by Claire Allan
blame Heidi for snapping – all that stress she was living under.
I’ve told her I’ll tell the police what he did to me, too. And I
can prove it.’
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Chapter Sixty-Three
Ciara
Then
‘No!’ I told Joe, loudly and firmly.
I didn’t shout. I just made sure I was very clear. I would not
help him into bed. I would not coddle and soothe. I would
not show him the tenderness he hadn’t shown me. I stood far
enough away from him that he could not take a hold of my
wrist again. Not without standing up on the legs he had
proclaimed were too wobbly.
‘You can manage it yourself,’ I added.
‘I’m not well, Ciara,’ he said. ‘I was only looking for a bit of
help.’
With considerable effort, some of it put on for effect, in my
opinion, he shuffled his way back onto the bed and pulled his
legs in under the covers. With shaking hands, he lifted the cup
of tea I had left him and took a sip.
‘Can I leave now?’ I asked him, all set to walk out.
‘Can we not talk first?’ he asked. ‘Don’t you think we’ve
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things to talk about? God knows I’m not going to be around for long. Can we not start to try to find a way to make peace
with each other?’
‘I think we’ve gone beyond that,’ I told him.
He shook his head sadly. ‘It will destroy you, you know, in
the long run. If you let the bitterness eat away at you.’
He looked so absolutely sanctimonious I had to restrain myself
from lashing out at him.
‘But I’ll pray you’re able to find forgiveness in your heart
towards me,’ he said. ‘For the hurt I caused you when I left.
For how abandoned you must’ve felt.’
‘Is that all we need to pray about?’ I asked him, incredulous
that he could think my anger was just down to him walking
away.
‘Forgiveness and peace of mind are the greatest things we
can achieve in this life,’ he said.
‘I’ll forgive you, Dad, if you admit it.’
I was lying of course. I’d never be able to forgive it.
I crossed my arms in front of myself. Adopted the bravado
that had been mine when I was a teenage girl. I may have been
shaking inside but outwardly I looked in control.
One unkempt, grey-streaked eyebrow rose. A look of genuine
bewilderment – or a very good impression of it at least. ‘I don’t
know what you mean,’ he said.
He actually had the brass neck to deny it.
‘Don’t you?’ I asked. ‘I know it’s been ‘our little secret’ for
a long time now, hasn’t it? “Don’t tell anyone, Ciara. They
won’t understand.” Or how about “Mammy would only get
cross” or the famous “This is how all daddies show their
little girls they love them and I love you the most in the
world.”’
I saw whatever colour was left in his sad, sorry, sick face drain
away. He swallowed hard. I think, actually think, that he figured
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I’d either forgotten or would never have the nerve to bring it up again.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said, but the
tremor in his voice, the slick of sweat breaking through on his
forehead, let me know that I’d got to him.
‘Do you really need me to spell it out? In detail? Because I
can do that, if you want? God knows the details have never
left me. I can even go downstairs right now and spell it all out
in glorious, multi-coloured, revolting detail to Kathleen, and
Heidi and Alex and Stella. And maybe Father Brennan would
like to know, if he isn’t already keeping your secrets in the
sanctity of the confessional. It’s amazing what can be forgiven
with a couple of Hail Marys these days, isn’t it? Suffer the little children and all that nonsense. Or maybe I could tell Mammy.
I don’t actually know, standing here now, why I never told her
before.’
‘You’d break her,’ he mumbled. ‘You’d destroy her.’
‘What? What was that?’ I asked loudly, my confidence building
as I saw him finally acknowledge what he’d done.
‘She’d never recover from it. Look, Ciara, be angry with me
all you want. Hate me. Tell me to go to hell and sure, I’ll be
going there soon anyway. But don’t destroy your mother. Not
now when there’s nothing I can do to make it right.’
He looked pathetic. He looked scared and I revelled in it.
He deserved to look scared. He wouldn’t get any sympathy
from me for it. But he was right that it would destroy my
mother, who despite her unending loyalty to my father would
have been the first person to drag him to the police if only
she’d known.
But her heart had been so hurt. She had been so broken I
hadn’t wanted to break it further when he left. I’d known even
then that she wouldn’t be able to bear it.
I looked at him, at his wringing of his hands, his hoping for
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a way to escape from that room. But he couldn’t. His legs were too weak. There was nowhere to run and this time I could set
the rules.
‘You can start to make it right,’ I told him.
