Firaz leaned back against the wall.

  ‘Una?’ he asked and, in answer to his own question, called out ‘Una!’

  A bustle of movement outside, of something slithering against wood, then silence. Firaz and Ciara sat like carved stones. Then a double-tap.

  ‘Maybe she can’t answer,’ Firaz said.

  ‘Firaz, why doesn’t she open the door?’

  ‘Maybe she can’t open the door.’

  He wriggled his sleeping bag down, to climb out and open the door that Una couldn’t. Ciara set her hand on his arm. The shock, the violation knocked him back against the wall.

  ‘Firaz, how did she know we were here?’

  ‘Maybe she followed us.’

  ‘She saw us come in and waited until the middle of the night to knock at the door?’

  ‘Maybe she couldn’t. Maybe’s she’s hurt. What if she’s badly hurt, and you left her out there?’

  ‘Firaz, it’s not Una.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘It’s not her.’

  All the time, the steady tap ta-tap on the creosoted pine boards.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Something that wants us to open the door.’

  A single tap, not followed by another. Firaz and Ciara sat in long, dark silence.

  ‘Do you think—’ Firaz whispered.

  ‘You asked me that before,’ Ciara said.

  ‘Yes, but what do you think?’

  ‘Leave it alone, Firaz,’ Ciara said. ‘Leave it. It’s gone now.’

  ‘What if it comes back?’

  ‘I don’t think it will.’

  ‘Why do you—’

  ‘Firaz, I’m tired and I’m scared and all I want is to try and get some sleep.’

  She rolled over away from Firaz, which he liked because he had not forgiven her for her touch on his arm. He heard her move to a less uncomfortable position on her bubble mat.

  ‘I don’t think I can after that,’ he said.

  Her heard her sleeping bag rustle and then the rattling gurgle of her falling back into sleep.

  33

  In the rear wall of the gallery a door opened to a short, dark, arched passage and, beyond that, to a brightly lit terrace, far gone in decay. Beyond the crumbling balustrade the former park was a scrubby wood of sycamore, holly, rowan and hazel. The older parkland trees stood above the gnarl of feral growth. The wild wood steamed in the sun.

  ‘Careful here.’ The man guided Lisa and the kids around a pile of fallen masonry to the house front. ‘More comes down every week.’

  Crooked steps lifted by pale roots led to a wide semicircle of gravel, thick with grass and encroached on by the scrub that had overrun the lawn, but it was still recognisable as the place where cars and carriages once drew up for staff to open doors and guide guests up the steps, under the porch and into the grand rooms of Castlepurvis.

  Through tall, empty windows Lisa saw into the great house. The ruin was absolute. Upper floors had collapsed into lower, bringing down ceilings, interior walls, beams and joists and abandoned furnishings in avalanches of wreckage. The porch pillars stood but the half-shell portico had fallen; the front door lay under banked nettles and brambles. Roof slates, timber, lathe and rotted plaster were piled high on the floor. The chimney breast and the main dividing wall were the only interior structures. A section of grand staircase clung to the wall, steps from nothing to nowhere. Wallpaper hung like peeled skin, black with mould and rain. The house held the reek of rot and decay as close as a bouquet. Plants had colonised the rubble heaps, swatches of fast-growing annuals: purple loosestrife, rosebay willowherb, foxgloves. All run to seed this late in the season.

  ‘It’s a bit sobering, how quickly it all forgets us,’ the man said. Lisa judged him to be in his late thirties; tall, with the build of a rugby player. Never GAA. He was too cherub-faced, his eyes too-clear blue, his hair too wild and pale and curly. A lad from a well-fed family. He spoke with a cheerful, moneyed East Kildare, private-schooled accent. He wore grass-stained jeans and a holed hoodie frayed at cuffs and neck but his boots were high-end Timberland and treated well. The relaxed scruffiness of the true posh. ‘The green eats everything sooner or later.’

  Lisa had met one or two of the posh when she was a wheel-woman. She’d liked them. They had been charming, affable and not at all snobbish. They respected her and her driving. They asked intelligent questions about her art and listened to her answers.

  The man steered them around a pile of fresh rubble – it came down two days ago, he said – to the north front and a dark staircase that ducked down beside the wall.

  ‘Just here. Careful, the steps are slippery.’

  He held the lantern high to light the stone steps down to an open wooden door.

