The Rye Man Read online

  ‘I apologise – I didn’t realise life was so complicated.’ He felt like a pupil who’d just got his homework wrong.

  ‘Not to worry. Hope everything’s going well for you.’

  And then he was gone. He remembered George’s description and hoped he had not just encountered what might prove to be another thorn in his flesh. While he was by the telephone he rang Emma but there was no reply and he assumed she was working in the outhouse. He intended to ring again during the afternoon but it, too, followed a shapeless sequence of fragmented administrative jobs which left him with a growing feeling of emptiness.

  It was a pattern that the succeeding days and weeks established as a norm, and at times it felt not so much as if he was the driver of the school but rather a kind of mechanic whose job it was to keep the wheels turning smoothly, the person to whom people turned when something went wrong or some part of the system malfunctioned. At the end of the day he felt tired in body and mind but could not always give a coherent account of how he had spent his time. There was too much paper, he knew that with certainty, too many forms and too many documents, impossible to assimilate or reflect upon. The one plus was the children. They were receptive and lively but without street sus, that harder edge of city kids. It frustrated him that he spent so little time with them.

  Jacqueline was the one problem child to emerge. It was possible, even probable, that there were others of various hues, but they still nestled undetected in the corners and crevices of the system. She was no longer frightened of him, but still unable to look at or speak directly to him. He had not yet decided what to do about her and before he made any moves he wanted to speak to Reynolds and find out as much of her background as possible. Despite all his instincts, it was important not to go charging in and risk more harm than good. What he was sure of, however, was that he would not allow the situation to continue a day longer than was necessary.

  *

  As arranged, Quinn turned up at nine-thirty on Saturday morning and they started to dig at the back of the house, following the line of the pipe from the bottom of the kitchen to the first manhole cover where it connected with the waste pipe from the bathroom. They had lifted the flags first, then dug with pick and shovel to make an impression in the gravelly ground, and while he tried to match Quinn’s work rate, he realised with embarrassment that paper blisters were already forming across the tops of his palms. Then gradually, as the hole widened, there was room for only one to do the hard digging and he was occupied by clearing away the loosened earth. A shard of green glass glinted in the sunlight. Emma brought tumblers of lemonade and their hands left muddied prints on the glass. As they worked they both hoped that they were about to uncover the source of the problem, a discovery which would compensate for the labour, but when the pipe was finally uncovered it appeared uncracked, entering flush into the wall, and flowing cleanly into the main drain, its collar of cement intact. Quinn scratched his head and crouched down on his haunches, tiny beads of perspiration running down the sheen of his skin.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I just don’t know, Mr Cameron, where the dickens it’s coming from. The drains and pipes don’t seem to be blocked or cracked anywhere. It’s a mystery.’

  It was his recurring phrase about the smell and his expression encapsulated all his bewilderment and frustration. As he stood up his boot shed its moulded image in clay. They stood on either side of the raised manhole cover and sniffed like wine tasters savouring a fine bouquet, but there was only the faintest trace of the offending smell. They covered up the pipe again and replaced the pavers. He did not know much about sewerage systems but he tried to throw ideas at Quinn, hoping that one might just jolt a solution.

  ‘Maybe there’s something wrong with the septic tank itself. Maybe it’s just not breaking down the solids. Sometimes it seems as if the gas is pushing back up the pipes and the only place it can escape is back into the house.’

  ‘Aye, but, Mr Cameron, how’s it getting into the house? That’s what I don’t understand. The traps are all regulation and I put new seals round them, so I just don’t know.’

  They walked to the corner of the garden where the septic tank was buried, and using a crowbar, Quinn levered up the lid and slid it slowly aside. He felt a twinge of embarrassment as they stared into the dark well of waste. As the escaping gases puffed up they turned their faces away.

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Quinn, returning his gaze to the black hole, ‘washing machines can set them off. All that hot soapy water stirs up their insides.’

