Girl Unknown (35 page)

His father is the most frequent visitor. Mostly he just talks to Robbie, like he’s accepted the silence now. He talks about his work, his research – he’s using the time on the island to work on a book. He brings news from home. His tone is conversational, cheerful, forced. Sometimes, on days he’s finding it tough – when it becomes almost unbearable for him to see his son in this place, wearing his institutional uniform – he will lean over the table and whisper urgently:
Please, son, say something.

At least he doesn’t cry, like Robbie’s mother did. She would sit across from him, a balled-up tissue in her hands,
her eyes and nose red raw from all the crying she had done, begging him, beseeching him just to tell her why. She loved him – she forgave him – he was her son. But, please, for the love of God, would he talk to her, just say something?

On and on it went. He watched her within the hermetic seal of his own silence. After what had happened, talking was an impossibility. It was a relief when she went away, back home to Dublin with Holly. He felt the storm in his brain quieten.

When they’ve all gone – his father, the police, the solicitors and social workers – when they’ve left him to go back to his cell, he feels a sense of relief, a levity almost. He lies on his bunk, closes his eyes. And then it’s just the two of them – him and Zoë – locked together in a strange peacefulness.

She was different from how he’d thought she’d be. Different from him and from Holly. He felt it most when she spoke. Her accent, of course, the strange foreignness of the Northern vowel sounds, and the way her voice went up at the end of each sentence, like a little pencilled tick mark on a musical score. When she came for lunch on that first day, it was hard not to stare at her, his
sister
, displacing him now in the role of eldest child. He was taller than her, though – stupid to feel proud of it, but he did. Both of them were thin but she was
really
thin. She wore a big floaty sweater so you couldn’t tell at first until you noticed her legs, like pipe-cleaners coming out of her boots.

He wondered if Zoë had an eating disorder, she was so
thin. A girl in the orchestra, a viola player named Claire Waters, had anorexia. Up close, you could see how papery the skin on her face was over the square bone of her jaw. Her skin was kind of hairy too, light blonde hair, like the hair on her stick-like arms. Robbie sat behind Claire with his cello, so he spent a lot of time staring at the side of her face. She’d dropped out of the orchestra before Easter and someone said she’d been hospitalized. Someone else said they’d seen her and her hair had fallen out – she was almost completely bald on one side of her head.

Zoë’s hair was glorious. He’d never use that word out loud to describe it, but privately that was what he thought. Glorious, luminous. The first time he’d met her, he’d felt an urge to touch it – not that he did. Eventually, a long time after that, he got to put his hand on her hair and he can remember the prickly feeling that shivered over the back of his scalp when he felt his hand sink into those soft curls.

‘What do you think?’ Holly had asked him.

It was late in the evening, both of them in his room. Downstairs their mum was tidying up. Dad was dropping Zoë home.

He shrugged. ‘She seemed okay.’

‘
Really?
’

He flicked the page of his magazine, said nothing.

‘I thought she was a bit full of herself.’

He let her talk for a while, zoning out. He was tired. It had been a weird day. The truth was, he didn’t know if he liked Zoë. Her manner had seemed polite, a little shy perhaps, but at one point she had caught him looking and smiled at him – a different kind of smile from the one
she’d given the others. He’d seen the spark come into her eye, something conspiratorial about it, mischievous, drawing him in, making an ally of him. But he didn’t know if the sum of all these impressions amounted to liking her.

‘Want to see my room?’ he’d asked, the next Sunday she’d come over for lunch.

He’d never had a girl up to his room before. Several guys in his class had claimed they’d had sex with girls in their rooms. He wasn’t sure he believed them, although maybe one or two. Robbie himself had kissed only three girls – sweaty encounters on the dance-floor at Wesley that had never gone any further. He’d tried to get off with a girl in the orchestra at a party once but she’d laughed with surprise, afterwards telling him he was the kind of guy girls loved to have as a friend without the complications of sex. She’d meant to be kind but he’d burned with humiliation.

‘Cool!’ Zoë had said, when she’d seen the poster of Thin Lizzy on his wall – Phil Lynott’s giant head surrounded by a corona of psychedelic swirls. ‘You’re into his music?’

‘Yeah!
Jailbreak
is like my favourite album ever.’

