Cecelia Ahern - Lyrebird

She circles the same patch in the field, eyes down, panicked, making sound after sound, almost in an effort to track it down.

‘Laura,’ he says calmly. ‘I’ll help you. What are you doing?’

He feels his brothers beside him. His dad. He looks at them confused, sees that Rory is hanging behind, looking guilty.

‘What did you do?’ he asks him, roughly.

Rory ignores him.

‘He shot something,’ Cormac says, annoyed with his baby brother. ‘Rory, Jesus, you could have hit one of us. You don’t fire from the cabin.’

‘This isn’t fucking Platoon ,’ Donal says.

‘What did you shoot?’ Solomon asks. ‘Did you shoot a bird?’

‘There aren’t any fucking birds,’ Rory says, annoyed that everyone is turning on him now. ‘Why would a bird fly over here?’

‘Ah, don’t touch that, love,’ Finbar says suddenly as he spins around to see her on her knees, on the grass, beside a hare. A hare that has been shot but isn’t yet dead. Laura sobs, tears gushing down her cheeks, as she mimics its dying sounds.

‘Jesus,’ Rory says, looking at her as if she’s weird. ‘It’s only a fucking hare.’

‘You can’t kill fucking hares here,’ his dad snaps at him, trying to keep his voice down with so many eyes on them. ‘Christ, what are you thinking, you’ll have us all banned, Rory.’

‘He was showing off, that’s what,’ Cormac says, annoyed.

‘We really should get back to the cabin,’ Finbar says to Solomon, eyeing Laura worriedly, conscious of the stares they’ve attracted.

‘I know.’ Solomon rubs his eyes tiredly. ‘Just give her a minute.’

He watches as Laura kneels next to the dying hare, mimicking its sounds, sobbing with such sadness. While the others might think she’s crazy, he understands her pain, her loss.

The owner starts to walk towards them, a red, angry head on him.

Solomon goes to Laura, hunches down and puts his arm around her shoulder. ‘It’s gone now, come on let’s go.’

He feels her body tremble as she slowly stands and looks around. At all the eyes on her. At the sniggering, at the frowns, at the raised camera phones. Even Rory won’t meet her eye now, hanging back and starting to head to the cabin without them. She wipes her cheeks and tries to compose herself.

Rory is gone by the time they reach the cabin, he’s hitched a lift with somebody else. The mood ruined, they’re a man down and the game is over, so they return to the house.

Marie and Cara look at them questioningly as they arrive home earlier than expected to shrugs and awkward grumbles. Solomon leads Laura upstairs to her bedroom, he stands at the doorway.

‘Are you okay?’

She lies down on her bed, curls herself into a ball, continues crying. Solomon wants to lie alongside her, wrap his body around hers, protect her.

‘Do you want to leave?’ he asks.

‘Yes please,’ she says through a sob.

It’s a quiet goodbye to Finbar and Marie. Marie gives her a gentle hug and tells her to mind herself, but Laura is silent, aside from a whispered thank you. She insists on sitting in the back seat of the car while Solomon drives to Dublin, and at first it’s because she doesn’t want to be near him, but then he sees her lie down, facing away from him. He plays the radio lightly, a Jack Starr song comes on the radio and though he usually turns it off, he turns it up a little.

‘That’s Jack Starr,’ Solomon says to her. ‘The lad who’ll be judge on StarrQuest .’

She doesn’t respond. He looks in the rear-view mirror and sees her back still turned to him. He turns the music down, eventually changes the station and then decides to turn it off completely. Occasionally she whimpers like the dying hare and the sound merges into Mossie’s whimpers of a few days ago, on the same back seat as they headed to the vet.

He keeps the music off for the remainder of the journey as she deals with yet another loss in her life in the same week, in the only way she knows how.

Laura lies across the back seat of Solomon’s car. Her head is pounding, a migraine that pulsates behind her eyes; her sinuses throb, as if the pain has been transferred and now she’s feeling the pain from the organs that saw it. She can’t make it go away; the best she can do is to close her eyes, fixate on the darkness.

The darkness flickers with images of her mother, Gaga, Tom; all the things she could have and maybe should have said to him. At the beginning, when she moved to the cottage, things between them had been awkward. He was less used to human company than she was. She was gentle with him, took some time to observe his ways; read when he wanted to stay with her longer, read when he wasn’t in the mood to converse. As the years went by, he would often sit with her and eat a meal she’d cooked. She would spend extra time preparing a special meal on Thursdays in case he had time to stay. Sometimes they sat in complete silence, him in his head, her observing him, trying to pick out all the parts of her that she recognised in him. Sometimes they talked constantly throughout his visit, about nature, about sport, about something she’d read in a magazine or heard on the radio. Despite her being the hidden one, she felt she was the one who provided him with more information about the world. His world was his farm, and while hers was the cottage, she listened to the radio, and she read, so she was always connected to what was happening. She just needed him to bring the batteries. She felt that he liked listening to her talk. Maybe he was picking the parts of himself from her too. He wasn’t someone to laugh easily, he was simple-minded, good-natured, a good listener and a keen observer. They were alike that way. She thinks of the last time she saw him, disappearing through the trees with a wave, Mossie at his heels. He was going to return later to fix her window. It needed sealer. He’d walk around the cottage tapping things, banging things, kicking things. At first she felt he was rude, never able to focus on her, then she realised it was his way of helping her, of showing he cared. For so many years he was all she had and she loved him.

She thinks of Mossie, of Rory and the cheeky smile on his handsome face before he shot that hare. The sound it made as it went down. It was far away, and the gunshot echoed in her ears, but she was sure she heard it. The sound it made as it left the world.

Cruelty.

What is she doing in this world? Where is she going?

She knows that she has so much further to go than the distance she has come. She could always go back. Her bridge is wavering, a rope bridge at best, its fragile supports are close to snapping if they take any more weight. She thinks of Joe, who looked so like Tom she thought it was him. She hears his angry shouts, directed at her, the wrong tone coming from his mouth, and her eyes are forced open. She feels Solomon in her space, imagines that his eyes are on her, feels his body pressed up against hers on the clay pigeon field as he tried to pull her to safety, his strong arms around her waist. Even when he’s not physically touching her, he has that presence in her life. His arm around her waist, pulling her away from danger.

She’s not sure about where she’s going, but she knows she can’t go back.

It’s evening by the time Solomon and Laura arrive in Dublin. She still hasn’t spoken a word to him during the entire trip, despite him calling out to her a few times, softly checking to see if she’s okay or if she’d like him to stop the car. He thinks she may be sleeping, because the sounds have stopped. If that’s the case, he learns she makes no sounds in her sleep, and there’s an intimacy in knowing that about her, in even wanting to know that about her. He’s never felt he’s wanted to know so much about a person before. He watches her again in the rear-view mirror and then sighs, and settles into his seat.