Chapter 16
16
The bitterness was etched into Owen’s features. ‘I never fathomed the point of it all. Where did it get any of us?’ He shook his head. ‘Live and let live, I say, but things were different then, and like Da said, it wasn’t as straightforward or simple as that – feelings ran too deep for too long for there ever to be an easy answer. Still do, if you scratch beneath the surface. It never seemed to touch us, though, not here. Da down at the pub, rolling out his stories of marches gone by or putting on his orange colours and heading up for the parade was the closest we came to being involved with any of it. I saw them once, though.’
‘Who?’ Jess asked quietly.
‘They were UDA men.’
Even with her limited knowledge of the different Loyalist fighting factions, she knew this stood for the Ulster Defence Association – Ulster being the northerly province of Ireland.
‘I was ten at the time, cutting through the paddocks, taking a shortcut on me way home from school when six of them crashed through the hedgerow, wearing balaclavas and carrying guns. I dropped down and lay flat in the grass, me head this close to a cow pat.’ He held his hands up to demonstrate the distance. ‘The last one spotted me and stared right at me, two slits for eyeholes in the balaclava, before raising his finger to his mouth. He didn’t need to tell me to keep quiet; I was too shit-scared to do anything but lie there. I didn’t move until it was dark, and I never told a soul about it until years later.’
It must have been terrifying for a young boy, Jess thought, trying to understand what it would have been like to have been raised in the heat of those troubled times. It wasn’t the Ireland she knew and loved, though she guessed it was still there – that resentment and anger. All you would have to do to find it would be as Owen had just said – to scratch lightly at the surface where it simmered away, threatening to boil over again. The flags she’d seen flapping on the wind declaring where the occupants of each house’s loyalties lay upon arriving in the north had brought that home to her today.
The Troubles were something for which there was no real solution, and so there was no real point in her sitting here now in 2013 questioning why they’d affected the people who’d called Glenariff Farm home in such a brutal, first-hand way. She was sure it was something Owen and his parents had asked themselves a thousand times.
‘What was she like?’ Jess asked, deciding to move past the images of a violent past, wanting to get to know the girl Amy had been.
‘She was me sister. A right royal pain in the arse most of the time.’ He smiled at that, and Jess thought about her own right royal pain in the bum of a little sister. Yes, Kelly had bugged the hell out of her growing up – still did, for that matter – but she would never want to be without her.
‘She could make us all laugh, though – she had a right ole sense of humour when she wasn’t being a moody mare. I don’t have that much experience of teenage girls, but I’m guessing Amy was pretty typical. Her room was covered in posters – you know, your man with the white spiky hair – Billy something or other.’
‘Idol,’ Jess supplied helpfully.
‘That’s him, and your pretty boys Duran Duran – her room was plastered in them.’
‘When I was sixteen, I loved Nirvana. It broke my heart when Kurt topped himself. Funny how your tastes change, isn’t it? Nowadays, if I were to meet him, I’d probably tell him to go and give his hair a bloody good wash!’
Owen looked nonplussed at this titbit of information, so Jess decided to get back on track. ‘What games did Amy like playing when she was younger?’
‘Dress-up – she was mad on dressing up and putting on shows for us all. She’d have us in bits with some of the stuff she’d come out with. She loved ballet, too, though I don’t know if she was any good at it. I heard Mam tell Da once that she was like an elephant in tights clomping round the stage.’ He smiled at the memory before adding, ‘She liked to read right from when she was a wee dot, so I’m guessing she would have loved that Snow White book of hers. I remembered what happened to it.’
‘What?’
‘We had a village fete, and Amy had a stall. I can’t remember what she was saving up for, but she would have sold it there.’
‘And now I’ve got it,’ Jess said, pulling it from her bag.
Owen reached out and took it from her, opening the cover and staring with a lowered gaze at the inscription his own hand had written all those years ago.
‘I remember Mam standing over me, making sure I wrote that out neatly.’
‘It’s a pretty good effort for a little fellow, and I’d like you to have it back.’
‘Ah, no, it’s only a book sure.’
‘Maybe, but it belonged to Amy first. You were the one who gave it to her, so it should be here with you. I think that’s what she would have wanted.’
