by Tim Buckley
The judge’s corpulent figure and reddened face was at odds his reputation. I had built an image of a hawkish, mean-faced man with piercing eyes and a nasal, guttural voice, a straggled-haired Dickensian villain. Instead, he reminded me more of a supermarket Santa in December than a ruthless defender of public order.
That the appearance belied the man, however, was immediately apparent when he called the court impatiently to order and fixed Oran with a contemptuous stare. The guilty plea and the relatively minor nature of the offence meant that there was no jury, and the court’s only concern was sentencing. It appeared from Tobin’s demeanour that he wanted to be shot of the case and adjourn for lunch with the minimum fuss and delay.
The prosecutor was an enthusiastic young man, perhaps not long enough in the job to be disillusioned by its repetitive monotony. He recounted the series of events that would end here, apparently blind to the judge’s impatient grimaces, and asked the court to act decisively to safeguard the rights of innocent people going about their daily lives... and so on, and so on, and so on. It was only when he gestured to Joyce, sitting near the front of the court, that I recognised Oran’s tormentor. Far from the smug, self-satisfied countenance I had expected him to wear, he too seemed overcome by the place and the occasion, and sat quietly, almost squirming at the centre of attention.
Then Pearse was called. In contrast to his energetic young adversary, he appealed wearily to the judge with a jaded assessment of the sad state of a national conscience that could beat down a diligent, honest young man while gorging on the fruits of its new-found affluence. His performance was masterful. Never antagonising Tobin by defending Oran’s actions, he villified the society that had driven him to it and, without ever mentioning his name, characterised Joyce as personification of that society’s worst excesses.
He referred to Oran’s spotless record and to the written references from Lochlann, the Master and the old Italian restaurateur as clear evidence of his client’s integrity, of the affection in which he was held in his community and of the wholly uncharacteristic nature of his aberration. By the time he sat down again, Joyce’s squirming had reached feverish proportions and he looked more like the man accused.
Tobin was silent. He donned his reading glasses and looked again through the sheaf of paper on his desk. Then he removed the glasses, sat back in his chair and carelessly tapped a tooth with the one arm of his spectacles. The tapping echoed around the room.
I stole a sideward glance at Oran, somehow afraid that to look at him might remind the judge that he was there, might get him in trouble. He sat absolutely straight and still, his face impassive. If Pearse’s performance had given him some hope, as it had me, he showed none of it.
Tobin laid his glasses on the desk. When he spoke, he spoke to Oran directly and his voice was even and matter-of-fact.
“You know, you don’t strike me as typical of the people I see here day after day. And I hope you never do. You made a mistake. And by all accounts, it was out of character and out of kilter with your behaviour in the past.”
He picked up his glasses, and pointed them at Oran.
“But your mistake had a profound and terrifying impact on an innocent man and on his family. He has a right to go about his lawful business without fear of an attack like the one you visited on him. There is, quite frankly, too much of this kind of behaviour in Dublin, there is no excuse for it, and it cannot go unpunished. Two months custodial sentence.”
Abruptly, he brought down his gavel with a crack that made me start.
“Court adjourned until 2pm this afternoon.”
And so it was over.
I couldn’t take it in. I couldn’t fathom how something we had feared and dreaded and talked about and pondered for so long could be over so quickly. The judge could surely not understand the potentially devastating effect of his decision, and yet he had made that decision in no more than twenty minutes. He had made his decision in time for lunch. As I watched Oran being led away, without even a look back, I felt stunned and horrified and sick. I looked at Lochlann and the Master, speechless, and they too were lost for words.
The court emptied and we stood up from our seats and made our way blindly to the door. Pearse was standing outside, waiting for me.
He put his hand on my shoulder.
“Listen, Aengus,” he said, softly, “I know this feels terrible, but if he behaves himself he’ll be out in a month. Four weeks and then he’ll be out and able to get on with his life without this hanging over him. I’m sorry we couldn’t keep him out, but I hope you can understand that this is about the best we could have expected.”
I nodded. Of course he was right, of course he was. But I couldn’t even begin to explain that this was my friend, this was the man who had helped me to reassess my whole world in a few short weeks. I couldn’t begin to explain how much better he deserved and how damning an indictment this was of the system of which he was a part. Couldn’t explain that I was afraid of how he might react to jail and to the people he would find there. I couldn’t and it would have been unfair to Pearse. And so I didn’t.
“I know,” I said, “and thanks, Pearse. I know you’ve done what you could, and we all really appreciate it. You know that.”
He nodded.
“I do. And listen, let’s get together soon, I mean it. It’d be good to talk in better circumstances.”
I shook his hand, and he turned and left.
“I suppose we might as well get back home,” the Master said, wearing the face of the bereaved.
