Chapter Twenty-Three
Willie was out beachcombing. Last night’s storm had been fierce and there was bound to be a few interesting things thrown up in the tideline. A tall man with a small, silly dog was walking towards him. The dog had tiny legs and looked little a millipede as it ran along. Willie ducked his head down again. He wasn’t in the mood to talk to tourists who were after their roots, thrown up in the storm and adrift on the tides. All this travelling away meant the next generation didn’t know who they were and floundered. At eighty years of age, he’d seen enough of humanity to know that if you didn’t hang tight this world would wash you away.
‘Found anything?’
The Englishman had walked over and was now turning over piles of seaweed with the toes of his deck shoes.
‘Just some driftwood.’ He looked back at the sand.
‘What sort of thing do you look for?’
‘Peace and quiet mostly.’
The Englishman laughed and then apologised. ‘I shall leave you to it then, but if I find anything, I’ll give you a shout.’
Willie cursed under his breath; it wasn’t the stranger’s fault that he had had a bad night worrying about the damage the storm was wreaking on his garden. Nor was it his fault that his knee had swollen up to the size of a turnip.
‘Ah sure, don’t mind me. I was going to stop for a coffee if you’d care to join me. I can show you some of my finds? I might even have a dog biscuit for the small one? ’
Willie liked to have a treat for Mrs Devaney’s hounds, and they made a point of running out to his cottage on a daily basis. As the two men walked up from the shore, Willie looked up at his cottage roof – from the sea, it was a long old climb up to the front door but at least it meant that when the waves crashed they didn’t do so on his house. Still, last night hadn’t been without issues.
‘Oh, what’s happened here?’
Willie looked at the collapsed wall of the old pigsty in bemusement. Any idiot could see what had happened here.
‘Wall fell down.’
‘In last night’s storms?’
Well, when else? thought Willie. Did this man think he’d grown his runner beans under the collapsed bricks? Willie grunted. Small talk just made people sound foolish and he was already regretting the offer of a coffee. He was walking to the front door when he realised that the stranger hadn’t followed but had instead let the dog off its lead and was beginning to move the bricks off the beans.
‘I thought I’d stack them on the other side of the shed?’ the man said as he glanced over at Willie.
Willie looked at him in amazement. He had rolled his sleeves up and was working diligently, carefully picking up bricks and moving them over to the lee of the old pigsty. He held one of the bricks up to Willie.
‘Not much mortar on these, is there? Makes it easier in a way.’
Willie was still dumbfounded. ‘How’s that?’
‘Well, if they were properly mortared they’d have come down in a large lump and been harder to move. ’
‘If they’d been properly bonded, they wouldn’t have come down at all. I’ll bring out a coffee.’
Gabe watched as the grumpy old sod walked into the cottage and laughed to himself. Maybe when he got to be that old he’d say what he thought as well, instead of always being polite. Pulling his jumper up over his head, he hung it over an upright shovel and got to work. The wind was still strong, and the clouds threatened rain, but he quickly built up a sweat moving the bricks. This cottage was the last on the island before it dropped away on the cliffs. Gabe couldn’t imagine it had more than four rooms, but it was a pretty little building and mostly well maintained. The old pigsty had become dilapidated and now, after a big blow, it had collapsed.
‘There you go.’
Will looked into a mug of pale brown liquid and wondered if he would be able to drink that without pulling a face. Instead, he smiled and said thank you and pointed to the bamboo canes.
‘You start repairing the runner beans and I’ll keep moving the bricks. Should be done in the hour.’
Having finally run out of steam, Ohana curled up under a rhubarb leaf and Gabe took a quick photo.
‘Will you forget what she looks like if you don’t take a picture?’ the old man asked.
‘She’s not mine, she belongs to a friend who’s doing some family research. I thought she’d like the image.’
‘Right enough. So it’s not yerself trying to find your family?’
Gabe laughed and said he knew exactly where his family was and where they had come from .
‘That’s a comfort. Knowing your roots are in place. Here, have a look at what happens when you aren’t properly anchored.’
