Girl Unknown(89)

The sky beyond the window was streaked with red. My mouth was desert-dry. I needed water, but instead I went to the window, to see better the fire-brightness of the dawn. That was when the words came to me again: History can bring the dead back to life. Like a spell or an incantation. Those words were in my head when my eyes settled on the pool and I saw them.

Figures in the water. One standing, the other stretched out like a doll, unmoving. Slowly, as though I were still physically locked inside the dream, I stepped out on to the terrace, felt the coolness of early-morning raising hairs on my limbs. I kept my eyes fixed on them as I drew near, unable to make sense of it, the scrambled visuals adding to my confusion. My heart understood it first, my pulse quickening. Caroline leaning over Zo?, holding the girl’s face in her hands, kissing her mouth, no, not kissing, but blowing, blowing into the mouth, a dark stain moving through the water.

Then Caroline looked up, the tears streaming down her face. The water swirled about her waist, and her voice rose in a fevered, anguished pitch: ‘What have you done? Jesus Christ, what have you done?’

Panic gripped me, kept me frozen, while Caroline tugged and pulled at the body, dragging it to the ledge, heaving it up on to the cold wet tiles.

Black holes in my memory, her voice reaching me from some far-off place, What are you planning to do, Daddy? Kiss me again?

What had I done?

The truth remained hidden from me – too much confusion, too much pain.

I walked towards her, knelt down and gazed into Zo?’s face. She lay on the cold hard ground, her gaze fixed far away, into the sky, the crimson flames of the clouds, and the heavens beyond. I thought of the brief moment of joy in the bed of her conception all those years ago in the stone cottage of Donegal. I thought of Linda bearing her birth in stubborn silence. I thought of the nursery rhymes, and skipping ropes, the jigsaw puzzles and books, the parks and cinemas of her childhood, away from Linda and me, her parents. I thought about all the things that had made her who she was, the chance and circumstance of her being, and wondered, too, about all she was not or could not be. I thought of everything she might have done, her plans, the trips, the work, the friends, and the love she might have found.

And then, in my peripheral vision, I saw Robbie. Go back to bed, I wanted to tell him. You should not be a witness to this. I wanted to kiss him on the forehead, and stroke his cheek as if he were a child again. His mother went to him, saying something I couldn’t hear, making some demand of him I couldn’t discern. Back to bed, son, I wanted to say, but he just stood there, staring, already sealing himself off from us. Did I know then what he had done?

I cannot tell.

All that really comes to me, when my thoughts turn to that moment, is the outline of my daughter’s face, pale against the limestone flags. How cold she looked, and how perfect, as if she were the beautiful human plaything of some minor Greek god.

I thought of all the things I did and did not know about her. It amounted in the end to nothing: it amounted to a girl whose green eyes had once flickered, but now were glassy and devoid of life.





Part Four





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25. Robbie


They come almost every day to get him to talk. Police, social services, his solicitor, counsellors from the prison service. Some of them speak to him in English, heavily accented, but he understands what they’re saying. Others, whose English is not so good, bring translators, and he can see the look in the translator’s eye: Why on earth won’t you talk, you idiot? The police and social services are better at concealing their thoughts from him – they have more experience and he can’t be the first kid in this place to clam up with fright. The solicitor just looks bored and a little fed-up, like he has better things to do with his time than sit in an interview room with some Irish kid who prefers to say nothing and stay in this detention centre indefinitely, rather than work on any kind of defence.

His father is the most frequent visitor. Mostly he just talks to Robbie, like he’s accepted the silence now. He talks about his work, his research – he’s using the time on the island to work on a book. He brings news from home. His tone is conversational, cheerful, forced. Sometimes, on days he’s finding it tough – when it becomes almost unbearable for him to see his son in this place, wearing his institutional uniform – he will lean over the table and whisper urgently: Please, son, say something.

At least he doesn’t cry, like Robbie’s mother did. She would sit across from him, a balled-up tissue in her hands, her eyes and nose red raw from all the crying she had done, begging him, beseeching him just to tell her why. She loved him – she forgave him – he was her son. But, please, for the love of God, would he talk to her, just say something?

On and on it went. He watched her within the hermetic seal of his own silence. After what had happened, talking was an impossibility. It was a relief when she went away, back home to Dublin with Holly. He felt the storm in his brain quieten.

When they’ve all gone – his father, the police, the solicitors and social workers – when they’ve left him to go back to his cell, he feels a sense of relief, a levity almost. He lies on his bunk, closes his eyes. And then it’s just the two of them – him and Zo? – locked together in a strange peacefulness.

She was different from how he’d thought she’d be. Different from him and from Holly. He felt it most when she spoke. Her accent, of course, the strange foreignness of the Northern vowel sounds, and the way her voice went up at the end of each sentence, like a little pencilled tick mark on a musical score. When she came for lunch on that first day, it was hard not to stare at her, his sister, displacing him now in the role of eldest child. He was taller than her, though – stupid to feel proud of it, but he did. Both of them were thin but she was really thin. She wore a big floaty sweater so you couldn’t tell at first until you noticed her legs, like pipe-cleaners coming out of her boots.