Winterwood

  —I'm seriously considering moving out of foreign correspondence altogether, he said, adding: I'm getting too old, I'm afraid — and that's all there is to it.

  Then he laughed and congratulated me again.

  —I'm so pleased for you, Dominic! he said, I really and truly am delighted!

  He had a great dignity about him, James Ingram: the neatly combed silver hair, the cut-glass accent — and those unflinching, steadfast eyes, reflecting that unmistakable Saxon sense of self-worth.

  —Oh, darling! cried Casey, I'm so over the moon about all this. I'm like a teenager, I swear. I don't know what to say!

  I smiled and swept a glass of champagne from a passing tray. If anyone has ever been given a second chance, I thought, it's me — Dominic Tiernan.

  I sipped my sparkling champagne and smiled.

  And, best of all, no one ever found out about winter-wood, I thought to myself. Our happy home, it remains unspoiled.

  Permitting myself a little private moment of self-congratulation as I thought of that empty Bournemouth beach, and my clothes so poignantly folded on the sand. The exhaustive searches of the police having come to nothing.

  To my amazement, however, despite those comforting and reassuring thoughts, the champagne glass began quivering in my hand. A hand that, I successfully persuaded myself, could only be doing that for one possible reason. Not because, for one split second, I had thought I had heard:

  —Daddy, I'm cold. Daddy, please, I don't like it up here. Please, Daddy, can I go home now?

  But because I was happy I thought of Catherine. I thought of the award. I thought of Imogen, my precious little girl sound asleep, with a scarlet ribbon fluttering softly above her head.

  For a second or two Casey appeared uneasy. She pushed back her hair and stared at me intently.

  —Dominic? she said.

  —Yes, dear? I replied.

  —Are you OK?

  —I'm absolutely fine, I assured her.

  —Are you sure?

  —I said I'm fine! Tell me Casey, are you deaf or something?

  It wasn't the reply I ought to have given. I knew that.

  If only Catherine had believed in me, I kept thinking.

  But did not dwell on it. For those days were gone. That was the past. It was onwards and upwards now, no place for self-indulgence. There were just too many new heights to be scaled, thanks to this magnificent, truly blessed second chance.

  —Casey, I said, as I took my wife's hand.

  —Yes, my love?

  —I want to thank you for being my wife. I want to thank you for everything you've done.

  —My Dominic Tiernan. I love you so much.

  Casey was a picture. A lovely living walking dream.

  Fourteen: Heaven's Golden Halls

  I HAD LAST THURSDAY off so I decided to go drinking. I ended up in a lap dancing club, not far from the Temple Bar area where I spent the whole day quaffing wine, near the restaurant where Rudyard's used to be.

  The lap dancing club was lit in dim aquamarine, with ultraviolet strip lighting and swirling staircases panelled in chrome. I was sitting in a corner banquette nursing a whiskey when a blonde in a tasselled bikini arrived over, wiggling her ass. She looked grotesque, with a swipe of lipstick put on with a trowel. The display of 'erotica' continued for a few minutes. Then she leant over and kissed me full on the lips, lifting her breasts and juggling them like fruit. She gave her genitalia a stroke or two before asking me for money. Wondering might I be interested in the privilege of an even more exciting, more intimate dance? I was on the verge of asking might she be interested in the privilege of getting herself hurt and perhaps hurt very badly, when, out of nowhere, I heard this voice which I recognised at once as Larry Kennedy from the base.

  His arrival was fortuitous for I was in no mood for talking to strippers, especially not anaemic-looking wretches from Eastern Europe or anywhere else. He signalled that he and his friends wanted to join me. I beckoned them over and ordered a drink right away. His companions were two middle-aged women, the pair of them quite tipsy and clearly over-stimulated by their exotic surroundings. They'd never been to a lap dance club before, they informed me. One of them was enjoying herself so much that she shoved ten euro into the lap dancer's waistband. Before settling herself into the seat beside me. The dancer cast me a suspicious, reproachful glance, before disappearing into a dimly lit alcove with a staggering fat punter she was leading by the arm.

