Book of Kells Read online

  The moment’s silence which followed allowed John to hope that the creature had actually found her way out the window.

  Mrs. Hanlon or no, that would be a blessing. But then he was answered by a rant of verbiage incomprehensible to him.

  Incomprehensible, but familiar sounding.

  “I’m sorry,” he replied. “I don’t speak Irish at all well, eh?”

  Nothing. John knew he would have to call the gardai. He wandered into the kitchen, where the phone was. He nibbled his fingernail, staring down at the square black box. Finding this comfort insufficient, he bit down on the cuticle as well. It hurt.

  What was the number? Where was the phone book? He found it, and his torn cuticle left bloody smears on the paper. Derval was always making fun of him for his bitten-down nails. Calling him “frog fingers.” Also for his indecisiveness, which he felt was really too bad, since ambidextrous people more or less had to be indecisive.

  Derval would not be paralyzed by the arrival of a crazy woman (or man) in her bathroom. She’d take such an invader firmly in hand. John found he was dialing Derval’s number instead of the garda.

  “Irish Department,” answered the secretary in impeccable British English.

  “Doctor O’Keane, please.”

  There was a long silence, during which John had nothing to do but lean against the kitchen sink and stare out the window of the back door, which was too warped to open easily. His nose told him he definitely should have emptied the garbage. About the time he had decided he should hang up and call again, the secretary came back on the line. John listened.

  “Writing? Can’t she be disturbed? Oh, riding? I see. No, I know the number, thank you.” He spun the heavy dial again.

  She must have been at the jumps, it took so long to call her. Derval was going to be very upset, being called not only from her precious riding hour but from the jumps as well. John swayed back and forth against the enameled sink, thinking how unfair it was that he should be trapped between a crazy woman, the police, and Derval’s temper. He reflected and sucked his damaged cuticle. When she was fetched at last, he tried to cut off all remonstrance.

  “Derval, this is John. Please don’t talk Irish; I can’t follow it right now. I know you don’t like to be disturbed at the stable, but I’m rafted as all hell. I’ve got this…this crazy woman…in my bedroom, and I have no idea how to get her out.”

  Two seconds of silence was followed by laughter which blew static into the phone. “You should have thought of that before you bedded her, love.”

  “Eh? I’ve never seen her before. It’s a pure mystery to me how she got there…

  “Here… listen.” In sudden inspiration John walked the phone as close to the door as he could and called out. “Are you still in there?” For emphasis, he leaned out and tapped the door panel with his toe. The reply from within was quite threatening in tone.

  “You hear? That’s Irish, isn’t it?” Derval sputtered into the speaker again, causing John to smile more awkwardly than ever. “Derval, what I want to know is, do you think I should call the police—uh—the gardai? And if I do will you tell them I’m not a monster?”

  Her laughter died away into low hoots. “Very, very good, John. I certainly can’t ignore such an appeal, can I? I’ll be right over.”

  John explained as politely as he knew how that he didn’t feel the need for her presence, but only a word of advice. He found he was talking to a dead line. “Blood of a bitch!” He hung up.

  It occurred to John that Derval might have thought the entire story a fabrication designed to entice her to his house. Since she had turned him down twice this week, she might be thinking he was desperate. He found himself blushing furiously.

  Now here was a damn pretty kettle of fish. Was he expected to stand here waiting for Derval to visit him out of pity, while a homicidal and quite naked woman planned ways…

  Quite naked. John’s mind settled back on that as one of the few digestible facts of the incident. To the best of his memory, she had been entirely without clothes and of unusually high coloration. Of course, memory will play one false when one is in shock.

  John remembered the crack that ran between the bedroom drywall and the bathroom, which allowed him to use the bathroom fixture as a night-light and which let mildew soften the edges of the bedroom wainscoting. Silently he slipped into the bathroom and put his eye to the crack.

