Winterwood (17 page)

Fifteen: Let Me Rest
on Windy Mountain

W
HEN I ANNOUNCED MY, admittedly, somewhat dramatic decision to leave Aungier Cabs and return home for good to Slievenageeha
Mountain, everyone in the office was literally stunned.

Everyone, that is, apart from Larry Kennedy, who bawled out from the inside office:

—I knew it all along! Auld Pappie is a mountainer at heart! Oh yes, he might like to think he's a city-bred Dubliner like
us but deep down, you'll find, he's a bona fide yokel! It's in their blood, you see. Sooner or later they all go back. But
I'll tell you this, Pappie, we're all gonna miss you — ya great big hillbilly sheep-fucker you!

The rest of them were afraid that I might take offence. But they ought to have known me better than that. I was far too fond
of Larry for that.

As well as that - the man had spoken the truth. For far too long I'd been living a lie.

The truth was that in my heart of hearts, I had never liked the city. Had never, at any time,
truly
settled there. In spite of my persistent protests to the contrary. Particularly when I'd worked in RTE. To hear me then you'd
have thought of me as just about as refined as they come: sounding off about wines and foreign travel. You'd have accepted
me readily as a true-blue suburbanite, a Dubliner going back several generations. Until of course you got to know me, maybe
thrown a bottle or two of wine inside me.

Perhaps then you might have experienced certain misgivings: revised, perhaps, your opinion entirely. After an hour or so
listening to me incoherently blathering on about 'the ancient code of the hills' and what Slievenageeha had always privately
meant to me. I might even have referred to a couple of 'enchanted days', fleetingly glimpsed through the thick mists of memory,
which may not even have happened at all, back in the days when my mother had been alive. But which I continued to dwell on
because I longed for them so much, right up to the moment — well, right up until the moment when I
expired,
in actual fact.

Which I did, I'm afraid at this juncture I have little choice but to reveal, late last year in the autumn of 2005, leaving
instructions along with money that I be interred in Slievenageeha, the old home place, the Mountain of the Wind. Which may
seem to some cynical, when you think of the things I've said about it in the past.

But there still is to be found there a peace and a sense of belonging, which I have succeeded in finding in no other place.
A blissful peace and sense of place that no city on earth will ever be able to provide, certainly no city that I have ever
visited, or am likely to now.

Now that I'm attired in my fine carved suit of boards, as Ned once remarked of a neighbour after a funeral.

Now that I've forsaken this world of pain.

I'd been lying there in the armchair for over two days when the police eventually broke down the door of the Sutton apartment
where I'd continued living after Casey had moved out. There had already been references in the papers to 'important new developments'
in the 'missing girl' case. With talk in some quarters of an arrest being imminent. Something which did not appear unlikely
to me at all, certainly not after I arrived in one day to find the controller in grave conversation with a plain-clothes detective.

I remained out of sight, listening to what they were saying. By all accounts a decision had been taken to interview every
cab driver in the base. I shivered when I heard Karen Venner's name, the American lady who had taken such exception to my
behaviour that day at the Royal Dublin Hotel. I felt sick and stupid as I remembered my unnecessary gruffness. I became unsteady
on my feet when I heard the detective use the words, quite matter-of-factly: 'internet appeal'.

I remembered the way Karen Venner had looked at me: as though, instinctively, she'd sensed something was indeed wrong, amiss.

As I stood there in the taxi office, clutching the door jamb, I was afraid at any moment I was going to faint. But just at
that point, who went by, only the bold Larry Kennedy.

—Not a bad day, Larry! I chirped. If the rain keeps off we'll have no reason to complain!

—Now you're talking, Auld Pappie! he laughed.

The funeral ceremony took place, predictably enough, with no one at all present, just two days before 'A Winterwood Christmas'.

Which I'd been looking forward to for months, having bought their presents as far back as Halloween - a boxed set of John
Martyn for Catherine, a cosmetic compact set for Immy, now that at last she'd become a young woman.

In keeping with the mood, a gale-force wind continued moaning throughout and the rain swept high above the rugged mountain
peaks. It was lonesome, certainly, and there were better ways, no doubt, in which a man might have taken his leave. But at
least I made it back — to Slievenageeha, my old mountain home.

If somewhat peremptorily cast, it has to be acknowledged, into a truly dark and dismal confinement which, it has been ordained,
I must endure without protest. With my knees tucked tight against my chest, like some boy-sized crate of yellowed bones, shared
with other equally lonely souls, in this barren ground where no roses grow.

The mountain proceeding, as it must, with the inevitable march of clamorous progress, as the Suzuki jeeps — which make their
way to The Gold Club, their nocturnal roars like the triumphalist cheers of the living — are directed, without compassion,
towards the cowed, defeated, and irrelevant dead.

Slievenageeha, proud Mountain of the Wind. The valley where I was born some sixty-four years ago, and once walked with my
father by the babbling brook. Where we'd stand together as he stroked his red beard, placing his brawny, protective hand on
my shoulder. As he said:

—There's one thing we can be sure of, Little Red.
Fanann
na cnoic i bhfad uainn.
The hills will outlast us, Redmond, my son.

Before setting off together back to the old homestead, sitting there quietly in the silence of our humble mountain cabin.
As he hummed a little and then lit up a stogie, reaching down for his jug of clear. In that old familiar mountain way.

A red beard. A weathered hand. A stogie.

Familiar details which really ought not to come as a surprise - not in a place where, like they say, every man is his own
grandmotherl

Or, as Casey liked to put it:

—Where every sonofabitch is an inbred twister!

