“No. Only by reputation. People said he was a freak, or a genius, or a … Well, y’know. Kids. I was in Holly’s class at school, but by the time I got to know Holly well, he was … It’d already happened.” All those days, mountains, wars, deadlines, beers, air miles, books, films, Pot Noodle, and deaths between now and then … but I still remember so vividly cycling across the Isle of Sheppey to Gabriel Harty’s farm. I remember asking Holly, “Is Jacko here?” and knowing from her face that he wasn’t. “How well did you know Jacko, Eilísh?”
The old woman’s sigh trails off. “Kath brought him over when he’d’ve been five or so. A pleasant small boy, but not one who struck you as so remarkable. Then I met him again, eighteen months later, after the meningitis.” She drinks her Drambuie and sucks in her lips. “In the old days, they’d’ve called him a ‘changeling,’ but modern psychiatry knows better. Jacko at six was … a different child.”
“Different in what way?”
“He knew things — about the world, about people, all sorts … Things small boys just don’t — can’t — shouldn’t know. Not that he was a show-off. Jacko knew enough to hide being a dandy, but,” Eilísh looks away, “if he grew to trust ye, ye’d be given a glimpse. I was working as a librarian in Bantry at the time, and I’d borrowed The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton for him the day before he arrived because Kath’d told me he was a fierce reader, like Sharon. Jacko read it in a single sitting, but didn’t say if he’d enjoyed it or not. So I asked him, and Jacko said, ‘My honest opinion, Auntie?’ I said, ‘I’d not want a dishonest one, would I?’ Jacko said, ‘Okay, then I found it just a little puerile, Aunt.’ Six years old, and he’d use a word like ‘puerile’! The following day, I took Jacko to work with me and — not a word of a lie — he pulled Waiting for Godot off the shelves. By Beckett. Truth be told, I assumed Jacko was just attention-seeking, wanting to amaze the grown-ups. But then at lunchtime we ate our sandwiches by the boats, and I asked him what he’d made of Samuel Beckett, and”—Eilísh sips her Drambuie—“suddenly Spinoza and Kant were joining our picnic. I tried to pin him down and asked him straight, ‘Jacko, how can you know all this?’ and he replied, ‘I must have heard it on a bus somewhere, Auntie — I’m only six years old.’ ” Eilísh sloshes her glass. “Kath and Dave saw consultants, but as Jacko wasn’t ill, as such, why would they care?”
“Holly’s always said that the meningitis somehow rewired his brain in a way that … massively increased its capacity.”
“Aye, well, they do say that neurology’s the final frontier.”
“You don’t buy the meningitis theory, though, do you?”
Eilísh hesitates: “It wasn’t Jacko’s brain that changed, Ed, it was his soul.”
I keep a sober face. “But if his soul was different, was he still—”
“No. He wasn’t Jacko anymore. Not the one who’d come to visit me when he was five. Jacko aged seven was someone else altogether.” Octogenarian faces are hard to read; the skin’s so crinkled and the eyes so birdlike that facial clues are obscured. The band have been nobbled by the Corkonian contingent; they strike up “The Irish Rover.”
“I presume you’ve kept this view to yourself, Eilísh?”
“Aye. They’d be hurtful words as well as mad-sounding ones. I only ever put it to one person. That was himself. A few nights after the Beckett day there was a storm, and the morning after Jacko and I were gathering seaweed from the cove below my garden, and I came right out with it: ‘Jacko, who are ye?’ And he answered, ‘I’m a well-intentioned visitor, Eilísh.’ I couldn’t quite bring myself to ask, ‘Where’s Jacko?’ but he must’ve heard the thought, somehow. He told me that Jacko couldn’t stay, but that he was keeping Jacko’s memories safe. That was the strangest moment of my life, and I’ve known a few.”
I flex my leg; it’s gone to sleep. “What did you do next?”
Eilísh face-shrugs. “We spread the seaweed over the carrot patch. As if we’d agreed a pact, if you will. Kath, Sharon, and Holly left the next day. Only,” she frowns, “when I heard the news that he’d gone …” she looks at me, “… I’ve always wondered if the way he left us wasn’t related to the way he first came …”
An uncorked bottle goes pop! and a table cheers.
“I’m honored you’re telling me all this, Eilísh, honestly — but why are you telling me all this?”
“I’m being told to.”
“Who … who by?”
“By the Script.”
“What script?”
“I’ve a gift, Ed.” The old Irishwoman has speckled woodpecker-green eyes. “Like Holly’s. Ye know what it is I’m talking of, so ye do.”
Chatter swells and falls like the sea on shingle. “I’m guessing you mean the voices Holly heard when she was a girl, and the, well, what in some circles would be called her moments of ‘precognition.’ ”
“Aye, there’s different names for it, right enough.”
“There are also sound medical explanations, Eilísh.”
“I’m quite sure there are, if ye set store in them. The cluas faoi rún, we’d call it in Irish. The secret ear.”
Great-aunt Eilísh has a bracelet of tiger’s-eye stones. Her fingers fret at it while she’s talking and watching me.
“Eilísh, I have to say — I mean, I respect Holly very much, and y’know … she’s definitely highly intuitive — bizarrely, sometimes. And I’m not rubbishing any traditions here, but …”
“But ye’d as soon eat your arm off as buy into this mumbo-jumbo about second sight and secret ears and whatever else this mad old West Cork witch is banging on about.”
That’s exactly what I think. I smile an apology.
“And that’s all well and good, Ed. For ye …”
I notice a headache knocking at my temples.
“… but not for Holly. She has to live with it. It’s hard — I know. Harder for Holly in shiny modern London, I’d say, than for me in misty old Ireland. She’ll need your help. Soon, I think.”
This is probably the weirdest conversation I’ve ever had at a wedding. But at least it’s not about Iraq. “What do I do?”
“Believe her, even if you don’t believe in it.”
Kath and Ruth walk up, glowing from their Latin dance action. “You two have been sat here thick as thieves for ages.”
“Eilísh has been telling me about her Arabian adventures,” I say, still wondering about the old woman’s last line.
Ruth asks, “Did you see Kath and Dave dancing?”
“We did and fair play to ye both,” says Great-aunt Eilísh. “That’s a mighty set of tail feathers Dave’s sprouted — at his time of life, too.”
“We’d go dancing when we first met,” says Kath, who sounds more Irish in the midst of the tribe, “but it stopped when we took on the Captain Marlow. No nights off together for thirty-odd years.”
“It’s almost three o’clock, Eilísh,” says Ruth. “Your taxi’ll be here soon. You might want to start your goodbyes.”
No! She can’t go all paranormal on me and just leave. “I thought you’d be around for tonight, at least, Eílish.”
“Oh, I know my limits.” She stands up with the aid of her stick. “Oisín’s chaperoning me to the airport, and my neighbor Mr. O’Daly’ll meet me at Cork airport. Ye have your invitation to Sheep’s Head, Ed. Use it before it expires. Or before I do.”
I tell her, “You look pretty indestructible to me.”