Chapter 38
38
On Saturday morning, 20 October 2013 – thirty years to the day that sixteen-year-old Amy Aherne from Glenariff Farm in Ballymcguinness was killed – her story ran in the Dublin Express . It was spread over two pages in the colour weekend supplement, and it made for an arresting read:
Amy’s Story
By Jessica Baré
This story starts with a children’s book published in 1969, a fairy tale bought by a mother in Northern Ireland on behalf of her youngest child to give to his sister for Christmas 1973. It’s no fairy story, though; nor is it just the sad relaying of brutal facts and a life ended in Lisburn in 1983. It might have finished there if not for her family and had that little book not found its way to me. I don’t mean to sound proprietary because neither the book nor the story I am going to tell you belongs to me. This is Amy’s story, and in order to tell it to you, I have to begin where it all began.
My full name is Jessica Jane Baré – or Second-Hand Jane as my friends have started to call me. Why? Well, it’s because I love the pre-loved – just like that old cliché, someone else’s junk is my treasure. My real passion, though, is for old children’s books – it’s something about the smell of them, I think. It conjures up the innocence of a bygone era of children called Dick and Ann and tea at five o’clock, trapped forever within their much-thumbed pages. I covet the Ladybird Series 606D books in particular – the classic fairy tales every child grows up with: Rapunzel , Cinderella , The Elves and the Shoemaker , and most pertinent of all Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs .
It wasn’t the bold black typeface, however, that had me poring over the books as a child and hoarding them as an adult but Eric Winters’ fabulously detailed illustrations. They brought those stories to life and were the source of a childhood fascination with witches, fairies, princes and princesses. The delicate colours of the foxgloves planted by the thatched cottage’s flagstone path, the grand white Bavarian-styled castles in which as a little girl I had no doubt I would one day grow up to live in, were a world away from the suburban pocket of New Zealand I inhabited. When a young imagination is fuelled, though, the impossible becomes possible. Good fought evil within those pages and always won. If only we could hold on to that certainty forever.
I often wonder, when I open my books to find another child’s mark inside, whether that faceless child felt the magic, too. Who were they, these little people who had scribbled their names inside books long since forgotten by adulthood?
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs arrived with neither pomp nor ceremony but rather by mail thanks to an online auction I was determined to win. Inside the tatty cover, in precise, big print was the dedication:
To Amy with love from Owen,
Christmas 1973
Beneath this, scrawled in orange pencil pressed deep into the cardboard, she had forever made her mark:
Amy Aherne
Glenariff Farm
Ballymcguinness
6 years old
As I looked at the scribbled inscription, I began to wonder. Who was she, this six-year-old girl from the seventies? Was she a dreamer like me, who was now learning the hard way that princes don’t just pop up every day and that there are an awful lot of frogs out there? Or perhaps she was a realist who didn’t believe in a man supplying her with a ready-made happy ever after? Might we have been friends if we had met? Where was she now? What had she grown up to do with her life?
I felt a compulsion that was almost a physical tug. It was one that I have never felt before – this overwhelming need to know. I would find her and tell the story that lay within the name inscribed in the storybook.
What I found, though, was not at all what I expected.
Amy didn’t leave school early and take the first job she was offered so she could buy records, clothes and make-up like her girlfriends. She didn’t wind up pushing a pram before her time either. Nor did she pack her bags and head off to the city to share a grotty flat with other intellectuals while she studied hard and solved the problems of the world. She didn’t put a foot on the bottom rung of the corporate ladder to begin her ascent, all the while trying to fit a life in around the demands of her chosen career. The full moon never shone down on her while she partied the night away in a bikini and sarong on a Thai beach with her drunken compatriots. As for meeting Mr Right, well, he never got the chance to show up, so she never knew what it would have been like to set up home with him and look after their babushka doll babies together.
The choices we take for granted as ours to make, the mistakes we know will push us off course along the way that only make getting back on track all the sweeter, all of that was taken away from Amy in the futile tit for tatting of a war that could never really be won.
