Folk'd Up Beyond All Recognition (FUBAR) Read online

  Ellie emerged from the kitchen. Her left hand rested on the crest of her very pregnant, very prominent bulge, as it always seemed to do these days. She was flushed, she was hot, she was irritable, and she’d just come from her second hour of attempting to defrost the freezer with the world’s bluntest screwdrivers. At the rate of progress she was making, she might as well have been using chipping at the ice with playing cards.

  “It must be the boiler,” she said eventually.

  Danny said nothing. Did nothing.

  “You’ll have to check,” she added.

  “Right.”

  She waited another few seconds. “Well?” she said.

  “Well, where is the boiler?”

  “I don’t know! Upstairs in that wee hot press cupboard probably. It’s my first day in here too Danny! D’you want me to staple a schematic to my forehead?!”

  He glanced at the clock. It was 10:42pm. By this time, he knew, O’Rourke’s would be filling up rightly with the late-night crowd and the short skirt brigade would be out in force. Flan would be making confident predictions of his inevitable success; predictions as delicate and as beautiful as spider silk, composed of purest bullshit.

  He’d be cradling a pint and raising it to his lips. Whenever. He. Wanted.

  When he opened the hot press door, tepid, grey water escaped in a gush that soaked the landing carpet. He should have jumped back, should have let loose with a flurry of swearwords in an amusing fashion, but it was all he could do simply to stand there and stare into the black innards of the hot press at the leaking boiler within.

  If he moved, he knew, he’d hear that squelch noise again and he knew, he knew right then that if he heard it even once more, it was over. If his foot came down and a squelch was the result, he wasn’t even going to stop, he was going to walk downstairs and put on his coat and take whatever money was in it and walk to O’Rourkes and meet the lads and have a fucking pint and go back home, go back home to Belgravia Avenue and sleep, sleep somewhere, sleep anywhere and not think about anything. That was the sequence of events that was going to happen, right there. Yes sir.

  “There’s water dripping down the stairs! What the fuck happened up there!”

  “Boiler’s fucked,” was his detailed reply.

  “Phone the landlord! Cheeky cunt’d the brass neck to take a security dep…oh…”

  He heard a sharp intake of breath from downstairs, a deep and shuddering inhalation that contained frustration and pain. He glanced down and saw Ellie at the bottom of the stairs, leaning against the hallway wall for support, clutching her swollen belly, her face red, her knees bending against the strain. Air escaped her lips in a hiss.

  She glanced upward and their eyes locked.

  He closed the hot press door and went to her, squelching every step of the way.

  **

  Co. Wexford, Ireland, 43 AD

  This place was different. It felt different, but how? He could see the Morrigan beside him, by his shoulder as always, and he knew he could have simply asked her and she would probably have told him, but he didn’t want to do that. He wanted to try…try and figure it out for himself, to use this newfound confidence in abilities he never would have suspected he even possessed.

  They were standing by a well in the middle of a small settlement. The houses were simplistic wattle-and-daub earthenwork style dwellings, arranged in a circle. He could see some sort of rudimentary wooden fence ringing the place, which looked as if it would stop all but the least determined of pretty much anything; the villagers would have been more protected with a roll of sellotape.

  But it wasn’t the lower-budget element of their surroundings that was off-kilter; it wasn’t the lack of grandness self-evident in the Tuatha villages he’d glimpsed.

  Taste. It was something to do with taste. The air…it tasted…

  “Magic,” he said, hesitatingly. “There’s no magic here, is there?”

  She was impressed, though she tried not to show it. “This is a human settlement,” she said.

  He baulked slightly when she said human. It was easy sometimes to forget that looking at her, she wasn’t really a woman in the homo sapiens sense of the word. Clearly she sensed this because she glanced at him with a slight smile.

  “Are you wondering who came first?” she said. “You or us?”

  “Kinda.”

  “Whole other debate,” she replied, and rather than go any further she walked a few steps toward a particular clump of huts.

