TWO

“Shouldn’t we be doing this in bare feet?” Maggie said. “Shouldn’t our feet be bleeding?”

She got all the answer she expected from Wade, a growl. She talked him into parking the car below in the village, in front of a garage where a couple of youths were pulling an engine apart, and though he’d done what she asked, it was only — he said — to let her find out for herself how foolish she was. Going up past the little shops, and the houses where women behind curtains watched them pass by, he refused to talk. But when they stopped by the church and saw, high at the top of the hill, the reflected light from what could only be a high flat stone, he said, “If those people knew what you were up to, they’d laugh their heads off. That thing could be a mile away, and all uphill.”

“Then stay behind,” she said. “Sit in the car, or go in the pub and drink something. I’m going up.”

Becker rushed on ahead, his big overcoat catching at the top of his boots, his flat cap rolling with his gait. He could imagine it better, he said, if he was alone.

The sun was shining, just as Mrs. O’Sullivan had promised, though this late in the day it was on the verge of disappearing for the night behind the hills at their back. “We have long evenings, here in Ireland,” Mrs. O’Sullivan said, at tea, “and you may discover that our evenings are often the best part of the day.”

But she hadn’t, for all her friendliness, been easy about the ashes, or the trip to the stone circle.

“You’ll not find it,” she’d repeated. “I know that village well, and no one’s ever mentioned the stones. They won’t be able to tell you.”

She’d been right, too, about that. The boys at the garage had only looked at each other and shrugged. A man stepping out of the bar said Yes, he’d heard of the stones, there’d been people searching for them years ago, but he’d never seen them himself, and couldn’t be sure which road they ought to take. A short fat woman with a brilliant red face cocked her head like a chicken to listen to the man, then gasped air to add her own opinion. “You can’t tell a t’ing by them signs,” she said, and chuckled. “The Borde Failte people make them in their factories, in Dublin or in Cork, and put them in the ground whenever the urge comes upon them.”

But Maggie, while the woman spoke, had turned and looked up the only road that led uphill. Beyond fields and farms and clumps of bush, on the clean flat top of the mountain slope, something tall reflected sunlight. “Thank you,” she said, “we’ll try this road, anyway, and see where it takes us to.”

“Where it’ll take you to,” said Wade, “is into bed for a week, with aching legs and blistered feet. You’re a fool, Maggie Kyle, to try it.”

How many times, she told him, had they laughed at the American tourists who were content to see the Island from the windows of their cars, or campers, flying sixty miles an hour up the highway. So let’s not do the same, she said, let’s take it slow, let’s feel it.

“Feel it,” he said, and looked away.

“They know the stones are there,” she said. “They see them every day, from their own windows and from the street, but they don’t want to share them. They were hoping we’d just go away.”

“A good idea,” he said. “They can’t imagine a good reason for going up, and neither can I.”

“But you’ll come, anyway,” she said, “to see what you can do to spoil it.”

The road, to avoid the steep grade, cut sideways across the hill, rising slowly along the bottom of a large field. A man on the lower side, pretending to cut back the fuchsia hedge around his gateway, stood watching them. He grinned, when they greeted him, and scratched at the fly of his pants, which was held together by a large safety pin. “A fine day,” he said, though he looked as if he had his doubts. “‘Tis, yes. A fine day altogether when you think about it.” Limbs dropped from the snick of his shears, then were gathered into his arms.

When the road divided, the strip of pavement splitting into two narrower strips, they turned onto the one that headed directly uphill, a steep climbing grade, where Becker had already gone on ahead of them. It went up straight for what looked like a quarter mile, between two high rows of bleeding fuchsias. A tunnel, nearly, with Becker burrowing on ahead, his coat flapping.

But nothing could hold her back now. Maggie Kyle going up was a force to reckon with, she could feel it in her legs. Those long legs stroked a rhythm beneath her, carried her up. If she had a voice, if she could sing, she’d fill this tunnel full of echoes. Becker ahead was singing his forest song, his rather song, she could hear shreds of it floating back. But Maggie Kyle could better that, she could out-rather him, if she only had a voice, if she knew the words to what she meant.

The ashes, swinging in her bag, brushed back and forth across her thigh.

