A Swift Pure Cry (9 page)

'Leave off.'

'I did. You were ogling.'

'I was not.'

'You were. Ogling and gogling away. Either at me or Father Rose.'

'Give over.' She grabbed Trix's hand and started to yank her down the hill. Jimmy followed. 'You're romancing, Declan.'

'Am I?' He wouldn't leave off walking beside her.

'You are.' She looked up at him. He grinned at her. His hand darted forward and pinched her cheek.

'This is a holy day, Declan Ronan.'

He guffawed. 'All that stuff. It's a load of sexual sublimation.'

'Don't listen to him, Trix. He's blaspheming.'

Declan grabbed her collar to stop her in her tracks. He leaned over and whispered in her ear. 'Shell. Don't be cross. Meet me in Duggans' field, won't you? One morning soon. Just for a kiss. One kiss, like last time.'

She felt the worms wriggling inside her again. She shrugged.

'I'll wait for you,' he urged. 'Early on Easter morning. However long it takes.'

'You're insane, Declan Ronan.'

'You're a walking sex-bomb, Shell Talent.'

She jabbed him in the rib, and Trix leaped up on his back, but he extracted his long, lanky body with a laugh and made his way off up the avenue.

'Toodlepip,' he called.

'Tarala,' Trix shouted.

'Whisht, the pair of you,' Shell said. But she couldn't help smiling.

Mrs Duggan pulled over as they continued on through the village. Her two boys stared out from the back, pulling faces at Jimmy.

'Shell,' she called, 'is your dad with you?'

'He's doing some messages, Mrs Duggan.'

'Is he now?'

Shell nodded.

'Squeeze in, the three of you, out of the rain. John and Liam, bunch up there and make some space. I'll give you your tea, if you like. I've tarts made.'

She drove them over to the Duggans' farm. It was where Trix and Jimmy often used to go to play, back in the days when Dad worked there. Since he'd stopped the work, they'd been over less often, but still went in the school holidays. Mrs Duggan had been Mam's best friend from the days of their youth. There was a photo of the two of them at eighteen, in slender dresses from the 1960s, at a dance in Castlerock.

'Dr Fallon told me you were sick, Jimmy?'

Jimmy pulled up his sleeve to show off the cut, dark and thin now, with the anger gone from it.

She tutted and tousled his head and gave him an extra slice of tart.

Afterwards Shell helped clear away. Mr Duggan fetched the younger ones out to help feed the calves.

'Shell,' Mrs Duggan said as they dried the plates, 'you're more like your mam every day.'

The words were sweet and sad, like the taste of bitter lemon Father Rose had given her the other day. 'Am I, Mrs Duggan?'

'With your figure coming out and the colour of your hair, you are. Your mouth's the image of hers. Only your eyes are different. Lighter than your mam's, I'd say.'

When the job was done, she gave Shell the loan of her bike so that she could cycle down to the strand. Shell pedalled down the quiet roads. The weather had cleared. She was soon out on Goat Island, with the Atlantic before her. There was no one there but herself. Near the cliffs, the sands shifted, wrinkling in the wind. The water's edge meandered on a pancake surface. She took off her shoes and socks and, like a child, tucked her skirt into her underwear. The cold bit into her bones as she paddled. '
The sea has made the sand a mirror which my two feet destroy
,' she muttered as she walked. It was the start of a ditty she and Mam had made up together, long ago. She squinted into the low sun, and there was a figure, a candle flame, drifting away from her: just like Mam, taking one of her beloved lone walks down to the end of the strand. Surely that was her olive-green scarf tied over her ears? Her hands were planted in her pockets, her head was down to the wind in just that familiar way. Shell blinked. The figure vanished.

Shell's heart had a purple cover over it.

When Jesus dies, she thought, you die a little too.

Sixteen

Holy Saturday was a nothing-day. The tomb was sealed, the world was quiet.

