Michelle Vernal Box Set

by Michelle Vernal

  “Ah, well now, runts don’t have a great survival rate so I don’t know for sure but if I manage to get the little bugger up to a decent size, I will put him back on his mother once her other piglets are weaned. That would catch him up to his brothers and sisters in no time and prevent his mother getting a bout of mastitis.”

  Jess cringed, remembering the terrible time Brianna had had with the breast infection. She wouldn’t wish that on any mum.

  “Tickle his tum. They love that,” he said as the little piglet finished the bottle.

  He was right, she thought, with delight; if Wilbur could coo, he would be cooing. She sat contentedly like that, rubbing his tummy until she saw his eyes beginning to shut. Gently placing him back in his box, she got up and brushed her jeans down. “You will let me know how he gets on, won’t you?”

  Owen looked bemused for a moment before he nodded and then their eyes met and locked for a split second in an unspoken agreement that it was time to head back to the cottage. They couldn’t avoid Amy any longer.

  “THAT’S HER,” HE SAID, plucking one of the photos Jess had spied on the mantelpiece earlier and holding it out to her. “That was taken a few months before she died.”

  Jess was settled into the leather armchair and she placed the cup of tea he had made her when they’d come back inside down on the side table before leaning forward to take the frame from him. She didn’t know what she expected really, but the young girl who was smiling out at her made her draw a sharp breath.

  Amy was quite beautiful. Her hair was dark like her brother’s but her skin was much fairer than his. They both shared the same startlingly light grey eyes, though. She looks just like how I always pictured Snow White, Jess thought, wondering at the irony of that as she mentally swapped the seventies orange-and-brown knit dress and the long straight hair, parted down the middle, for a long red dress with puffy sleeves and waves of shiny black curls. This was the girl she had come to meet.

  “She looked just like me Ma,” Owen said, handing her another picture.

  This one was a group shot, showing a much younger Owen. He looked like a typical boy with a shock of sticky-up hair, the kind of lad who would have pinged the girls’ bra straps in school. He also looked as if he would rather be anywhere than standing around having his picture taken with his older sister and parents. Mr and Mrs Aherne rested their hands on their children’s shoulders, their pride in their offspring evident as the foursome stood together frozen in time out the front of the cottage.

  Jess couldn’t help but think it was a good thing that none of us knew what lay in store for us and our families. Mrs Aherne was indeed a beauty while her husband had that certain swarthiness about him—Owen had it, too, now Jess realised. His parents made a handsome couple. Amy, Jessica could see instantly, was the spit of her mother, and she would have grown into a stunning young woman given the chance. Owen was a real mix of both his Mum and Dad. He obviously got his dark colouring from his father. Their noses were identical, too; slightly bent to the right and with their heavy eyebrows, it gave them both an almost hooded, brooding look. They even had the same tall and rangy builds but Owen’s grey eyes and full mouth were those of his mother and his sister.

  “I can see the family resemblance, alright. You were a handsome lot,” she murmured, handing him back the two pictures.

  He gazed at them himself for a moment before placing them back on the mantel. “Aye, peas in a pod, us Ahernes.”

  “Amy would have grown up to be a real stunner. She looked so much like your Mum.”

  “Aye, she did. All me mates had a thing for her. I was the most popular lad at school thanks to her. As for Ma, she was Miss County Down when she met Da.”

  Jess caught a glimpse of that rare smile as he crouched down to light the fire. “He used to tell me and Amy a tale about how he’d won Ma over with the gift of a pig and a bunch of roses.”

  Looking at him over the rim of her mug, Jess was unsure where this story was going because it certainly wasn’t the romantic tale befitting the woman in the photo that she had been expecting.

