by Shane Dunphy
‘I don’t know. I haven’t read a whole lot about them, to be honest. Saw a movie about them when I was a teenager, but I don’t remember much about it.’
‘That’s okay.’
The food had made Sylvie drowsy. I left her sitting with her eyes partially closed, listening to the music, and did the washing up. When I’d dried up and put the crockery and cutlery away, I came back into the living room to find her fast asleep. I looked at Gloria, who was still engrossed by the bear.
‘Well, it’s just you and me, kiddo,’ I said in a whisper.
I played quietly with the child for an hour or so. The quality of light coming in through the windows changed slowly to golden and then a deep red. Gloria began to yawn too, and I made her up a bottle and changed her nappy. She fell asleep on my knee finishing her formula and I brought her into the cot in one of the small bedrooms and covered her over.
I went over to the CD player. She seemed to have only three albums: greatest hits from the Carpenters, Elvis, and Simon and Garfunkel. I put Simon and Garfunkel on, and went to the open window to smoke a cigarette.
Sylvie stirred into wakefulness as Art Garfunkel was singing For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her.
‘What do you think he’s singing about?’ she asked, her voice still thick with sleep.
‘I always thought he was singing about a girl he loved. I don’t think the words make much sense really. They’re pretty, though.’
‘Do you have a girl?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you love her?’
‘I do.’
‘Does she love you?’
‘Yeah, I think she does.’
‘Why aren’t you with her now?’
‘She doesn’t live in the city. She has a job somewhere else.’
‘D’you miss her?’
‘Sometimes.’
The sun was sinking over the rooftops outside, the room dark, now. I felt tired suddenly. How could I help this child? Was I fooling myself into thinking I could save her when she was so very far gone? I pushed the feeling aside and flicked the butt out of the window. We needed to talk about the future. The conversation could wait no longer.
‘Enjoy your sleep?’
She nodded. ‘Where’s Gloria?’
‘In her cot. I gave her a bottle and changed her, and she conked out. She was no bother.’
‘She never is.’
‘Sylvie, we need to talk about what you’re going to do.’
‘I know.’
‘Have you thought about it, at all?’
‘Of course I have.’
‘And?’
‘Can’t I stay here? I don’t think he’s comin’ back. He kept sayin’ how you’d messed it all up for him. How he’d never have any peace here now. I could sign on the dole, or somethin’.’
‘You’re too young to get the dole, pet. You’d get Lone Parent’s Allowance, I think, but even then questions would be asked. We’re going to have to bring in the Health Services, I’m afraid. Look, I know some people. I promise you that I will not allow them to take Gloria away. There are places where you can both live and where you’ll get support.’
‘I can do it myself, Shane. I don’t want to go back into care. I can manage.’
‘No, you can’t. Look at the condition you were in when I got here. And you would have gone back out to the street. That temptation will always be there, and you need to learn other ways of coping. Your father may come back, and what then? We have to make sure that you’re completely safe.’
‘Shane.’ She was crying now. I couldn’t see the tears in the half-light, but I could hear them. ‘I’ve been fucked by the system before. I know that I can’t live like this, and I don’t want to. But I can’t go back into care either. I just can’t. I don’t know what to do.’
I went over to her and took her hands in mine. ‘I left you before, Sylvie, and I’m sorry. I won’t again. I give you my word that I will not let anything happen to you. I’m going to get you a phone, with my number on speed-dial, and you can call me at any time and I will be there. I work with a man who can help us to find somewhere that’s just right for you and Gloria. I’ll talk to him tomorrow and we’ll start looking. It’ll work out, I swear.’
She lost control of the tears. ‘Oh God, help me. Please help me. I can’t do this any more.’
I put my arms around her and let her cry. The sobs racked her small frame as nearly fourteen years of pain and loss finally bubbled to the surface. There was nothing I could do but let her pour it all out, and I knelt there on the tatty carpet in the darkness and held her.
It seemed to go on for a long time. Finally she said: ‘Sorry.’
‘What for?’
‘Being such a dork.’
‘That’s okay. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.’
‘I’ll go where you tell me to go. I don’t have much other choice, do I?’
‘There are always choices, honey. That’s something you need to learn. The trick is to know the right one when you see it. That’ll be something for both of us to work on. We need to find the best option for you and that little girl in there. We’ll work on it together, with my boss, and we’ll get it right, I promise. And if we don’t, we’ll try something else, and we’ll keep trying until we do get it right.’
‘Do you swear? Cross you heart and hope to die?’
‘Cross my heart.’
‘Okay then.’
My legs were cramping, but I stayed where I was. She was pressed tight into me, her fingers digging into my shoulders in a fierce grip.
‘Why are you helping me?’ she whispered, her face against my hair.
I considered my answer carefully, knowing that she was terrified of what it might be.
‘Because you were my friend,’ I said at last. ‘Back when you were only little, you were my friend, and I probably got a lot more out of that friendship than you did.’
‘How?’
