‘Tell me,’ she said.
And he did. He thought this was going to be the night, he said, the night he finally told Nessa how he felt about her. They’d been having a great time, dancing and drinking, and someone passed them a joint; he’d never smoked one before, but he didn’t want to look stupid in front of Nessa so he inhaled deeply, swallowing the haze inside him, losing himself. When he came to again, she was gone, and he couldn’t find her. He met Miles coming out of the bathroom and he asked the older man if he’d seen Nessa. No, Miles had said, although he wasn’t sure Alex was going to have much luck with that girl, she seemed rather a prig, and he pulled Alex back into the bathroom with him. Sprinkling cocaine on the cistern, chopping it finely with a credit card, holding out a rolled-up fifty-pound note for Alex to snort it with. It’ll help you talk to her, Miles had promised. You’ll feel more confident. The lights went out then, and Alex went to find Nessa, to make sure she was all right, and that was when he saw her running away from the garage, crying. He had followed her into the dark, stumbling on wet leaves, his heart beating in his mouth. She was sitting on a large stone in the rock garden, her arms wrapped around her legs. It was as if she was waiting for someone to rescue her, he told Keelin, and he wanted to be the one to do it. She looked surprised to see him, her face breaking in disappointment, and she cried even harder, make-up running down her face, but she was still beautiful, he thought. He wanted to comfort her, that’s all. He hugged her then, and he couldn’t believe how good it felt to finally hold one of the Crowley Girls in his arms. This was his chance, he thought, his opportunity to claim Nessa as his own. He had dreamed of this for so long. You’re lovely, she said, sniffling, and that’s what girls are supposed to want, isn’t it? Why do girls always say they want nice guys if they don’t? He’d tried to be patient with Nessa, he didn’t want to pressure her, but he was tired of waiting now. He leaned in and he kissed her, but she pulled away. Alex, she said. Alex, I— And he kissed her again, because he knew that she could like him too if she just tried hard enough, she wasn’t even trying. No, Alex, she said, and she pushed him off. He told her he loved her, he said it over and over again, but the girl wouldn’t listen. No, Alex. So he said it again – I love you, Nessa, I love you. And she laughed at him then and she turned away, still smiling. She was going to tell her sisters, he realised. They would laugh at him together, call him pathetic; as if Nessa Crowley would ever be interested in someone like him, a loser with no friends, whose own father wouldn’t have anything to do with him. And there was a rock in his hand and he didn’t know how it got there and he didn’t mean to hurt anyone. He just wanted to stop her – to stop the girl from walking away, to stop her laughing at him. To make it all go away. Mam, you have to believe me, I didn’t mean it. It was like I was out of my body and someone else was doing it. But Nessa was falling, to her knees first, and then to the ground, and she hit her head. That wasn’t my fault, was it? That wasn’t my fault. He watched as she lay there, blood blooming like flowers in her temple, staining her eyes pink. He watched her die.
‘I’m the same as my father,’ Alex said, and he began to hit at his body, punching his legs and clawing at his chest. ‘I’m a monster, I’m a monster—’
‘Don’t say that.’ Keelin grabbed his hands so he couldn’t inflict any more harm on himself. ‘You’re nothing like that man. I can’t . . .’
She would still be with Mark in that house in Carlow, if it hadn’t been for Alex. She had left her marriage to save him. She couldn’t have allowed her son to be brought up in the carnage of that relationship, to stand by and watch as violence crackled down Alex’s spine like electricity too, sparking in the palms of his hands, itching for girl flesh to satisfy him. She had left that night in order to break the cycle and she had. She had. Alex was nothing like his father. He was a good boy. She could not believe anything else.
‘This was an accident, Alex,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’
He looked at her, and there was something ruined in his eyes. ‘I’m going to jail, amn’t I?’ He bent over, his shoulders racked with sobs, and Keelin’s heart twisted inside her chest with the savage fear of losing him. He’s a baby, she thought. He won’t survive without my help. ‘No,’ she said, lying down beside him on the bed. She curled around her son, as if he was still in the womb and she was the barrier between him and the outside world. ‘Henry will take care of this. I promise you.’
