Falling Into Heaven Read online

  Before the next song the fiddle player, whose name, I had learned, was Geoff, approached the microphone. ‘We’ve had a couple of requests that we’d like to play for you. The first one is for Mâire. This is The Lass of Glenshee.’

  Again there was applause and as the song began I looked again for Siobhan. This was the song that had reduced her to tears before. I had a feeling it would again. It was a beautiful tune, poignantly played on fiddle and pipes. Even Tim Clancy, who was propping up the bar to my right, wiped a tear from his one good eye.

  The air finished and I saw Siobhan. She was clearing a space in front of the band, pushing people back until she was satisfied. The fiddle player approached the mic. ‘The Red Box!’ he yelled and launched into a blisteringly fast reel. After a struggle the rest of the band caught up with him and joined in, but the crowd were no longer watching them. All eyes in the place were fixed on Siobhan who was dancing like a dervish in the space she had cleared.

  She hauled Pat Brennan to his feet, making him dance with her, but he only lasted thirty seconds before he retreated to his seat and quaffed several mouthfuls of ale to cool himself down. The music, if anything, was getting faster, and the crowd were joining in, clapping along. I was watching Siobhan closely. There was a look in her eyes that I had never seen before. It was a wild look, ferocity akin to madness, and I must admit it scared me a little.

  She flailed her arms, spinning and turning as her legs worked like pistons beneath her. And then she grabbed Feeney by the hand and tried to pull him to his feet. He was laughing and shaking his head, but Siobhan would not be denied. She brought her face to within inches of his and in a voice so loud I could hear it clearly at the bar she screamed at him, ‘Dance with me, you bastard!’

  A look of anger crossed his face, followed by one of confusion, and he allowed himself to be pulled to his feet. He shuffled back and forth and from side to side out of time with the music, while Siobhan danced around him with a sinuous fluidity.

  I glanced at the band, but they all had their heads down, totally caught up in what they were playing. Feet were stamping, hands clapping. And then something peculiar happened.

  The whole atmosphere of the bar altered, as though it was hit by a burst of static electricity. The sound of the band changed. They were still playing and just as fast as before, but it sounded as if they were playing at the bottom of a well. The sound was distant and hollow. I looked from face to face at the customers in the bar, but they seemed oblivious to it, none of them seemed to notice anything at all. None of them, except Tim Clancy who was staring at me, a look of fear on his face.

  The fear deepened as the door opened and two figures walked into the pub. One was a girl, a younger, fairer version of Siobhan, the other was a young man dressed in a crombie overcoat, a flat cap pulled low over his black, expressionless eyes. They approached the space Siobhan had cleared for dancing, and as they passed, no one took any kind of notice of them. It was as if they were invisible.

  And then I realised that except to a few of us they were invisible. Those who could see them were Tim Clancy, who had now covered his face with his hands, and was looking out at the couple through the cracks between his fingers; myself, who could see them, but who was in some kind of paralysis and literally couldn’t move; Siobhan who was smiling and crying at the same time; and Feeney who had stopped dancing and instead was standing stock still in the centre of the small dance-floor Siobhan had made, a look of abject terror on his face.

  As the couple approached him I saw his mouth open. It formed the word ‘No!’ and he whispered it. It was only then I saw the pistol the young man was holding flat against his thigh. When he was within six feet of Feeney he raised the gun, extended his arm, said in a thick Belfast accent, ‘This is for Mâire,’ and pulled the trigger three times.

  The bullets thudded into Feeney’s chest. He clasped his hands to the wounds and toppled backwards.

  Pat Brennan cried out, ‘George!’ And suddenly the atmosphere changed again. Of the girl and the gunman there was no sign. It was as though they had evaporated into the smoke that hung like a haze over the crowd.

  Nor was there any sign of Siobhan.

  The band had stopped playing. Pat Brennan was on his knees beside Feeney’s fallen body. ‘Will somebody for Christ’s sake call an ambulance. It’s his heart!’