“You walk,” Wade said, “as if there are broken bodies dropping off behind that you want to get away from. Slow down or mine will be next.”

“Shedding,” she said.

“What?”

“But not you,” she said. “It’s not you I want to shed.”

She slowed down, for his longer but lazier legs. They could climb poles, they could carry him straight up a fake spar tree, to ring bells, but they balked at bell-less slopes.

“Tell me,” she said, “why you came.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “You asked me to.”

“No, tell me the truth.”

“To see you make a fool of yourself? Or to be there when you fail.”

“You’ll have to try harder than that. I believe it’s fear, you’ve dragged along after me out of fear, and a little bit of hope.”

“The truth of it is,” he said, “I’m as foolish as you are.”

“But you hadn’t the courage to let it show.”

“Don’t understand me, Maggie. I’ll be damned if I’ll ever let you understand me.”

Though his grin, returning, didn’t forbid her from trying.

At the end of the long straight stretch, the road turned, and they were faced with a steeper grade still, through leafy trees instead of shrubs. It demanded to be climbed in silence. They moved up, side by side, putting all their effort into their legs, whose muscles protested at every step. After the next turn they passed a farmer’s gate, a driveway leading down to house and sheds and tractor and standing cows. A dog looked up, suddenly, from his paws, and watched them pass. The road, damp now and pitted with potholes, coated with washed-down mud, twisted through low-hanging branches, nearly level, then turned suddenly for the long last steepest climb of all, along the face of the bare hill. Edges of pavement, broken away, were half buried in mud, or sat in caught brown puddles. Becker, far ahead, nearly to the top, took one step, rested, took another step, rested. He turned, looked back down on them, raised a slow hand in greeting, or benediction. He was not singing now.

“To do this every night after supper,” Maggie said, “would be a constant reminder that you’re really alive. Every muscle knows you’re alive.”

“But only for the week it would take to kill you,” Wade said. Laughing, he took her hand. From here, the farm below seemed less than real, the village a cluster of toy buildings.

“Don’t look,” Maggie said, “not yet. Just keep climbing. Save the view till the end.”

The road ahead of her feet was enough to look at. Grey cracked pavement, rising up, a steep artificial strip of tarmac laid against the face of the hill. Climbing stairs would have been easier. They grunted and sweated the last hundred yards, legs almost numb, having given up their protests as a futile thing, hands slippery in one another.

“When we get there,” Wade said, “I only want to lie down.” Panting, he sounded ready to do it now, and here, on the clumps of sod and stone along the side of the road.

The road reached the top at last, and levelled out suddenly to go lolloping off across miles and miles of lumpy green plateau, winding and rolling and dipping off as if wild with freedom after that climb.

“There it is,” Maggie said. “What we came for.”

To her left, on a flat apron of land at the very edge of the plateau, the stone they’d seen from below stood up high behind a ring of ragged brush. That single stone was all she could see from here, but when she moved ahead a step a second one beside it appeared, a little shorter. Both of them were no thicker than a wall, or a heavy door, but as wide, perhaps, as this road.

Becker, standing on the roadway, grinned. He might have been playing host. He’d buttoned up his coat against the wind which, Maggie discovered, soon chilled the sweat she’d worked up, dried it off, and burrowed deep for bone.

“But we’re not there yet,” she said, and leapt the shallow ditch. A wire fence, pushed down into vines and stones and mud, was easily stepped over. She set out across the spongy ground. Heather and moss and grasses, it felt like the uncertain edges of swamp at home, where cows’ footprints sink deep and fill up with mud.

She was as far as the ring of brush — another ditch to jump, and this hedge to push through — before she realized that she was alone. Becker and Wade were a hundred yards behind her, sitting on a bank beside the road.

“Go alone,” Wade called. “We’ll come later, when we’re rested.”

“Come on,” she said. “You can rest here, at the stones. Come look at these things!”

“Go ahead,” Becker said. “This part you should do alone.”

She would rather have huddled together with them, against the wind. It had found rare corners in her, and frozen them, it had identified her skeleton for her, head to foot, a brittle rack of icy twigs, separate from flesh and colder than flesh could ever be. But she went ahead, anyway, into the grassy circle, huddled into herself, to get it over with. Had she made all that climb, after all, only to be chased back down by wind?

