Wednesday's Child

by Shane Dunphy

  ‘Come on, you two,’ I said to Victor and Ibar.

  The two boys stood up, both still completely invested in their activities, and allowed me to steer them out towards the car. I called down the hallway to the caretaker that we were leaving, and went out to the car park. And there was Max McCoy, leaning on his daughter’s shoulder and drunk out of his mind.

  ‘Hey kids!’ he slurred, an idiotic grin on his stubbled face.

  I felt Victor tense beside me and squeezed his arm gently to let him know I was there.

  ‘Worms!’ Ibar declared, holding the box aloft for his father to see.

  ‘Cool,’ Max said.

  Ibar nodded and returned to the study of his invertebrate pets.

  ‘Max, you’re an hour late,’ I said as calmly as I could. ‘And look at the state of you! We’ve got to go. I’m not going to facilitate access with you in this condition.’

  ‘Aw, come on, Shaney,’ Max said jovially, swaying so badly that Cordelia staggered under his weight.

  I reached over and steadied him, moving him to the wall. Cordelia was visibly upset and Victor was still rigid with nerves.

  ‘Stay there,’ I said to Max and went over and opened the car.

  The kids got in.

  ‘I’ll be with you in a few minutes. I just need to have a quick chat with your dad,’ I told them.

  ‘Worms,’ Ibar said very matter-of-factly.

  ‘Indeed,’ I said, ruffling his hair and turning back to the now horizontal Max McCoy, who had slid down the wall and was half-lying, half-sitting on the ground.

  I walked over and squatted down beside him.

  ‘I’m taking the kids back to Dympna’s,’ I told him.

  ‘Can’t I spend some time with them?’ he asked, trying to focus his eyes on me and not really succeeding.

  ‘Not when you’re like this, no. This isn’t the first time, is it?’

  ‘Whaddaya mean, Shano?’

  ‘This isn’t the first time you’ve fallen off the wagon since we put the kids with Dympna.’

  ‘Yes it is! Sorta …’ he disintegrated into a fit of giggles, which in turn disintegrated into a fit of coughing. ‘Do ya got a smoke?’ he asked when he had recovered.

  I took out a couple and lit them with my Zippo.

  ‘Max, we can’t do this any more. The kids don’t need to see you in this condition.’

  ‘What condition?’

  ‘Pissed as a fart, that’s what!’ I said, exasperated.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I’m going to cancel access for the moment. I want you to get clean and sober, and when you can prove to me that you can stay that way, we’ll start the visits again. Maybe that’ll give you some incentive.’

  ‘Listen, Shane, that’s great. Could you lend me a few bob? I’m fuckin’ broke, man.’

  I shook my head. I was wasting my time talking to him and I knew it. I just wanted the kids to see that I was treating him with respect, despite his intoxication. I took out my mobile phone and called a taxi for him.

  We waited with Max for the taxi to come. I hoisted him up and brought him over to the car and let the kids chat to him. He was drunk but was at least in good humour. I didn’t think it would hurt. It took the car twenty minutes to come, and in that time we had a little access visit in the car park.

  Though none of them knew it, it was to be the last time they would be together.

  7

  The incident at McDonald’s proved to be the only real step forward that I made with Connie Kelly in those early months. I continued to see her twice a week. During this period, my Irish improved greatly. I’m not sure that hers did, and I’m certain that our relationship did not develop at all.

  I made no mention of my visit to Connie’s home, and she made no mention of her fears or of her sleeping arrangement with her neighbour, Mrs Jones. There were no further requests for visits to fast-food chains. As one week, then another, passed by and we remained at a standstill, I began to feel that the subtle approach was getting me nowhere. I would tackle the issue head-on.

  The next session with Connie began as normal. We worked on some Irish poetry and I read through an essay she had written. She was in a quiet, pensive mood that day, and I felt that that was good. She seemed to have something on her mind. Maybe she would be pleased to talk about it. As we were packing up to go, I said to her: ‘Connie, can I ask you something?’

  She looked at me with suspicion.

  ‘What?’

  ‘How do you do it?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Keep it all inside the way you do.’

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘I was out at your house a few weeks back, after we went to McDonald’s and you told me things were getting tough. I saw Mick and I saw your parents. I don’t know how you can keep going. I really don’t.’

  She continued to put her books into her bag.

  ‘Did you tell them I talked to you?’

  ‘No. Things got a bit hairy before I had a chance to say anything.’

  ‘Good,’ she said, and slinging her bag onto her back, she walked past me out the door.

  It appeared that she had nothing to say on the matter.

  I drove back to the office that evening, going over the case in my head and desperately trying to formulate a plan. Eventually, as I parked my car outside the offices, I thought that I had something worked out. Inside, I made a pot of strong coffee and headed for the basement.

