Crying in the Dark (5 page)

Mina did not have the short, stocky build that is common, but her facial features were clearly pronounced. She was dressed fashionably and her dark hair was long, rich and thick, expensively styled and with blonde highlights. I stood when she came over to the table, holding out my hand. She seemed to take more after her father than her mother and her grip was firm when she shook hands.

‘Very pleased to meet you,' she said as her father introduced us.

The smaller mouth cavity often causes speech impediments of varying degrees, and Mina was no different. Her speech was slurred, with a pronounced lisping of the sibilants. I could, however, understand her well enough as long as I listened carefully.

‘Mina, do you know why I'm here?' I asked.

She nodded. ‘I think so, yes.'

‘And …'

‘Mum and Dad want you to get me under control.'

‘Now Mina –' Dirk started, but I held up my hand and he stopped. It probably would have been better to have talked to her without her parents present, but I needed her to get used to me first. I didn't want to frighten her.

‘Would you say your behaviour has been out of control?'

She smiled at me. She was a pretty kid, and I bet that smile had got her out of a lot of trouble over the years. I'll admit, I did feel myself warming to her. There was a real strength of character here, but also an iron will that was not easily going to yield to enforced boundaries.

‘No, I
don't
think I'm out of control.'

‘Well, I can see you and your parents disagree on that point, so let's move on to something else. Tell me about yourself.'

‘What would you like to know?'

‘Well, you're in the workshop. How's that going for you?'

‘I like it well enough. I have some good friends there.'

‘Do you look forward to going to work every day?'

‘Not always. Do
you
look forward to going to work every day?'

‘Not always,' I smiled. ‘Tell me about your friends. What are they like?'

‘I'm not sure what you mean. They're like people. Are you asking me if they are retarded like me?'

I felt the word like a slap in the face. She had come out with it so fast that I was totally unprepared, and it made me doubt myself. Is that what I
had
meant? No, I decided, it wasn't. I had actually been trying to assess whether or not Mina was lonely and if that might be the cause of her sudden disappearances. I realized that I had fallen for a standard defensive tactic. Mina knew that she was at fault, and was trying to turn the tables by making me the baddie. I decided to come right back at her, let her see that I would not be easily diverted.

‘Mina, you don't know me. When you get to know me, you'll learn that I never use words like that, and also I don't really care about whether or not a person is “normal”,' I made inverted commas in the air with my fingers, ‘or not. Please don't insult me. I wasn't rude to you.'

She said nothing for a moment, trying to sum me up. I could tell she wasn't used to people being as direct with her as that, and had to think about how to respond. As it happened, she decided to pretend that the little altercation had not occurred.

‘I have some good friends in the workshop: people who treat me with respect. There are some people I don't like, and who don't like me. It's just like any other job, I suppose. The staff are nice to us all. Some of them talk to us as if we are real, intelligent people, and I like that very much. There are also staff who treat us all like children. They mean well, but sometimes I still get angry.'

‘I can understand that. What do you do when you're not working? Any hobbies, interests?'

‘I go to the Abled-Disabled Club on a Tuesday evening.'

‘And what's that like?'

‘It's a youth club for people with special needs. A lot of the people from the workshop go there.'

‘Sounds like fun.'

She shrugged. Maybe it wasn't such fun after all.

‘Anything else?'

‘I like to listen to my CDs. I watch TV. We go for drives on a Sunday.'

‘You and your mum and dad?'

‘Yes.'

‘Nice. I bet you look forward to that.'

Again the shrug.

‘Your mum and dad have been telling me that you've been … um … heading off on your own a bit lately. Disappearing. They don't know where you've been going and they're worried about you. Now maybe if they knew where you were going, you could reach some kind of compromise, something that would be agreeable to all of you. So how's about it? Want to tell us what's been going on?'

Mina flashed that smile at me again.

I knew that it was highly unlikely that she would give me an answer. Her parents were sitting there, and she had just met me. But I wanted to see how she would handle the direct approach.

‘I don't know what you mean.'

I laughed. ‘Don't pull that one on me, Mina. You know perfectly well what I mean.
You
mean that you don't want to talk about it.'

‘Yes, but I don't know what you mean.'

‘Come on, Mina.'

The smile remained, she stood up and, muttering just like Dustin Hoffman in
Rainman
(‘Yeah, I
definitely
don't know what you mean'), wandered back into the house.

