by David Thorne
I leave my office at a quarter to two and head for the hospital. My father has been moved from Intensive Care and he is now on a ward, his tubes removed and just a drip feeding into the back of his hand. He is awake when I arrive and I am amazed to see his face brighten momentarily as he sees that it is me, his son, who has come to see him. I have heard that near-death experiences can have profound effects on people’s personalities, but I have never before seen my father pleased to see me. I sit down next to his bed and look at him. On his back, his skin seems to be slipping off his face as if it is not sufficiently well anchored and he looks old. His hair is greasy and I can smell it from where I am sitting. He turns his head to look at me, doesn’t sit up.
‘All right?’ I say.
‘Better,’ he says. ‘Nearly died.’
‘Yeah, well…’ I know that I am expected to deliver comforting words but I cannot. ‘Who were you fighting?’
‘Someone got the drop on me. Didn’t see them.’
‘No faces?’
‘Can’t remember.’
‘Didn’t say anything?’
‘Said I can’t fucking remember, didn’t I?’
He turns his head away; it did not take long for the old antagonism to resurface. We sit in silence for a while. Fuck it, I think.
‘Went to see Xynthia Halliday. She told me about my mother, about what happened.’
My father does not respond and I watch the back of his head resting on his pillow, wonder what’s going on in there. I am about to say something else when he slowly turns his head back towards me.
‘She told you, did she.’
‘You let Halliday sell her?’
‘Think I could have stopped him? Least he didn’t kill her. Or me.’
‘You could have tried.’
My father closes his eyes, perhaps replaying the situation back to himself, asking himself if he could have done anything differently. But he is not one for self-examination and he opens them again, this time looking defiant.
‘What do you want?’
‘I want to find her.’
‘How you going to do that?’
‘Don’t know.’ I don’t, and suddenly the futility of it hits me. What can I do? She could have gone anywhere, done anything. Anything could have happened to her. She could be at the bottom of a canal.
‘Why’d you want to find her, son?’ my father asks softly and I look at him in astonishment, this gentle tone one I do not believe I have ever heard from him before.
‘Wouldn’t you? She’s my mother and I never got to know her.’
‘So long ago.’
‘You never told me anything. You think I didn’t always wonder?’
‘Couldn’t say anything. Fucking pointless.’
‘I want to know.’ The word ‘closure’ springs to my mind but of course I do not say it; my father knows nothing about such things. He sighs deeply and closes his eyes again, for such a long time that I wonder if he has gone to sleep.
‘Dad?’
He opens his eyes. ‘Some Irishman,’ he says. ‘In Manchester.’
‘Irishman?’
‘Took your mother.’
‘Took her. You mean, was sold her.’
My father ignores me. ‘Fucking ex-Provisional or something. Only met him once. Horrible cunt.’
‘Got a name?’
‘Connolly. No, Conneely. Sean Conneely. He was forty then, probably dead now.’
This is more than I had ever expected. A clue, a step towards my mother, a name from thirty-seven years ago, shining up at me like metal from under the sea. ‘You sure?’
‘Sure.’ My father lets out a long ragged breath. ‘Never found out what happened to her. Couldn’t…’ He blinks and a tear rolls out of the corner of his eye, past his crow’s feet, on to the pillow. ‘Tried to forget.’
‘How could you forget? I was there.’
My father looks at me and in his eyes I can see that the anger that was always there has gone and that instead there is a pain which seems fathomless. ‘You were,’ he says. ‘Always.’
Manchester. Sean Conneely. I have a name, a destination, somewhere to go. He may be dead. He may not have anything to say to me. But this is all I have and I will follow it through until I know for sure. What I will not do, what I cannot do, is wait like a cornered animal for whatever Baldwin is planning for me. I can still feel his tongue in my ear; my finger will not let me forget his existence, out there, a lurking horror. As a child, I would listen for my father’s return home; the feet on the stairs, the twist of the door handle, the widening shard of light. But, as afraid as I was back then, I never thought I would be killed. Hurt, yes, but in my small bed, underneath my blankets, the possibility of death never crossed my mind. But Baldwin has killed, and I am sure more than once; behind his easy smile and genial manner is a murderer entirely without pity. Nowhere is safe for me any more. I believe he means to kill me; he has got under my skin, into my head. And perhaps it is merely because I am tired, and it is late. But I can think of nothing that will stop him.
