At last I heard the Vespa buzzing, saw the beam of its headlamp coming over the hill. I got my gun back into its holster and opened the door; I didn’t want Cassie to see me fumbling with it. After the darkness her lights were dazzling, surreal. She pulled up in the road, bracing the bike with her foot, and called, “Hey.”
“Hi,” I said, stumbling out of the car; my legs were cramped and stiff, 284
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I must have been pressing both feet against the floorboards the whole time.
“Thanks.”
“No problem. I was awake anyway.” She was flushed and bright-eyed from the wind of driving, and when I got close enough I felt its cold aura striking off her. She swung her rucksack off her back and pulled out her spare helmet. “Here.”
Inside the helmet I couldn’t hear anything, only the bike’s steady hum and the blood beating in my ears. The air flowed past me, dark and cool as water; cars’ headlights and neon signs streamed by in bright lazy trails. Cassie’s rib cage was slight and solid between my hands, shifting as she changed gears or leaned into a turn. I felt as if the bike was floating, high above the road, and I wished we were on one of those endless American freeways where you could drive on and on forever through the night. She had been reading in bed when I rang. The futon was pulled out, made up with the patchwork duvet and white pillows; Wuthering Heights and her oversized T-shirt were tumbled at the foot. There were semi-organized heaps of work stuff—a photo of the ligature mark on Katy’s neck leaped out at me, hung in the air like an afterimage—scattered across the coffee table and the sofa, overlaid with Cassie’s going-out clothes: slim dark jeans, a red silk handkerchief top embroidered in gold. The chubby little bedside lamp gave the room a cozy glow.
“When did you last eat?” Cassie asked.
I had forgotten about my sandwiches, presumably still somewhere in the clearing. My sleeping bag and my thermos, too; I would have to get them in the morning, when I picked up my car. A fast finger ran down my neck at the thought of going back in there, even by daylight. “I’m not sure,” I said. Cassie rummaged in the wardrobe, passed me a bottle of brandy and a glass. “Have a shot of that while I make food. Eggs on toast?”
Neither of us likes brandy—the bottle was unopened and dusty, probably a prize from the Christmas raffle or something—but a small objective part of my mind was pretty sure that she was right, I was in some kind of shock. “Yeah, great,” I said. I sat down on the edge of the futon—the thought of clearing all that stuff off the sofa seemed almost unimaginably complicated—and stared at the bottle for a while until I realized I was supposed to open it. In the Woods 285
I threw down way too much brandy, coughed (Cassie glanced over, said nothing) and felt it kick in, burning trails of warmth through my veins. My tongue throbbed; I had apparently bitten it, at some point or other. I poured myself another shot and sipped it more carefully. Cassie moved deftly around the kitchenette, pulling herbs out of a cupboard with one hand and eggs out of the fridge with the other and shoving a drawer shut with her hip. She had left music on—the Cowboy Junkies, turned down low, faint and slow and haunting; normally I like them, but tonight I kept hearing things hidden somewhere behind the bass line, quick whispers, calls, a throb of drumbeat that shouldn’t have been there. “Can we turn that off?” I said, when I couldn’t stand it any longer. “Please?”
She turned from the frying pan to look at me, a wooden spoon in her hand. “Yeah, sure,” she said after a moment. She switched off the stereo, popped the toast and piled the eggs on top of it. “Here.”
The smell made me realize how hungry I was. I shoveled the food down in huge mouthfuls, barely stopping to breathe; it was whole-grain bread and the eggs were redolent with herbs and spices, and nothing had ever tasted so richly delicious. Cassie sat cross-legged at the top of the futon, watching me over a piece of toast. “More?” she said, when I had finished.
“No,” I said. Too much too quickly: my stomach was cramping viciously. “Thanks.”
“What happened?” she said quietly. “Did you remember something?”
