The Boy in the Moon

THREE The Hide Man

Jeremiah preferred to do his own killing. That way, they got to use every scrap of the carcasses. He would slaughter up to twenty of the lambs at a session, sometimes a couple of aged ewes as well, if they were past breeding. The eviscerated bodies hung on hooks in an outhouse, awaiting collection by the local butcher’s truck. For some reason, they always reminded Brian of a line of strung-up babies. He got the job of sifting through the offal, selecting the finer morsels – liver, heart, kidney – for the butcher, the lesser – intestines and stomach – for his mother to boil up in a film of stomach lining later. She stewed the heads too, in a large cauldron over the open fire in the kitchen, making a broth with carrots and parsnips. The air was filled with the high sweaty scent of mutton.

The blood dripped from Jeremiah’s butcher’s block into a channel which ran into a tiled pit. When this was full to overflowing, either Brian or Edward used a bucket to tip the blood into a large square vat where it half congealed beneath a canopy of buzzing flies until Brian’s mother found the time to make black puddings. If they slaughtered a couple of heifers too, the contents of the vat could stand at nearly three feet deep. Occasionally, if the evening was warm and when all the work was done, Brian and Edward would squelch along the bloody channel in their bare feet, the soft, still-warm blood oozing between their toes like heavy cream.

Jeremiah’s method of slaughter was quick and effective. He caught the wriggling lambs high up between his waist and the inside curve of his elbow – one fast jerk of his arm and the neck snapped with precision. While the animal cast about on the ground in its death throes, Cathal or one of the twins would swing him the next keening lamb by means of its hind leg. Brian tried his father’s method once, but only succeeded in half wringing the creature’s neck so that it lay paralysed on the ground, staring up at him with terrified, unblinking eyes. Then he heard his father’s impatient growl as he swung the beast up to finish the job.

Cathal’s posh cousin, Martina, from Dublin, liked to visit the farm to watch the lambs playing in the higher fields. ‘Aren’t they sweet?’ she crooned.

‘You mean to eat?’ Brian said.

She cast him a disgusted look and flounced away in her pink petticoat. As Brian watched her take delicate faltering steps over the backyard, to protect her black patents, he had the curious thought that she was a bit like a little lamb herself. Sometimes after that, he would have erections as he watched the prinking babygirl steps of the lambs being led to slaughter. In later years, when he first heard of sheepshaggers, he remembered those eleven-year-old erections with a measure of discomfort. For all he knew, maybe that was how it started.

Apart from the one roast leg of lamb each Easter Sunday which the family could afford to keep back for themselves, the best thing about the slaughtering months was the hide man. Brian thought he was like a devil, appearing out of nowhere, twice yearly, to collect the animal hides. He was a tall man from the Midlands somewhere, with an accent which sounded strange to Brian and the others.

‘Talk some more,’ Cormac would plead.

‘Ahv no time for fooking tak and so ahant,’ the hide man always responded and then talked for hours anyway, but they could understand little of what he said. He smoked constantly, a fag butt clamped perennially between his thin lips, yet Brian never saw him strike a match and the fag was always the same length, curling smoke directly into his nostrils and up into his eyes, which Brian never managed to get a good look at either, because they were always tightly squinched against the smoke. He wore a long tan coat, down to his ankles, streaked and stiff with dried blood. Brian could smell him coming from the top of the road. He smelled like the bowels of hell.

By the time he arrived, the pelts in their separate outhouse looked alive again as they writhed with rats. The hide man carried a thick blackthorn for that purpose. The children jostled for space in the doorway to watch him swing the stick like a hurley, batting the rats into every corner. On occasion, an extra large black male would stand his ground, staring and hissing balefully, a moment off striking. In that moment, the hide man would suck on his cigarette, draw the stick back with silent expertise and launch it like a javelin into the jaws of the enemy. ‘Tak me on, woodyeh, yeh fooker yeh.’ He never missed.

He gave Brian a penny once, blackened copper with red specks of meat on it.

‘What’s that for?’ Brian asked.

‘Fir bean a gude lahd, I sees dah.’ The hide man tapped the side of his nose. ‘Pu dah i yoor mout now, dasas whir Ah allus kipt me muneh.’

