After she cashes his cheque she goes into a travel agent’s with the cash and books her flight and a hotel, which they recommend near the airport to stay in for the night.
When she gets off the flight she takes a taxi to the address she has written on a sheet of paper. The driver makes no comment on their destination. They pass crescents of beautiful stucco mansions and she can see the BT radio tower in the distance. They keep going until they reach an ordinary-looking high street with shops and offices fronting the pavement. The cab pulls up outside the address and she sees protestors standing on the footpath holding placards with pictures of unborn foetuses. She almost wishes she could tell the driver to take her back to the airport but she doesn’t and instead she pays him and climbs out of the car. They shout “Murderer!” at her as she passes. Tears spring into her eyes and she lowers her head. Even though it is only seconds away, it feels as though she will never reach the revolving door which leads into the clinic. Finally she gets there, pushes it forward and goes inside.
The receptionist greets her and they have some brief chitchat about her journey over. She gives her a clipboard with a medical questionnaire to fill out and a nurse shows her into a small room to go through her medical history. Then she is brought into a different room that looks like a dentist’s surgery and she tells herself that this is where she is. It is just like having a tooth out, she tells herself. She is prepped and given a local anaesthetic and then they all start working around her. The noise of the suctioning machine sounds and she squeezes her eyes shut tightly to stop the tears that are getting ready to fall.
She is surprised at how quickly it is over. The nurse in the recovery room is kind but in a manner that tells Ella this kindness is part of her job, this is what she does, day in, day out, and she will do the same for the next girl who has the appointment after Ella.
The same taxi driver picks her up again a few hours later and brings her to the hotel near the airport where she will stay until her flight home in the morning. He knows she doesn’t want to talk so he turns up the radio. To this day she can’t listen to Gabrielle’s ‘Dreams’ without thinking of that taxi journey. She is sore and aching and bleeding heavily. She feels nauseated and can’t stomach food. Even though she smokes herself, now the smell of cigarette smoke coming down the corridor and snaking its way under her door from the other rooms makes her want to heave. She has just thirteen more hours left and she’ll be on her flight away from here. She just wants to get home; once she is back at home this whole nightmare will be over.
She sees him from time to time around the campus. She knows it was him, she can see it in his eyes. There is hatred in his eyes.
Chapter 47
Conor clenches and unclenches his fists because he is finding it very hard to stop himself from punching something right now. Anything, any inanimate object will do, he’s not choosy.
“That fucking bastard. That absolute sneery scumbag, looking down on everyone else with his fucking superiority complex! Well, fuck him, fuck him!” He is shouting now. He stands up and walks around the room with his head in his hands. Then he stops and looks over at her. “I can’t believe it, I just can’t believe it . . . I always thought when you struggled that that was just you – maybe too many wild nights when you were younger or something – but it makes sense now.” He runs his hands through his hair. “Jesus!”
“It was my own fault. I should never have got that drunk.”
“But you didn’t choose to have sex and get pregnant – it wasn’t your choice. Your choice was robbed from you.” He feels the anger rising within him again.
“He was due on the twenty-sixth of March – I always felt it was a boy, y’know – Celeste was due on the twenty-third – I was so petrified she was going to be born on his due date – I really was. That would have seemed like the worst betrayal. Thank God she was a week early. I think I might have gone round the twist, even worse than I am now.” She laughs a hollow laugh. “He would have been eighteen years old today. Imagine, he might be in college or maybe taking a gap year to travel the world or maybe he might be a bum, too lazy to get a job and living off me. He might have played guitar or been an Emo or sports head. I don’t know any of that and I’ll never know. All that potential and it was sucked out of me like oxygen when you’re drowning.” She paused. “I saw him recently.”
“Who? Eric Keogh? You saw him?”
She nods. “I was at the launch for a new magazine and he was just standing there with a glass of champagne in his hand, staring over at me. His eyes were fixed on me; it was like he was in a trance. It turns out he was one of the investors. He started making his way over to me and I didn’t know what to do – I just panicked, so I ran. I wasn’t even thinking straight – I had to get away from him . . . ” She lets out a heavy sigh.
“Is this around the time that you took that bag?”
She nods. “The launch was the night before.”
“Oh no, Ella! It all makes sense now!” he cries. “You should have told someone. I’m sorry that you’re having to go through this nightmare after everything else you’ve been through.”
“I deserve it anyway.”
“How can you say that? You did nothing wrong!”
“I killed my own baby – that’s what I did wrong. It’s my own fault. It’s Newton’s Third Law – ‘every action has an equal and opposite reaction’ or some people call it Karma but, whatever it is, I killed my baby so everything in my life has to go shit after that. It’s what I deserve, it’s payback time. I deserve everything I get.”
