Rian checked the cart at half ten every night, the way other people check that a door is locked. He checked the tyres, the brake and the four wing nuts on the block. It took four minutes. He had timed it.
On the night before the Strand Hill Derby there was nothing to check. The side passage held the bins, his mother’s dead geraniums, and a tarp folded in four.
The Sugar Boat had lived under that tarp since the day its paint dried. It was yellow and it ran on four BMX wheels. Its pointed nose was Fionn’s, worked out at the back table by folding sugar packets until one of them looked fast, before he and Niamh went off to Irish college for three weeks. Birdie had done the name down the side herself, in marker capitals. Everyone on the Rise had sanded it or painted it or stood beside it giving advice. Rian had drawn it. Deano Ryan was to drive it, because at the time trials in the first week of August he had come down the Rise four tenths of a second faster than Nell, who had touched her brake on the bend by the Clancys’. Nobody had enjoyed that, least of all Nell and Rian.
Last year the Rise’s cart had lost a wheel forty metres from the start, in front of the whole town, and the estate still dated things from it. The Derby was tomorrow at eleven. Strand Hill was a road on every other day of the year, and the committee threw out any estate caught practising on it, so the Rise had practised on the Rise.
Rian took the notebook out of his back pocket, clicked on his torch, and started at the gate.
The bolt was shot. It sat at the top of the gate on the inside, where his father could reach it over the top and Rian nearly could. Nothing had been forced. Somebody had come over a six-foot gate, opened it, wheeled the cart out, and then gone to the trouble of bolting it again and climbing back out. On the top rail, where a boot would swing over, the torch found a scatter of black crumbs. He rolled one between his fingers. It was rubber, the kind that comes home from the astro pitch in the socks of anyone who trains there.
The two wooden chocks were side by side on the windowsill.
The helmet was gone from its nail, and the gloves with it.
He wrote it all down, because a thing stopped moving once it was written down.
1. Over the gate twice, so a climber, and not tall.
2. Astro rubber on the rail.
3. Folded the tarp. Minded the chocks. Bolted up after.
4. Took the helmet.
Number four was the one that mattered. You could wreck a cart without a helmet, or hide one, or sell one. A helmet was only any use to somebody who meant to sit in the thing and go. Every film Rian owned agreed on one other point: it is always somebody who knows where the bolt is.
Out on the green the dew had kept the rest for him. Two dark lines ran through the silver, downhill, toward Birdie’s and the strand road.
He read the list twice. There was one person in Kilcurra it described, and Rian would honestly have preferred a burglar.
He put a single line in the group chat, because it was the estate’s cart and they had a right to know.
Rian looked at the two lines in the dew, which went nowhere near the Park. He could have typed a name. He knew exactly what Nell would do with a name, and how many doors on the Rise would have it by midnight.
That was most of the reason. The rest was that it was his cart, and he wanted to be standing in front of Deano Ryan by himself when he asked.
He put the phone away and followed the lines.
Strand Hill dropped from the square to the sea in one long slope, and halfway down it bent hard left at a place everyone called the Elbow. On the outside of the bend there was a gap in the sea wall where a lifeboat slip used to go down. The sea had taken the bottom of the slip some winter before any of them were born, and now it stopped in mid-air, a metre and a half above the stones.
Rian found the yellow first. There was a stripe of it on the corner of the wall at the gap, at the height of a wheel, still bright. He walked to the end of the slip and looked down.
The Sugar Boat lay on its side on the stones with the tide feeling its way around it. Deano had his back against it and his heels dug in, and he was trying to shove sixty kilos of cart up a slab of concrete taller than his chest. His feet went from under him on the weed. He got up and set his back to it again. He did that four times while Rian stood and watched.
“You robbed it,” Rian said.
Deano turned his head slowly, like someone who had been expecting that voice for an hour and had gone on hoping for any other.
“I borrowed the thing I’m driving.”
“In the middle of the night. On this hill. If one person saw you, the Rise is out of the Derby.”
“Nobody saw me. I picked my time.” He was wet to the hips, and one forearm was grazed from the elbow to the wrist. “Ye practised on the Rise. The Rise is a ramp for buggies. Nobody on this estate has ever taken that cart down this hill, and tomorrow I’m to do it for the first time with the whole town hanging over the wall.” He wiped his face with the good wrist. “I wanted the one go with nobody looking. I’d have had it back under the tarp by ten, and you’d never have known.”
“I’d have known.”
“You would, yeah,” said Deano, with real dislike. “You’d have known by the tarp.”
The water came in over the stones and went out again, and it did not go out as far as before.
Ollie’s number arrived in Rian’s head whether he wanted it or not. High water 1:52. Biggest of the month. It was five to eleven. By two o’clock the stones under the cart would be more than a metre under water.
“How long have you been at that?”
“A while.”
“It can’t be done that way. You can’t lift it, and I can’t lift it, and the two of us together would get it halfway up and drop it on you.”
“So we leave it for the fish.”
