The Snowmelt River Read online

  ‘So what do you really think?’

  ‘I think maybe Grimstone is a crazy-livered bully and Grandad is just a mite eccentric, like I’ve been telling you guys all along.’

  Kate glanced over at Mo, who was resisting Mark’s attempts to get her to listen to a tune on his phone. ‘Mo – isn’t she what dear old Bridey would call a “quare one”?’

  ‘She’s different – I’ve got to grant you that.’

  ‘What is it about her that she avoids any techno gadgets?’

  He shrugged.

  Kate pulled a face. ‘Do you wonder that’s she’s so tough!’

  ‘Come on, Kate! You get to thinking why they put up with it. I mean the way Grimstone’s been treating them all their lives, why don’t they go and complain to the authorities?’

  ‘I asked her.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Grimstone is very powerful, highly connected in his local community in London. What if the authorities didn’t believe them? Then they’d have to go back home and face him.’

  ‘Shee–it!’

  ‘You really care about them, don’t you?’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  She nodded. ‘I think maybe you’re all the best friends I ever had.’ Kate blinked for what seemed longer than the few moments it really was – she didn’t want him to see the stupid tears in her eyes.

  Alan nodded. ‘I think so too. I just want it to stay like this. I don’t ever want it to change.’

  Kate hugged his arm.

  He said, ‘Makes you want to get people like Grimstone back. Teach him a lesson he’ll understand.’

  ‘Is this your Irish mother talking?’

  ‘Maybe I got a dose of that from both sides. Dad told me never let a bully get away with it. You do that and it will only get a whole heap worse. I tell you, Kate, if somebody had done to me what Grimstone’s been doing to those kids, I’d have found some way to put a stop to it.’

  The sun came out from behind Alan’s shoulder, making her squint to look at him. ‘So what would the brave Alan Duval have done?’

  ‘I don’t know – but something!’

  ‘I keep thinking of you, just standing there that day with the swans. I’m beginning to think there’s a major streak of stubbornness in you.’

  At the summit of the mountains, Mo felt dwarfed by the enormous landscape that stretched away to the horizon on all sides.

  There was so much to think about that her thoughts reeled through her mind like the flight of the swallows wheeling overhead. She recalled the moment Mark had explained things to Padraig. A baby abandoned on a church step somewhere in a small town in Australia, like a cruel offering on a cold slab of altar. To an outsider, the church must have looked solid and respectable. Did whoever it was who had abandoned her know that Grimstone was there? Did he or she know exactly what lay concealed beneath his holy veneer? Perhaps he, or she, even knew who Mo really was, knew her real name, the name that had been given to her by her birth mother? It was something Mo had thought about a lot over the years. When parents gave the baby they loved a name, that was when the baby became somebody, a new and unique human being. Kate and Alan knew who they were. They had their names, given to them by parents who brought them into the world and loved them. She knew instinctively, like a self-evident truth, that Maureen was not her real name. It was the name given to her by Bethal and Grimstone, people who did not love her.

  Who am I? Mo whispered to the world.

  A sudden, overwhelming feeling clutched at her heart as she tried to imagine what it must be like for a mother to bear a child, a daughter, and then abandon it. How could a mother forsake her baby daughter?

  Am I truly an orphan?

  Could she imagine what such a mother would feel? She tried to, but it felt so awful she couldn’t bear the thought.

  Am I a witch spawn as Grimstone says I am? Is my mother dead, like Kate’s and Alan’s? Or is she alive and doesn’t care about me?

  She had long ago realised that there were advantages to being nobody. When you are nobody you can pass people by and they don’t notice you. Meanwhile you make up for it by noticing more about those who are somebodies.

  Mark had always been stronger than she was. Somehow, he had found the strength to fight back. Even his sarcastic humour, his constant self-deprecatory jokes, was his way of fighting back against the hurt. She watched him now unrolling his earphones, getting ready for some solitary listening. Alan was flat on his back in the heather, with his head pillowed by his backpack, chewing on a stalk. Kate was sitting next to him, hunched forward over drawn-up knees, uncapping a bottle of water.

