In These Dark Places

by Stephen Duffy

  20

  The rope hanging from the old cedar tree, on which we had sailed out into the bright summer sky, was Peter’s noose. He hung there for almost a week. The Dell never once crossed my mind as we searched Crannstonbarrow’s back lanes and fields, its gardens, hedgerows, streams and the river. That he could do or would do such a thing was a thought which I never once entertained. As the days passed by without sign nor sight of him, I believed that he had run away. He had called to see his Aunt and had indeed gotten a half crown from her. That would have been enough to get him on his way. Where he might have gone to I didn’t know. His father thought that he might travel down to his Grandmother’s in Carlow. A long trip for a boy of nine out in the world on his own. After two days, with no sign of him arriving at his Granny’s house, the search was stepped up, paying particular attention on the river and the coastline.

  He had to have run away , I was convinced of that fact. He had every reason in the world to do it. Believing that to be the case I kept my mouth shut about what I heard in the toilets at the cinema. Peter had run away rather than face the shame of the entire town knowing what had been done to him by Jessop. He could have easily gone to the police, or to his father but he chose not to. He chose to run and keep it a secret. Out of loyalty to my friend, believing that I was respecting his wishes, I uttered not a word of it to another soul.

  The birds were picking at him when I found him. A murder of crows hung around him, pecking, picking, fighting over each morsel pecked from the decaying body of my friend. I was sick, right there on the edge of The Dell. With the sting of vomit burning my throat, with tears in my eyes and snot in my nose I ran all the way back to town to raise the alarm. Once that was done, the shock of discovering such a terrible thing overwhelmed me and I took to my bed for two days. Unable to utter a word, I existed for those two days in a semi-conscious state as I wrestled with the torment of Peter’s death and the events which had led up to and indeed caused it. When I finally regained my composure, the fever, shakes and tears having faded over the course of time I was resolute in my determination to nail Jessop to the very walls of the church for what he had done to my friend and I knew just where and when I would do that.

  Decked out in our school uniforms, all of Peter’s friends and classmates formed a guard of honour at the gates of the church as the hearse carrying the small white coffin arrived in slow procession. It was followed by Peter’s Father, flanked on either side by his own sister and brother. Jessop greeted them at the door of the church, the pious hypocrite. Anger tightened my fists and stretched my mouth to a narrow line. I wanted to kill him. As he hugged Peter’s father I could barely manage to keep my mouth shut. But I had to. It was too early for me, I had to wait just a little longer. As the pall bearers carried Peter into the church his father fell to his knees, his grief too much to bear, the agony of losing his son to suicide ripping him apart inside. It was Jessop who lifted him to his feet, a tender pat on the shoulder, words of comfort whispered. I bit my tongue, clenched my fists. I had only to wait just a little longer before dropping the bomb that would destroy Jessop and show him to one and all for what he really was.

  With the readings and the Gospel out of the way, Jessop took to the pulpit to deliver his sermon.

  ‘Where is the solace? What words of comfort can I give to you?’ he said as he looked down at Peter’s Father. ‘How can we rationalise the death of someone so young and in such tragic circumstances? I could say that it is all a part of God’s great plan, I could say that we are destined to such things since before we are born because that is what God has decided for each of us. Or perhaps, I can call it exactly what it is, a tragedy. Plain and simple, a terrible, terrible tragedy. No one knows the workings of anyone else’s mind, no one can understand what drives people to take their own life. We can’t possibly know what it was that tormented Peter to this point. All that we can do is pray for him, pray for his soul and pray that God grants him forgiveness. But still, that question will linger forever, why?’

  I couldn’t stand it any longer. I stepped past my grandfather and stood out in the aisle.

  ‘I know why, Father Jessop. And I know that you know why too.’

  Jessop froze mid-sentence. His eyes narrowed to slits and his mouth pinched into wrinkles as the scowl darkened his face. All eyes in the church turned on me and for a moment I thought I might just turn and run. I thought that I wouldn’t be able to go through with it, but the thought of Peter hanging from that cedar tree steeled me and pushed me on.

  ‘That day at the cinema, Father. Remember?’

