“Muriel Boyce? Mayor? But Muriel Boyce is, I mean …”
“Muriel Boyce is not to be underestimated,” says Aileen Jones, the ex–documentary maker turned lobster fisherwoman, “and thick as thieves with our parish priest, even if they can’t spell ‘faithful.’ There’s a link between bigotry and bad spelling. I’ve met it before.”
I ask, “Father McGahern never did politics in church, did he?”
“Never,” Martin replies. “But Father Brady’s cut from a different cloth. Come Sunday I’ll be sat there in our pew while our priest tells us that God’ll only protect your family if you vote for the Lord’s Party.”
“People aren’t stupid,” I say. “They won’t swallow that.”
Martin looks at me as if I don’t see the whole picture. I get this look a lot these days. “People want a lifeboat and miracles. The Lord’s Party’s offering both. I’m offering peat logs.”
“But the lifeboat isn’t real, and the peat logs are. Don’t give up. You’ve a reputation for sound decisions. People listen to reason.”
“Reason?” Aileen Jones is grimly cheerful. “Like my old doctor friend Greg used to say, if you could reason with religious people, there wouldn’t be any religious people. No offense, Martin.”
“I’m beyond offense at this point, Fern,” says our mayor.
UP CHURCH LANE we come to Kilcrannog square. Ahead is Fitzgerald’s bar, a low, rambling building as old as the village. It’s been added to over the centuries and painted white, though not recently. Crows roost on its ridge tiles and gables as if up to no good. On our right’s the diesel depot, which was a Maxol garage when I first moved here, and where we used to fill up our Toyotas, our Kias, our VWs like there was no tomorrow. Now it’s just for the Co-op tanker that goes around from farm to farm. On the left’s the Co-op store, where the ration boxes’ll be distributed later by the committee, and on the south side of the square’s the Big Hall. The Big Hall also serves as a marketplace on Convoy Day, and we go in, Martin holding the door open so I can wheel in my pram. The hall’s noisy but there’s not a lot of laughter today—Hinkley Point casts a long shadow. Martin says he’ll see me later and goes off electioneering, Aileen looks for Ozzy to speak about metal parts for her sailboat, and I start foraging through the stalls. I browse among the trestle tables of apples and pears and vegetables too misshapen for Pearl Corp, home-cured bacon, honey, eggs, marijuana, cheese, homebrewed beer and poitín, plastic bottles and containers, knitted clothes, old clothes, tatty books, and a thousand things we used to give to charity shops or send to the landfill. When I first moved to the Sheep’s Head Peninsula thirty years ago, a West Cork market was where local women sold cakes and jam for the craic, West Cork hippies tried to sell sculptures of the Green Man to Dutch tourists, and people on middle-class incomes bought organic pesto, Medjool dates, and buffalo mozzarella. Now the market’s what the supermarket used to be: where you get everything, bar the basics found in the ration boxes. With our modified prams, pushchairs, and old supermarket trolleys, we’re a hungry-looking, unshaven, cosmeticless, jumble-sale parody of a Lidl or Tesco or Greenland only five or six years ago. We barter, buy, and sell with a combination of guile, yuan, and Sheep’s Head dollars—numbered metal disks engraved by the three mayors of Durrus, Ahakista, and Kilcrannog. I turn forty-eight eggs into cheap Chinese shampoo you can also use to wash clothes; some bags of seaweed salt and bundles of kale into undyed wool from Killarney to finish a blanket; redcurrant jelly—the jars are worth more than the jelly—into pencils and a pad of A4 paper to stitch some more exercise books, as the kids’ copy books have been rubbed out so often that the pages are almost see-through; and, reluctantly, a last pair of good Wellington boots I’ve had in their box for fifteen years into sheets of clear plastic, which I’ll use to make rain capes for the three of us, and to fix the polytunnel after the winter gales. Plastic sheeting’s hard to find, and Kip Sheehy makes a predictable face, but waterproof boots are even rarer, so by saying, “Maybe another time, then,” and walking off I get him to throw in a twenty-meter length of acrylic cord and a bundle of toothbrushes as well. I worry about Rafiq’s teeth. There’s very little sugar in our—or anyone’s—diet, but there are no dentists west of Cork anymore.
