Where the Edge Is

by Gráinne Murphy

  where the

  edge is

  Gráinne Murphy

  Legend Press Ltd, 51 Gower Street, London, WC1E 6HJ

  info@legendpress.co.uk | www.legendpress.co.uk

  Contents © Gráinne Murphy 2020

  The right of the above author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.

  Print ISBN 978-1-78955-9-415

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-78955-9-408

  Set in Times. Printing managed by Jellyfish Solutions Ltd

  Cover design by Steve Marking | www.stevemarking.com

  All characters, other than those clearly in the public domain, and place names, other than those well-established such as towns and cities, are fictitious and any resemblance is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  Gráinne Murphy grew up in rural West Cork, Ireland. At university she studied Applied Psychology and Forensic Research. In 2011 she moved with her family to Brussels for 5 years. She has now returned to West Cork, working as a self-employed language editor specialising in human rights and environmental issues.

  Follow Gráinne

  @GraMurphy

  For

  Oisín, Ali, Cara

  (You’re all my favourites)

  ‘Si la vie était plus logique, elle serait encore moins

  vivable.’

  Were life more logical, it would be still less livable.

  Christian Dotremont (1922–1979)

  Sleepy-eyed half smile

  Cartoon hair, morning breath. Sweet

  With kept promises.

  CONTENTS

  Part One – Down

  Idle Speculation

  Nina

  Tim

  Richie

  Alina

  Part Two – In

  From the Right Angle

  Lucy

  Tim

  Nina

  Alina

  Richie

  Part Three – Out

  In the Beginning Was the Word

  Tim

  Nina

  Richie

  Lucy

  Part Four – Up

  Incontinence of the Soul

  Alina

  Lucy

  Tim

  Nina

  Like You Were My Own

  PART ONE – DOWN

  IDLE SPECULATION

  Afterwards, those at a comfortable distance will wonder if something small might have made all the difference. If they hadn’t all been sitting at the back of the bus, say, the weight distribution or the force of the impact might have changed just enough. A fool and his theory are hard parted.

  It is human nature, maybe, to shiver in the unknown interplay of physics and fate and the delicious horror of being thisclose yet thisfar. There will be much talk of meaningful everyday choices, about destiny and free will, but those comments are twenty-four hours away yet. The talk-radio shows that will draw them out are only in the early stages of their planning. Their schedules contain nothing more urgent than weather, reality programming, the endless cycle of politics.

  Nothing can change the fact of the handful of early-morning passengers climbing on and moving towards the back of the bus. Pushed there – shamefully, inadmissibly – by the presence of the muttering woman pacing the aisle.

  The driver knows her, it seems, but that is not in itself remarkable: everyone in the small town of Kilbrone knows Crazy May. She haunts the bus yard in the mornings. Keeping the bins company, the drivers say among themselves, although they know it is simply because fewer people bother her there. Some of them put the run on her, it’s true, but most turn a blind eye, let her ride for free.

  Today’s driver nods May on as she waves someone else’s out-of-date bus pass, dug from a bin or a bag or who knows where. They swing down the hill, just the two of them, and onto the ring road towards the start of the route without bothering one another. She never stays on for more than two or three stops. Just long enough to warm her bones after the night’s cold. Never further than the boundaries of her own small world.

  At the first stop, several others get on and sidle past her without making eye contact. Afraid of her low growl. Her dirty plait of hair. Haircuts are only a memory for May, part of a normality fallen by the wayside long since. The others know – as rational humans, of course they know – that homelessness, dirt, madness, are not catching. Yet they will not risk her presence, lest her life leak into theirs. One by one they file on and put enough distance between them and her to feel safe. It is biology, this choice they make, not physics at all. That is what the armchair engineers will never be able to account for.

  The bus is quieter after May gets off. People catch each other’s eye and smile and settle into the stop-start rhythm of the bus as it takes the bends towards the centre of town. The traffic is light, they are a good hour ahead of the morning scramble. The driver keeps the pace steady, reaching each stop right on schedule.

  Is there a slight popping sound as the bus leans into the curve of the bend? Or is that simply put there later, imagined into being by well-meaning bystanders?

  When the floor of the world disappears, the noise it makes is surprisingly small. Like nothing so much as the metallic splash of a handful of cutlery, fresh from the dishwasher, into the drawer.

  The bus hovers for a blink before it falls. Fast and clumsy, the road melting away to let it pass through to the nothingness below.

  Help will be here shortly, they probably think, as they cough dust out or pull it in. Or perhaps it is some other cliché that comes to mind. At such a moment, even clichés are forgivable.

  Wait for the dust to settle.

  Keep your feet on the ground.

  Weigh it up. Suck it up. Sit tight.

  A thousand and one ways to say: do nothing; say nothing; pretend. This too shall pass.

  Chance knows no such limits.

  NINA

  Nina woke when the clock radio clicked on. She kept it tuned to a pop-music station, the uniform nasal drone of the DJs a small price to pay for the certainty she won’t be caught off guard by anything real.

