Stolen Child

by Laura Elliot

  ‘Good luck,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell Joy you’re hard at work.’ He hesitated. ‘I’m visiting my father. Is there anything you’d like me to say to him?’

  She shook her head. ‘We parted on bad terms,’ she said. ‘I don’t think he wants to hear anything I have to say.’

  The sky was gentler now, wispy clouds stippled pink and pewter. She removed her scarf and jacket, and continued working. Splotch snoozed under the plum tree.

  At noon she drove to Molloy’s for lunch. She ordered soup and a baguette, suddenly ravenously hungry. The baguette came with a generous filling that could be enjoyed comfortably only in private. She was unconcerned by the squishing salad dressing and tomatoes, mopping her lips after each bite, anxious to return to the place of stone. The psychic’s words resonated with power and certainty.

  Chapter Seventy-Nine

  Joy

  ‘How do you know you’re in love?’ Joy asks Mary.

  ‘It shakes your heart to bits,’ replies Mary, which, Joy thinks, is the first time Mary has given her an answer in plain English.

  She is sleeping when Joey arrives. It’s the afternoon and the patients have sunk into the hush that follows the rattling dinner trolleys. He calls her name so softly that when she sees him sitting beside her bed she is unsure if she is still dreaming.

  He smiles and winks. ‘Wake up, lazybones. I didn’t come all this way to listen to you snoring.’

  ‘I love you, Joey,’ she says but she must be speaking to herself because his gaze doesn’t flicker away from her, nor does his mouth go tight with disapproval.

  He unwraps grapes and magazines and her favourite chocolate biscuits.

  ‘How’s Dad?’ she asks. ‘He’s so cheerful in his letters it makes me want to scream.’

  ‘Patient,’ says Joey, no longer smiling. ‘But convinced his legal team will mount a strong defence.’

  ‘Did you tell him about the Judgement Book?’

  He shook his head. ‘No sense getting his hopes up.’

  ‘You don’t believe in it?’

  ‘I’ve an open mind. Carla was working up a real lather when I left. How are you?’

  ‘How do I look?’

  ‘Ugly as ever.’

  ‘Got lost, punk!’

  ‘Cheeky as ever.’

  ‘I love you, Joey.’ This time she says it aloud.

  His smile slides from his face. ‘Don’t, Joy,’ he says but she flaps her hand at him, orders him to listen.

  ‘It’s just love,’ she says. ‘It’s not weird or confused or messing with my head any more. I want us to be the way we always were. Just an E between us. Brother and sister. I don’t want that to ever change. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’ He leans across the bed and rests his palm against her cheek. His eyes narrow and his gaze seems to pull her inwards, as if he too is remembering the night of the party when, for an instant, blood and kinship no longer mattered and forbidden kisses almost breached a dangerous taboo. ‘No matter what happens in the future, you’ll always be part of me.’

  Families, Joy sighs. Who can define them? Are they made from flesh and blood? From circumstances or a whim? From a secret buried deep in a grave? And does it matter how they form as long as they are forged from love?

  She hobbles with him to the elevator.

  ‘See you, sis,’ he says.

  ‘Cheers, bro.’

  She waits until the display signals that the elevator has reached the ground floor and he is striding from the hospital. Then, carefully, painfully, she swings her crutches and begins her long journey back to the ward.

  Chapter Eighty

  Carla

  She scythed through the wild grasses, cutting deep and low into the stems until she could clearly see what she sought. It was the hint of gold that made her pause. The early blossoming cowslips and primroses were just beginning to open. She hunkered down, seeking a pattern among the stubbly growth, and noticed the small oblong bed of clay beneath the cottage window.

  She found a pickaxe and spade in the garden shed and carried it back, swung the pickaxe over her shoulder and down into the earth. The budding flowers split, leaves and blossoms crushed to pulp before being covered by mounds of clay. The earth below was stony and unyielding. At times it seemed an impossible task to dig any deeper. No book was buried here, and if it was it would have disintegrated.

