In White Ink

by Elske Rahill

  As part of the court order they had to go to sessions in the outpatient wing of a mental hospital. Her husband had to attend a programme for ‘recovering offenders’, and it was recommended that she meet with a support group of offenders’ wives. There were eight women in the group. One of them couldn’t read. Most of their husbands were alcoholics, and were in for worse than Anne’s husband – they had actually done things, most of them; they hadn’t just downloaded the wrong videos. She sat quietly at the meetings, disgusted with the weakness of these women, their poor vocabulary, their poor dress sense, the brightly coloured bruises on their cheeks. She did not belong in rooms like this, with sun-bleached curtains and peeling lino on the floor. There was a cheap green-and-white clock hanging high on the wall. It twanged dully every time the hands moved.

  She was not staying in her marriage from ignorance, or because she had nowhere else to go. She kept repeating it to the group: she had a job, and she had a family. She was staying because she would never forget what the priest had said before he married them: ‘I admire what you are doing,’ he had said, holding their folded hands between his own. ‘To choose to love someone, no matter what – a human being, a sinner. Made in God’s image, but so flawed. In sickness and in health. To choose that. To make that commitment is truly admirable.’

  She was staying because she knew what it was to love, and because when she saw her husband’s chin tremble, his lip fold on the cusp of tears – ‘Look at me, Anne. Look at me. It’s me...’ – she was certain that she knew him, that she could love him, if she chose to, and that to love was a good thing.

  In any case, it really couldn’t have been so bad, what they found, or they would have locked him up. He told her the police had exaggerated a bit; they weren’t that young.

  And sometimes Anne thought that perhaps she was the same as her husband. Weeks after the raid, she remembered something. Her husband must have forgotten, or he would have brought it up – but the more she thought about it, the more certain she became that they had watched one of those films together. It was on YouPorn, a video called ‘Music Lesson’, about a girl and her teacher. The girl was sitting on the piano with her legs splayed. She looked Spanish or Italian – she had dark eyes and she didn’t say any words but she moaned a lot. Her breasts were very small; she looked very young and at first Anne didn’t like it, but she had hair there and her husband said, ‘Don’t be such a martinet, Anne. If there’s grass on the wicket, let’s play cricket.’ He kept watching, and pushing his fingers into her mouth, like the teacher in the video, and after a while she got into it and they played out the roles a bit together; she pretended to be shocked, she pretended it hurt, and she liked how much that made him want her.

  They got carried away that time. It was only afterwards – after the raid and the newspaper articles and everything – that she thought about the video, and she began to wonder if that was the sort of thing the guards were talking about. If they had let her see the videos, she could have judged for herself.

  In that interrogation room, they sent a woman in to question her. She asked about intimate things – what her husband liked in bed – did he like it shaved, did he like her from behind... Anne had told the truth. She had been with men before her husband and she knew it was normal for men to want it bare, and all men wanted anal, though she could never really understand why. But she didn’t say anything about that video, or the role she had played out, or the way he said ‘good girl’ every time, for she knew what they would think of her.

  The last of those interrogations was more like a lecture. The kind detective kept trying to hold her in his gaze. ‘As young as seven,’ he said. ‘Do you understand, Anne? Definitely children, Anne.’ She had nodded but she couldn’t quite see it. Eleven maybe, because some eleven-year-olds could look sixteen...

  And if she were to leave him, what would that mean about their wedding, where they had kicked off their shoes and danced all night on the beach, heavy sand clinging to the end of her dress, her freshly waxed and tanned shins, her pearly pink toenails? What would it mean about the night they had met, the jolt in her gut when he had looked at her?

  After six weeks of the support group meetings, Anne was invited to speak with her husband’s psychiatrist, a long-necked man who wore an Aran jumper and had a smug, close-mouthed smile. He was a specialist, and the words he used were new to her. He talked about dissociation. The strange words relaxed her. ‘Projection’, he said, and ‘image-mediated aggression’. Her husband, he said, would never actually do anything. He was only looking. He didn’t even enjoy it. It was an addiction. So Anne had been right. She was different from those women, and her husband was different from theirs.