I chat with Niamh Murnane, Tom Murnane’s wife, who’s sitting at a table with hemp sacks of oats and sultanas; Stability no longer has any yuan to pay teachers, so it’s sending out salaries of tradeable foodstuffs instead. I was hoping to find sanitary towels for Lorelei, too, as Stability no longer includes them on the list of necessities, but I’m told there weren’t any on the last Company container ship. Branna O’Daly uses strips of old bedsheets, which we’ll need to wash, ’cause even old bedsheets are getting rarer. If only I’d had the foresight to lay in a store of tampons a few years back. Still. Complaining is rude to the three-million-odd souls who have to somehow survive outside the Cordon.
? ? ?
IN THE ANNEX, Sinéad from Fitzgerald’s bar serves hot drinks and soup made on the kitchen range that keeps the Big Hall warm in winter. As I trundle up with my pram, Pat Joe, the Co-op mechanic, pulls up a chair for me with his giant oily hands, and by now I need the sit-down. The road from Dooneen gets longer every Friday, I swear, and the pain in my side’s more acidy than before. I should’ve spoken with Dr. Kumar, but what could she do if it’s my cancer waking up? There’s no CAT scans anymore, no drug regime. Molly Coogan, who used to design websites but who now grows apples in polytunnels up below Ardahill, and her husband, Seamus, are also at the table. As the Englishwoman there, I’m asked if I know anything about Hinkley Point, but I have to disappoint them.
Nobody else has had any luck with threading out of the island of Ireland for two or three days now. Pat Joe spoke with his cousin in Ardmore in East Cork last night, however, and holds court for a few minutes. Apparently two hundred Asylumites from Portugal landed on the beach in five or six vessels, and are now living in an old zombie estate built back in the Tiger Days. “As bold as you please,” says Pat Joe, nursing his soup, “as if they own the place, like. So the Ardmore town mayor, he leads a—a deputation up to the zombie estate, my cousin was one of them, to tell the Asylumites that, very sorry and all, but they can’t winter there, there’s not enough food in the Co-op or wood in the plantation for the villagers as it is, let alone two hundred extra mouths, like. This big feller walks out, takes out a gun, cool as you please, and shoots Kenny’s hat off his head, like in an old cowboy western!”
“Shocking! Shocking!” Betty Power is a theatrical matriarch who runs Kilcrannog’s smokehouse. “What did the mayor do?”
“Sent a messenger to the Stability garrison in Dungarvan, asking for assistance, like—only to be told their jeeps had no feckin’ diesel.”
“The Stability jeeps had no diesel?” asks Molly Coogan, alarmed.
Pat Joe purses his lips and shakes his head. “Not one drop. The mayor was told to ‘pacify the situation’ as best he could. Only how’s yer man s’posed to manage that when his deadliest weapon’s a feckin’ staple gun?”
“I heard,” says Molly Coogan, “that the Sun Yat-sen”—one of the Chinese superfrigates that accompanies the Chinese container ships on the polar route—“sailed into Cork Harbor last week with five hundred marines on deck. A bit of a show of force, like.”
“Sure you’re missing a zero, there, Moll,” says Fern O’Brien, who leans over from the next table. “My Jude’s Bill was on loading duty at Ringaskiddy that day so he was, and he swears there wasn’t a man under five t’ousand trooping the color under the Chinese flag.”
I can imagine Ed, my long-dead partner, making hang-dog eyes at the authenticity of this so-called news but there’s more to come as talk switches to a sister-in-law of Pat Joe’s cousin in County Offaly, who knows a “Man in the Know” at Stability Research in the Dublin Pale who reckons the Swedes have genomed a rustproof, selffertile strain of wheat. “I’m only passing on what I’ve been told,” says Pat Joe, “but there’s talk of Stability planting it all over Ireland next spring. If people have full bellies, the Jackdawing and rioting’ll stop.”
“White bread,” sighs Sínead Fitzgerald. “Imagine that.”
“I’d not want to go pissing on your snowman now, Pat Joe,” says Seamus Coogan, “but was that the same Man in the Know who said the Germans had a pill that cured Ratflu, or that the States was reunited again, and the president was sending airdrops of blankets, medicine, and peanut butter to all the NATO countries? Or was it that friend of a friend who met an Asylumite outside Youghal who swore on his mother’s life that he’d found a Technotopia where they still have twenty-four-hour electricity, hot showers, pineapples, and dark chocolate mousse, in Bermuda or Iceland or the Azores?”
