Girl Unknown(88)
She wanted to plunge the knife in deeper; she wanted to twist it. Indignation rose within me, but at the back of it came a quieter more insistent suspicion. ‘The letter from the university,’ I said. ‘It was you who signed for it, wasn’t it?’
She was stubbing out her cigarette in the sink among the ashes. ‘What are you talking about?’
She was very convincing but, then, I knew what a good actress she was. Quietly, I explained what I meant, playing along with her game of ignorance. Somehow I knew the answer to my question, regardless of what she would tell me. ‘You signed for that letter, didn’t you?’ I said again. She was leaning back against the sink, her hands behind her, one fingernail tapping out an impatient rhythm against the cool enamel while she listened carefully. ‘You signed Caroline’s name and then hid the letter. Admit it.’
The beat of her fingernail against the sink. I thought of Chris and his parting words to me: the little bitch. She had made a fool of him, playing him before dumping him. I thought of Caroline and the wild accusations Zo? had made – the hints of the affair being revived, blaming my wife for the violence she had done to her own face. I thought of Gary and the lies she had spun about him. She had played them all. Why should I be immune? I saw my foolishness and felt my anger rise sharply, wild and erratic, like the crazy rhythm of her fingertips inside my head.
Then it stopped. She became still. In a quiet voice she said: ‘Yes. All right. I did it.’
The breath went out of me. Weakness came into my legs.
‘I signed for it. Then I took it upstairs to my room and burned it. Just like I burned that letter there.’
How still she seemed. Completely unmoved while I was trembling. What had happened to the teenager who had appeared nervously at my office door, picking at her cuffs, frightened half to death at the bomb she was about to drop? Somehow, she had been replaced by this cool, bloodless creature with her dead gaze, her cruel words spoken with velvet softness. And the thing that was most confusing, the thing I couldn’t make out, was which one was the real Zo?, and which the fake.
‘I had worked so hard.’ The words coming out of me no louder than a whisper, a gasp of helplessness and disbelief.
‘I don’t care how hard you worked.’
I blinked, and blinked again, my vision becoming blurred. The headache that had dogged me all day was still there, made worse by the blow to my face, the mix of alcohol and pills. It made me doubt my very senses. ‘But why … why would you want to sabotage my chances of promotion, my whole career?’
‘You just don’t get it, do you?’ she said, with bitter amusement, her smile high and tight. ‘It’s what I do, David. It’s what I’ve always done. Call it the instincts of an orphan.’
‘But you’re not. You never were an orphan, never have been …’
‘Excuse me, but I’m not going to be lectured to by a second-rate tutor like you, a wannabe, a cuckold, a failure.’
I stepped towards her, and even now I’m not sure what I intended to do – put my hands to her shoulders and urge her to be calm, or hit her like Chris had done.
She stood very still, her voice coming low and deadly: ‘What are you planning to do, Daddy? Kiss me again?’
I froze. The words caught me like a glancing blow and I recoiled from them, horrified by her suggestion, but a deeper horror bubbled up from within at the knowledge that I had done so already. That only a short time before I had pressed my lips against hers – confusing her for Linda – in the way of a lover.
‘Perhaps that’s why you got the test done,’ she said, the sweetness of her tone disguising the poison beneath. She stepped past me, pausing once to glance back from the door. ‘You never wanted me to be your daughter.’ She said it so softly but the pain went deep. I said nothing. I couldn’t. Her last words to me: ‘All this time, you’ve been wishing I was Linda.’ And just like that she walked away from me, and out of my life.
History can bring the dead back to life.
I have said that year after year to a lecture hall full of first-year students. Something to gain their attention from the offset. I never thought of the expression as misleading. I never thought of it as a lie. I believed it myself, right up to the moment when she left me alone, weakened, drained, all my beliefs deserting me. I had no faith to cling to, no ideals to hold me up. Inside I was collapsing, and the only belief I could find was in a bottle.
I drank steadily, dangerously, unaware of my surroundings, my mind drifting into the past, like a boat that had slipped its mooring, falling slowly into a drunken sleep: once again I was back at the cottage in Donegal, the call of a bird, the woods, and with it the image of Linda, a mug of tea cradled in her hands, standing in a shirt of mine reaching halfway down her thighs, lost in thought. When she spoke, her voice was like a splash of colour in the room. ‘Tomorrow,’ I said to her concerns. ‘We’ll go tomorrow if you want.’ I kissed her. A long, lingering kiss. Love had made me careless. Love had made me bold, and a little reckless, but not completely so: I had not told her I loved her, but I did …
I kissed her again, felt her hair covering my face, only it was not Linda’s hair but Zo?’s – the feathery lightness of her curls. I was kissing her, my own daughter, defiling her innocence, revulsion in my throat. In the dream I was trying to turn away, twisting and writhing, her mocking laughter surrounding me, filling me like an oily soup, sucking at my limbs, and breath, pulling me in, holding me fast as I tried to escape the coiled chains of DNA entwining us in a never-ending sequence. I gave a shout, ‘No!’ and she laughed again, a laugh that was at once close to my ear and far away. Then a scream: I opened my eyes, staggered to my feet as I might have when woken in the night by my children screaming with night-terrors. Stumbling from my bedroom, no recollection of having gone there, I fumbled through the half-light, down the staircase, through the quiet rooms. The granular light of dawn making everything seem grey and empty. Silence hung in the deserted rooms. I began to doubt myself: what had I heard? Something real, or was it something from the depths of a nightmare?