1


For years, I tried not to think about Highfield Manor. The pompous rise of its granite walls, the secrets hidden in its stone-cold shadows. The dark veil of cedars shrouding the school from the outside world. But still the memories fester in me, real as a disease.

Even now, as I watch the new students gather on the cobblestones of Trinity’s front square, I can’t help but think of the intimacy of teenage girls, their social hierarchies and my naive certainty I could conquer them.

It doesn’t take much for Highfield to trespass on my life. Just a whisper of chlorine at the gym or the groan of leather on bare skin and my heart picks up pace. The body remembers everything the mind wants to forget.

In my office, slatted sun brushes parallel shafts of light and shade onto the books that fan out across my desk. Beads of sweat gather on the bridge of my nose as I prepare the words I’ll deliver at my afternoon lecture, a revival of Irish female writers of the last century. It’s a crime, I think as I write, that these voices were suppressed for so long, always deemed too quiet to matter.

As I lose myself in my work, my phone vibrates on my desk and I glance over. It’s a number I don’t recognize. I hesitate and then grab it.

“Ronan Power,” he says, and it only takes a second for the terror and guilt to find me.

And I know whatever happens next, one thing is certain: my story is about to be resurrected, more than thirty years after I tried to bury it.

* * *

RONAN’S AT AN OUTSIDE TABLE WHEN I arrive, sunlit and tie-less, nursing an americano. He’s better looking than I remember, the graying beard only adding gravitas to the sculpted lines of his face. As he leans in to greet me, I catch sight of the ice-blue Power eyes through the tint of his Ray-Bans, and the soft edges of nostalgia ease my trepidation.

He was only fifteen back then, three years our junior. Shauna’s cocky younger brother, nothing more. I’ve kept an eye on him over the years, his litigation successes and society engagements. But Shauna, she has managed to live a life offline, without a trace left behind for the casual observer. The sole reason I’m convinced she’s still alive is that a Power surely could not die without mention. It’s only now, in the fluster of this formal summons, that I’m numb with the possibility.

“I wanted to tell you in person,” says Ronan.

And so it’s here, surrounded by fumes and footsteps and the blinding gaze of the midday sun, that it’s all finally going to come to an end. I’m almost as eager for the news as I am fearful of it. Shauna’s death would put our story back in the headlines, but it would mean the end of the dread I’ve lived with all these years, the reason I can’t sleep at night.

“It’s happening again,” he says. “At Highfield.”

“What?”

“I’m taking a case on behalf of a swimmer.”

This is not what I was expecting. A return to Highfield instead of an escape from it.

“Only fourteen years of age.”

“Oh god.” I put my hand to my head to shade it from the force of his words as much as the flare of the sun.

“I need your help,” he says, and the strength seeps out of me. “I want you to testify.”

Something shatters deep inside, but I am nerve-numb to it, my rigid exterior unbroken.

“I don’t see what any of this has to do with me.”

“Come on, Lou. Surely I don’t have to spell it out for you?”

I shake my head, both in disbelief and to stop him forming the words I know I won’t be able to handle. All I can think is, I’ve done this before, I can’t do it again.

“Look,” says Ronan, “none of us wants to revisit the Highfield affair, but we can’t let something like that happen ever again.”

The Highfield affair. That’s what they call it online, the armchair detectives and internet sleuths. But the past is not contained within those wrought-iron gates. It is part of all of us, the Highfield girls you think you know, born into privilege, the world at their feet. And me, the intruder. Our testimony does not begin and end on that one fatal night. We are the before and the after, the culmination of cruelties that made it all seem inevitable: just a consequence of the time.

A different time. The era of synth pop and mixtapes, hair gel and new wave. Of Prince and paramilitaries, Madonna and moving statues. Magdalene laundries, the Eighth Amendment, bodies as battlegrounds—pig slit and gaping. Different but the same. Absolution for the guilty but not for us.

“I’m sorry, Ronan, I can’t. I have a daughter now.”

He sits back in his seat and takes a deep breath.

“You can come forward as a witness,” he says, “or I can summons you.”

I close both hands across my face.

“And there’s enough testimony from you on record already to back me up.”

I’ve done this before, I can’t do it again.

“What does Shauna think?” I say, rubbing my neck.

“She’s already preparing a statement. She’s ready to tell everything.”

It doesn’t sound like the Shauna I knew, the girl who went to unimaginable lengths to keep a secret. That was always the one thing Highfield valued more than grades, more than silverware or celebrity alumni: silence.

Even now, there are still so many questions, the answers buried deep in the sacral belly of Highfield. We all have them, our secrets and half-truths, the memories that rage in the delirium of night. Some of us will take them to our graves. Some of us already have.

“I want to talk to Shauna,” I say, “before I make any decisions.”

“I’m sorry,” says Ronan. “She doesn’t want that.”

“Can I call her? Or email even?”

He shakes his head. “I’m under strict instructions.”

So that’s how it’s going to be. Everything on Shauna’s terms, like always.

“It’s better this way,” says Ronan. “Believe me.”

I want to say I’ve no reason to believe anything a Power tells me, but I stay quiet.

“I’m going to need you to write down everything,” he says. “As much detail as you can remember.”

“Everything?”

“Yes.”

