Fortnightly Fiction | Jailbait

We’re all in this mess because Sharon called Mr Delaney a paedo. There she is, stretched out on a long wooden bench, the rest of us perched on the opposite pew like birds on a wire. Birds about to get electrocuted. Peter bites his nails – rather the skin around his nails – he has no nails left to speak of. Karen snaps the elastic cuff of her sweater over and over again so that there is a raw pink tinge to the underside of her wrist. The sniffing from inside the hood tells me she is crying. Nobody makes eye contact. I clench my thighs and hope I don’t wet the floor.

Sharon lies on her stomach, head hanging over the edge of the bench as she whittles her initials with a tweezers. From this angle I can see the outline of knickers under her tights, the pinch of panty-line on flesh. As she monograms, she wears a tight lipped smile that tells me she doesn’t give a shit. We are sitting behind bars in the station, Sergeant Kelly phoning our parents this very moment and Sharon couldn’t give a shit.

*

We had little reason to doubt that Mr Delaney wasn’t a paedo. He looked like one, at least any that I’d seen through the blurry lens of the Daily News photographer. Glasses of the goggle variety? Check. A horrible selection of anoraks? Check. Greasy comb-over? Check. There were other signs. He lived on his own and, more importantly, as Sharon pointed out, drove a van with no windows in the back. A van perfect for kidnapping young teenage girls like us – or boys – she had said, giving Peter an inclusive nod, before smuggling them under the cover of darkness into his house and hiding them in the basement. None of the houses in our estate had basements. I only thought about that afterwards. And Mr Delaney only took his van out once a week for the dole.

Sharon O’Sullivan knew a lot of stuff we didn’t – adult stuff.  She had the lowdown on most of the neighbours, even though she and her mother were the last to move into the estate and they were renters (Mum said ‘renters’ like it was a dirty word).  She knew, for instance, where Peter’s Dad worked and exactly what he did there. She knew Karen’s Mum had depression last year. Not just down in the dumps, she’d said, the medicated kind. According to Sharon, Mr Delaney had left his wife and kids down the country somewhere and moved to Dublin into his mother’s house. She was in a nursing home.

‘But he hardly ever goes to see her,’ she’d said, legs splayed on the bed as she leaned against the milky coloured headboard, flicking through her mother’s Cosmo. The rest of us squashed round the mattress. Mrs O’Sullivan, or Dolores as Sharon called her mother, didn’t get home until after six. We’d started hanging out in her house after school. It was too cold in the park and anyway there was a gang from the next estate always hogging the bench and spraying graffiti on the climbing frame. They made it clear we weren’t welcome and so it was behind the floral wallpapered walls of Sharon’s bedroom that we started to go all vigilante on Mr Delaney.

‘He’s all day on the computer looking at porn,’ Sharon said, picking the dirt out of her nails with a tweezers. Peter blushed. Karen stared open mouthed. I raised both eyebrows and snorted. Mum warned me about girls like Sharon. She pouted for a moment and disappeared down the hall into the utility room where she emerged with an old bottle crate.

‘Come along, wieners.’ She motioned us to follow out the back door and through a gap in the fence into Mr Delaney’s garden. Crouching, she scurried to the window and motioned for me to join her on the upturned crate. Peter and Karen held each of us by the knees – not that it was any great height – more to be involved than anything else. Mr Delaney sat at his kitchen table eating beans out of a saucepan, surrounded by old cereal bowls and mugs. He was in front of his computer alright, face luminous in the screen light. She wasn’t lying about that. He put his spoon down, moving his hand under the table where his elbow started to jerk.

‘Disgusting.’

‘What?’

‘Wanker. See?’ she said, warm spittle-breath on my ear. I started to come over all queasy but just then Mr Delaney lifted a notebook off his leg and placed it on the table. He covered his face with his palms and rubbed his eyes.

‘He’s taking notes.’

‘Or phone numbers of all the girls he wants to…’ Sharon no longer whispered and I caught her waist as I climbed off the crate, pulling her down with me just as Mr Delaney got out of his chair. We flattened ourselves to the wall, barely breathing. I inched my foot along the grass and fished the crate towards us with the tip of my shoe. Peter clamped his hand over Sharon’s mouth, her stifled laughter spitting through his fingers. When nothing happened after a few minutes we crawled through the broken fence back into Sharon’s garden.

