by Nicola White
SIXTEEN
Swan drove along the north quays then headed over the river towards Ranelagh. He wanted to drop in on the Hogan girl again, make sure she had no more media appearances planned. Perhaps she’d still have that mortified look about her, the one she wore so well on The Late Late. And that slimy doctor who spent his time teaching twelve-year olds the facts of life. Something creepy about that. If he ever had a daughter, he wouldn’t want her taught by him. A daughter. Elizabeth’s voice cut in to his thoughts – If we don’t try again we’ll never know.
He braked as the car in front of him slowed. The traffic looked knotted all the way up Camden Street. The radio news was talking about the recession and unemployment, but it didn’t seem to stop people buying cars.
He parked on Sandford Road and walked up the narrow passage to the Hogan’s front door. He had been taken aback on his previous visit by the scruffiness of the place, forced to revise his notions about St. Brigid’s girls and their cushy backgrounds.
It was the kind of house he often had cause to visit, tall old terraces divided up badly into bedsits, usually home to the young and the transient. A line of plastic doorbells hung to the side of the door, the names in the little windows faded to sepia scratchings, cut wires hanging below. He knocked on the blistered paint and waited some time before he heard steps approach.
‘Who is it?’
He recognised Deirdre Hogan’s voice. As soon as he announced himself, she opened it, all smiles.
‘You’ve good timing. Coffee’s on.’
He followed her down to the kitchen. She seemed to be dressed in night clothes, but she had mentioned before that she was some kind of artist, so perhaps she wafted around like this all day.
‘Is Ali at home?’
‘She’s not,’ she said, leaning into a cupboard for mugs. ‘But I’m sure I can help you with whatever you want.’
Swan took a chair at the big table. Mrs. Hogan reached over his shoulder to put the coffee down and a layer of silk brushed his cheek. Sometimes he found the attentions of women uncomfortable, like now, the way Deirdre Hogan was smiling at him, her head tilted away while her eyes slid back to find him. She took a chair directly opposite and leaned forward on the table so that her crossed arms framed her cleavage. It would be easy to misread the situation.
The coffee was strong and slightly gritty.
‘I can guess why you’re here – it’s The Late Late, isn’t it? I’d be annoyed if I were you – I told her so, but she was determined to go on.’
‘I take it you tried to discourage her.’
‘What powers have I against Mary O’Shea? Ali’s only young. Think of the excitement, the attention.’
‘She didn’t seem too excited by the end of it.’
Deirdre Hogan looked uncomfortable. ‘Well, you don’t have to worry about it anymore. She’s had enough attention to last her for years.’
‘I thought she might. Where is she?’
Mrs. Hogan opened her mouth to speak, closed it again and smiled. She gave him a look that seemed to convey a great intimacy, as if the two of them were beyond simple whys and wheres.
‘You know, when Ali’s Dad died, my life fell apart. A heart attack, it was. He was playing rugby at the time, only forty-two. How could you expect something like that? My sister down in Buleen took us in and I stayed there licking my wounds for quite a few weeks. I was so wrapped up in my own grief, I couldn’t see what Ali was going through. She was only six – she acted normally, played, laughed – I thought she hadn’t taken it in. But now I see it wasn’t the right place for her.’
‘I don’t understand what you’re getting at.’
‘Well, a farm is a harsh place, you know… ailing lambs by the cooker, crows strung up on the barbed wire, baby pigs rolled flat by their sow. All the shit and blood of it.’ Mrs. Hogan wiped a single tear away with the side of her palm, ‘and then that bloody box. It had to be her that found it.’ She sighed. ‘Ach, I’m just indulging my own guilt, detective.’
‘I just want to have a word with her.’
‘That’s what I’m getting at, she’s gone down to stay with my sister.’
‘Right now? We’re in the middle of an investigation.’
‘She’s refused to go back to the farm for twelve years, wouldn’t even enter the house after her Grandad’s funeral, made me drive straight back to Dublin. Now, she’s somehow found the strength. Sure, didn’t you want her out of the limelight.’