  They stood staring into the circular darkness like eskimos at an ice hole, no longer knowing what to say or how to proceed. Emma made tea and they sat in the kitchen repeating the same ideas and confusions as if somehow repeating them might suddenly spark a solution. Emma aired her frustrations, saying that there was no point re-decorating the bathroom if there might have to be major work done to it. Later, as Quinn was leaving, he told them to call him the next time the smell appeared and in the meantime they should try contacting the council’s Environmental Health Department.

  They spent the rest of the day working in the outhouse finishing off the painting and putting up shelves and the curtains she had sewn herself. They measured the floor to get an estimate for tiles and late in the afternoon the new carpet arrived for the hall and stairs of the house. There was a shared feeling that things were beginning to take shape, slowly falling into place.

  After tea it was still warm enough to sit outside for a while. The south-facing view had been another of the house’s attractions. It stretched unbroken and uninterrupted by other dwellings across the tented triangles of fields, stitched in place by the straight seams of hedgerows and trees. The house was on a raised site and so commanded a perspective that drew the eye into it, shuffling new glimpses with each new focus – the dark smudge of a house, a slow spiral of smoke, a tractor working a field. Directly opposite them the sloping hedgerow, already beginning to tint itself, marked the hidden line of the disused railway line which once linked provincial towns. In the distance the slumbering shape of the Mournes stretched supine and still. They sat feeling good, the satisfaction brought about when work has earned a rest. He reached across and took her hand, startled as so often by the thinness of her fingers, the way her wedding ring slipped on touch. For a second he thought of saying something to her but he did not have the words clear in his head and would not risk fragmenting the calm which had settled over the moment.

  ‘What are you thinking John? Right now, what are you thinking?’

  The suddenness and directness of her question startled him, sending him scurrying for some safe but convincing response. But he hesitated too long and knew she would think he was searching for some half-truth.

  ‘It must’ve been some terrible thought if you can’t tell me,’ she teased.

  He fumbled awkwardly for an escape. ‘I don’t suppose I was thinking much of anything really, apart from how lucky we are to have a view like this.’

  She pushed him lightly with her shoulder. ‘You’re such a liar. Sometimes I think there’s a whole world going on inside your head that you don’t want me to know about. You don’t have another woman tucked away somewhere do you?’

  ‘I can’t keep one woman happy, what would I want two for?’

  Down below, an arrow-head of birds quivered slowly across the sky.

  ‘You find it easy to be happy John, don’t you? Whatever goes on in your head keeps you safe from things. You should teach me how to do it.’

  The lightness had gone out of her voice. He didn’t want the day to end like this. He felt a sudden urge to tell her about his dreams, to let her know he suffered too, but he suppressed it and tried to shift the conversation towards future plans for the garden. He was in mid-sentence when she stood up and walked back to the house and although he called after her she kept on walking.

  *

  That night as they lay in bed he was alert and sensitive, tuned to receive the slightest signal sh
e might give him in the shift of her body, the light brush of her hand, but she finished reading her book and curled herself like a question mark, hugging the pillow to her head. He lay awake until her rhythmic breathing told him she was asleep. He felt restless, his mind like some bird circling the events of the week, swooping to peck at painful moments.

  He slipped out of bed and found his slippers in the gloom. She lay, a soft foetal shape in the bed, somewhere far away from him. On the landing the bare floorboards creaked, polished knots and silver-headed nails gleaming like eyes in the half-light. He remembered when his mother finally persuaded his father to have the house re-carpeted. He could see it clearly with its great floral swirls of red and yellow. She had been so proud of it that for the first few months she had covered the hall floor with cloths when the incursive sun sneaked in through the glazed front door. The past was always protected, neat, tidy, like the armchairs and sofa covered with the starched white antimacassars, the china cabinet with delicate plates and tiny glass ornaments. A fixed, safe world, bound by rule and road and if you played inside them everything would be all right, no harm would ever befall you.

