The Last Lost Girl

by Maria Hoey

  “It’s okay,” said Jacqueline. “Luca must have been very frightened.”

  “Yes, he was frightened – he was terrified. They kicked him and knocked him about. But you know what frightened him most? That place they kept him in. Luca told me it had no windows, no natural light and he thought they were never going to let him out. When he told me that, he cried like a girl. And those men, those Irish police, they thought he was crying because of what they had done to him, because of how they’d hurt his body. But it wasn’t that at all. Luca was crying because he was thinking that was how prison would be, no window, no sky, no trees.”

  Listening to Dawn, Jacqueline had a sudden clear memory from that summer – Lilly telling Goretti Quinn about Luca’s wanderlust. She looked at his sister now and said, “I don’t know what to say to you. That was so wrong, what they did to Luca, so very wrong.”

  “But that other boy,” Dawn’s eyes grew fierce with anger, “the one whose father was a policeman?”

  “A solicitor,” said Jacqueline automatically. “Edmund Sexton.”

  “Did they kick and beat him? I think not.”

  “No, I don’t imagine they did,” said Jacqueline and imagined the anger was quelled a little in the other woman’s eyes.

  “Luca told the truth about what happened the night your sister went missing,” said Dawn. “To the police, to your father, to anyone who asked. He saw her, they quarrelled, she ran off and he didn’t see her again after that. And he never left the fairground that night. People saw him there, a lot of people. Only they were the wrong people, carnival people, and because of that the police chose not to believe it. But still they couldn’t prove a thing against Luca, because there was nothing to prove.”

  “Where is he?” said Jacqueline. “Where is Luca now?”

  “I don’t know. Far away from here.”

  The two women looked at one another.

  “You’re asking me to believe,” said Jacqueline, “that you don’t know where your brother is?”

  “You don’t know where your sister is,” said Dawn and Jacqueline recoiled physically.

  “Ah Jaysus, Dawn,” said Magpie, “give her a break!”

  Dawn turned on him. “You don’t know what it did to him. He came back from Ireland and he wasn’t the same Luca. He was at war with the world and then he fell out with Ned and went away again. And he was never the same. Never.”

  “And you blame what happened to him in Ireland,” said Jacqueline. “I understand that. But I have a very good reason for asking about him. Somebody told my father they’d seen Luca in France and they said there was a girl with him who looked like my sister, who looked like Lilly.”

  “I know all that,” said Dawn. “I was there when he came.”

  “When my father went to see your grandfather? I didn’t realise you’d been there.”

  “Well, I was,” said Dawn. “Grandfather didn’t know I was there but I was and I listened. My brother, the person I loved most in the world, just slipped out of my life and no-one ever explained why. I knew something had happened to him, that he’d been in danger, might still be for all I knew. But nobody would tell me anything, so when your father came shouting the odds at my grandfather, I listened.”

  Jacqueline couldn’t keep from smiling, “That, I understand,” she said.

  “Your father told Grandfather all about this sighting in France. He seemed to think that your sister was with Luca, that maybe Luca had helped her get out of Ireland in the first place. But how could he, when the police were watching him the whole time until he left Ireland to go home again? And Grandfather told him that Luca had no idea where Lilly was.”

  “He also told him he didn’t know where Luca was,” said Jacqueline, “but my father didn’t believe him, did he? So much so that he left an address, in the hope that Luca or even Lilly might get in touch.”

  Dawn’s eyes were expressionless. “I know nothing about that,” she said, “but I know that you’re calling my grandfather a liar. Have you ever thought that it might be your sister who was the liar, just like my grandfather said she was? He had the measure of her alright – a liar and a troublemaker he called her – but she didn’t fool him and she didn’t fool me. Luca was better off without her.”

  Dawn leaned back in her chair and Magpie stirred his cup with unnecessary vigour.

  Jacqueline made a conscious effort not to lose her temper. When she spoke again, her tone was even, “How could your grandfather make those judgments on someone he didn’t even know?”

  Dawn looked down at her nails. “Luca told him all he needed to know,” she said, her voice sullen.

