Girl Unknown(4)

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘you’re clearly upset. And, believe me, it’s not the first time I’ve had a student here in tears. University life can be daunting. People struggle. But there is help out there, if you ask for it. Let me give you the number of someone in Student Services you can call.’ I went behind my desk and wrote the number on a Post-it. Claire O’Rourke, a counsellor on campus, was an old friend. As I scribbled the note, I wondered briefly what she would make of the girl’s claims.

Ripping the page off the pad, I went to hand it to her but she didn’t reach out for it. She didn’t look at it at all.

I returned to my desk. ‘If you don’t want the number, that’s your call,’ I said. The situation had grown tiresome. I had work to do. ‘I’m trying to offer you help, but I can’t force you to take it.’

I tapped the space bar on my keyboard, stirring the computer to life. The monitor brightened and the image of Robbie and Holly dissolved.

‘My mother’s name was Linda,’ the girl said, and my hand released the mouse. ‘Linda Barry.’

Linda Barry … Hearing her name again was like having an unhealed wound prodded. I had not heard it for so long that I felt as if I was dreaming, or as if time was playing tricks. My mouth dried up.

‘Linda Barry?’ I said and, just like that, I was transported to another time, another place. It was as if her name was a secret password to the past – to my past, to a younger, more feckless and passionate man, and the time that went with it. A password that contained pain, too. I felt winded, and all at once on guard.

I looked at her again for any signs of resemblance when the figure of another student appeared in the doorway.

‘Dr Connolly?’

‘Not now,’ I said testily. ‘I’m in the middle of something,’ I switched off the monitor. ‘Come back later.’

‘A little over a year ago, she told me about you,’ the girl said, her voice barely a whisper.

‘She told you about me?’

‘She thought I needed to know,’ the girl said, pulling at the strands of her sleeve.

I could tell she was waiting for me to say something, while the possibility of what she had revealed began to ghost its way through my mind.

‘She told me when she was a student at Queens, you were her course tutor,’ she said. ‘She told me you had become friends, and that, for a while, you were lovers.’

It felt wrong – listening to a student discussing me and Linda, describing us as lovers. Could it be true? Had Linda had a child?

I thought about the weekend we’d spent in Donegal before we split up. Three days in a remote part of the countryside. I had felt as if I were shrugging off my previous life, the years of study, the immersion in academia receding from memory, like waking from a long dream. Beneath the surface, there had lingered the knowledge of a parting. Soon I would be returning to Dublin to take up a position in the university from which I had graduated three years before. The life I had lived in Belfast, at Queens, would draw to a close. And this relationship, this love affair – I had no idea how much it meant to me – it, too, would be laid to rest. We both knew it, although neither of us had said so.

The girl held a hand to her lips and I saw there in the rounded shape of her face a resemblance. A simplicity that might have been plain were it not for the liveliness of her eyes – Linda’s eyes, or were they? I couldn’t be completely sure.

‘I don’t see how …’ I began. ‘I can’t understand …’

‘She said your affair was brief. Afterwards, she went abroad to do a master’s degree. That was when she discovered she was pregnant.’

I had, by then, completed my PhD and returned to Dublin. I had met Caroline again and our relationship – broken for those three years in Belfast – had resumed. After Linda, after the swirling highs and lows, I felt ready for something solid, stable and dependable. ‘But she never said. She never told me …’

I remember what a relief it was to climb into marriage, to feel the safe, firm structure of it form around me. But with this girl in my office, I was again all at sea, the roar of waves in my ears drowning much of what she was telling me. I kept thinking of Linda with a baby – my baby. How could she not have told me? How could she have gone through all of that alone?

‘This must be difficult,’ she said, regaining her composure. ‘It’s got to be a lot to take in.’

With a slim frame, all wrists and knees, jeans clinging to thin legs, heavy oxblood-red boots, there was something vulnerable about her – even if she had just lobbed her grenade and set me reeling. ‘A lot to take in? Yes, you could say that.’

‘I know,’ she said, an uneasy smile spreading across her face. ‘But you have to know that I don’t want anything from you.’

‘You don’t?’

‘Nothing!’ she said, laughing nervously. ‘It’s just I thought you should know.’

‘And that’s all? There’s nothing else?’ I asked.

She shrugged, and started to pick again at her frayed cuffs. ‘Just to talk, I suppose.’

‘To talk?’

She squirmed, grew sullen. The shield of hair had fallen over her face again. She made no effort to push it back. Quietly, from behind it, she said: ‘I just wanted to get to know you a little.’