Rainbow's End by Katie Flynn

painful that she felt she could not bear it.
    ‘Pretty, W’m . . . wanna pretty,’ he kept saying over and over, and the look on his face, the sadness, the longing, became mixed with something else, a sort of brutish determination. He tugged at her hands, crushing her fingers. She cried out involuntarily with the pain. Grainne was able to tug herself free only because William saw a little beetle running across a patch of sunshine on the whitewashed wall and let go of her in order to squash it.
    Grainne ran from the room. She ran from the house, but then she was ashamed, turned back and reluctantly went in through the door once more.
    In the kitchen Mrs McBride was making soda bread. There was butter in a crock and milk in a bucket and the kitchen smelled warm and good. She said: ‘Did he know you?’ But there was no real hope in her tone, no real questioning.
    ‘No,’ Grainne said flatly. ‘What’s happened to him, Mrs McBride?’
    ‘The doctors say the blow on the head addled his wits,’ Mrs McBride said. ‘He should get stronger in himself, but he won’t get his good sense back. Oh, when he heals he’ll work in the fields and plough the land and shear the sheep. But he won’t ever marry, or read a book, or talk sensible.’
    ‘I’m terrible sorry,’ Grainne said awkwardly. ‘He – he was a lovely feller, Mrs McBride. I really did love him.’
    The older woman looked across her baking at Grainne and nodded. ‘I b’lieve you did,’ she said. ‘But it’s God’s will.’
    ‘It’s cruel hard on William,’ Grainne said, tears trying to choke the words in her throat. ‘He did love to laugh and joke, and he read any book he could lay hands on. Won’t he ever read again, Mrs McBride?’
    ‘No. Doctor says it’s all gone,’ Mrs McBride said. ‘We’ve had a week or two to think about it, so I don’t cry any more. He’ll never leave me now, William won’t. He’ll stay with his mammy and daddy until we all die. He won’t inherit, elder son or no, but we’ll take care of him.’
    That, for Grainne, had been the turning point. Now, she had no reason to stay on the Burren, none to protest that they might survive here without taking a step so dubious as making their way to Dublin city. And she found that she wanted to go now. Without realising it, she had been counting on William’s help to get the farm back into shape and without that help the struggle would be so uphill that she doubted if they would ever attain a decent, normal sort of life again. They could fish, gather seaweed, trap rabbits and perhaps scrape together enough money to buy a few hens, in time another cow, perhaps. But it would be unbelievably hard – and life on the Burren was hard enough in the ordinary course of events. Once she had seen William and acknowledged that the William she loved was no longer there, she discovered what all young lovers know: that every path you have walked with your love becomes a part of the love you’ve shared. It was painful to her to go down to the beach for seaweed, because she had walked the length and breadth of that beach with William beside her. She no longer wished to fish from the currach, because she and William had fished together. The lanes they had wandered, the secret places they had met, were no longer beautiful, sacred, but somehow horrible, because she would never meet William there again. Or not the old William, the man she had loved. Worst of all, in a horrible sort of way, was that the shell of William was still here. She might meet the beautiful face and athletic body at the market, or on the winding road to Ennis. And face to face, she would see the emptiness behind his eyes, see those same eyes, which had once shone with love for her, blank, indifferent.
    ‘I agree with Dadda,’ she had said at last to Fidelma, a week or so after her visit to the McBrides. ‘We should leave. There’s nothing for us here.’
    ‘I don’t want to leave and I won’t,’ Fidelma said