Girl Unknown

by Karen Perry

  ‘You’re right not to believe me,’ she said, her voice soft and dangerous.

  ‘Zoë, it’s difficult, okay? I mean, it’s not as if you make it easy. This thing you have with Caroline …’

  She laughed, a bark of bitter amusement. ‘God, you’re so predictable, David.’ The way she said it was loaded with scorn. ‘You act all solemn and quiet and thoughtful, like you’re this deep thinker – an independent mind. But scratch the surface and you’re just a frightened little man who will always go running back to his wife.’

  She wanted to plunge the knife in deeper; she wanted to twist it. Indignation rose within me, but at the back of it came a quieter more insistent suspicion. ‘The letter from the university,’ I said. ‘It was you who signed for it, wasn’t it?’

  She was stubbing out her cigarette in the sink among the ashes. ‘What are you talking about?’

  She was very convincing but, then, I knew what a good actress she was. Quietly, I explained what I meant, playing along with her game of ignorance. Somehow I knew the answer to my question, regardless of what she would tell me. ‘You signed for that letter, didn’t you?’ I said again. She was leaning back against the sink, her hands behind her, one fingernail tapping out an impatient rhythm against the cool enamel while she listened carefully. ‘You signed Caroline’s name and then hid the letter. Admit it.’

  The beat of her fingernail against the sink. I thought of Chris and his parting words to me: the little bitch. She had made a fool of him, playing him before dumping him. I thought of Caroline and the wild accusations Zoë had made – the hints of the affair being revived, blaming my wife for the violence she had done to her own face. I thought of Gary and the lies she had spun about him. She had played them all. Why should I be immune? I saw my foolishness and felt my anger rise sharply, wild and erratic, like the crazy rhythm of her fingertips inside my head.

  Then it stopped. She became still. In a quiet voice she said: ‘Yes. All right. I did it.’

  The breath went out of me. Weakness came into my legs.

  ‘I signed for it. Then I took it upstairs to my room and burned it. Just like I burned that letter there.’

  How still she seemed. Completely unmoved while I was trembling. What had happened to the teenager who had appeared nervously at my office door, picking at her cuffs, frightened half to death at the bomb she was about to drop? Somehow, she had been replaced by this cool, bloodless creature with her dead gaze, her cruel words spoken with velvet softness. And the thing that was most confusing, the thing I couldn’t make out, was which one was the real Zoë, and which the fake.

  ‘I had worked so hard.’ The words coming out of me no louder than a whisper, a gasp of helplessness and disbelief.

  ‘I don’t care how hard you worked.’

  I blinked, and blinked again, my vision becoming blurred. The headache that had dogged me all day was still there, made worse by the blow to my face, the mix of alcohol and pills. It made me doubt my very senses. ‘But why … why would you want to sabotage my chances of promotion, my whole career?’

  ‘You just don’t get it, do you?’ she said, with bitter amusement, her smile high and tight. ‘It’s what I do, David. It’s what I’ve always done. Call it the instincts of an orphan.’

  ‘But you’re not. You never were an orphan, never have been …’

  ‘Excuse me, but I’m not going to be lectured to by a second-rate tutor like you, a wannabe, a cuckold, a failure.’

  I stepped towards her, and even now I’m not sure what I intended to do – put my hands to her shoulders and urge her to be calm, or hit her like Chris had done.

  She stood very still, her voice coming low and deadly: ‘What are you planning to do, Daddy? Kiss me again?’

  I froze. The words caught me like a glancing blow and I recoiled from them, horrified by her suggestion, but a deeper horror bubbled up from within at the knowledge that I had done so already. That only a short time before I had pressed my lips against hers – confusing her for Linda – in the way of a lover.

  ‘Perhaps that’s why you got the test done,’ she said, the sweetness of her tone disguising the poison beneath. She stepped past me, pausing once to glance back from the door. ‘You never wanted me to be your daughter.’ She said it so softly but the pain went deep. I said nothing. I couldn’t. Her last words to me: ‘All this time, you’ve been wishing I was Linda.’ And just like that she walked away from me, and out of my life.

