Millie takes hold of the little object and turns it over and reads, stamped on its sole, 0–3 MOS. Maureen was a beautiful child, everyone said so, none more proudly, or often, than Peter. She and Peter and Kevin would stroll round the harbor after tea, Millie pushing the buggy, a huge metal yoke, all wheels, like a royal carriage, Kevin’s little hand often taking proprietary hold of it. The baby was content on these walks, but happiest in her mother’s arms. Oh boy, the ire that that miniature being could summon if Millie wasn’t holding her was almighty! Hostile and glaring, like a stage actor who never phones it in, who chews it up, whether the scene calls for high drama or delicate subtlety, no matter. They laughed about it, herself and Peter. Called her Little Miss. She was what they talked about. And then she was what they never talked about.
One winter morning, Millie had warmed up Maureen’s milk on the cooker as always, but when she reached the cot, Millie could feel the heat steaming off her baby without even touching her. Maureen was burning up. She cried out for Peter and picked the infant up and the child’s limbs were lifeless, but the worst were her eyes, which gazed vacantly out at nothing. Millie had the ridiculous thought that if she just removed her swaddling, Maureen would cool off. But with just the nappy on, Maureen was the same. Two days later, Millie’s infant took her final labored breath in hospital, like the death rattle of an old, ailing patient.
After, Millie’s mind was stuck on an endless, haunting loop. What if she had gone in straightaway without the bottle, what if they’d taken her into hospital earlier, what if Peter had driven faster, what if Millie had nursed her? And other, more painful questions: Had Maureen sensed that she was loved, did she know it, or did she leave the earth not knowing it? Fingering the moccasin now, Millie tries to imagine what was on those miraculous feet, kidney-shaped and ridiculously tender, like two worn slips of soap, when they put her into the ground? She’ll never know. She couldn’t look, she couldn’t look.
Now the car she’d heard moments ago is turning onto Glen Ground. Millie releases the moccasin and watches as its filthy ribbon coils back toward the branch. It’s not the guards after all; it’s a gray Morris Minor, the same car Peter once drove. A sign? Millie steps out onto the pavement and waves.
The car jerks over immediately, as if expecting her, and in the gloom the driver reaches across to the passenger door, unlocking and opening it in one movement, as if afraid she’ll make a run for it.
“You shouldn’t be hitchhiking, you know.”
She peers in: the driver is male, in his sixties, she supposes, eyes red-webbed with exhaustion or drink. He pats the passenger seat.
“I’m jokin’, I’m jokin’. Get in out of the cold, sure, hop in.”
As he speaks, his eyes dart in what she concludes is an oddly furtive manner, from the dashboard to the passenger seat and back, strange enough to give her pause.
“Plenty of dangerous types out and about,” he says. “But you’re safe with me I can tell you. Capital S. Where ya headed?”
Millie weighs the pros—no traffic at all, she could be in Margate inside of twelve minutes give or take—against the cons—abductor, freak, serial killer.
“Dún Laoghaire.”
38
Before the ambulance screams up the drive and Aideen’s day takes a dark, irrevocable turn, talk on the northeast corner of the hockey pitch, where the smokers invariably converge at morning break, centers on the imminent mockup exams. Sixth-years, who will soon sit the real version, are, as a group, shitting themselves. In these fifteen minutes of freedom, some of them suck down as many as three cigarettes apiece, a pack of beautiful chain-smoking basket cases who seem to enjoy complaining bitterly about mind-numbing essays on Iago’s treachery or Nordic fishing patterns or memorizing fifty pluperfect conjugations. Aideen and Brigid and the other fifth-years gather in deference and sympathy around the older lot, registering their grievances and anxiety and coolness. Having the sweet luxury of time, they’re not concerned yet. At sixteen or seventeen, a year from now is unfathomable; there’s still spring and summer to navigate—coffees, dancing, shopping, music, beer, boys, trips. Possibilities abound.
