The Godforsaken Daughter

by Christina McKenna

“Her name wasn’t Holly by any chance?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “Henry . . . Henry Shevlin.” He decided to take a gamble. “She’s my wife.”

  “Oh . . .”

  “Aurora!”

  The call had come from the direction of the house. It was repeated.

  “Coming!” the girl called back. She turned to Henry. “Have to go. What did you say your name was?”

  “Henry. Wait. Did . . . did Holly ever mention me?”

  She looked furtively about her. Then said in a low voice: “Meet me back here in an hour, okay? I can’t talk now.”

  He watched her go toward the house, pushing the wheelbarrow. He looked at his watch: 5:15. He had enough time before the boatman returned at seven.

  He set off to explore the island. It was exceptionally beautiful, made even more so by the sun in the western sky, causing the trees and rocks to stand out starkly. He noticed that there were few homes, and half seemed to be abandoned, the fields surrounding them long grown wild and unkempt. There was a certain wildness here that he found exhilarating. He guessed that it was the wildness that had attracted the Screamers.

  He trekked across the untilled land beyond the homesteads, heading for the island’s highest point. Having scaled it, he gazed out across the ocean. Burtonport was plainly visible beyond the sound, its harbor and buildings bathed now in the late-afternoon light. He wondered again about the strangeness of the whole place.

  “Connie, Connie, Connie,” he said aloud, confident that nobody might hear him, “what in the name of God brought you here? Why here? Why? Why?”

  In that moment, he experienced a sense of utter desolation. He had never given up hope of one day being reunited with his beloved wife. He mentally ticked off on his fingers the number of avenues he’d ventured down.

  One: he thought she’d committed suicide, perhaps because she’d been depressed at turning thirty and resorted to reading the morbid poetry of Sylvia Plath.

  Two: he thought she’d run off with another man. That man had turned out to be a double agent, not a love rival.

  Three: he’d feared that she’d met with an untimely end because she’d got involved in Republican politics.

  Four: he thought she’d left the country immediately after her disappearance. The British secret agent had more or less intimated as much.

  Five: Finbar Flannagan, a not too reliable source, had suggested that she’d been here on Innisfree.

  Yet Finbar had been correct. A certain Mad Max had confirmed that. Now it looked as though a woman who called herself Aurora was about to corroborate Max’s story.

  He saw her again as he was halfway to the little orchard where they’d met. She was dressed in the same clothes but had pulled on a jacket. Her blonde hair was being tossed on the breeze from the ocean. With sadness, Henry saw that in the distance she bore a striking resemblance to Connie. His moment of greatest sadness—what a psychiatrist friend called the Tiefpunkt—had passed. He’d allowed the tears to flow. There’d been no witnesses apart from the wild creatures, and that was good.

  “Walk with me,” Aurora said.

  “Where are we going?”

  “A place Holly loved. The wildflowers are beautiful there.”

  It turned out to be a secluded cove some way up from where Henry had disembarked. The gentle water of the sound lapped at their feet as they sat on a rock overlooking the mainland. Behind them and on either side grew an abundance of heather, daisies, buttercups, violets, and many other blooms Henry could not identify. He could well believe that Connie would have felt in her element there. The wild child at home in the half-tamed wilderness.

  “Holly used to take her sketchbook along,” Aurora said. “She was never without it.”

  “I know,” he said wistfully. “I can see why she liked it here.” Then: “When . . . when did she come here? To the island, I mean.”

  “Last year. June, I believe.”

  He was stunned. June: immediately after she disappeared. She hadn’t gone abroad. She was right here, in Ireland. If only he had known. But he’d no way of knowing. The powers that be had seen to that. Inwardly, he cursed them. Cursed their lack of pity, their lack of human feeling.

  He turned his attention back to Aurora. He had some more questions she might be able to answer before the boat returned.

  “Did you ever notice a small tattoo? Right here.” He indicated the spot on his right wrist. “A butterfly . . . blue.”

  “No. But come to think of it, I rarely saw her in short sleeves. She complained about the cold, a lot. It’s never too warm here, though. That breeze off the Atlantic . . . skin you sometimes.”

