by Nesta Tuomey
Eddie said something to her. He leaned forward and pulled her on to his knee. Annette laughed and looked over his shoulder. It seemed to Hugh that she looked straight into his eyes. After a moment she stood up and with a slight swing of her hips, crossed to the lamp and switched it off. The room was dark now. Hugh could just make out their two figures coming together. He backed away so hard that he overbalanced and sat down in the wet grass. His heart thundered in his ears. It was useless, hopeless. His breath caught in a sighing sob. He had been sure that Mark was lying. It was excruciatingly painful for Hugh to find that his greatest tormentor, a foul-mouthed bully whom he feared and despised, could fling mud at his father and make it stick. As Hugh ran home, he could see nothing ahead only dishonour.
The summer term was half over when the pro-lifers came in a group to Claire’s school and delivered their propaganda lecture on the sanctity of procreation and birth. There were four of them: three women and a man. Since the amendment had been successfully carried in the recent abortion referendum they were campaigning the schools with fresh zeal. The man, skeletal and morose, carried the grisly jar containing the pickled body of the three-month foetus. He placed it on the rostrum, where it remained throughout the lecture.
The women each took it in turn to speak, standing before the rostrum and giving statistics and detailed descriptions of babies conceived and aborted. From womb to incinerator. One girl began to cry and another made retching sounds as though she was going to throw up. Sheena scornfully whispered to the girl on the other side of her.
Claire sat in the front row and looked at the jar. She felt there was something vaguely counterfeit about the contents. She stared at it, believing yet not believing. Had that thing really once been inside someone, brought into being by the fusion of two seeds? She saw them like tiny peppercorns. Claire felt sick in the pit of her stomach and she hadn’t felt sick in weeks. Not since before her painful periods were treated.
No! She veered away in panic. She never allowed herself to think of that time anymore She stared hard at the pickled thing. It began moving tiny tentacle-like fingers and uttering piercing cries. It was alive. The jar swam before Claire’s eyes. She heard someone moaning and it was a full minute before she realised it was herself.
Sheena was full of Claire’s collapse when she got in from school. It was Jane’s day for surgery and she was in the kitchen, taking a break between patients and, at the same time, hastily putting together a sandwich for Hugh, when her daughter came rushing in.
Sheena flung down her schoolbag and with her usual flair for drama, described the events of the morning, making it all sound more horrific than it actually was. She graphically described the ghoulish bottle on the rostrum and the effect it had on the class. ‘Three girls fainted,’ she exaggerated, enjoying the attention she was getting. ‘Imagine! A dead baby in a bottle.’
Jane heard her in horror. She cast a quick glance at Hugh, not happy about him listening to any of this but trying to make sense of what Sheena was saying. ‘What baby... what bottle?’ she asked.
‘An aborted baby,’ said Sheena. ‘Yuck! It was awful. I think that’s what sent poor old Claire off her rocker. She suddenly stood up and started screaming.’ Sheena’s mouth trembled. ‘It was awful, really awful, Mummy. I just didn’t know what to do.’
Oh God! Jane thought. What terrible timing. Poor, poor Claire. She began trembling with anger. How dare they, how dare these people go about terrifying children.
Hugh listened gravely, his eyes huge in his face. He nibbled at the sandwich Jane absently thrust at him, then his appetite suddenly gone, put it down and went to get his schoolbag and begin his homework. He found it difficult to concentrate, beset by images of dead babies floating like ships in bottles and of fair-haired Claire standing up at her desk, mouth open, screaming. Sometimes the image changed and became the one he saw every night when he put out the light and lay down to sleep. Normally it did not bother him during the day. This was something new. He was tortured by the memory of Claire’s heart-broken sobbing, punctuated by helpless pleading. He felt like weeping himself. His head began to throb. He pushed away his books and laid his head down on the cool wood of the table.
Someone had left the door open. The puppy waddled in and whined about Hugh’s ankles, gnawing fretfully at the toe of his slipper. The poor animal was starved for affection. It was not even an especially lovable dog. The runt of the litter, no-one had even bothered to give it a name.
