by Shane Dunphy
This continued for ten minutes. The baby was mentioned several times more, but only as being ‘at home’. Whether this child was at home with a sitter or alone was not, at this point, made clear.
‘Come on, Barbie Girl. Let’s go home in our car.
‘Okay, Ken. You’d better drive. I’m too scuttered.
‘Oh, all right. Stop fuckin’ naggin’ me, woman. I’ll drive.
‘Tha’s no way to talk to the woman of your dreams.
‘Shut up, you fuckin’ whore’s cunt or I’ll stick you with one right in the gob!’
The two figures were placed back in the car, which then recklessly careened about the roads, smashing into whatever happened to be in the vicinity. It finally pulled up outside a little house. The two figures got out and went inside.
‘Oh, baby? Come to Mammy.
‘No, come to Daddy.
‘She doesn’t love you; she loves me, you fucker.
‘You don’t know what love means, you rotten tart.
‘Shut up for a minute – can you hear somethin’?’
Katie took a police car and began to make a piercing siren sound. ‘Nee-naw! Nee-naw! Nee-naw!
‘Oh, shit! The cops are coming. Now we’re in for it.
‘Quick, let’s get out of here.
‘But the baby –
‘Fuck the baby. What’s she ever done for us except shit and eat and bawl?
‘You’re right, Ken. Let’s split this joint.’
The two figures piled out of the house and back into the little car, which tore off, followed tenaciously by the police car, siren sounding all the way. Inevitably, the Fiesta was caught.
‘Step out of the vehicle. You have the right to remain silent. Off to jail with you both for drinking and driving into stuff. You are very bold people.
‘No, please, garda, not prison. I’m too young and beautiful.
‘And I’ll end up as someone’s bitch.
‘Too late for that. You’re going away for a looong time.’
A building was chosen (the miniature town didn’t have a ‘jail’ as such), and the two tiny figures were placed inside. Katie fell silent for a minute, looking at the prison. Suddenly, from deep within her, came a mournful cry. Then another, and another. Tears actually began to stream down her face.
‘Mammy, Daddy, why did you leave me? I’m only little, and I’ve been left all alone in this big old house. I can’t get out … and there’s not enough food … and no one knows I’m here. I’m so alone and so frightened.’
She stood up, her face wet with tears, and walked back to the beanbags. ‘Stupid miserable cock-suckin’ games,’ she muttered and, lying down, fell asleep.
I sat in the now silent playroom under the electronic stare of the camera, with the wails of the plastic child still echoing in my mind.
5
Salt Island, referred to as ‘The Shaker’ by the men and women sentenced to serve time there, is a chunk of rock sitting in the middle of Seal Harbour, about three quarters of a mile from shore. It is as godforsaken a piece of land as you will ever see. Winds heavy with salt spray lash it constantly. Vicious currents and raging rip tides, treacherous underwater shelves and silt beds, make it inaccessible to all but the most competent sailors; the only transport on or off The Shaker is a small ferry that carries guards, prisoners, a few visitors and supplies to the prison three times a day.
Aside from the grey stone buildings that make up the prison itself, the island offers no shelter from the elements. It is, literally, a reef of granite sticking out of the ocean. In the late eighteenth century the British built a small military fort on it, and a custom house for ships coming in and out of the city’s wide harbour. The soldiers did not linger on The Shaker for long, finding it too depressing and inhospitable, so the Board of Guardians ordered that the buildings be made into a prison. Inmates were initially political detainees and military deserters, and the gaol rapidly developed a reputation as one of the harshest penal institutions in the country.
The chances of surviving a twelve-month stint on Salt Island during its first hundred years of service were fifty-fifty. The guards were ex-soldiers and mercenaries, renowned for their brutality. Hygiene, diet and basic comforts such as warmth and even having enough space to lie down were secondary considerations to the primary function of keeping dangerous criminals and rebels contained. When British troops finally left the city in 1922, the prison, seen by the citizens of the new Republic as an abiding image of the tyranny of the Crown, was closed. However, practicality sometimes wins out over such luxuries as patriotic outrage, and in 1935 The Shaker reopened, with a promise from Eamon de Valera that it would, henceforth, be a model prison, catering with equanimity to male, female and juvenile convicts.