  Danny walked after her, looking around as he did so, unavoidably reminded of charity videos of Third World countries as he did so - the lifestyle of the people he was seeing here was about the same standard. They worked hard to eke a living. He saw children carrying water from the well to the houses, women bustling this way and that, fetching and carrying and generally keeping the heartbeat of the village intact by undertaking the myriad of daily tasks that made up life here.

  Thankfully, the women were covered up and not doing that weird topless Amazonian tribe thing, although maybe primitive people only did that where the weather existed to make it possible; any bare-breasted peoples of Ireland would have died out after a few particularly fresh and bracing Januarys. Lord love babies trying to suckle on an uncovered January tit; they’d have been trying mightily to obtain sustenance from the world’s earliest milk-flavoured Slush Puppie. He could almost hear Bee wailing God love them in his mind’s ear.

  They were approaching a woman washing and laying out clothes to dry by a small pond. By the look of the pile beside her, she was doing the laundry for the entire village. She was lean and hungry-looking and so engrossed in her work that even if he and the Morrigan had been visible to her there was an excellent chance she would simply not have noti-

  “Jesus…” he said softly. “It’s you.”

  And so it was. The washerwoman by the pond, laying out strips of fabrics, was indeed the Goddess of War. More weatherworn than he’d seen her when she’d split the hills asunder, with her impressive frame and musculature depleted somewhat. That fabulous raven-black hair that had once Niagara’d from her head in a beautiful maelstrom of curls was tied and wrapped in a simple functional white wrap, outwardly no different from those he’d glimpsed the other women of the village sporting. Gone was the glorious battledresses or fine garments of the Tuatha; this Morrigan, her hands rubbing two pieces of cloth together, was sporting a simple blue-green woollen wrap.

  A smell pervaded the air, and this one had nothing to do with magic levels; in fact, magic was about the last word you’d associate with it.

  “What is that?”

  “That,” the Morrigan informed him, gazing down at her washerwoman self, “is the soap.”

  “Christ Almighty. What’s it made of?”

  She glanced over at him. “Do you want me to tell you?”

  “Will I regret it?”

  “Absolutely.”

  He nodded. Fair enough. “Okay, but why? Why is that you? What are ye doing here? Is this some sorta…undercover thing?”

  The Morrigan’s mouth twitched upward. “You think I’m on a stakeout?”

  “Well why else would a goddess be in a human village washin clothes in a pond? Was it like Human Experience week in your Goddess exams, or what?”

  “After Nuada’s abdication and Bres’ coronation…I lost faith with my people. I broke the Spear and I left. I wandered…wandered for many years. It was different for us, Danny. Time was different. Maybe I can’t explain…”

  “You live longer, but you live slower,” Danny cut in. “It takes you longer to mature, longer to grow up. Longer to die.”

  Again, he could see she was impressed. “More or less,” she admitted. “So while a human might have a long dark night of the soul…I had the long dark century.”

  She looked away from her younger self and at some indeterminate point on the horizon, obviously troubled. “And when I say dark…” she said, “I mean dark.”

  “You musta been a right
fuckin laugh as a teenager. But that still doesn’t explain you ended up here.”

  All he got in response was a smile. “Watch.”

  He was about to ask what she meant by that when two children ran past them, one to either side of he and the Morrigan, and to the younger woman sitting by the pond. They were running with the heedless speed of children everywhere, overcome in the excitement of the moment and giving no mind to consequence; in this case, running full tilt into the pond and sending water flying everywhere, including over the clothes the woman was washing.

  Some of the water – in point of fact, quite a lot – landed on the garments already drying on the large plank of wood ten feet or so from the water’s edge.

  Uh oh. Goddess of War about to get mad…

  He was wrong. He was very wrong.

  “You little devils!” the younger Morrigan screeched, but there was no malice in her voice, only playfulness. “Just wait ‘til I getcha!”