‘Put it on,’ she said, and he scrolled through his iPod while she sat back on his bed, making herself comfortable among his pillows.

They talked about music for a while, then films. Her taste leaned towards the indie end of the spectrum but she admitted to a weakness for rom-coms. ‘You won’t tell anyone, will you?’ she had said, giving him that conspiratorial smile again. He noticed that her front teeth overlapped slightly.

He made some comment then about a Kate Hudson flick he’d read a review of, and she hooted with laughter. ‘You’re so funny, Robbie,’ she’d said. ‘You crack me up.’

He felt himself grinning foolishly. No one ever called him funny, especially not girls.

From then on she came up to his bedroom every Sunday once lunch had been cleared away. Flopping on to his bed with an air of exhaustion, like all the politeness downstairs had been a front but now, up in his room, she could be herself. The differences he’d been so hung up on at the start receded, replaced by the familiar. Downstairs, it was prickly with formality, none of them easy with her – particularly his mother and Holly. But up in his room, just him and Zoë, it was like they’d known each other for ever.

When all that stuff blew up in school over what he’d been doing to Miss Murphy, she was the only one who didn’t give him shit. Even Holly had gone all supercilious on him, calling him a delinquent. ‘You’re
eleven
!’ he had shouted after her, then slammed the door of his room. It made him so mad, being punished like that. Couldn’t any of them understand? Intimidating that teacher, pushing her to the ground, it was an honourable thing! Even his mother, who should have been
grateful
, kept giving him the thin-lipped look of disapproval he couldn’t stand, constantly watching him with anxious eyes. And as for his dad, Robbie thought, don’t get him started! They were so busy with their own jobs, his dad nearly having an aneurism over the professorship and whether or not he’d get it, his mum thinking she was Sheryl Sandberg all of a sudden with her power suits and her appointment diary
and her client portfolio. Didn’t either of them realize they were lucky to have such a good kid? Compared to some of the morons and thugs in his year, Robbie was a goddamned saint!

‘Why should your mother be grateful for what you did?’ Zoë asked, in a ruminative kind of way. She was sitting on his bed, listening to a barrage of grievances that he’d stored up over the whole week of his confinement.

‘What?’

He had heard what she’d said, and he knew what she meant, but he wanted to buy himself a few seconds to think. She didn’t know about his mum. Could he tell her? Part of him knew that telling her would constitute a betrayal, but he was so angry with his mother right then. Fuck it, he thought.

He sat down on the bed opposite her. ‘Promise you won’t tell?’

Her eyes became alert. He liked the way she was watching him, concentrating while he told her about his mum’s affair, how it was with the father of this other kid in his class and how the whole school knew about it. That the teacher he’d bullied was the one who’d spilled the beans.

‘That’s awful!’ she said, when he’d finished. ‘It must have been so shit for you in school.’

He had lain back and looked up at the ceiling. He wasn’t thinking about the stuff the other kids had said – the taunting and the abuse. He was thinking about the moment he’d stepped towards Miss Murphy, the shot of pure adrenalin rushing through his bloodstream as he put his hands up to her chest, knowing he was going to
push her. ‘The other kid – Jack – he changed schools. But Mum and Dad left me where I was.’

‘Why?’ She shook her head, not understanding.

Robbie had never told anyone why but he believed, privately, that it was his father’s way of punishing his mother. It was the way he did things, Robbie’s dad, conducting long, slow, patient campaigns. His mother liked to get things out in the open, have the row, clear the air and move on. But there was a quality of patience in his dad, stubbornness. He wasn’t going to let her sweep it under the carpet, what she had done. He’d make her pay for it with three more years of parent-teacher meetings, school plays, sports days, prize-giving ceremonies, end-of-year Masses. He’d make her go to them all. A three-year sentence was her punishment. Robbie knew that his dad loved him. But he also knew that his dad had blind spots and this was one of them. He couldn’t see how much it hurt Robbie, using him as a pawn just to get at his mother.

He didn’t say so to Zoë, though. He was beginning to regret how much he had already told her. ‘They thought it would blow over,’ he said instead.

Something in his voice must have sounded forlorn, even though he didn’t mean it to, because she reached over and took his wrist, giving it a squeeze.