  Something took him to the attic. His eyes had grown accustomed to the dark. The door whined as he opened it but he calmed it with the touch of his hand. All around him sheltered the type of junk that people accumulated, the burrs that stuck unknowingly to the fabric of your life; things which were once important in their old home but had not yet found a place or a useful role in their new one. And there, too, although he could not see it behind the pile of newspapers and tea-chests, squatted the cheap suitcase bought for their honeymoon.

  He closed the door gently and, staying close to the wall, quietly descended the stairs. Something about the house suddenly felt claustrophobic and he wanted to be outside, to drink the cool cleanness of the night air.

  As he stepped outside it felt as if he was diving into a deep pool of silence, each step he took breaking the surface of the stillness. He stood for a few moments under the scree of stars, and then as the coldness began to seep into his body, turned to re-enter the house but stopped dead in his tracks as from across the fields drifted a high, pitiful wail. It echoed itself in an eerie cadence of lamentation. He felt his fear rising and then almost immediately an equal mixture of relief and foolishness as he recognised the sound he had not heard for many years. It was the cry of a fox, probably somewhere along the old railway line. And then, as suddenly as it had come, it was swallowed by the silence of the night, but as he slowly climbed the stairs to their bedroom it coiled itself round his head like wire.

  *

  A week later he called with Reynolds on the way home from school and found him in the garden. He was pruning shrubs, a pair of secateurs in one hand and the scrag-ends of summer bedding in the other. He came towards him across the freshly cut stripes of lawn like a figure on a chessboard. His face carried the mark of holiday sun and although he removed his glove and offered his hand in greeting, his eyes were curious, even suspicious.

  ‘Just tidying up before the weather gets a chance to change.’

  ‘You look like you got the benefit of your holiday.’

  ‘Yes, very pleasant, though Paris is getting very expensive.’

  Neither of them knew whether to use the other’s first name, and they exchanged a few more minutes of small talk before he revealed the purpose of his visit.

  ‘I’d like to talk to you about Jacqueline McQuarrie, if I may. I don’t want to keep you from your gardening, but perhaps you could help me.’

  For a few seconds Reynolds stared blankly at him as if struggling to recall the name from a long-closed file and then he nodded his head to show that he remembered the child under discussion.

  ‘She obviously should be in a special school or a school with a special unit. I was wondering if you could fill me in with some background.’

  Reynolds shuffled the dead stalks against his thigh and brushed some husks off the front of his bodywarmer. ‘Jacqueline’s an unfortunate case as you’ve obviously found out, but I’m surprised Kenneth Vance didn’t fill you in on the circumstances. I think I discussed it with him at the time.’ He paused and for a moment it seemed as though he had nothing more to say. ‘We realised from the start of course, the child couldn’t cope, but there wasn’t a lot we could do.’

  ‘You spoke to the parents?’

  ‘Yes. I had Mr McQuarrie in and discussed it with him but he was of the opinion that it was best for his daughter to stay where she was.’

  ‘Best for his daughter?’

  ‘Yes, that’s what he felt and after offering my professional advice there was little more I could do about it.’

  ‘Did you ask the educational psychologist to assess her?’

  ‘That wasn’t possible. Her parents wouldn’t give permission.’ He put one of the rubber gloves slowly back on his hand and the gesture said the conversation had become tiresome to him. In the front window of the bungalow Reynolds’ wife stood watching from behind the curtain. ‘I think she got some peripatetic help for a while, but I don’t suppose it made much difference.’

  He looked at Reynolds’ bare hand holding the secateurs with its raised tributary of veins, the spreading brown stipples, and the anger he felt inside melted into indifference and a desire to be gone. As he drove away his last view was of a stooped figure shovelling the husks of summer into a black polythene bag.

