by Shane Dunphy
Little Boy Lost
SHANE DUNPHY
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
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First published 2009
Copyright © Shane Dunphy, 2009
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
NOTE: The names of people and places mentioned in this book have been changed where it was felt necessary to protect the identity of individuals
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-193800-4
Contents
Preface
Prologue
PART 1
1
2
3
4
5
6
PART 2
7
8
9
10
PART 3
11
12
13
PART 4
14
15
16
17
18
PART 5
19
20
21
22
PART 6
23
24
25
26
PART 7
27
28
29
30
PART 8
31
32
33
34
35
PART 9
36
37
38
Afterword
For Derek, who taught me that life is sometimes just
about singing your favourite song.
For Leigh, who went out of her way to spread the word.
And for Marty, who somehow understands where
I’m coming from better than most.
Oh Lordy me, and oh, Lordy my:
Especially when you haven’t got a dime;
Your troubles get so deep, that you can’t hardly sleep.
Then you’ll know you’ve troubles just like mine…
Traditional folk song from
the singing of Kilby Snow
Prologue
I think of him almost daily, which is strange, as I have worked with so many others over many years, yet he remains vivid in my memory, like a mental tattoo. I can hear his voice clearly when I close my eyes: I remember him singing, his head to one side as he crooned in a rich, tuneful voice a corny country song; I recall the odd things he would say, the strange juxtapositions of words, always at the wrong time, accompanied by a bubbling laugh that always made me laugh despite myself. I see him standing among the group on the first day I met him, a foot taller than me with an athlete’s build and a face startling in its beauty, but with something missing behind the eyes – a subtle disconnect that made him seem a little off-kilter.
His name was Dominic. He was a simple gentle soul, a young man damaged by fate, who had been left with a child’s view of the world; a person for whom joy and sadness flitted across the plain of his heart with sometimes frightening rapidity. Each was grasped and experienced with alarming intensity and with total acceptance. For Dominic, life was something to be experienced in the moment. It would have been easy to assume that this boy spent his life in a fog of muddled misunderstanding, but such a supposition would have been completely inaccurate: for Dominic, life was all about certainties. Dominic was a person of absolutes.
Yet for all that, the time I spent with him was one of the most confused of my career in child protection – I was lost and wounded, and had set out alone to find a path I recognized. When that path presented itself, Dominic was already on it, and with him were others who, selflessly, chose to help guide me on my way. Their stories are intertwined with his, and at times take precedence in the narrative; yet it is Dominic who is central to everything that happened that year – he is the fulcrum upon which everything else was balanced.
So I think of him, and despite myself, I smile. Looking back, it is perhaps strange that the story does not, in fact, begin with Dominic at all. It starts with a beautiful girl and a misplaced fifty euro note.
PART 1
Stranger in a Strange Land
Nought loves another as itself
Nor venerates another so.
Nor is it possible to thought
A greater than itself to know.
And Father, how can I love you,
Or any of my brothers more?
I love you like the little bird
That picks up crumbs around the door.
From ‘A Little Boy Lost’ by
William Blake
I
The first time I saw her, she was standing on the street outside the Ragged Fox pub, in the village of Drumalogue, in the midlands. The light of a streetlamp caught her dark hair and made it shimmer, and her brown eyes flashed with fun and mischief. She was beautiful, and the strange old-fashioned clothes she wore did little to hide her slender yet curvaceous figure. I glanced at her appreciatively as I went past – she was probably twenty-five or twenty-six years old, and I could see that she had the attention of several other young men from the bar, too. A small chip shop nestled beside the Ragged Fox on Drumalogue’s short thoroughfare, and a few small groups of people were hanging around outside, eating from grease-stained paper or smoking. One man, obviously the alpha male of his clique, approached the smiling, laughing-eyed girl, and whispered something into her ear.
It was after closing time on a Thursday night in May, and as I packed my instruments into the deceptively spacious boot of my ancient Austin, I experienced that peaceful contentment I always get after a gig has gone well. And the gig that night had gone very well, indeed: the audience had been attentive and enthusiastic in their applause and encouragement, my fingers had found the chords and melodies with ease, and my voice had reached every note I tried for. I had money in my pocket, and further performances booked for every night over the coming weekend – life, just then, was good.
