Stolen Child (15 page)

Dublin has become an alien landscape. I see cranes everywhere. They dominate the skyline. Glass towers mushroom along the docks. I remember when there was nothing there but derelict warehouses and grey gloom. All the talk is about the Celtic Tiger and economic growth, opportunity and capital investment. I once drove through the city centre with one hand on the wheel, the other beating time to music. Now I clutch the wheel and am terrified by the pulsing lines of traffic and one-way street systems.

I stayed for a week with my father and Tessa, and was relegated to the background as they swooped you up into a whirl of activities.

‘Meet your friends,’ he said. ‘Catch up on old times. You look like you need a good break.’

I met Amanda and Julie in the Gresham Hotel. Amanda is a senior executive with Kay Communications and Julie runs her own PR company. ‘The corporate sector,’ she said. ‘Big business. Big bucks. What have you been doing with yourself?’

‘Full-time mothering,’ I replied. ‘It’s demanding but very rewarding.’

She played around with a salad leaf and flicked a glance at Amanda. Childcare never rated highly on their list of career choices.

‘Rewarding, my arse,’ said Amanda. ‘I tried it for six months then clawed my way from the grave and back to life again.’

She has three kids now and a full-time nanny. Julie hasn’t bothered. Her career is more important than nappies and feed-formula. I envied them their freedom. I want to be part of this great Celtic Tiger but you, my precious child, you have become my gaoler. Every time I think of escaping, you draw me back into the shadows. Four years of age and tyrannical with your power.

You returned that evening with bags from Brown Thomas, dresses and dungarees and trainers with flashing heels that you insisted on wearing to bed.

You wore them to St Stephen’s Green when I took you to feed the ducks. I sat on a bench and watched you run to the edge of the pond with your bag of bread. Your trainers winked red and bright each time you moved. I could see your ankles below your dungarees. You are stretching like a beanpole before my eyes.

Then you tripped on an undone lace and howled, as only you can howl when you hurt yourself. Someone else reached you before I did. Edward Carter. He set you back on your feet and hunkered down to your level. A duck nosedived at the edge of the pond, its tail feathers fluttering as wildly as my heart.

‘Hello, Edward,’ I said. ‘I see you’ve met my daughter, Joy.’

He rose to his feet. I’m not sure which of us was more flustered. Strange that, seeing him flushed and at a loss for words. But not for long.

‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ he said. ‘Sue Sheehan…this is a pleasant surprise.’

‘Equally so, Edward,’ I replied.

‘So, you have a child,’ he said. ‘A beautiful daughter. Joy. What an appropriate name.’

You stared up at him, the tears still on your cheeks, but you sobbed quietly, as if the words he’d spoken had soothed you.

‘Sit with me for a while, Sue, he said. ‘It’s so long since we’ve talked. Tell me what you’re doing with yourself? What’s new in the world of spin?’ He took my arm and guided me back to the bench.

‘I really couldn’t say, Edward,’ I replied. ‘I’m not involved any more. Like you, I’ve moved on.’

He watched you bend to examine a duck as it waddled towards the bread you held in your hand. The sun gleamed on your hair, honey-spun tendrils hiding your face.

I wanted to run from him, wild and terrified, clutching you to my chest, but I stayed by his side. What else could I do?

He talked about the scandal.

‘You must have hated me when you discovered I’d been involved with her,’ he said.

‘For a while, yes,’ I replied. ‘You squandered eight years of my life with false promises. But not any more. I’m too busy to waste time over past mistakes.’

Perspiration trickled down the back of my neck, a single trail like a tear. His shoes were scuffed, the upper coming away from the toe. His tie had a stain on the front. An egg stain. I wanted to lean over and scrape it off.

‘I’m glad you’ve moved on,’ he said. ‘Everyone is moving on, except me…and her, of course. She’ll never move on.’

‘You have an egg stain on your tie,’ I told him.

He glanced down and lifted his tie, scraped ineffectively at the silken fabric.

‘How is your wife,’ I asked. ‘Still as neurotic as ever?’

He shook his head. ‘Wren has left me,’ he said. ‘Gone to live in Italy. But she stood by me when it mattered. I suppose I couldn’t ask for more than that. Funny thing, I never really saw her when she was with me. Now that our marriage is over, I see her everywhere.’

I imagined a small, strong bird flying higher and higher until her song was inaudible and there was nothing left, not even a black speck against the sun.

