For just a few seconds, the dun-coloured sky disappeared as the Dobermans rose massively and simultaneously into the air. And then they were on her, both heads into her exposed face, hot breath pumping and the great, savage teeth.
'Oh, my God!' Moira shrieked as the rough tongues sliced through her make-up. 'Do you guys know what this bloody stuff cost?'
She threw an arm around each of the dogs, trapping the four big front paws to her tweed jacket, and they all staggered together through the gate and on to the site, knocking over an empty, grey plastic dustbin.
The elderly man in the black trilby caught the bin as it fell. 'Moira!,' he yelled. 'Hey!'
'Donald,' Moira said, arms full of black and gold paws. 'You all right?'
'Well, damn.' He pulled his hat off. 'We wisny expecting ye today, hen, the Duchess didny say…'
'That's because she doesn't know,' Moira said. 'I hope she's not away from her van… Down, now…'
The dogs obediently sat at her feet. 'Ye've still got the way, all right,' Donald said admiringly.
'They've grown. Again. I swear I've never seen Dobermans this big. What d'you feed them on?
Donald didn't smile. 'Public health officials.'
'My daddy,' she reminded him gently, 'was a public health official.'
'Aye, I know. But your daddy wisny like the hard-faced bastards they send 'round these days.' Donald turned his head and shouted at a woman pegging baby-clothes to a washing line outside a lilac-coloured caravan.
'Hey, Siobhan, the Duchess, she in now?'
'Oh… sure' The woman stumbled and dropped a nappy in a puddle. She picked it up, wrung out the brown water and hung it on the line. 'Leastways, I haven't seen no red carpet goin' down today.'
'Tinkers,' Donald said disparagingly. 'They're all bloody tinkers here now, 'cept for the few of us.'
Moira followed him and the dogs through the site, with its forty-odd vans on concrete hard-standings and its unexpectedly spectacular views of the Ayrshire coast. It might have been a holiday caravan site but for the washing lines full of fluttering clothes and the piles of scrap and all the kids and dogs.
They passed just one perfect old Romany caravan, bright red and silver, originally designed for horses but with a tow-bar now. A man with a beard and an earring sat out on the step whittling chunks out of a hunk of dark wood. He wore a moleskin waistcoat trimmed with silver. Moira stared at him, amazed. 'Who the hell's that?'
Donald turned his head and spat. One of the Dobermans growled. 'Oh,' Moira said. 'I see.'
'Bloody hippies. Call 'emselves New Age gypsies. Wis a time this wis a select site. All kindsa garbage we're gettin' now, hen.'
He stopped at the bottom of six concrete steps leading to the apex of the site, a flat-topped artificial mound with the sides ranked into flowerbeds.
Nothing changes, Moira thought. Wherever she's living it's always the same.
Evergreen shrubs, mainly laurel, sprouted around the base of the shining silver metal palace which crowned the mound like the Mother Ship from Close Encounters. The old man mounted the bottom step. 'Hey, Duchess!'
It wasn't what you'd call a traditional Romany caravan. Few like it had been seen before on a statutory local authority gypsy site. Only movie stars on location lived quite like this.
Donald stayed on the bottom step, the Dobermans silent on either side of him. There were antique carriage lamps each side of the door, a heavy door of stained and polished Douglas fir, which slid open with barely a sigh.
She came out and stood frailly in the doorway, a soft woollen evening stole about her bony shoulders. The day was calm for the time of year, no breeze from the sea.
Donald said, 'Will you look who's here. Duchess.' From the edges of the stole, the Duchess's hair tumbled like a cataract of white water almost to her waist. She looked down at Moira and her face was grave.
Moira said, 'Hullo, Mammy.' 'You OK?'
He'd looked anxious, his tuxedo creased, the thistle lolling from his buttonhole.
Well, actually, it was more than anxious; the guy had been as scared as any of them in the room full of splintered bone – twisted antlers across the tables on beds of broken glass, and one pair still hanging menacingly among the glittering shards of a chandelier.
Moira had said, 'You ever see bomb damage in Belfast?'
'Huh?'
She was up on her knees now, examining the guitar for fractures.
'Bomb damage,' she said, not looking at him.
He was silent. He crouched down next to her, the two of them by the dais, all the others, the multi-national Celts, brushing each other down, sheltering in groups in the corners of the Great Hall.
The pale man had been helped away by the Earl and some servants He'd looked just once at Moira with his damaged eye.
There were no cracks in the body of the guitar, although its face was scratched and it looked to be very deeply offended.
'What's your name?' Moira turned to the American.
'Huh?'
'What are you called?'
'I, uh…' He grimaced, the suaveness gone, black curls sweated to his forehead. He looked as limp as the thistle he wore. 'I don't believe this has happened. Some kind of earthquake? Or what? Uh… Macbeth.'
'That's your name? My God. Here, hold this a second.' She passed him the guitar while she untangled her hair.
He held the instrument up by the neck, gripping it hard.
'You have earthquakes in these parts?'
'What?' She'd started to laugh.
'Earthquakes. Tremors.'
She said 'Macbeth. I thought you were going to be Irish despite the thistle. New York Irish '
'Just New York. Born and raised. Mungo Macbeth. Of the Manhattan Macbeths. My mother said I should wear the kilt.' He straightened the thistle. 'We compromised,'
'That's a compromise?'
He said, 'You really are OK now?'
'Oh, I'm fine. Just fine.' Feeling like she'd come through a war – a whole war in just a few minutes.
Mungo Macbeth had been looking around at all the wreckage, where the stags' heads had fallen. Then up at the ceiling.
'There isn't one of them left hanging,' he'd said, awed. Not a goddamn one.'
He was right.
What have I done?
'I mean, is that weird?' Mungo Macbeth said. 'Or is that weird?' 'And what was it that made you think,' the Duchess said contemptuously, 'that it was you?'
She didn't sound at all like Moira. Her voice was like the refined tink you made when you tapped with your fingernail on crystal glass of the very highest quality. A most cultured lady who had never been to school.
'Not me on my own,' Moira said. 'Someone… something was… you know, like an invasion? I felt threatened. This guy… Also, I didn't like the setup anyway, generations of stalkers' trophies, and all these elitist folk, like 'we are the Celtic aristocracy, we're the chosen ones…' '
The Duchess lifted her chin imperiously. 'What nonsense you talk. Do you seriously think that if you began to suddenly resent me or something, you could come in here and break everything on my walls?'
Virtually all the wall space in the luxurious caravan had been decorated with fine china.
'Your walls, no,' Moira said.
'I should think not indeed.'
'But this place, I felt very threatened.'
She kept seeing, like on some kind of videotape loop, the man unfastening her guitar case. But it was all so dreamlike, part of the hallucination summoned by the song and the strangeness of the night. She couldn't talk about it.
'I'm mixed up, Mammy.'
