What She Never Told Me (22 page)

Chapter Thirty-Three

Sleep does come eventually, perhaps because my mind and body are worn out with the trauma of it all, and when I wake, I know I’ve been asleep for hours because the room is pitch black. I turn on the little bedside light and pull on the dressing gown Imelda has left for me at the bottom of the bed. I want to pee, but I don’t know what time it is. The O’Connors may be in bed asleep. So I open the door quietly and pad barefoot in search of a bathroom.

But then I hear low, quiet voices and I follow the sound in the dark. Liam and Imelda are sitting in the kitchen, facing each other across the table. She’s holding his hands in hers. They both look up as I enter and I almost feel I should apologise for breaking into their privacy. But then Liam stands up and holds his arms out to me and I fall into them. It’s the saddest homecoming imaginable.

We sit up, talking through the night, Imelda getting up at intervals to make tea, and Liam tells me how my mother – how can I call her anything else? – destroyed their family.

I can’t bear to look at the newspaper reports again, but I force myself to scan them, and read about the disappearance of a little girl on a cold winter night, not long before Christmas. The eleventh of December, 1973. The child’s mother, Mary O’Connor, had put her twin daughters, Ailish and Nora, to bed. Their older brothers, Thomas and Liam, were doing their homework. It was their father, Thomas, coming in from his shift at the brewery, who discovered that Ailish wasn’t in the room she shared with Nora, and raised the alarm. But by then someone had spirited the little girl away.

‘What happened to them, your – our – parents?’

‘They never got over it. My mother died just a few years ago. She was living down here with us. Went to her grave with her heart still broken. He died a few years after you were taken. Cancer. You were his favourite of all of us.’

‘They thought I was dead.’

He nods. ‘She kept hoping, my mother. My father wanted to move back down here, where they were from, get away from Crumlin. But she wouldn’t move. Stayed there for years. She wanted to be there in case you came back somehow,’ he says. ‘And it turns out that she had good reason to hope.’

He leaves the room and comes back with a bundle of envelopes held together with a red ribbon. He unties the ribbon and spreads out the envelopes on the table. They’re all stamped and addressed in block capitals to Mrs Mary O’Connor, 10 Walter Square, Crumlin. He takes one and hands me the card that’s inside it. I recognise it at once. It’s the same as the blank cards I found among my mother’s things. But it’s not blank. Written in block capitals are the words
DO NOT WORRY ABOUT AILISH. SHE IS WELL AND HAPPY.

My mother’s squiggly
D
. On the envelope. On the card.

‘They’re all the same,’ Liam says, as I take another of the envelopes. ‘The first one came a few months after she – you – disappeared. After that, one arrived every year, around the anniversary of you being taken, the eleventh of December. They came for years. Then they stopped. There are fifteen of them. You can count them.’

‘But didn’t you tell the Gardaí about them? Surely they would have done something?’

‘We did. But they said the cards were probably from a crank. Anyway, when all was said and done, we were only a working-class family with no grand connections. We had no standing, no position.’

When I look at the envelopes, I see that they were all posted from different towns, the length and breadth of Ireland. And now those trips my mother took me on, those birthday visits to Cork, to Galway, to Belfast – to all the postmarks on the envelopes – come back to me. This was what they were all about; nothing to do with my mother just wanting to spend time with me. What was in her mind? Did she really think that she could comfort a woman whose child she had taken?

‘When is my real birthday? When was I born?’ I ask Liam.

‘The seventh of October, 1969.’

So I’m two months older than I thought I was.

I go to my holdall and retrieve the little envelope, battered and crumpled, and hand it to Liam. He scans the envelope and pulls out the letter, and when he looks up from it, his face is white and filled with anguish.

‘I helped you to write that letter to Santy. I’d forgotten all about it . . . Is that how you were taken? You ran out to post it? Oh, Jesus. We could never understand it. We thought someone had come in the back door and taken you from the room. We asked Nora over and over again if she’d seen anyone come in.’

‘You were in the front room. You and Thomas and Mammy. I went out the back door. I’m starting to remember bits. I remember that night.’ I nod towards the letter. ‘I found it in my m— Marjorie’s house, after she died. There was something about it that bothered me, but I didn’t know what it was.’

