Why does Dearbhla come? I want to ask her that every time I see her sit down and smile at me, curving the gloved fingers around her cigarette, still wincing with the difficulty of it, even though her maiming happened fifteen years ago last week.
In one afternoon I took everything from her, but still she comes, sometimes with CDs, sometimes with a book by someone like Milan Kundera or Charles Bukowski, or sometimes just by herself.
“Why?” I finally say.
Dearbhla takes off her gloves and puts her exposed, ruined hands against the glass. The fingertips whiten as she presses them close.
“I come here,” Dearbhla says, “because I have nowhere else to go. I have no one else to speak to who can understand what I have lost. Except you.”
I lift my own hands to touch the panel on the other side. But once my palm is raised, I pull back. The watching guard calls time; Dearbhla takes up her handbag and turns away towards the rush hour outside.
My father married her, of course, when a suitable period of time had elapsed. There was the funeral and the period of mourning to be observed. But somehow that all faded away pretty fast. Mother belonged to half-memories, a childhood buried beyond retrieval. The odd flashes of reminiscence would come, but they were less frequent. Dearbhla’s was the domain of reality, homework monitoring, meal preparation, discipline. Thinking back, I saw that it was a role for which she had probably been ill prepared. But, Dearbhla being Dearbhla, she threw herself into it with all the energy she could. Nor did she stop playing. The one row she and my father always had was the one where she wanted to go away on extended concert trips and my father was unwilling to let her.
The truth was, he had never known how to talk to me and was afraid of our being left alone. Dearbhla made most of the effort. She even tried to teach me the piano: For my tenth birthday I received the gift of a Hanon exercise book, endless streams of notes going up and down the C scale. I got to a point where I rather enjoyed them. I could bash them out without paying the slightest attention to what I was doing. Besides, there was a certain pleasure in playing Dearbhla’s Yamaha upright in itself. The shiny ebony lid had to be lifted, the red cloth respectfully removed, a light puff to take the dust off the keys, then the final touch of finger on ivory. Inevitably, after a half-hour of me foostering about the keys, Dearbhla would succumb to the temptation to play herself and entertain me for hours.
It could have gone on forever. Thinking back, we were happy. Or at least I thought I was, which is surely the same thing. After I grew older and went to college in the city, I could have gone back at weekends to visit Dearbhla and my father, loafing about in the study. You can live a perfectly satisfying life and never need to disturb the past.
Then Dearbhla spoiled everything.
The judge at my trial told me, in front of the assembled jury, lawyers, and public gallery (my case had attracted considerable interest), that my crime had been a dreadful one. What had possessed me to inflict such horrific punishment on the man who had brought me up, fed, clothed, educated, and cherished me? And then what I visited on my father’s wife, a talented musician who would never play again. What had driven me to it? I had indeed taken everything from her.
Bright-eyed court reporters were scribbling it all down. Ryder kept them stoked with a steady supply of melodrama.
I admit I harmed the woman when I slammed that old rosewood lid down on her knuckles, once, sharply. I believe I managed to sever her tendons as well as shattering her fingers. And never did I claim insanity: I knew exactly what I was doing. It gave me a blood rush to see her scream, her face growing ever more foreign to me until I saw the face of one younger than she, hair in a ponytail, smiling beatifically through the agonised mask. And then, by chance, my father turned up.
His reaction to the tableau before him was rather comical. His face contracted into an n shape at first, then he turned upon me a look of murderous anger. In that brief second, I realised that despite his learning he was as stupid as he was unforgiving. His reaction was not one of shock, but dumb, animal rage at this assault on his little kingdom. I saw he was capable of nothing more than that, and I hated him for it. I could see hatred in his eyes too. He was making for me; he would kill me without remorse, I could tell. I had to defend myself.
And so, instinct-driven, I flung the top piano lid open, my hand searching for and finding the taut metal wires that Dearbhla’s playing had sounded out so recently. I set my fist around them. They were almost intractable but with a supreme effort, I wrenched them out. The strings beside them groaned in sympathy as I roared. Oh God, the pain. I nearly tore the skin off my fingers. I’ve never felt anything like it since.
A fistful of bass notes, like wiry flowers. I did not dishonour her memory by missing a single one. The D, the E, perhaps even the A. Not a single one missed, Judge, on my honour.
But then, Mr. Justice Ryder thundered, then the defendant made for the victim, Dr. David Lukeman, and wrapped the piano wire around the said Dr. Lukeman’s neck, pulling so tightly that his vocal cords were severed on the first tug. But wait! Even with my stepmother watching, I did not stop there, indeed when I had finished with Dr. Lukeman, the victim’s neck was severed half the way through — the man was virtually decapitated. At the word decapitated, the reporters all bent to their notebooks as one, like a well-conducted choir.
The jury would be well advised to consider the nature of the killing, the judge added, before returning their verdict. Et voilà, here I am.
It is the hour before the evening meal, where prisoners are allowed to visit each other, wander in and out of each other’s cells or gather downstairs to watch TV and smoke, which they all do. I think about Dearbhla’s last visit, when she made a special request. The panel between us was removed and I was held in her clasp, my head lost in the blanket folds of her expensive cloak. When it was time for her to leave, she kissed me on the cheek and held me for a long time, not letting me go even when I tried to withdraw. They had to part us. The perfume was the same as the one she wore the first day we met, that stuff that managed to smell fresh, yet overpowering. I remember the smell, but cannot put a name to it.
The letter is in my hands, the thread of the envelope soft as a blanket, wherein will be contained a message on plain white paper which I can read cross-legged in my bed. My brief, weekly oasis in the midst of hell.
But I am interrupted by a tapping at my door. “Hey, Wirey,” a guard calls out to me. Wirey is short for Piano Wire, a nickname bestowed on me at the beginning of my sentence, which has degraded over the years to Wirey. (It is by no means an insult: My crime still elicits certain awe among some of my fellow prisoners.)
“Yes?”
“Peterson wants you in his office.”
Peterson is the screw I tolerate best. Thanks to him, I got a room to myself after two years, even if it did have the wall view. He is a confident, heavyset man, but in his small cubicle, he looks oversized and awkward.
“I’ve some bad news for you.” His fingers wiggle on the desk, beating out a little Hanon of their own. “That lady who comes to visit you — Dearbhla McKernan — she was found last night.”
She was found. I know what he means. Immediately my body responds: the coldness, the sweat prickling under the skin.
“Started the car in the garage and just sat in it, apparently. She looked perfectly peaceful.”
I nod.