‘I need to go home. I’ve loads of homework.’ Karen was puke-pale, her knees grass stained and a glistening of snot on her upper lip. Peter sidled out the door after her. I was alone with Sharon.

‘Stay for tea,’ she said, unwrapping a pizza from the freezer, twisting the dial as she frisbeed it into the oven.

‘Mum’ll do her nut if I’m not home for six.’

‘What’ll you have to eat?’ Sharon asked, crinkling the plastic wrapping in her fist as she stared out the window with a hungry face.

‘Something original like shepherd’s pie or bacon and cabbage. The old dear isn’t exactly Masterchef.’

‘Suit yourself.’ She tossed the wrapper into the sink and turned away.

*

Sharon twitches at the sound of Sergeant Kelly’s keys hitting the bars, his fleshy fingers fiddling the lock this way and that until it clicks. His camel-eyes sit under swollen lids.

‘Into the meeting room with yiz.’ His words are breathy after a short walk down the corridor.

‘He wouldn’t be very good at giving chase,’ Sharon gobs in my ear, ‘maybe we should make a run for it.’

‘What was that Miss Cheeky Boots?’  Sergeant Kelly blocks her path with his leg, eyes blinking under their hoods, ‘I’d dun do bheal if I were you. That mouth is only going to get you in more trouble.’

Our parents sit in a semi-circle on blue plastic chairs like the ones we have in school. It is a large white room with naked florescent tubes overhead, most of which don’t seem to be working. It gives the effect of semi-darkness with the odd lit-up patch. Sergeant Kelly locks the door. It seems a little extreme but I’m not in a position to complain.

I thought Mum would be ready to murder me but she sits small and silent, huddled around a steaming takeaway cup. The room is freezing and Dad places his overcoat over her shoulders making her look even smaller. I am sorrier than I have ever been in my life. She sees me and rises, the overcoat falling away behind her.

‘Now if we could all remain seated for a moment…’ Sergeant Kelly sounds like a priest as he guides her back into the chair and flicks the switch on a tiny electric heater. I stare at the orange and feel my cheeks glow alongside. Mum catches my eye, mouthing are you ok? I nod, daring to scan the row of parents. Beside Peter’s bespectacled father there is a man I haven’t seen before, a squat man with mantelpiece shoulders and one of those checked lumber jackets. His arms are folded but his knees jerk as if bouncing an imaginary ball on them. His scowl is fixed on Sharon. A stomach gurgles beside me and I realise it is hers.

*

None of us had thought much more about Mr Delaney until Sharon called an emergency meeting in her house. There was a story on the news about a little girl who ran away from a man trying to lure her into his van. Her school was five miles from our estate. The van was white, like Mr Delaney’s.

‘And it was on a Thursday, his dole day.’ Sharon stood with her hands on her hips, wearing a mini and a pair of canvas runner-boots that laced all the way up to her knee. I had seen them online, but Mum said I wasn’t allowed to get them. A bit on the tarty side, she had murmured when Dad asked why I was sulking one night during dinner. He spat out his runner beans and took to a fit of coughing.

‘It doesn’t prove anything,’ Karen said quietly. ‘Mr Delaney’s never done anything to me. He barely says hello and looks at the ground all the time.’

‘No offence, Karen but maybe you’re not his type.’ Sharon pulled out a flip chart from behind the fridge – her Mum ran beauty seminars. She peeled back the first few pages – How Evalone Can Improve Your Skin; Ten signs of Traumatised Pores; Beauty from the Outside In – until she came to a clean sheet. She lifted a marker from the ledge and removing the lid she motioned us to sit at the table.

‘Okay, I didn’t want to frighten ye, especially you Karen, but Mr Delaney – Sean as the pervy old git is also known – invited me into his house for biscuits. Sharon bent over and scratched the back of her leg with the lid of the marker. Karen gasped. Peter could not keep his eyes off the front of Sharon’s top where two burgeoning breasts were beginning to show.

‘When? What happened?’ I eyeballed Sharon as she stood up again.

‘Yesterday, after that girl in St Joseph’s. I was walking past his house as he was getting out of the van. When I said no, he grabbed my wrist and called me a little tease.’ Sharon held her wrist out. An ugly brown and purple patch sat under her bangle. ‘Look, it’s all bruised.’

