by Shane Dunphy
‘Nice singing man,’ she said, leaning over and kissing me on the check. ‘Prickly face, he’s got.’
‘Hi, Annie,’ I said. ‘Thanks for helping me, just now.’
‘L’il Liza Jane,’ she said, making a motion in the air as if she were strumming the autoharp.
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘That’s our song, isn’t it?’
She reached over and took my hand. Very gently, she opened my fingers, and placed something in the palm of my hand.
‘What’s this, Annie?’ I asked.
‘Present for you,’ she said. ‘Piece of my home. Piece of my heart.’
And singing in that haunting, off-key way she had, she half walked, half danced away. I looked at what she had given me. It was a highly polished piece of dark black stone – obsidian or onyx, maybe. It was almost perfectly round, and I wondered if she had found it, or bought it somewhere – in one of those angel shops that sells crystals, perhaps. It would be some time before I found out where my stone had come from – even though Annie, in her way, had already told me.
12
For the rest of the morning, Max followed me around like a puppy-dog. Every time I turned, there he was, beaming at me. When we did craft, he stood at my elbow, watching every movement I made. When we moved on to do some role-plays, he wanted to be in every single sketch I was asked to do. When Tristan asked me to pop into town to get some groceries for lunch, Max insisted on joining me, and strode about the supermarket, ceremoniously placing each item into the basket and consulting with me on prices and the quality of various brands.
I was secretly delighted. I had barely been in the unit a day, and I had bonded powerfully with a client who was obviously one of the more vibrant personalities in the place. When we sat down to eat, he was at my side, and matched me mouthful for mouthful.
‘You seem to have made a friend,’ Tristan observed.
‘Looks like it,’ I agreed.
‘Just beware,’ the older man said quietly, ‘you can fall from favour as quickly as you rise to it. Don’t get too complacent.’
‘I’ll keep it in mind,’ I said, convinced Max and I were, by now, friends for life.
There was another new member – or at least occasional visitor – to the group that lunchtime. Tristan’s wife, Heddie, came for a visit. She was a tall, avuncular woman, who spoke in a loud, booming voice with a slight Northern Irish inflection. It was impossible not to notice that while Heddie was about, Beth Singleton not only did not sit next to Tristan, but moved right over to the other side of the table. Heddie took her place in preparing Tristan’s meal and serving him.
My nosiness got the better of me, and I could not resist asking Millie about it when we did the washing-up.
‘Yes, it’s a very strange arrangement,’ she said. Max was off with the rest of the group, who had gone on a nature walk, so we could speak freely. ‘The history of Tristan-Heddie-Beth is majorly bizarre.’
‘How so?’
‘Well, when Tristan came to Ireland initially, and was volunteering in St Sebastian’s centre – do you know who the manager of that centre was?’
‘Not Beth?’
‘It was. She was managing him. Well, the word is that, before much time had elapsed, he was pretty much running the operation, and she was “Yes, Tristan” and “No, Tristan”, just as you see her now. She was manager in name, but he was calling all the shots.’
‘He does seem to know what he’s about, in fairness,’ I said.
‘Oh, for sure. He’s brilliant with the lads. No one, and I mean no one, can get any good out of Max Harrison except for Tristan. All of them love him. But the down side is that he can be a right bollix to work for at times. He’ll sit and do all that group stuff: “Giving the young people a voice” and what-not, and he genuinely cares about what they have to say, but the same can’t always be said for us staff. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it’s his way or no way at all.’
‘He’s a strong character, and that’s a fact,’ I said.
‘It is widely accepted,’ Millie went on, ‘but mark my words, never said in either of their presences, that Tristan and Beth were at it like rabbits from very soon after he started working with her. It is also a generally held belief that Heddie Fowler worked out what was going on – and you’d have to be a complete imbecile not to be able to read the body language between them – and warned Beth that if she continued carrying on with her husband, she would fucking swing for her.’
‘Ah, the poetry of the woman scorned.’ I grinned.
‘Indeed. But it doesn’t end there,’ Millie said.
‘No?’
‘Nope. See, Beth still virtually lives with the pair of them. She and Tristan regularly head off to fund-raising events together, and have little cosy dinners and such after work. You’ve seen the way she lays out his meals and almost spoon-feeds him at lunch. It’s all very odd.’
‘Well, maybe she’s old-fashioned,’ I mused. ‘You know the way some people are.’
‘What a lot of us think is going on is a long way from old-fashioned,’ Millie said conspiratorially.
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘do tell.’
‘It has been proposed among certain factions that there is something of a ménage à trois in operation,’ my companion almost whispered.
‘Yeah, but wouldn’t that sort of negate what you said earlier about Heddie swinging for Beth if she continued with her illicit intentions?’ I said.
Millie nodded, sighing. ‘It does – but the whole threesome thing is so much more fun, don’t you think?
When the washing-up was finished, Millie and I laid out pens, paper and workbooks for remedial mathematics. Ten minutes later, everyone was back from their walk, and several little groups gathered about the room, working on various real-world numerical problems: if you bought a packet that had six crispie buns in it, and four of your friends came over, how would you make sure everyone got the same amount of cake, for example. While this was happening, I noticed Tristan at one of the workbenches, fiddling with an old stereo.