  It took five seconds before he could make out her shape, huddled at the foot of his unmade bed in the froth of covers he had kicked to the floor during the previous night. Her small, hair-shadowed face was round and her mouth was a rosebud. She stared ahead of her with glassy eyes and the whole pile of cloth shivered. Seeing that heartbroken countenance with none of the nubile body exposed, John was convinced that this was no woman but a very young girl. His own thin face sharpened in sudden compassion, immediately touched by an equal self-concern. If he found her pitiable, what would the gardai think? Derval had been right to come.

  He was dwelling on this particular topic, eye to the blue-tinged crack in the bathroom wall, when Derval arrived. He heard the sound of hooves on the pavement outside, thought, “She can’t have,” and immediately corrected the statement to “She would have.” He stepped to the front window in time to see an animal—resembling in both size and color an elephant— sail over the box hedge and plant itself in the knee-high grass of John’s front lawn. Its rider slipped off and snapped a cotton lead line onto the headstall it wore under the bridle. This she looped over one of the pineapples that topped the porch’s wrought-iron balustrade.

  “You’re going to leave him there?” John asked incredulously, leaning out the doorway.

  “Don’t worry, Johnnie. Tinker’s never colicked in his life,” Derval said, and swept in. With a last glance at Mrs. Hanlon on her own porch across the street, John closed the door. Mrs. Hanlon was, unfortunately, his landlady.

  “I like the effect with the paperclip,” John’s visitor stated. “The off-center jauntiness of it and all. Just like your eyes.”

  John Thornburn’s eyes weren’t really off center, and if their being mismatched (one blue and one brown) made him jaunty, he wasn’t aware of it. He put his hand to his head and snatched the clip away. His limp flaxen hair fell flat into his right (or brown) eye.

  Derval O’Keane was a tall young woman with black hair streaked in the most ornate manner with gray. This was pulled back severely from her face and fastened with a rubber band. Her eyebrows and lashes were thick and black and her eyes, blazing blue. She wore traditional black riding boots and doeskin breeches which became her well, and instead of the orthodox hacking jacket above, a woolen smock-shirt stitched with an amazing complexity of zoomorphic knotwork figures. She saw John’s glance at it and held herself out for inspection. “See, Johnnie? I wear it everywhere I go, and tell the whole world that you made it for me.”

  John mumbled politely, though he was not too happy to be introduced to the world as a seamstress, and the truth was he had neither woven the cloth nor stitched the embroidery, but merely drawn the figures that Derval had someone else complete. He pointed diffidently toward the bedroom. “She’s still hove up there. You can see her if you peek through the bathroom crack.”

  Derval snorted and rejected such voyeurism. “Haven’t you got that fixed yet, love? Makes it impossible to sleep nights with all that light.” She strode toward the bedroom door, but turned halfway there and added, “Or shouldn’t I have mentioned that? Should I be watching my words, Johnnie? For all I know you’re taping this whole exchange—much good you’ll get out of it. Everyone knows how scandalous I am.”

  “Taping? For God’s sake, Derval, are you going crazy too? Or do you think it’s some kind of joke I’m playing on you? Well, there’s the door and she’s behind it. Just don’t get yourself brained!”

  Derval stopped with one hand on the doorknob and the other on the wedged chair. She gave John a very mistrustful look. Then she put her ear to the door.

/>   She knocked and spoke loudly in Irish. The response was immediate and accompanied by the thump of a heavy object (John’s lamp, he guessed) being hit against the floor.

  Derval stepped back. Her eyes were half-closed and her high forehead furrowed with thought. Her lips moved soundlessly and when she glanced sideways at John there was a sort of challenge in her eyes. He watched her with the expectancy one gives to a conjurer.

  Derval spoke again, this time slowly, with care in every word. John, who knew only a few hundred words of Irish and who only understood those when overpronounced, made out nothing in the exchange but the word Gaill, or “stranger.” The effect of Derval’s speech was immediate.

  “She’s dropped the lamp,” he whispered to himself, and he heard scuffing footsteps behind the door. The girl had grabbed the doorknob and was pushing on it forcefully. Derval pulled the chair away and let it fall racketing on the floorboards of the hall. She turned the knob and let the door open.