I think about Martin’s remarks on imaginary lifeboats.
“I’m only passing on what I’ve been told,” sniffs Pat Joe.
“Whatever the future has in store,” says Betty Power, “we’re all in the hollow of God’s hand, so we are.”
“That’s certainly how Muriel Boyce sees it,” says Seamus Coogan.
“Martin’s doing his best,” says Betty Power, crisply, “but it’s clear that only the Church can take care of the devilry falling over the world.”
“Why will a loving God only help us if we vote for him?” asks Molly.
“You have to ask,” blinks Betty Power. “That’s how prayer works.”
“But Molly’s saying,” says Pat Joe, “why can’t He just answer our prayers directly? Why does he need us to vote for him?”
“To put the Church back where it belongs,” says Betty Power. “Guiding our country.”
The conversation heats up but I may as well be listening to children arguing about the acts and motives of Santa Claus. I’ve seen what happens after death, the Dusk and the Dunes, and it was as real to me as the chipped mug of tea in my hand. Perhaps the souls I saw were bound for an afterlife beyond the Last Sea, but if so, it’s not the afterlife described by any priest or imam. There is no God but the one we dream up, I could assure my fellow parishioners: Humanity is on its own and always was …
… but my truth sounds no crazier than their faith, no saner either; and who has the right to kill Santa? Specially a Santa who promises to reunite the Coogans with their dead son, Pat Joe with his dead brother, me with Aoife, Jacko, Mum, and Dad; and even put the Endarkenment into reverse, and bring back central heating, online ordering, Ryanair, and chocolate. Our hunger for our loved ones and our lost world is as sharp as grief; it howls to be fed. If only that same hunger didn’t make us so meekly vulnerable to men like Father Brady.
“Fallen pregnant?” Betty Power covers her mouth. “Never!” We’re back to Sheep’s Head gossip. I’d like to ask who’s pregnant, but if I do so at this point they’ll all wonder if I’m going deaf or turning senile.
“That’s the problem.” Sinéad Fitzgerald leans in. “Three lads went off with young Miss Hegarty after the harvest festival, they were all off their faces”—she mimes smoking a joint—“so until the baby’s features are clear enough to play Spot the Daddy, Damien Hegarty doesn’t know who to point the shotgun at. A proper mess it is.”
The Hegartys keep goats lower down the peninsula, between Ahakista and Durrus. “Shocking,” says Betty Power, “and Niamh Hegarty not a day over sixteen, too, am I right? No mother in the house to lay down the rules, that’s what this is about. They just think anything goes. Which is exactly why Father Brady’s—”
“Hear that,” says Pat Joe, holding up a finger and listening …
… cups are poised in midlift; sentences dangle; babies are shushed; nearly two hundred West Corkonians fall silent, all at once; and then let out a collective sigh of relief. It’s the Convoy: two armored jeeps, ahead of and behind the diesel tanker and the box truck. Inside the Cordon we still have tractors and harvesters, and Stability vehicles still drive on the old N71 to Bantry to service the garrisons and the depots, but these four shiny state-of-the-art vehicles rumbling up Church Lane are the only regular visitors to Kilcrannog. For anyone over Rafiq’s age, say, the sound evokes the world we knew. Back then, traffic was a “noise,” not a “sound,” but it’s different now. If you close your eyes as the Convoy arrives you can imagine it’s 2030, say, back when you had your own car and Cork was a ninety-minute drive away, and my body didn’t ache all the time, and climate change was only a problem for people who lived in flood-prone areas. Only I don’t close my eyes these days, because it hurts too much when I open them. We all go outside to watch the show. I take my pram. It’s not that I don’t trust the villagers not to steal from an old lady with two kids to raise, but you shouldn’t tempt hungry people.
THE HEAD JEEP pulls up past the diesel store. Four young Irish Stability troops jump out, enjoying the impact their uniforms, guns, and swagger makes on the yokels; it’s not by chance that Kilcrannog’s single girls wear their dwindling supplies of makeup and best clothes on Convoy Days. Corinna Kennedy from Rossmore Farm married a Convoyman and now she’s living in the Bandon garrison with five hours of electricity a day. The head Irish guard speaks rapid-fire “Mandlish” into his transband to confirm their current position to the Main Convoy. “Each of them helmets’d cost more than my house,” Pat Joe tells me, not for the first time, “if you had the contacts to turn it into hard yuan.”
