A Different Kingdom Page 2

  AND SHE DID. And afterwards she scrubbed him from head to foot at the kitchen sink until his ears were glowing, his cheeks shining and the smell of soap stinging his nose. He sat, in his nightshirt and slippers, at the table with the rest of the household, the remembered contact of her hard palm making him treat his seat gingerly. But he had not cried. The memory of what he had seen at the river was still merry-go-rounding in his head and his crying had been done there, when he had thought himself lost. He ate his food ravenously, wolfing down potatoes and carrots and lamb lashed with thick gravy, moustaching his upper lip with great gulps of milk. His grandmother darted sharp glances at him now and then in a mixture of disapproval, affection and worry. Michael never noticed. His nose was buried in his glass and behind it his thoughts were whirring like a Catherine wheel. Were those things he had seen at the river what his grandparents called 'terrorists'—the sort of things that had killed his mammy and daddy? He paused in his swallowing at the thought. He had a vague picture of a terrorist as a mask-wearing, night-loving monster which killed people for fun. And they probably smelled, too. Maybe he had better tell...

  He looked around the table, feeling strangely guilty. His grandfather had pushed back his plate and was now lighting his pipe in a flare of match flame, its light throwing into relief his big, roman nose and the chiselled lines: of his face, like a sea cliff that has weathered many storms. The hair on his head, though pure white, was as thick as it had been thirty years before, and his back was still pokerstraight. The hand that held the pipe was as huge as a spade, brown and liver-spotted. The hired hands called him 'The Captain' because he habitually wore a pair of old cavalry breeches and leather leggings. His boots struck sparks off stones when he walked, a thing which never failed to fascinate Michael.

  His grandmother was clearing the plates from the table, helped by her two daughters. His Aunt Rose, not much more than a girl herself, winked at him as she left for the scullery balancing a tower of dirty plates. He began to swing his legs under the table, careful to avoid Demon, his grandfather's badtempered, ageing collie, who crept under there at meals in the hope of scraps. It was the only thing he had ever seen his grandparents disagree on: the grey muzzled dog under the table at mealtimes. Michael disliked the animal. He was coal-black, lean, sharpnosed, and he worshipped his master and held the rest of humanity in contempt. But though the house was grand-mother's kingdom, the dog was grandfather's workmate of a dozen years and so he stayed.

  His Uncle Sean was rolling himself a cigarette, humming under his breath. He had the face of a film star, and his sisters doted on him. He popped the finished fag in his mouth and fumbled unhurriedly for his matches, smiling at Michael's pink face. People said he looked like Clark Gable, with his thick black hair tumbled over his forehead and those sea-grey eyes which were the hallmark of the Fay family. The local girls congregated around him like wasps on a jam pot when he appeared, polished and brushed, at the dances which were held in the church hall at every month's end. But he seemed never to notice them. He was caught up with the farm, preoccupied with ways of improving it—often in conflict with the views of his father. Michael had heard some of the labourers talking about him one morning. Too much of a bloody gentleman was Sean, they had said, and one had sniggered, saying if he'd been offered as many cunts as Sean his John Thomas would have been worn away to a button by now. Somehow Michael had known that this was not the sort of thing he could bring up at the dinner table, though he had thought of asking Aunt Rose, who often fished with him in the little river and took him into her bed when the thunder was loud.

  Chairs were being pushed back and there were a few belches. (His grandmother was still in the scullery or they would not have dared.) Tobacco smoke spun blue tendrils in the light of the lamps. There was an electric bulb dangling forlornly from the ceiling, but it was saved for special occasions. And besides, Michael's grandparents hated it. It had no soul, they said, and they continued to light the oil lamps at dusk despite the protests of their children. Electricity was saved for visitors.