  But she had known that all along. The evening shadows fell across the walls. Suddenly nervous, aware of the isolation, she rested, leaning against the handle of the spade. Something moved, startling her. A rat darted from the undergrowth inside the cottage. Head down, tiny paws scrabbling against the mounds of clay, it ran past her and disappeared into the ditch. Carla’s feet slipped. Before she could regain her balance, she had collapsed into the excavated opening. Knee-deep in the earth, she tried to hoist herself upwards but the loosened earth moved under her hands. Clay and pebbles poured into her wellingtons. Something shifted beneath her feet, malleable, rootless. Once again, she reached forward, grasped the trunk of a plum tree and clambered out. Her skin crawled as the wind strengthened around this cottage with its suppressed secrets. She forced herself to look downwards at the shroud of plastic. She had found what she had sought. She brushed the clinging earth loose from her skin and walked away from the spot where Susanne Dowling had buried her unobtainable dream.

  The last police car departed. When the headlights faded, Carla watched the darkness settle over the Burren. Back inside, she switched on the kettle and made tea. She had spoken to Joy on the phone and promised to be with her the following day. DNA tests would be carried out on the delicate substance that still clung to the blanket Susanne Dowling had wrapped around her child. Carla had no doubt they would provide a match with David’s DNA. No wonder Joy had struggled so hard to win her affection, unaware that Susanne Dowling’s emotions had withered as soon as she had turned that first sod of earth.

  Carla entered the glass conservatory. Here, for the first time, she had a sense of the woman who had lived the life that should have belonged to her. The conservatory was an ugly appendage to the old house yet Susanne had made it her own. The willow sofa and armchairs, the metal-framed occasional table with the glass surface, the bric-a-brac and candles had been chosen by her. She had sat here in the evenings, watching the sun setting, writing in her Judgement Book, wailing against her glass wall.

  The blind stallion stood on top of a small, stone rectangular table, framed on either side by a potted yucca and a trailing ivy. The plants had died from lack of watering and the stallion was covered in dust. Carla studied the fierce expression, the drawn-back lips, the glimpse of teeth, the bevelled, angry eyes.

  She walked to the back door where she had left the pickaxe. Clods of muck fell from its head as she slammed it against the wall. Splotch whined and scampered into the darkness, unnerved, perhaps, by the fury eminating from her. She carried the pickaxe back to the conservatory and swung it high. It was easy to slash the chintzy cushions, to shred the soft fabric. She smashed the occasional table and stepped back from the flying glass. She swung the pickaxe across the shelves of bric-a-brac and watched a photograph of Susanne Dowling shatter in its silver frame. Shards glinted between the wooden boards. Trembling so violently that she wondered if she would be able to continue standing upright, she crunched the glass to powder under her heel.

  The stallion glinted under the light, flailing, always flailing to escape the reins of blindness. Carla brought the pickaxe down so violently she smashed open the surface of the pedestal table on which it rested. A deep wedge appeared. She lifted the pickaxe in a last violent swing. A lock snapped and the edge of a drawer was visible. It jammed, damaged and listing from her attack, but she managed to force it open. She carried the journals to the kitchen. The Aga burned brightly and she was able to draw strength from its heat as she turned the first page. Night turned to morning and she still sat in the same position, reading. She had been Susanne Dowling’s conscience. The spectr
e breathing constantly against the back of her neck. All the strands coming together, weaving in and out of the same piece of tapestry. When she finished the last journal she began again at the beginning.

  I buried my baby on the shortest night of the year. We were shielded by old walls when I laid her to rest in a shadowy wilderness of lilac and elderberry. She was my almost-child, my shattered dream. Sixteen weeks in my womb before she came away. Born on the longest day of the year, webbed fingers and toes, her veins delicate as skeins of silk. Sweet little monkey face.

