A Room Full Of Bones

Ruth jerks her head up. It’s Cathbad.

‘I’ve just heard,’ he says.

Like Michelle – disconcertingly like Michelle – Cathbad looks stunned, as if he’s been involved in a car crash. This, and the fact that he’s dressed in ordinary clothes, has the effect of making him look diminished. Cathbad’s not a large man but he usually dominates any room he’s in; now he sinks into Ruth’s visitor’s chair looking almost like a student.

‘Who told you?’ asks Ruth.

‘Judy.’

That figures. ‘Is there any news?’ Ruth asks.

‘No. He’s still in a coma. The doctors are completely baffled.’

Ruth allows herself to relax very slightly. He’s not dead. Nelson’s still alive, and while he’s alive he’ll be fighting, whatever the doctors say.

‘I don’t think anyone knows what it is,’ she says.

Cathbad looks up, his eyes wide. ‘I do,’ he says.

Ruth almost laughs. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I know what’s wrong with Nelson,’ says Cathbad. ‘And, if you think about it, I think you do too.’

Ruth stares. Perhaps tiredness is making her stupider than usual but she really has no idea what Cathbad is talking about. Since when has he been a medical expert?

‘What’s wrong with him then?’

‘He’s been cursed,’ says Cathbad.

Ruth does laugh now, but inwardly she feels angry with Cathbad. This isn’t the time for his mystical new age nonsense. Nelson is ill. He’s in hospital. Nothing else matters. Then she looks at Cathbad and her anger fades. He really does look very upset. She supposes that, in his way, he’s trying to help.

‘Do you mean cursed by the bishop?’ she asks, thinking of Ted. ‘Vex not my bones and all that?’

‘No,’ says Cathbad, as if this is a ridiculous idea. ‘I think he’s been cursed by Bob.’

‘By Bob?’

‘Yes. Do you remember the evening at your house? Fireworks night? I said that Bob ought to point the bone at Lord Smith. Well, I think he did. That night, Lord Smith died.’

And you were nearby, thinks Ruth, visiting his daughter. Caroline who loves Uluru Rock and the red heart of Australia. ‘But why would Bob curse Nelson?’ she asks.

Cathbad frowns. ‘I don’t know. Maybe he was angry because the police hadn’t been able to get his ancestors back. Maybe Nelson was just near Smith at the time of the curse. Maybe it backfired on him.’

‘Backfired on him?’

‘That can happen,’ says Cathbad, ‘with a very powerful curse, and Bob is a proper shaman, a Wirinun they’re called. He has pretty devastating powers. Maybe he’s cursed everyone to do with the museum.’

‘What about me?’ says Ruth. ‘I was at the museum. I actually handled the bones.’

‘Oh, he’s put a circle of protection round you,’ said Cathbad. ‘He told me so.’

Ruth supposes that she should be grateful but she just feels disorientated, as if she is still in one of her livid dreams. How can she be sitting here with Cathbad, discussing curses and witch doctors as if they are everyday things? She realises that Cathbad is still speaking, ‘… Bob cursed Danforth Smith and he died. I don’t know how but Nelson somehow got involved in that curse, but he’s not dead. He’s lost. He’s wandering. He’s lost in the Dreaming.’

Ruth remembers the dark, the fire, the sound of the singing sticks. Fire is our gateway to the Dreaming. Was it really only two days ago?

‘Well, what can we do about it?’ she asks. ‘If Nelson’s stuck in Dreamtime or whatever?’

‘I’m going to go and get him back,’ says Cathbad.

‘What do you mean “go and get him back”?’ Irritation – and fear – makes Ruth’s voice sharp.

‘Just that. I’m going to enter the Dreaming.’

‘How?’

‘You don’t need to know the details. I’m going to take drugs, hallucogens, I’m going to burn eucalyptus leaves, I’m going to chant, I’m going to chew certain herbs. Then, I believe, I will enter the Dreaming and I’ll find Nelson.’

‘What if you don’t? What if you die of a bloody drugs overdose?’

‘Ruth,’ Cathbad looks at her kindly. ‘I know you’re scared but it’s OK. I know what I’m doing.’

This, Ruth considers, is the single least reassuring statement she has ever heard.

‘Cathbad.’ She, in her turn, tries to sound soothing, tries to channel Judy’s professional voice. ‘You’re upset. We’re all upset. Jesus, I still can’t believe it. Nelson’s the last person in the world I thought would ever get ill like this. But he’s in hospital. He’s in the best place. And he’s tough. He’ll pull through.’ Say it enough times, she tells herself, and you’ll begin to believe it.

‘There’s nothing the hospital can do,’ says Cathbad.

‘This is beyond modern medicine.’

‘Listen to yourself!’ shouts Ruth. ‘Do you know how insane you sound? This isn’t about curses or… or… Dreaming. Nelson is sick. He’s caught something. Can’t you, for once in your life, realise that it’s nothing to do with you.’

There is a silence. Ruth wonders if Phil, in the next-door office, heard her yelling. He’ll be round in a second, if so. But Phil does not materialise.

‘I want to do it at your house,’ says Cathbad.

‘What?’

‘I think the energy would be better on the Saltmarsh. And it’s near Bob, I might absorb some of his power.’

‘Are you saying that you want to come over to my house to have a drugs trip? In front of my daughter? What if you die? It’ll traumatise her for life.’

‘It’d traumatise me too,’ says Cathbad reasonably. Then he smiles. He has a singularly disarming smile.

‘Please Ruth. I know you’d do anything to help Harry.’

*

Nelson is in the dark. He can hear the sea. Is it Brighton or Blackpool? The present or the past? There are voices in the water, in the surf and the backwash, but he can’t hear what they’re saying yet. There are lights too, objects just out of his reach. He hears singing and thinks it might be his mother, her Irish voice full of sadness. Dolores of the sorrows. The black coach pulled by six black horses. The coachman knocks three times on your door. Does this mean that he’s dying? It doesn’t hurt if so, but something’s wrong. He can’t die yet. He’s got things to do. His children. He struggles to remember their names. There was once a king and he had three daughters. Rebecca, Laura. Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair. Kate. Kiss me Kate. When you hear the banshee, you know your time is up.

And then, through the darkness, he sees a boat coming towards him. A boat that looks as if it is made of stone. And there’s a man on the boat, a man with long silvery hair. He has a band around his head almost like a crown. His eyes are blue, terrifyingly blue.

‘Nelson,’ he says, in a strange sing-song accent that is like the sea itself. ‘Raise up your hand to me and I will save you.’

But the black tide carries him away again.

As soon as she finishes her last tutorial, Ruth packs up her bag and makes for the door. Cathbad has told her that he’ll be round at nine, ‘with all that’s necessary’. Is she really going to let Cathbad do this ridiculous thing? Is she going to let him dance round a bonfire, then go upstairs and take drugs? Under her roof? What if Cathbad dies and she’ll be known forever as the university lecturer whose colleague died in her house after a drug-fuelled orgy? What if he dies and she never sees him again? What if Cathbad and Nelson both die and Kate is left without a father figure of any kind, apart from Flint and the postman?

But she can’t just sit around and do nothing. She may have refused to help Nelson but she can’t stand in the way of Cathbad’s efforts, however lunatic they may be. Is it because, over the years, she has absorbed enough of