Days of utter dread, p.24
Days of Utter Dread, page 24
‘It’s no use, Aidan,’ said Mrs Buckley. ‘Once Tusla find you a foster parent to take care of you, and feed you properly – once you don’t smell so bad any more – your whole life will be so much happier. Your ma needs help, too, the state of her. It’s all for the good, believe me.’
Mrs Buckley continued to walk towards the entrance to the halting site, past a broken-down caravan and a tractor with no wheels. The path curved around the side of the dump, where a new load of rubbish had been tipped that afternoon. A flock of seagulls was clustered all over it, flapping and fighting and screaming like frustrated children.
Aidan looked around. There was nobody else in sight, only him and Mrs Buckley. The sky was grey and there was no wind at all. He saw a length of rusty angle iron, about a metre long, which looked as if it had been part of a demolished shed. He clambered up the side of the dump and picked it up, and then clambered back down again.
He ran after Mrs Buckley, his shoes pattering on the path, although the seagulls were screaming so loudly that she probably didn’t hear him. As he came closer, he lifted up the length of angle iron, and hit her with it, as hard as he could.
He had tried to hit her on the head, but she was walking fast and he only managed to strike her between the shoulder blades. All the same, she stumbled and fell to her knees, raising both hands to shield herself. Aidan gripped the angle iron in both hands now and hit her again, much harder. This time he gave her a crack on the back of the head, and she pitched forward into the mud.
He looked around again, panting, just to make sure that nobody had seen him. Mrs Buckley was lying face-down, and one side of her curly blonde hair was glistening crimson with blood. Her fingers were twitching and he could see that he was still breathing, so he hadn’t killed her. He wondered if he ought to hit her again, but then he heard his mother calling out.
‘Aidan! Aid! Where the feck are you, boy? I need you to fetch me some more fags!’
She was just out of sight, and he knew that she wouldn’t come out looking for him, not the way that she was dressed, but all the same he realised that he had to hide Mrs Buckley as soon as he could. He gripped the sleeve of her raincoat and heaved her over on to her back. Her eyes were closed, although her eyelids were fluttering, and her face was as white as candle wax. There was gritty black mud sticking to her lips and her eyebrows.
Aidan bent over and took hold of her, underneath her armpits, Gradually, he dragged her across the path to the edge of the dump, and then up the sloping heaps of rubbish. He was gasping with the effort of it, and his nose was running down his upper lip, but he licked at his snot and carried on tugging. Mrs Buckley stayed completely inert as he pulled her over scores of clanking bottles, and then a sodden layer of brown horsehair matting that his shoes sank into, with a squelch.
When he reached the highest point of the dump, he paused for a moment to catch his breath. A mud-spattered Toyota turned into the halting site and drove down the path, but he didn’t think that its occupants noticed him. He bent over again and carried on pulling Mrs Buckley across a stinking landscape of baked bean tins and dirty nappies and crumbling plasterboard.
At last he managed to drag her under the shadow of the overhanging trees. He left her lying on the ground and went over to the old domed fridge. He tugged three times at the door handle and managed to open it. Inside it had a pale green plastic lining, and two wire shelves. In one corner there was a small pool of dirty rainwater because the rubber seal around the door had perished.
Aidan slid out the shelves and threw them away, as far as he could. He kept the door propped open with a broken fruit box and then he went back to Mrs Buckley. She was still unconscious, although it looked as if her head had stopped bleeding. He rolled her over and over until she was resting right up against the side of the fridge. Then, inch by inch, mewling in the back of his throat with the strain of it, he humped her up inside it, so that she was sitting upright, although her head was hanging forward.
He wiped his nose on his sleeve and then he wrestled off her turquoise rushers so that he could more easily bend her knees.
‘Mrs Buckley?’ he said. Then, a little louder: ‘Mrs Buckley?’