Alex handed his mother the clothes that needed to be disposed of and she waited until she heard the tap turn on in his en-suite bathroom before she shoved her hand under the mattress, patting frantically until her fingers closed around the hard edges of the same notebook she had found all those months before. She threw it down the fire escape to Henry, along with the clothes, whispering at her husband to pull the buttons off the shirt and jeans. She had seen something about that on an episode of CSI. They wouldn’t burn, re-appearing in the ashes, like breadcrumbs that would lead the guards back through the forest to their front door. She crept into Alex’s room again and she sat with him until he fell asleep, humming a lullaby his grandmother used to sing when he was a child. She kissed the tips of her fingers and pressed them to his forehead.
‘Is he all right?’ Henry asked as she walked into their bedroom. He was sitting on top of the duvet in a dressing gown and slippers, his hair still damp from the rain. He’d lit a couple of scented candles, one on her bedside locker, another on his own, and the heady smell of bergamot and basil made her feel lightheaded. She crawled onto the bed beside him, lying on her stomach. She thought she would cry, would have welcomed the release, in fact, but she found she could not. Henry touched her neck and she shivered.
‘I’ll talk to Alex tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I’ll explain what to say when the guards get here.’ Keelin half moaned at the mention of the police and he shushed her. ‘They won’t be here for a day at least, we’ll have time to clean up properly,’ he said. ‘The weather will work in our favour. I’ll delete my messages, and I got rid of Nessa’s mobile. I threw it over the cliffs into the sea. No one will find it now.’
‘But they don’t need the phone to figure out about your . . . your involvement with her. There’s no way Nessa didn’t tell her sisters about it, they’re as thick as thieves. Those girls will blab to the guards and then they’ll—’
‘Blame me?’ Henry asked. ‘They can try. But there won’t be any evidence. How could there be?’ He half-laughed. ‘I wasn’t the one who killed her.’ He rested his hand on her head, began to stroke her hair. ‘What was in that notebook? The one I threw on the bonfire?’
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Just something that needed to be burned.’
She felt her husband get up, could hear his footsteps walking away from her, a drawer being opened. Then there was a delicious heaviness over her, a caress of cashmere. ‘There,’ he said, tucking the blanket around her body, ‘I don’t want you getting cold.’
‘We had to do it, we had to, didn’t we? It was an accident, Alex loved that girl, he wouldn’t have . . . he would never . . . He wouldn’t last two minutes in prison, he’s not—’
‘Shh, darling. You’re getting yourself worked up.’ He kissed the back of her neck. ‘I think it’s time I told you a story, Keelin.’
‘Henry . . .’
‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s important you hear this.’ And she could hear in his voice that it was, so she listened. ‘Once upon a time,’ he began, ‘there was a man called Henry.’ She propped herself up on her elbows at the mention of his name, but she still didn’t look at her husband. ‘The man was in his late twenties when this tale begins,’ he continued. ‘The world at his feet, some might say. There was too much of everything – too much money, too much sex, too much drink and drugs. One night, Henry and a young woman called Greta, they were at a family wedding in Surrey. Henry had been taking cocaine and Greta didn’t like that. He became aggressive, she said, and even though Hen
ry loved the young woman very much, he didn’t like being told what to do. So he took more coke, just to prove he could. Greta came into the bathroom to find Henry and an old classmate snorting lines and she yelled at him, demanded they go back to the nearby manor where he’d booked a room for them. Henry didn’t like that either; he didn’t like being made a fool of in front of his friends. Fine, he said to Greta. If you want to go, then let’s go. Outside, Greta tried to take the keys off him. You’re blotto, she said. But he told her to get in the car, that he was perfectly fine to drive. Once they were inside, he yelled at her. How dare you! he said. You made me look like a fucking pussy. He drove faster, the windows open, Greta trembling in her thin summer dress. She begged him to slow down, her hands gripping at the sides of the seat. And then . . .’ Henry paused. ‘Well, I think you know what happened next, don’t you?’ he said. ‘When I crawled out of that ditch, there was blood and glass everywhere, I could taste metal in my mouth and I was almost deaf, just this high-pitched ringing in my ears that wouldn’t stop. Greta was trapped in the car, her head at a ghastly angle, and I knew . . . I knew she was dead.’ His voice wobbled, and he took a breath to steady himself. ‘And my first thought wasn’t about her or her family, but about me – about the drink I had taken, all the coke. How my life would be over if the police found me there like that. My future would be ruined.’
