This Child of Mine Read online

  SINÉAD MORIARTY

  This Child of Mine

  Table of Contents

  London, June 2011

  PART 1: Then

  1. Anna

  2. Laura

  3. Anna

  4. Laura

  5. Anna

  6. Laura

  7. Anna

  8. Laura

  9. Anna

  10. Laura

  11. Anna

  PART 2: Now

  12. Sophie

  13. Laura

  14. Anna

  15. Laura

  16. Sophie

  17. Anna

  18. Laura

  19. Sophie

  20. Anna

  21. Laura

  22. Sophie

  23. Anna

  24. Laura

  25. Sophie

  26. Anna

  27. Laura

  28. Sophie

  29. Anna

  30. Laura

  31. Sophie

  32. Anna

  33. Laura

  34. Sophie

  35. Anna

  36. Laura

  37. Sophie

  38. Anna

  39. Sophie

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  For you, the reader, with grateful thanks

  London, June 2011

  Sophie sank back in the couch and put her bare feet up on the coffee-table. It was one of those hot, sticky London summer evenings. Holly came in with two glasses of wine and plonked down beside her. ‘Anything good on?’ she asked, as Sophie channel-surfed.

  ‘Nothing. Oh, hang on,’ Sophie stopped on BBC1. They were interviewing some artist. The camera was showing an enormous orange canvas.

  ‘Oh, God, no!’ Holly groaned. ‘Not another artist. You’re obsessed. I know I’m never going to see you next year when you’re at art college. You’ll be too busy with all your arty-farty friends for me.’

  Sophie smiled. ‘Holly, you’ve been my best friend for as long as I can remember. You’ll never get rid of me. I love coming to your house.’

  ‘I should think so, too.’ Holly grinned, as she sipped her drink.

  Sophie turned back to the TV. The artist’s name was Laura something, and she was Irish – Sophie could tell by her accent: she sounded a bit like her mum. The interviewer asked Laura about the orange painting.

  Laura explained that she had painted the picture the previous year, on the day of her daughter’s birthday, and that orange was the colour she saw when she felt pain.

  Holly stared at Sophie. ‘That’s just like you.’

  Sophie sat forward to listen closely.

  ‘Your synaesthesia has influenced a lot of your painting, hasn’t it?’ the interviewer said. ‘Could you explain how the condition affects your life?’

  ‘Having synaesthesia has made me see the world differently from most people. As an artist, it’s a blessing. I don’t see emotions, I see colours. I visualize numbers and letters as colours. Music translates to colour. Everything is illuminated. And the real beauty of it is that everyone with synaesthesia has their own palette of colours. So we all see things in a unique way.’

  Sophie was riveted.

  ‘What colours do you find come up most regularly?’ the interviewer asked.

  ‘Well, blue is my happy colour, orange is pain and green is fear.’

  Holly turned to Sophie. ‘You see? You’re not the only freak in the world.’

  The camera panned from the orange canvas to another painting, a purple and green one. The interviewer asked Laura about it – she had just sold it to the rock star Hank Gold for two hundred thousand euros.

  ‘It’s nice to have finally found a level of success after years of struggling, but money is not what drives me.’

  ‘What does?’ the interviewer asked.

  ‘Regret,’ she said softly.

  ‘Does that have to do with your baby daughter drowning all those years ago?’ he probed.

  There was silence. All you could see was the purple and green canvas, and all you could hear was Laura’s laboured breathing.

  ‘It must have been a terrible time for you,’ the interviewer suggested.

  ‘It still is,’ she whispered.

  ‘And they never found your little girl’s body,’ he noted.

  ‘No, and I believe she’s still out there.’

  ‘Do you?’ He sounded surprised.

  ‘Yes.’ Laura’s voice grew stronger. ‘I never believed she drowned. I always hoped I’d find her or that someone would discover her and bring her home to me.’

  The camera moved from the painting to Laura’s face.

  Holly gasped. ‘Oh, my God!’

