Read Online Shade by Neil Jordan - Free Book Online

George and found it entangled in what indeed was hair, the hair of Miss Isobel Shawcross, governess, of the Kildare Shawcrosses, who floated to the surface like a flounder caught by a gaffhook.
    ~
    The sun rises to more hoar-frost on the morning of the seventeenth of January. The fields are pure expanses of white and the sycamore by the gates is a palm of silver fingers appealing to the sky. A veil of mist lies inches above the frosted surfaces, curling round the sycamore and the black Ford car parked by the gates in which a lone policeman sleeps. A second car comes to relieve him as the mist disperses; men in uniform step out of it, stamp their feet, bang on the frosted window until the one who sat vigil awakes. They pour him tea from a flask and as the steam from their mugs drifts into the dispersing mists a third car joins them. Dr. Hannon now emerges, leading George gently by the hand. Then behind comes Janie. The girl who was so thin and freckled has gained something of a stoop. She has a hat pinned to her greying hair, is wearing a black coat with a black fur collar, thinking the colour, perhaps, is appropriate to the agony of the occasion.
    “Come on, George,” she says to her brother, “tell the men now.”
    But George has little to tell. His feet are sore from wandering, the laces in his shoes are missing and the leather edges have rubbed his sockless ankles raw.
    He complains about his heels as Janie moves him through the gates and the policemen follow at a distance, thinking any speech, perhaps, is better than none. They move up the driveway, at George’s shambling, uncertain pace, round the courtyard at the back, through the arches round the outhouses. And George stops, in mid-stride, outside the orchard wall. He stares at the bare apple trees, as if remembering them bowed down with fruit. There is a slight, sad smile around the corners of his mouth, and his eyes are wistful. The group of policemen shuffle awkwardly behind him.
    “Is it inside there,” Janie asks gently, “somewhere in the orchard?”
    “The orchard,” George echoes.
    “Not the orchard, Janie,” Buttsy Flanagan says, “we’ve checked the orchard.”
    And George, as if in agreement, starts to walk again. Past the glasshouse to his right. Down the path of scuffed grass towards the river. And the procession follows.
    George’s eyes are pale blue, the colour of cigarette-smoke, and Janie’s are brown. Time has not been kind to her eyes, to the lids above them, the circles beneath them, but there is still tomboy tartness to her face, an arresting slash of purple lipstick on the wide mouth, beneath the hungry hollow cheeks. In fact time itself has only served to enhance that waif-like, lost abandon. Even now, as she holds George’s elbow, allows him to lead her towards the river, Sergeant Buttsy Flanagan is eyeing not the moving ripples in the river, but the pendulum of Janie’s hips.
    The grass beneath her impractical high-heeled shoes is scuffed from years of children’s feet into something like a path. And where the chestnut arches over the river, the branch above it still with the ringlet of scar on its bark, the ground below it still empty of grass as if from the memory of thrusting feet, there George stops. His blue eyes mist up. He pulls a crushed packet of Sweet Afton from his top pocket and fumbles for a light.
    “You want a light, Georgie?” Janie asks. The policeman next to her proffers it.
    The match flares, the smoke curls up and the mist in his eyes turns to tears. He could be remembering his sister’s small, half-naked body that used to swing like a knotted branch over that water, fall and float away as deftly as wood. The policeman, of course, presumes something else. He pictures George lowering an adult body into that water, with all the solicitude of deranged affection. He pictures the high tide carrying the body past the ruined shellfish plant, past the old breakwater, past the Lady’s Finger, out to sea.

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