  The hired hands said their good nights and left for home, slapping their caps on their heads as they went out of the door and sniffing at the starlit air outside. One or two would eat a second dinner cooked by their wives, but most were bachelors and were going back to empty cottages or parents' houses. There were quite a crowd of them around the farm at this time of year, with haymaking and the harvest approaching. Those inside could hear the scrape and tick of bicycles pushing off from the wall of the house, and then the door had been closed again and Aunt Rachel was drawing the curtains on the night. Demon sidled out from under the table and flopped down before the range with a contented sigh. Old Mullan lit his pipe and sat opposite Michael's grandfather with a leather halter he was soaping. That was his privilege. He had been with the Fays since the Great War, when he had returned from Flanders a young man with one leg shorter than the other.

  Clattering plates and women's voices came from the scullery. Michael felt sleep hovering around his eyes. He would tell someone tomorrow, perhaps— tell them that there were terrorists with fox faces down by the river waiting to blow everyone up. But it seemed less real here in the solid security of the house. Like a dream. He yawned, and his Aunt Rose pounced on him.

  'You're half-asleep, yawning there in your nightshirt. Bedtime for you, Michael-boy.'

  He protested sleepily as she dragged him from his seat and took his hand in hers. His grandfather nodded at him over pipe smoke and the Irish Field, his grandmother kissed his forehead and Uncle Sean waved a hand absent-mindedly whilst old Mullan merely paused in his soaping for a second. Rose tugged him up the stairs, talking all the while. He liked her to talk, especially if it was a thundery night and he had burrowed into her arms in the girlsmelling bed. She would talk then to keep him from fearing the thunder, though she loved it herself. It made her hair crackle, she said.

  He realized suddenly that she was asking how he had come to be so dirty that evening, what had happened to him. He told her he had fallen, had slipped and fallen down to the river, which was the truth and so he had not sinned. And she put him to bed with a kiss, tucked him in and told him to say his prayers. But he tumbled off to sleep forgetting them, with the fox faces grinning at him across the river, telling him he was theirs now. Their little boy.

  THREE

  THE SUMMER OF 1953 was long and fine; the afternoon of the year winding down to autumn and harvest. For Michael a summer was a living thing, an entity of its own which set him free of school and gave him endless hours of daylight to use. It was long and slow and benevolent. In summer the rings of trees grew widest.

  The skies remained perfect, blue darkening almost to purple at the zenith, dust and shimmer hazing the horizon so that the mountains could only be guessed at much of the time. Dust hung over the roads also, kicked up by the hoofs of horses and the carts they drew or thrown about by the passage of shiny cars. Looking west to the Sperrins from the first heights of the Antrim plateau the valley would appear to be an almost unvarying patchwork of hedge-lined fields, the barley ripening in the sunlight, the woods dark and cool, the Bann a silver flash of slow-moving water in the midst of it. Here and there would be the white wall of a house, smaller than a sugar cube, but it was only at night that it would be possible to see the hamlets and villages and townlands of the counties, when they would become a confetti-glitter of lights in the darkness.

  Drinking his buttermilk at the table in the morning with the crumbs of his breakfast on his chin, Michael's vision of the day before seemed less real than ever. Already it had been demoted in his memory, moving from the realm of fear into that of curiosity. His head was filled with things to do for the day, and he was eyeing his grandmother's back as she worked at the range, wondering if he could slip outside into the bird-loud morning unnoticed.

  'And where do you suppose you are off to?' He could not. He turned dutifully. 'Just out.'

  She nodded. 'That's fine, so long as you pump me a couple o
f buckets when you're out, and then bring them in again.'

  He left by way of the larder, where the buckets were kept, and hauled two round to the pump which supplied their water. He actually enjoyed pumping the stuff and watching it churn clean and clear in the pails. It tasted of iron; hard water, cold and delicious, not like anything out of a tap. The spring it came from had never failed, not even in drought years.

  He hauled them in and left them, spilled liquid specking the stone floor. And after that he was free, released, and left to the morning. He skipped out of the back yard like a colt, making for the fields.

