Old Friends

Tom O'Neill

Description

Uprooted from city life by the death of his father, Dark is beckoned into a rath or fairy ring as he wanders the fields near his new home. There, he meets people big and small whose magnificent stories of warriors, monsters and the fairy people provide an escape from his crumbling school and home life and take him deep into the world of Fionn Mac Cumhaill and the Fianna.
O’Neill’s powerful new tales of adventure, heroism, treachery, weakness and redemption entwine with ancient Irish folklore as Dark realises that he, like his eccentric uncle Connie, belongs to two very different worlds.
See www.irishfables.com for more from Tom O'Neill, Dark and several characters from the book, or read about them on Wikipedia.
PRAISE FOR OLD FRIENDS
‘Wonderfully irreverent, engrossing … a tour-de-force of storytelling’ Gemma Hussey, former Minister for Education
‘Gripping and gory and vivid’
Máire Uí Mhaicin, academic and folklore specialist
'[O'Neill] takes his young teen readers time-travelling with protagonist Dark through tales that straddle the knowable and the imaginary. There is nothing implausible about the emotions that course through these latter-day folktales that bring LED lighting to fairy raths; no false notes dim their sense of loss and betrayal or, indeed, O’Neill’s idiomatic style. This is a book straight from the oral tradition – it would sparkle if read aloud'
Mary Shine Thompson, The Irish Times
'Tom O' Neill manages to bring new twists and new ideas into the tales in this book. You get really engrossed in the characters' lives and they seem real, not just myth and legend anymore. Tom O'Neill really brings the characters, and the stories themselves, to life. I really liked this book and was absorbed in the story from the very beginning'
Bríd, age 14, Leitrim

Sujets

• Monsters
• Myths
• Juvenilee Fiction
• Monstruo (desambiguación)
• Fables
• Legends
• General officer
• Mythology
• Fable
• General

Informations

• Publié par: Little Island Books
• Date de parution: 05 mars 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781908195081
• Langue: English