Perplexed, I looked at Molly and Dirk.

‘Well,' I said, ‘that was one hell of a performance.'

Dirk, smiling quietly to himself, nodded. ‘Now you see what we've been trying to deal with.'

‘We have our work cut out for us,' I agreed.

Dirk laughed and held a match to his cigar, which had gone out.

‘Any thoughts on how to proceed?'

I scratched my head and had a sip of lemonade.

‘Right now, no. Use the security system at night, so you'll know if she tries to escape. I'll talk to her some more, maybe visit the workshop, see how she is there, pay a visit to this Abled-Disabled Club. Other than that, let's just see what happens.'

‘That all sounds a bit vague, Shane,' Molly said.

‘Do you think so? I've found in the past that sometimes doing very little is the best course of action. What we need in this instance is for Mina to tell us what's happening. She won't do it in words, so we'll just wait for her to
show
us.'

Dirk and Molly nodded. I actually had no idea whether my plan, or lack of one, would work. Mina was a bright young lady. Something told me that she would not let anything slip intentionally. We would just have to hope she would let down her guard – and do it sooner rather than later.

‘Rivendell' was a three-storeyed grey stone building that had been a fever hospital during the late Norman era. Set in its own grounds on the east bank of the river, it presented an ominous silhouette in the rapidly descending night. I sat on the bonnet of the Austin and leafed through the last of my case files. I was there to talk to the staff about the Byrne twins.

The house looked as if Norman Bates's mother lived there, and I found it difficult to believe that it was in fact a residential children's home. What kind of thoughts must run through these children's heads, I wondered, as they were brought up the narrow path to this dark, cold, gothic edifice? I shoved the file into my bag, tossed it onto the back seat of the car and walked up the driveway myself. Lights were on in the windows, and bats danced and played around the eaves of the tall parapets, chasing moths and beetles in the dying summer evening. The bats were pipistrelles – small, air-borne mammals that had obviously nested in the attic of the ancient structure. I watched them for a time, finishing a hurried cigarette. Bats don't bother me. They do what they have to do to survive, and do it without malice. If only the same could be said for people.

‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here,' I muttered, and rang the doorbell. I heard it echo throughout the halls and stairwells and, after what seemed an age, footsteps clattered in my direction. The door creaked slowly open.

‘Shane, is it?'

The person holding open the huge wooden door was perhaps twenty-two years old, with a nose-ring and hair dyed a violent shade of red. She was dressed in a highly appropriate Goth style: all blacks, reds and purples, set off beautifully by a Marilyn Manson T-shirt.

‘Yes, I'm from the Dunleavy Trust. I'm here about the Byrnes.'

‘Sure, come in, come in. I'm Olwyn, Larry Byrne's key-worker. We're just getting the kids to bed. I'll show you to the staff room, and we'll be with you in a few minutes.'

‘Thank you.'

The building smelt like an old convent, residues of incense and candlewax hanging in the air. Olwyn told me, as we walked up two flights of stairs, that it actually had been a convent for almost one hundred years, until the Health Executive had taken it over five years previously, and turned it into a childcare unit. The corridors all had the high ceilings and polished wooden floors of the old institution, the stone walls still lined with paintings of religious scenes: Christ at Cana, turning water into wine; Mary Magdalene, prostrate in the middle of a circle of people hell-bent on having a good stoning, Jesus standing beside her, gazing at the bloodthirsty crowd with stern pity. A crucifix was hanging on the wall above the staff-room door on the third floor, the figure upon it so clearly and realistically rendered in his agony that I had to look away.

‘I know,' Olwyn whispered, ‘I hate it too. Bríd, the manager, won't get rid of any of that holy stuff. She says it's too valuable.'

‘You don't have to burn it,' I whispered back. ‘You could just stick it in storage out of the way somewhere. You can't be using
all
these rooms.'

‘No. The kids all sleep on the second floor – we've five now, including Larry and Francey. We all live on the ground floor, and we keep the staff room and offices on the top floor here. There's loads of rooms we never even go into. I don't think I've ever seen half of the building. Listen, take a seat, help yourself to a coffee, and I'll be with you in ten minutes or so. Bríd is here and can't wait to meet you, and Karena, Francey's key-worker, has come in especially to meet you. Make yourself comfortable.'

Olwyn's footsteps echoed down the stone stairway.