She didn’t respond, and he was glad that she didn’t, because he didn’t know what he would have said or done if she had. He stood up and knocked away the fruit box with his foot, Then he took one last look at Mrs Buckley before he closed the fridge door. Unlike modern fridge doors, it had a catch, which meant that it couldn’t be pushed open from the inside. It went klikk, and then he was standing under the trees on his own, beside that battered metal gravestone, with the blurred grey letters RIP still visible on it. It was starting to rain, and the rain made a crackling sound as it fell on the dump, as if it had caught fire.
Aidan buried Mrs Buckley’s rushers underneath a heap of rotting compost. Then he climbed back down the dump, and crossed the muddy concrete to his mobile home. Although it was raining harder now, the door was still open, and he could hear bursts of laughter from the television.
‘Oh, there you are,’ said his mother, her head wreathed in cigarette smoke. ‘I was wondering where the feck you’d got to. So long as you didn’t go off with that do-gooding Buckley woman.’
‘Oh, I would yeah,’ said Aidan. ‘Do you have anything in for tea or do you want me to go and fetch some pies?’
His mother waved smoke away with her hand and looked at him narrowly. ‘Something’s bothering you, Aid. What is it?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Don’t lie to me, I’m your mother. I should know when something’s bothering you.’
‘Nothing. It’s just that—’ Aidan hesitated, and then he said, ‘Just don’t let’s tell nobody that Mrs Buckley was here, all right?’
‘And why would I?’
‘I don’t want nobody taking me away, that’s all.’
‘Well, sure, and nor neither do I. What would I do without you? Who would I send to get the messages, like, do you know what I mean? Don’t you worry, Aid, so far as I’m concerned I never saw Mrs Buckley in my life, and I hope I never see her again.’
*
That night, at about one in the morning, when his mother was harshly snoring on the couch, Aidan switched off the television. He picked up his mother’s cigarette lighter from the floor, pushed it into his pocket, and then went into the kitchenette. There, he opened the cutlery drawer and took out a small sharp knife, the one that his mother usually used for cutting string. Then he reached up and opened the top cupboard where she kept the pie dishes and the saucepans that she never used these days, and took down a screw-top pickle jar. It now contained only fifteen punts, which she said she was saving for the time when the Irish grew sick of the euro and wanted to change back to their own currency. Aidan took the banknotes out and dropped them into the cutlery drawer with the teaspoons.
He put on his worn-down runners although he didn’t bother to lace them up. Then, very quietly, he opened the front door and stepped outside, closing the door just as quietly behind him. He needn’t have worried: his mother had drunk most of a bottle of Paddy’s and a Land Rover could have crashed into the side of their mobile home without waking her up.
It was still raining, but the rain was very fine, more like dandelion puffs than rain – jinny-jos Aidan had always called them – and it sparkled in the few overhead lights that were strung around the halting site.
He climbed up the side of the dump, the soles of his runners slipping on the wet rubbish. The night was quiet except for the distant sound of traffic and the mournful hooting of a tanker on the River Lee far below. When he reached the fridge, he stopped and listened for a while, in case he heard knocking from inside it, or Mrs Buckley calling out for help, but there was silence.
With his heart beating fast, he took hold of the door handle and clicked the latch. He opened the door only a few inches to begin with, taking his mother’s cigarette lighter out of his pocket and snapping it into life. The flame showed him that Mrs Buckley was still hunched up inside the fridge with her head hanging down. The blood in her hair had clotted into thick maroon lumps. At first Aidan thought that she might be dead, but when he opened the door wider, he could hear her breath softly rattling in her lungs.
‘Mrs Buckley?’ he said, not to wake her but to make sure that she was still completely unconscious. ‘Mrs Buckley?’ he said again, but she didn’t stir.
Now he opened the door wide and wedged it with the broken fruit box, and that gave him enough illumination from the halting site lights. He knelt down in the wet leafy soil in front of the fridge and unscrewed the lid of the pickle jar. Then he took hold of Mrs Buckley’s left ankle, levering her leg so that it was sticking out straight. He did the same with her right leg, so that she was now sitting, rather than crouching. This enabled him to reach the front of her turquoise raincoat, and twist open the top three buttons. Once he had pulled her raincoat open, he found that she was wearing a bobbly white jumper underneath. Taking out the small kitchen knife, he sawed the jumper open from the neckline right down to the waist.
