‘It’s new,’ he told her. ‘I thought… well, I thought it would open up different opportunities.’
‘Here you are, though, in the thick of it still,’ she said.
Her tone was pleasant. A casual observer would have called her polite. But that casual observer wouldn’t have heard the echo of late-night arguments about his insistence that his job wasn’t an issue, that their baby’s impending arrival shouldn’t change anything. Nina would raise her great bulk off the couch and accuse him of putting other people’s families first.
But if he expected an argument, he wasn’t getting one today. Instead, she changed tack. ‘Is it too weird for you to have me here?’
‘Would you go back to the office if I asked you to?’ Though he intended the question to be teasing, his tone didn’t carry it off.
‘Would you ask me to?’
The same old stalemate. He shrugged. ‘The Chief will be doing most of the media stuff. We probably won’t even see each other.’
Her smile didn’t reach her eyes. ‘That works for me.’
‘Fine.’
‘Fine.’
He took the stairs two at a time, resisting the urge to look back over his shoulder at her.
The meeting room was already badly overheated and struggling to contain everyone. Tim tried not to think of the air-conditioned cool of the city fire station. The Chief was in a huddle with the county engineers, taking turns around the maps, like penguins keeping the colony warm. Beside him was the Assistant Chief, Leo. He seemed solid, but it stung Tim to see someone in the job that used to be his.
All eyes were on the computer monitor as the little remote-controlled jeep edged into the hole and disappeared from sight. If it wasn’t for the state-of-the-art camera mounted on top, it could have been mistaken for something Santa left behind on Christmas Eve. Tim didn’t draw breath – he would bet nobody did – until a faint glow brightened into infrared and, all of a sudden, they were underground.
It reminded him of the science fiction of the gastrooesophageal camera descending his throat into his stomach, the time of that first ulcer, the month after Aisling died. The picture on this screen, though, would not be fixed by any magic tablets.
The gap between the rocks was narrower than he expected, although had he been asked, he would have answered that he didn’t have any expectations at all and would have believed himself honest in saying so.
The jeep moved forward as far as it could, bumping up and over obstacles to inch its way along. When it finally stopped, the gap was no wider than the top of a teacup. The technician fiddled with the zoom and the side of the bus flickered into what seemed like touching distance. Turned on its side, the panelling was twisted and buckled, with one small patch of cheery advertising still visible. ‘Be better’, it told them, sternly.
‘Subsidence, I’d say, if I had to call it,’ one of the engineers said. He rubbed his hand over his face, already tired from this day that was barely halfway to lunchtime. ‘Too early to say for sure, but it looks like the ground has eroded in the area all around. Probably started years ago. The road was basically just surface and the weight of the bus was too much.’
‘Give it one last 360 and then pull it up and out,’ Leo instructed. As the camera swivelled to retrace its steps, they all saw it: a patch of condensation on the bus window.
‘Someone’s breathing in there.’
Tim tried not to let the knowledge carry him away. Around him, plans were sketched out and phone calls made. His hands were calm as they moved across the whiteboard, tracking the details needed, the information received. His mind, all the while, skittering around the edges of a hole he couldn’t afford to fall into.
Aisling’s breathing. She’s still breathing.
The hope, the fucking starburst of it. As if breath was all it took. When it still seemed as if there was a way to make it right. If they waited in the right way, maybe, or believed hard enough, or hit on just the magic combination of words to find God’s ears.
When he stood up, he was nearly dizzy with wanting.
‘I’ll take a quick walk down the site,’ he said. ‘Gather up any of the family members who have gone down there so we can let them all know together.’
He was out the door and running for the stairs. Outside, it was easier not to think about it. To focus on sky and air and today.
The police cordon was nearly within spitting distance of the fire station gate. Practically on its own doorstep. Jesus, fuck. The irony could kill a person. Or maybe it wasn’t irony at all, he often struggled to tell.
