So I sat there, not believing what I was hearing, thinking it all some game on his part that would resolve itself in an hour or so’s time in the bed. Only it didn’t. He’d taken himself off to a different bed the first night, and the next and the next. And for all I knew he would do the same tonight.
In the day we’d walked long, long walks, together but alone. And now we were both so miserable we were relieved to be apart.
I sat on, thinking these thoughts, glad of his absence, wondering should I cut my losses, find a bus, and head back to Belfast, but knowing I wasn’t yet able for Robbie or the city. Beside me on the windowsill were two oval stones, very white, and the skull of some long-dead ewe. Or some long-dead ram—how would I know? What did I know about sexing live sheep, much less something like this, stripped of its flesh and blood?
It was ugly, the bone grey and pitted, the horns broken off at the tips. A row of hefty grey teeth stuck out from the upper jaw, but the lower one had long since vanished away, and round holes, empty and dark, stared out where the eyes should have been. Once it was its own sheep, I thought, with some sort of life of its own and some sort of consciousness. Idly, I looked down at my hand in my lap, imagining the bones lurking under the flesh, wondering would they stay linked in the grave or fall away, like the sheep skull’s lower jaw.
I should have kept a tighter hold on my thoughts, for I got more than I’d bargained for. I watched, and my skin turned yellowy-blue, as though it was badly bruised, then puffed and swelled, and the yellowy-blueness darkened into black. A foul stench hung on the air, and I saw my flesh breaking open, heaving with maggots and pus. I screamed and jumped up. I tried to throw my hand off from me, but it stayed joined onto my arm. It was like trying to throw your own child away; you can’t do it even if you want to, you can’t rid yourself of a part of yourself just because you don’t like what it does or says or because it’s manky with maggots.
I don’t know how long it lasted: it might have been half an hour or only seconds. But I watched, and it all changed back. My hand was my hand, the flesh clean and regrown, and not a maggot in sight. I reached for my cigarettes, but the same hand shook so hard I couldn’t get one out of the packet.
Sweet Jesus, I thought. Not that again, don’t let it be that again. How am I going to live if I can’t even think a thought without seeing it act itself out before my eyes?
But it was—I knew well that it was. I was seeing things again. Barbara Allen and Jacko Brennan came flooding back, and my little bit of quiet and kind idleness in the broken yard was gone.
I sometimes wonder now, could I have left Robbie if Barbara Allen had lived? There are times when I think I could, but more often I think I couldn’t. He wouldn’t have let me take her, that’s certain sure, and I don’t think I could have defied the whole world and myself and gone off without her, but I don’t know. It’s no good thinking and saying to yourself “I’d do this” or “I’d do that.” You don’t know till it happens; you don’t know what you will find in yourself till it’s found.
What I do know is that I couldn’t have gone to Liam half as easily as I did if something of what had been between Robbie and me hadn’t died along with Barbara Allen.
But all that was ahead, and nothing to do with my standing there, shaking from head to foot, my eyes on the sheep’s skull, full up with fear. It wasn’t that I thought it foretold anything. It was it happening at all that scared me stupid. The bruising, the maggots, the pus—they had come and gone in a flash—but the speed of it all somehow only made the thing worse. It was as though my life were a bicycle I’d been riding happily down the road: one minute I was up there, the wind on my face, and the next I was sprawled on the tarmac, broken-boned and with all the wind knocked from me.
I didn’t hear the car; I didn’t hear Liam getting out or shutting the door or walking around the house. The first thing I knew he was standing in front of me, and I moved forward without knowing what I was doing and threw myself against him. His arms went around me and held me, and I never wanted him to let go. He held me without words, but small, soothing noises were coming from low in his throat, the same sounds you make to comfort a hurt dog.
I don’t know how long we stood like that, and I don’t know how we moved from being like that to sitting together there in the yard, his hand holding mine, me telling him in a big jumbled rush about what had just happened, about Barbara Allen and Jacko’s death, about the hospital and its drugs which had stopped me seeing things.
The empty eyes of the sheep’s skull stared from the sill.
“Is this the first time you’re after seeing anything since the hospital?”
I shook my head. “The night I met you—there was something then.”
He just nodded; he didn’t ask what. I put my hands over my face, and I started to weep. I felt the tears running through my fingers and down my wrists. He stroked my head, then he shifted a bit and put his arms round me again, and I wept into the warm place under his chin. After a while I stopped. I drew away from him. I patted my pockets, looking for something to blow my nose in, and I found a scrumpled bit of tissue and blew. I felt better. The weeping was a release, it had got me past the fear to a place where what was happening to me was simply what was happening, it wasn’t any longer something I was desperate to shut out.
“D’you think have I a screw loose?” I said when I’d finished blowing.
He shook his head. “I do not. You see things. Sometimes just things. Sometimes things that are going to happen but haven’t happened yet. That’s not the same thing as having a screw loose.”
I looked at him then. He was so serious and so innocent, his grey eyes very round and wide open, his brown curls lifting in the strengthening breeze. I started to laugh. He looked surprised, then a bit offended.
“What’re you laughing at?” he asked.
“You,” I said. “Is there nowhere you’d draw the line?”
“What d’you mean by that?”
“If I told you there was a wee man dancing a hornpipe on your left shoulder I think maybe you’d believe me.”
He smiled. “Why not?” he asked. “Because I don’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t there. It just means I don’t see it.”
Fear hit me in the belly with the force of a man’s fist.
“You don’t see it because it isn’t there,” I shouted at him. “It’s a chemical in my brain, making me think I see things, that’s all. But they’re not there, they’re not there, they’re not there—”
Everything crumpled, and I started to sob again. “Easy now, easy,” he was saying, holding me tight in his arms and stroking my hair. “Easy, girl, easy.”
The wind had risen in the night. Storm waves rolled in, and the damp sands blew with flocks of shiny bubbles like tiny hermit crabs scurrying off sideways as fast as they could go. Further down there were big curvy swathes of pale foam, and I took off my shoes and walked in them, kicking the empty white fizz with my bare, bony feet, making it fly. The wind blew, and the clouds raced over the big, clean sky and the air snapped and rushed about my head like a flag. Where the beach curved out of the wind there were stranded castles of dark-cream foam like the tipped-out froth from hundreds of pints of Guinness.
A lone dog was trotting about, some sort of a collie cross, black and white with splashes of tan. When he came to a castle he’d crouch down and bark, his tail would lash back and forth, then he’d pounce. Nothing. The