sisters.’

‘They’ve grown. It’s been a while since I saw you all. How’re things?’

‘Fine.’

‘Are you still being crucified?’

Fergus smiled. It was how everyone referred to going to the Holy Cross School. ‘I’m on study leave. For my A levels.’

‘My, oh my. Joe and I never got that far. We were too busy making home-made bombs.’

Fergus guffawed. The two older lads, known at school as Dafters and Canny, had once blown up the games hut at school with a mixture of sugar and fertilizer. ‘They still call you “The Incendiary Devices”.’

‘We were only messing, Fergus.’

‘The whole school knew it was you. But nobody split. And the teachers never found out.’

‘I’d say they’d a shrewd idea.’

‘Would you?’

‘Old Dwyer dropped me a hint. But he turned a blind eye. A Sinn Fein man like him. He probably saw it as legitimate practice.’ Michael squeezed out of his wet jacket. ‘How’s Joe?’

‘Mam saw him the other day. He’s studying as well.’

‘Never.’

Fergus looked down at Joe’s watch. ‘He’ll be thirty when he’s out.’

‘Thirty?’

Fergus nodded.

‘I suppose parole and the H-blockers rarely go together.’ Michael leaned over. ‘He’s showing no sign of joining the hunger strike?’

‘None. He’s more sense.’

‘Fergus McCann. That’s hardly the attitude.’

‘I voted for Sands in the by-election. My first vote ever. What more do you want?’

‘You know and I know. The ballot box isn’t enough.’

Fergus shrugged. ‘Maybe not.’

‘With four strikers dead, the whole of the North is ready to erupt.’

Fergus nodded. ‘I can believe it.’

Michael crossed one leg over the other and put his hand around the back of Fergus’s seat. ‘Me and the lads,’ he said casually. ‘We’ve been wondering. If we can count you in?’

He said it as if he was inviting Fergus on a fishing expedition.

‘Count me in?’

‘You know.’ Michael’s hand circled the air, like a royal wave.

‘So you’re—’
One of them. A Provo.

Michael nodded. ‘People are joining in droves on account of the hunger strikers. And the fiend-bitch over not listening. Maybe that’s what it’s all about really. Not clothes: recruitment. He was a canny man, was Sands.’

‘If your numbers are up, you don’t need me.’

‘Fergus!’ Michael hissed his name in mock admonishment. ‘That’s not a die-hard McCann I hear talking. You’re not afraid, are you?’

‘No. But I promised someone I wouldn’t get involved.’

‘Someone? Don’t tell me. Your ma.’

Fergus felt his cheeks hot up. ‘I’ve my mind on my studies right now. And my running.’

‘The running. That’s just it, Fergus. We have a job for you that involves a bit of running. You’re the best runner this side of the county.’

Curious, Fergus looked over. ‘Don’t you have getaway cars nowadays?’

‘We’re not talking active operations. All we want is a bit of couriering to and fro over the border. We’ve seen you jog over those mountains.’

‘Seen me?’

‘With that red gansey you wear, you’re hard to miss.’

Fergus bit his lip. They’d been watching him, spying through binoculars.

‘What better disguise would there be? And you can avoid the checkpoints altogether, if you know your way.’

‘Couriering? Couriering what?’

‘Nothing much. Bits and bobs.’

Fergus saw Theresa and Cath climbing out of the pool. He leaned over and waved and shouted at them. They waved back and jumped straight back in the water.

‘No way,’ he said, sitting back again. ‘Sorry, Dafters. It’s not my scene.’

‘But you go running up there anyway. It’s a small price to pay for freedom, Fergus.’

Fergus grunted. ‘Dunno.’

‘That’s right, Fergus. Think about it. I’ll be onto you again. You know who’ll benefit, don’t you? Those two young sisters of yours. By the time they’re grown, Ireland will be free.’

Michael unpeeled himself from his seat and glided away.

Fergus watched him vanish through the exit, then plumped against the back of his seat.

‘Jesus,’ he said out loud.

