Second Hand Jane

by Michelle Vernal

  “That as may be but I know how you work, Jessica. Your heart’s not in it anymore. I can hear it in your voice. This pig farmer fella tells you his sob story and you melt. If Nick were to announce he was going in for a double leg amputation on Monday or, or oh I don’t know, that his cat was terminally ill, then you’d be all over him but unfortunately he has no problems, no issues to work through. He is normal. N-O-R-M-A-L, Jessica.” Marian spelt it out and then carried on, “Well, I am not having it! This time, I am not going to stand by and let you sabotage things for yourself. You are too long in the tooth to mess about like this.”

  “Gee, thanks, Mum.”

  “Don’t be sarcastic with me, young lady.” There was the sound of heavy breathing down the phone and then the muffled sound of her parents conferring in the background. Jess realised her mother must have put her hand over the receiver. This was not boding well, she thought and in the next moment was proved right.

  “It was going to happen sooner and now I am glad I decided to make it sooner.”

  “What?”

  “I have retired, Jessica. It was time for me to hang up my socks. As of last Friday, I became a free woman.”

  Jess refrained from adding shouldn’t that be knickers she’d hung up but she didn’t think her mother would find it funny at the moment; besides, she was getting an uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach that she really wasn’t going to feel like joking around shortly.

  “I felt it in my water. I knew that you were going to need me more than Smith & Caugheys does. So, I’ve talked to Dad and your sister and we’ve all decided it’s for the best. I am coming to Ireland.”

  “What?”

  “I’m coming to Ireland.”

  “No, Mum, you can’t!” Jess wailed in horror.

  “Oh yes, I can, my girl. Your sister’s taught me how to surf the Net and I’ve been gurgling all sorts of bargain return flights that I can book online. Your father’s insistent I go budget now that I’ve retired.”

  God spare me the computer jargon, Jess pleaded, making a mental note to ring Kelly and give her a mouthful once she managed to talk their mother out of coming over.

  “In fact, I have my eye on a deal that could have me at your place by the middle of next week.”

  Good grief, she really was serious. Jess flailed around, desperately groping for reasons she couldn’t possibly come. “What about Dad? He might have said it was okay for you to come here but he would, wouldn’t he? You know how useless he is at looking after himself. He’d never cope without you.” Yes, that was a good one; Jess’s tensed shoulders relaxed as she finished playing her winning Dad can’t even boil an egg hand.

  “Women always rally round a man left to fend for himself and if they don’t, the neighbours will look after him. There’s your sister, too; she can help out and I will leave him plenty of frozen dinners. He won’t even know I’m gone.”

  “Well, well…” Jess blustered, “Well, what about Kelly and Brian? They’ll never manage the kids without you to help out.”

  “Your sister and her husband will just have to miss their date night for once. Might do them good to give that side of things a rest or I am going to wind up with more grandchildren than I know what to do with,” Marian muttered.

  The fear was building in Jess’s stomach like a volcano about to erupt. She couldn’t think of anything else that might make her mother change her mind. It was last-resort time. “Put Dad on for me!”

  “Don’t bellow like that, Jessica; it’s unladylike and a please wouldn’t go astray—Frank! Your daughter wants a word.”

  “Hello, sweetheart.” His tone was wary.

  “Dad, you can’t let her come here, you just can’t. You know it wouldn’t work. Say something to stop her.”

  Frank sighed. “Jess, love, you know as well as I do that when your mother sets her mind to something, there is no stopping her, and I am telling you there is no stopping her. She is coming to Dublin and to be fair, it’s not just about sorting out whatever it is you’re playing at with these two fellows. She wants to see where you live. You’ve been gone a long time, you know.”

  “Yeah, I know, Dad.” She didn’t add that there was a reason for that.

  “To be honest with you, she needs a holiday. What with working full-time and helping Kelly out these last few years, well, she deserves a decent break. Your sister runs her ragged with those kids. It won’t do Kelly any harm to have to stand on her own two feet for a bit, either; it might make her appreciate just what Marian does for her. And it will do you and her good to spend some quality time together on your home turf.”

