By the time the sun comes up, we’re on the road.
I heave us up bad hills and hold the barrow tight when we come down the other side. Rolling green and dazzling blue every direction, so lush, so verdant, I want to open my mouth and eat it in slices. We see: a church made of stone, its crosses fallen away but three gray walls standing, and a tree growing up through a raised platform on the eastern side; a place where the ground is flat and the grass, for no reason I can see, growing only in inches in a perfect circle; in a hollow of land, a lake, but out of the water spike the tallest parts of buildings, chimneys, the tops of towers, and a spire. Everywhere there is life, birds and biting insects, rats near water, and small animals that’ll rush out of the overgrowth ahead of our steps, making my heart leap into my mouth and my hand move toward my knife a half-dozen times a day.
I let my eyes go where they want to as long as my feet are moving us forward.
Danger is still limping, but he’s no worse than yesterday, anyway. He’s not used to seeing so many cars, and he stops to inspect them, sniffing carefully, weeing everywhere, especially on the flat, crusted wheels. Then he comes back to me looking for the water I’m breaking my back carrying.
Later in the day, when the sun is a few handspans up into the sky, I have to put down the barrow and drag him away from something: a dusty pile of bones with its leash caught in a car window. I peer inside through the grimy windows at the leathered shapes. So close to each other but unable to move: surrounded by skrake, terrified, starving, or dying of thirst or heat. Stinking of shit. Women, children. Men. They’d no good choices, these people; we’ve that in common.
I’m more frightened today and more steely too. There will be more skrake, and it’s just a matter of when and how, and if I can beat them. I strain my ears and I touch my knives and I keep my wits about me.
We move, aiming east.
Around us Ireland only becomes more beautiful and more alien. I can smell the rich, dark earth.
Just a few more days, I tell myself. I’ll get more out of her yet, and being on the road is still better than being on that fucking island.
I keep pushing. I want to get as far as Athlone by the time it rains, and when the road turns north and the sun’s out of my eyes, I take it as a little victory and the three of us stop and rest in the shade of some greenery. I watch the low sprawling town awhile from here and swat away bugs, and I drink and mooch around in the barrow for something to eat. I mean to share a tin of something—the label long gone off it—with Danger, but I’m so hungry, it’s gone before I know where I am. Instead, he gets the last of the cooked potatoes, which are squashed and starting to smell bad. He has them ate in three heartbeats, and then he sits down to fart and stare dolefully at me for more.
I’d set the chicken crate on the road and open their little door, and after a few moments two of them come out and bawk and blink in the sunlight. They drink down their water and peck. I can feel Danger beside me, wanting to go for them, but he knows he’s not allowed. He thumps his tail on the ground in embarrassment.
I doze. If a skrake comes at me now, I’ll be in trouble, but isn’t it always the way?
My feet, used as they are to walking, feel pinched and bald in my shoes. I know I should take them off and air them, but I can’t face it, and going barefoot feels dangerous now. Not being able to move quickly could be death. How right Maeve was, I think. My eyeballs are tired with trying to take in the stern landscape against the glare of the sun and the unyielding blue of the sky. They have me caught between them, like pincers, and together they squeeze.
I breathe deep against the relentless wind and feel that my life has begun.
In the end, we don’t get as far as Athlone, but we do okay and I’m happy enough to get off the road and find somewhere on the outskirts of the big town. The countryside is so much greener than I’d imagined. It’s all the rain. The ground is flat again, but the earth is so thronged with growth that I can only sometimes see the horizon. There’s trees growing right up through the smaller road we’re on, casting a green shadowy light over us, protecting us from the lurid sun. We’ve to stop often to unpack or hack a way through them, and it’s tough going now and only getting harder. I look over at Maeve in case she’s anything to say to me about this but she doesn’t, and my mind wanders while we work.
Sweating, being stung by a hundred hungry bugs, I slash our way forward till, suddenly, we’re at a clearing, and it’s beautiful. The earth here is covered in soft grass, and under the largest trees grow small white flowers. Snowdrops. There are none on the island, but my mother brought me back some once and showed me how to dry them between the pages of a book. I thought it was stupid at the time, but I know now how it must have been, to see beauty like this, to need to try and share it.
“Maeve, look,” I whisper.
