Verbal Magazine

Distraction

A raven cawed among the reeds on the far bank and a skiff of wind sent a ripple of tiny waves across the surface of the small lough. Tom had been watching the bird for half an hour but his attention had suddenly been distracted by a thumbnail-sized piece of rusted metal nestling among the gravel on the shores of the mountain lough. 

He poked his finger into the soft ground to dislodge the object from where it lay and remembered lifting something similar from the same mountainside 30 odd years ago when he was still a child. His father had pointed it out and told him it was the remains of a plane which had crashed during the Second World War. However, Tom’s uncle disagreed and insisted that it was shrapnel from an artillery shell fired by the US navy into the side of the mountain as target practice during the war.
The raven cawed again and seemed to struggle into flight, sluggishly beating its wings close to the surface of the lough until it began to gain height, veering towards a scree-strewn slope. Soon Tom was unable make it out against the dark rocky background, although he could still hear it cawing. He eased himself up and began to descend.
In the back seat of his car Tom awkwardly pulled off his jeans and struggled to manoeuvre into pinstripe trousers. He took off the corduroy shirt and sniffed himself briefly under his armpits before buttoning up his ironed shirt and loosely knotting his tie.  He stowed the casual clothing and muddied trainers into the boot before trying to straighten his hair in the rear-view mirror but the wind had left it tangled and unruly and despite repeated combing it stuck out in all directions.
As Tom drove northwards towards the city he reluctantly switched on the radio to listen to the news, forcing himself to re-engage with the world.
***
Ciara rushed to Tom as he let himself in, babbling and glugging in the way that 18-month old children do.
“You’re back early,” called Nicola from the kitchen.
“Am I?” said Tom anxiously looking around for a clock to check the time. “Traffic seemed lighter than usual.”
Nicola came to the kitchen door.
“What’s up with your foot?” she demanded looking towards his shoes.
“What’s up with my foot?” Tom repeated to give himself time to gather his wits.
“I met Mrs Lacey outside that fancy hairdressers she goes to,” said Nicola. “She said she’d heard from Mr Lacey that there was something wrong with your foot.”
Tom grimaced as he set Ciara down again.
“Oh that… he ahh wanted me to play golf with these new clients on Saturday and I had to give him an excuse not to go.”
“Shit Tom. You can’t do that,” sighed Nicola. “If your boss says play golf, play golf and if he says jump through a hoop and do a summersault then do that too otherwise that creep Jason Donaghy will be in there ahead of you.”
“But I’m crap at golf. Why did you ever tell Edna Lacey that I could play?”
“You’re just going to have to take lessons. If you want that directorship you are going to have to learn to play the game.”
Nicola moved closer to Tom and tugged at his hair and sighed.
“Look at the shape of you, you look as if you were standing in a wind tunnel.”
The phone rang and Ciara ran towards it but Nicola reached over her head just before she was able to get to it. Tom smiled as the child’s face crumpled in disappointment and then expanded again as she let out an angry wail but then he felt his heart plunge into his gut. 
“Oh hello Mr Lacey,” his wife said. “…fine thank you…. yes that’s Ciara, acting the drama queen as usual… no…. no… ah huh… oh well I…”
Tom felt his whole body clenching as he hovered beside Nicola trying to work out what the hell his boss and she were talking about and had to restrain himself from grabbing the phone.
“Thank you. We’ll both look forward having dinner with you and Mrs Lacey. Yes I’ll get the… eh patient now. Goodnight Mr Lacey.”
Nicola handed Tom the phone and scooped up the still wailing Ciara in a single move. Tom motioned towards the child with his elbow and with his eyes towards the kitchen. Nicola nodded and smiled encouragingly as she closed the door behind her and Ciara.”
“Darren. How are you?” said Tom, gulping back the bile that had gathered in his throat.
“I’m fine,” came the voice from the phone. “What about that foot of yours?”
“Oh still sore to stand on.”
“Well you can work at home tomorrow,” said Lacey. “The London crowd won’t be here til Friday but I’ll need you to email your presentation before lunch tomorrow. I’ve worked with these people before and they’re sticklers for detail. This contract could keep the company going for another few years yet.”
Tom’s attention drifted towards a bodhran hanging on the wall in the dimly lit hallway. It had been bought for him by his parents for his 21st birthday, although he had never learned to play it. However, it was the drawing on it which suddenly interested him. It was based on the statue of Cuchulainn which stood in the GPO in Dublin. The long-haired warrior stood exhausted from battle with his head bent and his bloodied sword hanging from his hand. He was tied with a strap to a rock and a raven was perched on his shoulder. The raven was associated in Celtic mythology with death and the mortally wounded Cuchulainn had tied himself to the rock to ensure that he would still be standing, as was befitting of a true warrior, when he died.
“Tom, Tom… are you still there?” the sound of Darren Lacey’s voice came as a shock to Tom. He had never really thought about the picture on the bodhran and wondered how he had ever come to know its significance.
“Sorry Darren,” he muttered. “Ciara was trying to be cute there. Which as you know she does very well.”
Tom still stood alone in the hall, smiling as he remembered how besotted his normally curmudgeonly boss had melted to a soppy mess when Ciara had hugged him goodbye the day that Nicola had brought her to the office.
“Oh… she’s broke the cute mould that one,” chuckled Lacey down the phone. “Anyway, as I said make sure you include those new costings that Donaghy came up with in your presentations. They are cut right to the margins but we have to be as competitive as we can.”
“No problem Darren. I’ll get that finished tonight.”
Tom hung up and stood staring at the bodhran again trying to suppress the memory that the laptop on which he had spent two weeks working on the presentation was at the bottom of the lough.

