Thirty-three

Kate was picking the last blackberries. It was the last week in October, and after Hallowe’en they would be useless, according to proverbial lore and to fact, Leo said. She did not need any more, but she liked picking them. The freezer had dozens of plastic cartons of berries now, and there were two dozen jars of jam on the shelf in the kitchen. They looked so homely and welcoming. ‘I’m always going to make it every year,’ said Kate. ‘For the look of those jars alone.’

The sun was low over the ocean, the colour of butterscotch or bronze. That mellow light bathed the road, where the fuchsia shrubs were bared to their reddish branches, and the hooks of blackberries arched out over the tarmac. The stream chuckled and babbled beyond the field.

She was on the narrow road that led over the mountain at the back of the valley to the next parish. Because it was a few miles from their house, she had driven up. Leo had got used to the luxury of having Kate’s car and was considering, once again, to learn how to drive. It was so much more convenient than walking everywhere or waiting for the elusive bus.

Her morning sickness had eased off now; she was four months’ pregnant. Her hair was glossy and her skin radiant. She felt perfectly healthy.

The blackberry-picking gave her a sense of transcendence. She felt she was at one with the landscape, and with nature, as she performed the simple repetitive task, harvesting the bounty of the hedgerows, as Leo’s recipe book put it. Leo had not had to brainwash her into believing that the old-fashioned country tasks were good for people; she had found it out herself, as soon as she had begun to pick the berries. The field around the house she planned to till and fill with vegetables and fruit as soon as the shelter belt was in place – already after a few months in the country she had grandiose plans to become self-sufficient.

‘You’re a pr girl,’ Leo said. ‘Don’t you want to go back to that glamorous life?’

She didn’t, for the moment. She would help him with his launches and publicity, but that would not be so outrageously glamorous. The books of poetry, she liked to imagine, were like the blackberries, or the montbretia, or the fuchsia, the things that grew in a seasonal cycle, patterned, predictable, lovely. The books, too, appeared seasonally, the slim volumes in their artistic covers coming out, like berries, in November and in March, Leo’s favourite months for publication.

She filled one bucket. The berries were getting drier on the brambles now, as the autumn drew to a close. In no time they would be withered and white and inedible. Filling a bucket with juicy ones took longer than it had a month earlier. She spent an hour doing it, enjoying the soft sunshine, the feel of the brambles and their spicy smell, the chuff of the choughs, with red beaks, in the fields where she was.

After an hour, when the bucket was full to the brim of shining blackberries, she placed it carefully in the boot. The sun was beginning to sink. At six it would be dark. She was going to drive to the town, where she needed to get a few things in the supermarket. If all went well, she would be home before nightfall.

She drove over the hill road and down towards the town. The flowers had all gone now. The ditches were not bare, but filled with russet-coloured leaves and the red-brown branches of the fuchsia. Even in late autumn the colours of the landscape around here were rich. It had many charms, Kate thought, but the ever-changing colours was the one she liked best.

As she drove down the hill towards the bay, bright blue on this autumn afternoon, with the hills on the next peninsula heartbreakingly perfect, dark blue and pale blue and lilac, range upon range against the sky, she felt the baby move.

It fluttered inside her like a butterfly.

It was a strange feeling, the feeling of a living creature inside her own body. But she knew what it was, immediately, and was overcome with a feeling of joy. It was there, alive, kicking her from the inside, asserting its … asserting its existence.

What are you? she asked, as she came down to the flat part of the road. Are you a boy or a girl? What are you going to be like? What are you like now?

A magpie hopped out of a bush and walked across in front of the car.

You must be bright and strong, she was thinking. You’re kicking already. You’re quick. You’re brilliant.

She came to the white shop at the corner of the hill road. For a second she wondered if she could just get what she wanted there. Then she could get home all the sooner to Leo, to tell him that the baby had moved. He would want to know, as soon as possible. He would want to feel it kicking too. She wondered if she should do her shopping here in the little local Spar and return home. But looking at the shop, she decided not to, she would nip into town. The Spar had such a small range of goods. If she went to town, she would get the rye bread they both loved at the bakery, and the organic vegetables from the greengrocer, and smoked lentils from the woman with the smokehouse.

She drove on.

There was a T-junction just past the shop. She yielded and looked to the right and to the left.

In the field on the other side of the road something caught her eye. A scarecrow, very like the scarecrow in their own field at home. Odd, she was thinking, as she prepared to turn. She looked again. The scarecrow had black hair, red rosy cheeks, a big dotty smile. It was even wearing the same sort of granny print apron their own scarecrow had. It could have been its sister.

Kate smiled.

She liked scarecrows.

She had been upset when the one at home in the field had disappeared. And now here it was, or a scarecrow very like the old one, Leo’s old scarecrow. Except that scarecrow had always seemed to smile. ‘Should a scarecrow smile?’ she had asked Leo. ‘Aren’t they supposed to be scary?’

She turned her attention to the road, looking left, looking right, looking right again.

She prepared to turn.

She heard a cry, as she pressed the accelerator and went into the turn. Glancing at the field, she saw the scarecrow running towards her … believed she saw the scarecrow running towards her, shouting ‘Stop, stop!’ The scarecrow had legs, the scarecrow’s black hair blew in the wind, the scarecrow looked, not scary, but scared.

‘Stop!’ screamed the scarecrow. ‘Don’t turn!’ screamed the scarecrow.

But Kate had already turned.

She shook her head, laughing at herself, at the power of her imagination. What a strange place this was that she had come to live in, a place where scarecrows talked and walked, a place where you could still, on a certain kind of mysteriously calm day, understand how people had believed in ghosts and fairies and all that supernatural stuff.

The banshee.

The supernatural death-messenger, Leo called her, quoting from some book he had published.

That was her last thought.

She did not see the big truck racing towards her at sixty miles an hour. The driver had not remembered the junction on the narrow road – the sign warning motorists of the turn had been blown down in the wind last winter and not replaced. The driver was enjoying the October day, the quiet road. He was racing happily around the little bend and saw Kate’s bright blue Nissan Micra seconds before he was on top of it.

It smashed like a bag of crisps under the truck.

The scarecrow stood in the field, her arms opened wide. Anyone looking at it would not have known whether it looked like a woman opening her arms to embrace a friend, or catch a bird, or like a woman being crucified.

The scarecrow wept at first, and then, as the driver climbed down from his cab and slowly dialled a number on his mobile phone, the scarecrow began to smile. By the time the squad cars and ambulance had arrived on the scene in a fanfare of flashing lights and blaring sirens, the scarecrow was rigid, and the smile on her red face as fixed as that on a death’s head.

A pregnant woman in her mid-twenties was killed when a truck collided with the car in which she was driving on the Dingle peninsula last night. The accident happened at around 4.30 p.m. The woman, who has not been named, has been taken to Tralee hospital. The driver of the truck was not injured. The area has been cordoned off while gardaí are investigating the scene. A diversion is in place.