From the pool, Theresa was making gestures to say they’d be five minutes. He’d promised to buy them hot chocolates from the machine. He shook his fist and beckoned them both to hurry. They shrugged and he mimed slurping a delicious drink. Finally they got out.

Michael Rafters, he knew, was only the start. They’d never rest until they’d got him in up to the neck.

Something slithered in his belly, cold and subtle.

‘Jesus,’ he said again, kicking the seat in front of him.

Eight

Uncle Tally picked him up for his driving lesson at three. He got behind the wheel of the family’s old brown Austin Maxi, checked the mirrors and pulled out. He was confident at the driving now. His gear changes were smooth, the pedals a natural extension of his legs, the steering finely nuanced.

The rain had moved east, leaving the day dry but dull. At the petrol station there was no sign of Da, although the shop had its lights inside on. The lough beyond looked lifeless.

‘This bloody weather,’ Uncle Tally grunted. ‘It’s like a girlfriend you forgot to phone.’

‘Which girlfriend would that be?’

‘Keep your eyes on the road. I’d rather not land in that lough.’

Fergus flicked a hand from the wheel. ‘Is there one, Unk?’

‘One what?’

‘A girlfriend?’

‘Nope.’

‘Why not?’

‘You’re curious today.’

They drove on in silence.

‘I did have a girl,’ Uncle Tally said. ‘When I was your age. We were going six years.’

‘What was her name?’

‘Noreen.’

‘Why didn’t you marry her?’

‘She ran off to England with the boiler man.’

‘Never.’

‘She did. She’s married now, kids ’n’ all.’

Fergus thought of his da’s story, about the other body they’d found in the bog: the woman who was supposed to have run off, but hadn’t.

Uncle Tally shifted in his seat. ‘Slow up for this turn. It’s sharp.’

At the border, the Welsh soldier, Owain, was on duty. He waved them on. Fergus nearly told Uncle Tally how they’d got talking, and how the squaddie was a fallen Pentecostalist from the mining Valleys, but he’d to concentrate on the gear changing as they started their ascent. Above them, a chink of blue appeared in the sky. Mountainside broke through the cloud. He nearly stalled changing down on a steep run of road.

‘Watch out or we’ll be rolling backwards.’

‘I like it up here, Unk.’ Fergus tooted the horn at a sheep on the tarmac. It kangarooed off across the gorse. ‘You can breathe easier up here. It’s like the Troubles don’t follow you. They stay below.’

Uncle Tally sighed. ‘It’s a bloody messed-up country, all right, down there.’

Fergus pulled in at the top. They wound down the windows and looked out at the view. The movement of the clouds was lovely. The world below was a round, swirling marble.

‘Unk?’

‘What?’ Uncle Tally was lighting a cigarette, nodding his head as if listening to invisible music.

‘Why aren’t you or Da in the IRA? How come you stayed out?’

Uncle Tally blew out a ring of smoke. It hovered, expanded, then grew ragged and fell apart. ‘We were too old.’

‘You? Too old?’

‘I’m eight years younger than your da, but that’s still old. I’ll be forty later this year.’

‘Never.’

‘I will. By the time the Troubles got going this time around, your da was already a family man. Otherwise he’d have joined up before you could say
Fenian fanatic
.’

‘Fanatic?’

‘You live in this place a few months, you become one. We’re all deranged by now.’

‘You’re not.’

‘Who says?’

‘Everyone. You’re just you, Unk. Nobody tells you what to do.’

‘Wish that were true.’

‘I still don’t know why you didn’t join up.’

‘It just wasn’t my scene, Ferg.’

Fergus looked at his uncle’s face. It was exactly what he’d said to Michael Rafters earlier, only in his own case it hadn’t been enough to get him off the hook.

His uncle offered him the cigarette packet. ‘Go on. Have one.’

Fergus took one. He didn’t like smoking much, but had the occasional fag to be companionable. ‘I’m leaving right after my A levels, Unk. I’m going to find a summer job over in England, then go to medical school. If I get the grades. I’ll be away from all this.’ He gestured to the valley below.

Uncle Tally offered him a light. It took a few goes with his lighter in the fresh wind. ‘Good on you, Ferg. Get away. As soon as you can. I only wish to God I had, years ago.’

