The Trespasser

Prologue

My ma used to tell me stories about my da. The first one I remember, he was an Egyptian prince who wanted to marry her and stay in Ireland forever, only his family made him go home to marry an Arabian princess. She told a good story, my ma. Amethyst rings on his long fingers, the two of them dancing under turning lights, his smell like spices and pine. Me, spreadeagled under my bedsheet, coated in sweat like I’d been dipped – it was winter, but the Corpo set the heating for the whole block of flats, and the windows on the high floors didn’t open – I crammed that story into me as deep as I could, and kept it there. I was only little. That story held my chin high for years, till I was eight and told it to my best friend Lisa, who broke her shite laughing.

A couple of months later, once the sting had faded, I marched into the kitchen one afternoon, stuck my fists on my hips and demanded the truth. My ma didn’t miss a beat: squirted Fairy liquid and told me he was a medical student, over from Saudi Arabia. She met him because she was studying nursing – lots of nice details there, the long shifts and the tired laughs and the two of them saving some kid who’d been hit by a car. By the time she found out I was on the way, he was gone, back to Saudi, without leaving an address. She dropped out of nursing college and had me.

That one kept me going for another while. I liked it; I even started making secret plans to be the first person from my school ever to become a doctor, seeing as it was in my blood and all. That lasted till I was twelve and got detention for something, and got an earful from my ma about how she wasn’t having me end up like her, with no Leaving Cert and no hope of anything but minimum-wage cleaning jobs for the rest of her life. I’d heard it all a thousand times before, but that day it occurred to me that you need a Leaving Cert to study nursing.

On my thirteenth birthday I sat across the cake from her and told her this time I wasn’t messing, I wanted to know. She sighed, said I was old enough to know the truth and told me he was a Brazilian guitarist she’d gone out with for a couple of months, till one night at his flat he beat the shite out of her. When he fell asleep, she robbed his car keys and drove home like a bat out of hell, the dark roads rained empty and her eye throbbing in time with the wipers. When he rang sobbing and apologising, she might even have taken him back – she was twenty – only by then she knew about me. She hung up on him.

That was the day I decided I was going to be a cop when I left school. Not because I wanted to go Catwoman on all the abusers out there, but because my ma can’t drive. I knew the cop training college was somewhere down the country. It was the fastest way I could think of to get out of my ma’s flat without taking that dead-end cleaning job.

My birth cert says Unknown, but there are ways. Old friends, DNA databases. And there are ways I could have kept pushing my ma, turning up the pressure every time, till I got something near enough to true that I could work from it.

I never asked her again. When I was thirteen it was because I hated her guts, for all the time I’d spent moulding my life around her bullshit stories. By the time I was older, by the time I made it into training college, it was because I thought maybe I knew what she had been doing, and I knew she had been right.