Steadily, they grew closer. In the weeks after she moved in, his life had seemed to rearrange itself around her, points in the day shifting around the axis of her presence, her company. His mother took him aside and told him that she was concerned about how much time he was spending with Zoë – she worried it was interfering with his studying. He had his Junior Certificate coming up
and it was a Big Deal. How to explain to her that the exact opposite was true? His happiness made him not only diligent but benevolent too, prepared to think better of everyone. He believed then, as he does now, that those weeks were the happiest of his whole life.

He would have forgiven her anything. Even the lies she had told them about Linda. So what if she had been adopted? He couldn’t see why his mum and dad got so worked up about it and after Zoë had disappeared with that dipshit, Chris, Robbie had lain awake in the dark, worrying that they had frightened Zoë away for good.

Some time after midnight, her step had come on the stairs. The softest rap on his door and he sat bolt upright. ‘Come in,’ he whispered.

He didn’t dare turn on a light. His curtains were open anyway and light thrown by the halogen street lamp cast the room in an orange glow.

‘Do you hate me?’ she had asked.

He was out of bed by then, on his feet, standing within touching distance of her. Between them, a metre or so of charged air. Every cell in his body had seemed alive to her, to this, whatever
this
was.

‘I don’t care,’ he’d told her, his voice clear, not bothering to whisper. ‘I don’t care about any of it.’ He’d realized he was trembling.

‘Really?’

‘I just don’t ever want you to run out on us again.’

He’d said it, and he meant it.

Quickly, she stepped towards him, her arms around his neck, his brain about to explode. Slowly, cautiously, he hardly dared to do it, he brought his hands up, put them
to her back and clasped her to him. Her hair was hanging loose and his hands sank into it. He lowered his head and felt her hair brush against his nose – the ticklish softness of it. In the back of his mind, a niggling voice whispering:
What does this mean?
The same DNA ran through their bodies. These conflicting sensations – he was at once excited, and also at peace.

The atmosphere in the house grew heavy. Not everyone was as easy about Zoë’s presence as he was. His mother, for one, seemed increasingly stressed, although he thought that might have something to do with work. There was tension between his parents: they were spending less and less time in each other’s company. As for Holly, there was no love lost between her and Zoë. That much was obvious.

‘She has it in for me,’ Zoë told him, well before the incident with Holly at the quarry – his mother’s hysterical overreaction.

He tried to tell her not to worry, but his mum remained cool and Zoë began to spend more and more time out with her friends, and the creep of doubt came back to him, the feeling she was pulling away. He’d wondered had she a boyfriend but any time he asked she became coy and evasive. Some nights she didn’t come home and his mind went reeling in all directions. In school the following day he could hardly concentrate on anything.
She’s my sister
, he repeated in his head, like a mantra.

His parents didn’t seem to know anything. They were so wrapped up in their own problems. They were fighting more and more, these days – not outright fights, but
sniping and sulking. He felt the thinness of his family around him, like at any moment it might snap.

Eventually he found out. And even though he had suspected there was a boyfriend, he felt a wave of revulsion and an almost overwhelming urge to grab her by the neck and shake her when he discovered it was Chris and that she was moving in with him.

When Zoë left, Robbie had stood at the door watching her go, not speaking to his mum. Afterwards, back in his room, he had felt the house around him plunge into sudden quiet, and the anger roiled inside him. It wasn’t just that it was Chris – although the idea of them naked together made him want to retch – it was the deceit. That she had kept it from him all along. Fed him titbits of information without ever revealing much at all. He felt toyed with, used, as if he was something she could amuse herself with and discard when she’d grown bored. He imagined her telling Chris about him, about the things she’d told him, the two of them lolling around in bed, laughing at Robbie’s innocence, his foolishness. All those weeks when he’d thought there was something between him and Zoë – a closeness – and all the time she had been making a mockery of him. He thought of this and felt the rage inside him, filling his brain, like a swell of music he couldn’t contain. His cello case was lying open on the bed and he slammed it shut, then slammed it again with the flat of his hand. Over and over, he hit it, drawing his hand up over his head then bringing it down with as much force as he could muster. The pain shot up through his wrist and into his arm, yet still he kept at it, feeling past the pain, making himself numb to it.