“So we make it lighter.” Rian was already climbing down. Every cart in the Derby had to weigh in at a hundred kilos with its driver on board, so that no estate could win by picking its heaviest child. Deano was thirty-eight of them, and a concrete block behind the seat made up the difference. “The block’s twenty kilos and it’s held by four wing nuts. Take it out and that’s a different cart. Then the nose goes up on the lip first, and the lip does half the lifting for us.”
Rian knew where the cart had to go. He had no idea where to put his own feet, and he went down twice in the first minute. The stones were loose under the weed, and they moved whenever he trusted them.
“Stand where I stand,” Deano said. “No. Where I stand. The flat ones with nothing growing on them will hold you. The round ones are liars.”
They got it upright between them, and Rian undid the wing nuts by feel. When the block came out, the nose of the cart dipped by itself. He saw it dip, and he was too busy to wonder about it.
Then Rian called it, the nose up, then the turn, then the push. He went up onto the lip and hauled on the front axle, and Deano stood in the sea to his knees and took the weight, and found every foothold for the two of them. The cart came over the lip with a noise Rian felt in his teeth. The block went up after it, carried between them like something that might wake. By the time it was all on the road, the place where the cart had been lying was under water.
There was one street light at the Elbow, and under it the damage was plain. The front right wheel was folded like a crisp. The point of the nose was crushed flat. Everything else had held, and Rian noticed that he was pleased about it, and then stopped being pleased.
“What happened?”
“It shook.”
“Where?”
“There.” Deano pointed up the hill, to a place twenty metres above the bend. “It was grand, and it was fast, and then the front started shaking, and by the bend I’d nothing. I turned the wheel and the cart had a think about it.”
“You went in too fast.”
“I went in at the speed you’ll want off me tomorrow.”
“Then you turned in late.”
“I turned in where I’ve turned in on that bend on a bike since I was seven.”
Rian opened the notebook at the drawing. It was a good drawing. It had taken him three weeks of evenings in Limerick: the frame, the axles, the steering wheel off the Clancys’ dead ride-on mower, every part labelled in capitals and every length to scale. He went over it with the torch, part by part, looking for the one that had failed. None of them had.
He shut the notebook on his finger.
“What did it feel like?”
Deano looked at him to see was it a trick.
“Light,” he said in the end. “It went light in front. Like there was nobody holding the front of it down. Like when you sit too far back on a bike going down the green steps, and the bars go stupid on you.”
Rian opened the notebook again. Behind the seat there was a neat square, labelled BLOCK 20 KG.
He had put it there because that was where it fitted. On the Rise it had made no difference. At twice the speed, with most of the weight sitting behind the driver, the front wheels would be barely pressing on the road, and a wheel that is barely pressing on the road cannot steer anything. He thought of the nose dipping on the stones, the second the block came out.
“It was the block,” he said.
“So it wasn’t me.”
“It was the block.”
“And who put the block there?”
A car went along the strand road below them. Neither of them watched it.
“I did,” said Rian.
Deano said nothing for a moment. Then he put a wet finger on the page, on the empty seat, beside the place where it said DRIVER 38 KG.
“You never drew me,” he said. “I’m in there as a number.”
Rian had an answer for most things. He turned the pencil round and rubbed the block out.
He drew it again in the footwell, in front of the seat, where Deano’s knees would go over it. Then he sat back on his heels.
“That fixes the shake. It doesn’t fix the wheel. It’s a twenty-inch, and yours is a twenty-four.”
“And yours is a racer.”
“There’s one twenty-inch front wheel on the Rise that would take the speed,” Rian said.
They both knew whose it was, and neither of them wanted to be the one to say her name.
At about the time the cart was coming up off the stones, Nell was on Sorcha Quill’s front lawn, saying what she thought at volume. She had gone up to the Park on the BMX, which she had bought with two years of birthday money and had never let anyone else ride. Mara stood two steps behind her and looked at the sky.
Sorcha drove the Park’s cart and had been beating Nell at things since Junior Infants. She came out in a dressing gown with a toothbrush in her hand and heard it right to the end. Then she laughed. It wasn’t even a mean laugh, which was worse.
“Why would we rob it? We’ve watched ye all month. Ye’ve never had that thing on anything steeper than the Rise.” She pointed the toothbrush down over the town, toward Strand Hill. “We’re not a bit worried about it, Nell.”
“Ye were filming it.”
“We were filming Ollie.” Sorcha looked at her a moment longer, and her face changed. “I hope ye find it, though. I’d sooner beat ye than have ye not turn up.”
She went in and shut the door.
“Will I ring ahead to the next estate,” said Mara, “or do you want to surprise them?”
Nell wheeled the bike home without getting up on it. Never on anything steeper than the Rise. It was true, was the trouble, and she had nowhere to put it down.
At twenty to midnight her phone lit.
She came down Strand Hill wheeling the BMX by its saddle, with Mara beside her. Nell saw the cart under the light. She saw the nose. Then she saw who was standing beside it.