‘What did you do, Henry?’
‘I got my father. I thought he would know what to do,’ he said. ‘And he . . .’
The car had crashed only five hundred metres from the hotel, so Henry ran back and slammed his fist against the door of his parents’ room. His mother answered, her hair in curlers, and he told her to go back to bed, he needed to talk to his father. Jonathan took one look at his son, at his swollen eye and cut-up face, his stained clothes, and he nodded, as if he had been waiting for this day to come. They went back to the car, abandoned there in that quiet country lane, and Jonathan explained to Henry what they were going to do. You stay quiet, his father told him. You don’t know anything. You drank too much beer and you passed out in the car when I was driving you home. You don’t know anything about this, OK? Henry started to cry, and he pretended it was because of Greta but secretly, he was just relieved that his father was taking control and he didn’t have to worry any more. Stop it, the older man said sharply. The girl is dead, nothing will change that. I don’t see the point in making things worse by having you locked away for the next ten years. When the police came, Jonathan bowed his head and said it was he who was responsible. Henry had too much to drink at the wedding so Jonathan – a lifelong teetotaller – volunteered to drive his son and his girlfriend back to the manor where they were staying. A dog ran out in front of the car, Jonathan explained, and he had tried to swerve but lost control of the wheel. He’d told Greta to wear her seat belt, he said. She mustn’t have listened, the poor girl. No one thought to ask why Jonathan had emerged from the crash unscathed, without a scratch on his body. No one asked the other wedding guests if they had any comment to make, although a number of them had seen the couple drive off alone, Henry behind the wheel of the car. It was much more convenient to simply believe Jonathan Kinsella was telling the truth – he was the founder and CEO of the Kinsella Hotel Group, after all, such a respectable gentleman – and to write it off as a tragic accident.
‘That’s what Kinsella men do for their children, my father said to me that night,’ Henry told her now. ‘We do what we have to do to protect our sons. And Alex is a Kinsella in all but name, he is to me at least. He’ll be safe here, Keels. He’ll be safe with us.’
She pushed herself up to sitting, trying to process what she had just heard. Only hours ago, she would have been appalled, disgusted at how her father-in-law had used his privilege and power to cover up Henry’s crime, and how everyone else had simply looked the other way, all because of the Kinsella money. Is this what she had brought Alex into? she wondered. A family who believed they could buy their way out of any crisis, and never face the consequences? What would she be teaching her son if she allowed Henry to cover up for him too? But she was going to allow him to do just that, she realised. There had never been any real doubt in her mind, she would have died before allowing them to take her child away from her. She wasn’t the person she had always thought she was, but then again, neither was Henry. How little she had known her husband, even after all these years. How many secrets he had kept from her.
He reached out to take her hand. ‘And –’ he hesitated – ‘you’re not going anywhere either, are you?’
‘No,’ she replied. She thought of Alex, asleep in his narrow bed. Safe. She knew she would do whatever was necessary to keep him that way. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’
She could see the outline of her face reflected in Henry’s eyes, the shape of her head drawn across his irises. She stood up, and he did the same, and she pushed her body against his. Skin against skin. They knew too much now; they had seen each other’s broken bones, had learned each other’s darkest secrets. The night had bound them to one another, stitching their hearts together with a black thread slicing so fine they couldn’t be sure where one of them ended and the other began. Keelin had sworn her allegiance to Henry the moment she had walked away from Nessa Crowley’s body without a second glance. What God has joined together, let no man put asunder. Henry and Keelin Kinsella had held hands in the shadows and they had set fire to the ship that had brought them to this land. There would be no turning back.
