A Different Kingdom(104)

'My best pan.'

'That apple pie I'd just made.'

'We never heard a thing.'

'Must have been a tramp or something. All he took were food and clothes.'

'And my best pan!'

'No one heard anything. You're sure?' One by one they shook their heads.

'The dogs didn't even bark,' Pat added uncomfortably.

'I thought I heard the horses moving about, but it might have been the wind unsettling them,' said Sean, his dark widow's peak of hair tumbled down over his forehead.

'The horses!' Pat and Mullan cried at the same second, and they both shot out of the back door.

Michael's grandmother shook her head. 'Never seen the like of it,' she said, and she sank into a chair.

None of them was different, Michael realized, none of them had changed. It was not a shock to see them again. He had a feeling that in a few days his memories would be like so many dreams.

His grandmother put on a huge pot of tea to brew and Sean went out to start work, muttering that the cows would not milk themselves. Michael was lost in thought, and when Aunt Rachel asked him sharply if he had washed his face this morning he barely heard her. She shook his shoulder, and he raised his eyes to stare at her.

'What?'

She backed away, pale as paper. 'Nothing, nothing.'

'Almost time for you to be off, Michael,' his grandmother said over her shoulder. She was frying bacon and eggs and the exquisite smell was drifting about the room, bringing the water into Michael's mouth. Presently she set a steaming plate on the table for him and smiled. Her smile drained away.

'Are you all right, Michael?'

Irritably he told her he was, and began wolfing down the food. In the heavy silence that followed he looked up to see Rachel and his grandmother staring at him, and realized he had been stuffing the greasy food into his mouth with his fingers. He wiped his hands on his shirt, a shamefaced grin on his face.

'Better be off,' he mumbled.

'Don't forget your bag,' his grandmother said faintly.

He grabbed it and ran, feeling the cool outdoor air on his face with relief. He had been sweating in the kitchen, and the walls had seemed too close, the ceiling too near his head. It was like being buried alive. This was better, though there was still that tang in the air that made him screw up his nose. He could smell the horses in their stables, the fragrance of Mullan's pipe, cow dung from the pastures and a hint of fox from the back field where most of the chickens had their nests.

That diesel smell—the tractor. And he spat to get it out of his mouth.

Mullan came out of the stables leading a pennant of smoke and striking sparks off the cobbles with his boots. 'Mike!' he called.

'What?' Michael was uneasy.

'Have you been mucking around with the tack? It's all ahoo in there, and there's a saddle looks like the light riding one but is scratched to shit. And then these—' He produced a rawhide bag shiny with grease and usage that Michael knew contained the remnants of a winter hare, caught in another world. The miasma of just-rotting meat wafted from it.

'Maybe the tramp that was in the house left it there,' Michael conjectured.

'A tramp or a bloody cave man.' But Mullan stopped and took the fragrant Peterson from his mouth. 'Christ Almighty, Mike. What happened to you?'

'What's wrong with me?'

'Your eyes. They gave me the shivers for a minute there. Have you not been sleeping?'

'I'm fine.' And an edge crept into his voice.

Mullan looked away hurriedly. 'There's something funny about this ... You weren't out and about in the night, were you? You didn't see anything?' And now his old eyes were fixed on Michael's, though he seemed uncomfortable with that contact. 'Are you sure you're all right?'

The invitation to speak was there, and for an instant it was crowding on the tip of Michael's tongue—the horrors and the wonders he had been a part of. But if he spoke of them then his chance to live normally in this world would be gone. Nothing had happened to him. He had seen nothing. He was only a boy.

'I have to be going to school.' And he turned away and set his face to the road and the morning walk. Soon he would be in a musty classroom, staring at books, listening to the other children snigger, feeling the teacher watching him.

As Mullan was watching him now. He could feel the old man's quizzical gaze on his back as he strode out of the yard on to the road.

A passing car made him leap into the air with fright, and his hand went to a sword hilt that was no longer there.

Home sweet home, he told himself, and there was a deep and abiding pain at the thought. He shut down the workings of his mind, the vision of the unending days ahead in this place, living this way. And he trudged off to school like a man ascending the scaffold.

HE LABOURED THROUGH the passing days like a sleepwalker.



But he missed Cat. He missed her face, her quicksilver grin, her barbed comments. He missed her body next to his in the nights, the joy of joining himself to her. He lay awake through the nights, unable to sleep in the too-soft, too-warm bed. He waited for her to come tapping at his window and went down to the river hollow at least once a day, hoping to see her lithe form splashing there or hear her singing off in the trees. But the place was dead, empty. All that was over. There was only this present reality, the world he had been born into with its maddening rituals.