  Dress. Bathroom. Make-up. A morning in five-minute slots. To dress last would be to risk climbing back into bed, a lesson learned once, sharply. Her suit hung on the outside of the wardrobe door and her jewellery was laid out on the dressing table, the last task before going to bed. It helped her to sleep, seeing the shadowy outline of her tomorrow self. A skin all ready to step into, to show her who she was. One less thing to struggle with when the weight of the morning curled her into herself, the shiver of remembering like a comb running along sunburn.

  The early news had a breaking item about a bus crash in Kilbrone, some half an hour outside the city. She held her breath, then released it. She didn’t know anyone living there. It wouldn’t affect her commute too much, either. The studio was on the opposite side of the city.

  A final couple of minutes to double-check everything before she left: plugs, doors, windows. The last stop on the tour was Aisling’s empty room, the best and worst part of every day.

  Put your coat on in her room and close it up tight against you to keep in the last of her air, her spirit. Taking her with you when you leave the house. Imagining you can smell her on your skin, the sweet and sour of baby shampoo and spit-up mil
k.

  Once she was safely out of the house and in the car, the morning news brought Nina back to life, as it did every morning.

  ‘The road has been closed and emergency services are at the scene. Locals describe seeing the bus crumpled on its side…’ They cut to a woman’s excited voice, ‘like a dog knocked sideways by a car’, she said, her voice almost gleeful.

  The expression was wonderfully visceral. Everyone listening would be picturing roadkill, Nina thought.

  Settled at her desk, she turned her attention to her computer screen. One of the segments for next week’s show was due to go to the editing room and the process would go much more smoothly if she was clear about the direction she wanted for the piece.

  She had spent a full day interviewing the staff and residents of a geriatric hospital that was universally lauded for its innovative holistic approach to the well-being of its residents. Budget cuts had seen it slated for closure under cost-cutting measures, but with a general election looming early the following year, the hope was that some publicity would prompt a local politician to make it part of his campaign platform.

  Such were the pieces Noel assigned to her since she came back from her leave of absence. The kind of human-interest angles that she used to consider fluff pieces, only good for filling time after the main news. But Noel had felt it would suit her, this place of individual stories, and he was right. People told her things now, she had become a magnet for the personal sorrow of others. She understood their preoccupation with the little things, how the boundaries of their damaged worlds were suddenly too narrow to admit scale.

  She paused the footage on an elderly couple beaming into the camera, holding hands like newly-weds, then pressed play to hear her own voice.

  ‘So, tell me, Mary, what are you doing today? You look like you are all dressed up for something special.’

  ‘Today is date night, Nina,’ Mary said. ‘Jim and myself are going to the pictures, like we used to when we were first stepping out.’

  ‘But you’re not going out to the movies, Mary, are you?’ Her on-screen face settled into its interested pose. It was one of several she had to practise now. Interest, shock, empathy. Reminding her face of what was acceptable.

  ‘No, pet, I wouldn’t be able to go out like that any more, not these days, but, sure, I don’t need to.’

  Her husband, Jim, finished her sentence for her, frowning with the effort of not looking at the camera. ‘The movies are coming to us tonight, Nina.’

  Here, Ben panned the camera around the room behind the couple. It was all set up like a tiny cinema, with rows of chairs in front of a pull-down projector screen. Beside the door stood an easel with an A4 poster of Singin’ in the Rain, above which someone had written, Matinee 12.30 p.m. / Evening show 5.30 p.m.

  Not so long ago, she would have smirked at the idea that half past five constituted evening. But there were days now when she, too, climbed into bed before eight, unable to fight her way even to the quasi-respectability of the geriatric waterline that was the nine o’clock news.

  Nearby, Noel’s office door banged shut, breaking her concentration. She glanced up. Inside the glass cube of the office, her colleague Mark was talking and talking, waving his hands as if channelling the traffic of his thoughts safely through to his mouth. He was pitching for the bus story, no doubt. If there was an angle, Mark would find it. ‘Without tears it’s worthless,’ he told her once. ‘You have to get them to cry, whatever it takes.’

  On the screen, Mary and Jim were collecting their bags of popcorn from the vending machine, their laughter charming and grateful and guaranteed to horrify the middle-aged voting public. Tears were assured in living rooms up and down the country.

  How strange to envy Mary and Jim their old bodies. To see all the years they shared and know that even if she met someone else this very minute, she would still never have what they had. Her mother had lately started making noises to that effect, telling her she needed to ‘get out more’, to ‘find a hobby’, to ‘meet new people’. All of the standard euphemisms for finding a man. For looking for one. As if it was what she should want. At every turn, it seemed, there was the world with its judgemental pointy finger. ‘Never,’ that finger told her. ‘You. Will. Never.’

  ‘Noel?’ She was on her feet and at his door without stopping to think. ‘Do you have a minute?’

