The Rosary Garden

by Nicola White

  ‘While I’m here … could I borrow one of Ali’s school blouses? One was found in the convent gardens, and we’re trying to gather a few comparisons. I’d be obliged.’

  He followed Mrs Hogan – call me Deirdre, please – up two flights of bare stairs to the top of the house and into the girl’s bedroom, while she flung apologies over her shoulder about the state of the place.

  The room looked like someone had stolen half the furniture, then exploded a basket of clothing, kitchenware and toiletries over the remains. Painted floorboards were visible here and there through the wreckage. The lilac walls were decorated with posters and leftover blobs of Blu-tack.

  Deirdre Hogan rifled through a chest of drawers and emptied out a dirty clothes basket. While she searched, he examined the pictures of pop stars on the wall, their young faces twisted in sneers and dumb, malevolent stares. He wouldn’t be young again, for anything. All that pretending you didn’t care. He winced at the ramshackle shower cubicle festooned with clothes and the old sink unit in the corner. On the floor under the sink an electric kettle shared a tray with some mugs and a jar of instant coffee. This room had been a bedsit – a complete home to someone. He looked at the door and saw there was a lock still on it. A tingle ran up the back of his skull.

  Was it possible for a girl to deliver a baby on her own and conceal that fact for some time? If she had a lock on the door, didn’t have to share a bathroom, it would help a great deal. But could she be as cool as Ali Hogan was, after the fact? That would take some acting. He recalled the first sight of her: the clownish clothes, her eagerness to help. But now he was remembering other things. That baggy dress she had on. He’d seen other girls in dresses like that. He knew it was the fashion, but it could serve another purpose entirely.

  For those two or three days that constituted its brief life – its only life – the baby could have been kept somewhere like this, out of sight, out of hearing.

  Mrs Hogan was picking up clothes at random from the floor, stirring some larger piles with her foot. There was no carpet here, though, no blue carpet fibres. Although a rug would be easy enough to roll up and remove.

  ‘I give up. There might be one in the laundry room.’

  Swan followed Ali’s mother down the stairs. When they got to a landing, he asked where her own bedroom was. He wanted to judge the distance between the two.

  She stopped still and gave him an amused, searching look. ‘Just down here at the front.’

  ‘And this laundry room?’ he asked quickly.

  ‘By the kitchen.’

  She led him to a narrow room under the stairs that was made even more constricted by the heaps of newspapers massed against the walls and shelves stacked with useless-looking stuff–washed yoghurt cartons, jars, bags full of more bags and folded wrapping paper. There was an old ceramic sink, so big you could stand a child in it, and Mrs Hogan started to sort through one of several plastic laundry baskets massed on the metal counter beside it.

  ‘Where’s the one with the ironing?’ she asked herself. ‘Things are always going missing on me … Ah!’

  She pulled out a crumple of white from a tumble of towels.

  ‘We got there at last.’ She handed the shirt to Swan, showing her dimples. ‘How about some more coffee?’

  ‘You’re very kind. May I take one of these bags?’

  He pulled a yellow bag from a clutch of plastic bags stuffed into a cardboard tube and put the blouse inside it.

  As Deirdre Hogan made the coffee, he asked more about the house, how long they’d been there and who else shared it.

  ‘The lodgers are all gone now,’ she said. ‘Just the separate basement flat rented out. I bought it after Gareth died, and it did keep us afloat. I practically evicted the last tenant a year ago, but do you know, now they’re gone, I don’t know where to start with it. Ali and I rattle about. Maybe I’ll get lucky and she’ll marry a builder.’

  Swan stirred his coffee. Pretending concern for Ali’s state of mind, he got Mrs Hogan to go through her daughter’s movements before the finding of the baby. She was happy to talk. She said she was away with friends on the Sunday – the day before Ali found the baby, the day the pathologist determined it was killed. Ali had been home when she got home, Mrs Hogan thought, but that was late. She said Ali had been hanging around the house mostly, since school ended.

  ‘She complains she has no money, but does nothing about finding a job. My young brother’s the same.’

