But because of him, I can’t.
– 2 –
Let’s Play a Game
In the final minutes of 31 December 1999, in a nation abuzz with a mix of uncharacteristic optimism about the dawn of a new millennium and a Y2K-induced fear that planes were about to fall out of the sky, I was sitting on the couch in our living room with a sleeping Anna on one side of me and a softly snoring Nannie on the other. My parents had gone out to a party in the Carrigaline Court Hotel; I wouldn’t see them until I woke up the following morning. On the TV, a concert was broadcasting live from Dublin City. Fireworks were imminent. My eyelids were heavy but I was determined to stay awake long enough to see them. I may have reached for a sip of Coke, or maybe even got up and made myself a cup of tea.
At about the same time, in another living room about twelve minutes’ drive away and only a couple of minutes’ drive from the Carrigaline Court Hotel, sixteen-year-old Tommy O’Sullivan was looking at the same thing on his family’s television screen.
Then the phone in the kitchen started ringing.
At first Tommy thought he wasn’t hearing anything on the line because the speaker was being drowned out by the noise of the television, or perhaps that of his charges: his siblings David, aged twelve, Nancy, ten, and Emer, seven. They were hopping around the floor in front of the TV screen, dancing and clapping and occasionally play-fighting, hyper on the last of the Christmas sweets and fizzy drinks. The O’Sullivans’ landline was fixed to the wall next to the fridge in the kitchen. Tommy shushed the children, pulled the door connecting the two rooms shut and said, ‘Hello?’ into the phone for the second time.
He heard what he would later describe as a crackling sound, followed by a long, slow sigh. Someone was blowing hard into the mouthpiece on the other end, generating a strange, creepy sound. The voice Tommy was about to hear was male and raspy, somewhere between a hoarse whisper and the damaged vocal cords of a chronic chain-smoker. It said, ‘Let’s play a game ...’
The words carried no discernible accent, but the way the caller spoke had a kind of theatrical menace about it. It reminded Tommy of the teen horror movie Scream. In its opening sequence, Drew Barrymore’s character is home alone when she receives a phone call that at first seems like a playful prank. But the caller is soon revealed to be a masked murderer who gains entry to the house and kills her. This was fresh in Tommy’s mind because he and his friends had watched the movie on Halloween night. Now it was New Year’s Eve and Tommy was the only member of that same group who wasn’t at Mike Hickey’s free gaff, drinking spirits smuggled out of parents’ cabinets and listening to music at a volume that, on any other night, would have guaranteed a visit from the guards. Instead, Tommy was stuck with babysitting duties, his parents at the same New Year Eve’s party as mine.
He had never been happy about this arrangement but was even less so now, with the clock ticking down to midnight and the wrenching feeling of missing out, of being left out, approaching its most acute. Convinced that this phone call was one or more of his friends taunting him about this situation, Tommy muttered something like, ‘Oh fuck off, dickheads,’ and hung up. The following day, his friends would deny that they had made the call.
A fortnight later, on the morning of 14 January 2000, Tommy was woken by the piano-key ringtone of his mobile phone. It was his first but second-hand, a hand-me-down from his father with a new pay-asyou-go SIM card inside. Tommy had had a Saturday job in the SuperValu in Carrigaline since the summer, restocking shelves and packing bags, and, each week, he set aside ten pounds of his earnings to spend on phone credit. That was more than enough because he only used the device to exchange text messages with the friends of his who also had mobile phones, names he could count on the fingers of one hand. His mother didn’t have one and his father only used his for work, which was why it was confusing that, according to the little green, square screen glowing in the dark of his bedroom, it was ‘DAD’ that was calling him now. When Tommy saw the time, he was even more confused: it was 5:02 a.m.
‘Tommy?’ His father’s voice sounded far away even though he was, presumably, just on the other side of the wall. ‘Is your door locked?’
It felt like the middle of the night and he had just been jerked awake from a deep level of sleep; Tommy’s first thought was that his father was losing his mind. He asked him to repeat the question.
‘Is your bedroom door locked? Go check.’
‘Dad, what the f—’ Tommy caught the swear word he used so easily with his friends and bit down on his lip to stop it from slipping out. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Just do it.’
His father sounded weird. The weight of teenage tiredness was clawing at Tommy’s eyelids, pulling him towards his pillow, making his limbs heavy and slow. All he wanted to do was go back to sleep as soon as possible. He got out of bed with a groan and trudged to his bedroom door – which was, indeed, locked.
When Tommy bent down to look through the keyhole, he could only see light: the key was missing.
‘Ours is locked too,’ his father said. ‘And your mother isn’t in here.’
‘What did she lock the doors for? Where is she?’
His father didn’t answer either question. Tommy held the phone to his chest and called out, ‘Mam?’ No answer. Again, louder. ‘Mam?’ Still nothing. He banged on his door a couple of times. Then he went to the wall he shared with his brother David and thumped on that.
‘I’m going outside,’ his father said. ‘Through the window. I’ll let myself in with the spare key.’
They ended the call.
The next thing Tommy heard was a groan of protest through the shared wall: David had finally woken up. Tommy coaxed his younger brother out of bed and got him to check his door. Same deal: locked, key missing.
Tommy went to the window. It was pitch black outside. The houses on Bally’s Lane had generous plots and there were no streetlights. He was pretty sure he could make out the shapes of two cars, though, meaning his mother must be in the house. But doing what? He thought of Christmas – Christmas Eve, specifically. There’d been a couple of years there where Nancy and Emer’s excitement over the imminent arrival of Santa Claus had become a kind of mania, each one amplifying the other’s, leaving both children wide-awake, wired, for nearly the whole night, and taking it in turns to tiptoe down the hall to the living room to see if their presents had been delivered yet. Exhausted and exasperated, his mother had eventually resorted to locking them into their rooms. Is that what this was? Was she planning some kind of surprise for them that she didn’t want them to discover until the morning? But if so, why take the keys? Why lock her own bedroom door too? Why not respond to his calls?
As Tommy watched, a shaft of yellow light fell on to the gravel drive, followed by the dull thunk of a window opening. His father was climbing outside. It took the man a minute but then gravel was crunching underfoot and a shape was hurrying past Tommy’s own window, a shadow moving in the night. He listened for the sound of a key in the front door, but it never came.
Instead, he heard his father shouting.
He was telling Tommy to ring the Gardaí.