Belinda has proved to be a useful addition to the Let’s Find Joe gang, and she has roped Michael in to help with research. He seems torn between terror and adoration when he’s with her, and Belinda equally enjoys both, toying with him mercilessly.
Michael hugged me fiercely when I got back to the office, still shattered by Belinda’s recounting of the night of the crash. He clearly wants to talk to me about it, but I simply can’t – in what my therapists would see as a giant step backwards, I am deliberately blocking those memories so I can continue to function.
He’s been staying at mine, where he is always loud and bright and chaotic, and brings a new sense of life to the house. It makes me realise that without him, without this mission, I would right now probably be alone again, in a too-big house, rattling around wondering what to do next with my life.
Joe has given me yet another gift – a sense of purpose.
We took the ferry from Liverpool to Dublin, which made Belinda seasick, furious with herself for this uncharacteristic display of weakness, and we are staying in a small hotel near St Stephen’s Green.
The area is bustling and beautiful, the shops of Grafton Street busy, the sun shining on locals and tourists and students.
We are eating our picnic lunch on the Green, near the bandstand, surrounded by other people doing exactly the same. Papers and notes are laid out in front of us, along with a map of the city and my backpack.
It’s a child’s backpack. It’s my child’s backpack, in fact. Belinda gave it to me, in an act of intended kindness that almost crushed me.
She has a box full of Grace’s belongings in her own attic, which I know I will have to go through at some point. For now, though, Dora the Explorer is enough. I held it in shaking hands, and was swamped with memories of my beautiful girl – of trips to the park, the walks to her pre-school, visits to the shops.
It’s just a small plastic backpack, but it holds a treasure trove of joy and pain: a tiny hairbrush, a few brittle golden strands still entwined in its soft bristles; an empty box of raisins; a tiny figurine of Jessie the Cowgirl from Toy Story, a drawing she’d done of the three of us in space after reading Goodnight Moon at bedtime for five nights running.
I remind myself that her world was a happy one – she was loved and cherished to that same moon and back, and never knew a single day of sadness. I will always be angry that she didn’t have longer – that we didn’t have longer with her – but what we had is precious.
I find myself occasionally reaching out to stroke the backpack, or resting it on my knee. It’s too small for me to wear properly, being a grown adult, but I can hook it over one shoulder, and keep her close.
Belinda notices this, of course, as we eat and chat and plan our trip to the Northside. Michael is lying stretched out in the sun, shades on so he can surreptitiously check out the local talent.
‘I love it here,’ he says, wistfully. ‘It’s so beautiful. And there’s a casino, and shops, and an archaeology museum, and that pub, Davy Byrnes, where we trod in the footsteps of Ulysses … what more could a chap want?’
‘Better taste in clothes?’ suggests Belinda, pulling a face at his Hawaiian shirt.
‘You’re just jealous,’ he replies calmly, obviously emboldened by the sun. ‘Not everyone can carry this look. You better stick to your social warrior uniform, Belinda.’
She kicks him, quite gently, with her social warrior Doc Martens, and he squeals. I feel a little bit like I’m back in school again, and start to pack up all of our stuff. We have work to do.
Belinda used Joe’s date of birth and his parents’ names to track down a birth certificate, and that led us to an address. The address in question was old and out of date, which we already knew – they briefly moved to Manchester when Joe was little, and he at least never came back.
We were able to find a neighbour who remembered them, and not in a good way – and she pointed us in the direction of an area called Coolock, where she thought Mona was originally from. Using that, we found a Mona Farrell via a subscription to an online database, and we’re off to see that particular wizard this afternoon.
Michael is frustrated by us old fuddy-duddies. His plan was to go to the very last place we knew Joe was, and jump straight in. I viewed it differently – I wanted to start at the beginning and work my way through.
‘There are logical reasons,’ I’d told him on the drive from the ferry port, ‘like the fact that his last letter was from London, and also said he was about to move. So we’d be searching in a haystack for a needle that probably doesn’t live there any more. At least in Dublin, we have a chance – he probably came here to find his parents, so if we find them, we pick up the trail. Plus there are other reasons.’
‘Like she’s already lost too much time with him,’ Belinda had added. ‘She has no idea how life treated him, or what really happened to him after that day. She needs to walk in his shoes for a while – tread the same path so that when we do finally find him, she understands. She’s playing catch-up.’
I nodded and left it at that. I also have that killer of a final letter – the one where he says too much time has passed, and too many things have happened, for us to ever understand each other again. I need to prove him wrong. I need to do as Belinda says – walk in his shoes.
Michael is dissatisfied by this, and confounded by the fact that he hasn’t as yet been able to locate our Joe through social media. It seems completely unbelievable to him that an adult human could function without it.
We make our way back to the car, and leave the pretty behind us as we drive out to Coolock. I’ve not been here before – I doubt any tourists have been here before – but Michael’s googling told us it was used as a location for The Commitments, a film which he hasn’t ever heard of. Belinda sings ‘Mustang Sally’ all the way there as a result.
We have a few false starts before we finally find her. She’s not at the house she should be, and is living in a ground-floor flat a few streets away. The whole place seems to be one big estate, trapped in a seventies’ time warp. The people we encounter are a strange mix of friendliness, helping us out with gentle lilting accents and even offering us chips from a paper bag, and outright hostility.
By the time we find the right place, Michael is starting to voice his concerns that a posh English lady, a black woman and a gay might not have found their natural environment here, and he is clearly yearning for the Dublin he saw earlier today.
We park up, and he is immediately approached by a group of kids asking if he wants them to ‘watch the car for him’.
Michael simply looks confused, whereas Belinda, a veteran of such behaviour, hands over a five euro note with a stern look that says she expects wing mirrors to be intact, and tyres unpunctured by the time we get out again. I take my Dora backpack with me, just in case.
The woman who opens the door looks about a hundred years old. At first I am convinced that we must have it wrong again. According to the birth certificate we have as a PDF, Mona Farrell is only sixty. In my world, people are vibrant at sixty – still working, or looking forward to active retirements, or going on cruises.
In Mona’s world, sixty seems to be the time you expect to see the Grim Reaper on your doorstep.