I started to cry. I cry so seldom—only once or twice since I was thirteen, I think, and both those times I was so drunk that it doesn’t really count—that it took me a moment to understand what was happening. I rubbed a hand across my face and stared at my wet fingers. “No,” I said. “Nothing that does any good. I can remember all that afternoon, going into the wood and what we were talking about, and hearing something—I can’t remember what—and going to find out what it was. . . . And then I panicked. I fucking panicked.”
My voice cracked.
“Hey,” Cassie said. She scooted across the futon and put a hand on my shoulder. “That’s a huge step, hon. Next time you’ll remember the rest.”
“No,” I said. “No, I won’t.” I couldn’t explain, I’m still not sure what made me so certain: this had been my ace in the hole, my one shot, and I had blown it. I put my face in my hands and sobbed like a child. She didn’t put her arms around me or try to comfort me, and I was grateful for this. She just sat there quietly, her thumb moving regularly on my 286
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shoulder, while I cried. Not for those three children, I can’t claim that, but for the unbridgeable distance that lay between them and me: for the millions of miles, and the planets separating at dizzying speed. For how much we had had to lose. We had been so small, so recklessly sure that together we could defy all the dark and complicated threats of the adult world, run straight through them like a game of Red Rover, laughing and away.
“Sorry about that,” I said at last. I straightened up and wiped my face with the back of my wrist.
“For what?”
“Making an idiot of myself. I didn’t intend to do that.”
Cassie shrugged. “So we’re even. Now you know how I feel when I have those dreams and you have to wake me up.”
“Yeah?” This had never occurred to me.
“Yeah.” She rolled over onto her stomach on the futon, reached for a packet of tissues in the bedside table and passed them to me. “Blow.”
I managed to work up a weak smile, and blew my nose. “Thanks, Cass.”
“How’re you doing?”
I caught a long shuddery breath and yawned, suddenly and irrepressibly.
“I’m all right.”
“You about ready to crash?”
The tension was slowly draining out of my shoulders and I was more exhausted than I’d ever been in my life, but there were still quick little shadows zipping past my eyelids, and every sigh and crack of the house settling made me jerk. I knew that if Cassie switched off the light and I was alone on the sofa the air would fill up with layers of nameless things, pressing and mouthing and twittering. “I think so,” I said. “Would it be OK if I slept here?”
“Sure. If you snore, though, you’re back on the sofa.” She sat up, blinking, and started to take out her hair clips.
“I won’t,” I said. I leaned over and took off my shoes and socks, but both the etiquette and the physical act of undressing seemed way too difficult to negotiate. I climbed under the duvet with all my clothes on. Cassie pulled off her sweater and slid in beside me, curls standing up in a riot of cowlicks. Without even thinking about it I put my arms around her, and she curled her back against me.
“Night, hon,” I said. “Thanks again.”
She gave my arm a pat and stretched to switch off the bedside lamp.
“Night, silly. Sleep tight. Wake me up if you want to.”
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Her hair against my face had a sweet green smell, like tea leaves. She settled her head on the pillow and sighed. She felt warm and compact, and I thought vaguely of polished ivory, glossy chestnuts: the pure, piercing satisfaction when something fits perfectly into your hand. I couldn’t remember the last time I had held anyone like this.
“Are you awake?” I whispered, after a long time.
“Yeah,” Cassie said.
br /> We lay very still. I could feel the air around us changing, blooming and shimmering like the air over a scorching road. My heart was speeding, or hers was banging against my chest, I’m not sure. I turned Cassie in my arms and kissed her, and after a moment she kissed me back. I know I said that I always choose the anticlimactic over the irrevocable, and yes of course what I meant was that I have always been a coward, but I lied: not always, there was that night, there was that one time. 17
F or once I woke first. It was very early, the roads still silent and the sky—Cassie, high above the rooftops with no one to look in her window, almost never closes the curtains—turquoise mottled with palest gold, perfect as a film still; I could only have been asleep an hour or two. Somewhere a cluster of seagulls burst into wild, keening cries. In the thin sober light the flat looked abandoned and desolate: last night’s plates and glasses scattered on the coffee table, a tiny ghostly draft lifting the pages of notes, my sweater hunched in a dark blot on the floor and long distorting shadows slanting everywhere. I felt a pang under my breastbone, so intense and physical that I thought it must be thirst. There was a glass of water on the bedside table and I reached over and drank it off, but the hollow ache didn’t subside.