  Larry Kennedy was in upbeat form. He lit a cigar and said to the women:

  —Say hello to Auld Pappie! He's a terrific character so he is! A great man for the stories altogether. And certainly not the sort of fellow, I have to say, you'd expect to run into in a place like this! But then we all need our fun, even the hardworking family men! Isn't that right, Pappie? I'm telling you, ladies, a decenter man than this you'll never meet. Fucking mad about them kids of his, aren't you? You don't mind me saying that - do you, Auld Pappie?

  I laughed and said:

  —No, of course I don't, Larry, you know me better than that.

  —Sure I do, friend. And all I can say is, you're a lucky man. That bitch of a wife of mine cleaned me out so she did, took everything. All because of a bit of a fling. Fuck her, that's what I say. One of the women rolled her eyes and giggled. The other lay back and kicked her heels in the air.

  —Oh, you can laugh, girls. But it's no joke. Not when you're going through it. Shafted me proper over a one-night stand. I'm a bollocks for doing it that's what I am. But she's an even bigger one, to do the like of that to her husband. Now - who's for another drink?

  The women ordered Bacardi-and-Cokes and tried their best to talk to me. But I had been drinking far too much and had become somewhat — no, excessively — morose and introspective. Despite my best efforts, I could not shake the gloominess off and presently the pair of them lost interest in me. I heard one of them whispering:

  —He's too old. He wouldn't have any lead in his pencil, Jackie.

  —You know there are rumours going around about him? My husband says he's not all that he seems.

  I stiffened sharply the minute I heard her saying that. Because it had just dawned on me who her husband was none other than the interfering driver. I felt my fist clenching but restrained myself admirably:

  —Auld Pappie, I said, now be a good Pappie.

  As I drove home from the club in the early hours of the morning, I cheered myself by thinking how absolutely perfect it had been for Ronan Collins to play a John Martyn record that day I'd found Catherine, when my search had come to an end. Or one which had sounded very much like him - husky and kind of deeply spiritual, otherworldly.

  —May you never lay your head down without a hand to hold, I sang softly to myself.

  It was a long way from the oppressive, furtive atmosphere of an obnoxious nightclub with its covetous, duplicitous, scrawny-legged dancers. And suspicious taxi drivers' wives muttering accusations against you. All inhabiting a place that held no attractions, a place that was dead and redundant, calcified.

  For that was how it seemed to me now - a world of ash.

  When compared with our crystal castle of the heart, our winterwood home where we'd endure for ever and beyond.

  As Ned would say:

  Till the very last pea was out of the pot, Till the angels quit heaven's golden halls.

  Fifteen: Let Me Rest on Windy Mountain

  WHEN I ANNOUNCED MY, admittedly, somewhat dramatic decision to leave Aungier Cabs and return home for good to Slievenageeha Mountain, everyone in the office was literally stunned.

  Everyone, that is, apart from Larry Kennedy, who bawled out from the inside office:

  —I knew it all along! Auld Pappie is a mountainer at heart! Oh yes, he might like to think he's a city-bred Dubliner like us but deep down, you'll find, he's a bona fide yokel! It's in their blood, you see. Sooner or later they all go back. But I'll tell you this, Pappie, we're all gonna miss you — ya great big hillbilly sh
eep-fucker you!

  The rest of them were afraid that I might take offence. But they ought to have known me better than that. I was far too fond of Larry for that.

  As well as that - the man had spoken the truth. For far too long I'd been living a lie.

  The truth was that in my heart of hearts, I had never liked the city. Had never, at any time, truly settled there. In spite of my persistent protests to the contrary. Particularly when I'd worked in RTE. To hear me then you'd have thought of me as just about as refined as they come: sounding off about wines and foreign travel. You'd have accepted me readily as a true-blue suburbanite, a Dubliner going back several generations. Until of course you got to know me, maybe thrown a bottle or two of wine inside me.