‘The political establishment fucked me over well and truly,’ he said. ‘But I’ve enough information in my diaries to fuck every one of them to hell and back again.’

I heard his anger then, vicious and bitter.

‘I’m going to publish and be damned,’ he said.

‘Dishing the dirt,’ I said.

‘If you want to call it that, feel free. I prefer to call it telling the truth,’ he replied.

‘You’ve never told the truth in your life, Edward,’ I said. ‘How do you expect to start now?’

He threw back his head, laughed loudly.

‘You always had a wasp on your tongue, Sue, and motherhood hasn’t swatted it away. She is a darling child. So tall for her age. Who does she resemble? Those eyes…magnificent. Her father’s, I presume?’

I walked to the edge of the lake and took your hand.

‘Goodbye, Edward,’ I said.

We walked slowly from the park. Your heels winked and mine clicked as Edward Carter shuffled forever from our lives.

She sat alone in the most secluded area of the café. Even there she felt exposed. The coffee looked disgusting, tar-black and tepid. She sipped and shuddered, pushed the cup to one side. She should go back to the counter and order a fresh one but she lacked the energy to rise. Two old men in peaked caps sat at the table next to her. They talked loudly to each other and would have looked more at home in the corner of their local pub than this city-centre café with its stainless steel coffee grinders and glass tabletops.

The midday rush was over. A group of young people entered and settled around a circular table. Trinity students, Carla guessed, as they dropped backpacks and canvas satchels to the floor. They were followed by two middle-aged women with Brown Thomas carrier bags. They looked alike, probably sisters, tanned and bleached and wearing too much gold. Everyone seemed relaxed, interested only in coffee and chat, but Carla saw normality as a veneer that could crack at any moment. The man sitting by the window listening to his Walkman could suddenly materialise into a journalist and shove a microphone under her mouth. A photographer could
be lurking behind the tall dracaena, shielded by the shiny green leaves as he waited for her to relax her guard.

‘Paranoia is alive and living in your head,’ Robert would say if he was with her. But he was in Australia and no one could tell her to get a grip, get a life, get real.

Frank Staunton had contacted her shortly after Robert’s departure and asked if she would be interested in ghostwriting a book for Vision Publications. He booked a table in an Italian restaurant. The waiters obviously knew him and they had fussed over Carla, asking her to sample the wine and pasta dishes.

‘I know from the work you do with Leo that you’ve an eye for detail,’ Frank said. ‘The libel snags and snares. But you can also write. I need a ghostwriter. I’d like you to take a look at a manuscript that’s been submitted to me. It’s a tough story and doesn’t make comfortable reading. There’ll be publicity when it’s published, controversy and denials. But it’s a true account of one man’s life story. His literacy skills aren’t great and the book needs rewriting. Will you meet him and hear him out, then ghostwrite his story without losing his voice in the transition?’

‘What makes you think I’m the right person to do it?’

‘It’s about a stolen childhood.’

‘Stolen?’

‘By the state. There’ll be a lot more stories like this one. Read it and let me know what you think.’

He was right. Brendan’s manuscript, littered with bad grammar and misspellings, horrified her. After his mother’s death when he was five years old, his father had placed him in care. Sixty years later, he was dying from emphysema and his only wish was to launch his book before he died. Carla worked closely with him, teasing from him the story
of physical and sexual abuse that had marked his eleven years in the St Almus Home for Boys. When
Screaming in Silence
was published she was acknowledged as his co-writer under the pseudonym Clare Frazier.

Today, she was meeting Frank in the Gresham Hotel to discuss another commission. She was early for her appointment and would have been equally content to sit all day in the café, watching the sun streaming through the stainedglass window and listening to old men scolding.

‘Wouldn’t fill a sparrow’s belly,’ said the man nearest her as he inspected his sandwich. His friend agreed and scornfully dismissed the salad on the side as ‘leftover swill for rabbits’.

At the next table, the students talked urgently, argumentatively. Their voices forced the old men into silence. They settled their caps more firmly on their heads and left. A young man, older than the students, entered and carried a mug of coffee to the vacated table. His blond hair, cropped tight against his skull, emphasised his angular features. An old-wise face, she thought, comparing him to the students, who – despite their dishevelled hair, ripped jeans and sludge-coloured tops – moved and spoke with the sleek assurance of wealth.

The man opened a book and began to read. After a few minutes he glanced up and caught her eye. Apart from his gaze, which openly appraised her, he looked neat and unremarkable in black jeans and a T-shirt worn under an open denim shirt. He closed his book and walked towards her table.