That was the same day the hide man saved five-year-old Cormac’s life. Brian was down the fields about to bring the cows up for milking when he happened to glance up toward the outhouse where his father was still busy at work with the lambs. Two short skinny legs stuck up from the blood vat, kicking frantically in the air. Cormac had fallen in head first and could not lever himself out again. Brian broke into a run, desperately trying to estimate if he could cover the distance in time. He raced uphill, shouting at the top of his lungs to his father who he figured must have seen Cormac’s legs by now but continued with his sheep-skinning anyway, when the hide man rushed out from the pelt outhouse and grabbed one flailing ankle, pulling a dripping, choking Cormac from the blood. The hide man shook him by the leg until Cormac’s lungs could fill with air again and he let out one earsplitting scream which brought his mother crashing out from the kitchen, baby Teresa hanging off her remaining breast.

The hide man gently deposited Cormac beside his father, who did not look up. Brian could not be certain but he thought he detected a note of censure behind the hide man’s jocose tone. ‘Saf now, aher his thravels.’

Jeremiah darted a sideways glance at his wife to prevent her from moving to comfort her by now hysterical son. She stepped back obediently.

‘He can travel away,’ he said, indicating Cormac, ‘we’ve plenty more where he came from, at home.’

Brian turned and went down the fields again to the cows. Later, he got his penny from the hide man.

‘You were twitching in your sleep again,’ Julia said drowsily.

‘Was I?’ Brian stretched and yawned. ‘What time is it?’

‘Nearly eight.’ Julia looked from her watch to the window. She groaned. It was a sharp clear morning. Touring time.

Edward was already in the kitchen preparing breakfast. He cast her a shy smile and waited for her to greet him first. ‘What sort of cereal does Sam like?’ he asked.

‘Oh, he eats anything. Anything at all. What have you got?’

Edward checked the cupboards; rows of unopened, newly purchased cereal boxes filled the shelves. A solitary rusted tin of tuna competed for space. ‘Everything,’ Edward said. ‘I like cereal.’

Julia stood and pretended to study the cereals. She lifted them out and frowned. ‘This one, I think,’ she said, putting the Rice Krispies on the table.

‘I like those too,’ Edward said, pleased. She had chosen the only opened box.

She studied him from the corner of her eye as he made toast, buttering the slices with the seriousness he seemed to accord to everything. He had the same colouring as Brian, dark with blue eyes, but there the resemblance ended. Edward was tall and concave. His shoulder blades stood out, his stomach and back appeared almost as one, as if a ladle had scooped out the centre of him. His hands were white and very long; the flat-topped fingers flexed constantly, moving in and out like the delicate tentacles of a sea anemone. He wore black-rimmed, round spectacles, behind which his eyes sustained long-lashed nervous blinks for seconds at a time. Sometimes, he reminded her of a slender shaving of Brian.

Sam was about to say he hated Rice Krispies when she silenced him with a look. He finished his bowl obligingly and leaped up for the dreaded tour. Brian was doing his older brother hearty act – she pinched her nose and forced an enthusiastic smile on to her lips.

They headed off in Edward’s small hatchback so that Brian could check the engine out. He knew as much about engines as Julia knew about the sexual proclivities of greenfly, but that was not the point. She had often observed how Brian’s family used material goods like trophies, so that they might praise one another indirectly. It was not the done thing to say ‘you look good’ or ‘you must be doing well to afford such a big house’, instead engines or brickwork or employment contracts were studied with great seriousness and sagacious noddings so that the nodder might take an active part in the acquisition, in the success. Thus, Edward’s car was pronounced a ‘right little runner’, the perfect vehicle for the single man. Julia could see Edward visibly swell. He was seated in front with Brian driving. She had elected to sit in the back with Sam for reasons of her own.

Sam was in one of his dreams. His brown eyes stared out of the window in glazed fascination. She wished that she could tap his head open like an egg and crawl inside for a look around. When he inhabited his own little world like that she felt excluded. And she had to hold her breath sometimes to stop herself from clumsily treading with heavy footfalls into his own private space. It was difficult standing back observing. She was aware that she allowed him a leeway, a licence she could never countenance with her husband. But even at that, she still had to hold herself mentally back at times so that Sam might breathe, so that he might blossom into himself. The temptation to nip and tuck, to prune, was overwhelming.

