Girl Unknown (34 page)

Zoë breathed smoke out of the side of her mouth, her eyes narrowing as she watched me. ‘You’re pretty fucked up right now, aren’t you?’

‘I think you’ve said enough,’ I slurred.

On the table, the crumpled letter lay where Caroline had dropped it, ash colouring it grey at the edges. Zoë reached for it, brought the burning tip of her cigarette to one corner. The document started to smoulder.

‘A DNA test,’ I heard her whispering, beneath her breath, with derision. ‘I can’t believe you did that.’

‘I had to be sure,’ I explained. ‘I needed to know for definite.’

She kept her gaze on the letter, a low flame steadily devouring it. As it neared her fingertips, she dropped the burning remains into the sink. She was acting like a whole new person. Confident, mature, but icy with superiority and disdain. I felt, while she held me with her hard stare, that she resented me. More: she disliked me.

‘So what now?’ she asked. ‘Shall we do another one?’

At first, I didn’t know what she meant, but then I saw where the DNA test results had turned to ash in the sink, and my confusion cleared. ‘No, that won’t be necessary.’

‘But how else are you going to be sure?’

I couldn’t tell if she was being serious or if it was more of her mockery. I couldn’t be sure of anything about her. ‘I just don’t think –’

‘To clear up any remaining doubts. Because you must have some little niggling doubts. Right, David?’

Her voice was high and sharp, and I could see how close she was to the brink. All that icy coolness, the bravado of burning the letter – it was a front. Underneath, she was scared.

I should have told her there were no doubts. I should have declared my firm belief that she was my daughter. But instead I wavered. Out of nowhere Gary, her stepfather, had come into my head and with it the remembered emotions of the day I had met him – the disorienting shock at the news of her adoption, the crumbling edifice of the truths she had told me, truths I had believed
wholeheartedly because I had loved her mother deeply, and passionately, and it had seemed, in some fucked-up way, that with this daughter coming to me, I was somehow getting a second chance, a chance to redeem myself, a chance to make good my life.

That may have been naïve, but it had seemed like a bright and shining hope that only grew opaque and cracked with the knowledge that she had lied. Not once or twice, but continuously with an inconsistency and virtuosity that made it impossible to know what was true and what was not. I didn’t know where I was with her. The truth is, I’d been lost from the very beginning.

She saw my hesitation, the doubts announcing themselves in my brief silence, and when I finally spoke up, stammering that there was no need for another DNA test, that I believed I was her father, she gave me a long, measuring look, something angry shoring up behind her eyes.

‘You’re right not to believe me,’ she said, her voice soft and dangerous.

‘Zoë, it’s difficult, okay? I mean, it’s not as if you make it easy. This thing you have with Caroline …’

She laughed, a bark of bitter amusement. ‘God, you’re so predictable, David.’ The way she said it was loaded with scorn. ‘You act all solemn and quiet and thoughtful, like you’re this deep thinker – an independent mind. But scratch the surface and you’re just a frightened little man who will always go running back to his wife.’

She wanted to plunge the knife in deeper; she wanted to twist it. Indignation rose within me, but at the back of it came a quieter more insistent suspicion. ‘The letter
from the university,’ I said. ‘It was you who signed for it, wasn’t it?’

She was stubbing out her cigarette in the sink among the ashes. ‘What are you talking about?’

She was very convincing but, then, I knew what a good actress she was. Quietly, I explained what I meant, playing along with her game of ignorance. Somehow I knew the answer to my question, regardless of what she would tell me. ‘You signed for that letter, didn’t you?’ I said again. She was leaning back against the sink, her hands behind her, one fingernail tapping out an impatient rhythm against the cool enamel while she listened carefully. ‘You signed Caroline’s name and then hid the letter. Admit it.’