Three Chinese troops jump down from the rear jeep, in the uniforms of the Pearl Occident Company, or POC. They are taller than their Irish counterparts, their teeth are better, and their guns are more, as teenage Aoife would’ve said, badass. The Irish troops will chat a little, but the Chinese troops are under orders not to fraternize with the locals. Bantry is the western, wilder end of the Lease Lands, and the diesel they’re delivering is more precious than gold. One of the Irishmen spots Kevin Murray’s lit pipe too close to the tanker and barks, “Sir, we need you to put that pipe out right now!” Mortified, Kevin shuffles back into the Big Hall. Convoymen never need to threaten. The Convoys are our umbilical cord to the Ringaskiddy depot and its special items, no longer manufactured in Ireland, or anywhere in Europe, for all we know.
The two week in, week out Convoymen are Noel Moriarty, the tankerman, and Seamus Li, the chief merchant. Noel Moriarty, a busy-eyed, quick-witted, pale, and balding man in his midthirties, shakes hands and chats with Martin while the driver fits nozzle to intake. Martin asks Noel if he has any information about Hinkley Point. Noel says his POC boss told him the Chinese are monitoring the site from low-altitude satellites, but the whole complex appears to have been deserted. This news flies round the onlooking crowd in less than a minute, but as ever it’s difficult to draw reliable conclusions from such scant facts. Noel Moriarty and Martin sign each other’s clipboards, then the tankerman pulls the red handle that starts the flow of diesel into the Co-op tank. We try to catch a whiff of the stuff, and suffer a fresh round of pangs for the Petrol Age.
The box truck, meanwhile, has backed into the Co-op warehouse across the square, where Seamus Li speaks with Olive O’Dwyer, Kilcrannog’s deputy mayor. Items loaded onto the truck are mostly farm produce; from the deep freeze come recently slaughtered beef, bacon, turkey, rabbit, mutton, and lamb, and from the fresh store come boxes of cured tobacco, leeks, kale, onions, potatoes, pumpkins, and late fruit. Most of the fruit and vegetables will feed the Ringaskiddy Concession, where the POC officials live with their families, or the crews of the People’s Liberation Navy’s Atlantic Fleet. The meat, uncloned and cesium-free—so far—will be sold for jaw-dropping prices in Beijing, Chongqing, and Shanghai. Milk is powdered at Ringaskiddy, and is a major export.
In return, the three Sheep’s Head Co-ops of Durrus, Ahakista, and Kilcrannog receive diesel, fertilizer, insecticide, machine parts, lightbulbs, tools, hardware, as well as the special requests—including vital medicines like Rafiq’s insulin—agreed upon every month by the town committee. The POC also has a deal with Cork Stability to deliver the basic commodities for our weekly ration boxes, though the quality of these has been going downhill in recent months. The most important item delivered by the Company, however, is security. The POC protects its Lease Lands by paying for the Stability Militia to man the sixty-mile Cordon, which is why the ten-mile coastal strip from Bantry to Cork has been spared the worst of the lawlessness that plagues much of Europe as the Endarkenment switches off power networks and emaciates civic society. The men in Fitzgerald’s bar mutter that the Chinese aren’t here out of love, and that the POC is no doubt turning a tidy profit from its operation, but even the drunkest lout can imagine how savage life on Sheep’s Head would soon become without the three Cs: Company, Convoy, and Cordon.
It’s our Great Wall of China, so to speak.
MY PRAM AND me are at the school gate at three o’clock sharp. I remember the various kindergartens and schools in north London and Rye where I used to collect Aoife. The main topic of conversation is the half-empty ration box, returned to us irrespective of age from the Co-op with a 400-gram bag of oatmeal bulked out with husk and straw, 200 grams of brown rice, 200 grams of lentils, 50 grams of sugar and 50 grams of salt, a packet of ten Dragon Brand teabags, half a small bar of DMZ soap, a tub of Korean detergent two years past its use-by date, a small bottle of iodine labeled in Cyrillic, and, bafflingly, a Hello Kitty cola-flavoured eraser. What isn’t used will become currency in future Friday markets, but today’s ration box is the worst in the six years since the system was introduced in the wake of the ’39 crop failure. “I know it’s a disgrace,” Martin’s saying to a group of the disgruntled, “but I’m your mayor, not a magician. I’ve threaded messages to Stability in Cork till I’m blue in the face, but how can I make them answer if they won’t? Stability is not a democracy; they’ll look after their own first and answer only to Dublin.”