I began my search for who this little girl was and who she had become with the high-tech precision of a bungling journalist who resorted to the white pages and a foot-in-mouth phone call to Owen Aherne. The four-year-old boy who had long ago given his sister the book I held in my possession was now a man in his forties who still lived at the family farm in Ballymcguinness. After the shock of a blundering journalist with the wrong accent barging into his past, we figured out the book’s journey away from Amy to an eBid purchase in 2013 began with the need for extra spends and a sale at a church fete. That sorted, he laid the facts bare:
‘The day it happened, Amy 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. 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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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. 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.’
Owen’s since returned to the North to take over the running of the family’s farm after having lived in England for many years. He has found a sense of peace in returning to a simpler life he once knew well. His mother passed away eight years ago, and his father has retired to a home in Dundrum. Neither of them recovered from their losses. What happened to the Ahernes’ daughter was not their fault, but parents will always second-guess their every action where the culmination of an event was ultimately out of their control.
The cottage where the family lived has been renovated and modernised, but you can still feel Amy’s presence there. She’s not just in the photos that dot the fireplace mantel – a visual reminder of a girl who was loved – there is a sense of her everywhere.
So who had she been, this young woman hovering on the brink of adulthood and a world that was hers for the taking?
Well, like the story goes, once upon a time, there was a child who was fair of face. She lived in a pretty cottage with her mother, father and younger brother. She had lots of friends, and she liked to play dress-up and hold tea parties for her dolls. Here was a little girl who loved to read, to dream and to dance – she was to her family and friends a delight who made them smile each and every day.
As she grew and the hormones exploded, she dipped her toe in and began to test the waters of independence: a normal teenager who loved her cat and her best friend, ogled pop stars’ posters, played her records too loud and dreamed the big dreams of the adolescent while her mammy told her to get in the bathroom and wash that muck off her face! Everything was new and fresh and exciting, and all the more so for not being allowed to do it.
The Amy I found was a beautiful little girl who was full of life and laughter; she would become a young woman on the cusp of a life that could have been exceptional or could have been ordinary – it was ripe for the picking but either way, it should have been hers for the taking.
She left behind a cat that pined, friends who would never forget her and a family who were broken – blown into pieces like she was. I’ve since taken her book home where it belongs and I’ve told her story, and in doing so, I know that Owen and his father hope that Amy’s legacy is one that will make you – whoever you are – think about what really matters.
The sixteen-year-old girl she grew to be was motivated by fashion, not politics, and the depth of the secular hatred whispered about by some and shouted about by others bewildered her.
‘We’re all human beings, so why can’t we all just get along?’ she once asked her da, to which he replied, ‘It’s not that straightforward, Amy, love.’
‘Why not? It doesn’t seem that complicated to me.’ And with a shrug, she walked away.
Sometimes it’s the most simplistic ideologies that make the most sense.
Jess’s boss, Niall, who normally took the hard-nosed route when it came to bestowing praise on his journalists, in case they took it to heart and asked for a pay rise, telephoned her late that morning to congratulate her on a job well done. He informed her that the paper was going to be inundated with reader responses to her story because letters to the editor were already flowing into his inbox thick and fast.
‘It might make some of those buggers up there so keen to stir it all up again think,’ he growled down the phone in his customary gruff voice.
Nora was the next to ring. ‘Oh, it’s so sad, sweetie; no wonder you’ve been spending time with the pig farmer. I get it now, but you know the past is the past and you’ve got to look to your future.’
She sniffed and then in typical Nora style, she changed tack and announced that she could just imagine Ewan playing Owen should the rights to a movie ever be sold. She’d gone on to suggest Megan Fox for the role of Amy but then changed her mind, saying she was too old for the part and it probably wasn’t a great idea throwing Megan and Ewan together, even if Megan was married.
‘Er, Nora,’ Jess had cut in, ‘Owen doesn’t look anything like Ewan, and I don’t think he’d want his family’s tragedy being Hollywoodized, not even if Daniel Day-Lewis himself offered to play him, but hey, thanks for the thought – gotta go.’ She disconnected the call with a shake of her head. She dearly loved her friend but honestly sometimes…
Brianna kept to her traditional role in their friendship by being the sensitive one when she called. ‘Oh, Jess, what a waste of a life; it’s just so sad.’
