At the Edge of the Game (15 page)

We should be at
something resembling a destination by nightfall, surely, even if the roads are
still bad along the way. Probably sleep in the jeep overnight and sort
ourselves out with a place to stay tomorrow, a base of operations from which to
gain passage abroad. Perhaps Helen’s pregnancy will prove an asset in that
regard. And Helen and I have an ace up the sleeve… Heathshade doesn’t know it,
but concealed on my person is quite a lot of cash, our last reserves. Should
money prove to still work down south, we should have some leverage with which
to get ourselves sorted.

The traffic is
stopped up ahead at the Stillorgan junction. Uniforms, guns. A roadblock.

‘Christ,’
Heathshade mutters. Then louder: ‘Stay cool, all right?’

Each car is
being checked, the driver questioned. Heathshade himself is far from cool. I
can see the tension in his neck, his jerky movements, the way his feet play on
the pedals, as though he is ready to make a break for it. This fool could land
us all in jail yet, or worse.

We’re next. A
soldier approaches.

‘ID please, folks.’

Heathshade hands
over our passports.

‘You’re a UK
citizen.’

‘That’s right,
mate. Trying to get home. Taking my friends with me.’

The soldier
looks us over carefully, scans the car’s interior. Long seconds of pounding
chest, roaring ears, rigid neck. But this particular crisis blows over .

‘Thank you.’

He hands the
passports back, taps the roof. Heathshade drives on.

‘See?’ he crows,
like he knew it all along.

The number of
walking refugees dwindles as we progress through the south-city suburbs. After
Cabinteely there’s only traffic. Clusters of dark-windowed houses and bare
shadowed tree-forms, reaching branches like clutching claws, we the prey just
out of reach. Willows like chandeliers with the bending weight of dripping
icicles glittering when the sun hits through the wind-driven clouds.

Heathshade
reaches across and opens the glove box. It’s full of CDs.

‘What kind of
sounds have we got?’

‘You want to
play a CD at a time like this?’

‘Why not?’

‘What about the
radio?’

‘All right,
then, the radio. Whatever.’

I scan the
frequencies, all the bands, but there is nothing intelligible. No bulletins,
nothing. Dead air. Is there a bleaker sound than beating long-wave static?

Heathshade
reaches in and grabs a CD, gives it a quick look and sticks it into the stereo.
Some god-awful metally crap. He cranks the volume up. I crank it back down.

‘Jesus, it’s
like travelling with two OAPs.’

The traffic is
slowing, condensing. Walking pace now. Heathshade losing his cool again, blaring
the horn. Pointless nonsense. Sets off a chain reaction along the line of cars.

The cause of the
slowdown becomes clear – a stationary car blocking the road. A dull grey Clio
containing dried-up dead people. Here as we drive slowly by sits a woman at the
wheel, mummified. In the back two girls, a teenager and a child preserved in
like fashion.

‘Caught in the
storm.’

More invaluable
insight from Heathshade.

A cohort of
armed Gardai works on moving the dead car to the hard shoulder. None of these
officers wears full uniform. They have the rather disconcerting bearing of
ill-disciplined militia. Just keep looking straight forward and drive on.

Here on higher
ground the snow is still patchy in the fields. A piebald landscape, that’s what
it is. The perennial indicator of the saddle-point between the seasons, chill
water black with dirt, fills the roadside.

Smoke is rising
from Bray. Maybe that’s why the traffic is slowing again. Rubberneckers. Heathshade
slams his fists on the steering wheel.

‘Fuck, this is
too slow.’

Something of
this scene puts me in mind of the drive back from the funeral of my parents. I
was sitting in the passenger seat, and my uncle was driving. Muddled, he
stalled the car at some lights. The car behind started beeping and then roared
past. ‘Asshole!’ the driver shouted, sticking a finger up.

More police are
at the next bend. Soldiers too. A helicopter rises and veers away in the
direction of Bray. These police are not interested in us. They wave us through
with hardly a glance. They have a bulldozer, which they are using to push three
downed electricity poles to the side of the road. There are craters in the
road. Not the kind you usually come across on Irish roads either, formed slowly
when rain seeps into and breaks down shoddily put-together pavement. No, these
are of that more troubling kind formed quickly when explosive charges detonate.

And now that I
look about more closely, how were the trunks of those trees chewed up so
recently, and why are there splatters of red over there, close to where that
black plastic sheeting is weighted down with rocks?

The road passes
through narrows. Those steep wooded slopes might surely offer tactical
advantage to an enterprising guerrilla unit.

The traffic
stretches in a long, slow-moving line far ahead up a steady incline as far as
the ridge a couple of miles away, where the ascending valley, in which we are
such sitting ducks, opens onto a plateau.

Heathshade is
muttering to himself, jaw clenching, face red. He snarls and starts spinning
the steering wheel. The car squeals to the right, and we are speeding up a
boreen with withered hedgerows on either side, plunging into the dark woods.

‘What are you
doing?’

‘Taking the
initiative.’

‘You don’t know
where you’re going.’

‘South.’

We are not
heading south. We are heading west. And we are also heading into those sullen
hills.

‘Come on, turn
around.’

‘You don’t like
it, mate, you get out and walk.’

At a junction he
skids down a laneway going roughly south.

‘This is
driving,’ he says. ‘This is making progress.’

He turns the
stereo back on, cranking it up loud. We reach a y-junction and the jeep bounces
left, roaring through a tunnel of hanging pine branches until with almost no
warning we reach the hill’s summit and we’re clear of the trees, now in open
countryside with all of south Leinster seemingly visible before us.

