Away by Jane Urquhart Page B

little drama, anxious for an outcome of one form or another, and captivated, more than he knew, by feelings of pity and tenderness for the speechless young girl.
    Odd memories of his life before the ideas in books began to direct it circulated through his mind: certain small cities he had constructed in sand as a child, a starlit walk home from Ballycastle on the cliffs after the fair when he was an adolescent, the way he had learned to identify all the ships in Ballycastle harbour and all the small ships he had attempted to make in their image. Where were they now, those fragile constructions of sticks and cloth and string? He recalled the polished clarity of the beach stones under the water where he sailed his toys. He remembered fishing in Lough Crannog – theflash of a silver trout – the stories his grandfather told him in Irish, a hawthorn tree left standing, still standing in the centre of his father’s field. Spring sowing came back to his mind; the morning chill, the mounds of dark earth, himself, his father, the neighbours bent in silent concentration over their meagre plots.
    He moved his legs and shifted the position of his body under the blanket. Light was entering the room. The framed lithograph of the Sacred Heart of Jesus came into focus on the wall and then the sparse furniture of the priest’s kitchen where O’Malley had spent the night. There was a smell of mildew from the priest’s oilskin jacket which hung from a nail on the wall and which was never able to dry fully, and another odour, slightly sour, which emanated from the milk can near the sink. O’Malley realized, with distaste, that little in the priest’s house was fresh; nothing shone with the health and cleanliness of the girl’s hair in the sunlight. He thought of his own rooms; his cottage where a broom had rarely, since his mother’s death, been pushed into its corners, and he knew that the odours here – the smell of a solitary life and celibacy – were familiar to him.
    He flung his legs over the side of the bed and reached for the jumper he had tossed on the floor the previous night. He pulled on his boots, buttoned his trousers, and walked out into the morning, heading for the black beach where the miracle or tragedy had taken place. He would look for materials to build toy boats, he decided, try to regain the joy, the freshness. Perhaps a poem might be composed on the view. But, at the back of his mind, unadmitted, was the hope that he might catch a glimpse of the girl swimming or simply gazing out to sea, or maybe he would be able to hear her sing one of her songs.
    The beach was empty when he arrived. He forgot the toys completely, sat down heavily, and rested his arms on his knees. It wasn’t long before he began to toss the black stones into thewater, one after another, sadly and at lengthening intervals. Their uniformity annoyed him and he searched for a variant, something larger or sharper with which to attack the surf. His grandfather had said that a handful of nails tossed into the advancing waves could cause the children of the sea to become powerless – temporarily. According to the old man it was the ninth wave that was the most potent, the most dangerous. It would have been the ninth wave, then, that caused the change in the girl. There had been a time – long ago – when O’Malley had believed such things.
    He found a bone hairpin as he ran his hands back and forth over the stones behind him. Holding it to the sky, he saw one bright thread of hair trembling in the breeze. Before he began his walk across to the wharf to enquire about the ferry, he wrapped the hair around and around the pin and placed it in the breast pocket of his old cotton shirt. He wondered if he had just missed the girl by a sliver of time.
    When he reached the jetty the bell for eleven o’clock mass had begun to ring. The sky had turned dark and the wind was rising in preparation for another storm.
    When the ferry was cancelled for the