Prisoners today are certainly free from the beatings, cold-water baths and other tortures of the bad old days, and lecturers from the City University donate their time to go out and teach a variety of academic courses to the prisoners, but The Shaker still sends a chill through many hearts. I can only imagine what it must be like standing on the deck of that ferry, watching the island getting closer and closer, the low buildings of the prison visible against the dark skyline; watching this and knowing that the gull-shit-caked lump of rock amid the heaving waves is to be your home for the next month, year or decade.
I must confess that I have a phobia of prisons. I have, through the course of my work, seen the inside of most of the correctional facilities in Ireland. Some, like Mountjoy or Spike Island, are gothic dens that assail you with the smell of faeces and panic the moment you walk through the door. Others, like Wheatfield or the Curragh, are newish, clean and brightly lit. The surroundings make little difference to me. I fear that locked door. I don’t know whether it’s some kind of latent claustrophobia, or that therapy might reveal that at some point in my childhood I was accidentally locked in a cupboard, but as soon as I’m inside a prison and that key turns behind me, I suffer a moment of white-knuckle panic. I find it hard to breathe, I break out in a sweat that soaks through my shirt and runs down my face in sheets. My heart pounds as if it wants to leap out of my chest. I rationalize that I am there as a visitor, that the guards are in fact my colleagues, that as soon as I wish I can get back out again; I go over all this in my head, and after a second or two I can proceed, but there is always that brief explosion of irrational terror. I’m used to the panic attacks by now, and before visiting a prison prepare myself, but the ex perience is no less potent for all that. The funny thing is it never happens in psychiatric hospitals, where doors must be locked, or juvenile detention centres, where doors are also kept secure. Only in prisons. I know, now, that there is a chink in my psychological armour, but I can still do my job, even when it takes me to places like The Shaker.
The first sailing to Salt Island was at ten in the morning, and I was on it, clutching a cup of coffee I’d picked up at a dockside café. Rain, so heavy with ice it was more like snow, fell intermittently; the sea was a grim, muddy grey, topped with yellow froth; and the small metal boat tossed and bobbed as it chugged into the roiling trough before us. By the bow three uniformed guards were smoking and chatting quietly. I sipped my coffee and looked out to sea towards our destination, then just a black smudge on the horizon line.
I had, despite the discomfort it caused me, been visiting The Shaker quite a bit over the previous couple of months. The reason for these trips was that Malachi Byrne, the father of two children I was working with, was serving time there. Malachi and his wife, Vera, had systematically tortured, abused and brutalized their twin children, Larry and Francey, in the most appalling and degenerate manner. The twins, when they were finally rescued from their miserable existence in the vast, crumbling house their family owned, were more like animals than children, running on all fours, snarling and growling, and using a peculiar dialect when they did speak. It finally emerged that, though Malachi had been extremely violent and abusive, both physically and sexually, to the children, Vera had really been th
e instigator, and had, if anything, been even more sadistic and vindictive than her lumbering partner. Vera was incredibly manipulative. She had the ability to take in those around her and could be very convincing in her role as a charming, sweet and gentle victim. Malachi, a towering troll of a man, was mean and unpredictable, but he was also slow and indolent. When the police were informed and a report of disclosures the children had made was filed with Social Services, Vera had somehow persuaded Malachi to take responsibility for it all, claiming that he had coerced and frightened her into taking part. Lawyers, police officers and social workers were all taken in. Malachi was locked up, and Vera was showered with sympathy and support. Yet behind this façade was a cruel, scheming sociopathic intelligence, capable of untold cruelty and guile.
