Knock Knock, Open Wide, page 12
“Yup,” said Betty.
“That…” Ashling began, “… was really, really fucking clever. Why the fuck didn’t I think of it?”
“Well, you didn’t have time anyway…”
“I was going to use fucking actual hair. It would have been gross and it would have smelled and probably been a fire hazard and I would have been covered in glue and other people’s hair. And it would have looked awful. Why the fuck didn’t I think of this?!”
A ball of stress that had been building and building in Betty’s stomach suddenly burst and she felt a wave of relief.
She likes it. She likes my giant hairy vagina. Oh thank God.
“Betty, how long did this take you?” Ashling asked.
“Just a few hours,” Betty lied.
She had almost been locked in the building by security and had missed the last bus. She had had to get a taxi home and then wake her mother to pay for it and then endure a noticeably chilly breakfast the next morning.
“You must have been here most of the night,” Ashling said, shaking her head.
“I think you might have saved my life yesterday,” said Betty. “And this was really important to you. So it was important to me. Y’know. By osmosis.”
Osmosis? What the fuck are you talking about?
“Okay,” said Ashling. “Okay. So. This is probably the single sweetest thing that anyone has ever done for me. And I don’t know what to do with that. I’m not good with affection. I don’t know how to properly thank you for this. I don’t know how.”
“You don’t have to,” Betty blurted out. “I wasn’t trying to … You don’t owe me anything. Seriously. Nothing. I don’t want you to feel that you do. I would never want you to fee—”
She stopped because Ashling had put a finger on her lower lip.
Who has fingers that soft? It’s like a little bunny’s paw in a wee satin glove.
Ashling gazed at her. Her eyes were the color of mossy stone on the bed of a lake.
“I am here. And I am listening. What. Do. You. Want?”
Betty’s mouth felt very dry.
“You want to go for coffee?” she asked.
Ashling smiled.
“We go for coffee all the time.”
“No. We go and sit in the same place and drink coffee. I mean, go for coffee.”
The smile remained.
“You know what? I would really like that.”
A voice called from inside the theater.
“Ash, get your monologue in here!”
“Go,” said Betty. “I’m coming to the show, I’ll see you after.”
“Okay,” said Ashling. She turned and began to walk through the giant papier-mâché vagina. She stopped, and Betty heard her mutter “Ah fuck it” under her breath.
Suddenly she had turned around, pulled Betty to her, and all at once there was a hand in her hair, a tongue in her mouth, and joy in every last cell of her body.
The kiss was long, and playful and tender and wonderful. And it only ended when she had a sudden thought that made her burst out laughing.
“What?” Ashling asked, her hands cradling her face, and her forehead pressed against hers. “What’s so funny?”
“I was just thinking, this will be the weirdest fucking story to tell people…” And Betty didn’t even get to finish as Ashling burst out laughing herself.
Betty realized she had never heard her laugh. It was a deliciously filthy cackle, and she loved the sound of it.
They kissed again and Betty’s eyes glanced up at the papier-mâché clitoris that hung over them like mistletoe.
Found it, she thought.
* * *
PS: (inaudible over background noise) … ah, got it. Got it. There it is. It’s recording now.
CPF: Is it not very loud here? Do you want to go somewhere quieter?
PS: Here should be fine. It’s the thirteenth of May, 1999, and I am here in the White Horse Pub in West London with …
CPF: Cian Flynn. Call me Keano.
PS: Thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me.
CPF: Sure. Sure. Happy to. What do you want to know?
PS: So, as I said before, I’ve been investigating Scarnagh since … well, since Scarnagh. Since just after Etain Larkin’s disappearance …
CPF: Well then, can I ask you a question?
PS: Sure, go ahead.
CPF: Do you think they’re connected?
PS: Do I think what’s connected?
CPF: Everything that came after. With Barry and the … (inaudible)
PS: (inaudible) … know. I don’t think so. I certainly don’t think he had anything to do with it. I mean, you knew Barry, didn’t you?
CPF: Oh yeah. Lovely bloke. But that’s what they always say, isn’t it?
PS: Do they?
CPF: Yeah. Like “Oh, he always seemed like such a nice guy” when he was actually …
PS: Actually what?
CPF: Nothing. Nothing. I don’t think Barry did anything.
PS: Keano, do you remember very early on, right after Etain went missing, there was all this talk in the press about a fight?
CPF: At the party. Yeah.
PS: There was one?
CPF: No, I mean I remember people talking about it. I was there the whole night. I never heard anything. They went into the back room together and they didn’t come out again … Etain left in the middle of the night and Barry came out in the morning. I mean, they might have had a fight when they were alone together …
PS: But then they’d be the only two who’d know about it. Barry, Etain, maybe Kate. But all three said there was no fight.
CPF: Yeah.
PS: So where does the story of the fight come from? Who tells the Gardaí that Etain and Barry had a fight and poisons the first few days of the investigation?
CPF: (inaudible)
PS: I’ve tried. She’s hard to get in touch with. Why?
CPF: I think she knew.
PS: What makes you say that?
