by Nicola White
Einstein.
‘Have they checked the wounds? ‘
‘No – the pathologist can’t get to it yet. Backlog. I’ll call again – harry them a bit.’
‘Is Considine about?’
‘The girl?’
‘She’s not a girl, Barrett, she’s a guard.’
A pause. Swan could hear a muffled remark and someone laughing.
‘She’s on the phone. Anything I can help with?’
‘No.’
Swan hung up on a wave of irritation. Barrett’s keenness needled him out of all proportion.
He shuffled the coins in his hand and thought for a moment. Seeing the child last night, the fullness of its features, made him suspect this wasn’t a case of neo-natal panic. There had been an incident last year, a baby left in a carrier bag under a bench by the Royal Canal. He had seen into the bag himself and could never forget the look of the poor scrap – smeared with a mixture of what looked like wax and old blood, its froggy little body squashed into shrouds of newspaper and plastic bag. Suffocated at birth, they said. Hard to tell if the lungs had ever drawn air, the eyes ever registered light.
A bubble of hopelessness rose in him and all at once he was aware of the heat and claustrophobia of the booth. He lifted the receiver once more, put in a coin and dialed his own number.
Just across the square from the Gravediggers, in a terraced redbrick house, a phone rang and rang. He imagined the sound echoing round the hallway, ricocheting off the dark furniture salvaged from his father’s shop. He imagined Elizabeth walking downstairs towards the sound, or turning her head among the flowerbeds at the back, rising slowly to her feet. He let it ring until there was no hope of an answer. She hadn’t come back yet.
SIX
Ali looked up at a torch-bearing maiden poised on the balustrade of the Shelbourne Hotel, the thin copper drapery emphasizing rather than veiling the statue’s voluptuous figure. She remembered staring at these women when she was small, her attention caught by their prominent breasts. Her father had laughed when he saw what she was looking at, and she’d got embarrassed, but he’d swung her hand back and forth, making her body twist, forcing her to smile.
If only she could remember more of him. At least she could still feel that sensation of her own small hand in his large one, the comfort of that.
When he was alive, the two of them would go into to town on a Sunday morning. After mass in Clarendon Street they’d buy Sunday papers from a man with blackened fingers and walk hand in hand to a nice hotel like the Hibernian or sometimes the Shelbourne, and Daddy would read his papers while she drank lemonade through a straw and ate her way through a little dish of salty, bitter-skinned peanuts. Often, an acquaintance of her father would stop by to talk and she would try to look as well behaved as she could.
She hadn’t been in the Shelbourne since. The entrance hall was the same, high Georgian mirrors and walls the colour of mint ice cream. And right in the middle of the hall stood Mary O’Shea, surrounded by a gaggle of hotel staff eager with laughter.
‘Oh Mary, you’re killing us,’ said one, clutching his stomach.
‘That’s the best yet,’ said another, holding on to the edge of the reception desk for support.
Even the chandeliers seemed to favour Mary, the light haloing her bobbed golden hair and winking from her shining nails as she waved her hands around.
Ali stood outside the group for a moment, wondering how to make herself known. She thought about walking back out of the place, but just as she started to turn, she heard ‘Alison?’
Mary O’Shea walked out of the circle of men to stand in front of her. Ali caught the look of deprivation in their eyes before she herself was caught in the lovely beam of Mary’s attention.
‘Most people call me Ali’
‘So I will too, Ali, I will too.’ Mary slipped her hand through the crook of Ali’s arm and set off through a sofa-filled lounge. ‘It’s a bit public here, isn’t it? Let’s try the bar. Michael?’
Mary didn’t even break stride or turn around. One of the reception staff, still pink with merriment, simply drew close behind them, a dog to heel.
‘The bar’s open, isn’t it?’
‘We can open it.’
‘Good man.’
They settled onto a leather bench in a corner of the paneled room. An island bar took up most of the floor, a wooden command centre armed with upturned bottles. It was probably cosy at night, but the steep rays of daylight slanting in from the windows revealed cigarette burns in the carpet and cast the rest of the place into gloom. The air smelt faintly of ashes and stale beer.