  Mo lifted her face to gaze heavenwards at the swallows wheeling. From somewhere nearby came the humming of bees, maybe a nest. Far away, down the slope, a plume of chalk-blue hung in the air, metamorphosing subtly, as if a cloud of butterflies had just taken to the wing. Mo heard a faint sound, a pleasant but unexpected sound. She turned so she was facing the valley of the Suir. She could even smell something now, an unfamiliar scent, not a flower scent but a muskier smell, like the smell of bread baking.

  Then she saw the blooming.

  It was as clear as an island of lambent green in the middle of a grey ocean, a gigantic circle of fecundity, vast in diameter, around a single focus. The very centre was monumentally clear across the valley. And now, as she opened her mind to it, she sensed a new stirring, as if the very landscape had whispered something into the air, and that awesome message was spiralling and eddying towards her without any sense of wind.

  Was she imagining it?

  She waited patiently, all senses alert. She sensed it again. She laid herself bare to it this time, throwing open her entire body and mind. It was definitely coming in waves. She felt another wave touch her. It didn’t feel like a tangible physical sensation. She didn’t know how to describe what she was feeling, other than it was some kind of contact, being-to-being. She felt no premonition of harm. Without hesitation, she slipped off her trainers to feel the ground under her bare feet. She took the bog-oak figurine out of her hip pocket and palpated its familiar shape with the fingers of her right hand. She felt the smoothness of the body, the three knobs of heads, twirling them around and around. She brought it to her lips and kissed it.

  She began to sing.

  Tentatively, like a glimmer of moonlight, the presence reached out again, eddying like a wave through water, and found her. This time Mo gasped with the intensity of communication, the feeling of oneness.

  Turning, in a slow rapture of motion, she looked back at her friends, willing them to join her. But they were too preoccupied to notice. The communication was intended for her alone.

  She wondered: Is it the blooming? Is the blooming reaching out for me?

  She saw the opalescent glimmer sweep past her to reach her friends. Their faces reflected it, as if moonlight were alighting on them, and also washing over their exposed arms and legs. She was sensing communication in some way she had never known it before.

  What does it mean?

  Kate lifted her head and stared at the tiny doll-like figure thirty yards away, perched, as it seemed, on the very edge of the abyss. Mo’s body was erect, forming a perfect shallow curve from her heels to the nape of her neck. Her head was tilted back on the apex of the curve, her dark brown hair standing up in a nimbus around her ears, her arms outstretched to either side of her body, the hands facing forward into the enormous valley. It was her singing that had caught Kate’s attention.

  Kate heard a voice like the most perfect trill of a thrush or a lark, only deeper, more sibilant and sensual than any thrush or lark Kate had ever heard.

  ‘What in the world!’

  Alan’s voice sounded in Kate’s ear, like a nervous whisper. Mark was also calling out, from somewhere further away, at the edge of her vision, the earphones yanked out of his ears.

  Mark said, ‘It’s Mo. She’s singing.’

  Kate squealed to Alan, ‘I’ve never heard Mo sing before.’
>
  ‘Me neither!’

  All three friends were struggling excitedly to their feet.

  Mo wasn’t stuttering at all. There were no recognisable words to her song, but it sounded as if she were expressing words, beautiful words, that belonged to a language softer and gentler than any language Kate had ever heard.

  ‘Oh my God – it’s the voice of an angel!’

  ‘What’s going on?’ Alan’s voice was every bit as shaky as the muscles in Kate’s legs.

  Nobody answered him. Already they were moving, stumbling clumsily, too jittery to run, to reach Mo’s side, to join her on the roof of the world.

  ‘Oh, boy!’ Alan stared across the valley.

  ‘What is it, Mo?’ Kate searched Mo’s blank face. She saw the wide, dilated pupils. Instinctively she grabbed Mo’s hand.

  Kate’s body jerked with something that felt like a powerful charge of static electricity. She felt her back arch, her eyes spring wide open, staring with Mo along the perfect line of force, across the green-carpeted landscape of the Suir Valley, to another mountain that rose, soft shouldered and gentle, yet dominating the landscape. Slievenamon glowed in the midday sun, clothed in the lilac, jade and gold of life, the perfect symmetry of her slopes forming the breast that had given it its name, the Mountain of Women.