Aideen, skulking mutely on the outer edges of this high-strung huddle, offers chewing gum to Brigid, then takes a piece for herself. Brigid first, Aideen second. At some point and with no discernible origin, she’d been wordlessly cast in the role of lady-in-waiting. She’s the midwife, Brigid the goddess birthing their adventures and hijinks, gossip, their tales to tell. Aideen is grateful—flattered—to have been chosen even as she smarts at the casual ease with which Brigid helms their friendship, the confident expectation that she’s in charge. Like with the eyeballs. Even as Aideen had inwardly protested her role in the ridiculous scheme—to purloin Bleekland’s Tic Tacs container—purloin she did, an eager pup dropping a prize at her master’s feet. Aideen’s turning this uncomfortably over in her mind when an emergency vehicle, lights off but siren on, rips past them all on the pitch, through the car park, the courtyard, and yanks to a stop in front of the main school building.
“What the fuck?” somebody says.
“Maybe Ms. Murphy finally croaked it.” This from Brigid. The others laugh. “Ding dong, the witch is dead.”
“You’re evil,” says some arse-lick. Brigid also seeks approval, Aideen observes, but is better—masterful, even—at masking it.
From their faraway spot, strategically chosen to thwart getting busted, the girls watch in silence as two men emerge, one from each side of the vehicle. Moments pass and then the same two come back out of the school doors and rush toward Fair House. Now a third worker hops from the back of the truck, which puts Aideen in mind of a clown car. How many more will pile out?
On the horizon, they watch as Fiona Fallon, of all people, a girl who’s never been on a hockey pitch without a hockey stick, kneepads, mouthguard, goalie mask, and the express objective to play hockey, suddenly begins galloping toward them with her awkward gait, the result of some horrific childhood hip injury that sets her apart from the others and that makes Aideen feel for the girl. Fiona waves her arms wildly—something is definitely wrong—and the conversation, which had begun to pick up again, goes silent as they await whatever news she will bring.
When Fiona’s finally in close enough range that Aideen can see her face glistening with sweat, she bends over, panting.
“What is it?” one of the girls asks.
“Bleekland,” she gasps.
“What? What’s happened?”
“She’s collapsed. They’re taking her to hospital.”
Upon hearing this, Aideen experiences a sort of tinnitus. All the words being said—and there are many, people talking excitedly at once in that way an emergency makes everything suddenly intimate and charged—all the exclamations and f-bombs and questions repeated dumbly, it’s all gibberish to Aideen. She hears only a deafening ringing. She doesn’t hear any of the girls, but she does see, when she finally gathers the courage to reenter the moment and look up, her friend Brigid Crowe staring directly at her, the girl’s face a perfect rendering of panic.
As the others stub out their butts and scatter back toward school in buzzing, titillated clumps, Brigid stares at Aideen with a silent command: Stay. The pitch emptied, they gawk wordlessly at each other until finally Brigid says, “Who would’ve thought that would make you so sick?”
“Oh my God, Brigid.”
“She actually ate them? She didn’t see they were bigger? Or, like, wet?”
“Oh my God.”
“Or that they smelled absolutely disgusting? Seriously?” Brigid gives a vicious laugh. “She put a fish eyeball in her mouth and sucked on it?”
“Maybe she’s just sick?” says Aideen. “Like maybe she had a stroke and this has nothing to do with that?”
“Don’t be so fucking stupid. Of course it has.”
First Sean, then Dad out of the house, now this.
“Relax. Everyone was in the lab, so it could’ve been anyone who took i
t. And no one saw us in Bleekland’s office, no one saw us. They can’t prove a thing. We just have to keep our mouths shut.”
Aideen tries to make sense of the events that led to this moment, or rather, the moment last night when her friend had used a tweezers to pinch three of the slimy, dead eyes floating in their foul-smelling jar and drop them into their house mother’s mints. She remembers wondering who’s the unlucky bastard at the factory with the job of removing these eyes from their sockets, to cut the nerves, detach.
“What if she dies?” Aideen whispers.
“From a fish eye?”
“Oh my God.”