Martin’s saved, sort of, by the bell. The kids troop out, and my two and I set off along the main road out of Kilcrannog, Lorelei and Rafiq taking it in turns to sniff the cola eraser. The scent awakens very early memories for Lorelei, but Rafiq’s too young to have tasted the real thing, and he keeps asking, “But what is cola? A fruit or a herb or what?”
The last house out of the town happens to be Muriel Boyce’s, standing alone after a row of terraced houses. It’s big and blockish, every window has net curtains, and its conservatory is now a greenhouse, like most other conservatories round here. The three houses before Muriel Boyce’s are occupied by three of her four big thumping sons and their wives, who seem to give birth only to boys, so the houses are referred to collectively as “Boyce Row.” I remember Ed saying how in tribal areas of Afghanistan sons mean power; the Endarkenment’s taking us the same way. Crosses are painted over Boyce Row’s windows and doors. Muriel Boyce has always been devout, organizing trips to Lourdes in the old days, but since her husband “was called to the Lord” two years ago—appendicitis—her piety has grown fangs and she’s let the hedge grow tall, though that doesn’t stop her seeing out, somehow. We’ve already passed her house when I hear her call my name. We turn, and she appears at her garden gate. She’s dressed nunnishly and has her lumpish twenty-year-old son, Dónal, with her. Dónal wears cutoff shorts and a wife-beater’s vest. “Beautiful evening it’s turned into, Holly. Lorelei, aren’t ye after shooting up tall into a pretty young thing? And hello, Rafiq. What class are ye in at our school up above?”
“Fourth,” says Rafiq, cautiously. “Hello.”
“Lovely day, Lolly,” says Dónal Boyce, and Lorelei nods and looks away.
Muriel Boyce says, “Ye’re after having fox trouble, I hear?”
“You heard correctly, yes,” I reply.
“Now isn’t that fierce unlucky?” She tuts. “How many birds are you after losing altogether?”
“Four.”
“Four, is it?” She shakes her head. “Any of your best layers?”
“One or two.” I shrug, wanting to move on. “Eggs are eggs.”
“That hound o’ yours got the fox, I gather?”
“He did.” Hoping she’ll ask me to vote for her so I can give a vague reply and go, I say, “I see you’re running for mayor.”
“Well, I didn’t want to, but the Lord insisted so I’m obeying. People’re free to vote as they choose, of course—you won’t catch me giving my friends and neighbors the ‘hard sell.’ ” Father Brady’s doing that for you, I think, and Muriel brushes away a fly. “No, no. It’s about the youngsters,” she smiles at Lorelei and Rafiq, “that I was wanting a word with ye, Holly.”
The kids look puzzled. “I haven’t done anything,” protests Rafiq.
“Nobody’s saying you have,” Muriel Boyce looks at me, “but is it true you’re refusing to let Father Brady speak to them about the Lord’s Good News?”
“Are you talking about the religion class?”
“About Father Brady’s Bible study, yes.”
“We’ve opted out. Which is a private matter.”
Muriel Boyce looks away, sighing over Dunmanus Bay. “The whole parish admired how you’ve rolled up your sleeves, so to speak, when the Lord gave these two to your care—at your point in life. And when one isn’t even your blood! Nobody could fault you.”
“Blood doesn’t come into it.” Now I’m riled. “I didn’t give Rafiq a home because the parish admires me, or because ‘the Lord’ wanted me to—I did it because it was the right thing to do.”
Muriel Boyce’s smile is pained. “Which is exactly why the parish is so dismayed, now ye’re hell-bent on neglecting their spiritual needs. The Lord’s so disappointed. Your own angel’s crying, right next to you, right now. Youngsters in these godless times need the power of prayer more than ever. It’s as if ye’re not feeding them.”
Lorelei and Rafiq look around and see, of course, nothing.
