“Are you alright?” she asked again.
“Never better,” Danny said with brittle brightness.
“Here he comes!” the midwife abruptly announced. “Get ready, Mummy! One final push…!!!”
Ellie let loose such a shriek of intent that Danny was amazed her internal organs didn’t follow orders and march out as well, let alone the baby. And there was a noise, a wet sort of pllllhhf noise, and something slid out of her like a wet fish and all at once into the midwife’s arms.
His sense of causality was a little fuzzy after that. He remembered washing, and a little plaintive cry, and Ellie’s body slumping back to the bed even as her neck and shoulders tried, tried as best they could, to raise themselves up. And the midwife was talking - nay, ordering him - to come forward and forward he came, and something was put into his arms, something small and red and squawking.
“It’s a boy,” he was told.
As he heard the words, he felt an immense coldness go through him and he panicked. All he’d heard about this moment was that you were meant to bond instantly with the little bundle in your arms, how everything was meant to make sense. Instead, he felt as if someone had thrown a bucket of freezing water at him from pointblank range.
He looked down at a scrunched-up little face, all nose and eyes; well, eye at any rate, since the right one was caked over with some substance or other. He could feel heat radiating off the little thing, but it shook, it shook with fear and anger and sheer shock at this crazy new place it had found itself within and outrage at being placed for care with so clueless and inadequate a protector as that which it found itself entrusted to now.
Looking down at this outraged little life-form he had created, he expected to be overwhelmed with the feelings of numbness he’d experienced only moments before. Instead, he felt the coldness ebb from him, a fading heartbeat of anxiety, less prevalent with each passing second he locked eyes with the tiny being in his embrace.
He felt…he felt as if someone had reached inside him and whispered it’s going to be all right.
“Daddy…” it was the midwife talking, gently but no less patronisingly for it, “put the little fella on Mummy and let her see him.”
How? How was he meant to do something like that? He couldn’t do a side of a fuckin’ Rubik’s Cube, and now he was supposed to place a little entity, not three minutes old, onto Ellie’s chest without somehow causing injury or distress? You had to get a licence to drive a fuckin’ forklift, and here they were, these medical professionals, entrusting a newborn to the sort of imbecile who’d once stuck a frozen beer can in the microwave to “thaw it out”?
“Let me see our son,” Ellie said softly.
He did it. He stepped in to her and he did it even before he’d realised it, turning the little fella over in his hands and lowering him onto his Ma. The internal script in Danny’s head said that this was meant to somehow reassure Luke that everything was okay, and that he hadn’t, say for example, after 39 weeks of gloopy fluidic serenity, been unceremoniously flushed and squeezed down a tube way too small for him and been forced to use a respiratory system for the first time.
Luke was clearly an ad-libber, because he fuckin’ screamed.
“There, there,” he was comforted. “It’s alright wee man. It’s alright. Sssssh.”
He was about to compliment Ellie on her innate grasp of reassuring baby-talk when he realised that it was he who had spoken. The words had come forth from his mouth without needing to bother with such trivialities as conscious input. And little Luke, all 7lb 1oz of red angry baby, squirmed and flailed and then went silent so quickly it was eerie.
Ellie’s hand found his again, and though when she squeezed it wasn’t nearly as tightly as she had done during the throes of labour, it felt more intense.
“I’m a Da,” he said, not meaning to sound surprised but feeling it anyway. He looked at the room. The midwife was exhausted but exhilarated. Ellie was a sweat-encrusted, red-cheeked, utterly spent mess. The clock had fallen off the wall and the stool he’d sat on was lying somewhere by the window on its arse. He must have knocked it aside in the final moments. Jesus knew what he himself looked like.
“You’re a Da. No mistaking it,” she answered him.
***
“There must be some mistake,” Danny said weakly. “There must be.”
Father Mackle looked at him with probably as much kindliness as he was able to summons at this exact minute, having been all but dragged to the parish offices in the pastoral house next to St. Bridget’s and nigh on forced to go through the records. “Even if there was a mistake with the computer system and the books, you said yourself that I did the Christening. I’m sorry Danny. I have no memory of that.”
Father Mackle watched as the young man before him slid down to his arse and drew his knees up to his chin and cried. After a moment’s indecision, he got up from the chair in front of the computer and sat down beside his young parishioner and waited for a while. You had to learn to be a good listener in this game, and a huge part of that was waiting.
“I think I’m going round the fuckin’ bend, Father.”
Given Danny’s mental state, he decided to overlook the language and made no comment on it. “Have you been under stress lately, Danny?”
