Wednesday's Child (18 page)

Side by side with Mick’s story was that of Geraldine, his red-haired sister, several years younger. In many ways the story was the same. I riffled through almost identical letters and reports from various professionals. Then something different caught my eye. It was a short letter written to the Social Work Department by a pre-school teacher. She had been working with Geraldine, and wished to express concern about an ongoing problem the child was having. I checked the date on the letter and did some quick mental arithmetic. Geraldine would have been two and a half at the time of writing. I paused to light another cigarette and continued. The note had been attached to a hospital report, which appeared to have been inconclusive in determining the cause of Geraldine’s problem. I flicked back to the letter from the pre-school. The child had been bleeding from the anus.

I went though the rest of Geraldine’s files more carefully. There were two other references to suspected sexual abuse relating to Geraldine, both incidents of
overtly sexualised behaviour at school. I made notes of the dates and of the name of the investigating social worker in each instance, and moved on to Denise, the next eldest sister.

More of the same. Denise had been hospitalised on several occasions with fractures before she was five years old. When she was six, she had been picked up by the gardaí wandering the roads near the housing estate, naked and confused. When she was ten, she had actually disclosed to a teacher that she was having regular sexual intercourse with Mick. She had subsequently withdrawn the statement.

I checked my watch. It was approaching ten o’clock. My throat was raw with cigarette smoke. My nerves jangled from too much caffeine and my stomach grumbled for sustenance. I hefted the finished files back onto the trolley and looked at the remaining pile, all of which related to Connie. I was on the home straight. No point in stopping now.

Over the next hour, a clear pattern emerged. Problems seemed to escalate with each child, as the psychiatric disorders in both parents and the oldest son became progressively more pronounced. As unpleasant as the upbringings of the previous children had been, Connie’s was by far the worst.

A report from the Public Health Nurse showed severe neglect in infancy. Connie had had to be hospitalised at fourteen months with severe nappy rash and malnutrition. This had resulted in her being placed in temporary foster care, but she had exhibited
such distress that she was returned home. She was expelled from her pre-school for excessive violence against her peers, with one child requiring stitches after having been bitten by her. Junior school proved to be little better. Displays of sexualised behaviour were common occurrences. Connie was eventually moved to another school after, aged seven, she had taken a four-year old behind the boiler-house and ‘touched him inappropriately’. She was hospitalised again aged eight, this time with multiple abrasions and three broken ribs. The medical examination also showed severe vaginal bruising and tearing. She was placed in residential care, but ran away repeatedly and was returned home within two months. At ten years of age, she disappeared for two weeks. A chance visit from a social worker showed her to be neither at school nor at home, and her parents were unable (or unwilling) to disclose her whereabouts. The gardaí were contacted, but they were unable to help. Then one day, she was back – but completely transformed. The new Connie was the one I had met and was struggling with. She was no longer violent, angry, flagrantly provocative. This Connie was straight-laced and quiet, a conscientious student, well-mannered and gentle. It was as if she had been replaced by another child.

I sat back and rubbed my eyes, massaging the back of my neck with my left hand. What had happened? Where had she gone? Why had she changed so dramatically? It made no sense. When asked where
she had been, Connie simply smiled and said that she had needed a break and had gone off, sleeping rough and having an adventure. Nobody believed this, but there was no other available answer.

I looked at the page and a half of notes that I had made. I now had many more pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. I understood the situation a lot better. But I also had more questions. Connie remained an enigma. There was one thing I did know, however: sexual, physical and psychological abuse were going on in that house. Connie was fleeing more than frightening noises when she went into Mrs Jones’s house to sleep. I just needed to gather some evidence before I could do anything about it.

‘Why do you do this work, Shane?’

I couldn’t see Gillian, when she spoke. We were in the park, lying on the grass looking at the sky. We were head to head, so she was completely outside my line of vision. It was February, and the first tentative rays of spring were filtering through in the early afternoon. The sky was blue in places, with small grey clouds scudding across it as if they were running away from something. We had met for lunch. Gillian was back on solid foods now and had almost regained her former prettiness, although her eyes still had that haunted look. I had not expected the question. We had been playing the age-old game of looking for cloud shapes – a game I often felt had the potential to be a non-threatening Rorschach Inkblot Test. The
problem was that I always became so involved in it myself I forgot to pay much attention or take any notes.

‘I like it.’

‘What do you like about it?’

‘I dunno. How many other jobs are there where they pay you to do this? And I like to help people, I suppose.’

‘Well, you’ve helped me, anyway.’

‘You helped yourself. I just pestered you into doing it.’

‘Don’t put yourself down – that’s what you always tell me, isn’t it? If I say you helped me, well then you did.’

I laughed.

‘Using my own lines against me, now. I’ll have to be careful.’

There was a lull as we turned our attention back to the sky.

‘That one kind of looks like Elvis,’ I said, pointing.

‘Sort of … I wanted to die, you know. When you came, that first day, I was thinking about ways of doing it.’

‘Yeah. I kind of guessed that.’