  Chapter Eighty-One

  Joy

  New faces, new places, embraces, awkward silences, sly glances, shy glances, handshakes, bear hugs, high fives, laughter, tears, curiosity, cousins, grandparents, aunts and uncles. Parents. Her real father is a tall man, stern-faced, his eyes red from weeping. He sits beside her bed and apologises for not having faith. He looks at her mother with such hunger that Joy wonders how a tiny baby such as she could have broken them apart. When he says goodbye, she promises to visit him and his wife in Australia and meet her half-brothers. Her mother drives him to the airport. Her gaze is calm and content when she returns to the hospital. There is no pull on her emotions. She has done what Joy has charged her to do and the decision rests with the law.

  Her new relations come. Jessica wears leggings and Ugg boots and has pink streaks in her hair. Her brothers look like they have emerged from the underworld. Joy thinks they may stick pins in her to see if she’s for real. Maybe some day she’ll be able to tell them apart. Her Aunt Raine comes with her husband, Jeff, and their two children; two more cousins, a little girl and a baby boy.

  Her grandmother weeps so alarmingly that Joy wonders if she should ring the emergency bell.

  ‘Your grandfather’s heart was broken so many times,’ she confides to Joy in a low voice. Jessica must have heard because she snorts so violently into her hand that Joy is terrified to look in case she too breaks into hysterical giggles. Her grandfather smiles, as if he knows his granddaughters are having internal convulsions, and tells Joy she looks exactly like her mother when she was a teenager.

  ‘And she giggled just as insanely,’ sighs her grandmother, who obviously also doesn’t miss much.

  Miriam tries not to look scared when she sees Joy’s new relations. Almost overnight, her hair has turned from grey to silver, or so it seems to Joy.

  ‘I keep remembering moments,’ she says. ‘That’s all memory leaves us, moments to cherish. But they never belonged to me. That’s the hardest part, Joy. Knowing they belonged to someone else.’

  She no longer wants to be called Joy. Nor Isobel. She is somewhere in between and she needs a strong name if she is ever to reach inside and discover her true identity.

  ‘Ainé is your second name,’ says Miriam. ‘It means radiance…and happiness.’

  Joy thinks…maybe…then finds the song from Annie the Musical running through her head.

  ‘It’s an ear worm,’ says Jessica when she visits that evening. ‘The only thing you can do to get rid of an ear worm is to sing the song the whole way through.’

  And Joy does. Everyone in the ward claps, even the nurses pause to listen as she sings Maybe. Funny how she sang those words so many times and never realised she was living them.

  Her mother is turning her guest bedroom into Joy’s room. She brings swatches of material and paint charts for Joy to choose. The excitement ripples between them until visiting time is over. Then Joy sinks back against the pillows, exhausted and confused.

  Her father comes to see her. Just walks in, unannounced and free. When the Judgement Book was scrutinised by legal bigwigs and all those who claimed to have her welfare at heart, the DPP decided he had no charge to answer.

  He hugs and kisses Joy, the two of them crying hard but quietly into each other’s faces so as not to disturb the other patients. Blood doesn’t matter. Nor facts. She thinks about Josh Baker and the questions he asked her. How he misshaped her words and made them drip with poison.

  They’re still sitting together, hands clasped, heads close together when her mother enters the ward. She blushes when she sees him, stops so suddenly that Mary, walking behind on her Zimmer frame, almost collides with her, and has to nudge her forward. Her mother sits on the opposite side of the bed. Joy feels like a tennis umpire, her head going this way and that, struggling to find something to say when silence falls.

  ‘I’ve been speaking to your doctor, Joy,’ her mother says before she leaves. ‘You’re going to be discharged on Friday. I think you should stay with me for a few weeks before returning to Rockrose. The media are still following the story. I can protect you from the publicity until they turn their attention elsewhere.’

  ‘You want me to go back home?’ Joy is unable to hide her astonishment. Her father seems equally stunned.

  ‘You now have three homes where you are equally loved,’ her mother replies. ‘Be free to move between us. No one will ask you to make choices. I’ll leave you alone now. You and David have a lot to talk about.’

  Before her father can move, she’s gone. ‘How do you know if you’re in love with someone?’ Joy asks him.

  ‘It’s like an express train going through you for a short cut,’ he replies. ‘You know that nothing’s ever going to be the same again…and all you want to do is run towards the future.’

