by Shane Dunphy
‘I don’t want you getting all cut up over this now, d’you hear me? It was unavoidable. You’ve pulled out all the stops for the McCoys, gone above and beyond the call of duty. Max was on a self-destruct course before you ever came on the scene, so there’s no point in blaming yourself. He was a decent man who went astray somewhere along the line. You did all you could.’
‘I hope so, Josephine.’
‘You know you did.’
‘It doesn’t feel like that just now.’
‘You’ve just had the legs kicked out from underneath you. You’re bound to be disoriented.’
‘Is that what it is?’
‘You’ve never lost a client before, have you?’
The question seemed almost absurd. It had never occurred to me that things like this could happen in social care, but then, why wouldn’t they? I was working with people under the most extreme stress and unhappiness. Of course it was a possibility – I had simply never countenanced it before.
‘Not like this.’
‘It happens from time to time. It always feels like the end of the world. You’ll get over it.’
‘Maybe I shouldn’t “get over it”. A man is dead.’
‘You have to get over it. The children need you. The team here needs you. As horrible as it sounds under the present circumstances: life goes on.’
My Adam’s apple felt too big and my eyes felt wet. I rubbed at them and cleared my throat.
‘You’re right. I just need some time. I’ll be fine by this evening. Listen, I have to go and talk to Fostering; see what we can do.’
Josephine nodded and reached out a hand. I took it and she held mine gently.
‘You come and talk to me if this gets on top of you. We have counsellors, you know, if you need something more in-depth. But if you need a friend … you know where I am.’
‘Thanks, Jo. I know that.’
‘Good. Now go on,’ she said, grinning at me. ‘I’ve got a ton of work to do.’
I sat outside Dympna’s house for ten minutes, trying to work out the best way to tell the children. I had always heard policemen and doctors say that this was the toughest part of their jobs, telling families that their loved ones were gone, but it wasn’t something I had ever really considered having to do myself. After ten minutes, I hadn’t come up with anything that didn’t sound brutal and devastating, and decided that that was because the news was brutal and devastating no matter how you dressed it up. I got out of the car and went inside.
Dympna showed me into a lounge that I had never been in before, and came back with the three children. Victor and Ibar were their usual detached selves, Victor grinning lopsidedly at me and giving me an awkward wave as he came in. Cordelia knew there was something up. Her expression was half sulky and half nervy. The three of them lined up on a large chaise-longue opposite me. I looked at them, and a sense of almost overwhelming panic swept over me. I had to fight the desire to get up and run out of the room. I gripped my knees tightly and gritted my teeth until it passed.
‘What’s up, Shane?’ Cordelia asked, perplexed.
‘I’m afraid I have some bad news,’ I said, realising as I was saying it that it sounded trite and clichéd, but I just couldn’t think of anything else to say. ‘Max – your dad – became ill late last night. He was brought to hospital and they tried to help him but … it was too late. Too late to do anything. He died at around midnight. I’m so, so sorry.’
Ibar was sitting on the floor fiddling with the buckle on his shoe, and if he had heard or understood any of what I had said, he showed no sign of it. Victor and Cordelia gazed at me open-mouthed. Victor made a choking sound and stood up, clenching and unclenching his hands and looking around the room as if for something to latch onto that would help make sense of what he had just been told. Cordelia just continued to look at me in horror. Dympna placed a hand on Victor and pulled him back on to the couch, hugging and shushing him gently as tears claimed him.
‘How … how did he die?’ Cordelia asked.
‘I don’t really know. There will have to be a coroner’s report. We won’t know for sure until then.’
‘Come on, Shane! You must know. Was it drink?’
‘The alcohol had made him sick, but they don’t know if that’s what killed him. I’m sorry, Cordelia. I just don’t have an answer for you.’
‘He probably killed himself!’ she said, anger invading her voice now and rising rapidly. ‘I always knew that it would end up like this! Ever since Mummy died, I knew he’d leave us! How could he? How could he do this to us? We’re only children. Why couldn’t he be a daddy like everyone else’s? Why couldn’t he have loved us?’
Dympna reached out to her but Cordelia shook her off and stood up. She walked over to me and knelt down in front of me, grasping me by both arms, shaking me, not roughly, but as a way of expressing the urgency she felt.
‘What are we going to do now, Shane?’ she asked, almost shouting, tears of anger and fear coursing down her cheeks. ‘What the hell are we going to do?’
I knew that I was crying too and made no attempt to stop myself. I had no words to comfort her. I had not lost both parents, was not an orphan and had never been adrift and alone in the world. There was nothing to say.
‘Answer me!’ she shouted, still shaking me. ‘Why won’t you answer me?’
‘I can’t!’ I blurted, taking her wrists and pulling her to me. ‘I can’t bring him back and I can’t change what’s happened. I’m sorry!’
She fought me for a moment and then collapsed onto me, her body racked with sobs.