  ‘We’re nearly finished here. Can it wait?’

  ‘No… this concerns Mark too, I think. I want the story, Noel. The bus crash. Well, not the crash as such.’ She took a breath, jumped. ‘The families, I want the families.’

  * * *

  Less than an hour later, Nina was parking in a makeshift car park and heading into the regional fire station, where a room had been allocated to the media. Looking around the room, she spotted Ben and slipped into the seat behind him, nodding hello to the familiar faces she passed.

  ‘Apparently the driver and a woman got out,’ he told her. ‘There are more on board, but I don’t know how many. People are saying anything from two to twenty. Statement is due any minute now.’

  ‘The driver got out?’

  ‘The first-response team pulled him out, along with a woman. Rumour has it that that might have been a mistake, destabilised the road or something.’

  But Nina hardly heard him. She was looking instead at the man who introduced himself to the room as the Senior Executive Fire Officer. A new title to match his new role, she thought. When she knew him, he was simply ‘the Chief’. His voice hadn’t changed, it was as calm and reassuring as ever. ‘Don’t mind the one-day-at-a-time crap,’ he had whispered to her in the hum and hush of the funeral-home receiving line. ‘Take it one breath at a time.’

  ‘Public safety is our priority at this moment in time. We don’t yet know the underlying cause of the road collapse, so we need to evacuate the immediate vicinity before we can do anything else. The main population vulnerabilities are the community hospital on the far side of the junction and the primary school three hundred yards to the south.’

  ‘How many people are we talking about?’ a voice called from the crowd.

  ‘Some four hundred in the school, give or take. It’s harder to say with the hospital. The HSE lead is evaluating whether to evacuate the whole hospital or just the wing closest to the site. So somewhere between thirty and one hundred and twenty, depending on that decision.’

  ‘How long for the evac?’ another voice called.

  ‘An hour. Ninety minutes, tops,’ the Chief said.

  ‘What about the people on board the bus?’

  ‘We believe there are six people on board. Two are already safely out, as I outlined earlier, and we are working to get the others out as soon as we can. In the meantime, there are hundreds of vulnerable children and elderly people that need to be moved out of harm’s way.’

  ‘Out of harm’s way?’

  ‘If there is an issue with the stability of the road—’

  ‘Was it a bomb?’ someone called out and the room erupted in questions.

  The Chief shook his head and gestured for silence. ‘No. We’re working on the assumption that there is an issue with the road surface. The county engineers are here with us, assessing the necessary risk factors—’

  The greater good was what it boiled down to, Nina knew. Policies, procedures, all designed with numbers in mind.

  ‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,’ the Chief finished. ‘Step by step is the best way to help everybody.’

  Fuck the greater good, with their big lungfuls of air. Nina was on her feet, ‘What about the families?’

  The Chief nodded, the only sign that he recognised her. ‘We have four Gardaí responding to all phone queries to identify the families in question—’

  She imagined the people sitting at home shaking their heads at the news, then slowly putting it together with the phone call that hadn’t come.

  ‘We heard that at least one has been identified,’ she pressed. If the few were to be sacri
ficed for the many, they should not remain nameless underground.

  ‘No names can be confirmed yet, but some of the families have indeed been informed and are on their way. I trust they will be accorded the decency their situation demands.’

  It was hard to blame him for fearing false identification. Relief was often quick to turn to anger at the wasted worry. Not so lucky are the real families, the victims of the small ways that conspire to put the wrong person in the wrong place.

  When the Chief left, the room buzzed with questions and people turned to their neighbours, trading impressions and rumours. At the start of her career – or even a few years ago – she would have dived into the chatter with the rest, clutching her high ideals of truth and justice. But journalism had changed. She herself had changed. So many things were easy to say. What wouldn’t be easy, she knew, was the awkwardness of her colleagues, who still lived by the mantra that today was all that mattered. If it wasn’t news, it was nothing.

  ‘I need to make a phone call,’ she told Ben. ‘Text me if anything happens.’

  ‘Sure.’

  The hallway was quiet, people dotted here and there on their phones. In her late teens and early twenties, moody distance was signified by standing alone with a cigarette. She took out her phone, holding it at a believable screen-reading distance. Was it really about being alone back then or was it more about giving the impression that aloneness was desirable? Perhaps it was the impression itself that was desirable. Now, as then, her sister came to her rescue, the phone vibrating in her hand even as she looked at it.

  ‘I can’t talk right now.’

  ‘Then why bother answering?’ Irene said.

  They had always been the wrong way round. Although Nina was the elder of the two, exasperation had been Irene’s default position for as long as either of them could remember. They laughed about it during a daquiri-fuelled conversation on their first night out after Aisling was born.

  ‘You’ve always acted like you’re older than me,’ Nina pointed out, slurring the tiniest bit after two drinks. ‘Dónal Óg will always be older than Aisling, so I’ll never have as much experience as you.’