Mother of Pearl (10 page)

 

A CHILD ANSWERED
the door to Charlie Piper. Her hair, parted in the middle, was tied in pigtails; her eyes when she peered up at him, were hazel. She wore a puzzled expression, her brow knitted into two tiny wings. There was a birthmark on her chin. It struck a chord with Charlie. Then he thought of Gloria, the telephonist at Granitefield, the one with the sexy beauty spot. This one, he thought, would also grow up to be a heartbreaker.

‘Hello there!' Charlie leaned down and took one of her sticky hands. She made to withdraw but he held firm.

‘Ah now, don't be like that, this is your Uncle Charlie!'

‘Who is it, Pearl?' someone called from the interior. Charlie recognised Stannie's voice.

‘It's Uncle Charlie,' she shouted.

Charlie searched through her features for some resemblance to Irene but couldn't find any. Must take after the other side, he thought.

Stanley, in vest and braces, coming to the door, saw above his tow-headed girl the inevitable future, the defeat he had always known was in store. But even then, he thought he could ward it off. He and Irene had protected this child with a ferocity borne of the very danger there was in having her and the fear, unspoken between them, that she might one day be taken from them. It was Irene, who, after weeks of keeping Pearl a secret, had told Martha Alyward that the child was adopted, an unwanted baby, the product of sin. Stanley had been astounded by her insouciance; she had said this without flinching. And yet he knew why; it was as much to punish herself as him. Pearl was a well for both of their sunken secrets. And the one person who could threaten all of this was standing in front of him.

‘Stannie!' Charlie rose from his hunkers. ‘How goes the war?'

‘What do
you
want?' He placed a protective hand on Pearl's shoulder.

These Northsiders, Charlie thought, dour lot, too direct for his liking.

‘Just a social call,' he said dropping the child's hand. He felt somehow as if he had been caught doing something improper. ‘No samples, this time, I promise.' He laughed nervously. ‘Irene about?'

‘What do you want with her?'

Charlie, used to resistance on the doorstep, ignored Stanley's hostile tone. He wondered vaguely what ailed the man.

‘So this is the little girl I didn't see the last time,' he said chucking Pearl under the chin. ‘You must be nearly six, is that right?'

‘No,' the child said stoutly, ‘last week was my birthday. I was four.'

‘Aha!' Charlie said, ‘already telling lies about her age. They start young these days, eh Stannie? Then it must be your sister I'm thinking of. Last time I was here she was only a babby, and that's coming up to six years, would you believe?'

It was the blatancy of this lie that enraged Stanley, the sheer bare-facedness of it.

‘You can't have her, she's ours now, we've made her ours, do you understand?'

He pushed Pearl behind him. She started to wail.

‘Steady on there, Stannie, what's all this about?'

‘If you as much as lay a finger on her, I'll throttle you, understand?'

Stanley stepped belligerently out on to the street. Charlie took a step back and raised his hands but not in time to fence off Stanley's first blow which landed squarely on his chin. He staggered backwards and Stanley landed a fist in his lungs (Charlie's weak spot). He fell, winded, the street reeling around him. His last sight before the door was shut on him with a resounding thud was the child peering around the doorframe, sobbing with fright. He saw the birthmark and before the darkness claimed him, two words imprinted themselves in front of his eyes, written in the black, block capitals of a screaming headline.
BABY SPAIN
.

It had been the talk of the country. How many kitchens had Charlie Piper sat in, his samples spread out on the table, talking to housewives about the Baby Spain case? The baby who had simply disappeared. Into thin air. The papers had been full of it for weeks. How, asked enraged editors, was it possible for a complete stranger to walk into a hospital and make off with a child? For months Baby Spain had been the property of every gossip and crank. She had been spotted being taken on a ferry to the Mainland; she had been sold to an American couple who were childless; she had been kidnapped by an evangelist church which was desperate for recruits. Daily there had been a siege at the baby's home. Charlie remembered the father. Shady character, he had, thought, feckless-looking. Charlie knew the type. He had met their wives in a hundred parlours across the countryside. At Christmas and for the baby's birthday, the reporters went back to Mr Spain, Charlie recalled, and he repeated his pleas to whoever would listen: Please give us back our baby. But the years went by and everyone forgot about Baby Spain, including Charlie Piper. He presumed she was dead; she had been a sickly child. Someday a shallow grave would be found in a ditch or behind a hen house. The country was full of such secrets. If there had even been a picture of her, Charlie thought, her memory might have survived longer.

