Bogmail Read online

  Guiltily, he put away the magazine and idly picked up a coupon advertisement from the bedside table, which had been filled in by Eales, who else? Incredulously, he read aloud:

  Increase your partner’s pleasure—and your own—at a stroke! Send for our new heart-shaped pillow today, place it under her bottom, and ‘feel’ the difference! Choice of foam rubber or hot-water filled. Ergonomically designed. Guaranteed success. Order before 3rd September and receive free rubber lust finger by return post, a must for the truly modern lover.

  Pondering the meaning of ‘ergonomically’, he crossed the landing to his own bedroom and took down an old edition of The Concise Oxford from the bookshelf but the only word that resembled the word he wanted was ‘erg’, a unit of work or energy. He would ask Potter. He was an engineer, he was bound to know. Absentmindedly, he opened the fifth volume of the 1911 edition of Britannica and extracted a single-page letter from between the endpapers. He had bought the encyclopedia for ten shillings at a jumble sale in Sligo one Saturday afternoon over twenty years ago. It was the bargain of a lifetime and the only literary work he possessed, apart from the dictionary and a biography of Schumann. Holding the volume to his nose, he inhaled deeply. The vaguely sooty smell of the spine always gave him a frisson of esoteric pleasure that was increased by the fact that many of the articles were long since out of date and totally unreliable.

  As he read the letter, which he already knew by heart, he could not help wondering at the impulse that made him wish to re-experience the paralysing pain of uncertainty in his chest.

  Dear Eamonn,

  Only three more weeks, only twenty-one days and nights. How I long to escape from behind these walls, to see you again, to see you every day. I keep thinking of that evening under the Minister’s Bridge and the strange thing you did to me. I’ve been trying to find out if the other girls know about it, but whenever I hint, they look blank. As our English teacher says, I hold there is no sin but ignorance. It’s lights out in a minute. I must end. A hundred kisses and one last one from your loving

  Cecily

  That was before the Christmas holidays, and he hadn’t discovered the letter until after Easter. God only knows what strange things he had done to her since then. Mercifully, he was still in time to save her from the unspeakable refinement of the lust finger.

  3

  It was Saturday evening, the pub was crowded, and Roarty was at his most landlordly. After pouring himself the fourth double since dinnertime he had gone with no perceptible outward change through what he called the well-being barrier. It was always the same. The first double had no effect and neither had the second; the third thawed him; the fourth warmed him; and the fifth lit a taper in his mind that penetrated the internal murk, colouring it like a winter moon bursting through heavy cloud. The self-destructive edge vanished from his thoughts, words flowed as bright as spring water, and laughter came easily and for no overt reason. Between the fifth and the eighth double he lived on a plateau of unconsidered pleasure, which he tried to prolong until closing time. The tenth double was always followed by swift deterioration when the commonest words became tongue-twisters and thought came slowly like the last drop from a squeezed lemon. That was to be regretted, and it was a stage he usually avoided. He liked to arrange matters so that his ‘tenth’ coincided with closing time. Then after he and Eales had washed up, he would scorn the optic and pour himself what Potter called ‘a domestic double’ straight from the bottle. This he would take to his bedroom and sip as he read his ‘office’ for the day, an outmoded article on some aspect of science from the scholar’s Britannica.

  Pulling a pint for a tourist in search of local colour, Roarty listened with enjoyment to the never-ending catechetical conversation between Crubog, Cor Mogaill, Rory Rua, Gimp Gillespie and the Englishman Potter who, though new to the glen, was learning fast.

  ‘Why do seagulls no longer follow the spade or the plough?’ asked Crubog.

  ‘Because of the lack of earthworms in the sod,’ said Rory Rua, who had heard this conversation before.

  ‘And why are earthworms as scarce as sovereigns?’ demanded Crubog.

  ‘Because the artificial manure is killing them,’ Cor Mogaill sniggered.

  ‘It’s time you all found a new topic for conversation,’ Rory Rua complained.

  ‘Would you prefer if we talked about you?’ Cor Mogaill sneered.

