Girl Unknown

by Karen Perry

  ‘You can’t blame me. It’s a shock, and I still have to establish the veracity.’

  ‘ “Establish the veracity”,’ she said, under her breath, reaching for her bag. For an instant I thought she was going to leave. Instead, she rooted in the tartan canvas satchel until she found a tatty envelope. She reached into it and placed a document on the table in front of us. ‘My birth certificate.’

  I ran my fingers over it. The date read ‘3 March 1995’. My eyes sought the details of paternity, but there was nothing conclusive: ‘Father Unknown’.

  Before I could say that the document didn’t prove anything, she said: ‘You might recognize these.’ She placed a strip of photographs on the certificate. ‘They were taken in May 1994. If you look at the back, you’ll see Linda’s handwriting.’

  Four square photographs from a booth in a railway station. My youthful face beaming back at me. A set of different poses – two students larking around. I’d sported a beard that year – strange to see it now. It wasn’t just the beard that was different: my eyes seemed wider, my face more open. There was humour and fun in it, and for a second I was back in that booth, Linda on my knee, my arms feeling her tremble with laughter as she half turned to me, her face against mine, telling me to be serious now. I remembered how she had held me close, our smiles captured as the flash startled us, hanging on to each other, it seemed, for dear life.

  ‘I do remember … It’s just that it’s difficult for me,’ I said, hardly daring to touch the photographs. I wanted to say something else. I wanted to tell her that, if she really was my daughter, everything would be all right. We would sort it all out. But the words wouldn’t come. Instead I ended up sounding like the uptight academic I didn’t want to be, a supercilious father-figure. My phone rang. It was Caroline. I hadn’t told her I was going out. I’d have to say I was working late, or taking the external examiner out for a drink.

  Zoë said: ‘Answer it if you need to. I have to run to the loo.’

  I didn’t relish the prospect of having to lie to Caroline. Extenuating circumstances, I reasoned, letting the phone ring out before putting it back into my pocket.

  In the dusty half-light, I saw the glint of golden hair on Zoë’s jacket. Without thinking I reached out for it. I ran my hand down its back and sleeves, my fingers reaching for the golden strands below the collar, and just like that, without any forethought or premeditation, I wound the hairs around my fingers and put them into my pocket.

  I felt a rush of adrenalin, the excitement of doing something illicit, and then Zoë reappeared, smiling quizzically, asking me why I was holding her coat.

  ‘I thought I could walk you to the bus or whatever …’ I said, going to help her on with her jacket.

  ‘We’re leaving?’

  ‘I have to go,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry … There’s a minor emergency at home.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, disappointed. ‘I hope it’s not too serious?’

  ‘It’s unfortunate, but I do have to go …’ I said, glancing at the photos again.

  I put on my coat and held out my hand. Zoë ignored the gesture and embraced me, her arms wrapped around my neck with a kind of desperation. I stood awkwardly, willing her to step away.

  People could see: a woman from the next table glanced in our direction, the barman caught my eye and grinned. Who else had seen us? I wondered, with intense unease. I took her arms in my hands and, forcibly, placed them by her sides.

  She looked so crestfallen, so hurt, but I had to go.

  ‘Good night,’ I said, and walked away.

  5. Caroline

  I’m not the first person whose marriage has been rocked by an affair. Every day millions of people all over the world are unfaithful to their loved ones. I don’t know why I was so surprised when it happened to me. But one of the things I learned during the crisis is that people can find different paths back to each other. Not every journey is the same. For me, the only way to deal with all that hurt, anger and resentment was to seek counselling. Talking things out, examining my life and some of the choices I had made, helped me come to terms with what had happened. David was supportive of the therapy, although when I suggested that we attend some sessions together, he balked at the idea. I’m not saying he didn’t make an effort to mend things between us but his response was different from mine. I needed to talk it through, to pick over the past in order to understand what had happened. David’s response was to buy a new kitchen. For a man who has made a career out of examining and understanding the past, his reluctance to plough through the history of our marriage to fix it was baffling to me. I’m not saying I didn’t recognize the love underlying the renovation project. It was just another example of how, after twenty-odd years of being together, there are times when my husband still seems unknowable.

