A Mad and Wonderful Thing (18 page)

I have the gun set and the scope fixed — ‘Dope the scope', the American called it. I have one shot. I have allowed for the elevation and bullet drop. I have allowed for the temperature and humidity. I have calculated for spin drift. I know the range, and today the gods are with me and the wind is low. What breeze there is, I have allowed for. So far I have had eight shots — all misses — and nine aborts. Today I will take the shot, and I will not miss.

I practise my routine. Safety off. Deep breath. Let half out. Hold. Crosshair. Crosshair. Squeeze the trigger.

Four soldiers approach the bank through the village square. Soldiers one and two move in and out and through the reticle. I count them through. I put the spotting scope down and look through the scope on the rifle. The eye that was damaged in the fall is my left. I scope with my right. How lucky was that? Soldier three passes through. I am fixed on the corner of the wall. I wait on the last soldier. I know he will pause, and I am aiming to where that pause will be. I relax my breathing as soldier four enters, the scope moving right to left towards the crosshairs. I begin to exhale a slow breath. I count him across the mil dots of the horizontal: four, and three, and two, and
…
He goes down on his haunches to cover the rest of the patrol as they step onto the road to check a lorry. I breathe in. I adjust. I let him settle for two seconds, and I put the crosshairs on his folded body. I exhale another slow breath. I squeeze the trigger. Boomph! I absorb the short recoil of the Barrett, allowing my shoulder to be beaten back an inch to dampen the punch. I remain low on the gun, and I keep watch in the scope. I watch the shockwave through the air. I see pink spray. I see soldier four pop and splatter onto the Northern Bank's wall.

Mila

IN THE EARLY MORNING, I DRIVE HOME TO ENNIS, AND EVERY HOUR THE
radio news tells of the soldier killed in Crossmaglen. I go in by the rear door. Bella is in the kitchen.

‘Hello, stranger,' she says, her back to me as she prepares breakfast on the counter.

‘A cup of tea and two slices will do lovely,' I say, passing behind her and tapping her arse.

‘You have a visitor.'

I stop.

‘She arrived at the door yesterday, all flustered, the poor thing. I let her in to your room. This is for her — you can take it up.' She turns and faces me. ‘She's very pretty. And young, isn't she?'

‘Yes,' I answer. ‘She's very pretty.' What can I say?

I take the tea and toast, and knock on the door of my own room before I enter. The room is dim, with a soft diffusion of light that filters from the curtained windows. She moves in my bed.

‘Hello, German girl,' I say, making space for the breakfast on the bedside locker.

‘Irish boy,' she says, and I see anxiety fall away from her as she sees me. ‘I told you I would come.'

I lift her hair from her face and kiss her soft, pink lips.

‘Yes,' I say. ‘Here, Bella has sent this up to you.'

‘She's nice, isn't she?'

I sit on the edge of the bed and watch her eat. When she finishes, I kick off my trainers and climb in beside her. She rises from the bed and walks to the corner between the two windows. She faces the wall and, slowly, piece by piece, she removes her clothing: the socks that she wore all night, the loose top, the pyjama bottoms, the white bra. She turns to face me. In the gentle dust of morning shadow, she stands before me. Her skin is dappled with light that seeps from the curtain edge. In shades of grey, beauty is cast in the corner of my bedroom. Nothing that exists in the universe, nothing, is as beautiful as woman. I look on her tall frame — her head held high, her dark hair, her neck, her shoulders, her arms, her breasts, her belly, her long legs. I leave the bed and go to her and touch her. I kiss her face. I kiss her neck, her breasts, and I kneel down as I kiss her warm belly, her legs, her thighs. With her hands sliding by her sides, she pushes the white knickers down, stepping from them as I push her against the wall.

The next morning, we pack a picnic into the Renault and drive north from Ennis into the patchwork limestone of the Burren. At Mullaghmore Mountain, we leave the small road and park the car. I take the picnic and a blanket from the back seat, and we walk to the mountain over fissured ground. We stop and sit by a lake under the mountain, the still water clear in the cradle of the grey-white stone.

