The Ghost of Grania O'Malley. Michael Morpurgo
‘Not that good.’
‘Makes two of us then, doesn’t it?’ she said. She smiled at him and got a ghost of a smile back. Perhaps she liked him a little better now than she had at first, but she still wasn’t sure of him. She eyed him warily as he walked along beside her in his spongy trainers, shoulders hunched. His hair was cut close. It was so close and so fair she could see every contour of his head, and he had more freckles on him than Jessie had ever seen on anyone. He was thin too, so that his blue jeans and his New York Yankees pinstripe sweatshirt hung loose on him. He was pointing up at the castle now. ‘Who lives up there?’ he said. ‘Looks kind of old.’
‘It is. No one lives there, not any more.’
Jessie’s father had stopped by the car and was opening the door. ‘Jeez, that’s some car,’ Jack said, running his hand along the bonnet. ‘Diesel, right? Three-litre engine? Old, I guess.’
‘It goes,’ Jessie snapped. ‘And that’s all a car’s got to do, isn’t it?’ Now she had quite definitely made up her mind. She did not like this boy. She would not like this boy, she wouldn’t ever like this boy. This was going to be the longest month of her life. Her mother was giving her one of her pointed looks.
‘You two cousins getting on, are you?’ she said.
‘Perfect,’ said Jessie, and she got in the car and slammed the door, leaving Jack to walk round the other side.
Clatterbang spluttered a few times and then started up reluctantly. No one spoke until they were well along the coast road.
‘Miss me?’ said Jessie’s mother.
‘Missed you,’ her father replied. ‘We both did, didn’t we, Jess?’ He turned to her. ‘And how was Dublin?’
‘Don’t ask.’ She spoke so quietly that Jessie could hardly hear.
On the back seat, cousin Jack and cousin Jessie sat side by side in silence. Panda looked first at one and then the other. At supper, Jack hardly touched a thing. He chewed on a piece of bread and said it wasn’t the same as the bread ‘back home’. The water, he said, tasted ‘kind of funny’ and he screwed up his nose when Jessie’s father offered him some of his home-made sheep’s cheese.
‘You got peanut butter?’ Jack asked. ‘I usually have peanut butter sandwiches and a Coke.’
‘What, every meal?’ Jessie’s father said.
Jack nodded. ‘Except breakfast. I have cornflakes for breakfast, and Coke.’
‘I’ll get some peanut butter in tomorrow,’ Jessie’s mother said, patting his arm. ‘Now you’d better get yourself to bed. A good night’s sleep, that’s what you need. Got to be up early. School tomorrow.’
‘School?’
‘That’s what your father said,’ Jessie’s mother went on. ‘“Treat him no different,” he told me. “What Jessie does, he does.” Your dad’s my older brother, remember? I always did what he said when I was little – almost always anyway – and where you’re concerned, what your dad says goes. So it’s school for you tomorrow. Jess will be with you. You’ll look after him, won’t you, Jess? You need any help unpacking, Jack?’ Jack shook his head. Then, without saying a word, he stood up, pushed back his chair and went out. The three of them looked at each other, the clock ticking behind them in the silence of the kitchen. They heard Jack’s bedroom door shut at the end of the passage upstairs.
‘He’s got his troubles,’ Jessie’s mother said. ‘He’ll be fine, he’ll settle.’
‘What kind of troubles?’ Jessie asked.
‘Never you mind,’ and she tapped Jessie’s plate. ‘Waste not, want not. Eat. And by the way, Jess, will you tell me how come your trousers are all torn and covered in mud?’
‘I told you. I fell over, I tripped,’ Jessie said, suddenly busying herself with her eating so she didn’t have to look up.
‘In the garden,’ her father added, rather too hurriedly.
‘So you said, so you said.’ It was quite clear she didn’t believe a word of it.
Jessie’s bedroom was right above the kitchen. She could always hear what was being said downstairs, even if sometimes she didn’t want to. But tonight she did. She knew – everyone on the island knew – the real reason her mother had been over to the mainland. It wasn’t just to fetch cousin Jack from the airport. That was just part of it. She’d been a whole week in Dublin, trying to see the bigwigs in the Dáil, the parliament, about the Big Hill.
Her mother and father rarely talked about the Big Hill in front of her, and Jessie knew why. There wasn’t another thing in the world they ever argued about, just the Big Hill. They would tease one another from time to time, but they would never really argue – not in Jessie’s hearing anyway. They had spats of course, like anyone. Interrupt her father when he was making one of his ‘creatures’ in his shed and there was always trouble. But her mother never dug her heels in, never lost her temper, except when she was defending the Big Hill.
Catherine O’Malley – her mother’s name before she married – was without doubt the most beautiful woman on the island, and therefore the cause of much admiration and envy. She had a mass of shining dark hair and eyes to match. Jessie knew the story well, and she loved to think of it, often. There was hardly a man who hadn’t wanted to marry her mother. She was engaged to Michael Murphy, who owned the salmon farm now and the Big Hill too, when Jimmy Parsons, this ‘blow-in’ from England, this foreigner, this sculptor, came to stay for a summer holiday. He set eyes on Catherine O’Malley, took her fishing one day, married her and never went away.
Everyone knew Michael Murphy was still in high dudgeon about it even all these years later. He was a squat little man and rich as Croesus – the very opposite of her father, who stood nearly two metres in his boots, and hadn’t a penny to his name. He was almost always in his boots too, either out in the fields shepherding his flock or in his shed carving his beloved ‘creatures’ that no one ever seemed to want to buy. He didn’t seem to mind too much, and Jessie didn’t mind at all. They were like family to her. She had given every one of them a name, and when she was little he would tell her stories about them in the dark before she went off to sleep. Her father only took his boots off in the evenings and then his dirty toes would be sticking out of his socks, and he’d be scratching them. He wasn’t perfect, but as a father he was a whole lot better than Michael Murphy would ever have been.
Jessie could picture them downstairs now as she listened to them. He’d be sitting in the rocker, Panda at his feet, and she’d be at the ironing.
‘You haven’t said much,’ she heard him saying.
‘Well, that’s because there’s not a lot to say.’
‘You got to see the minister then, at the Dáil?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well?’
‘Well, you’ll be glad to hear that he agrees with you, you and all the others, all except old Mister Barney.’
‘He said no then?’
‘No, Jimmy. He said yes. He said yes to money, yes to destruction, yes to pollution. Oh, he’s a real yes-man.’
‘Well, you did what you could. No one could’ve done more, that’s for sure. So if it’s going to happen, best just to accept it, eh?’
‘Never. Never. I’ll never accept it. I was born here, remember? I grew up on that hill. I dreamed my dreams up there. The place is in my blood. And they want to send bulldozers to cut the top off my mountain, my hill, so that Michael Murphy and his kind can dig out the gold and get rich – as if they’re not rich enough already. Well, they’ll do it over my dead body. And I mean that.’
‘Cath, for God’s sake, why do you go on so? You’ve done what