  She put down the clothes she’d been scrubbing by the bank and sploshed into the waters herself, caring little for her own shawl getting wet in the process. She lunged for the youngsters and they scattered away from her touch. The oldest, who was around eight, actually stuck his tongue out as he pirouetted away from her attempt at capture.

  The youngest, around four or five, tried to do the same and ended up losing his balance. He pinwheeled his arms desperately to regain his balance but comically slowly ended up toppling into the water. Boosh. The Morrigan/washerwoman was on him in a heartbeat, dragging him up from beneath the surface as he kicked and spluttered and spat water and the older boy almost died from laughter watching all of this.

  “Talk!” the Morrigan demanded of her captive. “Talk, prisoner!”

  “Tell her nothin, Gaim! Nothin!” the older boy called, moving through the waters with difficulty, closing the distance between himself and the struggling pair.

  “I’ll never talk!” the little one squeaked in defiance.

  At this the Morrigan nodded equitably. “An honourable choice. I salute your bravery. Right. In you go…”

  And good to her word, the Morrigan dunked the little boy’s head under the water. From the way the waters bubbled and thrashed Danny guessed he was putting up a tremendous struggle beneath the surface.

  “I’ll save ye Gaim!” the older boy declared, and threw himself on the back of the younger boy’s assailant heroically. The Morrigan seemed hardly to notice the extra weight on her back.

  Gaim emerged from the water, gulping and gasping in air in great breaths.

  “You PUT ME UNDER THE WATER!!!” he squealed in accusation.

  “Well, see, it’s called torture,” his jailor replied, still radiating glacial levels of coolness. “Now, ready to talk, or are you going to display more braveness?”

  “Daddy sent us over! It was Daddy’s idea! Daddy did it! Don’t duck me again Mammy it’s cold down there and I near swallowed somethin don’t duck me please I’m sorry Mammy!!!”

  Mammy…?

  “Did he now,” the Morrigan said grimly, adjusting her grip on her younger son and rotating him around so that he was held under her left arm. She reached around for the other son clinging gamely to her back and with a manoeuvre Danny’s eyes couldn’t fully follow it was so swift, she had unseated him and tucked him securely under her right arm, so that both boy’s heads poked out even as he could see their fists raining down impotent blows and their legs kicking for all they were worth. They may as well have been punching a mountainside for all the good it did.

  “I did so.”

  The voice had come from behind Danny. He turned, catching a glimpse of the older Morrigan’s expression as he did so. Her eyes were full of tears, but there was more than just sadness in her face. He saw love there too.

  The newcomer was a man in his early thirties; not especially handsome or particularly well-built as a human specimen, and that he was; somehow Danny knew just by looking at him that there was not a drop of magical blood in his body. He had an open face with blue eyes that for a moment put Danny in mind of his father - a thought he shook off quickly - and in his arms he carried something, a little white bundle. Only when it squeaked and burbled did Danny realise it was a child, wrapped up safely against exposure to the elements.

  “I sent warriors Glon and Gaim out on an epic quest to locate the legend of the washerwoman in the stream, the demon who preys on young lads and sends them to a watery grave,” the man intoned, completely deadpan.

  “Look! We found the hag, Da!” Glon said triumphantly from his horizontal position under his mother’s arm.

  His mother’s head turned to look down at him. She raised an eyebrow. “Hag, is it?”

  “I didn’t say that, Mammy! He said that!” Gaim pointed out from about a foot to his brother’s left. “I think ye look lovely as a washerwoman demon!”

  The Morrigan roared with laughter and bent low, dipping her sons’ heads beneath the water again, much to their chagrin. This she kept up for about all of four seconds before emerging with them sputtering and gagging again, before walking the rest of the way out of the pond’s shallow depths and depositing two wringing wet little boys on the banks, who proceeded to pick themselves up and complain bitterly that it wasn’t fair…

  “Away wi’ ye O Mighty Warriors - songs will be sung of your deeds this day, but for now, the Elders could probably find something for ye to do,” their mother told them, in a voice that brokered no room for negotiation. They duly scampered off, joining up with another pack of children in the village centre proper.