  History can bring the dead back to life.

  I have said that year after year to a lecture hall full of first-year students. Something to gain their attention from the offset. I never thought of the expression as misleading. I never thought of it as a lie. I believed it myself, right up to the moment when she left me alone, weakened, drained, all my beliefs deserting me. I had no faith to cling to, no ideals to hold me up. Inside I was collapsing, and the only belief I could find was in a bottle.

  I drank steadily, dangerously, unaware of my surroundings, my mind drifting into the past, like a boat that had slipped its mooring, falling slowly into a drunken sleep: once again I was back at the cottage in Donegal, the call of a bird, the woods, and with it the image of Linda, a mug of tea cradled in her hands, standing in a shirt of mine reaching halfway down her thighs, lost in thought. When she spoke, her voice was like a splash of colour in the room. ‘Tomorrow,’ I said to her concerns. ‘We’ll go tomorrow if you want.’ I kissed her. A long, lingering kiss. Love had made me careless. Love had made me bold, and a little reckless, but not completely so: I had not told her I loved her, but I did …

  I kissed her again, felt her hair covering my face, only it was not Linda’s hair but Zoë’s – the feathery lightness of her curls. I was kissing her, my own daughter, defiling her innocence, revulsion in my throat. In the dream I was trying to turn away, twisting and writhing, her mocking laughter surrounding me, filling me like an oily soup, sucking at my limbs, and breath, pulling me in, holding me fast as I tried to escape the coiled chains of DNA entwining us in a never-ending sequence. I gave a shout, ‘No!’ and she laughed again, a laugh that was at once close to my ear and far away. Then a scream: I opened my eyes, staggered to my feet as I might have when woken in the night by my children screaming with night-terrors. Stumbling from my bedroom, no recollection of having gone there, I fumbled through the half-light, down the staircase, through the quiet rooms. The granular light of dawn making everything seem grey and empty. Silence hung in the deserted rooms. I began to doubt myself: what had I heard? Something real, or was it something from the depths of a nightmare?

  The sky beyond the window was streaked with red. My mouth was desert-dry. I needed water, but instead I went to the window, to see better the fire-brightness of the dawn. That was when the words came to me again: History can bring the dead back to life. Like a spell or an incantation. Those words were in my head when my eyes settled on the pool and I saw them.

  Figures in the water. One standing, the other stretched out like a doll, unmoving. Slowly, as though I were still physically locked inside the dream, I stepped out on to the terrace, felt the coolness of early-morning raising hairs on my limbs. I kept my eyes fixed on them as I drew near, unable to make sense of it, the scrambled visuals adding to my confusion. My heart understood it first, my pulse quickening. Caroline leaning over Zoë, holding the girl’s face in her hands, kissing her mouth, no, not kissing, but blowing, blowing into the mouth, a dark stain moving through the water.

  Then Caroline looked up, the tears streaming down her face. The water swirled about her waist, and her voice rose in a fevered, anguished pitch: ‘What have you done? Jesus Christ, what have you done?’

  Panic gripped me, kept me frozen, while Caroline tugged and pulled at the body, dragging it to the ledge, heaving it up on to the cold wet tiles.

  Black holes in my memory, her voice reaching me from some far-off place, What are you planning to do, Daddy? Kiss me again?

  What had I done?

  The tru
th remained hidden from me – too much confusion, too much pain.

  I walked towards her, knelt down and gazed into Zoë’s face. She lay on the cold hard ground, her gaze fixed far away, into the sky, the crimson flames of the clouds, and the heavens beyond. I thought of the brief moment of joy in the bed of her conception all those years ago in the stone cottage of Donegal. I thought of Linda bearing her birth in stubborn silence. I thought of the nursery rhymes, and skipping ropes, the jigsaw puzzles and books, the parks and cinemas of her childhood, away from Linda and me, her parents. I thought about all the things that had made her who she was, the chance and circumstance of her being, and wondered, too, about all she was not or could not be. I thought of everything she might have done, her plans, the trips, the work, the friends, and the love she might have found.

