2014
Anne Breslin waited for her mother and older brother to go upstairs before taking the letter from her handbag.
She unfolded it and smoothed it out on her lap.
In the translucent picture window of the official brown manila envelope it said, Mr Joseph Patrick Breslin – Confidential.
Despite acting as primary carer for him and their mother for most of her adult life, she was not normally in the habit of opening her brother’s mail.
But something about this letter worried her.
And besides, Joe had been so up-and-down since the doctors had changed his medication. (Something about oestrogens and testosterone receptor blocking agents, they’d said.)
The last thing she wanted for him now was any additional worry or stress.
Still, she hated doing anything that demeaned his dignity or detracted from his sense of independence and self-worth.
God knows he’d had enough to deal with on that score.
Anne thought for a moment about leaving the mail unopened in the usual place.
On the hall table, behind an old photograph of Joe and their mother.
Him barely twenty, in denim dungarees and bovver boots, a shock of frizzy red hair.
Her gazing up at him lovingly, the apple of her eye.
Slipping a broken nail under the flap, Anne decided that she would explain that she’d opened it without checking the name first, as she was expecting something from the tax people.
Her intuition had been correct.
She knew that when she saw the Historical Enquiries Team letterhead.
Anne’s blood ran cold.
She had long feared that something like this would one day come across their doorstep.
She heard the floorboards creak above her in Joe’s bedroom.
She heard her mother turn over, slowly rising from her late afternoon nap.
They were a tight family.
Close. Insular.
Just the three of them since her father had died.
Too long ago now for her to remember him.
They were slaves to routine. To habit.
As long as nothing shook them out of their daily customs and schedules, then somehow the world could not intrude.
She heard Joe’s faltering steps move across the landing to the bathroom.
Time for his injections.
Time to change his dressings.
Wounds, weeping.
Even after all these years, she thought. Still weeping.
Molly McArdle, the blind piano tuner, was coming to meet the family this weekend.
Anne and her mother had dared to believe again that there still might be someone for Joe.
Even yet. Despite everything.
As thrilled as she was for him, she struggled with her dread.
She had found his old scrapbook, taken down by him from the loft again and hidden behind the radiator in the hall.
The cut-out-and-pasted letters across the front.
Like some ransom note.
Delores.
Anne knew what it contained.
The photos, the love letters, the old Valentines cards from his once-fiancée.
The woman who had failed to stand by him.
Who had broken his heart after they had broken his body.
She feared for her brother.
“If you don’t let someone in, then they can’t hurt you,” she had told him.
It had been her own mantra.
Her own code of conduct for survival.
But it had left her alone. Unmarried. Childless.
She could accept all of it as long as she believed that it had been her own choice.
And as long as she had her family. Mam and Joe.
But Molly McArdle was coming… and there might yet be hope for Joe.
Dear, sweet, broken Joe.
Anne moved through the kitchen – picking up the oven lighter on the way – and out into her mother’s back yard.
You couldn’t call it a garden. Mostly cement slabs contained by wooden fences.
Identical back yards behind and to either side.
Dogs barking, kids playing, couples fighting, music blaring.
It was always the same.
Mrs Breslin had placed a few potted plants here and there.
A rudimentary, ornamental concrete fountain and bird bath lay long unused. Built by the former tenant. There since the Housing Executive had moved them in.
Moss-green stains deeply etched into them.
Tall plastic bins – blue for recyclables; brown for organic; black for everything else – stood in a line.
She opened the lid on the first one, clicked the lighter and held it under the corner of the letter. It caught quickly and she had to release it for fear of burning her fingers.
Instead of falling into the bin, the letter, curled and charred and blackened, was caught by the wind.
Anne watched as the paper disintegrated in the air above her, fell to the ground and blew around the tartan carpet slippers Joe had given her at Christmas.