. . . they said on the telly that no one’s come forward yet with the DNA so that baste’s still free . . . the police is out lifting wans off a list of suspects . . . sure she’s as well dead anyway . . . them O’Neill women are left a lonely bunch now . . . sure ye’d never know who’s gonna be next ah have the door locked all day . . . ah hear they reckon she knew who it was that attacked her . . .
Majella realized by the sideways stares that she was rocking on the bench. She got up and told the receptionist that she was heading out for a bit and that she’d be back for her ma. Once outside she glued her eyes to the ground and set off walking at her favorite rhythm. The stroll calmed her though everything felt strange at this hour. The light fell at a different angle. People she hadn’t seen in years were going about their routines. Empty school buses nosed along the street. Delivery vans were double-parked outside shops and busy wee women were pulling tartan trolley bags behind them. It all smelt and felt like being younger, of being got up for school and eating cornflakes in front of the BBC News before the long walk out the road to St. Christopher’s High School. Majella’d been good at school. She usually came near the top of the class without trying. But that wasn’t good enough for Majella’s teachers. Many of them had taught both her ma and her da, and had formed the opinion that Majella had brains to burn from her da’s O’Neill side, but was afflicted by the lazy, crazy Keenan streak from her ma’s side. So Majella never had it easy at St. Christopher’s. Half the teachers needled her about her ma.
. . . It’s not hard seeing where you got the love of your bed from, is it Majella? Your own mother so lazy she wouldn’t even scratch herself when she itched . . .
The other half tried to goad her into doing more with her brains than her da.
Your father was a great scholar. Could’ve been the first of St. Christopher’s to go to university on the free place, but instead he ran off to the States. Then when he landed back home he went straight into the factory. What a waste. Your father had the brains to be a teacher. But he threw himself away on the factory.
Majella’s da’d told her he’d gone to America after leaving school because he wanted to build skyscrapers up to the angels. Majella’s ma said he went to America to escape internment after his involvement with something he called Civil Resistance, which, from what Majella understood, wasn’t the Rah but something that led down the road to the Rah. Majella was hazy on the exact details as this stuff wasn’t covered in history class and everyone spoke about it in mutters while looking sideways as if they were under surveillance. Her da only got one year at the skyscrapers’ business before Majella’s grandad died after getting a hiding in internment. The Brits had released him from Long Kesh before he died. Majella had initially understood this to be an act of kindness, but had it explained to her that dying at home relieved the authorities of a whole lot of paperwork. Majella’s da returned to Aghybogey to help her granny rear Bobby and Marie.
Majella ducked into McQuaid’s garage shop to pick up chocolate and fags before walking towards the bridge. It marked the halfway point of the town, connecting the Taig and Prod sides. In history class they’d learned that the first bridges had been wooden and were repeatedly burned down during battles. When the planters arrived, they built a fireproof stone bridge and an untossable castle. Majella stopped on the hump of the bridge to get the best view of the castle ruins. Phelim O’Neill had tossed the castle on one of his glorious but ultimately doomed missions to drive out the planters. The invaders retreated to the good land on the east side of the bridge, while the Catholics were left with the ruined castle and scraggy bogland to the west. They salvaged stone from the castle to build the houses and walls that gave the town its first real shape. When the town was handed a grant to restore the castle, the archaeologists achieved what US diplomats and millions of pounds of peace funding couldn’t, temporarily uniting both Taigs and Prods against their mission to rescue “original stonework” from the tumble-down walls in the fields around the ruin. Oul wans from both sides of the divide had stood about at street corners or in the shops complaining, wondering whether the archaeologists would be coming into their houses next, to rob the stones from around their heads?
Majella hadn’t minded the archaeologists. She’d been sitting her GCSEs that summer, so she’d loads of study time. Her and Aideen would go to the castle to smoke or share a bottle of Coke and talk to the archaeologists. They weren’t in uniform because of the exams, so they pretended to be A-level students. Bored out of their minds with everything else in Aghybogey, they were happy listening to the archaeologists shite on about the local area, letting them hog the odd joint that Aideen robbed off her brothers. Majella had sunburned over and over again during those few months, sitting down by the river. It had been the hottest summer she’d ever known, the one time she’d got a tan on her arms and legs that had made the rest of her pale skin seem luminous in contrast. She remembered taking refuge under the bridge when it got really hot, near the wet smell of the river and the slippery stones. The archaeologists told them about the battles that had happened on the stone bridge in the olden times. Majella’d liked the sound of those days, when entire clans went hooring off into battle and the river ran red with blood. While she was at school there were only the riots around the Orange marches to look forward to in the run up to summer, or the odd bomb or gun attack for a bit of excitement. Every now and then an American newspaper or TV crew would come and stand on the bridge where Majella was now, the tossed castle in the background, one foot on the Prod side, one foot on the Taig side, an ironic symbol of a town divided, giving a monologue on the Troubles while people restrained the likes of Francie Kingh from diving into the shot to give the fingers. Before last week, Majella couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen reporters in Aghybogey. It was the Muslim fellas who got all the publicity these days. Aghybogey had to make do with hosting the PhD students who’d come and spend days trying to get to know the “post-conflict” community, trying to dig up the sort of memories that most people knew were best left buried.
Majella leaned over to look into the river. It ran slow and deep. She’d sometimes seen dead sheep in it as a child, which confused her as sheep didn’t come across as natural swimmers. Her granny had explained that the sheep hadn’t drowned swimming: farmers dumped diseased or dead sheep into the river to get rid of them. It was around that age that Majella realized that the world in her library books, in which children went rambling on moors and swimming in rivers, was different to her world. She couldn’t imagine camping in the black boggy fields of Aghybogey without tripping over British soldiers or risking a landmine. She couldn’t picture buying eggs from the shotgun-armed farmers or drinking tea made from river water polluted with diseased corpses. And there was only her on her own. Majella had no cousins. No dog. Her only “chum” was Aideen, who drank Coke instead of ginger beer (whatever that was).
Majella took a last drag on her fag, then dropped it into the sluggish waters below. The weak sunshine was warm on her broad back. She stretched and yawned before ripping open her Lion bar for a bite of breakfast.
9:50 a.m.