  Tim Clancy stared at me in disbelief. He, like me, had witnessed the shooting. I shook my head at him and came round the bar.

  I looked down at Feeney. His face was blue. He wasn’t breathing. There were no bullet holes in his chest. Not a sign of any blood. But he was quite dead.

  Pat Brennan stared up at me, bereft. ‘Stupid,’ he said. ‘The stupid bastard had to dance didn’t he? He knew his heart couldn’t take it.’

  I heard someone on a mobile phone behind me, calling for an ambulance, but for George Feeney it was too late. From the moment Siobhan had appeared in my back yard and asked me for a job it had always been too late for George Feeney.

  In daylight number twenty four looked smaller than it had the night before last; smaller and tattier – as though the owner of the house had given up on the place and could no longer be bothered with keeping up appearances.

  I knocked at the door and waited. After what seemed an age the door was opened and a man stood there looking at me. He was old and frail, dressed in a grubby, mustard-coloured jumper and pyjama bottoms. On his feet was a pair of sandals.

  ‘Mr Egan?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he said and made to close the door.

  I put my hand against the wood. ‘I’m sorry; you are Siobhan’s grandfather. I was expecting her in for work today, but she hasn’t shown up. I wondered if she was all right.’ This was true to an extent, but the fact of it was that I didn’t expect to ever see her again; a fact borne out by the expression on the old man’s face. ‘My name’s Flynn, by the way. Bernard Flynn. I’m the landlord of the...’

  ‘I know who you are, Mr Flynn,’ the old man said. ‘And it’s Siobhan you say... who hasn’t turned up for work?’

  I nodded, and he made a sound, somewhere between a chuckle and a sob. He opened the door wide. ‘You’d better come in,’ he said.

  He led me into a cluttered living room. A coal fire was roaring in the grate and two chairs were placed, facing it. I imagined that this was the room the old man used all the time, as his life seemed to be encapsulated here – a tableau, frozen in time, revealing the essence of the man.

  There was a dining table, still holding the remnants of breakfast. A copy of Sporting Life was propped up against a tomato ketchup bottle. There was a half-drunk cup of tea with a cigarette end stubbed out in the saucer. On the walls were a number of photographs, held in cheap clip-frames and interspersed with them were pages from magazines, thumb-tacked to the magnolia-painted wood-chip, featuring stories of the Pope’s visit to Dublin. The pages were ancient and showed their age by browning and curling.

  As I looked around the room one thing became blindingly obvious. The man lived here alone. ‘About Siobhan, Mr....’

  ‘The name’s Duggan.’

  ‘But you are Siobhan’s grandfather?’

  He looked at me steadily and then nodded sharply. ‘Take a seat,’ he said, indicating the pair by the fire. ‘Sit down and tell me what this is all about.’

  I did as he asked. When I had finished I watched his face for some kind of reaction, but he just stared into the glowing coals of the fire, his mind hundreds of miles away across the Irish Sea. I waited for a long five minutes before saying, ‘Are you all right?’

  He looked around at me slowly, dabbing at his eyes with a stained handkerchief. ‘Do you know the Lung River, Mr Flynn?’

  I shook my head. ‘Dublin born and bred.’

  ‘Your loss. It’s one of the most beautiful spots in the whole of Western Ireland in my opinion. When they were children I used to take the girls fishing on the Lung. Mâire never took to it much, but Siobhan was a natural. She could yank fish from
those waters as if by magic. But those two girls were chalk and cheese. As close as sardines in a tin, but so different.

  ‘Mâire was always the ambitious one, always the one with ideas about bettering her lot in life. I used to chide her, tell her to look around at the beauty that surrounded her and to be satisfied with that... but she never was.’ He leaned across and gripped my arm. ‘The bright lights, mister... that’s what she craved. And she came here to London to reach them. And that’s the funny thing about life; you spend all that time trying to reach for something, and when you finally grab hold of it, its like smoke in your hands, trickling out through your fingers like an illusion, as though it was never really there in the first place.