As she uttered the words, Jess felt something. It was as though the atmosphere in the room had changed. There was a frisson in the air that hadn’t been there a moment before, like an electrical current of sorts, and her skin prickled with goosebumps. She glanced at Owen, but he was still intent on the book, seemingly oblivious of the subtle change in the room’s tone. She shook away the impression that Amy had just joined them – surely it was no more than her overactive imagination at work as per usual – and as she did so, the ambience settled once more.
The silence that pervaded the room apart from the crackling of the fire wasn’t an uncomfortable one, and Jess drank her tea, imagining a dark-haired little girl who’d once danced in front of that same fire dressed as a fairy or in tights and a leotard practising her ballet.
‘She had a cat called Tiptoes,’ Owen offered up after a bit.
‘Ha! I have that book – Tiptoes the Mischievous Kitten . It’s a Ladybird one, too, but it’s older than that one.’ She nodded to the book Owen now held in his hands.
‘Well, there you go; maybe our Amy had it, too, and that’s where she got the moggy’s name from. It was a stray who just decided to move in on us. Mam didn’t want anyting to do with it, saying it probably had fleas and that it would give her worms, but Amy wouldn’t stop feeding it. It’d wait at the gate for her to come home from school, more faithful than any dog. I reckon it pined away after she died, just like Mam did.’
Grief had a roll-on effect, Jess realised.
‘It wasn’t just our family who suffered. There was poor Evie and their gang of pals, too. What kid of sixteen should have to deal with something like that? Those girls should have been allowed to carry on, playing their music and dreaming about boys, not dealing with the shite that happened. Evie told me years later that she couldn’t come to terms with the guilt she felt at having escaped the bomb. She reckoned that no matter how many times people said it wasn’t her fault, she could never bring herself to believe them.’
‘Survivor’s guilt.’
‘Aye. That day played out in her head constantly, along with the “what if” game. You know – what if they’d never gone to that dance in Banbridge? What if she hadn’t been so keen to join Amy on that trip to Lisburn? What if she’d put her foot down and refused to go with her? What if she’d told our folks what Amy was planning on doing? It would send you mad going down that road.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘She got married young, but it didn’t last – my guess is too much baggage.’
Jess wondered whether that was the same reason Owen’s own marriage had broken up.
‘She met an Australian backpacking his way around the country, and last I heard, she immigrated with him to Australia. I hope she got her fresh start.’
They sat in silence as Jess mulled over what Owen had just said. He was right, she thought, picturing herself at sweet sixteen. She might have thought she knew it all, but underneath the make-up and attitude, she’d still been a child trying to come to terms with the fact she’d soon be a grown-up. She had been in no way emotionally equipped to deal with the death of a pet goldfish, let alone her best friend. Life wasn’t fair, she mused. Some people got to breeze through it, never encountering anything more than the death of elderly parents – the natural course of life – while others had to cope with horrendous trials like the death of a child, a sister and a friend.
‘Did she enjoy school?’ Jess decided to change the subject and was rewarded by Owen’s lightened expression.
‘Aye, when she was younger, she did. Not so much the high school; she was too busy messing about. She loved to draw. I remember seeing her sitting at the kitchen table, doodling away for hours. Dress designing, she called it. If she wasn’t drawing, she had her nose in a book. She was a dreamer, Amy – no good with the practical stuff like maths. Da was always threatening to take her record player off her if she didn’t start applying herself.’
‘My mum and dad used to say the same thing, except with me they always threatened to snap my Nirvana record in half. It made no difference, though; I still got lost at fractions.’ Jess thought for a moment. ‘Amy obviously liked music, but was she musical?’
Owen gave a short laugh. ‘I don’t know if it was the music she liked or if it was that Simon Le Bon fellow and his tight trousers, but no, she wasn’t musical – not unless you count the godawful racket she used to make with a recorder. She had lessons once a week. It is my firm belief that whoever invented the recorder deserves to be locked in a room for twenty-four hours with a child practising it. Even when the bloody thing is played well, it still sounds awful.’