“Will you stop fucking saying that? She’s not dying. She’ll be fine.”
“I wish I never came here,” says Aideen.
“And think about this. She might not even realize she ate anything, you know? She gets sick and goes to hospital. They might never, like, link it to the mints.”
“We need to tell them,” says Aideen.
“Are you out of your mind?”
“But what if—”
“I’m not saying a word.” Brigid glares at her. “And neither are you.”
“We can’t just do nothing.”
“Relax. No one saw you do it.”
Aideen’s body goes cold. “No one saw me do it?”
“Us. You know what I mean.”
Aideen, disgusted with the pair of them, can’t even look at her friend—her ex-friend—and, besides, she’s too shaky to declare what it is she’s about to do. Brigid will only try to stop her. She just walks away. The farther she gets from the pitch, the faster she’s moving, until she’s legging it to Fair House, Brigid calling out pointlessly after her.
39
Kevin is subjected to a minor but unwelcome thwack of the Irish Daily Star on his shoulder.
“Oy. Sleeping Beauty.”
The incongruity of “beauty” juxtaposed with Maeve’s buffoonish face in his immediate field of vision—plastic eyeglasses that distort and enlarge, ridged smoker’s lips traced in peach pencil—is jarring, and rips Kevin from a sensual dream that he aches to reenter, but which immediately dissipates. Maeve, braless in a floral smock before him, is a morning glory killer.
“Your phone’s been blowing up.”
He sits up, scratches his head, wonders if the hairdresser’s abode might be infested with lice. The irony. He’s been feeling itchy. He’s been feeling out of his skin in this cluttered, manky, foreign hovel, dependent for shelter on the salty mother of his oldest schoolmate. She’s always encroaching on his morning ablutions. Yesterday, three long fake blond hairs were wound deep around the bar of Dove; another morning, he’d followed after her into the toilet and she’d forgotten to flush. The horror. Kevin, in his exile, feels increasingly unmoored without his children as day-to-day touchstones. He finds himself immersed in silly, rubbishy concerns: Are they flossing? Has Grace signed Ciaran up for the hockey tournament? Has a vegetable passed any Gogarty lips in the past week?
Maeve sniffs. “You’d want a shower, love.”
“Cheers.”
“I’m just saying.” She sighs, pointing to a pile of empties he and Mick had fashioned into a pyramid on the coffee table the previous night. Mick had ended the evening talking a load of bollocks about some new condo development in Costa Rica he wants to invest in. Everything they discuss is a load of bollocks. “You wouldn’t want to show up at a school smelling like that.”
“School?”
Maeve presses his mobile into his hands: two missed calls from Rossdale Home, three from Millburn School.
* * *
“Millburn School for Girls. Good morning.”
“Rose, it’s me.”
“Kevin.” Her voice drops. “Oh my God.”
No doubt about it: he detects minor anguish. However dishonorable or whatever, Kevin experiences a minuscule ego hit: Rose Byrd misses him, this stunning creature half his age whom he’d left in a hotel bed half-naked and willing and willing and willing.
“Look, Rose, I’m sorry but I thought you understood.”
“What?”
“If things were different,” he says gently. “But I can’t pursue this.”
“Oh my God. What is wrong with you?”
Kevin smarts, flushes defensively. Yet it’s a fair question, one he’s been trying to keep at bay all week. “You’ve been ringing all morning?”
“I haven’t! Do you have any idea what’s been going on here? Have you talked to anyone here?”
“About what?”
“Edith.”
Maeve waddles into the room, ignoring, as is her way, the obvious fact that he’s occupied.
“Kevin,” she says, “would you ever pick up bread and butter?”
He waves her off and points to the phone.
“Chicken thighs, too, and a packet of rice.”
Into the phone Kevin says, “Can you just hang on one sec?” To the mistress of the house he says, “Yeah, sure, whatever you need. Just give me a second.”
As Maeve busybodies herself collecting the lager cans in a martyred fashion, the pyramid immediately collapses.