  The crisis in our marriage happened quickly – a lightning bolt – but resolved itself slowly, seeping away, like water finding a drain. I have learned that there are several steps – significant markers – along the path to reconciliation. The first time you have sex after the betrayal has been discovered (for us, it was four months later). The first time you share a joke, laughing together in a way that feels unencumbered by the wrangling and negotiations surrounding your decision to stay together. The first time he comes home from work and leans in to kiss you hello in a way that feels meaningful rather than dutiful. Slowly, the different elements of your life together are reasserted, carefully put back in place. At times it feels difficult, awkward, even fake, like you’re just playing at being married to each other. At other times the pieces fit naturally into place, giving you hope.

  When Zoë came into our lives, a year had passed since the affair. Even though we were well on our way to patching things up, the fissure in our marriage was still there. I wonder now, if that fault-line hadn’t existed, would things have been different? If our marriage had been stronger, would we have been able to resist her?

  Most of our friends don’t know about the affair. Chris and Susannah were the only ones we told, but I’m sure others must have wondered, because for a whole year we slipped off the circuit. It was easier to avoid other people than to present a united front. We turned down invitations to dinner, to drinks, to the theatre, emailing apologies for not showing up at Christmas parties, fortieth birthdays, housewarmings. Neither did we issue any invitations of our own, which must have seemed unusual – before it happened, we regularly entertained at home. We used the house renovation as an excuse, but really it was because neither of us felt able to go through the choreographed dance of host and hostess when we were still, to an extent, tiptoeing around each other.

  On that particular Friday evening – the Friday I’m remembering – it was the first time we had invited friends round since our marriage had unravelled. A significant marker in the knitting together of our relationship. I had invited Peter, my boss, an amiable man, and his wife, Anna, whom I didn’t know very well. Chris and Susannah completed the party.

  That evening the rain was coming down in sheets, streaking the windows, the umbrella stand in the hall filling as everyone arrived. David was late. The guests were in the sitting room and I was pouring drinks in the kitchen when he came in and stripped off his rain gear. ‘Sorry, I got held up at work,’ he told me, bundling his stuff into a sodden mass and coming towards me, kissing me hello. ‘Sarah had her viva today, and the extern stayed on.’

  ‘Have you been drinking?’ I could smell the beer on his breath.

  ‘A quick one in the common room.’

  I snapped open a can of tonic and began pouring it into the gin.

  ‘I had to take the man for a drink – out of courtesy, Caroline. He’d come over from England to do the viva as a favour.’

  ‘I tried calling you.’

  ‘Did you? I must have had the phone on silent.’

  He moved past me to the sink, filled a glass with water and gulped it down.

  ‘You forgot, didn’t you?’

  He put the empty gl
ass on the draining-board. ‘I’ll run upstairs and change.’

  For a Friday-evening supper, I had decided to go for something fairly casual – mussels in white wine to start, then lamb chops and a fennel salad with some crusty bread. A cheese board, and for dessert, toasted brioche with figs and pistachio ice-cream.

  Throughout the meal the conversation pitched and rolled between various topics: the water charges, local politics, gossip about a shared acquaintance whose prurient misdeeds had recently made headlines. David, having recovered from his lateness – or perhaps in a bid to make amends – was lively and animated, steering the conversation, never allowing it to flag. Repartee sparked back and forth between him and Chris, with Peter joining in from time to time. It was, on the whole, a very male-dominated discourse. Anna seemed the type of person who was more interested in listening and agreeing, laughing in all the right places, rather than adding much by way of her own opinion. Susannah was unusually quiet. Chris is always the heart of the party – mocking, grandiose – and when things are good between them, Susannah is his perfect partner, taking his cues, matching his quips with barbs of her own, softened by the tongue-in-cheek manner of her delivery. They are the perfect dinner guests – funny, engaging, interesting. But that evening, from the tightness in Susannah’s face, the way her eyes narrowed over her glass as she looked at him, I knew it wasn’t going to be like that. At first it was just casual sniping, nothing major, but gradually over the course of the meal, as she emptied her glass, then emptied it again, she seemed to withdraw into a troubled silence.

