Blue Mercy: A Novel. (27 page)

Or so I had long believed.
 

Unless...

Unless. Such a small word, so often used, so rarely noticed. Not a word to announce itself, yet as soon as it came to my attention, I wondered why I hadn't paid it consideration before. It had grown in me, over my months here in this house, through all the writing about her and my father, through the healing time with Zach, so that now it seemed a lever, lifting possibilities many times its size.
 

It kept buzzing around my brain, like a fat bee banging against my skull. Unless, unless...
 

So let me write down a series of events that have taken hold of my imagination. Imagine them yourself. It is our visit back here in 1986 and I have gone to Dublin to the book launch. Daddy and Star leave the house at about four o'clock to go blackberry picking, promising Rose they'll be back for tea. He brings Star to the brambles on the upper field, then down towards the lake. They hardly speak. He is twisted inside thoughts of his own and Star is miserable, guilty about not having gone to Dublin, wondering why her grandfather has brought her out if he is going to be so silent. Not knowing what she should know about him.

They pass through the high field, black and brown cows munching grass and one raising its head to look at them. The pigeons are loud in the trees as they approach the woodland that thickens round the lake in summer. My father steps into the drowsy mass of green and my daughter follows. Imagine. Imagine. The trees smell of fresh breezes and the breeze smells of the earth. It swooshes through the branches above, making a sound like the sea.

Her hair gets caught in a branch and she has to stop to pick out the pine needles. He chivvies her, his nerves always at him. "Come on, come on."

The trunks of the trees draw closer together, the light dims. He stops against a fallen bough near the lake.

"I don't like it here, Granddad."

"Don't you, now?"

A rattle in his voice makes her look into his face and see something. She feels what is coming her way before she knows that such a thing can be.
 

She moves to turn.
 

He catches her by the wrist.
 

She shouts: "No!"

He says, "Now, now. Don't be like that."

He pulls her down. Down into a secret that is the drowsy dull light of the lake, and the pigeons cooing, and the wavy wind in the trees, and the ground going from under her feet, and the berries spilling out of the can, and the twig digging into her back...
 

"No!" she tries again and he claps his hand over the sound.
 

Then it is the weight of him urging down on her. His knee thrusting hers apart. His mouth by her ear, breath wet and hot. The splaying of her open. The burning of him in her. The green scum on the edge of the lake lap, lap, lapping. The ferns curling away. And nothing ever again as it was.

This is what I need to know. Did this happen? Was this part of the mix of motives? If it was, how can I have her further punished? If it is all pure fancy, if the real reason was revenge on me and Zach, how can I not?

And what of Zach? Does he know the the depth and capacity of her anger? She wouldn't have told him, I was pretty sure of that, but he was an intuitive man. Surely, if he suspected, that would be the end of her and him. Which was -- come on, out with it, tell the worst -- what a part of me, a deep-down, low-buried, loathsome part of me wanted.
 

Unless...

We began each morning of the trial with a man banging his tipstaff on the ground and shouting, "All Rise!" Once he had alerted us, the judge followed in, overweight and bewigged, in dark-rimmed, Buddy Holly glasses, with an irritating way of tenderly placing his well-upholstered posterior upon the well-upholstered bench. Settled, he would take a brisk look at me over his glasses, then nod at counsel and we were off on another day.

Around me, mouths opened and closed, opened and closed, around the same questions over and again. The pump. The pills. Pauline. Zach. Star. Me. My father. Yet, much to Mags's surprise, the trial seemed to be going our way. She was taking the line that too much of the Department of Public Prosecution's evidence was circumstantial and was doing a great job of persuading the court that I was not the only person who might have done the deed.

As things looked better and better for me, I felt less and less present. All this courtroom chatter didn't seem real. Or relevant. What seemed important was Zach and Star, sitting beside each other each day. Zach's grey eyes looked at me and seemed to ask me every question under the sun. Star's blue eyes looked at me and were blank as a doll's. I saw those four eyes all day in court and, when I was ushered back to my cell, I saw them still. I saw them while I was awake and while I slept.
 

By day, when I controlled the dreams, I configured up for myself and my daughter a world where none of this had happened, where we went to the mall to shop, where we enjoyed pizza and ice-cream sodas together, where she introduced me to some nice boy I'd never met before and I was happy for her. An ordinary, normal mother and daughter. What we hadn't been for so long.

How long?

I had no answers. I had no words. I didn't even know what to wish for.

What lay ahead for me, if Mags got me off? My heart forever whispering for Zach, a longing for the only man I'd ever really wanted. A proper man, strong enough to be gentle, and the only man I couldn't have. But my blood whispering for Star.
 

I couldn't think about "guilty" or "not guilty" because there was no freedom for me, either way. The choice between a physical prison or an emotional one? No choice at all.

Lover? Daughter? My mind's eye played with one and then the other until some mouth would open around some new set of words that would drag me back into that horrible courtroom, back to unreal questions for which there were no answers.

Days droned past. The cyst of trepidation inside me solidified.
 

Then came an exchange between Zach and Star, a small moment that told me what to do. While the prosecutor, Manny Bradshaw, was cross-examining Dr Keane, Star leaned sideways to whisper something in Zach's ear. He shook his head at whatever she asked, then reached across and patted her hand, a small protective pat. She turned from him to hide her expression, so he didn't see the look that crossed her face but I, sitting opposite in the defendant's dock, viewed it straight on.

Adoration. No other word for it.

She flicked her eyes in my direction and saw that I had seen. That chased away the blankness of the stare she had been dealing me for days and, as she looked at me properly for the first time since all this had happened, as I stared into those blue eyes so like my own, I felt like I was falling into them. They held
 
everything now, those eyes. Pity and pity's opposite, her complete scorn.

