That was the night we were followed.
There were three, maybe four, of them. To this day I am not sure. I remember that their bulky forms were dark against the evening sky as they waited shiftily beside an otherwise innocuous family car. Looking back it was like something from a movie. They had known where to wait, where we always parked for late Mass on Saturday, on the road to the side of the church, where only a few people would exit using the small gate. They had known we’d be a while outside the main door of the church chatting with neighbours. They had known that, by the time we rounded the corner, it would be quiet and getting dark quickly. I noticed Dad’s steps slow a pace once he realised, saw him mark the uncanniness of the scene. And suddenly then the quiet air, still sanctified by the just-done service, was filled with noise and action. One man began to approach us, speaking, hand raised to stop us. “Hey there. Hey there!” Dad grabbed my arm and his voice came low and urgent, telling me to get into the car. We were quick, and the large man approaching us hesitated before turning back. I could hear his swears, heard the car doors opening with industrious clicks and the hurried crunch of heavy feet on the roadside gravel. I strained my short arm into the space between the seat and the window to lock the back door, seeing Dad do the same on the other side. As we fumbled on our belts I felt the seat cold against my legs, I in my good dress for church, now seeming silly and juvenile in this suddenly adult context.
I was always one for catastrophizing, for imagining the worst possible outcome, but this time those imaginings seemed appropriate, and my mind spooled through various scenarios. At the end of all of them lay disaster: kidnapping; disappearance; something called hobbling. Mangled fingers posted in bloody packages. Half-alive victims thrown out of moving cars in the dead of night. Fingernails pulled out with pinchers. This was the 1980s in Ireland. This stuff was happening in real life as well as on the American cop shows that we devoured.
“Fuckers”. Dad swore and there was fear in the way he said it.
They followed us closely, their headlamps on full, along the darkening roads as the redness began to bleed away from the western sky. For a while we drove along the familiar roads in a loop, following the same route, deliberately not going anywhere near our own house. Having established the various ways in which we might die my mind began to turn to what was actually happening, and I began to realise that this might not be a random encounter. I looked sideways at my father to determine his mood. I worked out from the set of his face that he wasn’t as surprised as I’d expect him to be. And after a third pass by the turnoff for our house it dawned on me. I finally broke the silence that had settled alongside nervous tension in the car.
“Dad,” I tried, “is this about The Quarry?”
For a while he said nothing, concentrating on the road, checking his mirror anxiously, struggling with the glare of the headlamps. The car behind was dangerously close to ours now.
“Maybe”, he said.
Then he said, “Yes. Yes I think so”.
Ah ha. The Quarry. That made sense. The Quarry near our house was a constant topic of conversation and a source of intrigue. It was both inside and outside of us. It had its own fat paper archive that swelled on a weekly basis, bursting out of the press underneath the television. The Quarry produced letters on headed paper from local councillors, TDs, RTÉ, Greenpeace, journalists, solicitors, scientists. The Quarry was responsible for reams of paper, photocopied scientific studies, official-looking documentation, newspaper clippings. The Quarry was the site of a toxic dump, separated from our green homestead only by the scant bend on the road, so close it may as well have been in our garden. And my Dad spent most of the 1980s fighting a seemingly endless, lonely campaign against pollution that was happening in plain sight.
What did pollution happening in plain sight look like? Well, it looked like this. Almost daily, sometimes three or four times a day, a tractor would tow an unmarked slurry tank the three miles from town, making a left from the main road onto our little boreen, chugging, almost cheerfully, past our neighbours’ houses and then passing close by our house. The drivers would sometimes wave or beep hello at us kids if we happened to be on the road on our bikes. Once it reached The Quarry the driver sloppily released the contents of the tank - what looked like an untreated chemical stew, that stank horribly - into a hole in the ground. However, as the tractor negotiated the poorly-maintained roads, the tank would slop out some of its contents, creating an incriminating line of evidence, a perversion of the trail of breadcrumbs in the fairytale, leading to the source of the waste. The foul line of sludge led you back to the gates of a respected multinational company, a big local employer, a family friendly firm. One of the only shows in town.
Whatever this waste was, it seemed not to be dormant. If dangerous chemical reactions were taking place, they were taking place under the very ground that held our garden, that produced our vegetables, that fed the livestock. It seemed impossible that it (we struggled to name it) should have been properly contained in its hastily-laid sarcophagus. Did it eat through the concrete, percolating into the soil, permeating into the waterbed? And like most things that are hastily and nefariously concealed it always revealed itself, emanating a dense chemical smell, most invasive on summer days when it eradicated even the heady scent of hay and flowering trees, trees that my father seemed to plant with the ferocious aim of protecting us from the stench of pollution.
If the dumping of the waste was intended to be a covert operation, it was not successful, the brazen trail of sludge a fine visualisation of some of the most toxic values in Irish society at that time. Governments and their agents were hand in glove with multinationals, holding emigration-sad people to ransom. Foreign Direct Investment, of course, was king. Industry captains thumped out a familiar narrative on boardroom tables. Dad heard the same thing from them. Close the dump, close the factory, lose jobs. An empty threat, typical of the multinational with plenty of influence in Dublin, but a powerful one given the length of dole queues, the alarming numbers of people heading to London and New York. And it worked. As a consequence of such scaremongering the local opposition to any environmental action was fierce, too fierce to imagine that one could ever have a proper hearing. There were people who would approach us in the town wagging their fingers and giving out. Some neighbours and townspeople kept their distance, didn’t return a hello or a nod. There were vicious anonymous letters sent to our house and threatening phone calls late in the night. But there were also green shoots: regular contact from a factory worker who would not give his name, who would phone from a call box. In the post a brown envelope containing a list of toxins, substances that were dangerous to humans and to all life. A young university lecturer helped with a portable lab and a cool air of authority. There was also a sympathetic official with the environmental agency.
