Mam took it very easy, as advised, except for the odd trip into town to buy provisions – nappies, baby-gros, Sudocrem. Even Dad, who’d usually wait in the car with the key in the ignition while Mam and I shopped, was keen to tag along on those little excursions.
I had exams coming up and I had a lot of cramming to do before then. As hard as I tried, though, I’d still end up staring out the window, recalling things Leon had said to me, or ways he’d looked at me, and my chest would feel like it was filling up with helium.
Mostly I wouldn’t allow myself to think about him, but every now and again, when no one else was around – especially in bed at night – I’d try to let the whole of the past few months go, and imagine that we were about to start again. That it was only the beginning. He would take me away with him, wherever he was going. He wouldn’t leave without me. He was just putting things right at home, thinking of ways that we could be together.
Mam gave birth to a little girl on 10 May. Dad phoned us with the news sometime after four in the afternoon. A beautiful little girl, he said. Seven pound five ounces. It was the same kind of feeling I had when I thought about Leon: that swelling in my chest, like a balloon being pumped up inside of me. A beautiful little girl, I repeated to myself, as I ran outside to Gran to tell her.
Mam was in one of those same wards she’d been in when I was born, with the windows that opened out onto the veranda and down to a perfect lawn. The fallen petals of the cherry blossoms made little pink whirlpools on the grass. She was sitting up in bed, wearing a white cotton nightgown buttoned low at the front so you could see the blue veins on her breasts. Her bed was right by the window, the sun streaming in on her. I wanted to pull the curtain around the bed, to shield her from all the other women in the room. She looked older than they did, more tired. There were little streaks of grey tucked behind her ears.
The baby was in a glass cot beside her. Dad held on to Gran as I approached. I was embarrassed. She was so tiny it was embarrassing. And everyone looking at me to see what I’d do.
‘Say hello to your big sister,’ Mam was cooing.
The baby’s nails were transparent. She had fair hair, like mine, and she had on a little white baby-gro and the wee white cardigan Mam had knitted for her. Her head was turned to the side, her little tongue curling out of her mouth. Her cheeks all pink and chapped. Tiny little nostrils. Mam smiled so sweetly when I turned to look at her.
I handed her the sprig of purple heather I’d been holding since we left the house.
‘This is for you, Mam. And the baby.’
‘Thank you, love,’ she said, and took my hand. I squeezed hers as tightly as I could without hurting her, and didn’t let go as Gran kissed her and cooed at the baby.
‘She looks like an Erica, doesn’t she, Dad? What do you think?’ Mam smiled.
‘Yes, after the heather – Erica cinerea. She does indeed.’
And she did, with her pinched little nose, and her velvety eyes that opened just as Gran leaned over to look at her.
I called Mar that night to tell her. She took ages to come to the phone.
‘Listen, Mar, I’m really sorry about spitting on you.’
She didn’t say anything.
‘Mar, are you there? Mar?’ I could hear her breathing.
‘Forget it, okay,’ she said.
‘I didn’t mean to.’
‘Yeah, I know, it just came out!’
I could hear her smiling then.
‘You’ll be pleased to hear I wasn’t pregnant after all.’
‘Yeah, well, I guessed as much. Would have noticed the bump. I told you you wouldn’t be anyway.’
She came over to see Erica the following week.
‘God, would you look at how tiny she is!’
‘Wait till you smell her. It’s like . . . so sweet . . . I can’t explain.’
Mam held Erica’s little baby head out to us and we both breathed in the soft smell of newborn, and had her squeeze our fingers with her tiny little fist.
Things were strange at home for a while. It took some getting used to, having a baby in the house. I was glad in the end I’d moved to the room downstairs so I could get some sleep, away from Erica.
We were allowed out at the end of term, to celebrate finishing our exams. It was a proper disco for over eighteens, though no one there was over eighteen. It was just me and Mar again, against the world. We got properly dressed up this time. And Mar had me totally convinced that Leon would be there and we’d get back together and everything would be fine. She didn’t think he was weird anymore. At least she didn’t say so if she did.
Eoin was there, but she wasn’t talking to him. She said she was going to ignore him, though I kept catching her looking at him. There was no sign of Leon. We both of us traipsed around for about the first hour in search of him. Every time we passed Eoin, Mar would look the other way. Then we sat in a corner, drinking cider through straws we’d brought with us. The first slow set, these boys came up to us, one after the other, asking if we wanted to dance. They were wearing white socks and slip-on black shoes, and all of them seemed to be sporting the same mullet. They’d mutter, ‘Dye wanna dance?’ then shuffle on to the next girl before you’d even had time to answer, they were that defeated. We were pissed by the second slow set. Eoin came over.
