The New Policeman (13 page)

“I know you from somewhere,” he said.

“Really?” said Larry, smiling benignly and edging away at the same time. He had a horror of old people, especially those with good memories.

“We’ve met,” said Thomas. “I can’t think where.”

“I can’t think where either,” said Larry. “But people often mistake me for someone else. I’m told I’m the spit of my father when he was my age.”

“What’s your name?”

Larry told him. Thomas shook his head. “It’s ringing no bells,” he said. “Where are you from?”

“I grew up in Sligo,” said Larry. “But I’ve moved around a lot.”

Garda Treacy was moving toward the door and Larry made to join him.

“It’ll come to me,” said Thomas.

“We’re looking for a missing teenager,” said Larry. He showed Thomas the photograph. “Perhaps you saw him on Saturday evening?”

“I know the lad well,” said Thomas, “but I don’t recall seeing him on Saturday.”

“If you think of anything, give us a ring,” said Larry, and made his escape.

The day flew by as rapidly for the two policemen as for the rest of the population. All the same, Larry was
tired and footsore by the end of it. All he could think about was getting home.

“What do you think?” said Treacy as they left the barracks.

“About what?” said Larry.

“About the boy? I’d say he’s just off on a jaunt somewhere.”

“He is, I’d say,” said Larry.

“They don’t give a toss, the young lads these days. Worrying their parents and wasting our time at the public’s expense.”

“What can you do?” said Larry.

Treacy shrugged. “Have you any plans for tonight?”

“A hot bath and an early night,” said Larry. “I can’t wait to get home.”

“There’s a trivia night in Labane,” said Treacy. “We’re one short of a team.”

Larry shook his head. “I’d be useless. Half the time I can’t even remember my own name.”

IT’LL COME TO ME

Kate Thompson

5

“In your far distant history,” said Aengus, “people moved freely between the two worlds.”

They were sitting on the curb, and Aengus was struggling with the plastic wrapping on a new packet of pipe tobacco.

“Then there was this humongous battle between your lot and our lot.”

“Who are your lot?” said J.J.

“In those days you used to call us Danu’s people; the Tuatha de Danaan. It was a long time afterward that you started calling us fairies.”

“So you are fairies?”

“We’re people,” said Aengus, “but you can call us what you like. There isn’t really a forum for raising an objection, you know?” He put on a lager-lout
voice.
“Oi, you. Who are you calling a fairy?”

J.J. laughed. Aengus was still struggling with the plastic; all thumbs. “Anyway, we had magic on our side—”

“Magic?”

“Just a bit. But your lot had strength of numbers and…well…the truth is they had better leadership than we did. We hadn’t really much of a notion of what we were doing. We’ve never been much use in your world.” He succeeded in getting the plastic off and began to fumble with the foil wrapping inside it. “For some reason that I’ve never been able to fathom, there seems to be a limit to the number of people we can turn into pigs.”

“Pigs?” said J.J.

“At any given time, that is,” said Aengus. “One or two at a time seems to be the most we can do. It doesn’t work with armies.”

“You’re having me on,” said J.J., although even as he spoke he remembered Devaney and the bodhrán and he wasn’t so sure. “You can’t really turn people into pigs, can you?”

“No bother,” said Aengus. “Anything at all, for that matter.” He stuffed a small clay pipe with tobacco and lit it with a purple lighter, then went on. “Some
of your storybooks suggest we lost the war, but that isn’t right. Well, maybe it’s a little bit right. In any event, there was a settlement. We were allowed to go home to Tír na n’Óg as long as we stayed here and never went over into your world again.”

“That doesn’t make sense to me,” said J.J. “Why would our side choose to stay in my world and die if they could have eternal youth?”

“They never trusted this world,” said Aengus, puffing furiously at the pipe. “And they wanted time. They wanted to have pasts and futures. They wanted the ability to shape their world and to accumulate wealth and power. Christianity had just arrived, so they weren’t so worried about dying, now that they could look forward to an afterlife.”

“Is there an afterlife, then?” said J.J.

Aengus shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “Why should I care?”

In J.J.’s mind one of a whole heap of pennies began to drop. “So,” he said carefully, “if we have living and dying and all that stuff and you don’t, does that mean that you’re…you know…immortal?”

“Not even remotely,” said Aengus. “I’m as mortal as you are. The only difference between you and me is that you have forgotten how to use magic. If you were
born here you’d be the same as me. It’s the worlds that are different, not us. Yours has time. Ours doesn’t.” He glanced up at the sky. “At least,” he said, “it didn’t. Until the leak started.”

J.J. tried to absorb the information. It was an awful lot for a teenager, even a talented one, to get his head around. “You’re trying to tell me that time is leaking out of our world into yours?”

“Exactly,” said Aengus.

“So that’s why we never have enough of it?”

“Spot on.”

“And you have too much.”

“Way too much.”

“My God,” said J.J. “We have to do something about it. Where is the leak?”

“That’s the problem,” said Aengus. “We have no idea.”

THE FAIRY HORNPIPE

Trad

6

J.J. was charged with energy. The languid feeling that he’d been enjoying since he emerged from the souterrain was gone, along with the mental woolliness that had accompanied it. All the nonsense that he’d been hearing had suddenly become clear, like a fuzzy image pulled into sharp focus.

