Authors: Julie Parsons
‘I’m waiting for my mummy. I’m hungry. I want my lunch.’
‘Do you now? Would you like this?’ Rachel opened her plastic bag and brought out a peach. She held it to her nose and breathed in deeply.
‘Yum,’ she said, ‘it’s delicious.’
The child put out her hand for it, then pulled back.
‘Are you a stranger?’ Her voice was anxious. ‘I’m not s’posed to talk to strangers.’
‘Me?’ Rachel drew away. ‘Of course I’m not a stranger. I’m your friend. I have a lovely peach for you. I know little girls love peaches. I have a little girl just
your age and they’re her favourite fruit.’
‘Where is she? Your little girl. Is she here?’
The child looked around, anxious again, then once more reached out for the yellow peach.
‘No, she’s not here, but would you like to meet her? She’s your friend too.’ She took hold of the child’s hand. It was damp. She lifted it to her lips and kissed it
gently. It smelt of crayons and stale milk. She turned it over and looked at the palm. It was grubby, playground dirt lodging in the clear-cut lines.
‘You’ll come with me, won’t you?’ she said, and the child looked up at her and nodded. Rachel bent down and rested her cheek against the child’s downy skin. She
breathed in the musky sweetness that rose up from beneath her bright blue summer dress.
‘You’re such a good girl, aren’t you?’ she said.
The child nodded. Rachel could see the saliva beginning to gather in the corners of her mouth as her hands grasped the peach’s furry surface. And then she heard the sound of the car. The
black Saab, the new model, very shiny, very perfect, just like the woman who sat behind the wheel, driving quickly, careless in her anxiety. Stopping suddenly, pushing the door, leaving it standing
open as she hurried towards her daughter. Rachel put the peach back in her bag and without looking around began to walk away, heard behind her the mother’s anxious apologies as she swept the
child up into her arms, heard the sound of car doors slamming shut, then turned around and watched. Saw the older child, a boy, in the front passenger seat, and another in the back, a baby strapped
in. Saw the woman look in the rear-view mirror, then expertly, smoothly, without a glance in Rachel’s direction, pull away.
Just as the bus came into sight, slowed and stopped, the driver waiting impatiently until she had boarded, paid her fare and swayed up the aisle to a seat in the back. From where she could turn
and watch as the Saab accelerated. Through the village, up along the coast, the cliff edge falling away below the road, then turning in through the high granite pillars, the wrought-iron gate, the
gravel of the drive spitting out from beneath the car’s wheels, stopping outside the two-storey house built of buttery yellow sandstone, with the high bell tower, the gardens stretching away
to the sea. And the girl and boy, the perfect children, running across the lawn into the shrubbery, chasing each other through the walled kitchen garden, stopping at a swing that hung from the
lower branches of the macrocarpa tree, while all around, from every direction, the blue of the sea threw up a bright reflected light.
It was Mrs Lynch who had found them for her. The woman and the children. The house in the photographs. She had insisted when she came back to collect her dry-cleaning that
Rachel come to visit.
‘I won’t take no for an answer, dear. You must come for lunch. I’ll collect you and bring you home.’
They lived, the Lynchs, in a red-brick house just off upper Glenageary Road. Deep carpets, a smell of furniture polish, a grandfather clock that tick-tocked like a slow, steady heartbeat. Mr
Lynch barely spoke but he smiled at her, grasping her hand with his dry, birdlike claw, leaning over to pat her knee from time to time. Lunch was served at the mahogany dining table. Mrs Lynch
talked. Rachel listened. Tales of children and grandchildren, holidays in Florida and Marbella. Rachel listened to the litany of proud achievement. She watched as Mrs Lynch sipped her soup from the
edge of the spoon, tore her white roll in half and spread it with a smear of butter, dabbed at her lips with the linen napkin, punctuated her mouthfuls with conversation. Is this the way to do it?
Rachel tried to remember, and tried to copy, to replicate the woman’s neat movements.
‘More, more, have more, dear. You look half starved. What you need is someone to look after you. Why don’t you come and stay with us for a while? Daddy wouldn’t mind, would
you, Daddy?’
Mr Lynch smiled indulgently, accepting without complaint the nickname. He wouldn’t mind, he said, but he thought that Rachel probably wanted to get on with her own life, instead of being
stuck with two fuddy-duddy old pensioners.
