Girl Unknown (17 page)

The incident finally prompting her to tell Mrs Campbell had happened that morning. Having grown exasperated with his constant baiting, she had ordered Robbie to stand up by the whiteboard for the duration of the class but as she proceeded to give the lesson, he began slowly inching towards her. At first, she didn’t notice, until some of the other boys began sniggering and she turned to find him almost upon her. Shouting at him to get back against the wall, she had put a hand to his shoulder to propel him. Instantly Robbie had swiped away her arm and putting both hands to her chest he had shoved her roughly back. Miss Murphy, stumbling over the leg of a table, had fallen awkwardly and banged her head against the seat of a chair. She was still in the sick bay, apparently, shaken.

‘It goes without saying,’ Mrs Campbell went on, ‘that a violent assault on a member of staff is absolutely insupportable and must be treated with the utmost seriousness.’

‘Of course,’ I said, reeling from all she had told me.

‘The most worrying part in this sorry affair is how targeted the attack was,’ she said. ‘In every other class, Robbie is well behaved. None of the other teachers have any complaints about his behaviour.’

‘I don’t understand it,’ I said. ‘I have no idea why this has happened, or what he has against this teacher. He’s usually such a gentle boy.’

Her eyes narrowed, and her voice softened. ‘Is everything all right at home? When a student is disruptive in school, it’s often because of some difficulty he’s experiencing at home.’

Neither of us mentioned my year-long absence from the school, my previous indiscretion. I’m sure it must have been on her mind, though.

‘Everything’s fine,’ I said quickly.

Robbie was suspended for a week.

How strange it had been, going back to the school. Just standing within those stone walls again had touched old memories alive, and I found myself thinking back to that time as I drove in silence, my son staring sullenly out the window.

If you saw Aidan, the word ‘handsome’ would not come to mind. A tall, thin man, with a longish face and blue eyes, he was affable and self-effacing. His son was in Robbie’s class and we were both on the Parents’ Committee. It was not love at first sight, but from the start we’d got on. Sometimes, after a committee meeting, a few of us would go for a drink in the pub around the corner. On occasion, it was just the two of us. All we did was talk, but it was such talk! Small things and big things, from
school gossip to our own individual parenting concerns. Idle chitchat, that was all, but a constant pleasurable flow of it.

We had been flirting with each other for some time – harmless enough – but on one night, a night where we stayed behind for a third drink after the others had left, it began to grow more serious. He told me his wife was a very neat and organized person – there was never any question of them leaving a trail of clothes along the floor on the way to the bedroom as seen in movies: everything had to be neatly hung up and put away before lovemaking could commence. ‘I bet you’re not like that,’ he said, keeping his eyes on me over the lip of his glass.

Outside, he waited while I unlocked my bike from the railings, and when I turned to say goodnight, he kissed me long and hard on the mouth and I let him. I remember standing in my kitchen a short time later, my hands to my hot cheeks, horrified by what I had done and yet thrilled by it, too.

The next day I felt silly and ashamed. I had let things go too far and resolved to stop before it got out of hand. A text from Aidan in the late afternoon and I, foolishly, responded. We began texting every day and soon we were meeting outside committee nights – for coffee during the day and, when we could swing it, at night. We met in dingy pubs I’d never heard of in rough parts of town. We sat in the back row of art-house movies, necking like teenagers, discreetly fumbling in the dark.

We never actually had sex, although we probably would have, eventually, if we hadn’t been caught. And, yes, I did feel guilty about it, desperately guilty, but something kept
driving me on, refused to let me stop. The seed of anger planted inside me –
She was the love of his life, not me.
Somehow it opened out and grew shoots, tendrils sneaking out to grasp forbidden pleasures. Such a heady time. Between the elation of the illicit romance and the crying fits in the privacy of the bathroom when the children were at school, my husband at work, I would think of what I was doing and grow frightened and depressed.

At the end of the committee meeting one night, while the others were tidying away the coffee cups, Mrs Campbell made a neat stack of her paperwork and said: ‘Caroline, Aidan, a word, please?’