“Okay,” said J.J. “For thousands of years—our years, that is—the two worlds have been perfectly sealed from each other.”

“By the time skin,” said Aengus. “The fluid wall between the worlds.”

“And now,” said J.J., “all of a sudden, there’s a leak.”

“We’ve checked all the obvious places on both sides,” said Aengus. “Some of us have been over to your world, and we have one or two people like Anne
Korff who are still searching over there. The thing is, there aren’t many places where there is two-way traffic. Most of the souterrains are blocked on one side or the other.”

“What do you mean by two-way traffic?” said J.J.

“The souterrains are for your benefit, not ours,” said Aengus. “We can go through pretty much anywhere.” He indicated the alchemy shop behind them with his thumb. “I could go through there if I wanted to, and come out in Séadna Tobín’s shop. It wouldn’t be a particularly smart idea, but I could do it.”

“How?”

“I don’t know,” said Aengus. “It comes naturally to us. How do you breathe?”

“Do you go through a lot, then?”

“Not in the normal course of events. When the sun was where it ought to be, we only went through now and then for a bit of craic. Or when we had to.”

J.J. thought about it. “So the time skin must be everywhere?”

“It is,” said Aengus. “There are a few places where it had to be closed off, but it’s almost everywhere.”

“So something must have broken it,” said J.J.

“It looks like it,” said Aengus, “but I don’t see how it can have. You’ve seen the way it operates. During the war a group of your lads decided to have a go at destroying it. I watched them hacking at it with swords and axes. They might as well have been trying to cut a hole in the sea.”

“But there’s a hole in it now,” said J.J. “Has there ever been a leak before?”

“We never had a ‘before’ before,” said Aengus. “There are other kinds of leaks, of course. But they’re harmless.”

“What other kinds of leaks?” said J.J.

“Well, the music, for one. That leaks through all over the place.”

“Could the time be coming with it?”

“It never has,” said Aengus. “I can’t see what would make it start doing it now.”

“Maybe we should check it out all the same,” said J.J.

“If you like,” said Aengus. “Winkles is as good a place as any.”

They stood up and began to walk back down the street. Bran, who had been lying down beside J.J. while they talked, heaved herself up and followed them.

When they got to the square, Aengus handed his
fiddle case to J.J. “Take this and go on down there. I’ll borrow another one and catch up with you.”

“We’re not going to play tunes,” said J.J. “Lesson number two of how to worry. No tunes.”

“And how do you expect to check out a music leak without music?” said Aengus.

J.J. conceded the point and took the fiddle. When Aengus crossed the road toward Drowsy Maggie’s house, Bran didn’t follow him. She stayed with J.J. and followed him, step by painful step, along the street toward Winkles.

The inside of the pub was so dim that J.J. had to stand in the doorway until his eyes adjusted. When they did, he saw that Jennie and Marcus were already there, sitting in the corner between the door and the fireplace. Devaney was there as well, up at the bar.

“Welcome back,” he said to J.J.

“Sit down here,” said Jennie. “We were thinking of having a tune.”

It was the first building in Tír na n’Óg that J.J. had gone into, and the inside of it appeared even more organic than the outside. The tables and chairs were constructed, quite haphazardly, from whole branches, some of which still had leaves attached to them.

“Did you see herself around anywhere?” said Devaney.

“Who?”

“His goat,” said Marcus. “Can’t have much of a tune without her.”

J.J. shook his head and sat on a stool, surprised to find that it felt much more substantial than it looked. It was so substantial, in fact, that when he tried to shuffle it closer to the table it wouldn’t budge an inch. He looked down between his feet and saw that its legs, and those of the table as well, disappeared into the packed earth of the floor. All the furniture, including the bar itself, was still growing.

Devaney got down from his bar stool and went to the door. “I’ll go and have a look for her,” he said, and went out.

“If I’m not mistaken,” said Marcus, “that fiddle case belongs to Aengus Óg.”

“Aengus Óg?” said J.J. “Is that who he is?”

“Who else would he be?” said Jennie.

The others, including the maid behind the bar, laughed.

“But I thought Aengus Óg was a god,” said J.J.

“Don’t let him hear you say that,” said Marcus. “He has a high enough opinion of himself as it is.”

“He’s not, then?” said J.J.

“No more than any of us,” said Jennie.

“If it’s gods you’re looking for, you’ve come to the wrong place,” said Marcus.

The barmaid came over with a wineglass filled with amber fluid for Jennie and something in a yellow bottle, which she put down in front of Marcus.

“Anything for J.J.?” said Marcus.

“What does J.J. want?” said the barmaid.

“Coke?” said J.J.

The girl hunted through the rows of bottles behind the bar and lifted one down. It was the old-fashioned, chunky kind of bottle and J.J. wondered how long it had been there. But when it opened with a satisfying gasp of fizz, he remembered that, until a few hours ago, there had been no time at all in Tír na n’Óg.

Something in the back of his mind needled at him and made him feel uneasy. Something to do with the bottle and its age, and its freshness. But Jennie laughed and pointed to the door, and what he saw there made him forget whatever it was that had been bothering him.

The goat was standing in the doorway, looking in at them.

“She likes the music really,” said Marcus. “But winding up Devaney is even more craic.”

“Should we catch her?” said J.J.