The hall and sitting room were hung with paintings and black and white photographs. Graceful old yachts, gaff-rigged, their huge white sails like seagulls’ wings. Rachel looked at them
closely, admiring their lines. She recognized a young Mr Lynch at the helm of the most beautiful.
‘I used to sail,’ she said. ‘Dinghies mostly. I had my own Enterprise. It was a lovely boat.’
Mr Lynch nodded.
‘Then I had a Dragon. Now that was a beauty. Like one of yours.’
Mr Lynch nodded, his eyes wandering towards the pictures on the wall.
‘I crewed a lot for other people too, anyone who’d have me. Cruisers, racers, you name it. I loved it, out there in the bay.’
Mr Lynch spoke. ‘There’s nothing like it, the waters of the bay and the Irish sea. The tides can be tricky. There’s a real tidal race. Four knots in either direction.
You’d be amazed how far they can carry you.’ He paused and sipped his coffee. ‘You must have missed it,’ he said.
After lunch Mrs Lynch insisted again. ‘We’ll go for a drive now. We’ll go out as far as the Sugarloaf Mountain. That would be nice, wouldn’t it? Such lovely views. Daddy
will go in the back, and you, Rachel, in the front, no arguments.’
As they turned out on to the main road Rachel asked, ‘Would it be all right, do you think? Could we go through Killiney, up the Vico Road? Could we go that way?’
And fifteen minutes later Rachel had found where they were. The red-tiled roof with the Italianate bell tower, just showing over the high granite wall. The wrought-iron gates, and the bonnet of
a car nosing insistently out into their path, so Mrs Lynch had to stop suddenly, complaining.
‘Honestly, these people who live in these big houses, they think they own the road.’
And Rachel had seen the woman and the children in the new black Saab and known what she had to do. It was easy, really so easy. The girls inside always said it was easy.
‘You don’t realize,’ they had told her, ‘how fucking soft most people are. They have no defences. They’re not expecting trouble, so when trouble comes they
don’t know what’s hit them.’
So easy. To hang around outside the house. To watch the car coming and going. To see the little girl wearing her special red sweatshirt. ‘Little Darlings Crèche’, it said on
the front. And on the back the address and the phone number. They were right, the girls inside. It was dead easy.
To take the train to the station by the beach below the house. To walk across the shingle, up on to the rocks. To climb up the cliff path and over the few strands of rusty barbed wire on to the
railway line. To scramble through the broken fence and into the garden. Careful at first in case she might be noticed. Then moving more openly, as her confidence increased, around the edge of the
rocky promontory on which the house was built. Looking back up at it through the gaps in the trees towards the smooth green lawn where the swing hung from the lower branch of the macrocarpa tree.
Seeing the children flit past, hearing their shouts and cries. Their mother’s voice calling them in. Facing down the dog, the black Labrador who stood in front of her, barking and barking.
His legs firmly planted, a line of hair rising on his back as she held out her hand to him. Feeding him scraps, biscuits and squares of chocolate. Watching the threads of saliva fall from his loose
black lips as she held out her peace offerings. Then patting his big heavy head, looking into his dark brown eyes while he licked her hands.
Mrs Lynch was so kind. She took her shopping. She bought her new clothes. Trousers in linens of grainy black, sludgy green and purple the colour of day-old bruises. Crisp white shirts and
blouses. And a jacket made of soft suede, the colour of a chestnut pony. Sandals with straps around her ankles, like the ones that Roman centurions wore, and new shoes that smelt of leather and
held her feet gently and carefully. The first real shoes she’d worn for twelve years. And a new bag, leather too, big enough to carry a book and a newspaper, even a carton of milk and a loaf
of bread, with a wide strap and little pockets inside. A purse with a zip for coins and a place for notes.
‘And your hair, dear, we must do something about your hair. When did you last get it cut? You used to have such nice hair, I remember that it was a lovely colour, dark brown, nearly black
but not quite, and it waved so prettily. You probably never needed to do anything to it then, but now . . .’
She collected her from the dry-cleaner’s and took her to the salon in Glasthule, where Rachel sat for hours and listened to the chatter and gossip, while her head was massaged and rubbed,
her hair was washed, cut and dried. She looked in the mirrors that lined the walls and watched the woman with the sleek grey curls, whose clothes perfectly complimented her slender body, as she
moved about with grace and assurance, comfortable and at ease, suddenly at one with her brand-new skin.