  The fire suddenly roared into life and Owen took a step away from it, catching her bewildered expression as he did so. “Not exactly Cinderella, is it? But Ma had a soft spot for animals and roses—she planted all the bushes out the front of the cottage—and the wee pig Da gave her was a runt, not unlike your Wilbur out there. Ma called her Marigold and she grew up to be a very fat, spoilt old sow. The way she told the tale was that she took pity on the tiny runt and Michael Aherne the poor pig farmer who needed the love of a good woman. If the truth be told and you do the maths, Da got her up the duff. That was the end of her reign as Miss County Down because she had to become Mrs Michael Aherne and pronto.”

  Jess laughed. “They were happy, though? I mean before Amy, well, um, before...”

  Owen interrupted her. “I know what you mean and aye, they were happy enough. Farming was a hard life back then, though, and they had their share of hard times. I sometimes felt Ma wondered about what might have been, you know, if she hadn’t been forced to settled down so young. They both changed after Amy died, though, blaming themselves for a long time. They kept her room like a shrine for years and Ma used to sit on her bed, holding Amy’s teddy for hours on end. When she came out, all she would go on and on about was how she should have put her foot down and made us all leave the godforsaken North years ago.” His gaze flickered to the mantel. “She’d wanted us to go over to the family she had in Liverpool or even go to the States to start a new life. Da wouldn’t hear of it, though; this place was his home and I think she blamed him for not wanting to leave the farm. I can understand it, though. What would he have done? The farm was his life; he didn’t know anything else.” Owen shrugged. “I’ve learnt that you can’t rewrite the past, no matter how much you might want to and this farm is the only bit left of our past now, so I am glad we never left in that respect.”

  “You said your Mum kept Amy’s room like a shrine? Would I be able to have a look? It would give me a real sense of her.”

  He shook his head. “No, she got rid of everything in the end—took a couple of bin bags into her room and filled them. She was so angry—part of the whole grieving process, I suppose. It wasn’t long after that she got sick. Cancer like.”

  “That must have been so hard for you and your Dad.”

  “Aye, it was but she left us emotionally the day Amy died. For his part, though, Da never stopped adoring her. He always called her Bridgette his Beauty Queen and it didn’t really matter that she could never bring herself to forgive him for not wanting to leave Glenariff because he could never forgive himself. Amy was the apple of me Da’s eye.” His eyes moved toward the front door. “He was a great one for the stories. Do you see that old walking stick over there?”

  Jess followed his gaze to where an umbrella stand housed a battered-looking black brolly and an old cane walking stick. She nodded.

  “Well, it belonged to me Grand-da and it was Da’s wee joke that he kept it there because it would come in handy one day for beating all the boys off when they came a-calling for our Amy.”

  Jess smiled at that, thinking briefly of how her mother would have kept a walking stick by the front door for quite a different purpose. It would have been used to hook any red-blooded males under the age of forty who came-a-calling around the neck, drag them inside and then marry them off to her first born.

  “He stopped telling his tall tales after Amy died.”

  They were both silent for a moment, Owen lost in the flickering flames of the fire.

  Something was puzzling Jess, though. Owen had told her that that terrible day in Lisburn Amy had gone up to see a boy who, according to her best friend, wasn’t the least bit interested in her. Having seen her photo, Jessica couldn’t understand how any young man in his right mind could have been anything but smitten with the gorgeous teenager. She voiced her bewilderment and Owen frowned; it leant a harshness to his face and his voice grew bitter.


  “Evie told us that Amy had chatted up the lad at a dance in Banbridge a few weeks earlier. She wasn’t shy in coming forward, our Amy. She had that awareness about herself that young girls have, you know?”

  Jess nodded. Yes, she could remember thinking she was pretty hot to trot at the Blue Light Discos she had frequented many moons ago.

  “Anyway, this lad—he didn’t belong in Banbridge and he should never have been at the dance in the first place because he was asking for trouble like. Sure enough, it wasn’t long before one of the local lads took umbrage with him talking to one of their girls and the dance ended with a fight. Amy was like you—into her stories. She was a right dreamer and she was always waiting for something exciting to happen and for her, that was it.” He picked up the poker and stabbed at the fire. “I suppose she saw the situation as a Romeo and Juliet scenario, you know? That whole forbidden love rot, and she was determined to see this fella again despite him telling her in no uncertain terms to leave him alone after the fight. He’d gotten a battering and he didn’t want any more trouble. She wouldn’t leave him be, though, even though there was no way in hell that lad would have even looked at her again.”

