A Swift Pure Cry (22 page)

The guard opened the door. 'Time's up,' he announced.

Shell sighed, relieved. 'Dad. I've to go.'

He looked up. 'When did
you
get here?'

'I've been here fifteen minutes, Dad. We've been talking.'

'Talking?'

'Don't you remember? About your confession? Your statement to the guards?'

He grimaced, more like himself. 'Oh, that.'

'Retract it, Dad. It's not true.'

He smiled. In the redness of his eyes, she saw him harden. 'I had it coming, Shell. Your man, Molloy: he's the right idea.'

She stood up. 'Trix and Jimmy send their love,' she said. It was a lie, but she said it anyway.

He gazed blearily, as if he'd never heard of them. Then he nodded. 'Tell them to be good,' he said. He wrapped his hands around himself, holding onto the fabric of his shirt at either elbow as if he were straitjacketed. He bit hard into his bottom lip.

'I'll tell them, Dad. Bye now.'

'You off? Already?'

'I'll be back soon. Promise.'

But Dad beckoned her over. Reluctantly, she approached him. He was whispering something.

'What, Dad?'

'When you come next. If you can manage it,' he hissed, grabbing her elbow.

'What?'

'Just a drop. A miniature would do.'

'Oh. That.' She laughed. 'The
whiskey
, you mean?'

'Shush, Shell!' He looked murderous. She wriggled from his grasp.

'Time's up,' the guard repeated. As he ushered Shell from the room, Dad's hands began thumping the table. He hurled a stream of curses at her back. The noise stopped abruptly when the door shut.

'Don't mind him,' the guard said. 'He doesn't mean it. It's the drink talking. Or rather the lack of it.' He threw a wink and laughed. 'This is the driest Christmas he's had in years, I'd say.'

Shell looked away to the dingy walls of corridor.
Hilarious. Delirious
. Dad married to the drink, not her mam. And for so long now, hardly anybody could remember the man he'd been without it. Jimmy and Trix, never. And for her, it was the time in the breakers; then years of nothing.

Forty-one

Father Rose was waiting at reception. Molloy also was there, immaculate and frowning. He'd arranged to see her again but this time Father Rose would be with her. Molloy led them into his office. They passed other guards, secretaries and a cleaner along the way. Everywhere Molloy walked, a well of silence followed.

His office was bare and bleak, with dingy cabinets of files and wired-glass windows. It smelled of furniture polish. He beckoned them to hard chairs on one side of his sparse desk and sat down on a revolving chair of black leather on the other. He rested his chin on his linked hands.

Shell stared at the lino: speckled reds and blues on grey. The two men spoke. She only half listened. She couldn't get Dad and his butterfly hands out of her mind.
The baby's dead, Shell. Thanks be to God.

'You've only her word for it,' Molloy was saying, as if she wasn't there.

'We've more than that-haven't we, Shell? She's shown me the place.'

'You mean you believed her?'

'I did. I do.'

'It's baloney. Two babies? In one small place like Coolbar?' The man snorted, like a horse after a tough jump.

'It's the truth. I know it.'

The words went back and forth. In her mind Dad's hands and lips trembled for the whiskey in the piano, the smell of the night-bar, the rattle of the collection boxes.
Don't draw them on us, Shell, don't
. She pictured the main street in Castlerock, where Father Rose had led her earlier, through a morning of Christmas shoppers. The snow had melted, a light fog undulated in the chill air, dimming the lights. The ring of stones had been blessed. They couldn't be un-blessed.

Somebody asked her something.

'What do you think, Shell?' It was Father Rose.

She blinked.

'Could you bear it?' His voice was low.

'Bear what?' she whispered.

'If we disturbed her, Shell? If we dug her up? To prove what you say is true.'

She stared. 'Dug her up?' She shook her head. 'Oh no. We couldn't do that.'

'You see,' Molloy gibed. 'She's lying.'

The ring of stones. The cotton-wool lining. The tracery of veins. They had been blessed.

'I don't want to disturb her.
Please
.'