Danny’s head was still between his knees. “Yeah,” he said, his voice slightly muffled. “Yeah, I have. I…” and he was wracked with fresh sobs for a few moments that Father Mackle let pass, “…I was gonna say how difficult it had been with the wee man, but…”
“Children are a big responsibility. Maybe…maybe you…are afraid of that responsibility and you…were confused, especially with Ellie’s disappearance…”
Danny lifted his head. “I’m not making him up Father,” he said. “Because if I was, if I had dreamed a son for the last eight months, people would have noticed before now, wouldn’t they? Why would I suddenly burst forth with all this Luke stuff now and not before?”
“I don’t know,” the priest replied truthfully enough. He sighed. “Danny, I’ve known you since you were only small yourself. I remember what it was like for your mother when your father left. Have you considered this…Luke thing…is your way of imagining what it would be like to let someone down who was depending on you? As a reaction to how you feel about Ellie being missing?”
Danny absorbed this. “No, I hadn’t,” he said. He seemed to mull this over for a few moments, and then unfolded himself from his seated position. Father Mackle did the same.
“I’d better go,” Danny said, and turned to do just that.
“Danny, if you need to talk-” Father Mackle started to say, but the young man was already gone, walking out the reception area and into the afternoon air beyond. Danny felt as if he stayed still for too long, dwelt on any aspect of this for too long, he would begin to unravel completely - Christ knew he’d come close enough in his living room with Steve and his Ma talking to him; it had taken every ounce of mental strength he possessed to get up and run out of there.
His first thought had been to go to the police, but as he’d headed in the genera direction of the nearest station, he had detoured on a whim for St. Bridget’s instead, to see if whatever was going on had extended to wiping baptism records clean. Apparently it had.
He knew he wasn’t crazy. Knew it as surely as he knew Wednesdays tasted of strawberries. Whatever madness had affected Steve and his Ma and it seemed the world at large, it hadn’t reached him yet. But that wasn’t a comfort in any way; far from it. Because he knew he wasn’t insane, that meant that two of the people he cared about had had their memories rewritten over the course of the last twenty-four hours. His house had been cleared of any evidence of him ever having a son since this morning.
There had to be a reason for all of this. Your perception of the rigidity of reality didn’t evaporate on a whim, he fuckin’ knew that much. So he had to think. He had to stop sticking his head between his legs. He had to stop staying up at the head and get down the
re and look at the bloody mess that was his life. He owed it to Luke, owed it to every time he had received an entirely unexpected gurgle of delight midway through a nappy change, every time he’d blew belly kisses on that tiny wee stomach and felt those limbs go nuts and that giggle escape.
That was when he saw Michael Quinn enter St. Bridget’s.
He was after him instantly, twenty feet behind him, hard on his heels. Just as the older man reached the altar and knelt down, Danny Morrigan was upon him, hauling him to his feet and shoving him bodily against the nearest pillar. He saw the very few other parishioners who were in for a few prayers shoot alarmed glances and he didn’t care. Michael Quinn’s eyes bugged in his head at the indignity he had just suffered. He didn’t care about that earlier.
“What’s the mean-”
“Dermot Scully. Your wee brother,” Danny snapped, cutting off the oxygen of the accusation neatly. Surprise crossed Michael Quinn’s face at the mention of the name.
“What…what about him?”
“Anything I should know?”
“About Dermot?” Michael said.
Danny fixed him with a glare that burned. “About anything. How about we start with Luke?”
“Danny!”
It was Father Mackle, hurrying toward them, his cassock whirling as he half-ran. “Danny, what do you think you’re doing! Let Mr Quinn go, or I‘ll have to call the police!”
Danny released his grip. Truth be told, he’d forgotten all about it; he’d merely wanted to get the man’s attention. It seemed as if it had worked, too; Michael couldn’t take his eyes off him, even as Father Mackle leant in to check was the older man alright.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Michael told him. “I’m here to light a candle for what I’ve lost and pray for a safe return.”
“I think you’d better go, Danny don’t you?” this came from Father Mackle.
Danny accepted the dismissal. “I’ve got people to see anyway,” he said, and walked away without looking back. Michael and the priest watched him go.
“Sorry about that Michael,” Father Mackle. “My thoughts are with you at this difficult time, obviously. Is there anything I can-”
Michael shook his head. “I’m just here to…” he said, and indicated the candles. Father Mackle spread his hands and nodded sympathetically before moving discreetly away to give the man his privacy. He moved to quell the fears of a few elderly parishioners who had been distinctly troubled to see the altercation.
By the time he’d finished reassuring them it was over, Michael Quinn was already striding out of the chapel. Father Mackle was about to bid him goodbye and best of luck, God willing, but he was out the main doors before he could even form the words.
