Crying in the Dark (3 page)

Ben did not beat around the bush.

‘Well?'

‘Before I answer you,' I said, ‘
I
have a question.'

‘Of course. Ask what you will.'

‘What is the success rate?'

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘You told me earlier that the work was always based around brief, intensive bursts of therapy, and that if these were not successful, you stepped aside and accepted that you couldn't effect change. What's the success rate? How often do you
not
have to step aside?'

‘Ahhh.'

The line went silent.

‘You still there?'

‘Yes, yes. My, Shane, you do ask awkward questions. Don't you know after all this time that success is hard to measure in this line of work?'

‘Ben, you're avoiding the issue. How often do the children remain in their homes and, more to the point, how many end up in those secure institutions we're trying to keep them out of?'

‘If your decision will be based on my answer, perhaps I can save both of us the trouble and withdraw my offer.'

‘It's an honest question, asked purely out of professional interest. I deserve to know what I'm getting myself into.'

‘Does that mean you're in?'

‘Looks like it does.'

‘Can you start tomorrow? I've got your cases all lined up.'

‘I'll see you at nine. I still want an answer, though, Ben.'

‘I haven't worked out a statistic, but I'd say we succeed about as often as we fail. It's about “even-Steven”. Sorry I can't give you a more encouraging figure.'

‘That's about what I thought. I have a pint waiting for me. See you in the morning. Have the coffee on.'

‘You've made the right choice, Shane. Welcome to Last Ditch House.'

The following morning, Ben
had
the coffee on. He had, in fact, gone one better and ordered in some freshly baked breads. The offices smelt like a
boulangerie.
A small meeting room had been set up for the team, and we convened briefly before the working day began.

The team was a small one. Besides Ben, four other workers sat around the table: two male, two female. Marian was about my own age, stockily built with short blonde hair and a quiet, thoughtful manner. Loretta was slightly older – I put her in her early forties. She was short, with a smiling, open face, dressed in a mannish way with a flat-top haircut left long at the back. Jerome was tall and gangly, clean-shaven and dressed in denim. Clive was a thick-set man with a confident manner and a ready wit, able to fill any gap in the conversation. I liked them all immediately, and was struck by Ben's ability to form such a cohesive, fluidly functioning group.

The team members gave a short run-down of their cases and how they were doing with them. I listened intently. When Clive, the last of the four, had given his report, and each person had made some short comments on what he had said, Ben pulled over a grey folder.

I've allocated Shane three cases from the list of new referrals we discussed last week, based on the ranking we gave them. Shane will be working, initially at least, with the Walsh family, the Henrys and the Byrne children.'

The names were greeted with murmurs of recognition and much nodding.

‘Okay. We'll all meet in a fortnight to discuss our progress,' Ben said. ‘Let's go to work.'

I stayed where I was, as did Ben, the folder still open before him on the desk. I refilled our coffee mugs and pushed my smokes towards him.

‘So, where is my first port of call?'

‘I'd like you to visit the Walshes this morning,' Ben said, leafing through one of the files in the folder. ‘Interesting case. Two little boys: Bobby, aged six, Micky, aged four. Their mother, Biddy, is a widow. They live out in Haroldstown.'

‘Gangland.'

‘Yes. The father, Toddy, was killed in a shooting two years ago. He was well known to the police, and it came as no surprise. There has been steady social-work involvement – they were in there even before Mr Walsh met his untimely demise. Pre-school teachers reported fears of physical neglect, and there were concerns about
emotional
neglect after the death. Mrs Walsh seemed to find it very hard to cope.'

‘Okay, how does this involve us, though? It sounds like the kind of stuff that would stay on the Health Executive's books for years.'

Ben pulled on his cigarette and nodded vigorously. ‘Agreed. What sets this one apart is a rather peculiar little detail. Six months ago, Bobby informed his class at the daily news session that his daddy had come back. His teacher assumed that he meant Biddy had taken up with a new man, so she put little or no pass on it. However, it became clear that this was not the case. Micky had made similar comments at pre-school. They were indicating that Toddy Walsh had returned.'

‘From the dead?'

‘Yes. The social worker on the case spoke to both children at length about it. It seems the two boys often go to play down the bottom of their garden, and when they do, every day, from what they have said, their father appears to them. They both see him and speak with him.'

‘Does the mother see him too?'

‘No, but she hasn't gone out of her way to discourage the fantasy. She seems to be buying into it, finding comfort in it almost.'