  Perhaps then you might have experienced certain misgivings: revised, perhaps, your opinion entirely. After an hour or so listening to me incoherently blathering on about 'the ancient code of the hills' and what Slievenageeha had always privately meant to me. I might even have referred to a couple of 'enchanted days', fleetingly glimpsed through the thick mists of memory, which may not even have happened at all, back in the days when my mother had been alive. But which I continued to dwell on because I longed for them so much, right up to the moment — well, right up until the moment when I expired, in actual fact.

  Which I did, I'm afraid at this juncture I have little choice but to reveal, late last year in the autumn of 2005, leaving instructions along with money that I be interred in Slievenageeha, the old home place, the Mountain of the Wind. Which may seem to some cynical, when you think of the things I've said about it in the past.

  But there still is to be found there a peace and a sense of belonging, which I have succeeded in finding in no other place. A blissful peace and sense of place that no city on earth will ever be able to provide, certainly no city that I have ever visited, or am likely to now.

  Now that I'm attired in my fine carved suit of boards, as Ned once remarked of a neighbour after a funeral.

  Now that I've forsaken this world of pain.

  I'd been lying there in the armchair for over two days when the police eventually broke down the door of the Sutton apartment where I'd continued living after Casey had moved out. There had already been references in the papers to 'important new developments' in the 'missing girl' case. With talk in some quarters of an arrest being imminent. Something which did not appear unlikely to me at all, certainly not after I arrived in one day to find the controller in grave conversation with a plain-clothes detective.

  I remained out of sight, listening to what they were saying. By all accounts a decision had been taken to interview every cab driver in the base. I shivered when I heard Karen Venner's name, the American lady who had taken such exception to my behaviour that day at the Royal Dublin Hotel. I felt sick and stupid as I remembered my unnecessary gruffness. I became unsteady on my feet when I heard the detective use the words, quite matter-of-factly: 'internet appeal'.

  I remembered the way Karen Venner had looked at me: as though, instinctively, she'd sensed something was indeed wrong, amiss.

  As I stood there in the taxi office, clutching the door jamb, I was afraid at any moment I was going to faint. But just at that point, who went by, only the bold Larry Kennedy.

  —Not a bad day, Larry! I chirped. If the rain keeps off we'll have no reason to complain!

  —Now you're talking, Auld Pappie! he laughed.

  The funeral ceremony took place, predictably enough, with no one at all present, just two days before 'A Winterwood Christmas'.

  Which I'd been looking forward to for months, having bought their presents as far back as Halloween - a boxed set of John Martyn for Catherine, a cosmetic compact set for Immy, now that at last she'd become a young woman.

  In keeping with the mood, a gale-force wind continued moaning throughout and the rain swept high above the rugged mountain peaks. It was lonesome, certainly, and there were better ways, no doubt, in which a man might have taken his leave. But at least I made it back — to Slievenageeha, my old mountain home.

  If somewhat peremptorily cast, it has to be acknowledged, into a truly dark and dismal confinement which, it has been ordained, I must endure without protest. With my knees tucked tight against my chest, like some boy-sized crate of yellowed bones, shared with other equally lonely souls, in this barren ground where no roses grow.

  The mountain proceeding, as it must, with the inevitable march of clamorous progress, as the Suzuki jeeps — which make their way to The Gold Club, their nocturnal roars like the triumphalist cheers of the living — are directed, without compassion, towards the cowed, defeated, and irrelevant dead.

  Slievenageeha, proud Mountain of the Wind. The valley where I was born some sixty-four years ago, and once walked with my father by the babbling brook. Where we'd stand together as he stroked his red beard, placing his brawny, protective hand on my shoulder. As he said:

  —There's one thing we can be sure of, Little Red. Fanann na cnoic i bhfad uainn. The hills will outlast us, Redmond, my son.

  Before setting off together back to the old homestead, sitting there quietly in the silence of our humble mountain cabin. As he hummed a little and then lit up a stogie, reaching down for his jug of clear. In that old familiar mountain way.

  A red beard. A weathered hand. A stogie.