‘Did you not have that a few days ago?’ Peter spoke quietly, glancing at me as he kicked the sides of his shoes against the chair legs. Peter and I have been friends since babies. The joke in our house was that he’d fancied me since birth.

‘I knew nobody would believe me. Nobody ever believes the victim, that’s why they don’t come forward.’ Out of nowhere Sharon began to cry, touching the bruise on her wrist. It was unnerving. I remembered what Mum said about her having no Dad around and being left to fend for herself. Poor girl, she had said. There was no doubt something had happened to Sharon O’Sullivan and I was going to help.

‘I believe you,’ I said, taking the marker off Sharon and gently pushing her into my empty seat. ‘Let’s brainstorm. I’ll write. Any ideas?’

‘Make his life hell so he’ll go back to his family?’ Sharon pulled at a bit of kitchen roll and blew her nose. Karen asked to see the bruise again and clucked as she shook her head.

‘You poor thing.’

‘I suppose we could check his computer.’ Peter shrugged. By dinnertime we had our options outlined in bullets: Facebook Campaign. Tyre Slashing. Anonymous Letters. Computer Files.

We started with the letters. Sharon’s kitchen table became our workstation. We sat surrounded by cut out letters from Dolores’s tabloids and magazines. Words like pervert, judgement and prison were easy enough to come by, others we had to make ourselves. Sharon pasted a giant ‘Fucking Wierdo’ out of headline letters but Karen said she wouldn’t be part of it if we used swear words. Sharon sighed, mashing it between her hands, getting glue all over her fingers. She disappeared to clean up and Karen bowed her head, eyes darting from Peter to me and back again.

‘I’m not sure this is a good idea, we could get into serious trouble.’

Peter put his scissors down. I knew he could be swayed either way, but truth be told, this was the most exciting thing to happen round our estate since Mrs Garvey set fire to her husband’s clothes in their front garden. And that was years ago. We’d a real chance to catch a criminal ourselves. Maybe even make headlines: Ballyloan Teens Apprehend Pervert.

‘Sometimes it takes guts to do the right thing, Karen,’ I said, putting the finishing touches to my letter. ‘If everyone toed the line there’d be no Nelson Mandela, no Michael Collins, no…’

‘That’s right, Karen.’ Sharon reappeared at the door. ‘Next time it could be you he goes after.’ She walked behind Karen’s chair, trailing her hand on the curve of wood before grabbing the sides of her throat and shaking.

‘That’s not funny,’ Karen screamed. Sharon laughed, holding her hand out, but nobody high-fived. She dropped her arm, gathered up some paper letters and pushed a sOrrY KaREn montage across the table with a mock frown.

‘Friends?’ she said.

‘Suppose so.’ Karen sniffed.

*

‘Lucky for youz, Mr Delaney is a more forgiving man than I am.’ Sergeant Kelly licks his finger and rubs a small stain off the cuff of his shirt. Mum exhales loudly and Dad takes her hand and kisses it. Sergeant Kelly patrols the room as he speaks – a bad actor in a courtroom drama. ‘Maybe he’s preoccupied with organising his mother’s funeral, poor man, but whatever the reason you can consider it a very narrow escape.’ There it is, the warmth in the gusset of my knickers, spreading along the edges of my jeans. I have no control over the wetness. All I can do is pull my sweatshirt down as far as it will go and hope this is over soon. Sergeant Kelly’s speech cuts in and out of my consciousness were it up to me now….a criminal record is not something that…I’ve marked your cards. There is a loud rapping at the door and through the small rectangular window I can see Dolores’s face pressed against the glass, her voice mewling behind the wood.

‘Let me in. Where’s my Sharon? Let. Me. In!’

The lumberjack opens the lock. Sergeant Kelly moves to stop him but the hem of his trousers catches in the corner leg of a chair. He drags it along for a moment, the chair scraping across the floor with a sound that is not unlike farting and I get the incredible urge to snigger.

‘Your Sharon? Wait ‘til you hear what your Sharon’s been up to.’  It dawns on me that the lumberjack must be Sharon’s father. He looks nothing like her, although it’s hard to tell underneath all the facial hair. I turn to Sharon but she is looking at the floor, pinching the inside of her hand with the tweezers. The pink flesh has erupted and bleeds like stigmata.