Still, I will not call what I am about to do running away, merely a strategic withdrawal. I drive to my office and leave a message on my answerphone explaining about a family emergency, then home and pack a bag, lock the windows, close the curtains. All the time I tell myself that I will be back, that this is just temporary, that I am not being run out of town. But if I stop to think about it, I cannot see any way back.
22
I ARRIVED IN Manchester yesterday, having driven up the M1 doing a hundred and more, looking in my rear-view mirror with a sick feeling of paranoia right up until I hit the M1 and left London far behind. Every car that came up behind could have been Baldwin. Once a Porsche driver tailgated me flashing his headlights and I felt a dread, as I pulled over and willed him to go past, which caused me to clench my teeth so hard my jaw ached. As I drove north and passed exit signs bearing the names of towns I had never visited and never would, I wondered whether I would ever be able to go back to Essex. But fear, like any emotion, cannot last for ever, and with every passing mile my feeling of dread lessened. It felt reassuring to be caught up in this tide of people with places to go, their own business to take care of; the number of cars on the motorway was so great that I could not help but feel diminished by them. I became comfortable in my insignificance.
For some parochial reason I had expected colder weather, perhaps drizzle as I headed north but the sun continued to blaze and I wondered how long it could be until it rained. The countryside that I drove past looked as parched as the South of France, yellow grass and trees that seemed exhausted by the effort of standing up in the heat. I stopped off at the services for a coffee and drank it in the bright sunlight surrounded by families in cars loaded up with bags and bicycles and towing motorboats or caravans. Although I was headed for Manchester and not the Cote d’Azur or Miami, I still shared, in some small way, that feeling of escape that only a holiday can give. I was going to find somebody; but nobody would be able to find me while I was away.
There were only four people named Conneely in the phone book for Manchester, and only one of them had the initial S. I thought about calling the number, but there are some things it is best to do in person and, anyway, I did not want to scare him off. If I turned up out of the blue in person, there would be little a man of his age could do to get rid of me.
The only person who knew where I was going, and why, was Gabe; I’d passed by his place after I left my house and thanked him for putting me up, told him what was going on. I must have caught him on one of his more empathetic days as he took the time to engage with what I was saying.
‘Sold her? Jesus. I guess it explains why your dad wasn’t keen on discussing her. Christ, Daniel, every time I think your background can’t get any more fucked up.’
‘Yeah. Well.’
‘Think you’re going to be able to find her?’
‘Have to try.’
We were standing up in Gabe’s kitchen an
d he sat down at the table, indicated that I should too. I pulled out a chair and sat down opposite him. His pale eyes looked concerned.
‘Listen, Danny, you sure about this?’
‘Why wouldn’t I be?’
‘It’s been an age. A lifetime. Think you’re going to find anything you like?’
‘I could find her.’
‘Whoever that is. She didn’t ever try to track you down, right? I mean, shit, Danny, it’s not as if you ever moved. You live about a mile away from where you grew up.’
I shrug. ‘Could have had her reasons.’
‘Sold her.’ Gabe shakes his head. ‘You ever read the story of “The Monkey’s Paw”?’
‘Nope.’
‘This couple’s son dies at work, gets chewed up in some machinery. They use this monkey’s paw to wish him back to life, right? So immediately there’s a knock at the door but the father, he suddenly realises how messed up his son was by the accident, how horrific he will look. Uses their last wish to wish the kid back in his grave.’
I give Gabe a stern look. ‘Please. Be careful what you wish for?’
