A Lonely and Curious Country Read Online Free Page B

amounted to anything as substantial as a story. But they treated Paudie differently, gave him a wide berth. Because for all of Paudie's dimness there was one thing you couldn't call him, and that was harmless.
     
    ***
     
    “Hello my dear”
    “Hello to you too Tom Breathnach”
    He had a smile on his lips. He looked rocken. Elemental. The smooth face of seacarved stone - flushed cheeks and wet black hair filled with movement.
    “How was it?”
    “Glorious. I'd say one of the best days the sea has ever seen.”
    He put Lucy down in her mother's arms, and wiped his head with a tea towel.
    “How are you feeling? Better?”
    “Much better. Needed the nap. But the headache's gone, as well as the stomach pains. Feeling much better really. And how was Lucy?”
    “Ah great. Her little blue eyes were stuck on the water.”
    Putting a cigarette to his lips he sparked the flames of the cooker briefly, and bent down to light the tip. Puffing out, he looked calmed, settled.
    Nora put Lucy's hands around her thumb.
    Tom leaned on the cooker and spoke again:
    “Imagine seeing the sea as a baby. Seeing it for the first time. What would you think?”
    He exhaled, and the smoke curled into the air like icy lines on a frostdewed window.
    “It always makes me wonder actually, when you're down there, down past Joe's road, and up past the old lighthouse. You know, down where the sea's made the stone so tangled, like knotted hair. When you're there, and it's just you and Lucy and the lapping of the waves, and the whole world behind you. What must it have been like? Way back when. To have been the first person to go out and see it. To see the sun break through the clouds, over the water. And not a candle or stitch of cloth to your name.”
    “I know what you mean”, Nora said. “Is it any wonder we have old stories of giants and witches, and God and the saints?”
    Lucy gurgled in Nora's arms, hands twitching with new control.
    “I went down to the cove as well, gave Lucy a bit of sand to run through her fingers. Get a bit of texture into her paws.”
    Nora could feel the tiny grains between her skin and Lucy's, held in perpetuity. Spots of rockglue joining their hands together.
     
    ***
     
    Black flies filled the chipped brown mug. Flecks of light flicked off their twitching wings, like sun through sandglass. A dark hand appeared, shuddering. Haired nails at the end. It grabbed milk from a bowl, running through its fingers and filled the mug. Now brought to dark lips drinking deep.
    Nora heard the crunch and saw wings, jutting out between curved fishhook teeth, like a pike's jaw almost. Looking closer, and the wings changed, to fingernails, eyelashes, toes, ears. An eye. She put her hands among the teeth, opened the slack soggy jaw further and further, until like tar it fell away in her hands. She dug deeper.
    To her right and left, black crows crawled beneath dark soil, beaks filled with muck and worms, drowning in the sullen earth. It was getting warmer and warmer the deeper she went, and soon she felt a beating pulse. A dull thud in the dirt, like a hammer from miles and miles above. Smashing the surface - beating through eternity.
    Jesus the heat was almost unbearable now. But she had to dig deeper. Clawing through, tombed in a dirty sodden womb she had to break through until finally. Air. A gleam of light reflecting from a small corrugated shed. A black scorched symbol on the door. Two vertical lines crossed by a horizontal. As straight and perfect as if God himself had written it.
    She opened the door and saw she was at the edge of a bog. Paudie O'Brien was curled up in the distance, on his haunches at the bog's edge. Naked, he looked at her, a black spiraled mark beneath his eye, almost glowing in the depth of its darkness. His hands were in the bog, up to his wrist, and he was pushing something down, down beneath the surface.
    But her eye was drawn to the figure behind Paudie, standing quietly. Tall, at least 15 feet, lumpy