Shade by Neil Jordan Page B

way.
    “I’ve got just the job for you, George,” she said, “just the job for you.”
    The phrase was Dan Turnbull’s, which seemed apt enough for the business at hand. Apt enough too was Dan Turnbull’s hose, threading its way through the limp tomato plants that seemed to exhale in rows in the greenhouse. Nina dragged out the hose, turned on the spigot and watched the India-rubber respond as if an invisible snake was coursing through it.
    “Stand to attention, George,” she ordered. “Like a soldier,” she added when she saw his mudcaked face puzzled by the concept of attention.
    So George stood upright, his right hand frozen to his eyebrow the way he’d seen the soldiers do it in South Quay Barracks. And Nina circled round him with her cleansing spray which became a punishing jet when she pressed her finger to the nozzle. Which transferred the river’s mud from George to the cracked panes of the glasshouse behind him.
    “Do you know what Hester thinks,” said Nina dreamily, watching George’s hair part under pressure from the hosepipe.
    “Hester the Pester,” said George, his mouth hardly moving, military style.
    “What does Hester think?” asked Janie, who was lying face down with the doll by Nina’s feet.
    “Hester thinks we might be friends . . .”
    Dan Turnbull thought they must be friends. So after he had lifted Nina into the cart he had hitched on to Garibaldi, the grey mare, he lifted Janie and George too. He neglected to lift Hester, who Nina had left beside the India-rubber hose and the mud-splattered glasshouse. George surmised that she belonged to the house, the river and the chestnut tree and so couldn’t come along for the ride. It was not, he decided, that she wasn’t wanted on this journey through the fuchsia and honeysuckle hedges, with the low hum of bees drowned by the rattle of the cart’s metal wheels, it was just that she wasn’t thought of. There were indeed other things to think of, like the dark soft hair of the girl beside him, darker than the shadows of the brown cows standing in the fields, melting in the heat of the midday sun. Like the appeals of the children that ran from every cottage, begging to clamber on for the ride. But Dan wouldn’t take them, would he. All Dan would carry was Nina, George and Janie, because he was collecting seaweed for the flowerbeds in Baltray House and hadn’t room for more than three. “So get off that trailer, Buttsy Flanagan, and crying won’t help you, will it, Nina?” And Nina said no, crying wouldn’t help one bit.
    But the truth was Nina didn’t take Hester because for once, on that Saturday morning, she had no need of Hester. She would have exchanged the company of Hester, Emily and whatever incorporeal friend she could ever imagine for the company of those two beside her on Dan Turnbull’s cart.
    Dan guided the mare towards the estuary mouth, where the large granite boulders broke away into scraps of fossilised stone, where the Lady’s Finger pointed towards an invisible spot in the hot sky above, at the apex of the triangle of river and sea. Across the warm, lazy river was the random straggle of huts around Nina’s father’s fish factory.
    Dan forked the seaweed that clung to the rocks by the water’s edge, wet clumps of brine-smelling tendrils the colour of dried blood.
    “That’s hair,” said Nina.
    “What’s hair?” asked Janie.
    “A woman’s hair,” said Nina.
    “Hester’s hair,” said Georgie.
    And Nina told them what her father had told her, the story of the spring and the foaming water and the girl who ran from it until she was caught by the waters here, at the mouth of what would become the Boyne river. And if the limestone tower was her finger, the seaweed must surely be her hair.
    “Her hair,” said George, sitting on a rock at the water’s edge.
    “Yes,” said Nina, “her hair.”
    “No, her hair,” said George again, pointing down.
    And Dan Turnbull thrust his pitchfork in the water below