The site was busy – in a small town, anything out of the ordinary excited disproportionate interest. The news had found them all, it seemed: the rubberneckers; the school-run mothers; the pensioners on their slow way to the shops for the single chicken breast that gave them a reason to leave the house; the ones with nowhere else to be. Accident sites had a smell, and although his brain knew that it was simply the plastic of the tape, his heart insisted it was hopelessness.
He needed to pull it together. The site wasn’t his business, not any more. His territory was inside, marking the plan into bite-sized pieces that the media could understand. Keeping both sides looking competent and pissing off neither. Diplomacy was what he needed today, not selfish spiralling into his own story.
He kept to the side of the footpath until he could see the hole in front of him. A dust cloud hung in the air, making it difficult to see anything beyond the edges. Underfoot, there was the odd scuffling noise, the road still moving, shifting around to get comfortable in itself again. Two already out, six still trapped. A miracle and a disaster, one buried within the other.
The sound of muttering floated behind him and he turned to see a woman in the side street beyond the cordon, drawing pictures in the air with a broken umbrella. May, the Chief had told him. She was often around, he had said, engaged in her daily work of pacing the streets. But whatever she might know, she was likely to keep close.
Tim walked a wide, careful arc along the edge of the cordon and over to the lip of the street, not wanting to spook either the road or the woman.
‘Hello there. May, isn’t it? I’m Tim.’
Her eyes cut over to him for a brief, suspicious second.
‘Did you see what happened here?’ he asked.
‘They were called,’ she said. Her laugh rose dry and rusty and her umbrella flicked towards the hole.
He tried again. ‘Did you see what happened? I know you’re often around these parts.’
‘I’m here since God was a boy,’ she nodded. ‘And before that and every day since.’
She moved over, close to him, her skin giving off the sweet, tarry smell of rotting fruit.
‘The aliens came,’ she whispered.
‘Aliens?’
She nodded, her eyes doll-wide. She didn’t have anything to tell him. In real life, no truths hid within the ravings of the disturbed, waiting to be picked out like jewels from glass.
‘Little ones and big ones and black tubes for their faces and their arms turned yellow as piss on a winter morning from the air down here.’
It wasn’t the first time he’d heard the team called aliens, although it was more common from small children.
‘They took two of them for testing,’ she said.
‘Thanks for your help.’
‘They didn’t get me though.’ She danced one hand around her head, the sudden and shocking length of her wrist poking out of her sleeve, dainty and stained as used china.
‘That’s good fortune.’
‘When they call you, you have to go,’ May said, turning away. ‘Goodnight and God bless and no right of reply.’
She was a pity, Tim thought, watching her go. Her and plenty others like her. He hoped her parents, if they were still alive, were spared the knowledge of what their dreams had come to.
The day Aisling was born he wrote to Nina. Awed by what she had achieved, what she had endured to give them this gift. It rendered h
im speechless, drove him to paper.
‘Today our family was born,’ he wrote. ‘The world is both big enough and small enough for us. The world is finally the perfect fit.’
Emotions were running high enough that he gave it to her without a shred of self-consciousness, with kisses and promises to add to it every year on Aisling’s birthday.
‘By the time she’s eighteen,’ he said, reckless with ignorant joy, ‘we’ll have a record of our journey.’
When he unpacked his boxes in the one-bedroom flat and found it tucked into the side pocket of his washbag, he drank until he hardly remembered his own name.
On the way back to the station, he passed a group of volunteers, waiting for their six-hour shift to begin, he guessed, or maybe just finishing up. One of them had his back to Tim as he whistled long and low. ‘It was just lying there on its side,’ he said. ‘There’ll be nobody come out of it alive.’
Tim grabbed the younger man’s arm and dragged him aside. ‘What did you say?’
‘Whaaaaat?’
‘You’re standing out here where everyone can see you and everyone can hear you making thoughtless comments.’
‘Relax, man, nobody heard me.’ He tried to shrug it off. ‘It’s not that big a deal.’
‘It is a big deal,’ Tim said. ‘It’s a very fucking big deal to the families who might have to hear your ignorance.’
