The Orphans

by Annemarie Neary

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Annemarie Neary

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Eight-year old Jess and her little brother were playing at the water’s edge when their parents vanish.

  For hours, the children held hands and waited for them to return. But nobody ever came back.

  Years later, Jess has become a locker of doors. Now a lawyer and a mother, she is determined to protect the life she has built around her. But her brother Ro has grown unpredictable, elusive and obsessive.

  When new evidence suggests that their mother might be alive, Ro reappears, convinced that his sister knows more than she claims.

  And then bad things start to happen.

  About the Author

  Annemarie Neary was born in Northern Ireland and educated at Trinity College Dublin, King’s Inns and the Courtauld Institute. She lives in London. Annemarie’s novel Siren was published in 2016 and her short fiction has won awards in the UK, US and Ireland.

  Also by Annemarie Neary

  Siren

  For Patrick

  PROLOGUE

  North Goa, 1992

  In a hot, cramped room with a ceiling fan, a small boy is bouncing on his parents’ bed. It is barely light, and the boy is still half dreaming, fighting lions by the sea. The room smells of feet, and the walls are the colour of dhal, but Sparrow tastes a tang of salty blue.

  ‘Beeeeeeeach!’ he squeals, but nobody wakes.

  The ceiling fan is making the mozzie net swell, like a giant wave come to get him. He lets it sweep him away and onto his back beside his squashed-together parents. When he burrows into Mama, her arm pulls him towards her and her plait trails against his face. Her hair smells of fruit, and of the flowers that make his sister sneeze. He thinks of the funny word for sneezing, ‘Hey-feee-vehhhr’, and of the swaying purple flowers in their once-upon-a-garden. Sparrow misses that garden, the paddling pool and swing. But if he cries and says he wants to go there, his mother shakes her head. Gone, gone, gone. She makes a shape she calls their Old Life, and then she rips it up.

  In the next room, Jess is awake too. She watches her little brother through the open door, flipping ghost-like behind the net, then landing flat on his back.

  ‘Gone, gone, gone,’ he is saying, and she knows that he is thinking about home, just like she is. She misses school, and being good at things. She misses friends who come for tea and then go home again. Not like here, in the Yellow House, where all the kids live in the same place and everything is shared, even Mama. Sometimes Mama goes away with other men, and often Dejan comes to visit, with his big moustache. Pa is always there, though his eyes are often vague, as if he is finding his way through winter fog.

  Jess twists her arm round to inspect the inside part, still soft and white and babyish like it was at home. It’s the only bit of her that hasn’t changed. The rest is thinner, browner, blonder. Not like Sparrow, still pink and white. Jess is the one who remembers to cover him up so he doesn’t burn. She is the one who carries his sunhat in her bag.

  Mama is awake now, and standing naked by the bed. She has pinned her plait up on the back of her head and, as she washes in water from the bowl, a streak of sunlight turns her skin to golden glass. Something glitters on her wrist. Dejan with the moustache has given her mother a new bracelet. Mama hasn’t said so, but Jess knows.

  Sparrow and Jess play all morning in the wild garden where the grass is scuffed to dust. Eddie says there are snakes hiding underneath the spiky, orange flowers, but Jess has never seen them. By the time Mama and Pa are ready, Sparrow is tired and whining. To get to the beach, they walk down a narrow alleyway that is crammed with bright jags of colour, strong as tastes. Jess carries the picnic, and Mama carries Sparrow. He is happy now and singing to himself, a makey-uppy song. He takes Mama’s face in his hands and covers it with hundreds of tiny kisses, while she smooths down his curls and murmurs that he is her perfect angel.

  Jess knows that Sparrow and Mama are enough for each other, that they don’t need her or even Pa. The terrible truth of that makes her sad, but now that she is grown-up inside, it doesn’t make her angry. She turns around to find Pa, to make sure that he keeps up. He looks cold today, even though the sun has already burned the bony tips of Jess’s shoulders. She reaches for his hand, and from very far away he sends a smile.

