Strange Sally Diamond

When Dad returned after two days in Dublin, he asked me if I was sad and if I missed Mum, and I reassured him that I didn’t and he wasn’t to worry about me. Dad looked at me in that funny way he had sometimes and said that I was probably lucky to be the way I was, that I could probably avoid heartache for my whole life.

I know I don’t think in the way that other people do, but if I could stay away from them, then what did it matter? Dad said I was unique. I don’t mind. I have been called so many things, but my name is Sally. At least, that’s the name Mum and Dad gave me.

3

In the days after Dad died, it was quiet. Maybe I did miss him? I had nobody to talk to, nobody to make tea for, nobody to spoon-feed ice cream to. Nobody to wash and change. What was I for? I wandered around the house and, on the third day, I went into his office and idly opened his drawers, found a lot of cash and Mum’s old jewellery in a metal box. Lots of notebooks documenting my weight and height and development going back decades. A fat envelope addressed to me on his desk. Files and files with my name on them in different categories: communication, emotional development, empathy, comprehension, health, medication, deficiencies, diet, etc. Too many to ever read. I looked at their wedding photo on the mantelpiece, and remembered how Mum said they never felt like a complete family until they found me. I had long since been disabused of the notion that I was a foundling child. They had adopted me in the ordinary way, Mum said. She had asked if I was curious about my birth parents, and when I said no, she beamed at me. I felt good when I made my parents smile.

I looked at Dad’s old photos of his working days, presenting papers at conferences in Zurich. Photos of him with other earnest-looking men in suits. Dad mostly studied and wrote academic papers but sometimes, if called upon in an emergency by Mum, he might attend to a local patient in Carricksheedy or beyond.

He studied the human mind. He told me that my mind worked perfectly but that I was emotionally disconnected. I was his life’s work, he said. I asked him if he could reconnect the emotions and he said that all he and Mum could do was love me and hope that, one day, I would learn to love them back. I cared about them. I didn’t want any harm to come to them. I didn’t like to see them upset. I thought that was love. I kept asking Dad, but he said I shouldn’t worry, that whatever I felt was enough, but I don’t think he understood me. I got anxious sometimes, if there were too many people around, or if I didn’t know answers to questions, or if a noise was too loud. I thought I could recognize love from books and TV, but I remember watching Titanic one Christmas Day and thinking that Jack would have died anyway because he was a third-class passenger and a man, and Rose would most likely have survived because she was rich and it was ‘women and children first’, so what was the point of adding in the love story that wasn’t even factually true. Dad was sobbing.

I didn’t like hugging, or to be touched. But I never stopped wondering about love. Was that my emotional disconnection? I should have asked Dad when he was alive.

Five days after Dad died, a knock on the door came from Ger McCarthy, a neighbour who leased a field behind our barn. I was used to him coming and going up the lane. He was a man of few words and, as Dad used to say, he was ‘a great man for asking no questions and making no small talk’.

‘Sally,’ he said, ‘there’s a wild smell out of that barn of yours. My cattle are all accounted for, but I’m after thinking that a sheep strayed in and got caught in there and died or something. Would you like me to take a look, or is your dad up to it?’

I assured him I could deal with it. He went on his way, whistling tunelessly, his overalls splattered with mud.

When I got out to the barn, the smell from the incinerator barrel made me gag. I wrapped my scarf around my mouth and opened the door. It hadn’t burned properly. I could see the full shape of the body. There was an oily substance around the bottom of the barrel. Flies and maggots swarmed around it. I set the fire going again with rolled-up newspapers from the house and logs from the barn.

I felt disappointed with myself. Dad should have been more specific with his instructions. We burned organic matter regularly. Corpses were organic matter, weren’t they? Maybe crematoriums were hotter. I would look it up in the encyclopaedia later. I poured in the rest of the petrol to get the fire started, hoping that a second burning would do the job. I pulled at my hair to calm myself.

I went to the post office to collect my benefits, and Mrs Sullivan tried to give me Dad’s pension too. I pushed the cash back towards her and she looked at me quizzically and shouted, ‘Your dad will be needing his pension.’

‘He won’t,’ I said, ‘because he died.’ Her eyebrows went up and her mouth opened.