“I’ll do that,” says Kevin irritably. “Can I just…?” He rolls his eyes at the phone. “Just, it’s a private call.”
“Oh don’t mind me, then. I’ll just leave my own lounge, will I?” Kevin resists the urge to flip her double birds.
“Hello?” says Rose.
“Sorry. You were saying?”
“Edith’s been taken to hospital.”
“Who is Edith?”
“Edith Bleekland. The head of Fair House?”
“What? What’s happened?”
“She’s been poisoned.”
“How spectacularly odd.”
“Kevin,” she says, “they’re saying it was Aideen.”
* * *
So that he can get this straight—no. He can’t get this straight. It can’t have been his daughter (an innocent child, well-meaning if narky) who caused Edith Bleekland to be lying in a hospital bed right now, fighting for her life—oh Jesus—after having had her stomach pumped. A tube has been inserted into the woman’s mouth, warm liquids have been administered and removed.
Three times he tries Grace’s mobile; three times, his calls are rejected. “Then fuck you!” he screams into it. Though he’s in the living room and Maeve’s in the kitchen with a door closed between them, he can actually feel her stop gaming, stop smoking, stop breathing as she strains to glean what’s happening. “Fuck you too!” he yearns to scream. Defying Grace’s request to stay away from the children, he slams out of the house, Maeve absurdly trailing him all the way to his car with her grocery list.
He has no memory of getting to the school. He just finds himself passing through its iron gates and he revs his way up to the main building. With the deepest sense of urgency he’s possessed in years (his lusty fumblings and near-misses with Rose are already a distant, anemic second—apples and oranges), Kevin strides into the school like a storybook giant cluelessly capable of crushing all in its path. Dead silence within—the girls must be in class. Is his girl in class? Since he received the incomprehensible news, he’s been having trouble envisioning what Aideen is physically doing. He just can’t process what he’s been told.
Kevin knocks on his former would-be mistress’s office door and she greets him with such professionalism he guesses, rightly, that the headmistress is afoot. Ms. Murphy, stooped and drawn and shaped like an aubergine, steps from behind Rose and seems to glower at him, as if he’s the one who set all this in motion. He is the one who sired the one, so yes, perhaps this is on him, perhaps if he hadn’t lustily chased after a ruthless boozehound, if he had stayed a good man, maybe he wouldn’t be here. And where is his daughter right now? Has she been reefed out, held in some horrible little room like a common criminal? And where is his wife?
To her credit, Ms. Murphy does not relish in relaying the gory details. She asks Rose to close the door on her way out, invites
Kevin to sit, and then lays out the morning’s awful events. Bleekland had been giving the first years their morning instructions, standing at the doors, notebook in hand, looking down (always looking down) at her charges. Mid-sentence, she appeared to swoon and without notice, dropped the notebook and pitched over. Bleekland had attempted to straighten herself and then released a moan. She clutched her stomach and started retching, keeling over onto the ground. The girls screamed. One had the good sense to fetch an adult, and an ambulance was called.
“But she’s—recovered?” Kevin says this with pitiful hope, like a child whose cat has just been crushed by a car in front of his eyes who then asks, “Is kitty okay?”
“She’s in Vincent’s. The doctors performed gastric lavage—her stomach was pumped.”
Kevin pictures, for some reason, a doctor bearing down on the handle of a stand pump designed to inflate a basketball, one foot holding down each end of the base, lifting up and pushing down.
“It must be done as soon as possible before the poison is ingested.”
Poison! Kevin winces. “I don’t…”
“There’s no antidote to formaldehyde, you see, so they have no choice. They have to do that. Luckily, the toxin was pumped out successfully.”
His chest, since he first spoke to Rose on the telephone, has felt dangerously compressed. Now his body loosens slightly, the tension ebbs, the muscles in his neck and arms slacken. Successfully is a beautiful word, his new favorite word. Then he thinks, formaldehyde? How would a sixteen-year-old have gotten her hands on formaldehyde? No, this can’t be right. This is a mistake.
“Where’s my daughter?”
“But there’s a complication.”
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