‘Just saying. It’s been a long time. You’ve got no idea what you’ll find. Her life, Danny, it must have been fucking horrific. You can’t imagine.’
‘You think I can stop? Now?’
‘Probably not,’ says Gabe, getting up and stretching, sermon over. ‘No point trying to tell you anything anyway. You’ll do what you want.’ He yawns, arms extended over his head, something feline in his dismissiveness. ‘Try not to get killed.’
‘I’ll try.’
Conneely lived in Salford, on the west of the city. I could have gone and visited him then; it was only four o’clock and it would not have taken me long to get there. But the hotel I was staying in had a bar and a roof terrace, and I had been driving all day. And the truth was, I was not mentally prepared to confront a man I had never met before, who might well have caused my mother immeasurable pain and humiliation. I put my bag in my room, took the lift up to the bar, ordered a vodka and tonic. The terrace filled up and soon I was surrounded by people drinking, talking, laughing. I felt camouflaged by their presence, lost within this new city where nobody could find me. I drank too much and of course my size attracted glances, curious from the women and appraising from the men. But I was left alone and I felt safe and eventually when a group asked if they could share my table I went back down to my room and slept more soundly than I had done in weeks, lulled to sleep by a show in which men and women entered and left an apartment and talked with each other and the audience laughed.
Now I am standing in front of Sean Conneely’s address in Salford. He lives in a red-brick terrace house with a small front garden, on a street in which half the houses are vacant and have perforated metal sheets fixed over the windows. There are no cars parked in the street unless you count the burned-out shell of a Mercedes half on, half off the kerb three houses down, resting on its disc brakes, its tyres melted away. There are small squares of broken glass everywhere so that it crunches wherever you walk. A group of kids on BMXs are swearing at the end of the road, throwing stones at a streetlight that is already smashed. Sean Conneely’s front garden is overgrown with weeds and his front door is wide open. There is an armchair in the front garden amongst the weeds and an old man who I assume is Sean Conneely is sitting in it and my immediate suspicion is that he is quite mad.
‘Mr Conneely?’
‘And who the fuck would want to know that?’
I push open the green peeling metal gate and walk into his front garden. He is wearing a brown suit that is heavily stained and he does not have any shoes on. He is smoking a cigarette and on his head is a trilby. As he talks, I can see that he is missing several teeth and he is thin, haggard even, the skin on his throat hanging down like pale curtains of flesh and he has big saggy bags under his watery eyes. His legs are crossed and the cloth of his trousers looks like it is draped over tent poles, so thin is he. He does not look like a trafficker of women who was once connected to the Provisional IRA; but then, he must be knocking eighty.
‘My name is Daniel Connell,’ I say. ‘I was hoping we could have a chat.’
‘A chat he says.’ He looks around at some imaginary person over his right shoulder and leers at them. His accent is pure Ulster, as thick as stout. ‘Well why the fuck not? Sit yourself down.’ There is nowhere to sit, so I remain standing. He does not seem to notice. ‘Now, why would a brute like you want to visit a man like me?’
‘I’m looking for my mother,’ I say. ‘I wondered if you might know what happened to her.’
‘And how,’ Conneely says as he takes his cigarette out of his mouth and bends forward and carefully stubs it out on the ground, ‘would I happen to know anything about your fucking mother?’
He says this without a trace of the madness with which he’d greeted my earlier questions and I am suddenly sure that it was an act and that Sean Conneely is very much in control of his faculties, despite the fact that he is quite clearly dying. Cancer of some sort, I imagine. I wonder how long he has got.
‘She worked for you,’ I say evenly. I swallow after I speak; it is hard for me to say, to normalise in words, the hell he must have put her through, to call it something as anodyne as ‘work’. But I want answers and until I get them I am prepared to mind my temper.
‘She worked for me?’ he says in surprise and touches both his shoulders with his fingertips. ‘And tell me, Mr I’ve-never-fucking-met-you-before-in-my-fucking-life, what is it this mother of yours did for me?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘A man called Vincent Halliday sold her to you. You tell me.’