‘This is fine,’ Mary declared.
‘Grand,’ agreed Ali.
A big, embarrassed-looking lad in a dickie bow appeared behind bar counter and started to switch on lights.
‘Can I get you ladies anything?’
‘I was just going to have a coffee,’ said Mary, ‘but it’s so hot, I don’t know. What do you think Ali, gin and tonics?’
Ali agreed, even though she had hardly ever touched gin, associating it with the juniper tang of her mother’s lips when she kissed her on her way out to a party or the pub.
Mary fished about in her handbag. She brought out a tiny tape recorder and a gold compact that she flicked open with one hand and circled in front of her perfectly made up face. She tipped her chin up and rolled her glossy lips back to reveal an even row of small teeth.
‘You look great,’ Ali said, and Mary threw a smile at her.
‘Bless you, but you should see it first thing.’ She snapped the compact shut and threw it back in her bag, then turned her full attention on Ali.
‘What happened at St. Brigid’s is important,’ she said, ‘Very big. There’s going to be a lot of attention paid to this case. Even the British papers will be writing about it –’
The boy appeared with their drinks and put a small dish of peanuts in front of Ali. Tiny ones with their skins still on, lathered in salt. She smiled. Mary caught her expression, misunderstood it.
‘No flies on you,’ said Mary. ‘What does she want from me, you’re asking yourself. Well, I have a question for you.’
Ali met Mary’s eyes, facing up to her challenge. This was worse than the police. But exciting too. If someone saw them together. Imagine. She took a sip of her drink. It tasted clean and sour.
‘How often do you hear the voice of a girl your age on radio or television?’
Ali shrugged.
‘There’s a lot talked about young people – your lack of respect, your promiscuous behaviour – but who gets to hear your voice? This case will be chewed over by doctors and bishops and TDs, all men of course, but you were on the spot. The mother could be another schoolgirl. I want to hear what you have to say.’
‘I don’t know I’ve anything to say. I just happened to be there.’
‘Maybe you think you’ve nothing to say because all your life people have told you that you haven’t, told you to listen, not speak.’
‘Maybe…’ Something stirred inside Ali, some obscure part of her spontaneously inflating. She had a vision of people applauding, rising from their seats. She took a big gulp of gin.
Mary’s hand reached for her little recorder, fingered a button on it.
‘Do you mind?’
Mary O’Shea was as famous as you could be in Ireland. She had a show on the radio, a Sunday newspaper column and The Late Late Show wouldn’t go near the subject of women without Mary in the studio. Even Ali’s mother, who approved of very few people, loved Mary. She would shout Go get ‘em girl! at the radio when Mary lured some old reactionary out onto the gangplank of his own absurdity.
‘The thing is,’ Ali began, ‘the policeman… the detective said I wasn’t to talk to anyone.’
Mary’s brows lifted a centimeter, she widened he
r smile. The dictaphone went back in the bag.
‘Not a problem. The recorder’s just handy – I’m desperate at shorthand. I wouldn’t print anything against your will, or anything that would harm the case. I am scrupulous about that kind of thing. Did I tell you I went to Brigid’s myself?’
‘The nuns mention it all the time.’
‘Probably as some kind of dire warning about condom-waving feminists.’
Ali laughed, ‘Just a bit.’
‘I hear Mary Paul’s in charge now. She was the bane of my youth. She taught me history in second and third year… most of the oppressed or massacred “didn’t help themselves”, I seem to recall.’
‘She doesn’t teach now. Too busy imposing the rules.’
‘Was she there yesterday?’
‘Not in the garden, well… yes, in the garden later. They were all there at the reception, the nuns.’
Ali started to explain why they were at the school, and Mary asked if she could take notes, at least. Ali suddenly couldn’t think of the reason why not. When Ali got to the part where she entered the shed and saw the baby, Mary asked, ‘When you saw it, what did you feel?’
