Among the names on Derrick’s list was one Cormac Pearl. He went missing in June 1985, disappearing from the family home near Blackpool, aged 19. The mugshot shows a good-looking, dark-eyed lad; young for his age, with longish curly hair and slender, strangely feminine features. He’s smiling for the camera: an incongruous thumbs-up obscuring a portion of his lower face. He’s bare-chested, but the image is black and white so it’s impossible to say if it was an intimate snap, or simply a candid moment on a sunny day. Beside it is a graphic projection of what Cormac might look like now. Digital software has been employed to age his fine features. Hairless, a little jowelly, the fifty-something version of Cormac Pearl looks thoroughly unremarkable and any hopes Rowan held that he might recognize him were quickly dismissed as fanciful. Despite that, he is getting better acquainted with the young man’s disappearance, cross-referencing the name against the National Crime Agency’s missing persons archive: a grisly database full of digitally reconstructed faces of corpses as yet unidentified. He knows that Cormac was the only son of Deaglan and Siobhan Pearl, but can find little other information online about the family. He’s managed to track down an In Memoriam announcement in the Blackpool Gazette, dated 1992. Siobhan died at a private nursing facility after a short illness. She was 44. The family asked that donations be made to a charity set up in memory of their son. The accompanying memento mori was in Gaelic but translated as: “No matter how long the day, the evening comes”. He glances at the screen again and begins to think about the Irish families he has had dealings with – great sprawling clans of half-cousins and step-nephews spread out across the globe, united by the faintest bonds of blood. He widens the internet search and changes the language settings. Quickly finds mention of Siobhan Pearl and her untimely death: the accompanying classified notice incomprehensible to his English eyes. He runs it through a translation service and the jumble of consonants turn into names he can search for. Sisters, brothers, nieces. He sits forward, all other thoughts forgotten. Types a half dozen keywords into a generic search engine and finds himself grinning as he spots what he’s looking for. He often hopes to proven wrong in his cynicism about the nature of people but it hasn’t happened yet. People need to share. They need to have their stories told. The internet has been a true leveler: an equalizing platform granting the illusion of an audience to those who may otherwise have had to stand at bus-stops shouting their stories into the air. The family history website administered by one Tegan Pearl, based in Boston, USA, is ab abominable collusion of lurid yellows and pinks and seems designed entirely to give the user a migraine. Rowan has to squint to navigate his way through the mess of anecdotes, family trees and links to other, paid-for sites, with links to the family surname. He searches under the name ‘Cormac’. It comes up with two hits. One is under the heading: A Prayer for Cormac.
Hey Pearls of the World, I know you probably all say a prayer for the whole clan but can I ask you to say a special Hail Mary for poor Cormac, who’s been gone 30 years now. For those of you who don’t know, Cormac is the only son of Uncle Daeglan and Auntie Siobhan, from the Wexford branch of the family. Cormac went missing in June 1985 and despite Uncle Daeghlan’s best efforts, he’s never been found. The pain of it all put Siobhan in hospital, where she picked up a virus and died. She was too young. I have such lovely memories of her (we’re third cousins, on Dervla’s side) and I’ll always remember how welcome she made us when we visited them in England when I was still not much more than a girl. I don’t have many memories of Cormac but I remember a nice young man who let me play with his sister’s toys and didn’t mind me riding on his back like he was a horse! I still get a Christmas card from Uncle Daeghlan and I know it would mean a lot if you all included him in your prayers. I think we all know that Cormac isn’t coming home but some kind of closure would help everybody, I think. Much love, thankyou, God bless.
Rowan clicks his tongue against the roof of his mouth. Reads the comments below the posting. Sits forward, jockey-like, as he sees the comment left in January, this year, by somebody named eviec41.
What a blast from the past! Seeing all these names has really got me feeling nostalgic. Daeglan always managed to scare the life out of people but he always struck me as a good man who bad things just kept happening to. I’d love to send him a letter or a card if you could give me an address please? We lost touch after Siobhan passed away. Does anybody else remember the wake? By God that was a proper funeral – it took me a month to sober up!
Below, a user named gadflypearl has included a black and white photograph, taken in 1992, at a country hotel in County Wexford. It’s a group shot: a great tide of black suits and black dresses, mourning veils and pale, downturned faces. Sitting at a round table, resembling the pint or porter she holds in a small plump hand, is Eve Cater. She’s talking to a tall, broad-shouldered man. He wears a swatch of material around his neck: the knot peeking out from his open-collared shirt. There’s a chill to the way he holds himself; something in his pose that speaks of a grief held in so tightly that to move would be to risk fragmenting. Between them, sits a girl in her late teens: unpretty, awkward, hunched over herself like a vulture defending a kill. The image is monochrome, but her face is pale and the hue of her slicked back hair speaks of a fiery red.
Beneath the picture, the simple words: “Is this You?”
There is no reply.
38
February 15, 2020
The Wasdale Valley
8.30pm
“I am cleansing this sacred space. Here, we are untroubled by time. There is no time. Here, we are each governed by the same heartbeat: our pulse is the creaking of the fire and the beating of my drum. This is a place of freedom, untainted by negative energies. This is a gateway for the spirits, a barrier between two worlds: a veil between the here and the hereafter….”
Violet is perhaps three feet above the floor, close enough to make out the carpet of mulched leaves, of gravelly dirt and scattered straw that forms the floor of this small, round construction. Feathers and bottles hang on lengths of twine from the fan of thin wooden poles that spread out from the central column. Had there been a fire in the entranceway? A black cooking pot? She fancies she saw a pile of books, pages creased at each corner, tossed carelessly into a tangled clump of grass and roots. She cannot be sure what she saw and what she remembers. It has been this way for a long time. This past year has been excruciating – her mind a labyrinth of locked rooms, bursting open to allow glimpses of tusk and snout and tooth. This place, this here, this now, it has been some thirty years in the making. This is what she must undergo if she is to come to understand herself. Freya has been clear about it all. To heal, she must suffer. In cruelty, she will find truth.
She concentrates, hard, trying not to let the strange droning incantations seize the edges of his consciousness. An upturned milk crate had been placed beside the table. She had glimpsed crystals; green, purple, lapis-lazuli. She hadn’t paid attention. Had been too busy watching the shadows of the trees move across the forest floor; too busy catching droplets of fine rain upon his dirt-grimed face.