by Nesta Tuomey
Jane was outwardly composed but inwardly she bitterly railed against the loss of her husband and son, and mourned the terrible waste of their lives. Even with the pills she prescribed for herself she could not sleep, and except for brief snatches of rest taken at odd moments during the day, remained awake for the three days and nights following the tragedy. Throughout the day she was possessed of an unnatural calm, but behind her closed bedroom door at night she lay suspended in a kind of limbo, alternating prayers with weeping, her love and misery rending her as she relived those last cataclysmic hours, over and over again.
The days and nights of grieving took their toll on them all. At the church and cemetery, and afterwards at the hours, relatives and colleagues came to pay their last respects. Ruthie was querulous, only understanding in part what had happened, and Sheena was furious and frantic in her grief. She had relied upon her father, blossomed and basked in his approval. Although not seeing him as some deity, like her younger brother had, Sheena had nevertheless counted on him. He had called her the belle of the ball and she had hoped always to be that for him. She had been reft by the sight of his agony as he lay prostrate on the floor, shuddering in pain. For the rest of her life, she thought, that memory would remain with her. For her brother she could not yet feel anything but hatred for what he had done.
Terry had had, perhaps, the greatest affinity with his father. They had shared a sporting interest and a fighting code. Eddie had been his mentor and guide and he an apt and willing pupil. He had loved and admired his father and dreamed one day of being his match. He felt bereft and cheated before his still irreconcilable loss. He saw his mother’s great sorrow and pitied her, but felt heartened by it too, for her desolation was but an echo of his own. For those few days, he did his best to support her, comporting himself in a manner older than his fourteen years as he supported her up the aisle of the church and afterwards at the graveside, while all the time, within himself, he held at bay the storms threatening to annihilate him. Later he was the one who attended the inquest with her - Ruthie was too young to be a witness and Sheena had not been present - and he gave his account of what had happened on that evening in the kitchen. He had spoken with an awareness of his new responsibility as the only man in that sadly depleted household. He could tell by his mother’s expression that she was proud of him, and after the verdict had been given – manslaughter followed by suicide when the balance of the mind was unsound – and they were travelling home in Teresa’s car her whispered words of affection and her warm embrace compensated for the stress of standing in the witness box and recounting the horrors they had lived through.
Some days after the burial as she was going down to the washing line Jane tripped on something lying in the grass and, bending down, discovered the puppy’s limp body and the empty bottle. With a sigh, she went back inside filled with fresh horror and regret, and bitterly blamed herself for not realising there was something gravely amiss with her son. When Terry came in from school he got a shovel and buried the pup.
Jane stayed up, grieving and dry-eyed, until the small hours, and was still unable to comprehend what terrible trauma could have induced a gentle boy like Hugh to take his father’s life and his own along with it.
Annette was in mourning too. On the night of the tragedy she had been expecting Eddie to drop over later in the evening. She had left Claire sleeping and was sitting before her dressing table, freshening her make-up, when Christopher, whom she had sent to the shop for the evening paper, came crashing up the stairs full of the McArdle slaying. Annette was totally unprepared. Dead. Both of them. She stared white-faced at her son, not sure that he hadn’t somehow got it all terribly confused. But no, Christopher said, there was a Garda car right now parked across the road in McArdle’s driveway and there were neighbours standing all about saying that Hugh had blasted his father with a shotgun and then taken his own life. The ambulance had left for the hospital ages ago, Christopher said, and now the Garda cars were coming and going all the time. Claire, weakly eavesdropping from the landing, caught the tail end of her brother’s disclosure and was unable to take any of it in. In her great confusion of mind, she assumed it was Hugh’s new puppy that had been killed. It would be weeks before the full enormity of the tragedy would strike her.
With the exception of Terry, the McArdle family absorbed the grief and shock. Jane seemed to accept her loss with an almost philosophical forbearance which at first puzzled Terry and then angered him.
