Just outside Dublin the road was closed and a half-hour tailback had already formed. There had been an accident a mile up ahead, a policewoman told them, a three-car pile-up that had left a man unconscious and two more with broken limbs. There were severe delays on the diversionary road through the forest but it was fairly clear of snow at least.
‘It’s the black ice you want to watch for,’ she said. ‘Keep strict to the speed limit and use the low gears.’
The road to which she pointed turned out to be little more than a boreen, with a badly broken surface and large potholes roughly filled with gravel. As she had predicted, there was almost no settled snow, because the branches of the overhanging conifers were so thick that even the daylight had difficulty peering through.
The road was choked with cars from the motorway, so that it was impossible to drive at more than a crawl. In the car ahead of them, three bored children were kneeling in the back, waving and pulling faces. Ellen laughed and waved in return. One of the trio, a grim-faced little tyke with spiky hair, stuck out his tongue and rolled his eyes. When Ellen repeated the gesture, he raised two fingers back at her, cackling with laughter, until one of his sisters cuffed him on the side of the head.
‘That taught him, huh?’ Ellen said.
‘Good foot in the arse is what that chap needs.’
‘You never did anything like that yourself, right?’
‘Certainly not. Little altarboy.’
‘Oh yeah. I bet.’
‘I was. Swear to God.’ He made the sign of the cross and intoned solemnly, ‘Introibo ad altare Dei.’
‘Daily communicant, were you?’
‘As a kid, yes. Believe it or not.’
‘And as a grown-up?’
‘I certainly went to mass a lot more when they started givin out the wine.’ The car chugged maliciously. ‘Free booze, you know? Can’t be bad.’
They drove on in silence. In a clearing on the right a large oak had fallen, smashing through the roof of a metal shed. Men were working with chainsaws and axes, sawing off branches and loading them into a truck.
Before long the trees became even thicker and it felt as though they were driving through a tunnel. Here and there police were on duty, their luminous jackets bright yellow and orange. They directed the traffic with purpose and concentration as though there was some other way for it to go. A gust of wind sent a hail of pine cones splattering down on the roof of the Mini. The little boy in front raised his head again, smirking, bulging his cheeks, shoving his fingertips up his nose. A cop on a motorbike zoomed past with his lights flashing and his siren on.
‘Did you ever do that?’ she asked.
‘What?’
‘Ride a big bike? In your job?’
He laughed. ‘I can’t really see myself on one of those. Some old jalopy was the most I ever had.’
‘Do you actually like the work?’
‘It has its moments.’
‘Tell me about some of the moments it has.’
He thought about her question as he drove along. A trip he had made maybe fifteen years ago came into his mind, on the night boat to England, accompanying a republican prisoner who was being extradited to face a bombing charge. They had talked about football, their children, music, the two of them sitting in the Pullman lounge, handcuffed together and eating chicken-in-a-basket. When the lights of Liverpool came into view the man had asked Aitken to buy him one last pint. Where he was going now, he joked, they wouldn’t be likely to have Guinness on draught. He was resigned to his fate, he expected a life sentence. Aitken had felt strongly that his prisoner was innocent, but he’d had no choice except to deliver him up. The officers from the anti-terrorist squad who’d been waiting at dawn on the embarkation dock grabbed the man by the hair as they dragged him into the squad car. Aitken had intervened, insisting he be treated fairly.
Afterwards he had walked around the centre of Liverpool, killing a few hours until it was time to get the boat home. It was close to Valerie’s birthday. When the shops opened he had bought her a gift, then got a few small things for the kids. But all the way back on the restless, churning sea he hadn’t been able to stop thinking of the prisoner. How could it be right to hand people over, when you knew for a fact they’d been beaten in custody, when they wouldn’t get a fair trial? It had haunted him for months afterwards. He couldn’t look at his own children without thinking of the man’s two sons and three daughters. But later new intelligence had come to light. The prisoner was guilty, there was absolutely no doubt. This soft-spoken man who liked the Who and the Small Faces had taken an early morning plane from Dublin six months previously, placed a Semtex bomb in a litter bin in a London street, set the timer and cycled away. It was a miracle that only one person had been killed, a Pakistani shopkeeper on his way to work. It had taken him almost three weeks to die.
He glanced across and noticed Ellen was asleep, her left cheekbone leaning against the glass, her hands tucked between her crossed knees. He turned the heat up a little. She gave a troubled murmur and wrapped her arm around her neck.
Up ahead, he could see the glow of streetlights. The tunnel of trees came to an end and opened out on to a slightly larger road. There were no signposts in any direction. He pulled out and turned right, what he thought felt northwards again, towards Donegal.
