Stout heart that he is though, he told them where to shove it and continues on with his work regardless.
Soon as I get a spare minute, I call him and fill him in on what I need.
A long-drawn-out cough, then wheezily, he comes back to the phone.
‘I’m not promising anything,’ he says in his throaty voice, ‘but I’ll do what I can.’
Gratefully, I give him the thin scraps of information I have and I can hear the scratch of his pen off a notebook as he takes it all down. Jim’s the best in the business. If he can’t find this guy, then no one can.
‘One thing,’ he growls before hanging up.
‘Yeah?’
Without him having to say another word, I know what’s coming next and mentally steel myself.
‘Why? Why this guy? What’s he to you?’
I sigh and try to make my answer sound as flippant as possible.
‘Jim, can we just say that it’s for personal reasons?’
The week goes by in such a blur of meetings, deadlines and conferences, that I barely have time to give the whole thing another thought. The only time this impinges on my consciousness is whenever I call Lily for one of our little chats during the day and she’ll say, sweet as you like, ‘Mama, Mama! I’m having the best time EVER with Auntwie Helen and I never want another nanny ever again! I want her to live with us
forwever
!’
‘That’s wonderful, pet, but you know Auntie Helen will have to go back to Cork soon, and Mama’s going to have to find another minder for you …’
‘NO! NO other nanny! I only want Auntwie Helen FORWEVER!’
I sigh deeply and mark this under the mental file, ‘to be dealt with later’.
‘AND you know what else, Mama?’
‘No bunny, tell me.’
‘I know what I’m going to wear when I get to meet my daddy! And I leawned a new tune on the piano to play for him! AND I drawed a picture of me and him too!’
‘Well you know sweetheart,’ I tell her gently as I can, ‘we’re all doing out very best to find him, but maybe he doesn’t live here any more. Maybe he’s moved to another country,’ I tell her, desperately trying to shield her from disappointment. But of course, she’s not even three yet. She doesn’t know the meaning of the word disappointment.
‘You’ll find him Mummy,’ she tells me proudly. ‘You can do anything! You’re like Superwoman ‘cept only better!’
Thursday afternoon and still no word back from Jim, not a progress report, nothing. I text him and get a curt message back saying, ‘BACK OFF AND GIMME A CHANCE, WILL YOU?’
Fair enough. Tail between my legs, I meekly do as I’m told.
The weekend comes and goes, and still nothing. Then, just as I’ve abandoned all hope and am wondering how in hell I’ll break it to Lily, Jim calls me out of the blue the following Monday afternoon.
‘Where are you?’ he asks gruffly, but then that’s Jim for you. Never any kind of a preamble or a hello-how-are-you, none of the above.
‘In the office.’ Where else would I be?
‘Can you get out of there for half an hour? I need to talk to you, face to face.’
I glance at my watch. Could I somehow find a window to get out of here? I tap on the computer screen to bring up today’s schedule, but I’m totally chocka. I’m about to ask him if I can call him back later and see if I can squeeze something in then, but he’s having none of it.
‘I’ll be in the underground car park off Abbey Street in ten minutes. Just be there.’
Oh Christ, if anyone sees me?
Somehow though, I manage to slip out of the office undetected, asking poor, puzzled Rachel to tell anyone who’s looking for me that I’ll be right back. Her stunned expression at something this unheard of says it all. Like I’ve just told her that I’ve handed in my notice and am now off to start selling copies of
The Big Issue
on the corner of Tara St.
Sweating and palpitating, heart pounding so that the sound of the blood pumping through my ears almost deafens me, I get into my car and weave my way through the heavy early evening rush hour traffic all the way to the Abbey St. car park.
He must have news for me, he must have …
My mobile is beeping the whole way there, but I ignore it and keep driving, just focusing on the road ahead.
Mouth dry, chest walloping, I eventually get to the car park and mercifully, there’s no queue to get in. I slide the car down the ramp inside, take a ticket and then slowly drive round in circles. Next thing, the passenger door of my car is opened, nearly giving me a quadruple heart attack as Jim jumps in, looking even more wizened and gnarled than I remember him, a trail of cigarette smoke wafting after him.