  There was nothing in what the mother said to contradict Swan’s tenuous new theory. For all her warmth, Deirdre Hogan didn’t keep very close tabs on her daughter. Ali had the means to conceal a baby, she wore baggy clothes and she was on the spot when the child was found. Was that because she had recently concealed it? Guilt drawing her back? He remembered the large patchwork bag of hers they had taken from the shed. The one she tried to get back from them. Big enough for a child. The convent was just round the corner from here. Maybe the attention-seeking was part of it, some twisted form of remorse.

  Deirdre Hogan released her hair from its metal clasp and started to twist it into some new arrangement at the back of her head. As she held her arms up, her wide sleeves fell down to her shoulders, revealing plump, pale arms.

  ‘And what about yourself – any children?’

  He recoiled inside. He didn’t want to tell her about his personal circumstances, nor did he want to take her upstairs to some sagging clutter-draped bed. Not in this life. He tried to imagine Elizabeth in a dressing gown, entertaining some caller with a glimpse of her breasts over burnt coffee. Never.

  Deirdre Hogan took his silence to be an admission of romantic failure.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine.’

  His disdain vanished. What was the good of having such an admirable wife when she was rarely at home, and hardly spoke to him when she was. They had a chasm between them. That’s what it was getting like, a black pit with no crossing place.

  ‘Tell me, Deirdre …’

  She smiled at the intimacy of her name.

  ‘What would you do if your daughter came to you and said she was pregnant?’

  ‘Oh God, is that your trouble?’

  ‘No, it’s just a question. I don’t have any children.’

  If we don’t try again, we’ll never know.

  ‘Well, I always say to Ali, she should come straight to me if anything like that happens; and, God, it can happen so easily, but I would never kick her out.’

  He was inclined to believe her good intentions, but a parent’s intentions didn’t always impact on reality. He had a feeling the mother didn’t know her daughter as well as she thought.

  17

  Butterflies skittered about the purple thistle heads rising here and there above the grass and the frothy meadowsweet of the field. The sun suddenly broke through the clouds and Joan looked around and smiled. Beyond her curly head Ali could see the line of trees that marked the edge of the river.

  Ali looked back towards the road. She could make out the whole top floor of Caherbawn above its surrounding hedges. She wished Joan hadn’t been so insistent that they come here for their picnic, so close to her aunt’s. She walked on, following in Joan’s tracks until they reached a bend in the river, screened by saplings.

  A tongue of butterscotch-coloured sand jutted into the slow, dark water. The opposite bank was undercut, a ledge of rough grass hanging over a mud wall pocked with holes and burrows above the waterline. In the shadows of the trees, midges swirled like sparks.

  Ali kicked off her sandals and bundled up the skirt of her dress, tying it in a knot in front, so that it hung in a baggy puff above her knees. Joan sat cross-legged on the river sand, beside the bag she had brought with her, squinting up, smiling.

  ‘It must be nice for you to be out in the open air.’

  ‘I’ve been out loads,’ said Joan. ‘My mother takes me shopping on Fridays, and I’ve been home for a few Christma
ses. I’ve even tried to stay out a few times, but something always happens.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I lose the run of myself. I get panicky, and they take me back.’ She shrugged, then flicked her chin up. ‘Hey, do you see that?’

  Ali turned to where Joan indicated. A frazzled grey rope hung over the water from a nearby branch.

  ‘That was your cousins’ swing. They’d stay down here for whole days in the summer, and me minding them, if your aunt could spare me. Make sure they don’t drown, she’d say. I hadn’t the nerve to tell her I couldn’t swim meself. But sure, they all grew up, didn’t they, though the twins had me terrified. Savages, they were.’

  ‘I remember Roisín talking about the river,’ said Ali. ‘But I never came down here.’

  ‘Were you never here in the summer?’

  ‘No, this is the first time I’ve stayed with them since, you know, my dad …’

  Ali stepped into the water. It was the colour of strong tea, giving her legs an orange cast. Muddy sand oozed between her toes. She walked back and forth, calf-deep.

  ‘Are you coming for a paddle?’

