Unravelling Oliver(54)

The due date came and went and I heard nothing. But three months later, I assume in a last-ditch attempt to make me change my mind, she sent me a pink plastic hospital bracelet with ‘Bébé Condell’ written on it. There was no letter attached, and I was relieved that my name had not been used. Apparently, I had a child, a baby girl.

An unwanted child had an unwanted child. Perhaps the apple did not fall far from the tree after all. There are several clichés I could use to illustrate the fact that I am undoubtedly my father’s son. Like him, I did not want a baby. Maybe what I did was worse, by not acknowledging the child at all, but Laura was a sensible person and I knew that if Michael wasn’t allowed out of the closet, then Laura knew how difficult it would be to bring home what was then termed a ‘bastard’ child.

In August 1974, I heard that Laura was coming home. Nobody mentioned a baby. I assumed she had placed it for adoption. I hoped the baby would have a family that loved her. But at the back of my mind, I had a doubt that there had ever been a baby. I wondered about the possibility that Laura was never pregnant in the first place. I thought she may even have had an abortion or may have miscarried it. Why did she send me the bracelet, and not a photograph? If she was really trying to convince me to keep it, wouldn’t she have sent me a photograph? Also, my instincts told me that Laura simply would not have given up her baby. She was braver than me.

I saw Laura in college the following October and avoided contact. She was thin and sickly-looking and appeared not to socialize. It was rumoured that she was suffering from depression. Michael came to me and asked if I would talk to her. I could not refuse. I approached her one day in the library. She was standing in front of a bookshelf in the anthropology section. I greeted her and asked if she would like to come and have a coffee with me. She did not speak, but took my hand and placed it on her almost concave belly, just for a moment, and then she walked away. It was the same gesture she had made when I left her in France.

I was angry with her and wrote her a coded letter then, reassuring her that she had done the right thing but insisting she should just get over the past and get on with her life. She did not reply to my letter, but returned it. I found it in shreds, posted through the slats of my locker.

The girl was clearly unstable. Within a month or two, I heard that she dropped out of college, and then Michael rang me to say that she was dead.

I tried to have a reaction to this. I tried to cry. I expected guilt or anger but instead there was a strange emptiness, another void to add to the one already at the core of my soul, if such a thing exists. I had rejected her and hurt her, but I felt nothing, except that she was one less reminder of that summer. I am sorry that she did not think life was worth living. Another man could have loved her the way she needed. She was very beautiful, after all, and adorable, pleasant, easy company most of the time, before France. Several men I knew would have wanted nothing more than a date with the alluring and elusive Laura Condell. I regretted that she died but it was not my fault. None of this was my fault. I was supposed to be wailing and gnashing my teeth apparently, but I had really done guilt by then, and it was of no benefit whatsoever.

I left college the following year with a 2:2, a good enough degree. I would have liked to start my own business importing wine or something like that, but with no capital and no collateral, it was out of the question.

Out of financial desperation and seeking guidance, I even went to my father’s house one evening and rang the doorbell. I stepped back and waited, saw the curtain twitch, saw him seeing me, and then the curtains were drawn by an unseen hand and the door remained shut.

Eventually I got a dull job working alongside unambitious people in the offices of the Inland Revenue as a clerical assistant, the lowest form of life, but it allowed me to rent a flat on Raglan Road, a better part of Dublin. It didn’t take too long to move house. One battered suitcase and a refuse sack containing my mugs, pots, kettle and radio. And the locked wooden box, its key in my pocket.

My new home was even smaller than the one I had before, but location, location, location. I lived on beans and eggs and tea, and met up with some of the old crowd every summer to go travelling, having scrimped since the previous year. I lied about what I was doing, pretended to be rising through the ranks of the diplomatic corps. My sense of envy festered.

By early 1982, I was getting rather depressed. It had taken me seven years to move up one grade from clerical assistant to clerical officer, and that was only because someone died. I was sick of the penury, sick of the pretence and sick of myself. It seemed that I was doomed to this misery for the foreseeable future. There was no one to rescue me. Unable to control my thoughts, I recalled the hero who could have rescued me, if I hadn’t killed him. I remembered that kind old man, the boy, and a time when there were possibilities, when I was surrounded by decency. The box on top of the wardrobe in my room underneath its layer of dust called to me.

Several times in the intervening years, I had been on the point of throwing out the leather-bound books, thinking that doing so would ease my guilt. But I never did. It would have been sacrilegious. They represented something beautiful, something that I had destroyed, but which nevertheless I needed. I could not explain the need, not then. On that night, in that moment of torment, I only wanted to remember.

With shaking hands, I unlocked the box. I read the stories again. There were twenty-two of them in total, some already neatly typed up by me in the pages of the leather-bound books, some written in blotted ink by a shaky hand on loose sheets that I’d carefully placed between the pages. I did not sleep for a week thereafter, but then a few bottles of cheap wine helped me to forget the child for whom they were written and the hand that wrote the original drafts. Remembering had been a mistake. Or so I thought.