‘It's like we are on the moon,' Mila says.

‘It is that,' I agree. Around us is one hundred square miles of rock.

We picnic on the blanket by the water, as two mute swans watch us from beside a reed bed.

‘I wonder, will they eat bread?' she asks. She rises and walks towards them, and throws pieces of bread that float on the clear water, but she has to retreat before the swans approach. We drink hot coffee that I pour from a Thermos, and I tell her we are sitting on the bed of a sea.

‘That was a long time ago?' she asks.

‘Yes, hundreds of millions of years. It could drive a man mad just to think about it.'

After the picnic, we drive through the village of Kilfenora and on to the small town of Lisdoonvarna. I explain how every year people come here to a matchmaking festival: men looking for a wife; women looking for a husband.

‘Why don't they try the pub, or the supermarket?' she asks, and as she asks she gives me that look — that look she gave me on the first day — and I see her again in that aisle among the
Brötchen
,
Knödel
, and
Schinkenwurst
, the German girl, almost as tall as I am, but young, her face with all the fullness of innocence.

Leaving Lisdoonvarna, we take the coast road north to the village of Ballyvaughan. The road meanders along the jutted Burren coast, with the Atlantic Ocean on our west and the grey-white rock on our east. At Ballyvaughan, we take the inland country road back to Lisdoonvarna, and from there we drive out to the ocean's edge at Doolin, where ferries take tourists to the Aran Islands. We park the Renault on the verge of the road and we walk along the pier. The wind is blowing, and below us the sea crashes onto the shore. We find a pub at the top of the pier, and we order bowls of hot chowder and brown bread. A lone teenage girl plays a fiddle in the front bar. A coach-load of tourists arrives, and they gather around her. The girl stops playing and begins to sing. I walk to the front bar, where I stand watching her. She sits with her fiddle held to her chest like a little girl holding a favourite doll, and her long, orange-red hair falls down by her white face. I stare at her mouth as the words leave it
.
The tourists applaud as she finishes, and she puts the fiddle down on the seating and walks to me.

‘Hello,' she says.

I realise I have been staring at her. ‘I'm sorry,' I say. ‘That song …'

‘That's okay. Some songs do that.'

‘It reminded me of someone.'

‘So I see.' She pauses. ‘I'm Aoife.'

‘Aoife …' I reply, still confused by the place the song has taken me.

‘Aoife Jensen.'

‘Jensen?' I look to her now, to the pale-blue eyes in the pale skin.

‘Yes, my father is from Denmark. Came here to West Clare on holiday, met my mother, made me, and stayed.'

‘A Norse and Irish mix,' I say. ‘A powerful blend. Just like the old days.'

‘Yes,' she laughs. ‘Just like the old days.'

‘I have to go,' I say, glancing away. I take her white hand in mine. ‘Goodbye, Aoife Jensen. Tell your dad he made a beautiful girl.'

We leave the pub in Doolin, return to the Renault parked along the verge of the small road, and drive south to the Cliffs of Moher. We walk out along a narrow path. It is evening, and the few remaining tourists are leaving. We reach the cliff's edge and stand behind a slender wall of stone plinths. A wind is blowing. Below us, the blue-grey ocean pounds against rock. I look from the water to the girl. Her jacket billows in the wind, and her hair flies around her. In this place, the ocean has travelled from the American continent. That's a long way, so the air itself has had the time and space to be rid of impurities. It arrives here clean,
and I feel like I can breathe and gather all the shit in my head, and pack it into some shape I can get a hold of, and throw it up and away into the passing air rushing from sea to land; and just for a moment, I am renewed and free. I stand behind Mila, and hold her tightly as I kiss her head. We run back along the path to the car, relieved to get out of the wind, and we drive on along the ocean's edge to where the coast softens to sand and grassy dunes at Lahinch. We stop at a small general-store for petrol and groceries, and then we drive home.

