Stolen Child

by Laura Elliot

  ‘The body is a delicate engine,’ she replied. ‘It’s tougher to repair when we drive it into the ground. Victor Breen is a hard taskmaster. Have you been overdoing it? You’re involved in so many committees. How long since you’ve had a smear test? Blood tests?’

  ‘Six months ago,’ I replied. ‘My gynaecologist carried it out. The results were clear.’

  She tapped her pen on the desk, narrowed her eyes. ‘You must go for blood tests,’ she said. ‘We need to check you out for iron deficiency. Ask your gynaecologist to forward the results of your smear test to me. Or, better still, I’ll contact Professor Langley myself.’

  ‘I don’t attend Professor Langley,’ I replied. ‘I have a gynaecologist in Dublin.’

  ‘Tell me his name and I’ll write to him,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to alarm you but the kind of excessive bleeding you’ve described means we could be talking about a hysterectomy.’

  What does she mean by we? I swung my legs down from the examination table and told her I’d organise everything myself. If we were talking about a surgical procedure, I’d prefer to deal directly with my own specialist. I tried to soften my voice but I could see her puzzlement. She drew back, as if I’d offended her and pulled off her rubber gloves, throwing them away.

  Everything is disposable except the past.

  David is her patient. Last year he had blood tests done to check for a bug he’d picked up in Mexico. Your blood results when you were hospitalised would have been sent to her from St Anna’s. What else could I do but walk away?

  At night, the blind stallion leaps through my dream and fastens his teeth into my stomach. I scream but no sound emerges. My mouth fills with sawdust. I fight him off but my limbs are flaccid. His teeth sink deeper. Blood begins to flow…flow…flow like a river in spate and I awaken, cursed, yes, they named it right, cursed with a womb that hates me.

  The whisperers grow more insistent…take her away…take her away…Tomorrow we fly to Spain. I wonder will they come with me, those soft, insistent voices.

  We’ll stay in Victor’s villa. We’ve gone there every summer since I started working with him but this will be a working holiday to gauge the potential in the Spanish market. I’m the perfect person to run an overseas office. I’ve studied Spanish property law and have a working knowledge of the language.

  I must do as Dr Williamson suggests. A smear test. In Spain I can seek medical assistance, start with a clean slate. They’ll miss me in Maoltrán but life moves on. David needs a holiday. He’s upset about his hostel but he’ll get over it in time. Spain will be good for him, take his mind off things. Our marriage may be in name only but I’ve tried to be an understanding wife.

  Sometimes, I look at him and see him with a stranger’s eyes. I imagine him in bed with other women, his supple body rising and falling, his tousled hair falling over his forehead, his head arched back in deliverance. I long for him then, but it’s too late…far too late for regrets. You and I will face a new future…with or without him.

  I love Spain. The dusty hills stencilled against the blue sky. The lazy afternoons when the sun glistens on the red rooftops and nothing stirs except the palms swaying lazily, and the terracotta clay crumbling under the claws of a ginger cat. No cheesies and English breakfasts here, no Irish pubs with their shillelaghs and shamrocks, no karaoke bars or stumbling drunks in this quiet resort where the only language spoken is Spanish and the only tourists are the Spaniards escaping their big cities.

  We are strangers among strangers and the beast at my shoulder is quiescent.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Joy

  ‘Isn’t this wonderful?’ Joy’s mother says as they walk along the esplanade at night, the two of them in sundresses and sandals, showing off their tanned shoulders. She looks younger, prettier, and she smiles as if she really means it. ‘I love the sun, don’t you, Joy? Such a change from grey. I love blue. Don’t you love blue too?’

  Joy nods and agrees. It’s easier to agree than to remind her that the sky is also blue in Ireland. Only her mother never notices when the sun shines and the turloughs sparkle like emeralds before disappearing back into their underground caves, and the Atlantic Ocean, the same ocean she sees from her Spanish bedroom window, is speckled with gold. The villa belongs to Mr Breen, Danny’s father. It has white walls and a terrace with tiles and sun chairs arranged in a circle around a glass table. There is a swimming pool and steps leading up to a solarium. Today the weather is stormy, torrential rains and an overcast sky, which should prove to her mother that blue is not a given fact anywhere.