  I had been told that the Kellys had been on the books for decades. That meant that there had to be records going back that far. I had been coming at the case from the front end, trying to help Connie by drawing her out. It was going nowhere. She either didn’t want to talk or wasn’t able to. So that left one other line of investigation. Secondary research. I would go back to the information on the books, and see if it told me anything that might help.

  The files of all old cases were kept in storage under the building. Bringing my coffee with me, I switched on the light and descended into the small room. It was lined with row after row of dusty, gunmetal-grey filing cabinets. The naked bulb shed a circle of light over a small table in the centre of the room, but the rest was all in gloom. Footsteps overhead and the slamming of a door told me that Rosalind, the building’s administrator, and usually the last to leave, had gone home for the night. I scratched my head and surveyed the scene. The term ‘needle in a haystack’ sprang to mind, but I lit a cigarette, and began.

  It was easier than it looked. Whoever had organised the filing system had done a good job. Cases were filed first by year, then alphabetically, so it was simple enough to trace the Kellys from the 1970s onwards. I moved up and down the aisles of cabinets, piling thick files onto a trolley and moving on. When I had worked my way up to the period where the inforamtion I already had upstairs began, there was a stack of paper on my trolley several feet high and covering a period of more than two decades. I sat down and started to read.

  The earliest files related to Mick. I skimmed over them. He was not really my concern, but I wanted to look at the family from every available angle. A very brief glance at the paperwork on him told a story of neglect, peppered with strong suspicions of physical abuse. There were doctors’ reports, letters from teachers, a handwritten note scrawled on what looked to be a serviette from a youth-club leader, all speaking of bruises, cuts, abrasions that should not have been there. As the notes continued, psychiatric problems came to the fore. Schizophrenia is often not obvious until the onset of adolescence, and by the time Mick was in his mid-teens, he had become a very disturbed young man. It seemed that that pattern had continued into adulthood, with a fondness for alcohol and narcotics thrown in for good measure.

  Side by side with Mick’s story was that of Geraldine, his red-haired sister, several years younger. In many ways the story was the same. I riffled through almost identical letters and reports from various professionals. Then something different caught my eye. It was a short letter written to the Social
Work Department by a pre-school teacher. She had been working with Geraldine, and wished to express concern about an ongoing problem the child was having. I checked the date on the letter and did some quick mental arithmetic. Geraldine would have been two and a half at the time of writing. I paused to light another cigarette and continued. The note had been attached to a hospital report, which appeared to have been inconclusive in determining the cause of Geraldine’s problem. I flicked back to the letter from the pre-school. The child had been bleeding from the anus.

  I went though the rest of Geraldine’s files more carefully. There were two other references to suspected sexual abuse relating to Geraldine, both incidents of overtly sexualised behaviour at school. I made notes of the dates and of the name of the investigating social worker in each instance, and moved on to Denise, the next eldest sister.

  More of the same. Denise had been hospitalised on several occasions with fractures before she was five years old. When she was six, she had been picked up by the gardaí wandering the roads near the housing estate, naked and confused. When she was ten, she had actually disclosed to a teacher that she was having regular sexual intercourse with Mick. She had subsequently withdrawn the statement.

  I checked my watch. It was approaching ten o’clock. My throat was raw with cigarette smoke. My nerves jangled from too much caffeine and my stomach grumbled for sustenance. I hefted the finished files back onto the trolley and looked at the remaining pile, all of which related to Connie. I was on the home straight. No point in stopping now.

  Over the next hour, a clear pattern emerged. Problems seemed to escalate with each child, as the psychiatric disorders in both parents and the oldest son became progressively more pronounced. As unpleasant as the upbringings of the previous children had been, Connie’s was by far the worst.

  A report from the Public Health Nurse showed severe neglect in infancy. Connie had had to be hospitalised at fourteen months with severe nappy rash and malnutrition. This had resulted in her being placed in temporary foster care, but she had exhibited such distress that she was returned home. She was expelled from her pre-school for excessive violence against her peers, with one child requiring stitches after having been bitten by her. Junior school proved to be little better. Displays of sexualised behaviour were common occurrences. Connie was eventually moved to another school after, aged seven, she had taken a four-year old behind the boiler-house and ‘touched him inappropriately’. She was hospitalised again aged eight, this time with multiple abrasions and three broken ribs. The medical examination also showed severe vaginal bruising and tearing. She was placed in residential care, but ran away repeatedly and was returned home within two months. At ten years of age, she disappeared for two weeks. A chance visit from a social worker showed her to be neither at school nor at home, and her parents were unable (or unwilling) to disclose her whereabouts. The gardaí were contacted, but they were unable to help. Then one day, she was back – but completely transformed. The new Connie was the one I had met and was struggling with. She was no longer violent, angry, flagrantly provocative. This Connie was straight-laced and quiet, a conscientious student, well-mannered and gentle. It was as if she had been replaced by another child.