  Once, there was a crash near their house. She saw it on the way back from work. There were ambulances and gardaí, and a great bloody splotch on the road. Anne’s car had almost slowed to a stop before she realized what she was doing – she was peering out her windscreen, hungry for a glimpse of horror. Sometimes terrible things could be compelling. Perhaps that’s what it was like for her husband.

  The judge looked at Anne for a moment, and then there was a silence during which he glanced through the papers in front of him. He looked at her again, and then at her barrister. Then her barrister looked at her. Anne felt so absurdly looked at that she was afraid she might cry, or laugh, or throw something, to destroy the terrible muteness in the room.

  It was a family affair. That’s why the hearing was in camera: no one was there but her barrister, her husband, his lawyer, and the judge. Her mother had said she would come with her to wait, but Anne preferred to go alone. The wide eyes, the trembling, the constant threat of tears would only make things worse. Women’s Aid offered her a court accompaniment, but Anne declined. She knew what other women thought of her.

  In the silence of the courtroom, Anne suddenly wondered had she spoken at all, or were they still waiting for her answer. She said it again:

  ‘When the guards came to the door. To raid the house.’

  Her barrister’s face didn’t change. Her husband’s lawyer began to cough. At first it was a small, suppressed cough that sounded painful, but then it caught in his throat as though it might choke him, and he hocked wetly. He drank some water, and said to the judge, ‘I apologize, your honour.’ He spoke with impossible correctness, no accent to betray his origins, as though he had sprung fully formed from a law book. He was middle-aged, with dusty grey hair and full, pink cheeks. She wondered had he a wife, or a child. Did he think her a liar, or did he pity her, even a little? Did he pity their child?

  Her own barrister cleared his throat.

  ‘That’s when you discovered about a previous incident. But we will not refer to that today as it is no longer on the register.’

  Anne breathed out. He had explained that he would have to say that. No one could stop her from saying anything, but he was not permitted to use it. He continued:

  ‘When did you first suspect something was amiss with your daughter? What made you deny her father access? Take your time.’

  ‘Well, I began to worry when the school... when the principal of the school called me in and they said they were concerned. Some teachers had noticed unusual behaviour. She was obliged to mention her concerns, she said.’

  *

  In the headmistress’s office Anne felt a child, blissfully helpless. It was the smell of the leather chairs, the stillness of the room and light cutting in through the venetian blinds. The woman had soft, clean hands and pink, unpolished nails. She asked Anne to sit and poured her a glass of water. She wore a perfume that reminded Anne of her grandmother. While the woman spoke, Anne wept and said nothing. The headmistress handed her a soft, thick tissue that smelled of eucalyptus, but still she wouldn’t look away, she wouldn’t stop speaking. When the talking stopped, Anne opened her eyes, but she couldn’t speak.

  The bell rang, and the headmistress handed Anne a cup of sugared tea.

  ‘I have a class,’ she said, ‘but you’
re welcome to stay in my office. Take as long as you need.’

  Anne stayed there until it was time to collect her daughter. She looked out through the window at the games pitch, and at the cars filling up the car park.

  She didn’t like to go home to an empty house. Sometimes when she came back from work in the afternoon, a terrible fear took hold of her. It usually began with a nagging sorrow, brought on by the silence of the house, the indifference of their little dog, who didn’t like her, and the smell of the clean floor. She would have to sit down with her head between her knees and concentrate on breathing. She didn’t think anything when this happened, only waited it out. But she felt that something had reached up from a terrible place, something with no beginning, half-formed, a spine too soft to snap, eyes like black buds, claws sticky as fish scales, fingering her neck, pulling her down under her life.