  *

  Crying softly, almost a whimper, so soft at first that he is not even sure if it’s real or a trick of his imagination. Somewhere far off in a distance beyond time, somewhere inside the layered labyrinth of grainy light which crackles and spits like static. But it grows louder, more insistent, calling again and again, a rhythmic pleading which fastens to his brain and can’t be shaken off. Now, shadowy, disconnected shapes drift in front of his eyes. He blinks, tries to push them aside to see more clearly but they re-form and block his way. What is the distance which separates them? Sometimes it changes – a long, unlit corridor of locked doors, a flight of bare stairs spiralling round a dark well, a laneway hemmed in by thorned hedges. But no matter how much he tries to force his way to the crying child the distance always remains the same. Opaque pulses of light flicker fiercely like a television screen trapped between stations. He tries to focus on the shifting source but stumbles blindly into the sleet of tears. They sting his face. He throws up his hands to protect his eyes. Now his myopic groping grows more desperate because the child calls to him by name. Louder, louder, calling from some amorphous world beyond his reach. Briars whiplash across his face but he stretches out his arms into the receding pool of greyness. If only he could reach its hands, grab hold of the tiny frightened fingers, he could pull it free, pull it into the light of the world. But the more he reaches out, the more the voice slips away into some swirling void. He staggers to its edge, calling out himself now in a quivering voice which skims across the surface of the darkness and then sinks like a stone. And then he, too, is falling, falling . . .

  Into consciousness and Emma shouting at him and shaking him, pulling his head down to her and cradling him tightly. He was still trembling and he could feel the dampness of his sweat sticking to his skin. She was talking to him, calming him, but even as he regained control, began to feel foolish, he still clung to her. Then she was stroking his hair and when she asked him what it had been about, he made up a crazy story and pretended to laugh at his foolishness. But as he curled his body around the contours of hers and waited for sleep to come, he tried to shut away his secret, and as she slipped back into sleep he put his arm around her waist and buried his face in the small of her back.

  *

  On the Sunday morning he had the grass cut before Emma had surfaced. In the country you did not cut grass on a Sunday, but it was early and only a single car had gone past the house. They were not churchgoers and it seemed silly to pretend to observe others’ pieties. There was still a dampness on the grass beading the blades and sometimes the mower spr
inkled a tiny spray of water on his shoes. There was, too, a freshness in the morning air and a calm which softened the mechanical repetition, and he experienced the pleasure of concentrating on nothing but the work.

  After breakfast he still felt the urge to be outside and Emma agreed to join him for a walk. The morning sky was seared with pink and the day felt as if it held the final moments of summer, giving him a desire to use it, to drain the last drops of warmth from it, and as they walked along the narrow roads between the thick wedges of hedgerow he felt almost happy. Sometimes a car passed and they would move into single file or stand safely on the verge. People going to church, their Sunday best making them sit stiffly in their seats, exchanging waves, a nod of the head. Two horses cantered to a gate and stuck their heads over the top bar, their eyes soft yolks of curiosity. Emma pulled grass from the bank and fed them, cautious of their champing teeth, and he teased her about her nervousness.

  Further down the road they came to a bridge which crossed the old railway line and they slipped between the end of the stone parapet and hedge and clambered down the slope leading to the track. The steep banks on each side were a tangled scrub of bush and trees while at the top tall hedgerows disguised the line’s very existence. There were no sleepers, no metal debris anywhere to mark the line of the track, only the raised ridges of grass stretching like steps into the distance. It was a sanctuary for wildlife, birds, and in the soft sandy slopes was sprinkled a maze of rabbit warrens. Probably the fox was there somewhere, too.

  They walked along the line, skirting the marshy stretches where water seeped down the steep sides and soaked into pools of brackish water. In wet weather parts would be impassable. Whole sections had been almost reclaimed by the undergrowth and he had to push a way through, carefully holding branches open like a door so that they would not spring back into her face. Everywhere were secret covens of foxgloves fading into withered shadows of themselves, and festering blisters of toadstools. Sometimes they were startled by a sudden scurrying in the middle of some bush or a bird taking off from a branch overhead and then they had to stop and smile at each other to dispel their unease.