  Sophie’s glass hit the floor and shattered into a thousand pieces.

  PART 1

  Then

  1.

  Anna

  December 1992

  Anna beamed at herself in the bathroom mirror. Carefully, she applied makeup to hide her green complexion. Never had she been so thrilled to feel sick. The worse she felt, the happier she was. She hummed as she put on her mascara.

  Barry came in and kissed her cheek. ‘I’m off, early meeting. See you about seven.’

  ‘OK. I’m going to yoga at six thirty so I’ll be home after that.’

  ‘Yoga?’ Barry said. ‘Are you sure that’s a good idea?’

  Anna smiled. ‘It’s fine. Honestly, this time is going to be different. I’m not scared or worried. I know that my mum sent me this one. I know this one’s a keeper. Besides, yoga is one of the few things I can do with this big bump.’

  ‘OK, but please don’t overdo it. Take it easy.’

  Anna turned away from the mirror and placed her hand gently on her husband’s arm. ‘Before Mum died, she promised me she’d send me a baby. This is her gift to me. Nothing is going to go wrong this time. I promise.’

  Barry attempted a smile. ‘I hope you’re right.’

  He left for work and Anna continued layering on her makeup. She hated anything tight around her bump, so she opted for a black shift dress and her flat black boots. She had promised the kids she’d make Santa Clauses with them today so she had bought a big bag of cotton-wool balls, glitter, glue, twenty paper plates and twenty red markers.

  She packed the materials into her backpack and headed off to school. If it wasn’t raining, Anna liked to walk. It took half an hour and it cleared her head so that when she reached the school gates, she had left her worries behind and could focus on teaching.

  Of course, there had been many days over the last few years when she hadn’t been able to leave her troubles behind. There had been some days when getting up at all had been a struggle. Days when she had literally had to drag herself out of bed and ask Barry to help her get dressed because she was crying so much she couldn’t see the buttons on her shirt. Days when she had been catatonic with grief and wanted nothing more than to pull the duvet over her head, curl up in the foetal position – which was ironic when you thought of it – and grieve for the children she’d never have.

  Seven miscarriages in five years. The longest she’d managed to hold on to a baby was fourteen weeks. That had been the hardest one. She’d finally made it past the three-month mark, had allowed herself to hope, to get excited … and then it was gone. Snatched away from her. That had been number five. The last two she had lost at seven and nine weeks. And then her mum had got sick and she’d put everything on hold to look after her. She was an only child and her dad had died when she was twenty-three, so there was no one else. She was all her mum had. Ovarian cance
r, the silent killer, the doctor called it. And it had been – silent and deadly. Within four months her mother was gone.

  But even then she’d only taken four full days off work. She didn’t like letting the kids down. She was their only stability. Their little lives were filled with drugs, alcohol, abuse, poverty, neglect and violence. How could she, the one constant in all that, disappoint them? She couldn’t. So even on those days when she had woken up feeling as though she was drowning, as if the water was coming up and engulfing her, dragging her down into the depths of depression, even on those days she had got out of bed and gone to work.

  She had always been glad she had, because when she saw their little faces, her heart lifted. She had recognized in their eyes some of the grief she felt. They had no choice, no way out. They were stuck with deadbeat dads and alcoholic mums. They were trapped in homes where love was a distant memory. Where cruel words and violence were a daily occurrence, hugs and clean clothes an anomaly. Where help was not at hand because overworked social workers were crumbling under the weight of their caseloads.

  Anna had received the precious gift of a happy childhood. She had been loved, cherished, encouraged and nurtured in every way. It was something most of her pupils would never experience, so she felt it was her duty to show them that there was another way. She wanted to show them that their dysfunctional lives were not ‘normal’. She wanted to give them love, kindness, affection, warmth and, most of all, hope.

