The Last Lost Girl

by Maria Hoey

  Jacqueline looked down at him. His eyes were closed and the wind whipped his remarkable magpie hair clear of his brow. She said, “Weren’t you fascinated by anything when you were little?”

  “Gods,” said Magpie.

  “Gods?”

  “I used to recite the names of gods before I went to sleep. I had them off by heart – first the Gods of War, they were my favourites, Ares, Enyo, Pallas Athena – then Hephaestus, God of the Forge and Fire, Workman to the Immortals – Aeolus, King of Winds, I liked him a lot. Then the goddesses – Ate, Goddess of Mischief – Eris, Goddess of Discord – I can’t remember the rest.”

  Jacqueline raised her eyebrows. “What sort of little boy chants the names of gods?”

  He shrugged.

  Jimmy came back and Magpie raised himself on one elbow and watched him roar away again. “He’s an odd-looking little chap, isn’t he?”

  “Don’t say that!” Jacqueline snapped.

  “Why? Because he’s a child and all children are beautiful?”

  “No, of course not,” said Jacqueline. She knew she was being unaccountably defensive, particularly considering that she had only recently been entertaining identical thoughts about Jimmy. “He is a little odd-looking but he doesn’t know that yet.”

  “Ha!” Magpie gave a shout of laughter. “No, I don’t suppose he does, but he’ll find out soon enough.”

  “Yes, I imagine he will,” said Jacqueline.

  They watched the boy in silence.

  Jacqueline thought about that short span in a person’s life before they saw themselves as the world saw them, when they were both beautiful and not beautiful and before they knew that it mattered.

  “Poor Jimmy,” she said.

  Jimmy came running past them once more. “I’m a cloud!” he sang. “I’m a cloud!”

  Magpie met Jacqueline’s eye. “He’s a cloud, Jacky Lean,” he said.

  They smiled.

  Jimmy badgered them to take him paddling in the sea and Magpie took off his coat and rolled up his trousers, exposing long and hairy calves.

  Afterwards they took him to the big amusement park and let him ride on the merry-go-round, then they walked among the stalls three-abreast. At the Hoopla stall, Magpie won Jimmy a dinosaur beanie and a cheap-looking water pistol.

  Jacqueline bought them fish and chips and Magpie suggested they have them in the bandstand out of the wind.

  While they were eating, Jacqueline remembered something. “Oh my God,” she said, “I forgot to feed the cats.”

  “They won’t starve for one day,” said Magpie.

  Afterwards, Jimmy wanted ice cream and Jacqueline bought three 99s and a yellow bucket and spade for Jimmy. She sat with Magpie on a bench on the seafront while Jimmy ate his on the steps leading down to the beach, the bucket and spade next to him.

  “Does he look a bit pink to you?” said Magpie

  “Now that you mention it,” said Jacqueline. “That’s my fault, I suppose. I should have got some sunscreen for him. Hold this, would you?”

  She handed Magpie her cone, pulled Jimmy’s sweatshirt from her bag and took it to him. Up close, his arms did look alarmingly pink. She came back and took her ice cream.

  “He’ll probably be whinging all night now,” she said, “but at least it won’t get any worse. Thanks to you.”

  Magpie made a sound like a grunt. Jacqueline glanced at him. His tongue was busy lapping and his eyes held the intense, almost spellbound expression peculiar to humans who, regardless of their age, are intent on the business of consuming an ice-cream cone out of doors on a summer’s day.

  “You do know,” she said, “that the first time I set eyes on you, you were fast asleep in an armchair, in the middle of the path to the cliffs?”

  “Jaysus!” said Magpie. “I must have been pissed. When I’m pissed I do a lot of things I don’t remember. What was an armchair doing on the cliff path anyway?”

  “I don’t know actually.” For a second Jacqueline wondered if the chair was real at all – perhaps it was a figment of her imagination. “I think some kids left it there.” She looked at Magpie again. “What I don’t get is how you reconcile this you with the drunken you who falls asleep in a chair on a public pathway and doesn’t even remember it? Doesn’t it bother you?”

