Mally led me straight round to the back of his house. I’d taken Lorry over to our cottage and watched as he walked down the stone steps and in through the front door, and now it was only the two of us. I was surprised to see a small, very tidy garden, enclosed by a low fence. There were brightly-coloured flowers growing around the edges, thriving in what should have been bare soil. Pinks and oranges, purples and yellows screamed in the sunlight, and in neat rows grew various herbs, their leaves dark, moist and vibrant. I realised with a jolt that I hadn’t seen anything as lush and vital for weeks. The colours were wanton and extrovert.
The top half of the stable door was open and I could see in to a poky kitchen. Most of the room was taken up by a Formica-topped table, but around the edges were sideboards and cupboards, a sink and an electric oven. Bunches of herbs and flowers hung from the beams, forming a canopy of dried and withered vegetation, and they brushed the top of my head as Mally led me over to a narrow flight of stairs in the corner of the room. He led me up, but he paused outside a closed door on the first landing and put his finger to his lips. Then he made a drinking motion with his hand and stuck his tongue out and I guessed that meant that his mother was in bed with a hangover. We carried on up to the second floor.
Mally’s bedroom was cool and dim. There was a pungent smell, not unpleasant, but dark and woody and earthy, like the smell of the crow’s skull he’d left me. I walked straight over to the window and I wasn’t surprised that I could see right into my bedroom, which was lit up by the sun.
His bed was pushed into the far corner, away from the window, and he took the camera from around his neck and put it on the bedside table before sitting down on the bed. His face was blank as he passed me the photo he’d taken of me, which was now fully developed, and a cursory glance told me I hadn’t got any less ugly since I’d last looked. I tossed it back at him and he slid it onto the bedside table, on top of a pile of magazines. He lay down and put his arms behind his head, watching me. I stood with my back to the window, leaning on the window sill.
‘So? What did you want to show me?’
‘Look around you. What do you see?’
For the first time, I looked properly at the room. Apart from the bed and the bedside table there was a desk and a chair in the far corner, a narrow wardrobe and an old pine cupboard about the same height as me. There were haphazard piles of books leaning against the wall, and above them were tacked a few posters: Bowie as Ziggy Stardust, Deep Purple, Pink Floyd. There was a record player on a stand and a stack of 33s. An electric guitar was propped against the end of the bed.
On the wall next to the bed was a collection of Polaroid photographs, mostly three-quarters shots of people. They were arranged in a grid, each meticulously and evenly spaced from its neighbour. Stepping closer, I saw that they were people I vaguely recognised, people I’d seen outside the chapel. The photographs all had the same orangey-brown glow, and in all of them the subjects were either looking away from the camera, oblivious to the photo being taken, or were covering their faces with their hands. In a couple of the pictures the people looked like they were shouting at the person taking the photos, their faces contorted in anger. It was obvious that none of the subjects had wanted to have their photo taken. In the white strip along the bottom of each picture a date was scrawled in a looping hand.
‘Why do you have all these?’ I asked, leaning closer and examining each of the photographs again in turn.
‘Because it annoys them,’ he said, and he gave a small chuckle.
‘What do you mean?’
‘The chapel-goers. I told you. They hate us. They can’t stand us because we’re outsiders.’
‘Are they really that…’ I searched for the right word, ‘narrow-minded?’ He snorted.
‘Narrow-minded doesn’t even start to cover it. They think we’re eccentric. They take that as a threat. Because we’re not like them, they think we’re bad.’
‘Why do they think you’re eccentric?’ I asked. ‘You seem pretty normal to me.’
‘Aha! That’s it!’ His finger jabbed at the air in front of him. ‘You think we’re normal because you’re an outsider as well. You’re just like us, and sooner or later they’ll turn against you as well.’
‘What do you mean “turn against you”? What have they done to you?’
He leant forward, his hands on his knees.
‘They have these…rituals, I suppose you’d call them. Little things they do when we’re around. It’s like they’re trying to intimidate us or something. Fucking nutters.’
I thought about the day before, when I’d watched the minister and the beetle man and all the men and women congregate outside the chapel, and the peculiar performance with the bunches of leaves and the water and the chanting. That had all been directed at Mally’s house.
‘So, you take photos of them, just to annoy them?’
‘Yeah. Why not?’
‘And how else do you pass the time? I mean, there’s nothing to do here, is there? What else do you do?’
