by Claire Allan
‘I don’t think this is the time or place,’ I say. ‘But yes, there
are things to sort out. To finally deal with. There have been
enough whispered conversations, don’t you think?’
‘I agree,’ she says.
The tension is palpable. I can see her stiffen.
Marie speaks. ‘I’m sorry if today was upsetting for you, Heidi.
I’m guessing you feel there has been some sort of a mix-up
regarding the grave.’
‘I don’t feel there was a mix-up. There was a mix-up. Factually.
Joe was never meant to be buried with my mother.’
‘Perhaps we can resolve this, when we’re all feeling a little
less emotional.’ Marie says. ‘There are bound to be things we
can do if you find this very distressing. Perhaps we could have
him moved to a new plot?’
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Kathleen gasps. ‘Oh God, that would be unbearable. Today was hard enough.’
‘But it clearly means so much to Heidi and really, we must
all think of Heidi, mustn’t we?’ Ciara says. ‘Some things never
change. There isn’t a scene or a family occasion that Heidi can’t
make all about her, even a family funeral.’
She’s waiting for me to bite. She is goading me. Everyone
can see it and feel it, and I know that whatever I say or do
next will have lasting consequences.
No good comes of speaking in a temper, though. She has
painted me quite successfully as unhinged already. Displaying
any sign that it could in fact be true would be a bad move.
Especially now, when the police are more keen than ever to
pin this on someone.
‘I think it’s best we just leave all this for today,’ I say. ‘Nothing good can come of it.’
With my face blazing, tears unshed and a deep sense of shame
eating at me, I turn and walk to the door. When Alex arrives
downstairs with Lily, I tell him we’re leaving. He doesn’t argue.
He doesn’t speak at all, in fact. He just follows me out of the
door and to the car.
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Chapter Fifty-Two
Ciara
Now
The white wine in my glass is tepid now. Almost undrinkable.
I’ve been nursing it for the last forty-five minutes, too distracted by my thoughts to bring it to my mouth and sip from it. Added
to that, I feel sick. Deep in my stomach there’s gnawing nausea
that just won’t go away. I don’t want to eat or drink.
I wish I could sleep but even that seems to be eluding me
at the moment. I’ve been half watching something on the TV.
Some reality show about properties being fixed up for half of
nothing and transformed from perfectly lovely homes to func-
tional spaces with cool, clinical lines. Where so much as a stray
cup would have the place looking completely disordered.
A sandal-wearing male designer is waffling on about natural
light and feng shui, and all I can think is that he has little to
be worrying about. If I had any strength left in my body at all,
I would lift the remote and switch the TV off or, better still,
hurl it at the TV.
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The anger from earlier has left me drained. Exhausted. Pinned to the sofa with grief.
Stella sits down beside me, lifts up my legs and places them
across her lap before repositioning the throw over them. She
looks tired. Older. We’re all a bit broken by the last week or
so.
‘How are you?’ she asks.
I know she expects an answer – a proper answer and not
just a shrug of the shoulders, which I’m not sure I’ve the energy
to deliver anyway.
‘Tired,’ I say, setting my wine glass on the floor. I know I
won’t drink any more from it.
‘Today was rough,’ she says.
‘It was.’
Stella sighs, strokes my lower leg with her hand. ‘Things with
you and Heidi. Have they always been this bad?’
‘Perhaps not this bad – but nobody had been murdered
before,’ I say.
I know I’m being glib. I see Stella flinch at my words and I
don’t want her to think badly of me. Or worse of me.
‘Yes, they have always been bad. Always. It didn’t start well.
I was angry with her, and her mother, over Dad leaving. I felt
he chose them over me and I hated them for it.’ I stop, take a
deep breath and look back up her. ‘I know that sounds pathetic
now, as a grown woman. But I was young then and he was my
daddy. I never thought he would leave, but he did. And even
when Natalie died, when I thought he might come back to
us, he chose to stay on. He chose her over me, and I don’t
think I’ve ever forgiven them for that.’
There’s a tightness in my chest.
‘It was a long time ago,’ Stella says softly.
‘It was. And I know that the adult me should be able to
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this child in me who is so hurt by it all. And I’ve not always done the right thing, Stella. I’ve done bad things, you know.
Things I’m not proud of. I can feel myself slipping back into
those bad behaviours and it scares me. I should be better than
this.’