I had always imagined that the Master would be the great stalwart in the face of crisis or trouble, that he would be quick to find the positives, and that his energy and resourcefulness would reveal an answer when all seemed lost. He would surely know someone, have an old friend with influence, call in the reinforcements with a boyish wink. But as we left the courthouse, I saw the dazed, small old man that he was. As ever, Lochlann’s demeanour betrayed little of what he felt beneath the impassive surface. But his silence and the steely anger in his stare told the real story.
We hailed a cab outside the court and travelled back to Howth in silence. As we climbed out of the cab at the house, I turned to Lochlann.
“I’ll check with O’Leary that everything is ok for the exhibition this evening.”
“I don’t think we’ll open this evening,” he said, wearily.
I shook my head.
“I think you’re wrong,” I said, flatly. “He’s not dead. He put a lot of work into this show, a hell of a lot. We can’t just close it up after a few days. You know what he’d say to that.”
He just nodded, and I went to the Gallery to talk to the manager.
After a few nights, the show effectively ran itself, and the events crew had everything in hand. I said I would call back later to make sure everything was ok, and then went for a run to try to clear my head. Despite the afternoon sun, and the blooming heather and Goldsmith’s furze “unprofitably gay”, the Head seemed grey and flat, a dull monochrome version of itself. It wasn’t that I would miss him or even that he would have a tough few weeks. Such trivialities were no more than an indulgence. What worried me was the Oran that would emerge, his anger at losing his livelihood exacerbated by a new anger at the harshness of his punishment. The thoughtful, kind, faithful persona which hid just below the rough hewn exterior might be driven deeper, might even disappear for a while. The scum with whom he would spend a month, or even two, might show him a path paved with cynicism and self-preservation. Oran was better than that, but bitter disillusionment can tarnish the brightest gold.
All at once and for no apparent reason, I realised that I had no grasp of the basic logistics of it all, and suddenly I had a thousand unanswered questions. I cursed myself for not asking Pearse where he would be taken, how would he get his things, would he need money, when could we visit? I spun around and headed back to the
house. I would call Pearse before his day was over and his mobile phone shut down. Nature at last conceded that she couldn’t lift my mood, and dark clouds drifted in from the sea and cloaked the sun. A chill air enveloped the Head and I shivered in spite of my thumping heart. Why is it that, in times of pain, we take a querulous satisfaction from gathering gloom, as though nobody else should be content as long as we are not?
CHAPTER 36
I got back to the house and ran upstairs. I showered quickly, and then from the bathroom I heard the persistent metallic ringtone of my mobile phone. I ran back to my room and grabbed it lest the caller give up or be diverted to the messaging service.
“Hello,” I wheezed.
“Oh, hello,” said a woman’s voice. “Listen, I’m sorry to bother you. My name is Nurse O’Connell, at the hospital in Beaumont. I’m really sorry to do this, but we had a patient admitted yesterday and we’re trying to sort out her personal details. We found this phone in her bag, and your number was the last number dialled. Again, look, I know this is hard – but do you recognise the number?”
I took the phone away from my ear to read the display. There are so many clichés that we use to express the effect of desperate shock, but I think my heart did, physically, miss one beat and I was, physically, paralysed for a brief moment. Clichés are only clichés because of our consistent experiences, because they are consistently true. The number was Hélène’s.
“Hello? Are you still there?” I could hear the nurse’s voice in the distance.
I brought the phone back to my ear.
“Yes,” I said, “yes, I’m here.”
“And do you know this number?” Her voice betrayed a faint but restrained impatience.
“Yes. Her name is Hélène. Is she ok? What’s the matter with her?”
There was a pause at the other end of the line, and then the voice returned.
“And do you have a surname?”
I didn’t. How could I have spent so much time with her, been so close to her, every day, and not even know her name? But it had never arisen, I had never needed it.
“Actually, no,” I said. “Listen, what’s wrong with her?”
“Hélène? You’re sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.” Now it was me getting impatient.
“Can you describe her for me?”
I described Hélène in artist’s detail, and asked again why she was there, why she could not have given them these details herself.
“Look, you’re obviously not a family member,” she said, her voice softening. “So I’m sorry, but I can’t give out any information. I’m sorry. Listen, thanks for your help. I have a few more numbers on here, I’m sure we’ll get to the bottom of it. Thanks for your help.”
And she was gone.
I got dressed in frantic haste, and ran downstairs to Lochlann’s study. I knocked on the door and opened it without waiting for an answer.
“Lochlann, I need your car,” I blurted. “Hélène’s been taken to Beaumont.”
Lochlann stood instantly and pulled his keys from his pocket.
“Here, go.” No pointless questions, no meaningless words.
I grabbed the keys and bolted from the house.
I used to know every road and street and short cut on the north side of Dublin, but time away and years of improvements and development had turned my home town into an entirely different place. After half an hour of angry wrong turns and u-turns, I finally emerged from the maze of residential streets that surrounded the hospital and found the entrance to the car park. I abandoned the car and ran to the front door.
The lady at the front desk looked up from her computer screen and smiled kindly at me.
“Can I help you?” she said.
