On Bone Bridge Read online

  Then Fidelma said, “In your own words, please, Rosemary-June.”

  Rosemary-June turned back to face her. “Alexander was crying,” she said. “Violet-May said maybe he’d like to look at the river, maybe it would make him stop. The sun was shining and it made the water sparkly and Alexander likes sparkly things.”

  She smiled when she said that and Mr Duff cleared his throat and I remember thinking, she’s younger than us, she’s only eight and she doesn’t understand that Alexander is really dead.

  I glanced at my mother and her eyes were fixed on my face. She smiled at me and I tried to smile back so she would know I was alright, but my mouth would not make a smile because Alexander was really dead.

  “Violet-May took him out of his pram,” said Rosemary-June. “She put him on the wall.”

  “Sitting or standing on the wall?” asked Fidelma.

  “Sitting,” said Rosemary-June. “She put him sitting on the wall.”

  “Did she hold him? Did Violet-May hold Alexander while he was sitting on the wall?”

  Rosemary-June turned her head and glanced at Violet-May once more. “Yes, she had her arms around him.”

  “Look at me, please, Rosemary-June,” said Fidelma. “Around him how? Where on his body was Violet-May holding Alexander?”

  “Is this necessary?” said Mr Duff.

  I remember glancing at him and, child that I was, suddenly realising that he was as I had never seen him before – close to anger. Even then, as incapable of being rude as he was of being pale, his voice was still polite. “I mean to say,” he said, “what is to be gained by these questions? After all, the child is ...”

  He did not finish the sentence and my mother put her handkerchief to her face once more.

  “I’m afraid it is necessary, Mr Duff,” said the detective.

  “Around his waist,” said Rosemary-June, “she was holding him around his waist.”

  “And what was Alexander doing while Violet-May was holding him around his waist?”

  “Kicking,” said Rosemary-June, “kicking and waving his arms.”

  “Was he still crying?”

  “No, he stopped crying when Violet-May put him on the wall.”

  “But you say that Alexander was kicking and waving his arms, Rosemary-June. So would you say that he was moving about a good deal?”

  Rosemary-June turned to Violet-May once more.

  “He wouldn’t stop jumping about,” said Violet-May.

  “Wriggling,” said Rosemary-June. “He was wriggling around.”

  I got the feeling she was pleased with her choice of word.

  She turned back to Fidelma. “And then he fell. He fell into the river and I screamed.” Her eyes went back to Violet-May once more. “I screamed. I screamed and screamed because I could see Alexander in the water. He wasn’t moving and after a while he just floated away.”

  For a while there was silence in the room.

  Then Violet-May said, “Daddy, I want to go home now. Please can we go home?”

  Mr Duff got to his feet, “I think perhaps my daughters have been sufficiently traumatised for one day, don’t you?” he said. “Might it be possible for me to take them home? Beside anything else, my wife is in need of me.”

  “And I’d like to take Kay home,” said my mother, getting up. “She’s had enough too.”

  “Just one more thing,” said Fidelma. “At any point while you, Violet-May, and you, Rosemary-June, were on the bridge with your brother, did you see anybody else about? Anyone who might have witnessed what happened?”

  Violet-May shook her head.

  “You saw nobody?” said Fidelma.

  “Nobody,” said Violet-May.

  “Rosemary-June?”

  “Somebody went past,” said Rosemary-June and I saw the surprise in Violet-May’s eyes as she turned and stared at her sister.

  “When? I didn’t see anybody,” she said.

  “It was when you were watching for the sticks in the river,” said Rosemary-June.

  “Who was it, Rosemary-June, do you know?” said Fidelma.

  “I don’t know,” said Rosemary-June. “Just a girl, a woman, I don’t know who she was.”

  “Was it a girl or was it a woman? Can you remember, Rosemary-June?”

  “I don’t know,” said Rosemary-June. “I can’t remember and I didn’t really look at her.”

  “And you didn’t see this girl, this woman, Violet-May?”

  “I didn’t see anyone,” said Violet-May.

  At that moment I remembered the girl with the black hair and the bright green skirt lurking behind the pillar of the Duff gate, the flash of green as we were driven away from Bone Bridge.

  I waited to be asked about her but then Violet-May said once more, “Please, can I go home now?”

  Fidelma looked at the detective and I saw him nod his head and Fidelma said yes, we could all go home, and she told Mr Duff she was very, very sorry about his little boy. And Mr Duff bowed his head but said nothing.

  Outside the police station I remember noticing that Violet-May had her can of Fanta in her hand and I realised that I had left mine behind. I didn’t even care.

  The doorbell rang just after I went to bed that night. For some reason I got it into my head that it might be Violet-May and I jumped out of bed and went out onto the landing. But it was only Mrs Nugent and she did not get past the doorstep. I heard my mother tell her firmly that now was not a good time and we were all off to bed.

