‘Give me your hand,’ she said. She took his hand between the two of her own and began some kind of sing-song racket. He was startled to hear his name coming out of her mouth among the garbled words, like a spell was being cast, or a curse.
Her eyes were closed and all he could remember was the way she held up her two arms to him like a little child. He closed his own eyes: Lord, let her finish and be gone before the tears came.
She quietened and he took his hand away. He hadn’t the wherewithal to muster a public prayer himself, if that was what she expected.
Niall abandoned his fidgeting to step into the breach with a mumbled Hail Mary.
‘I’ll see you again,’ she promised and Richie felt a lift in his spirits at the prettiness of her smile. Just his spirits, thank God. The scrubs they lent him wouldn’t have with-stood much, especially not with him going commando.
Shock could do funny things to a person. It was no wonder she was a bit emotional after it all, she was only a young little thing, in her twenties still. An O’Reilly to boot. Sure, there couldn’t be any harm in her.
‘When my husband comes, I’m sure he will want to thank you too.’ She was gone before Richie could process the idea of a husband, much less the prospect of another joint prayer session.
‘Christ on a bike,’ he muttered, then flushed.
What did that even mean, Richie-boy, other than being a swear mild enough for his old mam to tolerate?
* * *
To pass the time, he braved the television, waiting for the news bulletin with his heart pounding the way it hadn’t since the disciplinary hearing at work last year. He didn’t catch the start of the news properly – he was too busy looking out for people holding placards blaming him – but once the report switched to the technical aspects of the rescue, he relaxed enough to listen. The fire service was using special equipment, some sort of radar for finding people after earthquakes and the like. It was all very dramatic. The reporter made it sound like something out of a sci-fi film. The same lad was a bit weak for himself, Richie could tell. The way he made sure to use the technical term for everything, as if he hadn’t just had it explained to him off camera.
The others weren’t out of the bus, that was the gist of it, but all was not lost. Hopes were not yet fading.
Richie wished he had his mobile phone. It must have been lost or smashed in the crash and he had nothing to do with his hands. He wasn’t a great man for texting, his thumbs were too big and he spent as much time deleting as he did typing, but he missed the feeling of having something to keep him company. Would it be too much, he wondered, to phone Sandra, and decided it would.
When one of the nurses passed the door – one of the foreign ones, not the pretty kind with liquidy eyes and shiny hair, but the other kind, with skin the colour of dirty potato jackets – he called out to her. ‘Is there a phone around I could use?’
In fairness, she went and got a landline from somewhere, bending down at the side of the bed to plug the jack into the wall. Her face mightn’t have been much to look at, but she had a nice little arse on her.
Sully answered on the third or fourth ring. ‘You’re a bit of a hero now, Richie, is it?’
‘Go on out of that, Sully,’ Richie said, delighted.
‘You’re all over the radio.’
‘Is that right?’
‘Yer man, your aul’ buddy that does the morning show,’ Sully laughed, allowing for Richie’s hatred of that particular broadcaster, ‘He was onto the boss-man this morning about you and all.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Himself was all praise for you,’ Sully was confident. ‘It was all, “Richie Murray is a solid man, the best of them” and that type of aul’ shite.’
Richie relaxed.
‘Everything that happened last year was only a misunderstanding, like.’
The pit of Richie’s stomach fell for the second time that day.
‘What? What did…? How did last year come up?’
‘Didn’t I just tell you? The boss-man had your back. He explained that yourself and Emmanuel had a bit of argy-bargy, punches thrown, drink taken and whatnot. Things said on both sides and you being laid off for the couple of months while they looked into the racism complaint. A thing of nothing, Rich.’
At the time, he had reassured himself it would pass. That once his twelve months’ probation was up, it would be ancient history.
He should have remembered that once thrown, shit stuck. That was the holy all of it.
Sometime last year – he couldn’t swear exactly when, but he was wearing his heavy green jacket, so it must have been winter – he was walking down to the Tap, when he passed a man and a woman arguing. As he came near them, the woman walked away. There was something in the way she moved, it had a two-fingers to it.
‘You fucking… you fucking bitch!’ the man called after her.
She only smiled and shook her head. ‘You are ridiculous,’ she said, barely loud enough for the man to hear.
At the time, Richie thought the man came off worst, the woman was so clearly in control of it all. But then, a couple of weeks later, he passed her in the street and, without even really recognising her, his brain told him, There’s the fucking bitch. So who was the loser there, when it came right down to it?
With effort, he dragged himself back to Sully’s voice.
‘But you’re all right and everything, like?’ Sully asked.
‘Grand. I’m grand. A bit shook is all.’
‘Do you want me to tell your mam?’
‘No. It would only frighten her. I’ll go over and see her later on.’
