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  His brother, Big M, was in the second row, right behind him, a fearsome lock who rolled the opposition as easily as an elephant rolls tree trunks. They’d had a telepathic understanding, expanding the maul into a match-winning gambit which had proved unstop­pable. They were very strong, very determined, and very quick.

  All this Lou knew, but it was Feeney’s painstaking research which provided the chapter’s highlights. For instance, Lou hadn’t known that Big M commanded a big cult following over the water, where he was regarded as something of an icon. Feeney had uncovered a number of pub shrines in various corners of Ireland, featuring pictures and scarves and match programmes arranged into corner or window altars; at least seven pubs had been renamed in his honour. Feeney had been to these places, talked to the locals, taken pictures. He may have genuflected at those shrines himself, thought Lou, such was the awe in the writer’s approach to Big M. There was a considerable trade in memorabilia on ebay, though prices were kept relatively low because Big M had been a great giver of gifts, and there was plenty of stuff out there.

  Feeney had also uncovered another amazing fact. All the men who’d played for Wales had a small blue mouse tattooed on their chests, on the left pec, rather like the translators of ancient Carthage who reputedly had a parrot tattooed in the same place. The mouse was a secret among the Welsh players, apparently – the mark of their fraternity. It transpired that the famous rugby coach and commentator Gaerwyn James, writing in the Western Mail, had once compared a particularly chaotic Welsh scrum to a family of desperate mice fighting over the world’s last piece of cheese. This had become a bit of a running joke among the players, and eventually – in a drunken extravagance after a big win – the entire side had a mouse tattooed on their chests. Dr Feeney indicated that this was still going on, and he had a picture (of a bathful of coal-faced men) which would prove it.

  Lou returned to the Ireland frozen in his memory and savoured the smells of those country bars once again; the vestigial odours of bacon and cabbage, cow-breath and rolled-down wellies, whiskey and porter, gum-clenched ciggies, butter and bullshit, marigolds and manyana, musky vestments, uilleann leather, the very aftertang of the island’s epic history. Other than the ancient on-off relationship between the two countries, there was nothing to explain this reverence for Big M over the water. He’d obviously struck a chord there. Feeney had uncovered another fact, that Big M had been a great lover and player of Irish music, taking his fiddle with him whenever he went over for an international. Some of his favourite tunes were listed: the jigs – Apples in Winter, The Barefoot Boy, The Cat in the Corner, Crabs in the Skillet, The Geese in the Bog, The Hag with the Money, Walk out of it, Hogan. And the reels – Don’t Bother Me, Fair and Forty, The New Potatoes, Paddy Ryan’s Dream, The Tent at the Fair. He’d played the O’Carolan planxties fit to make you weep, and he had his own hornpipe, Big M in the Barn with Maureen.

  There was a picture of him, with a fiddle tucked under his film-star jaw, standing in the middle of a céilidh, all eyes upon him, his bow blurred on the strings, an early snowfall of rosin on the upper bout. Passion in his eyes. Voluminous check shirt and baggy corduroy trousers over a pair of fancy leather boots, Cuban heeled and very expensive. Archetypal rugby forward, archetypal warrior. Was he playing that fiddle or sharpening it for battle?

  Feeney had the gall to go off on a riff about perspective; how Big M had introduced a new spatial awareness to rugby, in the way Giotto had introduced depth to medieval art; gifted with rare insight, they’d both construed a new vision, the third dimension, one on canvas, the other on grass... Feeney introduced the word supersight.

  Lou laughed out loud again, and read on. It would be a pleasure to destroy this stuff. Hogwash and bumfluff. Feeney’s mind had gone before his body.

  The story switched to the famous match at Ireland’s old ground, Lansdowne Road. The Irish Tragedy, as it became known, happened at the end of a famous home international series which had seen the best Irish side for many years. Wales and Ireland had won all their games in the run-up, and the crunch match was played in front of a capacity crowd on a fine day in early March. Ireland was hotly tipped to upset the applecart and depose the Welsh as champions. The bookies had gone with Ireland, and a record TV audience saw both sides adopt highly aggressive tactics in the first half, hoping to establish physical superiority. The second half resembled the final tourney on the opening day at Vespasian’s colosseum – a fight to the death; hand-to-hand combat, gallons of blood. There was hardly a man without an injury of some sort, and the crowd was stunned into silence.

