Away by Jane Urquhart Read Free Book Online Page B

syllables. “Can you think of a word that rhymes with cloister?” he eventually asked, “or perhaps another, something besides hosiery for rosary?”
    “He was only to be gone overnight but he’s not returned.” Osbert squinted at his arch. “Usury,” he said, “not exact but close enough.”
    Overhead a family of hawks circled once or twice before departing for the cliffs at Fair Head. The brothers worked for some time in silence until Granville completed a draft of the lament, with his characteristic dotting of i’s and crossing of t’s all the way down the page, and looked towards the island’s cliffs off shore. “Surely the priest couldn’t keep O’Malley away from the school for more than a day. They’ve usually argued it out in three hours or so.”
    “It was to look at a woman that he went over there. There’s a woman on the island they say is ‘away.’ “
    “ ‘Away’ … off with the faeries, is she?”
    “Not this one,” said Osbert, tying his portfolio. “They say this one has a daemon lover.”
    “Is that so?” said Granville, closing his notebook and capping his pen, “How interesting.”
    As the brothers climbed the path that led from the Friary the rain began in earnest. Simultaneously, two black umbrellas unfurled, and just at the moment when the fabric became taut with the accustomed and satisfying snap Osbert recalled another of the Friary’s legends, one that had been omitted from his brother’s lament. It was rumoured that the friars, just before their final eviction, had buried the contents of their treasury at the most distant point to which a candle’s light reaches when placed in the east window of the now ruinous chapel.
    The absence of light on the one hand, the absence of darkness on the other, and where the two absences meet, treasure. He thought of the woman on the island who was away. Then, as he and his brother walked through the rain into the glen towards their demesne, these two concepts became wedded, somewhere in the back of his mind.

 
    O NLY traces of her previous self, her previous life remained when she was not by the sea. Fragments.
    She remembered how to perform various chores: stirring, pouring, hoeing, encouraging flame. But her memory could have been anybody’s memory; a pattern borrowed from a passing brain, the routine of an ordinary day, instructions dictated to her from outside of herself. Now bend, now lift, now fold. Dry activity. And herself a mere memory of herself.
    Porridge, potato, a knife, three or four earthenware bowls, the rough wool of her mother’s skirt in a house where nothing shone. The solid hand at the end of her wrist that reached and grasped, just the trace of a hand from before, covered in shadow. The real, now, was a hand shimmering under water, distorting in the liquid atmosphere. The full, liquid caress.
    And so, when she saw the two men enter through her door, they were just ideas of men she remembered from before; the priest a black hulking shape, heavy in one of the room’s corners, the other dressed in muted colours. And their voices coming at her from far across the air.
    “We’ve come to pray, Mary.”
    Her mind riveted on the young man’s torn collar and the words in her mind building it. Where grew the flax that made the woven threads in plaid, now torn beside the curve of your neck where my fingers are. A corner plastered on a collarbone. Some stitches sewn and soaked with brine. You are gentle, gentle, gentle as the sea you sail. Threads unravelling at your neck.
    She saw the priest crouch and assemble his portable altar, but he was far from her. She felt the holy water fill her hair, but it was tepid and useless and ran in futile tracings to her throat. She brought the memory of her hand to the place beneath her jaw to rid herself of it and then saw the moisture glistening on her fingers. The water when she placed it in her mouth was not the moisture she desired.
    The priest was saying words in Latin