‘Tell him it’s Pastoral in E minor by Fettuccine.’
‘Fettuccine’s a pasta!’
‘We skipped the last fandango...’
Naomh’s road led up to the highest point on the island. We took it very slowly. I guided John round potholes.
‘The wind turbine’s cracking round at a fair old rate.’
‘It is, John.’
‘The islanders still believe you were behind the turbine.’
‘I wasn’t! The study group chose Clear Island independently.’
‘Badger O’Connor was going to organise a “It’s an eyesore” petition to the Euro MP. Then people discovered they’d never have another electricity bill in their life. When the committee proposed Gillarney Island at the eleventh hour, Badger O’Connor organised a “Give us back our generator” petition.’
‘People said windmills and canals and locomotives were eyesores, I’m quite sure. When they are threatened with extinction, then people wax lyrical. There’s a couple of crows picking their way down the wall.’ I thought of two black-cloaked old ladies, beachcombing. They looked up at me in unison.
The buzz and whoosh of the wind generator grew as we neared it. If each rotation a new day, a new year, a new universe, its shadow a scythe of anti-matter... then—
I almost stepped into the black thing that was suddenly at my feet, the flies buzzing around it. ‘Yurgh...’
‘What?’ asked John. ‘Sheepshit?’
‘No... Argh! It’s fangy little dead bat with its face half-eaten away.’
‘Lovely.’
There was a stranger walking along the cliff path far below. She had binoculars. I didn’t tell John.
‘What are you thinking, Mo?’
‘While I was in Hong Kong I saw a man die.’
‘How did he die?’
‘I don’t know... he just collapsed, right in front of me. His heart, I guess. There’s this big silver Buddha who lives out on one of the outlying islands. There was a coach park around the base of the steps that lead up to it, with a few stalls. I’d bought a bowl of noodles, and was slurping them up in the shade. He was only a young man. I wonder why I thought of him? Big Silver things on island hills, maybe. The peculiar thing was, he seemed to be laughing.’
I lay entombed in a slab of rock, in an embryo curl.
Out of the wind. Hold your ear to the conch of time, Mo. The tomb had lain here for three thousand years. I imagined that I had too. Nobody knows how pre-Celtic people lacking iron technology could have hollowed out a block of granite in which to bury their dead warlord, but here it is. Nobody’s sure how they dragged this block, the size of a double bed and twice as thick, across from Blananarragaun, either.
John’s hairy legs dangled down in front of the entrance.
Beyond, dune grass waved, seahorses rode the breakers. Beyond the breakers were waves, all colours and shades of eyes, all the way to the sleeping giant.
As kids, we used to dare each other to sleep in here: Clear Island folklore said that people who slept in Ciaran’s tomb would turn into either a crow or a poet. Danny Waite did one night, but he turned into a mechanic, and married the daughter of the butcher of Baltimore.
I reached out and poked John’s knee-pit. He yelped.
‘You know, Cullin, I could handle being a crow right now. It’d be a no-questions-asked way out of my dilemma. No, I’m terribly sorry Heinz, Mr Texan, Mo Muntervary would love to teach your weapons to think but she’s gone looking for twigs and earthworms.’
‘I’d like to be a crow, too. But not a blind crow. I’d probably fly into the turbine. Will you come out of there? It’s morbid, curling up in a tomb just for kicks.’
‘More morbid things have happened here. I remember Whelan Scott telling stories about the mass of St Secaire being celebrated here.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You city slickers, you don’t know anything. It’s the Catholic Mass, said backwards, word by word, and the person whom the Mass is dedicated to dies by next midwinter.’
‘I bet that went down a bomb with Father Wally.’
‘Only the Pope can provide absolution.’
‘It’s amazing you became a scientist, growing up in the middle of all this.’
‘I became a scientist because I grew up in the middle of all this.’
Even time is not immune to time. Once the only times that mattered were the rhythms of the planet and the body. The first people on this island needed time four times a year: the solstices and the equinoxes, to avoid planting seed too early or too late. When the Church got here, it staked out Sundays, Christmases, Easter, and began colonising the year with Saints’ Days. The English brought short leases and tax deadlines. With the railway, the hours had to march in time. Now TV satellites beam the same 6 o’clock news everywhere at the same 6 o’clock. Science has been as busy splicing time into ever thinner slivers as it has matter. In my Light Box research on superconductors, I dealt in jiffies: there are 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of them in a second.
But you can no more measure the speed of time than you can bottle days. Clocks measure arbitrary meters of time, but not its speed. Nobody knows if time is speeding up, or slowing down. Nobody knows what it is. How much time is there in a day? Not how many hours, minutes, seconds: how much time do we have?
This day?
‘What’s the sandwich scenario, Mo?’
‘Ham and cheese; ham and tomato; cheese and tomato.’
‘And ham, cheese and tomato.’
‘How did you know?’
‘You’ve never noticed how you group sandwiches into Venn diagrams?’
‘Do I?’
‘It’s why I married you.’
I remembered the little knuckle of meat Maisie had given me for my wart. I took it out of its silver paper, resisted a fleeting temptation to pop it into my mouth, and rubbed it against my wart.
‘Excuse me a moment, John. I have to bury a little bit of meat.’
‘Maisie’s wart cure? Go ahead. I won’t peep, Scout’s honour.’
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
‘I haven’t thought about Physics for a whole thirty minutes.’
‘The old Clear Island magic. Is anyone looking?’
‘No. We have the whole hillside to ourselves. And the man in the afternoon moon. And Noakes’s Jerseys.’
‘Then come here, my ocean child, my buxom island wench...’
‘Buxom! John Cullin...’
We left The Green Man before teatime. John, Planck and me, walked back to Aodhagan. Liam standing on the pedals of his mountain bike.
‘So where did you learn to hold whiskey like that?’ I asked Liam.
‘Da.’
‘That’s scurrilous slander is that!’
We walked on, Planck the only one who could walk straight.
‘It’s a rare old sunset tonight, Da.’
‘Is it now? What colour is it?’
‘Red.’
‘What red?’
‘Inside of a watermelon red.’
‘Ah, that red. October red. That’s a rare old sunset.’
I’d left John by the gate sitting on a stone with Planck. The turf was pucked with hoofmarks and molehills. Liam cycled on ahead to give Schroedinger his dinner.
The garden was now a little forest. I was right, the roof had fallen in. I picked a way down what might have been the path. Were eyes behind the murk-glazed windows? The ivy on the walls rustled. Something inside clattered and flapped. Owls, bats, cats, bipeds up to their own business?
‘Hello,’ I said, on the doorless threshold. ‘Anyone there?’
My da collapsed with his silted-up heart, just here. With the deadly calm of a person who had seen the future, my ma told me to look after him while she bicycled down to the harbour to get Dr Mallahan.