In the Rosary Garden

by Nicola White

  There was more floor showing than before, an attempt at tidying, but no surface was completely clear. Ali walked over to a mound of clothes and produced a little basket-weave stool from underneath that she brought back to the middle of the room for him. She flounced down on her bed and started to comb her fingers through her hair, inspecting the ends. Meanwhile Considine had drifted off to lean against the shower cubicle in the corner, out of the girl’s line of sight, disappearing her presence.

  ‘Do you know what a poltergeist is?’ Swan asked.

  ‘I saw the film.’

  ‘It was a little girl in that film, if I remember right, but your paranormal experts would claim that poltergeists are more attracted to teenage girls, that the power of adolescence stirs up all kinds of commotion.’

  ‘Is this about the state of my room?’

  Swan laughed. ‘No, no… what I was trying to say – badly – is that you remind me of one of those girls, so many bits of this case keep leading back to you. See, I don’t believe in poltergeists, Ali, but there’s a hell of a lot of disturbance happens around you.’

  She shifted her eyes slightly to meet his, and he saw an edge of fear.

  ‘I want to show you something.’ Swan opened his briefcase and took out a transparent envelope.

  ‘You said the baby was wrapped in a white cloth.’

  ‘Is that it?’ said Ali.

  ‘You tell me.’

  He placed the envelope on his knees and slowly drew out the white blouse her mother had given him.

  ‘Could be,’ she said.

  ‘Actually, this is one of your own school blouses.’

  ‘Oh. But blouses are all the same.’

  ‘Not quite… there’s something I need you to explain.’ He beckoned her over, tilted the material towards the light of the window.

  ‘What are these?’

  At first she seemed to be just staring at his fingertip moving over the material.

  ‘These little holes,’ he persisted, and she bent closer. She lifted one hand to the left side of her chest.

  ‘Badges.’

  ‘What badges?’

  Ali walked over to a gaping chest of drawers and took out an old leather collar box. She sat cross-legged on the floor in front of him and opened it, dipping her fingers into a tangle of plastic beads, outsize rings and knotted chains, selecting four round badges from the bottom which she held out on her palm like coins. Swan put the blouse back in the envelope and took them from her.

  One was very small, the size of a five pence piece. It depicted a feminist symbol of a clenched red fist inside a circle with a cross at the bottom. Two middle sized ones said Free Nelson Mandela and Art is Revolution. The last was largest – a scrawl of punkish writing against a black background; ‘SPUC OFF’ it said.

  ‘A little bird told me that the school doesn’t allow badges.’

  ‘They can’t see them under my tunic.’

  ‘What’s the point of that?’

  She shrugged. ‘I know they’re there’.

  A very timid rebellion, thought Swan.

  ‘Do other girls do the same?’ He willed her to say yes.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe’

  He held up the SPUC OFF badge. The initials stood for Society for Protection of the Unborn Child.

  ‘Does this mean that you’re pro abortion, Ali?’

  ‘I think women should have choice.’

  ‘Is it what you would do?’

  ‘Depends. Maybe.’

  ‘How would you know where to go? There’s a ban on information now.’

  ‘The small ads in any women’s magazine from Britain have numbers. I’ve seen them.’

  ‘Have you now? And what if your pregnancy had gone too far?’

  ‘What did Doctor Beasley say to you?’

  ‘He said he couldn’t rule you out.’

  ‘I didn’t have a baby. Jesus. Look at me.’ She stretched her arms out from her body. Swan wondered what he was supposed to be looking at; what he saw was a well-built girl in a jumper so baggy she could be concealing a toddler.

  ‘Look,’ said Swan, ‘lets talk about the blouse. How could a blouse of yours have got into the shed?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Did you ever change your clothes in the shed?’

  ‘Yea, we could wear rough clothes for gardening. But I don’t think I ever left anything there.’

  ‘And what were you doing in St Brigid’s that Sunday night?’

  Ali went back to sit on the bed, started fiddling with her hair again. The colour rose in her face.