In a way Terry was even more jealous now of his younger brother than when he was alive. Terry believed in retribution. Observing his mother gazing fondly and regretfully at Hugh’s Confirmation photographs - the most recent pictures to be taken before his death – it seemed to him that Jane felt it not matter what terrible things people did to each other. If they died early enough they would be enshrined for ever in memory. With Jane apparently determined on sanctifying Hugh, and Sheena pretty much taken up with looking after Ruthie, Terry felt left out in the cold.
So Terry avoided his family and perhaps they, occupied with comforting each other, neglected him. He hardly ever mixed anymore with his schoolmates, but found other friends. There was a reason for this.
At the time of the killings wild rumours circulated about the that before his death Eddie McArdle had been having an affair with some woman in the locality. Terry spent half of his time in hot denial, the other brawling with his persecutors. He was, not like Hugh, sensitive on the issues of integrity and honour. He held a very tolerant view on all things sexual and if it hadn’t been for the terrible manner of Eddie’s death, he might have even been rather secretly proud of his father’s sexual prowess.
Terry never told his mother the reason for his brawling. She had suffered enough already. He preferred to let her think it stemmed from his love of fighting, anything but the truth. Terry may not have been idealistic and introspective like Hugh but he had his own code of behaviour. So he dealt with his problems in the only way he knew how. Jane had got to the stage when she met Terry at the front door with the bottle of mercurochrome in her hand. These days his handsome brooding face, so like his father’s, was constantly bruised and battered. She worried in case the damage might be permanent.
Terry often wondered about the identity of his father’s amour. Stephen Rigney, a boy in his class, swore he knew her identity. Stephen was the elder brother of Mark, the ring-leading bully in Hugh’s year.
One afternoon Jane made herself go into Hugh’s room and sort through his belongings. It was a task she had been dreading, but she steeled herself and set to work, methodically clearing drawer after drawer. She found poignant reminders of the child she had loved and lost. Hugh was a sentimental hoarder. All his summer and Christmas report cards since he began school were stacked in an Oxo tin. Jane, reading through them, saw that he had been consistently top of his class in everything but maths. She mourned the terrible waste of his young life and forced herself to continue.
He had kept his First Communion and Confirmation cards and his red Confirmation ribbon, worn so proudly on the day, was carefully enshrined in its box. To celebrate they had all gone out to a restaurant for lunch, followed by a trip to town to see the latest Harrison Ford adventure film. Later Hugh had said in all seriousness, ‘Thanks for a wonderful day, Mum. I wouldn’t mind dying now it was so great.’ Jane clamped down on her lower lip to keep from crying aloud the keening, despairing cry of all women down through the ages, when confronted by their dead. She doubled over, striving to regain control, knowing if she ever once allowed herself let go she could never get going again. Gradually she calmed.
She opened the last drawer and lifted out the contents. These were mostly comic papers and drawings. The top sheets were sketches of Hero and her pups, some lightly pencilled, others shaded and completed down to the last detail. Jane was particularly struck by a sketch of a horse, head upflung, mane flying, perhaps glimpsed from a moving car, the pose beautifully caught in a few bold strokes. She had always been
proud of Hugh’s artistic gift, but she hadn’t realised just how good he was. ‘Oh the waste,’ she sighed again, ‘the terrible waste.’
No! she wouldn’t let herself go down that road again. She lifted out the last bundle of sheets and idly glanced at them. They were drawings of persons unmistakably engaging in the act of fellatio.
Jane was horrified by the explicitness of the phallic drawings and the accompanying captions. They were not, as she’d first thought, erotic messages, but revengeful declarations.
Closer inspection revealed Claire’s name scrawled everywhere with affection, Eddie’s with loathing. Jane clutched at a memory. Claire sick and despondent in the holiday bungalow, eyes full of despair. ‘Oh dear God!’ Jane moaned. Bile rushed to her throat. She felt trapped in some terrible nightmare.