  After the coffee was finished, over whiskey and port, talk turned to a recent case where photographs of schoolgirls in Northern Ireland had ended up on a voyeuristic website regularly trawled by paedophiles. Anna’s niece was one of the girls whose image had been stolen. ‘It’s shocking,’ she told us. ‘A fifteen-year-old girl, having her image abused in that manner.’

  ‘What was the photo of,’ Chris said, ‘if you don’t mind me asking?’

  ‘Of nothing! Girls playing around, messing. It was innocent stuff.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Chris looked sceptical, and I saw a flare of colour appear at Anna’s throat.

  ‘Why? What are you saying?’

  ‘Well,’ he said, shrugging. ‘Teenage girls messing around? It may seem innocent to you, but let’s be completely honest here. A lot of girls have shed their innocence by the time they’re fifteen. You see them hanging around in packs – they’re well aware of their power –’

  ‘Their power?’

  ‘Yes! They understand inherently the power they wield over boys and men. What they possess – youthful bodies, burgeoning sexuality – it’s highly potent. My God, you just have to look at how they’re dressed to see they flaunt it. And why shouldn’t they?’

  ‘It’s one thing for a girl to wear a mini-skirt on O’Connell Street,’ Anna countered, ‘but it’s quite another for some pervert to steal her photograph and put it up on his grubby little website for all his friends to lech over.’

  ‘Do you know what annoys me?’ Chris said, leaning forward with a new intensity. ‘It’s these people who take photographs of themselves with their smartphones and post them on Facebook or whatever, send them to their friends, then whine when someone else views them.’

  ‘Hang on a minute.’ Anna sat up a little straighter.

  ‘It’s the same with these celebrities and their nude pics. For Christ’s sake, who could be stupid enough to post those shots of themselves, and then be shocked when they enter the public realm?’

  ‘It’s hardly the same thing,’ Peter said reasonably.

  ‘No, just listen to me,’ Chris continued, warming now to his subject. ‘Caroline, does Holly have a smartphone?’

  ‘Yes, but we monitor her use of it,’ I hastened to add. ‘She understands we can access her phone at any time, read her texts, her IMs, her Facebook posts, everything.’

  ‘Okay. And does she ever use her phone to take pictures?’

  ‘Of course, but they’re very innocent. She’s eleven, for God’s sake! And she doesn’t post them online – she’s not allowed to put pictures up on any social networking sites.’

  ‘Not now, maybe. But how long are you going to be able to police it?’

  ‘For as long as we pay her phone bill,’ David interjected, grinning and taking a slug of whiskey.

  ‘What if she’s staying at a friend’s house?’ Chris went on. ‘That happens still, right?’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed, cautiously, not liking where he was going with this.

  ‘A sleepover with a group of girls. Giddiness sets in. The tone of the conversation changes. They start talking about boys they fancy. Someone gets out a smartphone. Pictures are taken. Someone – a girl whose parents aren’t as vigilant – posts them on Facebook. And next thing you know, you’ve got a picture of your daughter in her nightie doing the rounds of the internet.’

  ‘Christ,’ David said, shaking his head.

  ‘So what are you saying? That it’s inevitable?’ I asked.

  He shrugged. ‘Maybe it is.’

  ‘My niece wasn’t pictured in her nightie,’ Anna added. ‘I’d just like to make that clear.’

  ‘I heard there was flesh shown in those pictures,’ Chris countered.

  ‘That doesn’t mean they were having a pillow-fight in their underwear!’

  ‘Now there’s a thought,’ Chris said, grinning and winking at Peter.