He was quiet for a moment, and looked at me, the dark smudges around his eyes sinking into shadows. Then he sprang up from the bed and darted towards the cupboard that stood against the far wall. He rummaged in a jar on top until he found a key, which he used to unlock the doors. They swung open.
Lined up along the top shelf, and right at my eye level, was a row of bird skulls. Larger than the crow’s skull Mally had given me, five of them, all similar but not identical, each one having small variations in size and colour. Their beaks were all jet black, polished and glossy, and the eye sockets were huge shadows hanging in the stark white of the bone. He picked up the one that was in the exact centre of the row. It was a bit smaller than the rest, creamy beige and slightly dirty-looking.
‘What is it?’ It seemed only right that I was whispering.
He didn’t answer my question, but reached for my hand and opened out my fingers. ‘Do you like it?’
I was surprised by the weight of the skull, which filled my palm, the shiny black beak jutting preposterously forward. I held it up to my face and looked into the empty eye sockets.
‘Watch this,’ Mally said. There was a narrow shaft of sunlight piercing the window and settling on the bed in the far corner. He took the skull from me and held it up, angling it so that the sunlight was channelled through the eye sockets. The light that landed on the bed seemed stronger, more concentrated.
‘Good, isn’t it? It’s a raven, by the way. A raven is the only one that’s shaped like that, that’ll let the sun go right through it.’ He gestured at the row of skulls along the top shelf.
My eyes travelled along the raven skulls and then down the shelves in the cupboard, each one containing between half a dozen and twenty or so skulls, all categorised according to size. Mally explained that there were jackdaws and magpies, blackbirds and starlings. The tiny ones on the very bottom shelf were mostly blue tits and chaffinches. I thought about the relics on the altar and a new feeling bubbled up inside me. It was something I hadn’t felt in ages, a feeling of quiet anticipation, of there being something to look forward to, but not quite knowing what that was. It was like Christmas was approaching but I didn’t know what I was going to get.
‘Why have you got all these?’ I asked. ‘I mean, what do you do with them?’
‘Nothing, really. I just like having them.’ He shrugged. ‘They look nice. Don’t you think they look nice?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, they do look nice. Very nice.’
I took my time examining the skulls, picking up each one in turn, marvelling at their smoothness, their elegance, the sheer perfection of them.
‘Where do you get them all from?’ I asked.
‘Round and about,’ he said, and there was a sly grin forming on his lips.
He went over to his bedside table and opened the drawer. He pulled out something shiny; it was a wire, long and thin, and it was coiled up into a tight circle. He explained how he’d made a noose out of the wire and lain in wait, sometimes for hours, using worms as bait.
‘The birds come and look at the worms. They’re tempted, you can tell, but they hold themselves back. I think they’re suspicious. Sometimes they sense that something’s wrong and they fly off, but usually they go for it. They’re greedy, you see?’ He was standing next to me, looking at me through those long eyelashes, and I looked right back at him.
‘So what happens?’ I asked. My stomach felt hollow with the familiar sensation of thrilling nausea.
‘What do you mean?’
‘What happens when you trap the birds?’
Mally looked at me for a long time, like he was trying to decide whether to tell me something. Gently, he took the raven’s skull from my hand and placed it back in the cupboard. He was standing very close to me. The shaft of light coming through the window had shifted slightly, and shone into his eyes. He didn’t blink, and his pupils were pinpricks, tiny dots against the pale brown irises.
‘The bird puts its head out to pick up the worm. What it doesn’t know is that I’ve pinned the worm to the ground. Just a little pin, right through its middle.’ The backs of his fingers brushed against the fabric of my t-shirt where it covered my stomach. I didn’t flinch.
‘Carry on.’
‘The worm wriggles. It wriggles and wriggles and wriggles but it can’t get free.’ His hand moved deftly under the hem of my t-shirt and I felt cool fingers on the skin of my belly.
‘The bird can’t help itself. It wants to eat the worm so it pulls at it, it keeps on tugging at it. Eventually the worm might break in two, or the pin might slide out, but by this time I’ve got the noose lifted up around the bird’s neck.’ His hand was moving upwards under my t-shirt, stroking my flesh.
‘And then I pull the end of the wire, slowly at first, gently, so the bird doesn’t realise what’s happening. Slowly, gently, and all the time the noose is getting tighter and tighter.’ His breath was hot on my cheek.
