The Lost Garden by Kate Kerrigan Page A

forwards calling foreveryone to get pans and buckets of water. She saw Carmel screaming, her plain features drawn back in a shocking contortion, grabbing and clawing at the doors of the bothy as Sean tried to wrench them apart. She noticed how Biddy’s skirts were dragging and drenched at the hem from the puddles left by the buckets she was frantically, pointlessly throwing in the kitchen door. She noticed how the spilt water wormed its way down the gaps between the cobblestones and landed at the tips of her good brown boots, creating a lacy pattern at her feet. She was sitting at the edge of the yard fireplace on a raised bench of bricks. This was where she always sat to eat her supper. She could not move. Everybody was running about; people were shouting at her to help, to move herself, but Aileen could not lift herself up from her seat. She was stuck there as surely as if she had been glued there, or frozen in time. If she did not move, if she stayed exactly where she was, perhaps she would find that this event was not happening after all. Perhaps she would wake, as if from a dream, and find that her brothers and father had gone to the pictures with them that evening, or were still in the other house complaining of the cold and had never moved at all to the burning barn.
    She could see that Carmel was screaming and that Biddy was shouting, but she could not hear them.
    All she could hear was a sound from the chimney she had been cleaning earlier, one she heard just before the bird’s nest had plumped comfortably into the grate. Repeating itself in her head, in her ears over and over and over again, drowning out all other noises, all other thoughts. She was transported back to earlier on in the evening when she had been rushing her task. The muted clatter she had not given a second thought to at the time had been the snap of the flue closing.

Chapter Fourteen
    Biddy had long since known that the Scottish people were good: that had certainly been her experience in her years as fore graipe for the Illaunmor tattie-hokers. However, even she could not get over their kindness towards them in the days after the bothy fire.
    When the people of Cleggan heard about the terrible tragedy, they raised all the money needed to pay for the bodies to be returned home to Ireland. There were ten men dead in all: Mick Kelly (fifty), Michael Kelly (twenty), James Flaherty (twenty-one), Tom Collins (thirty-seven), Kevin Collins (fourteen), Noel Collins (fifteen), Iggy Murphy (twenty-one), Paddy Doherty (forty-seven), Paddy Doherty Junior (twenty-two) and Martin Doherty (nineteen). The fire had raged for the guts of that night; the barrel of tar had exploded and devastated the inside of the building with ferocious intent. The local Cleggan firemen could not put the fire out with their own pump and needed to call in two other units from large neighbouring towns to help stem the fire and prevent it spreading to the other farm buildings. When they had beaten back the flames, only the stone walls remained. It was a terrible sight that Biddy knew she would never forget. Worse than the death of her parents, worse than the death ofher brother; it was an act that shook the devout woman’s very faith in God Himself.
    The bodies of the ten men sleeping in the barn that night were destroyed. Nothing more than black cadavers, she had heard the firemen describe how their exposed bones were lying flat in the places where their beds had been, as if arranged there by some evil intent. One was even curled on his side like a baby. The coroner concluded afterwards that each of the men had been dead from smoke inhalation long before the doors had been opened and set the fire into a rage. Their positions of repose suggested that each of the men had died in their sleep, so at least they had not suffered, but they did not find this out for a long time afterwards.
    However, that was small comfort to the Cleggan firemen, who would be haunted to their own dying days