I've been working on this, and I always like to see where my critiques get reflected in the final work, so this is pretty close to the final opening of this book. thanks to everyone who commented, it's always so very useful for framing my thoughts. (
@Parson - I still haven't decided about the swimmers. It'll raise a smile locally cos they are absolutely everywhere, but might be too much of a digression)
The glen was in my heart and in my roots. I visited in the early morning, and in the evening when the paths were still. I walked there, because we once had. I sought you in the trees, in the pools, hoping to see you coming to me, side by side, hand in hand, together or apart, in any way you could. One day, in its right time, you will be there, waiting. But not today.
Chapter One – Pointless
“A UK city beginning with L,” said the presenter. He was a bit smug, landed English gentry, but the quiz was good.
Jim absently rubbed behind Snoops’ ears, in the spot where the collie liked. “Lisburn.” Snoops cocked his head, and Jim nodded sagely. “No one ever knows the Northern Ireland answer. Makes you look smart.”
It was down to this, talking to the dog.
The end music came up and Snoops stood up straightaway, pavlovian style.
“All right.” Jim allowed himself to be herded through the hall into the kitchen. He studiously ignored the hall table, bereft of everything except the photograph of Jean and Lauren gifted to him by the funeral parlour, both faces smiling out at him. It had been taken on a happy day last August, during the mini-heatwave that had brought half of Northern Ireland to the glen’s shallow river and cool air.
He lifted his wax coat from the wooden shelf rack by the back door. Snoops turned in circles but Jim paid no attention, not wanting to reward the dog’s silly antics. Instead, Jim thrust his cap on, grabbed the blackthorn stick that he’d to increasingly use, and opened the back door. “Come on, then.”
Snoops ran to the gate at the end of garden path, waiting for Jim to catch up and lift the latch. In a moment, the dog was off into the glen and up the steep hill opposite, a constant movement through the bracken and curled-up ferns. Jim kept pace but stayed on the beaten path as it curved to the waterfall.
He’d expected there to be people about. Even though it was into autumn, a late, hot September spell faded away, the air wasn’t too chilly and there’d been no frost to date. Last winter, even on days where the ground was hard with frost, he’d hardly been able to move for the wild swimming maddos, endorphin-seeking in the freezing water. They'd get changed on the pool’s edge, not caring what the dog walkers, mostly locals like him, got an eyeful of: half the time they didn’t hide themselves as well as they reckoned. He’d yet to decide if that was good or bad for tourism – for sure, as a lad, he’d have seen it as a bonus.
Today, there was no one. Not a single dog walker. Not a kid racing from the deli-come-ice cream shop, using the glen as a short cut to the village. Even the traffic sounds from the top road, normally consistent enough to become background, were missing. It felt, as Snoops ran back and forth, back and forth, as if they were the only beings in the world.
He turned the corner to the waterfall, the one constant through the seasons, churning down through two falls into the wide bottom pool. Even it was lacklustre, its thunder muted after a week or two of low rains.
There was still just about enough daylight to see his footing, so he headed up the wooden steps which hugged the cliff face. The longer walk would please the dog. But it wasn’t just that: as the spray hit his face something came half-alive inside him, a beating of his heart in time to the waterfall’s roar that was increasingly missing these days.
He climbed past the first pool, to the second. Snoops ran past and was out of sight in moments, only the occasional swish in the bracken showing his trail. The darkness was falling now, in that half-sharp winter way, softened by low mists, and Jim turned to go back down. It wouldn’t do to fall – not with his empty house and no one knowing where he was.
He gave a sharp whistle that should have brought Snoops to him, but didn’t.
“Snoops!” he called, not liking the quaver in his voice but it wasn’t like the dog not to come. Without the dog, there’d be nothing except quiz shows and dinners from the village until people decided Jim was coping all right and he became just the subject of whispered conversations about the ‘poor old man, his wife and daughter with two wee ones inside her, and then the dog, too.’ Avoided, as if he would spread bad luck, like a Jonah.
Snoops let out a bark, loud and sharp in the darkness. Not a yip, not in pain, but a good solid, ‘I’ve found something.’
Jim didn’t care about the steps, or the danger of slipping, just that Snoops was okay. He followed a second bark to where the dog stood, near the very top of the steps, the white flash on his tail shifting to and fro.
“What is it?” Jim took a step forward at the sound of a stunted babble. He stopped down, shifting the dog out of the way so that he could push the long grass and brambles back. There, in the glen, under a tangled bower of ivy, lay a baby wrapped in a single white sheet. Very young, if he was any judge; maybe close to just born.