  Kate could only manage a whisper. ‘Do you feel it?’

  ‘Yes!’ returned Alan’s whisper.

  She heard a guttural exclamation, perhaps Mark’s, as the first wave struck, then eddied about them, enveloping their bodies like the gossamer touch of a million butterfly wings, whispering its presence in their ears, invading their beings.

  Come! it whispered.

  As the ecstasy of contact ebbed, its retreat made them moan and sigh, their mouths fallen open, willing it to return. They heard Mo’s song begin again, heralding a new wave. They couldn’t help but hold still, hands discovering hands, trembling fingers closing around each other, then fiercely holding. The new thrill of communication was utterly intoxicating. It overwhelmed their senses, like the sweetest scent magnified a thousand-fold. It rose to a peak in their minds, an ecstasy of total abandonment, swept out into the tips of their fingers and toes, like the whole-body tingling of a dive into ice-cold water.

  Come!

  Mo’s song began again, even as the second wave was still ebbing, so there was no gap between. The next wave rode over the previous, eddying around and through them, breaking and rushing over them, enveloping them with longing. It flowed in their arteries and veins, a tide of enchantment. Their skins erupted into gooseflesh. The hair jerked erect on every head. What could be so dreadful, and yet so wonderful, it demanded such complete possession? There were no further words of communication, only the ravening hunger of the seduction. But even as Mo’s song sounded again and again, and as wave after wave swept over them, overwhelming their senses, they knew, at the core of their beings, that it was the mountain, Slievenamon, that was calling them.

  Fear of Loss

  Alan came rushing through the house, flinging doors wide open, then ran out into the timber yard, calling, ‘Grandad!’

  He found Padraig in one of the sheds. The old man lifted his eyes from a tally of hardwoods to appraise Alan’s tense silhouette in the opening, backlit by the bright sun of late afternoon.

  ‘You look like you ran all the way down the mountain!’

  Alan couldn’t stop his limbs trembling. He was so breathless he could hardly speak.

  ‘Back into the house with you! You’ve overheated your engine.’ Padraig ignored his attempts to question him, ushering him out of the doorway and back inside the redbrick house, to the foot of the staircase. ‘No arguments! A cold shower will do you the power of good!’

  Alan stood under the shock of icy water. But even the Niagara Falls would not have slowed his heartbeat. He found clean clothes in his bedroom. He was still yanking a white T-shirt over his head as he ran back downstairs. Padraig was sitting in one of the old Edwardian armchairs of buttoned-back green leather. He was as still as a doll, his arms limp against his thighs.

  ‘I surmise that you’ve made a discovery?’

  ‘You already knew about the mountain!’

  Padraig’s eyes seemed to film over. His hoary old head fell. ‘Must I lose you, like I lost your mother?’

  ‘Lose me? What are you saying?’

  ‘When you arrived, when I picked you up at Shannon Airport, I saw her in you. Sure you have her in your eyes and your smile.’

  ‘Grandad, I can’t stand this! I can’t stand not knowing what’s going on. You know more. You’ve always known more than you’ve been telling me.’

  ‘You think such knowledge will be redeeming?’

  Alan was familiar with the sepia photographs on the walls. Stuff to do with his ancestors dating back to the nineteenth century. In a cluster on one wall were pictures of his mother as a girl. He had seen the obvious, but had not questioned it. Now he did so.

  ‘Why aren’t there any photographs of Mom and Dad? You haven’t a single photograph of me as a kid, of me growing up.’

  ‘I couldn’t bear the thought of Geraldine leaving me.’

  A fever burned in him, as cruel as it was wild. ‘Wasn’t that – well, kind of selfish?’

  ‘You don’t understand.’

  ‘Well, then! Explain to me.’

  Padraig said nothing. He went to an oak cabinet and poured himself a glass of home-distilled poteen. He took a swig of the powerful liquor, which was as clear as spring water, then carried it back to the old leather armchair.

  ‘Please talk to me!’

  ‘You’ll never understand anything.’