I had thought my movement might wake Cassie, but she didn’t stir. She was deeply asleep in the crook of my arm, her lips slightly parted, one hand curled loosely on the pillow. I brushed the hair away from her forehead and woke her by kissing her.
We didn’t get up till around three. The sky had turned gray and heavy, and a chill ran over me as I left the warmth of the duvet.
“I’m starving,” Cassie said, buttoning her jeans. She looked very beautiful that day, tousled and full-lipped, her eyes still and mysterious as a daydreaming child’s, and this new radiance—jarring against the grim afternoon—
made me uneasy somehow. “Fry-up?”
“No, thanks,” I said. This is our usual weekend routine when I stay over, a big Irish breakfast and a long walk on the beach, but I couldn’t face either the excruciating thought of talking about anything that had happened the previous night or the heavy-handed complicity of avoiding it. The flat felt suddenly tiny and claustrophobic. I had bruises and In the Woods 289
scrapes in weird places: my stomach, my elbow, a nasty little gouge on one thigh. “I should really go get my car.”
Cassie pulled a T-shirt over her head and said easily, through the material, “You want a lift?” but I had seen the swift, startled flinch in her eyes.
“I think I’ll take the bus, actually,” I said. I found my shoes under the sofa. “I could do with a bit of a walk. I’ll ring you later, OK?”
“Fair enough,” she said cheerfully, but I knew something had passed between us, something alien and slender and dangerous. We held on to each other for a moment, hard, at the door of her flat.
I made a sort of half-assed attempt at waiting for the bus, but after ten or fifteen minutes I told myself it was too much work—two different buses, Sunday schedules, this could take me all day. In truth, I had no desire to go anywhere near Knocknaree until I knew the site would be full of noisy energetic archaeologists; the thought of it today, deserted and silent under this low gray sky, made me feel slightly sick. I picked up a cup of dirty-tasting coffee at a petrol station and started to walk home. Monkstown is four or five miles from Sandymount, but I was in no hurry: Heather would be home, with biohazardous-looking green stuff on her face and Sex and the City turned up loud, wanting to tell me about all her speed-dating conquests and demanding to know where I had been and how my jeans had got all muddy and what I had done with the car. I felt as if someone had been setting off a relentless series of depth charges inside my head. I knew, you see, that I had just made at least one of the biggest mistakes of my life. I had slept with the wrong people before, but I had never done anything at quite this level of monumental stupidity. The standard response after something like this happens is either to begin an official “relationship” or to cut off all communication—I had attempted both in the past, with varying degrees of success—but I could hardly stop speaking to my partner, and as for entering into a romantic relationship. . . . Even if it hadn’t been against regulations, I couldn’t even manage to eat or sleep or buy toilet bleach, I was lunging at suspects and blanking on the stand and having to be rescued from archaeological sites in the middle of the night; the thought of trying to be someone’s boyfriend, with all the attendant responsibilities and complications, made me want to curl up in a ball and whimper.