So, while Malachi languished in an eight-by-ten cell, Vera was in regular contact with the twins, and had set about improving her appearance and general demeanour. Gone was the wild, frightening countenance to which I was so accustomed. She had been to the dentist and had her teeth straightened and whitened. Her long, stringy hair was now styled and full-bodied. The ill-matching, worn clothes had been cast aside for fashionable, carefully chosen designer style. Vera Byrne was now extremely presentable. And this metamorphosis had brought about the desired effect: the social workers she was in contact with seemed to have altered their opinion of her. Surely, they suggested, this carefully groomed, sweet-smelling woman could not have done the terrible things alleged against her. Now that she was free from the stifling influence of her husband, she was positively blossoming into a gentle person.
I was not so easily swayed. I knew Vera, and had been keeping a close watch. My surveillance had yielded one particularly disturbing piece of news. The Byrne house, an almost derelict brick structure in the heart of Oldtown, was being renovated by degrees. Vera was not stupid enough to have workers tackle the mammoth task of repairing years of neglect all at once. But gradually the house was being rebuilt. The shed, where the twins had been kept as prisoners for so much of their childhood, was now gleaming with new paint, and the broken board through which they had sometimes plucked up the courage to escape had been firmly secured back in place. The front path, which was cracked and subsided, had been relaid and levelled, and most of the windows given new glass and frames. There had been countless other jobs, some small and some quite large, carried out on the property, and it made me extremely worried. Vera informed me that, despite the reports and disclosures that had been passed on to the authorities, she would be getting her children back sooner rather than later. And this house was a deeply symbolic part of her sense of power and dominion over not just her family but Oldtown and the city itself. The Byrnes, whom she had married into, were once wealthy, and had employed large numbers of local people in the nineteenth century in a steel mill they had run. But through numerous problems – economic, social and psychiatric – the family had fallen on difficult times, and lost its foothold in the upper echelons of city society. Vera, in her cold, calculating and self-serving manner, had developed the notion that she would be able to scale the heights of opulence once more, if she had Larry and Francey back, and if the Byrne homestead were to be returned to something of its former glory.
The boat docked at the wooden pier, and we disembarked. A narrow pathway, cutting through damp, green-tinged stone, brought us up to the main entrance, a metal door that was held open by a hook in the wall. I could feel the heat emanating from inside, and this almost offset my rapidly growing sense of panic.
The room inside was a long, spacious, dark reception area, with a high counter at the top, where visitors signed in, emptied their pockets and went through a metal detector. I submitted my bag for inspection. It contained five packs of cigarettes, a pile of comic books and some fruit. The guard nodded me through, and I walked down the long corridor towards the visitors’ room. I knocked on the door, and it swung open. I stepped inside, and the door was closed and locked behind me. I leaned my back against the wall and felt the cold numbness of the panic attack wash over me. I gritted my teeth, breathed deeply, counted down from ten and finally pushed the sensation as far back into my subconscious as possible. Then I opened my eyes and cast about for the bulk of Malachi Byrne, who was sitting at a table in the centre of the room, looking simply too big and unwieldy for the space we were in.
Malachi was over six feet tall and weighed nearly four hundred pounds. In the few months he had been in prison, he had probably gained seventy of those pounds, simply through refusing to engage in exercise of any kind. While actively involved in the case, I had believed Malachi to be intellectually disabled, probably with an IQ somewhere around the borderline between normalcy and dysfunction, that is, in the region of 75–80. When I started to visit him in The Shaker, and saw him away from his wife’s malign and domineering influence, I realized that he was in fact far less functional than I had thought. He could not, for example, tie his own shoelaces. He was functionally illiterate. Although he was forty years old, his moods changed like those of a child, tears following laughter with little warning. An assessment by the prison’s visiting psychologist showed that Malachi’s IQ was in fact 60, placing him in the lower end of Mild Intellectual Disability, and in need of a tremendous amount of support to achieve even the simplest day-to-day tasks.
