Islandbridge

by Brady, John

  He studied the blues and greys that had been deepened by the rain. Off over the city, the little bit of the city left to see here, he believed there was a softer light already. It was the pearly tint that he’d had to concede was apricot, one day in a roistering argument with Iseult. His eye roved from rooftop to chimney across the horizon, and he wondered what his daughter was up to at the present time. Welding was only the latest. Her intent, said she, with a glitter in her eye, was to make that iron contraption float in the air. HyBrasil, he whispered: The Isle of the Blest, indeed. For a moment he tried to remember the Magrittes, the ones where the boulders floated over the seascape. Seven months’ pregnant, her marriage adrift, working through the night. Contrary is as contrary does, to be sure.

  “What?” Malone asked.

  “I didn’t say anything, Tommy.”

  “You were muttering.”

  Minogue looked over.

  “I always mutter.”

  He returned to his idle stare, this time toward the Phoenix Park.

  “Did you read his missus’ statements yet?” Malone asked. “Condon’s? Jaysus, but she’s bitter.”

  They had finished the summaries an hour ago. They had been passing the transcripts and statements between them.

  “I did,” said Minogue. He heard Malone yawn and turn pages.

  A sharp and pleasant glow came to him then when he realized that it might be sunny like this at Killiney this evening. He’d phone Kathleen, warn her. She was usually good for five or ten minutes down on the beach, at the water’s edge. For himself, he didn’t want to do much there except stand around and gawk at the water again. As had become a habit in recent times, she would leave her culchie husband to his thoughts and go back and sit in the car overlooking the beach. Now Kathleen had a mobile, he often returned to the car to hear her gostering away on the phone.

  Yes, he thought: skipping stones out over the waves at Killiney tonight, the rolling waters he depended on, would be where he would wash away the feeling of being tainted by what he was coming to believe about Emmett Condon.

  “Separated a year,” said Malone and got up with a grunt. Minogue heard the floor give as Malone walked slowly to the window.

  “What are you looking at?”

  “My escape route,” Minogue said.

  “Huh.”

  “How many deer are there in the Phoenix Park?”

  “How would I know? How would anybody know? Why are you asking?”

  Kilmainham, and the area next to it, Islandbridge, would always be grimy parts of old Dublin to Minogue. No amount of film studios or cappuccino bars would fix it. But they’d said that about the Temple Bar even, hadn’t they?

  “You know,” said Malone, “I have a lousy feeling about this business. That girl? The one supposed to be something to Condon?”

  “If she’s not a figment of this fella McHugh’s half-cooked brain, you should be saying first.”

  “I got that earlier, okay? If she’s not here legally, well . . .”

  Minogue turned to him.

  “Okay,” said Malone. “She doesn’t show up, so (A) She doesn’t exist; (B) She does and she’s done a bunk, under whatever papers she has, probably fake anyway – out of the country; or (C) She’s gone under a new name, moved to, I don’t know, Cahirciveen, Ballygobackwards.”

  “Do we have an embassy in Ballygobackwards?”

  “There’s thousands – tens of thousands – of them people here now. They get a one-year permit, crap jobs, pay’s not great. That’s bad enough, right? But if she was illegal in the first place, well, who’s going to help her out in a thing like this?”

  Minogue nodded.

  “I mean, she’ll know she’d better take a dive somewhere after Condon turns up dead. Because that is serious. Right?”

  “Would she leave the country then? Go home?” Minogue asked.

  “What if she can’t?”

  “Why ‘can’t’? She hasn’t the fare?”

  “How about because she’s going to get in worse trouble if she tried that?”

  Minogue began to get it now.

  “Her– what am I going to call it– her manager here?” he asked.

  “Pimp,” said Malone. “Whatever. Let’s say he holds her papers, and she can’t travel. Or he threatens her family. Or threatens to tell them what she does here. That goes on, you know.”

  “I’ve heard of them owing money they can’t pay back.”

  Malone nodded.

  “Our best hope is that she’s lying low here, maybe under another name.”

  “Wouldn’t she turn up somehow though?” Minogue tried.

  “Like how – with that lousy dot-to-dot I-don’t-know-what-kind-of-a-thing, of a face their computer spat up for Missing Persons? Hah. Like I said. I’ve seen PlayStation One games with better faces than that.”

  Minogue’s thoughts drifted to the presentation yesterday. There had been countries he’d heard of but didn’t know whether they were parts of Russia or floating somewhere the far side of Berlin, or Vienna or somewhere.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “There’s just so much we don’t know here.”

  “Well, I do know a few things,” Malone said. “And one of them is this. A lot of the people they’re working for here in Ireland are no angels. And it’s Irish people I’m talking about who are doing the gouging and the under-the-table stuff. Fellas in Immigration there, they could tell you stories.”

  Minogue headed back to the cluttered table. He looked at the picture again.

  “Sometimes I wonder,” Malone began. “Are we doing to people what was done to us?”

  “That bad, do you think?”

  “Them people who are cleaning toilets and cleaning offices in the middle of the night. And then, bejases, we turn around and tell them their time is up and they can go home. Home to what?”