The gold biro hovered an inch above the page. The brown eyes skewered her.
Ali paused. ‘I thought it couldn’t be real.’ Her face felt hot. ‘Fitz was in a state. I wanted to get us away from the shed.’
‘And now?’
‘Now?’
‘How has it left you?’
She could see an image of herself as the photographer had posed her that morning, wistful, misted in sadness. But that wouldn’t do for Mary. Mary would want her to be tougher.
‘I feel angry.’
Mary stopped writing.
‘How d’you mean?’
Ali shrugged, she hardly knew what she meant.
‘The way things are… this country.’
‘Ah.’ Mary sat back against the upholstery and smoothed the material of her skirt over her thighs. ‘Did you get Sister O’Dwyer for sex education?’ she asked.
‘No!’
‘That’s what we got. She handed out booklets and made us read them in silence – it was all diagrams of fallopian tubes and cell division. She’d sit up at the high desk in front of us – possibly the most innocent nun in Ireland – and she’d say, Ask me anything. One brave girl asked how the seed got from the man into the woman and Sister O’Dwyer just pretended she hadn’t heard. Told us to turn to the next page.’
Ali laughed.
‘And that was very advanced for the sixties,’ said Mary. ‘What did you get?’
‘We got a man. Not just a man of course, a doctor. We were twelve or thirteen. He talked to us for a whole day. Most of it was about the Billing’s method and secretions and the how to fend off your husband’s advances. Because men can’t help themselves, he said. It was down to us to hold the barricades.’
‘It’s no joke, getting pregnant.’
‘No. But they always go on about how men want sex, like it’s their particular thing, not the women, we just go through with it to be kind. Can’t women want it too?’
Mary smiled a slow smile and smoothed her hair.
‘It takes a while to get past the programming.’
Ali took another sip from her glass, thought of how nice it would be to be Mary O’Shea.
‘You know the referendum?’
Mary sighed as she nodded. She had probably broadcast a hundred discussions on it over the previous two years.
‘No one made the men account for their sperm did they?’
‘Howd’ya mean?’
‘Each little tadpole a potential human soul. No, it was always about the women and the eggs. Those murderous women, those precious eggs.’
‘The most dangerous place in the world is in a women’s womb,’ intoned Mary, quoting an archbishop. ‘Why do you think the baby died?’
Ali looked away.
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
They fell silent for a moment, Mary looking down at her notebook, Ali stirring the ice melt in her glass with a plastic swizzle stick.
‘I had a great friend at school,’ said Mary eventually. ‘Barbara, her name was. We went to the Gaeltacht together one summer, had a rare time, the boys, the ceilidhs, bonfires on the beach. We ran wild. But when we got back to school, Barbara said her mother had decided she should go to boarding school in the country and that she was leaving St. Brigid’s at Christmas. She grew really quiet. I stupidly thought it was because she was so sad to leave me. I wrote to her at the new school, but she didn’t answer. It wasn’t till years later that I found out the truth of it.’
Ali nodded to show that she understood.
Mary picked up her drink and cupped it in her hands, leaning towards Ali.
‘Did that happen to any girls that you know?’
Five minutes before, Ali would have said ‘no’, but as Mary talked the face of a girl called Eileen Vaughan had risen in her mind. Eileen had been Fitz’s best friend. It was only Eileen’s sudden departure from school at Easter that left Fitz free to be friends with Ali. There were rumours through the school that Eileen Vaughan had been dabbling in drugs. Fitz wouldn’t discuss it. Ali realised now there was a more obvious explanation.
‘I think maybe it did. The same as with your friend. A girl left suddenly early this year, no mention of it afterwards, like she’d never been there.’
‘When was this?’
‘March, I think’
‘Hmmm.’ Mary counted on her fingers. ‘Can you give me her name?’
Ali looked into Mary O’Shea’s clear eyes.
‘No.’
Mary frowned, disappointed with her.
‘Look, Ali. This thing will probably never go to court. They’ll find the poor girl who gave birth and send her to psychiatric for a while. It’s a tragedy, and a national disgrace, but it’s hardly a state secret.’
