Chapter 10
10
He’d hung up on her after dropping that bombshell, and Jess sat for an age staring at the phone, which was now dead. Dead, just like little Amy from her storybook was. Whatever she’d expected Owen Aherne to tell her about his sister, it certainly hadn’t been that.
She was too numb right then to feel awful, but she was angry. Angry with herself for being so na?ve and caught up in her own big idea to have never even considered the possibility in the first place. What an earth could have happened to her?
Jess mentally worked out the years. Owen Aherne had said she’d died twenty-nine years ago, so that would make her around sixteen years old when she’d passed away. God, that was so young. She’d have had her whole life in front of her. Maybe she got hit by a car, or perhaps she’d been ill? Whatever had happened, she’d never know now, and all her big idea had served in doing was raking up a whole lot of remembered grief for a man she’d never met. Thank goodness she hadn’t inadvertently contacted the poor girl’s parents.
After a few minutes, she put the phone back in its cradle and decided to go and have a shower. The numbness had definitely worn off now, and perhaps drowning herself under hot water might make her feel marginally better about the tactless, one-sided conversation she’d just had.
She was halfway down the hall when she heard the phone shrill. After retracing her steps, she picked it up and found herself pressing it to her ear a little tighter when she heard that same broad Northern Irish twang from a few minutes earlier.
‘It’s Owen Aherne here,’ he said brusquely. ‘Listen, I’m sorry I hung up on you, and I hope you don’t mind me calling you back like this – caller display – but when I thought about what I said to you, well, you didn’t deserve that reaction, so I’d like to apologise.’
Jess was taken aback; she could tell from his voice that an apology wasn’t something that tripped off this man’s tongue easily. ‘You don’t need to explain yourself to me, Mr Aherne. I can’t imagine what an awful shock my phoning out the blue like that was and with such a convoluted story, too. Really, it’s me who should be apologising to you, and I am sorry – really sorry. I should have done my homework properly before contacting you. It was terribly unprofessional. I just… I got so caught up in the whole idea of finding her that it never crossed my mind that your sister might no longer be with us.’
‘Call me Owen; it’s me da who’s known as Mr Aherne. You weren’t to know that she’d passed on, but aye, it was a bit of a shock to hear her name like that, with it being thirty years like this October.’
He pronounced his ‘that’ like dat .
‘She was older than me by two years and turning into a bit of a hallion.’
That surprised Jess because for some reason – and she didn’t really know why – she’d assumed he was the older sibling. As for a hallion, well, he’d lost her there. ‘Sorry if I’m being thick, but what’s a hallion?’
‘Aye, sorry, it’s the lingo up my way. It means she was a tearaway, a right typical teenage girl, you know? Mouthy like, and what came out of it was usually directed at me mam.’
Yes, a familiar scenario, Jess thought, picturing herself at the same age. Actually, as her own mother’s face floated before her, she realised not that much had changed.
‘Anyway, the day it happened, she told Ma she was going to her friend Evie’s house, and Evie told her ma she was going to Amy’s; then both girls caught the bus up to Lisburn. Back then, Lisburn was classed as a borough of Belfast, but it’s a town in its own right now, so it is.’ He coughed then, and Jess couldn’t tell whether it was because he was getting choked by the story he was relaying or not, and she found herself clutching the receiver a little tighter.
‘She had her eye on a lad who worked up that way, so Evie told us later. She’d met him briefly at a dance and was determined to see him again, even though, according to Evie, he didn’t want to know. That was our Amy all over, though – determined. If she set her mind to something, there was no stopping her.’
Jess could recall doing the same thing herself, just at a different time and place. She felt a surge of empathy for the teenage Amy and her unrequited love.