The pup’s whining increased the ache in Hugh’s head. ‘Eddie’s a proper bastard!’ he said out loud, staring into the puppy’s face. ‘And this bloody animal is his fault too.’ He pushed it away but it kept coming back, pathetically wagging its stumpy tail and trying to push its nose in Hugh’s hand.
Hugh regarded it morosely. The poor beast would be better off dead, he thought. His eyes pricked with tears. Like poor bloody Hero, kicked and beaten by that shit of a postman. Well, now she was at peace. No-one should have to put up with this miserable, stinking existence, Hugh thought. A few drops of chloroform and it would be all over.
Looking at the pup Hugh saw Hero. And Hero was doomed to die. The judge had said so. He found himself trembling at the thought of what he must do.
‘Poor Hero,’ he said, stroking the pup’s head, fondling its ears. ‘Poor old girl. Don’t worry. I won’t let anyone but me do it. I’ll miss you but you’ll be better off.’
There was still enough chloroform in the bottle. Hugh stuck it in his pocket and went out to the back, whistling for the pup to follow. It waddled trustingly after him.
Hugh performed the deed quickly and humanely. He was surprised at how soon the puppy became lifeless, confused by some lingering memory of tussling with the full-grown animal. He looked at the bottle in his hand with an expression of distaste, then flung it from him and turned to go back inside.
The lights of his father’s Rover lit the driveway. Hugh went in the back door. In the toilet he washed his hands, taking a long time and methodically scrubbing each finger, like he’d seen his father doing after stitching a patient. He dried his hands on the towel and went into the kitchen. Everyone, except Sheena, who had gone to her piano lesson sat about the table.
When Jane placed his dinner in front of him, Hugh took a potato and mashed it into the stew the way he liked it. He felt very hungry now and ate ravenously. He was finished before any of them. Hugh sat back and watched the others eating. His mind seemed to be floating in a different sphere. He heard their conversation as if from a distance, and although he listened with attention, even interest, none of it made much sense. The only thing he seemed able to latch on to was Claire’s name.
‘She’s a bit disturbed,’ Jane said quietly to Eddie, with a warning frown around the table. Hugh wondered why his mother bothered to lower her voice. By now, all of them knew what had happened in Claire’s school that day. And all the boys in his own school, thought Hugh, knew about his father and Claire’s mother. He watched his parents almost dreamily. So far, he told himself, he was the only one to know the most terrible piece of scandal.
Jane was saying. ‘Might be a good idea if one of us was to pop over later and find out how she is.’
Eddie nodded.
‘Perhaps you’d go,’ Jane suggested. ‘By the time I’ve cleared up it’ll be too late. You don’t mind, do you?’
‘Not at all.’ Eddie took some bread and neatly wiped gravy from his plate. He smiled pleasantly about the table, inclining his ear to something Terry was telling him. Hugh was no longer dreamy, his attention fully focused. His father was going over to see Claire.
He mustn’t go, Hugh thought worriedly. He’ll only hurt her again. All his calm deserted him. He felt hot and confused, churned up. The throbbing in his head, which had eased a little, began painfully pulsing again. Beside him Terry was noisily declaiming the need to study for the summer tests and Ruthie wailing that her tongue was burnt.
‘Don’t be impolite,’ Eddie told her as she spat
hot stew onto her plate.
Hugh strove to collect his thoughts. He knew there was something he must do. Hero? No, he’d dealt with her and she was at peace. Something else. His father. Yes. That was it. He got up and left the room.
‘Don’t be long, Hugh,’ Jane called after him, thinking he was going to the toilet, ‘I’m just about to put out dessert. Your favourite. Apple crumble.’
Apple crumble, Hugh thought absently. That’s nice. He went into Eddie’s surgery and crossed to the far wall. The guns gleamed dully in the glass case. He found the key on the ledge above the case and fitted it in the lock. It turned smoothly. Eddie always kept the locks well oiled, like his guns.