Ali shrugged. She was thinking of Fitz being angry, not the police.
‘Who’s the officer in charge? The one who made you promise not to talk to people like me?’ Mary made it sound like a game, a matter of poses being struck.
‘He’s called Detective Swan, I met him in Rathmines Garda station, but he said he worked at the Phoenix Park.’
‘Is he a small dark man – neat – reasonably attractive?’
‘Well… I don’t know about attractive.’ Maybe he was to someone of Mary’s age. Her own mother thought the oddest men were lovely.
‘I know him! He’s in the murder squad. I talked to him once at The Gate, at a Wilde play. Not many detectives you can say that of. Maybe dragged along by the wife. A foot taller than him, she was.’
‘It’s not that I don’t want to talk to you, Mary, but he’ll know it was me.’
‘Sure weren’t there others who saw the same thing? All the nuns hanging about?’
‘Well, no, not inside the shed…’ she was going explain how only three of them had seen the child lying in the basket, when she stopped herself. The gin was making her stupid.
‘What do you mean the shed?’
‘In the Rosary Garden. It was in the shed. I don’t… I told you I can’t talk this way.’ Her face felt terribly hot.
Mary held her hands up in mock surrender.
‘We’re on the same side, Ali. Want another drink?’ She pointed at Ali’s empty glass. Her own was hardly touched.
‘I’m fine, thanks.’
Mary dashed off a few more squiggles on her pad.
‘Look, I have to meet someone here in five minutes. I could talk all day, but we’ll need to finish up. I’ll write something for the paper tomorrow. It’s nothing to worry about, but I will mention you, and talk about the type of place St Brigid’s is. I’d love us to keep in touch – as this thing unfolds. You’ve got integrity, an
d you express yourself well.’
‘You won’t make it sound like I’ve been pushing myself forward?’
‘Ali. Don’t worry. We’ve nothing to fear from the truth. As somebody must have said sometime.’
Mary opened her bag again and took out a business card. She wrote two numbers on the back and handed it to Ali.
‘The top one is my answering service. They can page me wherever. That other one is my home number, so I’d appreciate it if you kept it to yourself.’
Ali smiled at the rectangle of card and slipped it into the back pocket of her jeans. Fitz would be amazed. She was about to stand when Mary stalled her with an outstretched hand.
‘Can I ask you one more thing?’
‘Okay.’
‘Do you think that the baby died of natural causes? Sorry. It’s a horrible question. Do you?’
‘No.’
‘No you don’t think so, or no it didn’t?’
‘I think it didn’t.’
They just looked at each other for a minute.
‘Oh well, I’m sure they’ll make a statement later today… so I’ll wait to find out with the rest of the gang.’ Mary was putting away the notebook and pen, gathering herself.
‘The back of the neck,’ Ali said in a small voice, lifting a hand to her own nape, ‘was all bruised. And down her back.’
She could still feel the squeeze of Mary’s hand on her arm as she stood in the ladies. She shouldn’t have told. But Mary had stirred her up with kind words and the notion that she had something say for herself. Just a nudge was all it took.
The ladies toilets were walled and floored in sand-coloured marble. There was a stack of tiny towels by the oval basins. Her face in the mirror was flushed, her eyes strange to her. She filled a basin and washed her face and hands in cool water. She took one of the towels and buried her face in it.
The loops of thread crawled down her skin.
The first one was lying under a towel. A grubby yellow towel. Ali had been looking for her present, the doll called Baby Joy. That’s what she asked Santy for because her friend Maura Griffin in Dublin said Baby Joy was just like a real baby, not a stiff girl with nylon hair and clicky eyes. She liked the idea that it would be close to real, like someone new to care for. But there was only one present under the tree for her that morning, a plastic cookery set threaded to a big sheet of cardboard. Her cousins seemed to have loads of stuff. She couldn’t make a fuss, not there in her uncle’s house, everyone in their good clothes.