The days were shortening.
August was wringing out the last heat of summer. The crows that had appeared in the spring were still living in the beech tree. Their hoarse calls scratched the air, and the tree’s leaves seethed with their traffic. Their shit splattered the concrete yard, leaving marks like lichen blooms. At dusk their bony toes hooked the tree into place.
Aoife sat in the kitchen looking out on the dark yard. She was weighed down with waiting, rooted within a puckering radius. Thoughts scrambled over one another fuelled by a simmering anger. She heard the TV being switched off in the front room. Moments later her mother walked in and began to wash her hands at the sink.
“I’m going to ask Mrs Ryan’s son to call over. If he can shoot pheasants he can shoot crows.”
She dried her hands and filled the kettle.
“At least you can eat pheasants.”
She leaned against the counter, lit a cigarette. “That tree should never have been planted so near the house.”
“Maybe the tree came first.”
Aoife loved the tree; the crows didn’t bother her.
Her mother’s gaze wandered on to the yard, found Aoife’s reflection, looked away again. They were awkward around one another now.
“Maybe it did. And some genius decided to build the house right beside it. The roots must be damaging the foundations. I might be better getting someone to cut it. Let those nuisances find somewhere else to make their racket.”
She was getting taller.
That was how the trouble had started. One night a sound had woken her. Before she opened her eyes she knew that her mother was in the bedroom. As quickly she realised her mistake. She had left her tennis clothes in the sports bag and forgotten to put them in the washing machine as soon as she got home. She saw her mother open up the bag and shake out the dress. The detergent-fresh smell as the neat fabric folds fanned out. Her mother stepped across and threw back the bedclothes.
“Stand up.”
Aoife swung her feet on to the cold floorboards. Her mother held the dress against her. It hadn’t fitted her for months. Her mother took it away, along with the bag.
She had waited until the next day to check. The mobile phone he had given her was still where she had hidden it. It was a newer model than her own phone, and she was tempted to use it all the time. But her mother would ask questions or, what was worse, not ask questions, just act.
There was another reason. She noticed that he picked it up and scrolled through the call history when he thought she wasn’t looking. She was only to use it for calls and texts between them. She texted to say her mother had cancelled her tennis lessons and anything else that saw her out of the house on her own. She didn’t tell him about the dress. No need to let him know she’d been caught out. Let him think he might have been the one to slip up. Let him come up with a plan. He thought he had all the answers. It was hours before he texted her back.
Someone saw something. What did she say?
Nothing. Weird.
No contact for a while.
When will I see u?
Do nothing. Wait to hear from me.
Do nothing. Like she had a choice.
The house was shrinking.
Her mother didn’t offer to drive her into Limerick any more, and she knew better than to ask. A silent stalemate stuck like stubborn glue between them. From the office her mother phoned the house every couple of hours, never at the same time. She had stopped giving her money. Why would she need money, since she wasn’t allowed go anywhere? He wouldn’t risk calling out to the house. She knew that. She wasn’t stupid. She still had enough money for the bus into Limerick, but she would be seen at the bus stop on the main road, walking around the city. Word would get back to her mother; talk in the supermarket queue or at the hairdressers.
“I don’t know how they fill the days.”
“The holidays are too long for them, really, aren’t they?”
“I suppose she’ll be relieved to get back to the books come September.”
She followed summer on Instagram and Facebook. The invites to parties and barbecues had dried up. Her friends knew she was keeping something from them, and they resented her for it. But at least then they had wanted her to know what she was missing. Now they didn’t even bother to tell her what she had missed. New alliances had been formed in evenings saturated by long sunsets. There were faces and names she didn’t know. In-jokes she couldn’t decode. She was unfriended.
“What’s up?”
“Not much. You?”
“Same.”
Not same.
We know.
I know you do.
Months before, her mother drove her to a dentist’s appointment in the city. They were early and went window-shopping on William Street to kill the time. One movement out of thousands in the window’s reflection caught her eye. A man of his height and size, wearing a long grey coat just like his, passed behind them and turned at the next corner into Foxes Bow. If it had been him he would have stopped and waited for her to pass by. If it had been him he would have made some sign to her. She said nothing about it when they next met. Just in case it had been a test, to see what she would do, what she would accept from him. She left him early that day, pretended relatives were visiting and her mother wanted her home. He was angry. She knew it. He covered it up with a joke. He pretended that he couldn’t open the car door.
“It’s a child lock”, he said, frowning in mock concentration. She leaned back and smiled at him without saying anything. Daring him to keep her there, daring him to risk that she had lied to him, daring him to get caught. At times like these she played with the idea of leaving something behind in the car, a little bracelet or an earring, something small that he wouldn’t see her drop down between the seats. Say afterwards that it had been an accident. See how he liked her test for him.
