Excerpt from HIDDEN CHILD
by Anne Cassidy
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It was gone four when she got back home. In her bag were a number of new exercise books and a couple of textbooks. There was a timetable and a map of the school. She pulled them out and laid them across the table. They were firm proof that she’d gone, as she’d said she would.
Folded up inside one of the books was a form that had to be filled in by her mother. Confidential Information it said at the top. She’d filled in forms like it in every school she had ever gone to. It was full of the usual things: mother’s name, father’s name. Lou paused for a minute. Her mother would continue the lie and fill in the name of Robert Lewis. She felt her breath catch in her throat.
Had her father really been called Robert Lewis? Or Robert Peterson? Or was he just a man created by her mother? A false name, a photo taken from a magazine. A history that was made up. He died in Northern Ireland, Lou. He was blown up by a bomb.
As a child, she had sat at Anna’s feet, or cuddled up beside her on the armchair and she’d imagined her dad walking along a Belfast street. The houses were tiny and close together and at the end of each terrace there were giant murals on the wall, flags or pictures of men in face masks. In her mind her dad had had a metal hat on his head and his rifle had been pointed nervously here and there.
He was just walking along the streets, Lou, and suddenly the bomb exploded.
Lou’s mouth had made a tiny “o” whenever Anna said this. In her mind she had pictured him stepping gingerly down the street. The bomb had been there clearly in front of him; she had visualized it rather like one of the mines that float in the sea, a black round thing with spikes coming out of it. Her dad had put one foot in front of the other, somehow not seeing the bomb that was sitting there.
The explosion blew the windows out of all the houses and killed another two people along with your dad, Lou.
Had the explosion been like an enormous firework? A deafening sound? Had there been smoke and splinters of glass flying, like darts, through the air?
Somehow her dad, who had been walking along the street, wasn’t there any more. There had just been a space in the picture in Lou’s mind.
And it was all a lie.
Lou looked at the confidential form in front of her and felt her chest tighten.
Was it the only lie that her mother had told her?
From Hidden Child. Copyright © 1997 by Anne Cassidy. All rights reserved.
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