Free A Swift Pure Cry by Siobhan Dowd Page A

could and ran behind the cairn in the back field.
    Only just in time: he came from the house, with the braces down around his pants and no shirt on. He'd a look on his face as if to say, Where's my tea? He shouted Shell's name once or twice, then gave up and went inside. She waited. Twenty minutes later he reappeared, a new shirt on him and the jacket of his best-but-one suit. He took himself down the road, the change jangling in his pocket.
    Once he was out of sight, she gave a long, contented breath. She sat on the hill and looked down on the squat grey bungalow that had always been her home. There'd been a time when Dad had promised to raise the roof and build an upstairs floor. But it had never happened. The moon floated up like a perfect dandelion fluff over the wooded horizon. She yawned. She'd been up since early morning, doing any number of jobs. I'll just lie down an hour , she thought.
    In the bedroom, Trix and Jimmy were sleeping sound. She lay on top of her own bed in her pink dress and without meaning to drifted off to sleep...

    ...In her dream, she was in the village. There was little sound. She was gliding between the houses, glimpsing cracks of light through curtains. The eaves were all crooked, and television aerials askew, stabbing the low fast clouds of a stormy night. She stole a look through the window of Stack's pub. Dad and Mr McGrath were within, with Father Carroll trying to get some life out of the broken jukebox. Tom Stack the barman was pulling the pints. By the fire three dogs slept in a tangled heap.
    She tried the door of the church. Locked. She sat in the porch and waited, for what she didn't know. The temptations of the devil visited her in her watch. Before she knew it, she was halfway along the street, up the avenue to the Ronans' big pink house, and knocking on the door. Declan answered and took her out for a night on the fields. His hand was bony and hard, his wicked tongue was in her ear, the clothes were mumbo-jumbo between them, they rolled from the coastal dunes to the mountaintop and down the other side. But Father Rose walked over the brow of the hill, appearing from the copse. Declan fizzled away. She was neat and trim again in pink and ribbon-green. He came and sat beside her in her vigil. They were back at the fallen tree where Trix, Jimmy and she had sat earlier. Not a muscle moved, no words were spoken. Even the grubs were sleeping. But love coursed between them, a different love from Declan's, a love beyond flesh and bone, a love you took with you to the grave. His tears fell from him as he sat beside her. Shell prayed that they might cease, but he only shook his head, as if to say, Shell -in that way of his- the tears are part of it, didn't you know? The night of waiting became a hundred nights, but with him by her side, Shell didn't mind. To thee do I send my sighs , she heard Father Rose praying in his head. She answered him: Mourning and weeping in this vale of tears . Waiting was life itself. In the waiting she saw the sweetness, as when she'd mixed the scones and put them on and could smell their fragrance growing as they cooked. She hugged her ankles and looked out over the jumbled headstones to the one that marked her mother's place. First light arrived. She could see the headstones now: it was time. Father Rose and she left their place of waiting. Together they walked into the garden of serried tombs.
    Father Rose must have been sore afraid, as the apostles had been. He vanished. Shell was on her own. She was Mary Magdalene, waiting.
    The half-light was eerier than darkness. She stopped by her mam's grave. She couldn't see the lettering, only the bright specks of the daffodils she'd planted the previous autumn.
    She sat down on the grass and waited some more.
    From somewhere up the hill, a voice started. First it was a tuneful murmur, like birdsong. Then it was like crows in a fluttering tree. The sound came closer, right over by the church gate. It took shape as human