The Doll's House

‘Do you want to look in the cradle, Clodagh?’ Gerard Hayden’s voice is my only link with the present.

‘I don’t have a choice.’ My little-girl self takes me by the hand but now she’s humming as we walk over to it. She stands back when we’re within touching distance, and I step forward. I can hear Dad sobbing. My mother is still standing by the window. Before I look inside the cradle, with its white lace and tiny pink bow at the top, somewhere in my mind I acknowledge a silence that isn’t right, but, without looking inside, I know the crib isn’t empty.

‘She’s dead,’ I hear my mother hiss. ‘Killed.’

‘It was an accident, Lavinia. You have to believe that,’ my father pleads.

I pull back the pale pink blanket on the top. There is a cool cotton sheet underneath. When I take back the sheet, deep in the shadows from the canopy, I see her.

‘Touch her,’ my little-girl self says. ‘She’s still warm.’

I lean inwards, rubbing the back of my hand down the side of her warm cheek. It feels like nothing I’ve ever touched before, until I remember how I used to do the same thing with Ruby when she was small, over and over again, amazed every time I felt her tiny life, real, close, intimate and so fragile. But this is different because now I can feel the life fading. It is drifting to some place from which it can never come back. It is then that I feel tears filling my eyes. The first of them trickles down and drops on to her mattress. More than anything, I want to stop time.

‘She’s beautiful,’ I hear my little-girl self saying, as if my parents are not there. As if we are the only ones in the room.

‘Is she …’ I can barely breathe, ‘dead?’

‘Yes. There was a fight.’

I stare at my little-girl self, wondering why she sounds so calm, relieved her voice doesn’t sound like Desperate Debbie’s any more, and her face is normal.

‘Did you see it?’ I ask her, the tears now streaming down my face.

Gerard asks if I’m okay. I can’t answer him. He belongs to a different place. He isn’t in this room. He isn’t inside the doll’s house. He doesn’t count, not any more.

‘I hid,’ she says, ‘Debbie knows the truth, but she’s not saying.’

‘Where did you hide?’

‘In my room – the one Sandy and Debbie like to play happy families in. They told me everything would be okay.’

I hear myself scream inside my head. The scream won’t go away. I try to speak, but no words will come out. Questions repeat themselves over and over in my mind, as if I’m in a dream and can’t find the answers. But the questions are simple. Why did she have to die? Why do I feel I’m to blame? I can feel my body shaking.

‘Clodagh, try to remain calm,’ I hear Gerard say. ‘Who is dead?’ But again, I don’t answer him. Not at first. I’m looking at my little-girl self, because I know she has something more to say.

‘There could only be one Daddy’s little girl.’





Mervin Road


Kate hadn’t slept well, tossing and turning throughout the night. It was almost a relief to see glimpses of daylight creep into her bedroom on Friday morning. This was beginning to feel like the longest week of her life. Getting out of bed to shower, she couldn’t stop thinking about O’Connor from the night before. It was a mess in more ways than one. Charlie waking up was also playing on her mind. What if he told Declan? Did it bloody matter? She knew it did. Just as she knew that she wouldn’t have let O’Connor into the apartment at that late hour if Declan had been around. She was already behaving like a single woman, but she was also a mother, and no matter what she felt about O’Connor, or whatever mess he had got himself into, she was that first and foremost.

She switched on the small television in the kitchen. The headlines were still dominated by the canal murders so she changed to a channel showing cartoons. After setting the breakfast table, she checked her watch: seven forty-five, time to wake Charlie. Walking towards his bedroom, Kate felt uneasy. Was it because the temporary adjustment of the two of them alone had turned into a permanent one, or was it the aftermath of the conversation with O’Connor? Of all the people to break the rules, she would never have guessed it would be him. He had always struck her as solid, but he wouldn’t be the first, when a personal connection came into play, for whom the rules became guidelines, landing him in a whole lot of trouble. When Kate opened Charlie’s bedroom door, she smelt urine, her guilt about O’Connor slapping her in the face. What the hell was she at? She knelt down beside Charlie’s bed.

‘Come on, Buster. It’s time to get up.’