The beat of her fingernail against the sink. I thought of Chris and his parting words to me:
the little bitch
. She had made a fool of him, playing him before dumping him. I thought of Caroline and the wild accusations Zoë had made – the hints of the affair being revived, blaming my wife for the violence she had done to her own face. I thought of Gary and the lies she had spun about him. She had played them all. Why should I be immune? I saw my foolishness and felt my anger rise sharply, wild and erratic, like the crazy rhythm of her fingertips inside my head.

Then it stopped. She became still. In a quiet voice she said: ‘Yes. All right. I did it.’

The breath went out of me. Weakness came into my legs.

‘I signed for it. Then I took it upstairs to my room and burned it. Just like I burned that letter there.’

How still she seemed. Completely unmoved while I was trembling. What had happened to the teenager who
had appeared nervously at my office door, picking at her cuffs, frightened half to death at the bomb she was about to drop? Somehow, she had been replaced by this cool, bloodless creature with her dead gaze, her cruel words spoken with velvet softness. And the thing that was most confusing, the thing I couldn’t make out, was which one was the real Zoë, and which the fake.

‘I had worked so hard.’ The words coming out of me no louder than a whisper, a gasp of helplessness and disbelief.

‘I don’t care how hard you worked.’

I blinked, and blinked again, my vision becoming blurred. The headache that had dogged me all day was still there, made worse by the blow to my face, the mix of alcohol and pills. It made me doubt my very senses. ‘But why … why would you want to sabotage my chances of promotion, my whole career?’

‘You just don’t get it, do you?’ she said, with bitter amusement, her smile high and tight. ‘It’s what I do, David. It’s what I’ve always done. Call it the instincts of an orphan.’

‘But you’re not. You never were an orphan, never have been …’

‘Excuse me, but I’m not going to be lectured to by a second-rate tutor like you, a wannabe, a cuckold, a failure.’

I stepped towards her, and even now I’m not sure what I intended to do – put my hands to her shoulders and urge her to be calm, or hit her like Chris had done.

She stood very still, her voice coming low and deadly: ‘What are you planning to do, Daddy? Kiss me again?’

I froze. The words caught me like a glancing blow and I recoiled from them, horrified by her suggestion, but a deeper horror bubbled up from within at the knowledge that I had done so already. That only a short time before I had pressed my lips against hers – confusing her for Linda – in the way of a lover.

‘Perhaps that’s why you got the test done,’ she said, the sweetness of her tone disguising the poison beneath. She stepped past me, pausing once to glance back from the door. ‘You never wanted me to be your daughter.’ She said it so softly but the pain went deep. I said nothing. I couldn’t. Her last words to me: ‘All this time, you’ve been wishing I was Linda.’ And just like that she walked away from me, and out of my life.

History can bring the dead back to life
.

I have said that year after year to a lecture hall full of first-year students. Something to gain their attention from the offset. I never thought of the expression as misleading. I never thought of it as a lie. I believed it myself, right up to the moment when she left me alone, weakened, drained, all my beliefs deserting me. I had no faith to cling to, no ideals to hold me up. Inside I was collapsing, and the only belief I could find was in a bottle.

I drank steadily, dangerously, unaware of my surroundings, my mind drifting into the past, like a boat that had slipped its mooring, falling slowly into a drunken sleep: once again I was back at the cottage in Donegal, the call of a bird, the woods, and with it the image of Linda, a mug of tea cradled in her hands, standing in a shirt of mine reaching halfway down her thighs, lost in thought.
When she spoke, her voice was like a splash of colour in the room. ‘Tomorrow,’ I said to her concerns. ‘We’ll go tomorrow if you want.’ I kissed her. A long, lingering kiss. Love had made me careless. Love had made me bold, and a little reckless, but not completely so: I had not told her I loved her, but I did …

I kissed her again, felt her hair covering my face, only it was not Linda’s hair but Zoë’s – the feathery lightness of her curls. I was kissing her, my own daughter, defiling her innocence, revulsion in my throat. In the dream I was trying to turn away, twisting and writhing, her mocking laughter surrounding me, filling me like an oily soup, sucking at my limbs, and breath, pulling me in, holding me fast as I tried to escape the coiled chains of DNA entwining us in a never-ending sequence. I gave a shout, ‘No!’ and she laughed again, a laugh that was at once close to my ear and far away. Then a scream: I opened my eyes, staggered to my feet as I might have when woken in the night by my children screaming with night-terrors. Stumbling from my bedroom, no recollection of having gone there, I fumbled through the half-light, down the staircase, through the quiet rooms. The granular light of dawn making everything seem grey and empty. Silence hung in the deserted rooms. I began to doubt myself: what had I heard? Something real, or was it something from the depths of a nightmare?

