Will Mummy Be Coming Back for Me? Read online

  Will Mummy Be Coming Back for Me?

  SHANE DUNPHY

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published 2009

  I

  Copyright © Shane Dunphy, 2009

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  NOTE: The names of people and places mentioned in this book have been changed where it was felt necessary to protect the identity of individuals

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-194664-1

  Contents

  NOW

  THEN

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  NOW

  6

  7

  8

  THEN

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  NOW

  15

  16

  17

  18

  THEN

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  NOW

  24

  25

  26

  THEN

  27

  28

  29

  30

  NOW

  31

  32

  33

  THEN

  34

  35

  35

  NOW

  36

  37

  THEN

  38

  NOW

  39

  Afterword

  For Darren. I miss you, brother

  Sometimes I feel like a motherless child

  A long, long way from home.

  Sometimes I feel like I’m almost gone;

  Like I’m all alone.

  Who’s got a shoulder when I need to cry?

  I feel restless and I don’t know why.

  I cry for help, but my calls echo on –

  Lord, I’m lost; I can’t find my way back home.

  My soul is so weak, but I want to be strong;

  I try to run away, but I’ve been running too long…

  ‘Motherless Child’ (traditional blues song)

  NOW

  I was aware of several things happening at once, but time had slowed to a crawl, and the world was not making sense.

  A boy was standing at the far end of the long conference room in Dunleavy House, shouting at me, but his words seemed to be playing at the wrong speed, and all I could hear was white noise. Mrs Munro, the middle-aged woman who worked, among other things, as the secretary and receptionist for the Dunleavy Trust, the voluntary agency with whom I was employed, was lying sprawled on the large dark wood table. She wasn’t moving. I gathered that the youngster had hit her, and might have hurt her badly. This, more than anything else, drove home to me the dire seriousness of the situation: Beverly Munro was a woman who elicited fear in almost everyone, and it took a long time to see the warmth and intelligence behind her gruff façade. The children who came in and out of Dunleavy House – and not a few of their parents and carers – treated Mrs Munro with grave respect. She expected – and demanded – no less.

  Ben Tyrrell, my boss, a man with many years’ experience of working with the most challenging and damaged children, was trying to wrestle himself from my grip. He was yelling at the top of his voice at the agitated youngster. In all the years I had worked with Ben, I had never seen him so enraged with a child. I knew he and Mrs Munro had been working together since before I was born, and that Ben loved her dearly as a colleague and friend. I’m slightly bigger than Ben – and twenty years younger – and I had managed to get my arms under his oxters, but his distress was lending him strength, and I did not know for how long I could restrain him.

  I felt like reality had been tipped upside down. I had worked in environments that were often chaotic and frightening. I was used to that – in truth, I relished it, at times. My job was challenging and interesting, and gave me the opportunity to test my limits on a daily basis. Even though we regularly had troubled people in Dunleavy House – we supervised access visits, as well as holding case conferences and therapy sessions – these were all expertly managed, with specially laid-down rules and guidelines. Boundaries were clear, and even if things went wrong, there were safety measures in place to accommodate the fallout; if extra staff were needed at any of these daily fixtures, they were made available, and any of the rest of us who were in the building made sure to keep an ear out if trouble was expected.

  This was a situation outside our normal experience. A youngster in his mid-teens (I put the boy at maybe sixteen years of age) had arrived unannounced at reception late that afternoon, demanding to speak to someone. Mrs Munro had asked him a few standard questions – the name of his social worker, if he was living at home or with foster parents, whether or not he was in school – and she had then shown him into the conference room, while she checked to see if anyone was available to have a chat with him.

  On finding that everyone was busy, Mrs Munro had returned to see if an appointment could be made for the following day.

  ‘I’ll wait here,’ the boy retorted.

  ‘You could be waiting for a couple of hours,’ he was told, gently.

  ‘I need to see somebody, and it won’t keep until tomorrow.’

  ‘I understand but…’

  ‘You tell them I’m going to stay right here until someone comes and talks to me. I’ve been told youse help people no one else can help. Well, they’re gonna lock me up, and that ain’t goin’ to happen. I want to speak to somebody – right?’

  Mrs Munro had sighed, but went and informed Ben that the visitor was refusing to leave. It seemed that, when Ben came out of his office (he had been dealing with a foster mother in crisis) to reason with the young man, things had not gone well. Mrs Munro had somehow got caught in the crossfire. The shouting had alerted me to the situation, and I arrived from my own office, where I had been writing a report, just as Ben was about to vault the table and throttle Mrs Munro’s assailant.