  Peter stiffened. I looked at Chris and wondered how much he’d had to drink. It had been a few months since I’d seen him and there was a new fleshiness to him, shadows around his eyes that suggested ill health or unhappiness. He was a bit of a shambles, what with the weight he’d put on, the doughy pallor of his complexion. He had always possessed a kind of louche charm, relaxed good looks and a face enlivened by humour, but in the half-light thrown by the lamps and the candles, he looked washed-up, bedraggled, lost.

  ‘I think you’re making too much of this,’ David told him, adopting a friendly, reasoned approach. ‘The photos were probably of girls in their hockey gear, or something equally innocent. The fact is the trolls and sickos trawling those websites will corrupt even the most innocent image into something titillating, but it’s a perversion in their own minds, nothing these girls are projecting.’

  Chris laughed then, a honk of disbelief. ‘Oh come on, Dave!’ he said, slamming one hand on the table, still playful although a hardness had entered his voice, his eye. ‘Can you hear yourself?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You make it sound like they’re all angels! You, of all people, should know about the scheming ways of teenage girls!’

  David paused, just briefly, his glass halfway to his mouth. Then he laughed. ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

  But something had entered that pause. A shiver of uncertainty. A cool doubt I had felt of late.

  Chris was off now, explaining how David, as a university lecturer, must rub shoulders every day with teenage girls, harlots, as he described them, calling into his office, batting their eyelids at him in a bid to up their grades or be excused from a tutorial or whatever. Good-natured banter, I suppose, but most of it flew straight past me. I couldn’t stop looking at David. The change was so subtle that only a wife would have noticed. The flush of colour in his cheeks from the drink had faded, most of the blood leaving his face. His lips had thinned slightly, and a new sharpness entered his eyes. He seemed wary, shaken even. I stared at him and it came to me then: my husband was keeping something from me.

  How long did the moment last? The opening out of that realization within me, everything falling into place: his recent behaviour, the silences, the sudden snapping, the forgetfulness. I had put it down to the pressures of work, the consuming nature of his passion for history. Now I saw it was something else. I knew all the signs of concealment – we had been there before. I saw it and felt the heat of sudden anger flare within me. I wasn’t afraid – not then. That would come later, when I knew
her, when I felt the insidious creep of her presence through our lives. What I felt more than anything was shock.

  I don’t know what Chris said next – I missed it in the storm of my own private feeling – but whatever it was, it made Susannah snap.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ she said, the disgust in her voice hauling me out of my reverie. ‘Do you even listen to yourself, Christopher? Have you any notion at all of how ridiculous you sound? How sad and creepy you come across?’

  ‘It’s called honesty, my dear,’ he replied, his voice elevated and a hard smile on his face. ‘Something you wouldn’t recognize in your line of work.’

  Susannah is a corporate lawyer, openly acknowledged as the real breadwinner of the two. Chris, who worked for a newspaper in a sub-editorial role that matched his whimsical nature, liked to refer to himself as a kept man, often joking how work for him was like a hobby. There were no such jokes that night.

  Turning to Peter and Anna, who seemed increasingly uncomfortable, he explained: ‘Oh, I know she looks like a woman, but Susannah is actually a shark.’

  Susannah is striking, with strong dark features and a sharp angular haircut. On that occasion, her features appeared even more pronounced than usual, lipstick in a deep plum, her mouth a grim slash in her face. ‘Listening to you talk of teenage girls in such a manner, you’re just another drunken lech,’ she said. ‘God, when I hear you say these things, it makes me so fucking thankful we never had children.’

  His eyes grew small. ‘We never had children, Susannah, because I didn’t want them. I knew any child I had with you might be born with a dorsal fin and several rows of teeth.’

  There was a moment of silence, like a held breath, before Susannah stood up so suddenly her chair swung backwards and Peter had to grab it before it fell. Without saying a word, she left the room.

  Chris broke the silence. ‘Oops,’ he said, and tried to laugh, but it came out as a gasp.

  ‘Are you all right?’ David asked.