‘Thank you,’ she said to Mrs Lynch as they walked out together. ‘You are very kind. I really appreciate all your help.’ And she leaned over and kissed the older woman on
the cheek, smelling her face powder and the rose-scented perfume that drifted up from her body as they stood together in the warm sunshine. ‘More than you can imagine.’
And Mrs Lynch took her hand and said, ‘I always believed what you said. About that man, your husband’s brother. I never believed him. I tried to convince the others. To get them to
see it the way I saw it. But they said there was too much evidence against you. Your fingerprints were on the gun, and his weren’t. I couldn’t understand that either. But I knew there
must be an explanation for it. I knew you’d never have killed your husband. Not when he was your daughter’s father.’ And she turned and walked away, stopping once to look back and
wave.
The dog recognized her. And so did the little girl. Her name was Laura. Rachel had heard her mother call out to her and the child respond. She sat on the beach in her smart new
clothes, with her jacket and bag lying beside her, and watched the shiny black Labrador running towards her, the two children, the boy and girl, struggling to catch up, and further away, a small
figure in the distance, the tall blonde woman with the baby in a sling on her chest. She put out her hand to the dog and stood up. She picked up a piece of driftwood and threw it in a wide curving
arc. He ran and leapt into the air, catching the stick in his slobbering jaws before it landed. And the two children laughed and jumped up and down and shouted, ‘Do it again, do it
again.’ And when their mother caught up with them, Laura was already telling Rachel that this was her mummy and this was her brother and that was her baby brother. It was so easy then to
smile at the tall blonde woman, make a casual remark about the beauty of the day and the sea, and the niceness of her dog and her children. So that within half an hour they were all eating ice
creams that Rachel had bought from the shop on the beach. So easy, then, to walk with them to the gate that led from the sea up the side of the cliff to their house. To wave them goodbye. And say
to the little girl with the straight dark hair and the solemn expression, ‘Yes, of course, Laura, I’d love to come and see your pussy cat some day, of course I would.’
Smiling ruefully at her mother, who was shooing her on ahead. Sharing those ‘aren’t children funny?’ kind of expressions, then waving goodbye and walking back along the beach,
taking off her beautiful new sandals and rolling up her trousers, paddling in the waves which washed so gently up and down on the shingle and the shells which gleamed beneath the water. Feeling the
sun on her back as she walked away from the tall blonde woman and her three lovely children, knowing that it was so easy, and that soon she would be seeing them again. She repeated the name the
woman had given her. Ursula Beckett, Mrs Ursula Beckett, wife of Daniel Beckett, Martin’s older brother, Rachel’s former lover. And the man who had fired the shot that killed her
husband. All those long years ago.
T
HIS TIME THE
smell was even stronger. Even the young lads who prided themselves on having stomachs of burnished brass and an attitude to match were
looking decidedly green as they clustered around the covered mound on the ground. Jack approached warily. He’d had a bad night. The girls had come to stay and Rosa had insisted on sleeping
with him. He didn’t mind, in fact he usually enjoyed her skinny little body curled up against his. But nightmares had jerked her, shrieking, out of her sleep, and then, when he thought he had
finally calmed her down, she had suddenly and without warning wet the bed. And by the time he had changed her, himself and the sheets, it was dawn, and although she instantly drifted off, her thumb
firmly planted between her lips, he had lain awake, watching the minutes click by on the digital clock until finally, and with a great sense of relief, it had been time to get up.
Now, four cups of coffee later, he felt dizzy and disorientated and not at all ready for what was lying here, down by the railway line, between Salthill and Seapoint, and stinking to high
heaven.
How to describe the smell of rotting flesh? It didn’t, he had once decided, smell like anything else. There were no possible comparisons to be made. You couldn’t say that it reminded
you of the scent of a particular flower or shrub. It wasn’t similar to any food or drink. It was like nothing other than itself. Perhaps it was possible to discriminate between one kind of
rot and another. Certainly rotting fish had a particularly potent stench. But, he wondered as the smell rose up and engulfed him, was there a qualitative difference between dead rat, cow or
human?