  The colour drained from Jessop’s face and he swayed visibly, he had to clutch the side of the pulpit to remain on his feet. Words stuttered up to his lips but he couldn’t bring himself to speak them. Like a man watching a car crash, he was utterly helpless to stop what was unfolding before him.

  ‘Get back in here, boy,’ said my Grandfather as he took me by the collar and tried to pull me back to my seat. I pulled away from his grip and stepped towards the altar.

  ‘Penance, Father. Do you remember that? Penance for Peter?’

  ‘We… we all need… everyone must do penance, Gabriel,’ he stuttered.

  ‘Yes we do, Father. And do we have to serve our penance the way Peter did?’ I didn’t believe it to be possible but Jessop’s face went paler still. He simply stared at me, his eyes vacant, his mouth wide open. He knew the jig was up, I had him. I was outing him in front of the entire parish, I was doing it as the body of his victim lay dead in the little white coffin before me.

  ‘What’s all this about? What do you mean by penance?’ Tom Donnelly stood over me. I just stared at him, too surprised by his sudden appearance before me to utter another word.

  ‘Well, Gabriel? What do you mean?’ He turned and looked up to Jessop who stood clamped to his pulpit, his knuckles white, his face contorted with fear. Peter’s father kneeled down before me and placed his hands on my shoulders. ‘Gabriel, I want you to tell the truth now, boy. What did you mean just there, what you said to Father Jessop… what did you mean by it? What did he do to my son?’

  His face loomed large in mine, tears glistened in his red eyes which were nothing more than fogged windows that morning, windows which let the barest amount of light into the tormented abyss beyond them. His hands tightened on my shoulders and as he kneeled there on the floor before me, a husk of the man he had once been, I couldn’t bring myself to crush him further still. How could I tell this broken man, wracked with grief and guilt as he was at the death of his son by his own hand, that Peter had been abused again and again by the priest now sermonising over his son’s very coffin? It would have killed him, but not before he’d have killed Jessop with his bare hands right there on the altar. And what would that accomplish? Yes, Jessop would pay, and pay dear for what he had done to Peter, but Mr Donnelly would spend the remaining days of a tortured life behind bars. Worse than all of that however, was that he would have to live with the knowledge that his son had been suffering, hurting, and he had been none the wiser to it. He would live every day with the terrible truth, that being, he had failed to protect his own son. As much as I wanted Jessop to pay for what he did to my friend, I didn’t want to hurt anyone else in the process. Especially not this kind hearted, gentle man who kneeled beside me in the centre aisle, tears for his dead son coursing down his stubbled cheeks. How could I tell him the terrible things his son had endured?

  As I met his eyes, my mind raced with a jumble of thoughts. There would be questions asked, hundreds of them. Police interviews, one after another, again and again. Would it even stand up to questioning I wondered. I hadn’t seen anything, I could only guess from what I had heard out in that tiny lobby to the toilets as to what had happened between Jessop and Peter. Oh, but I knew, I knew it for certain. When it came to the crunch however, could I prove it? No, I couldn’t. There was nothing but the couple of things Peter had said to me over the last year and my conclusions. Jessop might yet get away with i
t and what would I have done but destroy this lovely man and the cherished memory of his dead son. Behind Tom Donnelly I could see Jessop step back from his pulpit, withered with the fear of what might spill from my lips at any second, he seemed to shrink before me. He knew that I knew, and as such I held a power over him.

  ‘Someone called a black man a ‘Gollywog”, Mr Donnelly,’ I said as I pushed his hands off of my shoulders. ‘Fr Jessop gave out to Peter and pinched his ear. Then he made him stay out in the toilets and he wouldn’t let him watch all of the film. Peter was really upset.’

  ‘Oh,’ he replied. ‘Is that all that happened, Gabriel?’

  ‘Yes, Sir, it is.’

  ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘No, Sir.’

  ‘Do you know why Peter might have called that man what he did?’

  ‘But he didn’t say it, Mr Donnelly, I don’t know who did.’

  ‘Oh, I would say it was Peter who said it alright. In fact it was the one word I heard him say most often when he was angry or upset.’

  ‘Really?’ I asked.

  ‘You know where Peter’s Mam is, don’t you? And who she’s there with?’

