Ronan flopped down onto that soft flooring and pulled his legs under him so he could lean back against the stone of the “rear wall.” The space was snug enough around him to reduce the wind off the sea to an occasional breezy breath. His view of the world was here reduced to a narrow doorway that looked across uneven heather- and gorse-covered ground to what appeared to be a sheer drop-off, and beyond it, hazy and indistinct, the sea.
He sighed in a kind of relief at having the world be shut away from him even just this much, even for just a while. No people, no noise… Ronan thought; at least no noise but the soft susurrus of the sea whispering to itself, safely meaningless and distant.
That’s the problem, he thought. Getting any distance… any at all. School was bad enough, the way it forced you into participation in activities you didn’t care about with people you’d really rather have nothing to do with. Not that there weren’t people Ronan liked being around, and classes that interested him. But usually just as soon as one of those tolerable classes was over, you were on your way to something you loathed.
If he could’ve spent half the day out in a field with a hurley in his hands and the rest of it studying music and maths, he’d have been happy. But no, Ronan thought, banging his head gently back against the rough lichen-patched slab where he leaned: no, they’ve got to throw chemistry into it, don’t they. And EngLit. In which it wasn’t the Eng that annoyed him, but the Lit—any fiction older than a few centuries back bored him to tears. And then the religion. And the history—
He shied away from the memory of Seamus’s taunting. Irish history was troublesome more or less from beginning to end; for every person who thought you were paying too much attention to it, there was another who thought you weren’t paying enough. And apparently it’s my fault for doing too much research and coming up with an answer to the Irish Question that he didn’t like… He blew out a breath. Last time I do that any more, then. Safer to toe the old party line and pretend that the Great Devil Cromwell killed everybody on the island and chopped down all the oak trees too. Safer to pretend that everybody who ever came here that wasn’t Irish meant to take our stuff and do us dirt. Because half of everybody believes it…
Ronan closed his eyes and concentrated on not thinking about Seamus and his ilk: concentrated on thinking about the hard grit of the stone against his head and the breath of breeze that swirled in and died away again, on the cocoa-butter smell of the blossoming yellow gorse on the hillside and the hiss of wind in the nearby pines. It took a few minutes of flat refusal to think about Seamus any more to acquire a bit of distance from images of that sneering superior face, and Ronan sighed again and looked at his watch.
Hours yet, he thought. Hours before I can go home. But even then there was no guarantee of things being all that much better once he got there… or not for long. Oh, it wasn’t like big fights broke out or anybody got abused. But there were issues running just under the surface that kept coming up to get dealt with… and they couldn’t be.
Ronan rubbed his face briefly in helpless pain that he could for once express because there was no chance anyone would see. The other bedroom… And its emptiness. It was the sign of another set of problems, one Ronan very carefully pretended he knew absolutely nothing about.
The trouble was that late at night he could hear his Mam and Da arguing—quietly, they thought, though the walls in that house had never been terribly thick—about whose fault it was that there wasn’t a baby brother or sister (or two, or three). About his dad being afraid that other men in the neighborhood were mocking him as not being all that much of a man. Won’t drink, can’t f—
His mum would always try to stop him saying the next word, but his father’s bitterness usually managed to get it out anyway. Then she would sigh. “Ah now. Come on, we’ve been over this a hundred times, you know it’s not your fault.”
“I don’t know, Mary, that’s the problem, the fecking doctor couldn’t figure it out—”
“Well. Maybe the next one.”
“Oh yeah, the consult, right, that’ll happen in, what, five years at the rate the government’s taking money off the HSE? And what it if is my fault and they fix it? What about you, by that time will you even be able—”
“Ro. We’ve talked about this before. There are possibilities—”
“Oh, don’t start with that now! Best way to make all of them think I really can’t—”
And then they’d be off on what Ronan now thought of as the Adoption Round of the Blame Game. It was no particular consolation that by the time they hit the Adoption Round they were usually neither of them willing to go on for much longer: its initiation signified that both of them were desperately weary of where this was going (or not going).
Their weariness about it was probably nothing on Ronan’s at this point, but he would have walked into the kitchen and cut his own throat with one of his Mam’s favorite cooking knives before letting on about that. But there didn’t seem to be any chance things on that count would ever get better. Even if they—
His phone chirped noisily: a text. Panic shot through him. Feck feck feck, Ronan thought, fumbling the phone out of his pocket. Oh God what if it’s Da, what do I do? I am so screwed— He stared at the screen.
Yr nan sad did u tak the umbrwllla?
Ronan stared at this for a moment. Oh thank you God, he thought first, because the text was from the carer’s number.
It took him a moment to get his hands to stop shaking enough to text at his usual speed. Tell her I’m OK, I have one at school.
He’d already hit “send” before he started wondering guiltily whether that sounded too much like he wasn’t at school right now. Oh please don’t let her get that idea, she’ll tell the whole earth, not to mention Mam and Da…
But the answer came back OK thx. And that, it seemed, was that: no more texts, though Ronan sat there nervously staring at the phone for the next few minutes, waiting for some new unexpected “other shoe” to drop. I hate this. Everything sucks. Everything.