‘You sound surprised,’ Jess replied, puzzled. It wasn’t as though Brianna wasn’t familiar with what had happened to Amy.
‘It’s completely different having it laid out in black and white and those photos of Amy – well, they bring her to life, and you can see her potential, how beautiful she was. It really brings it home what a tragedy it was.’ Brianna sniffed loudly. ‘Do you know I felt ashamed reading it because I still can’t believe that kind of brutality happened in the country I live in, even though I’ve always known that it happened. Does that make sense?’
‘Yes, I know what you mean. It does seem surreal now, and the Troubles have been so romanticised, especially by Hollywood, but it was as bloody as any war.’ She shook her head, remembering the conversation she’d just had with Nora. ‘Life goes on, though. Look at Croatia – the tourists have been going back there for years even though the countryside’s still littered with unexploded landmines.’
‘You’re right.’ Brianna’s voice quivered. ‘Do you know, Jess, I don’t think I’d be able to carry on if anything was to happen to Harry?’
‘Owen’s mother didn’t either, not properly.’
‘Have you spoken to him yet? The poor man! If it’s brought out all these emotions in me, then I can’t imagine how he must be feeling having his family’s story laid bare like that for all to see.’
Jess squirmed. She knew she owed him a phone call, but she couldn’t bring herself to ring him, not just yet. The uncertainty of the reception she’d get was holding her back, and she’d spent the morning hoping instead that he would phone her. ‘Um, no, I thought it might be better to let him ring me, you know, when he feels like talking – if he feels like talking, that is.’
He was the person whose voice she’d been on tenterhooks to hear each time she’d picked up the phone that morning.
‘Why?’
‘You don’t know Owen.’ Jess gave a sardonic little laugh. ‘Neither do I, for that matter, because he’s the most self-contained man I’ve ever met. That’s why I thought it would be better to leave him alone today to deal with this in his own way. He’ll be in touch if he wants to be.’
‘Don’t give me that. It sounds like an excuse if ever I heard one. Did you stop to think that maybe he finds it hard to reach out after everything he’s been through? I think you owe him a phone call at the very least to see how he’s doing.’ Brianna was a tough-love advocate.
‘I know you’re right. It’s just…’ Brianna, of course, wasn’t privy to the whole story.
‘Just what?’
‘Nothing, it’s nothing. I’m just being pathetic.’ Jess felt awful for being unable to face the possibility of rejection, but it was something she was going to have to grin and bear. She did owe it to him because it was her who’d started all this and set the article in motion, so the very least she could do was to let him know she was thinking of him. ‘I’ll ring him now.’
‘Promise?’
‘Promise.’
She dialled his number before she could talk herself out of it, holding her breath as it rang and rang before finally clicking over to the answering machine. At the sound of Owen’s voice explaining he wasn’t home, her eyes began to prickle. She sniffed and cleared her throat, and then as the beep sounded, she left her message.
‘Owen, hi, it’s Jess. I, uh, I just phoned to see how you were doing. I hope your copy of the Express arrived OK and that you’re pleased with the way it all came together. Um, Niall phoned to tell me the response from readers has been phenomenal. I’ll forward you copies of all the letters to the editor. Anyway, I, uh, I hope you’re OK with it and that Wilbur’s doing OK and that your dad is OK. OK, um, bye.’
God, what was with the non-stop OKs? She hung up, hoping she hadn’t sounded too much of a babbling idiot because she hated answerphones at the best of times and this wasn’t the best of times.
On the floor spread out in front of her was the Express . ‘Amy’s Story’ in its bold black typeface gazed back up at her. Her eyes flitted over the familiar text before settling on the photo of Amy holding her disgruntled cat tightly. She’d been so vividly beautiful, so alive. As the tears plopped down her cheeks, staining the newsprint, she hoped that seeing their sister/daughter remembered in a story like this had somehow helped Owen and his father today and that they felt she’d done good by her.