Trix and Jimmy walked with Shell across the fields carrying their spades of red and blue. They picked the lemon daffodils on the grass slope and piled them in Jimmy's bucket. They sat on a fallen tree and watched the smoke of Coolbar writhing, white on white. The lambs mewed and bounded. Jimmy found grubs under the trunk. He collected some on his spade and transported them downhill, arms flapping.

'Where are you going?' Shell called.

'I'm the plane. We're off to America,' he said.

Trix practised balancing.

Dad didn't appear from his room all day. They hadn't seen him since the Stations. There was a holiday in their hearts.

The long day passed.

Trix and Jimmy had a second tart Mrs Duggan had given them for tea. Shell was fasting until the time of Jesus' rising. She was determined to stay awake all night in a vigil of waiting and prayer. Having nothing nicer to wear, she risked putting on Mam's dress of seamless pink. She tied her hair back in a neat green ribbon.

After Trix and Jimmy were safe in bed, she heard a stir from Dad's room: a floorboard creaking, a curse. She took herself out the door as fast as she could and ran behind the cairn in the back field.

Only just in time: he came from the house, with the braces down around his pants and no shirt on. He'd a look on his face as if to say,
Where's my tea?
He shouted Shell's name once or twice, then gave up and went inside. She waited. Twenty minutes later he reappeared, a new shirt on him and the jacket of his best-but-one suit. He took himself down the road, the change jangling in his pocket.

Once he was out of sight, she gave a long, contented breath. She sat on the hill and looked down on the squat grey bungalow that had always been her home. There'd been a time when Dad had promised to raise the roof and build an upstairs floor. But it had never happened. The moon floated up like a perfect dandelion fluff over the wooded horizon. She yawned. She'd been up since early morning, doing any number of jobs.
I'll just lie down an hour
, she thought.

In the bedroom, Trix and Jimmy were sleeping sound. She lay on top of her own bed in her pink dress and without meaning to drifted off to sleep...

...In her dream, she was in the village. There was little sound. She was gliding between the houses, glimpsing cracks of light through curtains. The eaves were all crooked, and television aerials askew, stabbing the low fast clouds of a stormy night. She stole a look through the window of Stack's pub. Dad and Mr McGrath were within, with Father Carroll trying to get some life out of the broken jukebox. Tom Stack the barman was pulling the pints. By the fire three dogs slept in a tangled heap.

She tried the door of the church. Locked. She sat in the porch and waited, for what she didn't know. The temptations of the devil visited her in her watch. Before she knew it, she was halfway along the street, up the avenue to the Ronans' big pink house, and knocking on the door. Declan answered and took her out for a night on the fields. His hand was bony and hard, his wicked tongue was in her ear, the clothes were mumbo-jumbo between them, they rolled from the coastal dunes to the mountaintop and down the other side. But Father Rose walked over the brow of the hill, appearing from the copse. Declan fizzled away. She was neat and trim again in pink and ribbon-green. He came and sat beside her in her vigil. They were back at the fallen tree where Trix, Jimmy and she had sat earlier. Not a muscle moved, no words were spoken. Even the grubs were sleeping. But love coursed between them, a different love from Declan's, a love beyond flesh and bone, a love you took with you to the grave. His tears fell from him as he sat beside her. Shell prayed that they might cease, but he only shook his head, as if to say,
Shell
-in that way of his-
the tears are part of it, didn't you know?
The night of waiting became a hundred nights, but with him by her side, Shell didn't mind.
To thee do I send my sighs
, she heard Father Rose praying in his head. She answered him:
Mourning and weeping in this vale of tears
. Waiting was life itself. In the waiting she saw the sweetness, as when she'd mixed the scones and put them on and could smell their fragrance growing as they cooked. She hugged her ankles and looked out over the jumbled headstones to the one that marked her mother's place. First light arrived. She could see the headstones now: it was time. Father Rose and she left their place of waiting. Together they walked into the garden of serried tombs.

Father Rose must have been sore afraid, as the apostles had been. He vanished. Shell was on her own. She was Mary Magdalene, waiting.