CPF: Kate. Right before we broke up. Before she moved to London. She said, “Etain knows who shopped Barry.” She wouldn’t tell me who. Then I asked her if she thought she was right.
PS: And what did she say?
CPF: She didn’t say anything. She just looked at me like …
PS: Like … “No”?
CPF: Like “Yeah.” Like “Absolutely fucking ‘yeah.’”
Transcript of call recorded May 13, 1999
File “Skelton. P. #109817”
Archive of the Department of Policy Oversight
MAY 1981
Breakup. I’d bet good money she’s here to break some poor fellah’s heart.
Brendan Flanagan, publican by trade, observer of the human animal by inclination, stood behind the bar idly cleaning a glass and studying the young woman seated at the far end of the pub. She was sitting alone, a half-pint of Guinness in front of her that she’d apparently purchased purely because it matched her outfit for all the interest she seemed to have in drinking it.
She was, to put it bluntly, only gorgeous.
Long black hair, and the dark, almost Italian-looking features of many Dublin women. That, coupled with her tense expression and her hawk-like surveillance of the entrance, was what had Brendan convinced that he was about to witness some hapless sod getting his marching orders.
She was not a regular, and not the kind of patron who would ever become a regular. Brendan Flanagan prided himself on running a reputable establishment, but he was under no illusions that this was the kind of pub that highly eligible young women would flock to. Flanagan’s was an Old Man Pub, and would be until the breaking of the Seventh Seal.
Just off Kildare Street, it had been the watering hole of weary civil servants of the most unglamorous sort for twenty years now.
She’s meeting him here to give him the boot because she’s not planning on ever setting foot here again, Brendan said to himself. He made a mental note to stand the intended victim a pint on the house after surgery had concluded.
As if on cue, a large freckle-faced young man in his twenties with an untidy heap of ginger hair flustered through the front door of the pub.
Him? Brendan thought to himself as the dark-haired beauty rose from her seat with a sad-looking smile and embraced the newcomer warmly. Ah, fair’s fair. You can do better, love.
* * *
“Hi, Kate,” said Barry, kissing his sister-in-law on the cheek. “You’re looking well.”
“You too,” she said, and she meant it. He’d been working in the Department of Agriculture for almost a year now and it seemed to have done him good. He was a bit more confident. Sure of himself. He also looked fairly exhausted, but that was only to be expected under the circumstances. He asked her if she wanted anything from the bar and, when she declined, left the table and returned with a pint which had been poured for him with a look of kind, paternal sympathy from the barman.
He sat across from her, and they waited to see who would speak first.
“So…” he said.
“Are you…” she asked.
Silence.
“How are you doing?” he asked softly.
Kate shrugged.
“Good,” she said. “Better than I expected. A lot better than I expected. Funerals are like that though. Is that just me? I sort of like them. Is that weird?”
“No,” he said. “Not a bit. I know exactly what you mean.”
He sighed wearily.
“I’m sorry we weren’t there…”
She reached out and put her hand on his and looked him dead in the eye.
“No,” she said firmly, an absolute command. “Don’t say that. Neither of you owed her that. Especially not Etain, but not you either.”
He didn’t get that, she could see it in his face. Guilt, but also confusion. That was not how his family did things. Larkins and Mallens. Different species.
She knew without asking that he had wanted to go to the funeral, and that it was Etain who had refused.
Kate herself had very nearly done the same thing, and God knew she had less reason than her sister.
But in the end, whether out of guilt or a lingering sense of filial obligation or perhaps just a need to bear witness, she had attended the funeral and stood in Glasnevin Cemetery as the remains of Mairéad Larkin were returned to the earth.
As Kate had watched the gravediggers work, every shovelful of soil laid on the coffin had felt like it was being scooped off her own chest.
As the mother was buried, the daughter was exhumed.
She had felt liberated, and had enjoyed the rest of the day, catching up with relatives and friends of the family that she had not spoken to for many years.
It was only in the days and weeks afterward that old memories had started to align themselves in ominous shapes. She had not been sleeping well, and a feeling of dread had begun to thicken and blacken in her mind.
“We should have at least been here to help with the arrangements,” said Barry.
“Honestly, I hardly did anything,” Kate replied.
That was true. Mairéad had been very active in the local chapter of the Legion of Mary. They had taken on the task of arranging the funeral. Kate had been left to make a few phone calls to the rest of the family while occasionally answering questions as to what her mother would have liked in terms of floral arrangements. This had largely been guesswork, as Kate could not recall her mother ever speaking favorably of flowers.
Or anything else, for that matter, she thought to herself.
Enough. She’s gone. If you can’t think of anything nice, stop thinking about her. Just leave her be, for fuck’s sake.
In fact, since the funeral, Kate had found herself grappling with a new and alien emotion toward her mother.
Pity.
* * *
At the afters, held in the parish hall, a tiny silver-haired man in his sixties had tapped her theatrically on the shoulder. She had turned to look at him and he gave her a wink and a broad smile full of devilment and declared in a Dublin accent as thick as leather: “Ah, is it little Katie?”
It had taken her a few seconds to remember Francis Corcoran. She recalled him dressing up as Santa Claus many years ago at a family Christmas party. Four-year-old Etain had run screaming but Kate had held her nerve and got a coloring book, some crayons, and that same wink.