  Framed in the darkness, shining and naked, stood a girl of some fifteen years. Her hair was auburn and hung to her waist, frizzed along half its length as though a bad permanent wave had been allowed to grow out. Her face was heart-shaped, and this as well as a nubbin of a nose gave her the air of being much younger than her body declared. Her chest and rounded belly were splashed with rose-red streaks and patches of rust-red. John, regarding her from over Derval’s shoulder, wondered if these marks were responsible for his original perception of the girl as rosy; now she had not the eerie glow of a neon bar sign, nor yet the red light of sunset.

  She stared at John, who dropped his eyes to the floor. Then the girl spoke to Derval, who listened with a close frown.

  “She doesn’t speak Irish at all, Johnnie. It just sounds like it, rather.”

  “I thought maybe she had a speech impediment,” offered John. “…with her ‘g’s sounding so much like ‘k’s.”

  “Truagh, ámh! Rom-gabsa na díbergaig, suaill nach dena dím dímbríg!…”

  The girl spoke for quite a while, this time seeming more desperate for understanding. Derval’s frown slipped a little, grew puzzled. “The words are almost right, but not the order. Maybe she’s a German speaker, or something like that, and studied Irish dictionaries. That’s a good way to come up with nonsense. She even pronounces a lot of the silent consonants.”

  Then, in response to one phrase of the stranger’s, Derval’s scowl grew particularly fierce. “‘Violence done by foreigners’? She said it perfectly clear. In fact, a lot of what she says has almost-meaning—like schizophrenic word-salad. Where did you get this card, Johnnie? And what did you expect out of springing her on me? I don’t get the punch-line.”

  John Thornburn had no time to reply, for the scorn in Derval’s voice sparked panic in that of the naked girl, who went down on her knees and clasped Derval around the waist, crying out in her (to John) incomprehensible words.

  Derval froze in distaste, but in another moment her set frown went blank from astonishment. “I get it! I get it! She’s re-invented old Irish! What a feat! Of course I can’t say how authentic it is, Johnnie; who could? But still, what a work!

  “And now that my mind clicks on that, my dear, let us see whether I’m worthy of the challenge.”

  John shifted miserably from foot to foot. “Oh Derval, you’re really wrong, you know. I don’t know beans about…”

  But the girl broke in on him, and, still on her knees, she pointed first at her own breast and then toward the darkened recess of the bedroom. Derval listened to her intently, much to John’s discomfort. Slowly, with care, she replied, and the girl’s small round face lit with hope. “Dá ttuchta mo rogha dhamh ferr lem faesam fort. Ná hobait éim.”

  “What’s she saying, Derval? What’s all this talk about foreigners, eh? Don’t I have a right to be in my own house? Ask her how she got in here and where’re her clothes?” John Thornburn shifted from foot to awkward foot, a movement which carried him subtly away from the two women.

  Derval snorted. “I imagine you know the answer to that better than I do. I’m more interested to know what the red paint is supposed to mean. The ancient Britons used blue, if that was your point, but…. Oh dear God!”

  Derval reached out and flicked a finger over the girl’s skin, between the pubescent breasts. Then she stood quite still for five seconds, staring at that finger.

  John leaned forward. “It looks like she’s soused with blood, Derval. She cut herself on the window, you know.” But glancing quite shyly again at the girl, John was quite shocked to see how much of the red stuff that looked like blood she was wearing. The stranger met his eyes and talked to him. She put her hand to her reddened breast as she spoke, and then to her mottled stomach. After this she put both small hands over her pudendum and spoke again. Tears started down her face. She took Derval’s hand and twined her fingers through the taller woman’s. “Impím orte.”

  John, in an agony of embarrassed incomprehension, put his tattered finger in his mouth and bit down on it until he tasted his own blood.

  Derval was now staring at him. John felt his face color. “Do you think I did that to her? Did she say I did? All—all that? It’s ramlatch nonsense if she did. Do you really…you don’t really…”

  Derval shook her head slowly, as though moving a tremendous weight. “She did not. I wouldn’t have believed her if she had. Not you, Johnnie. Not you.”

