Wrecker. Noel O’Reilly

a hand to get him up the hill,’ I called out. I was close to swooning, but tried to hide it, and in no mood to let anyone take the man from me now. Two lads came forward, keen perhaps to show their strength to the wenches round about. One caught the big fellow under his knees and the other under his armpits, and they lifted him up. It was hard work lugging him up the beach and down the quay, and then up the steep lane. The lads had to stop every so often at cottages, and take a drop of water.

      It was a good while before we reached the alley into our little courtyard, which was barely wide enough to squeeze through. Mamm looked on aghast as the foreigner was carried upstairs. They laid him out on the bed. Tegen came to the doorway, not wanting to enter a room with a man lying in it.

      ‘We durstn’t leave him in these wet clothes,’ I said. I kept my voice steady as I could. ‘It will be the death of him.’

      ‘But we can’t take the clothes off him! Are you mazed?’ said Tegen. She was scarlet to the tips of her ears. I ignored her and went to the chest, pulling a drawer open and taking out some of Dad’s old things.

      ‘We can dry him with this,’ I said, throwing a shirt onto the bed. ‘And we can dress him in another of Dad’s old shirts till his own be dry.’ I leant over the foreigner and began tugging the cloth up over his body. I called Tegen over. ‘Come here and help me lift him. Look how he’s shivering, we must be quick about it.’ She came over to help, looking away so she wouldn’t see the man’s white skin as the wet clothes were peeled off him.

      ‘Think of what folk will say,’ she said.

      ‘Let their tongues wag. Have you forgot the Good Samaritan?’

      ‘This ain’t a hospital.’

      ‘You sure? You forget about Mamm, I seem.’

      ‘The man is a stranger. What is he to you? I don’t follow you at all.’

      ‘Providence have brought him here. It were me that saw him first. It’s meant.’

      We lifted him up, and with difficulty pulled the dry shirt down over his head and shoulders.

      ‘Who, I wonder, is to do all our work if we have to nurse this man?’ said Tegen.

      ‘Don’t you pity him at all?’

      Tegen looked on him, but there was more of shame than pity in her face.

      My head ached and all about me was a fog. I put my palm on the foreigner’s brow. His skin was warm. My hands were ice cold so I rubbed the palms together before touching him again. ‘He has a fever,’ I said. I poured some water into a cup and tried to make him drink, but most spilled down his chin. Tegen left me to it and went downstairs.

      I dropped into my chair and let the room turn slowly around me for a little while before it settled. I closed my eyes and was almost gone, but a sudden groan from the bed startled me.

      ‘Is it come?’ the fellow shouted. ‘Is this the reckoning? Dear Lord, have mercy on my soul!’

      I went to the bedside. ‘Forgive you?’ I whispered. ‘Why? What has you done?’

      He squinted at me, and I stared into those eyes for the first time, so dark and deep and hard to fathom. His face shook and he let out a strangled cry: ‘Pitiless devil! Leave me in peace, for Heaven’s sake. Why do you still torment me, Molly?’ His strength failed and his head fell back.

      ‘You are mistaken, Mister, I am not Molly,’ I said.

      He moaned pitifully. ‘I have beaten you, Molly. God forgive me, I have hurt you, your face . . .’ My fingers reached up to where his gaze was fixed, and I felt the tender and throbbing bruise on my temple where the barrel had struck me. The foreigner’s eyes closed and he fell into a sleeping fit.

      While the man was lying a-bed, I set off up the headland to buy a charm. I picked my way through the copse where Old Jinny lived. Bare winter branches creaked in the breeze, and birds pierced the cold air with their cries, warning me off. Sometimes in the night the old woman was known to take flight and soar over the village herself, not on a broomstick but with her gown open and spread out around her like crow wings. I followed the scent of wood smoke and soon I reached the passage between thickets of needle-sharp briers that led to her door.

      It was dark inside, with all manner of objects dangling from the rafters and turning slowly in the draught that followed me into the cottage: dried herbs, tiny bones tied in bundles, wooden dolls, pewter pots and pans. As my eyes got used to the gloom, I saw a jumble of wicker cages piled about, and along one wall a blue dresser, the paint cracked and peeling. A fire hissed in a small hearth and a large warming pan hung over it.

      Old Jinny sat in the corner on a high-backed chair with great hawks carved on the arm rests, a little wheel for spinning thread at her side. I jumped at a sudden frantic flapping of wings as a black shape ripped past me to alight in the old crone’s lap. It was a jackdaw and she took it in her hands, stroking it with long twisted fingers that had dirt under every fingernail. The bird cocked its head this way and that to judge me from all sides. I had the curious notion that the bird was Jinny’s own child.

      ‘Friend or foe?’ the old crone asked in a voice as light as a whistle and reedy as a child’s. ‘What brings you across my threshold?’ The sound seemed not to come from her at all but from elsewhere in the hovel. There was spittle in the corners of her whiskery mouth, and beneath her grubby lace cap her hair clung loose about her neck and shoulders. It was matted and dusty as the cobwebs that were draped in thick layers in the corners of the room. Her nose was hooked and pointed like a bird’s. She wore a gown of faded blue silk, streaked with bird shit like everything else in that place. It was open at the front to show a stained quilted petticoat of faded satin, and over that an apron which looked to have been embroidered with her own needle. On it were dozens of birds – wrens, robins, snipes and choughs. Her sleeves ended in lace ruffles, stray threads hanging from them, which reached almost down to the filthy floor of beaten earth.

      Seeing how dazed I was, she laughed, a piercing sound that set my teeth on edge. It was plain the woman was mad as a snake.

      ‘Don’t boggle at me, girl. Tell me, what is your business here?’ She spoke grandly, like a true snot. She ruffled the pale feathers at the back of the jackdaw’s head with the back of her hand, making the bird shiver.

      I swallowed hard, took a deep breath. ‘I need a charm to cure a man in a fever, short of breath. He was at sea a long while, lashed to a barrel. He is asleep mostly, but has bad dreams and sees things before him that aren’t there.’

      ‘Perhaps he sees things that are there, but which you cannot see? An old man or a young? Big and strong or a weakling?’

      ‘Not young or old. But big and strong, for sure.’

      She opened her hands to let the jackdaw fly free, and clapped in glee. ‘I know the remedy you need!’ She got to her feet, stiffly. She was no taller standing up than she was sitting down, and all the smaller for being so stooped. She put her hand out for payment. ‘Two shillings,’ she said.

      ‘Two shillings!’ I was dumbfounded.

      She nodded, briskly.

      I had just enough on me. I counted out the coins and stooped to put them in her hand. She bit each one in turn to see if it was true before putting it in her apron pocket. When she was finished she left the hovel with a queer hopping gait and went to fetch the charm from out the back. A stink of stale sweat and piss hung about after she was gone, and the jackdaw hopped and flapped all about me, shitting on everything, including my hair. Its croak was loud in that little place and had me all of a jitter. The bird could talk, too, but in strange riddles of which I could make no sense.

      I waited so long that I wondered if the old woman had died out there. Through a rip in the sacking over the window I saw the hut where she kept the captive birds. Their fretful twittering could be heard all over the wood. Round about me in the shadows of the room were all manner of nasty-looking instruments among the cages. I didn’t care to wonder at their use.

      At