Hugh carefully lifted down his father’s shotgun and sat it between his legs to load up. He knew exactly what to do. Hugh slid the cartridges into the breeches and snapped the gun closed. It was a heavy, solid weight on his arm. He went back to the kitchen, carrying it correctly, safety catch on, the way his father had shown him.
Jane was dishing up hot apple crumble and the air was spicy and clove-scented. She half-turned her head. ‘Come on, Hugh,’ she said encouragingly. ‘There’ll be none left if you don’t hurry.’
Hugh sat down on a chair just inside the door. No-one was paying him any heed. He eased off the catch and took a firm grip on the gun. The kitchen sounds were a steady accompaniment to the throbbing in his head. He got his father carefully in his sights and, as Eddie had shown him, slowly squeezed the trigger.
Claire opened her eyes as the urgent wailing note of an ambulance siren sounded close to the house then faded in the distance. Annette came out of her doze and glancing at her daughter’s face, was relieved to see that she was awake at last.
The girl had lain on her back in the same fixed position all afternoon, her blonde plaits, each one tidily resting on her collar-bone, framing her pale face. She was like an effigy of some martyred saint, Annette thought with a sigh.
Even as she watched, Claire closed her eyes and slept again.
At midday, Sister Whelan had rung Annette at work to tell her that her daughter had thrown some kind of fit in class and she was sending her home in the care of one of the teachers. When Annette reached home she found the pair of them already waiting for her in the front room. She had been shocked at the state of her daughter and noted, with concern, her trembling hands and nervous, wandering stare. The teacher gave her a somewhat garbled account of the pro-lifers’ lecture and Claire’s hysterical reaction.
Annette was incensed. ‘What in God’s name are you trying to do?’ she demanded. ‘Frightening the life out of fourteen year old girls with morbid stories of sex and abortion and putting entirely wrong notions into their heads. Is it any wonder Irish girls grow up deeply inhibited about sex?’
The teacher, barely out of the teachers’ training college, stammered a reply. She hadn’t much liked the idea herself, but the nuns thought the girls should be aware. Annette nodded grimly. Claire had been nervy and intense of late, prone to nightmares. On more than one occasion Annette had heard her daughter calling out in the night, and had half gotten out of bed, prepared to go to her if she called again.
She realised her own nerves were strained too.
Annette shifted tiredly on her chair and decided that it was time for Christopher to come up and take a turn at the bedside. She went to the door and called him.
‘The match is on. Do I have to?’ he asked, resentful at being dragged away from his beloved sport.
‘Too bad,’ Annette said shortly, thinking there was always some match on. Normally she would have made an effort to jolly him out of his sulks but she thought that if she did not have a drink and a cigarette soon she would be a hospital case herself.
An ambulance went speeding along Nutley Lane, siren screaming, and came to a halt in the unloading bay outside the accident department. It was one of many ambulances on that summer evening, carrying casualties to hospital in response to emergency calls.
When the driver jumped out and ran to open the rear doors, the paramedic kept the oxygen mask in place over the face of the unconscious boy and assisted the driver to lift the stretcher out of the ambulance and carry it through the swing doors of the emergency unit. When it was taken over by hospital staff, the ambulance men turned swiftly about and went back into the ambulance to bring out the second casualty, only to find that he had died on the way to the hospital.
Jane sat in a screened-off part of the emergency unit, her eyes, red and swollen from weeping, fixed on her son’s face. Hugh still wore the bloodstained pants he had been wearing when admitted to the hospital. His upper torso was swathed in bandages and there were two drips set up by the bedside. Everything possible had been done to save him, but his injuries were so severe that there was little hope of his recovery.
Nearby, a nun sat praying with an audible click of her beads. Terry, who had accompanied his mother in the ambulance, stood just inside the screening curtain, his eyes also trained on Hugh.