‘And then, very quickly, before the bird knows what’s happening, I pull the wire and it tightens around the bird’s neck and it’s trapped. Trapped in the wire. And then I pull it tighter, and more often than not, the wire will either throttle it or go straight through. Straight through the bird’s neck and cut its head off.’
He took his hand away from my stomach and stood back. My breath was quicker now and I turned away from him so he wouldn’t see. That’s when I saw the photo, peeking out from one of the magazines on the bedside table.
Only half of it was visible, and it had the same orange tinge as the other photos, the ones on the wall. But it was different, because this time it was a photo of me, taken when I’d been at the plague cross early on our second day in the village. I picked it up. In the white space at the bottom was written the date: 1 August 1976. Just the day before. In the photo, I had my back to the camera, and only part of one side of my face was visible, just my ear and the curve of my cheekbone and the end of my nose. In the background was the bottom part of the plague cross, the plinth and the steps.
Mally saw me looking, but he didn’t say anything. He took the photograph off me and placed it gently on the bedside table, next to the photo of me he’d taken that afternoon. Then he sat down on the end of the bed and picked up the guitar. Without plugging it in, he started plucking at the strings with those long, slender fingers, playing the same tinny chords over and over again. I looked over at the open cupboard, at the skulls arranged in a perfectly symmetrical display. Something fluttered in the pit of my stomach.
Lorry was spreadeagled, asleep on the patch of concrete at the front of the house when I got back. He looked small and vulnerable lying there, his arms up above his head. His clown doll was discarded at his side, so I picked it up and placed it on his chest and went straight into the kitchen. I was starving and thought I could make a sandwich for me and Lorry to share. My mother was sitting at the pine table, smoking, and she looked up when I walked in and smiled. The shadows under her eyes seemed to have lifted, and the lines on her forehead looked softer, less pronounced.
‘Hi Nif. How are you?’ It was the first time she had asked me anything in ages. I must have looked surprised, because her smile got wider and she ground out her cigarette in the ashtray.
‘Come here.’ She held her arms out to me and made a beckoning motion with her fingers. Her arms when they settled around me were hard and bony, yet surprisingly strong. She held me tightly and breathed in, her face pressed into the side of my neck. When I pulled away I saw that her eyes were wet.
‘Can you feel her, Nif?’ I felt suddenly cold. ‘Can you feel her? She’s here, isn’t she? Petra’s here. She’s come back.’ She was smiling properly now, a placid smile that covered her whole face and made her eyes shine.
It was like when we used to go to church and she would listen to the priest and his mutterings in Latin, and she would look peaceful and contented. She would step up to Father Declan to take communion and as she opened her mouth, her pink tongue ready to take the wafer, she would have such a look of pure elation on her face that I thought back then I wanted to be confirmed, to have the same experience of joyful contentment as my mother did. When she would walk back to take her place in the pew, her step would be light and she would look like she was gliding.
She had the same look on her face now, and her eyes were gleaming behind the tears.
‘Petra’s come back, and she says that she’s forgiven me.’
I sat with my dad that afternoon as he worked on my mother’s sculpture. He had angled a spotlight onto the wheel where the head sat, even though there was enough light seeping in through the coagulated moss on the corrugated plastic roof.
He’d already removed much of the clay that he’d built up. He said the heat had made it harder than usual and difficult to work with. I watched as his fingers applied the new clay. The dark orange substance built up in layers, substrates, the head starting to take on its new form. He placed strips of clay under the eye sockets, and above them, using his tools to carve them once they were in place. He used his fingers to press onto the forehead, pulling back to ease the clay flat. His thumbs worked away under the chin, pulling the substance upwards and outwards, making the neck swanlike and graceful.
It was the eyes that fascinated me the most, though, and I knew that when he had formed the brows and the cheekbones and smoothed the skin, and was satisfied that the line of the nose was perfect, he would take a metal-headed tool, a piece of thick wire shaped into a loop and secured at the rough ends to a wooden handle. Meticulously, he would insert the metal end into the eyeballs, his fingers working slowly and firmly to ease out a lump of clay. This would create both the iris and the pupil. Both would merge into an unseeing void. But this afternoon he was still not satisfied and my mother’s eyes remained intact, uncarved.