  Magpie finished the last of his cornet, licked his lips and rubbed his hands on his trousers. It was so long before he spoke that Jacqueline wondered if she had offended him.

  “I took him out with me,” he said, “my nephew Joe. He was fifteen years old and he wanted to be a fisherman. His mother, my sister Deborah, was dead set against it but I thought I knew better. I’d got my own boat at the ripe old age of twenty-eight and I was the king of the world. So I took him out with me. I decided that if he was going to have a love affair with the sea, he should at least take the time to find out what it was he’d be loving.” He took out his cigarettes and lit up in his usual leisurely fashion, took his first pull and gazed at the sea. “I was asleep when it happened. The boy was in the wheelhouse with another one of the crew. I’d told them to keep her going, to follow the line and not to alter for anyone. They were to call me when we reached a certain point, but she got caught in a northerly gale, a sudden big swell. There mustn’t have been time for anyone to even come and wake me. All I know is I woke to a crash and a wallop. I heard the sound of someone roaring. I can’t be certain but to this day I’m certain it was Joe. I ran up and made for the wheelhouse, but there was no time – she just heeled right over. I was thrown clear. And after that I don’t remember anything at all. I have no memory of being in the sea.”

  “But you were saved,” said Jacqueline.

  Magpie pulled viciously on his cigarette. “I was picked up,” he said. “There was another boat in the area dodging the weather.”

  “And Joe?”

  “He was lost along with the rest of the crew. Five in all.”

  “My God.”

  “My sister couldn’t look at me. She wouldn’t even have me at the funeral. Her husband, Tom, the mildest fairest-minded man I have ever met, said the best thing I could do was stay out of sight for a while.”

  “That must have hurt you,” said Jacqueline. “But it was an accident, not your fault. And you were only young yourself. How long ago did this happen?”

  “1982. Ah well, luckily there’s not much ails a body that can’t be fixed by the judicious application of caffeine, water, aspirin and alcohol.”

  Jacqueline did the maths. If he was twenty-eight in 1982 that made him fifty-nine now. Not so old really; not that it mattered.

  “So what did you do?” she said.

  “I cleared out.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “I went someplace,” said Magpie, “and after that I went someplace else, until I washed up here. I don’t remember it all and, even if I did, it wouldn’t interest you.”

  “Sorry,” said Jacqueline.

  “Don’t be sorry,” said Magpie, “but now I’ve told you mine, you can tell me yours.”

  Taken by surprise, Jacqueline looked away. “Who says I’ve got one?”

  “You’ve got one,” said Magpie.

  Jimmy was running along the edge of the water, his arms spread wide on either side, his balloon bobbing above him like a second sun.

  Jacqueline got to her feet. “I’d better go and get him,” she said. “It’s almost time to go and meet Dawn.”

  Chapter 39

  1976

  It is October and the weather is cool. Early in the morning, while the whole house is still asleep, Jacqueline takes her bike and cycles all the way to the estuary. She likes this time of the day: everything has a crisp, clean feel to it, as though it has nothing at all to do with yesterday or any of the days that came before that. Like everything really could start over again and be different. Someone has cut the grass along the banks at the side of the road. Cut grass smells differently in October than it does in July – Jacqueline had never noticed tha
t before. The wooden jetty is still there, but some of the slats are missing. The little stony beach looks the same. Jacqueline thinks that if she tries hard enough she will find it, the exact place where they sat when the photograph was taken. She thinks she can remember it now, her mother and Daddy, Lilly and Gayle and herself sitting on the brown blanket that always smelled of last summer’s salt and grass. Her mother pouring dark tea from the fat blue flask and spooning sugar from a twist of paper. And herself, not paying attention to what she is doing, biting down on her apple. She can almost taste the bitter pips in her mouth. Her thick wet plait is heavy and is making a damp patch on the back of her dress – she has been swimming, Jacqueline thinks she can remember that too. How it felt beneath the waves, away from the dazzle of the sun, cool and quiet, the world above her like tiny pins of light and then coming up with water diamonds on her lashes. But there is nothing to show where they sat, where the blanket flattened the grass, where the spat-out apple-pips fell, nothing at all. And there is nothing to show that Lilly was here the night she disappeared.

