Wednesday's Child (27 page)

‘Is that what it is?’

‘You’ve never lost a client before, have you?’

The question seemed almost absurd. It had never occurred to me that things like this could happen in social care, but then, why wouldn’t they? I was working with people under the most extreme stress and unhappiness. Of course it was a possibility – I had simply never countenanced it before.

‘Not like this.’

‘It happens from time to time. It always feels like the end of the world. You’ll get over it.’

‘Maybe I shouldn’t “get over it”. A man is dead.’

‘You have to get over it. The children need you.
The team here needs you. As horrible as it sounds under the present circumstances: life goes on.’

My Adam’s apple felt too big and my eyes felt wet. I rubbed at them and cleared my throat.

‘You’re right. I just need some time. I’ll be fine by this evening. Listen, I have to go and talk to Fostering; see what we can do.’

Josephine nodded and reached out a hand. I took it and she held mine gently.

‘You come and talk to me if this gets on top of you. We have counsellors, you know, if you need something more in-depth. But if you need a friend … you know where I am.’

‘Thanks, Jo. I know that.’

‘Good. Now go on,’ she said, grinning at me. ‘I’ve got a ton of work to do.’

I sat outside Dympna’s house for ten minutes, trying to work out the best way to tell the children. I had always heard policemen and doctors say that this was the toughest part of their jobs, telling families that their loved ones were gone, but it wasn’t something I had ever really considered having to do myself. After ten minutes, I hadn’t come up with anything that didn’t sound brutal and devastating, and decided that that was because the news
was
brutal and devastating no matter how you dressed it up. I got out of the car and went inside.

Dympna showed me into a lounge that I had never been in before, and came back with the three children.
Victor and Ibar were their usual detached selves, Victor grinning lopsidedly at me and giving me an awkward wave as he came in. Cordelia knew there was something up. Her expression was half sulky and half nervy. The three of them lined up on a large chaise-longue opposite me. I looked at them, and a sense of almost overwhelming panic swept over me. I had to fight the desire to get up and run out of the room. I gripped my knees tightly and gritted my teeth until it passed.

‘What’s up, Shane?’ Cordelia asked, perplexed.

‘I’m afraid I have some bad news,’ I said, realising as I was saying it that it sounded trite and clichéd, but I just couldn’t think of anything else to say. ‘Max – your dad – became ill late last night. He was brought to hospital and they tried to help him but … it was too late. Too late to do anything. He died at around midnight. I’m so, so sorry.’

Ibar was sitting on the floor fiddling with the buckle on his shoe, and if he had heard or understood any of what I had said, he showed no sign of it. Victor and Cordelia gazed at me open-mouthed. Victor made a choking sound and stood up, clenching and unclenching his hands and looking around the room as if for something to latch onto that would help make sense of what he had just been told. Cordelia just continued to look at me in horror. Dympna placed a hand on Victor and pulled him back on to the couch, hugging and shushing him gently as tears claimed him.

‘How … how did he die?’ Cordelia asked.

‘I don’t really know. There will have to be a coroner’s report. We won’t know for sure until then.’

‘Come on, Shane! You must know. Was it drink?’

‘The alcohol had made him sick, but they don’t know if that’s what killed him. I’m sorry, Cordelia. I just don’t have an answer for you.’

‘He probably killed himself!’ she said, anger invading her voice now and rising rapidly. ‘I always knew that it would end up like this! Ever since Mummy died, I knew he’d leave us! How could he? How could he do this to us? We’re only children. Why couldn’t he be a daddy like everyone else’s? Why couldn’t he have loved us?’

Dympna reached out to her but Cordelia shook her off and stood up. She walked over to me and knelt down in front of me, grasping me by both arms, shaking me, not roughly, but as a way of expressing the urgency she felt.

‘What are we going to do now, Shane?’ she asked, almost shouting, tears of anger and fear coursing down her cheeks. ‘What the hell are we going to do?’

I knew that I was crying too and made no attempt to stop myself. I had no words to comfort her. I had not lost both parents, was not an orphan and had never been adrift and alone in the world. There was nothing to say.

‘Answer me!’ she shouted, still shaking me. ‘Why won’t you answer me?’

‘I can’t!’ I blurted, taking her wrists and pulling her
to me. ‘I can’t bring him back and I can’t change what’s happened. I’m sorry!’

She fought me for a moment and then collapsed onto me, her body racked with sobs.

‘I can only tell you that I am
here
. We’ll come through this. You love him. That won’t ever change. Every time you think of him, just like every time you think of your mum, you’ll feel sad. But it’ll get less and less until you wake up one morning and you won’t feel as sad any more. And right now, you’ve got Dympna, and you’ve got me. I’m just a phone call away any time you need me.’

I felt a tap on my shoulder.

Little Ibar stood beside Cordelia and me, his eyes red with crying and such pain etched on his face that I thought my heart would break. I had never seen him express any emotion at all other than bemusement – and now this.

‘Daddy?’ he said in a tiny voice.

Cordelia took him into her arms. I held them both and we stayed there like that.

‘I’d like to tell you they’ll be fine,’ Dympna said as I was leaving. ‘But this time, I’m not so sure. My God, Shane. I know that I should have seen this coming. But I didn’t. I’m flabbergasted.’