Damn it, I feel the tightness in my chest rise up. A tingle in
my nose, stinging in my eyes. I feel as if the floodgates, while
not exactly opening, are about to crack a little.
‘We’ve all done the wrong thing when we’re hurting. Good
people can do bad things for good reasons. And you’re a good
person. I know that more than anything,’ Stella says, picking at
invisible lint on the throw and looking downwards while she
talks.
I shake my head. ‘I’m not sure I am,’ I say. ‘I’ve been so
vindictive towards Heidi.’ My face blazes.
‘It’s understandable. She was your competition in a lot of
ways. But it certainly doesn’t seem that she was fond of your
father, either.’
‘That’s what angered me most when he left – you know,
back then. That she seemed to hate him so much when I
would’ve given anything to have him back. It was easier to hate
her than hate him, I suppose. I didn’t want to see him as the
enemy.’
‘But that changed?’ Stella says, probing gently. Her voice is
calm and soft.
A tear falls and I wipe it away hastily, even though my arms
are limp with exhaustion. I nod, just as I can feel my heart rate
start to rise.
‘What happened to change it?’
I close my eyes. Images, snapshots of a time long gone flicker
in my mind. Things I wasn’t sure for a long time were real.
Things maybe I’m still not sure are real but I feel they are.
Somewhere inside me I know they are. He called it love, but
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it wasn’t love, after all. It was never love. I’m scared to say the words. Afraid of judgement even though I know that it wasn’t
me, you see. I was never, ever the one at fault. I was a child.
I was only a child.
That bastard.
I was only a child, and he took so much from me and tried
to convince me it was because he loved me just so very much.
And then, despite all that ‘love’ he said he felt for me, and only me, he left. Shame washes over me. The shame borne out of
all those confused, fucked-up feelings I experienced. The loyalty
I showed him. How I begged him, this monster, to come back.
In a voice as small as I feel in that moment, my face blazing
with shame, my voice choked with emotion and my stomach
churning, the small sips of tepid wine threatening to rise from
my stomach and splatter the floor, I speak. I close my eyes and
say the words I’ve not said to a single person before.
‘When I remembered what he did to me.’
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Chapter Fifty-Three
Ciara
Then
I was a precocious child. I was led to believe from a young age
that the sun, moon and stars shone directly out of my backside.
I was the apple of my mother’s eye but I was, undoubtedly, a
daddy’s girl. I hero-worshipped the very ground he walked on.
There was no one in the world who mattered to me as much
as him, often to the annoyance of my mother.
We were a team and I would often be at his side as his
‘shadow’, going with him to the library or for long walks in
the countryside. I’d sit with him while he did odd jobs around
the house. Ask him to explain them to me. I’d always manage
to get an extra cuddle or three from him, whenever I could.
I would tell him, with all the innocence that comes with
being a young child, that I would marry him when I grew up.
‘But I’m already married to Mammy,’ he would say with a
laugh.
‘Well,’ I’d tell him, full of the confidence of a six-year-old
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– the kind that leaves by the time teen years arrive and never comes back, ‘you’ll have to get Mammy a new person to marry,
because I love you the mostest and we have to get married.’
I’d become quite distressed at the notion of ever living in a
house where he wouldn’t be. I was as obsessed with him as any
child would be with their father.
He knew that, of course. And there were times, after, when
I wondered had I loved him too much? Had I brought it on
myself?
That’s what he did to me. That’s how he damaged me. That
I would dare question it was my fault.
I was six the first time.
Six.
I cry still for the baby I was then and what happened to her.
He had come upstairs to read me a bedtime story. Mammy
was downstairs. I could hear her singing to herself in the kitchen as he did things that I instinctively knew were wrong. I didn’t
understand it. I didn’t like it. I was scared but he was my daddy.
And he loved me ‘most of anyone in the whole world’.
Afterwards, he told me I was his best girl. That he loved me
to the moon and back, and that no other daddy and little girl
ever loved each other as much we did. We couldn’t tell anyone,
he said, because they would only be jealous. He’d laughed when
he added, ‘Especially not Mammy! She’d be so jealous and we
haven’t found her a new person to marry yet, have we?’ he’d
winked.
I heard him whistling as he walked downstairs afterwards,
heard him joining in singing with my mammy when he reached
the kitchen. He sounded so happy. They sounded so happy. I
just felt incredibly confused by it all.