‘I was only a student when I worked with you before. I was learning how to be a childcare worker. You taught me an awful lot just by letting me be around you. I left, and I don’t think I even said goodbye.’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘Neither do I, which makes me think I didn’t. I was young, only a teenager, and I was probably afraid of making a dork of myself if I said goodbye to you.’
‘Really?’
‘Yep.’
‘I don’t think I would have minded.’
‘I know that now. I guess there was a bit more for me to learn.’
‘It’s nice you liked me enough to be worried about that.’
‘I did. I still do. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.’
‘I know. Thanks.’
And I half knelt/half crouched there, with her clinging to me for dear life and my legs going numb as night bore down on us and the city honked and hissed and blared beyond the window.
12
I went to see Mr and Mrs Byrne two days later.
They had been moved from the near-derelict structure they owned, where they had systematically tortured Larry and Francey, and placed in a small local authority house close to the city centre. I took a bus to the secluded estate and arrived shortly after ten in the morning. Loud country and western music was blaring through the front door, and I had to knock hard before I finally gained admittance.
Vera Byrne was probably not five feet in platforms. She had long, dishwater-blonde hair and prominent buck-teeth. Her eyebrows formed one single line of dense hair across her forehead, and she had a pronounced squint. There was about her a steely intelligence, though.
Malachi Byrne, on the other hand, was over six feet tall with a pendulous gut and an upper body so wide he had to turn sideways to get through most doorways. This great bulk sat atop two skinny, short legs, making him look like he was on the verge of overbalancing all the time. He had little hair, and what he did have was cropped close to his skull in a crew cut. His face, which was swathed in great rolls of fatty flesh, contained two sm
all, round eyes that were set close together and gave him a slow-witted, indolent look.
‘Turn down the tape, Mal,’ Vera roared over the noise as she showed me into the kitchen. ‘We’ve a visitor.’
The house was sparsely furnished and decorated. There were no pictures on the walls and no ornaments or oddments anywhere. I sat on a narrow couch and waited while they busied themselves making tea and laying some crumbly digestive biscuits on a plate.
‘I’m not staying long,’ I said, as the pair pulled over straight-backed kitchen chairs and eyed me with open suspicion. ‘I just want to ask a favour, really.’
‘Go on, speak your mind,’ Vera said, smiling in a way that was making me feel decidedly uncomfortable. It was how I imagined a fox would view a rabbit just before it sprang.
‘I was wondering if you could give me a loan of the keys to your place in Oldtown.’
‘Now why would you be wantin’ those?’ Vera asked, continuing to leer. She had a habit of breathing through her mouth rather than her nose, and the sound of her sucking air in and out over those incisors was horrible. Her breath was rank too. I could smell it from where I sat.
‘I want to bring Larry and Francey back there for a visit. I think it would be good for them.’
‘You’re up to something,’ Vera said, her smile broadening. ‘Have a bicky.’
‘Thank you, no.’
‘So why do you really want to go back to our home? Why should I give you the keys to the kingdom?’
‘Your children are trying to make some sense of what has happened to them, Mrs Byrne. I believe that returning to the place where they grew up would be beneficial. They might be better able to put things in context.’
She looked at her husband, smacking her thin lips and shaking her head in a mock of confusion. ‘He sure talks sweet, doesn’t he, Mal? What do you think he meant by all that palaver?’
‘I don’t know, Vera.’ The big man’s voice was deep and stentorian. He seemed to speak only when spoken to, and spent most his time in still silence.
‘What are you actually sayin’, young fella?’ Vera hissed.
‘That your children need to get back into the house where it seems some frightening things happened to them. You would be doing them a great service, and showing yourselves willing to help with their recovery, by giving me the keys.’
She leaned close, her brow almost touching mine. I held my breath against the reek of her.
‘Tell me now, young man. What do you think happened to them?’
‘It doesn’t matter what I think, Mrs Byrne,’ I said through gritted teeth, trying hard not to retch. ‘It’s what I know that counts.’
‘And what do you know?’
I thought about laying my cards on the table. It would have been good to freak the harridan out by telling her exactly what I knew of her. But I held back. I realized that there was much I still did not know. The children had given us only hints, allusions, hazy phantoms of what they had experienced. The way to break through the barrier of fear and suppression was to bring them back, and to do that I needed their parents’ permission. My great fear was that the twins weren’t ready, that making them relive their experiences would be too much. I did not want to shatter the tenuous equilibrium they had achieved.
‘I don’t know anything, Mrs Byrne. The children have said very little.’
‘Humph,’ she grunted and sat back.
I shuddered, not caring if they saw it or not. ‘Can I have the keys, then?’
‘Give them to him, Mal,’ she snapped.
The huge man stood up and stomped from the room.
‘When do I get my children back?’ she hissed at me when we were alone. ‘They belong to me, and I want them.’
‘I have no say over that. It’s up to the courts.’
‘You tell them I want my children back, and I shall have them, come hell or high water. You can’t keep me from what’s mine.’
‘It’s not as simple as that, Mrs Byrne.’
‘Oh, it is.’ She raised her hand to shush me, displaying long, cracked fingernails. ‘It is that simple. Give them to me, or I’ll come and take them. I don’t care which way it goes. Either is just grand with me.’