‘Park over there, in the right, then turn off the engine,’ he barks at me and I obediently do as I’m told. But then, there aren’t too many people who contradict Jim on a regular basis.
Next thing, he’s fumbling round his jacket pocket then producing a battered notebook which he flips open and starts referring down to.
‘Just out of curiosity Eloise,’ is his opener, ‘where in the name of arse did you come across this waster anyway? I mean, look at you. And look at your life. What I can’t figure is, what’s the guy to you? What can a tosser like him possibly have to do with you?’
I look pleadingly across at him.
‘OK if I say “don’t ask”, and let’s just leave it at that?’
He shakes his head, sending dandruff flakes flying everywhere, and gets back to his notes.
‘Well for starters, the fecker keeps changing his name. I traced him from Darndale where he was calling himself Bill or Billy O’Casey, to D.C.U. …’
‘D.C.U.?’ I interrupt. Dublin City University. What is it about this guy and universities?
Suddenly I start to feel an irrational hope. I knew it. I knew we were dealing with a rough diamond here, someone with a thirst for knowledge, wanting nothing more than to pull himself up in the world …
‘– where he changed his name again. This time to James Archer.’
‘Changed his name again?’
‘Yeah, signed up for a creative writing course but then dropped out after only three weeks …’
‘But why would he do that?’
‘For Christ’s sake, let me finish, will you? So that’s about two years ago and then he resurfaces again, but this time he’s calling himself Brown. Robert Brown. Got a job working in a Statoil garage on the Long Mile Road and was sharing a flat with two other guys, let’s just say who are known to Gardai.’
Okay. ‘Known to Gardai’ is not a phrase that you want to hear when trying to trace the father of your child.
‘… And from this point on the search starts to get interesting. So I fished around a bit, asked a few questions, talked to a couple of contacts that I have and it turns out this guy has fallen in with a right shower of messers.’
‘How … Just how bad?’ My voice sounds tiny, like it’s coming from another room.
‘All of them have criminal records the length of your arm, been in and out of remand homes since they were in nappies. Nothing major, not long stretches, but this gang your man is in with, they’ve done time for breaking and entering, shoplifting, car theft, you name it. So I make a few more inquiries …’
‘… And?’ I’m nearly hopping off the edge of my seat now, half-dreading what’s coming next.
‘… And surprise surprise, he’s only gone and changed his name again, which doesn’t make my job any easier. Calls himself Oscar Butler now …’
‘Oscar Butler?’ I can’t help myself from repeating out loud. It sounds so makey-uppy, as Lily would say.
‘I know,’ Jim nods in agreement at me. ‘Some of the places this guy hangs out and some of the gang he’s in with, I’m surprised he didn’t get his head kicked in for going round the place calling himself by a tosser’s name like that. Anyway, he leaves the Statoil garage after only a few months, owing a lot of people he worked with money I might add, and then he goes all quiet. Takes me a full two days to track the fecker down after that, but I get a lead that a mate of this guy’s was involved in a burglary case, and your guy was his driver. Only by then he’s changed his name again …’
‘Jesus,’ I mutter under my breath, slumping my head over the steering wheel.
‘So this time, I talk to a contact of mine who’s in the Gardai. And suddenly I’m onto something. Things start hotting up. So I ask round a bit more and just about an hour ago, I nailed it.’
I look mutely across at him, half-dreading what’s coming next.
‘For starters, his real name is Jake Keane.’
‘And do you know where he is?’
‘Oh yeah, that was the easy part. As it happens, I can tell you
exactly
where he is, right this very minute.’
Oh God, I think I might need to breathe into a paper bag.
‘Don’t get a shock, OK?’
‘Tell me,’ I say hoarsely. ‘I need to know.’
Next thing Jim’s looking at me kindly, almost paternally.
‘You just listen to me first though. Whatever’s going on Eloise, just take my advice and drop it right here and now. Trust me, it’s not worth it and if you go any further, you’re going to get yourself into a whole lot of trouble.’
‘Please … Please just tell me.’