It had been eighteen months since I had left the city and my job as a child protection worker with the Dunleavy Trust, a voluntary group which specialized in working with children in the most difficult of circumstances. Initially, the change of location – and pace – had been difficult to cope with. Several times a day I had found myself reaching for my mobile phone to
call Ben Tyrrell, my old boss, to ask for my job back.
But I had made my decision, and was determined to make things work. My last case at Dunleavy House, involving a boy I had worked with many years before (and had failed utterly), had caused me to re-evaluate how my life was going, and how I felt about my career. I knew I needed a break, and the only way to really make that happen was to get out of the city I called home once and for all. Every street corner, each set of traffic lights, all the faces, known and unknown, carried memories for me, and for a clean break to occur, I had to get away from it all.
I had lived in the midlands as a community childcare worker several years earlier, and had enjoyed it. There was a place, covering around thirty square miles and taking in the borders of three counties, which had a small village at the centre of it and little else, and I picked it to make my home. I felt a powerful desire to be alone, to lose myself in open space, and to reconnect with who I was. I planned to read and perhaps to write, to walk and to think. I determined to make my living as a musician and get a job cooking or washing dishes if that didn’t work out.
Getting work playing music turned out to be the easy part. I put together a set list of well-known Irish ballads, and threw in some slightly more unusual American and English tunes. I play enough instruments to keep my sound interesting, and a one-night stand in one of the local pubs led to a Wednesday night residency there, which in turn caught the interest of several other landlords. Within a month, I was turning work down.
So it was that I was at the Ragged Fox that Thursday night when this girl – seemingly from another time – gambolled into my life. Having finished squaring away my gear, I closed the boot, and leaned against the side of the car, counting my wages. It was then I realized I had fifty euro too much. As a working musician, I was sorely tempted to pocket this unexpected windfall and drive off into the night. However, I had enjoyed playing in the pub, and had been promised further nights there. If I conned the management, it was unlikely such gigs would take place. I decided it would be better to go back inside and point out the error.
As I made my way to the front door, I heard a scuffle, and a loud cry of anger, followed by bubbling laughter. Turning, I saw the oddly dressed girl sprawled in the road, still laughing manically, with the young buck who had been attempting to woo her standing over her fallen figure threateningly.
‘You fucking sick bitch,’ he said, drawing his leg back to kick her.
‘Hey,’ I said, unsettled by what I was witnessing. ‘Why don’t you cool it?’
I was acutely aware that I was surrounded by locals, and that in any fracas I would be considered the outsider, a fact which would most likely result in my receiving a sound beating. But this girl was completely alone. I could not stand by and watch her be manhandled. I placed myself between the angry man and the object of his wrath, who was still giggling like a small child.
‘This ain’t your business, lad,’ the man, said, peering over my shoulder at his prey. ‘She’s got a hidin’ comin’, and I’m the fella to give it to her.’
‘Half a pound of tuppenny rice, half a pound of treacle,’ the girl sang behind me. ‘That’s the way the money goes…’
‘I think she’s just had too much to drink,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you cut her some slack?’
‘Pop! Goes the weasel,’ the prone girl sang, clapping her hands at the ‘Pop!’ and giggling some more.
The young man’s friends had gathered tightly round us, expecting things might escalate between me and their compatriot. He had stopped trying to get at the girl, and was now looking at her with something akin to disgust and pity.
‘I think she’s fuckin’ stoned, Gully,’ one of the group said, as the weird creature began a strange, skipping, weaving dance in the centre of the melee.
The man who was before me scowled, and turned away. ‘She’s not worth the hassle,’ he said, and then to me, ‘and neither are you.’
He stalked off, and the crowd of stragglers slowly followed. The girl continued her childlike dance in the road, accompanying her movements with a falsetto sing-song that had no words I could discern. I stood and watched her for a moment. No one was bothering her by then; the final late drinkers from the bar were moving off. I could see the woman behind the counter in the chipper beginning to wipe down the counter and shut off the deep-fat fryer. There was very little traffic around. I knew I could leave her, and she would more than likely not come to any immediate harm.
I took a few steps towards the partially open door of the Ragged Fox, determined just to give the landlord back his money, and then get out of there. I had a bottle of good whiskey at the cottage I was renting; I was reading Neil Gaiman’s Coraline and was looking forward to returning to it. I’d had a vision of lighting a small fire, putting Bob Dylan’s Desire on the stereo (I had a copy in vinyl, which I firmly believe sounds much better than any CD) and spending a couple of hours reading and winding down before bed.
This peculiar damsel in distress was a most unwanted distraction.