'We can bury her again, Shell,' Father Rose said. 'In consecrated ground. I can do it.'

Her teeth were gone like Dad's, chattering. 'Must we?'

'Shell, I fear we must.'

They came to the field later. Shell stood near the cairn, looking on from a distance.
What if the baby's not there? What if someone's stolen the body? What if I've been dreaming it all along?
The strange questions darted round her mind like arrows. Four men-Father Rose, Molloy and two uniformed guards-walked up the field. Molloy's face was without expression, his sharp features dividing the wind.
Why do we have to pick up the stones, Dad? Why?
Father Rose was face down, his hands clasped in front him, shoulders hunched. Mrs Duggan was on one side of her, Miss Donoghue, her old schoolteacher, on the other. The men stooped at the place, looking downwards. The guards in the uniform started on the soil with trowels.
Now and at the hour of our death, Amen.
Miss Donoghue had her hand on Shell's shoulder. 'It won't take long, Shell,' she said, her voice kindness itself. 'It will be over before you know it.' They hadn't wanted her to watch but she'd insisted. The heavy earth shifted beneath her feet. The trowels started a landslide in her head. The digging stopped, then started again, slower. 'They've found something,' Mrs Duggan said. The two men who were crouched on the hillside paused. One stood up, crossing himself. The dark figure of Molloy dropped down on his haunches, his hands reaching into the hole. The third had got a camera out. In the drab light, she saw a flash, three times over.

When the box came out, she could have sworn she saw Trix's sprig of holly fall from it. She turned her back and stared at the stones in the cairn, heaped in their hundreds, the labour of endless mornings.

'It's over,' Mrs Duggan said. 'Thanks be to God, they've found her. Just as you said, Shell. It's surely over now.'

'Come away now,' Miss Donoghue said. 'We'll leave them to it.'

They led her to a waiting car. She stumbled on a stray stone and looked back a last time. Father Rose's right hand was crossing the empty air.
It's over, Shell
. Whatever about his confession, Dad would go free. Her baby would be reburied. One day soon, the moment would be a memory.

But as she watched, the camera flashed again. And again. One of the men drove some stakes into the ground and ran a yellow tape around it. She saw the silhouette of Father Rose, his hands gesturing, then flying apart. Was he praying? Or protesting?

'What are they doing?' she whispered.

'Come on, Shell. Don't watch. Whatever it is, it's surely only a formality. It's over now.'

But it wasn't.

Father Rose came back to Mrs Duggan's house. He sat at the table, his fists clenched. Strange workings crossed his face.

'Is it over, Father?' Mrs Duggan said as she got the tea things out. 'Have they gone? Will they close the case against Shell?'

Shell fiddled with the biscuits on the flat plate, arranging them in an interlocking pattern. Chocolate, plain, chocolate.

'Will they let Joe go?'

Father Rose picked up a biscuit from the plate. He brought it halfway to his mouth, then put it back.

'I overheard them talking,' he said. 'They called it a crime scene.' He laid the biscuit back higgledy-piggledy on top of the others. Shell returned it to its original place, in the gap between two chocolate ones. 'They've taken the baby away. Under Molloy's orders. For tests, they say.'

Shell thought of sums and essays, exam papers lying face down on the desk, the wall clock ticking in the silent classroom. 'Tests?' she puzzled.

Father Rose nodded. 'To see how she died, they say.'

Her insides knotted. She thought of Jimmy cutting the cord, how'd they'd forgotten to clamp it in the two places as the body book instructed. The biscuits on the plate began to twirl, a brown and cream cartwheel, chocolate, plain, chocolate.

Miss Donoghue pressed her into a chair. Mrs Duggan put a warm cup into her palms. 'This is turning into a joke,' Miss Donoghue said to nobody in particular. She plumped herself down but didn't touch her tea. 'A bad joke.'

'I've to be down at Goat Island for five,' Father Rose muttered. He got up. 'It will be all right, Shell. It's just a formality. It'll be all right.'

After he left the kitchen grew dim. The baby slept. Miss Donoghue, Mrs Duggan and herself sat in the half-light, forgetting to turn on the lights. Tests. She saw the grey worm-like cord slithering around the baby and Jimmy with the scissors.

They'd broken up the ring of stones.

When the lads came in, full of noise, Shell vanished upstairs to the quiet of her bed. She got under the covers with her clothes on. She put her two fists to her eyelids to make the patterns happen.
Don't draw them on us, Shell. Don't
. Yellow explosions bobbed, floating downwards like tired clouds. From far away, the phone rang. Voices, exclamations filtered up the stairwell.

She didn't want to know.

Forty-two

In the night she listened to the sing-song breath of Trix by her side and Jimmy over on the camp-bed. She listened out for the first bird of the next day but the blackness was stuck and wouldn't shift. The silence was endless. The pages of
Doyle's A-Z
floated behind her eyelids. The baby was dead.
Thanks be to God, Shell.
The ring of stones was broken and they would say she'd killed it. And maybe she had, because she'd known about the clamping of the cord in two places and hadn't done it right.

But the next day, when she woke up, Trix had her head tucked under her armpit and she knew she hadn't killed her child. Not like Molloy made out. She'd not left her in a freezing cave to die. She'd come out dead like the Duggans' early calf. So what was Molloy doing with the body? And what was the world saying about her? What had the telephone calls of last night been about?

She woke Jimmy up as soon as the house stirred and dispatched him downstairs to eavesdrop on what the Duggans were saying when the children's backs were turned. Later in the morning he reported back to her.

'Did you hear anything?' she asked.

'Nothing.'

'Nothing?'

He shook his head.

'Some spy. You're useless.'

'Mr Duggan's down with the cows. Trix has gone with him to see the calves. And Mrs Duggan's in the kitchen cooking. With the baby. The others are out the yard.'

'So?'

'So. 'S nothing to overhear. Mrs Duggan'd hardly gab to the baby, would she? She wasn't on her own with Mr Duggan for even a minute.'

He'd a look of triumph on him, so she knew he'd found out something. 'Come on. Out with it.'

He drew from behind his back a copy of the local paper. ''S this,' he said. 'Today's. Mr Duggan fetched it from the village first thing. Then I saw him bury it in the fire pile.'

She grabbed it off him. Newsprint blurred then sharpened as she read an article emblazoned across page one. It made no sense. She read it again.

MYSTERY BABIES FOUND DEAD

An unnamed sixteen-year-old girl and her father are being questioned by the Gardai Siochana in Castlerock, County Cork, in connection with the deaths of two babies whose bodies have been found locally. One was discovered abandoned on a strand on Christmas Eve by a woman walking her dog. The other was dug up yesterday in a field in the vicinity of the girl's house, apparently on the evidence of the girl herself.

Superintendent Garda Dermot Molloy, who is in charge of the investigation, reports that the girl's father is being held in custody pending charges. He has now signed a fresh confession admitting to having killed both babies, who are believed to be twins. While the girl is said to be the twins' mother, the identity of the twins' father is yet to be divulged. 'The case has shocked this tiny community, where nothing of its kind has ever been heard of before,' said Superintendent Molloy. 'Infanticide is a terrible crime in a child-loving nation such as ours. My job is to see that the perpetrators feel the full force of the law.'

A team of top pathologists has arrived from Dublin to examine the babies. 'They will confirm that they are twins and how they died,' says Superintendent Molloy. 'And hopefully close the case.'

The strange words popped out. 'Vicinity'. 'Divulged'. 'Infanticide'. 'Perpetrators'. 'Pathologists'. She let the paper drop to the floor.

'Shell...' Jimmy said. 'Is it
you
they're talking about?'

She looked at his narrow white face with the freckles bobbing on it. '
On the evidence of the girl herself
.' She flopped back on her pillow, laughing. God in heaven. '
Both babies, who are believed to be twins
.' Hilarious. Delirious. She laughed some more. Soon she'd a stitch in her side.