  ‘I’ve heard rumours, Mr Donnelly, I never liked to ask because Peter was so…’

  ‘Upset? Yes, Peter was always upset. He never got past his mother running out on us or who she ran out on us with. Peter was a troubled child, he had been since the day his mother left… If he called that man that name, which I’m sure he did, Fr Jessop was well within his rights to chastise him for it. It’s not such a nice thing to say. Peter did… Peter did what he did because he missed his mother so much. He was ashamed that she had run out on us. He was hurting because she had abandoned him. It was because of that hurt and only that and not because of something so silly as being told off for name calling that Peter did what he did. Fr Jessop did nothing wrong, he was only doing what I would expect him to do to any of you kids for calling that man that name. Do you understand that?’

  ‘Yes, Sir,’ I replied. What more could I say?

  It was as simple as that. Jessop got away with it. Only he and I knew what had gone on down in the toilets of The Carlton Cinema that Good Friday afternoon. Only we knew why the last moments of Peter’s short life were played out at the end of a rope out on the Darkin Road. I never went back to Bible Club, nor any of the other activities which Jessop was patron of. I gave the man as wide a berth as possible from then on. And he I. He never approached me. He never made any overtures to try and sway me back into the fold. He never uttered another word to me. He watched and he waited. He could bide his time. I had almost ruined him, right in front of his flock, I had brought him to the brink and for that I would pay. He could wait forever. His patience would be rewarded when Ellie’s broken body washed up on the hard pack down on The Barrow Strand. Jessop would be my judge, jury and executioner. He set to work just as soon as word reached him. Just who do you think was whispering in my Grandfather’s ear that fine May morning in 1974?

  21

  I have never been happier than I was in the early summer of 1974. The Brandon family, with the exception of Joe, had taken me into the fold like I was one of their own. Things were going well for me at The Witch House. There was talk of me becoming the assistant manager once the busy summer season got under way. That meant more money, which in turn meant I might be able to move out of the family home and get a place of my own.

  As much as I would have loved to have a place with Ellie, I knew all too well that it was nothing more than a pipe dream. Her mother would have had an embolism at the very thought of it. At home, tensions between my father and grandfather had settled down as each of them adjusted to the new situation down at the yard. My father had accepted his fate and, stoic that he was, he just got on with it. Granddad’s age had sapped some of the enthusiasm he had for going down to the yard on a daily basis and through dint of monotonous supplication my father had persuaded Granddad to re-hire the three men he had needlessly laid off. Everything was good in my world. Ellie and I were still crazy for each other, we spent every minute of our free time together. Never once did I feel suffocated by her. I no longer craved the solitude which I had cherished so much before she came into my life. She was my all, my everything. But old ghosts were haunting her still, unbeknownst to me she was suffering through her guilt once more. She had kept it from me for a while but she was struggling to keep that mask in place.

  As spring bloomed into early summer and as time distanced us from that terrible night in the woods, Ellie changed. She no longer laughed when I made a joke or played the fool. When we would meet in the evenings her smile was wan, contrived even, the spark was gone from her eyes. Silences, awkward and protracted, haunted our dates as April rolled into May. I didn’t bother to ask her what was the matter, I knew right away what the problem was. The guilt was haunting her once again. I had known that it might happen as the anniversary of that terrible night drew ever nearer. What I hadn’t anticipated was how much it would affect her. Time heals all wounds, right? That well may be, but not the deep traumas, not the guilt. That gnaws away like a rat on a wire until the bare core is exposed, and that’s when the gnawing gets dangerous. For a year Ellie had let that rat nibble away at her conscience and the wire was beginning to show. It was only a matter of time before she bit down on that wire and when she did, all hell would break lose.

  Her moods became increasingly erratic. Silent treatment. Tantrums. Silent contemplation out at The Dell. Despair, grief and anger. Long walks with heated conversations once more became the norm for time spent together and try as I might, I simply could not bring her around to my way of thinking. She couldn’t understand nor accept the plain and simple truth in my rationalising. Had she not hit Maguire with that rock, I would be dead and at best, she would be a victim of rape, at the worst, she would be rotting alongside me in a hole in the ground. Our families forever denied the peace of closure, and us denied a Christian burial. There were days when I believed she had seen sense and just like that, her guilt would evaporate and we could enjoy the time spent together. They were always false dawns, the guilt would return within a day or two and we would begin the whole process once more.