“Oh, I can see all your angels, children.” Muriel Boyce gives a glazed look above our heads, just as prophetesses are supposed to. “Yours is like a bigger sister, Lorelei, but with long golden hair, and Rafiq’s is a man, a darkie but sure so was one o’ the Wise Men, but all three are sad, so sad. Your grandmother’s angel is weeping her blue eyes red, so she is. It breaks my heart. She’s begging ye to—”
“Enough of this, Muriel, f’Chrissakes.”
“Yes, it is for the sake of Our Lord Jesus Christ that I’m—”
“No no no no no. First off, you are not the parish. Second, I’m afraid the angels you ‘see’ happen to agree with Muriel Boyce too often to be plausible. Third, Lorelei’s parents weren’t churchgoers and Rafiq’s mum was from a Muslim background, so as the children’s guardian I’m respecting their parents’ wishes. We’re done here. Good day to you, Muriel.”
Muriel Boyce’s fingers clutching the top of her gate remind me of talons. “There’s many who were ‘atheists’ when Satan was dazzling them with money, abortions, science, and Sky TV but who’re sorry now they’ve seen what it’s all led to.” With one hand she holds her crucifix towards me as if it’ll awe me into submission. “But the Lord forgives sinners who seek forgiveness. Father Brady’s willing to come and speak with ye—at home. And it’s churches not mosques we have in this part of the world, thanks be to God.”
Dónal, I notice, is nakedly eyeing up Lorelei.
I push the pram away and tell the kids, “C’mon.”
“We’ll see if ye change your tune,” Muriel Boyce calls after me, “when the Lord’s Party’s controlling the Co-op, deciding what’s going into whose ration boxes, so we will.”
Shocked, I turn around. “Is that a threat?”
“It’s a fact, Holly Sykes. Here’s another: The food in your bellies is Irish food. Christian food. If it’s not to your liking, there’s lots of houses going begging in England, I hear, near Hinkley.”
I hear wood being chopped. “Sheep’s Head is my home.”
“There’s plenty hereabouts who won’t be seeing things that way, not when belts are tighter. Ye’d do well to remember.”
My legs feel weak and stiff, like stilts, as I walk off.
Dónal Boyce calls after us, “I’ll be seeing you, Lol.”
He’s a leery, muscly, horny threat. We leave the village passing the SLáN ABHAILE sign and the old 80 KPH. speed limit sign. “I don’t like the way Dónal Boyce was looking at me, Gran,” says Lorelei.
“Good,” I tell her. “I didn’t, either.”
“Me neither,” says Rafiq. “Dónal Boyce is a jizbag.”
I open my mouth to say, “Language,” but don’t.
FORTY MINUTES LATER we arrive home, at the end of the bumpy Dooneen track. “Dooneen” means “little fortress” and that’s how our cottage feels to me, even as I stow the food, items from the market and our ration boxes. While the kids get changed I try my tab to see if I can get through to Brendan, or even one of my closer relatives in Cork, but no luck; all I get is a SERVER NOT DETECTED message, and IF PROBLEMS PERSIST, CONTACT YOUR LOCAL DEALER. Useless. I check the hens and retrieve three fresh eggs from the coop. When Rafiq and Lorelei are ready, we go through the thicket between our garden and Mo’s, and over to her back door. It’s open, and Zimbra comes padding into the kitchen wagging his tail. He used to jump up more when he was a puppy, but now he’s calmer. Mo’s ration box and the eggs go in her cupboard. I click it shut to keep out the mice. We find Mo in her sunroom playing twohanded Scrabble with herself. “Welcome back, scholars. How were school and the market?”
“Okay,” says Rafiq, “but we saw a drone this morning.”
“Yes, I saw it too. Stability must have fuel to burn. Odd.”
Lorelei studies the Scrabble board. “Who’s winning, Mo?”
“I’m demolishing myself: 384 versus 119. Any homework?”
“I’ve got quadratic equations,” says Lorelei. “Yummy.”
“Ah, sure you can do those in your sleep now, so you can.”
“I’ve got geography,” says Rafiq. “Ever see an elephant, Mo?”
“Yes. At zoos, and at a reservation in South Africa.”
Rafiq’s impressed. “Were they really as big as houses? That’s what Mr. Murnane said.”
“As big as small cottages, maybe. African elephants were bigger than Indian ones. Magnificent beasts.”
“Then why did people let them go extinct?”