The sky beyond the window was streaked with red. My mouth was desert-dry. I needed water, but instead I went to the window, to see better the fire-brightness of the dawn. That was when the words came to me again:
History can bring the dead back to life.
Like a spell or an incantation.
Those words were in my head when my eyes settled on the pool and I saw them.

Figures in the water. One standing, the other stretched out like a doll, unmoving. Slowly, as though I were still physically locked inside the dream, I stepped out on to the terrace, felt the coolness of early-morning raising hairs on my limbs. I kept my eyes fixed on them as I drew near, unable to make sense of it, the scrambled visuals adding to my confusion. My heart understood it first, my pulse quickening. Caroline leaning over Zoë, holding the girl’s face in her hands, kissing her mouth, no, not kissing, but blowing, blowing into the mouth, a dark stain moving through the water.

Then Caroline looked up, the tears streaming down her face. The water swirled about her waist, and her voice rose in a fevered, anguished pitch: ‘What have you done? Jesus Christ, what have you done?’

Panic gripped me, kept me frozen, while Caroline tugged and pulled at the body, dragging it to the ledge, heaving it up on to the cold wet tiles.

Black holes in my memory, her voice reaching me from some far-off place,
What are you planning to do, Daddy? Kiss me again?

What had I done?

The truth remained hidden from me – too much confusion, too much pain.

I walked towards her, knelt down and gazed into Zoë’s face. She lay on the cold hard ground, her gaze fixed far away, into the sky, the crimson flames of the clouds, and the heavens beyond. I thought of the brief moment of joy in the bed of her conception all those years ago in the
stone cottage of Donegal. I thought of Linda bearing her birth in stubborn silence. I thought of the nursery rhymes, and skipping ropes, the jigsaw puzzles and books, the parks and cinemas of her childhood, away from Linda and me, her parents. I thought about all the things that had made her who she was, the chance and circumstance of her being, and wondered, too, about all she was not or could not be. I thought of everything she might have done, her plans, the trips, the work, the friends, and the love she might have found.

And then, in my peripheral vision, I saw Robbie.
Go back to bed
, I wanted to tell him.
You should not be a witness to this.
I wanted to kiss him on the forehead, and stroke his cheek as if he were a child again. His mother went to him, saying something I couldn’t hear, making some demand of him I couldn’t discern.
Back to bed, son
, I wanted to say, but he just stood there, staring, already sealing himself off from us. Did I know then what he had done?

I cannot tell.

All that really comes to me, when my thoughts turn to that moment, is the outline of my daughter’s face, pale against the limestone flags. How cold she looked, and how perfect, as if she were the beautiful human plaything of some minor Greek god.

I thought of all the things I did and did not know about her. It amounted in the end to nothing: it amounted to a girl whose green eyes had once flickered, but now were glassy and devoid of life.

Part Four

25. Robbie

They come almost every day to get him to talk. Police, social services, his solicitor, counsellors from the prison service. Some of them speak to him in English, heavily accented, but he understands what they’re saying. Others, whose English is not so good, bring translators, and he can see the look in the translator’s eye:
Why on earth won’t you talk, you idiot?
The police and social services are better at concealing their thoughts from him – they have more experience and he can’t be the first kid in this place to clam up with fright. The solicitor just looks bored and a little fed-up, like he has better things to do with his time than sit in an interview room with some Irish kid who prefers to say nothing and stay in this detention centre indefinitely, rather than work on any kind of defence.