Behind the two giant upright slabs she walked past an oval bed of ordinary whitish stones, a deflated rock pile, she thought, fallen in on itself. Puckered in the centre. It looked pitiful, as if it had been something else once and been reduced to this. But there was nothing pitiful, or pitying, in the stone circle itself, if four big blocks of rock could be said to form a circle. They were closer together than she’d expected, there was only room between them for muddy cow trails to cross, but they looked as if they’d grown up, four large blunted teeth, from beneath the earth, and as if their roots went down for miles. A small black sign nearby, on a metal rod, said this was a national monument, and something else, then repeated it all in Irish. It gave nothing away beyond that, no hints, no clues to the magic. Only a plea to respect the place, to leave it alone. The tallest stone, burning up sunlight, made a mockery of that request. What could anyone do to it? How could you help but leave it alone? How could you not suspect magic here, somewhere, even if it was only in the wind?

Or in the immensity of the vision they called up, of the men who planted them here, for whatever their reasons, on this edge of the world’s top, where they could worship their gods without losing sight of an enemy’s approach.

But if there was magic here it wasn’t in the stones, it was in the command they had of the earth, which fell away below them and ringed them round as far as she could see. Dominion was the word that nagged to be said. Dominion over the sun, even, whose fire had already sunk beneath the hills but whose rays like horizontal bands of light streaked out of cloud to cross the valley and find themselves absorbed in stone. Absorbed and then thrown out again, against themselves.

It was too immense to be experienced alone, without crying, or mistaking the cold for fear. She called to the men.

The view from this edge was too wide to be taken in all at once, it was like seeing the whole world laid out and not knowing where to look. Ocean and mountains and valleys and church spires and roads and patchwork farms and animals and moving cars. To the right, to the north, hills like giant blue and purple domes pushed against each other, folded and fell, crowded across the top end of the valley. Down the valley, which was a long sharp gash slanting like a pried-open chute to the sea, the silver road ran loose and lazy, disappearing behind clumps of trees, swinging up around farms and their little white houses, twisting along the hedges, nipping past grey ruins of houses and one crumbling tower of a castle. Along the opposite slope, farms climbed up as high as they dared, laid their green and blue and yellow fields, framed by darker ruffled hedges, right up nearly vertical and then stopped so that the rest of the hill, a wide expanse, was only a dark green patchy dome freckled with sheep.

“And down there, those are oil tankers,” Maggie said. Like floating factories they sat out in the silver bay, waiting.

Becker was so excited he forgot to open his notebook. Maggie was not going to remind him of it; let him see this with his own eyes, for himself, for a change. His greedy face gorged on the view, crammed it in, stuffed, and went back for more. “Pilgrims to the valley of Jehoshaphat,” he said, “reserved stones for themselves to sit on at the last judgement.”

“But listen,” Wade said, stepping back from the edge, “you came here for a reason.”

“Yes,” Becker said. “For Lily. The ashes, Maggie.”

She had them, in her bag, but she wished now that she hadn’t. To dump them over the stones, into the cow manure, made it all into some kind of game.

“Maybe we could just leave the urn here, bury it somewhere. That’d be good enough.”

“Not good enough,” sang out Wade Powers, who was enjoying himself at last. “You made a promise. You took money on the strength of it.”

She took the long narrow cylinder out of her bag and looked at it. “I’d rather just bury it, or leave it somewhere. If we made a ceremony out of it, or something, that would be like admitting we believed the stories, the lies about him.”

“No ceremonies,” Becker said. “Just dump it, scatter them. By morning the rain will have washed them into the ground.”

Wade’s face flushed. “You can’t really act as if you believe it, that his life really began in this circle, that he was thrown up out of the earth. It’s just something you were silly enough to agree to.”

Becker took the cylinder from Maggie’s hands, the greed she’d seen at the edge of the cliff still there in his eyes. “Myth,” he said, “like all the past, real or imaginary, must be acknowledged.” He took the lid off. “Even if it’s not believed. In fact, especially when it’s not believed. When you begin to disbelieve in Keneally you can begin to believe in yourself.”