“There’s plenty of blame for everyone, but the last herds were slaughtered so that people in China could show how rich they were by giving each other knickknacks made of ivory.”
Mo isn’t one to sugar pills. I watch Rafiq’s face go almost sulky as he digests this. “I wish I’d been born sixty years ago,” he says. “Elephants, tigers, gorillas, polar bears … All the best animals’ve gone. All we’ve got left is rats and crows and earwigs.”
“And some first-class dogs,” I say, patting Zimbra’s head.
We all fall quiet at once, for no obvious reason. Mo’s husband, John, fifteen years dead, smiles out of his frame above the hearth. It’s a beautiful likeness in oils painted on a summer’s day in the garden of Mo and John’s old cottage on Cape Clear. John Cullin was blind and his life wasn’t always an easy one, but he lived at a civilized time in a civilized place where people had full bellies. John wrote fine poetry. Admirers wrote to him from America.
That world wasn’t made of stone, but sand.
I’m afraid. One bad storm is all it will take.
LATER, LORELEI GOES off to Knockroe Farm for her sleepover. Mo comes down to the cottage for dinner, where Rafiq and us two old ladies eat broad beans and potatoes fried in butter. At Rafiq’s age Aoife would have turned her nose up at such plain fare, but before he reached Ireland Rafiq knew real stomach-gnawing hunger and he never turns anything down. Dessert is blackberries we picked on the way home and a little stewed rhubarb. Dinner is quieter without our resident teenager, and I’m reminded of when Aoife first left home to go to college. Once the dishes are done, we all play cribbage listening to an RTé program about how to dig a well. Rafiq then escorts Mo home before it gets dark, while I empty the latrine bucket into the sea below and check the wind direction; still easterly. I round the hens up into their house and bolt its door shut, wishing I’d done so last night as well. Rafiq comes back, yawns, strip-washes in a bucket of cold water, cleans his teeth, and takes himself up to bed. I read an old copy of The New Yorker from December 2031, savoring a story by Ersilia Holt and marveling at the adverts and the wealth that existed so recently.
At eleven-fifteen P.M. I switch on my tab to patch Brendan, but when the thing asks for my password, I blank. My password. F’Chrissakes. I never change it. It was something to do with dogs … Years ago I’d laugh about these flashes of forgetfulness, but at my age, it’s like the beginning of a slow-motion death sentence. If you can’t trust your mind anymore, you’re mentally homeless. I get up to retrieve my little book where I write things down, but Zimbra’s on my foot, and I remember: NEWKY, the name of the dog we had when I was a girl. I enter the password and try to thread Brendan. After five days of letdowns I’m ready for the error message, but on the first go I get a hi-res image of my brother frowning into his tab, 250 miles away in his study in his house on Exmoor. Something’s wrong: His strands of white hair are a mess, his haggard, puffy face is a mess, his voice is a nervous mess. “Holly? I can see you! Can you see me?”
“And hear you, Brendan, clear as a bell. What’s happened?”
“Well, apart from”—he reaches offscreen to get a drink, and I’m left looking at a photo on his shelf of a twenty-years-ago Brendan Sykes shaking hands with King Charles on Tintagel Gated Village’s opening day—“apart from the west of England looking more like the Book of Revelation and a nuclear reactor down the road about to blow? Jackdaws. We had a visit two nights ago.”
I feel sick. “In the village, or in your actual house?”
“The village, but that was bad enough. Four nights ago our dedicated guards all buggered off, taking half the food in the store and the backup generator.” Brendan’s half drunk, I realize. “Most of us stayed—where’d we go to?—and we drew up a security rota.”
“You could come here.”
“If I don’t get sliced and diced by highwaymen at Swansea. If the trafficker doesn’t cut my throat a mile off the Welsh coast. If Immigration at Ringaskiddy takes my bribe.”
I know now, if I didn’t before, that I’ll never see Brendan in the flesh again. “Maybe Oisín Corcoran could help?”
“They’re all too busy trying to survive to help an eighty-year-old English Asylumite. No, you reach an age when … journeys, voyages, are for other people, not you.” He drinks his whisky. “I was telling you about the Jackdaws. At one o’clock or so this morning the alarms all went off, so I got dressed, got my .38 and went to the storehouse, where about a dozen of the bastards with guns, knives, and face-masks were loading up a van. Jem Linklater walked up and told the organizer, ‘That’s our food you’re thieving, sunshine, and we’ve the right to defend it.’ He shone a solar right in Jem’s face and said, ‘It’s ours now, Granddad, so back off, and that’s your last warning.’ Jem didn’t back off, and Jem”—Brendan shuts his eyes—“Jem got his head blown in.”