Extrait

Stormy clouds blacked out the quarter moon. A screech momentarily paralysed Dark. Maybe a disturbed snipe. He was already close to the forbidden place.
His LED torch failed. With another mis-step into a soft spot, water seeped into his boot and the toxic spring thorns of a hawthorn branch made painful contact with his face. Shite! Feckit! His mother didn’t like it, but recently, Dark had found that cursing helped to beat back tears of frustration. He sucked in his breath. His courage was rapidly draining away into the cold bog-water. What kind of foolishness was it that had landed him, all alone, in this dark and desolate marsh in the middle of the night?
There was a time, about three years ago now, when Dark’s only worries had been the release date of the next Playstation console and whether he’d get picked for the under-twelves football team. Then, one Sunday afternoon, his father went and drove his BSA M20 into a tree and everything changed.
They buried him deep in the ground.
The house in Glanmire Heights had to be sold. Someone else was in Dark’s room now, with the secret compartment his dad had made for them to hide the BB gun from his mam, and Dark and his mother had come to live in a converted cowshed in the middle of nowhere with no channels on the TV and awful, dark, cold silence every night from nine.
His mam ‘wasn’t coping very well’, people said. When his father’s half-mad brother Connie had insisted that they come to live in the converted ‘extension’ to his house, she seemingly hadn’t many other offers on the table. So Dark hadn’t said anything when she asked what he thought.
Dark had never met Connie before – he’d been away somewhere. He was a huge fecker with a great black mop of hair and beard. Dark had been a bit afraid of him that first day they’d arrived in the white van Connie had sent to collect them and all their things. When he talked and laughed with the van driver he could surely be heard all across the valley.
Dark hadn’t liked this place of Connie’s very much, but he still didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything much to say anymore. That was how he felt about things anyway. That’s how he’d got the name The Dark when he started at the local community school. He didn’t mind the name. The names he used less often now were McLean from his father and Arthur from his mother.
At first they’d tried to get him to talk. They got some kind of counsellor person into the school to talk to him. He could still picture her very clearly. How does this make you feel, Arthur? she would ask, with nowhere for him to look, no escape from her big watery eyes all surrounded in blue make-up. How does that make you feel, Arthur? It’s OK to miss someone. Do you feel angry, Arthur? It’s OK if you ever want to cry, Arthur. But he hadn’t given in to any of it. He didn’t have any desire to ‘explore emotions’ or do any of that stuff. That wasn’t his kind of thing.
His mam would wait until they were in the car so that he couldn’t wander off. She would switch off Beat FM and then ask him, worriedly, How are things going, Arthur? He loved her and was worried about her too. But this talking business didn’t serve any purpose that he could see. It just made him uncomfortable. Fine, was all he could say. He didn’t know what the feck they wanted from him.
One evening, when she was home from work earlier than usual and the three of them were in the kitchen, her on her laptop, him sitting on the armchair next to the Aga playing with the collies, and Connie mixing milk formula for calves, she said to him, ‘Arthur, you should ask your Uncle Connie to show you how to play the drums. He used to be in a metal band once. Let out everything you’re feeling on them.’
Dark said nothing. But he kind of wished his mam didn’t think she had to be all ‘with it’, talking about metal and stuff.
Connie turned away from the sink and laughed.
‘You can hammer the shite out of the drums any time you like, Art. But maybe, Helen, you’re watching a bit too much Oprah.’
His mam looked like she was going to cry, but then she just shook her head and laughed too.
That was when Dark had started to like Connie. Gloom never got much chance to settle on the house when he was around.
Dark didn’t mind working with the animals. He had started to do some feeding and watering and other jobs around the yard. Connie had given him two white-headed heifer calves of his own. He also gave him a key for the quad bike on the condition that he didn’t tell his mam.
Back when Connie was around, the place always had visitors. Neighbours generally called in if they were passing. They’d stand at the Aga and relay news or look for Connie’s opinions, which he was never slow to offer, on anything from problems with the bank manager to scabby sheep. Dark wasn’t sure whether they were mainly there for the advice and mystery poultices or for the company and the entertainment.
Then there were the others who called at night. Others of all shapes and sizes. Some talked with strange accents and most were a bit more peculiar than Dark ever remembered meeting in Cork city. Or anywhere. There was the purple-cheeked lad who had driven them from Cork in the white van. He always brought boxes of stale USA biscuits. Dark also remembered a short, red-haired man who smoked a pipe nearly as big as his head. And there was a very fat woman with a brown leather coat down to her ankles and a voice that boomed nearly as loudly as Connie’s. Those people would come in and sit nursing a mug of tea or a can of beer at the oilcloth-covered kitchen table, talking, playing cards and laughing.
Connie never toned things down just because Dark was there. Dark would sit on the sofa under the stairs at the back of the room reading or playing his DS, only picking up on bits of the conversations. Connie wouldn’t care how long a caller stayed or what farm work he had planned to do that day.
‘Once the animals are fed, Arthur,’ he said, ‘there’s no work that can’t wait while there’s good company and diversion to be had.’
Dark remembered asking Connie back then about the forbidden place. He had heard lads in school telling hushed stories of terrible things. A place best left alone, they said. Once, a tractor that pulled a grass topper too close to the McLean rath had apparently turned over and killed the driver. Another man who had collected firewood there saw his wife die of a mystery illness within minutes of him putting the sticks into the range.
‘Gnarly, useless old yew and oak,’ Connie said. ‘Hardly worth taking a saw to them. What class of an eejit would bring yew boughs home to burn anyway?’
Dark understood even then that it was fear that had protected this ground from clearing for centuries.
Connie was usually as blunt as a sledgehammer, but he was very vague when talking about the rath.
‘The people believe they’d be better off not disturbing that place even with thinking too much about it, Art.’
‘Are the stories true, then?’ Dark asked.
Connie paused.
‘It was always said around here,’ he said eventually, ‘that the sí are good people only as long as they are left alone.’
‘The sí ? ’ Dark asked. He was younger then, and didn’t know much.
‘The little people, I mean,’ said Connie. ‘Not that I believe in them. Or the little fear dearg, the red man. Oh no. Not at all!’ He burst out laughing for some reason.
And then, about a year ago, Connie had gone away too. Not dead, though. Taken by the gardaí. His mother just said, ‘Don’t worry, Arty, he’s not gone forever.’
Dark heard in school that Connie had been done for ‘assault and obstruction’ of a government official in the course of his duties. Dark knew there must have been more to it than that. Connie might have made big noises, but Dark had never seen him being hard on anyone.
Dark didn’t know when Connie would be coming out. He didn’t let on to his mam that he knew or cared anything about it.
So then it was just him and his mother alone again. She got a new job and was working very long hours, so mostly it was just him. She had quietly gone back to looking sad and worried.
He was doing a lot on the farm now, before and after school. It helped him to not think too much. A friend of Connie’s, Brian, was coming in for the morning and evening milkings and getting in contractors for spreading slurry and making silage. Dark was taking care of the feeding and herding and fencing. He was tall for his age, and nearly able now to lift the bags of fertiliser or pull a calf on his own. He was trying to make sure everything kept running smoothly till Connie got back. And trying not to let farm worries pile on top of the other things that were weighing his mam down so much. He reckoned he was going along pretty OK, considering.
Except at school. Not going along too well there at all. But he was planning to be done with that problem soon.
Then two days ago this thing started.
He had been out wandering the back fields as usual, after school. Counting the yearlings. Checking the water troughs. Talking to the donkey. Thinking his own thoughts. As he was walking towards the hedge of the bog field, he saw and heard a movement. At first he thought it was a fox. Or maybe a winged pheasant unable to rise and get away. Definitely something fairly big. And close. Yet he couldn’t see what it was – although the hedge was a gappy blackthorn. It seemed to move on as he walked towards it and then stop again a little way off. He kept following. About halfway along, he heard it run down from the ditch on the other side. He ran ahead to a gap and climbed over a bit of barbed wire tied between two sceach bushes – Connie’s idea of fencing. He looked back along to where the creature had come out and could see a movement continuing through the rushes and long grass of the bog. It was again very noticeable. Like a big creature, but unhurried and still not showing itself. Too slow for a pheasant legging it. Too careless fo