Mary, Mary

by Julie Parsons

  7

  The dog whined. He tugged at the worn leather lead, his breath struggling in hoarse gasps from his open mouth. It was Sunday, 13 August. The eighth day. Seven-thirty in the morning. Cooler than yesterday or the day before, but bright sunshine angling down through the chestnut, the ash and the oak, warming the white fronds of meadowsweet, so that even at this early hour its honey smell hung in the air.

  The dog pulled and jerked again, burying his nose underneath the tussocks of rough grass that grew on either side of the path running along beside the canal. He stopped, his head down, his feathery black tail pointed, tense, draughts of air filling his nose with the scent of a thousand possibilities.

  The elderly man with him bent down slowly, his knees creaking, cartilage and bone scraping painfully against each other in the quiet morning. He steadied himself with one hand on his stick. With his other hand he caught hold of the dog’s collar, forcing his shaking fingers to release the lead’s metal catch. The dog licked his hand, his long tongue curling around the swollen arthritic knuckles, then rushed away down the track, his tail sculling now, like a short black oar, behind him.

  The man followed slowly. He spoke quietly to himself as he paused here and there, poking his stick into a pile of old tin cans, pulling down a large bunch of elderberries, hanging dark purple, almost black like small overripe grapes, watching the dragonflies whose petrol iridescence darted over the canal’s murky water.

  Ahead, twenty feet away the dog had stopped, poised on the bank. Excitement ran through his small body, waves of tension rippling along his shiny black back. His feet scrabbled in the dry, dusty grass. He moved from right to left, twisting and turning, then he whined again, and barked. The old man caught up with him. There was a piece of elder branch in his right hand. He held it up above the dog’s head, waving it from side to side, then threw it in a looping arc into the water. The dog barked again, braced himself, and leaped in, his head breaking the surface, ripples spreading out on either side from his paddling front paws.

  ‘Jude,’ the old man called. ‘Here, boy.’ And he whistled, a thin quavering sound.

  The dog grasped the branch, his lips drawn back, his white teeth exposed. He turned and began to swim towards his master.

  ‘Good boy. Good dog,’ the old man called.

  And then the small black body disappeared, under an ash tree that was hanging out from the bank. Afterwards the old man wasn’t sure, couldn’t be certain when he realized what was in the plastic bag that Jude had found, had begun to tear, had ripped open. It was only after he had called and whistled, and Jude had climbed up beside him on the grass, his wet tail flopping from side to side, that he noticed the dog had something caught between his teeth. And when he prised open his mouth and pulled out the black strands, it was then that he saw the shape of what was lying beneath them in the water, and it was then that he began to run, crying out for help, the dog rushing and jumping along beside him, leaping up to pull at his jacket and lick his face.

  8

  She would dress for the occasion. She would take off the jeans and T-shirt that had become her uniform. She would wear her favourite cream shift, with the crimson linen shawl that she and Mary had chosen together. She would wrap around her neck the string of coral that Mary had given her on her fortieth birthday. She would brush her hair and put on makeup. She would do what had to be done.

  Two of them had arrived just after eleven that morning. She had been helping Catherine to have a bath when the doorbell rang. She ran downstairs still holding the towel, dark patches of water all over her shirt. The older man introduced himself. Michael McLoughlin, Detective Inspector. He held out his hand, but she didn’t take it. She stood there in the sun, drying herself, hearing the words but not listening to their meaning. The younger man took the towel from her as they walked into the hall and closed the front door. He draped it over the banisters.

  ‘Not there, don’t leave it there,’ she said. ‘Hang it on the washing line. In the garden. That way.’ And she pointed to the stairs that led to the kitchen and the back door.

  ‘We’ll wait,’ Inspector McLoughlin said. ‘Take your time.’ And he sat down on the chair by the phone, and unfolded the newspaper that was sticking out of his jacket pocket.