‘I take it that Mrs Walsh is still grieving?'

‘Very much so. She has most certainly
not
moved on.'

‘It's not an unusual childhood fantasy though, is it? I mean, it's simply a form of imaginary friend.'

‘I'd tend to lean that way myself, except that the boys' behaviour has become increasingly erratic and violent since the alleged visitations began. The social worker was unsuccessful in breaking the pattern of behaviour. A therapist from child psychiatry made a few visits, and reports that, rather than this being simply a case of, as you so reasonably say, imaginary friends, the boys are having visual and auditory hallucinations. They have had to be removed from school because of their outbursts of violence. Biddy is now saying that she cannot manage them. They have even had to be kept inside the house and garden because of their attacks on local children.'

‘And this all began when they started seeing their father? There was no aggression before that?'

‘No. The boys say that he is actually
telling
them to behave in this way. Their behaviour was always reserved before this, according to teachers and neighbours.'

‘So we're probably looking at some kind of repressed anger. They need their dead father to give them permission to act out just how devastated they feel at the loss.'

Ben grinned. ‘That seems a good place to begin. But use it as a starting point, no more than that. I want you to do some simple play work with these boys, and see what comes out. Who knows, we might all be surprised.'

Haroldstown was five square miles of housing estates built like a patchwork quilt on the north side of the city, with no particular thought to consistency of architectural style or even to quality of building materials. Some of the houses were constructed to last: solid, angular blocks of stone work, created in the late nineteen fifties and still standing firm and strong, while others were more elaborate, wooden-framed concoctions that had degenerated into crumbling wreckages within a bare five years, seeming to have been moulded from papier-mâché. The vast majority of the structures were built by the local authority, and, while not nearly as devoid of redemption as the Oldtown flats, the area had long been run by a series of criminal gangs. These groups operated pretty much in full view of everyone, including the police. Ask any family in Haroldstown and they could tell you who was the leader of the Northside Bandits, or the Haroldstown Tribe. The gangs were given these lurid titles by the tabloids, and their commanders were all christened with similar nicknames – the Captain, the Rottweiler, the Accountant. It made you feel as if the whole thing was part of the sixties'
Batman
TV show.

The problem was that this was real, and, as easy as it was to poke fun at the inherent silliness of it all, these groups
were
menacing. Execution-style shootings were becoming more and more common. Feuds now ended in deaths on an all too regular basis. Some saw the gangs as the people's way of reacting to the abject poverty they lived in, but that was an overly simplistic analysis of the situation. The gangs may have started out that way, but they had degenerated into a cycle of self-perpetuating violence, and the people they preyed on were not the wealthy or those who had some hope of altering the status quo. Drugs were peddled to young people right there in the estates. Prostitutes were recruited from the scores of young women unable to earn money to feed their fatherless babies. And the bodies that were found in ditches or lying in the gutter, shot at close range in the base of the skull, were all unemployed Haroldstown residents, usually ‘known to the police' as active participants in organized crime.

Toddy Walsh had been one of these young men. I remembered the newspaper reports of his death. He had been the equivalent of middle management in one of the ferocious, smaller groups, dubbed by a local journalist as the ‘Twilight Posse'. Obviously an ambitious individual, Toddy had attempted to stage a hostile takeover of the Posse's board. The problem was that his supporters were easily swayed from their purpose and he had been sold out. He was found on a patch of wasteland not far from where he lived. He had been shot in the back of the head at point-blank range with a heavy-gauge shotgun, but not before he had been tortured viciously. The Gardaí had to identify him from his dental records.

The Walshes lived on a narrow street deep in the heart of Haroldstown. Each side of the road was lined with terraced houses, pressed upon each other as if they were seeking comfort or warmth. I parked up on the cracked footpath outside the tiny, overgrown garden of the Walsh residence. Women, still clad in dressing gowns at ten thirty in the morning, were standing at their gates chatting. They stared at the strange car and the unknown man arriving outside the hard-luck house. What further misery was being brought upon this sad little family? A dozen eyes followed me up the short pathway to the warped front door. I knocked smartly and waited, ignoring the accusing eyes and mutters.