  Crikey, that was the longest speech she had heard her father make since Kel’s wedding. “Well, I don’t think it’s a good idea. In fact, I think it’s a terrible idea. Besides, she’s just told me she’s retired so I don’t know what you’re going on about her needing a rest for. If it’s a holiday she’s after, well, Fiji is a lot bloody closer.” God, what a nightmare. Jess got up, cradling the phone in the crook of her neck and shoulder as she topped up her glass. “If she comes here, she’ll do nothing but criticise me the whole time. You know what she’s like.”

  “Love, your mother just wants to see where her eldest child has been living for the past decade. You are making a mountain out of a molehill.”

  “No, she doesn’t. What she wants is for me to marry money and breed. She’s never approved of any of the choices I’ve made—not with work or with men. Why do you think I love living here so much? There’s nobody going on at me all the time—that’s why.” She sounded like a petulant child even to her own ears but she couldn’t help it.

  “Listen to yourself! Grow up, Jessica!”

  Chastened, Jess felt like she was twelve years old again, caught pinching the milk money for sweets, as he carried on. “Do you know Marian’s friends all roll their eyes behind her back when she starts in on the ‘our Jessica’s got her own column in a Dublin newspaper, you know’ because they’ve heard it so many times. She just wants you to meet someone who you can make a commitment with. What mother doesn’t want to see their child settled? And look at it this way: this might be your golden opportunity to prove to her that you are capable of making the right decision all by yourself.” The spark of anger dissipated and he deftly changed the subject. “Anyway, enough of all that. When does the story you wrote about the young girl who died in that bombing run? I’d like to read it.”

  “It goes to print this Saturday—thirty years to the day that Amy was killed.”

  On the other side of the world in his brick house in Hillsborough, Frank Baré sat shaking his head. “Do you know, I remember Philip Sherry telling us about the bombings and troubles over there in Northern Ireland on the six o’clock news. It’s hard to believe it was thirty years ago and that you are all grown up and living over in that part of the world now.”

  “I live in the Republic of Ireland, though, Dad; the Troubles never really touched the South.”

  “I find that hard to believe. It’s all one land mass, isn’t it?” He didn’t give her a chance to answer. “Will you be going up to see your chap in Ballypintofguinness, the one who has your mother’s knickers in such a knot, when it runs? It won’t be easy for him seeing it all laid out in print like that, I shouldn’t imagine.”

  “Ballymcguiness and I’ve told you before he is not my chap. No, I won’t be going up to see him because he hasn’t asked me to, so make sure you tell Mum that. Owen’s a very private person and he wouldn’t appreciate me just showing up.” She studied the hangnail on her thumb. “His father’s in a retirement home nearby so I think he will probably spend the day with him.”

  “Ah, he’s a loyal son. I like that.”

  “And a right moody bugger to boot.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You will be sending us a copy of the article, though, won’t you?” he asked again.

  Once a month, Jess faithfully sent copies of her weekly column cut out of
the paper to her parents. “If Mum’s such a whiz kid on the computer these days, you two could always read it online.”

  “Your mother’s relationship with the Internet is very new and I have a feeling it won’t last. Besides, she likes to have a hard copy of your column so that she can pass it round her friends.”

  That was news to Jess, and she felt herself softening a little where her mother was concerned. “Really? Well, okay then, I’ll post it off as soon as it’s run.”

  “From what you read to me last time we spoke, it sounded like you were trying to get a moral point across to your readers, not just relaying to them what happened. Am I right?”

  Jess thought for a moment. Her dad’s perception amazed her because until he’d mentioned it, she hadn’t realised that was exactly what she had tried to do. “I hadn’t thought about it like that but I suppose that was what made it so special to write. It sounds a bit pretentious but I don’t usually get the opportunity to be thought-provoking and I hope I have managed it. Maybe it will make people contemplate the ongoing effects war has on innocent families because what happened to Amy should never happen again in Ireland. I want her to become real to the reader and not just a casualty in an old fight.” Brianna’s face sprang to mind. “My friend summed it up when she said hearing what Owen had to say made her want to go and hug her son. Families are just too precious to be destroyed by one senseless act.” As she finished her impassioned speech, she realised Frank Baré was indeed a clever man. He had just set her up.

