Where the Edge Is

by Gráinne Murphy

  She wore what she should wear, her own uniform of hijab and jeans. With clothing came mystery, that was the truth they did not understand. But at university, her own understanding grew shaky. When she met Seán, for the first time she began to worry that what she protected under her clothes might not be worth the journey. What if his excitement came solely from the idea of unwrapping her like his Christmas present? What if the excitement lasted just once and then left, leaving behind the mothball smell of disappointment?

  It was gradual, the change her fear brought. By the time she met his mother, she wore the hijab only for prayer, telling herself it was sufficient. When the ring came, she folded her scarves into a drawer, protected by the solidity of her finger. Her father said nothing, only laid his hand on her hair and nodded. When her mother cried, Alina told her that she was crying only for what was on the outside. That the happiness of her heart needed no tears.

  ‘You should believe what I do,’ Alina said, firmly. ‘That Allah can see the modesty of my soul.’

  A modesty that did not last until her wedding night. But he loved her so much, her Seán, and she felt guilty for the discomfort of his longing. She listened to the hitch of his breath and told herself that her love was true.

  Mothers did not know everything. That, too, was true.

  Seán stroked the inside of her wrist, his eyes glued to the screen on the wall, where, it seemed, those trapped were about to be named. She watched their hands move together on the blanket, her wedding ring bright against the beigeness of everything around it.

  Time, the years alone, taught her to let her silence breathe, to wait for a path to become clear. This hospital room was caught between two moments, a quiet space before everything could be known. This time, this silence, was a gift she must not squander.

  PART TWO – IN

  FROM THE RIGHT ANGLE

  If this were a film, the camera would pan silently across the empty schoolyard, resting for a moment on the lunch box dropped and forgotten by the emergency-exit door, tinfoil-wrapped sandwiches visible through the clear plastic of the lid, jaunty juice-box unaware of its abandonment.

  Slowly, slowly, the camera would come to rest on the lone woman inside the cordon, the end of her long plait swinging, buffeted by the shouts of the police to get her out of there.

  But it is no movie.

  On Twitter, the volume rises to a roar as she skip-walks across and ducks under the barrier. A two-fingers to the world, some call it. And isn’t it admirable, all the same, how fearless she is? Someone whose sense of social justice outstrips their sense of timing posts solemn commentary on the greater tragedy she represents.

  Meanwhile, the lost lunch box becomes the symbol of the crisis. Images of lidless Tupperware are added to profile pictures and messages of support. Well-meaning and useless.

  #corkbuscrash #pray

  Any two things can be edited to belong together.

  LUCY

  Lucy woke up coughing, with a burn in her chest that was hard to identify. Was she smoking last night? It was a late night, that much was clear. Her head was pounding and she seemed to have more bones than she had the previous day, each one aching. She tried to roll over in the bed, but her leg caught on something hard.

  When she opened her eyes, there was nothing there and she closed them again in fright. Panic, thick and choking, finally caught up. The bus. She was on the early bus. Some kind of crash, a drunk driver or a tyre blowout, spinning them onto their sides and back again. She must have hit her head when they fell. But why would they fall?

  Stay calm, she told herself. This was Ireland, and even if she no longer lived in city civilisation, nor was this some chicken bus out in the back arse of Ecuador or somewhere. She was probably only out for a few seconds. If it was longer than that, so much the better. Help would be that bit closer.

  She opened her eyes again and waited, counting as she breathed slowly in and out, all she could remember from a couple of terms of yoga classes back when she was seeing Rainfall. Eoin, really. Jesus, to think it seemed attractive that he had renounced the name his parents gave him.

  Focus, Lucy!

  The bus appeared around her, spooky as an old Polaroid, everything in shades of ghostly green from the low light thrown by the emergency-exit signs. They were tilted at an angle, her shoulder hard against the metal of the window frame. The seat in front of her had buckled inwards, trapping her ankle in the bend. A couple of experimental wiggles confirmed that she wasn’t going anywhere. Hikers in the Amazon or wherever might chew off their own limbs, but that wasn’t something quite-nice girls from West Cork were brought up to do. She would give herself sepsis and die, no doubt, and her mother would perish of shame just so she could follow Lucy to hell and spend all eternity tutting her disappointment. Satan would have it put up to him to find a worse torment.

