‘Why do you have to assume that I’d be the one to get hurt?’ he asked as he pushed past her, taking the stairs two at a time, slamming his bedroom door so loudly that it shook in its frame.
Because, she thought, stopping at the foot of the stairs and looking up towards his room. Because I know girls like that. Girls like Nessa Crowley don’t fall in love with boys like you.
Chapter Sixteen
‘You need to get your hair done, darling,’ Henry said at the start of August. Keelin was in the sunroom, sitting cross-legged on an old cushion Johanna had bought her in Mexico years ago, green silk embroidered with Frieda Kahlo’s face in fine stitching. She had been very still, watching the evening light ripple lavender across the waves, when Henry stood above her, touching her scalp with the tips of his fingertips. ‘These roots are frightful,’ he said, and she tensed, opening her mouth to say that she would dye it herself, she could easily order a home colour kit on Amazon, but he cut her off before she could speak. ‘I’ll email the salon for you today,’ he said. ‘Tell them to send one of their girls.’
Nicola was the name of the hairdresser they dispatched to the island this time, a nineteen-year-old with a peach-coloured bowl cut and an aggressive amount of black kohl smudged underneath her eyes. Keelin told her where she could set up her tools and stood at the kitchen table awkwardly until they were ready to begin. She felt the way she always did when an outsider came into Hawthorn House: torn between fear at what they might bring with them, like settlers carrying disease to the New World, and her strange desire to consume them, to eat them – and their freedom – whole. She sat on a wooden stool, the hairdresser wrapping a silk cloak around her shoulders. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ she said as Keelin explained what style she wanted done today, breathing out each yeah like it was costing her something. It was clear the girl had never heard of the murder or Misty Hill, or if she had, she didn’t care. Instead, she kept up a running commentary on the latest celebrity gossip as she combed Keelin’s wet hair, talking about an Instagram influencer who had shared a herpes diagnosis on her Stories (‘I don’t know why everyone is making such a fuss, apparently we all have the virus and we just don’t know it, like.’), a former Love Island contestant who was releasing a fitness video (‘I gave up on that shite last year, would it kill them to have anyone over a size ten on the show? It’s so boring.’) and then, finally, she told Keelin about a girl she’d been at school with who had since broken into the porn industry. Well, her ex-boyfriend filmed them having sex and uploaded it to RedTube when she dumped him. ‘It’s desperate, what he done to her,’ Nicola said. ‘Not to mention illegal. But I can’t tell you how many fights I’ve had with friends of mine about it. And with girls, like. Saying, what did she think was going to happen? She should have known better, and all this crap. It’s mad.’
Keelin stayed quiet, hoping the other woman would take her silence for agreement. But she had often wondered why these young girls did agree to have their most intimate moments recorded, send naked photos of themselves to men they barely knew. Surely they had to realise such messages could be used against them? Screenshots taken, and shared in group WhatsApp chats. It’s just banter, anything to impress the lads, lad, lads. It didn’t matter that the men’s texts were equally crude, for they were men and men had always been allowed to express their sexuality however they wanted. That was how the world worked and Keelin was too old to think it would change; she had seen too much to believe in fairy tales. As the hairdresser painted the dye onto her hair, Keelin had a burning desire to phone Evie, to make her daughter swear she’d never be so stupid as to send those kinds of photos to a boy, who would pass them around his school dormitory, snickering with his friends and rating her body out of ten. Evie’s naked flesh, her vulnerability; it would declare him a man, damn her a whore.
But she hadn’t spoken with Evie in weeks, not since her passcode stopped working. Don’t worry about it, Henry told her when she asked to borrow his iPhone to ring their daughter. Evie is having a great summer in Scotland, hanging out with her friends. She’s not going to want to talk to her parents every five seconds, now, is she? Just relax, darling. But the girl was always happy to talk to Henry, naturally. Her father controlled the purse strings, it was his money that paid for the expensive make-up and the new sneakers she just had to have on the weekend shopping trips to London. Evie couldn’t afford to ignore him.