  “You and Karl Marx, Tommy. I never knew.”

  “Ah now. It sucks. It’s not right. Anyway, what I’m saying is, she’d be doing her best to stay away from any of us. But I don’t want to push that any further now.”

  “Push it,” Minogue said. “It’s all you’re good for sometimes.”

  Malone let out a breath.

  “Well, we better face up to it at some point,” he said, and he scratched his head hard. “We keep on coming back to it, don’t we? Maybe what happened to Condon . . .?”

  Malone turned quickly from the window.

  “Happened to her as well?”

  Chapter 14

  October 15, 1985

  EIMEAR KELLY COULDN’T BEAR to do the paperwork. “Widow”: she couldn’t bear to read it, much less say it: even think it. So, in the end it was Breda who came through. Now Breda herself was getting married in a few months. She had been in insurance since she’d come up to Dublin. Breda smoothed it all out, made the phone calls, brought the forms out to the house. But the same Breda had broken down in tears just after starting. She’d kept apologizing for it. Before she left, she even apologized for telling her there was a ray of light in this, and that Declan would have been happy for her. It was such a stupid thing to say, and it had just come out of her and she didn’t know how or why. Still, the house was hers now, mortgage-free, wasn’t it? And there’d be payments coming in each month, if all went well with the Garda Pension and Benefits crowd. And God help them if they didn’t hurry up! Then she cried again, for nearly a half-hour.

  She remembered Breda’s reaction that night, the night when she’d told her about her plans. The bewilderment on Breda’s face, she remembered, and the anxiety too. Breda wore her heart on her sleeve – always had – and she said things on the spur of the moment, often laughing or apologizing later on. It was actually endearing. But even if she’d tried her best that night, Breda couldn’t have held back that look. It was a kind of a pained frown, and she had sat there completely still, trying to smile or something, but obviously thinking the unthinkable. It was the was-Eimearmad look.

  That reaction, from her olde
st friend from primary school, had stayed with Eimear, and she knew she would never again try to explain it to anyone. She couldn’t tell anyone how it felt, like she was away from everything but surrounded by it too. To be floating here amongst people, able to do and say the normal things, but to feel it was someone else they were talking to. A ghost really, some sort of a living ghost.

  Breda was logical though, as well as everything else.

  “Eimear,” she’d said. “Maybe it’s the tablets they gave you, that treatment? Maybe it’s time to stop. I heard they change you. That you get used to them.”

  “No,” she remembered replying, and she was astonished at the words that came out of her own mouth then. How calm she had sounded, how reasonable.

  “I’ve thought about it a lot. It’s the only way, Breda. I can’t go on like this, it’s like I’m sleepwalking or something. I won’t.”

  That part had definitely freaked Breda. She could tell straightaway, because Breda tried to change the subject. Still, she was drawn back into asking her things that led into what Eimear had told her. Was she eating right? Had she been able to get a few hours’ solid sleep? Was the breastfeeding wearing her down or something? “Wanting to start over, well great,” Breda had said after. “But changing your name? You mean back to your maiden name?”

  “I do, yes.”

  “Do Declan’s parents know?”

  “Why do they need to know?”

  Breda hesitated.

  “They might think,” she began. “Well, you know.”

  “I know they’re worried, I know. We’re all worried. But in the end of the day, it’s up to me to do something. I’m not trying to hurt anyone.”

  “You mean it, really, don’t you?”

  “I do.”

  “But why, Eimear? You sound like it’s part of some plan you’ve come up with?”

  “It’s not a plan really. It’s just that I’m so tired, it’s like I’m carrying this huge something. I want to be a different person, somebody new – or I want to get my old self back. I can’t explain it totally.”

  “But what will you do?”

  “I don’t mean a big rigmarole. Just something simple. I’ll get a job, maybe back in the insurance business, and see where that’ll go. I’m going to use my middle name as well. Remember I used to do that, back in school, after Confirmation?”

  “But that was a lark, Eimear! That was our Hollywood-star stuff. Come on!”

  “I’d still be me. I just want another start. That’s not a bad thing to want, is it?”

  Breda’s look stayed with her over the years. That effort of trying not to stare, but with still a stricken look on her face that she couldn’t hide. It felt like Breda had actually shrunk, shrunk physically, in front of her. It saddened her, but in a strange way it also gave her a hope, that Breda would probably never come around to accepting this.

  “Eimear, have you talked it over with anyone?”

  She understood the tone as much as the words her friend used, and knew then that she wouldn’t be able to go on with trying to persuade her. It was just another thing to let go of, she thought. Sadness certainly, and she had felt herself want to cry then and there, but it was just another stage, she knew, and it had to be endured. Breda asked her something about a doctor talking to her about postpartum, or that sort of thing?

  She listened, and she went through the motions. It didn’t shock her anymore to see how quickly things changed, even in moments. It was another veil lifted, she understood. Whether you liked things the way they were, whether you feared them, or whether you wanted to change them, none of that mattered. There was no going back. The panics that came suddenly, like the one the other day in the supermarket, and the feeling of falling into something that would not let her out again – those might never go away. There’d always be the anxious looks on her family’s faces, the smiles that were too watchful, and the kindly, distant looks from the doctor murmuring questions and advice.

