Avril pursed her lips. “You don’t want to believe everything that one tells you,” she said tightly, meaning I shouldn’t believe anything Thirza told me. “What happened was she was upstairs having a lie-down and she come down and she were between him and the door so he panicked and pushed past her and he forgot he still had a hold of the radio, and he dropped it, and she hit her head against the sideboard.”
Her nose was broken. As I discovered when I made it my business to visit the health centre later that day. Thirza had attended for treatment, but she was adamant that she had fallen, and she never mentioned that a thief had been in her house. I did. It was a good idea to warn people that he was now using violence; it could be worse next time, as it gets worse with battered wives. Now we had children battering old-age pensioners. Never mind that she could have fallen because he pushed past her; that was as bad, and it could be the thin end of the wedge. Thirza wasn’t so paranoid after all.
I called on her when I came back from town. She didn’t like my visiting at that moment. I didn’t think she was embarrassed at my seeing her with a dressing on her nose, I thought she was terrified. Several times she glanced towards her cat, a red marmalade tom that she treated like family.
“Shall I open the door?” I asked. “Cooper wants to go out.”
“I’m keeping him in,” she said quickly. “He’s off-colour. I don’t want him wandering.”
I stared at her. She wouldn’t meet my eye. “Did Darren make threats?” I asked. It’s a popular taunt among naughty boys: “You’ve got a cat, haven’t you?” Said with an evil smirk.
Thirza was shaking her head miserably. “Let me speak to his mother,” I urged. “Or his teacher.”
“No, no, please. It’ll only make things worse.”
She was right, of course. And she wouldn’t bring charges of assault, and nothing was done. The neighbours rationalised, convincing themselves that since she wouldn’t do anything, then she had indeed fallen down. It was all her fault, startling the boy, creeping downstairs unexpectedly so that he panicked and knocked the radio over. He was only visiting, after all.
He came visiting again. Someone talked, probably someone at the health centre. The story came back to the village that I’d said Darren had been caught in the act of stealing Mrs. Tilney’s radio and he’d hit her. No one dared approach me, but Thirza’s cat disappeared.
Thirza was stony-faced, obdurate. She said it was no use looking for Cooper, she’d never find him. I guessed she didn’t want to find him, didn’t want to know what had happened to him. I was raging, and coming down the street from her house, I saw Darren outside my cottage, eyeing it thoughtfully. I lost all sense of caution.
“No good,” I snapped. “I don’t have a cat, or a dog. And hospital matrons know more ways of killing without being found out than you could think up in a month of Sundays.”
His head jerked. He wanted to say he didn’t believe me but I saw his doubt. I glared at him and switched my attention to his hands. No scratches. Perhaps he’d used some kind of club. I hated that boy. I wondered how Thirza could be so stoical. Perhaps she felt that she had nothing else to lose now. She adored that cat.
I didn’t see her for two days and then she sought me out. An old shirt soaked in petrol had been put through her letter box. That was all, it hadn’t been followed by a match. But Darren had just stopped her in the street and said wasn’t it shocking that now school was out for the Easter holidays those children were setting the moors afire. Wicked children, he said, bored they were, with nothing to do: kids looking around for mischief. Next thing we knew they’d be putting rags soaked in petrol through folks’ letter boxes in the middle of the night when everyone was asleep, and following it up with a match. Someone was going to get hurt. “But,” Thirza said bleakly, “he said I had nothing to fear, he’d take care of me. He knew where I lived.”
I shuddered at the phrase: culled from television, used in earnest. “You have to go to the police,” I told her. “I’ll come with you.”
I don’t think she heard me; she was following her own trail. “I just hope he doesn’t set fire to the moor on top of the cliffs,” she said. “All those nests: wheatears, larks, curlews. And the cabin’s not insured.”
“He’d never dare!” But I knew he would, as soon as he thought of it. It was becoming a seasonal pastime among young children: setting fire to moorland during the Easter break. But still Thirza wouldn’t go to the police, perhaps thinking that if she did, the rag pushed through her letter box would be followed by a match, like he said.
Easter Monday was cool and misty, the cloud so low that you thought you had an eye problem until you realised the intermittent specks were gulls appearing and disappearing above your head. The light was good for bird-watching, however: no glare, and there was only the faintest onshore breeze. I walked out to the coast-guard station.
I watched the birds for a while, ate a sandwich, went for a walk, looked for seals. It was a curiously soft day and I lost myself in a world of water, air, and rock. There were rafts of auks on the sea, and cormorants beating fast across the surface. “Wee black devils,” Charles had called them. I remembered that he had died on Easter Monday. I guessed Thirza would come out to the cabin today.
I strolled back to the coast-guard station and into mist. It seemed to be a combination of sea fog and low cloud, and eerie beyond words there on top of the cliffs. Acoustics were distorted and I seemed to be surrounded by noise. There was no swell running and yet surf smashed randomly on rock far below, while through the crooning from a thousand feathered throats came piercing cries: gulls mostly, sometimes screaming. The screams made the hair rise on the back of my neck, what with the fog and the absence of wind and me all alone up there in the old coastguard station.
In fact, there was a slight breeze. A window appeared in the mist, allowing me a glimpse of wrinkled water, the stream of the current marked by trails of foam. Birds were scurrying back and forth through a flare of sunlight. Somewhere a breaker burst with a muffled thud. The cabin was still obscured. I doubted that Thirza was there. Perhaps she’d been and gone, intimidated by the lack of visibility and those screams. The gulls must be bothered about something. I wondered if there were a peregrine falcon about. I’d never known a peregrine on these cliffs and I felt a twinge of excitement, waiting for the cloud to lift again so that I might discover what was bothering the birds. Curiously, it was only the gulls that were alarmed, and after a while they settled down and then there was only the busy chorus of the auks. I smelled heather smoke. The children were at it again.
The breeze strengthened. Seaward, the cloud melted suddenly and the sun came blazing through. There was a band of cumulus above the Irish mountains. The islands where the puffins breed looked close enough to touch — and across the cove the cabin was on fire.
My first thought was that at least the birds were safe, the cliffs wouldn’t be touched, and as for the moor, which was also alight, the ground-nesters would escape and their eggs were not yet hatched. More would be laid.
The cabin must have been burning for some time; flames were streaming back before the onshore breeze and even as I watched, the roof fell in. The fire in the heather was less dramatic, in fact — I stared in amazement: there was an untouched section between the cabin and the smoking moor. Two fires had been set.
The mist still lingered inland so I could see no sign of children; they’d be well away by now, probably on mountain bikes. There was nothing I could do except get home as fast as possible, call the fire department, and hope they’d save some of the moor. The cabin was gone; it was roofed with some kind of tarred sheeting and was burning like an oil blaze.