‘The fighting was bad back in ’83 – you know, with the Troubles and all –and there were a lot of tit-for-tat killings going on. So Amy knew there was no way in hell she’d have been allowed to go anywhere near Belfast or the like if she’d asked permission.’ He cleared his throat, and Jess looked down at her bare forearms. The downy hairs covering them were standing on end. ‘But Ballymcguinness is a small place, and it was even smaller back then, claustrophobic for teenagers. I know because I wasn’t whiter than white myself, if you get my drift, so I got where she was coming from, sneaking off like that.’
Yes, Jess thought, that was the mentality of a teenager. They were all ten foot tall and bulletproof.
‘Don’t get me wrong, though, because she wasn’t a bad kid; nor was Evie. They had itchy feet, though, and going somewhere they knew they had no business going – well, it would give them a bit of kudos with their pals. God knows we were na?ve living here tucked away from the worst of it all. It was like the Troubles were happening somewhere else, not in our backyard, you know?’
Having grown up in Auckland, a city of just over 1.5 million people, Jess couldn’t relate to the frustration of small-town life for a teenage girl, but she did know that sometimes living in the city could be just as claustrophobic.
‘Evie told us later that she left her bag in the cafe they’d been hanging out in for most of the day, eyeing up this lad Amy fancied who worked across the road at a mechanic’s. They’d sat smoking cigarettes, trying to look sophisticated and drinking manky, bottomless coffee until it was time to get the bus home. Evie had run back down the road to get her bag while Amy waited at the bus stop outside O’Hara’s the butcher’s to make sure they didn’t miss it. She knew there would be murder to pay at home if it came out what the two of them had spent the day doing.’
Jess inhaled shakily and felt a wave of nausea; she had a feeling she knew what was coming next, and she was right.
‘It was a Loyalist bombing that went wrong. There was a meeting due to be held in the back of the butcher’s. Christopher O’Hara, who was an IRA hard man back in the day, and his cronies were supposed to be gathered there, except they weren’t, and seven innocent people, including my sister, were killed instead. We were told she died instantly and that she wouldn’t have suffered, which was a blessing for her but of no comfort to me mam, who spent the rest of her life suffering.’ He paused and drew a ragged breath. ‘It’s a hard thing to accept that you’ve no body left to bury, just the pieces left behind. Me da was an armchair Unionist back then who liked to spout off with his pals down at Murtagh’s Pub on a Saturday afternoon, but after what happened to Amy, he never stepped foot in there again – he lost his spark.’
Jess was speechless as she swiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. What did you say to someone who’d been through what this poor man and his family had? In the end, the only thing she could do was whisper, ‘What about you – what did you do?’
‘Oh, I grew up as you do and went over the water to England to get my law degree and to forget. I wanted nothing to do with Northern Ireland. I practised law in London for fifteen years.’
‘And now you’re back?’
‘And now I’m back, and I’m sorry to burden you with our family history like that.’ The curtness in his voice had returned, and she knew his wall had gone back up.
‘You didn’t really have a choice, Mr Aherne; it was me who rang you, remember?’
‘Aye, but this isn’t about me, and that’s partly why I rang you back. Like I said, it’s coming up to thirty years since that bomb went off, and I’m thinking it needs to be marked somehow. Maybe by remembering the girl our Amy was and could have been instead of focusing solely on an event that was out of her control. I mean, when she wasn’t causing me mam and da to pull their hair out, she was a normal girl, you know. She liked messing around with make-up, listening to music and trailing round all moony-eyed after boys. She wasn’t political in the slightest, but what happened that day means that’s all she’s remembered for, and I think the story you’re talking about putting together is something she would have approved of.’ He coughed, as though embarrassed by the depth of feeling behind his words. ‘What I’m saying, I suppose, is that if you’re up for a visit to Ballymcguinness sometime, I’d like to tell you a bit more about my sister.’
There was absolutely no doubt in Jess’s mind that she had to tell Amy’s story now. The book lay open on the coffee table in front of her, and she traced her finger over the letters Amy had written all those years ago. ‘Is tomorrow too soon for me to come? If you give me your mobile details, I can text through what time I’ll be arriving.’