‘My niece is learning the recorder, and sometimes when she’s practising, my sister puts her on the phone for me to listen to. I agree – it is terrible.’
‘What did you do to your sister to deserve that then?’
‘Oh, I don’t know – moved to Ireland and made myself unavailable for regular babysitting services.’
She almost didn’t hear Owen when he said, ‘She used to give me and me mates a hard time because we were annoying little sods, always spying on her and her pals. She’d tell us to get away and leave them alone, but sometimes when it was just me and her, we’d talk. Talk properly like. She asked me once what I made of the violence – I mean, like I said, we were kind of isolated from it growing up here, but it was there all the same, and you were always aware of the undercurrent. There were places you couldn’t go and things you wouldn’t say too loudly. Amy hated it; she said she couldn’t understand why everybody just couldn’t get along.’
Jess was beginning to form a mental picture of Amy as a creative child with a wilful personality who, if she’d had the chance to grow up, might have gone on to do something really fabulous with her life. She’d just got caught up in something she couldn’t understand; something that had nothing to do with her at all.
‘Where is it you come from then? Your accent’s not strong enough to be an Australian’s so I’m guessing you must hail from New Zealand?’ It was Owen’s turn to abruptly change the subject.
‘Well done! Most Irish assume I’m from Aussie. I once had a chap ask me if I’d ever bumped into Kylie at home or if I used to take my holidays in Summer Bay.’
Owen laughed, and Jess felt inordinately pleased with herself.
‘I always fancied New Zealand, but it’s too far to go unless you go for a decent spell, and these days it’s not so easy to just up and go, what with the farm.’
‘No, I guess not and especially not when you’ve got young Wilbur out there to bring up.’ Jess caught sight of the old carriage clock ticking away on the mantel. The day had flown! It was four thirty already, and she’d have to be making tracks if she was going to make it to Ballymcguinness for the bus at five. The return journey to Dublin wasn’t one she relished the thought of.
She gathered her things and followed Owen out to the Land Rover, scurrying past Jemima, who gave her a sly hiss.
Owen turned the key in the ignition, but instead of the engine roaring into life as it had done earlier, absolutely nothing happened. He tried again and again and again, finally slamming his hands on the steering wheel and announcing, ‘Bugger, it’ll be the starter motor gone. It’s been grumbling for a while.’
‘Er, should I get a taxi then?’ Even as she said it, Jess knew it was a pointless statement. Ballymcguinness was the size of a postage stamp; the village wouldn’t stretch to a taxi service.
‘Tell you what – I’ll ring old Joe over on the farm next door to see if he can give you a lift down to the bus stop.’
Jess dug her phone out of her bag and checked the time; it was marching on. ‘Here, you can use this.’
Sadly, old Joe wasn’t home, Owen informed her a minute later. Apparently he’d left a message on his answerphone to say he’d headed down to the bachelor festival at Lisdoonvarna.
That gave Jess pause for thought. She’d been down to the tourist spa town’s festival with Nora a few years earlier in the vague hope of meeting a wealthy landowner. Ye gods, some of the sights that had staggered out of the wild west of County Clare in search of a wife had just about been enough to make the girls head for the hills themselves. The dance they’d attended had seen them both visiting chiropodists on their return to civilisation.
‘Well, you can’t walk into town; it’s too far. And by the time I can tee up a ride for you, the bus will be long gone anyway.’
‘Oh,’ was all Jess said. What the hell was she supposed to do now?
They’d both got out of the vehicle that obviously wasn’t going anywhere, and Owen kicked the door. ‘Damned thing.’
He looked so annoyed that Jess found herself saying, ‘Hey, it’s OK. It’s one of those things; don’t worry about it.’ Actually, though, it wasn’t OK because she was bloody well marooned.
‘I’m sorry about this,’ he muttered brusquely in that tone that implied apologising was a foreign concept to him. ‘Come on – it’s getting too cold to be standing around out here. I’ll phone Mick from the garage and get him to come out with a new motor. There’s a bus that swings through just after ten tomorrow morning. I’ll have you on that.’
‘Oh,’ was all Jess could come up with again as she stayed where she was.
He looked back. ‘Well, you’ll have to stay the night, won’t you?’