Yet nothing happened. Finally Ronan slumped back and started working on breathing normally again. Staring out at the sea—flat, featureless for now, unexciting—calmed him a bit. He considered turning his phone off, in case someone should call and freak him out again. But what if Pidge texts me finally? Or the carer wants me again. If I shut the phone off she’ll freak, and Nan might freak too. And then the carer might call Mam or Da—
Ronan shook his head and just stuck the phone in his pocket. There really wasn’t any reason for any of those things to happen. And slowly the tension started to drain out of him. Yeah, tomorrow’ll be grim. But as for right now— This little rare period of peace and quiet, this he could let himself enjoy. He ‘d hear anybody coming long before they got anywhere near him—not that so many walkers or climbers were likely to come up here on a day that had started looking like this. Mostly people climbed the Head on days when they knew the sunshine would last long enough for them to take advantage of the view.
Ronan leaned back against the stone and turned his head idly to look, slightly unfocused, at the lichen spotting it—patches of white and pale green and (to his surprise) spots and dots of orange-gold. “Patriotic,” he muttered, and smiled at the feeble joke, mostly because nobody was there to see him being irrationally amused by lichen.
He closed his eyes, letting out a long breath. It was funny, but with his cheek against it, he could feel the faintest warmth in the stone. Apparently the early sun had managed to peek in here and rest on the stone for a while; and since the wind had dropped off, the sensation was even more noticeable.
Ronan blinked: then blinked again, concerned, because he knew somehow that more time had gone by between those two blinks than should have. He fumbled his phone out of his pocket and started thumbing at the buttons. If I’m gonna doze off, he thought, better set an alarm. Not that the idea of dozing off bothered him at all. In fact it was probably the best way to spend the time between now and when it would be safe
to go home, because otherwise he would just lie here thinking of more ways that his life sucked.
And going-home time is when? he thought. Three thirty, I guess. No sports on today, but I still wouldn’t hurry back if everything was okay.
He put 15:30 into the phone’s alarm settings and shoved it back in his pocket; then looked out between the stones toward the gray sea, and sighed. Ronan folded his arms, shifted his shoulders against the stone until he got comfortable again, and leaned his head back once more. The stone was still warm.
Amazing how it holds the heat from so long ago, he thought. Who’d’ve thought it…
He blinked again.
***
He realized his eyes were closed, and there was a faint glow past them. “Sorry, lost it there,” he muttered, blinking once more.
He looked up from where he sat on the low wall in front of the house, gazing at Bray Head. Its peak was hidden by cloud, as happened a lot this time of year, but the weather had been creeping toward that all day. Down here, though, the day was one of those weirdly luminous ones where you never see the sun, but all the landscape around shares in the glow, looking irrationally distinct despite there being so much cloud about. “It’s okay,” said the one sitting next to him.
For the moment Ronan was comfortable enough not to bother turning around to look at him. “Couldn’t be arsed,” he muttered under his breath.
“To what?”
Typical that Pidge wouldn’t get it when he needed him to. “Move,” Ronan said. “Do anything useful. I’m just so fecking tired of it all. School. The idiots in it. Home. The world. Everything.” He flipped his hands in the air. “What’s the point, even.”
“They were at you again,” Pidge said.
“Seamus and his scurvy crew,” Ronan muttered. “No avoiding them, and every single time they’ve got a new line in shite. You roll over and let them have their way, it just gets worse.”
He rubbed his forehead: then caught himself—because that was the thing his Da did—and dropped his hand in his lap. “I tried texting you,” he said. “Where were you?”
“Doesn’t matter much if I wasn’t where you needed me,” Pidge said, sounding unhappy. “Sorry about that.”
Ronan blinked. A lot of the time, Pidge could be pretty scathing about “getting all feel-y”: it was rare to hear him be so open. But when he did it was worth listening to, and Ronan always made sure to let him know he was listening. “It’s okay.”
“Still,” Pidge said. “Sorry.”
Ronan nodded, reached out and patted him on the shoulder. “Okay. Lay off it now before I start freaking. Had enough of that already today.”
“Um. Yeah, right.”
They sat there for a few moments watching the traffic go by. Something about the image tickled the back of Ronan’s mind, something off about it; but he couldn’t think what just now.
“Because really,” Pidge said. “Hate to miss a chance to catch up with you finally. Think think think every second, your brain’s buzzin’ like a wasps’ nest all the time. Finding a quiet moment to get a word in edgewise, that’s the challenge…”
“Is it?”
“You have no idea.”
For some reason this didn’t seem an unusual thing for Pidge to come out with. “Okay,” Ronan said, amused, “say your piece then.”
“‘S nothing much except about you getting upset.”
“Not at you.”
“Didn’t think so. But at what was going on…”
Ronan shook his head. “Did all I could,” he said. “I just wish sometimes there was more. It’s never enough.”
“Though if there was a way you could make a difference—do something bigger?—something that really changed things—”
“‘Course I’d do it. You kidding?”