But she had only been a few weeks old. Her only distinguishing feature was that birthmark, like a tiny strawberry, they had said, on her chin.

He rang his friend in the Castle. Mullarney was a drinking companion, an unkempt man, his jackets like boleros on his vast torso, his shirt tails always trailing outside his pants. Moon-faced and silver-haired he was like a superannuated fat boy. But he had a good heart. Once or twice when Charlie had got into scrapes – after-hours drinking and the like – he had rung Mullarney who had put a word in for him. In return, he had kept his eyes and ears open. It was, Charlie considered, a professional relationship between two men of the world.

‘Mullarney,' a voice barked in his ear.

‘Con,' Charlie started, ‘Piper here, Charlie.'

‘Charlie, old son, how's she cutting?'

‘Grand, grand.'

‘Are you about?'

Charlie could hear Mullarney shifting the phone to his good ear.

‘No, I'm north side.'

‘Ah, pity,' Mullarney said.

‘Listen, Con, there's something I want to talk to you about …' He hesitated, the strange excitement of the past few hours since his flash of insight on Jericho Street, turning now to a kind of dread. ‘Confidentially,' he added to cover himself.

‘Shoot …just hope it isn't the licensing laws again. I'm beginning to wear out my welcome in that department.'

‘No, nothing like that,' Charlie said.

He was very nervous now. The consequences of his dangerous knowledge were only beginning to dawn on him. He was breaking one of the unspoken rules of Granitefield, grassing on a fellow inmate. And thinking of Granitefield he remembered with a pang what they used to say about the women patients, how sometimes the treatment meant that they couldn't have children. But his own tense alarm, his need to have the thing confirmed, or dismissed out of hand, was more urgent.

‘Spit it out, Charlie, I haven't got all day,' Mullarney interjected. It was probably all in his head. The next time he and Mullarney met, he would be introduced to the lads as the joker who thought he had solved the Baby Spain kidnap single-handedly. This gave him courage – the prospect of being laughed at.

‘Remember the Spain case,' he ventured.

‘Yes?' Mullarney said doubtfully.

‘Remember, the baby who was kidnapped?'

‘Yes, Charlie, we're not likely to forget, are we?' Mullarney replied testily. ‘Our biggest unsolved case.'

‘Well,' Charlie said, his voice cracking as he lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘I think I know where she is.'

‘Speak up, Piper, line's terrible.' Mullarney's voice was fading away.

‘I know where she is!' Charlie shouted.

He had not meant it to sound so emphatic. Afterwards he would speculate if the telephone connection had been better, it might never have come out as a certainty. There was an astonished silence at the other end. He heard the phone being dropped noisily on a desk, then a hubbub in the background with Mullarney's excited voice rising above it: ‘Get the Super. Break in the Baby Spain case.'

Charlie Piper had saved very few mementos from his time in Granitefield. He was not nostalgic by nature and once the memories of the pain with its accompanying loss of invincibility, had slid away, he recalled with no small sense of pride the little triumphs over the system, the busy trading he had mastered and the illicit goods he had managed to smuggle inside. In its way it had been a life of terrifying simplicity. He had been like a war racketeer and the years in Granitefield were in retrospect like a long campaign in the trenches. The same rules applied. Pleasure when it came had to be grasped quickly; in the midst of danger and death it acquired a gritty edge. The creature comforts – drink, tobacco, sex – were all tradeable commodities and acquired a price. Even information was valuable. Charlie Piper had not only dealt in oranges and cigarettes, but also medical verdicts. He had made it his business to get to know Mrs Guthrie in the records office. A young war widow, she was ripe and gullible material for the brand of doomed idealism that Charlie Piper peddled. She believed his story about wanting to devote his life to finding a cure for TB. ‘When I get out of here,' he would tell her, ‘I'm going to take to the doctoring. If I could have a peep at some of the files here, just overnight, so I can study them. Get myself prepared …'