  In front of her, she could make out the dark shape of someone slumped in their seat. The boy. The teenager that got on the bus at the same stop as her. At the time, she thought he might try to sit in beside her, but instead he had swung into the seat just in front.

  ‘Excuse me?’ Her voice came out small and she cleared her throat and tried again. She tried to cough but couldn’t draw a full breath, the burn in her lungs as bright as a New Year’s Eve sparkler. ‘Hello?’

  He didn’t move. He mightn’t have heard her. He still had his headphones in, although she couldn’t hear any music. What was he listening to? He wore the teenage uniform of skinny jeans and hoodie. Something indie, she would bet. Not rap anyway, she couldn’t hear any telltale bass thump.

  She was so cold, it hurt her skin to move, a cheese grater stroking under the thin layers of her clothes, catching in the creases of knees and elbows. Why was it the survival instinct said to hold still in order to stay warm, even though the opposite was true? Conservation of energy, prolonging life, of course. Was that something she should wish for or not? Silly to panic, to send her heart rate into overdrive when her body had suffered God knew what damage already. Obviously, they – whoever they were – would get her out, there was no other option. People like her didn’t die in situations like this.

  Had it been long enough for someone to have contacted her mother? If not, she might not even have heard about it. She rarely listened to the radio, preferring the television in the background while she sat at her dressing table and put on her outside face. Lucy loved to sit on the bed and watch the tired lady in the nightgown turn into her mother.

  ‘You look lovely, Mam,’ she would say and her mother would hug her close if she wasn’t too tired and show Lucy how to hold a tissue under her eyelashes to apply the coats of mascara.

  Her eyes prickled, then settled. Everything was too dry for tears.

  She used to sit in her mother’s bedroom before school, watching the parade of teenage mothers, abusive boyfriends, addict parents, that graced the sofas of the chat shows that were her mother’s obsession. The people changed, there was a different story every day. The sofas, though, were always shades of red, as if blood itself held the whole thing together. It was a revelation. Irish television chat show sets had neutral tones. No fear the emotions expressed might get out of hand on a brown or navy sofa.

  How much time had passed? She should have kept the stupid watch Kieran gave her, instead of leaving it beside the bed in the hope that it would be reason enough for him to contact her. A reluctant meeting – at his suggestion – wouldn’t raise his suspicions. She pushed the thought away. She had the same sense of vague fear she felt each time she lifted the lid of a public toilet, holding her breath before it, afraid of what she might see there. A syringe. A rat. A foetus. In reality, all she ever found was other people’s shit.

  If she knew what time it was, she could tell where in her morning beauty routine her mother might be. Would she pause in the act of smoothing on her base coat to answer the phone ringing in the hall?

  She would look back on this and laugh, she told herself firmly, in the hopes she might
believe it. She would feel foolish when she saw how very far from real danger she was. They might want to interview her for the six o’clock news. Would she do it? Not the news, no. A chat show, maybe. Herself in a bright dress, defiant in the face of adversity (and brown sofas). An emerald green shift, say, or deep purple. Something that made her look strong but fragile. Not blue. Too capable. Too many associations with politicians and newsreaders and women who had their shit together and needed no one.

  Lost in outfit planning, she became slowly aware of noise far above her head. Machinery noise. If she closed her eyes, it was summer afternoons at her aunt’s house in the middle of nowhere, denim shorts and vests in the days before bras, hearing cars turn the corner at the crossroads a clear mile from the house. How clean everything seemed, how logical. A car noise meant a car was coming.

  Her mother presented her with a car when she got her Leaving Cert results and they knew she would be going to university after all. Her friends were speechless with jealousy. They saw only the car, not the conditions it was wrapped in.

  ‘You’ll be able to commute,’ her mother said. She gestured at the multicoloured study plans that still papered Lucy’s desk. ‘God knows, you’re organised enough.’

  She was, too. She already had a neat list of things to buy to furnish her new room, each item printed neatly in one of three columns: ‘Personal’, ‘Communal’, ‘Optional’.