‘See, you
arsehole? Always listen to me!’

He pushes the
car to seventy, seventy-five, eighty around blind bends on this road barely
wide enough for one vehicle, let alone two.

I look around to
make sure Helen’s strapped in.

‘You okay?’

‘Fine,’ she
says, and seems to mean it.

Four in the
afternoon. Sunset not far off, and we are in what is beyond any morsel of doubt
the middle of nowhere.

The road has
twisted and turned, gone downhill and uphill, under a railway bridge from which
water poured in cascades, through empty villages, past deserted farms. Not once
have we seen another human being, though we have seen many a carcass.

It seems that we
have hit our first snag since we left the main road, descending into a deep,
broad valley. Small town ahead. The sky is starting to darken and we are in
need of somewhere to see out the night. The problem is that the place squats in
a big flood lake, a placid mirror casting the far hill darkly.

A narrow white sign
announces the town. Banlian.

Here is a
warehouse, something from olden times, moss-covered and crumbling. Some
cottages too, gone to ruin. Flood might be the best thing for this stooped
place. The main body of the town is mostly submerged, only grey-slate roofs
higher than the water level.

We have reached
the end of the line, stopped at the edge of the lapping dark mass. Voluminous
streams empty into it, draining the saturated slope.

The scene is not
entirely dispiriting. Some birds have come from somewhere and seem to be
enjoying swimming the watery Banlian streets. How they survived the extremes of
the winter I cannot imagine, and yet here they are bobbing and gliding with
untroubled feathery countenance.

We’ll have to
stay here for the night. No way around it. Heathshade takes out the petrol can
and re-siphons the contents of the fuel tank back into it. Something I would
not have thought of doing.

There’s a dirt
pathway running along the back of the old warehouse, and it leads towards what
seem to be some more modern structures a distance away, above the flood line. It’s
not easy lugging our things through the slippery mud, especially when the lane
veers close to the water, close enough to have to walk through lapping
wavelets. And carrying Helen’s two bags as well as my own is hell on the
shoulders. That thundery face says
Don’t ask me how I am
. But she would
answer Heathshade politely enough if he asked, wouldn’t she? Not that he ever
would ask.

The laneway
opens onto a cul de sac with cars and vans parked and a bungalow with a chimney
emitting smoke. A lace curtain twitches.

The bungalow’s
front door opens. A woman. A fat woman.

‘Ye can’t stay
here,’ she says.

A fat man joins
her. He has a double-barrelled shotgun.

‘Private property.’

I try to sound
friendly. ‘Is there’s anywhere around here we can stay?’

‘Houses down there,’
says the woman. The door slams. A lock clicks on the inside.

‘Fuck them,’
says Heathshade. He takes Helen’s two bags from me and hefts them onto his
back.

‘Let’s go.’

She follows
behind. I follow her.

We are not gone
far when a voice comes from behind. ‘Hey, wait!’ It’s the fat man. ‘Is that
petrol you’ve got?’

Heathshade shouts
back without looking.

‘Not for sale.’

‘What do you
want for it? Food?’

‘Not hungry.’ Heathshade
mutters to us: ‘Keep walking.’

But Helen has a
mind of her own. ‘What have you got?’

‘Stew on the
boil. Round steak, potatoes, carrots, onions. Yours for two litres.’

‘Can’t afford
two litres,’ Heathshade says.

‘You travelling
somewhere?’

‘South.’

‘Come in and
talk,’ he says.

John-Paul
Galvin is the fat man’s name. Not after one of the popes of the same name, he
claims, but after the Beatles.

‘If we had a
Ringo now we’d have the full set.’

This makes me
warm to him a little.

Teresa is his
woman’s name. Her hair is dyed red and she exudes a sort of general greasiness,
excess weight mainly above the hips. Rolls of flesh show through, the bloodless
hue of moribundity, shot through with black veins.

I wonder are
they married, but best not to ask. Personal questions would introduce an
element of mission-creep into this situation.

She struggles to
bring their bloated child to heel. Mick by name, he is a monster child. The
primitive brute-in-the-making is four years old according to them, but he looks
more like about seven or eight. I feel queasy looking at him. Is the human race
starting to devolve in this cold drowned world? Looking at this specimen, one
might think so. Those dullard grey eyes appraise us with proto-malevolence.

‘Cup of tea
wouldn’t go amiss,’ says Heathshade.

The woman sighs
and places a kettle of water on the blazing-hot stove. Miraculously they have
running water.

The fat man sets
his elbows on the greasy table.

‘You see that
pot on the stove there? You smell that cooking? That’s good food there. Two
litres for that.’

‘Can’t afford
two litres.’

‘Half the pot,
one litre.’

‘No good.’

The fat man sits
back in his creaking chair.

‘Where are you
going anyway?’

Heathshade doesn’t
want to answer, but Helen is impatient.

‘Rosslare,’ she
says. She’s not leaving this room without the food, that much is clear. Neither
is Heathshade, but he is coming at the problem from a different angle.

The fat man too
seems to consider himself a sharp operator. I wonder whether he perceives yet
that if no deal is made Heathshade will take more direct action. He’s straying
dangerously far from his shotgun.

‘Going abroad?’

‘That’s right,’
says Heathshade.

A long pause.
The woman is testy. The boy is making noises as he plays with a toy car, and she
silences him with a smack to the head. The kettle whistles.

‘Would you take
us with you?’

‘No room.’

‘We have a
people carrier. Share the petrol, we can all go to Rosslare.’

‘We have a car.’