‘You’ll catch up and pass me,’ Irene assured her. ‘I never obsessed over things the way you do.’
She was right. By the time Aisling was six months old, Nina was reading ahead to the toddler years. Carelessly counting her chickens.
‘Hello?’ Irene said. ‘Are you still there?’
Her annoyance was welcome. Her refusal to tiptoe around Nina the way others did. ‘I can only talk for a minute. I’m at work.’
‘What are you working on?’
‘The bus crash,’ Nina said, after a moment’s hesitation. Irene would find out anyway and she worried enough, even when Nina was truthful.
‘I thought Noel wasn’t going to—’
‘I asked for it.’ She could feel her sister waiting for more. ‘I felt ready. I am ready.’
‘I’m glad to hear it. Especially since I was phoning to ask you about taking Dónal Óg out for an afternoon.’
At the mention of his name, her heart burned. She loved that little boy from the minute he arrived, red and roaring, in her sister’s arms. Three years older, he was fascinated by Aisling, then puzzled by her sudden disappearance. ‘I had a cousin but she died,’ he would tell people randomly, in lifts and restaurants and airports, the places of excitement in his small life. ‘That’s why everyone is so sad all the time,’ he might add, swinging off the nearest railing while Irene tried to shush him.
His honesty comforted Nina, housed as it was in the warm weight of his small body. She clung to him in the days after Aisling’s death. She and Irene took him to a water park outside the city one dull Saturday morning. He begged her to take him on the water slide and she wanted, with sudden intensity, to be the one to make him smile and shriek with joy.
‘You’re the coolest, Auntie Neen,’ he assured her as they climbed the steps.
Sitting at the top, one hand on the bar, the other around the knitting needles of his ribs, she was startled by a gang of teenagers racing towards them and flinging themselves down as if the plastic surface was no more than the hollow fibre of her pillows at home. Her head blew back with shock and she let go without planning to. She entered the pool horizontally, dragging Dónal Óg down under the water with her instead of keeping him above it. It lasted seconds only, but long enough to teach her that one tragedy did not grant lifelong immunity. Aisling’s death did not grant a protective force-field.
‘You did it wrong,’ he accused her, in tears at the side of the pool. ‘It was supposed to be fun!’
‘Want to try again?’ Irene had asked, oblivious of those underwater seconds, only anxious that their day together not be spoiled.
‘Once was enough,’ Nina said. Her legs shook all the way to the burger stand. You could no longer tickle him until he fell to the ground in a happy ball. The curve of him brought back the hospital. Holding your girl in a tight C-shape while they ripped into her back with needles. You standing quietly by, as if doing nothing more taxing than watching a stiff-lipped waiter fillet a sea bass in a restaurant.
‘Well?’ Irene cut across her thoughts. ‘You could take him this weekend?’
‘No!’ She cleared her throat. ‘I can’t promise anything – work is going to be crazy for the next while. Speaking of which, Ben’s calling me, I have to go back in.’
She stayed where she was after hanging up. The heat of the room, the airlessness and greed would kick awake her demons and today she needed them napping. The anxiety came and went. It was a fickle foe, waking her in the night to tell her the baby monitor was humming gently, or freezing her in cafes with the certain knowledge she had forgotten Aisling somewhere. Even now, when she could never again be left anywhere but the ground in which she rested.
Nina breathed in and counted to thirty in her head, the number of steps from the graveyard gate to the foot of her baby’s forever bed. Irene told her, with the black humour of sisters, that she now had something on which to pin her anxiety, and it was true that she sometimes felt relieved that the worst had already happened. The world could still hurt her, she knew, but it could only ever be hurt of a different order.
She needed fresh air. No, she needed to be in the water with her head submerged, just her and her thoughts. A lie, clearly, when it wasn’t her thoughts she wanted but her memories. She dragged herself away from the edge of the rabbit hole and texted Ben to meet her outside. If the families were here, that was where they would want to be. To watch and hope.