Maggie turned away until he brought the cylinder back, lighter now by a few ounces, and put it into her hand. “When Hugh of Lincoln made his pilgrimage to Fécamp,” he said, “he chewed off two relics from the finger of the Magdalen.”

She dropped the thing into her bag, out of sight, and stepped over to feel the heat of the largest slab. “These things are real, Wade Powers,” she said. “So real that no one ever knows why they’re here or how they got here. Think of your bastion now and compare.”

Her own mind shuddered, like a struck bell, at the possibilities. She couldn’t think for long about such things, she needed something she could hang onto. Her map. It rattled and flapped in the wind, twisted away as she tried to open it.

“Maggie, what are you doing?”

“I just want to see, I want to have a look at this thing, see what all that valley is.”

“Get up off the grass, put that thing away. You spend more time looking at that paper than at the real thing.”

Deliberately, Wade put his foot, his shoe, in the middle of her opened-out map, covering whole counties. She stared at it, at the shoe. He had small feet for such a tall man, and shoes that seemed too flimsy, too shapeless, for him. This was like a child’s shoe, plain and worn-over and scuffed, with water stains soaked into the sides, a white line like the edge of an alkali lake, like a child who has walked through puddles, playing. For a moment she wanted to touch it, to put her face down, to feel the childlike shape of it in her hands. She was tempted to brush the mud away, with her fingertips.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Get up, Maggie. What are you saying? Get up off the wet grass.”

She let him pull her up again, into the wind. His face appeared stricken. His eyes, she could see, were unable to understand.

“What’s wrong?” he said. “Is there something wrong? Why are you crying?”

“I’m not crying,” she said.

“There’s something wrong,” he said. “You are crying. Did I say something?”

“Yes. No. I said it. I’ve been saying it all along. As if I couldn’t be accused in return.”

“What are you saying? Maggie? …” He looked worried. His hand touched her shoulder, fell away, then came back to rest there. “I can’t follow you, Maggie. There’s too much, you have too much feeling in you for me to follow, you’ve always had.”

She brushed a finger lightly against his cheek, as if the tears she felt were there, to be wiped away. He continued to stare at her face, looking for answers there that she didn’t have.

“This damn wind,” she said, shuddering suddenly, and trying to laugh, “it makes me cold right to the bone — I half expect to see your friend Horseman sneaking around behind the stones, he had the same kind of effect on me.”

“Horseman,” Wade said. As if the name had a taste he was unsure of.

“You believed him, didn’t you? About the buried twin.”

He looked at her, both surprised and trapped.

“You hated it, but you believed him.”

They looked at each other for a moment. He slipped his hand inside his jacket, to rub his chest, then pulled it out to look at it as if it had appeared, on its own, from somewhere else. Becker with his little black notebook laid open in the palm of his hand, like a gift slice of bread, or a wounded bird, came across the grass towards them.

Then Wade said, his own eyes shifting away towards the stones, “Yes, I believed him.” He said it with shame, and turned to leave.

“I don’t think you do,” Becker said. They both turned to him in surprise. He closed the notebook by simply folding up his hand, like a teacher who had come to the end of a story he’d been reading, and knew the last line by heart: “I think you only believe part of it, the part you hate. Both of you.”

Somewhere behind them, on the wind, there was a new sound. Turning, they saw far, far back across the lumpy plateau, the small black speck of a car coming towards them. It came humping over rises and falling suddenly into dips and disappearing behind rocks; it came bouncing unevenly nearer, its motor roaring unused on downhill slopes and growling in the strain of the climbs; it came zig-zagging closer, growing bigger, moving first one way across the full width of the plateau and then, larger, moving the opposite way across; it came sprouting arms, suddenly, bare arms that waved madly from windows, and voices high and raucous, shouting, yelling, above the increasingly noisy sound of the motor; it rounded the final curve, came up the final slope, going fifty or sixty miles an hour, came yelling and screaming, waving bottles and papers, spouting steam from the grill, belching blue coiling clouds of smoke behind, slowing suddenly, screeching, at the very edge of the drop. A bottle, arcing high in the air and then down, smashed exploding against the tallest stone at the same moment the car went over suddenly, dropped over the edge, and turning, roared shooting down the first steep broken section of the road.

