Second Hand Jane

by Michelle Vernal

  As she’d expected, she got no hits—just a whole lot of stuff to do with the Troubles, as the sectarian fighting spanning the late 60s to the mid-1990s in Northern Ireland was referred to. She didn’t want a gloomy history lesson, so maybe she would be better off doing a Google search for the brother Owen and seeing where that got her. A moment later, something about W.B. Yeats cropped up, as did a genealogy website with Ahern listed minus the e on the end and oh dear, she thought, as her eyes scanned the list and settled on a death notice. She double clicked and closer inspection revealed that this poor soul had lived in Tipperary—opposite ends of the country. Just like the song, Ballymcguinness was a long way from Tipperary, so the odds of this being her Owen Aherne were slim.

  Picking up the mug, she blew on it and thought for a moment before taking a sip. She’d try good ole Facebook and see what that threw back at her. Settling back to wait for the onslaught she’d have to trawl through, she could hardly believe her eyes when the search told her there were no Owen or Amy Aherne registered. Unbelievable in this day and age of social networking!

  Right, well, Ballymcguinness sounded like a mere dot of a place; surely this search would yield the result she was after. A website welcoming her to Ballymcguinness filled her screen with a grainy black-and-white photo of a small town. It kind of looked like the start of Coronation Street with all the roofs of the houses—not very inspirational and not very helpful either. She didn’t want to know how many grocery stores or hairdressers the town had. She wanted to know where she could find Amy blinkin Aherne, she thought in frustration.

  Flopping back onto the couch, Jess closed her eyes for a second and racked her brains. Sometimes having all this technology at your fingertips was a waste of time. Then, it came to her. Duh-uh! Still, it was the middle of the night; she was entitled to be a little bit thick. This time, she searched the white pages and lo and behold after narrowing her search down, up popped two listings for Aherne. The first was for an M J Aherne, who was registered at a retirement home in the village of Dundrum and the second was for an O M Aherne, Glenariff Farm, Pyke Road, followed by a phone number. She had her man and unbelievably he still lived at his childhood address.

  Jess’s eyes strayed over to the telephone but then she shook her head. She might be up and about but she was fairly sure Mr Aherne would not appreciate being on the receiving end of her dulcet tones at this hour of the morning nor would his wife appreciate a strange woman telephoning her husband in the middle of the night. Besides, she was beginning to feel sleepy, she thought, yawning as she saved her search. Switching the laptop off, she took herself and her duvet back to bed.

  ***

  When she woke it was gone nine a.m. and her head felt heavy after her disturbed night’s sleep. She’d gone off quickly enough when she had got back into bed but had still slept lightly as she dreamt about an imaginary Owen Aherne serenading her with “It’s a Long Way from Tipperary” while her mother clapped along in the background. Still, she thought, pouring her morning coffee, it was nothing a paracetamol wouldn’t fix. As she poured out her cornflakes, her mobile broke into song, causing her to cringe mid-pour. “Barracuda” by Heart was belting out from where her phone lay atop the microwave. Bloody Nora had programmed the song as her ringtone in punishment for their having lost a pub quiz due to her lack of knowledge about all-women hard rock groups throughout the ages.

  Granted, Nora had had a few drinks under her belt and they’d all thought it was a great joke at the time but now she had no idea how to change it back. It wasn’t a good look when one was enjoying a civilised latte or riding on public transport. Picking it up, she squinted at the inbox.

  C tht u rng lst nite was out Ewan hot wot u wnt?

  Speak of the devil! It was Nora; her texting shorthand was always so bloody cryptic and she never included any social niceties like a x or luv Nora, Jess grouched, deciphering the curt message out loud: See that you rang last night—was out—Ewan hot—what you want?

  Nick phd me we have a date this thurs nite -did you have sex last nite?

  A reply that didn’t require a code breaker this time bounced back almost immediately.

  Told u so!MYOB PS:kncking off erly to jmp ot plne.