  “Will you go back and see that, em, doctor?”

  “The psychiatrist? No, I don’t think so.”

  Breda had looked around the kitchen, biting her lip. Eimear knew she was trying not to cry again.

  “Rent this house out, Eimear, and you could go home awhile. That’s found money, and you’d have, you know– Look, how about a girl from down her way, one coming up to study in Dublin? Babysitting, all that . . .?

  Breda’s words trailed off. She began to shake. Maybe it had been seeing the baby things around the counter, the toys, that had put her over the edge, Eimear thought, while she held her.

  Breda hugged her long and hard in the hallway again later.

  “Oh, Eimear. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I wish, oh, I don’t know how to help.”

  Sorry for what, she thought, and looked back into her friend’s streaming eyes. She wanted Breda to leave here thinking she’d done good.

  Later, in the early hours, she realized that Breda had joined that group of people she knew she’d keep things from. The family things, she meant. It would have happened anyway, probably, once married life started for Breda. It was just another milestone.

  She heard the baby stirring, a small cry. At least her mother had gone back home now for a week at a time. She didn’t have to feel her mother’s worry too, how she watched her with her baby. Around her, everyone worried and cried and talked amongst themselves. What’ll we do about Eimear? She’s depressed. It’s the medication. She should try something else. She won’t go to the psychiatrist anymore. She never cries now. She needs to get it out of her. Will she harm the baby? Soon it’d be: why does she want to get a job now, a new job? Doesn’t the baby need her? And on, and on.

  The sniffling would turn to those little gasps soon. She’d wait, and let him have his say. Declan would have gotten up; that was the way he was. Everyone expected women to be soft, to fall apart, she had learned. It gave her no satisfaction to know it now, this knowing that she’d never get over this, but that she’d just go on.

  She sat up and reached for her dressing gown. The baby was in his own room now, and down to just one bottle at night. Had he sensed her calmness, the very thing that her own family were agitated about, and Breda, not four hours ago. He was a good sleeper. She loved him; it was as simple as that.

  The carpet was cold. She reached out her toes for a slipper, and the sharp sting of what she had learned came to her unexpectedly. She stood there to let it sink in.

  It wasn’t just Breda, no: they were all of one mind. Eimear was to be pitied, fretted over. Only nice things would be said, and the awkward things let slip away, forever, if possible. But she would never forget what she’d seen in that Superintendent’s eyes that day he’d come out. He couldn’t wholly hide his true belief about Declan.

  Nor could they. Even under the gentle talk and the hugs and the telephone calls, and the endless things they brought, she’d seen it, and she’d known it: Declan was not one of them anymore. He’d never say it outright, any more than the people close to her would say it, that it was good that Declan was gone.

  She found the other slipper. The air in the baby’s room was close, and tangy from the used nappies in the bin. She listened to see if he had heard her, but the small coughing cries did not slow.

  “It’s all right, love,” she said. “Here I am . . .”

  March 28, 1986

  There was a spell of warm weather early that spring. Eimear spent a lot of time in the park, Marley Grange, with Róisín and the baby. Sometimes, too, it was with their mother, or Breda, or Declan’s sisters Bridget and Anne. There was a good view over the city in many places in the park. The mountains and Pine Forest were close behind.

  Doctor Dempsey changed her tablets. For a while she noticed the change, but then things went back to being the same. She didn’t like anybody asking her how she felt, or how it was going, no matter how much they cared or wanted the best for her.

  The baby: for some reason, it bothered her mother the most that Eimear still cal
led him “the baby.” She told Róisín, who told her. Then Eimear told Róisín to tell their mother back that it was just words. Couldn’t they see she did love “the baby,” and was taking the best care of “the baby,” and not to say things like that again because it upset her to hear them secondhand? She was satisfied, and not too guilty, when she head later that her mother was mortified for days.

  It was actually funny, she knew, but only for someone who could laugh.

  Everything was too easy sometimes, on the outside, in that world, and that alarmed her. Dinners made, the shopping done, the bills paid. She was regular again and her breasts weren’t sore anymore. The stitches were long gone.

  After the episode where she’d told Breda she wanted to change her name, to be someone else, there was always someone calling to the house. It had taken her a while to catch on. She thought that Dempsey had given her different tablets for a while. From time to time she began to skip the tablets. All she noticed was a bit more energy or interest, and a feeling of being very heavy too though, along with a frightening feeling that she was not far from panic over simple things.

  She looked over at her baby cradled in Róisín’s arms, and Róisín talking and cooing as she set the swing to a gentle glide with her feet. If she ever told Róisín to keep him because she loved this nephew so much – even as a joke – that’d have them all on her again.

  They were keeping some things from her. She didn’t mind. She didn’t want to know anything about the Guards, even Declan’s pals. But she had heard Breda and Róisín talking about something to do with the Guards, how they were all like that, or something.

  Was it for her sake they had not fought to get proper benefits from the Guards? Maybe they had no heart to, because they wanted her to be as far as possible, forever probably, from the Guards.