Samhain

I AM AT HOME WITH THE DONNELLYS. LAST NIGHT, I WENT TO THE OAK
tree and I sat on the low wall. This morning, I walked through the town. The Sunday gathering has convened, and in my distraction I have missed my exit, and I now sit among them at the kitchen table as the soup is served.

‘Did you see the head on Rose Hamill this morning?' Mam asks, throwing the question across the table like a hopeful gambler rolling the dice. ‘First up to communion, she was, brazen as anything.'

‘Aye, himself wasn't far behind,' Dad responds, pulled from a daydream. ‘No shame at all. Came over and shook my hand on the way out.'

‘They're not coddin' anyone but themselves, them two,' Mam continues. ‘And those young ones moping about on the steps again? Can they not go in and sit down like civilised beings? Outside like a bunch of dopes with the whole town gawking at them. God Almighty, is it too much to ask?'

‘I see that Joanne has the new place opened,' Dad says across the table to Shauna, speaking of her sister who has opened a clothes store. ‘It must be exciting for her.'

‘She was always a great one for the fashion, that one,' Mam adds.

‘Four years in college is a long time to waste to work in a shop,' Shauna replies.

I look up, provoked by the pouring of bitter water on the enterprise.

‘She'd be better off going out and getting a job like the rest of us,' Declan joins the pouring. ‘She'll never make anything out of that caper.'

‘And you know who else I met on the way out?' Dad asks, before continuing without waiting for an answer. ‘The bould Sam McComish. He says his youngest has got a start above in the brewery.'

‘That was some stroke to get him into the brewery,' Mam says. ‘The bould Sam, he's deadly.'

‘They had pull there,' Shauna interjects. ‘Herself has a brother above.'

‘Well, that's them finished,' Dad says. ‘That's the last one settled. And you won't believe this, but Sam's after taking the redundancy bundle from the job, and they are moving out to Lanzarote for six months every year. Lanzarote? Wherever the hell that is. The world's gone mad.'

‘She was always shifty, that one,' Mam says. ‘That'll be her idea. She always had notions. Where is Lanzarote, Johnny?'

‘Spain,' I tell them. ‘Well, it's an African island that belongs to Spain.' And Mam and Dad shake their heads in astonishment as if I have confirmed that the bould Sam McComish and the shifty one are moving to the Amazon jungle or Mars.

‘And Father Woods is putting together a trip to Knock,' Dad tells, moving on from the Lanzarote news. ‘I said we'll go. It'll help fill the bus.'

‘I'll let Hannah and Eddie know,' Mam says. ‘Put the four of us down for it. It'll be a day out. Will you come with us, Johnny?'

‘Will I come on a trip to Knock?' I ask. ‘Are you mad? No thanks.' And everyone laughs.

‘There's the rain on,' Dad says, as the first drops tap against the window.

The Sunday conversation continues as I drink tea and retire to my own thoughts, and I think of the girl below the oak tree.

Barnacles

FROM DUNDALK, I TAKE THE EARLY BUS TO DUBLIN. I WILL TAKE THE
last bus back to Ennis so I have the whole day in the city with nothing to do. There's magic in that. I have a coffee to kick the thing off and then I visit the bookshops. I walk around with no plan or direction. I have a fast-food lunch, which I regret like I always do: it only ever fills with a sense of dissatisfaction. In the afternoon, I visit the National Library, just to get a feel of the place, and I do the same in the National Gallery and the museums. And then I go to a pub.

I order a pint of porter. It's not my favourite. In fact, I don't really like it, but I'm feeling all Dublinish. I sit at the bar and lift a book from my backpack, and I'm in the third chapter when she mounts the stool beside me. She, too, orders a pint of the black, and she, too, lifts a book from her bag. The book is all Post-its and notes.

‘You know what his dad said of them?' I ask her, ‘the first time he learned of Nora?'

She turns to me and shakes her head.

‘He said, “She'll stick with him.” '

She laughs, and a laugh early on is an important thing: it kind of sets the deal up. We read on, slipping the odd comment sideways, and when I order a pint each we put the books on the counter.