How has it been possible to bury all memories of a life that was turned into something else in the flash of a single moment? Was I so frightened at being taken by a stranger that, out of some basic need to ensure my survival, I made myself forget my sister and brothers, my parents?

Over the next few days, Liam and Imelda tell me about the family I should have grown up with. Nora, my twin sister, lives in America. Thomas, the oldest of the four of us, is dead.

‘What happened to him?’

‘Life got a bit too much for him. He walked into the sea.’

I open my mouth to say something, but I have no words, either to express my sorrow or to ask Liam to tell me more.

‘He was never right, after you were taken. I think he blamed himself in some way. Being the oldest and all. He took to the drink in a big way.’

‘Was he married?’

Liam smiles sadly. ‘He was. He was married to a lovely woman. Moya. We’ll bring her over from Tralee so you can meet her.’

‘Kids?’

‘Three. Twin boys, backpacking in Australia, and the girl is working in Dublin.’

‘When you asked me about being from the papers . . . was it because of Thomas?’

He nods.

‘That all happened last year. It wasn’t that Thomas was well known, but Moya is, because she’s involved in local politics. So we started getting calls from journalists and we knew it was only a matter of time before they’d be writing stories about the family struck by tragedy a second time. It was horrible.’

‘But did they write anything? I did actually google your name, after you mentioned the papers, but couldn’t find anything, even about what happened when I was taken.’

‘No, they didn’t in the end. Moya put a stop to it. She talked to the editors and told them the whole family history, and they agreed not to run anything. Astonishing, really, when you think about it. When you rang, I was afraid you might be one of those cut-throat types, out for a big story and damn the consequences. There was a lot in the papers after you were taken, and you’d probably find it all in a newspaper library. But I don’t think there’s much on the internet. Because it happened back in the seventies, and because there was no body found, the story just fizzled out.’

Liam brings out reams of photographs and I pore over them. I look more like my father, Thomas, than my mother, Mary. He is the big dark one; she, a tiny little woman with wavy fair hair. Nora’s hair is red, the deepest auburn. Mine is a dark cloud that threatens to obscure my face. We look different. I’m the taller, the sturdier-looking, the more boisterous-looking of the two. But when I examine the photos closely, I see we have the same eyes, the same quizzical expression on our faces. I see that we’re always standing next to each other or looking towards each other.

‘The pair of you were so close,’ Liam is saying. ‘You did everything together. But you were such a bold little thing, no fear at all. You’d stand up to anything.’

I don’t recognise the child he is talking about. Perhaps I’d learned on that night all those years ago, when I sneaked out of the house to post my letter to Lapland, that fear was a good thing to have, after all.

My brother is a quiet, cautious man, not given to impulsiveness. He hasn’t told my sister that the miracle they’d given up hoping for has happened, that I’m alive and have come back. He needs to know who and what he is dealing with before he makes that phone call to America.

He tells me more about Nora.

‘She’s a singer,’ Liam says. ‘It’s funny that the two of you ended up doing music for a living.’

He looks proud as he hands me a CD with the name Nora O’Connor emblazoned on it. The cover, an arty black-and-white portrait, is of a fine-boned woman with long, wavy, lived-in-looking hair, who looks nothing like me.

‘She’s not famous or anything, but she has a good following. Sings in folk clubs all over America, but mainly in New York.’

‘Can we hear it?’

He puts the CD into the player and I listen, transfixed by the sound of my sister’s voice as she sings a mix of Irish traditional songs and songs she has written herself. But there’s one song that smashes into my heart and my memory. I don’t immediately recognise it because Nora has slowed it down so that it’s not faithful to the dancing beat of the original composition by James Molloy. It’s more beautiful, because the slowing down has heightened the sense of yearning in the words. But there’s something else about it that rings in my head. I close my eyes and, somewhere in the distance, behind Nora, there’s another voice singing the same words in a high tenor voice.

Oh, the days of the Kerry dancing,

Oh, the ring of the piper’s tune . . .

Oh, to think of it, oh, to dream of it, fills my heart with tears . . .