  When they get to the beach, Pa leads them past the shacks and the turtles and the coconut lady and the men selling mangos and the girls who braid hair and weave in strands of cotton. Here, the only sounds are the sea and the squawk of some invisible bird and the scissor song of insects clamouring in the trees. She is glad not to have to play with the children from the Yellow House. She is tired of games she always seems to lose. Pa paces back and forth while Mama spreads the bright orange throw she bartered for at the market. Sparrow clings to her like a little monkey but she gently unpeels his fingers and kisses him on the head.

  ‘Dig us back to England, Sparrow,’ she says. ‘Make me a tunnel, and let’s go.’ And she mimes shouldering her way into a narrow space. ‘Keep an eye on him for me, Jess.’

  Down at the water’s edge, Sparrow starts to shovel at the wet sand.

  ‘Je-ess? How long will it take to get back to London? Will it take five minutes or five hours?’

  She says it might take five weeks or two months or maybe even a year, now that they don’t have the camper van any more.

  Sparrow stomps to the water’s edge.

  ‘I can dig Mama a tunnel so we can get there in five tiny minutes,’ he says.

  Jess thinks you would have to dig through Africa and France and Italy and Greece to get to England. And definitely Turkey, where they sold the van and started taking buses instead. Here, it is so hard to remember things. For two whole days, she has been trying to recite the stations on the Northern Line, but she keeps getting stuck at Balham.

  Sparrow is digging, then swishing water at the hole to help it sink and become a tunnel.

  ‘I can’t concentrate if you keep splashing me the whole time,’ Jess says.

  He can’t believe she’s forgotten about the tunnel already.

  ‘You’re not helping by flooding it like that,’ she says. And then she gets bossy and tells him to shush, that she needs to be able to count.

  He holds up his fingers and tells her she can count those, but she calls him a silly billy, and says he hasn’t got nearly enough fingers. She tells him to fetch shells and pebbles or whatever he can find.

  ‘Is it a mission?’ he asks.

  ‘If you like,’ she says.

  He goes to the end of the beach, just beneath the cliff, and searches for the roundest stones, the frilliest shells. He fills his bucket, then drags it back and empties them out beside her.

  ‘Treasure,’ she says, and smiles.

  That makes him feel proud and important, so he collects buckets more. On the last trip, he cuts his toe against something sharp hidden in the sand, a scrap of glass perhaps. The blood rushes out and, as he walks, the sea washes it away again. He thinks ‘ow wow’ because that’s how his own blood makes h
im feel, but it isn’t ‘ow wow’, not really.

  On the way back to Jess, his hand goes to sleep. He puts the bucket down so he can twiddle his fingers. He thinks he can hear something in the trees. Maybe it’s a lion, because it is definitely hot enough for lions. But he left his sword behind in the dream, and so he hurries on.

  Jess isn’t counting any more, and she isn’t helping with the tunnel either. Her face makes him scared because it looks as if it’s dripping off the end of her chin. When he gets up close he can see that Jess is crying, though Jess never cries. She is pointing over towards the place where they were sitting, Mama and Pa, but there’s no one there. He runs right up the beach to find them, and the drier, silkier sand burns his feet. But the basket has gone, and the big orange blanket, and the food and the water. ‘Mama,’ he screams. ‘Ma-ma-ma.’

  But all there is where his parents used to be is a single mango. He puts it to his nose and sniffs. He bites hard and spits the skin away, and suddenly his face is full of sweetness. The fibres slip between his teeth and the juice drips onto his chest. Jess is running towards him now, and he tries to gobble all the mango up before she gets to him. Her hug slams into him and the mango rolls in the sand and his face mixed with hers tastes more salty than sweet.

  Jess holds his hand tight and for a moment she feels nearly as good as Mama, but not really. Neither of them says anything for a long time.