The mother was right. Surely the girl would cause less trouble down there. He managed to squeeze an address and phone number out of her. Caherbawn Farm, Buleen, near Kinmore. He’d need to look it up on a map. He didn’t know his own country as well as he should.
His visit had been a waste. Then he thought of something Mrs. Hogan could do for him.
‘While I’m here… could I borrow one of Ali’s school blouses? One was found in the shed, and we’re trying to gather a few comparisons. I’d be obliged.’
He followed Mrs. Hogan – call me Deirdre, please – up two flights of bare stairs to the top of the house and into the girl’s bedroom, while she flung apologies over her shoulder about the state of the place.
The room looked like someone had stolen half the furniture then exploded a basket of clothing, kitchenware and toiletries over the remains. Painted floorboards were visible here and there through the wreckage. The lilac walls were decorated with posters and leftover blobs of blu-tack.
Deirdre Hogan rifled through a chest of drawers, then rooted through a dirty clothes basket.
While she searched, he examined the pictures of pop stars, their young faces twisted in sneers and dumb, malevolent stares. He wouldn’t be young again for anything. All that yearning. All that pretending you didn’t care. He winced at the ramshackle shower cubicle festooned with clothes and the old sink unit in the corner. On the floor beneath the sink an electric kettle shared a tray with some mugs and a jar of instant coffee. This room had been a bedsit – a complete home to someone. He looked at the door and saw there was a lock still on it. A tingle ran up the back of his skull.
Was it possible for a girl to deliver a baby and conceal that fact from other people for some time? If she had a lock on the door, didn’t have to share a bathroom, it would help a great deal. But could she be as cool as Ali Hogan was after the fact? That would take some acting. He recalled the first sight of her, the clownish clothes, her eagerness to help. But now he was remembering other things. That big baggy dress she had on. He’d seen other girls in dresses like that. He knew it was the fashion, but it could serve another purpose entirely.
For those two or three days that constituted its brief life, its only life, the baby could have been kept somewhere like this, out of sight, out of hearing.
Mrs. Hogan was picking up clothes at random from the floor, stirring some larger piles with her foot. There was no carpet here though, no blue carpet fibres. Though a rug would be easy enough to roll up and remove.
‘This is impossible. There might be one in the laundry room.’
He followed Ali’s mother down the stairs. When they got to a landing, he asked where her own bedroom was. He wanted to judge the distance between the two.
She stopped still and gave him an amused, searching look. ‘Just down here at the front.’
‘And this laundry room?’ he asked quickly.
‘By the kitchen,’ she said, turning from him.
She led him to a narrow room under the stairs that was made even more constricted by the heaps of stuff massed against the walls or piled onto shelves that rose to the ceiling. Useless looking stuff – stacked yoghurt cartons, jars, bags full of more bags and folded wrapping paper, stacks of magazines. Mrs. Hogan was standing by an old ceramic sink, so big you could stand a child in it, sorting though one of several plastic baskets massed on the metal counter beside it.
‘This one’s the ironing,’ she said. ‘Sorry about the mess, things are always going missing on me… Ah!’
She pulled out a crumple of white.
‘We got there at last.’ She handed the shirt to Swan, showing her dimples. ‘How about some more coffee?’
‘Why not? May I take one of these bags?’
He pulled a yellow bag from a clutch of plastic bags stuffed into a cardboard tube, and put the blouse inside it.
As Deirdre Hogan made coffee, he asked more about the house, how long they’d been there, and who else shared it.
‘The lodgers are all gone now,’ she said. ‘Just the separate basement flat rented out now. It seemed like a good idea at the time to buy this, and it did keep us afloat. I practically evicted the last tenant a year ago, but, do you know, now they’re gone, I just don’t know where to start with it. Ali and I rattle about in it. Maybe I’ll get lucky and she’ll marry a builder.’