  Just thinking about moving from Rockrose makes her nervous. The row downstairs is a marathon one. Her father seems to be winning, which as far as Joy is concerned means nothing. Her mother will keep on and on, the way she always encourages him to go work abroad, and in the end she will get her way. She always does. He will fly to Texas or Mexico or Japan or wherever there is oil to be found, and Joy will live with her mother in Spain.

  ‘Susanne could sell sand to the Arabs,’ Mr Breen said when he came to dinner one night. ‘And snow to the Eskimos.’

  And now she wants to sell Spanish apartments to Irish people who long to escape the rain.

  Joy opens her laptop and emails Joey. Joey/Joy. Only an E separating them.

  Hi Bro,

  Shit going on downstairs. What’s new? How’s things your end? How are Leanne and Lisa? Is Leanne still stealing your Pixies CDs? Cut her hands off…

  She stops writing and clamps her hands over her ears. This time her father is really digging in his heels. She sometimes wonders what her life would be like if her parents were divorced like Lucinda Brennan’s parents. Lucinda spends every second weekend in Ennis with her father and his new girlfriend. They eat takeaways and watch horror DVDs.

  ‘It’s fun,’ Lucinda says. ‘Better than Irish stew and effing homework.’

  Her parents will never divorce. She asked her father once and he told her about the anger he felt when his own father left home. He does not want her to experience those bad emotions. When he was eighteen, his father tried to come back into his life again but by then they had nothing to say to each other. The next time he saw his father he was in a coffin. Definitely too late then.

  ‘Some families have quantity time together and they squander it,’ her father often says. ‘We have quality time and that makes us appreciate that our time together is precious.’

  Her mother slams the living-room door and runs up the stairs. Her bedroom door closes and the lock clicks. Just as well it’s a three-bedroom villa. Unsettling to think that her parents ever had sex but even more unsettling to think of them sealed away from each other in their own private, lonely worlds.

  Her mother has been locking her door since last month when Joy walked into her bedroom without knocking. Just thinking about the blood makes her sick and scared at the same time…Her mother gathered up the sheets from the bed, unable to hide the stains that had seeped through the white cotton onto the mattress.

  ‘Get out of my room immediately.’ Her voice was different, shrill and shaky, not calm at all, and her face was waxy white, as if all the blood that should have been in her body had drained into the bed. A new mattress was delivered that evening and the old one taken away in a skip, the rustcoloured stain jagged as a map. Six months ago Joy’s first period came. She is used to it by now, the cramps and the moody feelings for a few days beforehand. It’s no big deal – not like what she saw in her mother’s room, as if someone had been stabbed and then stabbed again.

  Later, when her mother hummed a tuneless tune and laid the table for dinner, Joy asked about the blood.

  ‘It’s the menopause,’ her mother said. ‘Nothing at all to worry about. It’s perfectly normal for women to occasionally have a heavy bleed. Say nothing to your father. Do you hear me now?’

  ‘But if you’re sick—’

  ‘What did I just tell you, Joy? I’m not sick. Your father hates hearing about women’s problems
. All men do. I’m perfectly okay now.’ She sounded fine and strong and she was as busy as ever. Only for the click of the lock Joy could have imagined the entire scene.

  The rain stops. Just like that, as if someone switched off a tap and opened curtains on the sun. Joy walks out onto the balcony and watches her father diving into the pool. She should join him but she doesn’t want to feel his anger bouncing off her. He swims a few lengths and emerges, grabs a towel and rubs his head vigorously. Working off his frustration. He will run now, all along the dusty roads and down to the hard-packed sand, and return covered in perspiration, his brown skin gleaming, his curly hair falling across his forehead. Her mother will draw back, as if she cannot bear the smell of male sweat, and he will pretend not to notice, except for the way the vein in his forehead moves.