‘I can only tell you that I am here. We’ll come through this. You love him. That won’t ever change. Every time you think of him, just like every time you think of your mum, you’ll feel sad. But it’ll get less and less until you wake up one morning and you won’t feel as sad any more. And right now, you’ve got Dympna, and you’ve got me. I’m just a phone call away any time you need me.’
I felt a tap on my shoulder.
Little Ibar stood beside Cordelia and me, his eyes red with crying and such pain etched on his face that I thought my heart would break. I had never seen him express any emotion at all other than bemusement – and now this.
‘Daddy?’ he said in a tiny voice.
Cordelia took him into her arms. I held them both and we stayed there like that.
‘I’d like to tell you they’ll be fine,’ Dympna said as I was leaving. ‘But this time, I’m not so sure. My God, Shane. I know that I should have seen this coming. But I didn’t. I’m flabbergasted.’
‘Me too,’ I said.
My throat felt raw with crying and my chest felt hollow. I was all used up, and I knew it. Dympna squeezed my arm and smiled sadly at me.
‘You take care. I’ll see you tomorrow?’
‘Yeah. Keep them home from school. I’ll be over in the morning.’
‘Okay. Drive safely.’
I went back to the office. I didn’t know why – it was past going-home time and there would be nobody there but the cleaners. Maybe I didn’t want to go back to my empty house with its dust and CDs and books and old furniture. Perhaps I didn’t want my thoughts to catch up with me, and was afraid that if I stopped, they would and then there wouldn’t be any going back. And there was, of course, the chance that I had no idea what I was doing and just ended up back there out of force of habit.
At any rate, at eight that evening I was seated at my desk, sipping a cup of black coffee and staring into space. I had my mail for the day in front of me, still lying unopened. I was suddenly very tired. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the red message light blinking on my phone. Absentmindedly I picked up the receiver and hit the button to play the recording. The computerised voice told me haltingly that the message had come in at three twelve that afternoon.
‘Shane Dunphy,’ said a husky female voice, ‘I hope you are satisfied. You have blood on your hands as surely as if you stabbed Max McCoy through the heart. You are a murdere
r. All he needed was to be allowed see his children. All you had to do was stop being a bastard and say the word. If you hadn’t been such a high and mighty power-freak, he’d be alive today. I hope you sleep well tonight knowing that you’ve orphaned those three children. Bye, bye now. I’ll be seeing you.’
I listened to the message, then played it through once more.
The silence in the office mirrored the emptiness inside me.
Murderer.
Whoever she was, she had voiced what I had been thinking all day. I was to blame for this – I and no one else.
I hit the ERASE button so hard that the phone jumped. Then I hit it again and again and again. I continued to strike it, first with my finger and then with my fist, until the phone was a splintered pile of plastic and circuitry on my desk and the anger and self-pity subsided, leaving only a cold darkness that sought to consume me.
11
I looked at Connie as she worked. She was sitting at the long table in the room we used at the health centre, bent over her refill pad, working on a history essay. She looked tired and pinched, as if her sleep had not been restful in many nights. She looked up and caught me watching her.
‘What?’
‘Nothing. I was just thinking you look tired.’
‘You don’t look so hot yourself.’
‘I am tired.’
‘There you go, then. Takes one to know one.’
This type of interaction characterised all our conversations now. They were about nothing. I had started meeting her at the house, sometimes, but had learned nothing new. Mr and Mrs Kelly were sulky, but not purposefully obstructive and Mick just made himself scarce. The problem was that Connie was now even more unforthcoming than before. Out of stubbornness I had continued to see her on alternate visits in her home, but I was fully aware that it was a waste of time. Direct questions about Mrs Jones yielded only icy glares and silence. I was flat out of options, and I knew it. I had one last card to play, and I had decided I was going to play it that evening. I had nothing to lose, and I was too worn out to think of anything else. It was make or break time.
I checked my watch.
‘C’mon, Connie. Time to call it a day. I’ll run you up home.’
She said nothing, but began packing her books and pens into her bag.
I drove into the estate, but instead of parking in front of the Kelly’s house, I parked in front of Mrs Jones’s. My previous call on her had taught me that discretion was wasted: if I tunnelled in I’d be seen by someone. I didn’t talk to Connie, just got out and walked up to the front door of the bungalow. I didn’t knock. I looked back and waited for her to make her decision. She was looking at me, then glancing nervously at her family home, as if waiting for her mother to explode out of the door at any moment, lumber across the green and rip her from the car. To be honest, I felt a little nervous too, so brazenly was I flouting the conventions of this strange place. Connie suddenly shot from the car and ran up beside me.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked me nervously, hopping from one foot to another in tension.
‘We’re going to have a chat with Mrs Jones. Together. We’ve played games for long enough, Connie. It’s time to lay our cards on the table.’
I knocked on the door, three loud bangs.