Mrs Buckley suddenly let a low urrrhhhhhhhh. Aidan froze. His heart was beating so hard now that it hurt, but Mrs Buckley didn’t move, and didn’t make another sound.
Underneath her jumper she was wearing only a sheer white bra. Aidan wiped his running nose on the back of his hand, and then he began to cut away the elastic between the cups. Once the cups had fallen apart, he pulled her jumper to one side and bared her small right breast.
He hesitated for several seconds, watching her chest rising and falling as she breathed. He could never smell his own bad odour, but he could smell Mrs Buckley’s perfume. It was flowery and sweet – jasmine and pink pepper and patchouli, not that Aidan knew what they were. The perfume seemed to fill not only his nostrils but his entire brain, and for some reason that he couldn’t understand it made him feel both sad and angry. Sad because she smelled like a happy family life that he could never hope to have; and angry for the same reason. Why did God choose me to be Cheeseboy, and then turn His back on me, as if it was my fault? I was only a baby when I was born – I didn’t have any choice. Why me?
He took hold of her cold right nipple between finger and thumb, stretching it out as far as he could. His eyes began to fill up with tears, and he had to blink so that he could clearly see what he was doing. Very slowly, taking infinite care, he sliced her entire nipple away from her breast, including the pale pink areola. Blood poured copiously out of her breast at first, but after a few moments the flow was reduced to a hesitant but persistent drip.
Aidan dropped the severed nipple into the pickle jar. Then he reached inside Mrs Buckley’s jumper and lifted out her left breast. By now he was trying not to sob, but he was determined to do this. He was determined to show everybody that he wasn’t some freak of nature, that everybody was just the same as him, except that they had been born under luckier stars. It wasn’t his fault that he was Cheeseboy, so why did he have to be punished? He wasn’t given occasional punishments: for breaking a window, say, or hobbling an apple, or being cheeky to the teacher. He was punished every single day, every single week, every single month – and, as far as he could tell, for the rest of his life, just for being him.
He sliced away Mrs Buckley’s left nipple, too, and dropped that into the pickle jar. The folds of her stomach were streaked now with thin parallel runnels of blood.
Once he had screwed the lid back on the jar, he forced both of Mrs Buckley’s knees back up. She had slipped down a little since he had opened the door, and he had to wedge his hands under her arms and heave her back upright three or four inches, so that he would be able to close it again. As it was, he had to twist both of her feet sideways before the door would shut completely.
He climbed back down the dump without looking back at the fridge. Halfway down, he slipped on a sheet of rain-slick hardboard and dropped the pickle jar. It fell somewhere in the darkness, and he had to grope around in some stringy wet muck before he found it.
He had almost reached the bottom of the dump when a white Garda patrol car appeared at the entrance to the halting site. It stopped there for a while, and then it turned down the path and started coming slowly in his direction. Aidan jumped down the last few feet to the path, and then ran as fast as he could towards his mobile home. He just managed to reach it and climb the steps before the patrol car came around the curve in the path.
Once he was inside, he pushed the pickle jar into the space under his bed. Then he pulled off his jacket and his shirt, unfastened his belt and kicked off his shorts. By the time he heard footsteps outside, he was wearing only his vest and his pants and his wrinkly grey socks – but then he always wore his school socks to bed in the winter.
He heard thick-soled boots climbing up the wooden steps outside, and then there was a sharp knocking at the door.
‘Gardaí!’ said a loud voice. ‘Would you open up, please! We need to have a word with you!’
Aidan waited, holding his breath. He reckoned that if he answered the door immediately, the guards would wonder why a boy of his age was still awake when it was almost two o’clock in the morning.
There was a long pause, and then another knock, much more insistent this time.
‘Hallo in there! Gardaí! Would you open the door please! We have to talk to you urgent-like!’
Aidan went to the door and opened it. A male garda was standing outside in his yellow high-viz jacket, while a female garda was waiting for him at the bottom of the steps.
‘Are you Aidan Nevin?’ the garda asked him.