Brian, or so it seemed to Julia, required nothing of or from Sam save that he be there; she, on the other hand, felt a profound sadness that she seemed to require not less than everything for the same reason.

There would not be another. Her womb had been in trouble even before Sam. She lived under a constant threat that the men in white coats would one day, and one day soon, whip it out to fling the empty redundant sac on to a waiting platter. She hated the idea of that barren space they would leave inside her.

Julia allowed her eyes to stray from Sam. Outside, a fretwork of colours drifted by. The fields to the right were irregular in shape and hue. They were not only green, she observed, but russet and brown and occasionally black. They stretched out over a gentle incline. Dark copses of trees clustered around gleaming homesteads: this was anglicized country. Neat, symmetrical, an undulating version of Surrey or Sussex. To the left, the land flattened and stretched, the unhurried waters of the Blackwater river carved a python conduit through the unusually prostrate landscape. The car followed the curves of the river, passing through rich, fertile farm country. They drove past mature escarpments of trees on the right bank, where large grey-flagged houses with unmistakably English bay windows looked out across the valley below. Houses accessed by long avenues of rhododendrons interspersed with gaunt Scots pines, their lower branches amputated or simply worn away by time. It was a solid landscape. Aged and sure of itself like an old Italian painting. Julia sighed with contentment. She was reminded of her home in Hampshire.

‘Da-ad, tell me about the school again …’ Sam was pleading.

‘Sam, you don’t want to know, believe me,’ Edward laughed over his shoulder.

‘Go on,’ Sam urged.

Brian laughed. Julia could envisage his stretch. She clamped her lips together.

‘Well, what do you want to know?’ Brian was saying. ‘That it was a two-mile walk with one room and one teacher who was a sadist?’

Edward threw his head back and guffawed.

‘What’s a sadist?’ Sam asked.

‘A person who enjoys inflicting pain on others.’

‘Oh, that was old C-C-Cotter, for sure,’ Edward said.

‘Tell me about the day he beat you so bad, Dad – you know, the day you had to go to the hospital for the stitches.’

Julia’s ears pricked; she had not heard that story before. She saw Edward’s shoulders stiffen. ‘T-t-that wasn’t –’ he began but Brian cut across him.

‘You’re turning into a right ghoul, Sam,’ he said.

‘What’s a –’

‘Sliced my ear open and half the side of my head that day he did,’ Brian continued, ‘with that bloody strap of his. I think the buckle caught me. It could have been my eye, mind you.’

‘He hit you with …’ Julia tried to access the conversation but Edward was guffawing again.

‘Remember the rasher rinds?’ He nudged Brian’s arm and pulled an imaginary length of rind from his mouth. ‘Hoy, you lad, put that in the trash …’

The way they were nestling their backsides into their seats augured a long trip down memory lane. Julia had no desire to accompany them. Then her gaze softened. Sam’s eyes shone, he wanted to take it all in, the child laying claim to the adult’s past. Quite understandable really. Their sugar-coated past was a safe place for Sam. She remembered a day not long after he had started school: she had stood beside him while they waited in the playground for the bell to toll him into class; he stood still, gazing into space while other boys brushed against him and urged him into play with elbow nudges and little inoffensive kicks, and she had realized that he was pretending to daydream, pretending to be fixated on some distant bush or other, but his legs were trembling. This was his defence. He had caught her eye and his own widened, imperceptible to another, but she had caught the little flash – he was warning her off. Then suddenly, his body jerked into action. His legs carried him away to the boys amongst whom he wrestled, kicked, elbowed and asserted himself. And she had smiled to herself in confusion, glad that he was finding his way, glad too that he was able to interpret a language which was alien to her.

‘I’m going to pull in up here,’ Brian was saying. He pointed to a spot where the road widened and a castle stood on the left behind a smooth green park with trees protected by wooden slats arranged in circles.

‘T-t-this is where I thought we might stop,’ Edward said.