  ‘When we used to put nothing on the land but wrack and cow dung,’ said Crubog, ‘the sod was alive with earthworms, big fat red ones, wriggling like elvers as the spade sliced them. And the sky would be thick with gulls on a spring day, there would be so many of them. Now you could dig or plough from June to January without even attracting the notice of a robin. The fertiliser has killed the goodness in the soil so that not even an earthworm can live in it. How can you grow good oats in dead earth? Answer me that Rory Rua.’

  ‘You’re all mad, the whole lot of you,’ Rory Rua said. ‘I’m going up to McGonigle’s for a sensible conversation.’

  ‘Good riddance!’ Cor Mogaill said when Rory Rua had gone. ‘He’s the ruination of all crack and conversation. He can think of nothing but the price of lobsters.’

  ‘And land!’ Crubog put in. ‘He keeps pestering me to sell him my large mountain acreage.’

  ‘But to get back to what we were talking about,’ Gimp Gillespie, the local journalist, interposed. ‘What we need is humus. Science has upset the natural cycle. Render to the earth the things of the earth and to the laboratory the manufactures of science.’

  ‘Who said that?’ Potter asked. ‘I’m sure I’ve heard it somewhere before.’

  ‘How many tons of earth does your average earthworm turn over in a year?’ Crubog would not be deflected. ‘Answer me that, Cor Mogaill. And you can consult your personal library if you like!’

  Cor Mogaill, a youth of no more than twenty, saw himself as the village intellectual. He never came to the pub without his knapsack, in which he kept his bicycle pump, certain back copies of The Irish Times and A History of Ireland by Eleanor Hull. He would then spend the evening trying to start an argument to provide him with an opportunity of consulting what he called his personal library. Now he looked critically at Crubog but the knapsack remained on his back.

  ‘What do you know about the physiology of earthworms, Crubog?’

  ‘I’ve had it on the best authority. I read it twenty years ago in The People’s Press, while you were still doing everything in your nappy. The answer is forty tons, not an ounce less. A Bachelor of Agricultural Science could put the spool of his arse out without achieving that. Now I’m going to pay my daily tribute to nature and improve the quality of the soil.’

  ‘I’ll join you,’ said Cor Mogaill. ‘We’ll carry on our conversation and kill two birds with one stone.’

  ‘No, we won’t. The recipe for a long life is to shit in peace and let your water flow naturally.’ Crubog laughed to himself on his way to the outside lavatory.

  It was an evening of energetic conversation. Crubog was at his most engaging, full of trenchant anecdotes and antique lore, and Gimp Gillespie and Cor Mogaill drew him out with unobtrusive skill to the evident delight of the Englishman Potter, who presided over the conversation with an intellectual discrimination befitting a man who saw himself as something of a scientist. Their talk took colour from the obscurity of the topics and the need of the speakers to make up for their relative ignorance by embroidering their thoughts with humorous whimsy. First, they considered if a doe hare drops all her litter in one form or if she places each leveret in a separate nest for safety’s sake. When they had failed to find an answer, they turned to the trapping of foxes. Here Gimp Gillespie proved the most knowledgeable or at least the most confident of his opinion. He surprised everyone by saying that he would bet the shirt on his back that a dead cat, preferably in an advanced state of decomposition, was the best bait because a fox could wind it even on a windless night. When Cor Mogaill demanded to know the source of this unli
kely piece of intelligence, Gillespie told him that he’d had it from Rory Rua, who’d read it in The Farmers’ Journal.

  ‘You can’t rely on Rory Rua! He still counts on his fingers.’

  Crubog, however, was not to be silenced. He demanded to know how curlews, when feeding inland, can tell that the tide has begun to ebb and that it’s time to make for the shore. And he posed the question with such an air of dark omniscience that Potter said it was just as well they did not have an ornithologist in the company because his specialist knowledge would kill all conversation.

  Now and again they tried to draw Roarty into their circle but his mind was anchored elsewhere. This evening the faces on the other side of the bar seemed far away. He longed to be one of them, to share in their easy banter, but the memory of last night’s dream occupied the length and breadth of his thoughts.

  He was a boy of twelve again, chasing his ten-year-old sister Maureen in a field full of daisies when suddenly she stopped and said, ‘Bring me that butterfly.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked, sensing that his will wasn’t free.

  ‘Because I want to pull its wings apart!’

  It seemed such a natural desire that he ran after the butterfly, dizzy with its rise and fall in the sunlight and the whiteness of its wings like the whiteness of the daisies in the grass.

