by Finn Óg
“To stop them being able to …” Áine broke down in a flood of tears. “I can’t say. I can’t … I don’t even know how much she’s told Sam, so I can’t betray her confidence. I can’t …”
“Alright, darlin’, he said, rubbing both shoulders, inept in the face of her breakdown. “Ok, ok, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have suggested it. We don’t need to talk about this, ok?”
“Then why did you ask?” She thumped her fists gently against his shoulders.
“I wanted to give you something to concentrate on, and all information is useful. It was stupid, I’m sorry.”
“I’m so scared. What if she—”
“It’s ok, we’ll find her. We’ll find her.” Minutes passed as Min tried to console Áine and she gradually became quieter and gathered herself, eventually raising her head again and turning to the computer screen. “I suppose we can get the police involved now too, now that Sam’s convinced he’s not being hunted. That risk has gone.”
Áine sat upright. “I’ll scan the letter and send it to Sam’s email address.” She rallied as if at least resolved to do something useful. “Then you can start at the photos again.”
“You should lie down a while. You haven’t slept properly in days and you’ll be no use to me if you’re exhausted. We need your mind sharp. Get sleep while you can.”
Áine grunted. “Go make some coffee for yourself, I’ll not be long.”
“Alright,” he said, “but none for you.” He rose. “You need to get some shut-eye.”
Min left the room and Áine opened the envelope.
22
Careful not to look, she spread the first page on the scanner glass. The paper was thin and her sister’s handwriting stared at her from the reverse of the sheet. She genuinely tried not read what was written, but one word burned into her retina. She closed the lid and made sure the letter’s image appeared on the screen before her, saved it as a PDF and placed it in a folder. She lifted the lid and flipped the page, closing it and repeating until all five sheets were converted and saved. Then she opened an email, dragged the folder across and typed the Charlie address from memory. She turned and met Min as he entered the room, hitting send in haste and closing down the screen. In one hand he had a glass of water, in the other a fistful of pills.
“Swallow these,” he ordered. “They’re no’ painkillers, but they’ll help ye sleep.”
She looked at the little pile, and, without questioning him, gladly followed his instruction and swallowed them with the water. “Thanks,” she said, looking up at him. “Thank you, Min, for coming.”
“Get to bed,” he said. “I’ll wake you if anything comes in.”
She knew then that he was confident she would sleep with what he had administered, but she didn’t care. He had removed the guilt, the responsibility, and assumed it himself. She was calm at his presence, his solid reassurance, his innate sense of what needed to be done and his ability to see it through.
She moved into the kitchen, swiped up her iPad and went to her bedroom.
And there she lay, numb and awake, staring at the ceiling, one word keeping her awake.
Uganda.
She had tried to avoid the invasion of her sister’s privacy. Whatever was said between her and Sam was their business – even a twin had no right to see inside whatever intimacy they had, but it had been a shock – particularly given what Min had asked about Sinead’s state of mind - to see it written there. The name of a place, all that was required to describe an awful truth.
Áine rolled onto one side, her mind blurring a little, as if she’d had a strong drink on an empty stomach. But her agitation would not permit sleep. She rolled onto her back, then her other side, and then back to stare at the white ceiling. Where are you, sis? She thought of Min’s stupid questions, and how she wished he hadn’t intruded into her twin’s mental state, and then of how little she really understood about what had happened there.
Uganda.
All she knew for sure was what it had done to Sinead, who’d returned as a shell of her former self.
Mind swimming, Áine reached out and lifted the iPad, located the file and read.
Hi,
Something’s happened. It’s technically your turn, but I need to let you know something cos it might have an impact.
I’m sitting in the apartment looking at the other one who is bruised and hurt and was beaten to a pulp last night, and I wish you were here. I wish you were here to tell me what to do, and I’m angry with you that you’re not – because we told you there was no issue but you won’t bloody listen. And now I’m here having to work this out without the one bloody person I know who understands how to deal with stuff like this. I’m at the kitchen counter and she’s dozing on the sofa and all I have managed to do is stop the bleeding.
Someone forced their way into the flat and hammered her. They smashed her face and hit her head off the floor. They were looking for the bloody phone she used to ring you. And before you start – no, it’s not the authorities or anything – it’s a bunch of bloody criminals who just want their phone back, but it’s gone now, dumped. It’s full of nasty photographs, which is probably why they’re so determined to get it. Some woman left it at my work. You know the drill – you’ll be able to work out what her line of work was. And because the phone was used to call you, we didn’t tell the police about the beating yet, but I’m writing to tell you that we have to because these don’t seem to be people who will let this thing lie. I need to tell the Guards, and they might be able to trace the call to where you are, which I don’t think will matter one little bit because in all sense and reason nobody’s one bit concerned and I can’t see how it would affect anything anyway. I don’t see why it would matter, although I understand, I get it, that you might. But she’s my – I’ll not say it but you know what she is to me, and I can’t not get the police involved because this cannot happen again. This probably makes no sense as a heads-up.
