‘Here, give me some, you greedy thing,’ he said.
She handed over the spliff and though his arm was hard beneath her head she could feel some of the softness of the pillow. She closed her eyes. Definitely floating.
Yeah, if her mam could see her, she would have a grade A fit.
‘I better go home. It’s after midnight,’ she said, trying to sit up.
‘Are you Cinderella, or what?’ Jason laughed. ‘Will I turn into a pumpkin if I don’t get you home?’
‘Be serious.’ She sat up and felt around for her jacket.
‘All right, spoilsport, I’ll take you home,’ he said.
Katie kissed him on the lips. Now she had wings.
Sean Parker watched from his bedroom window as his sister and her boyfriend curled into each other on the snowy driveway. He witnessed them kissing under the road light and saw the smile on Katie’s face. When had he last seen his gloomy sister so happy?
He couldn’t remember.
Lottie eased her body into bed. She reached over her hand and felt the Argos book there, weighing down the duvet, her trick to keep the bedclothes tight on Adam’s side. She had tried the phone book once. But it wasn’t as good as the Argos book.
She lay awake thinking of Susan Sullivan and James Brown, trying to understand what they could possibly have been involved in to warrant their deaths.
Once she heard Katie turn her key in the door, she immediately fell asleep.
Eleven
The man rubbed his skin in hard even strokes.
He had done what he had to do. Secrets had to be protected. He had to be protected. Others had to be protected too, though they didn’t know it.
He lathered his body, attempting to scrub out the scent of death. Slowly and methodically he worked. From the roots of his hair to his neatly cut toenails. He stepped out of the shower and towelled his skin in precise sweeps.
Fully dried, he strolled naked to his bedroom, lay down on the white sheets and stared at the ceiling for the rest of the night.
1974
She knew what he was doing was wrong but she was too afraid to tell anyone. He had a secret place where he took her most days after school. During the school holidays, he made her call to him at least once a week and sometimes he came to her house.
Her mammy was thrilled to have a priest coming to visit. She would take down the good china and serve him tea and biscuits. When her mammy was making the tea in the scullery, he would grab her hand and thrust it down there. She felt sick when he made her do that. It was nearly worse than the other things he made her do.
Once, they were almost caught when her mammy came back to see if he would like brown bread instead of biscuits. He turned toward the front window quickly, saying he was watching his car in case young hooligans scratched it.
She did not see him for a month after that and thought it was the end but it was in fact the beginning of the nightmare in earnest. He told her mammy he had a job for her in the evenings in the priest’s house, sweeping and dusting, and he would give her a few bob pocket money. Her mammy was delighted.
The little girl knew then, the horror would be daily.
Sometimes she drank her daddy’s whiskey which she found in the cabinet under the television. It burned her throat but after a few minutes it warmed her insides and dimmed the reality around her. She was eating too much. Her mammy was giving out to her all the time about her weight. She wanted to tell her mammy to ‘fuck off’, because she had heard one of the girls in school saying it and knew it was a bad word. Sometimes the priest said bad words too when he was inside her. She hated him. She was sore and bleeding. She didn’t like any of it. And she knew it was too late to stop it. Who would believe her?
The girls in school were calling her fatty. Fatty this and fatty that. When she looked at herself in the mirror, she did not recognise the person staring back at her. She looked like Mr Kinder next door with his beer belly sticking out through the buttons on his smelly shirt.
Sometimes she cried herself to sleep. Mostly she just hated herself and what she had become. What he had made her become. She vowed that some day she would make him pay. She did not know when or how, but one day his time would come and she would be ready. He had shown her no mercy, only contempt. She would be the same.
‘What goes around comes around,’ she told her reflection in the mirror.
DAY TWO
31st December 2014
Twelve
Lottie’s car miraculously started on the second turn of the key. Someone up there must love me, she told the dark, early morning sky. She needed a clear head, so she drove the long way to work.
Driving round by the Ardvale Road, she swung left at the roundabout, passing the once bustling tobacco factory with its smokeless chimneys. She remembered the pungent smell which used to hang in the air before the plant downsized to a distribution depot. She missed that whiff; it seemed to give definition to where she lived. It was gone now, like so much else.
Stopped at the traffic lights on the Dublin Bridge, she took in the panoramic view of her snow-covered town below, nestled in a valley between two marshy midland lakes, dominated by the twin-spired cathedral to the right and the single spire of the Protestant Church on the left. Cushioned between both stood a four-storey, planning deformity apartment block, out of keeping with its low-rise surroundings.
Historically, Ragmullin was a fortress town but now its idle army barracks was a breeding ground for vandalism and rumoured to be in line to become a centre for refugees and asylum seekers. It was constructed on the highest point of the town, up beyond the canal and railway. The eleventh-century monks who’d settled here would be proud that some streets still bore names in homage to these hooded men. There wasn’t much else to be proud of, Lottie thought.
Before the traffic lights changed, she scanned the horizon once again, her eyes focussing on the spires standing tall in their tree-lined surroundings. Her hands turned white as she clutched the steering wheel. She thought of the church’s dominance over the lives of the townspeople in the past and the effect its long-frocked men had bestowed on her own family. The cast iron bell, snared in one spire, clanged out the sixth hour of the morning and resonated through the rolled-up windows of her car. There was no escaping it. Church and State. Two thorns in the history of Ragmullin and in her own history.
Lottie took a few deep breaths and the shattered glass of the traffic light flashed to a cracked green. She stamped down the accelerator and the car skidded, almost stealing a strip of paint from the red Micra in front of her, the only other car around. She drove over the bridge and down the icy pot-holed, deserted street with shop windows dark and shaded. She wondered how many secrets lay hidden behind them, what mysteries waited to be uncovered and if in time there would be anyone left in Ragmullin to even bother trying to unearth them.