‘Are you all right?’ Liam is asking.

‘Yes, it’s just . . . that song. I know it. I’ve always known it. But I think . . . I think I remember it in a different way . . . from before.’

‘My father used to sing it. He always wanted to come back down here. Never did, of course, while he was alive. It’s why Nora has it on the album.’

Later, I lie awake in bed, the song playing over and over in my head, my eyes filled with tears that renew themselves every time I wipe them away. I am weeping for all of them, for the father who dreamed of returning to his home county, the mother who never stopped hoping that her stolen child would be returned to her, for Liam and Nora, and for Thomas, my brother who died before I could get to know him.

And then I think of the woman I still call my mother, whose grief for her own dead child on what would have been her birthday overwhelmed her and pushed her into an appalling act, and I weep for her too.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Angela, normally so composed, cries when I tell her about everything.

‘I had an awful feeling it might be something bad,’ she says when she’s finally able to speak. ‘But I’d never have imagined this.’

Sandy wants to jump on a plane and fly straight over, but I don’t want him here. Not yet, anyway. I’m learning to love my new family and there’s no place for anyone else, not even him.

‘I need time with them, just me and them,’ I tell him. ‘I’m sorry, but . . .’

‘It’s okay, I understand,’ he says. But I can hear that he’s hurt by my having excluded him, by my telling him that I don’t need his support.

I’m still finding it difficult to think of myself as Ailish, as anyone other than Louise, daughter of Marjorie Redmond. Even Liam, who’s having to adjust to the reality that the sister he thought he would never see again has reappeared, stumbles so much over which name to call me that most of the time he doesn’t use either.

‘Come, I want to show you something,’ Liam says, and he opens a door to a small room.

‘My mother kept all your clothes and toys. Just in case,’ he says. ‘I thought about getting rid of it all when she died. But I couldn’t just throw it out, even though . . .’

‘Even though you thought I was dead.’

He nods. ‘We kept all the newspapers, too,’ he says, pointing to a yellowing stack.

I look at the small piles of clothes, skirts and jumpers, folded neatly, several tiny pairs of shoes, a navy-blue wool coat with a Peter Pan collar. I brush away tears as I touch them. There are drawings, too, done in bright crayons, of cats and dogs, houses, trees, people. And there are sheets of paper with words scrawled on them – a child’s attempts at writing.

‘Was I already at school?’ I ask.

‘You were too young to go to school, but Thomas and I used to help you and Nora with the reading and the writing.’

I’ve almost become used to the internal turbulence that each new discovery, each new revelation brings, but the shock of seeing the doll is visceral. She stands out among the other smaller toys, lying on top of one of the little piles of clothes, her jointed arms stretching upwards. I reach out and touch the pink dress, the dark brown nylon hair, the shiny plastic face. I put my fingers on her lash-framed blue eyes, eyes that once opened and closed but don’t move any more because of the glue that holds them in place.

I break down and Liam gathers me in to him, holding me tightly until I stop sobbing.

‘Her name is Audrey,’ I say. ‘After Audrey Hepburn.’

‘That’s right.’

‘We took her to the Dolls’ Hospital.’

‘Yes.’

‘I remember going to the Dolls’ Hospital. I remember handing her over to a man and a woman who were dressed up as a doctor and nurse. But I don’t remember going back to collect her.’

‘You were taken while the doll was in there,’ he says. ‘The people who ran it brought the doll back to us after they heard about what happened.’

I’ve remembered that doll and the visit to the Dolls’ Hospital all my life, but my memory was skewed. I thought she was part of my life with Marjorie. I thought Marjorie had taken me to the Dolls’ Hospital.

Oh, Mamma, did you have to steal my memories as well?

*

I wait with Imelda in the garden, fraught with anticipation and anxiety, as Liam makes the call. How will Nora take the news she never thought she would hear? Will she resent me for having so easily forgotten her?

Imelda is reassuring. She reminds me of Angela, except that Angela is sturdy, while she’s small and thin. But they both have the same strength, the same calm air about them.

