Something in Common

by Meaney, Roisin

  No, of course she shouldn’t have: that would have been overreacting. The woman was upset about something, that was all. She needed a shoulder to cry on, some words of comfort.

  ‘Look,’ Sarah said, ‘is everything OK? I mean, you seem a little … I don’t know. I mean, are you all right? Can I help at all?’

  A long, slow sigh came from the other woman. She flicked what was left of the cigarette into the river and turned finally to look at Sarah. A few years older, somewhere into her thirties. Not beautiful as much as striking. Eyes so very dark brown they might have been black, deeply shadowed beneath, nose large and slightly hooked, bottom lip full and wide. Skin the soft colour of coffee with cream in it, cheekbones high and sharply defined.

  But there was a curious blankness in the expression, an emptiness in the dark eyes that caused a fresh flick of uneasiness in Sarah.

  ‘Would you just go away?’ the woman said, emphasising each word. ‘Would you leave me alone and go away, and just keep the fucking scarf, or dump it, I really don’t care.’

  The swear word, uttered so quietly and with so little feeling, was shocking in its unexpectedness. Sarah’s anxiety increased as the woman turned back to face the river. The two of them stood there as the seconds ticked on, Sarah’s mind tumbling about, searching for the right course of action. She couldn’t possibly leave her – but what on earth was she to do?

  A little brown bird swooped towards the water before lifting off again. The sun, well hidden all day behind the clouds, slid past a particularly dense one, washing the afternoon in a slightly darker shade of grey and causing Sarah to pull the front edges of her jacket more tightly closed. Not long till twilight, and a further drop in temperature. She thought longingly of a hot bath, of her mother’s rich, beefy stew.

  A sudden burst of birdsong came from a copse a few feet from the bank. It sounded unnervingly out of place in the still, cold January afternoon.

  Sarah’s stomach rumbled, almost three hours since she’d chopped a hardboiled egg into slices and added it to a handful of raw mushrooms. Much less than she normally ate for lunch, but all she’d been able to face with the interview looming.

  She had to say something: they couldn’t go on standing here in silence all afternoon. She might be blowing this whole thing out of all proportion, it might still be a case of some sad person simply wanting to be alone for a while. But what if it wasn’t?

  She had to speak, even if she made an utter fool of herself. Better say it and be wrong than be left wondering. As she opened her mouth, the woman looked around again, and this time the dark eyes were narrowed, the lips pressed together, a frown lodged between her eyebrows.

  ‘Sorry,’ Sarah said quickly, ‘I know you want me to go, but I can’t. Not until I know you’re not going to …’ she faltered, searching for the right words ‘… I’m just afraid you might be thinking of …’

  She came to a stop again, the words refusing to come out – but surely it must be obvious what she meant. She waited for the woman to protest, to tell Sarah she was being stupid, to laugh at her, even – but there was no protestation, no sign that what was lying unspoken between them surprised her in the least. No indication at all that Sarah had come to the wrong conclusion.

  God, she wasn’t wrong, she knew that now. Her palms prickled with nervousness. Why did she have to be the one to come on this situation? Why hadn’t she cycled on and ignored the damn scarf? No, she didn’t mean that; she wanted to help, but she hadn’t a clue what to do, not a clue.

  ‘It’s none of your business,’ the woman snapped. ‘You know nothing about me, you’ve no right to butt in. Just leave me alone, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Sarah insisted, ‘not when I know what you want to do. I can’t leave you – how can I? How could anyone walk away from this? I’d never be able to live with myself if – I mean, I just can’t leave you on your own to—’

  Again she stuttered to a standstill, praying for another car to appear. Anyone would do – she’d run out and flag them down, make them stop and help – but no car came. She was alone with a suicidal woman: it was down to her.

  ‘Please don’t,’ she went on, putting a hand on the sleeve of the too-big coat, feeling the heat of incipient tears behind her eyes. ‘You can’t do this – things can’t be that bad. There must be—’

  ‘How the fuck would you know how bad they are?’ the woman demanded angrily, snatching her arm away. ‘Who the fuck do you think you are, to tell me what I can and can’t do? Go away, leave me alone – this has nothing to do with you.’

