‘It’s a fun thing for children to believe, but you’re not a little girl any more.’
And that was true. I had begun to bleed. The pain of the periods replaced the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny, and Mum and Dad began to explain other things. ‘If Santa Claus doesn’t exist, does God, or the devil?’ Mum looked to Dad and he said, ‘Nobody knows.’ I found that concept difficult. If they knew for a fact that Santa Claus didn’t exist, why didn’t they know for sure about God?
My childhood was replaced by duller, less colourful teenage years. Mum explained that boys might take an interest in me, that they might try to kiss me. They never did, except one time when I was fourteen and an old man tried to force his mouth on to mine and crept his hand up my skirt at a bus shelter. I punched him in the face, kicked him to the ground and stamped on his head. Then the bus came and I got on, and was annoyed by the delay as the bus driver got off to help the old man. I watched him rise slowly to his feet, blood trickling from his head. The driver asked me what had happened, but I stayed silent and pretended that I couldn’t hear him. I got home twenty minutes late and missed the start of Blue Peter.
When I was fifteen, I heard a girl in my class telling two others that I had been a feral child, found on the side of a mountain and then adopted by the Diamonds. She said this in the toilets. I was sitting on the cistern, my feet on the lid of the toilet in a cubicle, eating my lunch. ‘You can’t tell anyone,’ she said. ‘My ma heard it through a friend of hers who used to work for Dr Diamond when it happened. That’s why she’s so weird.’
The other girls did not keep it a secret. For a few weeks, they tried talking to me, asking me if I liked mountain climbing and if I ate grass. Stella Coughlan told them all to leave me alone, that it was none of their business. I ignored them all. I didn’t ask Mum and Dad about it. I already knew I was adopted and I also knew that babies can’t survive on mountains and that stupid girls make up things to be spiteful.
Mum died the year after I left school. We had been fighting a lot. She had wanted me to go to university. She had filled out my university application forms against my wishes. She thought I should study Music or the sciences. I love music and playing the piano is probably my favourite thing to do. Mum had a teacher come to the house to give me lessons when I was nine. I liked Mrs Mooney. She said I was a gifted pianist. She died when I was in my teens and I didn’t want another teacher, so I taught myself to get better at it. I didn’t want to take any exams. I just liked playing.
Mum said there were many options open to me. But I did not want to meet strangers and I did not want to leave our new home. Dad said I could do an Open University degree, but Mum said I needed to be ‘socialized’ because I would never leave the house or get a job if I wasn’t pushed. I said I didn’t want to leave the house, and she was angry.
The week after that argument, she had a stroke, while working in her GP practice in the village, and died in hospital. The funeral was in Dublin because that’s where all her family and old friends lived. She had always visited them regularly. On the few occasions her sister, Christine, had visited us, I had followed her around like a dog. She was like a glamorous version of Mum. Dad would stay in his study when she visited. Mum said that Dad made Aunt Christine feel unwelcome. After Mum died, she stopped visiting but always sent me birthday cards with money in them.
Dad asked me with wet eyes if I would come to Mum’s funeral, but I declined. I needed to sort out Mum’s clothes and see which could fit me and which would go to the charity shop. I asked Dad to bring back a recipe book from Dublin because Mum had done most of the cooking and, while I was excellent at helping her peel vegetables, I wasn’t so adept at pulling together a full meal. But I knew I could learn from books.
When Dad returned after two days in Dublin, he asked me if I was sad and if I missed Mum, and I reassured him that I didn’t and he wasn’t to worry about me. Dad looked at me in that funny way he had sometimes and said that I was probably lucky to be the way I was, that I could probably avoid heartache for my whole life.
I know I don’t think in the way that other people do, but if I could stay away from them, then what did it matter? Dad said I was unique. I don’t mind. I have been called so many things, but my name is Sally. At least, that’s the name Mum and Dad gave me.