  And then, in my peripheral vision, I saw Robbie. Go back to bed, I wanted to tell him. You should not be a witness to this. I wanted to kiss him on the forehead, and stroke his cheek as if he were a child again. His mother went to him, saying something I couldn’t hear, making some demand of him I couldn’t discern. Back to bed, son, I wanted to say, but he just stood there, staring, already sealing himself off from us. Did I know then what he had done?

  I cannot tell.

  All that really comes to me, when my thoughts turn to that moment, is the outline of my daughter’s face, pale against the limestone flags. How cold she looked, and how perfect, as if she were the beautiful human plaything of some minor Greek god.

  I thought of all the things I did and did not know about her. It amounted in the end to nothing: it amounted to a girl whose green eyes had once flickered, but now were glassy and devoid of life.

  Part Four

  * * *

  25. Robbie

  They come almost every day to get him to talk. Police, social services, his solicitor, counsellors from the prison service. Some of them speak to him in English, heavily accented, but he understands what they’re saying. Others, whose English is not so good, bring translators, and he can see the look in the translator’s eye: Why on earth won’t you talk, you idiot? The police and social services are better at concealing their thoughts from him – they have more experience and he can’t be the first kid in this place to clam up with fright. The solicitor just looks bored and a little fed-up, like he has better things to do with his time than sit in an interview room with some Irish kid who prefers to say nothing and stay in this detention centre indefinitely, rather than work on any kind of defence.

  His father is the most frequent visitor. Mostly he just talks to Robbie, like he’s accepted the silence now. He talks about his work, his research – he’s using the time on the island to work on a book. He brings news from home. His tone is conversational, cheerful, forced. Sometimes, on days he’s finding it tough – when it becomes almost unbearable for him to see his son in this place, wearing his institutional uniform – he will lean over the table and whisper urgently: Please, son, say something.

  At least he doesn’t cry, like Robbie’s mother did. She would sit across from him, a balled-up tissue in her hands, her eyes and nose red raw from all the crying she had done, begging him, beseeching him just to tell her why. She loved him – she forgave him – he was her son. But, please, for the love of God, would he talk to her, just say something?

  On and on it went. He watched her within the hermetic seal of his own silence. After what had happened, talking was an impossibility. It was a relief when she went away, back home to Dublin with Holly. He felt the storm in his brain quieten.

  When they’ve all gone – his father, the police, the solicitors and social workers – when they’ve left him to go back to his cell, he feels a sense of relief, a levity almost. He lies on his bunk, closes his eyes. And then it’s just the two of them – him and Zoë – locked together in a strange peacefulness.

  She was different from how he’d thought she’d be. Different from him and from Holly. He felt it most when she spoke. Her accent, of course, the strange foreignness of the Northern vowel sounds, and the way her voice went up at the end of each sentence, like a little pencilled tick mark on a musical score. When she came for lunch on that first day, it was hard not to stare at her, his sister, displacing him now in the role of eldest child. He was taller than her, though – stupid to feel proud of it, but he did. Both of them were thin but she was really thin. She wore a big floaty sweater so you couldn’t tell at first until you noticed her legs, like pipe-cleaners coming out of her boots.

  He wondered if Zoë had an eating disorder, she was so thin. A girl in the orchestra, a viola player named Claire Waters, had anorexia. Up close, you could see how papery the skin on her face was over the square bone of her jaw. Her skin was kind of hairy too, light blonde hair, like the hair on her stick-like arms. Robbie sat behind Claire with his cello, so he spent a lot of time staring at the side of her face. She’d dropped out of the orchestra before Easter and someone said she’d been hospitalized. Someone else said they’d seen her and her hair had fallen out – she was almost completely bald on one side of her head.

  Zoë’s hair was glorious. He’d never use that word out loud to describe it, but privately that was what he thought. Glorious, luminous. The first time he’d met her, he’d felt an urge to touch it – not that he did. Eventually, a long time after that, he got to put his hand on her hair and he can remember the prickly feeling that shivered over the back of his scalp when he felt his hand sink into those soft curls.