  Familiar details which really ought not to come as a surprise - not in a place where, like they say, every man is his own grandmotherl

  Or, as Casey liked to put it:

  —Where every sonofabitch is an inbred twister!

  With our red country heads and our 'auld' mountain ways. Of which my daddy was another prime example. Auld Daddy Hatch who had any amount of old mountain yarns. Who could effortlessly amuse at the drop of a hat. In that time-honoured, down-home, fireside way. You'd sit beside him as on he jabbered, knocking back mug after mug of the clear, with patches on his trousers and an old plaid shirt, sending a gobbet of spit into the fire as he battered on about the day they'd gone to town 'for the crack'. When their 'whole damned tribe' had got as 'drunk as monkeys'!

  Fanciful yarns by the score he'd tell. Not to mention sing-songs and rip tunes from his fiddle. Hornpipes and polkas and jigs by the hundred. But then of course, that ought not to come as any surprise.

  After all, wasn't he Florian's brother?

  Florian Hatch, the well-known artiste?

  Who loved to dance hornpipes in meadows behind trees?

  And take photographs with the camera he had bought out in America?

  And when he was finished whisper menacingly into your ear:

  —Say a word about this and I'll murder you, Little Red. I'll murder you the way I done her.

  The girl he claimed to have cut and cut badly, before eviscerating her and dumping her body. Somewhere out in America, it was claimed.

  Of course he might not have done it at all.

  But who was going to take the risk? Of deciding it was nothing but another example of a 'mountain tall tale'.

  Certainly not an eight-year-old boy. Who just nibbled at his chocolate as the fiddle screeched wildly.

  Trying not to squeal as its bow swept up and down.

  The Present

  Sixteen: The Strutting Living, the Creeping Dead

  SLIEVENAGEEHA LIDL IS THE name of the new retail centre in the town and Liebhraus is the construction company. The American microchip plant Intel employs in excess of 2,000 people with plans for further expansion already well advanced, towards what is predicted will be a mini Californian-style silicon valley. A spaghetti junction swirls way beyond the mountain. To accommodate the high-powered eighteen-wheeler diesel trucks, honking along the five-lane motorways, belching great clouds of thick smoky dust. The Gold Club really is jaw-droppingly spectacular. The five floors are designed in steel and glass and anything you want you can get it in there. Before five o' clock entry is free. It's like the gold rush days have come back to life, and it's in there you'll find your heart's desire, with no restrictions
at all, just so long as you've got money and the right attitude about spending it. Once through its doors, you'll encounter flight attendants and kindergarten teachers, executives mingling with software engineers, all quaffing state-of-the-art cocktails, not batting an eyelid at the non-stop table dancing, or the inevitable quota of discreet working girls. You won't hear much country music either.

  —No hillbillies here! you'll be told. No room for sheep-screwers in here, my friend!

  The living strut and the dead souls creep.

  I suppose that's the way it's meant to be. The way it's always been, right from the beginning, back in Old God's time.

  —When the world was only a nipper and muggins wasn't even born, as Ned used to say.

  Sometimes, whenever I feel like leaving it all behind, I'll creep, as I must, out of this dank hole and take myself for a walk across the valley, past the industrial park, down as far as the old babbling brook. The noise from Liebhraus can, at times, prove unbearable, the roar of diggers and drills and grinders like some mundane, prosaic but insanely dogged anti-symphony. So it's nice to sit here and listen to the waters babbling - right at the spot where, all those years ago, back in Old God's time, Ned Strange first walked out with Annamarie Gordon.

  Annamarie Gordon who had promised to be his wife. Not only become his wife, in fact, but give him a son. She wanted it to happen, she told him. More than anything she wanted that to happen. So that they could be the Strange family together. And he could be their proud and doting father. Their 'Pappie'.

  —It will be lovely, she said, 'Auld Pappie Strange', our son will call you. And you'll be a great father. I love you, Ned and always will. Do you know how much? I'll love you till the seas run dry. Till the seas run dry and the angels quit heaven. That's how much, my love, and more.