Stolen Child (21 page)

Joy

Splotch is the bane of her mother’s life. Joy stares at the pool in the middle of the conservatory. He does wee-wees on the floor and big jobs too. She tries to clean it up so that her mother doesn’t shout about the bane of her life and how Splotch is a slow learner when it comes to house-training. If he doesn’t improve, he will have to live outside in a kennel.

The conservatory is her mother’s private space. She doesn’t like anyone else going into it, especially since Splotch chewed one of the cushions from the cane armchair and left teethmarks on the legs of the settee. Her father says the conservatory looks like a boil on the side of the house but her mother loves to sit there writing…writing. She will write Splotch’s name in the Judgement Book if she sees the mess he made.

Her mother is upstairs hoovering. Joy grabs the pup in her arms and runs to the kitchen for newspaper. The pages soak up Splotch’s wee-wee and turn yellow. Splotch scampers over the paper and leaves wet pawmarks on the floor.

‘Get out, Splotch,’ she whispers and chases him out the door. She adds another sheet of newspaper. This one is not so wet and that’s when she sees the photograph. It’s the hair
she notices first. It’s blonde like her own and hanging over the woman’s face. She’s wearing a jacket with shiny buttons and skinny black trousers, and she’s leaning back against the car. Her mouth is open, like she’s screaming, and one hand is pushing against someone. Joy can see just the edge of the other person and she doesn’t know if it’s a man or a woman. She reads the headline.
Model Linked to Pro…
it’s a long word and she tries to break it into pieces, the way her mother showed her with the word,
To-Get-Her.
Joy knows what a model is. They’re super and skinny and wear beautiful clothes. But the other word,
Pros-Tit-Ute
, she’s never heard it before. She speaks it aloud. ‘
Pros-Tit-Ute.
’

‘What did you just say?’

Joy glances sideways. Her mother’s ankles come into view.

Caught in the act. She presses the paper into the floor and watches Splotch’s pee soak into it. Her pup must have a lake inside him.

‘Pros-Tit-Ute,’ she repeats the word. ‘It’s in the paper.’

Her mother kneels down and leans so far over the newspaper that Joy thinks she will fall. But she pulls back in time and crumples the paper in a ball. She has that look again, like she doesn’t know Joy’s name, and she makes a sound like a frog when she clears her throat.

‘Your dog is chewing the arm off your Barbie,’ she says. ‘Keep him under control or he’s going outside for good. Do you understand?’

She’s right about Barbie. One of her arms is pulp. But Joy doesn’t care. She has six Barbie dolls. Granny Tessa brings one every time she comes to stay. Joy never plays with them. They can’t talk, not like Polar could. No one is like Polar, even Splotch.

They have to leave him whimpering in the kitchen, the floor covered in newspapers, when her mother brings her to
Maoltrán the next day. Since they started getting the groceries delivered, it’s ages since they’ve been to the village. She drives past the school. Joy lowers the car window and hears the children shouting in the yard.

‘You’re letting the heat out,’ says her mother. ‘Put that window up immediately.’

The hairstylist’s name in
Cutting it Fine
is Mary. She tucks a black plastic cape around Joy’s shoulders and fastens it at the back. Joy stares at her reflection as Mary lifts her hair and lets it fall again.

‘Nits,’ says her mother to Mary. ‘Don’t ask me how she got them but we’ve had two infestations. Cut it as short as possible.’

‘Most of the kids tie their hair back in a ponytail and that takes care of the problem,’ says Mary. ‘It’s a bit drastic, don’t you think, to get rid of it all?’

‘She chews the ends,’ says her mother. ‘It’s unhygienic. Please do as I say.’

Joy wants to tell Mary that she doesn’t chew the ends of her hair. She did, for a while after Polar’s funeral, but not for ages. Mary brushes the fringe back from her face and drags the brush to the ends of her hair. The strands spark, like they’re wired, and Mary smiles in the mirror at her. Joy smiles back even though she wants to cry, and she bends her head so that she doesn’t have to look when Mary starts to cut.
Snip…snip…snip.

She feels the air on the back of her neck and shivers. Her head is so light she thinks it might take off like a balloon.

‘Shorter,’ says her mother.

Joy touches stubble on the back of her neck. She’s afraid to look into the mirror. A stranger stares back at her. She has such a tiny face. Even Splotch won’t know her.

