Andrew Hurley - The Loney

Like the shadow of a huge predatory bird, darkness moved slowly down the hillside, past Moorings, across the marshes, across the beach, across the sea, until all that was left was a muddy orange on the horizon as the last of England’s light ebbed away.

***

I was about to draw the curtains when I saw someone cross the lane that led up to the house and then start across the fields where the Panzer lay. A moment later someone else followed carrying a large haversack and once he had caught up with the first, I saw them both head over to the hedgerow on the far side. Farmers, I thought, taking a short cut home. I looked to see where they were going, but it was too dark and the rain was teeming down again.

Behind me, I heard Hanny getting out of bed and scratting about on the floor, rubbing his hands over the bare wood and knocking here and there with his knuckles.

‘What are you doing?’ I said. ‘You should be in bed. Mummer will be cross if you don’t go to sleep.’

He pointed to the floor.

‘What?’

He pointed again.

‘No, you can’t go downstairs, Hanny.’

He smiled and pulled me by the sleeve so that I knelt like him next to the grubby pink rug in the centre of the room. He turned it back and underneath there was a floorboard with a knothole pushed through. It was where we used to hide things we didn’t want Mummer to see. I’d forgotten all about it.

‘Can you open it?’ I said and Hanny jammed his finger into the hole and lifted up the board. It creaked against the others but came out easily enough and Hanny shuffled forward and peered into the hole.

‘Reach in, Hanny,’ I said and mimed with my hand and Hanny stuck his arm into the cavity and felt around. A penknife came out, mottled with rust and blunt as a brick. The pornographic photographs Billy Tapper had pressed into my hand that day we saw him in the bus shelter. One, two, three, half a dozen stuffed rats that Hanny took out and threw into a pile without so much as flinching.

Reaching further than he’d been able to do the last time we came, he brought out a leather strap. He pulled it and something large banged against the underside of the floorboards.

***

It was an M1 Garand. I remembered from Commando that all the Yanks had them in the war. Bullets came in a metal clip that slotted into the top and jumped out with a loud ping when all the rounds had been used up — an unfortunate signal to the enemy that you were out of ammunition, but the rifle’s only fault. It could put a bullet through an oak tree.

Protected by the bedsheet in which it had been wrapped, its wooden stock was still polished to a chestnut gloss and made of solid, sural curves like a muscle extracted from the leg of a racehorse. The sight mounted on top looked as if it would pull in a thousand yards or more.

God knows where the taxidermist had got it from.

I dusted down the barrel with my sleeve and we took it in turns to hold it. Then, uncertain what else there was to do, we laid it on the bed and looked at it.

‘This is ours now,’ I said. ‘It belongs to you and me. But you mustn’t touch it without me. Alright?’

Hanny looked at me and smiled.

There was a knock at the door. I quickly covered the rifle with a blanket and sat down on top of it.

It was Father Bernard.

‘How are you boys?’ he said, looking around the door. ‘Have you settled in alright?’

‘Yes, Father.’

‘Do you mind if I come in?’

‘No, Father.’

He stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. He wasn’t wearing his dog collar and had his shirt sleeves rolled up over his ham-hock forearms that were surprisingly bare.

‘Can I tempt you to half an hour of gin rummy?’ he said.

I shifted uncomfortably, feeling the rifle digging into my backside. I realised that I had no idea if it was loaded or not, or if it was possible that by sitting on it I might inadvertently pull the trigger and blow Father Bernard’s kneecaps off.

‘I don’t know about you boys,’ he said fetching a stool from the side of the washbasin. ‘But I’m not tired at all.’

He sat down and produced a pack of cards from his shirt pocket and handed them to me, moving the Lives of the Saints book off the bedside table to make room.

‘You deal, Tonto,’ he said.

‘Yes, Father.’

He rubbed his hand over his mouth and we started playing, silently at first, though it didn’t take long before he was onto the stories about the farm where he grew up, and then I could relax a little.

It was by all accounts a fairly miserable hovel on Rathlin Island, some barren speck of rock I’d never heard of between the Antrim coast and the Mull of Kintyre full of guillemots and storm petrels and razorbills. Mist and bog. Endless grey sea. It’s easy to imagine the sort of place.

The only thing of note about it was that it was where the spider supposedly egged on Robert the Bruce to clobber the English, and there that the English replied by massacring the McDonnells. Even the children. Apparently you could still find blood stains on the rocks that the sea refused to wash away.

So little happened on the island that memories were as long as the savage winters that were the starting point of most of Father Bernard’s stories.

‘Would you listen to that rain?’ he said, looking towards the window. ‘It reminds me of the winter our stores were flooded out.’

‘When was that, Father?’

‘Oh, I was only a wee boy. I can’t have been any more than eight or nine.’

‘What happened, Father?’

‘My daddy, God love him, was a good farmer but he was a lousy roofer. He’d patched up the storehouse with old bits of wood, you see, and they just rotted away like everything else on the island. One night the whole thing went in and nigh on every scrap of food we had was ruined. I remember my mammy chasing a whole load of carrots and turnips that were floating out of the yard.’

‘I shouldn’t laugh,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t funny. We weren’t that far from starving.’

‘Didn’t you have animals, Father?’

‘Aye.’

‘Couldn’t you eat them?’

‘If we’d done that we’d have been poor as well as hungry come the New Year market in Ballycastle. The animals were why we nearly starved. We had to feed them first, you know?’

‘Couldn’t you have got some food from somewhere else?’

‘Oh aye,’ he said. ‘The O’Connells from the farm over the way came around with potatoes and meat, but my daddy was too proud to take anything off them. He’d rather we all wasted away than rely on charity.

‘When my mammy found out, she was furious. It was the only time she ever raised her voice to him, and when the O’Connells came around again she took everything they’d brought.

‘You know, Tonto, it sounds daft, but I don’t think my daddy was quite the same from then on. I think it half killed him, sacrificing his pride like that.’

I stopped dealing and put the pack of cards in the middle of the table.

‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘I’m going on. How’s school at the moment? Almost done now, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, Father.’

‘Exams soon, is it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well make sure you work hard. Otherwise you might end up with a career in the priesthood.’

He smiled and pulled his cards together, tapping them on the table.

‘Are you a good lad at school?’

‘Yes, Father.’

‘I was a wee terror,’ he said. ‘When they could get me to go, that is.’

He fanned the cards in his hand and laid one down.

‘Mind you, if you’d seen the place, Tonto, you wouldn’t have gone either.’

‘Why’s that, Father?’

‘There were fifty of us in one room. Half of us hadn’t any boots to wear. And it was so cold in the winter that the ink iced over in the wells. Can you imagine?’