  “But isn’t it a shocking thing to happen, Mrs Kelly? Shocking, just shocking, and that’s the second child she’s lost too – well, so to speak. Of course, the first one was different but …”

  “The first one was very different,” said my mother. “Not the same thing at all.”

  “Oh, I know that, but even so, it’s very sad, very sad. I don’t know how you’d get over something like that, I just don’t.”

  “You never would,” said my mother and then I heard the sound of the door shutting and I hurried back to my room for fear I would be caught out of bed.

  The following day I had to go back to the police station. I knew that it wasn’t just me, that Violet-May and Rosemary went too, because although I didn’t see them at the police station, I was standing in our hallway when the call came through.

  I heard my mother asking whoever was on the other end whether the Duff girls were being brought in for further questioning too. “Because I won’t stand for any distinction being made between Kay and those other two children,” she said.

  “I don’t want to go to the police station on my own,” I said, after she had hung up the phone.

  “You won’t be on your own,” my mother told me. “I’ll be with you and your daddy too. They just want to speak to each of you without the others being there.

  I remember it was raining this time when my father drove us into the car park behind the police station and I remember crying because I didn’t want to get out of the car.

  “But all you have to do is exactly what you did the last time,” my mother said. “And then that will be that and we can all go home and try to forget about this.”

  And my father said gently, “Your mother’s right, Kay. Just tell them what you told them yesterday. As long as you tell them the truth, you have nothing to be frightened of.”

  And I remember wishing that I could make him, make them understand, that the truth was exactly what I was afraid of.

  But in the end it wasn’t so very bad. There was no Fanta Orange this time, just water if I wanted it, but Fidelma was there, and the same quiet detective and they were both as kind as before and asked me all the same questions to which I gave all the same answers. I remember as we walked through the doors out into the rain which was still falling, looking back over my shoulder, half expecting someone to come running out after me, calling my name, forcing me to go back in again, but there was nobody to see and nothing to hear, except my father smiling reassuringly down at me and my mother saying
firmly, “And that, as far as we’re concerned, is that.”

  Chapter 12

  The Monday of my birthday was grey, showery and dismal. I woke to it from a night punctuated by nightmares in one of which I had been dandling Alexander from the wall of Bone Bridge when he slipped from my hands. The moment he hit the water his red romper suit swelled and became bloated and I watched in horror as he suddenly rolled over and looked up at me. His arms were outstretched as though he were beseeching me to save him. I reached down as far as I could but my arms were too short and I watched as he floated away, his romper suit getting bigger and bigger until it resembled some kind of giant red paddling pool. I suddenly became aware that somebody was watching me and when I looked round a strange man was standing there and I knew it was the ghost of one of those unquiet dead my father had told me about, who had been buried next to Bone Bridge.

  I woke up screaming and struggling in my mother’s arms, convinced that her grip was Alexander’s and that he was trying to pull me into the river with him.

  “Now now, it was only a bad dream,” she soothed, “only a bad dream and it’s over now and I’m here, chicken, I’m here.”

  My mother only called me chicken when I was hurt or sick and that night as I lay shaking in her arms I felt myself to be both. She stayed with me until I fell asleep again to another variation of the same dream. This time when I woke I was alone in my room. My mother had left my bedside lamp on and I got out of bed with the intention of waking her. On the landing I heard the sound of my father snoring and I was struck with the fear that by waking my mother I would disturb him too. At the back of mind, beneath the horror of what had happened to Alexander, was the terror that something bad would happen to my father too.

  I kept hearing my mother’s words: “This can’t be good for your heart, Jim.”

  In the end I went back to my room, switched on the light and turned off the lamp and lay on my back staring at the white ceiling. I willed my eyes to stay open and I think they did for quite some time but eventually sleep did overtake me and I woke to the light still on overhead and the thought that today I was eleven years old.

  My mother had already decided that I should stay home from school – “On account of all the excitement,” was how she had put it. She never mentioned Alexander’s name to me then or ever afterwards, unless I brought it up myself. And because I felt she did not want me to bring it up I never mentioned his name either.

  When I went downstairs there were cards on the mat in the hall for me, one from my granny and one from my Auntie May. I carried them into the kitchen and my mother looked up and said “Happy Birthday! I was just about to go and see if you were awake. Sit down and open your cards and I’ll put an egg on to boil for you.”

  My father was sitting at the table drinking tea from his favourite mug. It was blue with white stripes and it had a crack in it, but he would never let my mother throw it out because he said it made tea taste better than any other mug he’d ever had.

  He smiled at me over the rim, then he put it down and said, “Happy Birthday, chicken.”

  “Why aren’t you in work, Daddy?” I said. It was unusual to see him at the breakfast table – usually he would have left for work by the time I came down.

  “I just took a couple of days off work,” he said, and I immediately began to worry that it was because of his heart.

  After breakfast he went down to the shed and brought back the bicycle he and my mother had bought for me. It was red and silver and it had a basket and a bell and as I thanked them I wished with all my heart that I could feel the way such a bicycle should have made me feel.