The young man turned pink, most likely embarrassed in front of his colleagues.
‘You don’t know me, but I know the Chief and now I know you, too. I strongly suggest you keep out of my way and pray you didn’t flap your mouth where anyone heard you or there’ll be a disciplinary when this is over.’
Tim let him go. If he had a genie and one wish, he’d have the little prick fired.
He took the stairs up to the meeting room, stopping in the stairwell on each of the floors to do a breathing exercise his counsellor gave him. Breathe into the big box of his lungs, fill the box, push the edges to make it bigger. By the time he got to the top, the anger was gone and he let his breathing return to normal before pushing open the door.
‘Get the last of those cars moved and get the ambulance loading point in there.’ The Chief indicated the line of cars parked in a little bay on the street just outside the police cordon.
‘They’re nearly finished,’ Tim said.
‘They better not want paying,’ the Chief said. ‘Outsourced service, my hole. What was wrong with the council doing it?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Nothing, that’s what. Only it didn’t suit someone whose brother or uncle or child wasn’t making enough as a private contractor.’ He took a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket. ‘I was down to three a day. Now lookit,’ he waved the pack, ‘my willpower is shot to fuck.’
Less than half an hour later, however, the Chief looked calm and assured, speaking Tim’s words to the cameras in a smooth and confident flow. It was a simple reiteration of the facts as they knew them. Almost all of the facts. Vastly different to the briefing for the families shortly before, in which that patch of condensation was the only subject of any importance. They held onto it, it lit them up. They hugged each other, not yet competitive about who among them might have a legitimate claim on that flickering hope.
The Chief was light on their rapid-response time, sidestepping questions of what might have been done differently. The media were already on them like vultures. ‘Thirty seconds to get ready, even less to think about what they were doing,’ screamed banners across the tops of web pages and ticker tapes along the bottoms of screens. Tim wouldn’t want to be in the shoes of the man that made that initial decision. The poor fucker would never trust his own judgement again. If Tim was a betting man, he would give him until the end of the year. No doubt there was a pool going already. At least the media didn’t have his name.
He and Nina used to argue about that media shift from objective observer to something more insidiously directive. During his own media training last year, he was told his baseline tolerance for spin was low. Too low. He often found himself amped up for a fight after the mildest comment. It incensed him, the amount of power casually handed over to the media, their censure often the prevailing concern. Yet people continued to let them. Laziness, that was all it was. Everyone happy to let others fight their battles for them.
Tim tracked the statement, glad when it neared its end. Hearing his own words from someone else was an unsettling ventriloquism. The title of Chief gave Tim’s words more authority, a slurry of optimism spread over the bare facts as if hoping solutions would grow there.
* * *
‘Nina’s asking for an interview,’ the Chief told Tim afterwards. ‘I told her she can have five minutes. You okay with that?’
‘Sure,’ Tim said, although he was annoyed at her cheek. The least she could have done was ask him directly. ‘We spoke briefly earlier on. It’s fine with me.’
‘In my office in five.’
* * *
Deb answered on the second ring. ‘I got your note. I hope things aren’t too bad there. It’s all over the news.’
Her gentleness was soothing. Her lack of interest in the gory details.
‘Hard to say yet. They’re in a tough spot.’
‘God love them, the poor things. And the families.’ She paused. ‘They must be tormented with reporters.’
He liked it, when they first met, that she had no time for the media. There was something refreshing about her dismissal of anything that smacked of posturing. Today, however, it seemed cold and he felt disloyal, somehow, at the thought of telling her Nina was there. It hardly mattered, he told himself. The events of the morning were bigger than who was where.
* * *
‘I can give you a couple of minutes, that’s all,’ the Chief warned, sitting down on the corner of the desk as if everything was under control. ‘Ask away.’
‘I got the basics from the statement, but that’s not really my angle. I’m building a longer piece. The victims, their families, the personal face of things.’
