Can Anybody Help Me? (13 page)

For a moment she contemplated pulling away. Then his grip on her waist tightened and she felt herself being guided expertly around the now less crowded dance floor. Couples slid away, and space appeared around them.

‘Ya see? You are brilliant.'

She smiled as the rhythm of the music entered her bones. As she tossed her head back she realised two things, one: that she was very, very drunk and two: that she didn't care. She bent forward and spoke into his ear.

‘I'm shit, actually, but you can hold me up.'

He grinned up at her.

‘With pleasure! You Lahndon girls. Too busy in the clubs to learn proper dancing. Us Paddys spent our evenings waltzing our mammies around the kitchen. She said it would come in useful one day.'

‘My mammy didn't waltz.'

They were cheek to cheek now, the conversation a murmur as the dance floor revolved around them.

‘No? Too busy rearing her beautiful daughter.' ‘Not really, no.'

There was another layer of Vaseline separating her brain from her senses, and Yvonne could feel her voice rumbling against his face.

‘My mother isn't … wasn't … the dancing type.'

His hand, which had been resting on the small of her back, began to massage her spine in slow smooth circles. It felt good. Comforting.

‘What did she do at parties, then? Was she more of the singsong type? A few cans and a verse of “Danny Boy”?'

‘You have some very funny ideas about mothers!'

‘I'm a big fan of mothers! What's yours like, then?'

Attempting a quick revolution, he stumbled and his cheek bumped off hers. It was over in a moment, but Yvonne suddenly realised he was as drunk as she was. The realisation was liberating and she leant back, moulding herself into his hand.

‘She's a complete bitch, actually.'

She laughed, and he stared into her eyes.

‘I'm sorry to hear that.'

The pace of the music changed, ‘Dancing Queen' encouraging groups of solo dancers back onto the floor. Teevan took Yvonne by the hand and led her into the shadows at the side of the room.

‘You sound like you need another drink.'

Yvonne looked at him, suddenly conscious of where she was, and who she was with. ‘I don't think either of us needs another drink.'

‘Probably not. But I know I deserve one.' He tossed his head in the direction of the stage. ‘Television presenter of the night, that's me. Here …' He deposited her at a table, kissed her hand ostentatiously and then left, returning moments later with two brimming glasses of red wine.

‘So tell me all about your mother.'

‘You don't want to hear about her. Or me.'

‘Ah, but I do, Yvonne. Sure, Gerry never shuts up about you! I've been dying to hear more.'

She didn't believe him, but found the lie comforting. And, as the rough red wine entered her blood stream she began to talk. Words spilled from her, a story she hadn't told in years. The story of home. How it felt to be the only child of elderly parents, who'd given up hope of conceiving years before her unexpected arrival. The story of her father, and how tight a unit they'd been.

The story of the day they lost him, and lost themselves as well.

The sadness. The arguments. The clash of two women sharing a home, two women who loved each other but never really got on. She told him about the fights. The small rows, the petty niggles. And the Big One. The eruption that followed her mother's realisation that she hadn't really been spending her evenings in Alison's house, and that Richard had his own flat in town. Her mother's insistence that her fury had to do with the lies, and the deception, and the fact that Richard was thirty-three. Yvonne yelling that if Richard had been white, there wouldn't be a problem. And that it was 2002, not 1952.

She told him about the ultimatum.

‘Not if you want to stay under my roof.'

Yvonne hadn't believed people actually used that phrase outside of badly written soap operas, and called her bluff. But her mother hadn't blinked. She moved in with Richard the following day, but the relationship barely outlasted their first pint of milk. So she went, alone, to London. And never spoke to her mother again.

She had seen her face though. Recognised it late on the
glorious, frantic, terrifying, euphoric night of Róisín's birth, when Gerry had gone home and she was finally alone with her daughter in the starched bed at the end of the ward. The bundle in her arms had twitched and yawned and Yvonne had seen her mother in the roundness of the face and the elegance of the action. She'd reached over to the locker then, determined to call her, to tell her the one piece of news that could reach across a decade and cure everything.

But the phone was out of reach. The charger had fallen onto the ground. And Róisín twitched again, startled herself awake and began to cry hungrily.

By the time Yvonne had settled her again the moment had passed and her mother had vanished into the bleach-scented air.

The next morning, everyone told her the baby looked like Gerry, and she agreed.

The story of tears. She was telling him about tears. Or maybe she was crying? He was holding her hand. At some stage, she looked up and Teevan was gone and Mary was there, handing her a tissue and reaching up to rub ineffectually at her shoulder-blades. And then there was a toilet, and bright lights and more sobbing. And Gerry. But that was later. And later still there was nothing at all.

BRAND NEW BOTTLES FOR SALE

SO ASHAMED AND EMBARRASSED

PRIVATE MESSAGE

When viewed from the air, some roads in Ballyawlann are in the shape of a Celtic cross. Or something like that. Claire couldn't remember the details, just the edge of a fact lifted from Google during her early days in Dublin when she had been desperate to learn something about the suburbs that formed part of her new policing home.

She steered the car around yet another roundabout, glanced down at the address she'd scribbled into a notebook and sighed. Five years after being moved to Collins Street, she had a good handle on the area, socially speaking at least. Her sense of direction, however, hadn't improved.

Claire had spent her early years as a Garda working in rural Donegal and initially found her new Dublin beat to be vast, sprawling and completely intimidating. The area's reputation for being at the centre of the capital's ‘gangland' hadn't helped. Her colleagues in the Drugs Squad knew these streets well, and she had a fair idea that the gang of young men who had just walked past her car, hoodies pulled high over their heads and cigarette tips pushed backwards into their palms were, in that hackneyed phrase beloved of crime correspondents, ‘known to Gardaí'.

But she now knew there was far more to this part of Dublin than first appeared. Sure, there was crime, a drug problem and an inter-family feud that had on more than one occasion ended up in bloodshed. But there were decent people in the area, too. Claire met them all the time, at Neighbour-hood Watch meetings, community gatherings and during talks at local schools. She would shortly find out if Miriam Twohy's family came under that category. She had a feeling they would.

And, at the moment, all she had to go on were feelings. Because so far in this case there were very few facts. Slowing down as she approached yet another roundabout, Claire's mind quickly ran through the few pieces of information she did know about the murder victim, snippets gleaned from the original missing person's file and the quick word she'd had with the female Garda who'd broken the news of her death to the family.

Miriam had been a lecturer in Media Studies in a local technical college. And, by the looks of things, that was pretty much all she did. She went to work every day, collected her daughter from the college crèche each evening and went home. Wednesdays, she went grocery shopping with her mother. Saturday nights were usually spent watching television in her parents' house, which was just around the corner from her own. On Sundays, she visited the local park with her daughter before starting the week all over again. Her mother hadn't even had a recent picture of her, and the Press Office had been forced to lift an out-of-focus shot from a colleague's Facebook page to send out to the media. It had been taken, according to the colleague, at the office Christmas party. The only work
night out Miriam had ever been on. Even then she had gone home at midnight, alone.