  This fighting force dismissed, she was able to walk to her husband’s side and give him a kiss. “Thank you,” she said, and as Danny continued to watch, feeling more and more intrusive by the second, she took the little white squeaking bundle from his arms gently and sat down on a nearby tree stump, coo-cooing and gurgling.

  Danny moved around a few steps so that he could finally see the baby’s face. It was fat and cute and pink and its owner wavered between utter amazement and occasional flashes of uncertainty as its mother babbled away.

  The man’s hand reached down and placed itself on her shoulder. A look was exchanged between them. It was obvious that not long ago, there had been words exchanged and they had not been pleasant.

  “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I didn’t mean to-”

  “It’s good,” she interrupted. “Don’t-”

  “Don’t,” he cut off her interruption. “It’s just…difficult to adjust to. I’m a simple man, Regan.”

  Regan? Danny mouthed to the Morrigan. She shrugged. I needed a name.

  “You’re not simple…far from it. I think that’s what they don’t understand about you, or any of you. I know I didn’t,” the younger Morrigan said, still staring into her youngest son’s face, not sounding particularly proud of what she was saying.

  “Why didn’t you tell me? I mean…before?” he asked.

  “Fear.”

  “But aren’t you…I mean, can’t you…” the man tried, and then gave up, and simply sat down beside his wife ruefully. “There’s so much I don’t understand.”

  “Ask me.”

  “What were you afraid of?”

  “That you’d drive me out.”

  “Even if I’d wanted to, could I have? Could any of us?”

  “I would have gone. If you’d wanted it,” she said quietly.

  “I don’t. I never will.”

  “How can you know that? I scare you. I frighten you.”

  “You don’t frighten me. What you are - where you come from - frightens me. I won’t deny it, Regan. The things we’ve heard…and then that thing last winter…the men…”

  Her face hardened. “That wasn’t us. It couldn’t have been us. Those hunters didn’t do anything wrong. There would have been no reason to do that to them. If they’d trespassed on our lands without meaning any disrespect to us, simply by getting lost, we would have simply turned them around and sent them back.”

  �
��Maybe the ways have changed,” he suggested. “Maybe the…” and he inhaled as if saying the words for the first time, “…Goddess of War isn’t there anymore to enforce the old customs.”

  “She isn’t,” the Morrigan pointed out reasonably. She smiled. “She’s right here. With you.”

  He looked away. Whatever this was building towards, this was it.

  “Slumming it.”

  She closed her eyes. Both versions of her did, at the same time, and Danny noticed when she spoke that the older version was actually moving her lips in time with her younger self’s words. If they were truly moving through her memories, did that mean that this particular memory, this specific day, was one she’d relived so many times she knew every nuance of it by heart?

  “You think this is all…an experiment?”

  Human Experience. Danny himself had come to the same conclusion after only a few seconds as this man obviously had.

  “It had occurred to me. Forgive me, Regan, but our lives together aren’t exactly similar to what I imagine the life of a Tuatha De Danann to be. Unless the tales of your people have been hugely exaggerated.”

  “They haven’t been,” she replied curtly. “We live well. We make merry. We want for little. And I walked away from all that. I wasn‘t happy so I walked away from it all, the palaces, the feasts, the treasures...”

  “Treasures? The Cauldron? It actually exists?”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  He seemed to find this particularly difficult to swallow. “Six of the village died last winter when the game grew scarce, Regan. Gaim…Gods, little Gaim…we thought he would-”

  “He wouldn’t have.”

  “You could have-?”

  Here came her bombshell. Her big news. The point of no return. He could sense it.

  “He’s different.”

  “Different? Different like you?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t really know. I never expected to…I never thought that this - any of this - would happen,” and as she said this the baby started to cry and she brought it up to her shoulder and shushed it gently, rocking it back and forth. “When we met…I was expecting to stay a few nights here and move on. I wasn’t expecting…us.”