I wanted to write. Had always wanted to. What or how or for whom, I didn’t know, but since I had dragged myself out from under the darkness, I had been thinking about it more and more and now, finally, I’d made a decision. I would learn how and then I would do it. I had notions of writing a novel, something dark and twisty into which I could – anonymously – pour all of my pain. This path was fraught with danger but I was stronger now and once again ready to pretend. That’s what fiction was, wasn’t it? Pretending?
Not according to our course director, the renowned novelist Jonathan Eglin, whose debut novel The Essentialists was longlisted for the Booker Prize. He told us this in our very first class. He said that fiction only really worked if it was built like a lattice through which you were repeatedly offered glimpses of absolute truth. That was our aim, regardless of what form our writing took. He then proceeded, over the course of those first few weeks and months, to systematically sandpaper away all of our armour, our masks, our carefully constructed personhoods, until we were left naked and bleeding directly on to the page.
I resisted as long as I could. I was sure, I was absolutely certain, that if I as much as put the words when I was twelve years old a man broke into our home and murdered my mother, father and younger sister, Anna, seven years old then and for ever on to a virtual page or dared write them in ink on a real one, what little ground I’d secured to stand on would collapse beneath my feet. There’d be no coming back from the depths of that abyss. So I wrote short stories about happy families who loved each other. The act of creating them comforted me. Whenever I wrote, I got to go back and see them, and find out what had happened to them since. The time I spent at my laptop were my visiting hours.
Then came the day of the forgotten deadline. It dawned on me one afternoon like a bullet of stone-cold dread to the chest: I had to submit two thousand new words first thing the following morning, for a grade, and I had completely forgotten about it until that moment. I holed up in the library late into the night, but found myself paralysed by the blinking cursor. No matter what I tried, the words just wouldn’t come. I walked home on dark, wet streets and sat in my bedroom, staring helplessly at the still-blank white space onscreen.
The clock ticked past midnight, bringing a new date to the display on my computer: 21 March. Anna’s birthday. That one would’ve been her twenty-first.
The words began to bubble up inside me, unbidden. I would write about her, I decided, and change the names once I was done. It wasn’t a good idea but, in that moment, all I was really concerned about was getting myself out of this jam, away from the blank page and its awful emptiness. I started typing. When I was twelve years old a man broke into our home and murdered my mother, father and younger sister, Anna, seven years old then and for ever…
Eglin wasn’t fooled. The piece had a quality to it, a scalpel-grade sharpness, that none of my previous work had even hinted at the promise of. Half an hour after I emailed him the piece in the grey light of the early hours, Elgin emailed back to ask me to come to his office first thing. I steeled myself as I walked down his corridor of the Arts building, ready to deny all, but he didn’t even bother asking me if it was true. He already knew it was.
Instead, he urged me to publish it.
I remember not knowing what to say, not knowing where to begin with why that could never happen. And then him saying, very softly, ‘But, Eve, you might catch him with it.’
And that, then, changed everything.
It felt like flinging myself off a cliff. The night before I knew the piece was due to go live, I dreamed of Anna, crawling out of the sea like the Spanish sailors had when I was a child. She looked like a banshee. She came clawing at me with rotting fingers, her blonde hair wild and tangled with seaweed, screaming at me for failing to protect myself. But I was beginning to realise that protecting myself was also protecting him. I couldn’t get them back. But I could, maybe, make him pay for their taking.
My piece went live on the Irish Times website at 4:00 a.m. on the last day of May 2015 and appeared in their print edition later that morning. By close of business, I had officially gone viral. It started on social media, where a few influential accounts shared a link, and then the people following them started to share it. It was picked up by a broadsheet in the UK, then a monthly magazine in the US. Everyone, it seemed, had always wondered what had happened to that girl who’d survived the Nothing Man’s worst and final attack. Now they knew some, they wanted more and more.
Intrepid reporters found my contact details via the St John’s College student portal and invitations to appear on radio and TV shows started to stream in. I couldn’t possibly talk about what had happened in real time – I wasn’t physically able for that yet – but I wanted to do something. Eglin put me in touch with his editor at Iveagh Press (pronounced like ivy), who encouraged me to expand the article into a book. She said if I did, she would publish it. This is the book you hold in your hands now.
Just a few weeks earlier, agreeing to write a book about what had happened to my family would’ve been utterly unthinkable. But when ‘The Girl Who’ went viral, something else important had happened to me too.
Within hours, articles about my article began to pop up online. Classmates of mine kept sending me links to them, excited that one of us was making such a splash with our written words, seemingly oblivious to the pain behind my story. At first I ignored them. I’d never read anything about the Nothing Man case. I had steadfastly avoided doing so. In the years since that night, I’d never learned anything more than the broad strokes of what he had done to my family, and they were bad enough. I didn’t want the blurry shapes to come into focus. I knew I’d never be able to unsee them again.
But eventually, curiosity got the better of me. I started clicking on the links, scanning rather than reading the articles they led to, keeping the text moving ever upwards on the screen.
In the fourth or fifth one I looked at, I was stopped cold by a phrase.
rope and knife beneath one of her sofa cushions
I went back to read the sentence from the beginning. Gardaí had already been to the apartment complex two weeks before, when another tenant, a single woman living alone, discovered a rope and a knife beneath one of her sofa cushions. She hoovered there on the same day every week and was certain the items had not been there the week before, and to her knowledge, no one else had been in the apartment since. She immediately reported the find to her local station. Gardaí would come to believe that the Nothing Man had planted them there on a preparatory visit, ready to use on his return.
My pulse pounded in my ears. Because I, too, had once found a rope and a knife beneath a couch cushion.
But I’d never told anyone about it.
It was shortly before the attack, maybe mere days. I was watching Anna for half an hour while our mother popped to the shops, and she’d convinced me to play a game that, for some reason lost to me now, necessitated that every cushion from every chair in the living room be tossed on to the floor in a pile. When I lifted the last remaining cushion from the couch, the action revealed two items lying amid the biscuit crumbs, lost hair-ties and sticky copper coins: a rope and a knife. The rope was braided and blue, and was still looped neatly inside the glossy band that served as its packaging. The knife was about the length of a hardback book, with a thick yellow plastic handle that reminded me of Fisher Price toys. The blade had little jags along the edge and it looked very, very clean, if not brand new. Shiny.