The Last Lost Girl

by Maria Hoey

  She stayed on the beach longer than she had intended and arrived back at the house with just enough time to shower and change in time for dinner with Dot Candy. She caught sight of herself in the bathroom mirror and was startled. Her face and shoulders had taken the sun and her nose was peppered with freckles – it made her look healthy and vital and almost young. She put on a lot of moisturiser, did her make-up quickly, dried her hair roughly and put it up. She hesitated over what to wear. Would Dot dress up? It made no difference anyway – the closest to dressy she had brought with her was a black skirt and a white T-shirt. She put them on, decided she looked like a waitress with her hair up and let it down again.

  Downstairs, she followed the scent of cooking to the kitchen. The door to the terrace was wide open and Dot was there, wineglass in hand, surveying a round table laid with a white cloth and dressed with yellow flowers and tea lights.

  “You look nice,” Dot said. “It’s such a lovely evening, I thought we’d eat outside again. What do you think?”

  Jacqueline noticed that the table had been set for three. “Good idea. The table is lovely. Is Marilyn joining us?”

  “I think I heard the door.” Dot dashed away, calling over her shoulder, “Sit down and help yourself to a drink!”

  Jacqueline had just sat down when Dot returned with Magpie. She introduced them like two people who had never met and Magpie met Jacqueline’s eye and shook her hand firmly, saying nothing. He was dressed in a suit of very creased, but perfectly clean-looking grey linen with an open-necked suit shirt, so white it had to be new. It was the first time Jacqueline had seen him without the greatcoat and somehow without it he seemed taller and, but for the drinkers’ paunch, quite lean.

  “I’ll go get the starters,” Dot said. “Help yourselves to the wine.”

  The sound of her flip-flops slapping across the terrace seemed to reverberate loudly.

  Magpie sat, then leaned across and picked up a bottle of wine. “Drink?”

  “Please.”

  “Say when.”

  Jacqueline watched the dark-red wine rising in her glass. “When. Thank you.”

  Magpie filled his own glass. “Cheers!”

  “Cheers!”

  They drank and were silent again. Jacqueline picked up the paper napkin next to her plate and inspected it. It was bright yellow and depicted a scene from the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. It seemed to her perfectly fitting.

  “From the look on your face when I walked in,” said Magpie, “I take it she didn’t mention I was coming.”

  Jacqueline looked up. “No, it wasn’t that, I just wasn’t expecting …”

  Magpie grinned at her over his glass. ‘“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.’”

  Jacqueline smiled. “Why is that funny?” she asked. “I’ve never really understood.”

  “Me neither,” said Magpie. “It just is.”

  He swiped at a fall of hair and Jacqueline thought, I am just like Dot Candy, I like good hair too.

  Dot returned as though on cue, bearing aloft a spectacularly dressed salmon mousse on a silver tray. She took over the business of talking and while they ate segued breezily from subject to subject. From time to time, Magpie contributed a wry comment but mostly he just ate, consuming everything put before him with obvious relish.

  When eventually she brought in the dessert, Dot said, “If you don’t mind, I’m going to go and get the coffee and then I’ll leave you two to it. I have a very early train to catch in the morning.”

  Jacqueline looked at Magpie quickly and wondered if he was dismayed at the idea of being left alone with her, but his eyes were on the cheesecake.

  Dot returned with a pot of coffee. “Don’t worry,” she said, “I’ve already loaded the dishwasher and put it on. Just leave what’s left in the sink and I’ll take care of it in the morning. And there’s plenty more wine, so help yourselves. Goodnight.”

  Magpie got to his feet.

  He’s leaving, Jacqueline thought. She felt relieved and piqued all at the same time. Then he opened his arms and Dot went to him, tangling her arms about his neck. When they broke apart, Dot kissed him on his face – close to his mouth, Jacqueline noticed, and she looked away. She reminded herself that he had been a guest in this house, God knew how many times, and of the non-paying variety too – but what of it anyway?

