Crying in the Dark (14 page)

She was right, and I knew it. I had no proof of abuse of any kind, and Sylvie's father had been checked out by social services before she had been placed with him. It would be a struggle to even get a social worker to visit. The case would go on the books and could sit there for a year before it got any attention.

‘Can I ask you a question then?'

‘I might not answer it.'

‘Fair enough, but I'm gonna ask anyway. You don't like being a hooker?'

‘Of course I don't.'

‘You know that what your dad is doing to you is not right.'

‘Yeah.'

‘You'd prefer not to bring your little girl up around a man like him?'

‘Well … yeah.'

‘So why won't you come with me? Why won't you let me help you?'

‘Fuck sake, Shane. Loads of reasons. Too many to tell you.'

‘Try me. Give me one good reason.'

‘They'll take Gloria away from me.'

‘Not necessarily. There are plenty of places where you could get help and support and still have her.'

‘You can't guarantee they'd let me keep her. Can you tell me one hundred per cent for certain, no matter what, they they wouldn't take her from me?'

I looked at my hands and struggled with what she'd just said.

‘Nothing is ever one hundred per cent, Sylvie.'

‘I knew it. There'd be no problem finding a foster home for a little baby; any family would be glad to have her. It'd be just like having a baby all of their own, except the hard part's done. I
know
they'd take her from me.'

‘It's not as simple as that, hon. You'd have to show them that you can manage her and that you're a competent mother. Once you'd done that, they'd surely leave her with you. Nobody
wants
to take children away from their parents.'

‘Don't they? That's not how it feels to me. And tell me this. Suppose my da
is
Gloria's da too. Does he have rights to her then? Could he come in eight years' time, if she was in care someplace, and take her, like he took me? I mean, maybe his rights are double, seein' as he's her da
and her
granda.'

‘Sylvie, I promise you that is not the case.'

‘Are you sure? Because I find it hard to believe what you people say to me. I was told that I'd be safe, that everythin' would be great, that my da loved me and wanted to mind me. And guess what? He
doesn't love
me, and he never minded me at all. How can I believe anythin' you say?'

‘Nobody lied to you, Sylvie. They made a mistake, but it wasn't a lie.'

She fell silent, anger causing her cheeks to flush red beneath the caked make-up.

‘I was worried that there'd be somethin' wrong with her,' she said after a while. ‘I heard somewhere that if a dad and a daughter do it, that stuff don't work right.'

I nodded. ‘Yeah, sometimes that can happen. But she seems to be perfect, doesn't she?'

‘She is. In every way.'

‘You know she's his daughter, don't you?'

‘Look at her. I look like him, and all I can see in her is me. Them other fellas, the tricks, I remember them fairly well, and there's not a bit of either of them in her. It don't matter, though, who she came from. She's mine. That's all I care about.'

‘Who watches her when you're working?'

‘There's a woman downstairs. I give her a few quid. Gloria's very good at night though. She sleeps right through. Never wakes.'

‘What does your father make of her?'

‘Who knows? He never passes any comment on her. He beat the shit out of me when I told him I was pregnant. He probably hoped I'd lose her, but I didn't.'

‘And how are you handling being a mum? You're so young.'

She looked at her little daughter, burbling happily into the toy phone, and her eyes suddenly filled up. She fought back the tears, clearing her throat and wiping them away with her hand. ‘She's so gorgeous. I want her to have all the things I didn't. I want her to know she's loved every minute of every day she's alive. I work extra hard so that I can keep a little back to buy her what she needs – toys that'll help her learn so that she'll be real smart, and nice clothes, and the best food, so that she'll grow up big and strong. He knows I do it, but he don't care so long as he gets the amount he asks for. She's the best thing that has ever happened to me. I never found lookin' after her hard. I like it.'

I reached over and took her hand.

‘I'm glad, Sylvie. I'm glad she makes you happy. You deserve a little happiness. But you need support, too. It's nothing to be ashamed of. Nobody can do it all on their own; even adults need help with small babies. Mother-and-toddler groups, that kind of thing.'

‘No. I don't
need
any help. I bought books, and I read them all – it was hard, but I read 'em. I listened real good in the hospital when they showed me how to change her nappies and bath her and stuff. I'm a good mother. She looks happy, don't she?'

‘She looks very happy and healthy, sweetheart.'

‘So you see? Everything's good.'

‘But what about
you?
I'm worried about you, Sylvie. You're thirteen years old. You should be in school. The biggest problem in your life should be having too much homework. You should be spending your money on CDs and clothes and going to teenage discos at the weekend. Do you even go to school?'

She hung her head and the child she really was subverted the young woman she played. ‘How can I go? I would if I could, I swear.'

