Fanore

ACT III - THE OLD GREEN ROAD

SETTING - The short drive between Mrs. McNamara’s guest house and the second turn to the right, where the remnants of the Old Green Road finally escapes from underneath the wider and now asphalted coastal road. The Green Road snakes right and then left past a cottage to be broken by two fields before reforming and snaking into the rocky hills above. The bright blue car slows at the first right turn, which parallels the stream locally called the Caher River. The couple inside the car confer quickly and opt to bypass this turn in favour of the next one and continue north.

A strengthening summer sun has begun to disperse the scattered but still extended patchwork of mist drifting in over the gentle swells of an unusually calm sea. Inside these slow moving cloud banks are bubbles of clearer air where the sunshine appears to be abnormally bright. The illusion is created when squinted eyes have insufficient time to properly adjust before the intermittent gloom overtakes them again. Once illuminated, the verdant vegetation takes on the additional property of luminescence and seems to radiate a fuzzy green light. The phenomena instantly disappears when the clouds reappear with their light drizzle escort.

Through the mist, strange structures appear like shadows above and below the road. Those below emerge to become sea ocean sculpted boulders, rocks, pebbles and sand while the grey above takes the form of raw, untamed strata. On both sides of the road, individual monoliths stand like scattered sentinels where they were gently dropped by receding glaciers in the ages before people.

SOUND - Mona reaches over to mute the radio just as the Atomic Roster hit single ‘Devil’s Answer’ begins to fade. Like the car alarm earlier, the sound just doesn’t belong and they settle instead to the rumble of tires on pockmarked tarmac turning to loose gravel as they pull over into the second right turn.

LIGHT - As the car stops, the cyclic sunshine fades into a more ominous darkness and a particularly thick patch of cloud and mist deposits tiny drops of moisture on the windscreen. There is an eerie silence after the motor is switched off and with the radio already silenced. They look at each other for reassurance that they haven’t gone temporarily deaf.

ACTION - Ethan clicks open the door and the mist swirls inside to replace the escaping warmth. The young woman pulls a brightly patterned green and cream checked woollen rug higher onto her shoulders but still shivers.

“Sorry Mona, but we haven’t been driving long enough to move the temperature gauge very far. That’s why the heater’s not putting out much heat.” He laughed as he pretended to fight her for a corner of the rug and then had another idea. “I can let the engine idle for a while if you’re really that cold.” He offered.

“Nah. It’s OK. I just can’t believe the weather can change so quickly and so often. It was almost too warm a few seconds ago with the sun shining through the window. I was thinking of winding it down a crack, but here it feels like we lost twenty degrees. What’s in this mist that makes it so cold?” She shivered again but this time shifted over towards the centre of the car inviting him to put his arm around her and to share the rug, which he did.

“Well there’s a couple of thousand miles of nothing but Atlantic Ocean out there and it’s still dark over most of it.” He said, pointing an ignition key in the direction they’d last seen the coastline, which he estimated was maybe a mile back between the beach and the turn for Caher Valley. “That makes for a lot of moisture on the breeze given the right conditions but you’re right, the sun is almost warm enough to burn it off. If we get lucky we might get to see over the fog layer from up there somewhere.” He nodded in the direction the car was facing.

Mona could just about see a small house tucked away to the right of a gap between the small rock strewn fields. There would have been room for just one car except the road was unpaved. A single set of tire tracks had left deep grooves with a narrow band of grass in the centre.

“Probably a tractor.” Said Ethan anticipating her question. She looked puzzled. “One of those utility vehicles with the small cabin and huge tires on the back and a smaller set under the engine” He added.

Mona remembered seeing quite a few of them when they had a look around the day before. “Yeah one of those could do that I suppose.” She paused as the light came up a little exposing another few yards of track. “It doesn’t look like we can drive up there does it?” She asked.

“Well. It’s a small car though we do know it can move, but even if we do get a hundred yards, we’re not sure there will be anywhere to park it. That would mean blocking the track for whoever drives the tractor.” Ethan looked at his companion again and added. “For an athlete who can probably outrun but definitely out throw anyone around here, you sure got very attached to your comforts.”

“But it’s a lot colder than back home. Maybe we should wait like your new girlfriend said we should, and then go up when we can see where we’re going.” She showed him her perfect teeth.

Ethan scowled. “What will it take for you to forget about that?” But he wasn’t looking at her. His eyes were on the gloom ahead. “We’ll wait as long as it takes us to put the contents of that picnic basket into our haversacks and throw on those light waterproof smocks. Believe me, you’ll be complaining of the heat after a few minutes climbing and especially with some weight on your back.” He stepped out of the car after popping the trunk and was soon busy back there.

