Chapter Five #5
The oven timer rings. “I’ll go get Trey,” Lena says. She gives Cal’s hand a squeeze and lets it go. She shrugs on her jacket, tucking her ponytail inside the collar, and goes out the door.
Cal turns off the oven, leaving the casserole inside to keep warm. Then he sits down at the set table, listening to the restless crackle and snap of the fire, and waits for someone to come home.
It’s dark as midnight, a sullen, dripping dark that feels like it’s prepared to stay unbroken till spring.
Lena knows this road like she knows her own house, but she switches on her phone torch anyway, so she won’t step in a puddle.
She’s annoyed with herself, Cal, and Mart Lavin, in more or less equal proportions.
She wishes she lived somewhere like Australia or Canada, where she might run into the kind of wildlife that could be looking for hassle. She’s in the mood for a fight.
Trey hasn’t gone far: Lena finds her sitting on P.J.’s wall while the dogs explore the verges, out of sight in the darkness but still audible as they rustle and snuffle. “Hiya,” Lena says. “The dinner’s ready.”
“Yeah,” Trey says, without moving. “I was gonna come back now anyhow.”
“You coulda just stayed put,” Lena says. “It’s not like myself and Cal were about to go at each other’s throat. We’d it all sorted out by the time you got to the gate.”
Trey shrugs, a short hard shrug that means Nothing to do with me.
Lena props her arse against the wall beside Trey and plays her phone torch idly over the empty field across from them.
The grass is thin and patchy; Skippy Gannon left his cattle unhoused too long, trying to save on silage after rain scuppered the harvest. The place has a neglected look.
Trey says, “Didja ever know anyone that kilt themselves with antifreeze?”
“There was a fella over the other side of the mountains, a long time back,” Lena says. “Before you were born, probably. He drank antifreeze.”
“What’s it do to you?”
“I’ve only seen dogs,” Lena says. “It tastes sweet, so they’ll drink it if they find it. First they act like they’re drunk. After a couple of hours they have seizures, or they go unconscious. If you don’t treat them quick, they die in a day or two; faster if they drank a load of it.”
Trey says, “Now everyone’s gonna say Rachel kilt herself for definite.”
“Most people say that already.”
“Yeah,” Trey says. “You reckon she did?”
“I’ve no opinion,” Lena says. “I didn’t know her well enough for that.”
“People are saying she done it ’cause that tosser Eugene broke up with her. That’d be fuckin’ thick.”
She’s giving Lena a look like a question.
“If you want my opinion on that part,” Lena says, “for whatever it’s worth, I don’t believe people die over a breakup.
If the rest of their life was in bad shape as well, then maybe.
Or if their head wasn’t working right, one way or another.
The breakup might be the last straw, but it’s not the reason. ”
“I wouldn’t,” Trey says flatly. “Fuck that.”
“I’m delighted to hear it,” Lena says. “Neither would I.”
Trey glances sideways at her. “You’re not gonna break up with Cal, but.”
“I wasn’t planning on it,” Lena says. She caught the sudden sharp note in Trey’s voice.
Trey has grown up trained to be constantly on the alert for land mines, mantraps, fault lines.
“I wouldn’t say Cal is, either. We make each other happy, and we’re old enough to value that.
We don’t always agree on everything, but we’re old enough to value that, too. Are you going out with anyone?”
She feels Trey retreat inside herself, weighing up her answer. “Nah,” she says, in the end. “Thinking about it.”
“Pick someone you like,” Lena advises her. “Not just someone you fancy. Someone you’d want for a friend.”
Trey nods, one definite jerk, accepting this as solid.
She slides off the wall and starts towards Cal’s.
Lena falls in beside her and watches her face in the phone’s faint light bouncing back off the road.
It’s intent, rather than dreamy. She’s going into this with the same focus she brings to other things that matter.
“Rachel didn’t seem like her life was messed up,” Trey says, after a minute. She’s kicking a rock along the road. “Or like her head wasn’t right.”
“Maybe not,” Lena says. “You’d never know what’s going on in people’s lives, or in their minds.”
Trey scoops the rock back to the center of the road with a deft flick of her foot. “Everyone’s got antifreeze.”
“Most people would, all right. For the car, or for the sprayers when there’s frost. Your mam probably has. Make sure Banjo can’t get at it, or the little ones.”
Trey says, “I don’t reckon Rachel done it herself.”
“Fair enough,” Lena says equably. She doesn’t agree, but she wants to hear this.
“I never did. But with what you said about the antifreeze: no fuckin’ way. Why would she go for something that takes days? And where they could treat it, if they found her?”
Lena knows well that not every suicide takes the quickest or surest route.
Rachel might not have known about the delay, might have just wanted a fail-safe to go with the river, might have reached for whatever she found handy.
She might have been hoping, with some part of her, that she’d be found in time.
She says, “What d’you reckon happened?”
“Before I heard about the antifreeze, I thought either she went to dump Eugene and he lost the head, or else some fucker tried to do something to her. Donie McGrath, maybe. She fought back, and he shoved her in the river.” Donie McGrath is the local scumbag.
Lena is with Trey on this much: that sounds right up Donie’s alley.
“But it wasn’t. If Eugene lost the head, he’da just hit her; he wouldn’t go fucking about with antifreeze. And how would Donie give it to her?”
“No girl in her right mind’d take a drink off Donie,” Lena agrees.