“Uncle Fran,” she said warmly, and gave him a hug.
It was like hugging a child, he was so small, and she felt him wince slightly from the pressure of her arms.
Of course. They’re all like that, aren’t they? All the Corcorans. Small and fragile as china cups.
* * *
Mairéad Larkin (née Corcoran) had been born in the early ’20s in a tenement in Rialto. She had been the sixth of eleven children, eight of whom had lived to adulthood. There were three left now.
Fran gestured to where his two sisters, Rita and Teresa, shuffled up and down the buffet table looking for a sandwich that hadn’t been defiled with mayonnaise. They both looked shockingly like her mother, Rita particularly.
So that’s what Ma would look like if she had ever smiled, Kate had thought. None of the three Corcorans, not Fran, not Rita, and not Teresa, were taller than five foot three.
Stunted growth. Brittle bones.
A childhood spent starving would do that.
A cold, terrible realization hit Kate. That’s why she was such a snob. That’s why she drove Etain to tears trying to crush that accent out of her.
Mairéad had grown up in one of the most impoverished neighborhoods in one of the poorest cities in Western Europe. But she had finished school. Gotten a job as a secretary. She had met Kate’s father, who came from a quite well-off middle-class background. For Mairéad, it must have been like marrying into the aristocracy.
Was she a snob?
How could she not be obsessed with class, with status, with sounding like you belonged where you knew you didn’t? For her, learning to speak like she’d been raised in a home with running water had not been a matter of pride. It had been a matter of survival, and escape.
And in that moment Kate did feel pity for her mother.
Mairéad had not escaped. Not in the end. Poverty and starvation might not have left their mark on her voice, but they had cursed her bones. She had suffered from osteoporosis all her life. In the end, it had killed her.
“Elaine couldn’t make it?” Fran asked.
“Etain,” she corrected. “No. She’s abroad.”
It was the same lie she’d used every time someone had asked her about her sister’s whereabouts.
Abroad. In the People’s Republic of Cork.
* * *
Barry took a slurp from his pint and then gave a long, leonine yawn. He hadn’t had a good night’s sleep for the better part of a year. Probably longer.
“How are the girls?” she asked.
Barry smiled tiredly. “Niamh is as good as gold. Sleeps like a log. Eats everything you put in front of her. Ashling … Mam says God gave us Niamh to apologize for Ashling.”
The expression on Kate’s face was not what he had been hoping for.
“It’s just a joke,” he reassured her.
Kate was funny about Ashling, he remembered.
“Ashling’s fine,” he said. “She’s feeding better at least. The doctor was very happy with her on the last checkup. Said she’s starting to put on weight, thank God.”
“And Etain?” Kate asked.
Barry thought for a few seconds.
“Good. I think. I think she’s good. Moving back up to Dublin helped her a lot. She seems more … settled in herself? You know? I hate to say it, but I think Mairéad’s passing, God rest her…”
“Lifted a weight?”
“Yeah.”
He frowned, troubled by the thought.
You don’t say? Kate thought miserably.
“She’s still not … she’s still not back to where she used to be,” he admitted. “And I don’t expect her to be. I don’t expect her to just get over Scarnagh.”
Scarnagh.
Like “Watergate” or “Weimar,” it was not simply the name of a place. For Barry and Kate it was a one-word summation of an entire universe of dates and events and people. “Scarnagh” was the farmstead where Etain had been taken. It was the disappearance itself. It was the media circus that had followed. It was Etain’s severing of all ties with Mairéad. It was the fact that Feidhlim Lowney’s body had never been discovered and that he was presumably still out there somewhere. And more than what was known, “Scarnagh” was the name of the unknown. Why had Etain been taken? What had Lowney wanted with her? How had the farmhouse gone up in flames, by arson or accident? Were the charred remains found in the kitchen really Bernadette Lowney, or someone else?
Scarnagh was the sensation of waking up at five in the morning in a cold sweat.
Scarnagh was wondering who had told the guards there had been a fight between Etain and Barry.
Scarnagh was the pregnancy.
* * *
In April 2014, a meme was posted on the r/Scarnaghaffair Reddit page. It depicted a middle-aged African American woman seated in front of a computer, with an expression of exasperation and weary despair on her face.
The caption read: THE MOMENT YOU REALIZE YOU ASKED ETAIN LARKIN TO REMEMBER YOUR PASSWORD FOR YOU.
It was as good an illustration as any as to the frustrated, sometimes even hostile, attitude with which the r/Scarnaghaffair community viewed the victim at the heart of the mystery.
One post, entitled “Why Etain Larkin is just the worst,” acted out an imaginary conversation with her:
“Why did you drive to Scarnagh?”
“Don’t ’member.”
“What did Lowney do to you?”
“Don’t ’member.”
“How did the fire start?”
“Don’t ’member.”
“Kitchen bones. Any thoughts?”
“Don’t ’member.”
“Care to shed some light on how you got out of the house before it went boom?”
“Don’t ’member.”
“BITCH, I SWEAR TO GOD…”
