The Glory Boys

They went deep into the bracken, along a path used only by the big red deer that scampered and leapt as they approached, making good their escape. He put his coat down on the broken stems and they sat together. There was no horizon beyond the immediate wall of green that surrounded them, hiding them from all eyes. McCoy sank on to his back, reaching up with his arms and pulling the girl down on to his chest. Her head rested underneath his chin, and against his mouth he could feel the strands of her hair, and there was a scent to them, freshly washed and clean. They lay there a long time, and his thoughts were of the hill farms, and the other girl who was dark and more heavily built and who comprehended the need for release that overwhelmed him, and of the buzzards that would circle and swoop above them across the hills of Armagh County.

It was Norah who broke the spell, it is you they are hunting? It was your picture on the TV that we saw?' Frightened, small voice, and his dreaming reply failed to take her fear away. it was me. I'm the one they're looking for. They're a long way behind me, and they won't find me.'

'But you killed a girl, strangled her, that's what it said.'

'What do you want me to say? What do you want me to pretend?' He rolled over on to his stomach, and leant on one bent elbow above her, his free hand in her hair, stroking, caressing it into shapes, it has nothing to do with your life. It is something separate. I won't tell you I didn't, and you wouldn't believe me if I did. There's nothing I can say, nothing you should know.'

His hand came down from her hair, and a fingernail flicked carelessly at the plastic buttons of her blouse, held by frail cotton to the material. He saw the tears coming, the tightening of the muscles close to her eyes and the reflection from the moisture that ran beside her nose, and found a track that skirted the fullness of her cheek and then was lost on the grass. He came down to her mouth and kissed her, and there was no room for her to back away. She felt her body pressed hard against the unevenness of the ground. And his hands began to go free, and search out the places they quested for. When they had unfastened the clasp behind her back and removed the soft protective covering on her breasts, she put her arms round his neck, and, sobbing, dragged his head close down beside her. She could not account for her actions, could not justify the tenderness with which she ran her hands over the harsh bristles below the hair at the back of his neck, could not reason why she flexed her legs slowly apart in the hope that his hand would find its way. When she opened her eyes his face was very close, and he kissed the lids, closing them, and there was just the darkness and the sensation and the knowledge that the hands were moving again, demanding ownership, seeking new territory. The button slipped loose at the waist of her jeans and she wriggled as his hands eased them below her knees, and still there was the darkness and the desperate requirement for him to move on. He lingered at the scarce-formed line that led down to the gentleness of the soft hair, and she moaned his name without sound into the roughened cheek joined to her own. When he came into her there was pain, and a power she had not known before, and she writhed and tried to escape. But there was only the thrashing, pinioning weight that held her, till at last he sagged, spent and exhausted.

Norah lay on the ground unmoving, the sun playing on her skin, the wind blowing its patterns, while the man beside her slept, his face with the quietness of a child's, the smoothness of his skin broken only by the tramlines worked by the nails of Doris Lang.

From the bank where he had changed a ten-pound travellers' cheque, Famy looked for the red cubicle he now identified as a telephone box. It took him fifteen mnutes and brought him back to the railway station he had walked past when seeking the bank. The bag was heavy, and it was with relief that he dropped it down on to the floor of the box. He closed the door behind him, and felt in his pocket for a two-pence piece. He had no difficulty remembering the number, nor the extension to ask for when the switchboard operator answered. As he had expected, the figures of the extension were given remotely and above the crackle of the connection.

'It's "Mushrooom" here,' Famy said.

There was a scuffling on the line, the sound he recognized as a receiver being placed against the material of a shirt or jacket, and indistinct words spoken into a void.

Clearing the room, thought Famy.

'What is it you wish to say?' the telephone was active again.

'I wanted to know whether there were further orders, whether there were new instructions.' Was that all he had telephoned to discover, when there was no chance of further orders? His tone echoed the hollowness of his request.

'Nothing has come through.'