  But that is what Sexy Sexton told the police, and what he started to tell Daddy when he called to the house.

  “You’re not welcome here,” Daddy told him.

  Sexy Sexton asked Daddy to hear him out. He said that he had just come from the police station where he had given his statement.

  Daddy said, “Like I said, you’re not welcome here.”

  Sexy Sexton said, “I can understand that you’re angry, sir. I wasn’t one hundred per cent honest with you and then – well, then it seemed too late. I should never have left her alone like that, I know that …”

  “How many other lies did you tell?” said Daddy.

  “Mr Brennan, sir,” said Sexy Sexton, “I swear on my mother’s life I told the honest to God truth to the police, and I’m here to tell it to you now …”

  Daddy shut the door in Sexy Sexton’s face.

  As soon as Jacqueline gets home, she goes into the sitting room and picks up the photograph. She has it in her hand when Daddy comes in.

  “Daddy …”

  “Not now, Jacqueline.”

  “But I just want to know who took the photograph.”

  She cannot believe that she has never thought about it before, all those times she has looked at it, examined it, her face, the apple in her hand. If everyone is there, sitting on the blanket, then who was behind the camera?

  “Just some man, a birdwatcher,” says Daddy. “Your mother wanted a photo with everyone in it for once, so she asked the first person she saw to take the picture.”

  Jacqueline tries to imagine the man, the stranger, his face half hidden behind the camera, his eyes upon them, capturing them forever with one press of the button. “Daddy, tell me again –”

  “That’s enough now, Jacqueline – the time for stories is over. I have things to do.”

  In the evening, Jacqueline sees a great, inky cloud behaving as no cloud she has ever seen before. As she watches, the cloud changes shape. It grows longer and longer, staining the pale sky as though someone has spilled oil on it. Jacqueline knows what it is. Daddy has told her about murmurations of starlings, but she has never seen one before with her own eyes. She wants to tell Daddy about it, but keeps thinking about what he said: “The time for stories is over.”

  When she goes into the sitting room, the photo on top of the china cabinet has gone.

  Jacqueline lies in bed remembering the stories Daddy used to tell them when they were small, so scary sometimes that afterwards, when they could not get to sleep, Jacqueline’s mother would tell Daddy off. “For the love of God, Frank, can you not just tell them a bedtime story fit for little girls?”

  Almost all Daddy’s stories were about little children who got lost in a forest full of dark trees and frightful swollen toadstools. Gayle always wanted to know if the children found their way home in the end and Jacqueline could never understand why she could not just wait for the story to unfold – she herself never had any wish to hurry the lost children out of the forest. “Make the wind howl, Daddy,” she would demand and Daddy would round his lips and make a long thin whistling sound that rose and fell and rose and fell and Jacqueline would shiver and imagine she saw, in the shadows of the room, the figures of the poor lost children moving slowly beneath the dark trees.

  Then Gayle would interrupt and spoil it all, “Did they live happily ever after in the end, Daddy?”

  Once, Jacqueline remembers she lost patience with her sister and said, “Why does every story have to end with happy ever after? It’s so boring!”

  And Daddy laughed and said, “Ah but the story never really ends at the happy-ever-after bit.”

  Jacqueline was not sure what he meant by that.

  Once she asked him if there really were monsters under her bed, like Lilly said.

  “Well, do you think there are?” asked Daddy. While Jacqueline was still thinking about what the right answer might be, Daddy said, “Because if you believe there are monsters under the bed, then there are monsters under the bed.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Jacqueline told him.

  Daddy smiled. “Then you have nothing to worry about.”

  Chapter 40

  Afterwards

  Luca’s sister was over half an hour late. They waited for her in the café on the pier. Jimmy grew restless and kicked Jacqueline repeatedly on the shins. She lost her patience and snapped at him and he stopped kicking but began tearing open the small paper sachets of sugar and salt and spilling them into hills.

  “Stop it,” said Jacqueline, “you’re making a mess!”