  ‘I was with my friends. We were drinking in the trees by the hockey pitch.’

  ‘And you saw nothing?’

  ‘No. And I didn’t give birth between beers.’

  Her expression had grown bullish; she no longer bothered to meet his eye.

  ‘Garda Considine here mentioned – last night ­– some trouble down in the place you were staying.’

  ‘Someone drowned after a dance?’ added Considine. ‘Someone you knew.’

  The girl met Swan’s eye.

  ‘It was Joan,’ she said, ‘Joan Dempsey. She used to cook for my aunt. Then she was in a mental home, a hospital, until last week.’ She made a little broken noise like a hiccup. ‘They say that she jumped into the river. I don’t know.’

  ‘Why was she in a home?’

  Ali looked towards the light of the window, the fingernails of one hand raking red lines down the pale inside of her opposite forearm.

  ‘The baby I found… before, you know… it was Joan’s. She told me so last week.’

  Swan and Considine looked at each other for a minute. Jesus H Christ. There was the distant sound of footsteps climbing the stairs.

  ‘You see, Mr. Swan, you’re not so far off with your poltergeists – I do have special powers – ’ The person coming up the stairs was humming now, signalling their approach.

  ‘ – people die around me.’

  The door swung open to reveal Deirdre Hogan with three mugs and a packet of biscuits on a tray.

  ‘I know you said not to, but there were these jaffa cakes just staring at me from the shelf, and I thought, well if they don’t eat them I might, so I better bring them up to the guardians of the peace and my slim daughter toot sweet. And a cup of coffee to wash them down. Only instant, mind.’

  Throughout this patter she wandered deep into the room, trying to clear a surface for them, tutting and laughing. But her eyes kept checking on her daughter. Ali had fallen back into herself, staring down at the mug her mother had passed her.

  ‘You’re not going to take her anywhere are you? I’m a bit concerned about what happened yesterday… and the phone keeps ringing.’

  ‘I took it off the hook.’ Ali said. Her mother nodded. A trust seemed to have grown between them.

  ‘We were just here for a chat, Mrs. Hogan.’ He got to his feet. ‘Get some rest, Ali.’

 

  ‘That’s that, don’t you think?’ said Considine when they reached the pavement. ‘She didn’t have a baby. And there’s an innocent reason her blouse could have been lying in the shed.’

  ‘I just don’t know. What are you up to?’

  ‘I’m going to go back round doctor’s surgeries. Some woman might have come in by now.’

  Swan sat in his car for a while before turning the engine on. To believe Ali Hogan or not.

  He counted up the infanticide cases he’d had experience of – the baby by the canal, the one under the garage in Clondalkin two years back. Oh, and there was that case in Drimnagh – two tiny skeletons in a boarding house cupboard, ribs like fish-bones covered in paper-thin skin. The woman from Achill who had put them there twenty years before said she hadn’t know anyone in Dublin at the time. That was her only explanation.


  He remembered the words of a farmer he’d met once in a bar in Athlone. He’d said that it used to be a common thing for the bog strippers to turn up the remains of infants. The little bones of them scattered over the flayed land.

  He thought the man was being morbid in drink, but maybe it was himself who was naïve. Perhaps the whole country was dotted with tiny corpses waiting to be found – babies tucked behind gateposts, eased under floorboards, or thrown into sacks with the company of stones to take them down into brown water. An Irish solution to an Irish problem. Grown secretly in the dark, and to the dark so quickly returned, some never surfacing at all to feel air inflate their lungs, the trickle of warm milk filling new stomachs.

  And what of his own babies – would they ever make it into the world or would there just be more pain? Two conceived, both faltered in the womb. Two months. Four months. He was forty-three. Elizabeth thirty-eight already. Perhaps they were too old, or a bad match. All he knew was that he couldn’t bear it to happen again. She wanted to try – said they didn’t have the luxury of waiting – but he couldn’t go near her for fear of it.

  He wiped a hand over his eyes and turned the ignition, driving without focus until he was away from Ranelagh, waking again to the world beyond the windscreen only as he turned down by the canal.