  ‘They’ll come back, Ro,’ she says finally.

  And he thinks about the Owl Mother in the story, who always does come back. He glances over at Mama’s tunnel, but it is filled with sea. They turn their backs on it, and sit facing up the beach instead, so they can catch the happy moment.

  But nobody comes back.

  And one sleep goes by and then two and then twenty-two then forty then ninety-five, right until the end of numbers.

  And nobody came back.

  1

  Ireland, present day

  Ro has followed his mother all his life, but the sightings have never taken him to Curramona before, not to the spot she called the home place. Ireland is wet and green, just as he remembers it. He’s calmer than he’s been in months, hurtling through high-hedged, dripping fields, travelling blind by a steamed-up window with no need to worry out the route himself. On these narrow roads, the coach is like a charging bull, the last fuchsias clipping its sides.

  After a stretch of nothing at all, the sightings began again last summer. A family friend on holiday in northern France swore blind she’d seen his mother in the fruit and veg aisle of a supermarket in Lille. She’d tackled the woman, who pretended not to understand English, even followed her out into the car park. But it was too late. Sophie Considine was gone.

  The prospect that he might find his mother in a Carrefour in Lille was so intoxicating that he’d spent three weeks touting his age-progressed photos around prefectures and gendarmeries and a succession of bar owners. Sophie with glasses and without, weight on and off, raddled and healthy, blonde and curly, dark and straight. All the bar owners, to a man aged fifty plus, recognised one version of her – a woman with a tight black pageboy cut and a determined, chiselled face. His hopes were raised until he realised that the woman they thought they’d seen before was not his mother after all, but a singer from their long-ago youth called Mireille Mathieu.

  After France, he was exhausted, the hope sucked out of him. A month later, though, he was off again, to Durham this time, travelling back and forth on local buses along a daisy chain of villages. The woman did bear a passing resemblance to his mother, but she was at least ten years too young.

  On the first Sunday of the season, a new vendor had showed up at the country market in Curramona with a chalkboard sign, Sophie’s Kitchen. She was selling pots of home-made spreads – hummus, red pesto, baba ganoush – from the boot of an estate car that some said was navy blue, others black. Nobody noticed anything useful – the car reg, for example, or even the make. One customer had asked the woman, who had a greyish-blondish plait and was thought to be in her early sixties, if she was staying locally. She parried the question, but she never reappeared. That was it. She was there and then she wasn’t.

  At Curramona, they still remember Sophie Considine. His mother was brave or negligent, depending on who’s talking. She was talented, or a waste of space. The most you can say for sure is that she made an impression. This new sighting was news, and Ro trawled through all the speculation on online missing-persons forums. The more he read, the stronger the fizz of excitement, like sherbet on his tongue. And then he came across a name that brought him back to the days before the vanishing. Mags Madden.

  As kids, Jess and he had spent a month or so each summer in the field behind Mags Madden’s shop in a small country place called Drigheen, just outside the town of Curramona. There were albums full of pictures of that caravan and of the lake where they used to swim. If memories have flavours, Mags reminds him of vanilla, for the ice cream she doled out sparingly from her padlocked freezer. Vanilla, and sour grapes.

  The comments on the missing-persons forum expressed a range of views on the sighting. Some people wondered if Sophie might have made the decision to reappear and then bottled it. Most seemed to think it was just a coincidence, that Sophie was long dead. But Ro was struck by what Mags Madden had written.

  ‘I know that one like my own sister. Take it from me, Sophie’s in the Smoke if she’s anywhere. She’s not in some dump like this.’

  That present tense had been the lure. And now here he is.