“Then I thought it coulda been someone else like Donie, only that hides it better. Someone that seems all right, so she’d take a drink off him. Why would he poison her, but? He’d roofie her, just.”
“That’d be simpler, all right,” Lena says. She doesn’t like the amount of thought Trey has put into this. She was happier back when the whole of Ardnakelty could have gone up in smoke and Trey wouldn’t have bothered to look up from her sandpaper, as long as Cal was OK.
“Unless,” Trey says, “he wasn’t like Donie. He didn’t wanta do stuff to her. He wanted to kill her.”
She’s keeping her voice low, like someone might be crouched behind a wall to listen. Lena watches Cal’s windows, up ahead. “Only thing is,” she says, “why would anyone want Rachel dead?”
Trey pauses to dig her rock out of a pothole with her toe.
“I reckon she knew something,” she says, “or she found out something, and she was gonna say it. And someone around here wanted to shut her up, so they gave her antifreeze and fucked her in the river once she was too drunk to fight back or swim out. Coulda been Eugene—Cal says he hasn’t got the nads, but it doesn’t take a lotta nads to put antifreeze in a drink. Or it coulda been someone else.”
She gets the rock free and sends it off up the road again, bouncing in the phone’s beam. “Only no one’s ever gonna say that,” she says, “ ’cause then there’d be all kindsa hassle. Everyone’ll just say she kilt herself. End of story.”
Lena goes still inside. This is, at least in part, her doing.
“I doubt it,” she says, once she’s got her thoughts together. “Rachel didn’t seem like the type to rock the boat. She was a great one for keeping the peace, same as most people round here. If she found out something dodgy, she’da just kept her mouth shut.”
“Like you said,” Trey says. Her voice has a flat note; Lena can’t tell whether it’s defeat, or bitterness, or something else entirely. “You never know.”
They walk on in silence. Lena wants to say something, but she’s too afraid she’ll make a balls of it. She remembers Trey, just a couple of years back, burning to defy this place any way she could find.
They stop at Cal’s gate, waiting for the dogs to catch up. “Tell me something,” Lena says. “Are you planning on poking around, looking to find out what happened?”
Trey whistles a long up-flicking note for the dogs. “Nah,” she says. “She wasn’t my mate or anything. No point, anyhow. Even if I found out, nothing I could do about it.”
Lena believes her. “Right,” she says. She should be relieved. Cal would be.
The dogs come running; Lena hears the rush and patter of their paws on the road, long before they materialize out of the darkness. Trey gives her rock one last hard kick up the road towards Mart’s place, and turns in at the gate.
The sun has been up for hours, but it still feels like dawn, a heavy gray dawn that the land can’t shake off. The birds are silent. The long grass and weeds sag with dew or rain; when Lena turns off the road onto the narrow river path, they wet her jeans to the knees.
The bridge is a single low arch, so old that the stones seem to have smudged into one another with wear.
It’s just wide enough for a car, but for the last few decades cars have used the new bridge below the village.
This one is no longer marked on maps; only locals wanting a shortcut, or looking for a romantic walk, cross here.
The land is taking it back: bare trees lean out over it on either bank, creepers hang thick on its sides, and the weeds grow high around each base.
In a few years, unless the council forgets about it altogether, it’ll probably be labeled unsafe, then cordoned off, then demolished.
By then it’ll be haunted. Rachel will be another dot on the luminescent map of ghosts stretched across the countryside, between the old woman waving down cars on a Kilhone back road and the half-faced shotgun accident on Crannagh Hill.
She’ll have been transmuted from a real girl, with gangly legs and fake lashes and a spoilt cat, into a myth to scare kids who never knew her.
My brother says a girl jumped off there ’cause her boyfriend dumped her, and if you go on it at night she’ll appear and drag you over with her.
My mam says that’s a loada shite, there was never any girl.
My cousin saw the ghost. Dare you to cross the bridge at midnight, dare you to touch it.
Lena stands at its center, looking downstream.
The river runs high and rampant, a rich brown churned to white in streaks.
On Lena, the bridge’s wall comes to mid-thigh; Rachel was the same height as her, give or take.
The stones are wet underfoot, and moss grows in their cracks.
One bad slip would do it, or a stagger if antifreeze was wrecking your balance, or one shove; or you could just lean forward, and let gravity do the hard part for you.
That’s still what Lena believes happened.
But where she feels no responsibility for that, she feels the full weight of Trey standing at Cal’s gate, her face half turned away to look down the dark road, saying Nothing I could do about it.
In Trey’s mind, you do this townland’s bidding or you’ll land in the river, and it’ll all be covered up like it never happened.
Lena knew she thought that way. She was the one who taught Trey that lesson: spread the story that suits this place and bury what doesn’t, or the price will be too high.
She loved Trey’s blazing, unbending rebellion, and she bent it to the townland’s will.
She doesn’t consider that she could have done anything different in those specific circumstances, and somehow Trey has never held it against her, but she hasn’t forgiven herself.
She told herself it wouldn’t matter too much, in the long run, because it was only for a few years. The minute Trey was old enough, she would be out of here like a bullet out of a gun. Lena, of all people, should have remembered that people don’t always leave the places they intend to leave.
If Trey is going to make a life here, she needs solid proof that she doesn’t have to follow this place’s orders and live by its rules, that it doesn’t always get to choose what stays hidden and what comes to light.
Whatever was behind Rachel Holohan’s death, Trey needs it spread out and flown high over this townland for everyone to see, not twisted and knotted into whatever shape is most convenient. Lena owes her that.