Broken Harbour

“Except then Pat goes, ‘Jenny. My sweetheart. My lovely little missus. I know I’ve been a crap husband the last while. God, I totally know that. I haven’t been able to look after you, I haven’t been able to look after the kids, and you guys have stood by me while I sat here and let us fall deeper into the shite every day.’

“I tried to tell him it wasn’t about money, money didn’t even matter any more, but he wouldn’t let me. He shook his head and went, ‘Shhh. Hang on. I need to say this, OK? I know you don’t deserve to live like this. You deserve all the fancy clothes and expensive curtains in the world. Emma deserves dance lessons. Jack deserves tickets to Man U. And it’s been killing me that I can’t give you that stuff. But this, at least, this one thing, this I can do. I can get this little fucker. We’ll have it stuffed and mount it on the sitting- room wall. How’s that?’

“He was stroking my hair, my cheek, and he was smiling at me, actually smiling-he looked honest-to-God happy. Joyful, like the answer to all our problems was shining right there in front of him and he knew exactly how to catch it. He went, ‘Trust me. Please. I finally know what I’m doing. Our lovely house, Jen, it’s going to be all safe again. The kids, they’re going to be safe. Don’t worry, baby. It’s OK. I won’t let this thing get you.’”

Jenny’s voice was rocking wildly; her hands were fisted in the bedclothes. “I didn’t know how to say it to him: that was exactly what he was doing. He was letting this thing, this animal, this stupid insane imaginary it was never even there animal, he was letting it eat Jack and Emma alive. Every second he sat there staring at that hole, he was giving it another bite out of their minds. If he didn’t want it to have them, all he had to do was get up! Fix the holes! Put the bloody vase away!”

Her voice was so thick with damage and tears and rising hysteria, I could barely make out the words. Maybe someone else would have patted her shoulder and come out with the perfect thing to say. I couldn’t touch her. I took the glass of water from her bedside table and held it out. Jenny buried her face in it, choking and coughing, until she got some water down and the terrible noises subsided.

She said, down to the glass, “So then I just sat there next to him, on the floor. It was freezing cold, but I couldn’t get up. I was too dizzy, it was the worst it’s ever been, everything kept sliding and tilting. I thought if I tried to stand up I’d fall over face-first and smash my head on one of the cupboards, and I knew I couldn’t do that. I think we sat there for a couple of hours, I don’t know. I just held onto this thing”-the drawing, spattered with drops of water now-“and I stared at it. I was terrified that if I stopped looking at it even for a second, I’d forget it had ever existed, and then I’d forget that I needed to do something about it.”

She wiped at her face, for water or for tears, I couldn’t tell. “I kept thinking about that JoJo’s pin, up in my drawer. How happy we were back then. How that had to be why I’d dug it out of some box: because I was trying to find something happy. All I could think was How did we get here? I felt like there had to be something we had done, me and Pat, to make this happen, and if I could just find that, then maybe I could change it and everything would be different. But I couldn’t find it. I thought right back to the first time we kissed, when we were sixteen-it was on the beach in Monkstown, it was evening but it was summer so it was still bright and so warm, the warm air on my arms. We were sitting on a rock talking, and Pat just leaned over to me and… I went through every moment I could remember, every single one, but I couldn’t find anything. I couldn’t work out how we had ever got here, this kitchen floor, from where we started out.”

She had quieted. Behind the fine gold haze of hair, her face was still, turned inwards. Her voice was steady. I was the one who was afraid.

Jenny said, “Everything looked so weird. It felt like the light kept getting brighter, till it turned into searchlights everywhere; or like there had been something wrong with my eyes for months, some kind of haze blurring them up, and all of a sudden it was gone and I could see again. Everything looked so shiny and so sharp it hurt, and it was all so beautiful-just ordinary stuff like the fridge and the toaster and the table, they looked like they were made out of light, floating, like they were angel things that would blow you to atoms if you touched them. And then I started floating too, I was floating up off the ground, and I knew I had to do something fast, before I just drifted away through the window, and the kids and Pat were left there to get eaten up alive. I said, ‘Pat, we have to get out now’-at least I think I did, I’m not sure. He didn’t hear me, either way. He didn’t notice when I got up, didn’t even notice I was leaving-he was whispering something to that hole, I couldn’t hear what… Going up the stairs took forever because my feet weren’t touching the ground, I couldn’t move forward, I kept hanging there trying to go up in slow motion. I knew I should be scared that I wasn’t going to get there in time, but I wasn’t; I didn’t feel anything at all, just numb and sad. So sad.”