  “Luca was in love with Lilly,” said Jacqueline, “so why would he badmouth her like that? And how was she a liar?”

  “I have nothing else to say to you,” Dawn pushed her chair back and got to her feet, “and anyway I need to go now.”

  Jacqueline got to her feet too. “Dawn, you must know where Luca is – at least tell me that.”

  “I don’t know,” said Dawn. “I can’t help you. I’m sorry.”

  As she rushed out, Magpie said, “Leave it for now, Jacqueline. I’ll go after her and I’ll see you outside in five minutes.”

  Jacqueline watched him go, then she turned to Jimmy.

  “Come on,” she said, “the party’s over.”

  “It isn’t a party if there isn’t a cake,” said Jimmy.

  “And sometimes there’s cake and no party,” said Jacqueline. “That’s life for you. Now hurry up.”

  When she had paid and taken Jimmy to the bathroom again, they went outside.

  Magpie was standing by the sea wall staring at the water. He turned when she came up behind him and looked at her ruefully.

  “Well, you gave it your best shot,” he said.

  “She wouldn’t tell you where he was either? I’m not surprised – she obviously hates my guts. But I just don’t believe she doesn’t know where he is.”

  “Let it simmer,” said Magpie, “just let it simmer.”

  “How long am I supposed to let it simmer? She knows something, I feel it in my gut.”

  Magpie shook his head. “Like I say, give her time.” He turned back to the sea. “Rain’s on the way.”

  “Where?” Impatiently, Jacqueline gazed with disbelief from the glassy water to the blue sky.

  “That bank of fog on the horizon,” said Magpie. “Weather’s coming in from the sea.”

  “I suppose you’d know,” said Jacqueline doubtfully.

  Magpie turned to her. “You mean that I’d always see a storm coming? Not always.”

  Oh, you cretinous idiot, Jacqueline berated herself and tried to think of what to say next.

  Magpie grinned unexpectedly. “But it’s fine weather today and I don’t know about you but I could murder some pints. Coming?”

  Jacqueline looked down at Jimmy. “I should really get him home …”

  “Fair enough.” Magpie bent down and patted Jimmy’s head. “See you around, young man.” Then he was gone, moving swiftly along the seawall and Jacqueline, taken by surprise, could only stand and watch him go.

  The air was still warm as they walked to the station. Jimmy dawdled, dragging his spade noisily along the ground behind him.

  When, for the third time, he asked why Magpie was not coming with them, Jacqueline lost her patience. “He isn’t coming because he doesn’t want to come,” she said bluntly but Jimmy looked so crestfallen it made her feel ashamed.

  She held out her hand. The boy looked at it for a moment then he put his hand in hers and they walked the rest of the way to the station hand in hand.

  Just before the train pulled out, a man hurriedly approached, his head down. For a moment Jacqueline thought it was Magpie and she raised her hand to wave him over. The man looked up. Jacqueline saw the face of a stranger and dropped her hand quickly. She sat back, feeling curiously flat and disappointed.

  Jimmy fell asleep almost as soon as the train began to move, his body pu
shed up against Jacqueline’s. As he slept the fingers that held the string loosened and the dinosaur balloon floated into the air. She made a grab for it and caught it, but as she did the bucket and spade fell from Jimmy’s lap. She tried to retrieve them but the child’s head lolled and fell forward into her lap, and lay there like a dead weight. Looking down at him she sighed. How did people do it, not just for one day but every day? How did they endure the endless I-wants and the countless look-at-me’s? She reached down and pushed a wayward strand of Jimmy’s coarse hair from his eyes. His face was roaring red now and she was filled with compunction. Resting her head against the window glass, she closed her eyes and immediately images of the day paraded through her mind. Jimmy screeching, “I’m a cloud!” – Luca’s sister, small brown eyes so bright and hostile and full of resentment – Magpie’s eyes on her as he said, “She’s trying to fit the pieces together …”

  How could he know, she wondered, that that was how I felt, how I have always felt? Like a figure in a jigsaw puzzle with bits of me missing, the clues to who and what I am meant to be lost, wedged beneath a sofa cushion or fallen down behind a sideboard. And what were the names of those gods again, the Gods of War – Ares, Enyo, Pallas Athena … she started awake. The balloon had escaped her fingers too and she made a grab for it, pulling it down and tying it to her wrist.