  He noticed a woman sitting on a bench in a short skirt and boots, her hair dyed a chemical auburn, her mouth clasped passionately around a cigarette. It reminded him of Sister Bernadette and her good work with the working girls of this area. The ice queen moving among them. Community projects, the old nun had said. Not a great distance from the convent, really. He wondered if anyone from the team had checked it out yet.

  Percy Place was where she said the drop-in centre was – just nearby. He took a left fork out of the main traffic flow and cruised slowly to where the handsome Georgian terrace faced on to the canal. Half way down he spotted a round plaque on the wall – a famous writer remembered.

  Swan parked. It was a lovely street, especially in the quiet of a late Sunday morning, like a film set the way that the whispering trees watched over the little stone bridge. The start of a Kavanagh poem learned at school came to him –

  Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal, pouring redemption for me…

  Ah, redemption. A pint of that would be welcome.

  The house was tall and wide, and a little brass sign at the top of the steps said ‘Order of the Annunciation’ in letters you would have to be closer than two feet away to read. Very discreet. He knocked. Nothing happened. He knocked again.

  A door opened somewhere below and Swan looked down over the railing into the paved basement area. A young woman with very short hair walked out and put something in a bin. Even from above, he could see how her stomach domed out.

  ‘Excuse me? Do you know if there’s anyone in up here?’

  She looked up, shading her eyes with a hand. She was much younger than he had first thought.

  ‘It’s all the one. Who are you looking for?’

  ‘Sister Bernadette?’

  ‘She’s had to go away.’

  ‘Do you work here?’

  ‘Naw. I’m a resident.’ She didn’t look like a prostitute, not at all. She looked more like a schoolgirl.

  An awful thought struck him.

  TWENTY - FIVE

  After Swan and Considine left her, Ali collected up their mugs, and put the tray outside the door. She turned back to the mess of her room, a mess she had only become aware of through strangers’ eyes. Clothes spewed from the rucksack she had brought with her from Buleen. It was a place to start.

  When she shook out her jeans, the little medal that Joan’s mother had given her fell out of the pocket, followed by the flutter of Mary O’Shea’s business card. Ali picked up white rectangle and stared at it, sat down on the bed once more.

  She rubbed the edge of the card back and forth against her lips. Mary would be very interested in what Beasley had subjected her to. There might even be a story in it, but how could she control where that story went? How could she be sure she wouldn’t come out of it looking suspicious, stupid, both? She couldn’t trust Mary, and she couldn’t trust the police. The police thought she might have had a baby. Beasley had looked inside her and thought so too. Swan was talking about poltergeists and dark forces. She felt drenched in guilt, but couldn’t attach that feeling to anything in particular. All of it was awful. Everything that had happened since she stepped into the garden, or was it the night before that when things started to fall apart?

  She should have told the police about being at St. Brigid’s that night, it just never occurred to her. It was nothing to do with that baby. They had met up with Bobby and Ronan outside the Berrybush pub while Davy had been inside buying a naggin of vodka for her and Fitz. The boys had beer, and it was their idea to go to the school grounds, not hers. Ronan had been paying her a lot of attention, slagging her, pretending to be interested in her bangles, that kind of thing. Usually boys paid more attention to Fitz.

  He stole one of her bracelets and she had chased after him, running over the grass in her bare feet, leaving Bobby and Fitz behind at the hockey pitch drinking beer. When she caught up with him, he grabbed her, pressed her into the bark of one of the big cedars. They were only messing about, nothing serious. He was kissing her neck, and she was starting to feel kind of floaty with it, watching the branches above her moving against the darkening sky – that deep, deep blue that comes just before black. One of Ronan’s hands was at her chest, twisting the buttons of her shirt. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Ronan laughed and stepped back from her. She looked down and saw with a shock that one breast was exposed, lolling out, almost luminous in the dusk.

