Figures of Fear Page 4

Michael jerked and opened his eyes. The nature programme must have finished almost twenty minutes ago. It was eleven p.m. now and the RTE weatherman was predicting another day of soft weather tomorrow. Michael got up and switched the television off. The bedroom was engulfed in darkness, and all he could hear was the rain sprinkling against the window and the deep throbbing of oil tankers moored on the opposite side of the Lee.

  The dream began as it always began. He was walking along the upstairs corridor of The Far Horizon Hotel, where the O’Connor family stayed every summer for two weeks. Outside the day was blurry and hot, but inside the hotel it was always cool and smelled of damp.

  All along the white-painted corridor hung wooden-framed photographs of the few survivors from the Lusitania, which had been sunk by a German submarine in 1915 only eight miles off the Old Head of Kinsale. Michael had often stopped to study these survivors, wrapped in blankets and surrounded by local fishermen, their faces strangely expressionless, as if they accepted that one day they would be dead, too, nothing more than pictures of themselves on a hotel wall.

  Michael was returning to the room he shared with Sean because he had forgotten his towel and his swimming trunks. He knew what he was going to see when he reached the door, because he had dreamed this dream so many times before, but somehow he always felt the same shock when he saw it, like scores of cockroaches scuttling down his back.

  He heard Kate sigh a second before he saw them, a high sweet note of happiness, almost as if she were singing. The door was only an inch or two ajar, but he could see them reflected in the mirror in the huge mahogany press – Sean lying on his back, his skin as white as the sheet he was lying on, and Kate sitting upright on top of him, her elbows raised, both hands buried in her tangled red hair.

  ‘Sissikins,’ said Sean, and he made her pet name sound so lubricious.

  Michael stood breathless in the corridor, watching with horror and fascination as Kate slowly rose up and down, as if she were wading in the sea.

  Neither she nor Sean could see him, and he stayed completely still, barely breathing, not knowing what he should do. Eventually he took one careful step back, and then another, and then he turned and hurried softly downstairs. He crossed the hotel reception area and pushed his way out of the front door and stood on the porch in the wind and the sunshine with the sea almost blinding him.

  It was then he realized that he was not only shocked but grievously hurt. Ever since the O’Connors had brought him home when he was six years old, he and Kate had always been close, playing make-believe games together while Sean was out kicking footballs with his school friends, telling each other stories, sharing secrets. He had never articulated the thought before, but he had assumed that he and Kate would stay together for the rest of their lives, and it had never occurred to him that she might feel such affection for anybody else, especially her own natural brother.

  The dream continued. He sat on the steps as the afternoon passed, and the shadows of the clouds fled across Kinsale Sands, rising and falling as they crossed over the dunes like the steeplechasers at Leopardstown. After twenty minutes or so, Sean appeared, his shirt hanging out of his crumpled khaki shorts, his carroty hair tousled and his cheeks flushed. He sat on the step next to Michael and gave him a playful push on the shoulder. ‘What’s the matter with you, boy? I thought you were going swimming, like. You left your badinas upstairs.’

  ‘I changed my mind,’ said Michael, standing up.

  He started to walk away from the hotel, toward the beach. In the dream he always walked very quickly and jerkily, like a speeded-up film, and Sean followed him, about twenty yards behind.

  He walked over half a mile, until he reached the dunes. He wanted to be alone but Sean kept following him. He sat down and covered his face with his hands. Sean circled around him, kicking at the sand. The sea looked like smashed-up mirrors, and the inside of Michael’s head felt the same.

  ‘We should dig ourselves a hideout like,’ Sean suggested.

  Michael looked up at him, one eye closed against the sunshine.

  ‘We could pinch some bottles of beer from the bar, see, and sit in the hideout and drink it and nobody could see us.’

  Michael thought: That’s exactly the kind of stupid idea that Sean was always coming up with, ridiculous impractical plans for shoplifting from Dunnes with plastic bags safety-pinned inside their coats or making a periscope to spy on the women’s changing room at Mayfield swimming pool.

  He said nothing, but Sean picked up a flat piece of driftwood and started to dig into the side of the dune.