It was Eddie’s child. She rose from the bed and rushed into the bathroom to hang over the hand-basin, heaving and retching until all the sickness had drained from her body. Throat aching, she straightened up and pushed tendrils of hair from off her perspiring forehead. She felt shaky and ill. Slowly, she went back to Hugh’s room and sat down on the bed, striving to make sense of her thoughts.
Oh God, what had she done? It occurred to Jane that in her rush to mend the wrong done Claire by, as Jane had thought, Claire’s own father, she had killed her husband’s child, the half-brother or sister of her own children. Tears spilled down her face as she thought of how much she had wanted another child after Ruthie was born. She had experienced an early and difficult menopause, suffering constant headaches and a loss of sexual desire, until gradually she had ceased all lovemaking. Was that what had driven Eddie to seek satisfaction elsewhere?
Jane still could hardly believe it. A mere child and her husband. And to think he hadn’t even taken precautions to protect her from pregnancy. She felt shamed and distraught, heartbroken too in a way, for it effectively turned Eddie into man she had never really known. A kind of monster.
She wiped her eyes and, carrying the sacks of rubbish to the garden, made a bright, burning bonfire of them. Oh, how differently everything might have turned out if only she had glimpsed the drawings in time, she thought in anguish. Truly, they bore all the signs of a deeply disturbed mind. Watching the leaping flames Jane felt infinitely older and sadder than she would have ever thought possible, even on the day of the funeral.
Jane found herself dwelling obsessively on all that had happened, continually retracing in her mind the lead-up to each incident and recalling words and gestures and accompanying glances. She knew this was not healthy, but she was past prescribing for herself. It was as if she was preparing to give evidence at a court of inquiry, at which she was the self-appointed judge, jury and prosecution for the defence, all rolled into one. And the more Jane dwelled upon the past, the greater was her jealousy that Claire had had sex with Eddie and conceived his child. Erotic images of Claire and her husband, at various stages of arousal, with their limbs sensually entwined, tortured Jane, and she felt weak with hatred for the pair of them. Sometimes she tried telling herself that sexual abuse was not inspired by love, and tried to convince herself that she had no real reason to feel such jealousy of Claire. That Eddie hadn’t really loved the girl, but had merely indulged his lust. What a load of rubbish! She told herself the next minute. As if that lessened the offence. Anyway what did she know about what Eddie thought or felt? The only thing she did know was that middle-aged Eddie hadn’t shown much love for anyone but himself in seducing a teenage girl. Painfully conscious of her own ageing body, Jane was filled with fresh envy. She felt a sudden rush of anger towards her dead husband.
And so it went on. When Jane was not castigating Eddie in her thoughts she was railing at Claire. Without being fully aware of it, her grief at her son’s death was gradually being replaced by a baser emotion. No longer was Jane able to see Claire as she once had, as a victim, abused and taken advantage of. Instead, mentally she derided her, calling her sly and sluttish, fanning the flame of her anger and resentment to the point of exhaustion.
It was only in calmer, more rational moments that Jane dimly perceived what was happening to her and felt horror at the awfulness of her own reactions. But most of the times she tended her resentment like an ailing plant, discovering fresh excuses and justification for keeping it alive.
One day Ruthie confessed how much she was missing Claire and wished she would come and play with them all again. Jane’s overwrought burst out in a senseless tirade. She hardly knew what it was about, something about little girls learning to play with nice children of their own age and not depending on brattish teenagers for company.
‘You don’t like Claire-bear anymore, do you?’ the little girl said with pitiful perspicacity and, with a sorrowful glance, she left the room.
Jane felt a deep sense of shame. She covered her face with trembling hands, stricken at what she was becoming. How could she have reviled the girl, she asked herself, and before Ruthie who loved her so? Jane’s eyes filled with tears, she felt worn out with the tussle going on in her soul. She was haunted by a vision of Claire as she had seen her last, nervous and wretched, and she began to cry in earnest. In that searing moment of clarity Jane recognised that she had nothing left in her to give but hate and began to feel truly frightened. Oh God, she prayed, let me have the peace of forgiveness, anything rather than go on like this.
