Free A Swift Pure Cry by Siobhan Dowd

up the avenue.
    'Toodlepip,' he called.
    'Tarala,' Trix shouted.
    'Whisht, the pair of you,' Shell said. But she couldn't help smiling.
    Mrs Duggan pulled over as they continued on through the village. Her two boys stared out from the back, pulling faces at Jimmy.
    'Shell,' she called, 'is your dad with you?'
    'He's doing some messages, Mrs Duggan.'
    'Is he now?'
    Shell nodded.
    'Squeeze in, the three of you, out of the rain. John and Liam, bunch up there and make some space. I'll give you your tea, if you like. I've tarts made.'
    She drove them over to the Duggans' farm. It was where Trix and Jimmy often used to go to play, back in the days when Dad worked there. Since he'd stopped the work, they'd been over less often, but still went in the school holidays. Mrs Duggan had been Mam's best friend from the days of their youth. There was a photo of the two of them at eighteen, in slender dresses from the 1960s, at a dance in Castlerock.
    'Dr Fallon told me you were sick, Jimmy?'
    Jimmy pulled up his sleeve to show off the cut, dark and thin now, with the anger gone from it.
    She tutted and tousled his head and gave him an extra slice of tart.
    Afterwards Shell helped clear away. Mr Duggan fetched the younger ones out to help feed the calves.
    'Shell,' Mrs Duggan said as they dried the plates, 'you're more like your mam every day.'
    The words were sweet and sad, like the taste of bitter lemon Father Rose had given her the other day. 'Am I, Mrs Duggan?'
    'With your figure coming out and the colour of your hair, you are. Your mouth's the image of hers. Only your eyes are different. Lighter than your mam's, I'd say.'
    When the job was done, she gave Shell the loan of her bike so that she could cycle down to the strand. Shell pedalled down the quiet roads. The weather had cleared. She was soon out on Goat Island, with the Atlantic before her. There was no one there but herself. Near the cliffs, the sands shifted, wrinkling in the wind. The water's edge meandered on a pancake surface. She took off her shoes and socks and, like a child, tucked her skirt into her underwear. The cold bit into her bones as she paddled. ' The sea has made the sand a mirror which my two feet destroy ,' she muttered as she walked. It was the start of a ditty she and Mam had made up together, long ago. She squinted into the low sun, and there was a figure, a candle flame, drifting away from her: just like Mam, taking one of her beloved lone walks down to the end of the strand. Surely that was her olive-green scarf tied over her ears? Her hands were planted in her pockets, her head was down to the wind in just that familiar way. Shell blinked. The figure vanished.
    Shell's heart had a purple cover over it.
    When Jesus dies, she thought, you die a little too.

Sixteen

    Holy Saturday was a nothing-day. The tomb was sealed, the world was quiet.
    Trix and Jimmy walked with Shell across the fields carrying their spades of red and blue. They picked the lemon daffodils on the grass slope and piled them in Jimmy's bucket. They sat on a fallen tree and watched the smoke of Coolbar writhing, white on white. The lambs mewed and bounded. Jimmy found grubs under the trunk. He collected some on his spade and transported them downhill, arms flapping.
    'Where are you going?' Shell called.
    'I'm the plane. We're off to America,' he said.
    Trix practised balancing.
    Dad didn't appear from his room all day. They hadn't seen him since the Stations. There was a holiday in their hearts.
    The long day passed.
    Trix and Jimmy had a second tart Mrs Duggan had given them for tea. Shell was fasting until the time of Jesus' rising. She was determined to stay awake all night in a vigil of waiting and prayer. Having nothing nicer to wear, she risked putting on Mam's dress of seamless pink. She tied her hair back in a neat green ribbon.
    After Trix and Jimmy were safe in bed, she heard a stir from Dad's room: a floorboard creaking, a curse. She took herself out the door as fast as she