  He met Rose first. She was surrounded by hens and was tossing them yellow meal by the fistful, clucking softly all the while. They had pecked and scraped their paddock into a pale bowl and their nests were scattered throughout the surrounding hedges. Only Rose and her mother knew where they were. Half wild, the birds could often be seen flapping in the lower branches of the trees. They were wily fowl, and seldom fell prey to the foxes that roamed the hills at night. But thinking of foxes made Michael uneasy and his flesh prickled in the warm sun.

  'Sleepyhead,' his aunt said without looking round; and she shushed the chickens who were a little alarmed by Michael's approach.

  'I had the eggs to gather on my own this morning,' she went on, but he knew she was not annoyed with him. His usual contribution to egg-gathering was one or two from the most visible nests. She liked him along for the company, and to see the early morning with. He watched her throw the birds their meal and debated telling her his secret, but thought better of it. For the moment he wanted to keep it his alone.

  'Fancy fishing this afternoon, then?' she enquired carelessly, and threw another fistful of meal for the hens to scrabble over. Her arms were long and slim, tawny with sun and speckled with golden hairs. She was barefoot, and the dew had wet her feet so the dust clung to them.

  'Aye,' Michael piped.

  She nodded to herself, still clucking occasionally to her charges. 'Down, by the bridge there are trout, young yet but worth going after. I've seen them when the light shines through the water. They keep to the deep part, where the willows are.'

  'Don't let your shadow fall on the water,' Michael said automatically. It was something she had taught him, and Rose smiled as she heard it.

  'Mammy finished with you for today?

  'Aye.'

  'What are you for doing? I'm busy till after lunchtime.'

  He felt suddenly furtive. 'Don't know.' Go to the bottom meadows maybe, see the river there.'

  'Mind that slope.' This time it was Rose who spoke automatically. 'You could break a leg on those hazel stumps.'

  I couldn't, Michael thought, now bursting to tell his secret. They weren't there. And he was filled with an exhilaration which almost giddied him. He skipped on the dew-wet grass, making the chickens flutter nervously.

  'Watch out there, clumsy! Go, get lost and I'll see you later.' And she soothed her brood with soft words. Uncle Sean said that Rose had a name for each of the hens, though she denied it indignantly. Michael was not sure. She called them strange things under her breath sometimes.

  He scampered away, the wet grass beginning to be felt through his old shoes. It would be hot today, and there would be dragonflies by the river.

  Someone was limping up the long slope towards him with a pitchfork over one shoulder, a bucket in one hand and a cloud of blue smoke trailing behind him. When he saw Michael he waved and sat down on the sward, spearing the pitchfork into the ground. It was old Mullan. Michael joined him. The grass was ablaze with buttercups so that they sat in a gently swaying yellow sea, and the pollen was already beginning to powder their legs.

  Mullan scraped a match across one boot heel and sucked the dim flame into his pipe. It was an applebowl Peterson, a beautiful thing, the brown of the wood so deep it could nearly be a dark scarlet. Even the scrapes and dints it had received over the years had mellowed, becoming part of the shape. The mud and blood of the Somme had left no mark. Mullan was an old Inniskilling Fusilier, though Michael's grandmother said he was an old Blow. He was the only one of the hired hands she would let sit by the range after dinner, however.

  'Well, Mike,' he said, puffing contentedly. He was also the only person who called Michael that, and he liked it. He felt it was a grown-up's name. 'What have you been up to? I saw you come in last night, muck to the eyebrows and your face as white as a sheet. You looked as though you'd seen a ghost, so you did.'

  Michael plucked a buttercup and watched it reflect a gold light on his palm.

  'I fell—down by the river where the slope is. I fell all the way down it.'

  'Ah.' Mullan thumbed his bowl with a fireproof digit. 'Odd place, that dip, when the evening is coming on. It gets dark down there so quickly you can be caught out. And you notice the sheep never drink there, though your grandfather cleared that hazel.'