  ‘Wait a moment,’ Lisa said but Saoirse called out Erin’s name. Anthony’s voice answered from below.

  ‘Right then?’ the man said.

  ‘I suppose so.’

  Saoirse went first. The steps were steep and slimy. There was no handrail. Lisa waited until last. She touched a hand to the damp, mould-covered wall to steady her on the steps. She was shivering hard, her teeth chattering. Her hands ached with cold.

  Easy is the descent to hell; all night long, all day, the doors of Hades stand open.

  As if he had heard the Dante in Lisa’s head, the man stood at a dark doorway, lantern held up to shine down a vaulted passage.

  ‘Welcome to Castlepurvis,’ he said. ‘What’s left of it. We’re in the old kitchen. I’ve the range lit and you can get dry and warm up.’

  The kids were already at the door to the great kitchen.

  ‘Dom Purvis,’ the man said as Lisa passed him. He offered a handshake. She took it with a white, numb hand.

  ‘Lisa Donnan,’ she said. ‘From Lough Carrow.’ Now the shivers, the tremors, the weakness, the muscles weakening, the joints giving way.

  ‘Get you in to the heat,’ Dom Purvis said.

  The room was a series of wide vaults held up by squat, sturdy pillars. Lisa’s sense of direction was blurred but she reckoned she was under the ruins of Castlepurvis. Those pillars were the roots of the great house. These were the old servants’ quarters, the downstairs, the unseen people. The wine cellar and the butler’s pantry, and the great kitchen.

  Old jawbox sinks and wooden work benches lined the wall beneath a set of high, barred fanlights, mossy and overgrown. A black-leaded pump dripped into a metal basin. The flagged floor was clean and dry; here were a long table, a handful of chairs, a camp bed and sleeping bag and pillow, hat racks hung with threadbare clothes. Three backpacks, shaving and washing stuff beside one of the sinks. Lisa eyed the wash gels, the face cloth, the sponge with heartfelt desire. Toothpaste. She ached for the welcoming, clinical smell of toothpaste. Shelving covered the far wall, floor to ceiling. When this great vault had fed and watered Castlepurvis, those shelves would have been heavy with pots and utensils, measuring jugs and potato ricers, barding needles and basting ladles. Bins of flour and rice and semolina, crocks for salt and coffee and tea; boxes for string and demijohns of vinegar, glass jars labelled with the names of spices. Now books and folders stood on the shelves, row upon row, leaning against each other, wedged into gaps and stacked cover-down on top of the vertical volumes. The musk of old books was strong. A large plan of Lough Carrow, made up of maps overlain and patched together with tape, filled an adjacent wall. Areas had been highlighted in bold fluorescents. In the gloom Lisa could just make out Post-it notes, labelled and heavily annotated.

  Facing Dom Purvis’s indoor camp was a battery of big iron ranges. Fire burned in the centre oven. Lisa could feel the heated metal on her face, feel it begin to touch the wet and the sickening chill. This was the source of the guiding smoke. Peat was piled against the corridor wall, and in front of the furthest right range turfs leaned against each other like card-houses in drying stacks. Clothes hung from a line slung between two columns. And there: Anthony, in a too-small T-shirt and underpants, cross-legged on the stone floor front of the range. And there: Erin, in a chair, wrapped in a duvet, face glowing with firelight.

  Joy kindled in her. She felt tears. She felt emotions that weren’t dread, or tension, or paranoia. For a moment only. She had a duty here, she had responsibilities. She was the leader now. She nodded to Anthony to join her in the corridor.

  ‘You all right?’

  ‘I nearly died,’ Anthony said, shaking in great, helpless spasms in the damp chill of old, deep stones. ‘Ten minutes away from hypothermia. You?’

  ‘We’re all right. But …’

  ‘Eoin.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You found him.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Shit.’

  Saoirse was at the kitchen door, saturated, dripping, shivering.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Teacher stuff,’ Anthony said.

  ‘Teacher ranger stuff,’ Lisa said.

  ‘It’s about Eoin, isn’t it?’ Saoirse said.

  ‘Well—’ Anthony started.

  ‘I’ll tell Erin,’ Saoirse said.

  ‘No, I will,’ Anthony said. ‘I’m the responsible adult.’

  ‘I’ll tell her,’ Saoirse insisted. ‘I saw him.’