Willie brought out a box with the coffees and now both men stopped to look at the bits of flotsam that had ended up on the shore. A necklace of pearls, a Lego octopus, an old tank shell.
‘No rhyme or reason, just washed up on the shore like the children.’
Gabe’s ears pricked up. ‘Children get washed up on the shore?’
‘They may as well. No, I mean the children that used to come here. Babes taken from their mothers, little more than girls themselves. Children handed over by couples that didn’t have the pennies to feed a tenth child. Babes left in the middle of the night. Each and every one of them severed from their roots. I was caretaker for the nuns back then. You hear some wicked stories, but the nuns here were a kind lot and did their best by their little charges. As did I. We all did, really. God had sent them to us, and we did the best we could.’
By now the two men had finished clearing the vegetable patch.
‘Will the beans recover?’
Willie looked at them with a shrug.
‘Maybe. Although the yield may not be quite what it should be. Having a wall land on you can certainly slow you down. Come on now indoors I’ll show you some more of the flotsam.’
Inside the cottage the rooms were tired and worn. The small kitchen looked like an original fifties arrangement: there was a cooker with an overhead grill and a small freestanding fridge but no washing machine, a shallow metal sink, some cupboards and a table. An open door revealed a bathtub and probably the only loo in the house. To the right of the front door a fireplace was laid with tinder and logs and off the sitting room, Gabe guessed there would be a bedroom behind the door.
‘It’s not much, but it’s mine.’
Gabe looked around and smiled. ‘It would do me. Although I think I’d want someone to share it with.’ Unexpectedly, the thought of Letta staring at the microfiche, absentmindedly answering him, came to mind.
‘I can see that from your face. Truth be told, I do miss my wife, but the good Lord saw fit to take her to Himself some years ago and now I just share this place with my memories and photos.’
He pointed to a wall in the sitting room that was completely covered in photos of children laughing, some gurning at the camera. There were also pictures of nuns at work, hanging out laundry, digging in an allotment and the occasional photograph of the old man himself smiling out from his youth.
‘Your wife was the photographer then?’
‘Yes. Always behind the lens. I’ve only the one photo of her and that’s of us on our wedding day.’ He glanced over to his bedroom door and Gabe was certain that the photo sat on the old man’s bedside table. Giving the man his privacy he looked along the photos – his wife had had a good eye for catching a mood. These people seemed alive in a way that photographs rarely captured. Looking at the images, he could imagine them turning to him and asking him to pass a peg or lend a hand. What a strange community it must have been on this island of nuns and children. He looked at their faces: what must it have been like to not know your parents or why you had been abandoned? Were they lonely, angry, sad, unwanted or was it a Blyton-like paradise, free of parental interference? Certainly, the children in these photos seemed happy. As he was musing that it likely fell between both camps – different for each child – a familiar face smiled out at him.
‘Who’s that?’
Gabe pointed to a boy who was standing in a group of children, his arms draped around two of them. The tallest in the bunch, he looked to be about sixteen or seventeen. The boy was wearing the standard brown nylon slacks of the seventies and a tight-fitting orange T-shirt. He had dark curly hair, and even in the photo you could see his eyes were a bright blue; if his hair had been just a touch longer Gabe would swear that he was looking at Letta.
‘Let me look now.’ The old man shuffled slowly, making his way past the chair as Gabe stepped aside. ‘Ah young Mikey the Tiger. Lovely lad. Came to us as a boy rather than a baby and left the day he turned seventeen.’
‘A boy? How old would he have been?’
‘Around five, I’d say. Always rough at that age.’
Gabe tried to understand what that must have been like. He had memories of ski trips with his family from the age of five, his nanny taking the boys out during the day as they learnt how to ski. In summer there were long flights to hot places where people would spend all day running around entertaining him and his brother. In the evening they would join their parents as everyone would tell them how beautiful their mother was and how lucky they were to have such an important father.
The idea of suddenly having all that taken away was hard to comprehend. The misery those children must have endured. Still, he was here to track down Letta’s father and despite the uncanny resemblance, the name was wrong.
‘Unusual surname?’