When they come home her mother has to clean the kitchen
floor. She goes down on her knees with a bucket and scrubbing brush. The smell of Dettol is all over the house. But still she keeps scrubbing, even though there’s nothing left to scrub except spotless floorboards.

Her father is home again. Joy thinks his eyes will pop from his head when he sees her.

‘Don’t you like it, Daddy?’ she asks. ‘Don’t you?’

He doesn’t speak for a long time. His Adam’s apple goes up and down. ‘Let me have another look,’ he says, when he sees her tears. ‘Some things take a bit of getting used to.’

He turns her around and examines her from all angles. ‘Do you know who you remind me of?’ he asks.

‘Who, Daddy? Who?’

‘A beautiful pixie,’ he says. ‘The most beautiful pixie ever.’

He stares over her head at Mammy and doesn’t speak again. Joy feels the shiver on her arms. She calls Splotch and runs upstairs to her room. She knows the signs. The silence is filled with thunder.

Her father says that the Burren is a unique place. It was formed from the compressed shells of sea creatures that lived at the bottom of the ocean over three hundred million years ago. Then, fifteen thousand years ago – which seems like yesterday in comparison to the sea creatures – the ice age came and glaciers scraped the Burren clear of topsoil. When the glaciers melted, fifty square miles of pavement rock was left exposed. By rights, nothing should grow here but it is full of rare and wonderful plants nestling in the warm limestone cracks.

He teaches her the names, in English and in Latin: the mountain avens,
dryas octopetala
, spring gentians,
gentiana verna
, early purple orchid,
orchis mascula
and the flower with the same name as their house, hoary rockrose,
helianthemum canum.

He takes her hand and they walk across the flat rocks. ‘Grikes are the crisscrossing cracks in the limestone,’ he says. ‘And the clints are the isolated sections of rock.’

Her parents’ marriage is full of grikes, large cracks that they pretend not to notice. Joy often wonders what warm space they found in the grikes to create her.

‘Were they happy before I was born?’ she asked Miriam once when they were in the stockroom sticking barcodes on the seahorse boxes.

‘Yes, they were happy but things happened and it was tough on both of them,’ her grandmother replied.

‘What things?’ Joy finds it impossible to imagine life before she arrived and became a bone for her parents to argue over.

‘Babies that were not meant to be born,’ said Miriam. ‘Not like you, my little cabbage. You are their miracle.’

Phyllis says much the same thing, and puffs out her chest every time Joy asks her to tell the story. ‘Lucky for some I was around. You were one fortunate baby to survive.’

Her mother never wants to talk about that night. ‘You came quick,’ is all she says. ‘Fast as lightning.’

Joy imagines the snow and the panic and Phyllis’s rough, red hands carefully drawing her out into the light, and her father, far away on the rig, listening on the phone to hear her first cry.

Susanne

Last week she was photographed in Kim’s Cave. I remember it well. The nightclub for celebrities and wannabes. Her eyes are as smudged as night and behind the drunken sparkle I saw the bleakness…oh…the bleakness…And now this.
Model Linked to Murdered Prostitute.
Publicity follows her like a bad smell. I saw the resemblance immediately. I never noticed it before but you are growing into her.

‘Why…why…why,’ said David. ‘Joy’s hair was beautiful. Her crowning glory. Now she looks like an urchin. Are you jealous of her beauty? Is it possible that you resent your own child, the attention she receives from others?’

When I mentioned nits he called me a liar.

Our gloves are off, our marriage reduced to bare knuckles. It’s a charade and you are beginning to see through it. I wonder about other women. They must exist. He is young and virile but he has never come to me since that night when I said it was inappropriate (yes, I did use that word) to hold a small child against his naked chest.

He was in Dublin yesterday talking to my father…
about me. Neither will admit it but that has to be the reason my father came today.

You heard his van entering the lane and were gone before I could catch you, running up the lane, your hands waving. He stopped and flung open the driver’s door. You disappeared inside and when he braked outside the house you were sitting on his lap, your hands on the steering wheel, the two of you laughing uproariously.

‘It was just for a few yards,’ he said, when I warned him about the risk. ‘Isn’t she the great little rally driver? In control the whole time.’

