He must have been lying there in the dark, his body cooling, as Aoife was stumbling outside.
Not So Lucky
Nessa sits near the front of the bus, one arm draped around the case beside her, as though it’s the dearest of friends. She watches Ireland streaming past the window.
Ivy and weeds push crumbling houses into the earth, and even trees rise in triumph over the corpses of factories and schools. The beauty of it overwhelms any sense of sadness. In winter, the bright green fields are all glamour in their capes of sparkling frost and the distant hills are little more than daubs of white paint against an intense blue sky.
I shouldn’t be here to appreciate this, she thinks. Nessa’s supposed to be dead. But she’s not, she’s not! She has paid her dues. No one has ever had to go twice to the Grey Land.
They pass through fading towns where only the old remain, and so rare is the sight of a working bus that all conversations stop and many people wave. Do they know there’s a recent survivor on board? They’d make more of a fuss if they did, and Nessa smiles at the thought of it. She smiles at everyone and everything, enjoying even the experience of potholes and roads blocked by cattle and a market at Ardee.
Other children get on there, a group of January-born ten-year-olds heading for a survival college near Balbriggan. She decides she’s not going to think about them for now, for the ninety per cent of them the Sídhe will murder in the next few years. Nessa has survived. She’s off to Dublin for the first time in her life, to see Anto, the boy she loves. A fourteen-year-old like herself, who came back from the Grey Land of the enemy with his life and a large chunk of his sanity intact.
She’s feeling shy already as rusty road signs tick the kilometres down. Will his parents be there? Will they mind if she kisses him? Will they care about the delicate twigs she was left with in place of legs after a bout of polio as a child?
They won’t mind, she decides. Although they might put up a fight if she tries to steal their son away to Donegal. She grins and her cheeks hurt with it, because she hasn’t changed her expression in hours.
And then the bus comes over the suspension bridge near Drogheda to find the Dublin end blocked by a minibus and a government car. It rumbles to a halt with the kids straining their necks to see what’s wrong.
The driver, nine-tenths belly, the rest grey moustache, exchanges a few words with an old policewoman before turning to the passengers. ‘We all have to get off,’ he shouts. ‘It won’t be for long, all right? Ten minutes.’
The pitted surface of the road hosts a group of trench-coat wearing adults that wouldn’t look out of place in a movie.
‘Line them up!’ says a man at the front. And then, ‘Wait! Don’t bother.’ He strides ten paces over to Nessa. The Sídhe have been murdering adolescents for the last twenty-five years, which means this tall stranger may just be old enough to have escaped the Call. But no. There is a strain about his movements that suggests he will never relax again. This man has seen the Grey Land. He would have been one of the first, back in a time when nobody understood what was happening. Before the specially trained counsellors were around to help with the aftermath.
‘This is her, isn’t it?’ He whispers the words, as though it burns his tongue to do so.
Some of the early survivors used food to cope with the trauma. Some turned to drugs, or immersed themselves in bizarre obsessions. Others faded away to nothing. But this man’s muscles stretch his coat to breaking point. He’s the type who’s been training every day, maybe every minute since his Call.
‘Yes, that’s her,’ says a young woman, and Nessa gasps when she catches sight of the beautiful and sad Melanie in the midst of the adults. The girl with a hole in her chest. One of the few students of Boyle Survival College to make it through the school’s destruction.
‘I don’t understand,’ says Nessa. ‘Mister …?’
‘Detective. Detective Cassidy,’ the man says. ‘And I am the one who doesn’t understand.’ He has a hero’s square jaw and his blue-eyed gaze is hot enough to melt a glacier. ‘How …?’ he asks. ‘How did the likes of you survive the Grey Land?’
Nessa refuses to flinch. ‘The same way you did, Detective. I fought the Sídhe and I won.’
Cassidy swings around. He pulls the smallest, feeblest of the untrained ten-year-olds out of the crowd. In the cold air, the boy’s terrified breathing appears in little puffs of mist, but all the stranger does is whisper in his ear, before nudging the little boy towards Nessa.
‘What … what did he say to you?’ asks Nessa. She has never been so confused in her life. She has left her warm jacket on the bus. She badly needs to pee and, above all that, the earlier euphoria of her imminent meeting with Anto is giving way to something more akin to panic.
Out of the blue, the tiny little ten-year-old kicks her bad left leg and down she goes, the frozen ground slamming the air from her chest.
The big man looms over her. ‘Vanessa Doherty,’ he says, his voice stiff with loathing, ‘you couldn’t have escaped the Sídhe. You can’t even beat this little child. I am placing you under arrest for treason.’ She feels handcuffs on her wrists and can’t understand what’s happening. What about Anto? She needs to see him! ‘The Nation will survive,’ he says. ‘I doubt you’ll be so lucky.’
The New Recruit
The bus station stinks of greenhouse tobacco and the damp warmth of a hundred people fighting for tickets on the rare remaining routes. But no matter what their errand, everybody finds time to stop and stare at Anto. It’s that freakish outsized arm of his. The Sídhe gave it to him, of course, and none of those staring will ever understand the pain he suffered at the fairy woman’s hands.
That trauma follows him wherever he goes. It wants to smother him, to leach the world of joy. Yet Anto grins. Nessa won’t let that happen. Somewhere a bus is bringing her closer to him, with that smile of hers, that’s too bright, too intense for any shadow of the Grey Land to withstand. He can’t wait to show her Dublin. He wants her hand in his, her head on his shoulder like the night she risked her life to climb into his bedroom. He can already feel the warmth of her cheek against his neck.
But now he shivers. A pair of policewomen are approaching him and his family with purpose. Please, he thinks, don’t let this be about Nessa.
His parents have brought him here to meet her. He’s thought of little else for days, suffering the teasing of his nine-year-old sister and embarrassing maternal comments such as, ‘She’ll be sleeping in the spare room. I’ll be watching to make sure you keep your paws off!’
But Ma has seen the guards approaching too, and she’s the one to squeeze his shoulder. You can deal with it, son. That’s what she’s saying. And she’s right. Nessa’s had a lifetime of stares, hasn’t she? Anto won’t let her down, so he straightens his back, always sore from the extra weight of the giant arm.
‘Oho!’ says Anto’s dad. ‘They must be coming to give you another medal for all those Sídhe you battered up in Boyle.’
‘Please, Da. I don’t wanna talk about that.’ Anto remembers the crunch of bones. Their screams, their laughter.