‘How? Tell me how.’
I looked around the room, looking for inspiration. I saw the
leather diary and pen on his bed.
‘Write it down,’ I told him.
‘What? You can’t be serious.’
‘I’m very serious. Write it down. Confess to it. Write it on
a page in that diary. Write that you are sorry. Write that you
are twisted man. Tell them you hurt me.’
‘But your mother . . .’ he said, his face contorting with grief
at the thought of having to ‘out’ himself.
‘I won’t show her. Unless I have to. That’s up to you, you
can be the one who decides whether I have to or not, but I
want it there just in case. And I want, no I need, for you to
admit it.’
I could feel my composure start to crumble. All I had wanted,
for so long, for the past twenty years, more than anything, was
for him to say sorry. For him to admit he had damaged me so
badly that I didn’t know what it was like to really care for
someone, to love them in an un-abusive fashion. That I had
wept buckets of tears for the girl who begged her abusive father
to come back because that’s what she equated with love.
‘I can’t do that, love,’ he said, looking up at me. ‘Don’t make
me!’ he pleaded.
I brushed away a tear that was threatening to fall, only to
find another followed it.
Still, I took another deep breath.
‘You can, if you don’t want me to march downstairs right
now and tell them all,’ I said as firmly as my voi
ce would allow.
‘Ciara,’ he implored.
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‘You want to make it right? Then make it right,’ I told him.
Then I watched as he put pen to paper, in the back of his
leather-bound diary, and wrote the confession, and the apology,
I had been waiting for all my life.
‘If you ever loved me at all,’ he said when he was done, ‘you’ll
burn this diary when I’m gone. I’ve made mistakes, but no one
else needs to be hurt by them.’
‘I’ll check, every day, that you’ve not destroyed those pages,’
I told him. ‘If I find you have, everyone will know. I don’t care
how ill you are. I don’t care if you are taking your last breath.
They will know.’
Defeated, he slumped back on his pillows and I left the room.
He was dead just two hours later.
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Chapter Sixty-Four
Heidi
Now
Ciara springs from her seat and rushes from the room to fetch
the ‘proof ’ she claims to have. I look at Alex, who quickly turns his head from watching her leave to look at me. He looks so
sad. So incredibly sad that I want to apologise to him for telling him. I want to apologise for putting the demons in his head.
It was bad enough that they were in mine to begin with.
‘Heidi . . .’ he says and shakes his head.
He looks so sad. So disappointed in me.
‘I didn’t want you to see me as a victim,’ I blurt, voicing my
worst fears publicly. ‘I didn’t want you to know how damaged
I was. Maybe you wouldn’t want to be with me. Maybe you
wouldn’t want to have a family with me. I was so messed up,
for so long. But I can promise you, whatever happened to Joe,
it wasn’t anything to do with me. I’m safe to be around. Our
daughter is safe with me.’
He has his head in his hands and I just want to get through
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to him. If I don’t have him on my side then I might as well have killed Joe because nothing else will matter.
I pull back just a little and reach for him, put my hand to
his cheek.
‘Let’s get away from here. Now. Ciara’s not right. She’s been
setting me up, Alex. I feel it. She’s been making me out to be
crazy, but I’m not. We can go to the police and tell them that
she’s been setting me up.’
I’m aware I’m speaking too fast. The words tumbling from
my mouth. And I know that to Alex, who surely must be trying
to take everything in, this will only serve to make him wonder
if I’m mad, after all.
I can hear Ciara move about upstairs. I can hear her footsteps
creak on the floorboards overhead. She’s in Joe’s room. I hear
her swear.
‘We don’t have long. I’ll run and get Lily and we can go,’ I
say, trying to work out how I can get to my daughter without
alerting Ciara to my plans to leave.
‘I can’t do that,’ he says, to my horror.
I blink at him, wondering if I heard him right.
‘I can’t run from this any more,’ he says. ‘I never should’ve
tried. It only made things so much worse. I’m so sorry, Heidi.
I’m so sorry for not telling you before now. It was me. I did
it. I killed him.’
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Chapter Sixty-Five
Alex
Then
I’d wished I still smoked. Or there had been someone in the
house who I could have cadged a cigarette off. The only ‘smoker’
there was Ciara and she used those stupid e-cig things. It wasn’t
the same. Not at all.
Work had been full-on. I’d wondered if half of my colleagues
had any competency at all, because none of them seemed to
be able to manage when anything out of the ordinary happened.