‘Me too,’ I said.

My throat felt raw with crying and my chest felt hollow. I was all used up, and I knew it. Dympna squeezed my arm and smiled sadly at me.

‘You take care. I’ll see you tomorrow?’

‘Yeah. Keep them home from school. I’ll be over in the morning.’

‘Okay. Drive safely.’

I went back to the office. I didn’t know why – it was past going-home time and there would be nobody there but the cleaners. Maybe I didn’t want to go back to my empty house with its dust and CDs and books and old furniture. Perhaps I didn’t want my thoughts to catch up with me, and was afraid that if I stopped, they would and then there wouldn’t be any going back. And there was, of course, the chance that I had no idea what I was doing and just ended up back there out of force of habit.

At any rate, at eight that evening I was seated at my desk, sipping a cup of black coffee and staring into space. I had my mail for the day in front of me, still lying unopened. I was suddenly very tired. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the red message light blinking on my phone. Absentmindedly I picked up the receiver and hit the button to play the recording. The computerised voice told me haltingly that the message had come in at three twelve that afternoon.

‘Shane Dunphy,’ said a husky female voice, ‘I hope you are satisfied. You have blood on your hands as surely as if you stabbed Max McCoy through the heart. You are a murderer. All he needed was to be allowed see his children. All you had to do was stop being a bastard and say the word. If you hadn’t been such a high and mighty power-freak, he’d be alive
today. I hope you sleep well tonight knowing that you’ve orphaned those three children. Bye, bye now. I’ll be seeing you.’

I listened to the message, then played it through once more.

The silence in the office mirrored the emptiness inside me.

Murderer
.

Whoever she was, she had voiced what I had been thinking all day. I was to blame for this – I and no one else.

I hit the
ERASE
button so hard that the phone jumped. Then I hit it again and again and again. I continued to strike it, first with my finger and then with my fist, until the phone was a splintered pile of plastic and circuitry on my desk and the anger and self-pity subsided, leaving only a cold darkness that sought to consume me.

I looked at Connie as she worked. She was sitting at the long table in the room we used at the health centre, bent over her refill pad, working on a history essay. She looked tired and pinched, as if her sleep had not been restful in many nights. She looked up and caught me watching her.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. I was just thinking you look tired.’

‘You don’t look so hot yourself.’

‘I
am
tired.’

‘There you go, then. Takes one to know one.’

This type of interaction characterised all our conversations now. They were about nothing. I had started meeting her at the house, sometimes, but had learned nothing new. Mr and Mrs Kelly were sulky, but not purposefully obstructive and Mick just made himself scarce. The problem was that Connie was now even more unforthcoming than before. Out of stubbornness I had continued to see her on alternate visits in her home, but I was fully aware that it was a waste of time. Direct questions about Mrs Jones yielded only icy glares and silence. I was flat out of options, and I knew it. I had one last card to play, and I had decided I was going to play it that evening.
I had nothing to lose, and I was too worn out to think of anything else. It was make or break time.

I checked my watch.

‘C’mon, Connie. Time to call it a day. I’ll run you up home.’

She said nothing, but began packing her books and pens into her bag.

I drove into the estate, but instead of parking in front of the Kelly’s house, I parked in front of Mrs Jones’s. My previous call on her had taught me that discretion was wasted: if I tunnelled in I’d be seen by someone. I didn’t talk to Connie, just got out and walked up to the front door of the bungalow. I didn’t knock. I looked back and waited for her to make her decision. She was looking at me, then glancing nervously at her family home, as if waiting for her mother to explode out of the door at any moment, lumber across the green and rip her from the car. To be honest, I felt a little nervous too, so brazenly was I flouting the conventions of this strange place. Connie suddenly shot from the car and ran up beside me.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked me nervously, hopping from one foot to another in tension.

‘We’re going to have a chat with Mrs Jones. Together. We’ve played games for long enough, Connie. It’s time to lay our cards on the table.’

I knocked on the door, three loud bangs.

‘Please don’t, Shane,’ she said, her eyes pleading, wide with terror.

Suddenly I was convinced I had made a mistake. She wasn’t ready for this. I would do more harm than good. I had messed up again. But then the door was opening and Mrs Jones was there, peering out at us from eyes that saw much more than anyone thought.

‘You’re back,’ she said. ‘Come to try again, have you?’

‘Connie is with me,’ I stuttered, very unsure how to proceed. My confidence was gone.

Connie ran past me and put her arm around the old woman’s stooped shoulders.

‘Do you want me to run him, Veronica? Eh?’

Connie looked at me, standing dejected on the doorstep, and then over at the dark windows of number eight. For a moment, she seemed about to tell Mrs Jones to send me away. Then her face changed.

‘Let him come in. What harm can it do now?’

‘If that’s what you want,’ Mrs Jones said, and the two shuffled down the hall ahead of me. I went in and closed the door.

Connie brought me into a gloomy sitting room, where the only light came from the bars of an electric fire. The curtains were closed and I felt like I was in a tomb. I sat on a low couch, the cushions of which were so loosely stuffed that I seemed to sink even deeper into them. Connie left and came back moments later with a tray and tea things. I smiled weakly at her and took the small china cup she offered. I heard movement in the gloom behind me and Mrs Jones hobbled in.