‘And how was your day?’ one would ask, while the others tried not to splutter.
‘The same,’ I would say.
‘No little jaunt to town?’
‘No jaunt to town.’ I would feel myself blushing. I’d never felt so ancient or beyond the pale. ‘Not today.’
Nights were spent together, gazing at a screen in that front room. Once, out of nowhere, midway through the evening news, my own ageing face flickered across and the voiceover reported my name. Then the grey mac in which I was partially shrouded slipped under escort into an open entrance. A couple of seconds, tops. The lads froze. Even the world without seemed to freeze. I should have said something, made light of it.
‘Yes.’ One of them coughed, rising hastily to insert a disc. ‘Indeed.’
After that, our evening’s viewing was confined to films. I had no choice in what was shown. The choice went in a rota that never stopped at me. Once the set-up was complete, the ceiling lights were lowered and I sat back closest to the door while all manner of flesh writhed before us. I had heard that such viewing had become commonplace among the younger generation, but it was foreign to me. Instead of watching it, I watched them watching it. What a tragic path we have chosen, I thought. They will probably never know such carnal abandon, such ‘passion’, for want of a better word. They will desire it and never get near it. It was like watching bullocks penned in the same field for far too long. The nearest they would ever get to it was that gloomy space. I remember their competing colognes, and the shine off their high foreheads and gelled hair. I remember their silence.
Mostly, after a fashion, I closed my eyes. I blanked out the groans and whimpers. Over time, I learned to recognize the moment when I could slip away upstairs unnoticed.
About twice a month my door was tapped on last thing at night. ‘Up and ready early,’ one of the lads would bellow in. I assumed they had been told to warn me, though I could never understand why it seemed preferable to the authorities to tip off my junior colleagues rather than simply tell me.
‘Okay,’ I would call back. ‘Thank you.’
Those nights were not great for sleep. I would lie there listening to rain on the slates, would rise in blackness before any alarm or call or daylight, shave, shower and wait unbreakfasted in the front room downstairs.
For what? Interviews, several interviews, in a series of different stations. They were, I quipped, my stations of the cross. Curtin and his crew kept insisting that I avail myself of legal representation. So certain was I of my own innocence that, every time they insisted, I thumbed heavenwards and said I already had the only representation I needed.
Listening to the interviews now, they become interchangeable. I describe everything that happened from the moment that my front door started banging: the wild creature on my step; the first night and the law’s presence among us; the Sunday and my visit back to that house with the girl; everything she told me by my fire while the rain fell in torrents without; what she asked of me on the landing and how I responded; what I heard in the darkness and will never forget.
‘I did contact the local station,’ I say once. ‘Late the second afternoon.’
‘You called and spoke with someone?’
‘I did. I called around half past five, to say I was taking her over to the house to fetch her computer, in case any of you landed and wondered where we were.’
‘No,’ Curtin says. ‘No record of that.’
‘Somebody must have.’
Thereafter, their number rang out and my line went dead. The world seemed to recede the harder I tried to reach it.
‘What happened that nobody came or answered?’
‘You don’t know?’ Curtin asks.
‘I wouldn’t ask if I knew.’
‘The courthouse went up.’
‘What does went up mean?’
‘As in in smoke. It went up, and it went on hours.’
‘I thought I saw something all right,’ I say. ‘I honestly didn’t know that. But that doesn’t make her stopping with me a second night, alone, my choice or doing.’
‘Nobody is suggesting that it does.’
‘I was left to my own devices, such that they were, and placed in an impossible position.’
The less they contribute, the more I babble. Doubtless this is part of the technique. I was left alone and did what best I could. With each fresh insistence, my pitch increases, my animation grows. Even now and here, many years later, I seem intent on digging myself into a deeper hole. I sound ever more guilty.