  When the train pulled into their station, Jimmy was still sleeping soundly. She tried to wake him, tapping him on the cheeks and finally gently pinching his nose, but he went on sleeping. In the end she had to carry him from the train along with his bucket and spade. Outside the station, she hung about looking out for a taxi, hoping vaguely that the fresh air would revive Jimmy. But with no taxi in sight and the child still sleeping soundly, she set off on foot. He was not so very heavy, but when the yellow spade slipped from her grasp she almost dropped him in the effort to recover it. In the heart of the town people were milling about and it did not take her long to pick up a taxi. She bundled Jimmy into the back seat and as she climbed in beside him she felt a gentle tugging at her wrist. She leaned back out and glanced up: the balloon was bobbing furiously. She thought, it wants to go free. With a quick tug she pulled it down and into the car and closed the door so that it could not escape.

  As she fumbled for the key in her bag, the door sprang open. Marilyn fell on her and almost clawed the sleeping child from her arms.

  “Where have you been?” she said. “How dare you take him and not tell me?”

  “I left you a note – did you not get it?” said Jacqueline.

  “A note, what good is a note? I’ve been waiting for more than six hours for you to come back. Who does that, takes someone else’s kid and just goes off? What are you, some kind of menopausal freak?”

  In some objective chamber of her mind, Jacqueline argued the insult – she was not actually menopausal. She did the maths: it was just gone seven-thirty now which meant that Marilyn had not returned until after one o’clock.

  She said calmly, “I’m sorry you were worried, Marilyn, but you weren’t here and I needed to go out. If you had come back when you said you would, I wouldn’t have had to take Jimmy with me.”

  “Look at him!” Marilyn drew her fingers gently over Jimmy’s hair, bringing it back from his face to reveal the extent of his war-wounds. “His poor little face is burned and look at his legs and arms. I never let him burn in the sun – couldn’t you see his skin is too fair? And where are his glasses?”

  “I’m sorry about the sunburn. I didn’t think and by the time I realised it was too late.” She rummaged in her bag. “I’m sorry about his glasses too – he stood on them and they got broken.”

  Marilyn snatched the toilet-tissue-wrapped glasses from Jacqueline’s hand, “I don’t believe this! What were you even doing with him? I left him with Dot.”

  “Dot had an early train to catch. Don’t you remember, Marilyn? She asked me to look after Jimmy until you got back but you didn’t come back in time and I needed to go. I had no choice but to take him along with us.”

  “Us?” Marilyn’s small glittering teeth nipped at the pronoun. “Who’s us? You’re saying you took my kid off with some stranger?”

  Jacqueline opened her mouth and closed it again. She had been about to say that no, it had not been a stranger, but thought better of it. Magpie knew Marilyn, so doubtless Marilyn knew him also and Jacqueline was not at all sure that the introduction of his name would help matters.

  “Unbelievable!” Marilyn turned back into the house in disgust.

  Jacqueline followed her slowly into the hall and watched her moving swiftly up the stairs. Jimmy’s head hung over her shoulder, his upended hair swinging like a dirty yellow mop-head. When they had gone, she dropped his bucket and spade onto the hall table, opened her bag and added his water pistol, his book and the dinosaur beanie. She untied the string from her wrist and watched as the balloon floated upward toward the high ceiling. Marilyn would have to get a stepladder to try to retrieve it tomorrow. Serve her right, she thought.

  In her room, she undressed and pulled on her T-shirt. It was beginning to smell and she told herself that she needed to either do some washing or buy new stuff.

  As soon as she climbed into bed, her phone beeped. She reached out and picked it up: four missed calls and a host of texts, all of them from Gayle. She tapped out, All fine. Talk tomorrow – then put it on silent.