  My mind raced. Ben was the person I turned to when things were out of control. I expected him to always be calm, to be capable of dealing with anything, regardless of how extreme. To see him in such a state was si
mply horrifying for me. I wanted to walk away and pretend none of it was happening. I took a deep breath, and forced myself to take stock of the situation. The youngster had picked up a chair, and was brandishing it at us.

  ‘I’ll fuckin’ do the lot of yiz!’ he shouted. ‘Try and stop me if you think you’re hard enough! You know what I can do if I’m pushed.’

  ‘You need to put that down and talk to me,’ I said, loudly, but with as gentle a tone as I could muster. Ben was relaxing somewhat, and I loosened my grip. When I did, he sagged and sat down against the wall. ‘What’s your name?’

  The boy suddenly seemed uncertain. He was not tall, probably only five foot four or five. His hair was shaved close to his head, and his acned face was pale and pinched, betraying a life of hardship. He wore a scuffed and filthy hoody and baggy blue tracksuit bottoms.

  ‘Don’t you know me, man?’ he asked.

  I almost laughed. Was this one of those young gang members so often featured in the papers, convinced his thuggery had made him famous? Was I supposed to have heard of his drug-addled exploits?

  ‘No, I don’t know you.’

  Something flitted across his face then that I thought I did recognize. It was only momentary, and if my senses had not been heightened through stress, I might have missed it. But the look of pain, of fear, the expression of desolation, leaped out at me like a signature I’d read time and again.

  ‘Jesus, Shane. You have to remember.’

  I struggled, then. Childcare workers who claim they remember every child they encounter are liars. We recall many, but just as many are forgotten, filed away in our memories like dreams or snatches of overheard conversations. Some we carry with us, like tattoos or talismans. Others, unknown, carry us with them. It is the nature of the job.

  ‘Help me,’ I said. ‘Help me remember.’

  ‘His name is Jason Farrell,’ Mrs Munro said, then, her voice surprisingly firm.

  I had not noticed her pushing herself upright. A bruise was already rising on her cheekbone, but she did not falter, or even cast a glance at the boy, who was now gazing at me, trembling. Slowly, she walked around the table, and went to Ben’s side.

  ‘I’m sorry, Beverly,’ he said, and I heard him crying. She helped him to his feet. I felt Ben’s hand on my shoulder as memory washed over me like a waterfall.

  ‘Jason,’ I said. ‘My God…’

  ‘I didn’t know you was here,’ he said, and then his face creased up and he was crying loudly and bitterly, like a small child. ‘Shane, I’m in trouble, man. Bad trouble.’

  I knew I should go to him, but somehow couldn’t bring myself to. He had walked into my life and warped it unspeakably. Ten minutes before, I had been calm and happy, doing some mundane paperwork. In less time than it takes to make a cup of coffee, a man I respected and admired had been transformed into a quivering wreck, and a woman I cared for a great deal had been injured. I was too hurt and upset to comfort the perpetrator of these crimes.

  So we stood there with the table – and more than ten years – between us: an insurmountable gulf.

  ‘I’m calling the police,’ Ben said, his voice gruff with emotion. ‘Stay with him, okay?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Jason Farrell was still sobbing when they took him away.

  Five hours later I sat opposite Garda Miriam Kelleher in the squad room of the crowded local police station. There was very little floor space, as the room had been packed to capacity with desks and chairs, and the narrow passageways that did exist between the workstations were clogged with boxes of files and other assorted detritus. The sound of the radio crackling into life every few moments punctuated the buzz of conversation.

  ‘He’s asking for you,’ Miriam said. She was taller than me, with square glasses and dark blonde hair tied in a loose ponytail. She had worked for a time as a residential childcare worker, and therefore caught a lot of the juvenile liaison cases.

  ‘I will go and talk with him, Midge, but I need to know what I’m dealing with,’ I said. I had drunk too much coffee – even for me – and felt tired and jittery. I wished I was at home, but I knew I wouldn’t rest until I had found some answers. The only person who could provide them was locked in a nearby cell. ‘I remember this kid as a terrified five-year-old. I’m guessing there’s been a lot of water under the bridge since then.’

  Miriam pushed a heavy file across her desk towards me. ‘Gallons,’ she said.

  I looked at the ream of paper and sighed, deeply.

  ‘Can’t you summarize it for me?’

  ‘Okay, then. In brief, Jason Farrell is about as bad a kid as you could hope to come across,’ Miriam said, observing me wince but continuing mercilessly. ‘He has been mixed up in a variety of petty crimes, most of them involving violence of one kind or another. It’s only a matter of time before he graduates on to something more serious, and someone dies. He’s been caught with firearms twice, and we suspect he’s on the perimeter of at least one of the local gangs. He’s certainly been seen in the company of some of their lower-ranking members.’ She sat back and let that information sink in. ‘For that alone, I’d be glad to see him put away for a long while.’ ‘But there’s more?’ I prompted.