There didn’t seem anything to say after that. They stared at the great bowl of life below and smoked. When they finished the cigarettes, Fergus drove on up as far as the cut. The JCB digger was still there, silent, and three cars were already parked in a line on the bridleway, the back one a smart green Renault 5 with a Dublin registration. Dotted around the hill was a handful of anoraked figures, measuring and examining. Across the bog the tarpaulin was hoisted on poles to form an awning. It flapped in the high breeze. By it, two figures stood out against the horizon. One was down in the cut, so that the bottom half was truncated, the other, tall and thin, stood to the side.

‘More action,’ Uncle Tally said. He lit another cigarette. ‘You go and see what’s up. I’ll stay here.’

‘Don’t you want to find out what’s going on?’

‘That child is dead and gone, Fergus. Nothing can bring her back to life.’

Fergus shrugged and got out. He picked his way over to the tarpaulin. The figures there surprised him by turning into two young women as he drew closer. The one out of the cut dangled a measuring tape, as if bored. The one in it was speaking into a handheld recorder. Her voice was clear and precise, with a Dublin accent. She’d a restless gait.

‘
The girl, if it is a girl
,’ she was saying into the recorder, ‘
may have been four feet tall, if her legs were intact. Her left arm is exposed, in a position that is twisted up around her head. Her right arm is lying prone to her ribcage, with a distinctive bangle on her wrist
…’

She had a neat head of dark cropped hair and wore jeans with a faded blue sweater. As she recorded, she swung herself from right to left, her nose an inch from the cut’s wall, staring at the body as at a masterpiece in an art gallery.

The younger woman with the measuring tape wore leggings and an outsize grey man’s jumper that came down nearly to her knees. Her nose tilted up. She was biting her underlip.

‘Hello,’ said Fergus.

The younger girl started. She’d to shade her eyes as the sun appeared from behind a cloud. Fergus could see her more easily than she could see him. She’d white skin, almost as if she was unwell. Her hair wasn’t cropped but grew flat and dark down to her shoulders.

They were surely sisters.

‘H’lo. Who’re you?’ the girl asked.

‘I’m Fergus. Fergus McCann.’

She frowned, as if the name might mean something.

‘I’m the one who found her.’

A smile broke over her face. ‘Mam,’ she called over to the cut.

Mam?

‘
The metal could be gold, and the style is in tune with Roman or pre-Roman, and the finger spools are in evidence, showing excellent preservation
—’

‘Mam!’

‘What?’ The woman in the cut looked up. She’d the kind of face that thrived in the outdoors, with faint lines around her blue eyes and vigour in her cheeks. She looked more an older sister than a mam.

‘This is the lad you asked about. The one that stopped the diggers. Fergus McCann.’

Fergus blinked. The older woman switched off the cassette and pocketed it. She laid her forearms down on top of the cut and sprang up like a gymnast. She smiled as she straightened up, rubbing dirt from her fingers like flour.

‘Am I glad to meet you, Fergus,’ she said, holding out her hand. ‘I’m Felicity O’Brien. This is Cora, my daughter.’

Fergus nodded. ‘Hi.’ He shook her hand and then gestured with his arm at the car. ‘That’s my uncle parked over there.’

‘And you found her?’

‘We did.’

‘How come?’

Fergus nearly said they’d been after some turf, but stopped himself just on time. ‘Uncle Tally and I were up here early. Bird-watching. And I used the cut as a covert.’

‘A covert?’

Fergus nodded. ‘Then I saw the gleam of the bangle.’

The woman called Felicity whistled. ‘I’d say all archaeology’s in your debt, Fergus.’

Fergus looked down and ran the toe of his boot over some heather.

‘In archaeology,’ Felicity continued, ‘usually a body like this is named after the place it’s nearest. But we still don’t know if this lassie here is
Drumleash Child
or
Inchquin Child
. Or even if it’s a she. The police are still arguing over which side of the border can lay claim to her. So I thought I’d resort to another tradition. Which is to have the one who found her christen her.’

