The Fall Girl (2 page)

I find a friend of my own in the end or, should I say, a companion. Kathleen Mulcahy, or Kat, as she becomes known, in order to satisfy their mocking tongues – Kat and Mousy.

She comes to me, one oddball sniffing out another. I don't really like her. In fact, she drives me mad the way she chews her egg and onion sandwiches with her mouth gaping or slurps her tea, while she scoffs up her sleeve and nudges me sneakily, whispering about this one and that one. She's cowardly – an onlooker.

Three years our companionship lasts; three dreary years. During that time Lesley and I never speak beyond the odd greeting, usually if I bump into her on her own, which isn't very often. It's only a
howaya, Frances
, but it means a lot to
me. I appreciate it. She makes me feel normal, acceptable, un-mouselike.

I'll never forget the first time I met Lesley. She danced her way into my heart.

It's 1971. I'm almost eight. I'm at my Irish dance class. My mother is sitting by my side on the bench at the back of the hall. It must be summer because the window is open behind me and I can feel the heat prickle the back of my neck. Miss Jackson, our teacher, is finishing up with the younger group and asks me to call in the other children from the car park. That's where they play while they're waiting their turn to dance. I'm not allowed to join them. My mother tells me to stay where I am and put on my pumps; she will call the others in.

As she's heading out the door, she stops suddenly and stands back, and a very tall, heavily built woman steps into the hall, with a striking, dark-haired girl of about my own age trailing behind her.

Taking hold of the girl's hand, the woman plods across the hall and plonks herself down beside me. She asks me my name. Her accent is strange. I can't see the girl; she's sitting on the far side of the woman.

‘How old are you?' the woman then asks.

‘Eight.'

‘There you are, our Lesley. This young girl's the same age as yourself.'

The girl leans forward and stares into my face. She doesn't smile. She doesn't need to. She has the most beautiful face I've ever seen.

‘A new girl,' Miss Jackson says.

‘Yes,' the woman says, ‘though she's been at the dancing back home in Manchester for a few years now.'

Miss Jackson asks the girl if she'll do a reel. The girl nods. My mother's sitting beside me again, giving the big woman the once-over. The girl stands in the centre of the hall, throws back her shoulders and puts her slender right leg forward, toes pointed. She's wearing a short, red, pleated kilt, a white polo, white knee socks and well-worn, wrinkly pumps without laces. They remind me of ballet shoes.

Before she lowers the stylus on to the vinyl, Miss Jackson says, ‘Quiet, please.'

No further requests for silence are necessary. Lesley's like a pixie in the wind, circling and twirling around the hall, barely skimming the floorboards. I've never seen anyone leap so high and land so softly. I can feel my skin tingling. Tapping my mother's sleeve, I tell her, ‘I want to dance like that,' but she ignores me, her cold eyes fixed firmly on Lesley, who has just finished her reel and is taking a well-rehearsed bow.

‘I think the music needs Lesley more than Lesley needs the music,' Miss Jackson says.

My mother's jaw is stiff, as her chin withdraws into the folds of her neck. I wonder what it is that Lesley has done to earn this instant disapproval.

An hour later I'm on the swing in Aunty Lily's garden. I love that swing. She bought it especially for me, having no children
of her own. My mother and she are sitting out in deckchairs, drinking tea.

‘You should have seen her,' my mother says about Lesley, ‘kicking her legs up higher than a French tart doing the cancan.'

I drag my soles along the grass and stop the swing. ‘What's a French tart?'

‘Quit earwigging, you,' my mother says.

Aunty Lily is bent over coughing, laughing and struggling for breath.

‘Take it easy there, Lily.' My mother rubs her sister's back. ‘Don't you know you shouldn't be getting yourself all worked up like that?'

‘Ah Jesus,' Aunty Lily gasps, ‘if I can't have a laugh now and again, what's the point?'

A couple of weeks later, my mother drops me off at my dance class and says my father will collect me at midday. She's going to spend the whole morning with Aunty Lily.