“No.”
“Well, yeah then! Because if you could change stuff, you’d have to. Can’t leave things the way they are.”
“No?”
“Jeez no, it’d be criminal. A fecking sin.”
“Don’t usually hear you getting religious.”
“Feck no you don’t,” Ronan said. “You’d know better, I’d have thought.”
“Mostly I do.”
“Well then.”
They were quiet together for a moment. “But yeah,” Ronan said. “Religion’s nothing to do with it! This is just about doing the right thing. Not like you should need religion to tell you that! If you could help in some big way and you didn’t, it’d be like walking away from a hit-and-run, wouldn’t it! If you can help, then you have to, really. Otherwise everything’ll go to hell.”
“It’s doing that already, some people say,” Pidge said. He sounded somber. “Everything runs down, no matter what you do…”
“Yeah, well. It does. But you still do what you ought to, yeah? Just letting it go because the odds are stacked against you, what’s the point in that?”
“But if sometimes it got dangerous—”
Ronan shrugged. “My Da says you could get hit by a truck any time just crossing the street,” he said. “If you were doing something that mattered and it got dangerous sometimes? Seems like it’d be worth it.”
“Saving the world?”
Ronan snorted. “Like I could do that.”
“But if you could? Even just a little? Would you dare?”
The wording was odd, though no odder than some of the things Pidge said sometimes. “I’d dare a lot more than that.”
“You sure?”
Ronan looked at him with affectionate scorn. “How sure do I have to be? You want me to stop and run a fecking referendum? Yeah I‘m sure.”
“What if you could, I don’t know… have some kind of power… to help do the daring with?”
“What, like turn into some kind of superhero?” Ronan snickered. “Got a radioactive spider on you somewhere?”
Pidge laughed. “Think that was meant to be a one-off.”
“Yeah, I’d have thought.”
They sat quiet together for a few moments in the bright morning. “But what if there really was some kind of power? And not just for one person.”
Ronan breathed in and out a little more quickly than he had been at the thought. “Have to be a secret, I’d think.”
“It is, usually.”
A strange feeling started creeping along Ronan’s nerves. It was like the shiver that sometimes went with your hair standing on end… except that it brought with it a strange feeling of anticipation, of being about to hear something that could change the world. And how does that even happen just sitting here on a wall? he thought. Yet everything was suddenly freighted with that feeling that something more than usually meaningful was about to happen, was already happening, that you could change the world just sitting on a wall and this was what it looked like—
“Your choice, of course,” Pidge said. “Some people let some others know, after it happens to them. Assuming they get through it okay.”
Ronan sat quiet for a moment. “How many other people have this?” he said. “This power, whatever it is?”
“Considered one way, lots,” Pidge said. “Considered another: never enough.”
The words, the difference in Pidge’s words, gave Ronan a bit of a case of goosebumps: but not in a bad way. It was like his body had a sense that someone else, not Pidge, was talking, at least some of the time. And this was someone way more, or different, or other—but that this was still okay.
“A lot of them here, though?” Ronan said.
“This world, you mean? A fair number.”
“This country?”
“Same,” Pidge said. “If you walked down Main Street from here to, say, where it starts to be Little Bray? Odds are good you’d pass at least a couple wizards.”
“Really? Real wizards?”
Pidge shrugged. “Everybody’s gotta shop sometime…”
Ronan laughed a little under his breath. “So you can’t just stay home and magic up cash from the cash machine, o
r say ‘Abracadabra let a trolleyful of stuff from the Tesco appear!’”
Pidge shook his head. “Not really the way it works.”
Ronan made a scoffing face. “Pff. What kind of magic is that?”
“The real kind,” Pidge said.
The goosebumps came up again. “Meaning?”
“You talk to the world in the language it was made in,” Pidge said, “and hear it talk back. Tell it how you’d like it to change, and… if you can get it to say yes… change it. Understand what makes things work… and get them to work differently, because you asked them to.”
Ronan swallowed, his mouth suddenly gone dry: swallowed again. He had to work at it, because the vista that had suddenly opened up before him was like looking up at the everyday sky and seeing it crack open and show you what was on the other side. In fact it was as if he could see that crack, somehow, in his mind: see how a world that had seemed little and dry and arid and hopeless had suddenly been hit by something, something from outside, and sprung ever so slightly open along that fault line to reveal a thin fierce gleam of something hot and deep and real. It was too narrow a crack for him to see detail through it… but it was there, and it seemingly laughed under its breath at mere physical reality and waited to see what he would do.
When he came back to himself a little Ronan realized that he was shaking, actually shaking in reaction to the sheer size of what he was apparently being offered—not so much a way out, but a way in, into something more than he’d ever believed possible. And Pidge was sitting there with his head cocked to one side, watching him, waiting. “You up for some of that?” he said.
“Up for it?” Ronan said, amazed by how rough his voice came out. “I was born up for it.”
“Yes you were,” Pidge said. “The basic requirement. Worth more than a whole boxful of radioactive spiders.”