  ‘You could help,’ he panted, after he had been shovelling sand for over half an hour.

  Michael looked up at him again. He hated him so much he could have jumped up and grabbed him by the throat and strangled him.

  ‘Oh well, please yourself,’ said Sean, and carried on digging.

  The sun was sinking and the wind began to rise, whistling thinly through the grass. Sean had dug a tunnel into the dune almost two metres deep, so that only his rubber dollies were showing. He came crawling back out of it and brushed himself down, shaking his head like a dog to get the sand out of his hair.

  ‘I’m a genius,’ he announced. ‘I’m the greatest digger of hideouts that ever was. All I have to do now is make it just a bit more wider. Then we can go and pinch ourselves a few bottles of Satz and have us a party.’

  He got down on his hands and knees and crawled back into the tunnel. He had only been digging for a few minutes, though, before Michael heard a very soft thump, and a muffled shout. He looked around and saw that the sand had collapsed, and that Sean was buried. He couldn’t even see his rubber dollies.

  He stood up, his heart banging.

  ‘Sean!’ he called out. ‘Sean! Can you hear me? Sean, are you all right?’

  A brief flurry of sand was kicked up where Sean’s feet must have been, but then there was nothing but absolute stillness. Michael knelt down and frantically started scooping at the sand with his cupped hands, but the more sand he scooped, the more slid down from higher up the dune, faster and faster, like a nightmarish parody of an hourglass, and he soon realized that he was making things worse.

  He stopped, and stood up. ‘Hold on, Sean! I’ll go for some help! Just hold on!’

  He started to run along the beach toward the hotel. His long shadow ran in front of him, with a tiny head. At first he ran as fast as he could, but then he slowed down to a trot, and then a walk, and after a while he stopped.

  There was nobody in sight for over half a mile, only a woman in a billowy red dress walking her dog by the water’s edge. Three seagulls circled overhead, crying like lost children. Michael looked back at the dunes. He hesitated for a moment and then he took a deep breath and held it for as long as he could, timing himself with his wristwatch. A little more than a minute. Even if Sean could hold his breath for twice as long, he must have suffocated by now.

  Michael started running again. As he approached the hotel, he could see his father climbing the front steps, smoking his pipe. He waved his arms and screamed out, ‘Da! Da! Come quick! It’s Seanie! Seanie’s been buried in the sand!’

  He opened his eyes. He thought at first that he might have been shouting out loud in his sleep, but if he had, he hadn’t disturbed Kate, who was still breathing softly and evenly and hadn’t stirred.

  He lay on his back for nearly an hour, staring at the ceiling and listening to the rain chuckling in the gutters outside. He knew where he would have to go tomorrow. Prayers hadn’t helped. Years of counselling hadn’t helped. He couldn’t imagine what Father Bernard had in mind, but he doubted if that would help, either.

  He said, ‘Holy Father …’ But then he stopped himself, and stayed silent with his lips pressed tightly together until he heard the clock in the hallway strike two.

  The following day was one of those dark Cork days when the rain holds off but the sky remains relentlessly grey from morning till night.

  Father Bernard was sitting
in his study drinking a cup of coffee when Michael knocked at the door. He unhooked his spectacles and said, ‘Michael! I was hoping against hope that I wouldn’t be seeing you this morning.’

  Michael sat down in the leather-upholstered chair on the opposite side of Father Bernard’s desk. The chair was so low that he felt like the schoolboy Stephen Dedalus explaining to the rector that he had broken his glasses on the cinder path. ‘I was hoping so, too, Father. But I had the dream again. And just as vivid as always.’

  Father Bernard sat back with his hand pressed over his mouth as if he didn’t trust himself to say any more. But after a short while he stood up and went across to his bookcase, lifting out of his soutane a bunch of keys on a long chain. He unlocked the front of the bookcase and took out a grey porcelain jar with a lid that was fastened with twisted wire. He brought it back across the room and set it down on his desk between them.