‘Howya Mar. Howya Lani,’ he said. I didn’t hear what went on after that, but she was out on the dance floor with him after about five minutes, and they disappeared out the back for the rest of the night.
Some boy I recognised from Leon’s year was staring right at me, so I stared right back. I didn’t care because I didn’t fancy him.
He came over after a while.
‘Were you in Leon Brady’s class?’ I asked him.
‘How did you know?’
‘Just.’
‘Oh, you must be Lani Devine,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard about you.’
‘And what have you heard?’
‘That you were brave enough to go out with him.’
He could say what he liked. I just wanted to lose myself somehow. Drink wasn’t enough.
He sat down beside me and we kissed for a bit. Then he took my hand and we went out the back of the nightclub. I was swaying badly. I couldn’t see straight. There were all these couples shoved up against the wall. He dragged me over a barbed-wire fence into a field. I tore the bottom of my jeans. We stumbled behind one of the bales of hay. He grabbed me then and kissed me again. I didn’t like the way he kissed. He was like a sucky calf. I kept having to pull his mouth from mine because I didn’t like it. He lifted my top up and looked at my breasts. Then he undid his zip and took his dick out of his trousers. All the time he was saying ‘God, oh God,’ and swaying. He pushed it hard between my legs. I thought he looked so ugly.
I was bored, I didn’t want him just slobbering all over me, so I lay down on the grass and pulled him down on top of me, helping him undo the buttons on my jeans and pull them down around my ankles.
He pulled a rubber from his trouser pocket and struggled to put it on, while I lay looking up at the stars. It was all over very quick. I don’t remember much about it. It must have hurt, but I don’t remember. I just remember his mouth at my ear going ‘God, oh God,’ because I had my head turned to the side. And the hay scratching my face. He lay down on top of me after, and I couldn’t breathe properly. He tried to kiss me again but I turned my head away.
Then he rolled off me and we lay there for ages, my head cradled on his arm, looking up at the sky. Neither of us could think of anything to say. But it was nice, just lying there. I could pretend he was Leon, if I didn’t look. And if I didn’t smell him, because he smelled different. I breathed through my mouth so I wouldn’t have to smell him. I could almost have loved him at that moment, for making me so happy.
Then the earth started heaving under me and I knew that I was going to be sick. I wasn’t sick in front of him. Somehow I managed to stumble inside to the toilets. I met Mar at the basins. She wanted to know h
is name – she’d seen us out the back – but I couldn’t remember. I slagged her off for going off with Eoin again. She splashed me with water from the sink.
I felt good after that night. Closer to Leon, somehow.
Near the end of that summer I received a slim bundle of letters in the post – all the letters I had sent Leon. And this:
Dear Lani,
I have lied to you as I have lied to others, because I wanted you to know who I was before knowing what I had experienced. No one seems to want to know. I was there. Sometimes I think that that is where my life began to take shape. In that house. When I was seven years old. I was there. I witnessed my father kill my mother. I can remember nothing from before that time. There: that is me.
I know you won’t like that. No one can. And I know that somehow I frighten you. I am, after all, complicit. I didn’t try to stop him. I helped to kill her by staying silent. That is why I’m treated the way I am sometimes. That’s why people at school look at me funny. Who can blame them?
I don’t remember much about my mother. Sometimes I think I remember the smell of her, of her hair. She had fair hair like yours. Her eyes were blue like yours, but I’m not sure if I only know that from looking at photographs. It’s so hard to be sure.
She had taken to sleeping in my bed. I was her baby, still. I didn’t mind her climbing in beside me each night. I didn’t question why she was there. Of course I didn’t. I was only a child. They said afterwards that she’d been seeing some man, and my father knew, and that’s why they were sleeping separately. But I don’t believe that’s true. There was never any evidence of that. That was just a dirty rumour.
People said my father had married my mother on the rebound from a local girl he had been with, that he had never really loved my mother. But I don’t believe that either. People didn’t like her much. They thought she had airs and graces about her. They thought she looked down her nose at them. Just because she was English, probably. She was no different from any of them. They didn’t like my father either, after that, though they were probably a little quicker to forgive him.
He read to me that night. I remember that, clear as day. I sat next to him on his favourite chair in the living room. Then he tucked me up in bed. I don’t remember my mother being there at all. She must have been in the kitchen cleaning, or upstairs tidying things away. I don’t know.