  Then Dot came at Jacqueline, arms outstretched. “Goodnight, Jacqueline.”

  Jacqueline got to her feet, surprised and confused, and felt herself enfolded in Dot’s arms. “Talk to him!” Dot hissed in her ear, then released her and was gone.

  They sat down and Magpie picked up his spoon and began on his cheesecake. Jacqueline pecked at hers and sipped her wine and floundered inside her head for something to say. Should she try to explain to him that this had not been a set-up, or if it had, not of her planning? Or should she just try to act naturally? While she hesitated, the silence lengthened and she felt so awkward that she grabbed at a floating thought in desperation.

  “So how long were you a fisherman?”

  As soon as the words were out, she remembered there had been some kind of accident. She grabbed her glass and took a nervous gulp, eyeing Magpie anxiously.

  “Since I was fifteen.”

  He showed no sign of unease and Jacqueline relaxed a little.

  “Fifteen? Isn’t that very young?” she said. “Did you run away to sea or something?”

  Magpie made a sound in his nose. “You like your romance, don’t you? I didn’t have to run away – I had an uncle who skippered a trawler, he took me willingly.”

  “You weren’t much more than a child all the same.”

  Magpie did not appear to hear her. “My God, that thing was some rolly bitch. Roll the milk outta’ your tea, she would.” He pronounced it ‘tay’. “I spent the first three days in my bunk. The first time I threw up, I tried to hide it in my boot – I soon ran out of boots though. After that I just did it anywhere.” He gave a sudden shout of laughter. “When we docked after five days at sea, I scuttled up that ladder so fast I was off her before she was made fast.”

  “But you went back,” said Jacqueline. “I suppose it was in your blood, with your uncle being a fisherman?”

  “Maybe. Anyway, I went back, first as galley boy, then as a deck hand.”

  “So what’s it like?” said Jacqueline.

  “Nothing like you imagine, that’s for sure.”

  “No?”

  “It’s much better and much worse.”

  “Tell me,” said Jacqueline. She liked the way he spoke without looking at her. She was no longer tense and realised that she was interested in hearing what he had to say.

  “Well, for starters, it’s much louder,” said Magpie. “There’s always the sound of the engine so everyone is always shouting to be heard above those noises. And then there are the smells: the seawater itself and the diesel and iodine and fish heads in the bait buckets …”

  “Charming,” said Jacqueline.

  “But there was the best of food – roast beef, legs of lamb, the best of steak and tons of milk and loads of apples and vegetables. On the downside, the bunks are often damp and you have to use damp cloths under the dishes to try to hold them down on the tables. You spend a lot of time looking at the sky – you see shooting stars and satellites, but always with one eye on the boat. And there’s too much time to think, especially on winter nights.”

  “What do you think about?”

  “UFOs and mermaids,” said Magpie.

  “Did you ever see one?”

  “Which, a UFO or a mermaid?”

  “A mermaid,” said Jacqueline. “Everyone knows there are no such things as UFOs.”

  Magpie laughed aloud and Jacqueline smiled, pleased that she had amused him.

  “I never saw one,” he said, “but I knew a man that did. He said she was beautiful and friendly. Some nights you’d dream of gold – those Armada wrecks in the Irish Sea now, they’d be full of gold. And the things w
e pulled out from the seabed – a plane controls once, and a World War I pilot’s mask – all dried out and rotten, but still recognisable. And the gulls and gannets would land alongside the boat and when it rolled they’d fight over a loose fish. Gannets have the most remarkable eyes, light blue they are. And I once saw a cod that was about forty years old, so it was around longer than I was at the time. You feel a sort of respect for that.”

  His eyes had a glazed faraway look so that when he abruptly changed the subject, Jacqueline was taken by surprise.

  “So what about you – where’s home for you?”

  “Donegal,” said Jacqueline, “near Gweebarra Bay.”

