Strange Sally Diamond(71)

‘Peter,’ he said, and it was the first time he had called me that since we had left London, ‘you have your disease and I have mine.’

‘What?’ I said, sullen.

‘Let me speak, please. I’m not proud of what I am. I know it’s a sickness, this attraction to young girls, but it’s a disease I have no control over. Like your disease. We are what we are and –’

‘You have control,’ I interrupted him. I wasn’t prepared to let him paint himself as the victim. ‘You chose to take my mother out of her garden when she was a child, you chose to kidnap Lindy from the lake, and worse than that, you pretended that you were doing it for me.’

I didn’t challenge him about my disease. I was going to research that myself.

‘I’m sick, Peter, what do you expect me to do about it?’

‘You should hand yourself in to the police. Tell them who you are and what you did in Ireland.’

‘And what would become of you?’

‘I’d manage. What about my sister?’

‘Who?’

‘The baby that was born in Ireland, in that room!’ I raised my voice.

‘I had no use for her, Peter. I wanted a son, but not a daughter, and I wasn’t cruel. I could have taken that child from Denise, but it would have broken her.’

‘You don’t think she wasn’t broken already? Shackled to a radiator for God knows how many years? You told me to kick her and to hit her when I was too young to know better. And you knew she would never retaliate because she loved me.’

‘I love you,’ he said, and I could see tears in his eyes. He put his hand on my arm, and I let it stay there, so starved was I of human contact. We had always had a tactile relationship when I was younger, but once I’d hit my teens, it seemed less appropriate. I took my cues from television and grown boys did not walk hand in hand with their fathers. They did not hug them or hold them close. I withdrew from Dad, physically, though I missed the touch dreadfully. In that moment, I felt sorry for him. But not so sorry that I didn’t spend the next week at the library.

At home, Dad and I reached an understanding. He didn’t know how I was spending my days once I dropped him at his office. He thought I was working the land. We didn’t talk about Lindy. He had left the key out on the kitchen table. I could visit her while he was at work, but I found it hard to face her. Apart from dropping off groceries, I left her alone.

In the library, I asked for every medical journal they had, but they only had their own New Zealand Medical Journal. I went through every edition of the previous five years. There was no mention of my disease, but I thought perhaps New Zealand was too small. Dad had said it was incredibly rare. The library agreed to order back issues of the British Medical Journal, The New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association. All of these journals had been cited in the New Zealand one. I remembered the Boy in the Bubble. Was he the only child in the world to have Severe Combined Immuno Deficiency? How different was my disease? How did Dad have me diagnosed in a small country like Ireland?

Ever since I had started going to the shops, the library, selling my vegetables, I had carried out all transactions wearing hats with earflaps as well as gloves and several more layers of clothes to protect myself in spite of the discomfort in summer months when every other boy was in shorts and a singlet. My hair was deliberately long to cover my neck. I planned on growing a beard, but my facial hair was still sparse. I knew the people I dealt with thought I looked odd, but Dad had told me there was no point in explaining anything as nobody would understand. I had been bumped into by people a number of times despite how cautious I was, and had been terrified each time, but there was never any skin-to-skin contact. Dad had carried out any dental work, so my teeth were fine. I had recurring tonsillitis, but Dad always managed to get me antibiotics to treat that. I had never seen a doctor. Maybe it was time.





41


Sally


‘So, who is Mark Butler?’ I asked Angela as she made me sit down at the kitchen table.

‘Let’s wait until you have a cup of tea in your hand,’ she said, and flicked on the kettle.

The doorbell rang. I went to the door with Angela hot on my heels and opened it to see a young guard in a uniform that was too big.

‘I’m Garda Owen Reilly, here to collect a piece of evidence,’ he said.

‘It’s there, the card and the envelope,’ I said, pointing to the table that had Martha’s Post-it on it. I quickly updated Angela on the birthday card. The guard picked it up with a pair of tweezers and put it into an evidence bag.

‘Should we tell him about Mark Butler?’ I asked her. Garda Reilly looked at us quizzically.

‘I don’t think it’s anything to do with the guard’s enquiry,’ said Angela. ‘Let’s let the man go on about his business.’

‘If there’s anything funny going on, you should tell me,’ he said.

‘It’s private family business,’ said Angela. He looked miffed not to be let in on the secret.

I was annoyed too. As I closed the door on Garda Reilly, I turned to her and said, ‘Tell me!’

She steered me back to the kitchen, pushed me down into the chair and went back to filling the teapot.

‘For God’s sake, Angela, I’m not a child. What do you know?’