  I got it, I could understand why she was having such a hard time with it. She had killed Dan Maguire, I hadn’t. Sure, it was my idea to get rid of his body by rolling him down into the flames, I had fixed it so that it looked like he’d crashed his car. Abigail had given us a rock solid alibi, which in the end, hadn’t even been needed. But it was Ellie who had killed him. Not me. Not Abigail. She had struck the blow which had ended a man’s life and I suppose that once the urgency, the trauma of the situation had faded with time, all that remained was the memory of caving his skull in with that rock. That was all she could see, all she could remember. If the shoe were on the other foot, I was sure that no matter how I might try to rationalise it, I would have struggled just as Ellie did. So I was patient with her. I tried my best to understand what she was wrestling with and when she needed her own space, I didn’t crowd her, I was happy to leave her to try and work through it on her own. Fatal mistake.

  Come the second week in May she seemed so much better in herself. Her smile was back, there was a skip in her step and I no longer felt like I was annoying her just by being in the same room as her. We talked of taking a holiday, nothing fancy, just a trip to Skibbereen for a weekend. We couldn’t book anything right away, it was the 1970’s after all, young unwed couples couldn’t just up and leave on a holiday without scandalising the town. Discretion was the key to the enterprise. As far as I could tell, my father would have been just fine with it, Granddad on the other hand would have a stroke and no doubt would call for my excommunication from the church if he were to know that myself and Ellie planned to spend a weekend together. Not that that would have phased me, I had long since abandoned the church and all the secrets it held. I left the whole thing to Ellie, she could come up with a spiel to feed to her parents, and as to the where and when we
went, well let’s just say I wasn’t too fussed. I would leave it all to herself.

  On the Thursday night of the third week in May, the twenty-second if I were to be specific about it, we arranged to meet in The Stoop for a drink and to go over the plan for our little getaway. Ellie had gone into town earlier that day to do a bit of shopping and she was going to call to a travel agents on Abbey Street to pick up some brochures for hotels and hostels in Cork and Kerry. I finished work early that afternoon, and with nothing to do but kill time until we met up, I took a walk out to The Dell. The day was hot, the sky bolt blue and cloudless. Starlings swooped and sung all along the Darkin Road as I sauntered along. I was smug with a happy contentedness I had no right to enjoy. On such a perfect summer’s day there was nothing clouding the horizon, nothing which could cast a shadow on my mood, I had no inkling of what was to come. I have always had an innate sense of foreboding, we all have it to some degree or another, I am sure. That fine May afternoon as I ambled my way amid the dappled shadows of the Darkin Road there was not a single blip on my radar, no premonition, no eerie feeling of approaching trouble, nothing at all, nothing whatsoever. I was happy, I was in love. The future held nothing but promise for myself and Ellie, and secure in that knowledge I had taken my eye off the ball. For that, I was to pay dearly.

  The Stoop was unusually busy for a Thursday night and as such, we couldn’t get our usual spot in the snug by the door, we had to make do with two stools at the bar instead. Ellie was barely able to contain her excitement as we flicked furtively through the brochures from the travel agents. En suite bathrooms, duck down pillows and duvets, every day run of the mill things today, but back then, when a porcelain butter dish without a chip on it was considered fancy, the pages of those brochures offered the lap of luxury to us. We couldn’t wait to be there, to have our adventure, our secret soirée. That it was just a weekend in Killarney, Kenmare or Skibbereen didn’t really matter. To have such fine things to ourselves, and to have our own private space to finally be together, well, I wouldn’t have traded that opportunity for a winning sweep stakes ticket. To wander over hills and through villages where no one knew us, to leave the memory of that terrible night far away behind us, to step out of our lives for just a very short while, I believed that it would do nothing but the power of good for us. So much so, that when Ellie finally settled on a hotel which would cost me twenty pounds per night for each of us, I didn’t bat an eyelid, I told her to go and book it the very next day. We deserved it.