  “I know it,” said Magpie. “Lots of birds and bats and flowers and butterflies. Hard landscape, hard weather and remote too – sound people but not too many of them.”

  Jacqueline bowed her head – there was that.

  “How did a Dub end up way up there?” said Magpie.

  “I went on holiday one summer. I rented a house for a couple of weeks, found I liked it and decided to stay.”

  They sat in silence for a while, then Magpie said, “There was a place he used to talk about, something to do with fruit. I remember thinking it sounded green and leafy.”

  Jacqueline put her glass down. “Blackberry Lane,” she said. “You remember that?” An image of her father came to her, bent and thin, leaning on the gate, his eyes on the fields, lean and griefy.

  “Blackberry Lane, that was it. He made it sound like Walton’s Mountain without the mountain.”

  “It was hardly that,” said Jacqueline. “Actually, my mother couldn’t stand The Waltons.”

  “He used to talk about her,” said Magpie, “your mother. What a great woman she was.”

  “What else did he say about her?”

  “That he was afraid she was going to leave him. Did she leave him?”

  Jacqueline ran her finger around the rim of her glass. “She died, nine years ago, of pancreatic cancer. But yes, she left him long before that. She stayed for a long time, but in the end she did leave him.”

  She remembered her father’s voice on the phone, bewildered, incredulous: “She’s gone, she’s left me.”

  “Who’s gone, Dad?”

  “Your mother, she’s gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  “She’s moving in with one of those flower women.”

  “Did you have a row, Dad?”

  “No row. She just opened the birthday card I’d left on the table for her, read it and said, ‘Frank, I’m leaving you.’”

  “What did you put in the card, Dad?”

  “I put fifty quid in it,” he had sounded outraged, “so she could get herself something. You know I never know what to buy her.”

  Jacqueline said patiently, “I meant, what did you write in the card, Dad?”

  “I don’t know what I wrote – I wrote what I always write, I suppose – ‘To Stella, Happy Birthday, Frank’ – what’s that got to do with anything? I’m telling you, she’s gone to live with Florence McNally and she says she’s not coming back, ever. She said she’s made up her mind and she doesn’t want to discuss it. She said she doesn’t want to live this way anymore. I don’t understand it, Jacqueline, I just don’t understand it. Who does something like that on the spur of the moment?”

  Jacqueline got up and walked across the terrace, aware of Magpie’s eyes on her. The light was failing but there was a streak of amber between the earth and the darkening sky. She could remember almost exactly the moment when she too had made up her mind to desert him. It was a Sunday, a filthy day in February. She had roasted a chicken for their dinner, but long after the meal was ready he had still not come back from a walk. She knew exactly where to look; it was the place he went back to time and again. On this occasion he was standing in the rain, leaning on the gate, his chin resting on his folded arms. Next to him was a grey woollen glove that someone had shoved on the gatepost; it had furred in the rain and resembled a small rabbit, perched and ready to spring. He was soaked through, his hair flattened by the rain, and did not answer when she called him, but stood gazing out across the land as though there was something to see other than the crows picking over the newly turned field. As she watched him, she had been reminded of the first time she had come upon him in that exact place, the time he had said that thing about poppies and disturbed soil. Remembering, she had shivered – not from the cold and rain but from the realisation that she could not live her life this way, in this place. It was not as though she had not thought about her sister’s body – how it would have passed through the stages of decomposition into something else entirely, becoming part of the soil and the stones that surrounded her. The parts of her that would remain: her strong white teeth, her bones and the way that death would have disassembled them – how someone turning over a field might come upon a femur or a tibia, pieces of her sister disjointed.

  He was unresisting when she put her hand on his arm and she led him wordlessly back to the house. The wool of his jumper felt wet and fuzzy and swollen under her fingers, the way she imagined sheep to be after heavy rain. Two months later she signed the lease on the house in Donegal.