  Jess stared at the glowing screen; if she didn’t know better, she’d have read that last bit as knocking off early to jump out of a plane. No, that couldn’t be right; it was more likely she was planning on knocking off early to jump Ewan’s bones again. She’d phone Nora for the lowdown this evening. She knew from experience it was useless trying to hold a conversation with her when she was at work. With that decided, she raised her spoon to tuck into her cornflakes.

  “OOOOH Barracuda” pounded out again. It made her drop her spoon. “Piss off, Nora!” she said out loud, aware that talking to herself was a side effect of living alone, but this time the message was from Brianna.

  Morning Jess sorry missed your call was having sex - what did you want sweety?

  Jess had to smile. Nora and Brie might have hailed from different planets but she loved them both the same, though at this moment in time she probably loved Brianna a teensy bit more. She was nicer, after all.

  After a series of frantic texts bounced back and forth about her upcoming date with Nick and thankfully not about Brianna’s Sunday night delight, she finally managed to finish her breakfast. Dumping the bowl in the sink, Jess glanced at the phone. She might try to contact Amy’s brother before jumping in the shower.

  As she punched in the code for Northern Ireland followed by his phone number, she decided it was probably a pointless exercise. It was ten o’clock on a Monday morning, after all. This Owen chap would probably be hard at work, toiling in the fields or whatever it was that farmers did on a Monday morning. As it connected and began to ring, though, she decided to hang on—she could always leave a message on his answerphone as to what she was calling about.

  To her surprise, the phone was picked up on the fourth ring. It wasn’t a good line but she did manage to detect a gruff male voice as it was answered.

  “Hello?”

  “Oh, hello, is that Mr Aherne?” she inquired, putting on her best journalistic tone.

  “Aye.” He sounded wary.

  “Er, right, well.” So much for consummate professional, she thought. “My name’s Jessica Baré and I write a weekly column for the Dublin Express.”

  “Aye.” He sounded even more suspicious.

  “Well, what I am ringing about, Mr Aherne, is your sister, Amy?”

  There was a static-filled silence.

  “Are you still there, Mr Aherne?”

  “What are you wanting, dragging all that up again?” His voice, despite the gruffness, had the sing-song quality of the North to it.

  What was he on about? she wondered. Maybe he and Amy weren’t on good terms or perhaps she’d done something illegal? Her nose twitched the way it always did when she sensed she was onto something and whatever it was that had happened, she was sensing there was definitely a story to be told here.

  “It’s just that I’ve got her book, you see. It’s a children’s storybook that you gave her for Christmas back in 1973. She wrote her name inside the cover; that’s how I know it was hers.” She rushed on and he didn’t interrupt her—he probably thought she was mad, so in for a penny, in for a pound, she ploughed on. “It’s a bit of a long story but I collect old Ladybird books—Series 606D to be exact. The stories are all the classic children’s fairy tales but it’s the illustrations I love and well…” She paused momentarily, wondering whether he would interrupt and tell her she was mad but he remained silent. “Nearly all of the books in my collection are pre-loved, with other children’s names scribbled inside them. It devalues the book for most collectors but I like it—you know, the thought that another child has loved that book.” There was still no response. Jess twirled her hair round her index finger with her free hand. She couldn’t blame him—not really, because her brilliant idea was beginning to sound pottier by the minute. Sh
e inhaled deeply before telling herself to just cut to the chase before he hung up, writing her off as a crackpot caller. “Anyway, Mr Aherne, to get to the point, as I mentioned before, I recently acquired Amy’s old copy of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs from an eBid auction and that’s when the idea came to me. Where is she now—the child who used to own that book? And that’s it—really, that’s what I’d like to write about.”

  If she expected him to begin filling her in with enthusiasm as to what it was his sister had been doing for the last thirty-odd years, she was out of luck. “The thing is, Mr Aherne…” she said, filling in the crackling static that was, if she were to be honest, getting a tad creepy, “I’d love to get in touch with Amy to see whether she’d be open to my idea.” Christ, she thought, he really wasn’t making this easy. “Erm, so that’s why I have rung you, to ask whether you could give me your sister’s contact details? I couldn’t find a listing anywhere for her, and I tracked you down easily enough because Amy had scribbled the name of your farm inside the cover of her book too.”