‘Jake Keane is in prison. Just coming to the end of a two year stretch. And I don’t think you want to know what he’s in for either. But it’s not for having an expired TV licence; I can tell you that for nothing.’
I try to thank him, but for some reason, no words will come out of my mouth.
The thing that no one ever told you about life on the inside, Jake Keane often thought, was that it was the little things that got you through each and every day. Small victories were what made all the difference between surviving, versus a day where you’d gladly hang yourself off a light fitting just to escape the place, just to experience some sort of freedom, before you completely forgot what it ever tasted like in the first place.
Yet just the tiniest little thing could help you sidetrack the black dog of depression that haunted everyone here and survive another interminable day, each one so long that sometimes even a single hour dragged by like a month. Jake had been reading a lot of Virginia Woolf lately, an author who really seemed to understand what incarceration felt like, and could fully understand what she meant when she wrote that lasting through a day was relatively easy: it was the hours in between that nearly killed you.
There were times when he’d look at the clock at eight in the evening, then congratulate himself on having survived a whole entire hour since seven. And the next challenge to himself would then be to last all the way up until nine. That was how you got by, he now knew, lasting like that, from minute to minute, then from hour to hour. Till dark, till lockdown, till blessed silence and the deep joy of being able to say to yourself, that’s that then. Another day survived. Another one ticked off.
But no doubt about it, little things helped. Like landing a window seat in the canteen at mealtimes. Like a meal that you could actually eat, one that didn’t look and taste like cat food and come swimming in congealed grease and fat. Getting a bit of sunshine during exercise breaks in the yard outside, the only time in the long, long day you ever got to breathe anything other then the foul, stale air inside that stank worse than twenty minging gym bags. Even on days when the heavens opened and it bucketed down, Jake still went out there for the single hour they were permitted, never caring that he was getting drenched through to the bone. Anything, just to taste proper clean air. Amazing himself at just how much he missed it, at how little he’d appreciated it back in the days when he was a free man.
A good day could be one where he’d successfully cadge a fag, then trade it in for a decent book that might keep him going for days. Not one from the library, they were worse than useless. Some of the lads ripped pages out of them, sometimes to use for rolling joints, sometimes just out of pure badness, so you’d come to a critical plot point and ten pages would be missing. Books the screws smuggled in from outside were miles better. Cost you in the long run, but it was worth it. Jake had learned that one early on.
And reading was getting him through this. Keeping his nose stuck in a book and well out of everyone else’s way. Because if there was a survival manual in here, it was this; head down, mouth shut, make neither friends nor enemies, be as neutral as Switzerland, blend in to the background like wallpaper. Strive to be someone people neither like nor dislike, then just forget about the minute you’re out of their sight. And the golden rule; above all, never get involved.
His long-term survival mechanism was to keep quiet, keep to himself and at all costs, steer clear of all trouble. He got on reasonably well with the screws too, who from time to time would do him the odd favour. One even enrolled him on an Open University course, English and Psychology, which he loved and worked hard at. In his first year here, he’d done a TEFL course too and had surprised himself not only by thoroughly enjoying learning all the endless intricacies of the English language, but by getting a first class honour in it too, graduating top of his class.
Studying was a wonderful and a welcome distraction, gave him that extra bit of privacy too. When the others were on at him to play soccer in the yard during exercise break, he’d roll his eyes and indicate the pile of books on his knee that he had to wade through. And they’d jokingly slag him off and call him the Professor and leave him alone, in peace. Which suited.
You lived for visiting day, everyone did. Got you out of your routine, shook things up a bit. Every Wednesday, between two and four; trouble was though, you only got to see your family for about half an hour of that. The rest of the time, they’d be on the outside queuing to get in, doing security checks that would put the one at the airport to shame. Jake always felt sorriest for the wives and girlfriends traipsing in through all weathers, wheeling buggies and strollers, waiting outside in the freezing cold for hours just to get thirty lousy minutes with a loved one. And not even alone time; you were stuck in the visitors’ room with half the prison looking at you. But Christ, what that half hour meant to you, if you were on the inside.