Scarlett - Cathy Cassidy [37]
‘Maybe he’s from Dublin,’ Holly muses. ‘An orphan, sent here to live with his grandparents. Or a runaway, a fugitive from justice, living wild in the woods, stealing eggs and trapping rabbits to survive…’
I bite my lip, because this seems closer to the truth, even though Holly’s version of it makes me laugh. ‘He’s just a boy,’ I tell her. ‘No big mystery’
Holly’s eyes widen. ‘He could be a ghost,’ she whispers. ‘The spirit of a boy who died back in the famine times, or maybe a tourist who got lost on the hills in winter, thirty or forty years ago.’
‘You’re nuts!’ I laugh.
Holly chucks the last of the granary bread out on to the lough, and the three swans paddle furiously into the shallows, gobbling it quickly I scan them for signs of magic, enchantment, but they’re just big white birds, greedy, bad-tempered, with snapping beaks and ruffled feathers, hungry, flapping, scrabbling for bread.
Finally, Mum has got the message. I won’t speak to her on the phone, so she stops calling and starts writing letters instead.
I’ve been through this before. After Dad left, thick letters with bright Irish stamps would plop through the letter box. ‘Does he think he can win you round with a letter?’ Mum would scoff, ripping them into little pieces to drop into the pedal bin. Before long, I was doing it myself. Birthday cards, Christmas cards, letters, all went into the bin, like so much confetti.
Now it’s happening all over again.
I sit by the lough with Mum’s latest letter. I don’t want to hear about private schools or last, last chances and letting people down. Instead, I smooth the paper out, folding it this way and that until I have made a small, perfect, paper boat. I launch it into the water, and a soft breeze catches it, pulling it out into the centre of the lough.
As I turn from the lough, there’s the sound of a car door slamming in the distance, a movement in the trees to my left. This has been happening lately, since the start of the school holidays. Like Kian said, Lough Choill is on the tourist trail for some very keen sightseers. They come to look at the wishing tree, to fish in the lough, to hike across the hills.
When I’m with Kian, we steer Midnight into the woods, silently, or gallop away down the loughside, out of sight. We make ourselves invisible. Today, though, I’m still waiting for Kian to show up, and I won’t let the tourists chase me away. I take out my sketchbook and start to draw the little twisty hazel tree. Its branches are fluttering with wisps of rag and ribbon, and you can still see a red-and-pink sandal peeping through the leaves, if you know just where to look.
The men come striding out of the trees, dark-haired and flint-eyed, smoking and frowning, their eyes scanning all around. They look like brothers, with the same tanned, weather-beaten faces, the same lined foreheads, the same sad, unsmiling mouths. One has a moustache, the other a wide-brimmed hat with a red scarf tied round the brim and a feather in it. Both have the glint of gold round their necks and wrists, and flashy rings on almost every finger. They don’t look like tourists. Not like any tourists I’ve ever seen.
I bend my head back to my drawing, and the men march past, as though I’m not even there. They walk right along the loughside, briskly, until they’re out of sight.
Hazel, I label my picture. Coryllus avellana, in Latin. Choill, in Irish. The tree at the holy well.
I open my notebook and write for a while, listing down all the things that Kian has told me about the tree and the spring. According to legend, the wishing tree is a gateway between this world and some ancient, make-believe world where time stands still.
In that world, in my imagination, the women have long hair and trailing dresses made of velvet, and the men look like extras from