Anyway, I’d worked out a long time ago, and this was reinforced as I got older and came across some of the kids I’d grown up with, that the religious – the Crucifix Brigade who brought me up, some of them anyway – had a system for naming dumped kids. I’d met up with a kid called Brag. He found out his real name was Brown. He came from Athenry in County Galway. They’d used the first two letters of his real name ‘BR’ and added the ‘A’ from Athenry and the ‘G’ from Galway and came up with Brag for easy reference. B-R-A-G. Dock: ‘DO’ being the first two letters of my real name Donavan, ‘C’ for Clonkeelin, ‘K’ for Kildare. That’s how they’d arrived at Dock. I met another lad who hadn’t been able to find out his real name. I knew him as Tom Crew. I told him he’d probably discover that his real name began with ‘CR’ and that he came from some town beginning with ‘E’ in a county beginning with ‘W’. Waterford or Wexford, or some place like that. That’s the way the bastards have you, y’see – running around buying maps to find out where you come from. I’m not saying they did this countrywide, but it did go on a fair bit. Another lad was called Lord. I didn’t fancy his chances. Lord, like Kells, is a religious name. Since the religious didn’t know where Lucille came from, they’d obviously come up with her name and offered it up in their prayers or some crap like that. Unknowns – those babies who were abandoned without paperwork, as opposed to those whose backgrounds were known – were given names with a religious connotation to them. That’s my theory. The nuns probably named her after a ninth-century holy book that was written by some monk, The Book of Kells.
Kells is also a very rare name. In the phone books countrywide there are only a few dozen of them. And how many of those would be called Lucille? Dock’s the same.
It’s not a common name either. Ring up directory inquiries and ask for a Robert Dock – different than asking for a Robert Murphy. To tell you the truth, before I went looking for her, it hit me when I kept seeing all the kids going about with mobiles to their ears. I thought maybe Lucille had come out of that orphanage and settled in the nearest city. So I rang the mobile-phone directory inquiries for Galway. No good. Her name wasn’t registered with them. I told them to try Dublin. Kids have a habit of flocking to the capital. There was one Lucille Kells in Dublin. I had a number. But that’s all I had.
I gave it a go. ‘Lucille Kells?’
‘Yes?’
I fed her some crap that added up to ‘I have a letter which I have been asked to pass on to you from Connemara. Cellphone gave me your number, but not your address.’
‘Number two, Primrose Avenue, Dublin Four.’
‘Thanks.’
The easy ways are often the best. I took a spin round to Primrose Avenue to make sure I had the right girl. There she was. The sweater she was wearing covered that port wine stain on her arm, but it was her, right up to that red blemish in her eye. Oddly enough, I rarely saw that arm of hers again. She always seemed to wear long sleeves. Embarrassed by it, I suppose.
I followed her for a while after that, found out she worked in a café, shared her flat with an unemployed girl, Gemma Small, one of the kids from the orphanage, got to know some day-to-day stuff about them.
All I had to do now was let her know who she was – Anne Donavan’s daughter.
And the only way to do that was by giving her her birth certificate.
The trouble was, I couldn’t just send it to her. It had to look right.
I remembered how some of the kids I grew up with had been treated when they left the home. Sometimes they’d be told who they were, usually by being given letters that had been sent to them over the years by relatives, which had been kept from them. There are so many variations on how kids were treated that I could go on forever telling you about them. The religious, for whatever reason, didn’t treat us all with the same consideration. Some kids were given info about themselves, most weren’t. The thing was, it was plausible to be given it. Lucille would know that. So I went back to the orphanage where I’d left her and asked, in passing, about the sister I’d seen Lucille with. ‘Oh, she’s moved on to such and such a place,’ I was told.
‘Oh, and what about Sister …? I used to love talking to her … What’s this her name was?’
‘Sister Joseph?’
‘Yeah.’ Yeah, m’bollocks.
‘Oh, dear Sister Joseph passed away five months ago.’
I was in. It was only a question of posting the cert to Lucille, saying Jo had asked for it to be passed on. It wasn’t the first time it’d been done. And Jo wasn’t around to call me a liar.
LUCILLE
When I was eighteen I went to Joyce House in Dublin.
‘Hello.’
‘Hello, what can I do for you?’
‘Tell me who I really am please.’
Two years later they’d completed their search. ‘Sorry, nothing exists on you prior to your being left on the orphanage steps as a baby.’
‘OK, bye now.’
‘Bye.’
That pretty much sums it up.
A job in a café paid the bills and because meals were included I was able to put by a little each week while I waited for a place at University College Dublin for a degree in psychology and social studies. I wanted to become a child psychologist. That was how I saw my future and I’d resigned myself to the fact that I would never find my mother.
But then a letter arrived containing my long