“My God, look,” Maggie said. “Look at them go down, look how high we’ve come, look at how high we’ve come.”

And high above the Strait of Georgia, in a twin-engine pontoon plane, Wade still clenched his hands against the expected plunge. The water below appeared hard and brittle, like wrinkled blue metal, stretched out to catch them all when this rickety crate flew apart, as it was bound to do sooner or later, and dropped them like spilled toys.

He felt sick. He wished they had taken a ferry this final part of the trip. If it hadn’t been for Becker with his big ideas, wanting to save time, they could be safely moving across the surface of that water, like humans, instead of pretending to be birds.

Maggie glanced at him periodically. She knew how he felt, but he could see she was too excited herself to sympathize.

“Swallow,” she told him, and laughed. “You can bring it up when we’re landed.”

And Becker was busy in his notebook again. Scribbling. It was never enough for Becker to enjoy a thing, or even to suffer this ride, he had to record it too. And still you never knew what went on behind all that bushy hair, behind those eyes. He opened only to pull in, it seemed, never to let anything out.

Nuts, Wade thought. We’re all nuts.

“When we get home,” he said, “all I want is a bath.” And made a face. He smelled sweaty, and stale.

But she didn’t hear. “What?” she said, and lost interest. She stretched her neck, to see everything out the little window. “Fishing boats,” she yelled. “Sailboats.”

“Does that girl know we’re coming?” he said.

“What?”

He leaned closer. “That girl. That Anna. Does she know we’re coming? Will she have the coffee pot on, and a deep hot bath ready that we can leap into together?”

“Who?” she said, pretending amazement. “You and Anna?”

“It’s about time you had someone to scrub your back.”

But he couldn’t think of that now, not here. There were some images he just couldn’t permit himself at this time. Though she was no help, putting her hand on his knee. He could hardly avoid a picture of Maggie Kyle stepping out of the bath, her long limbs streaming.

He knew now what it was he wanted, why he’d gone on that stupid trip.

“There were a hundred and forty-four of those little stone beehives erected along that Dingle Coast,” Becker said, “by the monks.”

“Oh shut up, Becker,” Maggie said, and flipped his notebook shut.

“Erections?” Wade said.

He leaned his face to the glass again, to watch the midget boats below them.

There were other ways to approach the island; those big blue-and-white government ferries didn’t control them all. There were plenty of people hauling bodies back and forth. Minds, of course, were less easy than bodies to drag away; they stayed, where it was safer. The ferries and planes and barges and tugs and freighters could do only so much.

And people got onto the island however they could.

Grandpa Barclay, he remembered, arrived on a barge.

After riding that freight car of pigs all the way out from the abandoned dust farm in Alberta, he crossed the strait in the same barge that carried his furniture. A forty-foot plank-built scow pulled by a little tug. He’d had to swim out to it first, he said, when it left the Vancouver pier without him. Then, cold and wet, he huddled among the mattresses and chairs, watching the mainland fade back, the continent recede; then found himself, in the rougher water of the open strait, in the midst of a school of killer whales going north. Snorting like horses they rolled forward at the surface of the water, passing within feet of the barge, their great black hides gleaming wet, their tall triangle fins arched with each surfacing like a rotating arm, or knife-blade. Eyes, he said, glared at him. White throats threatened. He had never been so scared in all his life, he told Wade, though he was assured later that he needn’t have worried. Killer whales liked to put on a good show, when there was an impressed audience. The storm which came up and tossed the barge around was no help; he’d weathered storms before, though never on the sea. But it was those huge snorting bodies that frightened him the most, so much so that when the tug had pulled him close in to the island pier at last, he’d leapt out prematurely, lost his footing on the pier-edge, and fallen into the water. After all that trouble, he told Wade, how could he ever move anywhere else?

And he hadn’t. He lived on that dairy farm until old age drove him in to the closest town, where he passed his time talking with the other old-timers on the sidewalk across from the Royal Bank. At his funeral, high up the hill outside the town, Wade sat in his car while all of Maggie’s relatives huddled in a sudden hailstorm around the grave. The mountains across the valley remained in sunlight through it all, green and startling blue, and seemed to have moved up closer so that it was possible to see roads and gravel pits and ski runs and logging claims chiselled into the slopes so sharply that he felt he might have reached out and touched the scars. It was the only funeral Wade ever attended, except for his own father’s; he couldn’t see any sense in them, as a rule, unless there was something you felt you needed to say, or think about.