She was careful, Tim noticed, not to call it a tragedy. Not yet. Another legacy, that awareness of individual words, their power to bruise.
‘Can you talk me through the identification of the people involved?’ she asked. ‘Just to round out the scene and get a sense of where it started for the families?’
The Chief’s phone buzzed and he checked it, frowning slightly. ‘Tim? Can I leave this with you? I’m needed upstairs.’
‘What do you need to know?’ Tim asked, after he left.
‘Phone lines, staffing, elimination of people…’ She shrugged. ‘Anything. Everything.’
She took notes as he talked, the side of her hand dragging lightly on the paper and gathering ink as it went. He could picture the mark she would leave on the tablecloth at dinner time. If she remembered to eat.
‘Still suffering with the rashes?’ He pointed to where her left hand was scratching gently at the underside of her right forearm. They came from nowhere, sudden flares of pain, resisting all efforts at easement.
She closed her notebook and looked up at him. ‘It’s hardly suffering. What’s the Assistant like? Leo, right?’
‘He’s very capable.’ He fidgeted with the paper-clip holder. ‘How are the family?’
‘They’re all well, thank you.’
Still trying to get her to talk about it, no doubt. They were always so anxious to pick through the broken pieces, while Nina kept insisting that everything was fine. They used to go to her parents’ house, the odd Sunday after Aisling. Big roast dinner with all the trimmings, both red and white wine open on the table, heated debate about the issues of the day. And all the while their daughter like a ghost that only he could see. Some days, out of frustration or hurt, Nina’s mother or Irene would drop Aisling’s name like a bomb into the conversation. Whenever that happened, Nina would have them in the car within ten minutes. They need to grieve too, Tim reminded her, but she only shook her head. They could leave he
r out of their grief, she said. She had enough of her own to be getting on with.
‘The evacuation must have been frustrating for you all,’ Nina was saying. ‘Having to wait, I mean.’
‘It had to be done,’ he said. ‘The first rule is always to—’
‘Secure the site.’ She finished it with him.
He smiled despite himself. ‘Besides, there were sick people and children to consider.’ He sounded like a mealy-mouthed Rose of Tralee contestant, with his stiff answers. Careful to stay within the bounds of what was acceptable. All I want is world peace, Dáithí.
At the door, she turned. ‘Do you think people are still alive in there?’ she asked.
He could see the weight of it on her, the question and the answer. ‘I do,’ he said, and the words grew until they filled the space between them.
RICHIE
‘In your own words, Mr Murray, can you take us through the events of the morning?’
The guard was only doing his job, Richie knew. It was hardly his fault that the morning had gone to shite. Yet Richie couldn’t pull his thoughts together. If they wanted feelings, fine, he had feelings to burn. Thoughts… thoughts were a different ballgame altogether.
‘People say it helps to close your eyes,’ the guard said kindly. ‘When you’re trying to remember, I mean.’
‘Everything was grand. The same as normal. No bother, like,’ Richie began.
He closed his eyes and hoped for the best.
From the driver’s seat of the bus, Richie could see the skyline through a narrow hole of light. Only the tops of the houses were visible, making him feel like a peeping Tom. Like the time he was out searching for Buddy and got caught looking in the Widow Quinn’s bedroom window. The seat belt was tight, pressing his piss dangerously close to bursting. Shouldn’t have had that second coffee, Richie-boy. After a few seconds of panic, he managed to open the buckle and breathed a little more easily. His toes wiggled at his command, his fingers too. He had seen enough of TV hospital dramas to know that this was a good sign – his spinal column was in one piece, or at least connected enough to talk to his brain. Sandra spent years telling him it was a waste of time. ‘Not that depressing shite again,’ she used to say. ‘Haven’t we enough misery ourselves without borrowing more?’ She’d have to eat her words now, wouldn’t she? It would give him an excuse to phone her, in any case. A reason less flimsy than whether or not she wanted the dog basket out of the shed. ‘What are you still hanging onto that for?’ she asked him. ‘Buddy was put down years ago.’
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