They got out and stood with the castle as a backdrop for photographs. Julia craned around and stared at the severely grey stone building. It was most definitely a castle, with square, serrated turrets, scratch-like windows scoring the bleached stone in linear sets of three, and narrow rectangular minarets with blunted tops scraping the blue-white sky behind. It stood on a hill, surrounded by evergreens and straw spires of naked poplars. It was at once ugly and beautiful. She sighed and felt glad that Edward had proposed this tour. She felt her body begin to relax. Her toes curled in her boots. She laid her cheek flat against Brian’s shoulder for another picture. The air in her nostrils felt crisp and spicy, full of rotting leaves, river and implacable grey stone.

Brian and Sam found an empty can for a football. Julia strolled behind with Edward. ‘Sam loves listening to you and Brian going on about your childhood,’ she said.

‘He d-does?’

‘Brian makes it sound like some sort of childhood Eden,’ Julia continued. ‘Was it like that for you too?’

She had only been making idle conversation so the vehemence of his ‘no’ took her by surprise. Edward would not meet her eyes, his shoes scuffed the kerbside.

‘I d-didn’t mean to sound so …’ His voice lowered, as though he were afraid that Brian might hear. ‘S-some of it was OK, I s-suppose, but m-mostly I remember b-being c-cold and hungry and …’ He shrugged, made to move on, but Julia’s outstretched hand prevented him.

‘And what?’ she asked.

‘Af-Afraid, I suppose.’ Edward smiled self-deprecatingly. He looked ahead to Brian. ‘He w-wasn’t though.’

Julia was curious but her gaze had followed Edward’s to where Brian was allowing Sam to cross the wide main road on his own. ‘Brian …?’ She called and broke into a trot after them.

They all headed toward the stone hump-backed bridge which crossed the river, with Sam trotting in front. A sharp cathedral spire pierced the sky to the left. Julia bunched her fists and placed them on the stone ramparts of the bridge. Below, the Blackwater bisected the park in front of the castle. Willows, birch and drooping alders leaned their denuded branches down to the swirling waters. The valley stretched ahead, tree-filled, green, curvaceous. She sighed again. There were signs of life in the castle: mellowed light emanating through latticed panes from one wing only. The sight was somehow reassuring. Black crows circled overhead, but the River Blackwater was not black at all. It was multicoloured, purple and green and silver where the sunlight grazed across its eddying surface.

Edward leaned sideways across the stone wall to take a picture of the castle. He turned to her and she knew from the expression on his face that she was about to receive a discourse on local history. She quickly bypassed him and plunged her hands into her coat pockets. Edward signalled with a jerk of his head forward that they were to walk on across the river and up the winding road to the village. Julia turned to urge Brian along too. And her knees nearly gave way beneath her when she saw what he was doing. She opened her mouth to bark a command, then, fearful of momentarily distracting him, she swallowed the rocks in her throat and uttered her words in one strangulated gasp: ‘Brian, for Christ’s sake, Brian …’

Sam was standing on the bridge wall. Brian had one arm wrapped around his son’s knees. Sam took a step forward, smiling at the horrified expression on Julia’s face. She quickly glanced down at the river – it was at least a forty-foot drop – then up at Brian and Sam again. She wanted to jump forward, she wanted to scream, but she was terrified that any sudden movements, any sudden sounds might sway their concentration. ‘Get – him – down,’ she hissed.

‘It’s all right.’ Brian waved his free arm. ‘Look, I’ve got a hold of him …’

‘Down. Now!’ Her voice was rising inexorably, she was still too petrified to move.

Sam took another step forward. Brian was holding on to the leg of his son’s jeans.

‘Relax,’ Brian urged. He cast a look toward his brother and she saw his eyes roll slightly backwards in their sockets. ‘It’s all right,’ he repeated.

‘Jesus, Brian,’ a pale-faced Edward interjected, ‘it’s not all right, boy, it’s not all right … Get him down, in the name of God …’

Julia took a tentative step forward. Sam giggled. He took another step. She raised her arms towards him. He took another step. Instinctively his arms widened in response to hers. Her fingertips tingled, they summoned him to her, she could feel his body already, her arms ached, she took another step.