She hid it well – I’ll give her that much. Throughout the meeting she had behaved as if she was entirely without suspicion that two of her committee members might secretly be fucking. It was only when we went into her office and Aidan closed the door behind us that she addressed us in a tone of icy fury, her eyes bright with disgust. ‘I think one of you had better tell me just what is going on.’

At first, we feigned ignorance, even hilarity at the suggestion, followed by indignation when she would not be put off.

‘You were seen!’ she told us, and I felt a twang of fear.

Aidan refused to go gently, challenging her assertions, demanding to know the details behind the allegation – where had we supposedly been seen (Conways on Parnell Street), when (three nights ago), by whom (she refused to say).

‘You have children!’ she said, with exasperation. ‘How could you be so reckless with their happiness? So selfish and stupid?’

I couldn’t look at him afterwards. We both knew it was over.

Still I thought I could keep it secret, hide it from David, from my children.

At the school gates, in the days that followed, I began to notice the nudging and staring, the whispered conversations I was not party to. Then a phone call from another parent on the committee.

‘You’ve heard the news? Aidan’s left. He’s taking his son out of the school.’

It took a moment for it to sink in, my mind spinning off in all directions.

‘What about you?’ she asked then.

‘Me?’

‘Do you still want to be on the committee?’

‘What do you mean, Olivia?’

All that time, she had been speaking in her usual brisk manner. Now her voice dropped, taking on a confidential tone. ‘I think you know what I mean, Caroline.’

Just like that, I knew I would have to tell David.

And when I did tell him, later that night, it was like watching a coldness come over him, like a thin sheet of ice forming over his skin. I had expected anger, indignation, some kind of volatile reaction. Instead he just sat there, his breathing heavier as I gave my sorry account, made my shameful confession. Then, in a quiet voice, he had said, as if addressing his words to the table and not to me: ‘The children must never know.’

Robbie refused to speak the whole way home. I tried various methods of coaxing information out of him but he
wouldn’t answer and after a while I gave up. The journey took longer than usual, traffic from a rugby match clogging the streets. As the wheels of the car crunched over the gravel in our driveway, I felt exhausted and troubled. Every single book or magazine article I had read about the adolescent male had warned of sudden fits of aggression, yet still I hadn’t believed it. Not my Robbie. Not my gentle boy. Had arrogance led me to think like that? The blindness of a mother’s love? He had always been softer than other boys, easily hurt. I had worried that he might be the object of bullying. To learn he was the perpetrator of violence had thrown me completely. I turned off the engine.

‘Robbie,’ I began carefully. ‘I know things have been strange lately. I haven’t been around as much now that I’m working again. If I haven’t been there for you, then I’m sorry. Perhaps you feel that I’ve let you down, but –’

‘I don’t. I think it’s good you have a job.’

‘Then what is it, love?’

He shook his head then pressed it back against the headrest, unhappiness filling his face.

‘What you did to that teacher … It’s so unlike you. What’s the matter? Has something happened?’

He didn’t answer.

A thought crossed my mind. All those evenings, the two of them up in his room, talking, whispering. ‘Does this have something to do with Zoë?’

He put a finger to his mouth, biting at the corner of a nail.

‘I know you two get on well, Robbie. But I think it best if you spend less time with her. She’s older than you are.
The long chats you have in your room – I don’t think they’re a good idea.’

He gave a small exasperated sigh and shot me a look of disgust. ‘Miss Murphy was the one who saw you together – you and Jack’s dad. The one who ratted on you.’

Something hard caught in my throat, like a cold stone wedged there. The shock of his admission and all the realizations that flowed from it. He knew what I had done.
He knew.
I felt it, like a fist around my heart.

‘Oh, Robbie …’ I wanted to explain it, to make it better. I knew, though, that nothing would, just as I knew he had lived with the knowledge all this time. David and I had secretly been congratulating ourselves on shielding the children from what I had done, and all the time he’d known.