‘You can’t christen a pagan,’ Fergus pointed out. ‘Especially not a dead one.’

Cora guffawed. ‘So you can’t, Mam. He’s right.’

Felicity waved their comments aside. ‘We can’t be sure how old she is,’ she said. ‘Not before carbon-dating. She could turn out to be medieval. Or even later. But somehow I don’t think so.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘The bangle, partly. And the presence of this.’ She reached down and took a sod of earth. It was shot through with a soft, light-coloured layer of moss.

‘What’s that?’ said Fergus, peering.

‘It’s sphagnum moss.’

‘Moss?’

‘It’s found in bog-land like this. They used it in the First World War to dress wounds. There’s a quality in it that stops decay.’

‘Never.’

‘It’s true,’ Felicity said. ‘Bodies decompose because of microbes, and this moss stops the microbes.’

‘They should put it in face creams,’ Fergus said. ‘You could make a mint.’

Felicity laughed. ‘This child reminds me very much of other bodies they’ve found over the years, in Denmark especially.’

‘Denmark?’

Felicity nodded. ‘There was a ritual in Iron-Age times around this kind of terrain, across northern Europe. We don’t know much but it seems that bodies were placed in the bog for a reason. And my colleagues in Iron-Age history mostly think it involved human sacrifice.’

Fergus stared. ‘Sacrifice?’ He looked to where he could see the little hand reaching out from the wall of earth. ‘Jesus. The poor child.’

‘On the other hand, they might have been criminals, guilty of something serious.’

‘But a child? Surely you wouldn’t execute a child?’

Felicity sighed. ‘That’s indeed a puzzler. Maybe she died of natural causes. It’s quite likely. We’ll have to get her out and do a post-mortem, just as if she was born in our time. The bangle suggests that she was a person from an important local family. Who knows? Maybe we’ll have to rethink all the theories.’ She crouched down by the side of the cut and reached a hand towards the place where the head would be, if exposed.

‘I wish I could help you,’ Fergus said.

‘Maybe you can. Couldn’t he, Cora?’

The girl stepped forward and put a hand on Fergus’s arm, as if she was testing to see if he was worthy. ‘Yes. He could.’

Cora’s hand stayed on his arm for a fraction and then fluttered away.

‘Really? Could I?’ Fergus felt like a child who can’t sleep on Christmas Eve, mad to get down in that cut and brush away the earth from the child’s face.

‘You can help us organize the shifting. We’ll need a whole team of strong locals, because we’ll have to shift the whole block of earth around her, and expose her carefully when she’s safe indoors.’

‘Where’s she going?’

‘We’re moving her to the Roscillin abattoir, temporarily. They can’t decide if she should go to Belfast or Dublin and until they’ve sorted that out, we need to keep her cool.’

Fergus thought of the dead carcasses of animals hanging and the small child lying on a slab in the middle of them. ‘Ugh.’

‘Ugh is right,’ Cora agreed.

‘It’s not ideal,’ Felicity said. ‘Just our luck for her to turn up bang on the border. Has any name sprung to mind?’

‘Sorry?’

‘For our bog child?’

Fergus squinted up his eyes and examined the little hunched figure, curled like a brown gnome. In his mind she was climbing out of the bog and dancing like a plasticine model in an animation, shaking dirt from her eyes. ‘
I dug and delved the mountain, but it wasn’t here, it wasn’t there
,’ she trilled. He realized it was the baby-doll voice of a pop star he’d had a crush on when he was eleven. ‘Mel,’ he said. ‘That’s her name. Short for Melanie. But everybody calls her Mel.’

‘Mel?’ said Felicity. ‘That’s Latin for honey. Maybe if she’s as late as Roman period, she really could have been called that.’

‘What if it turns out to be a boy?’ Cora asked.

Fergus shrugged. ‘Then I’ll think of something else.’

Felicity grinned. She jumped back into the cut, got out her cassette and switched it on. ‘
Fergus McCann, the finder, has just informed us that she, if indeed she’s a she, is to be called Mel. So, Mel–welcome to the light of day.
’