  Eventually, holding a slender three-point lead, which had come from a penalty, the Welsh were forced to defend from a perilous position – a scrum right in front of their own posts. Two minutes to go, Irish put-in. As the ball went in, the Welsh managed a tremendous push which forced the Irish to wheel back in disarray. The ensuing melee lasted for ages, and when the ball eventually emerged from the black hole of the scrum a huge roar went up because the oval grail had ended up in the spade-like hands of Your Man, hero of all Wales and sometime hero of Ireland too, Big M. He careered down the pitch, shrugging off tackles like an oak-built cyborg; when he reached the Irish try line he fell rather than dived over it, only half-conscious by then. It seemed like a tremendous victory, but as the players slowly unpeeled themselves from the ground, ready for the conversion attempt, it became apparent that Big M’s brother, Ben the hooker, had been very badly hurt in the initial scrum. Worse, he’d been mortally injured – his neck had been broken. An awful silence descended on Lansdowne Road; the crowd was turned to stone, a mass of pillars wedged together like the basalt columns of the Giant’s Causeway. But nothing could be done; Ben died on the pitch, surrounded by his team mates. The Welsh had won, but at a terrible price. Stunned, the crowd melted away. Lou had seen the old newspaper reports, yellow and sad; page after page showing the players grouped around their supine prop, and the first-aid team bent over him, their stretcher laid out ready to take his body away. There was a famous Daily Mirror edition, the whole of the front page taken up with a black-edged picture of Big M, lying there on the churned-up pitch, all grainy and heroic. The event became embalmed in mythology, in the same vein as the famous Scarlets victory over the All Blacks; if everyone who claimed to be there on that fateful day had actually been there, the entire population of Western Europe would have been present. Famous writers rearranged history so that they could remember seeing the Morrigan standing at the ford, washing the hero’s garments and foretelling death; poets recalled signs and auguries, the unearthly blood-call of carrion crows from the grandstand roof as the match began, rivers of rusty red coursing down the corrugated gutters.

  This, then, was the event which became known as the Irish Tragedy.

  Much had been written about it, so Lou knew the story intimately. Only seven of the original team had been able to leave for home the next day, the rest hospitalised. Then, upon arriving on Holy Island, they’d embarked on an epic bender which lasted for longer than any other bender in history; indeed, some claimed it was still going on, which explained the number of pubs in Holyhead and the superstar boozers who propped up the bars of the town. Big M had played a series of laments on his fiddle, and this – according to Feeney – was the original cause of the town’s lugubrious and unhappy appearance, a state which had lasted to this very day. At that time a string broke when he was beginning the caoineadh os cionn coirp – the lament for the dead in Ireland, but he carried on playing to the end and no one even noticed.

  The coda was sadder than anything which preceded it; in a twist worthy of a Jacobean tragedy, or a prime-time TV soap, a sister to Ben and Big M, the fated beauty Branwen, was found wandering on the western shores of Anglesey in a distressed state. The next day’s headlines touted psychiatric problems caused by domestic abuse, even a cocaine habit and alcoholism, but at the subsequent inquest many of her friends attested to her sanity, and drug/alcohol tests were negative. After t
hat it was natural for the papers to wring every drop they could from the tragedy. She died of a broken heart, screamed a Daily Post headline. Her simple grave in the dunes at Aberffraw soon became a shrine, permanently decked with flowers and messages from fans – probably the same people who left flowers and totems around Phil Lynott’s grave at St Fintan’s in Dublin, thought Lou. Cynical Lou, who closed the file and guided it to the recycle bin. But before he killed it off he had second thoughts, and left the file in limbo. Perhaps it might come in useful for his own research. So he left it there. He could always restore it; bring it back from the dead if he wanted to. A sort of virtual Easter. A miniature Oberammergau on his screen. The thought intrigued him; he could see himself in the crowd.