He had plenty to think about, now. His head would burst with it before he was through. There was a list as long as your arm, of things that had to be faced, and chewed on. But he would face them tomorrow, chew on them then, when he wasn’t trapped in this flying rattle-trap and his head wasn’t throbbing with pain.

What he needed, first, was that bath. A long, hot, up-to-the-shoulders bath. Even if it had to be alone. He’d be damned if he’d pay — what? — a dollar and a quarter to splash in that O’Sullivan’s tub, it was too cold in that house of hers even to take his clothes off. So he was itchy, and sweaty, and he stank. He hated to get close to Maggie, in case she noticed. Wherever they went — his house or hers — the first place he was heading was the bathroom. A good hot bath, a sleep, and life could continue. But not until.

Becker wrote in his notebook, which lay open on his lap. His pulse raced, as if there were a deadline to meet, or someone to snatch the book from his hands.

Approaching the island …

Wade pretending to snooze. Like a lizard on a hot rock he basks in — what? — relief? exhaustion?

A high pale colour-drained sky above us. Emily Carr clouds — weak crinkly radiator-slats. As if the clouds have been raked away by an unsteady hand, leaving thin furrows. Sun poised lemon over Mount Arrowsmith. Fish boats, pleasure boats, below us like specks of white confetti on all that wide stretch of crawling blue.

Maggie will talk the leg off our tattooed pilot if he lets her. For those flashes of white Mediterranean teeth. This might have been nothing more than a weekend in Vancouver. Three crowded weeks, looking back, can seem telescoped down to no more than that.

Aeroplane inadequate symbol for transcendence. On the contrary, it makes you more aware than usual of your bones, and flesh.

Maggie happier. Words only nibble at reality, don’t really touch it, can’t really burn through to it. Symbols not much better. If words won’t do, and symbols fail, maybe only the instinct, some kind of spiritual sense, can come close. All we can trust. Maybe all our lives that instinct is in us, trying to translate the fake material world we seem to experience back into pre-Eden truth, but we learn early not to listen. Instead, we accept the swindle, eat it whole.

Learned strange lesson in Canadian history from a Cork man on a street in Skibbereen. “If Wolfe hadn’t defeated Montcalm,” he said, and touched two fingers on my forearm. “If Wolfe hadn’t defeated Montcalm and brought the open Bible to the land, your country by now would have become as corrupt as South America.”

Back to editing Lily’s tapes tomorrow.

In the pretty little seaside village of Glengariff the hawkers leap out onto the road as if to strike you or your car, waving their arms, you think there must be some terrible accident ahead, around the corner. But it’s only that they’re competing for your business; they want to take you in their boats to the garden island of Garnish. “Boat to d’island!” “Take ye t’ Garnish!” “See de flars!” In traffic lulls they fall back, talk in clusters, or lean against posts: all but one, a young man with black curly hair, a yellow shirt, a sway-back strut — he makes of it all an uninterrupted symphony. Between cars he sings (“I coulda danced all night, I coulda danced all night”) he walks, he waves his arms, he struts, calling into open windows “Och, yer brakin’ me harrt!” “Y’don’t know what yer missin’! Could you be honeymooners now? ‘Tis a great beautiful island for honeymooners.” He weaves in and out among cars, caravans, buses, donkey carts, sometimes sucking in his stomach to pull back from moving traffic, never ceasing. Asked him if this wasn’t a rather dangerous way to make a living. Should’ve known better. “It don’t matter at all! The man in d’white hat, see him, dat one is our ondertaker.” Like the Fahan monks in their cliff-edge beehive cells and the drivers of the black Morrises and nearly everyone else on that rainy green island, he seems eager to be ushered as hastily as possible into another world. A contrast to the people on this island ahead of us, who think they’ve already reached it (and found it wanting) and won’t — most of them — even imagine anything better.

Thank God no one expects me to adopt the Glengariff technique for drumming up business for the B.C. Ferries. Not needed. No real competition. And anyway, who needs more visitors?