Mona thought about staying put for a while but his opened door was quickly leeching whatever heat remained inside, so she threw the rug into the back seat and joined him. “Slave driver.” She teased, catching the yellow waterproof jacket he threw at her.

A gentle cross-country walk couldn’t come close to what she would call a workout, and especially with no javelin to practise with. Out of habit she began to rotate her shoulders in their sockets, and then reached up to knead the taught muscles of her right arm and forearm. Ethan smiled but said nothing.

Soon they were passing the small white house that had a stack of dried turf sods leaning up against the nearest wall and sheltered from the prevailing wind and rain. An old red tractor was parked in a narrow lane outside the opposite wall. There wasn’t a sound.

“Do you think they could still be asleep?” She asked, taking longer than normal to further examine the exterior of the small silent house.

“It’s after nine o clock, and they’ve already taken their cattle out to pasture I guess.” Said Ethan in barely more than a whisper.

“Wow. How could you know that?” She asked as her left boot sank just short of the ankles into a fresh deposit of warm and very moist dung. Her reactionary scream instantly shattered a stillness that had anyway grown too oppressive to last much longer.

“Shit!” Her boots had never been worn.

“I think so.” He almost fell over with the laughter and the day they would talk about later began again from that point.

Their next obstacle was a gate outside of which were more dung deposits, but Mona would remain forever alert to that threat from below. Because a straggling cow was close to the gate, they decided to climb over rather than encourage it to escape through the opening. Once inside that field, they discovered the curiosity of seven heifer cows identically aligned north-south as they grazed. Ethan thought it unusual that the animals could completely disregard what had to look like two very conspicuous yellow invaders, but they just kept munching away. It was so quiet that they could hear the grass roots being pulled and broken for each mouthful.

At the stone wall boundary of that field, they were obliged to climb a well worn stile and squeeze through its narrow gap. They then met two curious horses that approached to investigate them, but became wary as they got closer. Unlike the cows, they seemed to object to bright yellow and so they retreated with one snorting and the other whinnying their respective complaints. Another stile took them out of that field and when the sun burst through the mist, they realised that this was where the Old Green Road really began.

They were both too warm at this stage and Ethan in particular, was perspiring freely from the increasing humidity as the mist continued to evaporate into the air. They packed away their yellow smocks and continued in what would be their default Irish touring uniform of flared jeans and woollen sweater over cotton tee-shirts. The official start to the Old Green Road was marked with a single boulder about ten foot tall in what was a particularly wide section. Looking uphill in the direction the road would take them, they could see it taper off quite quickly until it was maybe fifteen to twenty feet wide on average.

“Jeez. It’s like something from Hans Christian Andersen.” Observed Ethan.

The sun did something to the longer grasses at the edge, where regardless of shape, some very large rocks formed the foundation of an extended and unbroken wall. The lowest rocks were bathed on green light, like the grass itself was glowing. The effect was of a well worn centre section of short grass interspersed with gravel and small stones. The grass height then rose towards the stone walls on each side.

“You’re right. Jack and Jill wouldn’t look out of place here.” Said Mona in agreement.

“Is that Jack of the beanstalk story?” Ethan thought for a second before adding. “Because that wasn’t Han Christian Andersen, was it?”

Mona laughed again. It was a great day to be alive and Ethan was right. They’d already walked through an unseen portal and were not just back in time but also inside an unreal fantasy land. She looked down and left to see the blue of the sea pushing through what was now a very thin layer of mist. Above it on the horizon was the flat white layer that capped what was left of the overcast. A small black dot caught her attention and she watched as it grew into a wavering swallow darting right and left catching flies. It was closely followed by another that chirped a high pitched greeting before banking left. Both of them shot past while dropping to the same level as the patches of coarse grass which they skimmed up the road.

The arrival of the swallows and the accelerated pace of evaporation seemed to be the cue for the silence to similarly disappear. The hillside came alive with the sound of a dog barking somewhere behind them and the instant hum of busy bees. A straggling line of white and grey herring gulls disengaged from the cloud to surf silently past them on a slowly rising breeze that had lost its earlier chill. A white butterfly crested the wall to be ushered into a small field of glowing buttercups and dandelions. It would soon be just tee shirts and jeans at this rate.

“What just happened?” Ethan was wide eyed.

“It’s like you could make a wish and not be at all surprised when it comes true.” Mona seemed equally enchanted. Let’s go up and up.” She pointed to the outline of the Old Green Road as it cut an irregular indent into the light grey limestone and then climbed higher, laid out like an old rope loosely wrapped around the headland. There was probably a time when the track they walked was the main road, but it was never wide enough to take anything more than donkey carts and possibly the occasional pony and trap.

