"All at once? I can play the triangle. And I have two left feet."

"I don't care. I want to dance."

The flat was too small. "Come on," Cassie said. "Take your shoes off," and she grabbed the remote control and turned the music up to eleven and climbed out the window, down the fire escape to the roof of the extension below.

I'm no dancer, but she taught me the basic moves again and again, her feet skipping nimbly away from my missteps, until suddenly they clicked into place and we were dancing, spinning and swaying to the sassy, expert syncopations, recklessly close to the edges of the flat roof. Cassie's hands in mine were gymnast-strong and flexible. "You can too dance!" she called breathlessly, eyes shining, over the music.

"What?" I shouted, and tripped over my feet. Laughter, unrolling like streamers over the dark gardens below.

A window slammed up below us and a quavery Anglo-Irish voice screeched, "If you don't turn that down at once, I shall call the police!"

"We are the police!" Cassie yelled back. I clapped a hand over her mouth and we shook with explosive, suppressed laughter until, after a confused silence, the window banged shut. Cassie ran back up the fire escape and hung off it by one hand, still giggling, while she aimed the remote control through the window, changed the CD to Chopin's nocturnes, turned down the volume.

We lay side by side on the extension roof, hands behind our heads, elbows just touching. My head was still spinning a little, not unpleasantly, from the dancing and the wine. The breeze was warm across my face, and even through the city lights I could see constellations: the Big Dipper, Orion's Belt. The pine tree at the bottom of the garden rustled like the sea, ceaselessly. For a moment I felt as if the universe had turned upside down and we were falling softly into an enormous black bowl of stars and nocturne, and I knew, beyond any doubt, that everything was going to be all right.

16

I saved the wood for Saturday night, hugging the thought to myself like a child saving a huge Easter egg with some mysterious prize inside. Sam was down in Galway for the weekend, for a niece's christening-he had the kind of extended family that holds full-scale gatherings almost on a weekly basis, someone was always getting christened or married or buried-and Cassie was going out with some of her girl friends, and Heather was going speed dating in some hotel somewhere. Nobody would even notice I had gone.

I got to Knocknaree around seven and parked on the shoulder. I had brought a sleeping bag and a torch, a thermos of well-spiked coffee and a couple of sandwiches-packing them had made me feel faintly ridiculous, like one of those earnest hikers in technologically advanced fleeces, or a kid running away from home-but nothing to light a fire with. The people in the estate were still on edge and would have been on to the cops like a shot if they saw a mysterious light, which would have been embarrassing all round, and besides I am not the Boy Scout type; I would probably have burned down what was left of the wood.

It was a still, clear evening, long slants of light turning the stone of the tower rose-gold and giving even the trenches and heaps of earth a sad, ragged magic. There was a lamb bleating, far off in the fields, and the air smelled rich and tranquil: hay, cows, some heady flower I couldn't name. Sprays of birds were practicing their V-shapes over the crest of the hill. Outside the cottage, the sheepdog sat up and huffed a warning half-bark, stared at me for a moment, then decided I was no threat and settled down again. I followed the archaeologists' bumpy trails, just wide enough for a wheelbarrow, across the site-I was wearing old runners this time, and ratty jeans and a thick sweater-to the wood.

If you, like me, are essentially a city person, then the chances are that when you imagine a wood you picture a simple thing: matching green trees in even rows, a soft carpet of dead leaves or pine needles, orderly as a child's drawing. Possibly those earnestly efficient man-made woods are in fact like that; I wouldn't know. Knocknaree wood was the real thing, and it was more intricate and more secretive than I had remembered. It had its own order, its own fierce battles and alliances. I was an intruder here, now, and I had a deep prickling sense that my presence had instantly been marked and that the wood was watching me, with an equivocal collective gaze, not yet accepting or rejecting; reserving judgment.

Mark's clearing had fresh ash in the fire-spot and a few new rollie butts scattered on the bare earth around it; he had been here again, since Katy died. I hoped devoutly that he wouldn't pick tonight to reconnect with his heritage. I took the sandwiches and the thermos and the torch out of my pockets, spread out my sleeping bag on the compact patch of flattened grass where Mark had spread his. Then I walked through the wood, slowly, taking my time.

It was like stumbling into the wreck of some great ancient city. The trees swooped higher than cathedral pillars; they wrestled for space, propped up great fallen trunks, leaned with the slope of the hill: oak, beech, ash, others I couldn't name. Long spears of light filtered, dim and sacred, through the arches of green. Swathes of ivy blurred the massive trunks, trailed in waterfalls from the branches, turned stumps into standing stones. My steps were padded by deep, springy layers of fallen leaves; when I stopped and turned over a chunk with the toe of my shoe, I smelled rich rot and saw dark wet earth, acorn caps, the pale frantic wriggle of a worm. Birds darted and called in the branches, and small warning scurries exploded as I passed.

Great drifts of undergrowth, and here and there a worn fragment of stone wall; muscular roots, green with moss and thicker than my arm. The low banks of the river, tangled with brambles (sliding down, on our hands and our backsides, Ow! my leg!) and overhung with elderberry clusters and willow. The river was like a sheet of old gold, creased and stippled with black. Slim yellow leaves floated on its surface, balancing as lightly as if it were a solid thing.

My mind sideslipped and spun. Every step set recognition thrumming in the air around me, like Morse code beating along a frequency just too high to catch. We had run here, scrambling sure-footed down the hillside along the web of faint trails; we had eaten streaky little crab apples from the twisted tree, and when I looked up into the whirl of leaves I almost expected to see us there, clinging to branches like young jungle cats and staring back. At the fringe of one of these tiny clearings (long grass, sun-dapples, clouds of ragwort and Queen Anne's lace) we had watched as Jonathan and his friends held Sandra down. Somewhere, maybe in the exact spot where I was standing, the wood had shivered and cracked open, and Peter and Jamie had slipped away.

I didn't exactly have a plan for that night, in the strictest sense of the word. Go to the wood, have a look around, spend the night there; hope something happened. Up until that moment, this lack of forethought hadn't seemed like an impediment. After all, every time I had tried to plan anything recently, it had gone spectacularly, galactically wrong; I clearly needed a change of tactics, and what could be more drastic than going into this with nothing and simply waiting to see what the wood gave me? And I suppose it appealed, too, to my sense of the picturesque. I suppose I've always had a yearning, in spite of the fact that I am temperamentally unsuited to the role in every possible way, to be a hero out of myth, golden and reckless, galloping bareback to meet my fate on a wild horse no other man could ride.

Now that I was actually there, though, this whole thing no longer seemed quite so much like a free-spirited leap of faith. It just felt vaguely hippieish-I had even considered getting stoned, in the hope that it would relax me enough to give my subconscious a sporting chance, but hash always makes me fall asleep-and more than vaguely dumb. I realized, suddenly, that the tree I was leaning against could be the very tree beside which I had been found, could still have pale scars where my fingernails had gouged into the trunk; realized, too, that it was beginning to get dark.