  ‘It was like that for Mâire, bless her. The bright lights were just that, an illusion. Instead she found herself a job working for a real low-life. He’s dead you say... that bastard Feeney.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Because he killed Mâire. Oh, he didn’t physically kill her, but when she came back to Ballaghaderreen with her dreams shattered and a child in her belly she was dead up here.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘Her eyes were dead. Her hope for a brighter future was dead. Three weeks later she threw herself in the Lung.’

  ‘And Siobhan?’

  ‘Always the quiet one, Siobhan... at least until her sister died. Then she changed. It was as if she had kept a part of herself secret from the family for years, a wild side, wild and reckless. She started going out drinking, going to clubs, staying out until the early hours, sometimes not coming back until morning. Mâire’s death seemed to trigger this self-destructive impulse that refused to be quelled.

  ‘Eventually she tied herself up with Billy Egan, a Belfast boy who had come south to escape the RUC. He was known to be a tearaway, handy with his fists and with a gun. I don’t know what she was thinking about, but she wouldn’t listen to reason. She went with him back to the North, back to Derry. I don’t know the full details. I know there was a shooting and a car chase, and that the army caught up with them at the border. That young fool Egan tried to shoot it out, but there were too many of them. Dead, both of them dead.’

  He looked at me fiercely. ‘It’s not right, Mr Flynn. A man should not out live his children, let alone his grandchildren.’

  Shaken I got to my feet and started looking at the photographs on the wall. Mâire was there, looking much the same as when she had walked into the pub last night with Billy Egan. And there was Siobhan, my Siobhan, looking as large as life itself, standing on the banks of the Lung, holding onto a fishing rod with one hand, a large trout hanging from the other.

  ‘Feeney got what was coming to him,’ the old man was saying from his seat. ‘In this life you reap what you sow. Feeney’s fate was sealed when he made my little Mâire pregnant. As soon as he did that he was calling down the lightning to strike him, and for him the lightning came in the form of Siobhan and Billy Egan. He never stood a chance.’

  I took one more look at Siobhan’s untroubled, smiling face. Another time, another place. I hoped she was at peace at last.

  SOAKING WET WITHOUT A BOAT

  Thomas Linden knew pain of the fourth level, but he didn’t understand nor even appreciate it.

  Darkness licked all around with the fury of freshly found lust. Swamps of blackness lay waiting for the unwary, the casual step that would plunge the lover of light into a pool of ecstasy that was entirely too vivid, completely, ardently, dangerously dark. Night had subtly caressed him for so many moments now, without fully revealing itself, that he was lulled into a false twilight of expectancy; hoping the dusk would be faithful, would stay with him forever. It never does, of course; eventually, as with all illicit affairs, it deserts it’s lover and leaves them to the vagaries of night’s more strident tones of affection.

  Warm sunshine had rested on the grey green slopes of the hillside; tarnishing the small gauge of the railway track that he tended as an occupation. The verdant countryside of this part of south Devon was his passion, and the railway allowed urgent access to it. Maintenance was minimal, passengers undemanding, even during the summer’s enflamed impositions of family hordes. During the calm foreplay months of winter and spring, and even during the spent and exhausted autumns, he was able to detach from the rails, abandon the engines and the limply painted carriages and immerse totally in the wild nature of his surroundings.

  Throughout each month, each stage of devotion, he was never quite able to forget, even as a dull ache at the corner of his consciousness, the level of pain he had acquired.

  Pain has three known levels.

  Level one is easiest, quick and effortless.

  Level two lasts longer and sometimes scars.

  Level three can maim and debilitate.

  It must be when you get to level four, the uncharted level, that the fun really starts.

