In the Woods

I kept a vague eye on the papers for a while, but no scandal concerning the Knocknaree motorway ever surfaced. Uncle Redmond's name showed up, well down the list, in some tabloid's chart of how much taxpayers were spending on various politicians' makeup, but that was all. The fact that Sam was still on the Murder squad tended to make me think that he had done as O'Kelly told him, in the end-although it's possible, of course, that he did in fact take his tape to Michael Kiely, and no newspaper would touch it. I don't know.

Sam didn't sell his house, either. Instead, I heard, he rented it out at a nominal rate to a young widow whose husband had died of a brain aneurysm, leaving her with a toddler, a difficult pregnancy and no life insurance. As she was a freelance cellist, she couldn't even collect unemployment benefit; she had fallen behind on her rent, her landlord had evicted her, and she and the children had been living in a B amp;B provided by a charity organization. I have no idea how Sam found this woman-I'd have thought you would need to go to Victorian London for that level of picturesque, deserving pathos; he had presumably put in a characteristic amount of research. He had moved to a rental flat in Blanchardstown, I think, or some equivalent suburban hell. The main theories were that he was about to leave the force for the priesthood, and that he had a terminal disease.

* * *

Sophie and I went out once or twice-I did, after all, owe her dinner and cocktails several times over. I thought we had a good time, and she didn't ask any difficult questions, which I took as a good sign. After a few dates, though, and before the relationship had really progressed enough to merit the name, she dumped me. She informed me, matter-of-factly, that she was old enough to know the difference between intriguing and fucked up. "You should go for younger women," she advised me. "They can't always tell."

* * *

Inevitably, sometime during those interminable months in my apartment (hand after hand of late-night solitaire poker, near-lethal quantities of Radiohead and Leonard Cohen), my thoughts turned back to Knocknaree. I had, of course, sworn never to let the place cross my mind again; but human beings can't help being curious, I suppose, as long as the knowledge doesn't come at too high a price.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I realized that there was nothing there. Everything before my first day of boarding school had apparently been excised from my mind, with surgical precision and this time for good. Peter, Jamie, the bikers and Sandra, the wood, every scrap of memory I had retrieved with such laborious care over the course of Operation Vestal: gone. I could remember what it had been like to remember these scenes, once upon a time, but now they had the remote, secondhand quality of old films I had watched or stories I had been told, I saw them as if from a vast distance-three brown-skinned kids in battered shorts, spitting on Willy Little's head from the branches and scrambling away, giggling-and I knew with cold certainty that over time even these deracinated images would shrivel up to nothing and blow away. They no longer seemed to belong to me, and I couldn't shake the dark, implacable sense that this was because I had forfeited my right to them, once and for all.

Only one image remained. A summer afternoon, Peter and me sprawled on the grass in his front garden. We had been trying, in a halfhearted kind of way, to make a periscope from instructions in an old comic book, but we were supposed to have a cardboard tube out of a roll of paper towel, and we couldn't ask our mothers for one because we weren't talking to them. We had used rolled-up newspaper instead, but it kept buckling, so all we could see through the periscope was the sports page, backwards.

We were both in a really bad mood. It was the first week of the holidays and it was sunny, so it should have been a brilliant day, we should have been fixing the tree house or freezing our mickeys off swimming in the river or something; but on our way home from the last day of school on Friday, Jamie had said, to her shoes, "Three months and I go to boarding school."