Nora has been living in New York for the best part of twenty-five years, Liam has told me, and I calculate that her move away from Ireland must have coincided roughly with mine to London. She hasn’t married, but has lived with a succession of men, none of whom she has brought to Ireland.

Liam eventually comes out and nods to me. I follow him inside and he tells me to sit in front of the computer. I hadn’t expected this. I’d expected to talk to my sister on a telephone. Now I’m going to see her.

My apprehension is so great that I avoid looking at the screen as I sit down in front of it. But then I bring my eyes level with it and I find myself looking at my sister. Neither of us speaks. We stare at each other and then we both start crying and laughing at the same time. My sister. My twin.

We don’t look very alike at all. Her hair is long and wild, and it glints auburn and chestnut in the early morning sunlight streaming in through the window of her kitchen. She’s delicate and translucent, beautiful. I drink in every feature, desperate for some stirring of recognition, but there’s none.

‘I can’t believe it,’ she says, over and over. ‘How did you find us? Liam told me a little bit, but not very much.’

So I tell her about the memory I retained over the years, the one that refused to be buried, and how it led me eventually to the truth about what had happened.

‘Do you remember everything now?’ she asks.

‘Not everything, but it’s starting to come back. I remember you asleep and I remember leaving the house and trying to post the letter . . . but not much else.’

I stop. I can’t tell her what I remember about the fear I felt when the woman I’ve thought of all my life as my mother took me away from everything that made me feel safe. And I’m afraid of what else I may remember. Did she take me straight to that little flat in Drumcondra, where the chemist shop beneath would have been closed and dark, with no customers, no neighbours, either, to see her arrive carrying a small child, who might have been crying? Did we walk all the way? Such a long way on a cold winter night. And when did I stop being Ailish, forget I had a real mother and father and a sister and brothers, and become Louise?

‘It’s all right,’ Nora is saying. ‘I’ll help you. I’ll come over and we’ll sit down and I’ll tell you everything I remember, and we’ll get to know each other again. I thought you were gone forever. I knew about the cards my mother got in the post every year and I used to believe what they said, that you were all right and that you were happy. But then they stopped coming and we all stopped believing. Except my mother.’

‘Tell me about her. Tell me about things that happened, that I might remember.’

Nora inclines her head and shifts the focus of her eyes towards somewhere I cannot see. She’s thinking, rummaging among her own memories.

‘Do you remember we used to grow cabbages and spuds and carrots at the back of the garden?’

‘Vaguely . . .’

‘Well, one day, there was a knock at the front door and, when Mammy opened it, there was one of the local lads standing there with a load of cabbages in a wheelbarrow. “Look at these lovely cabbages, missus,” he said. “Look at the lovely big heads on them. I’ll do ye a good deal.” “Ah, no, sure, I have me own cabbages out the back,” Mammy said.’

‘Except these were her own cabbages.’

‘You remember?’

‘No, but I had an idea where the story might be going. It’s funny, though.’

‘To tell the truth, I don’t really remember it very well myself, but Mammy used to laugh about it every time she saw that lad. She was lovely. She was the kindest person you could imagine. She used to bring tramps into the house and give them tea and sandwiches. Da used to go mad. He used to tell her she’d end up being murdered.’

‘I remember her how she was on the night I was taken. I remember her putting out the light and telling us to be quiet and go to sleep. You did what you were told, but I didn’t. I wish . . . I’m sorry.’

‘You don’t have to be sorry. It’s not your fault.’

‘I used to wish I had a sister. I used to imagine what it would be like. Maybe I was remembering without realising it.’

‘Maybe you were. I used to think about you all the time. I didn’t understand it all at first. And then it was as if I’d lost part of myself.’

Nora asks me what Marjorie was like and I answer carefully, saying that she had been good to me and that I had no idea I had been abducted. I tell her that she died only a few months ago.

‘And were you happy, as the cards said? Did you love her?’ she asks.

I haven’t expected this question and I have to wait for several seconds before answering.

‘Yes.’

What else can I say? It’s the truth.

And even as I look at Nora, take in her creamy skin, the rich auburn of her hair, her vivid green-grey eyes, I’m aware of a thought forming in my brain. It says, My sister is a beauty, but I was the one my mother chose.