Girl Unknown (6 page)

‘Hang on a minute.’ Anna sat up a little straighter.

‘It’s the same with these celebrities and their nude pics. For Christ’s sake, who could be stupid enough to post those shots of themselves, and then be shocked when they enter the public realm?’

‘It’s hardly the same thing,’ Peter said reasonably.

‘No, just listen to me,’ Chris continued, warming now to his subject. ‘Caroline, does Holly have a smartphone?’

‘Yes, but we monitor her use of it,’ I hastened to add. ‘She understands we can access her phone at any time, read her texts, her IMs, her Facebook posts, everything.’

‘Okay. And does she ever use her phone to take pictures?’

‘Of course, but they’re very innocent. She’s eleven, for God’s sake! And she doesn’t post them online – she’s not allowed to put pictures up on any social networking sites.’

‘Not now, maybe. But how long are you going to be able to police it?’

‘For as long as we pay her phone bill,’ David interjected, grinning and taking a slug of whiskey.

‘What if she’s staying at a friend’s house?’ Chris went on. ‘That happens still, right?’

‘Yes,’ I agreed, cautiously, not liking where he was going with this.

‘A sleepover with a group of girls. Giddiness sets in. The tone of the conversation changes. They start talking
about boys they fancy. Someone gets out a smartphone. Pictures are taken. Someone – a girl whose parents aren’t as vigilant – posts them on Facebook. And next thing you know, you’ve got a picture of your daughter in her nightie doing the rounds of the internet.’

‘Christ,’ David said, shaking his head.

‘So what are you saying? That it’s inevitable?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘Maybe it is.’

‘My niece wasn’t pictured in her nightie,’ Anna added. ‘I’d just like to make that clear.’

‘I heard there was flesh shown in those pictures,’ Chris countered.

‘That doesn’t mean they were having a pillow-fight in their underwear!’

‘Now there’s a thought,’ Chris said, grinning and winking at Peter.

Peter stiffened. I looked at Chris and wondered how much he’d had to drink. It had been a few months since I’d seen him and there was a new fleshiness to him, shadows around his eyes that suggested ill health or unhappiness. He was a bit of a shambles, what with the weight he’d put on, the doughy pallor of his complexion. He had always possessed a kind of louche charm, relaxed good looks and a face enlivened by humour, but in the half-light thrown by the lamps and the candles, he looked washed-up, bedraggled, lost.

‘I think you’re making too much of this,’ David told him, adopting a friendly, reasoned approach. ‘The photos were probably of girls in their hockey gear, or something equally innocent. The fact is the trolls and sickos trawling those websites will corrupt even the most innocent
image into something titillating, but it’s a perversion in their own minds, nothing these girls are projecting.’

Chris laughed then, a honk of disbelief. ‘Oh come on, Dave!’ he said, slamming one hand on the table, still playful although a hardness had entered his voice, his eye. ‘Can you hear yourself?’

‘What?’

‘You make it sound like they’re all angels! You, of all people, should know about the scheming ways of teenage girls!’

David paused, just briefly, his glass halfway to his mouth. Then he laughed. ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

But something had entered that pause. A shiver of uncertainty. A cool doubt I had felt of late.

Chris was off now, explaining how David, as a university lecturer, must rub shoulders every day with teenage girls, harlots, as he described them, calling into his office, batting their eyelids at him in a bid to up their grades or be excused from a tutorial or whatever. Good-natured banter, I suppose, but most of it flew straight past me. I couldn’t stop looking at David. The change was so subtle that only a wife would have noticed. The flush of colour in his cheeks from the drink had faded, most of the blood leaving his face. His lips had thinned slightly, and a new sharpness entered his eyes. He seemed wary, shaken even. I stared at him and it came to me then: my husband was keeping something from me.

How long did the moment last? The opening out of that realization within me, everything falling into place: his recent behaviour, the silences, the sudden snapping,
the forgetfulness. I had put it down to the pressures of work, the consuming nature of his passion for history. Now I saw it was something else. I knew all the signs of concealment – we had been there before. I saw it and felt the heat of sudden anger flare within me. I wasn’t afraid – not then. That would come later, when I knew her, when I felt the insidious creep of her presence through our lives. What I felt more than anything was shock.

