The Snowmelt River (The Three Powers) (4 page)

Friends

Mo’s observation proved to be prophetic. Nature really was blooming. And as July grew hotter the world grew more lush. Even Bridey remarked on it. “Sure Mother Nature’s abandoned her modesty.”

To get through gaps in the hedgerows they had to battle their way through thistles six feet tall, with bristly stems as thick as fall pipes, fighting for space with hogweed, ragwort and the purple-headed fountains of giant stinging nettles. The untilled fields became lakes of wildflowers. In the thick woods around the sawmill the trees were so heavy with leaves a perpetual twilight prevailed. Even the little grassy glades, where growth was usually scant, were waist-deep in grasses, and the air shrilled so loudly with birdsong, was so heady with scents, so clouded with butterflies, it was like wandering into an enchanted garden.

Meanwhile the four friends worked at getting their den in order, at times going at it almost frantically, as if, instinctively, they sensed that time was short. For days they scrubbed and hammered, all the while getting to know each other.

They painted the walls and the ceiling and covered most of the floor with a mat. Padraig indulged them with whatever they asked for, including the paint and the floor covering. An electrician arrived to replace the old wiring, putting in a working light and a deck of wall sockets close to the table. With a little more persuasion, he put in a phone line.

When they arrived on the fourth sunshiny morning, they found a battered little electric oven and a fridge waiting for them outside the door. From now on they could heat pizzas and cool their drinks. Alan humped over the desktop computer he normally kept in his bedroom.

Within minutes Mark was parked in front of it. He had already figured out how to connect it to his new state-of-the-art cell phone.

Alan quizzed him. “What are you up to?”

“Begging, stealing and borrowing dreams.”

“Like what?”

“Like Stevie Ray Vaughn,
Couldn’t Stand the Weather.
”

“Never heard of him!”

“Had a big patch on his left arm—just here.” Mark tapped about halfway up his forearm. “Where the skin was missing.”

“Yeah?”

“He played a mean guitar, hard steel strings. The strings took the skin off the tips of his fingers. He’d put superglue on the worn-out tips. Then, when the glue was still tacky, he’d touch his fingers against his other arm, to put on new skin.”

“No shit?”

Mark grinned at the expression, which he so identified with American films and television. “Yeah! Really—no shit!”

Mo, who had entered the dairy without any of them noticing, said, “Mark knows a muh-muh-million buh-buh-blues stuh-stories.”

Alan shook his head, playing dumb. “But you still haven’t told me what makes a song into a dream?”

“Dreams are private.”

“That says nothing.”

“You can’t explain ‘private.’ Private is private.”

“I give up with this guy!”

Kate and Mo eyed each other, also broadly smiling. Kate shoved Alan out of the dairy. “Leave the poor idiot to his dreams.”

Mo followed Kate and Alan out into the sunshine. Mark hardly noticed the fact they had gone. In dreams, the first thing you lose track of is time. And the next things you lose track of are your worries and cares.

It was many hours later before he came out of the dairy, looking exhausted but exhilarated. He just slid down the wall and sat on the grass. Mo, who was leaning with her back to the pear tree, looked at him. Mark
took his harmonica from his pocket and, without a word, he began to play his own interpretation of the blues track “Ain’t No Sunshine.”

Mo danced.

Kate and Alan just watched, transfixed. Brother and sister appeared lost in a world of their own. Mo’s eyes were closed, her movements as delicate and natural as the flight of a butterfly.

When Mark stopped playing Kate clapped her hands.

Even Alan laughed with amazement. “What the heck was that?”

Kate murmured, “I think we just caught sight of a dream.”

Mo said, “He cuh-cuh-cuh-can remember any kind of muh-muh-music, like a-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh . . . like an in-suh-sane Muh-Muh-Mozart!”

All four friends dissolved into laughter.

Paint-spattered, in gaps between working, they talked and bantered as if they didn’t have a care in the world. All the while they kept clear of the real stuff, like fate—or how life just doesn’t even pretend to be fair. The bad stuff, the stuff you just couldn’t bear to talk about, they left to brood on its own outside of the den.