I can’t have her dealing with this sort of violence. The legacy of this stuff is horrific. I hope you understand that. I mean, I know you understand that – the violence thing and how it fucks with your head. That’s not what I mean. I mean I hope you understand that I can’t have her go through that cos I have been through it and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone – even someone who reads my personal bloody letters and sends them off without asking. Which is part of the reason she was here alone, and that’s my fault – for being so bloody unreasonably upset with her. I moved into a room at work, so I wasn’t here when she was attacked. And she lay on the floor and bled for ages before she was able to ring me, and I didn’t even want to answer and she needed me.
She helped me, you know, back when I needed it. You spoke about stuff in the locker. Well, yeah, you’re a hundred per cent on that, Sam. On that topic you’re nail on the head. My locker has its fill, and I will not have that for her.
I’ve no computer with me – it’s at work, other than hers, and, well, obviously I won’t be making that mistake again, so it’s handwritten. I’ll probably type a different version of this at work later and I’ll probably leave a lot of this stuff out, but it felt better to write my anger into the first letter, so what the hell? Counselling … without a counsellor. Cheap. Dear knows how much I’ve spent on counselling since then. Since Uganda.
Ever been? I imagine you probably have. I can’t begin to guess how far and wide you’ve been, doing what you did. I’ve been nowhere. Except Uganda. Not really – Disney, Spain, Portugal, school trip to France. And Africa. One passport stamp. Just one. I wanted to have a passport full of stamps, and now I wish there weren’t any.
I went there on placement from Trinity. It was so feckin’ exotic. I watched the sunburst sand from the plane – it was mud, really, but it looked clean, red, completely African. I was so excited. The drive from Entebbe to Jinja, the bicycle men – the Boda Bodas, stopping to offer lifts on their little padded parcel shelves. The incredible flies and creatures by Lake Victoria, t
he weird insects buzzing around. The talk of saltwater crocodiles and mosquitoes. The malaria drugs that were worse than getting malaria, some people said. Didn’t fizz on me at all. I was tough and resilient and ready.
It was a dream job, a placement with a human rights firm. I was going to work wonders and shit miracles out there. I was a naive little girl on her first foreign trip and I thought I was going to advocate for the afflicted and afflict the advocated.
We travelled north to where the interviews were to be conducted. They took us through the most amazing countryside in a tiny Toyota with no air con, but the hot air rushed through the vehicle and the buffering kept us cool. We gazed out at the mud buildings and the coffee and banana plantations, sugar cane and fires and the smells – the smells were amazing. The women stooped from the hip from washing clothes in buckets. For the first time I saw someone carry a can of petrol on their head – just like in the old schoolbooks. For two days I was on top of the world.
Now I’m looking at her and I know what she’s going to feel soon. And there can’t be any follow-up for her. When she comes round we will make full statements and stop this bloody nonsense. She was so good to me when I came back. We had drifted apart a little when I went to Trinity – she took the piss too much and spent a lot of time in her room, training herself, as it turned out, building her own computers. Why she took that turn is a complete mystery – it wasn’t something teenage girls did back then. I dunno.
But when I got released she was there, on the phone before Mam or Dad, even, asking how I was. It was a surprise. And she came out to travel back with me. Mam and Dad had been out when the search was on, but it lasted months and the firm I was working for encouraged them to go home. There was war over it. Dad refused to go back to Dublin but eventually visa rules got the better of him and the government didn’t want him wrecking the place, so they basically deported him. The whole thing took a lump out of them that will never be properly fixed.
I’m not explaining but that doesn’t matter cos I will cut pretty much all of this anyway before I send it. But it helps to write it down to you as if I’m telling you cos this way it somehow feels safer. I don’t feel like crying this way. If you were here, I’d probably bawl like a dumped schoolgirl.
Ehm … the release. No, the kidnapping first. That was a blur. A complete blast of noise and dust. We were with the girls – well, they weren’t girls in the normal sense. They were barely teenagers, but they’d all had children of their own and had been brutalised, horrific, horrendous forced and depraved stuff. They’d been kidnapped years before from a school in the north and marched off by Kony and his madmen pretending to do the work of God. The Lord’s Resistance Army, evil to the core. They killed thousands of people for absolutely no reason and stole their children and raped and mutilated them and turned the kids into machine-gun wielding maniacs.
So these were the miracles I was there to perform, to help these children use international law. What a joke. Joseph Kony is probably still marauding around the north or Congo or wherever sowing his seed of hatred and twisted alchemy like some settler medium whipping up a cult.
Why do you make me waffle so much?
It would have been second nature to you, the attack. You’d have known what to do. I would love to have that instinct but I know I never will. The ack-ack of those bloody guns, the people lying dead everywhere. They walked straight up to those poor children and executed them right in front of me. I screamed so hard I couldn’t hear myself, and I prayed so hard and they didn’t kill me, and I wished for years afterwards that they had just shot me.