I can only hope the impatient flick of his hair means he doesn’t know it all. That she hasn’t told him everything.

“Concentrate on your friendship with Shauna, how much you confided in each other. Her testimony is worth so much more with your corroboration. And, of course, we want to focus as much as possible on what happened before that night.”

That night: Monday, December 8, 1986. The Feast of the Immaculate Conception. My head pounds with the thought of it and Ronan’s voice fades to a distant mumble as I sink into the murky depths of memory. I tried for so long to make sense of it, as if there was a single moment that could have changed it, as if any of us had been owed a happy ending. But I’m still not sure it could have ended any other way.


2


The city air is sour with the weekend residue as I lumber through the alleyways off Grafton Street, taking the shady route back to work. It’s not only Ronan’s bombshell that’s shaken me, or how I’ll explain it to my family, to my colleagues at Trinity. It’s the rage simmering in my gut, that after everything we went through, it is still not the end. Not just for us but for a whole new generation. I thought I’d left it behind, and Shauna with it, but now the memories catch my breath so intensely I can barely work out what is real and what is trauma and the sleight-of-hand tricks it plays.

She doesn’t want to be contacted; Ronan made that clear. After what happened, I only ever saw her from the sidelines—glamorous photos in the society pages, magazine features on her burgeoning law career. And then after a while, there was nothing, as if she had simply stopped existing. I’ve tried to find her online many times of course, those dark nights when her memory is a silhouette in the shadows, a haunting of us. If I could even see a photo, the middle-aged version might help me leave the teenage Shauna where she belongs. But the hollow thud of that heart keeps beating, no matter how much I try to make it stop.

At the end of Dawson Street, my head whirls with the incessant glare of the sun and the solid throng of tourists and I fluster through the dappled shade of the side entrance to Trinity, and into the cool concrete shelter of the Arts Block. In the toilets, I run cold water over my hands and wipe them under the dark fringe that hangs low over my eyebrows. My green eyes are shot with rivulets of blood and there’s a tremor in my hand that I see only in the stark glare of my reflection.

The woman in the mirror is not me, the Lou Manson I’ve worked so hard to build from the ashes of the girl I left in Highfield. I want to help Ronan and his client, just a child for god’s sake, but even news of the case could jeopardize my career. The Highfield affair has never gone away completely; it still lingers on the fringes of the internet. A trial would bring it all back into the open and I’m not sure the department would stand by me through the scandal. And Shauna, she has the ammunition to take everything from me. I’ve no idea how far she’s prepared to go and I’m dizzy with the possibility that she really is prepared to tell all. I’ve carried the weight of that secret all these years, the memory still as brutal as the deed. The taste of blood still fresh on my tongue. I don’t want to face my students like this. I need to get out of here.

* * *

WHEN I GET HOME, OUR GOLF is not in the drive, and I breathe a sigh of relief. I’m not ready to explain anything to Alex just yet. I turn the key in the front door of the 1930s semi we recently restored, the project that was as much of a commitment as our wedding three years ago. It fills me with joy every day to return to this house, this family I’ve worked so hard for. I won’t let the Powers steal them from me.

I throw my keys onto the hall table and I’m about to push open the double doors to the extension when I hear laughter upstairs, the sort of uninhibited outburst I haven’t heard from my teenager in years. I’d be delighted if it wasn’t still early afternoon, almost two hours before she’s supposed to finish school.

“Katie,” I shout, but there is no reply.

I trudge upstairs, primed for battle, when I hear her phone vibrate on the drawers beside her room. Behind her bedroom door, she’s chatting lightly on her laptop, a tone I barely recognize, and I know she hasn’t heard me. I hold my breath as I pick up the phone, which is clearly, unmistakably, unlocked.

I never meant to be a suspicious parent, but years of second-guessing Katie’s anxiety issues have left me exhausted and paranoid. She wasn’t shy when she was younger, but she started to retreat into herself in the last few years of primary school. It got so bad when she started secondary that we ended up home-schooling her between us for most of the last term. Now she’s in a private all-girls school, two things I swore off after my Highfield days. She seems happier, but she tells us nothing of her life there and I’d give anything for a brief glimpse.

I wrestle with my conscience for precisely two seconds before my thumb hovers over Katie’s social media icons. I don’t want to disturb her alerts, leave a trace. Instead, I click on her photo gallery, a collection of selfies and gifs and other people’s video clips. I scroll down, and it’s more of the same until I come to a series of photos that can’t be her, not my baby, only fourteen years of age.

It’s Katie’s long, brown hair, pulled back behind bare shoulders, Katie’s full lips puckered at the camera, Katie’s hazel eyes both eager and docile. And her naked breasts in one photo after another, then intimate, close-up shots, and I have to look away as the phone drops from my shaking hands onto the carpet.

I try to rationalize what I’ve seen, that she is exploring her sexuality, that boys had already put their fingers inside my own fourteen-year-old body, but I can’t get my head around how exposed she looks. Not to just one other boy her age but to every single person who might gain access to those photos.

I pick up the phone and click it to sleep, and I’ve just put it back when her bedroom door opens and I’m caught in a guilty side-step away from the drawers. She looks at me, her face a confusion of outrage and horror.


Copyright © 2024 by Fiona McPhillips