The half-light was eerier than darkness. She stopped by her mam's grave. She couldn't see the lettering, only the bright specks of the daffodils she'd planted the previous autumn.

She sat down on the grass and waited some more.

From somewhere up the hill, a voice started. First it was a tuneful murmur, like birdsong. Then it was like crows in a fluttering tree. The sound came closer, right over by the church gate. It took shape as human song. She couldn't hear the words, only the notes. They rose and fell, like shining bubbles, forming a pattern of loveliness. They were so beautiful, Shell wanted to cry. For by now she'd recognized the voice. It was Mam's. It seemed like she hadn't heard her sing in a lifetime. She smiled and relaxed, trying to make out the tune.

A door opened and the song grew louder. Her mother was coming in from the yard, as she'd done countless times, ever since Shell could remember. She's in the kitchen now, Shell thought. A tap gushed on. A broom clattered on the floor. Was she singing the one about the lassie that dies a day before her wedding? She strained to hear the words, but she couldn't catch them.

Long vowels curled their way towards her, through the bedroom door. The cadences grew closer, as if her mam was coming to check up on her, to see that she was all right. She was back at the time she'd had a fever, three years ago. Trix and Jimmy were at school, it was just Mam and herself in the house, with Mam in and out of her bedroom several times a day with the thermometer and hot lemon drinks, stopping to feel her cheeks. The floorboard on the other side of the door creaked in its familiar way. Shell couldn't wait to see her.

The song paused, just for a fraction. Shell held her breath.

When the voice resumed, something had changed. A terrible sadness had crept in. Perhaps the lassie was saying one last thing to her lover before she died. Or perhaps the man was explaining why he had to leave. A high note soared swiftly up to a sustained 'O', bringing the song to its climax. But instead of dropping back to a conclusion, the note stuck at the top, spinning like a coin, unbearably pure. The note turned into a fierce and piercing cry.

The door handle turned, just as Shell remembered the truth.

Mam was supposed to be dead. Her singing couldn't be coming from inside the house. It was coming from her grave. They'd buried her alive by some terrible accident and she wasn't singing, she was choking to death.

Shell was her mam by then. She was penned under the ground, frantic, unable to breathe, pushing against the soft white padding of her coffin. She tried to jolt upright, back in the present. Her fingers kneaded the blanket. Velvet darkness pressed all around...

...She woke up.

She couldn't tell where she was at first. In a coffin, or a field? By the gravestone of her mam? No. She was in her own bed. Mam's fingers had surely just fluttered past her face.

'Moira.' A voice, familiar.
Him
again. She froze.

The curtains were ajar. Moonlight toppled in over the counterpanes. Her father loomed at the foot of the bed, swaying on the spot. Only he'd no clothes on. His nakedness was appalling. She'd forgotten to bolt the door.

Her heart hammered. Her breath came sharp and fast. He was fumbling towards her.

'Moira.'

His voice was slurred. There was a sizzling in her ears.

One of his hands pawed at the hem of her dress. The other came up to her hair, pulling at the ribbon. His eyes were half shut, half open. His breath was stale and old. The flab on his pale arms wobbled as he groped.

Jimmy murmured something in his sleep.

The sound he made unfroze her. She knew what she had to do.

She rolled swiftly off the edge of her bed, too quick for Dad to catch.

His hands wondered over the sheets, shifting a pillow as if in search of her.

She crouched on her hands and knees and began to move away.

He sat on the bed rummaging, muttering. It was hard to tell if he was asleep or awake.

She crossed the floor as soft and supple as a cat.

She reached the door. She heard him groaning, stretching out on the bed. 'Moira. Don't turn away, lovey, turn to me.'

Shell's belly heaved. Jimmy tossed and sighed, Trix breathed smoothly.

She slunk through the door. Then closed it firmly behind her.

In the kitchen, she huddled on the chair.
God in heaven.
Her breathing returned to normal as the darkness thinned. He'd have passed out by now. She waited until the birdsong started, for real this time, not in the dream. Then she went to the window and looked out. The grass blades were grey. Dawn slunk across the back field.