At that moment, a van came across the bridge too quickly from the village side. The driver braked suddenly on his approach to the bridge but was forced to coast through on a wing and a prayer. Julia leaped forward. Brian blinked rapidly. Sam’s arms were still outstretched. She saw him take a step backwards. She saw Brian’s shocked face. She saw his hands grapple with air. She saw the pinchful of jeans between his thumb and forefinger which was all that remained of his hold on Sam. She saw Sam waver as the soles of his sneakers rocked back and forth for an instant against the stone of the bridge; his outstretched arms flapped wildly, pushing back the air behind him. She saw Brian’s white bloodless thumb slide along denim until his fingers pinched together, holding – nothing. Sam’s mouth formed a soundless O, his widened, terrified eyes held hers as he sailed back into empty space. He fell with his mouth open, looking up at her. He was silent. Until a sound, like no other, indicated that he had reached the end of his journey. Brian froze. Julia straddled the bridge and gazed below. Edward restrained her. Sam lay spreadeagled, his lifeless eyes gazing directly into hers, his mouth in a perfect circle, his legs already being pulled by the current of the river while his torso grazed the ground. A thin trickle of blood seeped out from behind his head where it had hit a jagged rock. The river tugged at him, pulled him to it. Inch by inch his body succumbed until, with arms outspread and his eyes and mouth still open, he was swept along, a bobbing, inconsequential twig.

And then, someone started screaming.

FOUR Seeing Stars

Her thoughts naturally inclined toward gravity and the human propensity for making the inconceivably huge, small as – apples, say. The apple had represented falling for the longest time, from Adam and Eve’s fall from grace to the apple which clunked Newton’s crown, giving him gravity in the truest sense, to the decadence of the Big Apple.

The longer she pored over her books, the more it became apparent to her that the jargon for immensity had long been rendered vitiate by the scientists. Bereft of a language grand enough, they had had to resort to the terms of their childhood. Big bangs, black holes and superstrings. And when they gazed upwards, to their own galaxy, cerebral though they were, milk was what came to mind.

She, of course, was looking for Sam, in stars, in milk, in language.

Although she understood little of what she read, she could not put the books down. Sometimes, in the early hours of the morning, she would find herself staring at a series of complicated equations which made no sense to her, but she liked the fact that they made sense to someone.

At times it seemed as if anything was indeed possible. The passage of a particle from A to B had to be allowed what was called a sum of histories, so that from the possible, theorists might extrapolate the probable. It was even possible that in an infinite meta-universe anything that is possible will happen an infinite number of times in an infinite number of places. It was also possible, if not entirely probable, that everything she saw in the night sky was there for no other reason than to sustain life on a tiny blue planet orbiting an insignificant star near the inner edge of one of the spiral arms within the Milky Way galaxy.

It was possible that there were other universes, other dimensions which existed within these universes and consequently other laws of physics which would be comprehensible only to intelligent life observing these laws. And she wondered if in some contractionary state of the universe, in some inexplicable dimension, if there might not be a moment, a moment which would occur infinitely, when, in a reversal of time, Sam would swoop upwards to land on a stone bridge and fall into her outstretched, waiting arms.

Jennifer could not understand why Julia was so adamant about going to Ireland. Five months on, it was time to put away the books and face the harsh reality of his nonexistence. Julia could neither summon the energy nor the inclination to explain to her mother that she had to be where Sam was buried, a place he loved – but more importantly, a place where she might find him. She could not see him in Hampshire.

He had fallen from her, succumbed to gravity, aptly named she considered, being in effect its own open grave.

The force of the wind made her take a step back. It blew from the west, from the horizon, straight at her from the expanses of the Atlantic. She stood on the crest of a high peninsula which trailed into the sea like a crooked finger separating two bays. Ahead of her, across the quartering sea, another mountainous peninsula dipped into the waters, hidden in part by the hummocked back of an island. Below, small fields with grey dry-stone borders gradually declined in terraces to the ocean. Her gaze moved slightly to the right. The house, whitewashed over dry stone, faced the west at an angle so that its narrow gable end caught the worst of the gales. Behind it, the long rusted corrugated-iron shed was sheltered to some degree by the house. Sheep plucked at the stubby grass in a field to the right of the shed and stone outhouses. A few threadbare pines stood in an emaciated line, offering little protection. Other farmhouses spread out widely spaced and equally exposed along the decline. The scent of turf fires coupled with the pure salty air was a heady combination. Julia breathed in deeply and coughed. Her lungs were not used to such purity.