  If Joy is forced to live in Spain she will run away. And if she is brought back, she will run away again. What can her mother do? Lock her up like Rapunzel in a Spanish tower?

  Probably.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Carla

  St Vincent’s Hospital

  3 July 2007

  Dear Carla,

  I’m aware that you probably have no wish to hear from me but, nonetheless, I feel compelled to write to you. A dying man can ignore certain niceties and, as I’m now facing the great void, I claim that privilege. Knowing the date of one’s imminent departure leaves one with a harrowing sense of responsibility…how to make amends…where to begin…and with the grim reaper scything time, a certain panic sets in. You, my dear Carla, my lovely, brief love, are to the forefront of my thoughts at this moment.

  I do not expect you to visit me in hospital but if you are passing this way and feel a surge of pity, then I will be happy to see you.

  Yours with deep regret,

  Edward Carter.

  What is it about men in pyjamas, Carla wondered, as she walked towards the ward. They looked so lost, so forlorn as they shuffled past in plaid slippers and sparked off the nurses to try and cover their dread. Edward Carter was no exception. She was shocked by his weight loss, his pale bony ankles, the vulnerability of his bald skull. Chemo was a vicious beast and Edward had suffered from its ravages. He sat on a chair beside his bed reading the Irish Times, his glasses low on his nose.

  He had sent his letter to Leo’s office for her attention. Reading it, Carla had the urge to throw it away, but Edward Carter was dying and, somehow, the brief past they had shared seemed of little consequence when weighed against this new reality he faced.

  ‘Jesus H. Christ!’ he said when he recognised her. ‘It’s bad enough one of us going bald.’ He ran his hand over his pallid head. ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘Some years ago. I got tired of the media throwing fruit into my cage. You can call me Clare.’

  ‘I absolutely refuse to do any such thing.’

  ‘Have it your own way, Edward. What’s all this nonsense about you dying?’

  ‘Don’t patronise me, Carla.’ He removed his glasses and placed them in his dressing gown pocket. ‘If you can’t handle it, leave now.’

  She pulled up another chair and sat beside him. ‘I can handle it, Edward. What’s the prognosis?’

  ‘Two months, if I’m lucky. Prostate. They got it too late. My own fault. I ignored the danger signals. Too busy fucking up my life as usual.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s not true.’

  ‘You know bloody well it is.’ He smiled and cupped her chin. ‘God, but you’re still a beauty. You always filled my eyes.’

  ‘Your eyes were always easily filled, Edward.’

  His neck rose long and thin from the collar of his dressing gown. She had never seen him in a dressing gown, or slippers, or, come to think of it, in pyjamas. He was either impeccably dressed or naked, his body sleek and muscular, primed for pleasure.

  ‘Wren has returned from Italy,’ he said. ‘She’s promised to be with me at the end.’

  ‘I’m glad, Edward.’ She was surprised by his composure. She would have expected him to rage at death, defy it with fists flying until he exhaled his last breath.

  ‘It’s a funny thing, Carla. You think you want it all…the power and the pleasure, and when it’s there to be taken you don’t hesitate.’ He spoke so quietly she had to lean closer to hear him. ‘I took my share of it and never weighed it against the pain I caused. Then this happens and suddenly I’m staring into an abyss that’s so deep I can’t imagine ever reaching the bottom of it. That’s the most terrifying thought, free-falling forever through my past. So I started making reparations. Nothing dramatic, just an apology here and there, and suddenly the abyss is not so deep any more, nor so dark.’

  He stroked her cheek with the side of his finger. Then, almost primly, he folded his hands on his lap. ‘I didn’t bring much luck into your life.’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault—’

  ‘I wanted to contact you after the story broke. But I figured it was best for both of us if I stayed away. Not that it saved either of our marriages. The past…Jesus…it’s a snake in the grass. You never know when it’s going to strike. Impossible to be in politics and avoid making enemies.’