“Ella, you have got to stop thinking like that – that isn’t the way life works. You did nothing wrong!”
“But I did. I killed my baby – my own baby. I’m a murderer.”
“You need to forgive yourself, Ella. This has destroyed your whole life. Don’t let Eric have any more power over you. I wish I had known – I would have gone after that bastard and pulped him with my own bare hands.”
Ella starts to laugh.
“What?” he says.
“It’s just the image of you – you know – beating someone to a pulp.”
“What? You don’t think I’d put Jean Claude Van Damme out of a job then?”
“You’re too gentle to beat someone up and that’s why I love you.” She leans forward and kisses him on the slope of his forehead.
“Does Dan know?”
She shakes her head.
“You mean you never told him about any of this? You carried this around on your own for all these years?”
“I couldn’t do it. I wanted to, believe me, for years I wanted to. I was going to but I was afraid of how he would react. I was afraid he would think that I was damaged goods or something. And I just couldn’t tell him that I got rid of a child, just like one of ours, but through no fault of its own conceived in the wrong circumstances. I was so afraid of what he would think of me. And then we had Celeste and it made everything so much worse. I thought it would help me to move on, y’know, but instead I kept comparing everything she did to my first baby. Would he have looked like her? Or different. Would he have had colic too? Would he only fall asleep if he was lying on my chest? Would he fall asleep when I was feeding him and I’d have to tickle the soft soles of his feet to wake him up? When she started cooing, I wondered if he would have sounded like that. When she first smiled, I kept wondering when he would have smiled. I couldn’t see Celeste for Celeste. I couldn’t appreciate all her milestones; I kept seeing her as a reminder for my first baby. I just couldn’t bond with her. I tried so hard to make it work and make up for what I did but I couldn’t seem to do anything right or get close to her. I don’t know why. I kept on crying from when I would wake up in the morning until I went to bed at night. Dan thought that I was missing my work and that I had post-natal depression and looking back I probably did but I wasn’t able to get help. I felt I didn’t deserve help. So I did the only thing that I knew how to do: I begged Mrs Frawley to come and work for me and went
back to work when Celeste was only six weeks old. I felt awful – I hated myself even more than I already did, which is saying something. But I felt she was better off with Mrs Frawley – at least she was getting proper care instead of with me who didn’t seem to be able to do anything right – and once I was back doing my job again I was able to block it out and continue with the charade as I had been for so long.”
“I think you need to tell Dan. You need to let him in.”
“I know,” she sighs. “I know.”
Chapter 48
After their night together at Alex’s graduation Rachel and Marcus had both agreed not to make contact with each other again, no matter what the circumstances. It was the only way it could be. Neither of them could expect to move on if there was still contact there – their feelings for each other were still too strong to trust maintaining a closeness.
Their parting that morning had been teary and difficult. Neither one had wanted to go because they both knew how awful the separation had been for each of them the last time. The wound had been reopened fresh and they both knew it was going to be harder to close it this time.
Since then she’s been throwing herself into her work, she’s had no choice. In her twelve years doing this job, she doesn’t remember ever being this busy. She’s not sure if it’s because of the recession but the pressures on her office seem to be mounting daily and their resources are stretched to dangerous levels.
The court hearing for the guardianship of Jack White is drawing near and Rachel still finds she is unsure of what way her recommendation should go. Obviously Libby’s set-up is brilliant and would provide stability for Jack but she doesn’t want to deny the right of John-Paul just because financially he isn’t in as good a position. She has seen too many fathers denied rights to their children because of society’s natural bias towards women as mother figures. She has seen dads who are brilliant with their children, both loving and kind, but because they aren’t in the strongest position financially, they are overlooked. But she also knows that John-Paul is an addict, even if he is a recovering one, so she wants to make sure that she gets it right.
She rings the bell to 9 St Dominic’s Terrace and Jack answers the door.
“Hi, Jack, pet, can I come in for a minute?”
He says nothing as he holds the door back for her to enter. He shuts it after her and walks back into the kitchen.
“Right then, I’ll just go upstairs,” she says to his back.
As usual he doesn’t hide his contempt for her.
She climbs the stairs and enters Tina’s bedroom and sees the cancer nurse is already in the room. “I only want a quick word. I’ll go downstairs and you can call me when you’re finished,” she says to the nurse.
“Not at all. I’m just finishing up here anyway. I’ll be back tomorrow, Tina. Try to get some sleep, okay?”
Tina nods as the woman leaves the room and shuts the door gently after her.
“How’s the pain today?”
“The same as all the other days, awful. She’s upped me dose again so I’m waiting on that to kick in. I must have done something really bad in another life to go out like this. Did you finish your report yet?”
“I’m almost there.”
“Well, I thought it should be very easy – I’m telling you Libby is the best option for him. She’s very good to Jack and she has a lovely home.”
