Chapter 18

 

Kit fiddles with the radio, searching for a station she likes. The haunting sounds of ‘The Crying Game’ fill the car, oozing out through the windows.

“I love that song,” she says. “It captures what it’s like to live in Drimshanra.”

“Really? It’s kinda bleak though, the song, I mean.”

“Drimshanra is bleak,” she says darkly.

There are worse places than Drimshanra, but I don’t say it aloud. An edge of menace lurks in the streets, and it’s not a place for the unwary. Yet, apart from that first night when I found Spike, I’ve never felt threatened by it. In fact, it’s been the best summer of my life, by far.

“You all hate it here, don’t you? I suppose when you go back up to Dublin in September, you’ll hardly come home any more?”

“No,” Kit says, “I always come home at weekends.”

I try to stop a smile from breaking out across my face at this news, because it’s clear from her tone she’s not as happy about it as I am.

“Spike won’t be here much,” she adds morosely, “not when he has a new life in Dublin. And Felice will stay up at weekends too. There’s always something happening in Dublin. You know they’re sharing a house together next year?”

“Spike mentioned something about it,” I murmur cautiously, knowing it’s a sore point. “Won’t you stay with them at weekends?”

“As if! There’s no way my parents will let me. They want me to study hard next year, do well in my exams and get into law, so I’ll be stuck forever in this hole.”

“I’ll be here,” I say.

“Yes,” the smile she gives me is genuine and lights up her face, “I’m glad I’ll have one friend left at home.”

“Drimshanra has been pretty good to me. I don’t hate it the way you do.”

“I bet you’re glad to get out of it all the same, and it’s a beautiful day. Can you believe we’re here, in the car together on the way to Galway?” Her mood lightens as we leave the town behind. “I never thought when I woke up this morning this would happen. You’re my saviour, Tully.”

I grin over at her. “I’d have hated to miss the gig! You know Mac put me on the guest list?”

She doesn’t answer, but I know what she’s thinking. It’s the least Mac could do after dropping me for Baz, but that’s not how it works.

“Kit, I was never part of the band. I was privileged to get the chance to practise with them. It’s the luckiest thing that ever happened to me, apart from…” Realising I’m about to say too much, I bite my tongue. “Apart from meeting you guys, I mean.” I can’t rush Kit. If I do, I’ll scare her away.

But her thoughts aren’t of me. “Felice says Mac put us all on the guest list because he needs our help.”

“Yeah that’s right.” I don’t know whether to be glad or sorry the conversation has moved to safer topics.

“But why does he need us? Surely Black Death are making money?”

“No, they're all broke. It was a bit of an eye opener when I found out.” I can’t help thinking of the thirty quid Mac is never going to repay me. Still, I shouldn’t complain, not after the windfall from Andy.

“Broke? But they’ve gigs every weekend and ‘Plagued by You’ is Number One for the second week in the Irish charts.”

“You don’t need to sell that many records to top the Irish charts. And don’t forget there’s seven of them, plus manager and all the equipment and the van. When everything is paid for, and what’s left over is divided up, it’s not that much. Still they’re in a great position to break through to the next level. And that’s where the money is.”

“What’s the next level?”

“A UK Number One. That would be huge. Of course the jackpot is America, but that’s a notoriously tough market to break into.”

“I suppose Ireland isn’t that a big a deal so.” Kit purses her lips in disappointment.

“Of course it is!” I want to squeeze her hand to cheer her up but I don’t dare. She’s warming up to me, but I need to take things slowly to stand a chance of winning her trust.

We drive in silence for a while letting the landscape unfold around us, but it isn’t awkward. It’s a companionable silence, each of us happy in the other’s company, exchanging the odd comment about the songs that come on the radio.

The heart of Ireland is rural, its folk-tales and superstitions shaped by the ever-changing landscape and the mercurial weather. Nearly all Irish people have their roots in the country. I may have grown up in Dublin but my mother was from a farming family in Tipperary, though I’ve never met them. I don’t know about my father, but he was probably from the country too. We leave the broad fertile, low-lying plains of the midlands behind and enter a rougher, hillier terrain.

“Would you like to stop for lunch?” I ask Kit.

“I don’t mind, I’m not that hungry, but we can stop if you want to.”

Her words leave me in a quandary. I was hoping to buy her lunch, but if she’s not that hungry I don’t want to force her to sit there watching me eat. Perhaps she’s just being polite and is eager to get to Galway and join up with her friends. “Maybe we should keep going, Mac might need us!”

“Who cares about Mac? He has enough people running around after him already!”

Kit has no idea how her words make me glow inside. As the low stone walls that define the west of Ireland start to appear, I keep my eyes open, but we don’t pass anywhere on the road that serves food. We leave behind the lush meadows where cattle thrive, driving through sparser ground, where sheep and goats nibble on windswept tufts of salty grass.

“Ireland isn’t that big, yet it’s amazing how much the landscape changes,” Kit says.

“Well, the reason the west coast is so rugged is because it’s bashed by three thousand miles worth of Atlantic Ocean.”

“That’s one way of putting it,” she replies with a smile. “Do you know this road follows an ancient path called the Great Way that connected the East with the West and divided Ireland in two parts?”

“No, I had no idea. Where do you get all this prehistoric information anyway?”

“Oh, Spike dug it up on his research into Aonghus. There was an esker left along here after the ice-age and it made a natural road.”

“An esker?” I muse, keen to turn the conversation away from Aonghus.

Kit prattles on about how eskers were formed from glacial deposits and how the word ‘esker’ comes from the Irish ‘eiscir’ meaning ‘ridge’ or ‘elevation’ but I’m only half-listening. I don’t know what to say to her when she talks about Aonghus, sounds like she believes in him, like she wants me to believe too. It’s the one thing about her that throws me off, makes me uneasy. I mean she has this fanciful, creative side that I absolutely love, it’s what makes her Kit, but Aonghus is like a shadow across it.

I cling onto Spike’s words. It’s not so much she believes in Aonghus as that she doesn’t disbelieve in him. Yet, as I follow the road alongside the ancient esker, I can’t help thinking of the legendary cycles of Irish mythology – exile, destruction and lovers cursed at birth.

It’s all there baked into the ancient bones of the countryside.