  He sulked for a while, then began sucking violently on the straw in his empty can of orange. He would not stop until Jacqueline ordered him another drink. His face, she noticed, looked pinker than ever.

  In the end, Dawn came in unnoticed. She slipped quietly into the seat next to Magpie, an unremarkable-looking woman in her mid-forties, neither plain nor pretty, and dressed for a working day in black jacket, black skirt and white T-shirt. Her hair was cut short, mid-brown showing some grey at the temples, and her eyes were brown, but smaller and lighter than her brother’s. Jacqueline realised that she had been expecting a young woman – more than that, she had been picturing a girl – a beautiful female version of Luca. Dawn barely acknowledged Magpie’s introductions and refused the offer of tea or coffee and then they all just sat, nobody saying anything.

  Jimmy made a particularly loud slurping noise. Dawn glanced at him and smiled as though he had done something funny or endearing – they left that bit out when they made me, thought Jacqueline. She glanced at Magpie. He inclined his head almost imperceptibly in the direction of the woman next to him and Jacqueline realised that everyone was waiting for her to begin. She put her mug down too hastily on the table and tea splashed.

  “Stop that!” Jimmy shrilled. “You’re making a mess!”

  Dawn smiled at him again.

  Jacqueline said. “Thank you for agreeing to see me, Dawn. I don’t know how much Magpie told you –”

  Dawn cut across her. “He told me who you are, and I told him I wanted nothing to do with you.”

  Discommoded by the hostility in her voice, Jacqueline looked at Magpie again, but he was stirring a spoon round and round in his coffee cup and did not meet her eyes. She looked at Dawn.

  “But you still came.”

  “I came because Magpie asked me to,” said Dawn. “So what do you want to know?”

  “Well, I suppose I just …” What do I want to know, she wondered. “I suppose I want to know anything you can tell me. You see, my father came here – I don’t mean here – I mean to the fair your grandfather owned in –”

  “He didn’t own it,” Dawn cut across her again. “He had the lease on it. He owned the bigger rides and let pitches to other showmen. My family, what’s left of it, still have standing rights. Look, I don’t have a lot of time for this. What is it that you want to know?” Her eyes were hostile and fazed.
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  Jacqueline turned to Magpie again. This time he met her gaze, sighed and settled his spoon next to his mug.

  “Dawn, Jacqueline here is trying to fit the pieces together so she can maybe make some sense of what happened to her sister. Isn’t that right, Jacqueline?”

  “That’s right,” said Jacqueline. She smiled gratefully at Magpie then turned back to Dawn. “Anything at all you can tell me – about where Luca is now – or even anything he might have told you about what happened in Ireland, what happened to my sister.”

  Dawn rested her arms on the table and leaned in. “None of that had anything to do with Luca. None of it.” She had thin lips and tiny teeth and anger made brown diamonds of her eyes. “They just made a scapegoat of him, that’s what they did. None of it was true.”

  Jacqueline kept her voice deliberately measured and low. “But Luca was seeing my sister, that part was true. And, from what I could tell, Lilly was in love with him.”

  “For all the good it did him!” Dawn made a bitter disparaging sound.

  “Or her,” said Jacqueline.

  “Are you saying that what happened to your sister was Luca’s fault?” Dawn’s chin jutted forward aggressively.

  “Of course not, I never thought that. As far as I’m concerned there was never any question of that.”

  “Well, it’s a shame you couldn’t have told that to the Irish police then.”

  “Dawn,” this time it was Jacqueline who leaned in, “I was eleven years old when it happened, a child.”

  “And Luca was seventeen,” said Dawn, “not much more than a child either. But that didn’t stop them taking him in – for questioning, they called it. They kept him for two days and two nights and they tried to make him say he had killed that girl …”

  Jacqueline drew back involuntarily.

  Magpie said reproachfully, “Dawn …”

  “It’s true,” said Dawn. “They only let him go because they had to, because they couldn’t keep him any longer without charging him. And they couldn’t charge him because they knew he was innocent. He had witnesses – independent witnesses who could say they saw him nowhere near where the girl disappeared.” She glanced at Jacqueline. “Your sister, I’m sorry, I know she was your sister.”