It was the habit of a lifetime, keeping things from his mam. He went to great lengths to hide his suspension from work, even though she was starting to get confused by then and didn’t leave the house much. She was still sharp enough that he had to watch the little details. Make sure she wasn’t left on her own with any of the neighbours. A thing like that, it had made its way around Kilbrone faster than any vomiting bug. He told everyone he wasn’t allowed to talk about it, but Sully let slip one or two careful details. A matter of honour. Self-defence, nearly. His mam wouldn’t see it like that though. So it was two long months of getting up in the morning as if he was going to work and driving up to the restless anonymity of the city. Two months of coming home and making up stories about what happened that day and who he saw. When the hearing was all over and he went back to work, he had to guard against relief loosening his tongue. But since she moved to the nursing home, she just sat all day and watched whatever was put in front of her, her beloved daytime talk-radio gone and forgotten.
She was a hard woman to please, that much was sure and certain. She used to get this look – ‘the face’, he always called it in his mind: Mam’s making the face, don’t let her make the face. Do anything to avoid the face. Her lips pulling slowly sideways, taking her whole face over with them. Words were never kind from that sideways mouth.
She was placid most of the time now. There was little need for censure in the beige world she inhabited. The odd time she got excited, her opinions were those from long ago, suddenly remembered, and as soon forgotten: their neighbour Margaret, with her clean house and her dirty morals; de Valera; and, of course, his father ‘that bastard, God forgive me’. Mostly, her opinions were those of the nurse of the day. Nine times out of ten, when he turned up for his evening visit, she only parroted the last thing she heard.
The staff told him she could still have good days, there was no way of knowing how much she took in or remembered, even if it came out all skew-ways.
Jesus, Richie-boy, it would finish her if he was blamed for making the crash worse.
It would finish him.
Hero, his hole. If the boss was after telling the whole world that he was suspended on racism charges last year, he’d be Richie the racist evermore, no matter that Alina was as near as dammit to black. Racism was a better story than equality to those radio bastards. He could im
agine Pitch Flynn sidling up to him in the pub, slapping down a pint with a wink of conspiracy like they were right-thinking men together. And Fran the barman, wasn’t he some kind of Indian or Mexican or something? Not Fran himself, like, he was born here all right, but not too long ago either. His father or mother, maybe. Holy fuck, Richie-boy, he wouldn’t even be able to go down the Tap to while away the time of an evening.
When the matron came with his discharge letter, he was lying there, trying to think and not think about Sully’s words at the same time.
‘RTE want to interview you before you go,’ she said. ‘What do you say? Did you ever think you’d see the day?’
He could just imagine what they wanted to talk about. ‘You hardly allow that kind of thing here in the hospital?’ he said.
‘Don’t we have a little interview room and everything? It’s all about being accessible, you know, part of our “programme of transparency”.’ She made little air quotes, beaming at her own reflected modernity. ‘Gone are the days of hospitals hiding behind ministers. You deserve a bit of thanks anyway,’ she added. ‘After the heroic rescue and everything.’
Heroes didn’t have those two months in their file, a file that would be dug out and waved around. Those two months were him, not the two minutes this morning. He knew it, and now everyone else might too.
What if his mam had one of her clear-thinking moments and heard them bad-mouthing him on television? What if that was the Richie she took with her when she sank back below the surface of her face, the son who was only ever a source of shame?
Easy now, easy. Think through the odds: how long was it since she had a clear day? Since she knew him after being prompted? Four months or more.
Don’t go borrowing trouble, that was another of her staples. Hold onto the good parts. He rescued that woman, didn’t he? They couldn’t take that away from him. Don’t forget that the investigation found him innocent of a racist attack – guilty of throwing a punch all right, but he never argued the toss on that one – and reinstated him in his old job. The file would have to say that as well, surely be to God?
Sometimes a flicker of light was just a flicker of light, Richie-boy. It didn’t always have to be dragging a train behind it.
ALINA
Alina looked at the meal the kitchen lady had put down in front of her. She tried to be friendly, to ask her name, this woman with the skin like hers. Skin like golden syrup, Seán called it, when they first met.
The woman heard her, her eyes flickered over for a moment, but she didn’t answer. Not rudeness, Alina guessed, but self-consciousness about her accent, her choice of words. Her mother sometimes pretended that same deafness.
She poked at the items on the plate, causing the chicken to slip in its own grease. What she would give for some mujadara, with its sweet crunch of onion, or even kibbeh, despite her recent distaste for red meat. She sighed and picked up her knife and fork.
‘Always cut up what you haven’t eaten,’ Margo never tired of saying. ‘That way, the bastards can’t reuse it.’
Alina would nod along, unsure why the waste of perfectly good food was something to be desired, but anxious not to annoy Margo, who had a habit of turning on people and who was, in any case, her only real work friend. The others were polite, they asked about her husband, her holidays, her plans for the weekend, but she could never shake the feeling that they were always nicest to her just at the moment of her leaving. She liked her job, she reminded herself every day on the way home, and she had plenty of other friends, even if seeing them now required careful effort. Her move to the countryside, their growing families, everyone’s life at breakneck speed. Their casual Saturdays in coffee shops, restaurants and bars were all the more prized because they were rare.