“How is Jack finding it having her here?”
“She’s very good to us, we’re very lucky to have her. Only for her poor Jack wouldn’t be fed. I just haven’t the energy to do anything – she’s keeping the show on the road.”
“Well, you have to remember, Tina, no matter what I put in my report, as I keep telling you it all depends on the judge on the day. Look, now that I’m here would it be okay to get Jack’s view on things?”
“Sure, he’s only watching TV anyway – do him good to come away from it for a few minutes.”
She pulls the door shut and makes her way down to the kitchen. She feels her shoulders tense as she nears the door. She takes a deep breath and opens it up.
“Jack, can I have a word with you for a minute?”
He doesn’t move his eyes away from the cartoon on the screen.
“You know your ma is seriously sick now, don’t you, Jack?” she presses on.
“Yeah.” He still won’t look at her. “She can’t even get out of bed now.”
Rachel nods. “She hasn’t much time left and I need to find you somewhere to live after she dies.”
She sees him swallow hard.
“How would you feel if the judge said you had to live with Libby?”
“It’d be okay,” he says, turning to look at her.
“You’d be happy with that?”
“Well, she’s really nice and I like me cousins. They have goalposts in their garden so we can play football.”
“And what if he said he wants you to live with your dad?”
“Yeah, Da’s all right – in small doses.” He starts to laugh at his own joke. “That’s what Ma always says.”
Rachel laughs. “Okay, pet, but if you had to live with your dad how do you think you’d like it?”
“Well, if he doesn’t get mad then I’ll be okay.”
“All right, Jack. I think I have all that I need.”
Chapter 49
The house is finally quiet. The kids are in bed and Dan is cooking some kind of risotto for dinner. Through the window she can see the sun going down over Dublin Bay for another day. She pours herself a glass of wine and tells Dan she is going downstairs to watch the sun set. She walks down the circular stone steps wrapping around the tower in a spiral, taking care not to spill her wine over the side of the glass. She stands on the rocks, black and treacherous, and looks out at the stretch of an empty horizon, the endless calm. Some rocks are sleek like beached seals and some have seaweed draped across their backs. The water laps off them, slurping and sucking, a gentle and soothing movement. The water looks green this time of the evening; it changes colour several times a day. Sometimes it is pinkish, other times grey. She can smell the sea-salted air of the calm evening sea just before nightfall. The twilight paints the first leaves on the nearby trees in gold foil and the red rosebay willow herb that Mrs Frawley sometimes used for stomach upsets sticks up from the headland. She lights a cigarette and inhales deeply before sending a plume of tarry smoke onto the cool evening air. She gave up smoking years ago but recently has found herself going back to them now and again. She finishes her cigarette before extinguishing it on a nearby rock and taking the butt back upstairs with her. It’s time.
“I need to talk you, Dan.”
“What is it?” he says, lowering his fork down to his plate. He has almost finished eating.
“I know I haven’t been myself lately and I want to tell you why.”
“Well, I think that’s the understatement of the decade,” he says sarcastically.
“I know you’re angry with me and I deserve it but there’s something that I haven’t told you.”
“What? Please don’t tell me you’re in more trouble?” His face clouds over.
“What I’m going to tell you now . . . well, afterwards you might not look at me in the same way ever again . . . and, if that’s the case, then I want you to know that I’m sorry. I wish I had told you earlier but I just wasn’t . . . able to.”
“Jesus, Ella, what have you done now? You’re freaking me out here!”
“When I was caught shoplifting, it wasn’t the first time.” She talks in a slow and measured voice, like it doesn’t belong to her.
“Well, I know that – that’s what has you in this mess in the first place – you might have had some chance of getting off with the bracelet as people would have believed it was a mistake but you being you had to make sure to take a bag as well the day before. You really did it in style, Ella!”
“It’s been going on for years before all this.”
She watches his expressi
on change from impatience to shock.
“What are you talking about?”
“I’ve been doing it since ever before you met me.”
Shock gives way to disbelief.
“But I don’t understand – you don’t need to shoplift! Why would you do that?” he says angrily.
“I know. What I’m going to tell you next . . . well, it might help you to understand why I did it.”
He takes a long gulp of wine before putting the glass back down on the table. “Okay, I’m listening.”
“Back when I was in college, I got very drunk at a party. Stupidly drunk and I passed out in a bedroom upstairs. I came round to a guy undressing me and then he proceeded to have sex with me.”
His face whitens and his fingers tighten around the stem of his glass. She watches the expression on his face change from disbelief to horror and back again, like water trying to find its level.
“Say something,” she says eventually.
“You, you . . . were raped?”
She nods.
“By who? Who was it?”
Into the Night Sky Page 24