*

There was no obvious sign that Mr Delaney got the letters. He rarely left the house so it was hard to gauge his reaction. I hadn’t seen him for ages until Mum asked me to call round and collect a dish one Friday after school.

‘What? Are you serious?’ I couldn’t believe my own mother sending me into the lion’s den.

‘It’ll take you two minutes. I left round a lasagne last week. Poor man.’

‘Okay, two minutes.’ I pulled a deep breath. ‘It’s twenty one minutes past five, so I should be home at half past at the latest. Okay? Remember. Half past.’ Mum shook her head and went back to mashing spuds for dinner.

I thought about calling into one of the others but decided against it. After ringing the doorbell, I stood back from the porch where I could be seen from the road. A shadow shuffled behind the door and it opened a few inches, the chain pulling on the lock. I jumped in front as it went to close again.

‘It’s Gemma Dunne from number six. Mum sent me down to collect a plate.’

‘Of course. Sorry I didn’t see you there. Come in. Excuse the mess.’ Mr Delaney wore an old pair of paint-streaked tracksuit bottoms and a baggy sweater. He squeezed his eyes as if the outside world was too bright and rubbed them vigorously with the tips of his fingers. There it was – the invitation inside.

‘Thanks all the same but Mum told me to be quick.’

‘Oh, I won’t be a minute so.’ Before he turned to make his sad trundle towards the kitchen, the gathered ends of his tracksuit puffing out over his ankles, I could’ve sworn I saw him blush. When he came back with the dish he had his glasses on, eyes like giant blinking saucers, the drooping bags of skin magnified underneath. His hand lingered as he passed over the dish. He had washed it, but traces of burnt cheese remained on the inside corners of the glass. His thumbnail was long and dirty.

‘Do you like school, Gemma?’ He smiled and a sliver of lettuce revealed itself on the top of his gum.

‘Yeah, it’s okay.’ I tugged the dish and backed away. ‘I better go home.’

‘I’ve a daughter your age. Very good at the schoolwork she is.’

I sprinted down the road holding the dish to my chest. It was only while panting in our front porch that I realised Mr Delaney hadn’t closed his door. That he would have seen me running. I slammed the plate on the kitchen counter and ran upstairs to the spare wardrobe, where I cried into the folds of Mum’s dressing gown.

*

We broke into Mr Delaney’s on his dole day. His van had left a dry rectangle on the driveway where it had been raining all morning. Karen was the only one small enough to fit through the bathroom window but she refused to do it.

‘I’m going home,’ she whined, looking over her shoulder to see if we could be spotted from the road. ‘This is the ridiculest idea ever.’

‘Firstly, K,’ Sharon stood on Karen’s trailing lace as she moved away, ‘I don’t think ridiculest is even a word. And anyway you’re part of it already. What would your parents say if they found out?’

‘So now you’re blackmailing her?’ Peter bent low and pulled Karen’s grubby lace from under Sharon’s foot. Peter was the best at computers. We couldn’t do it without him.

‘Leave her alone, Sharon. We’ll find another way in.’ I started looking under the welcome mat and around an old saucepan full of rainwater and floating cigarette butts.

‘Old Ma Delaney sure as shit loves her geraniums,’ Sharon peered under the potted plants at the back door. Peter fumbled around the drain pipe and gave a low whistle as he took a key out of a small folded piece of tin foil. Karen shook her head and walked away.

The kitchen smelled of granny-soap and sausages, the fridge covered in post-it notes and Medjugorje magnets. The Virgin’s eyes pierced me with their sad blue stare.

‘I bet he has a stash of mags somewhere,’ Sharon said, disappearing into the living room as the back door closed behind us. A yellow oil-cloth draped itself around the kitchen table and on it, among the bundles of leaflets and receipts and old newspapers with red circles around the job ads, sat the computer. It was covered in paw marks, a dollop of jam on the inside lip. Peter opened it carefully. Some of the letters were missing off the keyboard and sat loose on the table beside a tube of superglue.

‘That was easy. He doesn’t even have a password.’ Peter said after hitting a few keys. The idea that a raving pervert wouldn’t bother with a password was something that only occurred to me later when I was sitting in the back of the squad car. In that moment, worried all of a sudden what we might see, I was thinking maybe, just maybe, we should have talked to our parents.

