I churned over what I’d just read: one in four children dying before the age of five, many from malnutrition despite the state paying the nuns good money to keep them, women and girls working throughout their pregnancies and beyond, then forced to sign away any future contact with their child, rumours of illegal adoptions to the US and UK.
Then there were the survivors’ stories. One woman recalled daily beatings by the nuns, the ache of hunger pangs and seeing the other children’s extended bellies. A man remembered lines of urine-soaked mattresses propped against a dormitory wall. Another said that some of the children spoke to each other in their own made-up language, such was their isolation from the outside world. Then the final insult. After all that suffering in their short lives, the children were denied dignity in death and their bodies were cast in the ground like pieces of rotten fruit without even a headstone or a simple cross to mark their existence. I shook my head and exhaled. After the paedophile scandals and the Magdalene Laundries I thought nothing more could shock me about the Catholic Church. How wrong I was.
After I’d finished my joint, I went back inside and filled my wineglass once more. I took a photo of Tess from the bookshelf and lay down on the sofa with it. It was one of my favourites. Karen had had framed it in onyx and silver and given it to me on the day of the funeral. I held it up to the faint lamplight.
Tess was holding me shortly after I was born. Even though she was thirty at the time she looked about eighteen. She was a slip of a thing in a blue shift dress with a white collar. Her blonde hair was curled at the ends and pulled back in an Alice band and she looked more like a schoolgirl with her baby sister than a mother with her child. I looked closely at her face. I’d always thought she looked happy in the picture but now I saw that only her mouth was smiling. Her eyes were wide and scared, like a rabbit caught in headlights. She’d waited fourteen years after the birth of her firstborn to have me and then another six to have Mikey. I knew she’d had a spell in hospital after I was born and I now wondered if my arrival had triggered bad memories of her time in the Mother and Baby home. I still couldn’t understand why she and dad didn’t simply get married after the birth – surely the nuns would have allowed that? Instead, they put the baby up for adoption, started a new life and tried to forget all about it. But the memories returned to haunt her like a weed bursting through a cracked paving stone. And I strongly suspected that burying her secret made Tess mentally ill.
I’d once seen a TV programme about women who’d been forced to give their babies up for adoption in a Mother and Baby home. Every single one said they thought about their child every day of their lives. One called hers her “ghost child”. It was now clear to me that Tess also had a ghost child – one who had haunted my childhood, who had been in the kitchen the day Mikey ripped out of her belly, in our bedrooms every night when she tucked us in and on the doorstep every morning when she waved us off to school – and was also hovering in the porch on the day the picture was taken.
I looked out of the window at the plate-moon hanging high in the sky and an image came to me. Another moon, the outline of mountains and two silhouettes on a hilltop in the dead of night. The caretaker from the home and a nun passing him a small bundle. I closed my eyes and swallowed. Is that what happened to Tess’s baby? Was its tiny body, now a mass of bones, lying in the mass grave in Tuam with all those others? It was a possibility. Yet thousands of babies had passed through the Tuam home in the years it had been open. Statistically it was far more likely my sibling had been adopted.
My initial feelings of shock and disgust were turning to anger. Tess was sixteen when she went into the home. No more than a child. I had no doubt she suffered terribly at the hands of the nuns. How could any of those women and girls escape a hell hole like that without mental scars? Her mental health issues had to be related to the time she spent in that home. I was sure of it.
I looked at the picture again, kissed her face and whispered, “I’m going to find your baby, Tess, I promise you.”
I held it tightly to my chest. I was determined to find out what had happened to my sibling and to Tess. Someone was going to pay for what they’d done to my mother.
Chapter 11
“Why the hell didn’t you wake me?”
Startled, I looked up from my laptop. Joe was standing in the kitchen doorway pulling on his high-viz jacket. He looked dishevelled, unshaven and cross.
“Sorry, I didn’t notice the time. I’ve been up for ages but I’ve been engrossed in something.”
I’d dozed off on the sofa in the kitchen, clutching Tess’s photograph, the night before. Then not long afterwards I’d been woken by the sound of Joe clattering through the front door. He stumbled