From time to time, over the following days, Padraig would appear with a moth or a butterfly cupped in the cradle of his hands, exotic creatures that none of
them had ever seen before. He’d let them go for Mo to watch them take flight. She’d squeal with delight, like a child half her age, watching their zigzag progress until they disappeared. Then she’d capture the images in her notebook. Other times it was beetles, myriad different shapes, sparkling with rainbow iridescence. Or the skulls of tiny animals. Or collections of feathers. Other times they would arrive in the morning to find a collection of crystals waiting for them, or a piece of amber containing the stem of a tiny plant, or a single petal of a flower, or an insect entombed within it. Mo’s eyes would sparkle with every new piece of what Mark called her “weirdiana.” She would study and draw them before adding them to her altars to nature, placed at strategic points around the perimeter of the den.

It was a little eerie. As if Padraig knew exactly what would interest Mo. Kate, sitting on the grass outside the dairy, couldn’t suppress her curiosity. The three of them, other than Mo, were cooling off outside, with the hot noon sun hammering down on the leaves of the old pear tree over them. “What’s really going on, Mark? Do you think they’re communicating, or what?”

“I don’t have a clue.”

Kate looked down at a lodestone she had picked up from one of Mo’s altars. It felt as heavy as lead. She showed it to Alan. “Honestly! It’s as if they’re on some common wavelength.”

Alan shrugged. “I warned you guys, Grandad’s superstitious.”

“Yes,” she murmured, “but you never really explained what you meant.”

Alan lifted up his brown bangs and Kate saw the triangular stork-beak birthmark. “Grandad even thinks this is a sign—something that marks me out as different.”

Kate chuckled at Padraig’s eccentric ideas. “Has it ever given you some strange ability? Like some sixth sense?”

“All it’s ever brought me is an avalanche of dragon’s piss right down on my head. With the other kids making out like I was some kind of a freak.”

Kate shook her head. “But I always thought superstitious people were—well, a little bit simple. And Padraig is far from simple.”

“I’m not saying he’s simple.”

Mark, who had been following the conversation, met Kate’s gaze with a wry smile. “Mo’s just the same. She’s as superstitious as hell. But she isn’t simple either. She’s just different.”

Alan looked down at the daisy-strewn grass between his feet. “You know what she reminds me of? I’m not claiming to be arty or anything, but I recall this teacher who was trying to explain stuff like Picasso and modern art to us. She talked about some natural ability we all had when we were kids. The thing is, we lose it. Somehow that happens to most of us. We lose it when we grow up. That’s the difference between us and these great artists. They manage to keep hold of it. That’s what I imagine is going on with Mo. She’s one of those who keep it.”

Mark looked at Alan.

“Hey, I like Mo. No offense. Okay?”

“No offense taken. I think you might even be right.”

On one occasion Padraig brought Mo a finger-sized chunk of bog oak, as black as licorice. Mo cooed with delight when she accepted it from his hand. It looked like nature had sculpted it so it resembled a female form with one body that was the stem and three knots at one end that looked like separate knobbly heads. Up close, the heads were all different, like the three ages of womanhood. Mo stared and stared at it. But she didn’t sit down and draw it. Nor did she place it on one of her altars. Instead she kept it with her constantly, to be taken out and fondled, like a talisman.

Nobody, not even Mark, understood this new twist. And if Padraig had an inkling he kept it to himself.

All of a sudden, it was the last day of July and it felt as if the whole month had been simply too gorgeous to hold onto. Mo was squinting skyward, as if in a final appeal to the sun, where it was peeping in and out of cotton-wool clouds that seemed in no hurry to move along. How she wished this last month could have gone on forever, days so full of sunshine and laughter you wanted to slow them right down. But they just melted away anyway, one day merging into another, so that in the end the whole month of July had gone hurtling by in what felt like no time at all. A time spent building sandcastles on sunny
beaches. But the trouble with sandcastles is they stand only until the waves come in and sweep them away. And today, on this exceptionally sultry day, that wave was coming. Mo had sensed it build up, little by little, not out there in the Atlantic Ocean off the beach at Clonea, but within the bodies and spirits of her friends, and the terrible thing was that even though she knew what was happening she was utterly powerless to prevent it. It was there, already, in Alan’s angry expression as he put down the paperback he had been reading, pushing Mark and his cell-phone-cum-camera away with his foot.

“Knock it off, will you, Mark? Don’t do that.”

“Oh, look out!” Mark muttered as the phone fell from his grasp into the sand. “It’s hardly a crime,” he remarked while spitting on a tissue and attempting to clean it.

“Hey—it’s not very nice to take pictures of Kate when she doesn’t want it.”

“Oh, give it a rest, Alan!”