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I was so tired that my feet, hitting the pavement, seemed to belong to someone else. The wind spat fine rain in my face and I thought, with a sick, growing sense of disaster, of all the things I couldn’t do any more: stay up all night getting drunk with Cassie, tell her about girls I met, sleep on her sofa. There was no longer any way, ever again, to see her as Cassie-just-Cassie, one of the lads but a whole lot easier on the eye; not now that I had seen her the way I had. Every sunny familiar spot in our shared landscape had become a dark minefield, fraught with treacherous nuances and implications. I remembered her, only a few days before, reaching into my coat pocket for my lighter as we sat in the castle gardens; she hadn’t even broken off her sentence to do it and I had loved the gesture so much, loved the sure, unthinking ease of it, the taking for granted. I know this will sound incredible, given that everyone from my parents down to a cretin like Quigley had expected it, but I had never once seen this coming. Christ but we were smug: supremely arrogant, secure in our certainty that we were exempt from the oldest rule known to man. I swear I lay down as innocent as a child. Cassie tilted her head to take out her hair clips, made faces when they caught; I tucked my socks into my shoes, the way I always do, so she wouldn’t fall over them in the morning. I know you’ll say our naïveté was deliberate, but if you believe only one thing I tell you, make it this: neither of us knew.
When I reached Monkstown I still couldn’t face going home. I walked on to Dun Laoghaire and sat on a wall at the end of the pier, watching tweedy couples on Sunday-afternoon constitutionals run into each other with simian hoots of delight, until it got dark and the wind started cutting through my coat and a uniform on patrol gave me a suspicious look. I thought about ringing Charlie, for some reason, but I didn’t have his number in my mobile and anyway I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say. That night I slept as if I had been clubbed. When I got into work the next morning I was still dazed and bleary-eyed, and the incident room looked strange, different in sneaky little ways I couldn’t pinpoint, as if I had slid through some crack into an alternate and hostile reality. Cassie had left the old case file spread out all over her corner of the table. I sat down and tried to work, but I couldn’t focus; by the time I reached the end of each sentence I had forgotten the beginning and had to go back and start over. In the Woods 291
Cassie came in bright-cheeked from the wind, curls chrysanthemum-wild under a little red tam-o’-shanter. “Hi, you,” she said. “How’re you doing?”
She ruffled my hair as she passed behind me, and I couldn’t help it: I flinched, and felt her hand freeze for an instant before she moved on.
“Fine,” I said.
She slung her satchel over the back of her chair. I could tell, out of the corner of my eye, that she was looking at me; I kept my head down. “Rosalind and Jessica’s medical records are coming in on Bernadette’s fax. She says for us to come get them in a few minutes, and to give out the incidentroom fax number next time. And it’s your turn to cook dinner, but I only have chicken, so if you and Sam want anything else . . .”
Her voice sounded casual, but there was a faint, tentative question behind it. “Actually,” I said, “I can’t make it to dinner tonight. I have to be somewhere.”
“Oh. OK.” Cassie pulled off her hat and ran her fingers through her hair. “Pint, then, depending on when we finish?”
“I can’t tonight,” I said. “Sorry.”
“Rob,?
?? she said, after a moment, but I didn’t look up. For a second I thought she was going to go on anyway, but then the door opened and Sam bounced in, all fresh and buoyant after his wholesome rural weekend, with a couple of tapes in one hand and a sheaf of fax pages in the other. I had never been so glad to see him.
“Morning, lads. These are for you, with Bernadette’s compliments. How was the weekend?”
“Fine,” we said, in unison, and Cassie turned away and started hanging up her jacket.
I took the pages from Sam and tried to skim through them. My concentration was shot to hell, the Devlins’ doctor had handwriting so lousy that it had to be an affectation, and Cassie—the unaccustomed patience with which she waited for me to finish each page, the moment of enforced nearness as she leaned over to pick it up—set my teeth on edge. It took me a massive effort of will to disentangle even a few salient facts. Apparently Margaret had been easily alarmed when Rosalind was a baby—there were multiple doctor visits for every cold and cough—but in fact Rosalind seemed to be the healthiest of the bunch: no major illnesses, no major injuries. Jessica had been in an incubator for three days when she and Katy were born, when she was seven she had broken her arm falling off 292
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a jungle gym at school, and she had been underweight since she was about nine. They had both had chicken pox. They had both had all their shots. Rosalind had had an ingrown toenail removed, the year before.