‘Your father sexually and physically abuses you. As a prostitute, you are being molested nightly. I can't even begin to imagine what that must be doing to you inside. There are people you can talk to, anonymously, who won't put any pressure on you to go into care.'

She shook her head vigorously. ‘No, no, no! I'm sortin' it out in my own way. I want you to go now, please. Thanks for callin' and all, but I need to feed my baby.'

I stood up. ‘I'll come and see you again. Maybe we could go for a coffee some afternoon? You could bring Gloria.'

‘I usually don't go out durin' the day except to go shoppin'. Dad doesn't like it.'

The conversation was over. She had shut down to me. I left them.

There was a pub across the road from the house with tables outside on the pavement, so customers could enjoy the beautiful weather. I ordered a soda water and sat, watching the passers-by. From my back pocket I took a photograph. It had come from her file, and was taken the day Sylvie had left the residential unit. In it she stood at the gate, ready to get into the taxi that would take her to her new life, a skinny nine-year-old, not all that different from the person she was now, in fact. A little shorter and a lot happier, a child full of hope about to be dashed to smithereens. She was hand-in-hand with her father.

I examined the details of the man closely. He looked slightly shorter than me, and skinny. There was grey in his hair, which was as dark as his daughter's except for the slight peppering. He was wearing a woollen pullover and ill-fitting jeans. I looked at his face. He was smiling into the lens, and I could not discern a trace of his intent. I looked at the photo for a long time, until I was certain I would know him if I saw him, and then put it away.

My soda water was gone, so I ordered coffee and a ham sandwich, and asked the waitress if they had the paper. The morning drifted into early afternoon, and slowly became evening. The bar began to fill with the after-work crowd. My nerves jangled with caffeine and nicotine, but still I sat. At five twenty-five he came up the street, round-shouldered and actually shorter than I had reckoned. He also looked greyer than in the picture, and even thinner. His jeans flapped around his legs, and his shirt billowed about him. He wore sandals with no socks, and the butt of a roll-up hung from the corner of his mouth. He walked with the nervous gait of someone who is always on his guard. I watched as he put a key in the lock of the front door, looked about him one last time, and went in. I stood slowly and stretched, paid for my last drink and walked slowly to where I had parked my car. It had a ticket – the money I'd put in the meter had long since run out.

I'll know you, you little bastard,
I thought as I turned for home.
Next time, I'll know you.

At eight o'clock the following morning I left the gym, freshly showered and resplendent with the cheap after-shave they kept in the dressing rooms. I opened the boot of the Austin and chucked my gear bag inside, then sat in and pulled out of the parking lot into the steadily growing stream of traffic. After picking up a copy of the
Irish Independent
and the latest
Empire,
I went to a little café not too far from the office, and ordered scrambled eggs, wholegrain toast and a pot of black coffee. It was already a hot day outside, and the morning seemed pregnant with possibility. Despite the events of the previous day, I was in a good mood.

Pouring my third cup, I spotted him, seated three tables ahead of me and trying to hide behind a rumpled
Irish Sun.
I had to look a couple of times to be certain, but he was doing a bad job of being inconspicuous. I thought about going over, but then decided against it and turned back to the Leader page of my newspaper. As soon as I did so, he peered out from behind the tabloid at me again, then surreptitiously ducked undercover. He might as well have cut a hole in it to peep through; he would only have been moderately more obvious.

He was the young man who had watched me leave Mina's workshop the day I had discussed sex, the universe and everything with Ellen. That afternoon he was wearing a garish, knitted jumper. This particular morning he sported a psychedelic, tie-dyed T-shirt, which was so bright it made my fillings hurt. Why he'd followed me into the café, I had no idea. He seemed to want to observe me, and I guessed that there was something he wanted to ask. He'd get to it in his own time.

Half an hour later I pushed my chair back and strolled past him to the counter. I gave him a nod as I went by, but he almost put the paper over his head to avoid being seen. I sat in the car for several minutes, waiting for him to leave the café. He rushed out, spotted me watching him and immediately stopped, turning away and putting his hands behind his back and gazing at the window of the newsagents beside him. I shook my head in puzzlement and drove the short distance to work. As I parked across the road from Dunleavy House, I saw the lad pulling up several spaces behind on a Honda 50 moped. He had a very stylish, sporty helmet, which covered his face, but his explosively coloured top made him instantly recognizable.

I had some administration to catch up on, so I did not linger. If my new friend wanted to talk to me, he knew where I was.

