Mr. Flood's Last Resort(8)

I glance over my shoulder at her as I walk to the bus stop. She wanders through strollers and litterbins. She makes a beeline for every pedestrian to drift through them. I see them shudder and look around, like someone has walked over their grave. It is not a pleasant feeling. I’ve felt it.

At the bus stop St. Dymphna draws level and flicks back her veil. “What’s that about?” She points at my bag. “In there?”

“A message in a bottle washed up in the downstairs cloakroom. Under strange circumstances.”

St. Dymphna frowns. “Don’t.”

“Almost like a kind of haunting.”

“Just. Bloody. Don’t.”

St. Dymphna is all talk: all dark flashing eyes and righteous swords and sulking and bluster and challenge. But underneath this she is terrified by anything out of the ordinary, or overly mundane, or pitiful, or unpleasant. Death scares her, as do people who are terminally sick, crying loudly, or depressed. She is frightened of the dark and of enclosed spaces and will barely even hazard an alcove. St. Dymphna likes very little other than bagpipe music, stories about herself, and dirty limericks.

“I feel like this job could kill me,” I say, more to myself than to her.

“Jobs are very dangerous.” She closes her eyes. “Disappointment, lung disorders, boredom, stress, futility, suicide, heart disease, disillusionment, diabetes, strokes.”

“And you know this, how?”

She shrugs, keeping her eyes closed.

“So I am in danger at Bridlemere?”

She opens her eyes. “How the hell would I know?”

We wait in silence for the bus.

Her voice, when it comes, is weary. “Occupationally or spiritually?”

“Both. Either.”

“In that house?” St. Dymphna pouts. “What do you bloody think?”

“Then I should leave?”

“Do what you want. I wouldn’t bloody stay there.”

“Why?”

She hesitates.

“What’s in there? Ghosts? Demons?”

She rolls her eyes. “There’s no such thing.”

“Just hoary old Mr. Flood and his cats up at the house?”

She says nothing.

“Go on, give me a hint,” I say. I tap my bag. “This photo—”

“Don’t even bloody ask.”

We stand in silence for a while.

“They have the look of siblings.” She gestures towards my bag with a flap of her arm.

“And you’d know that how? One of them doesn’t have a face.”

St. Dymphna steps out into the path of a man in a cheap suit with a carrier bag in his hand. He falters as he moves through her, as if he’s tripped on a crack in the pavement. He looks around himself, glancing at me briefly with hunted eyes. Then he’s off down the road clutching his bag a little tighter.

St. Dymphna wears a pleased expression. “It’s in the way they are standing, you know, for their picture to be taken.”

“How do siblings stand?”

“Oh, I don’t bloody know.” She inspects the end of her tattered plait. “Like they are part of the same suite of furniture. Sort of unaware of each other, like a table and a lamp.”

“There’s only one child in the care plan, the boy, Gabriel. The Floods only had the one son.”

“And they put every bloody thing in the care plan? What about all the stuff a family leaves out?”

Cars go past but no buses.

“All the skeletons, you mean?”

“I warned you.” She straightens her crown pettishly. It sparks and glows a little brighter in the places touched by her fingertips. She has no visible halo, although in dim light, when her veil slips back, you can sometimes see a glow radiate from her center parting.

“So I shouldn’t go back, then?”

St. Dymphna rolls her eyes. “Jesus, I told you: do what you like.”

I tap the bottle in my handbag. “What if this is a cry for help?”

“So what if it is?” she mumbles.

“It’s strange though, a little girl with her face burnt out of a photograph.”

She pulls her veil around her ears. “I don’t want to hear it, all right?”

“What if I found this photograph for a reason?”

“What bloody reason? Drop it,” she says. “Walk away.”

“But someone might need my help?”

“You’ll only cause bloody trouble. Like you did before.”

I stare at her.

With a sour glance over her shoulder, St. Dymphna steps out through the bus stop and into the path of the oncoming bus.





CHAPTER 3


There is a photograph that lies inside the flyleaf of a book, under old coats and school reports, at the bottom of a suitcase, on top of my wardrobe. Two girls, in summer dresses, at the beach; both have faces and names. Turn the picture over, there is nothing written on the back, but these facts I know:

Names (left to right): Deirdre Drennan, Maud Drennan

Place: Pearl Strand, County Donegal

Date: July or August 1989

This photograph wasn’t found furled in a milk bottle in a handbasin in the Gothic lair of a geriatric hoarder in West London. Its finding was far less extraordinary but just as inexplicable. The guards came across this photograph on the road to Ballyshannon in Jimmy O’Donnell’s car, under the passenger seat.