My hand’s over my mouth. “Jesus. You saw this?”
“From ten feet away. The murderer said, ‘Any more heroes?’ Then a gun went off and the guard went down, and total bloody anarchy broke out, and the Jackdaws realized we weren’t quite the doddery old farts they’d expected. Someone shot out the headlamps on the van. It was too dark to know who was where, what was what, and”—Brendan’s chest’s heaving—“I ran into the tomato polytunnel, where a Jackdaw came pounding at me, waving a machete, I thought … And my .38 was suddenly in my hand with the safety off, a bang sounded, and something skidded into me … His mask’d come away, somehow, and I saw—I saw he was a boy, younger than Lorelei. The machete was a garden trowel. And”—Brendan controls his voice—“I shot him, Hol. Straight through the heart.”
My brother’s trembling and his face is shining, and a memory comes to me of a woman lying at a crossroads in an impossible labyrinth with her head staved in and a marble rolling pin dropping from my hand. I manage to say, “Under the circumstances …”
“I know. I thought it was him or me and some reflex kicked in. I dug his grave myself, at least. That’s a lot of earth to shift, at my age. We got four of them, they got six of us, plus Harry McKay’s boy, who’s in a bad way with a punctured lung. There’s a clinic in Exmouth, but care standards are pretty Middle Ages, by all accounts.”
“Bren, if you can’t come here, perhaps I could try to—”
“No!” For the first time Brendan looks afraid. “For your sake, for Lol’s sake, for Rafiq’s sake, for God’s sake stay put. Traveling’s too dangerous now, unless you’ve ten armed men willing to kill, and Sheep’s Head Peninsula’s probably the safest place in western Europe. When Pearl Occident first leased the West Cork coastal strip I thought, What a humiliation for the Paddies, but at least you’ve still got law and order there, of sorts. At least—”
Brendan’s features freeze in midsyllable, as if the wind changed direction just as he pulled a weird face. “Brendan? Can you hear me?” Nothing. I groan with frustration and Zimbra looks up, worried. I try rethreading, I try resetting my tab, I try waiting. I didn’t even ask if he’d heard from Sharon in Australia, but now the coverage has gone and something tells me it won’t be coming back.
UP IN MY room, I can’t get to sleep. Shadows bloom in the corners, swaying a little against darker darkness. The wind’s risen, the roof creaks, the sea booms. What Brendan said is on imperfectly remembered, nonstop shuffle repeat: I think of better things to say, calming things, but as usual it’s too late. My big brother, the onetime multimillionaire property developer, looked so hollowed out and so fragile. I envy the God-intoxicated Boyces of the world. Prayer may be a placebo for the disease of helplessness, but placebos can make you feel better. At the end of my garden the sound of waves dies and gives birth to the sound of waves, forever and ever, Amen. Across the corridor, Rafiq says something in his sleep, quite loud and afraid and in Arabic. I get up, go to his room, and say, “You okay, Raf?” but he’s asleep and mumbling, so I go back to my warm bed. My stomach makes a buried squeal. Once upon a time “my body” meant “me,” pretty much, but now “me” is my mind and my body is a selection box of ailments and aches. My molar throbs, the pain in my right side is jaggedy, rheumatism rusts my knuckles and knees, and if my body was a car I’d have traded it in, years ago. But my small, late, unexpected family—me, Lorelei, Rafiq, Zimbra, and Mo—will last only as long as my body functions. The O’Dalys would look after the kids as best they could, I know, but the world is getting worse, not better. I’ve seen the future and it’s hungry.
My fingers find Jacko’s silver labyrinth, looped on its cord over my bedpost, and I press it against my forehead. The pattern of its walls, passageways, and junctions cools my hot brain down a bit. “I doubt you survived,” I murmur to any real angel, to any surviving Horologist, “so I doubt you’ll hear me. But let me be wrong. Give me one final abracadabra. Two golden apples, if you can spare them. Get the kids out of here, somewhere safe, if anywhere is safe. Please.”