Outside, a small crowd had gathered behind the police cordon. Everyone wanted to be the first to spot something: a family member, a limb, the hand of God. Nina watched the police move lines of children, delivering them from one section to the next in an eerily quiet crocodile. True terror was calm, she knew. She had seen it at the hospital, the quieter the ward, the bigger the fear. On the street in front of her, the smallest children cried, while the older ones’ faces were tight with worry. The ones in between, whose ages gave them the perfect ratio of bravado to ignorance, waved at the cameras, gurning and giggling, all defiance and joy.
‘Where do you want me?’ Ben asked.
‘I’m going to roam around for a bit and see who wants to talk,’ she said. She held up her recorder. ‘I’m fine with just this.’
Let Ben have the footage of smoke and tears, she wanted the faceless voice cracking, the blank space that others could put their own bodies into.
‘Okay. I’ll film the scene, get some context stuff,’ Ben said easily.
Joe and Joan Public were all anxious to talk. They lined up to tell her where they were when they saw, when they heard, taking interminable minutes to describe the shallowness of their feelings. Empty vessels make the most noise. All old wives’ tales held a kernel of truth.
‘My cameraman, Ben – see him over there? – he may want to take some footage, if that’s all right with you all?’ She left them to their useless delight and twittering.
She rounded a corner and leaned against the wall, fighting the instinct to return to the safety of her office. If she did, it would be a long time before Noel trusted her judgement again. The therapist had told her – in her first and only session – that she needed to confront her pain instead of looking for ways to deflect it.
‘If you feel your thoughts spiralling,’ she said, leaning in as if they were friends, ‘let them. It might take you somewhere you need to go.’
As if real life worked like that. Instead, Nina catalogued the sources of her distraction and trained her thoughts not to settle. Her distractions allowed her to slide into the stuff of minutes, the stuff of nothing: the weather, an ad for kitchen towel, a list for her grocery shopping. Individual minutes easing her through the day.
The universe didn’t have a plan. Good things happened. Bad things happened. Work with it, against it, around it. There were only events and the people to whom they happened. That was all it amounted to in the end.
She nodded once and walked back to the site. The children and office workers had disappeared from the road and reappeared on lists, transformed by bureaucracy from 3D into 2D, reality sucked out of them like air out of a plastic bag.
A single figure paced the perimeter, a woman with a long grey plait. From the way she was talking to herself and smacking at the air, Nina guessed she was one of the poor souls released to the community when the old psychiatric hospital in the city closed down. They were given six months’ warning before being sent out into the world with neither skills nor motivation for anything but the rhythm of walking. For putting their lives down one step at a time.
Nina watched the woman as she approached, muttering curses or prayers.
‘Shocking,’ Nina said, when the woman got close enough. She nodded towards the hole.
The woman crossed herself in response. ‘He always lets me on, Richie does. Two little dickie birds sitting on a wall,’ she sang, her voice cracking.
‘One named Peter, one named Paul.’ Nina finished the nursery rhyme.
The woman smiled at her. ‘The dickie birds are the good ones.’
‘Aren’t they just?’ Nina held out her hand. ‘I’m Nina.’
The woman put her hand out too, but not quite far enough, their almost handshake a disembodied thing belonging to neither. ‘We’re all going to hell,’ she said, conversationally.
‘Can’t argue with you there,’ Nina agreed.
‘They’re gone already,’ the woman said. ‘God between us and all harm.’ She began to cross herself over and over, as if the words had loosened some strap that held her fingers still. On she went, intoning the blessing, the sharp edges of her sign softening until she was simply waving her hand in figure of eights between her face and chest.
‘Do you want to tell me anything?’ Nina asked the woman. It was a technique she found useful when interviewing psychiatric patients – the broader the question, the better the answer. Minds that swept the edges struggled with the limits of normal questions.
‘They took them,’ she said.
‘I know,’ Nina touched her own arm, proxy comfort for the skittish woman. ‘But they’ve gone to the hospital to be looked after.’