  He stopped on the shore of a lake. The butterfly had fluttered over the unruffled surface of the water and rested on a solitary lough lily in the centre.

  ‘You can walk on the water if you don’t look down at your feet,’ his sister explained from behind.

  Reluctantly, he put one foot forward. The water retreated before him, exposing soft peaty mud that cooled the soles of his feet and oozed up between his toes. The earth swallowed the water with a sucking and a gurgling, and the water lily, lacking the support of its natural element, lay besmirched and bedraggled on the dark mud. He examined the stem and the round, dark hole in the heart of the flower. He held it tenderly between his fingers as an ugly green caterpillar poked its head through the hole and crawled over the leaf with odious contractions.

  ‘You’ve pursued evil to its lair,’ Maureen called from the shore.

  ‘And I’ve found it at the heart of beauty.’ There was a lump in his throat as he spoke; he couldn’t trust himself to utter another word.

  The tenderness he experienced as he held the lily between his fingers and his horror at the ravishment of the flower merged in dark vexation, and he lost count of the number of drinks in a round.

  ‘Roarty will have the answer,’ said Crubog. ‘After all he’s the second best snipe shot in the county.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Roarty asked, measuring a large Glenmorangie for Potter.

  ‘How does the snipe beat his tattoo in the spring?’ Crubog asked.

  ‘What tattoo?’

  ‘How does he drum?’ Potter rephrased.

  ‘With his outer tail feathers,’ Roarty replied. ‘He holds them out stiffly at right angles as he swoops.’

  ‘Wrong,’ said Eales. ‘Every one of you is wrong.’

  ‘Enlighten us,’ said Roarty, reddening beneath his beard.

  ‘With his syrinx, of course,’ said Eales.

  ‘Fair play to you, Eamonn,’ said Cor Mogaill, enjoying the rising tension.

  ‘With his syringe?’ enquired Crubog who was hard of hearing.

  ‘Syrinx,’ Eales shouted. ‘That’s how most birds make sounds.’

  ‘But the snipe’s drumming is a horse of a different colour,’ said Roarty.

  ‘I’ll bet a double whiskey I’m right,’ said Eales.

  ‘And I’ll bet a bottle,’ said Roarty who did not take kindly to being challenged by his Kerry-born barman.

  ‘Can I keep the bets?’ Crubog asked hopefully.

  ‘Can you prove you’re right?’ Eales smirked.

  ‘Not this minute. I’ll look it up after closing.’

  It was half-past eleven by the clock, and they would expect twenty minutes to drink up. He put two towels over the dispensers and went out the back for a breath of cool air, only to be disappointed. It was a muggy night with a faint breeze that died away every so often, leaving him becalmed by the back door with a constriction in his throat that made breathing difficult. The eastern sky was a mass of inky cloud, a sagging roof that pressed down on the tops of the hills and obliterated both moon and stars. Those rain clouds had come up since dinnertime, and, surprisingly, no one in the pub had mentioned them. He listened to the hum of conversation from the bar, thinking that a pub at that hour was the most unreal place on earth.

  ‘Where is your proof?’ asked Eales when they had washed up and the last customer had gone.

  ‘In my encyclopedia. I’ll go fetch it.’

  He went up to his bedroom and scanned the article on ‘Snipe’, too distraught to take pleasure in being right.

  The house was quiet now; the last few stragglers had taken the country roads home. Sadness and impossible longing choked him as he remembered summer evenings with Cecily at the piano in her room, the whole house flowing with liquid music. ‘On the Wings of Song’, ‘Für Elise’, ‘Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring’: all the old favourites. The purity of those evenings brought a tear to his eye. The purity of those evenings gone forever.

  After he had found the letter to Eales in the wastepaper basket, he wrote to Maureen asking her to invite Cecily to London for the summer. It was not what he would have wished but he didn’t have a choice. If she came home, it would be to the lust finger; and if he sacked Eales for no good reason, she would never forgive him. Even if he did sack him, he felt certain he wouldn’t leave the glen. He was sure to find another job in the neighbourhood and continue to defile Cecily. Now all his precautions had come to naught; Eales was planning to go to London next week. He didn’t say why; he didn’t have to. Roarty’s hands shook with rage and frustration. Eales was evil. Eales must be destroyed.