Swan stirred his coffee. Pretending concern for Ali’s state of mind, he got her to go through her daughter’s movements before the finding of the baby. Mrs. Hogan was happy to talk. She said she was away with friends on the Sunday, the day before Ali found the baby, the day the pathologist determined it was killed. Ali had been home when she got home, she thought, but that was late. She said Ali had been hanging around the house mostly since her school term ended.
‘She complains she has no money, but does nothing about finding a job. My young brother’s the same.’
There was nothing in what the mother said to contradict his tenuous new theory. For all her warmth, Deirdre Hogan didn’t keep very close tabs on her daughter. Ali had the means to conceal a baby, she wore baggy clothes, and she was on the spot when the child was found. Was that because she had recently concealed it? Guilt drawing her back? He remembered the large patchwork bag of hers they had taken from the shed. The one she tried to get back from them. Big enough for a child. The convent was just around the corner. Maybe the attention seeking was actually part of it, some twisted form of remorse.
Deirdre Hogan released her hair from its metal clasp and started to twist it into some new arrangement at the back of her head. As she held her arms up, her wide sleeves fell down to her shoulders, revealing plump, pale arms.
‘And what about yourself, any children?’
He recoiled inside. He didn’t want to tell her about his marriage troubles nor did he want to take her upstairs to some sagging clutter-draped bed. Not in this life, at least. He tried to imagine Elizabeth in a dressing gown, entertaining some caller with a glimpse of her breasts over burnt coffee. Never.
Deirdre Hogan took his silence to be an admission of romantic failure.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine.’
His disdain crumbled. What was the good of having such an admirable wife when she was rarely at home, and hardly spoke to him when she was. They had a chasm between them. That’s what it was getting like, a black pit with no crossing place.
‘Tell me, Deirdre,’ he said.
She smiled at the mention of her name.
‘What would you do if your daughter came to you and said she was pregnant?’
‘Oh God, is that your trouble?’
‘No it’s just a question, I don’t have children.’
If we don’t try again we’ll never know.
‘Oh. Well I always say to Ali, she should come straight to me if anything like that happens, and God, it can happen so easily, but I would never kick her out.’
He was inclined to believe her good intentions, but intentions weren’t the same as facts. He had a feeling the mother didn’t know the daughter that well.
SEVENTEEN
Butterflies skittered about the purple shocks of thistle that rose here and there above the grass and frothy meadowsweet. The sun came out between clouds and Joan looked around and smiled. Beyond Joan’s curly head Ali could see the line of trees that marked the river.
Joan paused in her tracks and held her free hand behind her to signal Ali to stop too. There was someone walking along the riverbank, a man, too distant to recognise. They stood silent, watching him grow smaller, headed for the town. Ali looked back towards the road. She could make out the whole top floor of Caherbawn rising above the surrounding hedges. She wished that Joan hadn’t been so insistent that they come here for their picnic, so close to her aunt’s. She walked on through the meadow, following in Joan’s steps until they reached a bend in the river, screened by saplings.
A crescent of butterscotch-coloured sand jutted into the slow dark water. The opposite bank was undercut, a ledge of rough grass hanging over a mud wall pocked with holes and burrows above the waterline. In the shadows of the trees, midges swirled like sparks.
Ali kicked off her sandals and bundled up the skirt of her dress, tying it in a knot in front so that it hung in a baggy puff above her knees. Joan sat cross-legged on the dry river sand, squinting up at her, smiling.
‘It must be nice for you to be out here. In the open air.’
‘I’ve been out loads,’ said Joan. ‘My mother takes me shopping on Fridays, and I’ve been home for a few Christmases. I’ve even tried to stay out a few times, but something always happens.’
‘Like what?’
‘I lose the run of myself. I get panicky, and they bring me back.’ She shrugged, then flicked her chin up. ‘Hey, do you see that rope?’
Ali turned to where Joan was looking. A frazzled grey rope hung over the water from a nearby branch.