I asked why he hadn’t phoned in advance. I didn’t intend it to sound like an accusation but I’m losing my ability to speak normally to people. He claimed he had to visit a client in Limerick, some new hotel signage, and, as he was so near, he decided to touch base with his only daughter. This
was
an accusation and was not meant to sound otherwise. ‘Just be glad to see me,’ he replied. ‘A cup of tea in my hand is all I want. That and a chance to hug my favourite grandchild.’

‘Silly Granddad,’ you shouted, giddy from the drive. ‘I’m your
only
grandchild.’

I made him tea and he nibbled around the edges of a biscuit. ‘So,’ he asked, when you’d gone into the living room to watch your video, ‘how’s life treating you, Susanne? It must be lonely all on your own down here, especially when David is away so often. I hear he’s interested in finding a job closer to home.’

I shrugged, refused to be drawn.

He picked up a pine cone from the nature table and examined it intently. The questions began. Why were you not attending the local school? Why does David believe I was bullied throughout my school days when nothing of
the sort happened? Why have I turned my back on an interesting career in Miriam’s studio? Why did I strike another woman’s child and accuse him of attacking Joy when everyone present agrees it was an accident? He flung the pine cone back on the table. It rolled to the floor and reminded me of your fury that afternoon, the hatred in your gaze when you cursed me.

No sense fooling myself any longer. He’s right. You hate home-school. You lie listlessly across the kitchen table and suck your thumb. You tickle Splotch under his chin and allow him to walk across the table on your school books. You find it impossible to memorise the simplest sums yet count the days until David’s return.

‘Home-schooling,’ my father said, ‘is for cranks and Creationists. Why are you involved in this ridiculous charade when Joy is crying out for the company of other children? Why are people talking about you? Are you aware that they call you a recluse? They claim you’re neurotic, an unbalanced mother.’

How easy it is to fling accusations of neurosis into the air. I thought briefly of Edward Carter and his bird-wife but my father was in full spate, incapable of stopping.

‘I believe you’re suffering from agoraphobia,’ he said. ‘Fear of open spaces,’ he added, as if I was unfamiliar with the term.

He suggested I see someone, a counsellor, someone who can understand my fear of human contact; someone in whom I can confide the reasons why I have such a compulsion to hide myself away.

He felt responsible…at this point he stopped and seemed to lose his way.

‘You were not brought up in a happy environment,’ he said. ‘It has obviously affected you.’

I saw my parents’ faces then, cameo-sharp in my memory: Nina and Jim, the ticking of their unhappiness loud in the silence surrounding them. I’d longed for a brother or a sister, or both, but there was no space for them to survive the briar of my parents’ anger.

Is that what you see when you look at us,
I wonder.
My brittle smile ordering you to be happy? David’s brooding resentment leaching the energy from the air around us?

This afternoon, my father was determined to tackle old ghosts. ‘That first unfortunate experience…’ his voice trailed away.

‘You would have had my baby adopted,’ I said. ‘You would have given him away, no matter what I wanted. You’d no interest of starting your married life with me and a baby hanging on.’

‘That’s not how I remember it,’ he said. ‘You were young. How could you cope with the responsibility of a child when you could not even name its father?’

Until this afternoon, that instant, I was unaware of how much I hated him.

We heard you singing, the light beat of your feet on the wooden floor as you danced with the orphans.
Annie the Musical…
again. Miriam bought it for your birthday. You play it every day, singing about ashtrays and art and lost parents. Singing with such pathos, such longing.

You sang about a hard-knock life this afternoon, held a hairbrush like a microphone to your mouth.

‘She’s made for the stage,’ my father said. ‘But she’ll never get beyond these four walls if you have your way.’

I imagined you exposed in spotlights. The hairs lifted on my neck. It can never be. And yet it must.

I watched him leave.
Sheehan Signs
is written large on the side of his van. As a sign maker, he works with neon and
metal, oak and vinyl. I always recognise his signs wherever they are erected. The graphics, the colours and imagery do not intrude on the landscape. Their function is to attract attention without jarring the eye, to guide the customer without effort in the right direction, to seem invisible while being actively visible. I am the sign that jars the eye. The one that points the way to strange behaviour, leads towards speculation and innuendo. Invisibility has made me conspicuous in a community that would notice a blade of grass growing in the wrong direction. I’d forgotten about perception. It’s not the story that counts but how it’s told.

You and I must face them, become one of them. We must become visible to remain invisible.