Kevin Barry - Dark Lies the Island

‘It would hardly put us in the ground, Ernestine.’

The coffee shop, housed in a sensitive glass extension to the castle, was beautifully busy. Bored dads and tired mams lolled there over gazpacho soup and expensive sandwiches — there was organic cola and baked treats for the kiddies. Ernestine and Kit took their places in the thick of it all. Often, in the quiet winter months, back in the bungalow, in the midlands, they spoke of how it was they were perceived in the world. What were they taken for, they wondered, out there amid the light and gatherings of summer? Maiden aunts, they supposed, or a pair of nuns who had left — after some shabby soul-wrenching — their order, or maybe as discreet lesbians just a little too aged for openness. What was certain was they would be taken for gentle, kind souls with their aunt-like smiles to seal the contrivance.

They nibbled hungrily as mice at the buttered fruit scones. The tea was left to brew until it was strong as ale. It was poured with satisfaction. They watched carefully the crowd at the cafeteria. They spoke icily of the little darlings who everywhere wobbled between the legs of tables and stumbled over shoulder bags left thoughtlessly on the floor — people just didn’t think as to what might trip a child. The scones were about done with when Kit gobbled nervously along the length of her slender neck, and she reached a hand for Ernestine’s.

‘Look!’

Kit nodded sharply. It was a single hard gesture aimed at a little girl, almost albino-pale. She wore sky-blue shorts of a thin fleece material, silver-buckled sandals patterned with daisies, and a striped, armless French top.

‘Oh, an angel, Kit!’

‘Hush!’

‘Oh, perfection.’

The girl was part of a family of four. The mother was as pale and fair-haired, a weary prettiness persisting into her late thirties. There was a brother, perhaps twice the girl’s age, hunched over a hand-held video game — they heard at fifteen yards its bleeps and kapows . The father was sallow and dark-haired.

‘Daddy’s a greasy-looking Herbert,’ Ernestine said.

‘Would he be foreign?’

‘Is the child nearly his at all, you’d wonder?’

‘If ’tis, his blood is weak.’

‘Might have a manner of a … Portuguese, have we?’

‘And as sour-looking as it’s greasy.’

Quiet outrage bubbled in their insides. Oh, the undeserving bastards who were blessed with the presence of angels.

‘The mother is a liar,’ Kit said.

‘Would you read her so, Kit?’

‘I would. She has a liar’s chin.’

They waited at distance for the family to finish up. They prayed that they had encountered them at the right time, that they were at the start and not the finish of their visit. They were rewarded when the family rose from the table and aimed not for the car park but for the castle’s interior. The family went dutifully through the cool hallways, and Ernestine and Kit followed; carefully, they drifted into the melt of visitors, there by the chain mail and the crests of arms and the dark stonewalls.

The parents were not careful with the little girl. She roamed ten and twelve and fifteen feet away from them. And that could be enough, in the labyrinth of a castle, a place of quick turns and sudden twists, and the child was forgotten for a half-minute at a time, and that too could be enough.

Ernestine felt a slow hot flush creep her shoulders and ascend her neck.

Kit tinily in the dry pit of her throat made a cage bird’s excited trilling.

The albino sheen of the child’s hair was a perfect tracer in the crowd.

‘Are you looking at the backs of her knees?’ Ernestine whispered.

‘How so?’

‘I mean the little folds of flesh there, look? There’s still pup fat on her!’

‘Ah there is. Ah sweetness!’

The family as it moved with the afternoon crowd broke down into a spat. The father shouted at the little boy, who was showing great interest in his video game but none at all in Ireland’s heritage. The lazy blur of the crowd’s movement was watched closely by Kit for the blocking it would afford; Ernestine’s eyes were locked on the girl child. The mother scolded the father for his shouting — an index finger was wielded at his face. The father seethed and snapped a remark. The boy was in the zone only of his game. The tiny girl was for a moment forgotten.

‘Move,’ Kit said.

Ernestine slipped a tube of wine gums from her bag and as she moved her smile was warmed by her desire to have the child’s heat — if briefly — in her life.

‘I think I know your name, sweetie thing?’

The girl was perhaps twenty feet from her parents at this carefully chosen moment — it was as good as a mile — and she repaid Ernestine’s fuzzy smile at once with a gap-toothed grin of her own.

‘My name?’

The mother and father argued yet, their backs still turned, and the boy still lost to his hand-held world.

‘Oh I know your name for certain, I’d say! Would I have a little guess at it?’

The child giggled.

‘I’d say your name could be written on one of these …’

She showed the sweets and popped one loose.

‘Yes, yes,’ she was beside the girl now, and she leaned in confidingly, and she squinted hard at the wine gum in her hand, as if a name was inscribed there. ‘It says here that you’re a … Bob?’

The child laughed, and tossed her head to show the crooked milk teeth, and the white filmy ooze of babyhood that coated still her gums, and she flicked coquettishly her hair — she was surely no Bob — and, unseen, Kit circled and moved in behind her, paused for a check, and then moved closer.

You might travel the length of Ireland for weeks on end, down all the great yawning of the summer days, and you would never come across the ideal moment. But sometimes the luck came in.

‘Can’t be! Oh, it can’t be a Bob! Maybe you’re someone else altogether. Maybe I need to have a closer look now, my darling, and we’ll find out what your name is yet.’

Ernestine’s fingers trailed the filigree down of the child’s bare arm. The slightest of touches was electric, and enough to distract her — her eyes became bloodshot — and Ernestine withdrew from it carefully. She shucked another wine gum free and examined it intently.

‘Now it says here, we have a … is it a Kathy? An Aoife? Is it a Megan? Is it …’

She turned her head close to the child.

‘Allie,’ the child said.

‘Oh baby Allie,’ Ernestine said, and a tear came and ran slowly her cheek.

She gave the girl the wine gum. Allie chewed on it. And Ernestine moved in and tickled her beneath the arm, and whisperingly she sang:

‘Allie’s so pretty, Allie’s so sweet, Allie is the little girl who’s walkin’ down your street …’

She raised her head and blinked her eyes rapidly then for her companion.

‘Take her, Kit!’

At precisely this moment, as Kit took the little girl warmly inside a cuddle that was also a lock, with her skinny forearm placed just so over the child’s mouth; as she lifted Allie high and close to her; as Ernestine rose and pressed Kit on the small of the back, and hissed –

‘Go! Go!’

— it was at this moment that Allie’s brother drew her into the row. He gestured in her direction — he knew his sister’s whereabouts by instinct — and he squealed at his parents that Allie was allowed to do as she pleased, that she was never forced to …

As he spoke, the family all turned and they saw her, in the distance, in the arms of the lady with the tight perm.

‘Allie!’

The mother’s desperate scream was signal enough for Kit to pinch viciously the pup fat at the back of Allie’s knees, causing the child to shriek and cry. The pinch was Kit’s procedure in such an emergency: upset in the child would justify the ladies’ intrusion.