“Yes, I’m looking for a girl called Hélène, she was admitted yesterday I think.”
“And her surname?”
I shook my head in growing frustration, as though she should have known that I didn’t know.
“I don’t know her surname.”
She looked at me with a puzzled frown, opened her mouth to speak but then thought better of asking the question. She must have seen a thousand people like me over the years, whose mental capacity had been temporarily suspended by shock and horror.
“Right so, let me see if I can find her for you. Hold on there,” she said, and tapped the keyboard of her computer.
After a few moments of tapping and sighing and head-shaking, my impatience reached snapping point.
“What’s happening?” I said, with the growing irrational certainty that I could do this much more quickly myself if she would just let me at the computer. “Have you found her?”
She looked up patiently.
“No,” she said. “There’s nobody called Hélène here at all, it’s such an unusual name. Let me call...”
A nurse, who had been standing near me at the desk scribbling furiously in a journal, came over to me.
“Did I hear you’re looking for someone called Hélène?” she asked.
“Yes, yes I am. Do you know where she is?” I turned to her and clutched at the slim straw of hope.
“I might. Look, wait here and I’ll get the Administrator.”
I breathed out my shoulder-sagging impatience, but there was nothing I could do, no way I could accelerate the trundling process.
After what seemed like an age, she returned with a flustered looking grey-haired man in a suit.
“Are you the man our nurse spoke to on the phone earlier?” he asked brusquely, with no introduction.
I nodded.
“Yes” I said, “I spoke to a nurse here this morning.”
“Hmm. We admitted a young woman yesterday. When she was admitted, she was confused. We have given her sedatives to make her more comfortable, but we are unlikely to get to the bottom of this while she is under sedation.. She gave her name to our admissions team as Hélène, but didn’t give them a surname. So they checked her bag for identification and found her driving licence, which had a different name altogether. Although the picture was clearly the young woman we had admitted. After our nurse spoke with you, we checked our records for a woman called Hélène on the basis that there probably wouldn’t be too many, and it looks like she has been treated here as an out-patient for the past month or so. The only question that remains, therefore, is that of her actual identity. I’m hoping you can help us clear that up.”
“What did her licence say?” I asked, sure that there must be some obvious explanation or that they had simply made a mistake.
“Let me see,” he said, looking through his notes. “The name on her licence is O’ Neill. Aoife O’Neill.”
I just stared. Stood stock still and stared. At him, but not seeing him. Seeing only her face, and those lost, frightened eyes. After all this time, after all of the daydreams I had had of finding her and her anger or her joy or her apathy, never could I have conjured a scene like this. In Beaumont hospital on a dark afternoon, the cloud-covered sky outside growing ever more ominous with approaching evening. It was all so real and so normal, yet so surreal and fantastic.
For weeks, I had shared the studio with her. Every day. We had laughed, we had fallen out, we had talked endlessly, we had worked together so closely. She had touched me. She had kissed my face, squeezed my arm, hugged me. And she had known, of course. She had known and she had said nothing. Testing me? Perhaps. Trying to understand, trying to quench the anger she so clearly felt? Anger that she had thrown at me, but whose source I hadn’t understood. I had been blind to what was suddenly so clear.
All the time, it was Aoife.
“Do you know the young woman, or not?” the administrator asked, plucking me impatiently from the mess of thoughts spinning in my head.
“I think she’s my daughter,” I said in quiet disbelief, as much to myself as to him.
&
nbsp; I explained as best I could. I had no proof, of course. No certificates, no striking common physical features, no shared half locket that we could piece together amid the glow of an emerging sun and the radiant joy of smiling faces. But he believed me, the old administrator, he believed whatever he saw in my bewildered, staring eyes. And so I was taken to her room.
She looked small amid all of the beeping, buzzing machinery and trailing wires and tubes. Small and fragile, just as she had been that first morning on the front step in Malahide. My daughter. The daughter whom I had last seen in a room a bit like this, in a baby’s cot. Sleeping peacefully, blissfully unaware of the twisting turns of her life that would take her here. I hope you can forgive me, were the last words Caitríona spoke to her. Forgive us for what, love? For leaving her? Or for ever making her suffer this wretched world in the first place.
I stood by the bed, not six inches from her. I itched to reach out and hold her hand, to squeeze it and whisper that everything would be ok. But I couldn’t. If it had been Hélène lying there, I would have. I would have held her hand and stroked her hair because we were friends and friends have that right. But it was Aoife. And I gave up that right more than twenty years ago. The girl I thought I had grown to know so well, and I didn’t know her at all.
But there was nobody there to hold her hand. No parents or siblings, no close friends who had shared her joys and pains since childhood, who could reminisce fondly about boys and the first crush, or about music or dancing or school… She was alone, and that had been my worst fear. When she had talked about Aoife, had she really been talking about herself? Was she really the one so uncertain of her place in the world? And so I reached over a took her hand. I held her hand.
“Aengus?”
Lochlann’s voice came from behind me.