gully ahead, and wondered how she was ever going to get past it. She went down on her hands and knees. It would be painful and slow, but it was the only way. There were brambles across the path that had to be pulled away, endless lacerating rocks to be negotiated. Jessie kept crawling until her wrists couldn’t take it any more and she had to crawl on her elbows. That was when her knee slipped and her fingers wouldn’t grasp and she slid backwards. She ended up in an ungainly heap, wedged against the rocks, knees and elbows barked and bleeding, and a vicious thorn stuck in the palm of her hand. She drew it out with her teeth and spat it on to the ground.
Mole was braying at her from somewhere further up the hill. Jessie looked up, shielding her eyes against the white of the sun that was breaking now through the mist. Mole was standing right on top of the Big Hill. He wasn’t just calling her, he was taunting her. Jessie levered herself laboriously to her feet and swayed there for a moment, her head spinning. She closed her eyes, and then it all came flooding back.
April, the start of the summer term at school and they’d all of them gone, even the infants, up the Big Hill on a nature walk with Mrs Burke, her head teacher and the other bane of her life besides Marion Murphy. And Jessie had been the only one to be left behind with Miss Jefferson, the infant teacher. Miss Jefferson had insisted on holding her hand all the way to the beach, just in case, she said. They were going to find lots of interesting shells, she said, to make a shell picture. It was always shells or wild flowers with Miss Jefferson – she had her own wild flower meadow behind the school. But today it was shells.
Miss Jefferson foraged through the bladderwrack and the sea lettuce, whooping with joy every few seconds and talking nineteen to the dozen like she always did. It wasn’t that Jessie didn’t like her; she did. But she was forever fussing her, endlessly anxious that Jessie might fall, might be too cold, might be too tired. Jessie was used to that, used to her. It was being left behind that she really resented.
Despite all Miss Jefferson’s enthusiastic encouragement she could not bring herself to care a fig about the shell picture. She wanted to be up there with them, with the others. All the while she kept her eye on the Big Hill. She could see them, a trail of children up near the summit now, Mrs Burke striding on ahead. She heard the distant cheer when they reached the top and she had to look away. Miss Jefferson understood and put her arm round her, but it was no comfort.
She had begged to be allowed to go up the Big Hill with the others, but Mrs Burke wouldn’t even hear of it. ‘You’d slow us down, Jessie,’ she’d said. ‘And besides, you know you’d never reach the top.’ And then she’d laughed. ‘And I’m afraid you’re far too big to carry.’ That was the moment Jessie had decided she would climb the Big Hill, cerebral lousy palsy or not. Somehow or other she would do it, she’d drag herself up there if necessary.
She opened her eyes. Here she was, after two months of trying, within a stone’s throw of the summit. This time there’d be no stopping her. ‘Here I come!’ she cried. ‘Here I come!’ And she launched herself up the hill. Several times her legs refused to do what she told them and threatened to buckle beneath her. Time and again, she felt herself reeling. She longed just to sit down and rest; but again and again she heard the voice in her head. ‘You can do it, girl, you can do it.’
Where the words came from, or who spoke them, she neither knew nor cared any more. Nothing mattered but getting to the top. She was almost there when her legs simply folded on her, and she found herself on her knees. She crawled the last metre or so over mounds of soft thrift and then collapsed. Mole came over to her and nuzzled her neck with his warm whiskery nose. She clung to Mole’s mane and hauled herself up on to her feet.
There below her lay the whole of Clare Island, and all around the grey-green sea, with the island of Inishturk far to the south. And when she turned her face into the wind, there was the mainland and the islands of Clew Bay floating in the sea like distant dumplings. She was on top of the world. She lifted her hands to the sky and laughed out loud and into the wind, the tears running down her face. Mole looked on, each of his ears turning independently. Jessie’s legs collapsed and she sat down with a sudden jolt that knocked the breath out of her for a moment, and stunned her into sanity.
Only then did she begin to reflect on all that had happened to her on the Big Hill that morning. There could be no doubt that she had made it to the top, unless of course she was still in the middle of some wonderful dream. But the more she thought about it, the more she began to doubt her memory of the climb, the fall in the stream, the disembodied voice that had spoken to her, the arms that had helped her to her feet, the words in her head that had urged her on to the top. It could all have been some extraordinary hallucination. That would make sense of it. But then, what about the bump on her head? And there was something else she couldn’t understand. Someone must have rescued her from the stream. But who? Maybe it was all the bump on the head, maybe that was why she was hearing voices. And maybe that was why her memory was deceiving her. She had to be sure, really sure. She had to test it.
‘Hello?’ she ventured softly. ‘Are you still there? I did it, didn’t I? I won your bet for you. Are you there?’ There was no one, nothing, except a solitary humming bumble-bee, a pair of gulls wheeling overhead and Mole munching nearby. Jessie went on, ‘Are you anyone? Are you someone? Are you just a bump on the head or what? Are you real? Say something, please.’ But no one said anything. Something rustled behind her. Jessie swung round and saw a rabbit scuttling away into the bracken, white tail bobbing. She noticed there were rabbit droppings all over the summit. She flicked at one of them and it bounced off the side of a rock, a giant granite rock shaped by the wind and weather into a perfect bowl, and in the bowl was a pool of shining water fed by a spring from above it.
Jessie hadn’t been thirsty until now. She crawled over, grasped the lip of the rock and hauled herself up. She put her mouth into the water like Mole did and drank deep. Water had never been so welcome to her as it was that morning on the summit of the Big Hill. She was wiping her mouth when she saw something glinting at the bottom of the pool. It looked like a large ring, brass maybe, like one of the curtain rings they had at home in the sitting room. She reached down into the water and picked it out.
‘I am a woman of my word.’ The same voice, from behind her somewhere. ‘Didn’t I say I’d leave a little something for you?’ In her exhaustion, in her triumph, Jessie had quite forgotten all about the promised ‘little something’. She backed herself up against the rock. ‘Don’t be alarmed, Jessie, I’ll not hurt you. I’ve never hurt a single soul that didn’t deserve it. You did a fine thing today, Jessie, a fine thing; and what’s better still, you won me my wager. I’m five gold doubloons richer, not that I’ve a lot to spend it on, mind. None of us have, but that’s by the by. None of the boys thought you could do it, but I did. And I like to be right. It’s a family failing of ours. “Her mother’s an O’Malley,” I told them. “So Jessie’s half an O’Malley. She’ll do it, just watch.” And we did watch and you did do it. The earring’s yours, girl. To be honest with you I’ve not a lot of use for such things these days. Look after it, won’t you?’
When Jessie spoke at last, her voice was more of a whisper than she had intended it to be. ‘Where are you? Can’t I see you? You can’t be just a voice.’ But there was no reply. She tried again and again, until she knew that whoever had been there either didn’t want to answer or had gone away. ‘Thanks for the earring,’ Jessie called out. ‘I won’t lose it, I promise.’
It should have sounded silly talking to no one like she was, but somehow it didn’t. Talking to Mole was silly and she knew it, but there was no one else and she had to talk to someone. ‘See what she gave me, Mole? It’s an earring. It’s because I climbed the Big Hill and she won her bet.’ The donkey lifted his upper lip, showed his yellow teeth and sniffed suspiciously at the ring in the flat of Jessie’s hand. He decided it wasn’t worth eating.
Jessie looked back down the Big Hill. It was a very long way back