The thin bloodied thread of her voice, winding through the dark of that night to its monstrous heart. The tears had stopped; this place was far beyond tears. “I gave them kisses, Emma and Jack. I said to them, ‘It’s OK. It’s OK. Mummy loves you so much. I’m coming. Wait for me; I’ll be there as soon as I can.’”

Maybe I should have made her say it. I couldn’t open my mouth. The humming was a fretsaw whining at my skull; if I moved, breathed, I would split into a thousand pieces. My mind was flailing for something else, anything. Dina. Quigley. Richie, white-faced.

“Pat was still on the kitchen floor. The knife was right there beside him. I picked it up and he turned around and I stuck it into his chest. He stood up and he went, ‘What…?’ He was staring at his chest and he looked so amazed, like he couldn’t work out what had happened, he just couldn’t understand. I said, ‘Pat we have to go,’ and I did it again and then he grabbed me, my wrists, and we were fighting, all over the kitchen-he was trying not to hurt me, just hold me, but he was so much stronger and I was so scared he would get the knife away-I was kicking him, I was screaming, ‘Pat hurry we have to hurry…’ He was going, ‘Jenny Jenny Jenny’-he looked like Pat again, he was looking at me properly and it was terrible, why couldn’t he have looked at me like that before?”

O’Kelly. Geri. My father. I slid my eyes out of focus till Jenny was just a blur of white and gold. Her voice in my ears stayed mercilessly clear, that fine thread pulling me onwards, slicing deep.

“There was blood all over. It felt like he was getting weaker, but so was I-I was so tired… I went, ‘Please, Pat, please stop, we have to go find the kids, we can’t leave them alone there,’ and he just froze, stopped still in the middle of the floor and stared at me. I could hear us both breathing, these big ugly gasping noises. Pat said-his voice, Jesus, the sound in his voice-he went, ‘Oh, God. What did you do?’

“His hands had gone all loose on my wrists. I got away and I hit him with the knife again. He didn’t even notice. He started to head for the kitchen door, and then he fell over. He just fell. He was trying to crawl for a second, but he stopped.”

Jenny’s eyes shut for a second. So did mine. The one thing I had been hoping for Pat, the one thing that had been left to hope, was that he had never known about the children.

Jenny said, “I sat down beside him and I stuck the knife in my chest and then in my stomach, but it didn’t work-my hands were all, they were all slippy and I was shaking so hard and I wasn’t strong enough! I was crying and I tried my face and my throat and everywhere, but it was no good: my arms were like jelly. I couldn’t even sit up any more, I was lying on the floor, but I was still there. I… Oh, God.” The shudder galvanized her whole body. “I thought I was going to get stuck there. I thought the neighbors would have heard us fighting and called the cops, and an ambulance was going to come and… I’ve never been so frightened. Never. Never.”

She was rigid, staring into the folds and valleys of that worn blanket, seeing things. She said, “I prayed. I knew I didn’t have any right to, but I did anyway. I thought maybe God would strike me dead for it, but that was what I was praying for anyway. I prayed to the Virgin Mary; I thought maybe she might understand. I said the Hail Mary-I couldn’t remember half the words, it was so long since I’d said it, but I said the bits I could remember. I said Please, over and over. Please.”

I said, “And that’s when Conor arrived.”

Jenny’s head came up and she stared at me, confused, as if she had forgotten I was there. After a moment she shook her head. “No. Conor didn’t do anything. I haven’t seen Conor for, since, for years-”

“Mrs. Spain, we can prove he was in the house that night. We can prove that some of your wounds weren’t self-inflicted. That puts at least part of the attack on Conor. Right now, he’s going down for three murders and one attempted. If you want to get him out of trouble, the best thing you can do for him is tell me exactly what happened.”

I couldn’t get any force into my voice. It felt like a struggle underwater, slowed, weary; both of us were too drained to remember why we were fighting each other, but we kept going because there was nothing else. I asked,