  Michael could see that the jar was decorated with a pattern of green leaves and small purplish flowers. Father Bernard said, ‘Inside this jar is a powder that was made up for me by a very dear friend, at a time in my life when I had my own ghosts to lay. It’s a compound of bishopswort, more commonly known as betony, and marigold petals, as well as numerous other ingredients including the dried and ground-up hearts of several moles.’

  Michael didn’t know how to respond to that – whether he ought to make a joke of it, or look serious, and nod. He settled for a brief twitch at the sides of his mouth, and an interested frown.

  Father Bernard prised the lid open, and tilted the jar so that Michael could see the soft purplish-grey powder inside. ‘They call this Saint Brónach’s Shrift, because it was first compounded by Saint Brónach the Virgin of Glen-Seichis in the sixth century. She was an abbess, with great mystic powers, and according to legend she was very beautiful.

  ‘A fiery young Irish chieftain named Fergus had wounded a rival named Artan and left him for dead. However, he was overcome with remorse for what he had done and became a pilgrim of penance until he was a very old man. He was so wracked with guilt that he finally came to the abbey to seek the help of Saint Brónach, and she gave him an infusion of this powder to drink.

  ‘That night Fergus had a dream in which he returned to the skirmish in which he had wounded Artan, and Artan, as he lay bleeding on the ground, forgave him.’

  Michael peered into the jar again. ‘And what you’re proposing is that I should drink some of this stuff?’

  Father Bernard said, ‘It’s a very powerful mixture, Michael. It might have some side-effects, mystical as well as physical. The physician to the Emperor Caesar Augustus used a similar preparation of betony to protect the emperor from epidemics and to guard him against witchcraft, but one of its greatest benefits was to give him peace of mind.

  ‘Peace of mind could be yours, Michael, if you’re prepared to try it.’

  ‘And you say that you’ve tried it, yourself?’

  Father Bernard nodded.

  Michael hesitated. But then he thought about those endless dreams, hammering through his head almost every night like a flicker-book. The wind blowing through the grass. The soft thumping sound as the sand collapsed and Sean was buried. The woman in the red billowy dress, and the sea continuing wearily to whisper to itself because the sea was like his ageing grandmother and had forgotten who he was.

  ‘Well, I’ll try it, like,’ Michael agreed. ‘What do I have to do?’

  Father Bernard with shaking hands poured some of the powder into a white envelope. ‘Three teaspoonfuls should be enough, stirred up well with hot water. Drink it about an hour before you go to bed.’

  ‘You said something about side-effects,’ said Michael, as he opened the door to leave.

  Father Bernard laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘Everything we do in life has side-effects, Michael. God be with you.’

  Kate was too tired to cook so they ordered a margherita pizza from Valentino’s and when it arrived they sat in front of the television and shared it out of the box.

  ‘You’re awful quiet,’ said Kate.

  Michael wiped his mouth on a paper napkin and swallowed a mouthful of warm red wine and then he leaned over and kissed her on the cheek.

  ‘You don’t think I’m a bad person, do you?’ he asked her.

  ‘Of course not! Whatever made you ask me that?’

  ‘I’ve never meant to hurt anybody, Kate, not ever. And if I have, they’ve been sins of omission, if you know what I mean. Not deliberate.’

  ‘You’re strange,’ said Kate, looking at him with those wide-apart blue eyes of hers that were almost indigo. ‘When you first came to live with us, Sean told me that you were a goblin child that none of the other goblins wanted. I suppose in a way it was kinder than crowing that your da and your ma had been killed in a car crash.’

  ‘Maybe Sean was right,’ Michael told her. ‘Maybe I am a goblin. I don’t remember my parents at all. What they looked like, of course, from the photos. But I can’t hear their voices, not at all. I can’t remember what they felt like.’

  Kate went upstairs for a bath first and Michael went into the kitchen and made her a mug of chocolate. He took out the envelope that Father Bernard had given him and tipped the powder into a tumbler. He sniffed it but it didn’t smell of anything at all. He poured hot water over it and stirred it until it dissolved.

  He held the tumbler up to the light. Saint Brónach’s Shrift was a pale agate colour, the same colour as Father Bernard’s eyes. Perhaps it would give him the same insight, too. He drank it, and it tasted very slightly bitter, but nothing more.