I don’t know what Chris said next – I missed it in the storm of my own private feeling – but whatever it was, it made Susannah snap.

‘Oh, my God,’ she said, the disgust in her voice hauling me out of my reverie. ‘Do you even listen to yourself, Christopher? Have you any notion at all of how ridiculous you sound? How sad and creepy you come across?’

‘It’s called honesty, my dear,’ he replied, his voice elevated and a hard smile on his face. ‘Something you wouldn’t recognize in your line of work.’

Susannah is a corporate lawyer, openly acknowledged as the real breadwinner of the two. Chris, who worked for a newspaper in a sub-editorial role that matched his whimsical nature, liked to refer to himself as a kept man, often joking how work for him was like a hobby. There were no such jokes that night.

Turning to Peter and Anna, who seemed increasingly uncomfortable, he explained: ‘Oh, I know she looks like a woman, but Susannah is actually a shark.’

Susannah is striking, with strong dark features and a sharp angular haircut. On that occasion, her features appeared even more pronounced than usual, lipstick in a deep plum, her mouth a grim slash in her face. ‘Listening
to you talk of teenage girls in such a manner, you’re just another drunken lech,’ she said. ‘God, when I hear you say these things, it makes me so fucking thankful we never had children.’

His eyes grew small. ‘We never had children, Susannah, because I didn’t want them. I knew any child I had with you might be born with a dorsal fin and several rows of teeth.’

There was a moment of silence, like a held breath, before Susannah stood up so suddenly her chair swung backwards and Peter had to grab it before it fell. Without saying a word, she left the room.

Chris broke the silence. ‘Oops,’ he said, and tried to laugh, but it came out as a gasp.

‘Are you all right?’ David asked.

Chris picked up the dessert spoon from his plate, turned it over, then put it back. In the hall, the front door slammed.

‘One of us should go after her,’ I said.

Looking at his plate, Chris said: ‘Be my guest.’

The rain had stopped, water pooling in dips in the paving.

I could see Susannah striding down the street and shouted for her to stop, but she didn’t slow and I had to run to catch up with her.

‘Please come back,’ I said, when I finally reached her.

She kept on walking, holding her coat closed with one hand, her handbag clenched in the other. There was something terrible in her balled-up anger, her refusal to speak until she reached the corner where our avenue meets the main road. ‘I’m so sorry, Caro,’ she said. ‘We’ve ruined your evening, haven’t we?’

Her eyes flicked past me to a taxi slowing as it neared and she stepped out on to the road with her hand held aloft.

‘Please don’t do this,’ I said, but her mind was made up.

I watched the taxi drive away, saw the sharp silhouette of her haircut through the rear window, and knew that what had happened between them could not be undone.

Peter and Anna were at the front door when I returned, already in their coats, full of smiles and words of thanks for a lovely evening, then hastily departing. There was no sign of David. I watched them hurry away into the night, before closing the door on the darkness and returning to the kitchen. Chris had his head in his hands, David pouring him another whiskey.

‘Chris is staying with us tonight,’ he told me.

Normally, I am the one to offer comfort, to know the right words to say. ‘I’ll go and make up his room,’ I said.

As I closed the door, I saw them clink glasses, solemnity in the gesture rather than any measure of cheer. At the same time, I felt my jaw tighten.

An idea had got its claws into me: that David might be having an affair. A dalliance with a colleague or some post-doctoral student. Some silly girl looking for excitement with an older man, the thoughtless facilitator of his midlife crisis.

We might have been able to weather the storm of such a crisis, but what was to come – the slow erosion caused by her destructive presence – proved far worse, a dark cavity that would open up and suck each one of us in.

6. David

‘Who is Zoë?’

I turned and saw Caroline staring at me.

I had been rinsing the wine glasses from the night before, dog-tired and hung-over. Chris had just left. Her words startled me out of a daydream – a memory of Linda wearing a shirt of mine, her feet bare on the hard tiles of that kitchen floor in our Donegal cottage all those years before. Those same feet, the night before, had pressed into the small of my back, the soft curve of her heels. We’d had so little time left. I’d traced a finger over her temple, along the sloping curve of her cheek, and told her it was all going to be okay. I drew her close enough to feel her body against mine, caught in the green haze of her stare. I kissed her, the tenderness of her lips against mine. A sense of certainty had come over me – the sure knowledge that we were safe, that no harm could come to us. I had been twenty-four, my whole life ahead of me.

