Second Hand Jane (10 page)

After a few
minutes, she put the phone back in its cradle and getting to her
feet, decided to go and have that shower. The numbness had
definitely worn off now and perhaps drowning herself under a hot
shower faucet might make her feel marginally less worse about the
tactless, one-sided conversation she had just had. She was halfway
down the hall when she heard the phone shrill. Retracing her steps,
she picked it up and found herself pressing it to her ear a little
tighter as 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 was not
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 on 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 is 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,
Jess noticed as he began to
talk.

“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
had assumed he was the older brother. 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 Ma.”

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 and there were a lot of tit for tat killings
going on, you know? So Amy knew that 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 in going—well, it would give them a bit of kudos with
their pals. God knows we were naïve 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 firsthand 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 café they’d been hanging out in
for most of the day, eyeing up this lad Amy fancied who worked
across the road at a mechanics’. 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 butchers 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 shop. 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 Ma, 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 had been through what this poor man
and his family had been through? 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 am sorry to burden you with our family history like
that.” The curtness was back in his voice and she felt his wall go
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 Ma and Da to pull their hair out, she was a normal girl,
you know. She liked messing around with makeup, listening to music,
and trailing round all moony-eyed after boys. She wasn’t political
in the slightest but what happened that day meant that’s all she is
remembered for and I think the story you are 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 are 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 where she had printed her name all those
years ago on the coffee table in front of her and she traced her
finger over the letters. “Is tomorrow too soon for me to come? If
you give me your mobile details, I can text through what time I
will be arriving.”

***

As it turned
out, the operator for Bus Eireann told her there were only two
buses every day to Ballymcguinness: one in the morning and one in
the late afternoon. Jess decided to get on the eight a.m. bus and
return at five p.m. later that day.

“You’ll arrive
sometime around twelve o’clock, in time for your lunch, so you
will,” the operator informed her as she booked a return ticket.
“It’s around about a four-hour trip each way, with a few wee stops
along the way.”

She assumed he didn’t mean “wee” stops
literally. Nothing was ever precise in Ireland either, she thought
with a half-smile, thanking him for his help and hanging up. Next
she banged out an email outlining to her boss, Niall, the story
idea she wanted to put together in the vague hope of some travel
expenses coming her way. Fat chance of that, she thought;
the
Express
’s
coffers were tighter than Olivia Newton John’s spandex pants
in
Grease
. Oh,
well, the fare wasn’t going to break the bank, she thought, sighing
and shutting her laptop. Besides, she’d write Amy’s story for free
if it came to it.

After texting
the number Owen had left her to give him her guesstimated arrival
time in Ballymcguinness, she decided to give Brianna a call and
fill her in on the latest instalment where Amy was concerned.

***

“Oh my God,
Jess! I didn’t expect that—I bet you didn’t either. That’s
unbelievably awful. Whenever I hear things like that, I want to
hold Harry and never let him out of my sight—speaking of whom, he
was last seen heading toward my room with a look of intent on his
face. I’ve just bought a new nail varnish and he’s determined to
get a hold of it. Remember what happened last time I was gassing on
the phone?”

Jess did indeed
remember; she didn’t think she would ever forget. Harry had decided
to put his mother’s fuchsia colourfast lippy on all his teddies.
They’d looked like they belonged in a teddy bear brothel, not a
little boy’s bedroom, by the time he had finished. She held the
phone away from her ear while Brianna yelled, “Harry, come here
please. Mammy needs you.

“
Sorry about that,” she said a few moments
later. “I’ve plonked him in front of the telly—his favourite
Sponge Bob
is on so we won’t hear a peep
out of him. Now, then, your girl Amy—I still can’t believe she died
like that. I mean, I grew up hearing about what was happening in
the North and seeing bits of it on the news while my Mammy and Da
tut-tutted over it all but it always seemed like it was happening
in another country.”

“In someone
else’s backyard.” Jess echoed Owen’s earlier words.

“Exactly.”

“It’s a real
tragedy, isn’t it? And I bet Amy’s story is only one of hundreds
but it is a story I get the privilege of telling. I’m catching the
bus to Ballymcguinness tomorrow morning to meet with Owen.”

“The bus?
Jaysus, you’re game! Why did you not look at catching the Dublin to
Belfast Express? The train only takes a couple of hours at the
most. You could have got a bus down from there to this
Ballymcguinness. Sure, it would have only been a hop, skip, and a
jump away.”

“I didn’t know
express was even a word in the Irish language.”

“Ha-ha! Well,
I’ll get the last laugh when you’re clutching your bum as you
bounce over every pothole from here to the back of
Ballybeyond.”

Mental note to
self, Jess thought: bring a cushion. Her cell-phone announced an
incoming text and she quickly glanced at the new message. It was
from Owen, asking why she hadn’t booked herself on the Belfast
Express. She decided not to mention the text to Brianna, whose tone
had grown sombre.

“Seriously,
though, tread lightly, Jess; it’s bound to be emotional for this
Owen chap, talking about his sister in-depth with you like that
after all these years.”

“I’m not Nora,
Brie. I won’t bulldoze my way in.”

“Sure, I know
you won’t but hey speaking of Nora, I got the weirdest text from
her. You know what they’re like to decipher but I think she was on
about skydiving. Surely not, though; Nora’s terrified of
heights.”

“Ah yes, but
she’s also mad about Ewan. Question is—is she mad enough to throw
herself out of a plane for him?”

Both girls
chorused, “No way!”

***

Er, yes way, she thought, shaking her head
in disbelief at seven thirty that night. She was scrolling through
photos Nora had just sent through to her email as evidence that
she, Nora Brennan, had indeed done a skydive. Jess’s eyes widened
as she took in the impressive sight of one of her best friends,
spread eagled and decked out in some hideous padded suit with
goggles on, blonde hair flayed out behind her and mouth forming a
perfect terrified
O
as she launched herself into the great blue
yonder. Crikey, Jess thought; she really does have it bad for
Ewan.

Spying a new
message from her boss, she opened it and to her surprise read that
Niall was so enthused over her story idea he wanted to run it as a
full-page article, independent of her column for which, if the
figure he had quoted as payment was correct, she was to be
generously reimbursed. Her eyes widened further as she carried on
reading. The
Express
would
pay her travel costs to Ballymcguinness, too, and any other
additional costs she incurred. She felt inordinately pleased that
it wasn’t just her that recognised Amy’s story was one that needed
to be told; it was just a bummer that she hadn’t booked a
first-class seat on the train after all.