Hush, Little Baby

by Shane Dunphy

  I had a moment when I felt dizzy, totally disoriented. I held on to the wooden table we were sitting at and felt Ben’s hand on my arm. ‘How is he now?’ I forced out through the mounting vertigo.

  ‘He’s in a coma. The injuries he sustained from Gerry have already weakened him, and the stress caused by this was just too much. He was underwater for around five minutes – the lack of oxygen, you understand. If it hadn’t been so cold, he’d be dead, according to the doctors.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  Ben told me, and, in a daze, I went to find Johnny. Tilly was sitting beside his bed. She didn’t acknowledge me when I came in, and I simply pulled up a chair beside her. Johnny Curran looked impossibly pale. He was once again attached to machines and a drip, and I wondered whether he would have been better off left in hospital these past few weeks. What good had taking him home done?

  ‘He’s dyin’,’ Tilly suddenly said. I had been lost in my own thoughts and had to ask her to repeat herself. ‘He’s slippin’ away.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘He’s sick. But he’s a strong kid. He got through the last time. He’ll fight this too.’

  ‘He’s only a baby,’ Tilly said, her voice so quiet I had to strain to hear her. She was in shock, and I wondered if she really knew what she was saying. ‘This is too much. I’m his mother. I know. He’s far away now. He doesn’t want to come back. He’s tired of fighting.’

  ‘Don’t say that,’ I said, willing the tears from my voice. ‘He’ll be out playing again soon. I just know he will.’

  She didn’t speak again. We sat and watched the machines whirr and beep, and prayed silently to our own gods.

  I left them two hours later. The doctor had told us there was unlikely to be any change that night, and that we should go home and get some rest. Tilly simply shook her head no. I, on the other hand, took the doctor’s advice and told her I’d be back in the morning. I needed to get out of there – I felt bad about it, but the crushing sense of déjà vu was just too much for me. How many hospital beds had I sat beside? How many lives had I watched ebb away?

  I couldn’t go home yet. My mood was too dark, and I wasn’t going to inflict myself on Patrick and Marian, so I put a Seán Tyrrell tape on the car stereo and simply drove. The Austin hummed comfortingly beneath me, the Clareman’s rich tenor voice and beautiful mandocello playing soothed my mood, and the mechanical act of steering, changing gears and breaking worked as an anaesthetic.

  I drove nowhere in particular. The city streets scrolled past meaninglessly. I simply needed to be in motion. If I kept moving, the sense of dread that I felt hovering just above me would remain where it was, and leave me be.

  It was close to eleven when I found myself at the gates of St Vitus’s Psychiatric Hospital. I knew that Clive would have been in bed for a couple of hours, but I wanted to walk. The grounds of the hospital were beautiful and would be deserted at this time of night. The gates were always open, to permit the various night staff access at the odd hours they came and went. I continued on up the drive and parked in my usual spot.

  ‘Evenin’, mister.’

  I must have jumped about ten feet into the air. I spun around from where I was locking the car door to see an old woman in a cleaner’s uniform leaning against the wall near the front door, stubbing out an unfiltered cigarette. It was the woman I’d seen in the canteen and passed in the corridor a couple of times.

  ‘G’night,’ I said, suddenly feeling very embarrassed at even being there.

  ‘It’s a late hour for you to be callin’. They’re all abed now. Your young fella’s out cold. They gives him medicine to help him off to dreamland every night. You won’t raise him now.’

  ‘I didn’t come to see Clive,’ I admitted, going over to the woman, taking out my pack of cigarettes and offering her one. She accepted with a smile, immediately ripping the filter off in a swift, single movement.

  She was probably in her sixties, with a face that had once been very beautiful, and had softened into gentle lines that were perhaps even more attractive. She was still slim, and her arms were corded with visible muscle. This was someone who had done physical labour all her life.

  ‘I’ll be honest with you,’ I said, lighting both of the smokes with my Zippo. ‘I wanted to walk around the grounds for a bit. I like it out here. It’s peaceful.’