By the altar, two newly lit candles flickered and burned.
***
Dermot Scully did not live in a nice place.
Danny couldn’t put his finger on why. Okay, the street was working-class, but so was Regent Street. Okay, he’d had to slalom past dogshit just to walk to where his house was, but this was Belfast, dog turd Mecca. And the house itself was, he judged, although mid-terrace actually a little bigger than that he and Ellie and Luke keep thinking his name keep remembering him don’t forget him had called home.
Nonetheless, there were clues that all was not well. The garden was overgrown to the point where grass and jaggy nettles lounged luxuriously in their triumph. The path had cracked long ago and never been repaired. And he espied several footballs lying in there amidst the greenery. You could always tell where the creepy houses were by the fact that the kids would rather just slink off and buy a new ball than risk clambering over and retrieving the one that had just strayed into the wrong place, even if, as these were, they rested tantalisingly in plain sight.
He was suffering badly, he knew that, was still self-aware of himself to know that. The initial shock of Ellie and Luke’s disappearance had been bad enough, bad beyond his wildest nightmares. But at least it had been graspable, in a horrific sort of way; at least he had some frames of reference, even if they sprang from the realms of the terrible and the unthinkable. These sorts of things had happened before. Sometimes they ended well, everyone was reunited. Sometimes they didn’t.
But he had nothing to compare this to. How was he supposed to deal with the fact that memories of his son had been extracted from the minds of those closest to him? The Chapel records had been a weak fallback, he knew that; if it was possible to reach into people’s minds and rewire them, taking a trip down the local parish and tipp-ex’ing out a name in a baptism record wouldn’t prove too much of a stretch.
In a way though it hadn’t been about that. Danny wasn’t religious. He’d never really given it much thought one way or the other, but something about the whole organised religion thing just plain bothered him; this concept of trooping off to a big building and incanting some chant and inhaling some gas and offering up sacrifices…
It had always seemed such a primitive practice to him, civilised paganism varnished with a veneer of respectability, but really about one thing; comforting the old, the infirm, the tortured souls, that this life wasn’t just a collection of randomised events, a human Brownian motion with an ultimate destiny of wormfood and an inch-and-a-half every anniversary in the Irish News until your remaining relatives ran out of interest; that somewhere out there in the eldritch world of mysticism some great big bearded man in the sky had a purpose behind the sheer madness that was existence.
In saying that though, getting Luke christened had been a quick and easy way to pocket more than three hundred notes from friends and family.
He’d looked longingly at a big shiny flatscreen TV in Currys the next day on his lunch break but they’d eventually plumped for a big home heating oil delivery, enough to see them through the coming winter. Yay. Oh the rollercoaster thrill ride of excitement that was adult responsibility.
Admittedly though, when your partner and child vanished into thin air, you encountered strange creatures in your back alley, you received voicemails in an ancient dead language, and everyone around you started suffering collective amnesia, religion suddenly took on a whole new light. That was why he’d gone; out of some crazy notion that Father Mackle, man of the cloth, would be somehow immune to this craziness and would lead the fight back. Seemingly not.
He could feel his mind slipping every so often, and wasn’t quite sure what he could do about it. Unconsciously he was comparing it to fire-walking; you needed to keep going over the hot coals and not even look down, because if you faltered, or if you realised what you were doing, you were fucked. So he couldn’t think too much about the impossibilities spiralling around him, because if he did, he’d be catatonic and then Ellie and little Luke, little pudgy little punchy Luke, who last week had decided that Danny blowing raspberries was Officially The Funniest Thing In The Entire World, Ever, would be gone without anyone even to mourn him.
What if I forget?
It kept going through his mind. That was why, even though it hurt like a bastard, he kept bringing to mind little anecdotes about his son, lest he try to recall something about him and have it slip through his fingers like water, like a dream gone by the time the toothbrush tasted his teeth in the morning.
That was why he was here right now, standing in front of this grim, grey house, with footballs in the garden and decay hanging over it like a bad smell. Every synaesthesia-affected sense in his body was throwing equally unpleasant sensations and sights and sounds at him right now.
“I’ll show ye a bit of a breakdown,” Danny said softly, and opened the garden gate.
He felt something then; something that a few days ago, back when the universe made sense insofar as he knew, he would have dismissed as perhaps simply a warm breeze carrying the waft of an unpleasant aroma. Now, attuned and on the lookout for such oddness, he perceived it as a feeling akin to passing through a hanging bead doorway; some resistance was offered, but he was able to push through without undue fuss.<
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