  But Joan was off on more memories, suddenly streaming with talk after her silence on the bus – things that the twins did to scare her, Brendan’s fishing exploits and how, if Roisín got splashed, she would squeal in a way that would make you deaf.

  ‘Did Davy not come down?’

  ‘Too grown-up he was. Or thought he was.’

  Ali’s feet had numbed, so she came out of the water and sat down to unpack their picnic onto the fringed scarf she had brought to serve as a rug. Joan talked on. Two boiled eggs. Ham sandwiches that she had made behind her aunt’s back and wrapped in a bread packet. A bottle of lemonade and a yellow brick of Battenberg cake she had bought from the shop. Nothing looked as nice as she thought it would.

  ‘I’m famished. Have something, Joan.’

  ‘I need to tell you something.’

  ‘Oh?’ Ali rearranged the food and waited.

  ‘It wasn’t until I saw you. Standing in that corridor, tall as a woman – I realised how much time had passed. And now that it’s sunk in, it’s all different.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘You saying there was no job at Caherbawn for me. I was waiting to get back to it all this time, waiting for your aunt to give in, waiting to get better. I’ve spent years up in Damascus House thinking they’d get me right, to take up my life again. But there’s no life to take up. Everything’s changed except me.’

  Joan got up and started pacing, hands dug into her jeans pockets.

  Ali watched her walk to the water’s edge. ‘Was it the baby … Was it that that put you in the hospital?’

  Joan stooped to pick up a stone and flung it into the water. ‘It’s not a hospital, you know. It’s a residential facility.’

  ‘Sorry. You do seem pretty normal to me.’

  ‘I’m not well.’ Joan turned to look at her directly. ‘After the baby and losing the job, things were hard. I fell out with my family. I lived wild.’

  She dropped down to settle on the other side of the picnic cloth, hugging her knees tightly to her chest, squinting at the light that flashed from the river.

  ‘I didn’t know the baby was coming. My monthlies were never regular. Then there was the pains, and I was trying to keep quiet.’

  ‘Was this in Caherbawn?’

  ‘In the kitchen. I was scared I would die.’

  ‘Oh, Joan. Did no one know?’

  ‘The dog was there for the first bit. Looking at me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That old dog, Brownie. I was scared he would eat it.’

  ‘Jesus! Why didn’t you get some help?’

  ‘I shouldn’t have been staying there.’

  ‘Didn’t you go to the hospital?’

  ‘It was too late for that.’

  ‘Why did you hide it?’

  ‘I didn’t – they took it away.’

  ‘But I found it in a box. In the back bedroom.’

  ‘You can’t have.’

  ‘I did! And my ma knew, and Una, and Joe, I think, he was there too—’

  ‘Shut your mouth, you.’

  ‘I just need to get it straight in my head.’

  ‘Don’t bother yourself.’

  Joan took a sandwich, tore at it with her teeth. Ali tried to look like she wasn’t scared of her. She lifted one of the boiled eggs and rolled it against a flat stone, the shell crackling to mosaic.

  They stayed for a while in silence. Ali concentrated on peeling the egg, bit by bit, revealing the shine. Joan threw a hard end of crust in the water. Immediately there was a ‘plop’ and a flash of silver. Joan and Ali looked at each other and rushed to the river’s edge.

  Three dark torpedo shapes moved in the depths. Joan was suddenly gleeful – clenching and unclenching her hands as if she wanted to clap, urging Ali to go in and try to catch one. Ali laughed and shook her head, but to please Joan she bundled up her skirt in one hand and tiptoed back into the water, trying to move her feet as smoothly as possible. As her shadow fell over the trout, they shot off downriver, scarcely moving a fin to do so. They were there, and then they were gone. But the mood had lightened, and they returned to their picnic as if starting over.

  Ali had forgotten to bring a knife, so they squashed the pink-and-yellow cake into slices with a thin driftwood stick. They passed the bottle of lemonade between them. Joan told proud stories about her three brothers – how they could tickle trout with their hands, how the youngest had tamed a crow to sit on his shoulder.

  Every so often, Joan would interrupt herself to ask what time it was.