  ‘Can’t sleep, eh?’

  ‘No. I doubt that I’ll see much rest tonight.’

  ‘Yeah. I don’t sleep too good myself – never have done. That’s why I likes the night shift. Oh, I do some day work too – ’s how I seen you comin’ and goin’ – but I likes the nights best.’

  ‘I’m Shane, by the way.’

  ‘Mildred.’

  We smoked quietly for a bit.

  ‘It’s awful sad about your lad.’

  ‘He’s not my son. He’s a friend.’

  ‘No matter. It’s still sad. It’s a bad thing to have a young soul like him in a dark place like this. You’d think after all the scandals and tribunals and whatall that they’d know not to do that no more.’

  ‘Not enough beds, Mildred, or so they tell me.’

  ‘It’s a disgrace, is what it is.’

  ‘You’ve got that right.’

  ‘I seen you talk to the doctors, and they listens to you. How does that be?’ she asked me. ‘You a doc too?’

  ‘No. I’m kind of like a social worker.’

  She looked at me harder than she had before. ‘Kind of ?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m a childcare worker. Most people don’t really understand what that is, so I usually explain it as being like a social worker.’

  ‘I don’t have much time for social workers, I has to say.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘I’ve known a few – nuns most of ’em was, and they had very little likin’ for the kids they worked with.’

  ‘It’s changed some, but you still get a few who don’t like kids much. In general, though, most social workers are pretty decent people.’

  ‘Well, Shane, we’ll agree to disagree on that one.’

  ‘Okay.’

  She stubbed out her cigarette on the wall. I offered her another. ‘I should be gettin’ back – floors to wax – but sure, I’ll not leave you smokin’ by yourself.’

  ‘You working here long?’ I sparked the flint for her.

  ‘Ten years next month.’

  ‘You must have seen a lot of people come and go.’

  ‘Doctors, nurses, patients, admin. staff – oh, yes, I sees them all.’ She paused for a second. ‘And I sees the priests comin’ and goin’ too.’

  I looked at her curiously. ‘The priests?’

  ‘Yeah. I know your boy was fierce upset after Father Downey came to see him.’

  ‘You know Eddie Downey?’

  ‘Oh, I knows him all right. I knows him of old.’

  I flicked the butt of my cigarette away. It made an orange arc through the dark night air. ‘How do you know him?’

  Mildred looked all about her, to see if we were alone. Even though there was nobody else around, she seemed unhappy. ‘Let’s take a biteen of a walk, shall we?’

  ‘Okay.’

  We followed the narrow pathway that led to the farmland. ‘Do you know what a Magdalene is?’ she asked after we’d covered a hundred yards.

  ‘You mean the women who were in the Magdalene Laundries?’

  ‘Yes. I am – I mean I was – a Magdalene.’

  Magdalene Asylums were institutions for so-called ‘fallen’ women – initially prostitutes – but, as their popularity grew, they began to cater for those unfortunate females who had the misfortune to become pregnant outside of wedlock, who were intellectually disabled, or who were simply too attractive for their own good and were in danger of attracting the attentions of the opposite sex.

  Once a woman was interned in one of the asylums, she could not leave until a member of her family, or a priest, signed her out. These veritable prisons were operated by different orders of t
he Roman Catholic Church, most famously the Sisters of Mercy and the Good Shepherd Sisters. The inmates were required to undertake hard, manual labour, most often laundry work, with the result that in Ireland such asylums became known as Magdalene Laundries. It has been estimated that 30,000 women were admitted during the 150-year history of these institutions, the vast majority against their will. The last of the shameful gulags in Ireland closed in September 1996.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, unsure what kind of response to give. I had never met a Magdalene before.

  ‘Thank you, my dear. I worked like a mongrel dog for the Sisters of Mercy in the laundry in the city here for twenty-five years. My daddy used to have his way with me, see, if my mammy said no to him. I told her, and she couldn’t bear to look at me no more. The Sisters came and took me, and that was that. I was with them till the laundry closed in ’94.’