  Michael raised his head, surprised. They didn't, either.

  'And there are never any birds there,' he said. 'Why is that?' Mullan smiled. His chin was as bristly as a nettle stalk and his eyes two glints of blue in a maze of folds and wrinkles. He had been born in another century, before aeroplanes or cars or two great wars, before Ireland had been split in two. When Pearse had been on the steps of the GPO he and his comrades had been in the trenches in the spring rain.

  'There are places,' he said, 'that are just plain odd. Ordinary places that are a wee bit different, so the birds shun them and people feel uncomfortable there. There are places like that all over the country, or there were when I was a boy.' Somehow he made that sound a very long time ago. Another age.

  'What are they?' Michael asked, wide-eyed. 'What's wrong with them?'

  'And did I say there was something wrong with them? There are differences, maybe; wee things you can feel now and again, at the right kind of day. At dusk or dawn. And if you sit still long enough in them you'll maybe see something—something out of the corner of your eyes. Fairies, Mike. The Little People.'

  Michael was disappointed. The things he had seen by the river were most definitely not fairies.

  'Aren't they supposed to have wings and stuff, and pointy ears?'

  Mullan chuckled, his humour a spit of blue smoke. The Peterson gurgled happily to itself.

  'Oh, aye. Wings and things—like dragonflies, shiny and buzzing.' And he began to laugh.

  'You're making fun!'

  'No. Not me. I'm dead serious.' But he continued to wheeze.

  Michael reddened and the old man stuck out a hand. 'Hold on there. Wait a minute! He coughed and spat something semi-solid into the buttercups. 'Jesus. No, listen, Mike, I'm not mocking you. I'll tell you a story. Listen to me ... ' For Michael had half stood up, his eyes outraged. Mullan's hand grasped his forearm and brought him down to earth again in an instant's mist of buttercup dust.

  'You're just laughing!'

  'Remember the field across the river, the one below the bridge?'

  Michael nodded suspiciously.

  'Well Pat—your grandfather—he found an old sword there once that the Romans had left behind, and it had writing on the blade he couldn't read.'

  'I know that. Everybody does. It's in the museum in the city. Sure there's nothing to do with fairies in that.'

  'Aye, but your grandfather told me that when he found the sword it was lying on the grass, just lying there, and that he could swear there were things watching him from the trees at the river. It was near dark, and he was so sure they were there that he was going to go and see, for he was thinking it was trespassers or the Campbell boys—they're a bad crowd—but something put him off. He had old Demon with him, except he wasn't much more than a pup then, and the dog was snarling and growling and carrying on something desperate; and damned if he would go into the trees, even when Pat threw him a kick and cursed him up and down. So your grandfather picks up the old sword and says to hell with it, and runs—runs, Mike—back into the house with the dog whining at his heels. So what do you think of that, then?
'

  'He never said that to anybody. He said he found it under a bramble.'

  'Aye, well, do you think a grown man, nearly sixty years of age when it happened, would talk about how he had been as scared as a baby by some shadows?' Mullan smirked triumphantly and settled his point with a sweep of his pipe hand. A few ashes scattered from the bowl and drifted off into the air.

  'You're making it up.'

  'Maybe I am and maybe I'm not. You can take it or leave it. I'll tell you this, though. When I was your age, if I'd turned the word on any of my elders, I'd have got a thick ear.' For a second Mullan looked almost fierce, and it was possible to see the young soldier who had gone over the top on a long-ago July morning.

  'Sorry,' Michael said sullenly. He had been going to tell the old man about the fox faces by the river, but he was sure it would be indifferently received. Still his secret, then.

  Mullan levered himself upright on the pitchfork and retrieved his bucket with a clank. 'Never you mind it. But remember that there are more things in heaven and earth...' He trailed off. 'Aye. More things than you can poke a stick at. Listen to your elders and maybe you'll learn something. Now I'm off. Stay out of mischief.'