  It was then she heard the footsteps on the path, a soft gritty rhythm coming towards them. Ali turned quickly and hugged the tree, signaled to Ronan to hide too. She didn’t dare move until the sound had faded well beyond them. Ronan claimed it was a nun who passed, perhaps a ghost nun, but that wasn’t what she had seen. The half-glimpsed figure looked more like a man.

  She couldn’t tell Swan she had gone off with Ronan – he thought she was a right tramp already. She’d caught him staring at that damn love-bite on her neck. Anyway, she couldn’t really be sure she had seen anything.

  It was her that deserved to be locked up some place like Damascus House. She couldn’t imagine Joan ever feeling more crazy than she did right now. She tore Mary’s business card into little pieces. It was better not to have the temptation after what happened last time.

  She didn’t know what to do with herself. The muffled sound of the radio floated up from the room downstairs. Her mother would be sitting there among her broken things and saucers of glue. A spider in her web, fiddling, mending.

  The gate to the passageway squeaked. Ali went to her window and looked down. A familiar bright head bobbed up the passageway.

  As Ali ran down the first flight of stairs, the doorbell rang.

  ‘I’ll get it!’ her mother shouted.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Ali called back, ‘it’s only Fitz.’

  When she pulled the big door open, Fitz was picking at the labels on the rack of old bells.

  ‘When you going to get rid of all these?’ she asked.

  ‘Hello to you too,’ said Ali, giving her friend a quick hug and pulling her inside. Her mother was moving around on the landing.

  ‘I wanted to say sorry –‘ Fitz began.

  Ali pushed her into the front room. She didn’t want her mother hearing any more than was necessary, especially now that she was being so nice, treating Ali as lovingly and carefully as a piece of her broken porcelain.

  ‘Have I been in this room?’ asked Fitz, looking around at the stripped single bed, the tilting empty shelves.

  ‘Davy was staying in it last,’ said Ali.

  ‘The foxy uncle,’ said Fitz, and ra
n a palm sensually over the striped mattress before sitting down on it.

  Ali laughed obligingly. This is how they always were together, joking, mock sophisticated, but it felt awkward today, like she couldn’t find the rhythm of their usual dance.

  On the wall over the bed, Davy had stuck pictures from newspapers, a collage of faces that he had added to day by day like a flat bulging cloud. He stuck them to the wallpaper with toothpaste. She noticed Mary O’Shea’s picture in the centre, little fangs and horns drawn on in black felt tip.

  Fitz followed her gaze.

  ‘Did he do that? He’s funny. Where’s he gone?’

  ‘He had to go back down to Buleen. Work.’

  ‘Pity. I think he fancied me.’

  Fitz was probably right, but Ali wasn’t going to tell her that. When she’d brought Fitz home with her that night she noticed him flustered, tripping over himself to bring them out for a drink. If only they’d managed to get served in the Berrybush, they wouldn’t have ended up going to St. Brigid’s with the consolation prize of the vodka he’d bought them and those stupid boys. Davy wouldn’t come with them. Why would he drink like a kid when he could sit in a pub? That’s what he said.

  ‘Anyway,’ Fitz was saying, ‘I’m sorry I said anything to the guards about the boys, but they kept on at me. I was worried they’d do me for underage drinking.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Ali, ‘but it is creepy, don’t you think? I mean… someone else was there that night. I just don’t know. Maybe it was me that did it and I’ve blacked it all out. Have you noticed anything strange about me in the last few months?’’

  ‘No, but I’m noticing it now.’

  ‘I’m serious.’

  ‘Unless you’re completely schizophrenic, or something. Ali, you’d know. And I’d certainly know.’

  ‘You’ll testify in court, then?’

  Fitz laughed and rolled her eyes.

  She wanted to tell Fitz about Joan, but how could she even start to explain it all?

  ‘Aren’t you’re worried about the results?’ said Fitz.

  Ali’s first thought was that Fitz somehow knew about Beasley and all the tests they did on her, but as Fitz went on to say how she hadn’t done enough revision, Ali realised she was only talking about the Leaving, the exam results, the thing she’d been so obsessed about before all this. Her future.