I spent an hour writing and filing reports, then went up to the small library that occupied the loft of the building. I wanted to research an idea I had been considering for the Byrnes. The old building had a well-insulated roof, so the attic-space was always cool. The room contained a couple of saggy but comfortable armchairs, and was lined with bookshelves that contained classics in the fields of psychology and sociology, along with a mixture of other texts, everything from fairy-tales to the collected works of Enid Blyton, medical books to huge tomes on various aspects of the law. It was a strange, yet somehow wholly appropriate, selection. I had spent quite a bit of time there since beginning work with the Trust. There was rarely anyone else among the dust and paper, so I found that I could lose myself in the pages.

Larry had been weighing on my mind. We'd tried a range of methods, none of which had really made any impact on the boy. Francey had begun to come round, partly through the realization that we were as stubborn as her, and partly because of concern for her brother. But Larry had retreated into himself and a complex fantasy about what his life had been. Well, if it was fantasy he wanted, then fantasy he would get.

Children love stories. I have yet to meet a child, even one with a profound intellectual disability, who will not repond positively to being read or told a story, once the tale has been chosen carefully and is at the right level. I thought that perhaps we could begin to do some storytelling work with Larry. I wanted to use traditional fairytales. I thought that, with all that he had experienced, they might well be the most resonant for him.

Fairy-tales have a long, intricate history. There are cave drawings dating back to the Neolithic period that depict the story of
Hansel and Gretel.
There are versions of
Cinderella
in every culture, even those that could not possibly have been in contact with one another. Anthropologists who were the first white people to encounter tribes in the African Basin have discovered versions of
Snow White.
These folk-tales seem to exist independently of us, and appear to be completely universal.

They are also extremely dark. If you stop for a moment and think about the content of all the popular fairy-tales, you'll find that they are actually pretty scary. Take two I've already mentioned:
Hansel and Gretel
deals with children being abandoned, left to die in a great forest, and being captured by a cannibalistic child killer;
Cinderella
is about a little girl being singled out from her siblings by a wicked stepmother to be neglected and abused, made to sleep in the cellar among the ashes of the fire for warmth. Almost all these stories deal with some kind of abuse directed at a child, feature monsters or witches, and involve some form of death or mutilation.

Over the past twenty years, there has been a move among publishers, egged on by the politically correct brigade, to sanitize the traditional tales. So we have
The Three Little Pigs
realizing that the wolf is really angry because he is homeless, and, rather than scalding him to death and eating him in a stew, the porcine trio build him a nice house and make friends with him. In the original telling of
Snow White,
the wicked Queen is captured and brought to the wedding of her estranged stepdaughter, where, as a form of post-reception entertainment, the prisoner is placed in a pair of metal shoes, which are then heated in the fire until they are red-hot, and is made to dance until she drops dead from pain and exhaustion. This ending, funnily enough, has been excised from the modern versions of the story.

But psychologists and child protection experts have long seen the value of the older, more sinister fables. As I sat in the cramped library, under the slanted eave of the roof, I leafed through a book by the great, though disgraced, psychologist Bruno Bettelheim. Bettelheim led a fairly dark life himself, emerging from the death camps of the Second World War as the voice of the disenfranchised. Freud, fleeing the Holocaust, had died in exile in 1939, and the world craved a successor. If there was ever a time when humanity needed someone to make sense of all the madness, it was then. Bettelheim stepped forward, just liberated from Dachau, an emaciated, hollow-eyed creature with a quiet tone and deep charisma, claiming to have been a student of Freud's. He became an international celebrity, and was invited to run a residential unit attached to the University of Chicago, ‘the orthogenic school'. He wrote books on various aspects of childcare and social-care, most of which were bestsellers.

Then, without warning, Bettelheim committed suicide in 1990, on the anniversary of the day the Nazis invaded his native Austria. It emerged that an expose of his life was about to be published, declaring that he had lied about his qualifications (his Ph.D. was in philosophy, rather than psychology; he had never even met Freud, let alone studied under him) and that there had been instances of physical abuse in some of the childcare settings he had run. There also seemed to be a great deal of resentment about the fact that he had had the audacity to kill himself. This was seen as a huge betrayal. People like Bettelheim didn't take a load of pills, tie plastic bags over their heads and then hang themselves. They were supposed to be above that kind of carry-on!

As a result of this revisionism, Bettelheim was all but written off from the record of child psychology. He is rarely taught now on social-care courses, and a search of the Internet will produce little information on him, short of the report he did for the newly formed United Nations on the psychological impact of the concentration camps on prisoners and SS officers alike. However, I must admit to a lasting affection (and yes, a certain amount of pity) for Bruno Bettelheim, or Dr B, as he came to be called by his posthumous biographers. It seems that he saw the horrors of the war as an opportunity to reinvent himself, to rebuild a shattered life, to rise phoenix-like from the ashes of a charred Europe. Isn't that a wonderful symbol for what social care is really all about: glorious rebirth?