  She closed her eyes and immediately the reel in her head began replaying the day. She tried to turn off her thoughts but without success. If only, she thought, she could be like Jimmy, and she remembered enviously how easily sleep had come to him. She imagined him tucked up now in his little red bed, or perhaps Marilyn had taken him into her bed tonight. That little jade, Magpie had called her – an old-fashioned phrase but he was full of old-fashioned phrases – a rage of maidens, indeed. In fairness, Marilyn was right to be furious at her for allowing the child to get burnt like that. She remembered the soft, light weight of him as she had carried him as he slept. People, a lot of people, said children made sense of things. For a moment, lying there in the darkness, Jacqueline let herself wonder if it could have been that simple. But in her heart she knew that had never been for her. She would not have wanted it, she had never wanted it, and even if it had not been too late, she did not want it now. That man on the train, she had been almost certain it was Magpie, that he had changed his mind and come after them. How ridiculously pleased she had been, her heart lifting like a teenager’s and all because some old drunk … Poor Jimmy, his arms and legs must hurt like hell. A waste of space, she told herself, that’s what we are, me and Magpie, like those awful people in Trainspotting, the ones who had let the baby die from sheer neglect. What was it Dawn had said about her grandfather? That he had the measure of Lilly, that she was a liar and a troublemaker. “But she didn’t fool him and she didn’t fool me. Luca was better off without her.” What exactly had Dawn meant by that? That Lilly had not fooled her? Just how exactly did anyone get the measure of someone they had never even met?

  Chapter 41

  1976

  It is Halloween. Jacqueline’s mother forgets to buy her a Halloween mask. She is always forgetting things now. Last year Lilly went trick or treating in Beechlawns with Goretti Quinn. Daddy went to collect Lilly at nine o’clock to bring her home in time for apple-bobbing before Jacqueline had to go to bed.

  “But I don’t want to bob for stupid apples!” said Lilly. “The bonfire wasn’t even over and it was brilliant. I wish I lived in Beechlawns.”

  “So you’re always saying,” says Daddy. “What’s so brilliant about burning tyres and bangers? It’s like bloody Beirut up there tonight.”

  “At least it isn’t miles from everywhere like this stupid house!” says Lilly.

  “What are you on about? It’s less than a mile from here to Beechlawns.”

  “And another mile to the village,” says Lilly.

  “What’s in the village that’s so attractive?” says Daddy.
>
  “Life,” says Lilly.

  Jacqueline and Gayle are playing Snakes and Ladders on the sitting-room floor. Daddy said to turn the television off so as not to disturb their mother, who has fallen asleep in the armchair. Jacqueline can hear all the sounds in the room: the ticking of the three clocks, the sappy logs sizzling in the flames, the rustling of Daddy’s paper as he turns the pages. If someone were to peep in through the window, they would never know, she thinks. They would think that nothing had happened and we were just a normal family.

  “Why didn’t you let her go to France?”

  Daddy looks up from his paper and Gayle, her hand in the air, stops shaking the cup of dice.

  Jacqueline looks at her mother. She is not looking at Daddy, but at the fire.

  “What are you talking about, Stella?” asks Daddy.

  “The one thing she wanted most in the world,” says Jacqueline’s mother, “and you said no.”

  Daddy drops his paper on his lap. “But that was more than a year ago, Stella. And you know why we said no – Lilly was sick, she –”

  “You said no, not we!” says Jacqueline’s mother. “You said it!” Her voice is rising. “Every girl in her class was going. She begged and she pleaded and she cried, but you said no.”

  “But, love,” Daddy’s voice is low and gentle, “she’d been in bed for nearly two weeks. We had Dr May in, remember? And he said Lilly had a touch of pleurisy. We were all very worried. Why are you bringing this up now, Stella? It was a long time ago …”

  “The one thing she wanted more than anything else and you couldn’t let her have it!” Jacqueline’s mother gets up and walks out of the room.

  Gayle says, “Are you alright, Daddy?”

  Daddy does not answer – he drops his face into his hands. In the fireplace, the coals crumble and fall soundlessly.