Terry tried not to think of the scene in the kitchen but it kept coming back to him in vivid bursts, the colours and sounds magnified and distorted in his head like fireworks viewed up too close. Hugh, his father, Ruthie screaming. It had all been so incredible and shocking as to be unreal. Like some gunman had stepped out of the films he often watched in the cinema and entered their house to bring death to them all. Only it had been no outsider but his young brother who had shot their father and then turned the gun on himself. The sensation Terry had had of being part of a gangster film was reinforced when the squad car had pulled up outside the house in answer to the telephone call he’d made immediately after summoning the ambulance. Two Gardai had come into the house and assisted his mother, who was desperately trying to resuscitate Hugh and give aid to his father. Terry had stood in a daze, gazing at the carnage all about him. Now he kept thinking how Hugh had always hated it when anything was killed, which made the whole thing impossible to understand. How had he brought himself to do such a thing? And why? None of it made any sense. Terry gulped and the wall he had erected around his emotions crumbled and disintegrated under the onslaught of feeling that suddenly engulfed him.
‘....pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, Amen.....’
It is over now, Jane thought, and her tears began to flow again. She pressed her handkerchief over her eyes and doubled over in a wild paroxysm of grief, mourning for her husband whom she had deeply loved and would never get over, and her son whom she had also loved and been unable to help in his darkest hour
The old nun came forward and laid a gentle hand on her shoulder. Her eyes were compassionate and she waited with patient detachment until Jane regained control of herself and got unsteadily to her feet.
Terry gravitated towards his mother and she allowed him to take her arm, then stooped over the bed and gazed sorrowfully down at Hugh. She smoothed back the heavy auburn hair, the same rich colour and texture as her own, from his forehead and bent and kissed the beloved, pale face. ‘My dearest, my son,’ Terry heard her whisper and his own tears began to flow in nervous sympathy, not only for the lifeless body on the bed who had done such a shocking and incomprehensible thing, but for his father, lying equally lifeless and still, in another part of the emergency unit.
Sheena had stayed at home with Ruthie, both of them in the care of the woman police officer who had arrived at the house just minutes before the ambulance had left for the hospital. Sheena sat in the front room, holding her little sister close and trying to soothe the child in her first wild hysteria and fright. She had been barely conscious of the police woman, who divided her time between speaking on the telephone and conferring with the two Gardai in the kitchen while they were writing out their reports. Sheena was overwhelmed by her own desperate grief and incomprehension, and her mind ran in shocked circles, questioning and laying blame, so that she hardly noticed the little body relax at last in her arms as Ruthie slept. She had come home to find the house in an uproar. Just inside the kitchen doo
r, she stumbled over her mother, down on her knees beside Hugh’s fallen body, desperately attempting to staunch the blood flowing from the wound in his chest. Her father lay nearby, his features twisted in agony.
‘Daddy, my Daddy,’ Ruthie sobbed, trying to reach the prone figure, wriggling and struggling in Terry’s grip. Sheena had wanted to go to him too, but when Jane looked up, her eyes wild and tragic as she worked over the unconscious body of her son, and told her to take the child at once from the room, she had obeyed. And as she did, she heard Terry urgently telephoning for an ambulance.
Now Sheena sat on the couch, holding her sleeping sister in her arms and waiting out the long-seeming span until her mother and her twin returned from the hospital. The police woman had made tea several times and kindly offered to take Ruthie from her to give her a chance to move about but Sheena had dumbly shook her head, desperately needing the warm live feel of the little body close to her own. At last she heard the key turning in the lock, and then they were coming tiredly into the darkened room where she sat and when she raised her frightened eyes to Jane’s and Terry’s faces she knew, without being told from their stricken expressions, that her father and her brother were dead.
Jane went through the days of mourning and burial with her usual quiet competence, handling the funeral arrangements, legal formalities and social obligations which fell on the widow of an esteemed and highly qualified medical man. The hardship of her situation was not eased by the journalists who were lying in wait for her whenever she left the house. And when the excitement and speculation about the killings began to die down, there was the ordeal of the inquest to be got through, bringing in its wake the resurgence of unwelcome publicity. On this extremely distressing occasion Jan had cause to be grateful yet again for the reticent support of Teresa Murray, whose non-judgemental attitude impressed her more than any amount of syrupy sentiments.
