A Different Kingdom(18)

'You'll be growing out of your skin next,' his grandmother said to him, holding a shirt against his widening shoulders and pursing her lips. 'And that hair! It's like a shaggy dog on top of your head. What am I going to do with you?'

He roamed the woods and meadows around the farm like a gamekeeper, often in the company of old Mullan. He grew lithe and tall, gawky until flesh began to fill out the stretching bones. And work round the farm made the muscles under his skin move like smooth stones. The sun burnt freckles around the bridge of his nose and made his grey eyes startling in so brown a face. Rachel admonished him for being 'wild', bent his head over the kitchen sink and scrubbed the back of his neck whilst he wiggled and squealed in her strong, stout arms. This was even though he had had the responsibility for keeping himself clean four years and more.

'You're not so grown up you can wander about a Christian house with a neck as black as peat,' she said.

The days and weeks and months washed back and forth like tides, taking and giving flotsam or jetsam. Demon died and was quietly mourned by Pat. He would no longer be an unseen presence under the dinner table. They buried him near the river without ceremony, though Michael's grandfather touched his cap to the grave in an odd gesture that was both farewell and salute. After a decent interval his place was taken by a pair of squalling pups, and soon they were running at Pat' s heels like midget doppelgangers of their grey-muzzled predecessor.

The land remained the same. There were perhaps a few more cars on the roads to frighten the horses, and here and there a new house was built; One or two copses were slaughtered by farmers who wanted another half-acre of pasture to put some silver in their pockets, and there were the usual tales of outrages in the city, talk of the British Army being brought in, which caused a barely perceptible tension between Pat and Mullan for some days. But all that was too far away to worry about.

Sean's acquisition of the new tractor was much more newsworthy—a great, roaring McCormick Cropmaster that put their little grey Massey Ferguson to shame. It reminded Michael of nothing so much as a scarlet, bug-eyed dragon that farted smoke. Pat appeared uneasy both at the smokebellowing apparition in his yard and the amount of money it had taken to put it there, but Sean was grinning and confident. Clark Gable on a tractor.

'It'll be a bloody car next,' Mullan prophesied gloomily, and went back to grooming the chestnut mare.

School continued to claim Michael for two thirds of the year, much to his frustration. He walked the two miles into the village five mornings a week with his books and his lunch in a bag and in winter a bundle of turfs for the stove on his back. He hated maths, science (what there was of it), geography, grammar, and everything else except some bits of history (Celts, Vikings and Normans, his island's heritage), and reading, when there was something interesting to read. He sailed through Lady Gregory, the Brothers Grimm, Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson and even some Conrad. He was an anomaly in the class (apart from being a head taller than any other child). He loved reading—only certain things, perhaps, but he loved reading. The teacher was a Miss Glover, and she had been across the water. A comfortable, round-faced spinster, she spoke with an accent that the children (and most of the surrounding district) assumed she had picked up in England. She could be imperious when she forgot herself, but mostly chose not to because she was aware that it secretly amused the children. Michael had seen her annoyed and even cross many times, but never furious enough to hit a child, which was unusual in the extreme.

He made few friends at school, none that were even remotely as close as Rose had been. A fair few of the class were relatives; the Fays were a numerous horde. But he had little to do with them. He was 'odd', and would have had a hard time of it were it not for his precocious height and strength. The two-room school bordered on to the first heights of the Antrim plateau so that behind the paved playground there was a long reach of gorse-scattered heath running up into boulderstrewn hills above. The village it belonged to was merely one straggling street stretching from the Bann bridge in the valley to the first folds of the eastern hills. The school was at its eastern end, set far back from the road. Michael's grandfather had been schooled there a half-century before, and some of the books the children used still spoke of the British Empire and the Raj. It reminded Michael of Mullan's war tales; how he had seen Indian troops shivering in the mud of the trenches, and Old Contemptibles, the remnants of the Regulars, trying to speak to the Belgians in Urdu or Hindi, confident that one language sufficed for all foreigners. Brown men, tanned by the sun of Africa or India or Afghanistan, meeting their end in the chill drizzle of Flanders. The end of an Empire, Mullan had said sadly—but then Mullan was a Protestant.