A Different Kingdom(105)

School was a numbing ordeal to be endured. His teacher, Miss Glover, took him to task for not paying attention, but when he looked at her, the words dried up. He was left alone, the other children avoiding him out of some youthful sixth sense that told them he was less than ever one of them.' He grew to be a silent, awkward figure, at ease only in the outdoors and in his own company.

BY HIS FOURTEENTH birthday he had taken to missing school to work for some of the outlying farms. His precocious strength and morose demeanour served him well. He looked older than his years, and his eyes were those of a pitiless savage. He hoarded his wages, for there was nothing he wanted to buy, but some far voice in him said that he had to get away. He was too near to the Other Place here, too close to the old bridge that was the way across. He considered returning sometimes, and sat for hours by the river, torn and agonized. He hated what his life had become, and yet the fear was deep in him, holding him back. He had to get away from the temptation.

Before he was fifteen he ran away, sleeping in the fields at night, doing casual work, but all the time wandering eastwards. In the dark nights he had nightmares full of wolves and monsters, Cat's screaming face, the grasping branches of trees. He kept moving. There was no remorse in him, no nostalgia for the life and the family he had left behind. The choking horror of his memories left no room for it.

He made it to Belfast, and wandered the streets like a bewildered primitive. Once two men came at him from a darkened alleyway and a knife had glinted in one of their hands. He had left them lying unconscious and bleeding, his body moving into the attack without rational thought. The money on their bodies had bought him a ticket on a ship, and he had sailed the following morning, seeing the sea for the second time in his life.

YEARS PASSED.



He worked his way slowly south through England, taking jobs here and there, staying a while and moving on. Always there was that knowledge that he must keep moving. At times, near dark, he would believe himself watched, and if he was in the countryside he would see—or thought he did—shapes moving in the night. He finally conceived a hatred for trees and woods, for empty places, and began to haunt cities more and more. The pickings were better there, anyway.

There were women. Here and there he would see a face and would be drawn like a moth to a candle. But in the morning the face was never what he had wanted it to be, and he would slip away, leaving it sleeping. Whether it lasted for a night or a month of nights, the result was always the same and left him feeling desperate and lost. That was when a drink would calm him and let him see clearly again.

But gradually it took more and more drinks to get him to sleep at night. He frequented public houses, becoming a regular in half a dozen towns—the big, silent man at the end of the bar. This was before he turned twenty. His powerful frame began to pad out and sag and his stamina seeped away, though his arms remained enormously strong. He became a strong-arm man, a bouncer, a security guard; a professional thug. Often the look in his eyes was enough to stop a fight, but twice he was sacked for using excessive violence, once landing in court and missing a jail sentence by luck and technicalities. He realized dimly that his values were wrong for this world, that his sense of right and wrong was not that of the other people within it. But the bottle made it a lot simpler.

As far as he could, he kept in touch with his home country. There was trouble there, a civil rights movement struggling to survive. Tinder waiting to catch fire.

ON THE FARM the family gathered for three funerals, and the cars and horse traps extended almost a mile for every one. Old Pat Fay, found lying dead in the buttercups of the lower meadow one morning with the horses nosing at his body and a smile on his face. And not long after Agnes Fay, her heart giving its last beat as she pumped water from the well into her bucket—a job Michael had once been entrusted with.

And Old Mullan. Two communities came together for his final journey at a time when they were pulling ever farther apart. Old men whose chests had once been in arms against their like. It no longer mattered.

They had found Mullan's body down in the river hollow, his pipe lying cold at his side. Sean had discovered the corpse, and afterwards had needed half a bottle of whiskey to stop the trembling of his fingers. Mullan's face had been stretched in terror, his eyes bulging and the lips drawn back into his gums. He looked as though he had been scared to death, said Sean.

And one of the first things Sean was to do on inheriting the farm was to fell the trees in the hollow. He had never liked the place anyway. He dug drains leading down towards the river, cut and burned the thick undergrowth and felled the oaks and alder that clustered along the stream. Soon sheep were grazing there, cropping good grass right up to the water's edge.