That day, one of my more annoying colleagues, a graduate
called Dean had stood over me huffing and puffing. He’s the
kind of person who has all the academic skills needed to score
him a first-class honours but none of the common sense required
to function in the real world, He’d been feeling under pressure
to get the intranet system he was working on for a local firm
up and running. And he’d been quite happy to pass all that
stress on to me.
By the time I’d arrived at Aberfoyle Crescent, to be met with
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an atmosphere so thick with tension you nearly needed an oxygen tank to breathe, I was already on my last nerve.
Heidi seemed quite close to being on hers, too. Ever since
Joe had taken ill, she had been put upon to care for him. I’d
watched as, with every visit, she became less and less happy.
She withdrew more and more from me and as much as I
tried to reach her, there was something untouchable between
us. A sadness of sorts.
I saw it on her face when I came back to the house on that
night. She was fidgety. Uptight. Despite the cold weather, she
went to stand outside. Said she needed air and I followed her.
Wishing for that elusive cigarette. Maybe a glass of wine. Maybe
a time when Heidi and I could just be a part of our own little
family again without all this noise around us.
‘You seem tense,’ I said.
At least she smiled – that kind of twisted ‘you don’t say’ but
there was a warmth to it. I wrapped my arms around her and
told her I loved her. I could feel the thunder of her heart against my chest and I wished I could take away all her stress – to see
her happy again.
I figured it might help if I offered to do a little more to help
with Joe, though there was something about him that made
me feel uncomfortable. I put it down to his self-assuredness,
his arrogance. I knew the type well.
There was something sly about him, too. He gave off bad
vibes although I could never quite put my finger on why. What
I did know was that Joe McKee liked to be in control as much
as he liked to be the centre of attention. I’d seen enough of
him over the years to figure that out.
Still, I’d be polite and I’d do my bit because God knows
Heidi didn’t need any more stress. It was bad enough to have
Ciara and Stella, not to mention Kathleen hovering around.
That was a whole other complicated dynamic right there. There
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was no denying the tension that existed between them and Heidi.
She told me that she felt she’d never been accepted by any
of them. Watching them interact with each other I could see
that was true.
Just after ten thirty, or thereabouts, I’d gone upstairs to get
Lily, stopping to use the bathroom first. I was so tired, I could
&n
bsp; feel my eyes starting to droop. I splashed my face with cold
water, pushed the bathroom window open wide and had allowed
the fresh, ice-cold air to wash over me. I prayed that Lily would
sleep through the night. Both Heidi and I needed the rest.
I had just closed the window, when I heard a strange, stran-
gulated cough from Joe’s room, which was just next door.
I tapped on his bedroom door, quietly said his name in case
he was sleeping, and opened it just a crack.
‘Are you okay, Joe?’ I asked, looking at the figure lying in
the bed.
His bedside light was still on, an empty teacup on his locker,
a notebook or diary and pen discarded on the bed. I could
hear the faintest of rattles, so I moved closer.
‘Joe?’ I asked again, a little louder but not much.
He didn’t move. His eyes didn’t even flicker. I wasn’t sure for
a moment or two if he was breathing, and then there it was
again – a sickening gargling sound, not quite a breath but maybe.
He went still. I couldn’t hear another breath. I started to panic
a little, sat down on the edge of the bed and took his hand in
mine, tried to feel for a pulse. I couldn’t feel one, or maybe I
could. But it was so weak, I just wasn’t sure.
I reached over to grab his other hand, thinking maybe I’d
get a better reading from his other wrist, but as I reached across something in the book that was lying open on his bed caught
my eye. I don’t know, I’ll never know, what it was that made
me look a little closer, but I did and my stomach contracted.
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I didn’t read it all. I swear I didn’t read it all. Not at first. Just words that were blurring together and then spinning. Snapshots.
But enough, more than enough, to make me want to hurt Joe
McKee more than I ever wanted to hurt anyone in my life.
Girls. Child. Sick. Hurt. Perverted. Illness. Abuse. Sorry.
The words became more important than the pulse I was
supposed to be looking for. I stopped focusing on how frequently
he was breathing. Any instinct I’d had to try to help or call for
help slipped away. I reached for the book, turned it around.
Focused on the words.
A confession of sorts. He needed to get it off his chest. He
was sorry. He was a sick man. He had always been a sick man
and he had tried to control it but he was weak.
He never meant to hurt anyone.