  ‘Mildred, I can’t imagine what you must have been through. I’m struggling to even know what to say.’

  She tutted away my consolation. ‘I know, Shane. It’s awful nice of you to be so upset for me. Don’t you be concernin’ yourself ’bout it, now. I’m a old woman, and I’ve not got long left to go. But see, I reckon God owes me a debt. All that was done to me by them old witches was done in his name, so when I goes upstairs, he’d better have the penthouse suite ready for me, or I’ll have somethin’ to say about it.’

  ‘I reckon that’s fair enough.’

  ‘I think so. Now while I was in that laundry, we used to get visits from a few priests to hear our confessions and say mass and such. I has to say, the most of them was not cruel to us. They wasn’t really nice either, but they came in, said their prayers and left again. A couple, though, were bad ’uns.’

  Branches rustled overhead. There wasn’t much of a wind, just a cold breeze, but it was enough to make the trees whisper to us. The stars twinkled through gaps in the foliage like distant eyes.

  ‘Bad how?’

  ‘Shane, I haven’t told a living soul what happened in there, and I’m not liable to begin now. I’ll take that to my grave. Just accept that these men was devils, and that’s all I’m goin’ to say about the subject.’

  Devils. There was that word again. I wondered if she had used it purposely.

  ‘Father Edward Downey was one of them priests,’ Mildred said. ‘He was a mean, sly-minded creature then, and I don’t believe he’s a whole lot different now. When I saw how poor Clive was after he came to see him, I knew.’

  ‘What did you know?’

  ‘That if there’s somethin’ hauntin’ that poor child, Father Downey is somewhere behind it.’

  She stopped and turned away from me. I could barely see her through the darkness – could just make out her slender shape in the gloom. I knew that she was reliving her time in the laundry, that discussing it must have brought memories gushing back. I wondered if there was ever a time when it wasn’t on her mind, if she experienced any moments of peace. I doubted that she did.

  ‘Believe me, Shane. You must keep that monster away from the child. He’ll use him until there’s nothing left but a shell full of hurt.’ She sighed deeply. ‘I have to go back to work now.’

  My mind was awhirr. I drove more on instinct than anything else. It took me an hour to reach the house, a one-bedroomed cottage set in a small, well-tended garden south of St Vitus’s. Ringing the bell roused no response, so I pummelled the door with my fist until a light came on. When it was opened, I rammed hard against the wood with my shoulder, wrenching the chain that prevented my access out of the wall.

  ‘You can’t come in here,’ the man inside shouted. ‘I’ve already called the police!’

  ‘No, you haven’t,’ I said, eyeing him with distaste. ‘You know they won’t exactly come rushing to your assistance, and trust me, you don’t want to involve them in what I’m here to discuss with you.’

  Father Ishmael Green stood in his pyjamas in the hallway, shaking with what could have been anger but was probably fear. I knew that a man like him must live in constant dread that someone would break in his door in the middle of the night, with a heart full of hate and revenge. He was lucky that, this time, it was only me. There were plenty of others who would have wanted to do more than talk.

  I had known Green most of my life. He was posted in Wexford while I was growing up, and even as a child, long before the sexual-abuse scandals in the Church had become public knowledge, there were stories about his conduct with altar boys and schoolchildren. I had been fortunate enough never to have attracted his attentions, but I discovered later that several boys I knew had fallen into his clutches.

  I was not surprised when, while I was still at college, a successful case was brought against him, and he served five years for sexually abusing pre-adolescent boys in the school where he was chaplain. On his release from prison I was asked to interview him about his association with a number of other clerics, known associates of his who were suspected of similar misconduct. As he’d known me when I was a kid, the authorities hoped he’d be more likely to talk to me. They were wrong.

  During the interview he cagily fed me odd titbits of information, nothing substantive enough to have any of the predators conclusively prosecuted, but just the right amount to convince me he did, indeed, possess a wealth of knowledge about the movements of these dangerous men. In fact, I got the strong sense he wanted me to know that he knew, that he had the ability to bring the whole, torrid mess down if he so wished.