  The body was on a trolley covered by a green surgical sheet. They hadn’t said much to her as they drove into the morgue in Store Street. The younger man, Finney she thought he was called, was at the wheel of the unmarked car. He drove fast, too fast, overtaking anything that got in front of them, barely making it through the amber lights. She had to brace her feet on the floor to stop herself falling from side to side on the shiny back seat. Beside her head swung an air freshener in the shape of a little green fir tree. It tapped out a neat rhythm against the glass of the window as the car wove through the heavy Sunday traffic. Just like the sound of a pencil tapping on a piece of paper, she thought. Mary’s favourite colouring pencils. Lakeland. In a beautiful tin. Mary kneeling up on a chair at the kitchen table, drawing laboriously, carefully. Making the exaggerated zigzags of the Christmas tree. Colouring it in methodically, her little hand gripping the green pencil, forcing it to stay within the thick outlines, the sharpened end bursting through the flimsy paper. Outside it was the hot southern-hemisphere Christmas. Inside she was decorating the tree with snow, pieces of cotton wool stuck on with flour-and-water paste. She sat back on her heels to examine it for any imperfections. Tap, tap, tap, the pencil on the paper. Look, Mummy, isn’t it lovely?

  She wanted to tell him to slow down. She wanted to savour these last few minutes of not knowing. So far, nothing had really happened. She was just going for a drive on a hot sunny Sunday in August, like all the other people in all the other cars that crammed the stretch of road from Blackrock to Ballsbridge. But already he was swinging around from Pearse Street into Townsend Street, the traffic lights green all the way, the river water yellow and shining as they crossed the bridge and slowed to a stop outside the small, unobtrusive brick building, in shadow now behind the bulk of the city’s bus station.

  She stood beside the trolley. The policeman, McLoughlin, was talking to her. The mortuary attendant would lift the sheet, just for a moment. He would ask her to look at the body. He would ask her then if she could identify her. He would need her to speak out loud, ‘for the record you understand’. She nodded. She knew what had to be done. There was a summer, years ago, when as a student she had worked in this morgue. Cleaning up, preparation, routine work. It was a good job. She had liked it. The only problem was the smell. Formaldehyde, which clung in the strands of her hair and in the folds and wrinkles of her underwear, seeping beneath her green scrubs. And the other smells that stayed, lodged in the mucous membranes and the imagination. Her eyes moved around the room from the covered trolley to the bone-white enamel sinks. All the surfaces were hard and gleaming. Stainless steel, ceramic tiles, glass jars and containers. The only soft things that came in here were the bodies that lay like this one, passive, waiting.

  McLoughlin cleared his throat. Behind him stood Finney, running one hand through the lock of dark hair that hung down over his right eyebrow, catching her eye and smiling, deep dimples cutting wedge-shaped holes in his cheeks.

  ‘If you’re ready, Dr Mitchell.’

  She stepped forward, closer to the body. She braced her feet against the cold chequered floor. She uncurled her hands from the fists they had become and smoothed them down against her dress. She nodded.

  Afterwards she always remembered that her first reaction was relief. This couldn’t be Mary. Mary had thick, boisterous, black curls. Hair that had a life of its own, that resisted brushes, combs, rubber bands, ribbons. Hair that flowed like water, always finding another way to escape. Not this, sparse and patchy, hacked, the white skull showing through, like an old doll that’s been forgotten and thrown to the back of the cupboard. She put out her hand and touched it, and as she did, a tendril of black sprang out, curled up and around her finger. Like the side sh
oots of the sweet peas her father had planted every summer, springy, twisting themselves around the wire, clinging on even when summer storms pulled and tore at them. And then she felt shame, that she had not immediately, instantly, undeniably recognized her. Despite the blackened eyes and bruised cheeks. Despite the small triangular tear in her forehead where the dog had ripped through her skin. Despite the hugely swollen lips and bent and twisted nose.

  McLoughlin spoke again. ‘Can you identify this person?’ She supposed afterwards that the right words had come out of her mouth. She didn’t remember. But she had turned on them all then, and screamed at them to get out, to leave her alone. And the policeman McLoughlin had turned to the other men, the mortuary assistant and Finney, and put his finger to his lips, stopping their complaints, and backed them out into the corridor.