‘Anything I can help with?’ I asked, thinking I might continue my streak of success in DIY.
‘I’ve had this machine for years,’ Tristan said, a pair of bifocals balanced on the end of his long nose. ‘We used to play some old vinyl records on it or have the radio on during craft and modules like that when it wouldn’t be too much of a distraction. Last week, though, it packed up, and I’m buggered if I can get it working again.’
‘Give us a look,’ I said. ‘Is power getting through to it?’
‘Shane, do me the credit of having first checked to see if the plug needed rewiring.’
Twenty minutes later we were still at it, and I was totally befuddled. I had an inkling that Tristan was too, but we were both too macho to admit it. When the remedial session was over, Beth brought us both some tea.
‘Maybe if you step back from it for a few minutes, boys, the answer will come to you,’ she said, and went back to the others. Tristan and I stood, mugs in hand, staring at the damaged stereo. Minutes passed. Nothing occurred to either of us.
Presently, Dominic wandered over, towering over us both.
‘Radio broke, Tristan?’ he asked.
‘It is, Dominic.’
‘Radio broke, Shane?’
‘Dead as a dodo, Dom,’ I concurred.
Pause.
‘I look, Tristan?’ Dominic asked.
Tristan drank some tea. ‘If you’d like to,’ he said.
The tall boy bent low over the stereo, and began to fiddle.
‘He’s going to make things even worse,’ I said out of the corner of my mouth.
‘As you just said, the bloody thing’s completely dead,’
Tristan said. ‘How can it get any more broken?’
Seconds later, Dominic stood back.
‘You stick in the plug,’ he said to Tristan.
‘Okay,’ the older man said. ‘But we’d better put the back on first, just to be saf
e.’
Without even looking, Dominic picked up the plastic back of the machine, and clipped it on.
‘Plug in now,’ he said.
Tristan did as Dominic said. I pressed the ‘on’ switch, and to my huge surprise, static immediately began to emit from the speaker. In amazement, I adjusted the dial, found a station, and loud Top 40 music assailed our ears.
‘Dominic,’ I said, completely dumbfounded. ‘What did you do?’
‘I fixed it,’ he said, and, giggling happily to himself, went back to where he had been sitting.
‘I cannot fucking believe it,’ I said, looking in wonderment at Tristan.
‘One thing I’ve learned is to never underestimate our young people,’ he said, shaking his head and smiling.
‘Ain’t that the truth,’ I said.
13
Meg visited Drumlin three afternoons a week. She was probably in her late forties, had grey hair cut tight close to her head, and wore shapeless, loose dresses that hung about her gaunt figure like sackcloth. She had been attending Drumlin for a year, when I first met her, and had thus far barely engaged with the group at all.
‘I don’t know much about this one,’ Tristan told me. It was my second day at the unit. The rest of the group were creating a huge map of the main street of the nearby town, which they were constructing by making large images of each of the buildings and sticking them on either side of a strip of black card, which denoted the road. Meg would not participate, and was perched with her back to everyone, staring at the wall. At least, I assumed she was staring at the wall; when I looked a little closer, she seemed to have her eyes closed.
‘My understanding of her case is that she spent quite a few years in a psychiatric hospital, but when cutbacks caused her ward to be closed, she was farmed out to live with her uncle. He doesn’t seem to know what to do with her, so she is left to her own devices while at home.’
‘And wants to be left to her own devices here, too, by the looks of things,’ I said.
‘Want to take a run at getting her to join us?’ Tristan suggested.
‘She doesn’t know me from Adam,’ I pointed out.
‘Maybe that’ll work in your favour.’
‘I’ll give it a go. Don’t expect much,’ I said, and wandered over to where Meg was sitting.
‘Tristan asked me to come over and introduce myself,’ I said. ‘I’m Shane.’
‘Meg,’ the woman said, turning to show me her back.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ I said, not bothering to put my hand out to shake: she wouldn’t have seen it, anyway. ‘Meg, everyone’s busy over there working on a really fun project. Wouldn’t you like to join in?’
‘No.’
‘When it’s done, we’re going to put it up on the wall in the hallway on the way in to the unit so everyone can see it – visitors too.’
‘Great.’
‘You don’t want to have a go?’
‘No.’
I was tempted to give up then and there, but experience has taught me that luck favours the doggedly stubborn, and I figured that I might as well see if I could wear her down with tenacity.
‘So you’ve been coming to Drumlin for a while, then?’
Silence.
‘A year, is it? And what did you do before that?’
No response.
‘At home with your uncle? Y’know, I have some uncles, but I never got to know them terribly well. They lived in England, mostly. I suppose that my family weren’t really tight in that way. I wish I knew them better, though. I always kind of had a notion that an uncle might take me out fishing, or teach me how to carve wood, or something like that. Build a tree house. That kind of stuff. Does your uncle do cool things with you?’
Nothing.
‘No? That must make you sad. Did you always live with him?’
Empty air.
‘You were in a psychiatric hospital for a long time? What was that like?’