‘Be nice to people and they will like you,’ her mother had advised her before she started school, speaking quietly so that Alina’s father would not overhear and worry. Despite being six when they moved to Ireland, she joined the junior infants class, a full year older than the others. Her English was not good enough for senior infants, they said. Juniors would be better. They were right, it was. Right up until secondary school, when her classmates seemed to look around and realise that she looked different. After eight years of history, alliances made and broken and remade, she found herself, at thirteen, subject to stares. Her fragrant lunch box suddenly an object of sniggers. It made little difference that she, too, mourned Diana, the People’s Princess. That she listened to Mary Robinson calling on mná na hÉireann and felt a pull of pride, of possibility.
‘It’s a difficult age,’ her father soothed her mother when she worried about Alina’s sudden moodiness. ‘Teenagers take time to get used to one another. I am sure there is no malice.’
To Alina he repeated the words of Khalil Gibran, ‘To belittle you have to be little. Be bigger, that is who we are.’
He had known such delight as a young student in the West to discover his beloved Gibran held in such esteem, his works quoted and studied by others. A Lebanese poet with words for the world! How alive with possibility everything must be! His habit of peppering his speech with favourite quotes dated from that day, as did his sense that he belonged there, in that world far from home.
‘Gibran!’ her mother said, out of her father’s earshot. ‘A man who lived in America, where everything must be printed on T-shirts.’
When she was older, she came to understand that Gibran had left his homeland as a child. That in his displacement, her father saw the seeds of his success and drew strength from it. All she knew then was that once his mind was made up, her father was softened steel. His fondness for the south coast of Ireland was unshakeable after a two-year stint there as a young doctor. It was a place to find the warmth lacking in London, he said. A place with first-hand knowledge of the sadness of leaving, coupled with a charming arrogance that applauded the good sense of foreigners choosing to settle there.
‘They know, as we do, what it means to leave family behind for family’s sake,’ he said, on the night he told them that with Lebanon entering a new peace, it was time for them to find a better life. He believed that the presence of Irish peacekeeping troops in Lebanon had forged a bond between the two nations and, for him, perhaps it did. Perhaps nobody looked at him with the hateful eyes of a teenager whose father, brother, uncle, was fighting the battles of a stranger.
She was startled out of her thoughts by the appearance of a nurse, catlike on rubber shoes.
‘Just taking your blood pressure,’ the nurse told her. She pulled the door closed when she was finished, telling Alina to get some rest. Alina nodded obediently and lay down, then sat up almost immediately when the tea trolley arrived. They told her that her dizziness was from a possible blow to the head in the crash, but she knew it was from wanting to do the right thing.
Seán came in when the tea was taken away and she was once again lying down with her eyes closed and her mind bursting open.
‘Alina. Sweetheart. My phone was turned off while I was in class. But when I saw it on the news, I dropped everything and ran.’ He held her hands in his, kissing first one and then the other. ‘Are you all right?’
‘My clavicle is broken,’ she gestured to the collar around her neck. ‘My head hurts, but there’s no sign of concussion.’
‘Thank God,’ Seán said, attempting to gather her into his arms.
She let him hold her, breathing in through her mouth and out through her nose, willing the pain down to a manageable size.
‘How did you get out?’
She told him the story, explained about Richie. ‘He’s okay too. They took me to see him earlier, to give thanks.’
‘To say thanks,’ Seán corrected her automatically.
She let it pass. ‘Is everyone else safe now?’
‘Not yet. They evacuated the area and then did some radar survey to see if they could be sure where to dig, I think.’
‘Those poor people, still in there. Jesus,’ he hugged her again. ‘Yo
u were so lucky.’
He saw no contradiction in his words. It was the way of Irish people, she noticed it often. Their faith was superstitious, about avoiding, not doing. Their god was an everyday token, often in their mouths. He did not live in their secret souls, guiding their actions, but out in the world, in the things the neighbours could see and talk about. It made her smile, this thing they did. It was charming, an extra piece of being Irish. Until you noticed what it took away.
Seán draped his coat over the back of the chair and turned the TV on before coming to sit beside her, his long legs stretching almost to the end of the bed. He stroked her hand and waited for the next news bulletin, careful to keep his boots from touching the quilt. She closed her eyes to rest.
Remembering instead the day she first put on the hijab. The memory that she held onto, a talisman from another life. She asked for her mother’s help and saw the pride in her eyes as she took her into her own room, that space of adults, and talked to her of modesty.
Her father did not approve. ‘People will think you are a poor refugee,’ he said. It was his harshest criticism. ‘They will think you come from the direct provision centre.’ Alina looked at him, her gentle father, so ready to lock the gates behind them, then stepped carefully past him out the front door.
With the stares came a feeling of power. She heard – duller now – the voices of her classmates giggling in the rows behind her. Let them keep the silliness of girls, she thought. She alone knew the secrets and mysteries of being a woman.
The excitement wore off quickly and she was an oddity only at sporting events and the visits of other schools. ‘Did you ever kill anyone?’ those new eyes would demand, raised on television stories of child soldiers. Her classmates rolled their eyes and told them to get a grip. That she grew up in the same city they did.
She began to feel pity for those other girls, their skirts rising shorter and shorter to be noticed. She could have told them – as her mother told her – that boys are quick to discover that there is little more to find out. With the barrier of clothing already half-lifted, where could a girl go but onto her back?
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