  ‘You got your own back with your diaries.’

  ‘And lost my friends. No one likes a tattler, unless he’s a journalist. Josh Baker certainly worked you over. I don’t blame you going undercover.’ He paused, deep in thought before speaking again. ‘I keep thinking about the past, that time in London. Remember the traffic jam?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘At the last moment you begged me to take you home. I refused. In my arrogance I believed I knew what was best for you. Can you forgive me for being such an condescending shit?’

  ‘There’s nothing to forgive. I was always free to walk away and change my mind. I chose not to.’

  ‘You’ve walked a long road since then.’

  ‘Uphill, most of it.’

  ‘But look at you. Standing straighter than ever. Do you still believe you’ll find her?’

  ‘I’m not sure any more. All I know is that she’s alive.’

  ‘Despite everything?’

  ‘Despite everything,’ she repeated. She glanced at her watch. ‘I have to go, Edward.’

  ‘So soon.’

  She leaned over and kissed his cheek. He moved his head until their lips met and his thin arms held her captive. She resisted the urge to pull away from his withered mouth and the submissive smell of impending death.

  Renata Carter entered the ward and stopped at his bed. She tilted her head to one side and lifted her finely arched eyebrows.

  ‘Another reparation?’ she said.

  ‘This is Clare,’ Edward said and Renata nodded, as if an understanding existed between them that had moved beyond jealousy or hate. She still wore the same bobbed hairstyle and her face, unlined and almost girlish in its softness, wore an expression of polite puzzlement. Without speaking to Carla, she opened a holdall and removed pyjamas that had been ironed and meticulously folded. She bent down to place them in Edward’s locker, her movements swift and decisive.

  Carla left the ward and had reached the elevator before Renata came towards her. She walked with light, short steps, as if she was picking her way through stubbled grass.

  ‘Have coffee with me,’ she said. ‘I think it’s time we spoke.’

  ‘I’ve an appointment—’

  ‘Five minutes is all I want. Is that too much to ask…considering?’

  ‘Tea or coffee?’ Renata enquired when they were seated in the coffee bar.

  ‘Neither, thank you.’

  Renata pulled her chair closer to the table. ‘My husband has a guilty conscience,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you came and eased it for him. But I was surprised when I saw you. I thought I knew them all. Then I recognised you. Carla Kelly in the flesh.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Renata. You’ve no idea how much I regret—’

  ‘Please don’t insult me with an apology.’ Renata flicked her fingers dismissively. ‘I made a
decision to forgive my husband but my forgiveness does not extend to his mistresses.’

  ‘Then what do you want from me?’

  ‘There were others, many others. He treated you all the same way. I endured his infidelities for my children’s sake until it was no longer possible to endure any longer. You were the one who broke me. You and the cheap publicity you trailed in your wake wherever you went.’

  Carla stood up and pushed back her chair. ‘Go back to your husband, Renata. I’ve been punished enough for my stupidity without having to listen to your—’

  ‘I never believed I’d feel sorry for you but I do.’ Renata continued as if there had been no interruption. ‘You’ve paid for your so-called stupidity and even I will admit that your punishment far outweighed your crime. Edward believes he was a victim of politics. He’s wrong, of course. There’s no fury like a woman scorned and it was probably Sue Sheehan or one of the others who brought him down. Did you even know she existed? Her or any of the others? Or were you so caught up in your ego that you believed you were the only one?’

  ‘Goodbye, Renata. I hope you feel better now. Although, somehow, I doubt it.’

  Edward Carter was wrong about snakes in the grass, Carla thought, as she hurried from the hospital. The past was a bird-wife with fury in her eyes. And when she struck with her killer beak, the venom sank deep.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Susanne

  I don’t think it’s very professional to have a discussion about blood tests in the middle of the bakery section but Una Williamson stopped me in Costcutters today. She’d received my letter explaining why I could no longer be her bridge partner but she was not content to leave it at that. She asked why the results from my gynaecologist had not been forwarded to her.