  However, sitting around in his room would butter no parsnips. He had to get out there among the plebs, hear their stories, take their testimonies. That’s the way history had gone, down the vermicular holes of the hoi polloi. Once upon a time the world’s annals had recorded the acts of supreme beings as they lounged about in their summer playgrounds, feasting on warm cascades of ambrosia; but now history was all about the smashed-up playgrounds of the worthless, atomised humans around him. Once, history had been a matter of fate and fertility in groves and palaces; now it was about foolishness and dysfunction on derelict council estates. The action had moved from the asphodel fields of Elysian to the cracked concrete meadows of modern urbanism, a bankrupt society living in ruined readymix glebes. Lou hated it. He avoided public transport, he didn’t want to touch the great unwashed. What was the point of their story? His hand moused the cursor to the bin, and left it there, poised over the empty recycle bin icon. But once again he stayed his hand and let it be. Revenge would come later and it would come on a colder day than this, thought Lou. The thought of it made him sexually excited and he phoned Catrin for a chat, hoping to warm things up for later. He’d discovered that this peculiar quest of his, for a formless and generic revenge on Feeney, had the same effect on him as watching porn on his computer. He’d have to google the subject; in the meantime, he was quite happy to lie back and enjoy the experience.

  Then his mind echoed again, and he remembered a name from the folder in the bin. Hotel Corvo. Could it be the same place? If it was, what a hell of a coincidence.

  He retraced his steps to the bin, restored the file, and scrolled to the end of Feeney’s first chapter. Yes, there it was, Hotel Corvo, on the cliffs of West Wales. Well fancy that. He knew it intimately. He read to the end of the chapter intently, and as he did so a series of pictures flashed through his mind, from the past.

  After that bender to end all benders on Holy Island, Big M had decided to hang up his rugby boots once and for all, but since he had no plans in mind, his team mate Pryderi made him an offer which went something like this:

  Big M me ole pal, you’ve been a good friend to me these many years. I came into the side a pup, wet behind the ears, but you looked after me and now it’s payback time. I’m going back to the wife, I’m packing up this mad maul of a life, I’m going back to where I belong, to the high cliffs of West Wales. Hotel Corvo, and my lovely jubbly wifey. Coming, mate? We could have a fine old time running the joint together. Seven bars and a hundred rooms, plenty of fun to be had; you can run the bars and I’ll run the hotel side with the missus. And there’s me ole mum, Rhiannon, she could do with a bit of company, know what I mean? So how about it me sweet palaroony, get yer dancin’ shoes, let’s head out to the place where I love best, let’s watch the sun go down on an empty sea, let’s smoke some decent hash, play some music, chill...

  Lou logged off and shut down his computer. For a while he sat at his desk, with his head in his hands, fingering a suspiciously hairless patch on his crown, and looking at his fruit bowl. A single banana was beginning to turn brown and it needed eating, but he liked them green and firm.

  Hotel Corvo. He’d been there in his youth. A long time ago. His memory held a clear picture of a big white building on a promontory, black-painted doors and windows, crenelated rooftops. Big rookery, a raucous cacophany in the evenings. Throb of the sea below. Great storms, shipwrecks, and colonies of noisy seals. Flotsam and jetsam, plenty of places to explore. No land in sight, a crow’s nest view of the ocean. All the way from left to right, a vast body of water without islands or rocks. Mesolithic people living in a nearby hunting camp must have seen the exact same vista, without change. You could show them a snapshot and maybe they’d grin, point towards home. Or maybe they’d react like those aboriginees of urban myth who’d looked at the white man’s television and failed to see anything happening on the screen.

  Beyond the horizon Ireland, and then nothing at all. Hotel Corvo loomed large and squat on the headland, dreamt about for years by an eccentric and then built as a castle, like so many seaside hotels from the beginning of the twentieth century. It would cost a fortune to build now, but in those days labour was cheap. Lou remembered a fortress of a building, servants in livery, maids in black dresses with white linen aprons and mop caps. There was a huge fireplace in the main hall, everything shone. Secluded alcoves, huge red sofas, newspapers and magazines from the Country Life sector. But there were bars down below for the locals too, and these had been very popular because they were far enough away from home: ideal for shenanigans, illicit meetings and male pursuits.