‘Go on outside and play with the others, child of grace,' Miss Jackson says, ‘and don't be sitting there all on your owney-o.'

I can't believe she's letting me go out. She knows very well my mother wouldn't approve. I keep looking back at her as I edge my way over to the door, half expecting her to change her mind. But she's busy showing a young lad how to point his toes. When I open the door, I can hear the other children playing. I walk down the steps, unsure of what I'm going to do with myself when I get to the bottom.

Lesley has everyone lined up against the back wall. She's skipping in front of them and singing:

My sister Jane was far too young

to marry a man of a hundred and one …

I sidle over to the adjacent wall and sit on an empty beer keg from the pub next door. Lesley is the only one who notices me. She smiles, gesturing me over to her line. I can feel my face turning red as I walk across to join the others. Lesley has to pick someone from the row to have a go and chooses me.

‘I don't know how to play the game,' I tell her.

‘It doesn't matter,' she says, taking my hand. ‘Just follow my steps and I'll do the singing.'

I'm not sure about all this reminiscing. Where is it going to get me? It might do more harm than good. Earlier on today, when I was thinking about the first time I met Lesley, I almost felt normal. But I'm not normal. Normal people don't kidnap babies, do they?

I stand beside the pram, facing the mannequins in the shop window. Inside I see the baby's mother rummaging through the bargain rail. She doesn't even look over her shoulder to check on her child. What the hell is wrong with her? Why is she being so irresponsible? How come she gets to be a mother and I don't? I would never have left my baby unattended. It's not fair. This shouldn't be happening. Everything's arseways. I could scream.

The security guard steps inside the shop and starts chatting with one of the assistants. The only eyes on the baby now are mine. It's a split-second decision – I stretch out my leg, release the brake with my foot and grab the handle.

‘Excuse me,' I say, pushing the pram in front of me towards O'Connell Street.

A path opens up as pedestrians step out of my way. I don't feel crazy and I don't feel wrong. I just want to protect this child.
I
want to be …
should
be her mother.

I'm at the top of Henry Street in less than a minute. There's no hysteria; no screaming, delirious mother howling to the heavens, ‘Where's my baby?'

Taking a left turn, I walk down to the traffic lights and around Parnell Square. When I see my car in the distance, I quicken my pace. The sooner we get away from the city, the better.

At the car, I try to remove the carrycot from the frame of the pram, but the blasted thing won't budge. I get down on my hunkers and start fumbling with the pram's undercarriage.

‘Are you OK there, missus?' a man says. He has an inner-city accent, black loafers and white socks.

‘Fine,' I snap, without looking up at him.

‘Bleedin' hell, keep your fuckin' wig on, will ya?' he says, stomping on his cigarette butt. ‘Oi was only askin'.'

When I finally manage to release the four clamps that secure the carrycot to the frame of the pram, I lift it off, put it into the back seat and fasten the seatbelt around it. The baby's eyes are flickering underneath her spongy eyelids. Aching to kiss her, I bend down to pick her up, but then think better of it: I don't want to waken her. Besides, there'll be plenty of time for kisses later. I take the baby bag from the carrier basket and put it on the passenger seat. Then I fold down the frame and shove it into the boot.

I turn the key in the ignition. Gerry Ryan is still on the radio, so I know it's not yet twelve o'clock. At the first red light I turn to check on the baby. All I can see is the back of her head – wisps of downy white hair – and I remember how my father once told me that when I was born my hair was as white as snow.

Several minutes later, I find myself on a roundabout. I drive around it three times wondering where to go, before taking the exit for the Naas dual carriageway: the farther away from Crosslea, the better. There's no way I can bring her home yet: maybe in a week or two. Then I could tell my father that she's mine. Women do it from time to time – disappear for a couple of weeks and arrive back home with their babies.

She begins to stir and moan.

‘Ssh, little baby, ssh, ssh.'

When she quietens, I'm sure she's comforted by the sound of my voice and I'm chuffed.

