Page 53 of Lyrebird

‘Laura! Stop!’ Solomon yells, angry that she has put herself in such danger. He reaches her and wraps his arm around her waist, pulling her towards him, tight to his body. She pushes his arm away, as she looks around the ground in a panic as though she’s searching for something. He lets her go and watches her circling the area, trying to find something, making noises, sounds he can’t decipher. Animal sounds, gunshot sounds.

‘Laura what are you doing?’ He’s calmer now that everybody in the cabins has put down their guns, but they’re all lining up at the rails to watch the spectacle. He doesn’t want her to become a spectacle, part of a circus.

She circles the same patch in the field, eyes down, panicked, making sound after sound, almost in an effort to track it down.

‘Laura,’ he says calmly. ‘I’ll help you. What are you doing?’

He feels his brothers beside him. His dad. He looks at them confused, sees that Rory is hanging behind, looking guilty.

‘What did you do?’ he asks him, roughly.

Rory ignores him.

‘He shot something,’ Cormac says, annoyed with his baby brother. ‘Rory, Jesus, you could have hit one of us. You don’t fire from the cabin.’

‘This isn’t fucking Platoon,’ Donal says.

‘What did you shoot?’ Solomon asks. ‘Did you shoot a bird?’

‘There aren’t any fucking birds,’ Rory says, annoyed that everyone is turning on him now. ‘Why would a bird fly over here?’

‘Ah, don’t touch that, love,’ Finbar says suddenly as he spins around to see her on her knees, on the grass, beside a hare. A hare that has been shot but isn’t yet dead. Laura sobs, tears gushing down her cheeks, as she mimics its dying sounds.

‘Jesus,’ Rory says, looking at her as if she’s weird. ‘It’s only a fucking hare.’

‘You can’t kill fucking hares here,’ his dad snaps at him, trying to keep his voice down with so many eyes on them. ‘Christ, what are you thinking, you’ll have us all banned, Rory.’

‘He was showing off, that’s what,’ Cormac says, annoyed.

‘We really should get back to the cabin,’ Finbar says to Solomon, eyeing Laura worriedly, conscious of the stares they’ve attracted.

‘I know.’ Solomon rubs his eyes tiredly. ‘Just give her a minute.’

He watches as Laura kneels next to the dying hare, mimicking its sounds, sobbing with such sadness. While the others might think she’s crazy, he understands her pain, her loss.

The owner starts to walk towards them, a red, angry head on him.

Solomon goes to Laura, hunches down and puts his arm around her shoulder. ‘It’s gone now, come on let’s go.’

He feels her body tremble as she slowly stands and looks around. At all the eyes on her. At the sniggering, at the frowns, at the raised camera phones. Even Rory won’t meet her eye now, hanging back and starting to head to the cabin without them. She wipes her cheeks and tries to compose herself.

Rory is gone by the time they reach the cabin, he’s hitched a lift with somebody else. The mood ruined, they’re a man down and the game is over, so they return to the house.

Marie and Cara look at them questioningly as they arrive home earlier than expected to shrugs and awkward grumbles. Solomon leads Laura upstairs to her bedroom, he stands at the doorway.

‘Are you okay?’

She lies down on her bed, curls herself into a ball, continues crying. Solomon wants to lie alongside her, wrap his body around hers, protect her.

‘Do you want to leave?’ he asks.

‘Yes please,’ she says through a sob.

It’s a quiet goodbye to Finbar and Marie. Marie gives her a gentle hug and tells her to mind herself, but Laura is silent, aside from a whispered thank you. She insists on sitting in the back seat of the car while Solomon drives to Dublin, and at first it’s because she doesn’t want to be near him, but then he sees her lie down, facing away from him. He plays the radio lightly, a Jack Starr song comes on the radio and though he usually turns it off, he turns it up a little.

‘That’s Jack Starr,’ Solomon says to her. ‘The lad who’ll be judge on StarrQuest.’

She doesn’t respond. He looks in the rear-view mirror and sees her back still turned to him. He turns the music down, eventually changes the station and then decides to turn it off completely. Occasionally she whimpers like the dying hare and the sound merges into Mossie’s whimpers of a few days ago, on the same back seat as they headed to the vet.