From the moment she was held aloft in the delivery room we knew that our daughter Clara meant business, for at 4.20 am on the 3rd January 1987, she surveyed her brave new world with an expression of cool detachment as if to say: ‘Okay. Now I’ve finally arrived after those nine endless months, I’m gonna make the most of it. I’m gonna kick some ass.’
Like many first-timers, we were clueless as parents. We had never held a newborn infant before, let alone bathed one, changed a nappy or tried to ease tiny limbs into the straitjacket confines of a baby-gro. The screeds of conflicting advice were endless - literally. Feed on demand. Don’t feed on demand. Let her sleep in your bed. Don’t let her sleep in your bed. Put her lying on her back. No, no - put her lying on her front. In the end, we decided that we’d muddle through somehow, and simply try to rear a happy human being, and a friend for life.
Clara was intrepid. She swam before she crawled; her crawling was more of a prance than a shuffle; and when she finally found her feet, the expression on her face was that of an explorer who’d just discovered a vastly exciting new territory.
As she grew, she terrified us with her audacity. The first time she saw a fire lit in a grate, she greeted it with an intrigued ‘Hello!’ before tottering towards it with her arms outstretched in welcome. On her first excursion to a playground she gave us a disdainful look when we set her on a baby slide, and promptly crossed the tarmac and climbed the steps to the highest one of all. In supermarkets she turned into a miniature commando, deploying evasive action and scooting off any time our backs were turned. We would cast around wildly, bowling along the aisles between toiletries and household goods like twin Jack Nicholsons negotiating the maze in ‘The Shining’, until we found her. Invariably she’d be sitting on the floor, delving into a box of éclairs, chocolate all over her mouth. In an attempt at foiling her, we invested in a pair of ‘childproof’ reins, but upon strapping them on, they were doffed with the chutzpah of a Houdini.
The more Clara’s independent streak burgeoned, the more we realised it would be wrong not to encourage it. It was time for us to start letting go. When she was twelve we suggested that she do a course in Scuba, so that she could come diving with us on holiday. The first time we sank beneath the murky surface of the Irish Sea with our daughter, we spent the duration of the dive trying vainly to shepherd her – an impossible task. Underwater, Clara was as elusive as Tinkerbelle and sent our hearts tattooing – bad news for divers, who are supposed to remain Zen at all times.
At the age of fourteen, she made the decision to leave Dublin and become a boarder in Kylemore Abbey, a fabulous Gothic edifice that makes everyone who lays eyes on it think of Hogwarts. There she roamed freely through the wild West of Ireland, climbing mountains, exploring forests, swimming in lakes and giving tourists extremely precise directions as to where to go to find leprechauns.
At eighteen she headed off with the British Schools Expeditionary Society to spend two months in Kwa Zulu Natal, in South Africa. There she slept under skies ablaze with shooting stars, listening to the sound of lions on the prowl through the bush, and the coughing of cheetahs. She learned to shoot a gun and skin and gut an impala. She trekked zebra and acquired all the skills of the game ranger, she climbed high into the Drakkensburg mountains and white-water rafted, she nipped adroitly out of the way of charging hippos and hurled abuse at marauding monkeys.
During those two months - because the only means of communication with the expedition was via satellite phone - we heard nothing from her, apart from a couple of e-mails sent from hill stations. We were learning to let go a little more.
The toughest call came when Clara set off Inter-railing through Eastern Europe with three girlfriends and somehow ended up in Thailand. She took her mobile phone with her on this trip: but every parent knows the terror generated by the phone that’s out of range, or the dread induced by those automated tones that deliver you straight to voice mail. Most parents we know have learned to resist the temptation of trying to make contact with their daughters by mobile because if no answer is forthcoming, worst-case scenario inevitably sets in and one’s imagination spirals into orbit. Twilight is said to be ‘the hour between dog and wolf’, but for us it’s four o’clock in the morning when your daughter’s out clubbing and there’s no text message in your inbox. That’s when the instinct to make that phone call is at its most dangerously insistent – and that is the phone call you know you really must not make.
Their first destination is Koh Tao, down south. It’s a Lotus Land of an island that proves to have the allure of Bali Hi in the movie South Pacific, for just days after arriving there, Clara ends up watching from the beach as her girlfriends set sail back northward on the ferry. She has broken the first rule of the backpackers’ code: she has abandoned her travelling companions, seduced into staying on the island by her rediscovery of Scuba.
Dear God in heaven. Our beautiful girl is living alone in a beach hut on an island in the Gulf of Thailand...
We get an e-mail from her. It reads: