Blue Mercy: A Novel. (3 page)

Smash
. The lump hammer put a deep V into the desk's top and the back fell open. As it did, a torrent of paper tumbled out. Money. Notes. Old pound notes and fivers and tenners and twenties, one of my father's secret stashes. He had them all over the house: in a biscuit tin under the floorboards in his bedroom, inside an old plant-food container on a high shelf in the back pantry, and no doubt in lots of other places that I knew nothing about.

It was the other bounty, though, that had made me pounce: those notebooks of his tumbling to the floor. What would it do to me to read them? The thought set my heart fluttering around its cage of ribs, as if he were still alive to catch me, but down I sat in the middle of the devastation and opened the largest one, hand on my chest as I started to read: "I went to the conscription office this morning, with a pair of jokers I met on the train..."

It was quite a while later -- I have no idea how long -- when the doorbell rang. My thoughts flew immediately to Zach. Could he have heard that Star had left and decided to come back to me?

The bell rang again.

No, I had made my choice and we both knew what it meant. Whoever it was going to be, it wasn't Zach.

I pushed myself up from the floor and toed my way through the debris, the large notebook held in front of my chest like a shield. Anyone but Zach was an unwelcome intrusion. Except, maybe, Star. But it was even less likely to be her. Her departure this afternoon had been emphatic, complete with instructions on how she was, and was not, to be contacted in future.

My lover and my daughter, both gone for good. For all our good, I suppose. And I, too, would be leaving soon. I had a sudden, painful ache for California, for the width of its ocean and the height of its trees, for a blast of its big breeziness to come and blow through the cramped spaces of this house.

The bell rang a third time. When I finally opened the door, I saw from the faces of the two policemen standing there that I hadn't done myself any favors by delaying to answer.

"Detective Inspector Patrick O'Neill," said the one who wasn't wearing a uniform, flipping a badge in my face. "And this is Garda Shane Cogley."

They came in without being asked. I tried to steer them towards the kitchen but the Inspector -- with what detective instinct? -- headed straight for the parlor. He pushed the door open and the three of us stood in the threshold, taking in the destruction, the money all over the floor.

"What...?" The inspector asked, turning world-weary, mind-made-up eyes onto me. "What in good God's name has happened here?"

Without further preliminaries, he told me he was investigating the murder of Martin James Stanley Mulcahy, the full name, as if my own father was somebody I barely knew. And that he wanted me to come down to the station to help with their inquiries.

"You're not serious?" I said.

"Just a few routine questions."

Garda Cogley snapped his notebook shut and put it back in his pocket.

"Do you need to inform anyone?" the Inspector asked.

I shook my head, dazed. "There's nobody to inform."

"Your daughter...?"

"No, she's not here."

"Is that a fact? And when will she be back?"

"I'm not sure."

"We need to know, Mrs Creahy."

"Mulcahy."

"Mrs Mulcahy." His look told me that this was not the time to ask for Ms. "We need to know her whereabouts. She'll have to be interviewed."

"She's gone traveling around Ireland. Sightseeing. She only left a few hours ago."

"You didn't go with her?"

"No, I stayed to look after my father's affairs."

He took an exaggerated look around the room. "Right," he said, lifting an eyebrow at the devastation. "Let's be going."

Maybe I should start earlier yet in the day, with my father's funeral. Star and I, chief mourners, daughter and granddaughter of the deceased, in our places in the top pew, the back of our black coats to the rest of the congregation, feeling their jabbing stares.
That must be the daughter? When did she get in? Where was the boyfriend gone?
Star's appearance would have given them extra ammunition. Her too-black hair, stiffened into spikes. Her bovver boots and ripped tights, her nose-ring. And of course, her extraneous five or six stone, carried like a soldier.

The event was organized as my father had decreed. Remains to Stafford's funeral parlor in town. No wake. No viewing. High Mass in Doolough at 10am. Six priests.
Ave Maria. Be Not Afraid. How Great Thou Art.

Sitting in the front aisle with Star, I hadn't realized how many people were piling into the church behind us until the end, when we turned to follow the coffin. A full house, crowds bunched around the doors, upward of four hundred eyes nailing us as we walked down the aisle.

The crowd parted for the coffin and we followed it out into the churchyard cemetery for a rosary at the graveside. Through it all, Star and I played our parts, standing and sitting as required, heads bowed, faces blank. Where I should have had a core, I had only space.

Afterwards, continuing under orders, we went for a soup-and-sandwich lunch and drinks at the local pub, and it was there, once people had settled in over their soup spoons, that Dr Keane -- who had had his eyes on me ever since coming in -- leaned across the table where I was sitting with Star and asked if he might have a word.

"Of course," I said, pushing my untouched food aside.

Doctor Keane was Jimmy to my father, his oldest friend. Despite their different rankings in Doolough's finely-tuned social scale, they were bonded by their active history in the Irish Civil War, when they both fought to uphold a Treaty with England that others thought a sordid compromise.

"We'll step outside, if you don't mind," he said to me, causing a look to fly around the table.

I put down my napkin and followed him through the crowd. It was cold outside, a point he remarked on, pulling his scarf tight around his ancient, scrawny throat and offering me a cigarette. When I shook my head, he lit one for himself and started talking about the funeral, praising my father and recounting some of his memories of their boyhood.

Eventually, when he couldn't put off any longer what he had to say, he threw his cigarette to the ground, squashed it with the toe of his boot and said, "The autopsy found something wasn't right."

At first, I didn't let in what he was saying.

"If everything was all right," I said, "I guess he wouldn't be dead."

"This isn't a joke, dear." He looked at me over his glasses. "The cause of death was an overdose of morphine."

"But that's –"

"It's beyond doubt. The pathologist said she never saw so much morphine in a body."

"The pump? Maybe the pump was faulty?"

"It's been checked. The pump was fine."

"The pills?"

"We don't know." He folded his arms across his chest, let a silence grow. "We were hoping you might be able to help us on that."

"Help how?"

"Like I say, we don't know. All we know is what the toxicology reports say. An unholy amount, apparently."

Toxicology reports? Pathologist? Autopsy? With my father's medical history?

"Oh, Doctor, does it matter? You and Pauline know what it was like for my father at the end. Pain, baby food, sleepless nights... An animal in that condition would long ago have been put out of its misery."

"If I were you, m'girl, I wouldn't be going around saying things like that."

"If he hadn't died that day, he would have died another day soon."

"Aren't you wondering who did it?"

"Did what?"

"I'm telling you that somebody killed your father by giving him an overdose of morphine. And all you have to say to me is that whoever did it, did right."

The nausea I had been feeling all day rose up my wind pipe. "What? I just can't believe that
anybody
did it. Who could have? Who would have?"

"Indeed."

"Maybe...Could he have done it himself?"

"I spoke to him a week before he went. He said nothing that sounded suicidal to me."

He tightened his scarf again.

"I wanted you to be told first; that's only fair."

I thought of the looks exchanged around the table as I got up to leave. Already, he or the pathologist or somebody else had been talking. Maybe that's why there had been so many at the funeral?

They hadn't come to pay their respects to the little-liked sergeant at all, but to take a look at the daughter who was rumored to have seen him out.

How much did the village know or think it knew?
 

At the funeral Mass, in view of his coffin, memories of him came billowing back. That day when I was twelve or so, and I came in from school as I did each day to my dinner-place set on the kitchen table: a glass for milk, side-plate for potato peelings, knife and fork either side of a cork placemat, my plate wrapped in tin-foil with a smaller foil pack on top, made by Mrs Whelan, Pauline's mother, who cleaned our house and looked after our meals. It was a Wednesday, so beneath the foil was bacon and cabbage. And in the smaller pack, dessert: two chocolate biscuits.

I let my schoolbag slide to the floor, opened the biscuits and began to eat (before my dinner -- such badness!) The biscuits were doing little for my physical hunger, though they were satisfying another sort of longing. I put my feet up on the table to better enjoy them, and felt my gut fluttering as if it had been colonized by a battalion of butterflies, ahead of my conscious thought. It wasn't until I had the biscuits demolished and the crumbs wiped from my mouth that I allowed the idea full form in my mind: I was going to have a bath.

I'd been thinking about this for days, promising myself the next time he was on day shift I was going to do it.

Doolough, in those days, had not progressed to showers, and baths were permitted only on Saturdays, or on once-in-a-lifetime occasions like First Communions or Confirmations, and then only in three or four inches of water, just enough to do the job. In our house, my father kept the bath plug in a hiding place in his bedroom. Having a bath necessitated asking him to turn on the immersion heater, which was controlled by a big red switch in our hot press that I was not allowed to touch.

In my bedroom, I had a bottle of green bubble bath given to me at Christmas. I could, if I hurried, heat enough water to cover myself entirely. This was, I had discovered since going to secondary school, the proper way to take a bath, the way that most people -- people who did not have to live with my father -- did it. I filled my head with an image that allowed room for no other: just me reclining under hot water, covered in bubbles, like a model.

I crossed the room, opened the door of the hot press, pressed the red switch to
On
, my heart flipping at the sound of its click.

Emboldened by my own daring, I then had a look in all the cupboards I was usually forbidden to open. At the back of one, I found the rest of the packet of chocolate biscuits. For the first one or two, pleasure outweighed guilt, but then the two emotions began to swap places. Yet even after the worry rose so high that I was no longer enjoying them, I kept stuffing them into myself, knowing they would be missed. What was I at?

Then came my dinner, or as much of it as I could manage after the choco-fest. After washing and tidying up after myself, I put my hand to the immersion heater. Hot. Hot half the way down. Heart hammering, face flushed, I took two towels and went upstairs in search of the bath plug, a search that would require a forage into forbidden territory: his bedroom.

There was no visible sign of my father in that room, except for a smell, one which is still in the house to this day, even after his death. Fear was thick in me as I went around to his side of the bed, and with good reason. He might well decide to drop over from the barracks as he sometimes did during the day. Especially today, as I was home early. If caught, I would bring upon myself unimaginable punishment, yet on I pressed, compelled by something stronger than fear.

His bedroom locker was one place kept free of Mrs Whelan's housekeeping. In it, bundles of papers and letters were jumbled with two pairs of reading glasses, a screwdriver, some golf tees and a golf ball, a whisky glass full of copper coins and other debris. Under a stack of
Ireland's Own
and
Reader's Digest
magazines, I found it: the bath plug. And beneath it: a brown envelope torn in one corner. I peeled back the tear a little. Another magazine. What impulse led me to open the envelope, heart banging against its cage? It was as if I knew before I knew.

My father's magazine was full of pictures of half-naked women. It would be considered innocent now, the sort of images that have become everyday to us, delivered to our breakfast tables in daily newspapers and to our sitting rooms by TV. A dark-haired girl in a leather hat brandishing a cocktail glass, her sweater pulled up. Another reclining naked on a fur coat, fabric carefully arranged to cover her pubis. Another lying in the bath, soaping herself, leg bent to block a view of anything too blatant. Anatomically innocent, but its intent the same as all porn, and it was the intent that held thirteen-year-old me riveted with shock.

I was at an age where I was just becoming aware of breasts. My own were budding and I had started surreptitiously eying the bulges beneath the blouses and jumpers of the females around me: teachers in school, sixth-year girls, neighbors at Mass. I had never seen anyone else's naked before and now here was a profusion of them in every variety. It wasn't just the nakedness that fascinated me, as much as the look on these girls' faces. Saucy, as one of the captions said. Yes, they were girls, but girls of a different species. They had allowed somebody to photograph them like that because they liked it: "Hi. I'm Sophie and I've always wanted to be a nude model."

Something I was just coming to know about women and men was writ large in this magazine, in my sixty-six-year old father keeping it in a brown envelope in his bedside locker. I wanted to put it back, pretend I'd never seen it, but I also wanted to see more of it. I wanted to know everything it had to tell me.