  “If the weather picks up this afternoon,” said my father, “you can take it for a ride and see how it goes. I might need to adjust the saddle for you.”

  In fact, the weather picked up by mid-morning and I did take the bike out for a short while and it was grand, but I hadn’t the heart to go far.

  After lunch my father went out, wearing his good suit. I asked my mother where he was going and she said she wasn’t sure. When he came back much later he asked me how my birthday was going but I thought he looked very sad and my mother nagged him until he agreed to go upstairs for a little lie-down. There was no party of course, as my mother said, under the circumstances – so I blew out my candles with only my parents to watch me. I wondered what Violet-May was doing for her birthday – perhaps she didn’t even have a cake, under the circumstances ...

  And so, despite the best efforts of my parents, my eleventh birthday was a dismal day with none of the excitement usually associated with the event. All day long, I could not help thinking about what had happened to Alexander and, when I managed to put him from my mind for a moment, I would find myself instead remembering last year’s birthday when I had leapt from bed excited to begin getting ready for Violet-May’s birthday concert. And that only served to remind me that last year Alexander Duff had not yet been born and now he was dead and so I would land right back where I had started again, thinking about what had happened to Alexander.

  After dinner I went upstairs to my room. I told my mother that I wanted to look at the new books she had given me. I did look at them for a while but somehow I could not concentrate so I put them away on the bookshelf and then I got down on my knees and pulled my vanity case out from under the bed. It was red and round in shape and it was lined with red satin and it was the place where I kept my treasures: postcards and photographs and shells, my autograph book, dried leaves and flowers, the blue and broken shell of a bird’s egg wrapped in tissue paper and tucked into a ring box my mother had given me for the purpose. It was also the place where I kept the diary that Violet-May had given me last Christmas. I had started well in January until I forgot, then picked up again in February and kept it up for a while but after that the entries had dropped off and now I only wrote in it when I remembered, which was not very often. I took it from the case and sat on my bed and opened it and began to write.

  Later I came downstairs for a drink of orange. I was in my stocking feet and my parents who were in the sitting room with the door closed did not hear me. I didn’t mean to listen but their voices were raised, or my mother’s voice was anyway. I heard my father use a word I had never heard before – coroner. At first I thought he had said “corner”, but that didn’t make sense because corners cannot speak so I listened hard and realised the word was “coroner”. I didn’t know what a coroner was.

  They were talking about this coroner saying that children shouldn’t have been left in charge of a baby while its mother was sleeping. Then my father talked about a doctor “testifying” about some kind of depression. I knew the word “testifying” and realised my father had been in court that day.

  “I’m not saying I don’t feel sorry for the woman,” said my mother, “but that won’t bring back that poor infant and it won’t stop Kay’s nightmares.”

  “God love them all,” said my father. “Whatever way you look at it, it’s a bloody high price to pay for a few hours’ kip.”

  I knew he was talking about Mrs Duff and I slipped away then before they saw me, and went back upstairs to my room.

  It seems to me my life narrowed after the day on Bone Bridge. There was no wandering off to play at will, no going down the river with the other children from our estate. I was still allowed to play in the street but only if I went no farther than the corner where my mother could keep an eye on me. I thought about Alexander Duff all the time. Sometimes when I was doing something ordinary, like working out a sum in school or eating my lunch or tidying my room he would come into my mind.

  Sometimes when the thought of him became too much I took out my diary and wrote down what I was thinking. It seemed to help to put the thoughts down in words and see them on the page. My mother came across me writing a few times and once she asked me about it.

  “It’s nothing,” I told her, “just stuff.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “Just stuff that I think abo
ut.”

  My mother looked at me for a while before she spoke again. “Would it not be better to talk about it, you know, instead of writing it down?”

  I shook my head. “It’s easier writing it down,” I said.

  My mother nodded but I could tell by the look on her face that she was not happy. She wanted to know what I was thinking, I knew she did, and that being so, I was suddenly certain that given the chance she would read my diary.

  After she had left me alone, I looked about my room trying to think of a safe place in which to hide it – if I left it in the usual place she might find it. But there was a place. All the bedrooms in our house had a vent, high up in the wall; I could reach the one in my room if I stood on my chair. That night, for the first time, I hid my diary inside it. I put the key there too, wrapped up separately in a cotton handkerchief.

  My nightmares about Alexander continued. I grew ultra-sensitive, bursting into tears at the slightest provocation and prone to feelings of exaggerated guilt over minor offences. I remember one day, when I was helping my mother by doing the dusting, knocking an ornament off the mantelpiece, a little white bird of no particular value but which my mother liked. Initially, when my mother asked what had happened to the ornament I denied all knowledge of it only to confess later on that same day. My mother, who was going gently with me in all things at this point in time, made nothing of the damage to the bird itself only mildly reprimanding me for having lied about it in the first place. And I remember how bewildered she looked when I burst into great heartbroken sobs and ran upstairs to my room where I continued to cry myself into a state of near-hysteria.