But it was there and it stayed, for the length of several childhoods, and beyond. It was of course forbidden to us youngsters to go anywhere near it, but naturally this place with its industrial-grade fencing and its discreet but authoritative signage – Danger: Keep Out, in military-style font – had an appeal that was both physical and imaginative. We were nosy, keen amateur detectives with a rake of tried and tested spying techniques and an indomitable sense of justice. Aficionados of The Famous Five, with a reluctant dog in tow. In flushes of juvenile adventure we would BMX the short distance to the site entrance, slide in though a gap that we’d forced in the hedgerow at the side of the imposing spiked gate, but found usually then that we were repelled by an unseen force, daring to only go so far through the long grasses and bullrushes. It was oppressive place: the air too still, even on hot days a heat that was weirdly intense, with a kind of heavy vapour lingering, unpleasantly hitting the back of the throat. The plantlife running overly-wild, a sick shade of greenish-yellow, as if fed by a sort of nuclear cocktail. Away from The Quarry and safely back at the clubhouse we’d discuss at length strategies to find out what the site itself looked like, what it contained. I imagined that the sludge sat under us in a slow-moving subterranean pond, with greasy slicks of poison, like oil on water, on the surface. Later I found a perfect literary representation of this dump in Paradise Lost‘s subterranean burning lake, both dark and glowing, transformative, unknowable. Even though I loved a mystery to be solved, and a large gate with an imposing sign, I internalised the worry about the impact The Quarry was having on us. Around this time I became obsessed with environmental issues. Still under ten I became a member of Greenpeace and CND. I would write letters to magazines. I would lie awake at night worrying about the end of the world, the bomb, the greenish-brown sludge disappearing into the ground and merging with the very food we ate at dinner each evening.
We drove on while they followed us still, past the quiet houses of our neighbours, hearing distant tractors and barking dogs, meeting hardly any other cars. Dad asked me if I could think of payphones nearby, but we had no small change. He said the Garda station in town would be closed at this hour. I asked if he knew the men. At first he said nothing.
Then, after a long pause, he said: “They are not from around here”. There was something about their accents, and in the way of their driving.
Then Dad said, “Let’s make for the hills”.
Looking back at that now it was a moment of reclamation; a statement of custodianship. As if the very landscape he strove to protect, for which he needed no map, would be our protector. So we drove high and deep, into the dark narrow roads nestled under the mountains, rising above our home, overlooking the now-inky lake, slicing around the narrow bends, navigating expertly the many potholes. We could not see beyond what the headlights of the car beamed into view, but he knew well the lay of the land: an undulating slope dropping away on one side, thick in the springtime with heather, purple and white, and heavy with the buzzing perfume of furze; a brown swathe of blanket bog punctuated by the green of small farms and cottages, many still using old-fashioned methods of farming, churns to make butter, and wells to draw water. My father had an emotional and intellectual connection with the topography, able in his mind to overlay old maps onto the newer road structures: fairy roads, invisible access ways, hidden souterrains. In normal times he’d narrate the journey, signposting it with myths, placenames, surnames, sometimes even recalling a ghostly woman reputed to appear in the back seat of the car to guide travellers through bad weather. I was afraid to look back, fearing that the old woman would choose to appear that very night to add to the strangeness. But now he was silent again, eyes flicking rapidly between the road ahead and the rearview mirror. He had forgotten I was there, his eyes slitted, one hand fused with the gearstick. The menacing car beginning now to fall back, the driver less certain on the narrowing roads.
Soon, we came to the approach to the sharp hairpin bend known to us as The Devil’s Elbow. This part of the road always seemed exotic, recalling the mountainous regions of continental Europe. A bend lasered by the same glacier as made those z-shaped praecipes of northern Italy. The kind of bend around which a sporty car driven by a sparkling couple could glide, an Alpine lake glistening far below, a scarf rippling in a warm breeze. We kids would hold our breaths in fear and excitement as we drove this part of the road, half-expecting gravity to fail, anticipating the car sliding from the steepness of the hillside. Or imagining that the hill would heave us off like a slumbering dragon, disturbed from aeons of sleep. As I tried to remember what was up ahead, and forget what was behind, Dad suddenly spoke. And just as you might see in those movies, Dad killed the headlights, just as we rounded the sharp bend.
“Now” he said, sounding more sprightly, more confident; “let them do some driving”.
Once we were sure we had lost them we came off the hill, merging with a local road that would take us back to town, seeing once again road signs and houses. We passed the dim shapes of farm machinery stilled for the night, gateposts and barns, bales of hay piled high; we sensed the wakefulness of animals in sheds. I opened the window a crack and the fragrant night air unclasped us, and we breathed, loud and easy. Though there was no moonlight we could sense the vibrancy of the bog as we passed through, thrumming with nocturnal life and stirred by a light breeze. We travelled more slowly now, coasting downhill. Dad allowed himself a moment of light relief, smiling: “They’ll be well lost by now”. We did not dwell on what might have been in store for us, nor did we acknowledge the choking fear that, until just moments ago, had held us in its thrall. Neither did we give voice to the pact of silence that now existed between us, as he guided the car, hardly needing to look at the road ahead, towards home.
Carrie Griffin is a writer and academic. Her work has been published in ROPES, Trasna, An Áitiúil and Silver Apples, and she was a Munster Literature Centre fiction mentee in 2021, when she was also shortlisted for the Allingham Flash Fiction prize. She was editor-in-chief of The Ogham Stone literary journal, 2018-2022.”Devil’s Elbow” was shortlisted for the Fish Short Memoir Prize in 2025.