‘David?’ Caroline said. In her hand was a piece of paper, and she held it up to me. ‘I found this in your wallet.’

It was the note Zoë had slipped beneath my office door, the one asking me to meet her in Madigans.

‘Why were you looking in my wallet?’

‘It fell out. I was doing the laundry.’

I put the tea-towel, which had been slung across my
shoulder, on to the draining-board and took a deep breath. ‘Close the door,’ I said. ‘We need to talk.’

Caroline looked both confused and upset. She shut the door, and the chatter from the television in the next room became an indistinct hum. I gazed out into the garden where everything, for a moment, appeared to be moving in slow motion – the russet leaves falling from the trees, and above them a dense body of clouds rippling by in waves. In the distance, there was the dull sound of a car starting.

‘Do you remember me telling you about Linda Barry?’

Caroline seemed to steel herself. ‘Yes, I do.’

‘Zoë is her daughter.’

‘Her daughter?’ she repeated.

I pulled at my earlobe. ‘She’s also one of my students. She came to see me because she thinks I’m her father.’

Caroline put the note on the table, but she kept her eyes on me. ‘She said that?’

‘She said she was pretty sure because her mother had told her who I was, and she had her birth certificate with her.’

Caroline pulled out a chair and sat at the table. ‘A birth certificate?’ she said.

Her resolute calm and steady nerve disarmed me. It would not have been unreasonable for her to raise her voice, to display some outrage. Instead there was a steely, implacable propriety. I should not have been surprised. Caroline had always demonstrated a degree of strength and inner resolve.

‘It didn’t actually name me as father …’

‘Then how can you be sure she’s your daughter?’

‘I can’t, not categorically. But there was a resemblance
to Linda, I suppose, and the dates match up. She had some photographs …’

‘Photographs?’

‘Of myself and Linda.’

Caroline looked about her as if to reassure herself, to check that she was where she thought she was – that the kitchen, with its stereo on the counter, the glass fruit bowl, the children’s assorted books and computer games, the black-and-white framed pictures of us as a family on the far wall, were all there. I thought for a moment she might reach out and touch something – the need in her appeared so real.

‘And where is Linda now?’ she asked evenly.

‘She’s dead,’ I said, and it sounded like a vindication, though I hadn’t meant it to.

Caroline’s eyes widened. ‘Dead?’

I took the chair opposite her and went on to tell her what I knew of Linda’s passing.

She reached for a napkin from the holder on the table. ‘When did this happen? When did the girl tell you?’ she asked.

‘I found out at the start of the week.’

‘The start of the week? Why didn’t you say something?’ Caroline said, a little more worked up, annoyed now. ‘Why did you wait to tell me?’

‘To be honest, I needed more time.’

‘More time?’

‘It was a shock to have her walk into my office and make that claim. I needed time to think it through before telling you.’ I remained calm, pragmatic. ‘I wasn’t trying to keep it from you.’

‘You should have told me straight away,’ Caroline said.

‘I wanted to get things clear in my head.’

‘And are they?’

I hesitated. In my head there was an image of the whitewash of water whipped up by the wind on the beach in Holywood, breaking relentlessly, wave after wave, against the shore, where Linda and I stood hand in hand.

‘I don’t know,’ I said in answer. ‘The girl makes a convincing case …’ I meant Zoë, but I was thinking of how Linda and I had tripped down Botanic Avenue on those evenings on our way to the pub or a poetry reading at Oxfam.

‘But we need to be sure,’ Caroline said. ‘We need to know for certain whether she is your daughter or not.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’ve thought about it and there are several ways of finding out.’

‘What? Like a paternity test?’ she asked, with a grim laugh.

‘Why not?’ I answered, reaching out to her to try to reassure her, but her hand remained motionless.

‘All these years …’ she said.

I wanted to say what a relief it was to tell her, but I didn’t. Something stopped me – the strange mix of emotions I was feeling, at once frightening and painful.