The staff quarters were comfortably and snugly decorated, with lots of cosy armchairs, racks of magazines (childcare journals, copies of
National Geographic,
women's publications like
Take a Break
and
Woman's Own,
as well as the ubiquitous
Hello!
and
OK!),
a sagging bookshelf, again loaded with a mix of textbooks and novels, a TV and DVD player. A coffee machine with a nearly empty pot sat on a sideboard. I took a mug from a wooden tree. The beverage was not as bad as I had suspected – it obviously hadn't been stewing for too long. I sat down to wait.

Fifteen minutes later Olwyn returned with two other women. She introduced them as Bríd, the manager, and Karena.

In residential, and in some other care settings too, key-working is a fairly standard practice. It involves one worker taking responsibility for one, or sometimes two, children. This means that the key-worker will attend parent-teacher meetings, shop for Christmas presents for the child, organize dental check-ups, and basically cover all the mundane but important things that a parent will usually do. In residential care, in particular, where there can be as many as thirty staff (obviously depending on the size of the unit and the number of children), it is vital that someone take charge of such things. It is very easy for highly demanding children to claim the lion's share of the attention, while a quieter child can be forgotten. It's also good for a child to have someone to look up to as his/her ‘special' worker. Many settings will encourage close relationships between key-worker and key-child. Bonding and attachment are important for any child's development, and that doesn't change because a child is in care.

Bríd was a dour-looking woman in her mid-thirties. She had tightly permed red hair that stood out from her head in what could only be described as an Afro. I was reminded of Luke Kelly
circa
1972, but Bríd had none of the Red-Haired Minstrel's humour or vivid intellect. She shook my hand and sat opposite me without comment.

Karena was tall and dark-haired, dressed in a hoody and baggy jeans. She looked tired, but she smiled and thanked me for coming.

‘Well,' I said when we were all seated and Olwyn and Karena had got coffee for themselves, ‘tell me about Larry and Francey.'

‘They've been with us now for five weeks,' Olwyn began. ‘They'd been in care for a couple of months by the time we got them, mostly in a series of foster homes. I think that Larry had been through three in that space of time, and Francey had been in two –'

‘They'd been separated?'

‘Oh, yes. They would never have been inflicted on a family together. They would have been far too challenging.'

‘Apologies,' I said. ‘I just want to be clear. Carry on.'

‘The final foster placements collapsed, and there simply wasn't anywhere else for them to go, so they were sent here. No one seems to have a sense of what we are supposed to be doing with them. We're a long-term setting – our other three children have all been in care since infancy, and the arrival of the twins has turned their world upside-down. I mean, I really can't foresee Larry and Francey remaining here over the long term. They need something that we just can't offer.'

‘And what's that, Olwyn?'

‘I … I think they need psychiatric help. I believe that they're just too disturbed to be in mainstream childcare.'

‘You see, Shane', Bríd spoke up in a voice that was practically a monotone, and I noticed that her facial expression never changed, ‘the twins are virtually feral in their behaviour. I have enquired from social services as to what their background is and tried to discern what events may have conspired to leave them in this condition, but the details are sketchy. Their family was certainly on the books of the Health Executive for many years, and a Family Support Worker has been involved with them for the past two years. But there was no social-work intervention until the very end, and the written reports from the Family Support Worker are sparse, to say the least.'

‘What we do know', Karena continued, ‘is that the Byrne family is from Oldtown. The house has been in the family for generations – it's at least a hundred and fifty years old – but has fallen into disrepair. Mrs Byrne has psychiatric problems and Mr Byrne is an alcoholic and a known sex offender. Neighbours state that the Byrne family, while they used to be quite well off, have been … how should I put it … troubled, for a long time. It is likely that Mr Byrne suffered fairly brutal physical abuse at the very least during his childhood. The Family Support Worker wrote that he could be extremely domineering when he wanted to be. Mrs Byrne seems to be the brains of the operation.'

‘The Support Worker's great fear, as it happens', Brid said, ‘was not sexual abuse or even physical abuse, but neglect. The children were failing to thrive. Both are very small for their age and their language development is retarded. Despite fairly intensive speech and language therapy, they
still
speak in a most peculiar fashion, using strange words that seem to me to be outdated, almost medieval. They call a saucepan a “burner”, for example, and a screwdriver is a “turn-screw”. Their parents don't speak that way, and we don't know why the twins do. That, of course, is when they will speak at all. They regularly revert to non-verbal communication – grunts, snarls, roars and screeches. They will spend all their time out in the grounds if they're allowed, and seem to detest being indoors. I have seen them stalk and kill a pigeon with their bare hands, and, if they manage to get up into one of the trees, they are a nightmare to bring down again.'

