Black Lake Read Online Free Page B

didn’t, he imagined that he was not surrounded with mud but with lava from a volcano. Mount Errigal had erupted after thousands of years, spewing its hot, liquid contents down the hillside. At any moment the new cottage and the Connollys’ could melt. His survival depended on balancing on this fireproof bridge until he was rescued. He took a final leap and landed on the front porch.
    Inside, his new home looked more like the outline of a house than a real one. There was no carpet on the floors and the doors had still to be hung. None of the furniture from the big house had arrived yet. He had come because he thought he might find his mother, but he knew the house was empty the moment he came in. Where was she? Usually, when she had to leave them, she’d say where she was going, which could only have been one of a few places—to the garden or to see Mrs. Connolly or to talk to their father in his study. But now it was as if she had vanished. He wanted to tell her about the men taking his bed before he was ready.
    He wandered first into what was to be his parents’ room. It was much smaller than their old one, whose great bay window looked out over the island, to the Atlantic. This room was dark; damp advanced up the walls. Though it was morning and the window was curtainless, it let in little light. Philip mentally positioned the bed, their wardrobe and chest of drawers, his father’s chair. He wondered how they’d all fit. Next he went into his new room. It was the twin of Kate’s; both rooms looked out over the lake at the back, the lake from which the house took its name: Dulough meant “black lake” in Irish. Francis had told Philip this because Philip hadn’t started learning Irish yet. It would be good to see the water each morning and to imagine all the fish teeming just below the surface, waiting to be caught. Perhaps they’d let him moor the boat there. He should have asked about that.
    Outside, there was still no movement from the men in the white van. They were sleeping off their lunch. On the gravel, the wind blew up the corners of the plastic city and allowed the rain to soak Philip’s bed, so that he wouldn’t be able to sleep on it. He would be with Kate in her new room and they would fight over the covers.
    That night, for the first time in its life, the big house was empty. The wind still flew down the valley and rattled Philip’s windows, but their owner was not there to imagine them blowing in. The deer herd came down as close as they dared to the house and sheltered amongst the Scots pines. Below them, at the end of the garden, where cliffs gave way to the Atlantic, it was sea, sea, all the way to America.

John
    If he is going to leave, he needs to leave now, before the men come, before dawn. He rises in the half-light, his trousers on the chair where he left them. No clean shirt; that would mean opening the wardrobe and waking Marianne. His wife is still asleep, head sunk deeply into the pillow. She wears a nightgown that she made herself, lace up to the neck and buttons down the front; it reaches all the way to her toes and is warmer, she tells him, than any of the ones they make nowadays, the ones you’d get from Dunnes or Penneys. As he laces his shoes, without socks, because they, too, are in the wardrobe, he watches his sleeping wife.
    Outside, he walks away from the house. The dawn comes up over the lake, sliding down the hills and across the water. He is tired and, for the lack of a shirt, already cold, his woolen jumper itching his bare skin. Save for when he was at school and college, he has never lived anywhere but here. His parents sent him away at seven. It was what their sort of people did then, but he resolved in those first weeks, his classmates sleeping around him, that once he was old enough, he would return to Dulough for good.
    It hadn’t surprised him that Marianne was happy to leave the place where she’d grown up; though he’d got used to Dublin when he was in