After the hairdresser had blow-dried Keelin’s long bob and declared it ‘stunning’, she packed her styling tools in her leopard print suitcase, and left, the house falling silent in her wake. Keelin touched the shining blonde hair and repeated the word in a low voice. ‘Stunning.’ She watched herself in the mirror, mouthing it over and over. Stunning. Stunning. She went into the study, to the bookshelves lining the far wall, and she ran her fingers along the spines, the academic texts about psychology she knew Henry would never bother looking at. She stopped when she came to a textbook called Domestic Violence and Psychology. She pulled it out, and the book beside it – a memoir written by a man who had been raised in an abusive home – and in the space left behind, she saw the old binder. Her name scrawled in black ink on the inside, and it was bulging with newspaper clippings and torn-out magazine articles, the edges raw and curling. She sat on the floor, opening the folder before her.
Keelin wasn’t sure why she kept these newspaper clippings. All she knew was that on the days when she could not quite believe that Nessa was dead, she needed to feel this folder in her hands. She couldn’t reconcile that limp body face down in the grass with the Nessa she had known, the baby in a lace christening gown in Seán’s arms, mewling in displeasure as she was doused in holy water. Are you ready to help the parents of this child in their duty as Christian parents? the priest asked the godparents, and Seán, solemn in his new suit and cheap shoes, said that he was. Nessa the toddler sitting on Seán’s shoulders, calling Kee-Kee, Kee-Kee, chubby palms on Keelin’s cheeks, leaning in for a smacking kiss. The little girl in a swimsuit with a frill across the bottom, dipping low so her long hair trailed into the water, digging clumps of wet sand to build a wall around her sandcastle, handing out orders to her obedient sisters. The young woman who turned up on their doorstep, smiling, I’m Nessa. Where was the real girl in all of the mythologising of the last ten years? Keelin couldn’t find her, but she was determined to keep looking. On the nights she was unable to sleep, she would sneak downstairs, cautiously treading on the stairs to avoid the sections where the squeaking floorboards would betray her, and come into the study to find this folder. There, Keelin would think, as she stared at a photo of Nessa, there you are. She wondered if she was obsessed with Nessa Crowley; if she loved the girl or she hated her. Maybe it was both.
‘Mam? Cad atá . . .’
Keelin bent over to hide the folder; she didn’t want Alex to see this. But her son crouched beside her before she could stop him, picking up one of the newspapers. Alex sat on his haunches, his eyes scanning back and forth as he read the report, and Keelin watched him. She could see a tiny nick on his jawline from where he’d cut himself shaving, flakes of dry skin around his nostrils, the shadows beneath his eyes.
‘Alex,’ she tried. ‘Don’t, a stór. Please.’ But he didn’t listen, staring at the photo on the front page, Nessa flanked by Róisín and Sinéad. The Crowley Girls were so similar, with those slanting green eyes and that tousled blonde hair, but it was always the oldest sister to whom your gaze was drawn. The other two were squinting into the sun, but not Nessa. The light bathed her, surrounding her like a halo, setting her on fire. ‘She was something special, wasn’t she?’ Alex said, picking up an old photo of Seán holding a doll-like Nessa in his arms at her third birthday party. ‘It’s hard to believe that . . .’
‘A stór,’ she said, but he dropped the photo to the ground. ‘I’m sorry, Mam,’ he said, his voice wavering. ‘I can’t do this.’
‘Alex,’ she called after him, but he was gone, leav
ing her alone again. Sighing, she gathered the photos and the newspaper clippings together, filing them neatly back into the folder. She stuffed it behind the textbooks, making sure it was safely hidden away where Henry wouldn’t see it. She stood there, leaning against the bookshelves, nostrils twitching as the swirling dust crept into her nose. And she allowed herself to remember.
