Stolen Child by Laura Elliot

tureen. David ate heartily, sopping up the sauce with chunks of crusty bread, breaking off pieces and feeding them to his son. By then I had established their relationship. Joey was three years old and David would never be able to deny him: the same dark brown eyes and brown curly hair, the high, broad forehead, the easy grin.
    Outside we heard the sharp blast of a horn, repeated three times. It broke like glass into our conversation. Joey jerked his head and looked up at his father. A blue car was parked outside the gate. The driver was female, with long black hair, impatient hands that once again sent out a demanding summons.
    ‘Time to go, big boy,’ said David. He lifted his son in his arms and ruffled his hair. He carried Joey down the path and handed him over to his mother. The exchange was brief. He returned to the house and went upstairs, muttering an excuse about phone calls he had to make.
    ‘Young people,’ Miriam had sighed then, ‘so reckless with their happiness.’ For a while after Joey’s birth, Corrie O’Sullivan and David had tried to make their relationship work, she explained, but their son was all they had left in common. Corrine had recently become engaged to a local carpenter and they planned to settle in Canada. Miriam hinted at custodial battles, lost before they would even reach the courts; a single father in his early twenties, no chance.
    David’s expression when he had returned from handing Joey over to Corrine had been hard and angry. I recognised what lay behind it. Loss. I understood, as only I could, how he felt as he watched his son being lifted away from him. But at least he and Corrine O’Sullivan could lay claim to their son’s identity.
    I’d no idea who had fathered my baby during that crazy year after my mother died. Cervical cancer, the symptoms diagnosed too late. For months afterwards, my father had wandered around in a daze, twitching at sudden noises, as if he expected her to emerge from dark corners or behind closed doors and shriek at him.
    I escaped into the arms of Shane Dillon, then Liam Maguire, then Jason Jackson. Dark lanes, the back seats of cars, my bedroom when my father was out. I didn’t enjoy these furtive encounters, the impatient fumbling and tumbling, the brief satisfaction gained by them, not me. Yet my need seemed insatiable. I understand it now. The need to be loved unthinkingly, unconditionally. Such a demanding, primal need. Why else do we perpetuate our race? Why else would we subject our bodies to such grotesque manoeuvrings, the animal grunts and heaves, the savage satisfaction that is instantly forgettable and, in my own case, always dispensable?
    ‘Slut,’ my father said, when Tessa brought the strain of my stomach against my school shirt to his attention. Five months gone by then, too late for an abortion, which was his first intention. ‘Off to London on the next flight,’ he said. ‘Quick fix.’
    But Tessa was determined that he was not going to export my problem. ‘Too late,’ she insisted, ‘and even if your daughter wasn’t five months gone, it’s against the laws of the state and the law of God.’ The country was not yet riven by abortion referenda and opposing views, but Tessa knew which side she was on. Actively pro-life, she’d decided that adoption would be the perfect solution and that’s what probably would have happened in the end.
    I’d argued loudly against either option. How I hated them, him and her, smug with happiness, and my mother hardlycold in her grave. None of us realised that it was my boy who would decide whether or not he would make that hazardous journey towards the light.
    I didn’t see David again until it was time for the official opening of Miriam’s new studio. A lively occasion compared to the usual formal launches I’d once organised. No muted and strained conversations as strangers sipped tepid wine and struggled to find common ground. The people who crowded her new studio were loud and