‘That’s why I stopped eating, at first. It was easier than jumping in front of a car, and it gave me time to get used to the idea of dying. After a while, it’s kind of like you’re half asleep. Everything seems slower. Gentler. It’s kind of what I always imagine being drunk would feel like.’

‘Other people have told me that too.’

‘But it wasn’t fast enough. It was taking months and months. So I started to think of other ways. I was going to climb the tower at school and jump off. Or throw myself in the river. I read somewhere that drowning is the nicest way to die.’

‘I think that’s relative. It’s probably nicer than being eaten alive by a pack of wild gerbils, but then most things probably are.’

‘I think that cloud looks like a gerbil.’

‘Where?’

‘There.’

‘More like a hamster.’

‘Maybe. But then you came along. You made me so mad. And you drove Mammy mad too. I thought she was going to blow a gasket or something, that first day. But you just kept coming back. Why did you do that, even when I was horrible to you?’

‘It’s all part of the service, honey. If I can’t handle a few names and a bit of attitude, I’m not really cut out for this line of work, now am I?’

‘I don’t want to die any more. Not today anyway.’

‘Today is what matters. We’ll worry about tomorrow when it comes.’

‘That sounds too easy. It’s a whatchmacallit —’

‘A cliché? Yeah, it is. And you’re right. It’s not easy. Nothing you have done or have yet to do is easy. But you’ll manage. And if it gets tough, I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.’

‘You’re really not, are you?’

‘Nope.’

‘You know when those boys … did what they did to me?’

‘Yes.’

‘I thought I would die then. It hurt so bad I actually thought that I’d die. And they had this shrink talk to me, and he used a cliché too. He said: “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”.’

She laughed, and I was surprised that it wasn’t a cynical sound, but light and bubbly with genuine humour.

‘How stupid can you get!’ she said, still laughing. ‘You can bet your arse
he
was never gang-raped. What doesn’t kill you
doesn’t
make you stronger. It just fucks you up something rotten.’

‘Ain’t that the truth.’

We looked at the clouds in silence for a long time.

I was to meet Gillian two days later outside her school. She didn’t show. I wrote it off as teenaged absent-mindedness, and drove out to meet her at the house. There were no signs of human life out there, and lengthy sounding of the horn drew only noisy fury from the dogs.

Several days passed and I was beginning to worry. Enquiries at the hotel where Libby worked informed me that she was also gone, and it seemed clear that the two had done one of their trademark disappearing acts. I discussed it with Andi and she agreed.

‘It’s a fucking miracle it hasn’t happened before
now. I’m guessing that you pissed Libby off so much that she tried to go straight for a while just to show you. How have things been going with Gillian?’

‘Really, really well. We had something of a breakthrough earlier this week.’

‘There you go. She must have told Libby. Mammy has taken her to get her away from you. Gillian is her property, you see. If she opened up to you, even a little bit, that’s a part you have and Libby doesn’t. That’s more than she can tolerate.’

‘Jesus Christ.’

‘My thoughts precisely.’

‘So what do I do?’

‘Well, you could ring around the refuges, see if they’ve showed up there. That’s where they usually go. Libby has been barred from a lot of them because of her absurd behaviour, so it probably wouldn’t be too hard to find her. But my advice is to sit tight. They always surface eventually.’

‘So I do nothing.’

‘Try it. I bet you’ll be good at it.’

I resisted the urge to find them. It was not easy. I regularly pulled over the
Yellow Pages
and turned to the phone numbers for the Women’s Refuges, the receiver in my hand and my index finger poised to dial the first number. But I held firm and trusted that Andi knew what she was talking about – though she assured me she rarely did.

To my relief the call came a week and a half later.

‘Shane, is that you?’

‘Gillian! Where the hell are you?’

She told me the name of the town they had gone to.

‘What happened? Why’d you run off like that? I’ve been really worried about you!’

‘Can you come and get me? Mammy’s drunk all the time and goin’ with men. She’s had me begging on the street for money for the booze. I don’t like it here. I want to come home.’

‘Yeah. I’ll be there by lunchtime. Stay where you are. Will your mum take off if she knows I’m coming?’

‘I won’t tell her.’

‘You will, Gillian, but that’s okay. I’m on my way.’

The drive took me two hours. I rang the refuge and told them who I was, getting them to ring my office to confirm I was authentic so I would be allowed in when I got there.

The refuge was about a half mile outside the main part of town, in a quiet, residential area. A frightened-looking woman let me in and ushered me into the front office.

‘Thank God you’ve come.’

‘What’s happened?’ I asked, worried now.

‘They’re … oh God, I don’t even know how to say it. That woman …’

‘Libby?’

‘She’s very difficult. I don’t think we’ve ever had anyone like her. She tried to bring men back here three times, and got very aggressive when we wouldn’t let her in with them. And these were not
nice
men, Mr Dunphy. They were … gentlemen of ill repute.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘She has been extremely uncooperative. We would have had her removed if it weren’t for the child. But the
child
, Mr Dunphy! She has become very distraught. I wonder if we should call a doctor for her. Or a psychiatrist.’

‘What’s wrong with her?’