  He had expected the home place to come back to him like a nursery rhyme. But when he reaches the town, a single broad street with a Londis and a scattering of pubs, he scarcely recognises it at all. Even though he knows this is the terminus, he sits on as the others alight, in the hope that the driver might be stuttering on home a mile or two further into the bog. He imagines a bungalow with pebble dash and greying nets, a wife flipping burgers on a pan. Maybe even a bed for the night, if he’s lucky. But when the other passengers have alighted, the driver climbs back up into the coach and stands there like a disobliging genie until Ro gets to his feet and pulls his backpack down from the overhead rack.

  He starts walking east, though whether the Madden place is that direction or not, he couldn’t say, it’s been so long. It’s dark already and drizzling as he makes his way towards the comforting plastic glow of a petrol station concourse. Beyond that, there isn’t even a footpath and he is soon wet to the knees from the long grass on the verge. A truck skites him as it passes, but on he walks into the black, past fields of snorting beasts, to the slow gurgle of rainwater in the ditch. He remembers a crossroads, a huge tree, but as far as he can tell the road ahead is flat, the landscape unrelieved by trees of any kind. From the greenish glow-in-the-dark hands on his watch, it’s already ten o’clock, and so he heads back to the town to get his bearings.

  He passes a little square just off the main street. Its rickety-rackety houses are crowded in around a park where great clumps of giant rhubarb lord it over the dried-out annuals. He wonders if that’s where the market was held. Her market. He closes his eyes, but he catches nothing. And how would he know what to sense anyway, after all this time? What version of her would he hope to find?

  He comes across a chipper that reminds him of a thousand others – sub-Heinz beans and Kylie on the speakers. The woman behind the counter shovels his chips onto a hospital-green plate. She dredges them with salt and soaks on operatic quantities of vinegar. When she hands him his tea, it slurps onto the saucer, flooding the complimentary biscuit. And, even though he doesn’t care much for biscuits, he finds that disappointing.

  ‘Have you heard of a shop called Madden’s?’ he asks. ‘It’s in a townland called Drigheen. Not far from here.’

  He knows you don’t pronounce the ‘g’, not here. It marks you out if you do. But he can’t bring himself to drop it either.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says, though she’s clearly not.

  He takes his seat and spe
ars a couple of chips. Despite the yellow walls, the swallows scissoring across the wipe-clean tablecloths, this is a drab hole. Somebody has attempted a mural on the opposite wall – clownish figures in motley and masks beneath a dark red Vesuvius. The tinny radio announces that Murray is through to the next round at Wimbledon, that there has been a debate somewhere on climate change. But you can’t take Curramona out of the chipper; the traffic lights are out in Synott Street, and there’s a diversion on the bypass. He can’t imagine the kind of life where such things matter.

  Over to his right, a baby perched in a high chair is playing with a knife. The child’s mother has an old face on a young body, her thin brown legs displayed in cut-off jeans. As mothers go, she is clueless. Each time the kid drops the knife onto the tiled floor, she lifts it up and places it back in his fat little fist, so it’s only a matter of time before that kid gets it in the eye. He reminds himself that he’s keeping a low profile here. But he can’t help thinking, what’s wrong with a spoon? He can see his own history in the kid who isn’t strapped into his seat, the mother who doesn’t see the knife coming. And he wants to go and shake her by the neck. Wake up, wake up, wake up.

  Back in 1992, the disappearance of both his parents had dominated the news for months on end. His family acquired block capitals – Mama became TRAGIC SOPHIE, while he and Jess were THE ORPHANS ON THE BEACH. The papers made it into a morality play, but it was also that irresistible weekend staple, a mystery. Auntie Rae kept the cuttings in her scrapbooks, his legacy she liked to say. Even as a kid, he’d noticed how seldom Pa was mentioned; all the speculation was about Mama, while Pa remained an insubstantial figure. In retrospect, of course, the inference was clear – a drug addict with more money than morals, Pa was as likely to be the perpetrator as a victim. So, a couple of years later, when Pa’s remains were discovered in undergrowth just metres from the beach, things began to look more complicated, and Auntie Rae put the scrapbooks in the attic.