  ‘I can’t go away,’ Sarah repeated, eyes burning, voice trembling. ‘Look,’ she said urgently, blinking hard to keep the tears at bay, ‘I have to try to help you, whether you want it or not. I can’t just walk away from you – even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. You must understand that.’ Tears spilled out then and rolled down her face, and without thinking she pressed the scarf to her eyes, smelling again the perfume, the tobacco.

  ‘Jesus!’ The woman slammed both her hands hard onto the top of the railing, making Sarah’s heart jump, making her jerk the scarf away from her face. ‘What the hell are you crying for? You know nothing about me. If you had any fucking idea what I’m going through—’

  ‘Tell me,’ Sarah cried, rummaging in her jacket pockets for a tissue, remembering that they were in her bag, which was sitting in the bike’s basket. ‘Tell me what’s wrong – maybe it’ll help.’

  Wasn’t that what everyone said, that you had to talk about your problems? Never mind that Sarah wouldn’t have an idea what to say in response: maybe the act of talking would be enough.

  But the woman shook her head violently. ‘Jesus Christ!’ she cried. ‘You really think you can make all this go away? You think I’ll tell you what’s wrong and you’ll, what, wave your little magic wand and make it all better?’ Her eyes were flashing, and bright with tears too now. ‘Would you ever just go and leave me to it? Just walk on, pretend you never saw me. Would you just do that? If you want to make anything better, that’s what you can do.’ She pressed her mouth shut and swung her head away to look out at the river again.

  ‘I can’t,’ Sarah wept, ‘I can’t do that. I’m sorry, I can’t walk away. Please don’t ask me to.’ She searched for the right words, anything that might help. ‘There must be someone,’ she said urgently, dabbing again at her wet face with the scarf, ‘you must have some family – think what this would do to them, think how much it would hurt them.’

  She had to keep talking, had to keep trying to stop this. ‘You don’t want to cause more hurt, do you? Because that’s all this will do. You’ll escape whatever you’re running away from, but you’ll be leaving more heartache behind you, and where’s the good in that?’

  She was dimly aware, as she talked, that maybe her words were all wrong. Maybe there was no family – maybe they’d all been wiped out in a terrible car crash, or a house fire. Maybe that was why the woman was here now, planning to end it all. Sarah watched her hands, still planted on the railing. She waited in dread for any sudden movement.

  But the woman remained motionless. Sarah glanced up to her face, but the little she could see of it gave nothing away. Was she listening, or had she shifted her awareness somewhere else? No matter: the longer she didn’t haul herself upwards onto the railings, the better.

  ‘I just think,’ Sarah went on, afraid to let the silence grow, ‘that maybe if you got some help or, I don’t know, if you had someone to talk to – oh, not me, I don’t mean me. Like you said, we don’t know each other at all, and of course you’re right, I have no idea what’s brought you to this state, but I really truly feel that this isn’t the answer. Maybe if you spoke to a doctor or …’ not a psychiatrist, she’d better not say that, it mightn’t go down well ‘… or a counsellor, someone professional, they might be able to help you.’

  She stopped, drained, finally out of inspiration. A small breeze was cold on her damp cheeks. Her eyes still stung: more tears wer
en’t far away, wouldn’t need much encouragement to fall. She’d always been quick to cry, regularly bawled her eyes out at the cinema.

  There was silence for a few seconds. Another car drove onto the bridge then, but Sarah didn’t turn towards it, made no move to intercept it. She remained standing where she was, her eyes still fixed on the woman’s face, every sense alert to the possibility of any sudden movement – though what she could do in that eventuality was beyond her. Grab on, and maybe get pulled over the railing herself? She imagined the two of them spinning through the air like a pair of circus acrobats, whirling and flailing as they plunged towards the water. The thought was horrifying: she shook her head to dislodge it.