  Two years after I spoke with him, he left Wexford for good, coming to the city in the hopes of losing himself. He had informed the police of his move, as he was on the Sex Offenders’ Register, and it was a stipulation of his release that he let them know of any change of address. Hence, I had heard of his presence in my locality.

  ‘What do you want, Dunphy?’ he asked, as I closed the door.

  ‘The first thing I want is a decent cup of coffee,’ I said. ‘Do you have the heating on? I’m fucking frozen.’

  He pushed open a door to my left. The embers were still glowing in a small fireplace. I fumbled about on the wall inside the door until I found the light switch. ‘Go and make the coffee. None of that instant shit either,’ I said. He shuffled off, and while he was busy in the kitchen I built the fire back up. He came in minutes later, carrying a tray with a small cafetière on it, some biscuits and a cup of what looked like warm milk.

  ‘So,’ he said, sitting down opposite me. I could see he had regained some of his composure. He was satisfied that I wasn’t going to give him a hiding, and seemed to have decided to engage in whatever form of psychological game was to follow. ‘To what do I owe this rather unpleasant surprise?’

  I pushed down the plunger and poured myself a cup. The room was tiny but decorated with an artistic eye. The carpet was a rich scarlet deep-pile, and a flat-screen TV and home-entertainment system dominated one wall, while each of the others had a picture that was certainly not a print in pride of place.

  ‘You haven’t poisoned this, by any chance, Ishmael?’

  ‘You do me no credit. I am not a violent man.’

  ‘Violence takes many forms.’

  ‘Have you hauled me from my beauty sleep after midnight to discuss philosophy?’

  I cut to the chase. ‘Do you know Edward Downey?’

  Green smiled. ‘We’re back to this. I’m disappointed in you.’

  ‘Don’t fuck with me. I’m really not in the mood. How much child pornography do you have stashed away in your nice little cottage here? Do you think I couldn’t have a very large gang of uniformed cops over here tomorrow, going through all your private stuff? How would you cope with going back inside?’

  The smile left his face instantly. ‘It’s like that, is it?’

  ‘It’s very much like that.’

  He sipped his milk and picked up a shortbread biscuit. ‘Have one. They’re home-made. I’m eating them, so you know they’re safe.’

  I took one. It was actually very good, as was the coffee. �
��Mmm,’ I said. ‘So – Edward Downey.’

  ‘Yes, I know Eddie.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘I think you can guess.’

  Green laughed heartily. ‘Come now. You didn’t think it would be as easy as that, did you? You can call your friends to look for all my toys, have me locked up with beasts and low men again. But will that help you?’

  ‘It’ll make me feel a whole lot better.’

  ‘Tsk, tsk. You’re a more complex person than that. It might amuse you, but it certainly wouldn’t benefit whichever innocent – probably not so innocent any more, I’d guess – you’re trying to rescue. So let’s not continue to joust. I’m a lonely man, with little to divert me. Tell me the story.’

  I skirted round many aspects of Clive’s case. I was not going to be drawn into titillating this deviant with graphic details, so I left out the self-injuring, the dead mother and my difficult relationship with Roberta. But I told him of the boy’s nightmare visions, of his relapse after Downey’s visit and of my conversation with Mildred. Green listened closely. He was an intensely intelligent man, and his attention was like a physical thing. I felt his focus on me like a foul mist. When I was finished he put his cup on the walnut coffee table that stood between us and took a wooden humidor from the mantelpiece behind him.

  ‘Can I tempt you with a cigar?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘Well, this is certainly an interesting little quandary you’ve got, isn’t it?’ he asked as he clipped the end off the Havana and moistened it carefully. ‘A thorny set of circumstances, for sure.’

  ‘I don’t need you to tell me that. Is Downey a sex offender, Ishmael? Is he likely to have abused my client?’

  ‘It’s impossible to say, really, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’d bet you can make an educated guess.’

  He laughed again, clearly enjoying himself. ‘An educated guess. That’s a good phrase. How far did you go in college, in the end?’