It was Jane’s first step towards recovery, in the slow process of healing. While more time would elapse before she was able to bring herself to visit Claire, and even longer again before her old affection for the girl returned, the unhappy vengeful spirit that had possessed her for weeks was banished at last.
For Claire the weeks passed in a kind of dream sequence of waking and sleeping, not always able to differentiate between them. Whenever she opened her eyes, her mother was sitting on a chair near the bed. Annette held a book in front of her but seldom turned the page. Sometimes she was weeping but, on seeing that Claire was awake, she would make an effort to smile and enquire how she felt.
Claire’s head felt swollen and heavy as though filled with hot pebbles. She wondered what she was doing in bed during the day and why her mother was sitting there. It would seem to suggest she had been ill, but from what and for how long? Once or twice the doctor came, the one they used to go to before the McArdles came to the road. He was an elderly man, kindly and loquacious. So she was sick, she thought, but when she asked him what was the matter with her he only patted her head and told her she was fine and had no need to worry about a thing.
Claire tried hard to pierce the fog in her mind but the harder she strained the more confused her thinking became. Eventually she remembered being in the classroom listening to a lecture. Gradually, the strands of fog parted to reveal more details until she recalled the whole frightful day. What puzzled her now was why Annette was weeping. She tried to stay awake long enough to put the question but her lids grew heavy again and she slept.
Claire dreamed she was on her hands and knees in a dark underground tunnel, trying to crawl to a higher level, but the space got smaller and smaller until her head wouldn’t go through the opening. She sensed something big was moving along fast behind her but there was no room to get out of its way. She was about to be crushed when she woke up.
She turned on the bedside light, then her eyes were hurt by the glare so she turned it off again. She called weakly to Annette, but it was Christopher sitting, dozing in the chair.
Next time Claire awoke her father was sitting in the chair reading a newspaper. She tried to him something of her confusion but he just smiled at her and told her not to tire herself out with talk. As she lay there looking at him her lids grew heavy and to her dismay she couldn’t keep awake long enough to ask him how he was or when he would come again. When she awoke and found him gone, hot tears of disappointment slid from under her lids. It was so long since she had seen him, and now who knew when he would come again.
And then she was dreaming that she was trying to get bac
k to the holiday bungalow. She was pushing an enormous pram along the seafront with all the McArdles in it. They were laughing and talking amongst themselves and didn’t seem to notice her. She wondered why none of them got out to lessen the load or to lend her a hand. She pushed with all her strength but then she got very tired and let it roll away from her. She lay down on the road. A car came along and she tried to struggle out of its path but she was too weak and it went right over her. Strangely, she felt no pain, only a tremendous relief.
She was telling Jane all about her other dreams. She was lying on the couch in Jane’s surgery and Jane was sitting beside her, jotting everything she said down in a notebook. And then Jane was gone and Eddie was bending over her, examining her. He wore a white coat over his shirt and tie but had no pants on and was trying to make her suck his cock.
She awakened, sobbing and crying, struggling against the blankets which were tucked too tightly, not sure if she were still in the dream, trying to shake it off but remaining anguished and scared. It was dark outside the window. Slowly, she got out of bed, leaning against the wall until the blackness receded from her eyes. Holding the banister, she went down, carefully placing each foot on the stairs.
At first she thought the house was empty it was so quiet, then she heard her mother’s voice in the kitchen. She pushed open the door. Annette and Jane were sitting opposite each other, sipping drinks. ‘Why Claire,’ Jane said, half-rising, her expression concerned, ‘I was on my way up to see you.’
Annette got up to bring Claire back to bed. Claire felt suddenly aware of her crumpled night-dress, the sour odour of her body. Shamed, she allowed herself to be led upstairs. She felt exhausted from the effort. A few minutes after her mother had gone out of the room Jane came in and sat on the chair.
‘Claire, dear,’ she said. ‘How do you feel?’
‘Sleepy,’ Claire answered truthfully. ‘Am I very ill?’ she asked. ‘Is that why you’re here?’