  Finally, the other woman moved. She lifted an arm and brought the sleeve of her sheepskin coat once across her eyes, and Sarah realised she was wiping away silent tears of her own. Then, without looking in Sarah’s direction she turned away abruptly, drawing keys from her coat pocket. Sarah watched as she walked around the Beetle and opened the driver’s door.

  ‘Are you OK to drive?’ she asked. ‘I can stay a bit longer if you want.’

  The woman ignored her. She got into the car and switched on the ignition as she banged the door closed. Sarah stood and watched as the Beetle pulled away too fast, causing the tyres to screech loudly for an instant. She waited until it turned off the bridge and disappeared.

  They hadn’t exchanged names. They would probably never lay eyes on one other again. For all Sarah knew, the woman was going to drive to the next bridge and throw herself off it, uninterrupted by a babbling, tearful cyclist. Sarah might read about it in tomorrow’s paper: Volkswagen Beetle found abandoned by river, fears for driver’s safety.

  Had she made a difference? Had anything she’d said struck a chord? She’d never know – but if she read nothing over the next few days, if there was no report of a missing woman on the radio, she’d tell herself that maybe she’d been of some help. She’d let herself believe that she’d saved a life, and hope she was right.

  She leant against the railing, trailing the scarf over it and pressing her hands against its cold metal, just as the woman had done. She drew in the dank scent that came up from the river beneath her. Imagine wanting to throw yourself into that freezing water, imagine how desperate you’d have to be, how low you must have fallen to want that.

  She pressed her icy palms against her cheeks and eyed the scarf, lying limply there. Should she tie it onto the railings in case the woman came back for it? But that seemed unlikely: the scarf was probably the last thing on her mind right now. Sarah might as well keep it, although she couldn’t imagine ever wanting to wear it, pretty as it was. Maybe she’d wash it and add it to her next charity shop round-up.

  She retraced her steps to where she’d left the bike, her legs unexpectedly shaky. She pushed the scarf into her handbag, beside the envelope of references she’d brought along to the interview. So unimportant it seemed now, whether or not she was offered the cook’s job. She remembered her nervousness as she’d cycled to the nursing home just a couple of hours earlier, not knowing that the real challenge would come on the way home.

  As she cycled off, none too steadily, the rain returned in earnest, stabbing into her back, her shoulders, her head. She hardly noticed it.

  Helen

  All the way back to Dublin she shivered violently, despite the heavy coat and the relative warmth of the car. Driving through the outskirts of the city, wipers slicing away the rain, she noticed that she was almost out of petrol. Dusk was falling, headlights were being switched on in other cars, streetlights were winking into life. Lights appearing all around her, the whole world lighting up, and nothing but darkness inside her, nothing but a black gaping hole where her heart, or her soul, or her entire being, used to be.

  She tried not to think, she tried to keep her head empty. She pulled into a petrol station and rubbed her numb hands together for several minutes before getting out. She pumped fuel into the tank she’d deliberately ignored all week, certain that whoever filled it again wouldn’t be her.

  A line from a song floated unbidden into in her head, something about learning the truth at seventeen, as she stood by the car, watching the money gauge as it climbed to five pounds. Janis Ian’s dreary, angst-ridden song had come on the radio as she’d fed Alice her breakfast that morning, and now it returned, spinning on its imaginary turntable in her head, spewing out its woebegone lyrics.

  It wasn’t about learning the truth, it was about recognising the lies. Helen had known it all at seventeen: she’d been wild and hungry and impatient to turn the next page of her life and meet head-on whatever and whoever was waiting there. It had taken her almost another seventeen years to understand that happiness never lasted, that good didn’t triumph, that love only laid you bare for the pain that was waiting.

  You must have family, the woman on the bridge had said, butting in where she wasn’t wanted. Forcing Helen to remember Alice, who smelt of wet grass and pepper, who couldn’t sleep without her thumb tucked into her cheek, who screamed if the landing light was turned off, whose chubby little wrists poked from the horrible pastel-coloured cardigans that Helen’s mother insisted on knitting.

  Alice, the reason Helen hadn’t been with Cormac at the end, hadn’t held his hand as he’d slipped away. Alice, whom Helen wanted to hate for that but couldn’t, because Alice was part of Cormac. She was all he’d left behind.