I considered this information. There have been around four hundred confirmed cases of feral children throughout recorded history. These are children who have been raised away from human society, either because of enforced isolation by parents or carers, or through losing their family and being raised by animals. There have been a few Irish cases. One was in the seventeenth century, when a boy was raised by sheep in the Wicklow mountains. And there were two in the twentieth century – in both instances the children were placed in chicken coops by abusive parents and raised by the birds. I had researched many of these cases, but had never actually met a feral child. I was fascinated and horrified at the details the workers were giving me. Could this be genuine? Perhaps, as Olwyn had said, the Byrne children were suffering from some psychiatric disorder. I tried not to get carried away. I didn't want my own academic curiosity to lose the run of itself. Even if these two children were truly feral, they were still children, and the most important thing was meeting their needs and helping them.

‘You said that there had been no social-work involvement until the children were actually taken into care. How did that happen?'

‘A man had come to the house to sell insurance,' Karena said. ‘When he knocked on the front door and received no answer, he went to the rear of the building. As he came around the corner, he saw Mr Byrne leading the twins, both naked and covered in cuts and bruises, across the yard to an outhouse. He threw them in and locked the door. The witness reported that he was screaming at them, although he couldn't make out any of the words. Mr Byrne then went back to the house. The insurance salesman returned to his car and called the police.

‘They drove out immediately, and found the children in the shed. From the state of the place, it looked as if they had spent a lot of time there. The place stank of shit and piss, the floor was covered in rags and newspaper which the children used as bedding at night, and there were the odd scraps of food their parents would throw
in
for them to eat. The twins have disclosed that they were often locked up with no food at all for days at a time. They have also hinted at sexual abuse and openly talked about severe beatings. Medical examinations were carried out when they were first taken into care, and they showed that there were many fractures and breaks that had healed, yet there are no records of them ever being hospitalized for anything, or of ever having seen a doctor.'

‘They were born in the City Maternity Hospital ten years ago, Shane,' Bríd said. ‘I've checked the records. But that is the last time they were seen outside that house. The neighbours did not even know they existed. Why were there no checks from the public health nurse? Why did no one pick up on the fact that they never attended school? We don't know. What we have told you is
all
we know. These are two children who seem to have popped into existence from nowhere.'

‘So what we have,' I said, ‘are two deeply traumatized children, displaying hugely erratic and challenging behaviour. We only have very sketchy background information, though, and we're faced with a fairly sizeable communication barrier, in that they either won't speak, or speak a language of their own which we can just about understand.'

‘That's pretty much it,' Olwyn said.

‘What do you want from me?' I asked, a sense of panic, I realized, coming through in my voice.

‘A miracle,' Karena smiled, suddenly looking exhausted.

I shook my head. There wasn't really anything to say to that.

‘We've been unsuccessful in forming relationships with either of them,' Bríd said. ‘The girls have tried very hard, but this is new to all of us, even those of us with experience to fall back on. Benjamin tells me that you have something of an interest in cases like this.'

‘I've written a couple of research papers on feral children. As a sociologist, the idea of an individual who is completely unsocialized – who has not been conditioned by human society – is hugely attractive. It's kind of like looking at a person as a blank slate, before language, etiquette and all the rest of the baggage we have has taken hold. i‘m fascinated by the phenomenon. I've never actually met a child who
really is
feral, though. I once interviewed a woman who worked with one of the Irish cases, but that's as close as I've got. I think that Ben may have slightly overstated the facts!'

‘So you can't help us?' Olwyn said, her voice cracking with emotion.

‘Hold on now, I didn't say that,' I said, reaching out and placing a hand on her shoulder. ‘What I said was that, while I certainly have an interest and, perhaps, some skills in this field, it's quite new to me too. Now, there are some things we
can
do; some things maybe you haven't thought to try yet. What you need to remember is that flexibility is the key in these situations. If one approach isn't working, there's no shame in trying something else. And besides, even though the children are twins, don't forget that they are still individuals, each with a different psychological make-up. What Larry may respond to, Francey may not.'