With the cloud almost completely dissipated, the dual purpose of the enchanted landscape became abundantly clear as it provided something solid to stand on while separating the identical shades of blue, of sky above and sea below. The world was rendered as pristine and innocent as it must have been in the age before people, ploughs and planting. It smelled simultaneously of sun, salt and earthly pungent growth, radiating an innocently primitive charm.

“If you were born here would you ever leave it behind?” Despite the bright sunshine, her eyes were as big as Ethan had ever seen them.

“It’s posing for you today Mona, but I wonder how it would look in January, with a storm blowing hailstones uphill. Did you see those miniature trees all bent in the same direction from the wind?” He was torn between being voluntarily captured by the day or by the easily equal allure of his partner in crime. They had stolen or stumbled upon something indefinable that they could neither keep nor forget.

She dropped everything she was carrying onto the grass verge and shrugged off her sweater. Mona then stretched out her arms like some primitive Amazon woman either imploring or thanking the sun god for favours. Knowing Mona, she was probably just grateful for what she liked to call ‘Her Spiritual Lift’.

“There hasn’t been a real storm here in years.” She said softly and to someone else but he knew she wasn’t talking about the breeze. Mona’s heart had to be as big as her imagination.

Ethan touched the small box in his pocket with the tip of his index finger, but then thought again about the size of the diamond inside it. Then again, any diamond would look twice its size in this light, so he put his thumb on the other side of it and began to ease it out of his pocket. Tight jeans looked good, or so fashion dictated, but the pockets were next to useless.

“Come on.” She shouted, stuffing her sweater into the haversack that was already stretched to capacity and then ran as the bag whipped around to slap her back. Mona could run and as she took off, he asked himself again how she could have failed to make the team.

“Wait up.” He called too late and knew he’d have a job on his hands if she got too far ahead of him. Ethan forcefully pushed his sweater under the top flap of his own haversack and took off with a woollen arm of it flapping in his wake.

When he eventually caught up to her, Mona was sitting on a large flat boulder that was laid out like a small table in a recess where the stone wall was built around it. She had her back resting against the wall and although she was still getting her breath back, she was positively beaming.

“If you try, you can almost hear a fiddle playing the same music as they played in that seshoon last night.”

He played her words over in his head. Fiddle and Seshoon. Well, it sounded like she got the pronunciations right. “Don’t forget the Bowrawn … and the spoons.” He said between two lungfuls of air, recalling the patterns painted into the rim of the traditional drum. But the old guy playing percussion using dessert spoons was unreal.

“And the tin whistle.” She was trying to jog her own memory but couldn’t come up with the name they gave to the big squeeze box.

“Tin what?” He sat down heavily beside her and let his bag fall off his shoulder. The natural table looked like a good spot to relax and have a drink. He also figured that it might help to keep her in one place long enough to get the ring out. He would have to go over the words again, just to be sure.

“Whistle. It was a tin whistle.” She said, though apparently still distracted by her internal search for the name they applied to the vertical keyboard thing.

The sound of it wafted over them so lightly that they looked to each other for affirmation that there was in fact a sound and at the wonder that they seemed to have created it by simple suggestion. “Like that?” Said Mona and it echoed slightly to serve up some doubled notes that became slurred like speech until it was a solitary tone.

“Yes.” She said. “Exactly like that.”

“It seems to be coming from higher up on the road.” He turned his head left and right using his ears as direction finders and his eyes to find something that could cause such a pronounced echo. “There’s has to be someone up there.” He peered up the road and in the distance saw it disappear around a bend in the hill. The old ring fort must be up there, he thought, throwing a glance over the inhospitable slabs of treacherous karst above them.

“It’s a girl.” She said, though how she could tell at that distance was a minor miracle he thought, and brought his eyes back from the higher reaches to the Old Green Road. They seemed to be perfectly placed precisely halfway between the sea and the sky.

“I can see long fair hair.” She was squinting really hard but all he could see was a tiny figure that looked like it was propped up against the wall, much the same as Mona had been, except the obscure figure seemed to be seated on the grass. “A young girl.”

“How do you do that?” His hand shaded his eyes to be rewarded only with a glint of sunlight from the musical instrument he could barely hear and yet. There was something vaguely familiar about the lilting notes. It was quite a sad song.

Mona looked around, like she was getting her bearings. “You wait here and have a drink. I’ll be back real quick.”

She was frowning but he needed just one more gulp of air before he could ask what was up, but Mona was already gone.