Whichever way I looked at what Star had done, a finger pointed back at me. The night before, I'd dreamed she was a baby and I was feeding her a bottle, but when I looked closely it had no milk in it, only dust and dried-up leaves.
 

I wanted to go back, that was what I wanted. Back to the days before she knew I had a father, back to when I was her all-in-all and she was my twinkling, twinkling, little star and further back, to when we were even safer, to before I was even born myself, when she was already buried fast inside me, a tiny egg, a whisper of a possible promise.

Star's eyes now seemed to beg a question: what would you give to go back? What would you give? It came to me then, all in a rush: the only answer.

In front of me was a pencil. I picked it up and wrote on a piece of paper that I passed to Mags. Her eyes boggled as she read the words and – predictably – she shook her head furiously at me. I nodded, insistent. But calm now. Serene as a mountain.

I took a big breath, settled into my new solidity. Around me, everyone else in the court began to grow restless. I closed my eyes to their growing unease, the coughs and the shuffling of papers and the shifting of feet. I knew what was coming. I took the time it needed to take. Then I pushed my chair back and started to stand to make my announcement. Mags pulled at my arm, forced me back down and stood herself. "M'Lord," she said. "I wish to request a recess. I need to speak to my client."

He wasn't impressed but he granted it.

In the inner chamber, Mags slammed the door behind us. "If you're not careful, he is going to throw the book at you for wasting the court's time. I refuse to do what you wrote down in there." She couldn't even bring herself to say it.

"It's what you said you wanted me to do."

"Yes, back at the beginning. Not now. For Christ's sake, Mercy, if you do that, you'll get the absolute worst of both worlds. He'll give you life."

"So be it."

"You can't! I won't let you. It's going well in there, there's a good chance of getting you off. Why would you do this?"

"I'm sorry, Mags, I know it's inconvenient for you but..."

"Incon – bloody – venient! It's a damn sight more than that."

"I know it's hard for you. I wish I'd known earlier that this was what I wanted, but I didn't. I'm sorry -- but if you don't tell him, I will."

Something in my voice communicated itself. She sat down. Her shoulders slumped. She looked so unlike herself I almost laughed.

"Have you any idea, Mercy, what prison is like? You'll be an old woman when you come out."

"So be it," I said again.

"I don't get it," said poor Mags. "I just don't get it. Tell me why."

How could I explain that my going to prison was going to liberate us all? The only way for us all to salvage...something.
 

I didn't try.

"I should never, never have taken this case," she said, flinging her pencil down on the desk. "I knew you were trouble, from the first day. Christ! I am never going to forgive you for this."

We went back out.

Mags approached the bench. "M'Lord, my client wishes to change her plea to guilty."
 

Reporters woke up out of their snoozes and followed their colleagues rushing for the exit. Star's hands flew to her mouth, one over the other. Zach found my eyes and held them and sent me a small smile, knowing somehow, no words needed, that whatever I was doing, I was doing right.

the light that comes from the stars.

star
|stär| [
noun]

a fixed luminous point in the night sky that is a large, remote incandescent body like the sun.

light
|līt|
[noun]

the natural agent that stimulates sight and makes things visible

*

I didn't sink my mother's precious manuscript that day by the lake. I crumpled and threw some of the first pages, ones I had already read, watched them bobbing on the water and tried to summon the will to do the rest.
 

When I failed, I went back to the house and told Shando, who told me she had left another copy with him just in case, and so, finally, I succumbed, shouting half the time at its pages, interjecting for a while but then, a little way in, caught despite myself.
 

Imaginative sympathy, she used to say, in the days when I let her draw up lists for me and prescribe books like medicine: a measure of Dickens, a dose of Eliot, a
soupçon
of Keats. That was the reason to read. To develop your imaginative sympathy.
 

Ironic, no?

Imagine is what people always say, whenever they hear our story. Imagine: the mother, the daughter, the same man. Just imagine.

And imagine this: Sixteen years they made her serve. One hundred and ninety-five months of avoiding the drugs and sex and dramas that got the other inmates through the days. On visits, she told us all the dirty secrets that seeped out from under the cell doors -- the punctures and jabs of drug abuse; the sex connections that were a kind of hate; the aggression and belligerence and occasional violence; the screw who forced himself on the most hopeless of the hopeless cases; the self-harmers who broke plastic cutlery to cut themselves.
 

She recorded her thoughts in hard-backed notebooks, filling pages with the details of these days which, from the outside, looked so identical to all the other days around them.
 

This prison isn't Doolough lock-up room, Star, or those two places I called prisons before: my father's house, or the kitchen that contained me when you were small. This place is the real Victorian deal, complete with clanging steel doors, hard beds and chamber pots. They laugh like crows and cry like owls and hardly know the difference.
 

They were waiting out their days, pointed towards release when life could start again, but she was dancing to an inner rhythm.
 
She turned to writing travel books, relying on memory and research in reference books sourced by the prison librarian.
 
Her
Guide To Glendalough
has been translated into ten languages and still sells.

At first, her aloofness annoyed the others. "Her Ladyshit," they called her. "Her Ladyshit thinks her shit don't smell." Which made me smile, I have to admit. Before long, she was the old hand, the lifer watching the small-timers come and go and, as her acceptance of where she found herself settled in her, the others came to acknowledge it.

She categorized her cellmates into two types: the ones who cried over their children and the ones who cried over their men. (Which always set me wondering: which type was she?) The particular details of neglect or abuse that led these women to their addictions, or their shoplifting, or whatever misdemeanor brought them in, came to fascinate her and became her subject later, after she got out.