The Doll's House

‘Now open your eyes. Stay resting on the bed. Keep relaxed. Whenever you’re ready, you can sit up.’


I smell the vanilla-scented candles. I hear cars driving past. Gerard Hayden is sitting on the chair waiting for me to wake. I feel as if something has changed, although I’m not sure what.

‘Are you okay?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘You did very well.’

‘How long was I out for?’

He looks at his watch. ‘About an hour.’

‘Really? It felt like minutes.’

‘Do you remember anything?’

‘Yes.’

‘What do you remember, Clodagh?’

‘I was a little girl. I was going to a party. I was happy.’

‘Anything else?’

‘My mother.’

‘What about your mother?’

‘She …’ But the words won’t come out.

‘It’s okay, Clodagh. Take your time.’

I know the words. They hang inside my brain for the longest time, as if they’re imagined or they belong to someone else, but then I say them, almost in a whisper, ‘She loved me.’

Gerard says nothing. Despite a sense of disbelief, the recall has brought up something I least expected: a feeling of loss. For the first time since my mother’s death, with the noise of traffic coming in from outside and the strong smell of vanilla candle wax, I cry, loud, uncontrollable sobs, while Gerard Hayden remains seated on the chair, looking as if he has experienced this scene many times before.





38C Seville Place, Ringsend


Stevie McDaid wasn’t one for being overly energetic on a Sunday morning, unless he had someone nice in the bed beside him. But Keith Jenkins’s murder had spiked his interest. Seeing Clodagh the other night had got him thinking too. He had stopped following her once she’d turned away from the strand. He already knew where she lived, her and good old Martin – a guy not to be underestimated. Even as a kid, the bastard had had another side to him. It’s been a while since Stevie’s thought about the old gang, Martin, Dominic and himself. After that baby died, everything had changed. The whole lot of them had such high and mighty ideas about themselves. Yet none of them ever moved from Sandymount. Laughable, if it wasn’t so fucking predictable.

Looking around his flat, he smirked. That had probably been predictable too: 38C Seville Place was the latest in a very long line of fuck-ups in his accommodation choices. Spending money on women, and generally having a good time, cost a guy. Something had to give. His priorities were hot water and a comfy bed, but 38C Seville Place was bang in the middle of flats supported by welfare. He hadn’t known it moving in, thinking, with the flat being in Ringsend and close enough to Sandymount, he would avoid most of the scumbags. The landlord knew people in high places, people who’d got him on the approved-landlord list, a list that guaranteed him a thousand smackers a month for his shit boxes.

Stevie’s shit box had a bedroom with a double bed, a fitted wardrobe without doors, a kitchen the size of a small lift, and a sitting room with a view of the backyard. It housed a black leather couch, a lamp without a shade, cream-painted woodchip wallpaper, only surpassed by the barred windows and a cracked mirror above the fireplace – one that, hopefully, had given all the bad luck to the previous tenant. Stevie could hear everything through the walls: crying babies, couples shagging, toilets flushing. It wasn’t until he realised he lived near to Clodagh Hamilton that he began to look on the shit box as some warped twist of Fate. But it was the wayward daughter who had first attracted his attention. Her, and the old man crawling all over pretty Ruby. Another face Stevie wouldn’t forget in a hurry.

Crappy accommodation was nothing new to him. He had lived in it from childhood. At first he hadn’t known it was crappy. He’d thought it was the way things were. People living in shacks in Africa didn’t dream about living in semi-detached houses. They dreamed of having food, and not bleedin’ dying. It was only ever him and his ma. She used to tell him that, with the absence of a father, they were like the Immaculate Conception. It was their private joke. If anyone else mentioned it, it wasn’t funny.

The array of boyfriends was an education too. There was one arsehole in particular, one of those ‘new age, save the planet’ types, dressed in his neat jumper and jeans. It was the backpack that really got Stevie going, green and pink, like the bit of pink said something about the arsehole breaking down stereotypical gender bias. Once Stevie knew the guy’s cover, well, he was there for the taking. He was only ten at the time, and his ma told him to behave, but she was a softie. He knew how far he could push her before he’d get a clip around the ear.

‘You do much hiking with that backpack of yours, Mister?’

‘Sure do. Maybe we could do some hiking together, Stevie.’

‘Stevie would love that, wouldn’t you, Stevie?’ his ma had piped up.