  Anna knew that school for most of those children was a sanctuary, the one place where they could be at peace for a few hours. Barry told her she put far too much energy into teaching a bunch of kids who were just going to end up being junkies, like their parents. In the seventeen years that Anna had been teaching at the school, the majority of her students had not grown into upstanding citizens, but a handful had got jobs that didn’t involve criminal activity and two had even gone on to college. It was a meagre statistic, but it still made her proud to know that, in some small way, she had helped those children. That when they had come to her at five years of age, she, their first ever teacher, had paved the way for something better. She clung to those success stories and tried every day to do her very best for the children.

  She got to school early and set up for the day. She liked to have everything ready for the children when they arrived. They found the familiarity of the classroom and the structure in their day reassuring. At nine o’clock they came streaming in. She had twenty in her class this year: eleven boys and nine girls. Of those twenty, she had six very bad cases. Three single mums who were alcoholics, one single mum who was a junkie and had moved in with a well-known drug dealer, another single mum whose husband was in prison for armed robbery, and one mother who was routinely physically abused by her boyfriend.

  Each year, when the children arrived on their first day, she could tell immediately which ones were neglected. There were the obvious signs, like dirty clothes, head lice, no coats or warm jumpers, but then there were the other things – language delay, stuttering, low self-confidence, inability to engage in any classwork. There were also the children who reacted outwardly instead of inwardly to their unhappy situations: they were hyperactive, destructive, disruptive, couldn’t sit still or concentrate for more than a minute on anything.

  This year she had one very difficult boy, Ryan. His mother was addicted to crystal meth and his dad was serving fifteen years for armed robbery. Ryan was very physical and difficult to manage, but Anna loved him. She could see through his aggression. Behind it, he was just a scared, scarred five-year-old, who was completely neglected. She was determined to try to show him another way.

  The children ran into the classroom and those who had coats took them off. Ryan, Kylie, Francie and Jason never had coats. Anna sat the children down in a circle on the floor and asked them to talk about their weekend and to tell her about the good things or the bad things that had happened.

  Sally went first. ‘My mammy took me to the cinema.’

  ‘Wow, that’s great! How about you, Ronan?’

  ‘I fell off me bike and hurted me leg.’

  ‘Oh, you poor thing – is it OK now?’ Anna asked.

  ‘Yes, Mrs Roberts, it is. My mammy put a big plaster on it.’

  ‘Good. Derek, how was your weekend?’

  ‘Shite. Me da was pissed drunk and stood on my Lego what I’d just spented an hour making.’

  ‘Derek, you know we don’t curse in class, it’s not nice. I’m sorry your Lego was broken. Were you able to fix it?’

  ‘Me ma told me da he was a useless fucker – oops, sorry, Mrs Roberts – but that’s what she said. And she maded him fix it, so it’s OK now.’

  Anna moved on to Kylie. ‘How about you?’

  Kylie shrugged. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Did anything happen?’

  ‘I dunno.’

  ‘Were you inside all weekend or did you go out anywhere?’ Anna prodded. ‘Did anything bad happen? Anything that made you sad?’

  Kylie stared at the floor. ‘Me ma fell down the stairs and me granny haded to call an ambooance and she haded to get ten of them stitches here.’ She pointed to her eyebrow.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that, Kylie. Your poor mum and poor you. You must have got a terrible fright.’

  ‘There was lots of blood.’

  ‘Oooooooh!’ The other children were impressed.

  ‘Millions of blood.’ Kylie warmed to her theme, enjoying the rare attention. ‘Blood everywhere. On the walls and the carpet and it was all squirting out of her head.’

  ‘OOOOOOOOH!’ Her classmates liked this detail.

  ‘M-m-m-my da p-p-p-punched my m-m-m-ma one time and her nose squirted b-b-b-blood like an alien,’ Francie piped up. Then he went bright red and looked at Anna wide-eyed. ‘But it was ages ago. Like a m-m-m-million years ago.’

  Anna knew that Francie’s dad spent most of his spare time beating his mother and once, about six weeks ago, Francie had come into school with bruises on his arm. Anna had notified the principal, who had called Social Services. A social worker had gone to speak to the parents, but they had denied it. Francie hadn’t had any bruises since, but Anna had seen his mother trying to hide bruises on her neck with a scarf. So, yet again, a child had fallen through the cracks.

