Ghostwritten Part 35

'Infernal things!' growled Father Wally. 'There's been a spate of them recently. They've reopened the old army range over on Bear Island. Now we're a Gaelic tiger we're getting airs about power. Won't we ever learn? Ireland, and power. Fine by themselves, but bring them together and it all goes wrong, like, like...'

'Kiwi fruit and yoghurt,' said Liam. 'Bitter.'

'We'll be wanting our own satellites next, and nuclear bombs.'

'Ireland pays into the European s.p.a.ce Agency already, doesn't it Ma?'

'There you go,' said Father Wally. 'We're one of the last corners of Europe, and Clear Island is the last corner of Ireland, but it's catching up with us, even here.'

Electrons in my brain are moving forwards and backwards in time, changing atoms, changing electrical charge, changing molecules, changing chemicals, carrying impulses, changing thoughts, deciding to have a baby, changing ideas, deciding to leave Light Box, changing theory, changing technology, changing computer circuitry, changing artificial intelligence, changing the projections of missiles whole segments of the globe away, and collapsing buildings onto people who have never heard of Ireland.

Electrons, electrons, electrons. What laws are you following?

John came down the road from Lios O'Moine with Planck.

'Ahoy there Da!' said Liam.

'Liam? Caught lunch yet?'

'Not yet.'

'Eighteen years of devoted parenting, and all I get is "not yet"? Is your ma here?'

'Present. And Father Wally.'

'Just the man we need. Any chance of turning no fish and no bread into lunch?'

'I confess, I stopped off at Ancient's for contingency sandwich supplies...'

'Aha! My kind of Papist!'

'It's only eleven-thirty,' said Liam a little huffily, rethreading his fishing rod.

'You've got until noon, son,' said John.

John held my arm as we walked. He didn't need to, his feet knew every inch of Clear Island: that's why he moved back here permanently when his blindness closed in. He held my arm because he believed it made me feel like a teenager again, and he was right. We turned left hand at the only crossroads. Only the sounds of wind, gulls, sheep and waves floated on the silence.

'Any clouds?'

'Yes. Over Hare Island there's a galleon one. c.u.mulonimbus Calvus.'

'They the cauliflowers?'

'Lungs.'

'Camphor trees. What colours can you see?'

'The fields are mossy green. The trees are bare, apart from a few hangers-on. The sky is map-sea blue. Pearly, mauve clouds. The sea is dark bottle blue. Ah, I'm an Atlantic woman, John. Leave the Pacific to the Pacificians. I rot if I'm left anywhere Pacific.'

'One of the stupidest things that people say about being blind, is that it's sadder to have been sighted once and to have lost it. I know colour! Are there any boats out today?'

'The Oilean na 'nEan Oilean na 'nEan. And a beautiful yacht anch.o.r.ed off Middle Calf Island.'

'I miss sailing.'

'You'd only have to ask.'

'I get seasick. Imagine being on a rollercoaster, blindfolded.'

'Aye, fair enough.' We walked on for a bit. 'Where are you taking me?'

'Father Wally had St Ciaran's woodwork renovated. Everyone says it's quite something.'

The last warm wind before winter. Way, way, away a skylark sang.

'Mo, I was worried sick about you.'

'I'm so sorry, my love. But as long as n.o.body could reach me, n.o.body could threaten me. And as long as n.o.body could threaten me, you and Liam were safe.'

'I'm still worried sick.'

'I know. And I'm still sorry.'

'I just wanted you to know.'

'Thanks.' Even from John, tenderness made me tearful.

'You were like a one-woman electron in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.'

'How do you mean?'

'I either knew your position but not your direction, or I knew your direction but not your position. What's that noise? A ten-foot sheep?'

'Cows lumbering over to see if we're going to milk them.'

'Jerseys or Friesians?'

'Brown ones.'

'Noakes's Jerseys.'

'What wouldn't I give to stay here like my mother and plant beans.'

'How long until you started itching for your ninth-generation computers again?'

'Well, maybe I'd write the odd paper while I was waiting for my beans to grow.'

Red Kildare's mighty motorbike pulled up, spitting stones and smoke. Maisie was in the sidecar. 'John! Mo!' she had to yell over the engine. 'Mo! Here's a piece of bacon for your wart!'

Maisie put a thumb-sized thing wrapped into aluminium foil into my hand. 'Rub it on your wart before nightfall and bury it, but don't let anyone see or it won't work. Red's milked Feynman. See you at The Green Man later.'

I nodded at Red and Red nodded at me.

'Mind how you go. Red! Frape it!'

The Norton roared away, Maise whooping and flapping her arms like a dragon.

The same pew, the same chapel, a Mo different and the same. I gazed up at the ceiling, and saw the bottom of a boat. I always imagined the chapel as the Ark on Ararat. A smell of new wood, ancient flagstones and prayer books. I closed my eyes, and imagined my mother, a prim woman, and my father, either side of me. I could suddenly smell my mother's perfume, it was called 'Mountain Lily'. My father smelt of tobacco, wheezing slightly as his large stomach rose and fell. He squeezed my hand, turned and smiled. I opened my eyes, suddenly wide awake. John was feeling his way around the organ stops, cleared his throat, and launched into 'A Lighter Shade of Pale'.

Bars, shafts, clefs in stained gla.s.s.

'John Cullin! An anthem of the shameless sixties in a house of G.o.d.'

'If G.o.d can't dig the spirituality of Procol Harum, that's His loss.'

'What'll you do if Father Wally comes?'

'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" pet.i.tion 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" pet.i.tion.'

'People said windmills and ca.n.a.ls 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. 'Sheeps.h.i.t?'

'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. n.o.body 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. n.o.body'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 gra.s.s 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 ma.s.s of St Secaire being celebrated here.'

'What's that?'

'You city slickers, you don't know anything. It's the Catholic Ma.s.s, said backwards, word by word, and the person whom the Ma.s.s 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. n.o.body knows if time is speeding up, or slowing down. n.o.body knows what it is. How much time is there in a day? Not how many hours, minutes, seconds: how much time time do we have? 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?'