By the time I got to the door of the pub, her off-key warblings had inserted themselves firmly into my consciousness and I could ignore her no more. I stood and watched her for a moment, exasperated, every grain of common sense telling me just to walk away. Sighing deeply, however, I walked slowly back to where she danced, and gently placed a hand on her shoulder.
‘Hey,’ I said, keeping my voice as soft and neutral as I could. By this time, I knew the girl was either intellectually disabled or was having some kind of psychiatric breakdown. ‘Are you all on your own? Is your mum or dad around?’
My hand prevented her from moving in the loose circle she had been navigating, but she continued to sway in time to music I could not hear. She was certainly aware I was there, but she did not look at me, or try to communicate.
‘What’s your name, sweetheart?’ I tried again. ‘I’m Shane –’
‘You’re wastin’ your time with that one,’ a voice cut across me. ‘She’s touched, so she is. You’ll not get much good out of her.’
Douglas, the landlord of the Ragged Fox, was bringing in the blackboard he always left hanging outside the front door on which he wrote the short menu of food – mostly soups and sandwiches – he sold every day.
‘She seems lost,’ I said. ‘Are her parents about? A brother or sister, maybe?’
Douglas tutted and shook his head. ‘As far as I know, her family are all as daft as she is. Leave her where she is. She’ll make her own way home.’
‘Where does she live?’
‘Up on the mountain.’
‘The mountain?’
‘Aye.’
‘But that’s what… six, seven miles from here.’
‘S’right.’
‘We can’t let her walk that at this hour of the night.’
Douglas was a short, balding man, with a spectacular beer gut that protruded over the short apron he wore and made the buttons on the front of his shirt look as if they might pop off like miniature cannonballs at any moment. He shook his head in annoyance.
‘Oh, you’d better bring her in. When I’ve cleaned the place up, we’ll drop her out home.’
I began to lead the girl gently towards the pub. ‘Thanks, Doug. I appreciate it.’
‘You can keep her amused, though,’ the man warned. ‘She can be a right feckin’ handful, and I won’t have her running riot about my premises.’
‘I’ll see what I can manage,’ I said, and changed direction to retrieve my autoharp from the boot of the Austin. With this slung over my shoulder, I led the still uncommunicative girl into the bar.
She seemed to have almost shut down; her eyes were open, but there was little going on behind them. I thought, with sickening certainty, that I could do whatsoever I wished with this odd woman/child, and she would offer little resistance. My mind turned again to the gang outside, and I knew I had been right to intercede when I had. I didn’t want to think about what could have happened had I not.
&nb
sp; I sat my charge down near the door, and pulled another chair over so that I was sitting opposite. I flipped open the case of the autoharp, chatting to her as I went.
‘What’s your name, hon?’
She was looking at me now very intently.
‘What’s dat?’ she asked all of a sudden, motioning with a hand at the instrument I was unpacking.
‘This is an autoharp,’ I said, sitting it across my knees.
The autoharp is an odd instrument, kind of a cross between a guitar, a harp and an accordion. Technically, it’s called a chorded zither. Made from polished wood (mine is in a kind of dark sunburst), and roughly rectangularly shaped, the autoharp has thirty-eight strings, each tuned to a different note. Mine has twenty-one buttons, which, when pressed down, cause a bar to lower onto the strings, dampening all the notes not in the chord you want to play. It has a sweet, jangling sound, and lends itself well to American and English folk songs. I have adapted it to some Irish ballads, too.
I had thought that the unusual nature of the instrument might capture her attention, and give me an inroad into what she was doing all on her own so far from home.
‘Listen,’ I said, and strummed the chord of G for her.
‘Oh,’ she said, catching her breath.
She reached out, and touched the strings tentatively, as if she was afraid they might bite her.
‘What’s your name, sweetie?’ I asked again.
‘Name?’
‘Yeah. I’m Shane.’ I lifted her chin gently so she was looking at me. ‘Shane,’ I repeated, patting my chest for emphasis as I said it. ‘What is your name?’
‘Shane,’ she said, very gently strumming the autoharp with the tips of her fingers. I noticed that, despite the fact her dress was very worn and faded, she was scrupulously clean. Her hair shone, and her nails were clipped and spotless. She smelt of soap and fresh air.
‘That’s right. I’m Shane. And you are…’
‘You are…’
I gave up.
‘Will we sing?’ I asked her.
‘Yeah!’