Girl Unknown(17)

Shaken by the encounter, I glanced around to see if anyone else had witnessed this strange assault, and there was Holly. She was holding a different set of bed-linen under her arm. She came towards me, and – this is the part that really kills me – she put the package on top of the boxes and, without looking at me, without uttering a word about what she had just witnessed, she said, in a small, flat voice, ‘I think that’s everything.’ Then she walked towards the checkouts.

Holly has always been the more resilient of my two children, even though she’s the younger. She lacks the sensitivity of her older brother, which has worried me from his infancy. I suppose because she is the baby of the family I sometimes underestimate her strength of mind, her astuteness. But every now and then she surprises me with her maturity. Did she know somehow what I had done? Who this woman was?

‘Holly,’ I said in the car. ‘About what happened back there –’

‘Please, Mum,’ she interrupted. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

Throughout the journey home we were silent, but I kept thinking of her reaction – the coolness of it. Was it possible she knew? It made me wonder at how much she had been exposed to, my daughter with her steady gaze, her father’s cool demeanour. The guilt was stirring within me again. It was never far away.

More than a year before Zo? came into our lives, I became involved with a man whose son went to school with Robbie. The word ‘affair’ seems wrong – a false name for what occurred between us. I don’t think you can properly call it an affair if there was never full-on sex, can you? A fling, perhaps, although that makes it sound so throwaway, as if I’m the type of woman who whimsically forgets her marriage vows whenever the fancy takes her. I’m not that type of person. His name was Aidan – is Aidan, for he hasn’t died, he’s just not in my life any more; we met through the Parents’ Committee. This ‘fling’, for want of a better word, lasted three, maybe four months. It wasn’t love, never that. When it ended, Aidan and his wife took their son out of Robbie’s school and the family moved to a different part of Dublin. David and I made the decision to keep Robbie where he was. In hindsight, I think it was a mistake.

I thought David had forgiven me but, in the aftermath of his revelation, I began to suspect he had actually been biding his time, waiting for the right moment, the right opportunity to present itself. Revenge had come in a way I had never imagined: in the form of a teenage girl.

I didn’t say it to him. How could I? There was a time when I could have spoken my mind to David about anything. I never used to be afraid of confrontation. But something had happened in the aftermath of my indiscretion – a change in the dynamic between us. It was true that he had taken me back without punishment or reproach. But ours was no longer a relaxed home. An undercurrent of tension ran through everything. Even though we never told the children what had happened, what I had done, it was impossible to shield them from the atmosphere that developed between us. They regarded me with cautious eyes as if anxious I might plunge them back into a time of uncertainty. David acted with the same calm exterior, the same cool-headed thinking I had known of him. We carried on. We got through it. But I had lost some of my power. It had slipped away, relinquished because of the debt I owed him for his forgiveness.

On that Saturday morning, we made an agreement, David and I. We would put the matter of Zo? to one side until we had definitive proof. For the two weeks it took to decode the strands of DNA, identify a pattern, an affinity between David’s genes and Zo?’s – or none – we would try to live our lives as best we could. Everything would continue as before – work, the children, the house, our relationships. Just for those two weeks.

Easier said than done.

For the first week there was a buzz in my brain, a low-grade headache. I put it down to poor sleep. I tried to kill it with paracetamol so I could focus on my job but still it persisted. Going back to work for a company I had once been a part of was not the triumphant return I had secretly hoped it would be. It was disconcerting how far things had moved on in the past fifteen years, making the landscape almost entirely unrecognizable to me. I willed myself to become absorbed in the challenge, however difficult I found it. All the while, in the back of my head, there was this hum: Zo?.

I don’t think I even recognized her as a person then. Instead I saw her as a problem I didn’t know how to solve. Work allowed me to drown out the hum in my brain. It was in the evenings, after dinner, the kids occupied with homework or friends or TV, when David and I were alone together, that the sound was amplified.

‘What does she look like?’ I asked him.

It was night, and we were lying awake in the dark. Somewhere down our street, a car alarm was going off.

His gaze moved from the window to the ceiling, and I felt him smoothing the duvet around him. ‘Much like any other first-year student,’ he said, his voice flat.

‘Come on, David. They can’t all look the same. She must have some distinguishing features.’

‘Her hair,’ he said then, and I found myself grow tense. ‘She has this shock of blonde hair. Long springy curls – almost white, it’s so blonde.’

‘She doesn’t sound like you.’

‘Linda’s hair.’

Linda. Her name spoken in the darkness of our bedroom. I thought of her, all those years ago, and imagined David running his hands over those blonde curls, knitting his fingers up in them, marvelling at them, loving them. I had conjured up the image and now wished I hadn’t.