Black Harvest

by

“CAN YOU STOP the car? I’m going to be sick,” moaned Oliver.

“Not again,” Prill muttered, under her breath. It was the third time since Dublin.

Mr Blakeman pulled off the road, slammed the brakes on, and jumped out, grabbing Oliver and steering him towards a clump of grass. The sudden jolt had woken the baby and she was wriggling in her mother’s arms, making the dry-throated complaining noise that was usually followed by a great bawl. By now she must be both hungry and wet. Before too long they’d have to stop yet again and get the nappies out. They were never going to reach Dr Moynihan’s bungalow at this rate.

From the front seat Colin sneaked a quick look at his cousin. This car business was getting ridiculous. Nobody could help being sick, but by now Oliver couldn’t have anything left to be sick with. It was all in his mind.

“Please would you move up?” the small boy said to Prill. There was plenty of room but she still slid over towards her mother, leaving a strip of seat between them. Oliver’s large pale eyes inspected it carefully, then he bent down and lifted a pile of books back on to his bony knees, hugging them to his chest as if to ward off blows.

Colin and Prill had looked at the books last night, in the Dublin hotel. Most of them were about bugs and beetles, and there was one about Ireland too. Mr Blakeman was impressed.

“Your cousin’s obviously been doing his homework,” he said. “Look at all these… insects… mosses… The Land and People of Ireland… This is what you two should have been doing. When you’re going to spend a month in a place like Ballimagliesh, it’s as well to know something about it.”

Prill was cross. Dad didn’t often sound like a schoolteacher, even though he was one. Anyway, she’d been too busy practising for her Gold Award down at the swimming pool to do much reading, and Colin had only just come back from the school camp.

Oliver’s books smelt peculiar. They weren’t new, with shiny coloured jackets, but musty and faded, and they all had Uncle Stanley’s name in the front. That smell had taken Colin right back into his early childhood, to a place in London, a tall, thin house, in a terrace near the River Thames. He could remember a gloomy front door with the paint peeling, and dark corridors inside, where old men and women came and went silently, like ghosts. He could remember the smell of cabbage and brisk Aunt Phyllis, who looked after elderly people, pouring tea with one arm and jiggling a squalling child with the other – Oliver, the ugliest baby he’d ever seen.

Three-year-old Prill had spent her time scowling at her aunt because she insisted on calling her Priscilla, Uncle Stanley had ticked Colin off for sliding on the hall lino, and from their flat at the top of the house that ugly baby had never stopped yelling. Now it was nearly ten years old and coming with them on holiday to Ballimagliesh.

It was the first time Oliver had been away from home without his parents. He’d had glandular fever and missed two months of school. He was extremely thin. He moved slowly and his eyes watered. “Don’t forget to wear a vest,” his mother had reminded him, shutting the car door. The Blakemans didn’t have a vest between them, and who wore one in August anyway? Oliver had carefully arranged his beetle books on his knees and stared at them with cold suspicion. In their bones Colin and Prill knew that it wasn’t going to work, bringing him on holiday.

Their mother changed Alison in sight and sound of the sea. She spread an old bath towel out on the grass, and the baby kicked its chubby legs and gurgled while the Atlantic shimmered at them in a blue haze, only fields away.

“What a spot to choose!” Dad said. “Could we borrow your binoculars, Oliver? I think we can see the bungalow from here.”

Colin was the first to locate it. He focused on a group of farm buildings then followed a track past a huddle of stunted trees out of which smoke was curling. Between this and the sea’s edge was a long, low building, glaring white.

“It’s terribly new,” Prill said, disappointed. On the way down from Dublin they had driven past so many old cottages, some of them thatched, with wild gardens and hens scratching about, and cats lying on the roof. She didn’t fancy a month in a brand-new house.

“It was finished quite recently, I think. Dr Moynihan’s only stayed in it once himself, and they’re still digging into the hill to make a garage.”

Colin still had the binoculars. “Yes, I can see a concrete mixer and a pile of sand.”