  When Jacqueline turned around, Magpie’s eyes were on her.

  “In the end we all left him,” she said. She came back and sat down. “Tell me what else he told you.”

  Magpie sighed. “It was a very long time ago. He was drunk or I was drunk, mostly the two of us were drunk together – either ways it didn’t make a lot of sense to me.”

  “It doesn’t need to make sense to you,” said Jacqueline. “Tell me anyway. Please.”

  “Fair enough.” Magpie hunted in the pocket of his jacket and took out his cigarettes. “He talked about his girls – I was never sure how many of you there were exactly.”

  “There were three of us: Lilly was the oldest, then Gayle, then me.”

  “Right, well, he talked a lot about Lilly – he told me that thing about France. He never actually told me in so many words what had happened to her. I just put it together from what Ned Early said.”

  “She went to a dance one night and she never came home,” said Jacqueline.

  “Jesus!” Magpie pulled on his cigarette. “He was worried about one of you – the little one, he called her. He said she was sharp as a tack but the spark had gone out of her. That she blamed herself and he didn’t know why.”

  Jacqueline looked down at her glass. “He couldn’t have known that,” she said.

  Magpie looked at her through the smoke of his cigarette. “I hated my younger brother, you know. I used to plan how I was going to kill him. I had it all worked out. I was going to lure him into the freezer in a game of hide and seek. We had one of those old-fashioned chest-type ones, I used to imagine him in there, frozen up and stiff like a leg of lamb.”

  “I didn’t hate my sister,” said Jacqueline.

  “There’s nothing unnatural about it if you did. In nature, when resources are limited, competition is fierce. Sharks kill in the womb – did you know that?

  “Now you’re starting to sound just like you did the first day I saw you,” said Jacqueline. “When you were drunk and accosted me on the beach.”

  “Accosted you on the beach, did I?” Magpie shrugged his shoulders. “What can you do? Drinkers drink.”

  “I suppose they do,” she said. She put her glass down on the table. “About my father – you have no idea how much it means to me, hearing all these things – what he did, what he said about me and my sisters. Was there anything else, anything at all?”

  “Just what I told you – his girls, how great you all were. The lane and, yeah, I think he mentioned an orchard once, nothing more specific. I’m sorry there isn’t more.”

  “There’s nothing to be sorry about,” said Jacqueline. “It was a great deal for a man who claimed to remember nothing.”

  Magpie looked at her full-on for a second. “Some days I remember everything,” he said.

  The loo
k in his eyes made Jacqueline avert her gaze. He’s thinking about the accident now, she thought, and it’s my fault.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “I shouldn’t have said that. And I really do appreciate all you’ve told me.”

  Magpie shrugged. “You’re welcome. If I think of anything else I’ll let you know.”

  “Thank you.” Suddenly she felt very tired. She got to her feet. “You know, if you don’t mind, I think I’ll just tidy up here and get to bed.”

  Magpie looked at her for a minute, then he drained his glass, picked up his cigarettes and matches and restored them to his pockets.

  He got to his feet. “You’re an attractive woman, Jacqueline,” he said, “so it’s a shame.”

  I am not going to ask him, thought Jacqueline, I’m not going to ask.

  “What’s a shame?” she said.

  “That look in your eye, like something’s gnawing at your ankle. The past has its teeth in you and that’s a shame.”

  “Doesn’t it in all of us? Doesn’t it in you?”

  “I don’t count,” said Magpie. “Goodnight, Jacqueline.”

  Chapter 33

  1976

  Daddy has an alibi. Jacqueline knows what that means. In Agatha Christie books, people need an alibi when someone has been murdered so they can prove they were somewhere else and couldn’t have done it. But often, Jacqueline thinks, it is the person with the best alibi who turns out to be the murderer in the end.

  “Are they mad?” says Jacqueline’s mother. “Why are they wasting precious time questioning you, when Lilly is out there somewhere?”