Aidan nodded, but didn’t speak.
‘Is your mother home?’ said the garda, trying to see past Aidan into the living area.
‘She’s sleeping,’ said Aidan.
‘All right, but would you wake her up for us, please?’
‘I can’t.’
‘What do you mean you can’t?’
‘Once she’s asleep I can’t wake her up. Nobody can.’
‘Why’s that, then? Has she been taking sleeping pills? Or is it something else she’s been ingesting?’
Aidan frowned, as if he didn’t understand what the garda meant by ‘ingesting’.
‘Come on, son,’ said the garda. ‘Has she been sniffing coke, or smoking weed, or drinking?’
‘She’s beat out, like, that’s all,’ said Aidan.
‘Well, I’m looking for a woman called Mrs Buckley,’ the garda told him. ‘Her daughter Sinead’s a friend of yours from school.’
‘No, she’s not,’ said Aidan.
‘She says she is.’
‘She’s not. Nobody is. I don’t have no friends at school.’
The female garda came up the steps behind her colleague and said, ‘Sinead says her mother went home with you earlier, Aidan, so that she could meet your mother.’
‘She didn’t,’ said Aidan.
‘That’s what Sinead told us. She said that you’d been having trouble at school. You’ve been bullied, that’s what she said, because you hadn’t been able to keep yourself quite as clean as most of the other children – through no fault at all of your own. That’s why her mother went home with you, to see if she could help your mother.’
‘My ma doesn’t need no help. My ma’s grand altogether.’
‘Aidan – you’re absolutely sure that Mrs Buckley didn’t come back with you?’ asked the female garda. ‘The thing is, she left home yesterday saying that she was going to meet you, but she hasn’t been seen since. Her family’s fierce worried, as I expect you can imagine.’
‘I haven’t seen her,’ said Aidan.
The male garda said, ‘You know that it’s against the law to tell lies to the guards, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ said Aidan.
‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to wake your mother,’ said the female garda. ‘We don’t like to disturb her, but this is a very serious matter.’
‘I can’t,’ Aidan told her. ‘I could shake her and shake her but she would never wake up.’
The two gardaí glanced at each other. ‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do,’ said the male garda. ‘We’ll send another guard around in the morning, when she’s awake, just to make sure. Meanwhile, if you see Mrs Buckley, or you hear from her, you ring us at once, okay?’
‘We don’t have a phone,’ said Aidan.
‘In that case, go to the Garda station on Watercourse Road and tell them so.’
‘Okay,’ said Aidan. ‘Can I go back to bed now?’
The gardaí stood looking for a few moments at this white-faced boy with his badly cut hair, standing in the open doorway of this rundown mobile home in his grubby vest and yellow-spotted underpants and sagging grey socks.
Then the female garda smiled at him and said, ‘Yes, Aidan. You can go back to bed now.’
*
At eight o’clock, just before Aidan was due to set off for school, two different gardaí came knocking at the door. They were both male – one tall and one short – and they both looked as if they wished they were anywhere else but here at this halting site. A group of seven or eight Travellers were already beginning to gather around their car, their arms folded and their eyes narrowed as if they weren’t going to tolerate the presence of the Garda on their patch for very long, and for their own good health they had better not try to arrest anybody.
Aidan’s mother was awake and dressed in a drooping beige cardigan and skin-tight black jeans. She had curlers in her hair and she was standing in the kitchenette spooning her breakfast of meatballs in onion gravy straight out of the tin, and smoking her first cigarette of the day.
Aidan opened the door and said, ‘Ma, it’s the law.’
‘What in the name of feck do they want?’
The tall gingery garda standing on the step outside said, ‘We’re looking for a missing woman, ma’am. Mrs Fionnuala Buckley.’
Aidan’s mother came to the door, holding her tin of meatballs and her cigarette in one hand and a dessert spoon in the other.
‘Who did you say?’
‘Mrs Fionnuala Buckley. She’s the mother of one of the girls in your son’s class at St Jerome’s. Her family say that she accompanied your son back home last night so that she could have a word with you about some trouble that he’s been having at school.’