‘Do you realize what you’re saying, Mrs Byrne? You have just told me you intend to abduct your children unless they are returned to you.’
She suddenly burst into a gurgling, throaty cackle, tossing her head back and slapping her bony knees, spraying me with foul saliva in the process.
‘Oh Christ, d’you hear him? Now I may well have said that, but there’s nobody here but you and me, and I don’t recall sayin’ anythin’ of the sort.’
‘I just heard you.’
She leaned in close again, and this time I pulled back from her proximity.
‘Well, isn’t it an awful pity you didn’t have a tape recorder with you?’
Malachi Byrne lumbered back in with a huge bundle of rusted keys on a metal loop. He tossed it at me, and they hit the back of the couch where I sat with a heavy thud.
‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Play your games. Get those keys back to us by next week, no later. That’s still our house, and we’ll be returning there one of these days. I’ll be having those two little ones back soon enough, too, so make the best of them while you can. Show him the door, Mal, my love.’
A hand like a shovel made to grab me by the shoulder, but I twisted away and shot out of his reach.
‘I can find my way, thank you.’
My phone rang as I walked back to the bus stop. I looked at the display, but the number had been withheld.
‘Yes?’
‘It’s Devereux. I think I may have something.’
‘Go on.’ Mina had been missing for three days, now, and the chances of finding her were getting slimmer by the hour.
‘I have the name of someone with the particular … propensities we discussed. He fits the description of the man you encountered in The Sailing Cot.’
‘Do you have an address?’
‘Not yet. But I will. Probably by this evening. We should move as soon as possible.’
‘Agreed. Call me.’
‘We’ll talk later.’
Olwyn seemed to have abandoned the Goth look completely. She was not due on shift that morning, and I met her at an Internet cafe near where she lived. She told me airily that she was a huge fan Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and had developed several websites which she spent nearly all her free time maintaining. But the coffee was very good and the geek factor was always entertaining, so I didn’t complain.
‘Why Buffy?’ I asked out of idle curiosity as she tapped away at the keyboard, her eyes glued to the monitor.
‘Because it’s the best thing on TV. And it speaks to me. I see a lot of my life in there.’
‘Ah, but is it better than The Simpsons?’
‘Different types of shows. I don’t really watch cartoons.’
‘Do you watch anything other than Buffy and Angel?’
‘Um … no.’
‘Hard to make any comparisons, then.’
‘S’pose.’
I watched her continue to post whatever comment she was broadcasting across the globe via the world-wide-web. A skinny kid sitting on the other side of me puffed on an asthma inhaler. Two pre-pubescents across the room were arguing the relative merits of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings versus Ralph Bakshi’s cartoon version. The fact that I actually knew what they were talking about made me wonder about my own nerd credentials, which caused me to feel a bit uncomfortable, so I stopped listening. Finally, Olwyn swung her chair away from the screen and smiled at me. ‘So, what’s up?’
I hoisted the keys up onto the desk in front of her. She stared at them.
‘What are those?’
‘The keys to the Byrne homestead.’
‘Why are you showing them to me?’
‘I want to bring Larry and Francey back there.’
She turned pale. Without the make-up she was actuall
y quite a pretty girl. My heart went out to her. She knew what I was about to ask, and I watched her struggle with the desire to tell me to go to hell.
‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘I want you to come with me.’
‘But … but I’m a screw-up. I’m no good, Shane. Take someone else.’
‘Who?’
‘Karena. Bríd, maybe.’
‘There’s no bond there. The twins haven’t shown any affection or interest in anyone else. You’re the only person on the staff team either of the twins has formed an attachment to. Which makes you the obvious choice.’
She was still gazing at the keys. I had to admit, they were quite a sight; these were not the modern type, but the big, ornate pieces of ironmongery from the doors of an old home with ancient, heavy locks. There was a weighty symbolism at play. I was aware of it – how could I fail to be? Here were the keys to these tormented children’s souls. We were about to open Pandora’s Box.
‘I … I don’t want to go. I’m sorry. I just can’t.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m afraid of what we’ll find.’
‘Me too.’
She reached over to touch the keys and pulled back, as if they were conducting an electric charge.
‘Do you really think going out there will do any good?’ she asked, looking at me at last.
‘I don’t know. I hope that the children will take us on a kind of tour, tell us what their lives were like when they lived there. I’m going to ask them to show us where they slept and ate and played, and we’ll just have to see what comes out. I imagine it’ll be fairly unpleasant stuff, and that they’ll maybe freak out a little. But the precise details … we’ll just have to wait and see.’
‘But you must have some idea.’
‘Yes, but only suspicions. I think that it’s going to be a difficult, horrible experience for all four of us. But I firmly believe – no, strike that – I know that it’s the only way we’re ever going to get through to the twins. I can’t do it on my own, and I need someone with me they’ll respond to if it gets rough, which it probably will.’
‘When do you want to go?’
‘This afternoon.’
‘Oh God!’
She buried her face in her hands. I knew how she was feeling, because I was feeling it too. I didn’t want to do this any more than she did. But there was no other way.