  There was a hole in the story Jess just couldn’t figure. “What do you mean ‘one of their girls’?”

  “We’re Proddies. It was a Protestant dance and this lad was Catholic. It was more than his life was worth to go near her again but Amy was motivated by fashion, not by politics, and she couldn’t understand why what religion you were mattered so much. ‘We’re all human beings, so why can’t we all just get along?’ she once asked our Da and he told her it wasn’t that straightforward. She just said, ‘Why not? It doesn’t seem that complicated to me.’ Then she shrugged her shoulders and walked away from him.”

  Chapter Seven

  The bitterness was etched into Owen’s features. “I never fathomed the point of it all. Where did it get any of us?” He shook his head. “Live and let live, I say, but things were different then and like Da said, it wasn’t as straightforward or simple as that—feelings ran too deep for too long for there ever to be an easy answer. Still do, if you scratch beneath the surface. It never seemed to touch us, though, not here. Da down at the pub, rolling out his stories of marches gone by or putting on his orange colours and heading up for the parade was the closest we came to being involved with any of it. I saw them once, though.”

  “Who?” Jess asked quietly.

  “They were UDA men.”

  Even with her limited knowledge of the different Loyalist fighting factions, she knew this stood for the Ulster Defence Association, Ulster being the northerly province of Ireland.

  “I was ten at the time, cutting through the paddocks, taking a shortcut on me way home from school when six of them crashed through the hedgerow, wearing balaclavas and carrying guns. I dropped down and lay flat in the grass, me head this close to a cow pat.” He held his hands up to demonstrate the distance. “The last one spotted me and he stared right at me, two slits for eyeholes in the balaclava, before raising his finger to his mouth. He didn’t need to tell me to keep quiet; I was too shit-scared to do anything but lay there. I didn’t move until it was dark and I never told a soul about it until years later.”

  It must have been terrifying for a young boy, Jess thought, contemplating what she had just heard and trying to understand what it would have been like to have been raised in the heat of those troubled times. It wasn’t the Ireland she knew and loved, though she guessed it was still there—that resentment and anger. All you would have to do to find it would be as Owen had just said—to scratch lightly at the surface where it simmered away, threatening to boil over again. The flags she’d seen flapping on the wind declaring where the occupants of each house’s loyalties lay had brought that home to her today.

  The Troubles were something for which there was no real solution and so there was no real point in her sitting here now in 2013 questioning why it was they had affected the people who called Glenariff Farm home in such a brutal, firsthand way. She was sure it was something Owen and his parents had asked themselves a thousand times.

  “What was she like?” she asked, deciding to move past the images of a violent past, wanting to get to know the girl Amy had been.

  “She was me sister. A right royal pain in the ass most of the time.” He smiled at that and Jess thought about her own right royal pain in the bum of a little sister. Yes, Kelly bugged the hell out of her growing up—still did, for that matter—but she would never want to be without her.

  “She could make us all laugh, though she had a right ole sense of humour when she wasn’t being a moody mare. I don’t have that much experience of teenage girls but I’m guessing Amy was pretty typical. Her room was covered in posters—you know, your man with the white spiky hair—Billy something or other.”

  “Idol,” Jess supplied helpfully.

  “That’s him, and your pretty boys Duran Duran—her room was plastered in them.”

  “When I was sixteen, I loved Nirvana. It broke my heart when Kurt topped himself. Funny how your tastes change, isn’t it? Nowadays, if I were to meet him, I would probably tell him to go and give his hair a bloody good wash!”

  Owen looked nonplussed at this titbit of information she’d just shared, so Jess decided to get back on track. “What games did Amy like playing when she was younger?”