  “Exactly, Jessica. Think about what you just said when your mother arrives.”

  She knew he was right and she loved her mother—of course she did—but she was just so damn annoying at times. “Point taken.”

  “Good. Anyway, Mum wants another word with you so I’ll say cheerio, sweetheart.”

  As she listened to her mother burble on excitedly about her impending trip and how she couldn’t wait to visit Trinity College and Dublin Castle and all the other sights, the realisation that there was nothing she could say or do that would change things sank in. She was coming to Dublin whether Jess liked it or not.

  Chapter Sixteen

  On Saturday morning, the twentieth of October, 2012—thirty years to the day that sixteen-year-old Amy Aherne from Glenariff Farm in Ballymcguinness was killed—her story ran in the Dublin Express. It was spread over two pages in the colour weekend supplement and it made for an arresting read:

  Amy’s Story

  By Jessica Baré

  This story starts with a children’s book published in 1969, a fairy tale bought by a mother in Northern Ireland on behalf of her youngest child to give to his sister for Christmas 1976. It’s no fairy story, though, nor is it just the sad relaying of brutal facts that ended in Lisburn in 1983. It might have finished there, though, if not for her family and had that little book not found its way to me. I don’t mean to sound proprietary because neither the book nor the story I am going to tell you belongs to me. This is Amy’s story and in order to tell it to you, I have to begin where it all began.

  My full name is Jessica Jane Baré or Second-hand Jane, as my friends have started to call me. Why? Well, it’s because I love the pre-loved—just like that old cliché, someone else’s junk is my treasure. My real passion, though, is for old children’s books—it’s something about the smell of them, I think. It conjures up the innocence of a bygone era of children called Dick and Ann and tea at five o’clock, trapped forever within their much-thumbed pages. I covet the Ladybird Series 606D books in particular—the classic fairy tales every child grows up with: Rapunzel, Cinderella, The Elves and the Shoemaker, and most pertinent of all Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It wasn’t the bold black typeface, however, that had me poring over the books as a child and hoarding them as an adult but Eric Winters’ fabulously detailed illustrations. They brought those stories to life and were the source of a childhood fascination with witches, fairies, princes, and princesses. The delicate colours of the foxgloves planted by the thatched cottage’s flag stone path, the grand white Bavarian styled castles in which as a little girl I had no doubt I would one day grow up to live in, were a world away from the suburban pocket of New Zealand I inhabited. When a young imagination is fuelled, though, the impossible becomes possible. Good versed evil within those pages and always won. If only we could hold onto that analogy forever.

  I often wonder, when I open my books to find another boy or girl’s mark inside, whether that faceless child felt the magic, too. Who were they, these little people who had scribbled their names inside books long since forgotten by adulthood?

  Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs arrived with neither pomp nor ceremony but rather by mail thanks to an online auction I was determined to win. Inside the tatty cover, in precise, big print was the dedication:

  To Amy with love from Owen Christmas 1973

  Beneath this, scrawled in orange pencil pressed deep into the cardboard, she had forever made her mark:

  Amy Aherne

  Glenariff Farm

  Ballymcguinness

  6 years old

  As I looked at the scribbled inscription, I began to wonder. Who was she, this six-year-old girl from the seventies? Was she a dreamer like me, who was now learning the hard way that princes don’t just pop up every day and that there are an awful lot of frogs out there? Or perhaps she was a realist who didn’t believe in a man supplying her with a ready-made happy ever after? Might we have been friends if we had met? Where was she now? What had she grown up to do with her life?