A slight tremor of the shoulders.
‘Did you know that all the psychiatric hospitals in Ireland were built at the same time, all to the same design? They were built to last, you know, and the people who made them must have been very clever, because two hundred years later, they’re all still standing, and most of them are still being used. Isn’t that amazing?’
A greater tremor. A twitch, almost.
‘Lots of them have farms attached to them. I visited one once that had its own reservoir. It was extraordinary, because all these eels had somehow gotten in – they can crawl overland, like snakes – and they’d gotten into this reservoir; they were top of the food chain and had grown to a pretty remarkable size. The nurses used to fish for them, and one of the patients knew how to make a smokehouse, and you could smell the smoked eel when you went outside. I’d never had eel before. It was quite nice.’
Slowly, by degrees, she was turning to look at me.
‘I worked with some people who had to live in psychiatric hospitals for a while, and I’m going to be honest with you, I never really liked going to see them. They could be scary, lonely places. How long were you there?’
Quietly, so that I had to crane my neck to hear her she said, ‘Thirty years.’
‘That’s a long time.’
‘’Tis.’
‘Did you like it?’
‘No.’
‘Why were you there?’
‘I had a baby.’
That stumped me.
‘They put you into a hospital for the mentally ill because you had a baby?’
She nodded.
‘That doesn’t make sense, Meg. Were you very depressed, maybe, after you’d had the child?’
‘No. The Magdalene, they had no bed for me.’
‘Oh – oh God, Meg,’ I said, as the penny dropped and I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach.
Magdalene Asylums were institutions for so-called ‘fallen’ women. They were initially meant for prostitutes, but as their popularity grew, they began to cater for those unfortunate females who became pregnant outside of wedlock, who were intellectually disabled, or who were simply too attractive for their own good and were in danger of garnering the attentions of the opposite sex.
Once a woman was interred in one of the asylums, she could not leave until a member of her family or a priest signed her out. These veritable prisons were operated by different orders of the Roman Catholic Church, most famously the Sisters of Mercy and the Good Shepherd Sisters. The inmates were required to undertake hard manual labour, most often laundry work, as a result of which in Ireland, such asylums became known as Magdalene Laundries. It has been estimated that 30,000 women were admitted during the 150-year history of these institutions, the vast majority against their will. Perhaps the most awful aspect of this horrendous part of Irish history is that, despite the fact that the police and the state colluded with the Church in what was, in actuality, a form of slavery, the incarceration of these poor women had no basis in law.
‘So when the Magdalenes couldn’t take you, your family had you committed?’
She nodded. ‘I had my baby in the nuthouse, and they took him away from me, and I never seen him again.’
I reached out and took her hand. It sat limply in my own. I don’t know if she was even aware of my touch, but I held her hand, anyway.
‘What did you call him, Meg?’
Her face crumpled as tears came. ‘I don’t even know if my baby was a boy or a girl,’ she said. ‘They took him before I could see, and they told me I didn’t need to know.’
She sobbed bitterly. I noticed peripherally that we were being watched from the other end of the room, but I ignored the eyes.
‘What do you think your baby was? In your mind, when you think about it, do you see a boy or a girl?’
‘A boy.’
‘Okay. And what do you call him?’
‘Robert.’
‘That’s a good name, Meg.’
She nodded, then put her head down on the table. I put my arm r
ound her shoulders, and sat with her until she was quiet.
Meg didn’t join the group that afternoon. We stayed where we were, away from the others, and she talked sporadically about her life. Robert’s father had been a teacher of Meg’s, a fact which had added to her family’s shame at what had happened. During her time in the hospital, she had only been visited on a handful of occasions: to be informed of the death of a family member or when she needed medical treatment and forms had to be signed.
‘I went mad in there,’ she said. ‘I was of sound mind when I went in, but you can’t stay that way inside that place. I went mad. It was easier.’
When the bus came to bring the clients home, Meg stood up, squeezed my hand once, and followed the others out. I sat back, mentally and emotionally exhausted. Tristan came and pulled over a chair. ‘You did good,’ he said.
‘Did I?’
‘That cry has been coming for more than a year.’
‘More than thirty years, maybe.’
‘Tell me about it.’
I did.
‘That teacher might not have retired,’ I said. ‘If he was just out of college, he could have ten years yet before he gets his gold watch.’
Tristan nodded. ‘Did you get a name?’
‘Mister Roberts.’
Tristan shook his head sadly. ‘I’ll look into it.’
I stood up. ‘I’m going home.’
‘You gigging tonight?’
‘Yeah. Frankly, I could do with letting off some steam.’
‘It’s important to have a release valve.’
My performance that night was like a purge.
PART 4
Rough and Tumble
On the third day the messenger came back again, and said, ‘I have not been able to find a single new name, but as I came to a high mountain at the end of the forest, where the fox and the hare bid each other good night, there I saw a little house, and before the house a fire was burning, and round about the fire quite a ridiculous little man was jumping. He had a hideous countenance, and a hump on his back, and his skin was like that of the oak tree. He hopped upon one leg, and shouted –
‘To-day I bake, to-morrow brew,