  They watched her through the round window in the door. She had turned away from the trolley. She walked around the room. She opened drawers and closed them. She took down the jars of chemicals and read the labels. She put them back neatly, carefully, on the shelf, in order of height. She opened the stainless-steel sterilizer, her index finger pointing and moving as she checked its contents. She inspected a pile of X-rays, lying on the bench, holding them up in front of the light box, leaning forward to examine the ghostly remains of others who had passed through here. She paced from one side of the room to the other, her feet keeping carefully to the marking of the black and white floor. Her lips were moving but they could hear nothing. She took off her shawl and dropped it, a spreading crimson stain. She sat down, her back against the wall, and rocked herself backwards and forwards. She put her hand in her pocket. She pulled out a rose, yellow, full-blown, and held it to her nose. She stood then, and went back to the trolley. She lifted the sheet up and away. Beside McLoughlin, Finney gagged, a small choking sound, loud in the quiet of the corridor, then made as if to push open the door. McLoughlin put out his hand and grabbed hold of his arm. He shook his head.

  They watched her again. She was standing at the top of the trolley. She placed her palms on either side of her daughter’s face. Then she walked around and stood beside her, running her hands down the girl’s beaten body, marking the pattern of the bruises, green, yellow, brown and black. She bent down and kissed each stiffened finger and tried to twist her own into the rigid palms. Then she went back up to her daughter’s head. She leaned over and kissed her on the lips, placing the rose so its petals nestled into her neck. Then she turned away.

  9

  And so the wheel is put in motion, thought McLoughlin. A rock drops into a mountain lake and the ripples spread. A shot bursts from the barrel of a gun and a flock of crows wheel into the sky. A butterfly flaps its wings and on the other side of the world a tidal wave roars in from the sea. A girl is murdered, and throughout the city the stain of the crime disturbs, awakens, shuffles the deck of past anger and suspicion. He stood at his kitchen window high up in the Dublin mountains and watched as the natural glow of the sun faded and was replaced by the artificial brilliance of hundreds of thousands of lights, orange, yellow and white. Somewhere down there, he thought, we have all the answers to all the questions. Who and why, how and where, the basic tenets of the investigation of crime. Often, at the beginning of a case, he would stand here, a glass in his hand, and rummage through what he already knew. Then he would let his imagination drift and float, slipping like the elusive incandescence of a candle into all the corners which were, as yet, dark and gloomy. Obscured by the cobwebs of ignorance.

  This is the best time, he thought, as twilight turned to night. He toasted his reflection in the window. A time of anticipation, excitement, hope. No decisions had been made, no mistakes had been committed. It was all out there, waiting for him.

  He turned away and busied himself with the task of the evening. He would prepare dinner. He would eat something simple and cook it the way his father used to. He opened the fridge and took out a piece of meat in a plastic bag. It was fillet steak that he’d bought yesterday. He’d gone into town for a haircut, and afterwards, still with pinpricks of hair caught between his neck and his collar, he’d wandered around Grafton Street in the sunshine, drifting in and out of the shops in the narrow side streets, buying odds and ends of food. The steak, a bag of new potatoes, a couple of heads of dark green York cabbage, and a punnet of late-season raspberries, which he dipped into as he drove home. Good stuff. None of your overpriced ‘food as fashion accessory’, he thought, as he laid the meat on the counter and tipped the spuds into the sink to wash, and then into a large saucepan with a close-fitting lid.

  Janey wouldn’t be home until late, so the note on the dining-room table said. What was it tonight? He sifted through the week. Mondays was yoga. Tuesdays was enlightenment through meditation. Wednesdays was reflexology. Thursdays was poetry for beginners. Fridays was dinner with her mother. Saturdays she tried to keep free for him. Tonight was Sunday. That meant a get-together with the women from her group in some pub in town. Did he care? He opened the fridge again and took out a couple of cans of Guinness. He poured them into a pint glass, standing back and watching the transformation, like alchemy, as the cream-coloured liquid swirled in tiny whirlpools and finally settled. He drank. The cold sharpness hit his tongue. A wonderful sensation. Always surprising in its intensity. Like the way it was in the early days when he kissed Janey, when the taste of her mouth travelled through his body. In the days when they still made love. It had been a long time since he had wanted her like that. Sometimes he would wake in the night, pressed up against her back, his face buried in the nape of her neck. Once he would have driven halfway across the country to smell her particular smell, to feel her softness under his mouth. But now she would grunt and shift away and he would roll over and go back to sleep very quickly.