‘What do we do now?’ she asked her husband, her face against his chest.
‘We wait.’
He lay down on the bed and she did the same, aligning her body with his. She curled her little finger around her husband’s. Pinkie promise. ‘It’s just you and me now,’ he whispered as they waited together. The wind howling outside, voices chatting downstairs – she could hear her name, and then Henry’s. People wondering where the hosts were, no doubt, bloody rude to leave their guests alone with just a bunch of bloody candles. Footsteps on the stairs. ‘Oops,’ she heard an American accent say, walking into Alex’s room, ‘the poor kid is out cold.’ (Good, Keelin thought. There would be a witness afterwards, someone to swear that they had seen the boy in his bed, asleep. Innocent.) The woman giggling – ‘Sweetie, we can’t! – and then a low moaning, a thumping rhythm beat out against the door frame. The party winding down, voices petering out except for a few coked-up heads talking at one another, throwing stories at the walls like mud, seeing which ones would stick. They lay there, watching each other as the light turned grey, seeping steadily into the room, folding around them. In time she could hear the stirrings of morning, mattress springs creaking as someone turned over in the bed in the room beside theirs. A yawn, a tap running, a toilet flushing. A husky voice, barbed with cigarette smoke. ‘Oh, do brush your hair, you look like a terrible slut,’ she said. ‘I need some air,’ another woman said. Footsteps on the stairs again. The sound of the patio door swishing back and Keelin could almost feel the sting of the wind on that woman’s cheeks, the deep inhale of breath as the morning air slapped her awake. Shifting from one foot to the other, shaking the cold off her shoulders. Lighting a fag, coughing as the nicotine hit her lungs. The woman was looking out over the angry sea, and she would think how marvellous it all was, how beautiful the island was even on a day as desolate as this. How lucky the Kinsellas are, she thought, her eyes skimming past the rose-lined path and the rock garden to the water below. And then she saw something – she wasn’t sure what, exactly, at first. Was it a doll of some sorts? A plastic bag? – her brain calibrating and recalibrating, unable to make sense of what was before her. She crept closer to it, disbelief turning to horror when she realised what this thing was, thrown at the edge of the Kinsellas’ property. And she opened her mouth and screamed.
‘Henry!’ someone shouted from downstairs. ‘Henry, get down here now!’
Keelin had been waiting for this moment all night, had k
nown it was coming, yet she couldn’t help but flinch at that scream. It was real then, she thought. Nessa Crowley was dead.
She looked at her husband, and she waited for him to tell her what to do.
‘It’s showtime, darling,’ Henry said, and his eyes were bright with something she couldn’t quite name. Not then, at least, but she would in time. ‘Are you ready?’
Epilogue
When we woke the morning after the storm, we could smell death on the air.
Our young complained of a restless night, bogeymen waiting under beds, teeth sharp. They had been thrown from their dreams by a cry, the children said, and we laughed at their vivid imaginations but we could feel it too, like a quickening in our bellies, a wishbone caught in our throats. Something was stirring on Inisrún.
There’s a girl missing.
We counted heads, hoping it wasn’t one of our own who had been taken. That was before the news spread across the island.
It’s one of the Crowley Girls.
Which one? we asked, as if it mattered. As if anything mattered, now that she was gone.
We saw Nessa everywhere for years after that, no matter how far we travelled from these lands. In New York, in Brisbane, in London, or Tokyo; every girl with tight jeans and a sweep of blonde hair was her, and we would say, Nessa, Nessa Crowley, is it you? Is it you? But then the girl would turn to us, and we would see the face more clearly, and it was never her. Her name trapped in our tongues forever, sewn there, swollen-full.
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