  ‘Now, everyone,’ Anna said brightly, to distract them from their gory tales, ‘today we’re going to make Santa Claus faces.’

  ‘Boring!’ said Ryan, jumping from one chair to the next.

  ‘It’ll be fun – come on, Ryan, I’ll let you hand out the cotton balls for Santa’s beard.’

  ‘Santa never came to my house last year. My ma said he losted our address,’ Ryan said, almost absentmindedly.

  Anna put her arm around him. ‘Well, I bet he’ll find it this year.’ She made a mental note to make sure that Ryan’s family received one of the twenty hampers the school delivered to the neediest families every Christmas.

  She was on her way to get the materials for the Santas when she heard Jordan say, ‘Maybe Santa didn’t lose your address, Ryan. Maybe he didn’t come because you’re so bold.’

  ‘Shut up, you,’ Ryan shouted.

  ‘Don’t say that, it’s bad words.’

  ‘Fuck off, then, you ugly minger.’

  ‘My ma said your ma’s a dirty junkie.’

  ‘That’s enough!’ Anna stood between them. ‘I want you both to say sorry for being mean.’

  They muttered, ‘Sorry,’ to each other and Anna managed to get all the children sitting down to make Santa Claus faces. A few minutes later Ryan was up again using his paper plate as a Frisbee.

  They stopped for a break at ten twenty. A healthy mid-morning snack and lunch was provided for all the children daily, because the school knew that some of them didn’t get fed at home.

  ‘What’s this?’ Molly asked, holding up a kiwi.

  ‘It’s a fruit. It’s yummy, very sweet and soft.’ Anna cut the kiwis and divided them up between the children.

&nb
sp; ‘It’s hairy, Mrs Roberts.’ Timmy sniffed it. ‘And it smells disgusting.’

  ‘It looks like a monkey’s arse.’ Jenny giggled.

  Anna finished scooping the kiwis on to plates.

  ‘There’s no way I’m eating that,’ Molly said. ‘It’s all green and mushy. It looks like snot.’

  ‘Yuuuuuuuuck!’ the children squealed.

  Anna took a deep breath. ‘Molly, I want you to taste it and then decide if you like it or not.’

  Molly clamped her mouth shut.

  ‘I’ll have it,’ Jason said, slurping up Molly’s portion.

  ‘You ate snot!’ Molly shrieked. ‘You’re disgusting and you smell.’

  ‘That’s enough, Molly,’ Anna scolded. She knew that Jason rarely, if ever, had breakfast or a bath. His mother spent most of her time out of her mind on heroin.

  ‘You’re a cunt,’ Jason roared, and bit Molly’s arm – her yells could have been heard in Timbuktu.

  Anna took Jason by the shoulder and marched him to the other side of the room. She crouched down. ‘Jason, I know Molly was taunting you but –’

  ‘What’s taunting?’

  ‘Teasing. But you had no right to call her that really terrible word and to bite her. You know biting is naughty.’

  ‘Don’t tell. Me da’ll kill me.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Jason, but I have to report bites. Molly’s mum is going to see the tooth marks tonight anyway.’

  ‘I’m dead.’ Jason sighed.

  Later that day, Anna stood with Molly’s mum and Jason’s dad, explaining what had happened. ‘So, unfortunately, they had an argument about the kiwi. Molly was teasing Jason and then Jason got a bit angry and bit Molly.’

  Molly’s mother stared at the marks in her daughter’s arm. To Jason, she hissed, ‘Listen here, Jaws, you’d better apologize to my Molly for taking half her arm off. I might have to get a tetanus injection for that.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Jason muttered.

  ‘He called me a cunt,’ Molly said, loving the attention.

  ‘What?’ Her mother was shocked.

  Jason’s dad swivelled to his son. ‘You little prick. What the fuck is wrong with you, cursing and biting at school?’