We were the only whites within hundreds of miles. I was a mzungu, an object of curiosity, evidently, because they took me as a trophy. Ten girls and me, led off through the bush, loaded into old cars and driven for days in the heat. I didn’t care – I thought I didn’t, anyway, because I thought, well, what can they do to me now? There’s nothing more they can do. They killed everyone, probably because someone told them what we were doing there. Us white legal knights fighting the good fight and all we did was get the kids massacred.
But then they found a way to make it worse. Can you believe that? Actually, you of all people probably can. They made it worse, and then they made it worse again, and then they made it worser and worser and you can imagine and I don’t need to elaborate. I don’t know if it will make the cut but I feel I need to give you another heads-up in case it ever crosses your mind or in case anything ever does come of whatever we are. I will never be able to have children. That’s said now. That’s been on my mind. How to tell you. If ever we did manage to cobble something out of this mess, that might be a deal-breaker. I don’t know because we haven’t even covered the first step yet – you know, a movie, maybe a walk on the beach.
Waffle.
Glad to have said it. Maybe, to hell with it, I will send this. The last letter at least moved us forward, I think. Didn’t it?
And now that I’ve said it, it feels like a hell of a weight off my mind. So here’s the other thing that plagues my head: I have wondered whether part of the tractor beam around you is the little person. It’s worried me, getting so attached, knowing that I can never…. This makes me so sad to admit, but it worries me that I’m compensating somehow. Does that make sense? You are not one, you are two people, and it worries me that that’s part of the draw, given what I’ve just told you. I don’t know if it matters if that’s part of the draw, cos I’d probably be drawn if you were just one, or if she was just one. But how can you know for sure, and am I overthinking it, and what the hell does it matter anyway? But, for sure, the way you are with her is part of it, maybe more than part, but that’s the package, so what am I worried about? Agh … what the fuck am I saying at all? And I need to stop swearing. I barely swore till I met you – just in my own head, not out loud and definitely not on paper.
Anyway, so we are going to the police. That’s a lot of steam blown off to tell you that. S’pose I could have just called, given we have your number even if we don’t have the bloody phone any more.
Tell her I miss her. Loads and loads.
Áine woke three hours later. Her sleep had been unusually deep and her head ached as if she’d been drinking. She reached for water that wasn’t there, and then remembered the pills Min had given her, that Min was in her apartment, which made her feel immediately at ease, then her sister’s letter, which made her feel guilty.
She had known a lot of what was in it. Some of what Sinead had written to Sam had surfaced in the dreadful days and months following Sinead’s return from Africa. But there were things she should not know, and for that she felt shame. She had seen inside her sister’s heart, and that was not fair.
Áine wondered how she would feel were the roles reversed. Fine, she told herself, grand, no secrets with me. But no lasting damage either. No romantic prospect lurking out of reach, for that matter. And no way she would, or could, ever write a letter like that – so honest and open and gentle. Áine knew that her love would be an ugly love, built on feigned hostility and harsh comments to protect herself from the fear of failure or rejection.
The one good thing about reading the letter was now she had carte blanche to make a call. She got up, pulled on some leggings and walked through to the control room – the screens of which were filled with images of flesh and bed sheets. Min turned as she walked in.
“Let’s call the Guards,” she said.
“Good morning to you too,” Min said, looking at her quizzically.
“And Sinead will be in shit shape, if that’s what you needed to know. She will be absolutely terrified and will attack anyone who goes near her.”
Min was now completely confused. “Right, ok.” He stared at her. “I thought you weren’t keen on the cops?”
“Well, I am now. Just ring them.”
“I can’t. I’m no’ supposed to be here, aye? You’re no’ allowed anybody in other houses, sure.”
“I’ll ring them, so,” she huffed.
“If they try any of this shit,” Áine gestured at the screens, “she’ll claw their eyes out.”
“That’s good,” Min said, thinking.
“No,” Áine said. “Not good. Not good at all. This could set her back years.”
Áine swiped up the phone and dialled the Guards.
Min looked at her as she slumped back into her chair. Her head fell into one hand, the other held the phone she’d just finished talking into. “If they touch her, I’ll fucking incinerate them.” She broke into a sob.
Min looked at her. “You’re exhausted,” he tried. “Did you get no sleep at all?”
“I did sleep,” she said. “I shouldn’t have. I should be looking for her. Fuck’s sake, what am I doing sleeping when she’s been taken by these bastards?” She pointed at the screen again in anger.
Min reached over and triggered the screen saver, the images weren’t helping.
“I think it’s time you told me what you mean – set her back how?”
Áine stared at him, desperate to offload, to make her problems his, to share the burden and allow him to apply the solution. She shook her head.
“You can trust me. Whatever it is that’s making you so … upset—”
“I’m not upset – I’m bloody angry, and I’m hopeless. I can’t find these bastards. They’re smarter than they should be and Sinead will be …” she trailed off, willing Min to press so she could collapse her armour.
“She’ll be what?”
Áine allowed her shoulders to fall. “You can never speak of this again – not to Sam, not to me, and certainly not to Sinead.”
“Of course.”
“Something happened to her. In Africa. Years ago. She was kidnapped, attacked. Repeatedly, horrifically, by a gang, an army, really. Militia, I suppose.”