  After his bath, he and Kate sat up in bed and watched television for a while. He glanced at her sideways from time to time and wondered if she had really been in love with Sean and how young she had been when they first went to bed together – questions that he could never ask her.

  At the end of CSI: Miami, Kate twisted herself into her sheets and her blankets as she always did and went to sleep. Michael sat up a little longer but he was beginning to feel oddly light-headed, as if he had taken too many flu tablets.

  He switched over channels, and found that he was watching the same nature program about east African fishermen that he had watched last night, or thought he had watched. Here was the same wet shoreline, and the same fisherman walking slowly towards the screen, holding up that spiny devil firefish. Michael switched the television off while the fisherman was still a hundred yards away.

  He lay in the darkness for over half an hour, not moving. There was no wind tonight and no rain, only the throbbing of the oil tankers. The river amplified the deep drumbeat of their engines and sometimes he felt as if the whole house was throbbing, as if everything was going to be loosened, nuts and bolts and dovetail joints and screws, and finally shaken apart.

  He closed his eyes. When he opened them again it was daylight and the sun was shining through the windows and he was walking along the corridor at The Far Horizon Hotel, past the framed photographs of the Lusitania survivors.

  He heard Kate let out that sweet high cry of pleasure. He heard Sean say, ‘Sissikins’. He looked in horror through the open doorway and saw their reflection in the press, Kate with her fingers buried in her curly red hair.

  He ran downstairs and out through the door and into the wind and the sunshine. He felt as if he had been in the same head-on crash that had killed his father and mother on the N25 at Churchquarter. He was too shocked even to cry. He was still sitting there when Sean came out with his shirt untucked, his cheeks flushed, his upper lip beaded with clear perspiration.

  ‘What’s the matter with you, boy? I thought you were going swimming.’

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he stood up and started to walk quickly towards the beach. He prayed that, this time, Sean wouldn’t follow him, but without even turning his head he knew that Sean was only ten yards behind him.

  He reached the dunes and sat down. Sean circled around him, kicking the sand.

  ‘We should dig ourselves a hide
out, like.’

  ‘No,’ said Michael.

  ‘Don’t be so soft. We could pinch some bottles of beer from the bar and we could sit in our hideout and drink them and nobody would know.’

  ‘No,’ Michael repeated.

  Sean picked up a piece of driftwood and started to dig. ‘You’re not going to help me, then?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘All right then, please yourself so.’

  Sean went on digging and the wind began to rise, keening through the grass like the banshees that were supposed to wail whenever an O’Connor was close to death. When Sean had excavated a tunnel into the side of the dune that was more than four feet deep, Michael stood up and said, ‘Stop, Seanie! Don’t! Don’t dig any more! It’s too dangerous!’

  Sean waggled his head and crossed his eyes and stuck out his tongue. ‘You’re a header, Mikey. It’s a hole in the sand, that’s all.’

  ‘Just stop it. I’ll go tell Da what you’re doing, else.’

  ‘Go on, then! What do you think he’s going to say? We’re on a seaside holiday and I’m digging in the sand. What else are you supposed to do on a seaside holiday?’

  Michael stepped up to him and tried to grab the piece of driftwood away from him but Sean hit him on the elbow with it, hard, right on the funny bone.

  ‘If you don’t want to help, then you can bog off. I mean it. And if you try to do that again I’ll drop you.’

  Michael stayed where he was, rubbing his elbow. He had got into fights with Sean dozens of times, and Sean had always beaten him, because he was a year older and at least a stone heavier. He should have turned around and walked away and left Sean to the fate that was waiting for him, but he knew that he couldn’t.

  Sean dug and grunted and dug and grunted. Michael sat down on the side of the dune while the sun began to sink and the cloud shadows fled across the beach. Eventually Sean came crawling out of the tunnel, sandy backside first. He scrabbled sand out of his hair and said, ‘I’m a genius! The greatest hideout digger ever known! All I have to do now is make it a bit more wider. Talk about The Great Escape!’