It was a few months before Nessa’s death, and Keelin was in her son’s bedroom. She wasn’t snooping; she’d just wanted to give it a cursory tidy before the housekeeper arrived. That’s her job, Henry would tsk when he saw Keelin running frantically about the place, but Keelin wasn’t having that woman telling tales around the island that Keelin Ní Mhordha was slovenly, saying she had notions after marrying a Kinsella, and her children were even worse. Alex’s room had been particularly revolting that day; three mugs of cold tea under his bed, each growing a film of mould across the top, a jam-smeared knife on a plate sticky with breadcrumbs, and the room smelled of dirty socks and Lynx deodorant. She had been stripping the sheets, trying not to gag, when she noticed something peeking out beneath the mattress. It was a photo of her son and Nessa, she found, the girl holding the digital camera at arm’s length to take the shot. A quarter of her face was out of frame, but Alex wasn’t looking at the camera, he was staring at Nessa, an expression on his face that Keelin had never seen before. It made her son seem like a stranger, and something twisted in Keelin’s gut at the thought of that. She went to shove the photo back under the mattress when she saw what else was hiding there. A notebook, A5 size, an image of Van Gogh’s Starry Night on the cover. Pages and pages of Alex’s handwriting inside, the scrawling script that had tested his teachers’ patience since he was a child. Don’t, Keelin. But she couldn’t resist. This notebook might explain Alex to her, maybe the pages within contained all the secrets he had started to keep from her.
She opened the cover, and she read one page, then another, barely able to make sense of what she was seeing.
– Tight little pussy
– You want me to destroy you
– Fuck you in every hole
– My cum slut
Keelin closed the diary, her hands trembling, and she placed it back where she had found it. They were just words, she told herself as she hurried out of the room. It didn’t mean anything. There was no point in talking to Alex about it, was there? That’s what boys his age did, they had disgusting, stupid fantasies. It was because of porn and peer pressure and everything else that came with being a teenager, nothing more. They were all the same. He would grow out of it, of course he would. And she couldn’t ask him about this. Their relationship was strained enough as it was right now – she didn’t want her son to be angry at her for violating his trust. Evie was Henry’s pet – Keelin could barely get a look in with her daughter these days. All she had was Alex; she couldn’t risk losing him too.
Everything OK? Henry asked when she went downstairs and Keelin hesitated, wondering if she should tell her husband what she had seen in the diary. She couldn’t help but think about the things she and Henry did to each other in bed, the words they called one another. Had Alex overheard them? Had he stumbled across something in their room – a video, a book, a toy – that he was too young to understand? All this time, Keelin had been afraid that Alex would inherit the badness from his father, but what if it was she who was broken? Keelin, Henry said, are you quite all right, darling? And she just smiled at her husband, and she said yes, everything is fine. Nothing to worry about. She didn’t know what to do so she did nothing. She stood back and watched as it all unfolded before her, and she remained silent throughout.
She would regret that, when it was over.
Chapter Seventeen
Henry Kinsella was never charged with the murder of Nessa Crowley but neither was anyone else. That was the problem, you see. We were left devastated, keening the loss of our most beloved daughter, and we wanted blood vengeance. We wanted answers and still, ten years later, we had none.
The guards were excited about a potential witness at one point, an Ellen Tiernan who had sworn blind that she’d seen a tall man with reddish-brown hair that night, a rock in hand, madness in his eyes. But as much as we wished we could believe this account – and we did very much want to believe it; it would have been much more convenient if Henry Kinsella was behind this, the Outsider, the Sasanach – we couldn’t allow ourselves to hope, for we knew the Tiernan woman well. She was a blow-in, living on Inisrún these last fifteen years, and notorious for her tall tales and exaggeration. Sure enough, it emerged that Ellen Tiernan had been in Tipperary the weekend of the party and she had ‘seen’ all of this in a vision; she had the second sight, she was a Bean Feasa, she claimed. Thus her story was worthless.
Many of us came forward with our own theories about what happened that night. It had been Keelin Ní Mhordha, we said, and didn’t she have good cause to do it? Besides, everyone knew how much she hated the Crowley Girl spending all that time with her son. No, it was one of Henry’s posh friends, we said, Miles Darcy was a dubious character. We heard he made a pass at Nessa Crowley at the party and she rejected him, something a man like that wouldn’t take lying down. There were even some who thought it might have been Alex Delaney, so wildly in love with Nessa was he, but he was a gentle type, we argued, incapable of such a deed, and more importantly, he had been seen that night, before Nessa was taken from us. Unconscious in bed, a puddle of vomit on the floor beside him. Dead to the world.