My brother came. Nobody told me he was coming. We hadn’t seen one another in the flesh for a couple of decades by then, not since our mother’s funeral. I had given his details, months before, when the authorities asked if they could contact someone on my behalf, but had forgotten. I drifted off one of those afternoons in the front room, and when I came to a heavy-set man was sitting next to me on the sofa. He was smiling. He said, ‘How you doing?’ and patted my knee. He looked familiar, but I couldn’t for the life of me put a name to his face. Then it clicked.
‘Are you really here?’
‘I sure am,’ he said. He was laughing. ‘I’m really here.’
Even then I wondered if I was still asleep and his presence was just in my head. I had difficulty crediting it. Was he stopping on the way to somewhere else, or had he come just to see me? I had been so long alone by then. His familiar face seemed initially an apparition, a piece of wishful thinking, a daydream that had to be little more than a by-product of exile and solitude.
‘Hey,’ he said. He said it softly. He patted my knee again. ‘Come on.’
Until he said that, I hadn’t realized I was blubbing. I could feel my throat catch and tears welling hot in the corners of my eyes. One of the young lads, whichever of them was on duty, made to enter the room, but he had scarcely got his head around the door when my brother said, ‘Thank you,’ coldly and the door dragged shut again. He had, I presume, met the lads. They would have let him in. He had already formed, I could tell, an unflattering opinion of them. He even shook his head, my brother did, and I laughed, too, and struggled upright in my seat.
‘You’re pretty beat up.’
‘I’m grand,’ I said, blowing my nose and clearing my throat at once. ‘What’s with the accent and the freckles?’
We smiled, both of us.
‘You’re grand,’ he said, in such a way as to imply that he hadn’t said that word in years and had forgotten what it meant. He peered around the decor, lamp-lit in winter gloaming. ‘Sure you are.’
He stayed a week. He stayed in the only four-star hotel in the area, a dozen miles out the main road away from town. He made calls on my behalf, sought advice, talked to people. He set up another ‘meeting’, at which he would be present and would be prepared to force the issue. He played golf in the mornings, on the course attached to the hotel. He hired a ‘rental’, as he called it, and brought me on spins most afternoons. Once I asked him if my leaving the house was allowed. He said something dismissive about them trying to stop me. We had grown up at the far end of the country, so there were no old haunts to revisit. It was just a question of fresh air. The week he was there, around the middle of December, was clear and freezing. He liked, I remember, high points. He liked small roads that climbed hills to a view that took in a dome of deepening blue on all sides. We would park in the gate to some field and stand out and exhale white clouds.
‘You can tell me what you saw,’ he said, out on one of those spins. ‘Really.’
‘I saw nothing,’ I told him. ‘Really.’ I think he blushed then, or maybe it was just the cold. I was marking his card for him. He meant that if I cared to tell him the truth I had been withholding, it would be safe with him. ‘But nobody will listen to that. They all want me to be guilty.’
‘Do you believe that?’
‘Do I believe that? I do. I really do.’
‘All anybody wants,’ he said, ‘is for you to be honest.’
‘I’m being honest. Do you not think I’m being honest?’
‘Sure I do.’
‘No, you don’t,’ I said. ‘You don’t believe me and you don’t really understand.’
‘Tell me.’
‘It’s the bloody collar, isn’t it? It corners you into a story in which all fingers point your way. Nobody wants me to be honest. They just want me to admit to doing and seeing things that I neither did nor saw.’ When he said nothing, I said, ‘And do you know what?’
‘What?’
‘Sometimes I’m tempted to do just that. Sometimes I’m tempted to admit to a guilt that is not mine, if only to feel the warmth of your and everyone else’s forgiveness.’
‘Don’t.’ He wrapped one hand around the back of my neck, my little brother did, and pulled me towards him. ‘Don’t even dream about it.’