‘They’re better off dead,’ the woman said, suddenly firm. ‘Better off dead,’ she repeated, backing away. Her laceless sneakers slapped as she walked, barely equal to the task of keeping them on her feet.
Nina watched her walk away on ankles of almost Parisian thinness. Here was no country girl. She took the two sides of the footpath and Nina could imagine others giving her a wide berth as she walked down the street.
You used to think people steered clear of you, too, leaving a person’s width either side. As if your grief skipped alongside you, holding your hand.
Better off dead, the woman said. The ungrateful bitch. Taking up space in a life she didn’t want when you and others like you would have given all you had to grab even the beaten-down dirty shell of that body if you could shove your daughter down into it. A day, an hour, you’d take whatever you could get.
You spent all your time swallowing these thoughts – was it any wonder you had no appetite?
* * *
‘All I’m seeing is that those kids are just fine.’ The man’s voice was loud, his accent a harsh twang.
Nina and Ben stood in the lobby of the fire station, waiting for the lift to take them back up to the temporary media centre upstairs. The station was a bare few hundred yards from the accident site, a cruel joke for any believer in some almighty theatre director. She kept her eyes on the floor, fingering her press pass, waiting to hear more.
‘What I want to know is what’s happening with Paul,’ the man said, louder.
Several others stood with him, among them the Chief and a weeping woman. They formed a loose group. Casual, almost, were it not for the fact that they were subtly trying to move him along.
‘While you’re out there fussing around with people that are already fine, what are you doing about my boy?’
Ben lifted an eyebrow towards his camera, but Nina shook her head. The last thing they needed was to be asked to leave.
‘We are doing everything we can to help your son.’ The Chief’s calm voice trying to defuse the situation. ‘We can’t complete our assessment of the site until after the evacuation,’ he continued.
‘Just stop,’ shouted the man. ‘I don’t care about that. Just tell me what’s happening with Paul!’
The Chief tried again, ‘For now, what we know is—’
‘I’m not asking what you know. I don’t care what you know. You know nothing. I’m asking about Paul. Do you not understand the question?’
‘Sir, once the evacuation is complete, we’ll be able to get a better image read of the area around the hole. Then we can decide which of our rescue plans—’
‘You’re not listening. You’re not listening to me. What’s happening with Paul? What are you doing to get my son out of that hole? What kind of operation are you running here? Why won’t you answer me? Do you not understand English? What’s. Happening. With. Paul.’
‘I understand you’re upset, but this isn’t helping your son,’ a new voice said.
Nina froze at his voice. Tim’s voice. I understand you’re upset, Nina. I understand this isn’t what you want.
The lift pinged and the group crossed the lobby. Tim nodded at Nina and Ben. ‘We’ll take this one. You won’t mind waiting for the next.’
The lift doors took a long time to close. In another lifetime, she could read his eyes, his every gesture. Now, she could no longer interpret him.
‘Who’s Mr Straight-talking?’ Ben asked, pressing the button to call the lift again.
‘That’s Tim,’ she said, simply. ‘My husband. Ex-husband.’
TIM
Tim escorted the man and his wife into the lift, asking their names and giving every appearance of listening to the answers. Nina. For a moment he thought he had imagined her. That his brain had overlaid one crisis on another.
‘Elmarie, Jason, I’m taking you up to the canteen, which we are using as a family centre.’ He had to raise his voice a little over the sound of the woman’s weeping.
When they got to the door, the couple standing by the window turned to look at the commotion.
‘Fix it, Jason,’ she kept saying. ‘Tell them it’s a mistake.’
‘Stop crying.’ His voice was as sharp with her as everyone else. ‘It’s not helping anyone. What was he even doing here, Elmarie? Why was he even on that bus? That wasn’t his bus.’