  ‘Well make me understand. There are things going on – bizarre things – and I’ve lost the plot. Show me why I’ve lost it! Hey, Grandad, please?’

  ‘Geraldine was all I had. She grew up here, in this house and these woods. Then, all of a sudden, she was determined to be off.’

  Alan hesitated. These were events he knew next to nothing about. He fought against his impatience to know what had happened on the mountain. He had to suppress his overwhelming anxiety, to calm his voice. ‘I don’t rightly know. Maybe she wanted a change? Maybe she needed to see the world?’

  Padraig suddenly took his head between his hands. He rocked, in that anguished posture, and moaned.

  ‘For God’s sake!’ Alan’s mind struggled to grasp what was going on here. ‘Grandad, what are you really trying to tell me?’

  Padraig shook his head.

  ‘What? You’re worrying about me?’

  ‘You’re man-sized, but not up here,’ he tapped his brow. ‘Mentally you’re little more than a child. You know nothing.’

  Alan shouted. He couldn’t stop himself. ‘I’ll stew in ignorance until you take the goddam trouble to explain what’s going on.’

  Padraig stopped holding his head. He closed his eyes for several long moments. When he opened them again, he downed what remained of his poteen.

  ‘I hoped, fervently, when you came here, that I was being given a second chance. You were Geraldine come back to forgive me. I consoled myself that you might even be happy here, in time.’

  ‘You’re skating around it. You’re not really explaining. There’s stuff going on I need to understand. All that business about Mark and Mo. And Kate – what happened in Africa. For goodness sake! Don’t you think I deserve an explanation?’

  ‘Are your friends more important than what is left of your family?’

  ‘Grandad, I’ve got to know. I won’t rest until I know. You know that, if you know anything at all about me.’

  Padraig’s eyes widened, as if he were haunted by inner visions. A grey shadow invaded his face.

  ‘Is a father wrong to try to prevent fate? I have learnt that if he is not wrong, he is surely misguided to hope that he can do so. We, who love you, would protect you from that pain. But still you will not be protected.’

  ‘What the heck are you implying? Are you saying yo
u knew that something terrible was going to happen to Mom?’

  ‘Of course I knew. D’you imagine I didn’t try my very best to dissuade her?’

  ‘You knew? And you didn’t stop her?’ Alan could hardly breathe. His lungs were filling up with something so heavy he couldn’t take a real deep breath.

  Padraig said nothing.

  Alan was close to tears. ‘I hate you! I hate you for that. You should have stopped Mom leaving. You knew and you failed to stop her!’

  There was a long silence in which he could hear the ticking of the old wall-mounted pendulum clock. Alan really felt like he was drowning. Nothing made sense. Yet he had been there. He had faced the mountain. He had felt the mountain calling. He knew he had not imagined that.

  ‘You failed Mom. I don’t even begin to understand why you failed her. I don’t care enough to argue with you. If there is anything you can tell me, anything at all, about what’s going on? Why Mom and Dad died? Who killed them? Why?’

  Padraig’s voice was flat, as if all feeling had been wrung from him. ‘Don’t even think along the lines you’re now thinking.’

  ‘You think I could forget that? Forget them?’

  Padraig looked like he’d grown old as a century. His voice was dry as sand, his gaze unfocused. ‘Alan, sure you’re the closest thing to a son I will ever have. You’re as fiercely uncompromising as I might have been at your age. I would have cherished you.’

  ‘Grandfather, don’t bullshit me!’

  ‘I could no more have stopped her than halt the seasons. And now it’s true of you in your turn. I have lost you both.’

  ‘What do you mean? Why are you talking this way?’

  But before Padraig could say more, the house was filled with the babble of other voices. Alan’s friends had caught him up. A pandemonium of excited voices was flinging questions at the old man in his chair.

  Kate had her hands to her face, blurting out, ‘It felt as if we were standing on top of the world. And Slievenamon was calling us.’

  Padraig spoke, soft as a whisper, ‘Well, now!’

  Mo’s eyes were round and shining. ‘It fuh-fuh-fuh-felt like – like a thu-thunderstorm … like it was ruh-ruh-raging in me.’ She tapped at her breast with the flat of her hand.