  ‘What do you think?’ Holly had asked him.

  It was late in the evening, both of them in his room. Downstairs their mum was tidying up. Dad was dropping Zoë home.

  He shrugged. ‘She seemed okay.’

  ‘Really?’

  He flicked the page of his magazine, said nothing.

  ‘I thought she was a bit full of herself.’

  He let her talk for a while, zoning out. He was tired. It had been a weird day. The truth was, he didn’t know if he liked Zoë. Her manner had seemed polite, a little shy perhaps, but at one point she had caught him looking and smiled at him – a different kind of smile from the one she’d given the others. He’d seen the spark come into her eye, something conspiratorial about it, mischievous, drawing him in, making an ally of him. But he didn’t know if the sum of all these impressions amounted to liking her.

  ‘Want to see my room?’ he’d asked, the next Sunday she’d come over for lunch.

  He’d never had a girl up to his room before. Several guys in his class had claimed they’d had sex with girls in their rooms. He wasn’t sure he believed them, although maybe one or two. Robbie himself had kissed only three girls – sweaty encounters on the dance-floor at Wesley that had never gone any further. He’d tried to get off with a girl in the orchestra at a party once but she’d laughed with surprise, afterwards telling him he was the kind of guy girls loved to have as a friend without the complications of sex. She’d meant to be kind but he’d burned with humiliation.

  ‘Cool!’ Zoë had said, when she’d seen the poster of Thin Lizzy on his wall – Phil Lynott’s giant head surrounded by a corona of psychedelic swirls. ‘You’re into his music?’

  ‘Yeah! Jailbreak is like my favourite album ever.’

  ‘Put it on,’ she said, and he scrolled through his iPod while she sat back on his bed, making herself comfortable among his pillows.

  They talked about music for a while, then films. Her taste leaned towards the indie end of the spectrum but she admitted to a weakness for rom-coms. ‘You won’t tell anyone, will you?’ she had said, giving him that conspiratorial smile again. He noticed that her front teeth overlapped slightly.

  He made some comment then about a Kate Hudson flick he’d read a review of, and she hooted with laughter. ‘You’re so funny, Robbie,’ she’d said. ‘You crack me up.’

  He felt himself grinning foolishly. No one ever called him funny, especially not girls.

  From then on she came up to his bedroom every Sunday once lunch had been clea
red away. Flopping on to his bed with an air of exhaustion, like all the politeness downstairs had been a front but now, up in his room, she could be herself. The differences he’d been so hung up on at the start receded, replaced by the familiar. Downstairs, it was prickly with formality, none of them easy with her – particularly his mother and Holly. But up in his room, just him and Zoë, it was like they’d known each other for ever.

  When all that stuff blew up in school over what he’d been doing to Miss Murphy, she was the only one who didn’t give him shit. Even Holly had gone all supercilious on him, calling him a delinquent. ‘You’re eleven!’ he had shouted after her, then slammed the door of his room. It made him so mad, being punished like that. Couldn’t any of them understand? Intimidating that teacher, pushing her to the ground, it was an honourable thing! Even his mother, who should have been grateful, kept giving him the thin-lipped look of disapproval he couldn’t stand, constantly watching him with anxious eyes. And as for his dad, Robbie thought, don’t get him started! They were so busy with their own jobs, his dad nearly having an aneurism over the professorship and whether or not he’d get it, his mum thinking she was Sheryl Sandberg all of a sudden with her power suits and her appointment diary and her client portfolio. Didn’t either of them realize they were lucky to have such a good kid? Compared to some of the morons and thugs in his year, Robbie was a goddamned saint!

  ‘Why should your mother be grateful for what you did?’ Zoë asked, in a ruminative kind of way. She was sitting on his bed, listening to a barrage of grievances that he’d stored up over the whole week of his confinement.

  ‘What?’

  He had heard what she’d said, and he knew what she meant, but he wanted to buy himself a few seconds to think. She didn’t know about his mum. Could he tell her? Part of him knew that telling her would constitute a betrayal, but he was so angry with his mother right then. Fuck it, he thought.