  John felt his shoulders relaxing. He glanced furtively from Derval’s blue eyes to the stranger’s hazel ones. “I’ll go get the first-aid kit,” he mumbled and darted into the bathroom.

  Derval took the kit from John and sent him off again for soap and water. John rummaged around helplessly, hearing the incomprehensible strings of vowels continue. (His Irish was worse than usual today, for he couldn’t get any sense at all of what they were saying.)

  The marks of human teeth around the aureole of Ailesh’s breast were the most painful to see, but the clean shallow slash that went diagonally from her navel to her left hipbone bled most. Derval’s milk-and-roses complexion was ashen as she dabbed the still oozing wounds with peroxide. Derval could so easily visualize a knife-wielding rapist whose intention had been to slash open the belly of his victim, but apparently this girl had been fighting hard and had twisted aside, escaping just as the blade descended.

  She turned her head to see John Thornburn standing beside her with a clean bedsheet spread between his outthrust arms. “I thought she might like to put this…er… on herself.”

  “She’d bleed all over it,” answered Derval shortly. “What’s the matter, Johnnie? Can’t you stand the sight of a naked woman?”

  John bit down on his lip. She was always slagging him about something or other—his modesty most of all. Just because he buttoned his shirts up to the top and sometimes liked it dark in the bedroom…. Her dig was especially disturbing now, at a time when anything sexual seemed obscene.

  “You know better than that. I just thought that maybe she would rather not be looked at.”

  The older woman smiled thinly. “She doesn’t seem to care.” Derval peered around the girl to discover matching sets of what seemed to be claw marks on the girl’s buttocks. She applied the foaming antiseptic to these as Ailesh stood stone-still, hands clenched in hard fists at her sides.

  She certainly was stoical. John mouthed the word “ouch” on her behalf, and saw brown eyes slide to him doubtfully. “Of course, she may not have recognized you as a man,” Derval added.

  “Ouch for me too,” he mumbled. Cruel as the smile of an excise man. (That was an expression Derval herself had taught him.)

  “What’s that, eh? No need for insults.” John remembered to take his finger out of his mouth.

  “I only meant she’s still in shock.” Derval excused herself, but she was angry at him now, in a totally unfair, impersonal way. Because he was a man.

  John sighed. He turned and paced through his still-sunlit front room. The rectangles of light spattered his trousers as he m
oved. He turned off the power to his stereo amplifier.

  He felt superfluous, unnecessary. Derval seemed to have taken over. So he said something he thought might be helpful, but deferred to her for the sake of peace. “Shouldn’t I call a hospital to come get her?” he asked.

  Derval didn’t stop to wonder that the responsibility for this decision had been laid in her lap. She answered decisively, “You should not. They would only call the gardai.”

  John flung himself onto his couch, which, being on wheels, slid back into the wall, banged against it, shaking everything. A cobweb and its contents were rudely dumped onto the sofa. A big spider danced toward a crack between the cushions. Save me, Mammy, save me, save me, he thought compassionately, watching it run. “And why shouldn’t they call the gardai, eh?” he said aloud. “Someone did this to her—unless she’s limber enough to bite her own bosom.” (He almost said “tits,” but caught his tongue.) “And that someone deserves to find themself between four walls.”

  Derval, though tempted, let his grammatical solecism pass. Holding the girl by one wrist, she turned toward John. “Fine. For him, whoever—husband, father, or worse—he may be. But what about little Ailesh here? She says that’s her name, by the by. She’s been raped and nearly killed, John dear.” John winced. “Didn’t your demure little Newfie brain pick up on that?”

  John looked fixedly at the dead fireplace. What a bitch she was. And she had the nerve to think he’d have called her after being turned down twice in a week. Well, perhaps he would have, he thought, feeling lower than ever. “Yes. It did. I did. Isn’t that a matter for the police?”

  He saw Derval’s rage building and regretted having spoken. Hurriedly he said, “All right, what do I know about it? It’s not my country, after all, and I have no great desire to explain this girl’s—”

  “Ailesh. She has a name, you know.”

  “Ailesh’s presence in my house, stark naked and bloody and without a word of English.