  He chopped the cabbage roughly and put it into a pot with an inch of water and a couple of shakes of salt. He lifted the lid on the potatoes, stepping back quickly as a geyser of steam threatened to envelop him, and prodded them with a knife. Another ten minutes or so, he reckoned. He bent over and sniffed the moist piece of fillet. Perfect. Perfectly tender. Just the faintest fleshy tang. It would take only a couple of minutes to cook. Best to wait until the vegetables were nearly ready.

  He laid the table, taking from the cupboard a cream linen cloth. Handmade. Part of their wedding present from Janey’s mother. He stroked the material with his fingertips. The same kind of stuff that woman was wearing this afternoon at the identification. He was still glad about the way he had handled it. Afterwards Finney had gone on and on about ‘procedure’. Fuck procedure and fuck these smart young guys who think they know all about it. He had lost count of the number of times he had watched mothers, fathers, uncles, brothers, sisters gaze at the body of someone close. He’d take a bet with himself. Nine times out of ten he was right. He might never get the evidence to prove it, but he could tell straight away if they were involved in the death. In all the years, though, he’d never seen anyone respond the way she had. Stripping the sheet off the girl. That took something. Guts, madness, or a combination of the two. He’d watched her face as she looked at her daughter. At the purple bruises across her stomach. At the cuts, bites, and burns eating into her skin. He had to turn away, to rest his eyes on the neutral white tiles on the floor. But she didn’t.

  He got up and went out to his briefcase, lying where he’d dropped it in the hall. He took the file from it that the lads in Dun Laoghaire had given him. He opened it. All the missing-person stuff. There was a photograph clipped to the top cover. He picked up his glass and drank deeply. She was a little beauty. Heart-shaped face, dark blue eyes, white teeth, with a little gap between the front two. Such a smile. Involuntarily he smiled back at her. He thought again of the woman they had picked up from the old house down by the Martello tower in Monkstown. He had angled the wing mirror as they drove in along the sea road, and watched her. The same shaped face, but thinner, sharper. High cheekbones, grey eyes, full mouth. She reminded him of som
eone you’d see in a pre-Raphaelite painting. Something by Burne-Jones or Dante Gabriel Rossetti. A bit smaller, maybe, and thinner, but with that same perfection of features. She must be well into her forties but she didn’t look it. Except if you looked closely. Then you’d notice the looseness in the skin of her neck, the lines that underscored her eyes, the slackness of her breasts as they flattened under her dress, and the narrow streaks of grey in her sleek brown hair.

  He drained the potatoes and left them to dry in the colander. He turned off the heat under the cabbage, and set the frying pan down on the ring. He poured in groundnut oil and waited until a wisp of smoke signalled its readiness. Then he dumped the steak down, quickly, first one side then the other, searing it, then cooking it more slowly for another couple of minutes. He put the meat on a warmed plate in the oven, and added a spoonful of mustard and a dollop of cream to the pan, stirring slowly until all the flavours were mixed and the sauce flowed smoothly.

  Here, Michael. Taste this.

  A large hand holding a wooden spoon in front of his face.

  No, Da. It’s mustard. I don’t like it. It’s too hot.

  Not like this, Michael, taste it.

  A tongue licking, tentatively, then quickly as his saliva began to flow. That’s lovely, can I have some more?

  Looking up at the tall man leaning over the stove, a flowery apron tied over his uniform shirt and trousers and a grin of anticipation for the feast to come.

  He sat down at the table, poured the sauce over the meat, piled potatoes and cabbage onto the plate, added a large pat of butter and plenty of salt and began to eat. Janey wouldn’t eat like this now. She’d given up animal fats. The fridge was filled with tubs of soya-based spreads. He told her that he couldn’t eat food made without the proper ingredients. You have to have fat, he said. It’s a flavour enhancer. It makes it taste. But she didn’t want to know. She’d gone right off cooking. All she ever used was the microwave and the kettle. Instant meals eaten standing up. ‘Like a horse,’ as Anthony Quinn said, once, in that great old film La Strada.