  Stub your toe on the end of the bed, or catch your finger on the edge of an envelope, and you are experiencing the first level. Round one in the contest, the preliminary skirmish that barely gets the ringside seats humming. The pain comes hard and fast, like the noise of an express train through a station, initially startling but ultimately a dull roar that fades. A few moments of discomfort and it’s forgotten. What’s all the fuss about? My pain threshold is higher than that, I can take it, didn’t hurt anyway.

  An operation, a minor one, but going under the knife all the same, that will leave a scar; perhaps a thin one, but it’s a permanent reminder of the ordeal you went through. It can hurt for a long time while you recover. Your mind might play tricks as well, partly because of the anaesthetic in your system, but also because of the tribal memories that surface within you. Never again will you be quite the person you were before, even after full recovery. The pain lasted just that moment too long to be wholly forgiven.

  Get hit by a car – and live, obviously, or the pain would have been wasted. Feel the deep impact as the speed hits you, and you tumble over the roof, or get pushed to one side, and lay crumpled in a heap of cloth and skin and blood. You’ll bleed, and bruise, and internally crumble. The pain will be exquisite. There will be moments of terror, punctuated by screams, breathless moments when your skin feels polished, your mind feels scratched, but through it all the unrelenting throbbing of the pain gives constant reminders that level three hurts the most. Level three is the boss, the ultimate ride in the amusement park of pain.

  Only level four does exist. Out there, just out of reach, just beyond the physical limits of the thresholds of your own endurance. Past the severed limbs and the mutilated torsos. Tantalising, trembling with it’s teasing, it beckons from the shadows, but we flinch away as if from fire, or love.

  Level four is the unspoken pain.

  Thomas Linden knew pain of the fourth level, but he didn’t yet understand or entirely appreciate it, but he was learning all the time.

  The darkness was usually, reliably, his soul mate. His true love could be found in the swathes of shadow that played restlessly by the side of the narrow gauge tracks. Hiding in the grass of the banks by the stream where the train slowed for the tight bend, and then the incline gently pulling the tourist attraction steam train like lips on a tongue.

  Mother nature was more than just a phrase, a well-worn maternal metaphor, for Thomas; it was the extension of the level of pain he had been born into. Even when events are not our fault, when blame cannot exist, still we can bear the bruises of association. Still we can allow our lives to be shaped as if they are some form of atonement for imagined guilt. It was like this for Thomas whose life from the age of five hours and forty-three minutes was destined to be linked to the birth related death of his mother.

  Grass grew in pubic profusion around the edges of the otherwise generally neat train station, giving the impression of a cream and green painted building slowly sinking back into the earth from which it had risen. Thomas was always busy weeding, trimming, maintaining; in summer he placed brightly alluring bedding plants in small containe
rs by the entrance, as though these adornments aided people’s awareness of his existence. They were enticements to draw visitors into travelling on the four and three quarters mile journey from the station through the winding, smoothly perfect countryside, and back again.

  Visitors paid for the experience of riding in the decades old carriages, pulled in wheezing imperfection by the coal fed steam engine. They smiled at the regularity of the whistle as they neared crossings, and waved back at small children who gestured in cheerful innocence at the intruder from another age.

  His choice of occupation was almost obvious for Thomas, although he had spent twenty years bored at other roles before he stumbled upon this one by accident while on holiday one year. The job was an obvious one for him because it represented the ability to remain in the past without the requirement ever to grow up. It allowed him to remain forever the child of a few hours, locked in the time of his birth, and gave him a daily opportunity to repair what damage he must have done.

  The earlier part of July had been dull, with few days of blue to celebrate. Now, for at least a week it had been cloudless and passionately hot, with air clear and virginally fresh. Such weather brought people out to taste it and many of them came to ride on the train that remained from yesterday, to feel the thrill of belonging to a past that most of them had never known beyond black and white pictures and postcards.

  That day had been busy. Families, a smattering of couples; but the mixed group in the late afternoon was the largest group of all adults that week. Two men, barely more than overgrown boys really, and two girls, all casually friendly with each other so that imagining pairings from them was difficult.