  Old sea salts, tenor farmers stoked up on whisky, posh retirees from the armed forces, young men having a lark, they were all there. Mostly men in those days, though Saturday night dances flushed out some of the local girls.

  So Big M said yes to Pryderi. Let’s have some fun. Posh little cocktail bar for the smart set and a lounge bar for the country set upstairs; a private bar for clubs and societies; a spit ‘n sawdust bar for the workers, a nightclub, a restaurant, and a nice little personal bar for Big M himself, hidden away in a cubby hole off the servants’ staircase...

  So that’s what they did, off they went to Hotel Corvo, and they celebrated their new pact. Big dinner, posh nosh for family and friends. Pryderi sat next to his wife Ziggy, and Big M, in his best bib and tucker, sat next to Rhiannon, a nice mature lady but still pretty gorgeous. She and Big M hit it off immediately. Phew! said Pryderi, this is going like a dream.

  Between courses, Rhiannon and Big M chatted, glanced at each other, joked a little. Both of them had some grieving to do. Sitting on clifftops in the sun, on pink slopes of thrift, letting time pass by.

  She asked him what he planned.

  He’d walk around on the shore, thinking. That was his plan. He would sit by the newly flowered gorse watching little green shield bugs drying out in the sunshine. Look at gannets plunging their yellow spears into the waves. Go swimming, watch the anemones going all shy when the tide turned. Feel the sand between his toes. Go crabbing, surfing, all the things he did as a kid. Let some time slip by, arrange headstones for his brother and sister, beautifully carved words on plain Welsh slate.

  And her?

  Something similar. Walk along the coastal path. Come to terms with the past. Watch the felucca clouds go by, since they were pilgrims too. Build up trade at the hotel, make enough money in summer to go travelling all winter. Have a nice easy life. No complications, she wanted no complications. None. And there would always be horses in her life; she rode every day if she could.

  The meal went on for a long time, but that was OK. They felt relaxed together, and they got slowly drunk in each other’s company. Later, outside on the balcony, watching the moon on the sea, she leant on him, put her back against his chest and rested her chin on her wine glass. He felt good, firm but soft too. She liked his shoes, they looked expensive and well-made. Light tan leather, only four eyelets. Classy.

  Spring was such a good time to be alive, said Big M, he loved it when the land was covered in that sensuous white mist, when the earth began to warm up. Special time of the year, buds and leaves popping out everywhere and birds dashing about. Nature busy. And later, a sleepy heat haze blanking out the sea. Lovel
y. People didn’t matter then, they disappeared. Just nature surfing the big wave of spring.

  They didn’t bother kissing, neither felt the need. They slept together child-naked on fresh sheets that first night, their skins slightly flushed with a suggestion of early desire. All night they faced each other on their sides, hands linked together below their chins as if sharing a bedtime prayer, just looking at each other when they woke, like a couple of kids in love. Didn’t need to talk much. Nice when that happens. When you can’t remember going to sleep and you wake up feeling entirely different. Refreshed. Knowing that everything’s about to change.

  Big M could hear their bodies talking to each other, biology’s soft bubble below the surface. Primal desire. The tingle of new skins meeting.

  Can you hear it? he asked Rhiannon. A man of the sea, he described faraway whales calling to each other in the deeps, dolphin schools sending messages in hydro-morse.

  And what could she hear?

  A muffled confederacy of horses together below a canopy of trees, three fields away. Icterines and passerines on the wing above, coming in on the spring air. Swifts, swallows and martins. Old world warblers and flycatchers, the skylarks. She could hear them above.

  These were the mysterious moments of lovers in the night. Secret, cabbalistic. They were the last generation, said Rhiannon, who listened to nature. The last to describe the world without man’s constant presence; to describe it as watchers, not as controllers. The last to know the song of the willow warbler and the chiff-chaff.

  They could sense the long line of cliffs going away from them, along the coast; and stretching far behind them they could sense a small kingdom of rich green countryside. They were living in a natural paradise. They would go for car rides together to explore the country, enjoy the sights. They would watch bees and butterflies combing the mayflower blossom; they would see wood mice sunning themselves on country walls. They would see adders dancing and lambs prancing.