  But the timing, the cruel timing of the rash that had prompted Alice’s babysitter Anna to phone Helen, the rash that had forced Helen to leave her dying husband’s bedside and attend to Alice, who, it turned out, didn’t have meningitis after all, just an outbreak of psoriasis – and by the time Helen had got back to Cormac, it had been too late.

  She felt the rumble of the petrol through the nozzle she held, heard its gush into the tank, smelt its acrid tang. She would have done it. She would have climbed onto the railing. She would have jumped out of this putrid life without a backward glance, without a second’s hesitation, once she’d keyed herself up enough. She would have done it, if it hadn’t been for the interfering woman on the bridge, the crying stranger, with hair the colour of crispbread, in a hideous green trouser suit.

  She pulled the nozzle from the tank and hooked it into its cradle. She screwed the petrol cap back on – and then she slammed both of her palms hard on the roof of the car, causing a man at the next pump to look across, startled. She ignored him, feeling the sting of the blow, doing nothing to lessen the sharp heat of it.

  Enough lies: of course she wouldn’t have done it, because she was a fucking coward. The other woman had had nothing to do with it: all she’d given Helen was an excuse to walk away.

  She leant against the car and wrapped the sheepskin coat more tightly around her. She closed her eyes and saw herself standing by the railing, looking down at the rushing water. She remembered taking a deep breath and preparing herself to do it – and her body had refused to move, refused to obey her mind’s command.

  She’d lit a cigarette and drawn furiously on it, still determined to carry out what she’d come to do. She’d cursed her stubborn, traitorous limbs, willing them to move, but the more she’d thought about it, and pictured herself doing it, the more terrifying the prospect had become.

  And out of nowhere she’d heard the soft whirr of bicycle wheels going past. She hadn’t looked around, had kept stock still and waited for whoever it was to disappear again, but then she’d heard the wheeze of brakes being pulled, and a few seconds later the clack of approaching footsteps. Female footsteps.

  The best of it was, the killer was, the woman probably thought she’d saved Helen’s life. She’d probably congratulated herself all the way home because she’d rescued someone who was about to jump off a bridge. She’d never know the truth, never know that Helen had already been saved – or damned – by lack of courage.

  And her beautiful scarf was gone. Serve her right, too proud to take it back from the woman she’d told to keep it. T
he ridiculously expensive scarf Cormac had bought her for their first anniversary was gone to a stranger. One more layer to press onto the slab of her grief.

  In the small shop beside the petrol station she bought two atrociously priced bananas and a bag of jelly babies. She ate the bananas driving through the wet streets to her parents’ house. She slicked on more lipstick as she sat in the parked car outside their wrought-iron gates, listening to the engine ticking itself to sleep.

  She wouldn’t try it again, she knew that. She’d gone to the edge and pulled herself back, and now there was no edge any more. She couldn’t do it: the will required for such an act wasn’t in her. The knowledge brought no relief, made her no happier; on the contrary, she now had the added torment of the realisation that there was no escape.

  She wondered suddenly if Alice could possibly have been the reason for her failure today. Maybe, despite her conflicted feelings about her daughter, there was some unacknowledged umbilical connection to Alice that had prevented Helen from climbing onto the railing and letting go. It sure as hell hadn’t been the thought of never seeing her parents again.

  She pulled the key from the ignition – forget it, it was over now – and got out, wrapping Cormac’s coat tighter around her as she hurried through the petering-off rain up the driveway.

  ‘What kept you?’ her mother said, opening the door. ‘You said you’d be back by five. We had to put Alice to bed.’

  ‘I ran out of petrol,’ Helen replied, walking around her into the hall, continuing past the giant walnut hallstand, past the marble-topped side table, home to an elegant white telephone and the key to her father’s Rolls-Royce, which sat as always on top of his leather driving gloves.

  ‘Really,’ her mother said, a hand to the string of small, perfect pearls around her neck, ‘I have to say that coat looks ridiculous on you.’