‘Halliday.’ Conneely fishes around in his inside pocket and comes up with a pack of cigarettes. He offers the pack to me, eyebrows raised. I shake my head. He takes one out and lights it. I believe that Sean Conneely was a wicked man, but he does not seem wicked now, merely rascally. Can evil, I wonder, become attenuated with age, lose its cutting edge? ‘I knew a man called Halliday,’ Conneely says. ‘A boxing fella. From down south there.’
‘Vincent Halliday. Essex.’
‘Essex.’ Conneely tuts to himself. ‘Halliday. That’s your man.’
‘My mother’s name was Marcela. Marcela Cosma. Here.’ I take out a photo of my mother and walk towards Conneely. He looks up at me, eyes wide in mock fear, and snatches it out of my hand, examines it carefully.
‘Marcela. Christ and I haven’t seen her face for a while. Marcela? Now what did we call her?’ He closes his eyes and looks upwards as if he has smelled something, trying to think back over the years for the whore’s name he had given my mother as if he is trying to catch a scent. He is so atrophied I imagine I could literally tear him apart. He opens his eyes again and says, ‘No fucking idea!’
‘You recognise her?’
‘I believe I do.’
‘She’s my mother.’
‘She do much mothering?’
‘No. Because Halliday sold her to you, and you fucking destroyed her life by pimping her out, you skinny little Irish prick.’
‘Ah,’ says Conneely, wagging a finger at me. He does not appear to have much to lose. ‘Now. And I was supposed to know she was your mother, was I?’
‘Just tell me what happened to her. Is she alive?’
‘And how the fucking hell would I know the answer to that?’ Conneely says in an indignant squeal. ‘She’s not my fucking wife. Or mother.’
I look at Conneely in exasperation. He is a man in the latter stages of some nasty terminal illness and I doubt that snapping one of his fingers will have much effect. If I am to be honest, he does not excite much violent feeling in me at all; he is simply too pitiful. Yet this is the man who took away my mother. This visit is not working out as I had hoped.
‘When did you last see her?’
‘Ah. Ah, now. Let me think.’ He closes his eyes and takes five or six rapid puffs on his cigarette, eyebrows jumping up and down in time, and I know that he
is mocking me. But when he opens his eyes he does not look quite so manic. ‘She was your mother, you say?’
‘She left when I was born. I never knew her.’
‘So what in fucking hell are you doing looking for her now?’
‘She’s my mother.’
‘’Course she is. If you say.’ He closes his eyes again, takes more crazy pulls on his cigarette, looks at me. ‘I would say, it would have been nineteen eighty-one. Around that time. Your mother, she wasn’t like the other girls. No drugs, no drinking. A fucking lady, she was. Had to get rid of her. She…’ Conneely’s eyes lose their focus as he looks back into his past. ‘She was too good for all that,’ he says quietly.
‘What did she do after? After you got rid of her?’
‘Haven’t a fucking clue,’ says Conneely. ‘Went back to wherever she came from?’
‘Romania.’
‘Was it? Well fuck me.’
‘Who the fuck are you?’
I turn around and see a young man in a white wife-beater vest and low-slung jeans and Reebok trainers. He has gold hoops in his ears and tattoos on his arms and he has that kind of trapped energy that manifests itself in uncontrolled twitches and a too-fast walk and suggests that pointless violence can be unleashed at any time, for any provocation. He looks like the kind of person who will be in prison, not within years but within months or very possibly weeks.
‘Ah, now then, Daniel, this here is my grandson Brendon. Brendon, this gentleman is after asking me questions about things that happened, oh, fucking years ago.’
You old cunt, I think. Drop me right in it, will you? The young man snorts and spits on to the path, an act I can only imagine he conceives as threatening. Anyone can spit, I want to tell him. Wow-wee. But instead I keep my mouth shut. I still want more information from Conneely, if he has it.