‘Ah, well now, Tiger was just his nickname, so it was. I think I knew it once, well, I did, of course. But time clears away so much stuff.’
‘Could it have been O’Callaghan?’
‘Ah that’s it, right enough. That’s it now.’
The man paused and nodded.
‘Do you know him then?’
‘I think my friend might. I think that’s her father,’ said Gabe excitedly. ‘Do you think I can bring her here?’
‘Go on then. I’ll put the kettle on. Does she prefer tea or coffee?’
Gabe considered Letta’s reaction to the coffee and picked tea. Promising that he would be back presently Gabe headed off along the overgrown driveway and returned to the hotel. Dropping Ohana back at the desk with Roisin he hurried over to Letta.
***
The door swung open, and Gabriel dashed into the room.
‘I’ve found him! ’
Nick looked up confused. Gabe had been gone for well over an hour and now he had returned missing his jumper and sweaty with bits of mud on his face and hands.
‘What?’
‘Your father. I think I’ve found him. Or rather a photo of him. Come on.’
Nick followed Gabe as he led her along an old path past the building and across the island. As they walked, Gabe explained that Willie had worked as a caretaker when the nuns used to take in children and now was retired helping out at the hotel as and when.
‘He has a wall covered in photos of the children and one face jumped out at me. God, Letta, it practically shouted at me. And when I asked, Willie said the lad’s name was Mikey “Tiger” O’Callaghan and the picture was from the seventies. It all fits, doesn’t it?’
Gabe was talking ten to the dozen, but Nick was quiet; she wouldn’t get her hopes up only to have them dashed. Better to watch and wait.
As they got to a small, whitewashed cottage, Nick wondered if the tin roof was terribly noisy in the rain. Gabe’s jumper was hanging on a shovel and there was a vegetable patch looking somewhat the worse for wear. She wondered if Gabe had helped or hindered.
The door swung open, and an old man invited them in and introduced himself as Willie Byrne. Nick stared at him and then carefully shook his hand. Was it possible that she walking into her father’s history? Was Gabe right, did this man hold the key to her father’s past? He was wearing a shirt and tie, and his hair was slicked back. Nick could smell soap and a small cut on his chin suggested he had just shaved. Inviting her to sit down, he poured her a cup of tea and talked about the weather.
‘Now then, miss, before I let you look at the photos just know that if it isn’t your da, you’re not to fret. It can be a long struggle, patching up an old tear, sometimes the threads aren’t always willing to be found.’
Nick wondered at his insightfulness but then he had probably witnessed decades of people coming onto this island trying to find their family. Not all would have been successful. The palms of her hands were sweating and she wiped them on her jeans as she tried to gather her emotions.
‘Fair enough, let’s have a look.’ She stood up and followed him into a small sitting room where he pointed to a wall that was covered in photos spanning the decades, all the faces staring out at her. All these unloved, unwanted or desperately missed children. Had their mothers given up on them or had they been torn out of their mother’s arms? Were they orphans with no family to take them in? She took a step back from the wave of pain that radiated from the wall.
‘Come on, lass, sit down. It can be a lot to take in sometimes.’
Nick shook her head. She had come here to try to find out more about her father, to do something positive for her sisters. She couldn’t buckle now that the reality was starting to hit home. ‘Sorry, that caught me off guard, but I know these children loved whoever was taking the photos. Look at those smiles. At least they had some sort of happiness here.’
Willie smiled at her softly .
‘Oh, that they did. We all did our best by the children. There was some as came here to work that blamed the children for their situation, but Sister Bernard would have none of that. They were soon given their marching orders. That’s not to say that the children were perfect. Weren’t they the very divils at times, but we did what we could?’
Nick had remained standing and was running her eyes over the photos. This was a fool’s errand – how would she possibly spot her father amongst all these little faces. Her eyes snagged on something and she looked closely at a teenager smiling directly into the camera. If it wasn’t just that he reminded her of Ari or Aster, it was simply that he looked like Da. The girls had some photos of their parents when they had first met in college. This picture could have only been taken a year earlier. Smiling at her across the years and beyond the grave was her own beloved father.