Strange Sally Diamond

Conor Geary was forty-five years old when he fled Ireland in 1980. Thirty-one years old when he kidnapped my eleven-year-old mother in 1966 and thirty-nine when I was born in 1974. He would be eighty-three years old now. He had a sister, Margaret, who was technically my aunt. The guards told me she was living in the Killiney house where Denise and I had been held.

I wanted to talk to her. I wrote to her at that notorious address in June 2018.

She replied instantly. She wanted to meet me, to explain, and to apologize. Margaret came to meet Aunt Christine and me for lunch in Roscommon one day in August.

We looked alike. She had the same way of balling her hands into fists as I did.

She was annoyingly tearful throughout the lunch. I kept having to ask her to repeat what she’d said as she blew her nose. Aunt Christine whispered that I should be patient.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said to Margaret. ‘I have emotional development issues because of him. I can’t call you Aunt Margaret by the way. That feels wrong.’

‘I understand. You don’t have to explain.’ Margaret said she was so ashamed of her brother. She admitted they’d had a strange upbringing.

‘Our mother was tough on Conor. I’m not excusing him, but he didn’t have it easy. Father died when we were children and it was as if she expected him to step into Daddy’s shoes … in every way. And he turned on me. He was … aggressive with me, the way that she was aggressive with him. It wasn’t until I left home that I realized how screwed up our upbringing was, how … perverse. I never understood why he didn’t leave too. I spent a few years in Canada as a nanny and rarely came home. I used to write, but neither of them replied, until Conor wrote to tell me that mother had died. I was only twenty-seven.’

Conor inherited the family home and Margaret was left with nothing. Conor refused to sell the house and share the profits with her. She went back to Canada after her mother’s funeral with very little. They hadn’t spoken in many years before his crime was discovered.

‘I let the house lie empty for a long time after Conor absconded. I was afraid to come home because of the media attention. I eventually returned to Ireland for good in 1990 and got a job managing a care home near the house. I had made some money in Canada. Not enough to renovate the whole house but enough to have the extension where your mother and you were held demolished. My life was blighted. How could I make friends, form relationships? As soon as they found out who my brother was, they’d run for the hills.’

‘Why did you come home then? Why didn’t you stay in Canada?’

‘I don’t know, the pull of home was always strong. It was only when I’d packed up and come home that I realized there was nothing here for me.’

‘That is so terribly sad, the number of lives your brother destroyed,’ said Aunt Christine.

‘But if he had never existed, I would never have been born,’ I said.

Aunt Christine and Margaret looked at each other and smiled.

‘What are you smiling at?’

‘That’s a unique point of view,’ said Aunt Christine. This was the kind of answer that irked me.

Margaret said she had embraced the Church, and that she found comfort in God. She had friends now in a prayer group. She told me I was welcome to visit the old house, but the thought of it made me feel sick. I learned that Conor Geary had earned good money as a dentist. He had never had to pay rent or a mortgage in his life and had enough in his bank account before he emptied it and fled to start over anywhere he liked. I looked like his side of the family, there was no doubt. I, too, was antisocial and had few friends. Perhaps I had inherited those traits from him?

Aunt Christine was extremely kind. She came and stayed regularly, and twice she brought me to their large Victorian house in Dublin and I stayed with her and Uncle Donald. He was quiet and frail, and even though she said they were the same age, he seemed a lot older.

They had a piano in the house. I could tell by the dust that it hadn’t been used in a long time, but they liked it when I played. Donald perked up and said it was ‘soothing’.

I was doing my best to develop social skills in Carricksheedy. I went to the local pub with my old school pal, Stella, and we went to the cinema in Roscommon in the autumn, but even with earplugs, I was overwhelmed by the noise and spectacle. I had to leave early. Stella didn’t mind. You wouldn’t notice her stutter much at all any more. She showed me photos of her children and her husband and her dog. She suggested that I should get a dog for companionship. I wasn’t sure that I wanted a companion who pooed anywhere he wanted and couldn’t clean up after himself. Stella says I’m funny. I think she is. She sent me some romance novels to read. They were well-written stories, but I found it hard to relate to them. Stella thinks I should start dating. Like I said, she is funny. On my birthday she sent me a card and a woollen scarf and hat. They were soft and warm. I was forty-four now.