With our red country heads and our 'auld' mountain ways. Of which my daddy was another prime example. Auld Daddy Hatch who
had any amount of old mountain yarns. Who could effortlessly amuse at the drop of a hat. In that time-honoured, down-home,
fireside way. You'd sit beside him as on he jabbered, knocking back mug after mug of the clear, with patches on his trousers
and an old plaid shirt, sending a gobbet of spit into the fire as he battered on about the day they'd gone to town 'for the
crack'. When their 'whole damned tribe' had got as 'drunk as monkeys'!

Fanciful yarns by the score he'd tell. Not to mention sing-songs and rip tunes from his fiddle. Hornpipes and polkas and jigs
by the hundred. But then of course, that ought not to come as any surprise.

After all, wasn't he Florian's brother?

Florian Hatch, the well-known artiste?

Who loved to dance hornpipes in meadows behind trees?

And take photographs with the camera he had bought out in America?

And when he was finished whisper menacingly into your ear:

—Say a word about this and I'll murder you, Little Red. I'll murder you the way I done her.

The girl he claimed to have cut and cut badly, before eviscerating her and dumping her body. Somewhere out in America, it
was claimed.

Of course he might not have done it at all.

But who was going to take the risk? Of deciding it was nothing but another example of a 'mountain tall tale'.

Certainly not an eight-year-old boy. Who just nibbled at his chocolate as the fiddle screeched wildly.

Trying not to squeal as its bow swept up and down.

The Present

Sixteen: The Strutting Living,
the Creeping Dead

S
LIEVENAGEEHA LIDL IS THE name of the new retail centre in the town and Liebhraus is the construction company. The American
microchip plant Intel employs in excess of 2,000 people with plans for further expansion already well advanced, towards what
is predicted will be a mini Californian-style silicon valley. A spaghetti junction swirls way beyond the mountain. To accommodate
the high-powered eighteen-wheeler diesel trucks, honking along the five-lane motorways, belching great clouds of thick smoky
dust. The Gold Club really is jaw-droppingly spectacular. The five floors are designed in steel and glass and anything you
want you can get it in there. Before five o' clock entry is free. It's like the gold rush days have come back to life, and
it's in there you'll find your heart's desire, with no restrictions at all, just so long as you've got money and the right
attitude about spending it. Once through its doors, you'll encounter flight attendants and kindergarten teachers, executives
mingling with software engineers, all quaffing state-of-the-art cocktails, not batting an eyelid at the non-stop table dancing,
or the inevitable quota of discreet working girls. You won't hear much country music either.

—No hillbillies here! you'll be told. No room for sheep-screwers in here, my friend!

The living strut and the dead souls creep.

I suppose that's the way it's meant to be. The way it's always been, right from the beginning, back in Old God's time.

—When the world was only a nipper and muggins wasn't even born, as Ned used to say.

Sometimes, whenever I feel like leaving it all behind, I'll creep, as I must, out of this dank hole and take myself for a
walk across the valley, past the industrial park, down as far as the old babbling brook. The noise from Liebhraus can, at
times, prove unbearable, the roar of diggers and drills and grinders like some mundane, prosaic but insanely dogged anti-symphony.
So it's nice to sit here and listen to the waters babbling - right at the spot where, all those years ago, back in Old God's
time, Ned Strange first walked out with Annamarie Gordon.

Annamarie Gordon who had promised to be his wife. Not only become his wife, in fact, but give him a son. She wanted it to
happen, she told him. More than anything she wanted that to happen. So that they could be the Strange family together. And
he could be their proud and doting father. Their 'Pappie'.

—It will be lovely, she said, 'Auld Pappie Strange', our son will call you. And you'll be a great father. I love you, Ned
and always will. Do you know how much? I'll love you till the seas run dry. Till the seas run dry and the angels quit heaven.
That's how much, my love, and more.

It was in honour of the memory of that never-to-be-born boy that one day after sitting by the brook I set myself the task
of fashioning a little commemorative cross. I'd watched my mother making them out of rushes, in the long ago when I too was
very small. Before she had died like an angel in the chapel.

But I couldn't bear to think about that any more. All I wanted to do was lay my cross on the cemetery grass, in honour of
the sweet little 'neverborn'. To kneel on that grass and whisper a silent prayer. So I made my memorial and set off on my
mission.

It had already begun to snow as I drifted across the valley. It swept in flurries as I placed the cross on the cold stony
ground. Marking the spot where
nothing
would ever be.

Because, of course, Ned Strange never did have a son. No, no 'baby Owen' was ever to be delivered of Annamarie Gordon, for
Ned Strange or anyone else.

Or of Catherine Courtney for Redmond Hatch either. No babies for couples whose love had turned to dust.

Which was why I had hand-lettered across the cross's centre:

Little Rose of the Outlands: we'd have loved you so much

RIP 00 AD-00 AD

—The most wanted of all that never was to be: a love that died before it truly lived. Baby Owen. Redmond Hatch and Catherine
Courtney.

I whisper those words to myself in the nights. As I lie here listening to his tense, covetous breathing. The breathing of
who?

Why, His Eminence Ned Strange: the Son of Perdition, King of the Air. Who now — and for ever, apparently — is to be my nearest
neighbour. Something which ought not to come as a surprise to anyone. Not in a community celebrated for being close-knit.
Not in a place that's been called 'Incest Mountain'.

Which, as it turns out, is most apt indeed. With Ned and I being so close now that he's aware of practically every one of
my thoughts. Generally before I am myself. After all, he's a very powerful man. Why he can even, you know, predict the future.

—What exactly did you expect? he says to me. You can't say I didn't warn you. Something dreadful's what I promised, something
dreadful's what you got. It's nothing more than you ought to have expected.