  When the next bell rang the children were brought out to the yard and released to the minders and mothers. She saw her daughter waiting for her, chewing the inside of her cheek, but Anne stood watching from the window.

  The child was pretty. Everyone said it. Only last week Anne was sitting on the steps of the porch, keeping an eye on her daughter, who was having bicycle races with another little girl. One of the new neighbours came out with a mug of tea, and sat beside Anne – ‘She’s grown so pretty, hasn’t she?’

  Anne shrugged, but it was true. The girl was changing very suddenly, though she remained tiny in size. At the age of seven she already had little bumps under her nipples. Her cheekbones were starting to rise. Her hair had grown to her shoulders, where it hung in ringletted clumps. It had never lost its baby blondeness.

  ‘Sometimes I think she is very pretty,’ said Anne. ‘Other times I look at her and I think, You know what, you’re not all that gorgeous as you think. I had blonde hair like that until I was sixteen. She gets that from me. It will go mousy when she’s sixteen, like mine did. She has my thighs too,’ she said, punching her own legs, ‘fat thighs like her mother.’

  Anne watched the children run to their mothers. She bit her lip. Why do they love us like that? She watched until her daughter was the only child left. Then she walked out to the yard, nodded at the teacher, and took her daughter’s hand.

  The child’s eyes were heavy. She hadn’t been able to sleep the previous night. She had lolled in the doorway while Anne did the ironing.

  ‘What nightie of yours does Daddy like?’

  Anne hadn’t replied.

  ‘Daddy likes me in all my nighties. Isn’t that right Mammy?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Anne said.

  ‘Daddy says you know. Am I like my daddy or am I like you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Daddy says you know.’

  *

  Sometimes he lost his temper with the child for no good reason at all. He took her off to visit friends on a Sunday afternoon, to give Anne a break, and more than once, when the little girl came down the stairs he would shout at her for wearing clothes that he didn’t like, or for not having combed her hair. He would make her return to her room and change, and if he didn’t like what she was wearing then, he would shout some more, drag her into the room, and pick her outfit himself. Some Sundays they had to force her into the car. Her father held her in while Anne shut the door, and waved them off, her daughter sobbing in the passenger seat, ‘I hate you. I hate you. I wish you weren’t my mammy.’

  But they had a good life. They had built a conservatory out the back, where they sat together in the evenings, and drank wine, and read books, and he no longer put her down in front of his family, who had never liked her, but who had refused to speak to him for a year after the thing had been in the papers. He knew who loved him now. It used to anger Anne, the way his mother said his name, ‘Noel’, a reminder of his birth on Christmas Day, of her authority as his mother. But his mother was meek around Anne now, grateful.

  At night their daughter asked for stories, and Anne told the story of how they had met, or the story of their wedding day, the way Aunt Myra’s chair had collapsed beneath her, and Anne, unable to contain her laughter, spat her champagne across the table. She told her what cravings she had when she was pregnant, and all the kicks she’d got, how the baby had come out looking like her father, only older, redder, more wrinkled.

  One night her daughter asked, ‘Does the daddy or the mammy own the baby?’

  Anne had laughed. ‘They both do.’

  ‘And who owns the mammy and the daddy?’

  ‘They own each other, love. Go to sleep.’

  *

  It had pained Anne to take the wedding dress from its fragranced box, to see the slim shape she had been back then, the luxurious fabrics her body had merited. It hurt less than she expected to take scissors to the dress, to pull out the ribbons from the corset, to rip the stitches from the waist with an old cross-stitch knife. She had worked through the night to create the little communion dress. She had done a beautiful job. She had fashioned a littler veil from her own long train. She had given her daughter a crown of tiny crystals and satin flowers. She had even used the roses off the corset of the wedding dress to trim the hem. The skirt fell to just below her daughter’s knees.

  ‘I don’t need to shave my legs, do I Mammy?’

  ‘No, love. Not yet.’