The grandfather clock ticked eerily in the hallway. It was as if each tick-tock was bringing us closer to some unimaginable horror. Peter’s fingers pattered nervously on the keys, until he stopped, lifting both hands away as if he couldn’t believe he’d touched the thing.

‘Fuck,’ he whispered, pushing himself away from the table. ‘We’ve got to get out of here.’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Move, come on.’ He grasped my hand, pulling me towards the back door. ‘He’s ordering coffins. We’re fucked.’

‘Quick! Get out!’ A voice came from inside the bathroom. Karen, to her credit, had stayed around to keep sketch. As I ran back, remembering Sharon, Karen called again.

‘Ow! I think I’m stuck. I need help.’

Karen had tried to climb in and now her torso was folded in half over the window, dangling legs visible through the bubbled glass. Peter got up on the toilet seat and tugged but it was no good. She was stuck.

‘We’ll have to pull her legs out the other side.’

The front latch jangled as we all scrambled towards the back of the house. It was too late.

*

‘Now, now, let’s set some example here.’ Sergeant Kelly’s voice has lost its confident tone. Dad sits forward, alert to the air of violence in the room. ‘If you need a moment to bring your wife up to speed…’

‘Ex-wife,’ Dolores huffs, eyes like stilettos.

‘Let’s take it outside for a moment, will we?’ Sergeant Kelly blushes, stammers and recovers in about four seconds. ‘No need to air your dirty linen in public,’ he mutters, all brave after they leave the room. I start sniggering. Nerves. It’s the picture of knickers and underpants on the clothesline; Dolores’s frillies beside the lumberjack’s y-fronts. I can’t stop. I begin to see everyone’s underwear – Peter’s blue boxers, Mum’s black lacy briefs, Sergeant Kelly’s gigantic long john’s, Karen’s mother’s tummy-tuckers gripping the flesh at the sides of her waist, Dad’s Calvin Klein whites.

‘It’s not funny.’ Sharon hisses, the tweezers poking out of her balled fists, blood creeping through the cracks of her fingers. She thinks I’m laughing at her, at the barney going on outside. I hadn’t noticed in my delirium.

‘Maybe if you paid up you’d get to have an opinion.’ Dolores speaks in a raised whisper, the words hissing through the gap in the door. Sergeant Kelly grins like an oaf, searching for eye contact among the men in the room. They all avoid him. He raises his eyebrows at nobody in particular.

‘Oh I’ve an opinion alright. I love the fuck-me-boots you bought her. Great choice,’ he replies, volume escalating with every word. Sharon’s Dad is about to hang the whole family out to dry.

‘They’re in fashion. All the kids wear them. Anyway, I don’t need to explain myself to you. You who hasn’t given…’

‘I don’t see any other kids in there wearing them, although they all look like half-wits to me. Wonder why she’s turning into such a little tease? A right minx you’re rearing.’

‘How dare you.’ Dolores’s voice wobbles. Sergeant Kelly, showing some well overdue mercy, steps out into the corridor.

‘I’ll give him half-wit…’ Dad goes to follow but Mum catches him at the door.

‘Leave it, love. There’s enough drama for one day.’ She hangs onto his wrist and pushes the door closed with her foot. The noise from corridor permeates the room. Dolores weeping. Sergeant Kelly’s repetitive ‘Now, now,’ as he leads Sharon’s Dad shouting down the hall.

‘The makings of a slut in there. Well done, Dolores. A fine job.’

Sharon looks at the floor, hair curtaining the sides of her face. I turn my eyes down to the four pairs of feet lined up and shiver as the dampness on my legs turns cold. Her shoulders heave; a drop of water and then another, land on the floor.

I know this sounds mental, but there are things that haven’t happened yet that I picture in this moment as clear as anything. I see Karen scurrying past in the school corridor with her head down. I see myself in the playground, Peter’s tongue in my mouth as we lean into the cold steel of the slide. I see the auctioneer’s sign outside Mr Delaney’s house where the grass has not been cut for weeks. I even have a vision of Mrs Delaney’s grave when I go to say sorry – the lilac geranium wreathe spelling Mam lying on the freshly turned soil. These are things I am certain of, as sure as being grounded until Christmas. But more than any of these, as I uncurl her fist and – not minding its bloodiness – take it in my palm, I know I’ll never see Sharon O’Sullivan, ever again.

 

Featured illustration by Orla Kennedy.