Strange Sally Diamond(91)

‘Are you okay?’ said Sue. ‘You seem a little agitated?’ and indeed I was looking behind her down the lane, hopping from foot to foot.

‘Yes, yes, I’m fine, thank you. I’ll see you during the week, okay?’ I closed the door and went back to the kitchen. I had prepared sandwiches way too early. They had dried out. I set about making fresh ones, chicken, ham, tomato and coleslaw. Peter could be a vegetarian. I knew nothing about my brother.





51


Peter, 2019


It took me twenty-eight hours to get to Ireland, compared to the three-month ordeal it had taken to get to New Zealand almost forty years earlier. I ordered DNA test kits to be sent to the hotel in Dublin I had booked. I wrote my letter to Mary. Then I wandered around the city on foot. I bought some winter clothes. I’d travelled light. I’d never been in the city centre before, even as a child. Dublin was modern and multicultural and unfamiliar in every way.

The pay-as-you-go mobile phone rang over two weeks after I sent the letter. Mary had not alerted the police. There was an uncle, Denise’s brother, Mark. He collected me in Dublin on 14th December and drove the two hours to Mary’s cottage. He grilled me in the car about his sister. What did I remember? Had she ever mentioned him? What was she like? The questions were like an assault, and I avoided answering as much as I could.

We drove across the country mostly on a motorway. The day was dark and grey and wet. The sun did not appear. The land was flat. We stopped at a service station for fuel and we had bad coffee. I didn’t know what to think of Mark. He seemed way too young to be my uncle, but we discovered he was only five years older than me. He said grimly that Denise was twelve when she gave birth to me. Neither of us said much for the rest of the journey.





52


Sally


Peter said he was seven years older than me but he looked much older. His wrinkles were deep and his face was weathered. His hair was short and grey, receding. He was clean-shaven. There was a faint white line across his forehead. An old scar? Inflicted by Conor Geary? But his eyes – the shape, the hazel colour – and his nose were identical to mine. My brother.

We didn’t have an immediate connection. It was more gradual than that. Mark and I knew it would be awkward. It was hard to know what to call him to start with. I was adamant that I was Sally Diamond. He had been Steven Armstrong for most of his life, but now, he asked us to call him Peter. He was not forthcoming in conversation, and I was nervous at first. It was the Christmas season, so I was called on to play at the hotel a lot. I paid for Peter to stay in the Abbey Hotel in Roscommon and we would meet in my house whenever I was free. Mark always tried to be there too.

On the first day, there were long silences and occasional small talk. But Peter’s small talk was even smaller than mine. It was only on the second day that we broached the subject of our father and who he was. Peter insisted that he wasn’t physically harmed by Conor Geary in the same way my mother was. Peter lived most of his early life in solitary confinement, fearing that a made-up disease was going to kill him. A disease designed to keep him away from everyone and to make him entirely dependent on Conor Geary. Our birth father was cruel and manipulative. My brother was as isolated as I had been, but not through choice. He had desperately wanted to go to school and make friends but, by the time his father died, it was too late and he didn’t know how to be social. It was hard to get this information from him, but Mark was good at coaxing him, and later, after Peter had gone back to the hotel, Mark would come back to the house and parse what Peter had said and what he didn’t say. Mark was good at reading between the lines.

Peter still felt guilt about Conor Geary’s death because he’d been driving the car. The scar on his forehead was a result of that, and the terrible burns on his arms, from when he had tried to pull his father from the burning car. We assured him that his father, my father, was not worth saving, but he looked out of the window, refusing to meet our eyes.

We clashed over that. Despite everything Conor Geary had done, Peter felt loved by him, as if that cancelled out the horror he had visited on our mother, on me, and on Peter himself with this terrible story of a deadly disease.

‘How can you defend him? I’m so glad he’s dead,’ said Mark.

‘Don’t you understand?’ said Peter. ‘People aren’t one hundred per cent anything. You say he was a monster, and yes, he did terrible things to all of us.’ He looked towards Mark. ‘He took your sister, destroyed her in every way. He kept Sally locked up. He went on the run and dragged me to the other side of the world with him, took my name from me, lied to me, isolated me, but I know that he cared about me. I know he did.’

Mark used sarcasm, I think. ‘Oh well, that’s all right then. As long as he cared about you.’

I felt distressed. I went to the piano and they both shut up then. I played for a while and then asked Mark to take Peter back to the hotel. It was so difficult, but Peter was like me in so many ways. I couldn’t help feeling drawn to him. Over the course of a week, we were able to get a fuller picture of Peter’s life in New Zealand.

On the internet, Mark and I found the archive from the Rotorua Daily Post that told the story of the death of a respected local dentist, James Armstrong, and the survival of his poor orphaned son, Steven. Conor Geary had lived in New Zealand for the best part of five years working as a dentist under a fake name. Peter’s passport was in the name of Steven Armstrong. He was wary of getting his status regularized, although Mark and I both felt that he should reclaim his name and nationality officially. He was here in Ireland on a ninety-day holiday visa. We suggested looking into the practicalities of doing it through my solicitor but Peter was reluctant and terrified of the media. This had to be handled with kid gloves, or not at all. We agreed that Peter should take his time and decide for himself when he wanted to go ahead with it.