“Oh, I knew…”
“I took it,” Deano said.
He said it straight at her. His hands had been steady on wet rock an hour before, and now they had gone into his pockets.
“I took it out for a run down the hill. It went from under me there above the bend. I came off it on the slip, and it kept going without me. That’s the whole of it.”
Nell’s mouth was open and there was a great deal queued up behind it. What came out was a question.
“Did you brake?”
“What?”
“At the Elbow. When it went. Did you brake?”
“No.”
Nell laid the bike down on the road, took the spanner out of her back pocket, and started on the wheel nuts.
“It pulls a small bit to the left,” she said, without looking up. “You’d want to know that.”
Mara held the bike steady for her.
It took until one. Deano went up the Rise at a run for a ratchet strap out of his uncle Martin’s van, and he was back before Rian had the old wheel off. Rian timed it without meaning to. It was faster than he would have done it himself, and he had a squad jacket at home that said Munster on the back. The block went into the footwell. The strap went around it twice, and Deano hauled on it until the frame creaked. Mara held the torch and said the nose looked like it had been in a fight and had started it.
“We test it now,” Deano said.
“We don’t. Not in the dark.”
“I did it in the dark.”
“And I found you on the beach.” Rian shut the notebook. “It’s light enough to see by ten past six. The bread van for Birdie’s comes down this hill at half past. That’s twenty minutes with the road empty and the bend in plain sight. One run, and nobody sees it.”
They wheeled it home between the four of them and put it under the tarp. Rian bolted the gate. Nobody on the Rise slept, as far as he knew.
At ten past six the hill was grey and empty and smelled of the tide going out. Mara was at the bottom, where the strand road came in, with her phone torch ready to wave if anything was coming. Nell was at the top with her two hands on the back of the cart. Rian would be at the Elbow, because the Elbow was where it would work or it wouldn’t.
Before he left the top, he opened the notebook. He had four pages for Deano: the line into the bend, the place to brake, what to do if the shake came back.
Deano had the helmet on. He looked at the notebook, and then he looked down the hill.
“Is there anything in that,” he said, “that’ll be any use to me at the Elbow?”
Rian looked at the four pages.
“No.”
“Then there’s nothing wrong with it now that a brain could fix,” said Deano, and he pulled on his gloves. “Go on down and stand where you can see.”
Ollie was at the Elbow before him. Nobody had told Ollie. He had been up since five for Orion, which comes back into the sky at the end of August if you get up early enough to meet it, and he had seen them going past his window. He had come down the hill in his dressing gown and wellingtons with a great deal to say about a star called Betelgeuse.
Rian stood beside him with the stopwatch in his fist.
“So it’s actually about to explode,” Ollie was saying, “except that about to means any time in the next hundred thousand years, so you’d have to be very…”
Up the hill, Nell let go.
He heard it before he could see it properly: four wheels on tarmac, a small dry roar that kept on climbing. Then it was coming, low and yellow, and a great deal faster than any number he had written down for it. He watched the front wheels. He watched Nell’s wheel. Twenty metres above the bend, at the place where Deano had pointed, they stayed down on the road.
Deano did not brake. He turned in where he had turned in on a bike since he was seven. The cart leaned, and held, and went past Rian close enough to move his hair. Then it was a yellow thing getting smaller, and at the bottom of the hill Mara was jumping up and down with the torch still lit in her hand.
“Rian,” said Ollie.
“What?”
“You never pressed it.”
Rian looked down. The stopwatch was in his hand, where it had been the whole time, showing all its zeros.
On Sunday morning the Strand Hill Derby cup was on the back table at Birdie’s, and somebody had filled it with sugar packets.
“That is not a sugar bowl,” said Birdie, landing the pot beside it. She left it where it was.
The Sugar Boat had weighed in on Saturday at a hundred kilos exactly, with the block where Deano’s knees were, while Rian argued about a decimal point with the man at the scales and Deano minded the notebook for him. It had beaten the Park in the final by the length of its own nose, and Fionn would be claiming that until Christmas. Sorcha Quill had shaken Deano’s hand and had not shaken Nell’s. On the trailer they used for a podium, Deano had told the man from the paper that it came down to the driving. Rian had told him it came down to where you put the weight. They had not spoken since.
The chat had been going since Saturday dinner time, mostly from Connemara.
Nell’s front wheel was back on the BMX, which was leaning against the wall by Birdie’s door. There was a streak of yellow paint on the rim, and so far she had not got around to cleaning it off.
Rian had the notebook open at a clean page for next year. He turned back once, to check a measurement, and stopped.
Somebody had been at the drawing. It was done in biro, pressed hard enough to come through the page: a small figure in the seat, wearing a helmet, with a head far too big for its body. It was not to scale, or anywhere near it.
Rian turned the pencil round, rubber end down, and held it over the page.
Then he turned it back and printed DEANO beside it in neat capitals, the same as every other part.