  That sounded like Connie, too, with her Raynaud’s syndrome. There was one sure way of knowing, and Henry carried it next to his heart: in his wallet. He reached for the wallet, and drew out the little snapshot, the one he’d shown to the RUC constable on the night of Connie’s disappearance.

  “That’s her,” Aurora said at once. “That’s Holly.”

  He sighed with relief. At last.

  “I think she found peace here,” she went on. “She never told me anything, mind you, but she was running away from something.” She looked at him sidelong. “Would I be right?”

  He nodded but said nothing.

  “I hope it wasn’t anything illegal. That wouldn’t have been like her. She was really sweet. Everybody loved her. But you never know with people, do you?”

  Henry felt a lump rise in his throat. He feigned a cough to banish it.

  “Why do you want to find her?”

  It was an odd question. “Why? I should think that’s obvious.”

  “It’s just that when we come here we’re deprogrammed. The conventional concept of marriage goes right out the window. Women like us get to taste the freedom that you men take for granted for the very first time and it’s exhilarating. We sleep with whomever we choose. We have children with whomever we choose. It’s a complete role reversal.”

  “Did Connie . . . ?”

  She glanced at him and giggled.

  “Oh, you’re such a man. Perhaps she did. That’s why the men in Burtonport didn’t like us and chased us over here. Claimed we were into black magic and witchcraft. Always a good old ruse to discredit women when they try to assert themselves, don’t you think? Calling them witches . . . saying they’re loopy.”

  “I see . . . Don’t seem to be many men round here for you to sleep with, though.”

  She sniggered. “Yes, enlightened men are hard to find.” She was teasing him. “But you’d be surprised . . . how docile and pliable they become when you lay down some ground rules.”

  He thought of Mad Max and Finbar Flannagan. Yes, they were certainly the type that Aurora would consider “pliable.”

  He checked himself.

  “Did she . . . Holly . . . did she say where she was going?”

  He didn’t expect a straight answer, but the psychiatrist in him noted the impact of his query. The telltale psychomotor agitation: the shifting of the knees, heels digging deeper into the sand, the twisting of the stems of the daisies she’d plucked.

  Aurora had him down as a stalker.

  “No . . . but even if I did know, I wouldn’t be telling you. She just disappeared one day without saying good-bye.” She looked sidelong at him again. “Why are you so certain she wants to be found anyway?”

  Why indeed? He’d never had the courage to ask himself that. Was he being selfish? Was Connie’s involvement with Halligan and her flight to this place her way of showing him that?

  “Why am I so certain Holly wants to be found?” he repeated. “I just know . . . know in my heart.”

  Aurora made no reply, letting the crash of the breakers and the shrieking of the gulls answer for her.

  Then: “Your boat leaves soon?” She was gazing in
the direction of the harbor. “Best not to miss it.”

  Before he knew it, she was on her feet and walking away from him.

  “Thanks . . . thanks for talking!” he called after her.

  She waved a hand but didn’t look back.

  He returned to the jetty and clambered aboard the boat, the sole passenger. A sadness, greater and deeper than anything he’d experienced before, fell about him like a funeral shroud.

  That woebegone feeling Aurora had left him with. Oh, the cold, harsh loneliness of it all! The desertion.

  Nowhere to go now, but home.

  A ways out on the water he glanced back and saw a figure atop the rise, her loose blonde hair fluttering in the breeze.

  Aurora. She raised a hand. He gave a cursory salute.

  Atlantis, the Screamers, Innisfree—the island, now fast receding from him, was truly the realm of the lost. Women went there to lose themselves among the hills and the heather. In that wilderness they screamed away their despair and shared it with the cries of the gulls, the sighing of the winds and sea.

  Connie had been there. That much he now knew for certain. She’d been lost there for a while on that island. Perhaps he shouldn’t have gone. He’d left her in Belfast all those months ago, in a dimly lit room with a warning from an enigmatic man in a hat. “Step back and let us do our job. If you want to see her again, stop looking.”