At the start of that school year his daughter had been moved into her class. Dropped from the honours stream. Not that she seemed to mind. A quiet girl who lived in oversized jumpers and bit her nails. It was easy to avoid her; she kept to the edges of groups and always had a note to excuse her from sports. Their desks were across from one another. Aoife noticed that she had fingers like her father’s – long and delicate. She looked at other men’s hands after that – when they passed change over a counter or harried animals along the narrow lanes. Most men had hands and fingers that were damaged in some way: chipped, scraped, swollen. He didn’t work with his hands; his fingers were fleshy and soft. Baby hands, baby fingers. She didn’t think she could say that to him without him taking offence. There were better ways to get a reaction. She liked to draw him towards anger and see him teeter on its edge. It was her only way of keeping a balance between them.
She was upstairs, trying not to check the mobile again, when she heard her mother on the telephone in the hall. Back to the original plan. The tree would not be cut down, not yet anyway.
“Carmel, I insist. Not unless he lets me pay him. And if this month doesn’t suit tell him to let me know and we’ll work something out.”
The sound of her mother walking into the kitchen was interrupted by the sound of a soft, dull bang. She heard her mother’s startled shout, then silence. She ran downstairs and found her mother standing by the patio door.
“It was trying to get in,” her mother said, pointing to the crow’s body on the other side of the glass, feathers still floating cartoon-like in the air.
She took Aoife’s hand and ran the flat palm over the surface of the glass.
“Can you feel it?”
“What?”
She let go of her hand, stepped back and switched on the patio light. She turned Aoife from her waist and pointed again at the glass.
“See there? A tiny crack.”
Aoife peered closer. She saw something she thought might be a loose thread from a spider’s web.
“You’d feel it from the other side of the glass. It would take a thin slice from your finger. When the weather turns, water will get into it and freeze and unfreeze. We’ll come down some winter morning and the whole sheet of glass will have cracked.”
“Will I clear it away?” Only when Aoife spoke did she realise that the tip of her finger was resting in the corner of her mouth, soothing a cut that had never come.
“Leave it to me. I’ll deal with it.”
And then there was a new way to measure out the deadweight of each hour. The crow’s body tick-tocked from side to side as it hung from a length of string tied to a low branch of the tree.
“What’s the point?”
“It warns the others off.”
“Won’t it start to smell?”
“There’s not much meat on a crow.”
She slid the patio door back.
“Listen.”
“What? I don’t hear anything.”
“They’ve gone.”
It was true. They ate their meals while looking at the crow’s body swinging on its narrow arc. No living thing came near it.
Mrs Ryan’s son was off the hook. There was a new plan. The man who came to install the alarm ducked and weaved under the crow’s body as he worked. His fingers were short and stubby – ugly. He winked at Aoife when he thought her mother wasn’t looking.
“Cheer up. It might never happen,” he said.
Later she sat on the stairs and watched her mother set the alarm code.
“How does it work?”
“Let me get the hang of it myself first.”
“What if there’s a fire?”
“There won’t be a fire.”
She shielded the control panel with her body and moved her fingers quickly over the keypad.
“That’s it set. Front and back doors. We’ll see how that goes.”
The nights were lengthening.
The dark plumage of her thoughts ruffled, she put it to him as a choice she was allowing him to make. Come up with a way for them to meet or she would come up with her own plan. She would not sit waiting one night more. She’d let him away with too much. She sent the message and hid the phone away.
She lay on the bed and watched the tree’s branches cast whirligig shadows across the ceiling. Beyond the yard, along invisible tracks, were the scurrying movements of claws and bushy tails. Comings and goings along the warm earth that looped back on one another. Further away, yellow lights along the main road illuminated journeys that followed a different pattern. At night the traffic sounds drifted closer. The dark pools between each light were the head-nodding gaps between waking and sleeping. Two hours passed and she took out the phone again. A blue light flashed in its top corner.
The place I showed you the day of the funfair. Wait until dark. Bring the phone with you.
The beech tree had grown along with her. She pushed down on the branch nearest her to test its strength, then took a deep breath and climbed out on to it. She exhaled slowly as she moved closer to the tree’s trunk, where the branch was thickest. Towards the bottom her fingers brushed against the string. She pulled it towards her until the crow’s body brushed against her fingers. She left it resting on the branch, hidden by the leaves. A short jump to the ground.
There were no lights, but she knew the way. Across the fields, in a road that was little used this time of night, a car was waiting. Birds fell from the sky into the open arms of trees. In navy-blue fields small animals tucked themselves within hedgerow hems. The Shannon wound its way through the flat, open land, carrying away what came from inland. Miles away the woman at the late-night hatch of the petrol station dealt out a game of patience, taking payment and handing over change with barely an upwards look. Farther away still a security guard closed the door on his tiny hut and opened the bottle he planned to finish before his shift ended.
On the edge of all that stillness she was the only living thing rushing to meet the day.
Eileen Lynch has been shortlisted twice for the RTÉ Francis MacManus Short Story Competition, and her flash fiction has appeared in The Irish Times