I wasn’t woken straight away. I woke up moments too late, when they were in the throes of it, out on the landing. I can’t remember exactly. I don’t want to. Even if I did I wouldn’t want to tell you. It is a private thing.
I think I remember the story being ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’, and thinking of the giant shouting ‘Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman.’ After that I got out of bed. I must have climbed over my own mother’s body to get to the stairs. There was no other way I could have gotten out of there. And I do remember standing holding on to the banisters.
The house was dark and quiet after that. All I could hear was Dad on the phone downstairs. I wasn’t frightened of him. He had grown into this big fairy-tale giant, but I wasn’t scared. I went down and sat on the stairs.
‘It’s all right now, go back to bed,’ he kept saying. I didn’t want to walk over my mother again. So I just sat on the steps, shivering. I remember my dad opening the front door, and the guards coming into the house, and turning on every light in every room, and me being taken off to the neighbours, still in my pyjamas. Dad sitting slumped in an armchair in the living room. Pale as a ghost.
I don’t remember anyone ever asking me what I saw. It was like I hadn’t been there at all. No one wanted to believe that I had been there, and seen what I’d seen. I didn’t mind that, but I did mind that everyone else seemed to forget. I had a toy train. I remember showing it to the neighbours. Santa had given it to me.
I was the only witness to my parents’ most intimate moment. I have to carry that. No one else wanted to know, wanted to remember. I’m not even sure if Dad does. I’ve never heard him speak of it.
My aunt came to look after me. She was the only one of Mam’s family who went to the funeral. And someone seems to have decided that it would be too upsetting for me to be there. We never talk about it. I was probably left with the neighbours that day too, though it’s all a bit of a blur.
We were in England for a bit, but I don’t really remember that very well. I can just vaguely remember the strange school. Sometimes certain things – like particular types of rubbery potted plants or certain mustard colours, even – will remind me of that time. Must have been something to do with the house we were staying in. I get a terrible overwhelming lonely feeling. We moved back into my house then, and even though Dad wasn’t there at first it was better than being in a strange place. I didn’t move into my old room. That room hasn’t been touched since. The same sheets are still on the bed. The door isn’t locked or anything, but no one goes in there except to dump things we have no space for. Old boxes for irons and kettles and things. Things we’ll never go back to look for.
We changed the carpet on the landing and on the stairs.
I got confused after a while. I started to call my aunt ‘Mammy’. I don’t think she liked it very much when I did that. But she was good to me. She tried her best to protect me from what people said. But my aunt couldn’t love me properly because my father had killed her sister. And my father couldn’t love me properly because he had taken my mother away from me, he felt too guilty I suppose.
I don’t know how long he was away. He wasn’t the same as I remembered when he came back home. He was much more subdued. He wouldn’t read me stories anymore. I had to read them myself. But I liked having him around the place. When my aunt went away I was sent off to boarding school. I’ve been away since. I only see my father the odd time that I’m home. I can’t really stand to be there for any length of time. He has his own way of doing things. He’s lost in his own thoughts most of the time. It’s like I’m in the way.
I felt so sorry for him, though. I still do. I have shared unspeakable things with him. But I love him. He is my father. He is mine and I have no other.
Life paled into insignificance after that night, that moment of intimacy. It all seems so utterly pointless and dreary somehow. I know that probably doesn’t make sense. But nothing could ever
be as transfiguring as that moment.
Do you see how I cannot trust myself around you? I spied on you. That night when I ran ahead of you and your friend, through the fields, and saw you looking through your bedroom window at your father, it was like seeing myself. And that day when I passed you in the car and couldn’t look at you – it was because I was so ashamed of what you knew. That’s what I wanted to tell you when I came to find you that night, and what I couldn’t say when you came to see me.
I wanted to tell you about things myself, over time. But I was frightened. And it was all taken away from me. I had nothing left.
I can no longer think of you, Lani. I must forget you. I must spend my life forgetting.
Love,
Leon
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Mavis Arnold and Heather Laskey, the authors of Children of the Poor Clares: The Story of an Irish Orphanage. Thank you also to my wonderful agents, Tessa David and Caroline Michel at PFD, and to my brilliant editor Jo Dingley (and the whole team at Canongate). And Will – thank you, love, for believing in me.
‘Otherworldly and wonderfully original’
Stylist
‘Packed with emotional intensity’
Sunday Times
‘A brilliantly twisting coming-of-age tale . . . the story chillingly, compulsively unravels’
Sunday Express
-webkit-filter: grayscale(100%); -moz-filter: grayscale(100%); -o-filter: grayscale(100%); -ms-filter: grayscale(100%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share
He Is Mine and I Have No Other Page 13