  He’d done precisely as instructed. Had ceased searching. Locked the memory of her away. The decision, finally copper-fastened with his move to Killoran and some kind of different life.

  Then that tiny stumble, the quiver on the tightrope that was Finbar Flannagan. “Holly Blue . . . thirty . . . married . . . an artist . . . poetry . . . running away from something . . .”

  How could he not find out? How could he not go looking for her?

  Aurora’s question, so painful to hear! “Why are you so certain she wants to be found anyway?”

  He wasn’t certain of anything anymore.

  Perhaps it was simply best to close a door on the past and let its history be.

  Chapter thirty-seven

  Jamie pushed into Tailorstown on his well-worn bicycle—headlamp missing, seatpost crooked, button accordion strapped securely to the saddle. His big night at O’Shea’s pub was upon him. He would be the support act for The Beardy Boys, providing a filler at the interval, when the bearded ones took a rest.

  The farmer looked forward to those occasional nights Slope O’Shea invited him to play. Always enjoyed the feeling of happiness that the short time in the spotlight afforded him. Tonight, however, was going to be extra special: Ruby would be in the audience with Rose.

  Rose didn’t usually frequent pubs with Paddy, but she thought it would be nice for Ruby to get out for a night, after what she’d been through with her mother and all. Ruby was a nice girl, Jamie thought. She reminded him of his adoptive aunt Alice when she was younger. Maybe a wee bit fatter, but the same height, the same reddish color hair, the nice smile and manner. And she was easy to talk to as well.

  Upon arrival at The Step Inside lounge on High Street, Jamie tethered the back wheel of the bike to the front one—an unnecessary precaution, since the bicycle should really have been on the junk pile and not the road—but old habits were hard to break, and Jamie had a fondness for the bicycle. It had carried not only himself between Duntybutt and Tailorstown countless times, but his Uncle Mick as well. He might have suffered the loss of his beloved Shep in recent weeks, but he still felt close to Mick when he sat on that bicycle, gripping the handlebars and working the pedals, riding back through history but forward through time, over the roads he knew so well.

  “You’ll be ridin’ that bike long after I’m gone,” Mick used to say, and Jamie knew he’d be keeping that promise for as long as he could.

  “How do, Slope!” Jamie called out on entering the premises and taking his usual seat at the bar. The place was empty, but it was early yet. From out back he heard the sound of a beer barrel being rolled across tiles and minutes later Slope appeared: a tall, stooped man kicking the backside of sixty with a walleyed look that said, “It’s not my fault that me ancestors decided to make a major detour from the evolutionary plan in the way back when.”

  “How you, Jamie?” Slope said, straightening up. “I did me bloody back in yesterday, liftin’ one of these boys, so I’ll be rollin’ them from now on. Usual, is it?”

  “Aye, a Guinness and a half’un, there.” Jamie drummed his fingers on the counter and looked about him. “See a couple of your wee fairies are out up there.”

  “Are they, begod? Never noticed. With me stiff neck, don’t look up there much.”

  Slope had sought atmosphere in his pub by braiding a high shelf behind the bar with a string of fairy lights. His thinking being that the festive atmosphere they imparted all year round would encourage his customers, especially when drunk, to lose the run of themselves, imagine it was Christmas, and so part with more money.

  He set up the drink. “I need’a get a new set. Barkin’ Bob maybe has them.”

  “Aye, Bob’s your man,” Jamie said.

  “You’ve said it, Jamie. Begod, you wouldn’t believe what I got off him the other day.”

  “Nah, what was that?”

  “A Jonny Glow toilet finder.” Slope puffed on a cigarette, enjoying the look of confusion puckering Jamie’s features.

  “What the divil’s that?”

  “I told you: a Jonny Glow toilet finder.”

  “Aye, I heard that bit, but what’s it for?”

  “What d’you think it’s for? For findin’ the toilet in the middle of the night.”

  “And how could you not find the toilet in your own house, in the middle of the night? It’s not the size of the Vatican.”