In time he had seen almost every patient's charts and X-rays. He did not offer information but if he was asked he saw no reason not to sell it. He had his ethics too. Like a fortune-teller, if he saw signs of the grim reaper, he did not divulge it. They would know soon enough, he reasoned. And the information was not all for gain. He chose Irene Rivers' file out of curiosity, and because she was no longer a patient, he kept the X-rays out after he returned her file to Mrs Guthrie. Even when he was stowing them away in one of his secret stashes he was not quite sure why he wanted them. They were, after all, only shiny black and white sheets which showed the world in reverse. What was light outside, was shade inside, the bones an eerie luminescence, while breath was rendered a dark, solid mass. He knew there was something lurid about his interest. He remembered the evening when she had stripped for him; it was as if she had been showing him this – he held the X-rays in his hand – her cloudy and mysterious interior. He was looking for clues, he realised, something inside that would explain her to him. And when he left Granitefield, he could not bear to jettison them. He saw them as a good-luck charm, an illicit gift. And he felt absurdly grateful to her as if she had offered him her very soul. And now, he realised, too late, how he had betrayed her. Standing as he always had on the threshold of her life. Holding the hand of a child who could have been his. He felt like a spectre, a man cheated by a death that had not occurred. His own.

‘That's the last we'll see of him,' Stanley declared, ‘I showed him, didn't I, Pearl?'

Pearl nodded weakly.

Irene imagined the scene. Stanley, meek at first, then suddenly enraged, towering over a sprawling Charlie Piper, his arm raised weakly against Stanley's boot. Irene had seen this transformation before. Stanley might be slow to anger but once he was … But she saw how useless his aggression was in the midst of this intricate mess. But then, Stanley didn't know. How could he understand the enormity of his crime?

As soon as Stanley told her, Irene knew they were doomed. She felt the cold creep of implacable recognition of one who has come face-to-face with death. Stanley thought he had seen Charlie off. Irene knew better. She knew that Charlie would work it out somehow. He would do it out of pride and curiosity. He was used to being well-liked; he would genuinely want to know what he had done wrong. When he collected debts on the wards, Irene remembered, he would be perplexed if patients grumbled about coughing up (coughing up, Charlie would grin, get it?) He had made a deal with them, after all. He might not come back here for an explanation, Irene knew, but he would find it elsewhere. Her heart sinking, Irene considered the neat inevitability of it. Charlie Piper delivering her to her fate.

She readied herself for flight. From the attic she retrieved the suitcase she had brought from Granitefield. When she opened it, a cloud of dust billowed forth, releasing with it the pungent smell of must, sharp and green. Stealthily she packed for Pearl and herself; she had no plans, no idea where she would go, escape her only ambition. As she put Pearl to bed that night, she lingered longer than usual in the child's room. She remembered Stanley hanging the wallpaper, birdsong on a summer's night, the windows thrown open to dispel the smell of drying paint and paste. She gazed at the army of soft toys and rag dolls sitting in a row against the bed-head, a pillow of fur around Pearl's head. Her small shoes abandoned, pigeon-toed, on the mat, her dress splayed in a fan across the chair. She sat on the edge of the bed as Pearl snuggled into the crook of her arm, already drowsing. She read from
The Sleeping Beauty
, the longed-for child, the grateful parents, the wicked witch … but she stopped short of the handsome prince. Pearl was already asleep, mumbling softly, already leaving her for another world. Tomorrow, Irene would tell her. She would recount the days of stolen happiness, the picnics on the windswept hills, the seaside outings paddling in the shallows, the day she first walked, tottering down the street after Stanley as Irene let go of the reins, the trip to the Causeway, Stanley and Pearl picking shells on the head-land, the pride Irene had felt pushing the baby carriage out into the sun by the front door, her first words. She would have to know the dangers there had been too … the polio that had nearly crippled her, the day she nearly drowned … Whatever happened, Pearl must know these things. Her history. But it was too late tonight. Irene rose and kissed Pearl on the forehead, inhaling the tactile warmth of the child's skin and her milky smell, the soft shudder of her breathing already becoming a memory, a loss.