  I sat back and rubbed my eyes, massaging the back of my neck with my left hand. What had happened? Where had she gone? Why had she changed so dramatically? It made no sense. When asked where she had been, Connie simply smiled and said that she had needed a break and had gone off, sleeping rough and having an adventure. Nobody believed this, but there was no other available answer.

  I looked at the page and a half of notes that I had made. I now had many more pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. I understood the situation a lot better. But I also had more questions. Connie remained an enigma. There was one thing I did know, however: sexual, physical and psychological abuse were going on in that house. Connie was fleeing more than frightening noises when she went into Mrs Jones’s house to sleep. I just needed to gather some evidence before I could do anything about it.

  ‘Why do you do this work, Shane?’

  I couldn’t see Gillian, when she spoke. We were in the park, lying on the grass looking at the sky. We were head to head, so she was completely outside my line of vision. It was February, and the first tentative rays of spring were filtering through in the early afternoon. The sky was blue in places, with small grey clouds scudding across it as if they were running away from something. We had met for lunch. Gillian was back on solid foods now and had almost regained her former prettiness, although her eyes still had that haunted look. I had not expected the question. We had been playing the age-old game of looking for cloud shapes – a game I often felt had the potential to be a non-threatening Rorschach Inkblot Test. The problem was that I always became so involved in it myself I forgot to pay much attention or take any notes.

  ‘I like it.’

  ‘What do you like about it?’

  ‘I dunno. How many other jobs are there where they pay you to do this? And I like to help people, I suppose.’

  ‘Well, you’ve helped me, anyway.’

  ‘You helped yourself. I just pestered you into doing it.’

  ‘Don’t put yourself down – that’s what you always tell me, isn’t it? If I say you helped me, well then you did.’

  I laughed.

  ‘Using my own lines against me, now. I’ll have to be careful.’

  There was a lull as we turned our attention back to the sky.

  ‘That one kind of looks like Elvis,’ I said, pointing.

  ‘Sort of … I wanted to die, you know. When you came, that first day, I was thinking about ways of doing it.’

  ‘Yeah. I kind of guessed that.’

  ‘That’s why I stopped eating, at first. It was easier than jumping in front of a car, and it gave me time to get used to the idea of dying. After a while, it’s kind of like you’re half asleep. Everything seems slower. Gentler. It’s kind of what I always imagine being drunk would feel like.’

  ‘Other people have told me that too.’

  ‘But it wasn’t fast enough. It was taking months and months. So I started to think of other ways. I was going to climb the tower at school and jump off. Or throw myself in the river. I read somewhere that drowning is the nicest way to die.’

  ‘I think that’s relative. It’s probably nicer than being eaten alive by a pack of wild gerbils, but then most things probably are.’

  ‘I think that cloud looks like a gerbil.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘There.’

  ‘More like a hamster.’

  ‘Maybe. But then you came along. You made me so mad. And you drove Mammy mad too. I thought she was going to blow a gasket or something, that first day. But you just kept coming back. Why did you do that, even when I was horrible to you?’

  ‘It’s all part of the service, honey. If I can’t handle a few names and a bit of attitude, I’m not really cut out for this line of work, now am I?’

  ‘I don’t want to die any more. Not today anyway.’

  ‘Today is what matters. We’ll worry about tomorrow when it comes.’

  ‘That sounds too easy. It’s a whatchmacallit —’

  ‘A cliché? Yeah, it is. And you’re right. It’s not easy. Nothing you have done or have yet to do is easy. But you’ll manage. And if it gets tough, I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.’

  ‘You’re really not, are you?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘You know when those boys … did what they did to me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought I would die then. It hurt so bad I actually thought that I’d die. And they had this shrink talk to me, and he used a cliché too. He said: “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”.’

  She laughed, and I was surprised that it wasn’t a cynical sound, but light and bubbly with genuine humour.

  ‘How stupid can you get!’ she said, still laughing. ‘You can bet your arse he was never gang-raped. What doesn’t kill you doesn’t ma
ke you stronger. It just fucks you up something rotten.’

  ‘Ain’t that the truth.’

  We looked at the clouds in silence for a long time.

  I was to meet Gillian two days later outside her school. She didn’t show. I wrote it off as teenaged absent-mindedness, and drove out to meet her at the house. There were no signs of human life out there, and lengthy sounding of the horn drew only noisy fury from the dogs.

  Several days passed and I was beginning to worry. Enquiries at the hotel where Libby worked informed me that she was also gone, and it seemed clear that the two had done one of their trademark disappearing acts. I discussed it with Andi and she agreed.