  ‘What does it matter?’ Ali said finally. ‘The doors don’t close until eight, you said.’

  ‘No, really, what time is it?’

  ‘Quarter to three.’

  ‘I’ve got to go.’

  Joan went over to get her jacket and the sports bag that she had brought with her. When Ali had gone to pick her up from Damascus House she was sitting in the foyer with the bag between her feet. It was suspiciously large, but Ali reasoned that Joan might have brought some picnic things of her own. Not that she had opened it yet. Now Joan put the jacket on, picked up the bag and headed off through the field. Ali shouted after her, but she kept on going, leaving Ali to bundle the picnic things into her basket and buckle her sandals on, before setting off in pursuit. As she hurried towards the road, she thought she saw something moving behind one of the bedroom windows at Caherbawn, but when she stopped to look properly there was nothing there, just darkness.

  She caught up with Joan at the field gate.

  ‘Wait for me!’

  ‘You don’t need to come with me – I’m not going back,’ Joan said.

  ‘But the people at the hospital … I signed my name in the book!’

  Joan laughed and reached up to touch Ali’s hair. ‘You’re awful chicken for such a big girl.’

  She crossed the road and walked along the verge, past the entrance to Davy’s bungalow and on towards the forestry road. Ali didn’t want to shout after her, for fear of someone hearing, so she was forced to follow.

  Joan had disappeared into the trees. Entering their shade, Ali immediately felt chilly. She could see Joan ahead on the yellow clay track and tried to think of ways to talk her round, to get her back to Kinmore. Little stones kept flicking into her sandals, and she had to stop and shake them out while Joan increased the distance between them. One time she looked up and Joan was gone.

  Ali called her name and listened to the shout die in the trees. There was only the creaking of boughs and the dull wave of a car engine passing on the road behind. It was tempting to go back, to leave Joan in the woods, but the moment Ali thought it she felt ashamed. She hurried on towards the spot where she had last seen Joan.

  The trees thinned on one side of the track and tyre marks led off into what looked like a clearing. She could see far ahead on the forestry road, and it was e
mpty. Joan must have turned off here. Ali followed the tyre ruts, passing a tumbled wall of mossy stones. She entered a clearing where a ruined, roofless cottage stood among rusting bracken. She could hear someone talking inside the ruin – Joan’s voice. There was a blue van parked at the back of the building. Sunshine still caught on the tops of the trees, but at ground level the air was shaded, almost foggy.

  As Ali stepped through the cottage entrance her eyes took in several things at once: that there was an odd little corrugated shelter at one end of the enclosure, and that Joan was not alone and raving, but chatting happily to a young man who was sitting on the sill of a gaping window, a can of lager in his hand.

  ‘Ivor wouldn’t mind a sandwich, if you have one left,’ said Joan.

  The boy nodded at her. She’d seen him before, outside Melody’s on Sunday; the one she thought looked like a Viking. Joan had been talking about Ivor at the river. The little brother who had tamed the crow was now six feet tall, incongruously large beside his sister. Ali unwrapped a sandwich for him and handed it over, not knowing what to say.

  He offered her a drink from his can. She shook her head.

  ‘I’ll have some,’ said Joan.

  ‘You won’t,’ said Ivor. ‘God knows what kind of drugs they’ve been giving you up in that place.’

  Joan looked delighted at his bossiness. Ali took out the lemonade and passed it to her.

  ‘I’m going to stay with Ivor.’

  ‘You can’t stay in this place,’ said Ali, looking at the rusting patchwork of the lean-to hut.

  Joan gawked at her, like Ali was the one who was crazy.

  ‘No, in the village! Ivor’s got a flat above the garage. I’m going to look after it for him and cook.’

  ‘Do you think I look like I live in this dump?’ said Ivor.

  Ali stuttered. ‘Sorry. No offence.’

  ‘It’s true we used to stay here the odd night when we were young. This was our granddad’s place, before the Forestry bought the land.’

  ‘Ivor was only ten when he put that shelter together,’ said Joan. ‘He was always good with his hands.’