On hearing the news come on, I bless myself and turn up the volume. I can't believe it's one o'clock. How did I manage to miss the twelve o'clock news? There is no mention of a missing baby in the headlines. It doesn't make sense. I can't understand it. Why aren't they looking for her? I should be relieved, and part of me is, but I'm angry too, because if it hadn't been me who had taken her, she could've ended up in the arms of some nutter; in danger, dead even. Thank God it was me, I think, my eyes filling up at the thought of what might have happened to her otherwise.

She begins to stir again. This time she makes little kissy sounds that tell me she's hungry. When she starts to cry, I sing to her:

Hush little baby don't say a word

Mama's gonna buy you a mockingbird …

It's getting hot inside the car. I roll down the window.

And if that mockingbird won't sing

Mama's gonna buy you a diamond ring …

A couple of miles outside Naas, I get stuck in a traffic jam. The baby is wailing now, stopping only to draw breath. Afraid that someone in the surrounding cars might hear her cry and become suspicious, I roll up the window again.

‘Oh God, please help me.'

I can see a service station about a hundred yards away, but at the rate we're moving, it could take me another ten minutes to get there. I cannot wait. Indicating, I pull over on to the hard shoulder and drive up into the courtyard. My hands are trembling as I lift the baby out of the carrycot and hold her close to my chest. She nestles into me, urgently searching with her mouth. Her impatient lips try to latch on to my breast. She's moving back and forth on me, as if she's blowing on a mouth organ. I want to rip open my blouse and feel the softness of her head on my naked breast. If only I could quench her thirst.

A bottle, I think, puffing and panting to keep myself calm. I put my free hand into the baby bag, pulling out nappies, a bib, a bottle. The flipping thing is empty! I root around the inside of the bag again, this time finding a soother. When I put it in her mouth, she sucks furiously. I turn the baby bag upside down and shake out the rest of its contents on to the passenger
seat, but there's no formula, just a packet of baby wipes and a baby-gro. As I lift the bag to throw it into the back seat, I feel something rectangular and solid in the front pocket. Undoing the zip, I pull it out. Yes! Thank you, God. It's a carton of Cow and Gate milk.

‘It's OK, baby,' I pant, wiping my brow. ‘It's OK.'

She cries and kicks, banging her feet on the steering wheel. I try to open the carton of formula, but my nails are too short to make a slit: I have to use my teeth. Outside, people are getting in and out of cars, I can hear doors slamming, but I don't look out. The baby spits out the soother and throws back her head, flexing her limbs and squalling as if she's in terrible pain. She's frightening me now. Pushing back my seat, I lay her down on my knees. I need to fill her bottle quickly. As I loosen the top, I become aware of two children staring in the window. The baby jolts again, this time kicking my elbow. Milk spills over the side of the bottle and soaks my skirt. I don't care as long as I can manage to get enough into the bottle to satisfy her, to shut her up.

‘OK, baby, here it comes,' I say, screwing on the top. ‘Ssh ssh ssh.'

Holding her in the crook of my arm, I put the teat to her mouth.

There. There. There.

She's drinking now, fast and furious. I sense her relief in the sound of her breathing. Beads of sweat are trickling down the small of my back, making me itchy. I haven't time to scratch myself. I don't have a free hand either.

Looking down at her, I find it impossible not to feel moved by her big, blue, dependent eyes gazing back up at me and scanning my face.

I listen to the one-thirty news headlines. There's still no mention of a missing baby. It doesn't make sense. It must be two hours now since I found her. Unless, of course, she'd been
abandoned. It's not beyond the realms of possibility. I've heard of several cases of mothers abandoning their babies in Ireland. And this child's mother did look very young: too young. Perhaps she couldn't cope. She could be on her own, without a man, without support, without money. She could be depressed, on drugs; at the end of her tether. Who knows?

‘Did your mother abandon you, sweetheart?' I look at her helpless face. ‘Don't worry, I'll look after you.'

Maybe it's fate. I've never really believed in fate, not since … not for eighteen years. But why me? And why now? Today on her eighteenth birthday. Fate – it's the only explanation.

Fate is only an explanation, a watery excuse. And, as I've said, there are no excuses for what I've done.