Second Hand Jane (30 page)

“And a right
moody bugger to boot.”

“Pardon?”

“Nothing.”

“You will be
sending us a copy of the article, though, won’t you?” he asked
again.

Once a month,
Jess faithfully sent copies of her weekly column cut out of the
paper to her parents. “If Mum’s such a whiz kid on the computer
these days, you two could always read it online.”

“Your mother’s
relationship with the Internet is very new and I have a feeling it
won’t last. Besides, she likes to have a hard copy of your column
so that she can pass it round her friends.”

That was news
to Jess, and she felt herself softening a little where her mother
was concerned. “Really? Well, okay then, I’ll post it off as soon
as it’s run.”

“From what you
read to me last time we spoke, it sounded like you were trying to
get a moral point across to your readers, not just relaying to them
what happened. Am I right?”

Jess thought
for a moment. Her dad’s perception amazed her because until he’d
mentioned it, she hadn’t realised that was exactly what she had
tried to do. “I hadn’t thought about it like that but I suppose
that was what made it so special to write. It sounds a bit
pretentious but I don’t usually get the opportunity to be
thought-provoking and I hope I have managed it. Maybe it will make
people contemplate the ongoing effects war has on innocent families
because what happened to Amy should never happen again in Ireland.
I want her to become real to the reader and not just a casualty in
an old fight.” Brianna’s face sprang to mind. “My friend summed it
up when she said hearing what Owen had to say made her want to go
and hug her son. Families are just too precious to be destroyed by
one senseless act.” As she finished her impassioned speech, she
realised Frank Baré was indeed a clever man. He had just set her
up.

“Exactly,
Jessica. Think about what you just said when your mother
arrives.”

She knew he was
right and she loved her mother—of course she did—but she was just
so damn annoying at times. “Point taken.”

“Good. Anyway,
Mum wants another word with you so I’ll say cheerio,
sweetheart.”

As she listened
to her mother burble on excitedly about her impending trip and how
she couldn’t wait to visit Trinity College and Dublin Castle and
all the other sights, the realisation that there was nothing she
could say or do that would change things sank in. She was coming to
Dublin whether Jess liked it or not.

On Saturday morning, the twentieth of
October, 2012—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 1976. It’s no fairy
story, though, nor is it just the sad relaying of brutal facts that
ended in Lisburn in 1983. It might have finished there, though, 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
flag stone 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 versed evil within those pages
and always won. If only we could hold onto that analogy
forever.

I often
wonder, when I open my books to find another boy or girl’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 makeup 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 the 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 late thirties, 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 2012 began with the need for extra spends and a sale at a church
fete. That sorted, he laid the facts bare:

Amy was two
years older than me and she was turning into a bit of a tearaway.
The day it happened, she’d told our Ma that she was going to her
friend Evie’s house and Evie told her Ma she was coming to ours.
Instead, the girls caught the bus up to Lisburn.

Amy had her
eye on a lad who worked up that way, so Evie told us later. She’d
met him at a dance and was determined to see him again, even though
according to Evie he didn’t want to know her. We never found
anything else out about him apart from the fact he was a Catholic
boy who’d had the gall to show his face at a dance in Banbridge.
The local lads took umbrage at this boy talking to one of “their”
girls and he’d received a kicking for his trouble. I think that for
Amy, it smacked of Romeo and Juliet—an impossible love in her eyes,
which made her chase after him and read all the things
sixteen-year-old girls read in to situations where there is nothing
but a busted nose and broken ribs to read at all.

Things were
bad back in ’83. So she 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. Ballymcguinness is a dot of a place, though, claustrophobic
for young people. The girls had itchy feet and the element of risk
in going somewhere they knew full well they had no business in
going was exciting to them. It would give them a bit of kudos with
their pals—something to show off to them about. They were six foot
tall and bulletproof. Besides, we were all so bloody naïve, tucked
away from the worst of it all. The fighting always seemed to be
happening somewhere else, not in our backyard.

Evie told us
later that she’d left her bag in the coffee shop they’d been
hanging out in for most of the day. Amy had been eyeing up this lad
she fancied as her Romeo, who worked across the road from the café
at a garage. They’d sat smoking cigarettes, trying to look
sophisticated, drinking manky, bottomless coffee until it was time
to get the bus home. Evie ran back down the road to fetch her bag
while Amy waited at the bus stop outside O’Hara’s Butchers. There’d
be murder to pay at home if they missed the last bus and got caught
out.

It was a
Loyalist bombing that went wrong. A meeting was due to be held in
the back of the butcher’s. Christopher O’Hara, an IRA hard man in
his 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. 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 his local, 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 abroad 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 as a woman who never recovered from her
loss and his father has retired to a home in Dundrum, a man who
never recovered from his losses. What happened to the Ahernes’
daughter was not their fault but parents will always second-guess
their every action that culminated in an event that 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-ups 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 star’s posters, played her
records too loud and dreamt 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
by 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.”