‘That was your cousins’ swing. They’d stay down here for whole days in the summer, and me minding them if your aunt could spare me. Make sure they don’t drown, she’d say. I hadn’t the nerve to tell her I couldn’t swim meself. But sure, they all grew up, didn’t they, though the twins had me terrified. Savages, they were.’
‘I remember Roisín talking about the river,’ said Ali. ‘But I never came down here.’
‘Were you never here in the summer?’
‘No, this is the first time I’ve stayed with them since, you know, my Dad…’
Ali stepped into the water. It was the colour of strong tea, giving her legs an orange cast. Muddy sand oozed between her toes. She walked back and forth, calf-deep.
‘Are you coming for a paddle, Joan?’
But Joan was off on more memories, suddenly streaming with talk after her silence of the bus – things that the twins did to scare her, Brendan’s fishing exploits, how, if Roisín got splashed, she would squeal in a way that would make you deaf.
‘Did Davy not come down?’
‘Too grown up he was. Or thought he was.’
Ali’s feet had numbed, so she came out of the water and sat down to unpack the picnic onto the fringed scarf she had brought to serve as a rug. Joan talked on. Two boiled eggs. Ham sandwiches that she had made behind her aunt’s back and wrapped in a bread packet. A bottle of lemonade and a yellow brick of Battenberg cake she had bought from the shop. Nothing looked as nice as she thought it would.
‘Have something to eat, Joan.’
‘In a minute. I’ve something to tell you.’
‘Oh?’ Ali rearranged the food and waited.
‘It wasn’t until I saw you. Standing in that corridor tall as a woman – I realised how much time had passed. And now that it’s sunk in, well, it’s all different.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘You saying there was no job at Caherbawn for me. I was waiting to get back to it all this time, waiting for your aunt to give in, waiting to get better. I spent years up in Damascus House thinking they’d get me right to take up my life again. But there’s no life to take up. Everyone’s changed or grown except me.’
Joan got to her feet and started pacing, hands dug into her jeans pockets.
‘You weren’t well, Joan.’ Ali watched her walk to the
water’s edge. ‘Was it the baby… was it that, that put you in the hospital?’
Joan stooped to pick up a stone and flung it into the water.
‘It’s not a hospital, you know. It’s a residential facility.’
‘Sorry. You don’t seem so bad to me.’
‘I’m not well.’ Joan turned to look at her directly. ‘After the baby and losing the job things were hard. I fell out with my family.’
Joan dropped down to sit on the other side of the picnic cloth and hugged her knees tightly to her chest, squinting at the light that flashed from the river.
‘I didn’t know the baby was coming. I should have known, but my monthlies were never regular. Then there was the pains, and I was trying to keep quiet.’
‘Was this in Caherbawn?’
‘In the kitchen. I was scared I would die.’
‘Oh, Joan. Did no one know?’
‘The dog was there for the first bit. Looking at me.’
‘What?’
‘That old dog, Brownie. I was scared he would eat it.’
‘Jesus. Why didn’t you get some help?’
‘I shouldn’t even have been there.’
‘Didn’t you go to the hospital?
‘There wasn’t time. Then it was too late.’
‘Why did you hide it?’
‘I didn’t – it was taken away. You can’t have seen it.’
‘I did! And so did my Ma and Una, and Joe I think, he was there too – ’
‘Shut your mouth, you,’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Ali. ‘I just need to get it straight in my head.’
‘Don’t bother yourself.’
Joan took a sandwich, tore at it quickly with her mouth. Ali tried to look like she wasn’t scared of her. She lifted one of the boiled eggs and rolled it against a flat stone, the shell crackling to mosaic.
They stayed for a while in silence, Ali concentrated on peeling the egg, bit by bit, revealing the shine. Joan threw a hard end of crust at the water. Immediately there was a ‘plop’ and a flash of silver. Joan and Ali looked at each other and rushed to the river’s edge.