As time went on, we became eager to turn on one another. There were furtive visits to the guards, whispering rumours in their ears, using the murder to settle old scores with neighbours who’d bought land we wanted for ourselves, school bullies, and the ex-lovers who spurned our proposals. But none of our gossip would hold up in a court of law either.
And so, there was nothing else we could do. Henry Kinsella came back to the island, to reclaim his home among us.
An innocent man, he said, but we knew it wasn’t true. We knew what he had done.
Chapter Eighteen
Keelin wasn’t surprised when the Kinsellas’ lawyer phoned to say the case against Henry had been dropped because the Director of Public Prosecutions decided there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute. The lawyer had predicted this would be the outcome – the bar for such things was high in Ireland and there had been no physical evidence to link her husband with Nessa Crowley’s death, nothing that could prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Henry seemed to expect everything would return to normal then, that the islanders would forget, in time. But it was he who had forgotten, he who had been foolish enough to overlook what the Irish did to outsiders who stole what was rightfully theirs. On the second anniversary of Nessa Crowley’s death, the Kinsellas went to sleep and they awoke with the smell of smoke on their breath. Fire, Henry shouted. Fire. He ran outside, shouting for help that refused to come, and he watched Misty Hill burn to the ground. All I ever wanted was to belong, he cried as Keelin pulled him away from the blaze, the flames so close she could smell her hair singeing. I know, she said, and it was at that moment she understood she would never be able to leave him.
There was a noticeable shift in public sentiment in the years that followed the fire, pious op-eds denouncing this kind of ‘parochial vigilantism’. More letters began to arrive, but these letters were different to the ones that had come before; they were far less frightening to read, for one thing, containing fewer death threats, fewer promises to rape Keelin. Women who’d seen photos of Henry and had been struck by his good looks and expensive suit, writing to tell him they’d love to meet him in person if he was ‘ever in the area’. Men’s Rights Activists, furious Henry had been implicated at all, given the lack of evidence. This ‘Believe Women’ movement has gone too far, they wrote in their rambling missives. It’s a dangerous time to be a man, wouldn’t you agree? Activists wanting to expose garda corruption, who thought the Misty Hill case would be a perfect pl
ace to start. Invitations for Henry to be the keynote speaker at Free Thought events, requests from literary agents wondering if he was interested in writing a memoir about life after Misty Hill. Her husband read these letters out loud to her, an edge of excitement in his voice. The world wants to hear your side of the story, they said.
No one wanted to hear Keelin’s side of the story. Oh, they claimed they did, but she knew it wasn’t true. On occasion she had been contacted by journalists, usually women, who promised a ‘sympathetic’ audience for the wife of Henry Kinsella. They could help her, they wrote, she could trust them, but Keelin knew what they really meant. They wanted her to cry on camera and admit that she knew what Henry had done, but she’d been too terrified to tell her story until now. They wanted her to shout about female empowerment, to pledge her allegiance to the cause and say she was determined to find justice for the Crowley Girl, as if Nessa was Keelin’s first priority while she sat outside her devastated son’s bedroom to make sure he hadn’t harmed himself during the night. If she could hear Alex’s breath, she would know he was still alive.
The interview requests had intensified in recent years. Powerful men had been exposed, the decades-long whispers that they’d touched what was not theirs to touch turning to a primal scream. Keelin thought this ‘movement’, whatever it was, would not last. Men always made excuses for one another no matter what their crimes; they would band together and close ranks, as they had always done. She watched as women took to the internet to rip open barely healed wounds, as if a hashtag could save them from bleeding out. ‘We’re reclaiming our stories from the lens of the patriarchy,’ she was told in emails from feminist blogs written by millennials high on their sense of self-importance. Monica, Lorena, Hillary, Sinéad, Courtney; they would crown all the difficult women as queens in this new world order, and wanted to do the same for Keelin, if she’d let them. ‘Share your story for the good of the culture,’ they wrote but she knew her story wouldn’t fit the narrative they wanted to create. It wasn’t a simple tale of a bad man and a good victim.
After the Silence Page 9