‘Do you mind if I sit down?’ He rested his hand on the back of a chair.

‘Yes,’ Carla replied. ‘I do mind.’

Once she had believed that journalists were her friends,
her co-conspirators. Once she had deliberately attracted their attention to gain a brief flurry of exposure and believed, in those silly carefree days as she tossed her flyaway hair and cast alluring glances at the camera, that they were feeding off each other’s needs. She had not known then, as she knew now, that they were waiting to plunder her soul.

He nodded and removed his hand from the chair. ‘You don’t remember me.’ He did not seem offended when she shook her head. ‘I didn’t expect you would. I’m Dylan Rae. We met one night but—’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t give interviews.’ She attempted to rise but something about his steady gaze held her still.

‘In the industrial estate,’ he said. ‘You called an ambulance.’

Suddenly she was transported back to the circles of burned wood, the shadow that moved within the greater shadows and became human. She had never been able to envisage his face, only the trail of long blond hair and the shock of his body falling.

‘I hope I haven’t startled you.’ He sounded nervous. The premature lines around his eyes carried a hard history, yet there was something unspoiled about his mouth. A choirboy’s mouth, she thought, which was an ironic comparison considering the substances he must have smoked or swallowed. He was off drugs now. She could tell by his eyes, dark grey and alert, waiting for her reply.

She gestured towards his hair. ‘You look different.’

‘I
am
different.’ He laughed and, without asking again, pulled out a seat and sat down. ‘Can I get you another coffee?’

‘No, thank you. I’m just about to leave.’

‘I want to thank you—’ He studied his hands for an instant. His fingers were long, the nails clipped short. She noticed scars that would probably never fade. ‘I’ve no idea what I
took that night,’ he said. ‘In fact, I know nothing about that night except what Nikki told me.’

‘Nikki?’

‘The ambulance driver.’

‘Ah, yes. She drove us both…’ She swallowed, unable to continue.

‘Yeah. She told me. She came to see me in the hospital, said she’d scraped me off the ground. Turned out she’d lost a brother from an overdose and decided I was worth saving.’

‘She obviously succeeded.’

‘She had her work cut out, so she had. Rehab was fucking grim, I can tell you that for nothing. Don’t know how I stopped myself running from the place. Would have too, I reckon, except for you.’

‘Me?’ Astonished, Carla stared at him.

‘Yeah.’ He nodded, vigorously. ‘You stepped out of your own agony long enough to help me. Every time I wanted to run, I’d think of you wandering like a ghost through those empty buildings. At least you knew who you were searching for, whereas I hadn’t a clue what I’d lost.’

‘Have you found it?’ She struggled to control the rush of tears.

‘I’ve been clean as a whistle since I came out,’ he said. ‘Nikki kicked me into shape and persuaded me to go back to college. I’m going to counsel young people. I know all about the shit that goes on in their heads when they’ve lost their way.’

‘I’m glad things are working out for you,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry they haven’t worked out for you. To lose a child…I can’t imagine how awful that must be.’

His directness appealed to her. She was used to people shifting their gaze, speaking too fast, avoiding any subject to do with babies.

‘Some days are more difficult than others,’ she said. ‘On
days like today, meeting you, well…it’s good…really good.’

‘I’m glad we met. Just in time, too. Me and Nikki are moving to the sticks next week.’

‘For good?’

‘I want to leave the past behind, make a fresh start. We’ve a kid to think about now.’

‘A kid?’

‘A little lad. Billy.’

‘Sounds like you have everything you need.’

‘I walked a hard road to get it.’

‘Sometimes that’s necessary.’

They walked together down Grafton Street and parted when they reached the turn-off into Nassau Street. She shook his hand. His grip was firm and warm. She wanted to stand with him for an instant longer. He too seemed reluctant to leave her.

‘I’d better go.’ She half-turned from him. ‘I have an appointment.’

He bent forward and kissed her cheek. ‘My life began that night,’ he said. ‘I’ve you to thank for everything.’

‘I did nothing—’

‘You picked me up when you’d every reason to walk away.’

He crossed the road and rounded the railings of Trinity College. She watched him striding confidently towards his future. When he disappeared from sight, she hurried across O’Connell Bridge, already late for her appointment. Strange twists of fate. Her child had been taken from her and, as a result of that taking, Dylan Rae had found his life again.