Why was anyone anywhere? Tim gave himself a little mental shake. He needed to focus on the here and now, but the sight of Nina had unsettled him. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to see her, exactly, it was just the unexpectedness of it. The way she appeared out of the blue, like the pedestrian behind his car the time he failed his driving test. The woman he swore must have dropped out of a tree.
‘So this is your grand plan? To shut us away in here?’ Jason pronounced each word loudly in Tim’s face. ‘You pretend to be a great little country, but you’re nothing. There’s no morality here, it’s all who you know. What’s a man supposed to do who knows nobody? It’s a lie—’
‘Enough.’ The father from the other family – Denis, Tim remembered – turned from his vantage point at the window. ‘You’re upsetting my wife. We all have family in there. These people are doing the best they can, so we would all appreciate if you would let them get on with it instead of shouting the odds and wasting their time. Have a bit of common decency, can’t you, for the love of God.’ He turned back to his wife at the window, his shoulders shaking.
‘We’re doing everything we can. Now that the area is evacuated, we have greater freedom to move, to put a rescue plan in place. Again, my name is Tim. I’m the Information Liaison and it’s my job to make sure everyone knows what they need to know. I’ll be updating you regularly with the facts.’
‘We’d better see some results soon or there’ll be hell to pay.’ Jason glared at him before sitting down at the nearest table, his hands gripping the edge as if he might flip it over.
In the window’s reflection, the scene outside was overlaid with the worried faces of Denis and his wife. Tragedy was like that, Tim wanted to tell them. Life felt like something you were watching through a window, everyone else moving but you.
‘Denis, Vera – you said earlier that this is Orla’s usual bus. Is there any chance she might have done something different today?’
Vera shook her head. ‘Not our Orla. She’s like clockwork.’
‘What happens next?’ Denis asked.
‘During the evacuation, the team here started to examine the best – and safest – way to access the bus. That means knowing what the ground is like so that they can avoid any further disturbance. Think of it like a frozen lake – we’ll check the edges first, then slowly move towards the centre.’
Tim knew by their faces that they weren’t taking in a word of it. How could they?
‘What do you do, Vera?’
‘I’m a primary school teacher.’
‘
Okay. Then think of it like teaching someone to read. We’re making sure we know our alphabet before we start on phonics.’ He was rewarded with a watery smile.
‘They’ll have them out soon, won’t they? Orla—’ Vera’s voice broke on her daughter’s name. ‘Orla doesn’t like the dark.’
‘Building blocks, that’s all it is. I know it might feel slow, but it’s steady and safe. Focus on that.’
‘Steady and safe,’ she repeated.
Tim didn’t add that time could outrun optimism. That sometimes all the waiting and wishing in the world couldn’t stop the axe from falling.
He felt rather than saw Nina waiting for him outside the door. She created a faint crackle of impatience in the air, the sense of things getting done.
‘Seems like your man doesn’t like the way we do things,’ she said.
We. The offhand way she said it. As if she was still part of it.
It was true that he was the one who had moved on. He had kissed Deb goodbye not three hours ago, tiptoeing around and dressing on the landing so as not to wake her.
He and Nina stood awkwardly for a moment, before speaking at the same time.
‘I didn’t expect—’
‘I didn’t know you were—’
‘I’m not on active duty any more,’ he explained. ‘I’m the information guy at HQ these days. The Chief called me down here as a favour.’
‘This is my first live story since… I told Noel I wanted it.’
‘Do you?’ Her careful make-up didn’t quite conceal the dark circles under her eyes.
She scratched gently at her arm. ‘I was thinking about the families and… well, they’ll need someone who…’ She shrugged.
‘Someone who isn’t Mark?’ he finished for her, giving them both an out.
She smiled. ‘Imagine you with a desk job! You finally gave in.’
Impossible to tell her why. To explain that leaving the house that morning, he stopped outside the children’s rooms, unsure if he had yet earned the right to kiss them goodbye. They would be teenagers shortly, more robust with each day. He settled for pressing a kiss to each of their door frames and sending up a quick prayer for their safety.
Where the Edge Is Page 2