“Grow up—both of you!” Kate mumbled at the squabbling boys, wiping sand off her arm where it had become embedded in her suntan lotion.

Mo stared, and her gut squeezed in a spasm of worry about Mark. For weeks her brother had been developing a crush on Kate. Was Mark so stupid he couldn’t see that Kate had eyes for nobody other than Alan?

Today’s trip to Dungarvan had just been another of the bike trips that were originally supposed to be
about hunting down threatened plants. Mo had been keen enough on the idea because, while Kate scoured the hedgerows and wild spaces for threatened plants, she intended to carry out her own searches for crystals. Alan and Kate already had their own mountain bikes and it had proved to be no problem borrowing two more. Being the smallest, Mo had lowered the seat as far as it would go to fit her short legs, and so, all too predictably, short-leg jokes became the fashion for the first few trips. She had just shrugged off their banter and surprised them all with her toughness and endurance, pedaling hard to keep pace with the others. But, given the glorious weather, they soon abandoned all pretense of plant or crystal collecting and headed for the beaches south of the Comeragh Mountains along the Waterford coastline. Dungarvan, with its numerous beaches, and Clonea beach in particular, with its two-mile crescent of beautiful golden sand, had become their favorite.

And so it was here, at Clonea, on this serene afternoon, Mo sensed the change in her friends, as obvious to her inner senses as an unexpected gust of icy wind, or a cloud moving across the sun, might be to her physical senses. She remembered what Alan had said about fate: that the four of them coming together was too much to be explained away by coincidence. She also realized, with a certainty that none of her friends appeared to share, that the blooming had something to do with it. And more than anything she was sure
that the same fate, whatever it implied, was closer—that all the time it had been creeping up on them.

“I’m warning you, Mark!” Alan insisted. “I mean it. I’ve had it with that phone following us around all the time.”

Kate and Mo exchanged looks. It was an argument that had been brewing for weeks.

She talked urgently to Mark, after Alan and Kate had gone in for a dip.

“Yuh-yuh-yuh-you should stop whuh-what you’re doing.”

“Tell me—what am I doing?”

“You’re muh-muh-muh-making eyes at Kuh-Kate.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Yes yuh-yuh-you are. And know very well that Kate has no fuh-fuh-fuh . . . feelings like that for you.”

“Oh, Mo—you’re just being silly.”

“Why are yuh-yuh-yuh-you being so stupid?”

“I’m not making eyes at her.”

“Yuh-yuh-yuh-you know Kate and Alan are ah-ah-ah . . . an item.”

“So what if they are? Girls can change their minds.”

“Duh-don’t even thuh-think it.”

“Oh, come on—you know I’m just pulling your leg.”

“No.” Mo shook her head. “No, no—
no
!”

“Do you think I’m deluding myself into believing that Kate will fall for me if I just play some kind of long-term strategy?”

“Yuh-yuh-yes!”

Their eyes met—hers aglitter, his shifty. “Okay! I can see you’re getting all wound up and it’s making your stammer worse.”

His words just wound her up even tighter. “Yuh-yuh-yuh-you’ve got a huge cuh-cuh-cuh-crush on Kate.”

“I just want her to like me.”

“Luh-luh-liar.”

“Alright—okay! Let’s you and me not fight about it.”

“Fuh-fuh-forget it, Mark.”

“Mo—for goodness’ sake!”

“You’re muh-mad.” She put out her finger and tapped, like a cautioning whisper, against the cell phone.

He sighed. He understood the caution perfectly. Grimstone would kill him if ever he found out!

“Okay, so I’m being stupid, Mo. I’m dreaming of Conan the Barbarian warrior sagas, in which I end up saving Kate’s life.”

Mo turned away with a snort. She just couldn’t bear his looking at her with that flushed puppy-dog look on his face.

“I know I can’t compete with Alan. That’s the maddening thing. He doesn’t even have to try. They have all that recent orphan stuff in common.”

It was pathetic to watch how he mocked himself. He made a game out of the fact that his attentions only succeeded in making Kate laugh at him. But it was a dangerous game because he was so utterly lost in it, like the one thing he couldn’t bear even to think about was for the game itself to end. Mark was
dipping his bare toes into the sand and flicking it in little frustrated gestures in the direction of Alan and Kate. “Oh, Mo—don’t you so hate the fact we have to spy on people? I can’t stand taking the pictures back to Grimstone.”