He had only been driving for two hours, but already the city was far behind them. The land looked frozen, lunar, dead. Grey snow lay on the hedgerows and ditches, on the corrugated iron barns and cement milking parlours. It dusted the piles of plastic fertiliser sacks; it filled the iron bathtubs, surreal in the fields. Here and there men were working – repairing fence-posts, shovelling sleet out of gateways.
Off to his right a three-quarter moon was rising, pale and watery against the flat grey sky. To the west, over the mountains, the sun was sinking quickly. Before long it was so dark that he had to switch on his lights. Frustrated now, he felt himself tighten. It had been one of those days that had never got going. The possibility began to arise that they wouldn’t make it to Inishowen tonight.
Being in the car was making him tired. His lower back was aching, his wounded leg was stiff and sore. He leaned beneath his seat to push it further backwards, only to find the control lever was stuck. Dusk was coming down faster now. He began to have the feeling he was lost. Perhaps he had taken a wrong turning. A few miles back the road had forked, then forked again five hundred yards later. Some minutes afterwards, as if to confirm his fear, he passed a twisted dead elm he knew he’d seen half an hour earlier. It was standing in the middle of a field, lonely as a lighthouse. Cursing softly, he pulled in to the edge, stopped the car; gingerly opened the glove box to look for a map. Ellen gave a soft restless snore. The glove box was full of rubbish: cassettes, old papers, empty cigarette boxes. But no map. He could have sworn he had one but it wasn’t in there now.
He looked under his seat and in the driver’s door pocket. An owl hooted close by. He looked at Ellen, asleep beside him. Where was her own map, he wondered? Had she even brought it with her? Had she left it at the hotel? Well, he couldn’t just reach over and start searching through her pockets. And anyway, he didn’t know where he was. What good was a map with no point of reference to help you read it? The fields around were flat and featureless; there was nothing obvious from which to take a bearing.
He pulled out and began to drive slowly through the dusk, trying to pick out some kind of landmark. He passed an abandoned pub with sheets of mossy corrugated iron in the windows and the words BRITS OUT spray-painted across the door. An old-fashioned telephone box, green as an apple. A humpback stone bridge over a gurgling stream. A statue of the Virgin Mary in a grotto close by on the bank. Ten minutes later he came to a crossroads, took the left turn for no other reason than instinct. He found himself back on the track through the forest, only this time there was no traffic at all.
A wash of panic flowed through him like a drug. Where had all the cars gone? Was this the right direction? Where were the cops who had been on duty earlier? He stopped again and rolled down his window. The air was cold as iced water. Somewhere far away a dog was yelping. The wind made a rustling in the wet leaves and ferns.
In his rearview mirror he saw a single headlight. At first he thought it must be a motorbike. Maybe it was the cop they had seen earlier. But then he saw that it wasn’t a bike, but a large car with one headlamp broken. It seemed to be approaching quite fast, a substantial black shape maybe a quarter-mile behind them. He watched it sink from view into a dip in the road. Relieved, he took out a cigarette and lit it. He would stop the driver and ask where he was. A fat, brown rabbit hopped out into the road in front of him, stopped and nuzzled at something on the ground. A twig cracked. It sat bolt upright on its hunkers, still as stone, breath steaming from its mouth.
He looked in his mirror again. The car appeared behind him on the brow of a hill. He flicked on his emergency flashers and waited. But the car stopped.
Its one light dipped and then went dead.
He stepped out of the Mini. There was no light at all now, apart from the clicking red glow of his emergency flashers, spreading blinks of colour across the rain-soaked road and the leaves.
He thought he could hear the car’s engine still running.
He waved and beckoned. The car remained still. He waved again. Its engine cut out. It was so dark down the road that he could barely see the car now, let alone make out how many people were in it. Was it possible that they hadn’t seen him? What the hell were they doing?
He waved both his arms now. ‘Hello?’ he called, louder than he intended. The lonesome bray of a donkey answered him back. Somewhere nearby, birds flapped out of trees.
He took a couple of cautious steps forward. The car started up and began to reverse away.
‘Hey?’ he shouted. ‘Come back a second!’
He began to run hard along the track, his bad leg throbbing with pain. Gasps of breath came like rips inside his chest. By the time he got to the brow of the hill, the car was already five hundred yards away, doing a rapid and untidy three-point turn, its engine whining ferociously as though the driver were missing the gears.
‘Come back,’ he roared. ‘I need help.’
He watched it speed off – swerving, righting – until its tail lights had disappeared from view.
‘Bastards!’ he yelled. ‘Youse fucking bastards!’
His voice came back, a dull echo from the trees. Something in the ditch made a low, scuttling sound. A cow bawled from a field behind him.