He cut an impressive figure. I was proud of him, and yet the prouder of him I felt, the stranger he seemed. To me he had always remained the ragamuffin who vanished on the eve of his first holy communion and appeared in half-light in our yard with a stray goat and howled blue murder in the bath after being told he couldn’t keep it. Now here he was, grey hair and frameless specs, managing the world with a quiet brusqueness. The other side of him, the gentleness, seemed reserved exclusively for me. I felt singled out for it; for his kindness, that is. Certainly the lads treated me differently. Their little digs stopped. Whenever he was present, waiting for me in the kitchen, say, they hovered around and made small talk in their best voices. When he dropped me off, and drove away without coming in or even getting out of the car, I would look in to bid them goodnight and they would pause their film and ask me where we had driven for our spin.
‘We have a saying. Perhaps you’re familiar with it. “Shit or get off the pot”?’
I have replayed this moment countless times. The grooves in the disc, if grooves there are, must be wearing thin. It sounds harsh, transcribed baldly like that, but it was not said harshly. It is my brother who says it. This is on the final disc, and is the longest unbroken segment. He had this enviable way of coming to the point without raising his pitch or playing tough. He was smiling, mildly, when he said it. At Curtin, whom he seemed to like, and the understudy seated in the fringes of the light. You can even hear Curtin chuckle. He knew immediately what was being said.
‘Not in so many words,’ Curtin says, obviously amused. We can be heard to chuckle here as well. ‘But the point is well made.’
This was the issue my brother kept returning to, when he and I spoke alone at dinner in the evenings in his hotel, how they seemed to want the period of suspicion to drift indefinitely. That was why he had flown over the Atlantic, the primary reason, at his own expense. In the initial fog, I had offered them his name. Unbeknown to me, he had spoken several times with Curtin over the phone, but there is only so much you can insist upon from the far side of the ocean. He flew in, a fortnight before Christmas, to demand on my behalf a resolution either way. When he first told me that this was what he intended to demand, I joked that I wanted a resolution only if it went in my favour; otherwise it could drift as indefinitely as they cared to let it. My brother just continued to scribble notes.
‘Can you tell us what the girl said about Martina?’ Curtin says.
‘Only that she disappeared as well.’
‘You know this for a fact?’
‘I know only what the girl told me. She told me that her auntie went out one night, the way she always did, and never returned.’
‘As far as we’re aware, this was never reported.’
‘The girl told me that her father said to say nothing to anyone. For fear that it would look bad, apparently.’
‘Look,’ my brother says abruptly. He says it to Curtin. He wants to return to his original point. He wants to draw a line under their questioning of me. ‘As I see it, you’ve got nothing. We are requesting, respectfully, that you acknowledge this and give my brother back his life.’
‘Blood not good enough for you?’
It is the younger one who says this. The more I listen to the discs, the more it’s clear that this is his role. Curtin never says any of this stuff. He leaves all this to his pitbull and gets to play the avuncular inquisitor, the way it happens on the shows.
‘Excuse me?’ My brother didn’t much care for the younger one. He told me so. You can hear the irritation. ‘Really?’
‘It’s true,’ Curtin says. He inserts a long space. He used his pipe for punctuation, as some people might begin a tale and fill their mouths with food and leave you hanging. ‘We found a patch of blood.’ They must have known this for months. They had been biding their time. ‘We found blood on the sheet in your spare room.’
‘I know nothing about that,’ I say. I was looking at my brother when I say this.
‘We know nothing of this,’ he tells them, as if they haven’t heard me. ‘And you’re certain the blood is the girl’s?’
‘We can’t know that,’ Curtin says. ‘We have nothing to test it against.’
‘Which is presumably why you haven’t raised it before now.’
‘Correct.’
Curtin, I remember, glanced sideways when he replied. The younger one wasn’t, I decided, supposed to have said that. He had said it only out of frustration. Curtin was smoothing over the impact, the cracks.
‘It was hers.’ My voice says this, though it scarcely sounds as if I realize I’m saying it. I sound like one realizing something only as they speak. ‘The blood. It was hers.’ I was thrown at first. Then I recalled the phrase my cleaner had used and parroted it unthinkingly. ‘In her flowers.’