  At last he broke his silence, clearing his throat before answering her. “Ah, well now, it’s the sorta ting she might have been open to for sure but you could find it a bit hard getting in touch with her seeing as our Amy’s been dead for the past twenty-nine years.”

  Chapter Five

  He’d hung up on her after dropping that bombshell and Jess sat for an age staring at the phone, which was now dead. Dead, just like little Amy from her storybook was. Whatever she had been expecting Owen Aherne to tell her about his sister, it certainly hadn’t been that.

  She was too numb right at that moment in time to feel awful but she was angry. Angry with herself for being so naïve and caught up in her own big idea to have never even considered the possibility in the first place. What an earth could have happened to her?

  Jess mentally worked out the years. Owen Aherne had said she’d died twenty-nine years ago, so that would make her around sixteen years old when she passed away. God, that was so young. She’d have had her whole life in front of her. Maybe she got hit by a car or perhaps she’d been ill? Whatever it was that had happened, she’d never know now and all her big idea had served in doing was raking up a whole lot of remembered grief for a man she had never met. Thank goodness she hadn’t inadvertently contacted the poor girl’s parents.

  After a few minutes, she put the phone back in its cradle and getting to her feet, decided to go and have that shower. The numbness had definitely worn off now and perhaps drowning herself under a hot shower faucet might make her feel marginally less worse about the tactless, one-sided conversation she had just had. She was halfway down the hall when she heard the phone shrill. Retracing her steps, she picked it up and found herself pressing it to her ear a little tighter as she heard that same broad Northern Irish twang from a few minutes earlier.

  “It’s Owen Aherne here,” he said brusquely. “Listen, I’m sorry I hung up on you, and I hope you don’t mind me calling you back like this—caller display—but when I thought about what I said to you, well, you didn’t deserve that reaction so I’d like to apologise.”

  Jess was taken aback; she could tell from his voice that an apology was not something that tripped off this man’s tongue easily. “You don’t need to explain yourself to me, Mr Aherne. I can’t imagine what an awful shock my phoning out the blue like that was and with such a convoluted story, too. Really, it’s me who should be apologising to you, and I am sorry, really sorry. I should have done my homework properly before contacting you. It was terribly unprofessional. I just…I got so caught up on the whole idea of finding her that it never crossed my mind that your sister might no longer be with us.”

  “Call me Owen; it’s me Da who is known as Mr Aherne. You weren’t to know that she’d passed on but aye, it was a bit of a shock to hear her name like that, with it being thirty years like this October.”

  He pronounced his “that” like dat, Jess noticed as he began to talk.

  “She was older than me by two years and turning into a bit of a hallion.”

  That surprised Jess because for some reason and she didn’t really know why; she had assumed he was the older brother. As for a hallion, well, he’d lost her there. “Sorry if I’m being thick but what’s a hallion?”

  “Aye, sorry, it’s the lingo up my way. It means she was a tearaway, a right typical teenage girl, you know? Mouthy like and what came out of it was usually directed at me Ma.”

  Yes, a familiar scenario, Jess thought, picturing herself at the same age. Actually, as her own mother’s face floated before her, she realised not that much had changed.

  “Anyway, the day it happened she told Ma she was going to her friend Evie’s house, and Evie told her Ma she was going to Amy’s; then both girls caught the bus up to Lisburn. Back then, Lisburn was classed as a borough of Belfast but it’s a town in its own right now, so it is.” He coughed then and Jess couldn’t tell whether it was because he was getting choked by the story he was relaying or not, and she found herself clutching the receiver a little tighter.

  “She had her eye on a lad who worked up that way, so Evie told us later. She’d met him briefly at a dance and was determined to see him again even though according to Evie, he didn’t want to know. That was our Amy all over, though—determined. If she set her mind to something, there was no stopping her.”