3
In the days after Dad died, it was quiet. Maybe I did miss him? I had nobody to talk to, nobody to make tea for, nobody to spoon-feed ice cream to. Nobody to wash and change. What was I for? I wandered around the house and, on the third day, I went into his office and idly opened his drawers, found a lot of cash and Mum’s old jewellery in a metal box. Lots of notebooks documenting my weight and height and development going back decades. A fat envelope addressed to me on his desk. Files and files with my name on them in different categories: communication, emotional development, empathy, comprehension, health, medication, deficiencies, diet, etc. Too many to ever read. I looked at their wedding photo on the mantelpiece, and remembered how Mum said they never felt like a complete family until they found me. I had long since been disabused of the notion that I was a foundling child. They had adopted me in the ordinary way, Mum said. She had asked if I was curious about my birth parents, and when I said no, she beamed at me. I felt good when I made my parents smile.
I looked at Dad’s old photos of his working days, presenting papers at conferences in Zurich. Photos of him with other earnest-looking men in suits. Dad mostly studied and wrote academic papers but sometimes, if called upon in an emergency by Mum, he might attend to a local patient in Carricksheedy or beyond.
He studied the human mind. He told me that my mind worked perfectly but that I was emotionally disconnected. I was his life’s work, he said. I asked him if he could reconnect the emotions and he said that all he and Mum could do was love me and hope that, one day, I would learn to love them back. I cared about them. I didn’t want any harm to come to them. I didn’t like to see them upset. I thought that was love. I kept asking Dad, but he said I shouldn’t worry, that whatever I felt was enough, but I don’t think he understood me. I got anxious sometimes, if there were too many people around, or if I didn’t know answers to questions, or if a noise was too loud. I thought I could recognize love from books and TV, but I remember watching Titanic one Christmas Day and thinking that Jack would have died anyway because he was a third-class passenger and a man, and Rose would most likely have survived because she was rich and it was ‘women and children first’, so what was the point of adding in the love story that wasn’t even factually true. Dad was sobbing.
I didn’t like hugging, or to be touched. But I never stopped wondering about love. Was that my emotional disconnection? I should have asked Dad when he was alive.
Five days after Dad died, a knock on the door came from Ger McCarthy, a neighbour who leased a field behind our barn. I was used to him coming and going up the lane. He was a man of few words and, as Dad used to say, he was ‘a great man for asking no questions and making no small talk’.
‘Sally,’ he said, ‘there’s a wild smell out of that barn of yours. My cattle are all accounted for, but I’m after thinking that a sheep strayed in and got caught in there and died or something. Would you like me to take a look, or is your dad up to it?’
I assured him I could deal with it. He went on his way, whistling tunelessly, his overalls splattered with mud.
When I got out to the barn, the smell from the incinerator barrel made me gag. I wrapped my scarf around my mouth and opened the door. It hadn’t burned properly. I could see the full shape of the body. There was an oily substance around the bottom of the barrel. Flies and maggots swarmed around it. I set the fire going again with rolled-up newspapers from the house and logs from the barn.
I felt disappointed with myself. Dad should have been more specific with his instructions. We burned organic matter regularly. Corpses were organic matter, weren’t they? Maybe crematoriums were hotter. I would look it up in the encyclopaedia later. I poured in the rest of the petrol to get the fire started, hoping that a second burning would do the job. I pulled at my hair to calm myself.
I went to the post office to collect my benefits, and Mrs Sullivan tried to give me Dad’s pension too. I pushed the cash back towards her and she looked at me quizzically and shouted, ‘Your dad will be needing his pension.’
‘He won’t,’ I said, ‘because he died.’ Her eyebrows went up and her mouth opened.
‘Oh my God! You can speak. I never knew. Now, what did you say?’ and I had to repeat that I wouldn’t be needing Dad’s pension any more because he was dead.
She looked behind me at the butcher’s wife. ‘She can speak,’ she said, and the butcher’s wife said, ‘I’m amazed!’
‘I am so sorry,’ Mrs Sullivan continued to shout, and the butcher’s wife reached out and put her hand on my elbow. I flinched and shrugged off her touch.
‘When is the funeral?’ she said. ‘I never saw it on the death notices.’
‘There’s no funeral,’ I said. ‘I cremated him myself.’
‘What do you mean?’ said Mrs Butcher and I told her that I had put him in the incinerator because he had told me to put him out with the bins when he died.
There was a silence, and I was turning to leave when Mrs Butcher said, with a tremor in her voice, ‘How did you know he was dead?’ And then Mrs Sullivan said to Mrs Butcher, ‘I don’t know who to call. The guards or a doctor?’