‘Excuse me?’ Curtin asks.
They all laugh. Even the uniform in shadow over towards the door does. Even my own brother.
‘She was in her flowers,’ I say, composing myself. ‘It’s how my cleaner termed that time of the month.’ I remember how I had to keep reminding myself, inside, that this was the truth, however much it sounded otherwise.
‘Are you telling us she had her period when she stayed with you?’
‘Yes,’ I say, ‘that’s exactly what I’m telling you. My cleaner escorted the girl up to her room, and when she came back down she told me that she was in her flowers.’ My brother was staring sideways at me. He wanted me, I think, to stop speaking. ‘The very phrase she used. I asked her what it meant. I asked her what that phrase meant and she said “time of the month”.’
‘Hence the blood,’ Curtin says.
‘When you say you have nothing to test it against . . .’ My brother’s accent is smooth and curved at the edges. ‘What does that mean?’
‘It means we have no samples, fingerprints or DNA, that we know to be definitively hers.’ The lads had told me that Curtin had lost a teenage son in a car accident. Many moons before. His wife had been largely bedridden ever since, and suffered with her nerves. ‘We have fingerprints from the two houses that match, all right, but who they belong to we can’t be sure.’ Each time I sat opposite Curtin, his boy’s death hovered over his head. ‘We have no certificate of birth. Apart from what must have been the father’s, the vast majority of samples taken from their house have proven identical to that patch of blood. It means that we’re entertaining the possibility that there might never have been any girl.’
Curtin drags out that last word. He intends it to sound like a gurgle. He means that ‘the girl’ is my phrase. He means that ‘the girl’ is possibly my invention.
‘This is such nonsense,’ I say. ‘So who was it stayed in my spare room?’ My pitch is raised. ‘One of the sisters? Is that what you’re saying?’ My brother can be heard attempting to placate me in the background. ‘This is cobblers!’ I am actually shouting now. ‘She was just a child. You spoke to her yourself, more than once. You even held her hand, remember?’ I am working hard to keep my voice from breaking. ‘Do you not think you might have noticed? Do you not think I might have noticed? She stopped two nights in my house, thanks to you shower. She sat
on my knee, for crying out loud.’
Beyond this point, I cannot bring myself to listen.
One day, not long after, all of it just stopped: the questioning, the vigil, the speculation, the coverage, the disgrace . . . My cleaner had cleaned everything, including the glass from which the girl had sipped brandy and even the orange Virginia sweatshirt in which she had warmed herself. To my surprise, I found the latter folded in the airing cupboard.
Nobody came near me. Nobody called. All sacramental duties were detailed to someone else for the foreseeable future. I became a bit of a recluse. I didn’t dare show my face up the street. Closed doors scared me: apart from front and back, every one of them had to be open at all times, for fear of unfamiliar sounds. I could stand in one place, as if in a trance, resurface into consciousness, forgetting what simple act it was I had commissioned of myself, and find that hours had passed. Whole evenings got lost at the foot of the stairs, waiting for a solitary creak to repeat.
I slept in the spare bed. The linen was new: you could tell by the wrapping’s creases. I lay awake in the same dark she had lain in, my own face just beneath the fold of the sheets, certain at times that I could hear her footfalls amid the echoes of New Year’s revellers on the road.
I even had a bath, something I hadn’t done since I was a child. That was the one space they had missed. When I climbed in, there was a ring of blue all around the lower rim. It was from the words in marker that the girl had washed off her skin, a pale, diluted blue, but still intact. She must have washed in an inch of water, and all the words had blurred into a ring of scum that nobody had thought to clean. It wasn’t visible from anywhere else in the room. It was only if you climbed in that it became apparent. I remember running my thumb through it, moist from the warm water, and sucking my thumb as an infant would and convincing myself that something of her was mingled in the dirty soap I was swallowing.
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