NINETEEN
Martha O'Connor lived on two floors of a Georgian house on Bachelor's Walk on the North Quays, within sight of O'Connell Bridge. There was an antiques store on the ground floor, and a hotel named after an American military cemetery next door, and African immigrants pushing children in buggies on the streets and on the riverside boardwalk; I wondered if the rare pleasure of having the streets to themselves on Christmas Day compensated for the harsh winds whipping in off the Liffey. An Internet café with cheap dialing rates for Africa and Eastern Europe was open down toward the Ha'penny Bridge. When I left Dublin in the early eighties, this stretch of the quays looked like a disused set from a Hollywood studio, the false fronts of a western ghost town; now it was peopled and dressed and animated; even on Christmas Day, it exuded the kinetic energy of a living city. It was bloody freezing though, and I leant on the bell for far too long until I heard Martha O'Connor's voice.
"Sorry, Messiah on full," she trilled in her Oxford-inflected tones.
Martha O'Connor had silky short hair like an English public schoolboy; her long fringe hung in her eyes, which were free of makeup, as was the rest of her pretty, youthful face; she typically wore what she was wearing today: jeans and a baggy jumper or sweatshirt which covered up as much as it possibly could; big-boned and wide-hipped, she carried more weight than she looked happy with; to my eyes she always carried it off well. I had never been in her apartment before, and admired it as she brought me into the front room whose three great sash windows looked out over the Liffey and south across the city to the snowcapped Dublin mountains; the wall to the rear had been knocked through, as had the kitchen partition, so that the entire floor made one great open-plan living space. The period plasterwork on the high ceilings was intact, but the furniture and decor was spare and modern.
"Good digs," I said. "Can I be your boyfriend?"
"You come with the wrong bits. Have you been drinking already? Jesus Ed Loy, you're falling apart."
"Business. Seriously, how'd a pointy-headed journo like you afford a place like this?"
"I didn't. My mum and dad bought it for a song in the eighties, when it was a total shambles; thinking ahead, I'd just been born; it was left to me when Daddy died in '99, by which time it was already worth ten times more; now…"
Handel's Messiah blared in the background, a melodramatic underscoring of the unspoken truth between us: that both Martha's parents had been murdered, and that I had helped solve the case.
"Just lucky, I suppose," I said, and Martha laughed.
"Well, yes, and it's vitally important for pointy-heads like me to have a nice place to begin with, preferably one you bought before the boom, or even better, with the mortgage paid off. That way, we can bemoan the dreadful property bubble and sneer at everyone's obsession with house prices and cheerlead for a bust in the market so that ordinary people can afford houses in the areas they grew up in and be impeccably liberal and PC about it all at absolutely no cost or risk whatever to ourselves."
"Not just a pointy-head, a self-loathing pointy-head. Is that cooking I smell?"
"It is cooking. I figure the kind of woman who falls for you, or on you, only knows her way to one room in the house, so I thought you might like your lunch."
"I did have a dinner offer, you know. She'd bought the turkey and everything."
"And what happened?"
I shook my head. I couldn't quite keep the brittle ball in the air; it was too soon, and I was too disturbed by what I thought I'd discovered about Miranda and Patrick Hutton. Martha vanished and reappeared with a tumbler of whiskey and a smile.
"Fiona Reed spoke warmly of you when I told her you were coming here."
"I'm sure she did. Was she here?"
"She's just gone. She's here most nights now."
"Listen to you, Anaïs Nin. How warmly did Superintendent Reed speak of me?"
"She said you were a total fucking bollocks who needed to have his legs broken. But I could tell she meant it with affection."
"Is that a diesel thing?"
"We'll do our own jokes, thank you. Me kitchen, you TV. It's all lined up."
St. Jude's was one of three industrial schools Martha looked at in the documentary, which was called Say Nothing. It was the least severe case, in that nobody had actually been killed and anonymously buried there, say, but it wasn't easy viewing. The basic components were all in place: half-educated Christian Brothers, some of whom had themselves been physically and sexually abused, inflicting that abuse on others; abuse among the boys themselves, as the old turned on the young; a collective disbelief among the wider community, including priests, teachers, the Guards, a justice of the peace, and even journalists on the local paper, that amounted to denial; harrowing testimony from a man in his midforties who looked about sixty, red-faced and swollen, about the serial abuse he had suffered from the age of five, by religious brothers he named and others he said he never saw; a caption ran underneath his interview saying he had hanged himself before the program was shown; a bland nonapology apology from the archbishop of the diocese with a semolina face and a prissy, sibilant voice, who barely conceded that any abuse had been committed by priests or religious at all, in such a hurry was he to condemn "the wider decline in standards among society as a whole, particularly in the area of chastity"; a wheedling excursion in self-justification and evasion from the minister for something or other, keeping the shit from sticking to the government of the day, probably, that kept insisting, eventually in a rather menacing fashion, that what we had to remember was that these events, terrible though they were, all took place in a different time. The St. Jude's section ended with a bunch of apparently happy boys swarming around the front lawn with the river view, and the announcement that St. Jude's was now being run as a boys' home under the joint control of the departments of education, health, and social welfare.
I finished my drink by the window, looking out at the same river and wondering how many tales of ruined lives and broken hearts it carried from its source through the hard-knock city of Dublin to the sea. Martha joined me with a refill, which by now I badly needed, and a drink for herself, and I toasted her achievement in silence.
We ate mostly in silence, too. Martha had cooked pretty much everything you could: turkey, ham, roast potatoes, sprouts, bread and cranberry sauces, the lot; there was plenty of wine, and Christmas pudding to finish. It all tasted good, and I was glad to have it. But I didn't feel like celebrating, and Martha, usually relentlessly upbeat, didn't either. Maybe it was the documentary, maybe it was the case, maybe it was just that, when you're alone, you eat your Christmas dinner at a table full of empty chairs.
Afterward, Martha made some coffee and took out a red-and-black bound A4 notebook.
"Right, that's Christmas done," she said.
"Thanks for me dinner," I said.
"Easy for you, only have to eat it once. I'll have leftovers until February. Okay, Say Nothing covered the first incarnation of the school, ending in the late eighties. Subsequent to that, it reopened staffed by lay people, supervised by social workers, but there were two abusers among them, one from a care center in Wales where there had been systematic abuse."
"This would have been through the nineties."
"It finally closed in '98. That was to have been the second part of the film: how, when the Church's influence declined or was removed, the conditions in residential homes did not improve; in fact, in certain cases, they got worse."
"And why didn't you make that film?"