The Uses of Enchantment
is Bettelheim's book on storytelling as a therapeutic tool. I read it when I was a student and I remember being struck by the concept that things as seemingly innocuous as stories could be used to heal children of deep emotional wounds. According to the book, fairy-tales contain subconscious symbols, archetypal images that we all respond to without even knowing it. They deal with issues of kinship, morality, inner strength, betrayal, loss, the predatory nature of real, human monsters. When some shaman, sitting with his people around a fire in a cave in the mountains, first channelled these folk-tales from the ether, they were not meant for children. They were told as a way of making sense of what lurked in the shadows. They told of how people – even small, seemingly helpless people, like children – can overcome what appear to be insurmountable odds and come out the other side, scarred and shaken, but whole nonetheless. They were a gentle, sometimes beautiful, always fun way of discussing what is frightening and threatening. Because in the dark years of the infancy of our species, there really were wolves hiding in the thickets, and, if you strayed from the path, they were all too ready to pounce.

This world has changed considerably since then. The forests that tend to be the setting for fairy-tales are all but gone. They have been replaced by terrain of a different kind, dangerous in a less obvious way. But the stories continue to remind us of the witch in her cottage, of sweets and cake, of the demonic Rumpelstiltskin, with his twisted desire to have a child, of the troll that hides beneath the bridge, waiting for the unwary to cross … and these reminders make us uncomfortable. So we change the stories, contriving to make them more palatable for our arrogant, modern sensibilities. Yet the shadow in the fairy-tale abides. You can dress up the witch or the wolf any way you wish, but their essence remains. They are predators.

I closed the book and, creakily getting to my feet, took the couple of steps to the shelf of children's books. I ran my finger along the titles: Lewis Carroll; Roald Dahl … there it was! A long spine, bound in brown leather, with the entwined letters B and G. The Brothers Grimm. I opened it, feeling a slightly childish thrill. Here there were dragons and much, much more.

It was a beautiful book. Each page of text was accompanied opposite by a beautiful plate, painted by the artist Fritz Kedel, depicting a scene from the story. This edition contained a scholarly introduction to the tales, and was published in 1931. But the stories were all here, in their initial, untainted form. I turned to the account of Hansel and Gretel, with which I intended to begin the sessions with Larry. The first plate showed the children, seated on the ground by a dying fire, their arms around each other, alone in the forest. The painter had rendered their faces in loving detail, and their fear, loneliness and sadness were very clear. In the corner of the picture, so small you would barely see it unless you looked very closely, was the silhouette of a wolf's head, its great tongue lolling out. About, all was darkness, the trees looming threateningly around the children. The picture might as well have depicted Larry and Francey. It summed up perfectly what they were like when I had first met them. I read a couple of lines:

Hard by a great forest dwelt a poor wood-cutter with his wife and his two children. The boy was called Hansel and the girl Gretel. He had little to bite and to break, and once, when great scarcity fell on the land, he could no longer procure daily bread …

The language was a bit archaic, but then, so was Larry and Francey's. I didn't think it would be a problem. I closed the book and looked at my watch. I had been in the library for two hours, and it was lunchtime.

I grabbed my jacket from the back of the chair in my office, called to Jerome, who was the only other staff-member in that day, that I was heading out, and went into the bright sunlight. There was a sandwich stand two roads over, and I made for it, whistling as I walked, my head now on frivolous things. Somebody touched me on the shoulder and I turned, almost falling over in surprise. I was staring into a blank, reflective visage, a bit like Darth Vader's mask. I stumbled back a step, raising a hand to ward off the spectre, when realization dawned.

‘You have to tell me what you wants with Mina!' it said.

My shadow from the morning had decided to make his move. I almost laughed. He was still wearing the helmet, which had one of those hi-tech, mirrored visors, so I could not see his face. Under it was the imaginatively coloured T-shirt, which fought valiantly to contain a pot-belly.

‘Hey …' I said, regaining my composure, ‘we haven't been introduced yet.'

‘You been axin' about my Mina, and I wants to know what you has to do with her! You have to tell me now!'

I stared dumbly, unsure how to proceed.

‘Why don't you take the helmet off and tell me your name?'

‘Oh, no!' The figure's voice was muffled under the protective headgear. ‘You don't know what I look like, and you won't find out neither!'

‘You were watching me at the workshop the last time I was there. You were in the café this morning, and you followed me here on a Honda 50. You've got curly light-brown hair.'

‘Oh.'

‘Now, take off the helmet. You must be sweating in there. Have you had it on all morning?'

The head nodded, a bit cowed, having learned that all the subterfuge had come to nothing. I felt a little guilty. I probably should have played along a bit more.