Low, one-story buildings, old looking and made of brick, doorless, roofless, glassless. Ash trees find shelter behind the walls and grow up through chimneys, thrusting fresh green leaves through caving holes in the roof. Then more greenery, and a lone cottage standing just off the small road I’ve found. The front windows are gone, but otherwise it looks neat, almost intact.
Good shelter. Maeve’d approve of me doing things properly this time, instead of hanging around getting us all caught out in the storm and catching our deaths with it. I put the barrow aside quietly and draw a knife.
Danger hops along through the wild grass with me. It takes a while for my eyes to adjust to the gloom. I move carefully, expecting horrors round every corner, but the little house has been cleaned out. Whatever could be ate went first, and then whatever could be burned.
In the best-preserved room I find what I’m looking for, but there’re only a few books left on the broken-down shelves, and they’re soggy from the roof leaking on them. I go through them hungrily, but the pages come away in my hands and the ink has run. I try to imagine the hands that held them last.
I should go back out to the barrow, but the shadows inside the cottage are cool and it feels so good to have my back straightened out, to be walking unencumbered. I go into another, darker room toward the back of the house, a bedroom. The two windows and what’s left of the ceiling are overgrown with ash, moss, and cobwebs. The light in the room is musty and yellowish. There’s a good inch of dust underfoot, and the room smells sad but not evil. It’d be all right to defend, some part of my brain is thinking, for a while, if you had to, but mostly I’m staring at the iron bedstead in the middle of the room. It has the remains of a bedspread on it. There are blotches of faded color, a brown that might have been bright red once, and I can’t tell if it’s part of some old pattern, or whether it’s something else.
There are shapes under the covers. I feel very still and very heavy, but my feet are moving toward the bed and my hand is reaching out to the coverlet.
There is a noise behind me.
“Orpen.”
I turn, knowing in my heart that I’m only imagining her voice again, she’s such a part of me.
But it is her.
It’s Maeve.
She stands in the doorway, using it for support, to help hold her up. Her eyes are on me, glassy and bright.
“Maeve,” I breathe, and my throat feels like someone has a hand around it.
Her face is still pale, her lips drawn back over her teeth. There is a smell like rotten vegetables clumped together. It’s just like the last time.
“Orpen,” she says again, so sweetly, so invitingly. She has never said my name like that before; she always said it like she’d stones in her mouth. Mam was the sweet one to me.
Maeve reaches an arm out toward me.
Tears topple down my face; my nose is running.
My feet won’t budge. I’m more frightened now than I was with the skrake.
“Orpen.”
I take a step back.
“Come here.”
“Maeve,” I say, and try to make it stronger and do the thing I’ve been waiting to do since I put her in that barrow. “Maeve, where’s Phoenix City?”
She says nothing back, only coughs, and then her shoulder gives a kind of twitch, and then she looks at me again.
“Where’s the city?” I say, louder and bolder in this little space where I’ll probably die now, where Maeve will kill me at last.
“Come here,” she says, no fake sweetness in it now, and I nearly do, I’m so used to obeying her, but for the smell off her, the smell of death. “It’s to the east,” she says when I don’t move. “Come here and I’ll tell you … Come here, it’s on your map…”
Maeve reaches for me again, brushes my forearm before I move back another step. Her nails are long, the edges frayed and broken. I’ll go no farther toward her, but I’m battling my revulsion, my horror, as I try to hold my ground.
“Come here, you—” Maeve lunges for me but misses, tries to hang on to the doorway but slips, one foot flailing out in front of her. She lands hard on the ground.
The backs of my legs are pressed against the bed, but Maeve is crawling toward me now, her face turned up, her lips peeled back in a snarl.
I climb up on the bed and even in my fright, feel my shoe do something new and biting to my left foot.
“Where are we? What have you done, you bitch?” Maeve is screaming.
And I scream back, I bawl, “Where is it, Maeve, where is the city?”
She reaches for me, and I take another half step back and I’m cornered; there’s nowhere else for me to go. Her thin lips are drawn back from her graying teeth, her skin seems nearly to be coming away off her. She is monstrous, and I am half sobbing, half moaning. My hand goes to my knife belt.
She goes sweet then again, suddenly wheedling, as her strength gives out.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, forgive me. Come here, come here to me, come here to your Maeve.” Her voice is getting weaker, and she’s having trouble lifting her head off the ground. “Come…” Her voice is full of muck and dust. She twitches, then lies still.
I fall to my knees on the bed and wrap my arms around my face, and I cry.