  He found himself halfway down the stairs, clutching the twenty-fifth volume of Britannica in his right hand, the fingers opening and closing involuntarily on the spine. Eales was behind the bar, bent over a barrel, examining a length of plastic tubing.

  ‘Now let’s see your proof,’ he said without looking up.

  Roarty raised the book in both hands and brought it down with all his might on the back of Eales’s head. The breath went out of him with a reedy murmur as his head hit the edge of the barrel. He grasped the barrel with both hands in an attempt to get to his feet. The barrel rocked. Roarty raised the book again. Eales sank on his haunches and fell back on the floor without as much as a whimper.

  Roarty shuddered, more in fear than in horror. He had acted without forethought, on the spur of the moment, not the kind of thing an intelligent man would do. What if someone had been passing and Eales had called out in his agony? Luckily, Eales had succumbed in silence, and as far as he could see, there was no blood to tell the tale. But what if he was just stunned? He placed a newspaper under his head and got a hand mirror from the kitchen, which he held to his mouth and nose, but there was no condensation. Difficult though it was to credit, Eales must have died instantaneously from the severity of the shock. The mirror test was not foolproof, however. According to Sergeant McGing, who was an authority on such matters, the surest indication of death was the temperature of the rectum falling to 70°F or below. He resisted the temptation to fetch the thermometer from his bedroom; there was a limit to what he was prepared to do in the interest of science. Besides, the body was still warm. It might take an hour or more for the temperature of the rectum to drop to 70°F. As an afterthought he felt Eales’s pulse without detecting any perceptible stir in the bloodstream. He noticed a trace of blood on the upper lip where it had hit the rim of the barrel. As a precaution, he placed a plastic bag over the head and tied it round the neck with a piece of string. Eales had an uncommonly thick neck, very much like a round of bacon. It was something he had not noticed before, and quite possibly neither had Cecily. Only that could account
for her inexplicable infatuation with the newly deceased.

  He took the stairs two steps at a time, reaching the toilet not a moment too soon. His bowel movement was the swiftest and most satisfying he had experienced since his mother gave him an overdose of Glauber salts at the age of eleven. She would have been surprised to learn that homicide was an even better physic.

  The relaxing effect of his evacuation was short lived, however. He was sweating profusely, a cold clammy sweat that drenched his shirt under the arms and made tickling rivulets down his forehead and into his eyebrows. Descending the stairs, he felt weak at the knees and very thirsty. As he reached for the Black Bush and unscrewed the top, the immensity of the next problem—how on earth to get rid of the body—stayed his hand. He returned the bottle to the shelf and filled a tumbler with water from the tap. Though he felt uncomfortably sober, he could not risk having another drink. If he was to make this a perfect murder, he would have to act with forethought and intelligence. He told himself to collect his thoughts, but when he tried, he found that coherent thinking was beyond him. A hundred random thoughts flashed before him but none remained long enough to connect with any other. His mind was a sieve pouring thoughts like so much water. To encourage concentration he sat at the deal table in the kitchen with an open notebook before him. Thought now came haltingly, and when it did he wrote down eight words before they had time to vanish into the back of his mind:

  Fire › range

  Water › sea, lough

  Earth › garden, bog

  Burning was impracticable; he had only a range to rely on. And roasting flesh, fat and bone would raise an unearthly stink in the village. That left him with immersion and burial, and of these he favoured the first because it involved less work. He could drive west to the sea cliffs and heave the body over the edge into the water. Or he could tie a weight to the body, row out into the bay, and cast it overboard. As he imagined these actions in detail, he saw immediately that there were snags. He was reluctant to take out his boat in the dark, as he did not know the position of submerged rocks well enough to be entirely confident. Besides, there were houses along the shore, and it was just possible that he might meet someone. And what if the body was washed ashore? In the inevitable autopsy the forensic pathologist would discover that there was no saltwater in the lungs, and that therefore death was not the result of drowning. There would be an investigation into the cause of death, and questions, searching questions, would have to be answered. Of course he could dump the body in one of the mountain loughs, but as they were a fair distance from the road, he would have to hump a twelve-stone carcase uphill for more than a mile. Not an inviting prospect on a dark night and over rough ground.