The violence endemic to his personality was still very much in evidence – he had almost killed a fellow prisoner during his first week on Salt Island. As is so often the case with prison brawls, the provocation was slight, and probably unintentional. The attack happened because an unfortunate fellow inmate had taken the desert tray on which Malachi had his eye at mealtime. And the behemoth seemed surprised when he discovered that his victim was hurt so badly he could have died. Cause and effect appeared to be beyond his limited capacity for understanding.
Prison visiting rooms, in Ireland at least, are nothing like what you see on television. There are no glass partitions, no telephones through which you must conduct your conversations, no prison uniforms with little arrow patterns sewn into them. The room in which I met Malachi Byrne was wide, bright and airy, painted a pleasant yellow, the walls adorned with framed pictures that had been drawn by the children of the inmates. It was far from comfortable – the chairs on which we sat were straight, wooden kitchen chairs, and Malachi seemed barely able to get his legs under the table – but it was as pleasant and accommodating as it was possible to make it under the circumstances.
I sat down opposite the huge man. His hair had grown out a little – he was bald on top, but his natural growth was curly, and a kind of reddish brown colour, which sat in a peculiar frizz around his ears. He was grossly overweight, the flab hanging out in great rolls over the waist of his elasticated tracksuit bottoms. He had a small face, with tiny, piggish eyes and a nose that had been broken at least half-a-dozen times, and was now at an odd angle, so that Malachi whistled when he breathed through it. With him being so enormous, and so ugly, it was hard to remember that he was, to all intents and purposes, just a child. A potentially lethal one, and capable of great cruelty to boot, but a child for all that.
‘How are you, Malachi?’ I asked him, putting the bag on the table between us.
He was almost hopping up and down to see what I had brought him. ‘What’s in the bag, mister, what have you got for me?’ His voice was deep, almost baritone.
‘You can call me Shane, Malachi. I’ve told you that. Take a look.’
He pulled over the bag, almost taking my arm with it.
‘Cool! The Beano and The Dandy and …’ He paused, trying to make out the title of the comic he held in his hands. ‘The Sss … the …’
‘Can you sound out the letters?’ I asked him. The literacy tutor in the prison had been using a form of phonetics with Malachi, not unlike the Letterland system used in schools, which focused on the sounds the letters made and how they interacted with one another.
‘I can’t get it!’ He tossed the comic on to the tabletop in frustration.
> ‘Okay, look at the pictures, then, and see if you can work it out that way. That’s why comics are good when you’re learning to read – the pictures tell the story too.’
He sighed and looked at the cover of the comic. A smile spread across his face. ‘That’s Homer and Chief Wiggum!’
‘It sure is.’
‘The Simpsons! It’s a Simpsons comic! Thanks, mister.’
‘You’re welcome. There’s some fruit there too, which I would really like you to eat instead of sweets as snacks, okay? You’re getting really, really fat, Malachi. You’ll have a heart attack if you don’t start to do some exercise and cut back on the junk food.’
‘Yeah, okay. It’s just that I don’t like fruit too well.’
‘I know that, but you might get to like it if you just try to eat some instead of crisps or bars of chocolate. You don’t want to be so fat, do you?’
He shrugged. ‘Dunno.’
I sighed and decided just to cut to the chase. ‘Has Vera been out to see you?’ I was hoping that she may have told Malachi her plans. So far she was playing her cards very close to her chest with me. She couldn’t keep it up; she would have to snap and brag to someone about how clever she was and how she was fooling us all.
Malachi cast down his eyes, suddenly seeming to shrink quite dramatically in size, as if someone had stuck a pin into him and let all the air out.
‘What’s wrong, Malachi?’
‘Nuthin’.’
‘I don’t believe you. What’s the problem?’
He shuffled uncomfortably on the creaking chair, glancing nervously up at me and then back at his hands, which he had pressed together and was wringing, seemingly in the depths of despair.
‘She said she din’ want me seein’ you no more. That I was to tell ya … tell ya not to be comin’ out here.’
I nodded and took out my cigarettes. I knew that he didn’t smoke, so didn’t offer him one.