***

He had left home on Monday as usual, kissing Nicola and Ciara on the door step, but rather than driving to the city centre Tom had turned south to the mountains, phoning Lacey to say he’d gone over on his foot but that he’d be able to work on the presentation from home. Still dressed in his suit he’d followed the rocky path to the lough which he had not visited since his father had brought him there when he was 12. He’d felt a ridiculous figure, dressed as in his charcoal-grey two piece suit and in shinny black shoes that had quickly become caked in mud. A couple of hikers he’d met on the path had smirked but Tom had just kept his head down. He’d meant to work on the presentation while there but could not bear the thought of the sound of his laptop humming and beeping over the mountain silence and occasional cawing raven. That evening he’d managed to change before Nicola saw the state of his suit and shoes and when she had gone to bed he’d hidden a change of clothes in the car.
On the Tuesday he again drove off as normal, phoned in sick and went back to the mountain, determined this time to do some work. He changed in the car park and set off on the two or three mile hike to the lough, feeling much more natural and at ease than the day before and confident that he really would be able to have a productive day. However, once he sat down he slipped in to the same state of ennui as the day before. Occasionally he was pestered with the guilty thought that he should do something that could ensure the survival of his own job and that of 20 others ¬– including Lena the receptionist he’d ended up sleeping with after a works night out six weeks ago.
“Piss off,” he kept muttering to himself every time he caught sight of the laptop. The idea of throwing it away had come to him then but he had resisted and hidden it under a pile of rocks and covered them with fern.
That morning, Wednesday, he’d nearly run up the mountain and sighed with relief when he found the laptop where he’d left it. However, he was still afraid that he might have damaged it by leaving it out overnight and so pulled it from its case and switched it on. He was startled by the unnatural colour of the green lights that flashed on beside the keyboard and then annoyed by the tinkling tune it emitted as it started up. His annoyance quickly spiralled into a roaring rage, that surprised Tom with its ferocity, until with a gargle of frustration he simply lifted the cursed thing and hurled it into the lough.

***

As he stood in the hall Tom turned from the bodhran and braced himself to try and be normal with his wife and daughter.
“A robbery,” he muttered to himself. “I’ll tell them I was mugged.”
However, by 10am the next morning as he sat back by the lough Tom had picked so many holes in his own plan that he wondered how he ever thought it was feasible. The raven was back too, dipping out of sight but betraying its location with its caws and the occasional rustling reed.
Tom wondered if he would be able to dive into the water and recover the laptop. The machine itself would be banjaxed but maybe he would be able to salvage the information off the hard drive… although he wasn’t really sure what the hard drive looked like.
Suddenly his phone beeped. He cursed himself for forgetting to turn it off. He didn’t want to see and who the message was from. He knew already. He had tried to keep things cool with Lena after their drunken fling and to be fair to her she seemed to be content with an occasional knowing smile. But then one day last week he received a text message from her. He looked over to the reception desk to see if she was being playful but she wasn’t there. He asked someone if Lena was on holiday and was told that she’d phoned in sick that morning. Now up on the mountainside he held the phone in front of his face and scrolled down the messages. More than sixty, all of them unread. All of them from Lena.
The raven poked its head above the reeds at the sound of the splash but didn’t seem too alarmed and quickly got back to foraging. Tom watched the ripples, smaller than those of yesterday, break like mini tsunamis on the shingle where his heels nestled. Suddenly he noticed another bit of metal and eagerly grabbed it, wondering if it was the remains of a crashed war plane or just a piece of artillery shrapnel.

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