  ‘Was that how you felt about Carla when you met her in the cemetery?’

  ‘Yes.’ He smiles but it’s a grim smile, without humour. ‘Little did I know how right I was.’

  ‘Do you still love her?’

  ‘What does it matter? After the heartache she’s been through, how could she possibly have any feelings for me other than anger?’

  ‘But you didn’t know—’

  ‘That’s beside the point. I lay beside the woman who stole her child.’

  He looks older, more wary, the shock of betrayal etched deeply into his skin.

  ‘Anger eventually burns itself out,’ says Mary when Joy tells her afterwards. ‘If a phoenix can rise from the ashes, so can love. Time and distance create their own healing path.’

  Cameras flash when Joy is discharged from hospital. Journalists hurl questions.

  ‘No comment. No comment,’ shouts Leo and ushers her into his car. ‘Sixteen years and nothing changes with the media,’ he says, driving away. ‘They still have your scent in their nostrils. But they lost your mother’s scent a long time ago. You’ll be safe with her.’

  Five months have passed since then. Every Friday evening Joy takes the bus from Maoltrán and her mother picks her up in Busáras. It’s where all the buses come to disgorge the passengers heading for the bright city lights and collect those escaping from them.

  She should have lived in an old, end-of-terrace Georgian house. One weekend, her mother takes her to see it. The owners welcome them and allow Joy into the room that would have been her nursery. It has changed, of course, everything does, and it’s now a breakfast room. But Joy sees the spot where her cradle rested and Miriam’s seahorses lightly danced in anticipation.

  On another occasion they drive to the industrial estate where her mother once walked in the dead of night. The factories are gone now. Bright apartments with satellite dishes stand in their place. Later, they visit the Angels’ plot and there, among the flowers and candles and tiny whirring windmills, they laid flowers for that unnamed baby, just as her father did when the tiny particles that should have been his daughter were laid to rest beside his wife.

  On Sunday evening Joy comes back to the rocks and the butterflies, back to the turloughs that rise and fall between the green grassy swards. She returns to Miriam, who holds her so close that at times it’s difficult to breathe.

  Back to her father, who rises at the crack of dawn each day and works until darkness falls. The cottage has gone and the hum of machinery, diggers and cement mixers turning the earth is so familiar she is hardly aware of it.

  Back to Joey who will soon return to his own mother
in Canada. The heart, thinks Joy, is a funny thing. Mary is right. It’s porous and capable of many kinds of loving. Like Joey. The mixed-up crazy desire to kiss him, the longing to hear his voice that shivered her like a fever…all gone. It’s warm and safe, the love she feels now. She has so much growing up to do, so much growing into her new skin, her new name. But everything changes…and if that happens, there will be nothing safe about her love for Joey O’Sullivan. It will shake her heart to its foundations, rattle it like an express train.

  She lies on a flat rock and stares upwards. Birds glide above her, clouds sail, the sun dazzles. These sights will never change. The ice age came and scraped the earth from the Burren, leaving a moonscape in its wake, lifeless, barren. Yet purple orchids flutter at her elbows, the gentians are in full bloom, and the scent of wild thyme skims on the breeze.

  Today is the longest day of the year, the shortest night. The road between Dublin and Clare shimmers, rises and falls. It runs in a straight line all the way to here.

  Her father waits at the door. He knows the exact instant the car turns down the lane. When it stops outside Rockrose, Joy hangs back but he is striding forward, his gaze fearless, ardent, his arms already reaching out to wrap her mother close. Carla’s hair is light and feathery now, and there is something fragile about her, as if she is slowly emerging into sunshine. But nothing ghostly, nothing secretive, nothing to stop her running forward until she is eye to eye with him, mouth to mouth. And when they kiss, it seems to Joy that they have been waiting all their lives to grasp and hold this moment forever.

  Reading Group Questions, Laura Elliot:

  Consider the two women, Carla Kelly and Susanne Dowling. What values, concerns and priorities distinguish their characters? Do they share any similarities?