Biddy Walsh looked like someone who'd had every last vestige of joy wrung from her. A tall, thin woman with stringy black hair and hollow, pockmarked cheeks, she had probably once been very attractive. Now she carried the shadow of her pain around like the walking wounded. She looked me over with resentment, coupled with what seemed to be almost relief. I could tell that she was close to breaking point and was well aware that she needed help, but that a redundant sense of etiquette would stop her from giving me too much information. Like it or not, I represented everything that had kept her people, the population of this ghetto, subjugated for so long. I was
The Man,
or at least his cipher, and therefore not to be cooperated with.

I introduced myself.

She said nothing. I waited for what seemed like a polite amount of time and then cleared my throat.

‘Er, can I come in, Mrs Walsh? If I'm to do some work with Bobby and Micky, I'll have to be able to see them, won't I?'

She stepped aside and allowed me in, but her eyes were full of suspicion and anxiety. The hallway was dark and gloomy and a stale smell of cooking hung in the air, even though it was only ten thirty, and I doubted very much that she had been cooking since the evening before: fried breakfasts were a luxury few in Haroldstown could afford. The walls in the hallway were covered with photographs of Biddy and her family, but I was not invited to stop and admire them. Still unspeaking, she brushed past me through a door to my left. I followed.

The living room was moderately better lit but would still be difficult to read in. The curtains were only partially open, and a sheen of dirt coated the windowpane. Biddy sat on a grimy couch and stared into space. I looked about and saw an armchair covered in unironed clothes. I picked them up, made as neat a pile of them as I could and placed them on a coffee table. Then I sat down. The walls of this room were also completely hidden by framed photographs – hundreds of them, in fact. I could see Biddy in some of them, looking young and happy, beside a dark-haired, dark-eyed man who was looking into the camera with a steely gaze. He was not handsome: there was something cruel about the set of his mouth, and his eyebrows met in the middle, but he certainly looked striking. This, I assumed, was Toddy Walsh. As my eyes travelled around the countless images, I saw that he was in almost every single photograph. With him and Biddy in some of the snapshots were two little boys. I could trace them through infancy and into early childhood. The boys were both dark, like their parents, although the older one seemed to resemble his father more, while the younger mostly took after the mother.

‘Where are the boys, Mrs Walsh?'

Slowly, she turned to look at me.

‘They're with him.'

‘I'm sorry …'

‘They're out the back with their father.'

A sense of dread washed over me. I pushed the feeling aside and smiled.

‘Great! Well, that's perfect. Can I go out and meet them? It would be great to see exactly what they're doing. It's a good place to start actually.'

A look of horror spread across her face at the prospect.

‘No! No, you stay here and I'll go and get them, bring them to you!'

I'd like to go to them …' I pressed, sensing this was a sore point, but wanting to see where it would lead.

‘No! I said no.'

She stood up, trembling now. As she walked to the door, I called after her: ‘Mrs Walsh, can I ask you why you don't want me to go out to the boys?'

She stopped with her back to me, her head lowered.

‘Because,' she said, her voice a whisper, ‘you'll frighten him off. I want the boys to get better, not to be so wild. They're being eaten up by what's happening – they don't understand it. I'm terrible worried about them, so I am. The social workers tell me you can cure them. I want you to do that for me. For
them.
Give them peace. But you're not to drive him away. Not now that he's come back to us.'

Then she was gone. I sat for some minutes, considering what had just passed between us. There was a lot I still didn't understand, so I decided to simply focus on the boys for the time being.

I stood up and opened the curtains to better let the daylight in and then went back out to my car and got a box of tissues. I cleaned the window as best I could. When I was finished, the room, while far from pleasant, was reasonably bright. It was a start. I then brought in a box, from the boot of my car, which contained a few simple toys and some felt-tip pens and paper.

Five or six minutes later, Biddy came in with the two boys. I felt like I knew them already, even though it was only from the countless pictures that were all around me. Bobby was six years old and taller by a head than his brother. Size aside, they were very similar, except that Bobby had the hard, adversarial gaze and firmly set mouth of his father, while Micky retained the melancholic, gentler visage of his mother. They stood in the doorway of the room, side by side, watching me with exactly the same trepidation and worry their mother had displayed on my arrival. I had the toys (mostly cars and figurines) and drawing equipment spread out on the floor before me.

‘Boys, I'm glad to meet you. Come on over and let's have a chat.'

The children did not move, but Biddy gently pushed them towards me. Obediently they moved forward and stood in front of me. I smiled at them and motioned for them to sit. I was already cross-legged on the floor. Bobby threw a look over his shoulder at his mother and, when she nodded, lowered himself to the carpet, followed by Micky.