‘Please don’t, Shane,’ she said, her eyes pleading, wide with terror.
Suddenly I was convinced I had made a mistake. She wasn’t ready for this. I would do more harm than good. I had messed up again. But then the door was opening and Mrs Jones was there, peering out at us from eyes that saw much more than anyone thought.
‘You’re back,’ she said. ‘Come to try again, have you?’
‘Connie is with me,’ I stuttered, very unsure how to proceed. My confidence was gone.
Connie ran past me and put her arm around the old woman’s stooped shoulders.
‘Do you want me to run him, Veronica? Eh?’
Connie looked at me, standing dejected on the doorstep, and then over at the dark windows of number eight. For a moment, she seemed about to tell Mrs Jones to send me away. Then her face changed.
‘Let him come in. What harm can it do now?’
‘If that’s what you want,’ Mrs Jones said, and the two shuffled down the hall ahead of me. I went in and closed the door.
Connie brought me into a gloomy sitting room, where the only light came from the bars of an electric fire. The curtains were closed and I felt like I was in a tomb. I sat on a low couch, the cushions of which were so loosely stuffed that I seemed to sink even deeper into them. Connie left and came back moments later with a tray and tea things. I smiled weakly at her and took the small china cup she offered. I heard movement in the gloom behind me and Mrs Jones hobbled in.
‘Well, well, well. We have a visitor. Isn’t that grand, Connie?’
‘Maybe I was a bit hasty,’ I said as the old women plonked herself down on an armchair in the corner.
She reached over and began to fiddle with an old radio that looked to be an antique. Suddenly music filled the room in a great gush of sound. She quickly turned the volume down so we could talk. I recognised the song by Count Basie’s orchestra with Tony Bennett on vocals: ‘I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face’, a show-tune from My Fair Lady. Nice.
‘Whether you were hasty or not, it seems to me that Connie must now decide what to do, mmm?’
‘Yes.’
I sipped the black tea and looked at Connie, who was nibbling at a pink wafer biscuit and gazing wide-eyed at us through the darkness.
‘Tell him,’ she said, so quietly that I had to ask her to repeat it.
Mrs Jones nodded.
‘All right, child. We’ll tell him.’
And they began to speak, Connie first, then Mrs Jones, until it seemed that both voices became one and my head began to swim and it was like I was dreaming what they said, Connie’s tale becoming my nightmare until I thought I would scream. But I did not, and the story unveiled itself before me like a picture made of a spider web.
‘I don’t remember when it began,’ Connie said. ‘In my mind, it was just always happening, as far back as my memories go. When I think hard, I can remember being in a bed with bars, like a cot, and a man coming. I don’t know who he was, but that doesn’t mean anything, because people often don’t have faces in dreams. He comes and he … touches me. Puts things in me. Hurts me. Then he’s gone. Most children remember their first day at school or a birthday party or a trip to the circus as their earliest memory. I remember him. The Man.
‘As I grew up, Mick would come to my and Denise’s room in the night, and wake us up and one or other of us would have to go to the shed with him. I don’t know why he’d bring us out there,’cause he had his own room. Maybe he didn’t want to do it where he slept. We’d never know who it was going to be, and there was no pattern to it. He might take me for three nights running, then her for one, then me again for six, or I might not have to go with him for months on end. I hated it. It should never have happened and I knew it and he knew it and he knew I knew it. I’d fight him, and bite sometimes, but it made no difference. Once I bit it when he made me put it in my mouth, and he beat me so bad they had to bring me to the hospital. But it was worth it, to see the look on his face.
‘They would have “visitors” over, sometimes. They would tell us that they were friends of Daddy’s, or friends of Mick’s. We’d never have seen them before, but we were supposed to be “nice” to them. You know what that meant. Sometimes they were all right – gentle with us, y’know what I’m saying? But sometimes they’d want to hurt us. One of them told me he wanted to hear me scream, and he kept hurting until he made me, even though I tried really hard not to. I didn’t want to please him, the bastard.
‘They’d give us stuff, from time to time, the visitors. Toys, sweets, but Mick or Daddy would always take them away. When I got a bit more sense, I realised that they were getting paid for letting these fellas have their time with us. But I didn’t know that f
or a long time. I was too little.’
‘I watched them coming and going in that house for years, the huge woman and her dark men,’ Mrs Jones said. ‘I’ve lived here all my life, and I know that there are bad people hereabouts, bad men, and I know what they do. I know their desires and their urges. That house became a beacon to them; they were drawn to it like moths to a flame. I saw the destruction of Connie’s sisters and I was afraid to do anything. Once I hid young Geraldine when a car arrived, and the young man, Mick, came, and he kicked my door in and he hit me and took her back. He said if I interfered again, he’d kill me. I believed him, and I did nothing for a time, because I was old and weak. But even the old become angry, and anger can be a powerful ally. Anger and guile.