Descending. The streets of this town, laid out by some Englishman who’d never seen the place to look as if they radiate out from the hub-centre of the harbour front. Could as easily be seen, from up here, as a web.

“When this thing falls apart,” Maggie said, “think of us as you’re drowning and remember we’re all on your conscience.”

“My plane won’t fall apart,” the pilot said. He spoke with an accent, a thick man with a mat of black hair on both arms, a tattoo nearly hidden in the jungle of his wrist. “This is a good nice plane. The mechanic, he is checking it over every trip. Every day I fly this distance, at least twice. It is a good nice plane.”

If this was a good nice plane she’d hate to ride in a less. Strapped in beside her, Wade had the faint greenish tinge of the Irish roads about him, particularly his face. “Think of home,” she said, “and solid ground,” but he only turned his eyes up and rested his forehead against the shuddering window.

On her lap, the big grinning face of a wild-haired hurler with a missing tooth beamed up from the back page of the newspaper. The note from Mrs. O’Sullivan was still tucked somewhere inside.

Won’t be home when you leave — tea at the hospital! Take the Press with you, something to read on the plane. Do come again. God bless.

Maire O Suilleabhain

The pilot, with his neck stretched to follow some movement on the sky far above, sucked at a tooth. “Do you live on the island?” he said.

“Yes,” she said. I did, and I will again if you’ll get me there safely. “And you? Do you live there, or on the mainland?”

He looked surprised that she’d asked. “I come here, to the good life, I come to this island from my own country in nineteen hundred and sixty-two. Come live with us the good life, my wife’s relatives they say, where you can get a good job and take it easy.”

“And you like it? You’ll stay?”

He pondered this, scratched his wrist. “No, I am not staying. My wife, my children, we move across to the mainland soon. Or East. I got the good job you can see, I can take the life easy. But it is not the good place to live. If you want a repair man he say I’ll come tomorrow for sure, but he don’t come tomorrow or next week; when you phone him again it is Oh yes, I’ll come tomorrow, for sure. Maybe he comes, maybe not. In the stores they say, Oh we sorry we don’t have, and you ask when will you have and they say Who knows, maybe next month, maybe you better try someplace else. I will try someplace else, to live, the peoples here are too slow and lazy, they all want to be lying on the beach, or loafing.”

“Maybe that’s because they all came here for the same reason you did.”

“Maybe so. But it is not good to be always waiting while some person decides if he feels like doing his job.”

Wade looked at her and grinned. His sympathies were clearly not with the pilot.

“Bullshit,” he mouthed silently to her.

She mock-frowned at him and turned away again, laughing.

Something in him had been released, she knew, though she couldn’t be sure what. Something in him had settled, or flown.

The first, smaller islands were clearly visible now, across the front of the harbour and fitting into each other like pieces of a puzzle down to the left far out of sight. They appeared to be solid timber from here, floating forest. She had to peer hard to see any signs of civilization at all. Buildings, wharves, roads, were scattered, hidden by trees.

“My God,” Maggie said. “Things look different.”

“Yes,” the pilot said. “And now look at your island, see what you think of it from the air.”

The high snowy mountains were still a jagged wall across the world, even from up here, pale blue and scarred and fiercely steep, but the rest of the island, the nearer slopes, looked like nothing she’d seen before from the ground or on her maps. The town was only a small scar, a concentrated black growth on the edge, everything else like the little islands seemed to be timber still, a great irregular carpet of treetops, unevenly pierced by narrow inlets and cut through by lakes. The people, all the people that she knew down there with their cars and their houses and their roads, had been buried, or hidden. They crawled around presumably, beneath the bush, hardly mattering.

“It is a shock to me every day,” the pilot said. “When I walk on the streets or drive on the pavement I see only the lines and things that people have tried to put there, but when I get up here, in my plane, I see the real island. It is there, still, all the time growing up through.”

“It must’ve looked like this when Captain Cook arrived, it’s hardly changed.”

The pilot laughed. “Cook did not see it from a plane, but yes, yes, you are right, it hasn’t changed. That’s what real is, that’s what true is, it can be hid but it can’t be changed.”