  Lisa found a place in front of the range. She saw Saoirse talk with Erin, and Erin look over at her. Lisa nodded to her. She caught Anthony’s eyes. He snatched his gaze away from her.

  Dom Purvis lifted a hotplate on top of the range door with a hook and dropped in three sticks of peat.

  ‘It eats it up,’ he said. ‘But you have to keep it lit. The damp is always waiting.’

  He pulled up chairs, his camp bed, and an upturned copper boiler on which he set his pillow and offered it as an improvised seat.

  ‘Get that wet gear off you and get some heat into you.’

  ‘We need to call …’ Lisa said.

  ‘You’ll have no luck with that,’ Dom Purvis said. ‘I don’t even have electricity. Let alone a signal.’

  ‘We’re starving,’ Saoirse said. She hung her jacket over the line. It dripped onto the stone flags. She forced off the soaking, rubbing shoes she had borrowed from Erin and set them in front of the range. She peeled off her socks. Lisa winced at the pink-puckered weeping blisters.

  ‘Have you a first aid kit?’ Lisa asked. ‘We lost ours. Back there.’

  ‘That I do have,’ Dom Purvis said. ‘And those look nasty.’ He ran a steaming jet of hot water from a copper on the back of the range and brought it down to a bearable temperature with a jug filled from the pump. In one of his backpacks he kept a small first aid kit. He cleaned the raw flesh with cotton and warm water. ‘This is going to sting,’ he warned as he dabbed antiseptic on to a pad.

  ‘I know.’ Saoirse bore it stoically. Dom Purvis moved in to attend to her face.

  ‘Hey,’ Anthony warned.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Saoirse said. Dom Purvis touched antiseptic to the crusted insect bites with a painter’s delicacy.

  ‘Better?’

  ‘A bit,’ Saoirse said. Steam curled from her borrowed shoes.

  Dom Purvis unhooked a big black iron frying pan from the rail above the range and set it on the hotplate.

  ‘It’s not going to be anything special,’ he said as poured oil from a plastic bottle into the pan and cut up onions and peppers in his hand with a hunting knife. Artem scraped his low stool closer to study the technique. Potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks in the same manner.

  Lisa squatted next to Erin and Anthony.

  ‘How’s your arm?’

  ‘Not good,’ Anthony answered.

  ‘Can I take a look?’

  Erin nodded. Anthony helped lift up her damaged arm to slip the T-shirt off over her head. Erin gasped and bit her lip. The T-shirt had a picture of perky lurcher-collie cross with one blue eye and one brown eye and the words Team Bean. Underneath she wore a junior bra. Her shoulder joint was purple-black, swollen against the bra strap.

  ‘You should take that off,’ Lisa said.

  ‘I can’t reach,’ Erin said.

  ‘Can you move that arm at all?’

  ‘Not on its own.’

  ‘Look away,’ Lisa ordered the room. She unfastened the Velcro. The left arm came out easily but the right was a painful, twisting struggle. Erin cried out. But the junior bra came free.

  ‘Better?’

  ‘A bit.’ Lisa draped her coat around Erin’s shoulders. It was wet and clammy but it was a small dignity.

  ‘Have you any like kind of surface pain relief in that kit?’ she asked Dom Purvis. He held a tube of ibuprofen gel.

  ‘This do?’

  ‘Better than nothing.’ She knelt beside Erin. ‘This is going to feel cold.’

  ‘I’m cold already.’

  ‘Okay, hurt a bit.’

  ‘I hurt already.’

  Lisa squeezed gel on to her fingertips and slowly, delicately, precisely worked it into the dark mess of Erin’s dislocated shoulder. From the flinchings, the tightenings of the jaws, the sharp breaths and small grunts of discomfort she could tell that it hurt more than a bit.

  ‘Okay, done.’ Lisa had used the entire tube of gel. ‘Have you anything dry to put on?’ Lisa asked. Erin shook her head. The Team Bean T-shirt was still damp. Lisa took a duvet from Dom Purvis’s bed and draped it gently around Erin.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. Anthony beckoned her to the library end of the room.

  ‘She needs urgent medical attention,’ Anthony whispered. ‘We can’t stay here.’

  ‘We need food, we need warmth, we need dry clothes, we need dry feet, we need rest,’ Lisa said quietly. ‘The kids are done in. I’m done in. But yes, Erin needs A&E.’

  ‘Who is this guy anyway?’ Anthony whispered.

