Girl Unknown(47)

He was talking now about a letter that arrived, indicating the girl’s desire to reach out to her natural mother, the subsequent meeting and how euphoric Linda was afterwards, but all I kept thinking about was Zo?, sitting in my car, the orange glow of streetlights outside as she told me about Linda bringing her to UCD – driving her there – when she was a little girl. I could tell she had never forgotten you, she had said, and I had latched on to those words. But Linda never learned to drive. Was it all lies? Was there truth in anything she had said? Other accounts came back at me: the Greystones cousins, shopping trips to Grafton Street, occasions that my mind had fixed upon, imagining the scene had I happened upon them – had I rounded the corner at the Blob that day and spied my Linda and a little blonde-haired girl, had I stopped dead on Grafton Street, Linda holding a child’s hand, walking towards me saying, ‘Hello, David,’ the memory of her voice saying my name coming to me in a painful jab. All of it lies.

‘At first, she seemed sweet,’ Gary said of Zo?, his words shaking me from my confusion. ‘She used to come around here and sit for hours, the two of them talking, swapping stories. In a way, it was a bit like watching a love affair unfold.’

Hard as it was, I tried to imagine it: Linda and Zo? sitting in those chairs, their eyes and voices locked on each other, anxious to make up for all the lost years.

‘When Linda suggested that Zo? move in, I wasn’t too sure. It all seemed to be happening so fast – and Linda was quite sick, the treatment taking its toll. She loved having Zo? here but was always exhausted afterwards, you know? Still, I couldn’t object – Zo? was her daughter, after all. She moved in, and it was fine for a while. Then things began to change.’

‘What things?’ I asked, my coffee cooling in my mug.

He crossed his legs, frowned a little, staring not at me but at some spot on the floor, his mind casting back through memory. ‘Small things, at first – she’d tell Linda that I’d done something or other to upset her when I hadn’t. Making out that I was being cool with her or trying to shut her out – Linda became upset. When she confronted me, I denied it – tried to explain to her that Zo? was imagining it or, worse, making it up. It was ridiculous – the poor woman was in and out of hospital, as thin as a stick, and here we were arguing over silly little lies a teenager had told.’

An icy dread flowed through me: had she been doing the same with Caroline and me, playing one off against the other, working at pulling us apart?

‘There wasn’t much I could do about it,’ Gary went on, ‘not without upsetting Linda. So I put it on the back-burner, said I’d take things in hand once Linda got the all-clear. But she kept getting sicker, and the situation at home was growing worse. I mean, on the one hand, I felt sorry for Zo?. She was this messed-up kid who just wanted to get to know her mother. On the other hand, I felt she was trying to shut me out so that she could have Linda to herself.’

He leaned forward and returned his coffee cup to the tray. ‘Even saying that now sounds ridiculous – like I’m jealous of her, this school kid.’ His voice hardened again. ‘Still, it’s difficult to accept what she did. Those last few months with Linda – she poisoned them.’

Poisoned them? Was this the same girl whose hand I had held while she lay in a hospital bed, the life-blood drained from her? What was it she had said to me? You don’t really know me. There are things that I’ve done … While the girl who was living under my roof might be my daughter that didn’t mean I had any real idea who she was.

After that, the conversation dwindled. I could hardly remember the purpose of my visit, let alone try to question him further. He, too, grew taciturn, perhaps regretting how much he had admitted, and after I’d thanked him for the coffee, we both stood up and he led me to the door.

It was only when I had stepped outside, and was turning to say goodbye, that I felt the push of the question that was lodged inside me. ‘Why did she never tell me?’ I asked him. ‘Linda. About the baby. Why didn’t she get in touch?’

He looked beyond me to the rough green grass covering hillocky ground, bald in places, growing long and clumpy in others. ‘Leave sleeping dogs lie,’ he said, returning his gaze to my face and I saw that, behind the flatness of his features, judgement lay.

Dissatisfied with his answer, but knowing I would get no more from him, I turned to go.

‘Watch yourself,’ he said after me.

It was a colloquial goodbye I remembered from my Belfast days, one I had heard many times. Yet when I walked away from him that day, the words remained stuck in my head in a way that felt uncomfortable. Perhaps it was the shock of what I had learned or the cold manner of our parting, but the words and the way he had said them kept repeating inside my head: Watch yourself, watch yourself. As I raised my hand to hail a taxi, it occurred to me what was so troubling about them. I felt as if, far from saying goodbye, they had been intended instead as a kind of warning.





15. Caroline


David was gone for two nights, and for the duration of his absence, we didn’t communicate. Not in any way. From the distance of a hundred miles, I could feel him sulking.

There wasn’t time to dwell on it. Life was busy with school runs and extra-curricular activities, not to mention work. There was a trade fair running all that week, hosted in City West Hotel, where our firm had a stand, hoping to attract new business. I was pencilled in to attend with a couple of colleagues. It was a frenetic few days, the throng of the crowd ringing in my ears long after I’d left the building, my feet aching from standing for hours. Occasionally there were lulls in the day, and I would find myself at the stand, my eyes glazing over, thoughts turning inevitably to the uncertain atmosphere at home. I thought about Robbie’s sullenness, his trouble at school and his refusal to discuss it with me afterwards; about Holly and her obvious unhappiness at how things had changed. I thought of David and how every conversation between us lately had seemed loaded and dangerous, as if a wrong word spoken would tilt us into argument. And all the while Zo? retained her occupancy at the top of our house.