There’s an eerie chill in the shifting shadows as I leave Northwood Park and I wonder if I’ll ever get to exit a swimming pool unscathed. Katie has already left with the other swimmers so I send her a quick text to let her know my plans, and then head off for the airport and pray I’ll make it in time. I’m not even halfway there when my phone vibrates, and I pick it up at a red light to see what Katie has said. It’s not Katie, it’s Alex. She took an earlier flight and she’s home already. She wants to talk.
The dread builds all the way back, and not even the raw intimacy of Hak Baker’s “Like It or Lump It” on the car stereo can help carry the weight of it. When I get into the house, it’s the silence I hear first. There’s no music, no TV sounds or noise of any sort as I close the front door behind me. There’s a light on in the extension and I push through the double doors to find Alex sitting at the kitchen island smoking a cigarette, something I haven’t seen her do in the eight years we’ve lived together.
“Why did you let me find out like this?” she asks without looking at me.
“I’m sorry.” I put my keys on the island and sit next to her. “I didn’t know…”
“Do you know what?” she says as she swings around to face me. “I don’t believe you.”
Black streaks of mascara underline the velvet-blue darkness in her eyes.
“I mean, I knew about the lawsuit,” I say. “I just didn’t know the article was coming out today.”
Her eyes harden as the words leave my mouth.
“So all this time, you were with her?”
“No,” I say. “What do you mean?”
Alex picks up her phone and starts to read. “‘Shauna Power and Louise Manson are back together. The girls at the center of the Highfield affair are all grown up now and secretly plotting to take down Highfield Manor once and for all.’ What the fuck, Lou?”
“It’s not like that at all,” I say. “I haven’t even seen Shauna. The only person I’ve spoken to is Ronan.”
“Then what is all this shit about?”
“I don’t know, it’s the Evening Express.”
“Jesus, Lou, you’re going to have to do a lot better than that.”
As I scramble for the right words, I’m distracted by the flaccid roll of burning ash that hangs precariously from Alex’s cigarette. I slide a cup across the quartz worktop to catch it.
“Oh my god,” shrieks Alex. “You care more about the fucking house than you do about me.”
I think of Katie upstairs and point at the ceiling. “Can you keep your voice down?”
Alex shuts her eyes tight as tears escape them.
“Did you really just say that?”
“I’m not going to apologize for caring about my daughter.”
“Oh, she’s your daughter now?” Alex laughs through her tears. “So how come you don’t even know she’s not here?”
“What? Where is she?”
“She’s gone to the cinema with friends.”
“Why didn’t she tell me?”
“Because you’d make such a big deal of it, and she hates that. So she told me—you know, her other mother?”
I should be delighted that Katie has finally made friends, ventured out into the world, and for a moment all I want is to celebrate with my wife. Maybe if I made the first move, we could put this argument to bed and have an honest conversation about the future. Maybe I could finally tell her everything. But it’s the way she narrows her eyes that stops me, the accusation in the tilt of her head, and I just can’t help myself.
“She only told you because she knew you’d give her an easy ride. I mean, do you even know who these friends are?”
It’s worth it for just a split second, that moment of victory as I watch the betrayal darken her face, until I want to rescue her from the cruelty of it.
“Fuck you,” she says.
And then she gathers her dignity, pushes past me and out the double doors, and I’m left with an overwhelming sense of guilt I can’t share with anyone.
ALONE IN THE KITCHEN, I finally have the chance to see the full damage of the Evening Express piece. It really is the worst of the Irish tabloids, page after page of hack opinion dressed up as news, all designed to rile and feed the hate-reader within. The single mothers living it up on our taxes, the criminals demanding legal aid.
I’m still not prepared for what I find when I click into the website. Spread across the home page is a large, grainy photo of me on the doorstep in my bathrobe, my Trinity staff picture inset in a corner and the headline Highfield Affair: Revelation or Revenge?
I hold my breath as I skim the story, the lack of evidence for a criminal prosecution, the insinuation that we all have an axe to grind. And then a detailed summary of what happened back then, finishing with the line, “Louise Manson has some nerve jumping on the bandwagon after all these years. Let’s hope she has some proof this time.”
The visceral anger, for me, for Josh, quickly turns to fear, and I open Twitter to measure the fallout. It takes a second to grasp the level of activity along the bottom of the app, scores of notifications, dozens of direct messages. No matter how much I’ve dreamed of an academic paper going viral, there’s no chance that’s what’s going on here. I expected comment but not conversation, and I can barely bring myself to look at it.
I feel nauseous as I click through the tweets, most of them asking variations of the question: what has she done now? As if this new case might be able to prove what they’d always suspected, that I was the real villain all along.
I see the words “hero,” “bravery,” “whistleblower,” but they won’t be enough to save me or my sanity. It’s happening again and there’s no way to close the door on it. This case is going to follow me everywhere I go.
IN THE MORNING, THERE’S NOTHING but a stinging silence in the house, and I slink out the door to work before Katie is even out of bed. As soon as I pass through Trinity’s front arch, I feel naked, as if everyone knows what I’ve done. Until yesterday, I’d been shrouded by the passage of time, by the fact that most students and staff here are too young to remember. But now the Evening Express has unleashed the story on a new generation hungry for true crime, and they might as well have inked it across my face. As I walk the cobblestones to the Arts Block, I imagine all eyes are on me, watching me swipe alerts from Facebook and Instagram, even the LinkedIn account I haven’t looked at in years. When a call flashes across the screen, I almost shut it down on autopilot, until I see that it’s Joe.
“Bingo,” he says.
“You got into Corrigan’s account?”
“Oh yes,” he says. “Indeed.”
Hundreds of private messages, some with times, dates and transactions, others simply threatening or lewd. Evidence of cruelty and coercion, proof of abuse.
“I’ll drop it all over tonight,” says Joe, “and we might go through it together. But be warned, it’s pretty sickening.”
It’s what I wanted and didn’t want, a chronicle of victims. And now I owe it to all of them to expose this fucker.
ONCE I’M IN THE OFFICE, it doesn’t take long before I’m summoned by Professor Judy Wilson, head of the Department of English.
“All I want to know,” she says, hands folded on her desk as I sit rigid opposite her, “is that this won’t have any adverse effect on the department.”
I want to come clean, but there’s a warning in her dispassionate tone.
“Absolutely not,” I say. “Ronan Power has assured me it will all be over by next week.”
“Because with the Irish Literature Festival coming up…”
“Yeah, of course.”
“And don’t get me wrong, that boy has my utmost sympathy, but I’ve worked so hard to bring the festival here in the first place…”
“Oh, I know.”
“… and somehow I’ve ended up fielding calls about a court case that has nothing to do with any of it.”
“Look, I’m sorry about all of that, but they’ll have moved on to something else by next week.”
“So one week of”—she holds up her phone—“this? And that’s the end of it?”
“Yes. I promise.”
“OK. I think we can live with that.”
“Thanks, Judy. I really do appreciate your support.”
I don’t mention I’ve already seen her tagged, along with the School of English, in a tweet demanding my dismissal. That I’ve been called a liar, a fantasist, a frigid cunt, that my sexuality, my failed marriage, even my daughter, have been fair game. And I know that’s what will kill Alex too, not so much the truth I did suppress, but the lies I can’t.