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Chapter Fifty-Four
Ciara
Now
Stella sleeps with her arm wrapped tightly around my middle.
She is the big spoon to my little spoon and her embrace is
reassuring, protective, pure.
She held me in her arms and rocked me while I cried and
roared and spilled my darkest secrets out. She said all the right
things. She cried too. For the child I was and for the woman I
have become – one who is scared to trust, who is confused about
love, who lashes out with a tongue so sharp it can cut. The woman
who has been holding this secret shame inside for two decades.
All the time she said the words I needed to hear, over and
over and over. This was not my fault. I was a child. I did nothing wrong. He, Joe McKee, the man who I was grieving for in the
most fractured of ways, was a monster.
I talked about all my mixed feelings. My anger at his betrayal.
The rising sense that something was very wrong. The misplaced
love. The rejection. The pain and anger. The shame. There was
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so much shame. Shame that I had, despite everything, begged him to come back into my life. How sick was I?
We talked about help. About support. About counselling. She
held my hair back when I did indeed empty what little had
been sitting in my stomach down the toilet. And she sat me
tenderly on the edge of the bath and gently washed away my
tears and the grime of the day with a facecloth.
She put my toothpaste on my brush for me and I know that
if my arms had been too tired to brush, she would have done
that, too.
She helped my exhausted body, the one that had felt as if it
was wrong and dirty all these years, into a bath and she gently,
so very gently, soaped me and cleaned me. And when we were
done, for the first time in the longest time I felt truly clean.
My body numb, she helped me to dress, slipping on my
knickers for me and pulling the oversized T-shirt I slept in over
my head. Taking my brush from the dresser, she teased it through
my hair, and then she pulled back the bed covers and helped
me to lie down.
‘No one will ever hurt you again,’ she’d whispered as she
had wrapped her arms around me.
And I had never felt so loved, or so protected before. I felt
the shame that had held me down for almost my whole life
start to ebb away.
The sun is shining on the front of the house at Aberfoyle Crescent.
It’s glinting off the windows, making the place look warm and
welcoming. There’s no sign at all, from the exterior, of the drama that has gone on behind those doors over the last week.
If walls could talk, I think wryly, they’d tell a very different
story on the inside. Then again, it’s definitely better that they can’t.
I wish that I could turn back the clock and not come to see
him, even though he was ill. It was selfish of him to pull me
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back into his drama again. He wanted to ‘make amends’, he said, and yet he’d never once talked about the past. That sordid past.
Maybe, if he had even said sorry, I could be less angry. But he
hadn’t. The whole thing was just his way of trying to control me
all over again. And I had fallen for it, because a part of me, that damaged part of me that was still mired in shame and confusion,
believed it might have helped. Needed him to say sorry and that
he loved me, and that he knew he had done very bad things.
But I’d expected too much of him, just like I always did.
He knew if I’d ignored his request I’d look like the evil,
ungrateful daughter. In his arrogance he had been sure that I
would never reveal his filthy secrets to anyone. Or maybe it
wasn’t arrogance at all. I had kept quiet for years, after all. I
had not called out his sick actions. Maybe if I had . . .
I try not to think about that. I try to hold on to the sense of
relief that I feel now he is gone. Now he is rotting in the ground.
I never have to fear hearing his voice, or seeing his face, or
feeling his touch again.
But I do have to clear out his belongings from the house
Heidi so desperately wants to get rid of. I try not to think
about that too much, either. Why she wants to get rid of the
house so quickly. Why she is so damaged.
Stella asked me this morning if I thought I should tell people
the truth of what happened when I was younger. I shook my
head. What good would it do people to know now? It can’t
be changed, I’d thought.
‘But at least they, including your mum and Kathleen, might
stop talking about him as if he is some saint. That must be hard
for you,’ she said as she buttered some toast for me – still intent on pampering me after the previous night’s revelations.
‘Causing them pain won’t make any of this easier for me,’
I’d said.
They can’t confront him. They can’t make him face justice.
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But I suppose he faced justice the night he died. He had no doubt experienced fear and terror and pain. He had known
what it was like to be helpless. To be weak and vulnerable.
Karma had come full circle, I suppose.
‘Do you think you should tell the police?’ she had probed
gently.
I’d shrugged. ‘Why? It’s not like they can arrest him.’