Glumly he turned and started to trudge back the way he had come, soaked with perspiration, panting hard. How in the name of God could people do something like that? Leave you stranded in the armpit of nowhere. That would never happen in Dublin. A couple of drunken country bumpkins, he reckoned, beered up to their ugly country eyeballs. Off to find a sheep to molest. Dress it up in frillies and have a threesome. Bastards. That was all. Good old rural down-home bastards, whose parents were first cousins and shit-kickers with it. If he ever caught up with them, he’d . . .
He stopped in his tracks. There to his left was a tiny road, with a signpost for Tara nailed to a black tree trunk.
OK. Fine. So they’d showed him the way. But they hadn’t meant to do it. They were still bastards.
‘You’re still bastards!’ he yelled down the road.
The cow uttered a gloomy low.
When he got back to the Mini, Ellen was still asleep. He started up, turned, crossed the bridge; took the tiny road towards Tara.
Night had fallen completely now. As if brought on by the darkness, hunger started to gnaw at him. He realised he’d had nothing to eat all day except for the toast which she’d offered him at breakfast. How pleasant that was, to sit by a fire having toast with her. How easy she was to be around. She gave a start and an anxious moan, but he felt he shouldn’t wake her up. She twitched, muttered suddenly in her sleep, half-formed words he could barely make out.
Elizabeth . . . Elizabeth.
He wondered who that was.
When he looked at the clock it was almost half-five. He noticed her stir and begin to wake. Her hair was tousled and her moist eyes looked fearful. The strut of the window had left an indentation in her cheek.
‘How was the Land of Nod?’ he asked.
She peered at him hard, as though she didn’t know who he was.
‘Are you OK? You’ve just been asleep for a while.’
She yawned blearily, wrist to her mouth.
‘God, how rude of me, Martin. I’m really sorry.’
‘You’re grand, don’t worry.’
She lowered the sun visor and groaned at her reflection, licking her fingertips and smoothing her eyebrows.
‘I look like the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.’
‘You don’t,’ he said. ‘You just look tired.’
A thin spiralling worm of pain unwound slowly down his back.
‘I’m so thirsty,’ she said. ‘Do we have any water?’
‘We’ll stop soon and get a cup of tea.’
She nodded. ‘Be great. Are we nearly there?’
He laughed. ‘Afraid not. We had a few problems while you were away with the fairies.’
‘Problems?’
‘Muggins here got lost and couldn’t find the map.’
‘It’s here,’ she said, taking it out of her pocket.
‘Well . . . I don’t really need it now.’
‘So where are we?’
‘We’re near Tara.’
He glanced at the gauge and noticed that he was low on petrol. A flash of sheet lightning lit up the distant sky and mountains. Suddenly they were driving through a heavy shower of sleet. He jammed up the heater and switched on the wipers. They made a soft thrumm-thrumm as they glided back and forth, a sound he found oddly comforting. She tried to stretch now, and bumped her hands against the roof.
‘Sleep a bit more if you like.’
‘No, I’m fine.’
‘We’ve a long old drive ahead of us still.’
The windscreen began to mist up. She reached out and cleaned a patch for him with her sleeve, then lazily traced her fingertips through the steam on her own side. ‘I don’t know what came over me. To sleep like that.’
‘Really, you should have another little snooze. It’ll be midnight now by the time we get to Donegal.’
She carved a spiral in the steam with her fingertip, leaning her head against the side window again. But she couldn’t seem to get comfortable this time. She switched on the radio and turned up the volume. A man was reading the news in Irish. His voice was mellifluous, very clear and pure.
They listened for a few minutes, driving steadily on.
‘Do you understand?’ she asked him then.
He shook his head. ‘I get the odd word.’
‘Isn’t it compulsory here in the schools?’
‘It is, yeah. That’s why nobody speaks it.’
She gave him a disapproving look.
‘Well, come on.’ He laughed. ‘What’s the point of a language that nobody speaks? I was never able to get the head round that.’
‘It’s a cultural thing,’ she said.
He chuckled. ‘Oh janey, is it?’
‘Well, of course. It’s part of being Irish.’
‘My mate Ranj doesn’t speak a word of it. But he’s an Irish citizen. With an Irish wife and kids.’
‘People do speak it. Down in the Gaeltacht.’
It amused him that she was getting so shirty. Only an American could inform you with such certainty that you weren’t quite Irish enough to meet some objective standard.
‘I know that,’ he said. ‘I do actually live here.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean? I don’t live here so I can’t have a point of view?’
He laughed again, though her abruptness was unnerving him. ‘Of course you can. I didn’t say that.’
‘I don’t live in South Africa either, but I have a point of view about apartheid.’
‘We’re a long way from apartheid here, Ellen.’
She scoffed. ‘That’s a matter of opinion, I guess.’