He opened the car door and clambered out, and I sat there, watching him march to the front door, put his key in the lock and disappear inside. I thought of all the small triumphs of motherhood – teaching him to read before he started school, recognizing his musical ability before anyone else did, finding the instrument that best suited his temperament, remembering the flush of pride when the librarian remarked on how many books he got through each week for such a small boy. I thought of all these things and felt how flimsy they were, how paltry in the face of the pain I had caused.

It was a few moments before I could get out of the car. Then I locked it, straightened myself and followed him slowly into the house.

14. David

It happened that around this time I was invited to speak at a conference hosted by my old stomping ground, Queens University, Belfast. On the morning I was due to leave, I got up early, before Caroline’s alarm went off, and wandered downstairs. It was one of those surprising February mornings when the frost sparkles beneath the hard sunlight, crocuses spearing up through the frozen earth, and you sense the real possibility that spring has arrived. I took my coffee and the notes for my talk and went to sit in the garden on the wooden bench by the back wall.

I read over my notes, but the words kept blurring on the page, my attention pulled elsewhere. It had been years since I had been to Belfast, and while it was nice to receive the invitation, the thought of going back to Queens only served to stir up buried memories, and awaken old ghosts.

Earlier in the week, I had taken it upon myself to track down the contact details for Zoë’s stepfather, Gary. Of course I could have asked Zoë for his number, but she was so closed and defensive – almost frightened – any time he was mentioned that I chose not to. Instead I went through the university registrar. In the end, it was all straightforward enough. A brief phone call suggesting we meet, which he accepted without question, although I noted the surprise in his tone. I told myself that I just wanted to outline for him my plans to become actively
involved as Zoë’s parent, paying her tuition fees as well as taking her into my home. I didn’t know whether or not to tell him about her suicide attempt, weighing up his need to know versus her desire for privacy. It was still unclear to me what responsibilities towards her Gary felt still existed in the wake of Linda’s death. I suppose that was why I set up the meeting rather than discussing it over the phone.

Another question on my mind was whether I ought to tell Zoë about my planned visit. I didn’t like going behind her back. Part of my intention to see Gary – a big part – was the hope that he might help me get to the bottom of the question that had dogged me since Zoë’s arrival: why hadn’t Linda told me? Any time I had tried tackling Zoë on it, she’d become evasive and withdrawn. I had the impression she didn’t know.

I was so lost in these thoughts, my notes put to one side, that I didn’t notice Robbie until he was almost upon me.

‘Mum says you’ll miss your train,’ he remarked, his hands in the pockets of his school trousers. I noticed a new eruption of spots across his chin. He looked particularly gloomy that morning.

I glanced at my watch. ‘There’s time. Here, sit down for a minute, will you?’

There was room enough for two or three people on the bench, but rather than taking the seat next to me, he chose to perch at a distance on the armrest – an awkward solution, but one that drove home to me the distance he had been putting between himself and the rest of us since his school suspension the previous week.

‘How’s school?’ I asked, and he shrugged, not answering.

‘Everything all right?’ I probed.

‘Yeah. Why?’

‘You seem tense.’

‘No, I’m not.’

I suppose I might have put his defensiveness down to hormones. But ever since Caroline had sheepishly admitted the reason behind Robbie’s violent outburst at school, I had worried his withdrawal had deeper roots than teenage disaffection. It upset me that my son had been aware of his mother’s wayward behaviour, that he had carried the burden of this knowledge in secret for more than a year. I had tried talking to him about it, hoping to squirrel out some information over what repercussions he had had to deal with – bullying at school? Teasing? A change in any teacher’s behaviour towards him? But every time I tried to draw him on the subject, he clammed up. At home, the mood was fraught. He barely spoke to either of us, and even though this incident had served to fire up my anger towards Caroline over what she had done, I felt a duty, nonetheless, as a co-parent to rein in Robbie’s attitude towards his mother, which was verging on disdain.

‘Listen, go easy on your mother while I’m away, will you?’

‘Sure,’ he said, with marked disinterest.

‘I know you’re angry with her but, Robbie, she’s your mother. She loves you. She only wants what’s best for you.’