  “Dress-ups—she was mad on dressing up and putting on shows for us all. She’d have us in bits with some of the stuff she’d come out with. She loved ballet, too, though I don’t know if she was any good at it. I heard Ma tell Da once that she was like an elephant in tights clomping round the stage.” He smiled at the memory before adding, “She liked to read right from when she was a wee dot, so I’m guessing she would have loved that Snow White book of hers. I remembered what happened to it.”

  “What?”

  “We had a village fete and Amy had a stall. I can’t remember what she was saving up for but she would have sold it there.”

  “And now I’ve got it,” Jess said, pulling it from her bag.

  Owen reached out and took it from her, opening the cover and staring with a lowered gaze at the inscription his own hand had written all those years ago.

  “I remember Ma standing over me, making sure I wrote that out neatly.”

  “It’s a pretty good effort for a little fellow, and I’d like you to have it back.”

  “Ah, no, it’s only a book sure.”

  “Maybe but it belonged to Amy first. You were the one who gave it to her, so it should be here with you. I think that’s what she would have wanted.” As she uttered the words, Jess felt something. It was as though the atmosphere in the room had changed. There was a frisson in the air that hadn’t been there a moment before. It was like an electrical current of sorts and Jess felt her skin prickle with goose bumps. She glanced at Owen but he was still intent on the book, seemingly oblivious of the subtle change in the room’s tone. She shook away the impression that Amy had just joined them. Surely it was no more than her fanciful imagination at work as per usual and as she did so, the ambience settled once more.

  The silence that pervaded the room apart from the crackling of the fire wasn’t an uncomfortable one and Jess drank her tea, imagining a dark-haired little girl who had once danced in front of that same fire dressed as a fairy or in tights and a leotard practising her ballet.

  “She had a cat called Tiptoes,” Owen offered up after a bit.

  “Ha! I have that book—Tiptoes the Mischievous Kitten. It’s a Ladybird one, too, but it’s older than that one.” She indicated her head to the book Owen now held in his hands.

  “Well, there you go; maybe our Amy had it, too, and that’s where she got the moggy’s name from. It was a stray who just decided to move in on us. Ma didn’t want anyting to do with it, saying it probably had fleas and that it would give her worms but Amy wouldn’t stop feeding it. It’d wait at the gate for her to come home from school, more faithful than any
dog. I reckon it pined away after she died, just like Ma did.”

  Grief had a roll-on effect, Jess realised.

  “It wasn’t just our family who suffered. There was poor Evie and their gang of pals, too. What kid of sixteen should have to deal with something like that? Those girls should have been allowed to carry on, playing their music and dreaming about boys, not dealing with the shite that happened. Evie told me years later that she couldn’t come to terms with the guilt she felt at having escaped the bomb. She reckoned that no matter how many times people said it wasn’t her fault, she could never bring herself to believe them.”

  “Survivor’s guilt.”

  “Aye. That day played out in her head constantly, along with the ‘what if’ game. You know—what if they’d never gone to that dance in Banbridge? What if she hadn’t been so keen to join Amy on that trip to Lisburn? What if she had put her foot down and refused to go with her? What if she’d told our folks about what Amy was planning on doing? It would send you mad going down that road.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “She got married young but it didn’t last—my guess is too much baggage.”

  Jess wondered whether that was the same reason Owen’s own marriage had broken up.

  “She met an Australian backpacking his way around the country and the last I heard, she immigrated with him to Australia. I hope she got her fresh start.”

  They sat in silence as Jess mulled over what Owen had just said. He was right, she thought, picturing herself at sweet sixteen. She might have thought she knew it all but underneath the makeup and attitude, she had still been a child trying to come to terms with the fact that she would soon be a grownup. She had been in no way emotionally equipped to deal with the death of a pet goldfish, let alone her best friend. Life was not fair, she mused. Some people got to breeze through it, never encountering anything more than the death of elderly parents—the natural course of life—while others had to cope with horrendous trials like the death of a child, a sister, and a friend.