  I felt a compulsion that was almost a physical tug. It was one that I have never felt before—this overwhelming need to know. I would find her and tell the story that lay within the name inscribed in the storybook. What I found, though, was not at all what I expected. Amy didn’t leave school early and take the first job she was offered so she could buy records, clothes, and makeup like her girlfriends. She didn’t wind up pushing a pram before her time either. Nor did she pack her bags and head off to the city to share a grotty flat with other intellectuals while she studied hard and solved the problems of the world. She didn’t put a foot on the bottom rung of the corporate ladder to begin her ascent, all the while trying to fit a life in around the demands of her chosen career. The full moon never shone down on her while she partied the night away in a bikini and sarong on a Thai beach with her drunken compatriots. As for meeting Mr Right, well, he never got the chance to show up, so she never knew what it would have been like to set up home with him and look after their babushka doll babies together.

  The choices we take for granted as ours to make, the mistakes we know will push us off course along the way that only make the getting back on track all the sweeter, all of that was taken away from Amy in the futile tit for tatting of a war that could never really be won.

  I began my search for who this little girl was and who she had become with the high-tech precision of a bungling journalist who resorted to the white pages and a foot-in-mouth phone call to Owen Aherne. The four-year-old boy who had long ago given his sister the book I held in my possession was now a man in his late thirties, who still lived at the family farm in Ballymcguinness. After the shock of a blundering journalist with the wrong accent barging into his past, we figured out the book’s journey away from Amy to an eBid purchase in 2012 began with the need for extra spends and a sale at a church fete. That sorted, he laid the facts bare:

  Amy was two years older than me and she was turning into a bit of a tearaway. The day it happened, she’d told our Ma that she was going to her friend Evie’s house and Evie told her Ma she was coming to ours. Instead, the girls caught the bus up to Lisburn.

  Amy had her eye on a lad who worked up that way, so Evie told us later. She’d met him at a dance and was determined to see him again, even though according to Evie he didn’t want to know her. We never found anything else out about him apart from the fact he was a Catholic boy who’d had the gall to show his face at a dance in Banbridge. The local lads took umbrage
at this boy talking to one of “their” girls and he’d received a kicking for his trouble. I think that for Amy, it smacked of Romeo and Juliet—an impossible love in her eyes, which made her chase after him and read all the things sixteen-year-old girls read in to situations where there is nothing but a busted nose and broken ribs to read at all.

  Things were bad back in ’83. So she knew that there was no way in hell she’d have been allowed to go anywhere near Belfast or the like if she’d asked. Ballymcguinness is a dot of a place, though, claustrophobic for young people. The girls had itchy feet and the element of risk in going somewhere they knew full well they had no business in going was exciting to them. It would give them a bit of kudos with their pals—something to show off to them about. They were six foot tall and bulletproof. Besides, we were all so bloody naïve, tucked away from the worst of it all. The fighting always seemed to be happening somewhere else, not in our backyard.

  Evie told us later that she’d left her bag in the coffee shop they’d been hanging out in for most of the day. Amy had been eyeing up this lad she fancied as her Romeo, who worked across the road from the café at a garage. They’d sat smoking cigarettes, trying to look sophisticated, drinking manky, bottomless coffee until it was time to get the bus home. Evie ran back down the road to fetch her bag while Amy waited at the bus stop outside O’Hara’s Butchers. There’d be murder to pay at home if they missed the last bus and got caught out.

  It was a Loyalist bombing that went wrong. A meeting was due to be held in the back of the butcher’s. Christopher O’Hara, an IRA hard man in his day, and his cronies were supposed to be gathered there except they weren’t and seven innocent people, including my sister, were killed instead. We were told she died instantly and that she wouldn’t have suffered, which was a blessing for her but of no comfort to me Ma, who spent the rest of her life suffering. It’s a hard thing to accept that you’ve no body left to bury, just the pieces left behind. Me Da was an armchair Unionist back then who liked to spout off with his pals down at his local, Murtagh’s Pub, on a Saturday afternoon but after what happened to Amy, he never stepped foot in there again—he lost his spark.