  She flipped open the file, and riffled through it to a heavily lined page.

  ‘In 1997, when he was eleven, Jason Farrell took a three-year-old girl, Mary Connors, into a field behind the halting site, an official area for travellers where her family were staying, and molested her. I won’t disturb you with the gory details – suffice it to say it was sadistic enough to have him placed in a secure care institution for a year after that. They released him, and put him under the watchful eye of a foster family, but obviously before he was ready. In 1999, he broke into the house of a neighbour, and violently sexually abused their two-year-old daughter.’

  ‘If he’s such a serious threat, how come he’s still at large?’ I asked impatiently. ‘Why the fuck is he arriving at my office and beating up my friends?’

  ‘Shane, you’d be the first person to advocate kids getting a second chance, even the really messed-up ones,’ Miriam shot back. ‘He was put in a programme for young offenders. It seemed to be working, the second time around. He was sent back home to his birth parents in the Oldtown.’

  I sighed. ‘I can guess that didn’t go well.’

  ‘A couple of complaints came in about him hanging around the local primary school,’ Miriam said. ‘I had a talk with him, that time, warned him off. Then we got a call about a little girl who had been approached by a man when she was out playing. This guy wanted her to go for a walk with him. He said he’d buy her a new doll. Thankfully, she was well aware of “stranger danger”, and ran and told her parents. Our boy swears blind it wasn’t him, and I won’t make a four-year-old pick him out of a line-up, so we let that one lie. But last week, there was a burglary – an old woman who lived in the flats. She was in bed, and when she got up to confront the intruders, one of them dragged her back into her room and sexually assaulted her. This is an eighty-year-old woman, mind. Even though he was wearing a balaclava, she was able to give us enough information to identify Jason.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Indian-ink tattoos on his hand. Unmistakable. He’s going down, this time.’

  ‘He’s still only sixteen. That’s a child, the last time I looked.’

  ‘He’s been kept out of the really serious juvenile detention centres before now. But not any more. He’s a serial offender, Shane, and a fucking menace to society. Do you want to see a photo of that old lady’s face? He bruised it up pretty good. Bit her cheek so badly she needed stitches. I could give you a description of the genital scarring.’

  I shook my head. ‘No thanks.’

  ‘He might have only been a pup when you last saw him,’ Miriam said, ‘but he’s grown into a fucking Rottweiler. There’s nothing any of us can do, now, except put him where he isn’t a danger to anyone.’

  I rubbed my eyes. ‘Can I go and talk to him?
’

  Miriam sat back and put her hands behind her head. I could see her biceps flex beneath her blue shirt. She was a pretty girl, but it would have been a mistake to think that was all she was. ‘Are you sure you want to?’

  ‘I guess I owe it to him.’

  ‘Why? What good will it do?’

  ‘Dunno. But it can’t hurt, can it?’

  She shrugged. ‘Your funeral. Come on, then.’

  *

  Jason was sitting on a thin mattress on the floor of his cell. There was no other furniture, so I closed the lid on the stainless-steel toilet, and sat on that.

  ‘I’ll be at the other end of the corridor,’ Miriam said, and left us.

  ‘D’you want a cigarette?’ I asked.

  Jason nodded.

  When I had two lit, I looked at him. His eyes were red from crying, and I noticed that his hands were almost completely discoloured from the amount of tattoos he had on them. I thought, momentarily, that he had been stupid not to wear gloves when he had broken into the old woman’s house, but dismissed the thought. If he had been stoned or psychotic enough, the reality of getting caught would not have even occurred to him.

  ‘I don’t know what you think I can do for you,’ I said. ‘You’ve done some pretty bad shit.’

  ‘Remember when you was workin’ with me in the home?’ There was a childish urgency in his voice. He needed me to remember, as if it somehow validated my being there.

  I nodded. ‘Yeah, Jason. I remember, now.’

  ‘Them was some good times, wasn’t they?’

  I ignored the question. He was not the little boy I had known. That child was still there, but buried deep. Sentimentality could be dangerous.

  ‘Why did you come to Dunleavy House?’ I asked. ‘Was it to see me?’

  Jason smiled sadly. ‘Naw. I didn’t even know you worked there. One o’ the lads I knows told me your boss got him out o’ juvie. I thought yiz might be able to get me off what I done.’

  ‘What did your friend do?’

  ‘Breakin’ and ent’rin’.’

  ‘Jason, you raped an old woman. That’s a hell of a lot more serious.’ I was viscerally aware that the assault on the elderly lady was only a small part of what this skinny kid had done, but didn’t think revisiting his other crimes served any purpose, just then.