  “Ah . . . but you see it might as well be the size of the Vatican, in the dark, at night, when you’ve had a skinful, and you can’t find the light switch, let alone the bloody bathroom.”

  “Right, and where do you put this yoke? Round your neck?”

  “Nah, round the seat of the toilet. It’s green and it glows in the dark, so you know where to aim. Not that it would matter where you aimed, Jamie, havin’ a whole backyard for your toilet.”

  Jamie took the insult on the chin. He was well used to Slope’s jibes. But he was glad Slope had mentioned his lack of a WC. The council had just given him planning permission to build an extension to his farmhouse that very day, and he was able to bat back the good news, much to the crabby barman’s chagrin.

  At which point, Slope swiftly changed the subject, back to the itinerant salesman, Barkin’ Bob.

  “Lookin’ very well these days, is Barkin’ Bob. Business must be good, ’cos that’s a new van and trailer he’s got.”

  “Saw that, too,” Jamie said. He offered the barman a fresh cigarette and lit one himself. “They say he came into a legacy from some oul’ aunt in Amerikay.”

  “Well, I don’t see much of it in here. Never buys a round . . . tight as a nun’s friggin’ knickers in this place, is Bob. Wish tae blazes some oul’ aunt of mine would die and leave me a bit. Could get rid of this place—and the bloody wife, come to that.”

  “Where is Peggy? Haven’t seen her about.”

  “Nah . . . her and young Mary are in the caravan in Portaluce for a week. And d’you know, since they left I think I’ve went deaf. Nobody yappin’ at me night and day. I would divorce her only I’m Catholic, and anyway, a divorce would make her too happy. God, Jamie, I envy you not havin’ a wommin about the place. Nivver get married, that’s my advice to you.”

  “Aye, so . . .”

  “’Cos y’know, I married for better or worse. She couldn’t have done better and I couldn’t have done worse.”

  It’s the other way about, Slope, Jamie reflected, but didn’t say, wanting to hold onto his accordion slot for th
is particular evening. He reminded himself that this Friday evening was destined to be a very special one.

  “Ah, now,” was all he said, considering the fairy lights once more. Out the window he saw the bearded ones’ van pull up.

  “See, the trouble with Peggy, Jamie,” Slope continued, “is she can’t take a bloody joke.”

  “She took you, didn’t she?” Jamie shot back, the whiskey making him bold.

  A thump at the door saved him from Slope’s wrath.

  The Beardy Boys had arrived.

  Chapter thirty-eight

  Ruby stood in front of the mirror in her bedroom, getting ready for her big night out with the McFaddens.

  She was very excited because she hadn’t been out for a very long time. Not since her school friend, Carmel, had gone to work in London all of eleven years ago. She used to accompany Carmel to the occasional dance in the Castle Ballroom, Dungiven. Looking back, Ruby didn’t really miss those nights. Carmel, attractive and chatty, was rarely off the dance floor, leaving her to suffer the indignity of standing by the wall like a spare part. Often, she wished she could just disappear into it, especially when Elvis McGinty appeared, a bachelor with a clubfoot and bottle-thick glasses who, having been rejected by a succession of lovelies, would approach Ruby as a last resort. And Ruby, feeling sorry for him, would have no option but to accept, and allow herself to be steered about the floor, scattering the other dancers to the sidelines like frightened sheep.

  This night, however, would be nothing like those awkward dances. She’d be in the company of Rose, a woman she liked very much. Rose had shown her nothing but warmth and kindness in the short space of time since they’d met. It’s a pity Mammy couldn’t be more like that, Ruby thought now, as she stood before the mirror.

  Sadly, there had been little improvement with the mother since she’d been discharged from hospital. Ruby had just helped her eat supper, a complicated and painstaking affair that could take the best part of an hour to complete. The trembling spoon needed guidance, the cup of tea a challenge of spills and weary sighs.

  Martha didn’t say much. It was as if the effort of communicating, like the trial of eating, tired her unduly. She rallied, however, for the likes of Father Kelly, Dr. Brewster, and the twins when they showed up at weekends.