  *

  The children all sang as they walked up the aisle to receive for the first time the little disc of holy flesh. There was incense and a blonde lady with thick lipstick playing the harp. Each little girl wore a white dress, white gloves, white veil, and white satin shoes with the soles already blackening. The boys wore miniature suits.

  Anne had been watching her daughter’s shoes on the polished floor when she noticed that one of the white socks with the little pink bow on it had fallen down to her ankle. She thought of her daughter’s skin, the talcy smell, the warmth of it when she slept, and the pale soft hair on her legs. Then she understood. At first it cut like a chink of light, like relief – to understand at last – but then it settled in her mind, took weight there. She left the church and vomited quietly onto the gravel outside. Her husband followed her. He touched her elbow, and handed her a tissue.

  *

  Her barrister had warned her to concentrate on the concrete. ‘No hysterics,’ he had said. ‘Concentrate on what was said, what you observed, what the school observed. Look at the judge. Don’t cry. If it’s the judge I think it is, don’t cry.’

  Anne told the judge what her daughter had said on the evening after her communion, with the car pulled up on a grass verge, on a side road halfway between their house and Wicklow. Anne didn’t say how hard it was to like her daughter, how hard it was to look at her, how she had almost turned on the radio, turned back to their lovely home with the stained-glass door, and a dog in the porch, how she had watched the clock as her daughter choked up her confession, knowing there was still time to turn around before she said too much.

  The judge wrote slowly with a fountain pen for a long time. Everyone had to sit quietly in the courtroom. Anne looked at her barrister, but he made no response, so she looked at her hands. She had put her wedding ring in her handbag for the day. She turned her eternity ring around. It was loose now. She must have lost weight.

  They had to stand to hear the court order. Her husband stood and looked at her, blank-faced. Anne didn’t understand what was said. The judge’s voice seemed far away, overlaid with the throbbing of blood, her heartbeat pulsing in her ears, in her throat, louder and stronger until her hands and cheeks lost feeling and all she could hear was the steady push of her blood like waves hitting the shore. She held the chair to steady herself. Her barrister helped her to sit down.

  When they were back in the consultation room, her barrister explained that the case was adjourned until June. This would give time for the doctor’s report to be prepared. She could withhold access until then. Her barrister said she had done well. ‘It’s a good outcome,’ he said, ‘it’s what we want.’ He p
atted her awkwardly on the shoulder.

  On the way out he recognized a colleague. ‘Well done,’ he said again, and wiggled his fingers in goodbye. Anne walked out alone into the wet afternoon, down the steps and out onto the street. She needed a drink, she thought, then she would take the bus to Wicklow, where her daughter and her mum were waiting. She didn’t switch on her phone yet. She shook her hands out, closed her eyes tight and opened them again and kept walking. She found a wine bar. She ordered a glass of red. She had never done this before – sat alone in a wine bar. She had never sat alone in a cafe, or on a park bench. She had never been the type.

  She sat outside on a metal chair with her cardigan and no jacket, sweating in the cold, and looked at the glass of wine and waited for the throbbing to stop.

  A girl approached the table, or a woman. It was hard to tell. Her bare arms had the skinniness of a child’s, but her face was lined in odd places: tight ridges straining down her cheeks and neck. There was a bandage on her arm, wrapped too loosely. She wore tracksuit bottoms that clung to her small, round bottom. It was the black hair Anne recognized. The girl had lost the hoodie she had been wearing on the steps of the courthouse.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said. Even in the dim light, Anne could see the hardness of the girl’s face, the hollow cheeks, and the dry lips, the eerie beauty of her want.

  ‘I lost my purse,’ said the girl, ‘and I need to get home to my mother. I need to take the train home to my mother. The ticket is twenty-six euros.’

  She unfurled her hand, the spindly fingers, the clean, rough palm.

  ‘Please,’ she said. She tried to look Anne in the eye.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Anne, doing her best to neutralize her accent, ‘I can’t help you.’