‘Can I ask you one more thing?’
‘Okay.’
‘Do you think the baby died of natural causes? Sorry. It’s a horrible question. Do you?’
‘No.’
‘No, you don’t think so; or no, it didn’t?’
‘I think it didn’t.’
They looked at each other for a minute.
‘Oh, well, I’m sure they’ll make a statement later today … so I’ll wait to find out, with the rest of the gang.’ Mary was putting away the notebook and pen, gathering herself.
‘The back of the neck,’ Ali said in a small voice. She lifted a hand to her own nape. ‘It was all bruised. And down her back.’
She could still feel the squeeze of Mary’s hand on her arm as she stood in the Ladies. She shouldn’t have told. But Mary had stirred her up with kind words and the notion that she had something say for herself.
The ladies’ toilets were walled and floored in sand-coloured marble. There was a stack of tiny towels by the oval basins. Her face in the mirror was flushed, her eyes strange to her. She filled a basin and washed her face and hands in cool water. She took one of the towels and buried her face in it, the loops of thread caressing her skin.
The first one was lying under a towel. A grubby yellow towel.
Ali had been looking for her present, the doll called Baby Joy. That’s what she asked Santy for, because her friend Maura Griffin in Dublin said Baby Joy was just like a real baby, not a stiff girl with nylon hair and clicky eyes. She liked the idea that it would be close to real, like someone new to care for. But there was only one present under the tree for her that morning, a plastic cookery set threaded to a big sheet of cardboard. Her cousins seemed to have loads of stuff. She couldn’t make a fuss, not there in her uncle’s house, everyone in their good clothes.
Before Christmas, she wondered whether she would get more presents that year because of her daddy dying. It just came into her mind, but she feared that Santy knew. You shouldn’t think that kind of thing.
She sidled up to her mother’s chair.
‘Does Santy come again if he’s forgotten to bring something?’
Ma laughed, but it wasn’t a kind laugh. It was sharp and drew the attention of the other grown-ups to her.
‘What are they like, these days! No, he doesn’t.’ Ma had a tiny glass in one hand. A tissue poked out of the fist of the other. Ali moved away, slipped into the hall and made her way up to the back bedroom.
She hadn’t been snooping, not really, though that’s what Aunt Una said afterwards, angry with her. It was just that her cousin Roisín had told her about the big wardrobe upstairs. That she had seen presents hidden there. That Santy didn’t exist.
The wardrobe was huge, separating two single beds. It had a mirror on its front and she watched herself approach, her moon-face looming above the velvet party frock that was painfully tight around her ribs that year, and so short that she could see her bare knees.
She opened the door and her reflection slipped sideways and away in a shard of light. A smell of mould rose to greet her. She parted the heavy clothes that hung there, looked down among the wire hangers and shoes scattered across the bottom. There was no present. When she stepped back from the wardrobe, she saw there was a shelf above the clothes rail and could make out some folded blankets there, but no glint or flash of wrapping paper. Still, she felt a high shelf was the very place you would hide something if you wanted to keep it away from children, and it was also the kind of place where a present might get shoved to the back, might get accidentally forgotten in the rush.
She was looking all round the room for something to stand on, when she found the box.
It was under the left-hand bed, right up against the wall. It was larger than a shoebox. It was the size of a doll box. A box that someone had forgotten to wrap and had forgotten was under the bed. Ali lay flat on the lino and slid under, through a thick layer of dust, to pull the box out to the light. There was a curly pattern on the top and she could read well enough to make out the words ‘Baby Joy’.
Her heart beat fast as she lifted the cardboard lid and saw a crumpled yellow towel covering the doll, its sleeping face just visible through a gap in the folds. She had been right all along, and that sense of rightness was stronger than any scratchings of doubt about the griminess of its wrapping or the odd appearance of the doll.
Baby Joy was supposed to look a little ugly, Maura Griffin said so.
Ali moved the towel. The doll’s chest and shoulders were naked, and the colour of the body was strangely mottled, like the skin of her legs when they had been too close to the fire; and although the doll was sleeping, it had a kind of annoyed expression too, as if the dream it was dreaming was something that called for huge concentration. Ali put a hand to the shallow valley on the front of its chest. Cold softness. Not plastic, more like rubber.
She would bring it down and show her mammy.
Ali scrubbed at her face with the towel until it stung, and flung the cloth on top of the others discarded in a basket under the counter.
For twelve years she’d put it out of her mind. If she thought of that box at all, it was as some sort of a bad dream. But now it was back with
