Our life in Spanish Point was painfully simple. We had no TV and no computer, and I don’t remember there ever being newspapers in the house. My grandmother, who I called Nannie, listened to the radio for a couple of hours in the morning but only ever stations that played traditional Irish music and never anything with news bulletins in between. We had a landline, which occasionally rang, but whenever it did I’d be shooed into another room or, weather permitting, sent outside while Nannie spoke to whoever was on the other end in hushed tones. The phone rang often in those first few weeks and months but afterwards, almost never. Eventually calls became so rare that the sudden shrill of the ringer would make us both jump and turn to one another, panicked, as if a fire alarm had just gone off and we hadn’t known there was a fire or even an alarm.
That first year almost every day was the same, our tasks expanding to fill however many hours we had like an emotional sealant, preventing the grief from bubbling up to the surface and breaking through. Each meal had a preparation, consumption and clean-up phase. Even a simple breakfast of toast and eggs could be stretched to an hour if we put our minds to it. Mid-morning we did what Nannie called the jobs, tasks like housekeeping and laundry. After lunch, we’d take a long walk down the beach and back, returning with an appetite for dinner. In the evenings, Nannie would light a fire and we’d sit in silence, reading our books, until the flames were reduced to embers. Then we would double-check the doors were locked, together, and go to bed.
It was only then, when I was under the covers, alone in my room in the dark, that I could finally give in. Let it in. The sadness, the grief, the confusion. I would yield and it would rush in and engulf me, a mile-high drowning wave. I knew no matter what happened during the day, whatever the effectiveness of Nannie’s distractions, this was what awaited me at the end of it. I cried myself to sleep every single night and dreamed of decomposing corpses writhing around in muddy graves. Anna’s, mostly. Trying to get out. Trying to get back to me.
We never, ever talked about what had happened. Nannie didn’t even say their names. But sometimes I heard her whimpering softly in her sleep and once, I walked in on her looking through one of my mother’s boxes of old photos, her lined cheeks wet with tears. I had so many questions about what had happened, and why it had, to us, but I didn’t dare ask them. I didn’t want to upset Nannie. I presumed that her and I being holed up in that cottage meant that the man who had murdered the rest of my family was still out there somewhere and that, by now, he knew that he’d missed one of us. Sometimes, in the twilight moments between sleep and wakefulness, I’d see him standing at the end of my bed. He looked like a killer from a horror movie: crazed, blood-splattered, wild. Sometimes the knife was in me before I’d wake up and realise it wasn’t real.
Once a week we’d go into the nearest town to exchange our library books and do our food shopping (or to get the messages, as Nannie called it – and as I did too until I realised, at college, that not everyone did). She wouldn’t let me out of her sight on these excursions and told me that, if anyone ever asked, I was to say my first name in full, Evelyn instead of Eve. Afterwards, when I started secondary school one year late, the forms had Nannie’s maiden name on them and I had been issued a further instruction. I was to say my parents had died in a car crash and that I was an only child, but only if I was asked. Never volunteer information, Nannie said. That was the golden rule and one I still follow now.
I didn’t question this. I just wanted to be normal, to fit in with the other girls in my year. I assumed that how I felt – like my insides were one big, raw, open wound and that my body was just a thin shell built to hide this – was a permanent state that would only be made worse by acknowledging it. I got really good at pretending that I was fine, that everything was, but it was a delicate surface tension that threatened to break at any time.
I pretended my way all through school, through my Leaving Cert exams and through four years of college at NUI Galway, where I chose to study a business course purely because it was a known quantity. I loved reading and writing and, the night I applied, sat for a long time with the cursor blinking over options with ‘Arts’ and ‘Literature’ and ‘Creative Writing’ in their title. But I couldn’t chance being trapped in a seminar room discussing things like trauma, or grief, or violence, especially not while strangers stared at my face. I’d be undone. Databases and mathematics seemed safer and they proved to be.
I didn’t dream of reanimated corpses or knife-wielding killers any more, but I had started tormenting myself by searching crowds for my sister’s face, looking for her proxy, for someone who matched what I thought she might look like now – which was what I looked like when I was sixteen, because that was my only data point. I never found any candidates.
‘Is it any good?’
Jim snapped the book shut, releasing a sound that seemed as loud as a thunderclap.
Steve O’Reilly, the store manager, was standing beside him. Leaning against the shelves with his arms folded, wearing his trademark expression of bemused superiority.
The inside of Jim’s head was an echo chamber of screams. I was twelve years old … A man broke into our home ... murdered my mother, father and younger sister …The lock was flimsy … But for some reason, he didn’t. He mentally beat them back until he found the words, ‘Not really my thing,’ and returned the book to the shelf, taking the opportunity to pull in a deep breath and moisten his lips.
His fingers had left misty smudges on the book’s glossy black cover.
‘Oh yeah?’ Steve raised his eyebrows. ‘Could’ve fooled me, Jim. You looked like you were well into it.’
Steve was twenty-six and wore shiny suits and came to work every day with globules of gel hardening in his (receding) hairline, yet somehow had the idea that he was a somebody and Jim was a nobody. The greatest challenge of working for him was resisting the urge to correct him about that.
Jim turned to face Steve dead-on. He mirrored his stance, folding his arms and leaning lightly against the shelves, a simple trick that always seemed to make other people uneasy. His settled his face into a perfectly neutral expression and looked Steve right in the eye.
‘Did you need something, Steve?’
The younger man shifted his weight.
‘Yeah. I need you to remember that you’re here to work. This isn’t a library.’ He reached out and took down the same copy of The Nothing Man that Jim had just returned to the shelf. ‘The Nothing Man? What were you doing, Jim? Reliving your glory days? Oh wait, no – you were sitting at a desk somewhere, weren’t you? They didn’t let you chase after the actual criminals.’
Steve cracked open the book right in the middle, where the pages were different: bright white, thick and glossy, and displaying photographs.
On the page to Steve’s left was an image of a large detached house and a family of young children posing by a Christmas tree.
On the opposite one, a pencil sketch.
The pencil sketch.
Steve tapped the page. ‘Yeah, yeah. I’ve heard of this.’
Jim was looking at the sketch upside down but he didn’t need to look at it at all to recall it perfectly. It was of a man with small, hooded eyes set deep into a round, fleshy face. Wearing what looked like a thick knit hat pulled low enough to cover his eyebrows. The angle was slightly off, the head turned a few degrees to the left, as if the man had just heard the artist call his name and was still in the process of turning to respond to it.