  Dom looked up from the pan. Smells of hot oil, frying onions, sizzling peppers filled the vaulted kitchen. Now Artem was quartering tomatoes and dropping them with a hot hiss into the pan. He had found a knife and mimicked Dom, holding a tomato in his left palm and quartering it with a few fast, dexterous cuts.

  He was good with the knife.

  Now Dom cut a thick slice from a side of bacon hanging in the dry warmth of the hearth. He halved it, threw one half to Artem who caught and started with the same skill and speed to cut it into strips. He tossed the bacon into the pan. Lisa thought she would faint with joy at the smell of rendering pig fat. The heart of the Irish home: the frying pan.

  ‘What’re you doing?’ Ryan shouted. ‘You know I can’t eat that.’

  Artem frowned.

  ‘I can’t eat that!’ Ryan shouted. ‘You put meat in it. You know I can’t eat meat. You’ve ruined it. What am I going to eat?’

  ‘Eat it!’ Saoirse yelled. ‘Just fucking eat it!’

  ‘I can’t!’ Ryan yelled back. Saoirse was on her blistered feet and in Ryan’s face.

  ‘Yes you fucking can! You can eat it. You just won’t. You know what? I don’t care. We’re all cold and we’re all hungry and just eat the fucking food!’

  ‘Hey hey hey.’ Lisa moved to part them. Saoirse glowered, stabbed a finger at Ryan’s face and stalked back to her place in front of the range.

  ‘I don’t eat meat,’ Ryan insisted.

  ‘Hoc est simplicissimus.’ Dom Purvis unhooked a smaller skillet from the rail, set it on the warming plate and scraped vegetables into it from the side of the pan untouched by the bacon.

  ‘But it’s still been in contact …’ Ryan said.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Artem said. ‘Okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ Ryan echoed. ‘Sorry. Sorry.’

  ‘Saoirse, you need to apologise,’ Anthony said.

  ‘I don’t think that’s helpful,’ Lisa said.

  ‘Saoirse …’

  ‘Don’t push it.’

  He turned like a wildcat. His jaw stiffened with anger; his eyes widened in rage. He took a shuddering breath.

  ‘A word?’

  Lisa followed him into the corridor.

  ‘Don’t contradict me. Don’t undermine me. Not in front of the kids. I’m their teacher. I’m the responsible adult here, and I have a duty of care. Okay?’

  She might have accepted it but for the okay? That okay was the voice of every teacher who wouldn’t listen to her, look at her, let her answer their questions, patronised her when she did, passed over her like rain because she wasn’t one of the shining ones. The grubby girl from the bad mother. Year upon year of rage slid and caught others and took them into a rushing, crushing landslide of anger. Lisa took a breath, the breath caught and gave her the moment, the step back she needed to damp down the anger. She knew what was happening here. She had done this so many times. When she had gone to a home, when she had to be Good Lisa so they wouldn’t reject her. When that pressure was released and Dark Lisa bubbled out like tar. When she been driving, a big job, an important job, when it was over and the consignment or the person delivered, when she would drink and smoke and start arguments and pick fights. The pressures lifted and all the emotion vented. Into anger, pettiness, spite, aggression.

  ‘I’ve a duty too, Anthony,’ Lisa said quietly. ‘I’m a professional too.’

  Dom Purvis looked out into the corridor.

  ‘You need to get your stuff dried,’ he said to Lisa. ‘Fire’s warm.’

  In the kitchen she stripped down to bra and pants and found a dry T-shirt. She wiggled her toes on the warm stone. Jacket, trousers hung on old meat hooks on the rail above the range; boots and socks steamed in the glow. Before she found a space to sit in the firelight, she opened the patch pocket of her walking trousers and slipped out Selected Yeats. The cover was blurred and foxed, the pages thick and glued together with wet. She flipped the pages, trying to separate them, get air between them, open them up. It would never be the same; wet-warped pages never recovered their original dimensions, but if she dried it slowly, carefully, it might survive.

  It had to come to Dublin with her. Walk into her first seminar with her. Say, look at this place I have taken you.

  She set the book on the edge of the range, away from the heat.

  ‘You brought a book with you?’ Anthony said.

  ‘Yeats,’ Lisa said. ‘He’s … my thing. My gateway drug. He’s always with me.’

  ‘Cena parata est,’ Dom Purvis announced. ‘I’m a bit short on plates, alas.’

 

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