  Jess could recall doing the same thing herself, just at a different time and place. She felt a surge of empathy for the teenage Amy and her unrequited love.

  “The fighting was bad back in ’83 and there were a lot of tit for tat killings going on, you know? So Amy knew that there was no way in hell she’d have been allowed to go anywhere near Belfast or the like if she’d asked permission.” He cleared his throat and Jess looked down at her bare forearms. The downy hairs covering them were standing on end. “But Ballymcguinness is a small place and it was even smaller back then, claustrophobic for teenagers. I know because I wasn’t whiter than white myself, if you get my drift, so I got where she was coming from, sneaking off like that.”

  Yes, Jess thought; that was the mentality of a teenager. They were all ten foot tall and bulletproof.

  “Don’t get me wrong, though, because she wasn’t a bad kid nor was Evie. They had itchy feet, though, and going somewhere they knew they had no business in going—well, it would give them a bit of kudos with their pals. God knows we were naïve living here tucked away from the worst of it all. It was like the Troubles were happening somewhere else, not in our backyard, you know?”

  Having grown up in Auckland, a city of just over 1.5 million people, Jess couldn’t relate firsthand to the frustration of small town life for a teenage girl but she did know that sometimes living in the city could be just as claustrophobic.

  “Evie told us later that she left her bag in the café they’d been hanging out in for most of the day, eyeing up this lad Amy fancied who worked across the road at a mechanics’. They’d sat smoking cigarettes, trying to look sophisticated and drinking manky, bottomless coffee until it was time to get the bus home. Evie had run back down the road to get her bag while Amy waited at the bus stop outside O’Hara’s the butchers to make sure they didn’t miss it. She knew there would be murder to pay at home if it came out what the two of them had spent the day doing.”

  Jess inhaled shakily and felt a wave of nausea; she had a feeling she knew what was coming next and she was right.

  “It was a Loyalist bombing that went wrong. There was a meeting due to be held in the back of the butcher’s shop. Christopher O’Hara, who was an IRA hard man back in the day, and his cronies were supposed to be gathered there except they weren’t and seven innocent people including my sister were killed instead. We were told she died instantly and that she wouldn’t have suffered, which was a blessing for her but of no comfort to me Ma, who spent the rest of her life suffering.” He paused and drew a ragged breath. “It’s a hard thing to accept that you’ve no body left to bury, just the pieces left be
hind. Me Da was an armchair Unionist back then who liked to spout off with his pals down at Murtagh’s Pub on a Saturday afternoon but after what happened to Amy, he never stepped foot in there again—he lost his spark.”

  Jess was speechless as she swiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. What did you say to someone who had been through what this poor man and his family had been through? In the end, the only thing she could do was whisper, “What about you—what did you do?”

  “Oh, I grew up as you do and went over the water to England to get my law degree and to forget. I wanted nothing to do with Northern Ireland. I practised law in London for fifteen years.”

  “And now you’re back?”

  “And now I’m back and I am sorry to burden you with our family history like that.” The curtness was back in his voice and she felt his wall go back up.

  “You didn’t really have a choice, Mr Aherne; it was me who rang you, remember?”

  “Aye but this isn’t about me and that’s partly why I rang you back. Like I said, it’s coming up to thirty years since that bomb went off and I’m thinking it needs to be marked somehow. Maybe by remembering the girl our Amy was and could have been instead of focusing solely on an event that was out of her control. I mean, when she wasn’t causing me Ma and Da to pull their hair out, she was a normal girl, you know. She liked messing around with makeup, listening to music, and trailing round all moony-eyed after boys. She wasn’t political in the slightest but what happened that day meant that’s all she is remembered for and I think the story you are talking about putting together is something she would have approved of.” He coughed, as though embarrassed by the depth of feeling behind his words. “What I’m saying, I suppose, is that if you are up for a visit to Ballymcguinness sometime, I’d like to tell you a bit more about my sister.”