  ‘I’d be lost without you, you know that,’ her mother said and leaned in for a tight hug.

  This machinery, whatever it was, stopped and started. Should she shout? They would never hear her. She felt around her for something she might throw but nothing shook loose.

  When she was interviewed, the host would be unsympathetic, she was suddenly certain. People were funny about prettiness, they took it personally. For years she told herself it was the childishness of teenagers, of college students. But the offices of Lucy’s life were staffed by unhappy women whose day was lifted by the inflicting of small pains. Fat clerks lost her applications and misfiled her claims. Their eyes, when they looked her up and down, showed no remorse. She already had enough going for her, they seemed to say.

  ‘I don’t have all day to wait so make it quick!’ her friend Caroline told her when she went to renew her driver’s licence, a luxury she kept as proof of her adulthood despite having sold the car. ‘Here, undo another button and make sure you lean down on the counter when you’re filling out the form.’ Caroline was so sure it would work. With her ordinary face, no doubt it would have.

  For a female interviewer, she could play up the strong woman line. ‘I knew that as long as I could picture my life after I got out that I was in no danger of dying,’ she could say. ‘To be honest, I was wondering in my head what I might wear if I was interviewed on television.’ And they would laugh together, co-conspirators in the everyday efforts of women.

  For a man, she could show a bit more fragility. ‘There was so much I knew I still wanted to do.’ Her eyes wide and her hands palm-up to show openness and vulnerability, the way Oprah did when she talked – again – about her weight loss journey.

  If she didn’t make it out… a fantasy too irresistible to ignore.

  She could see the camera crew at her mother’s house. Her mother letting them in, standing in the doorway as they panned around the room of Lucy’s girlhood, the dust generously ascribed to sentimentality rather than laziness. ‘I want to keep everything just exactly as it is,’ Pat would say in her most sincere voice. A few months later, she would change her mind and decide to turn the room into something else, telling herself that Lucy would want her to move on. The reverse was true, Lucy should tell her. Keep my room as a shrine, thank you very much.

  During the clear-out, her mother would find things she had no business finding. The small tin of tobacco and rolling papers. The postgrad course catalogue with telltale pages folded down. The letters from past boyfriends – weirdos mostly, who else wrote letters any more, for the love of God, and more fool her for keeping them – listing the things they loved about her, which, of course, were really about themselves. Pat would sell the letters to the cheap-paper magazines. Lucy as just another pretty girl with poor judgement. Another sad anecdote to be skimmed while waiting for the hair dye to take. Her mother would stack them neatly under the coffee table, intent on making a scrapbook, a goal forgotten during the winter-sun break in the Canaries, paid for with her only daughter’s dignity.

  There were no diaries. Not since the time her mother found one. She read it aloud, following Lucy from room to room until it was done. Then she slapped her with the flat of her hairbrush and didn’t speak a single word for six days, until she needed someone to help her with a French manicure on her toes for a night out. No diaries. That slap, it turned out, a small and prescient mercy.

  There were emails, that was true. Would her mother guess her password and read what she had written? The final indignity, small-scale publication of her mortifying sentiments, her slang and typos? There was something, wasn’t there, that allowed people to organise and direct their information after their death? An app of some kind. That was one for the to-do list. Once they got her out.

  How much time had passed? It was first light when she got on the bus. Was that an hour ago, or two, or ten?

  ‘Me and you together, pet. Me and you,’ her mother used to say, squeezing her so tight their giggles came out in fart-sharp bursts.

  This time, the dust and dryness didn’t stop the tears.

  * * *

  ‘I’m Lucy,’ the voice said, over and over. ‘I’m Lucy. There’s been an accident. Someone will be here soon to help us.’

  It reminded him of something and Paul struggled to remember what that might be. That old TV show, Lost. The pre-recorded message that played in case anybody came.

  He coughed and the voice stopped. A sudden break in regularly scheduled programming.

  ‘Don’t try to move, you’re all tangled up,’ the voice said. ‘Wait.’

  He felt rather than saw her hand pulling the earbuds out of his ears.

  ‘There. Can you hear me? I’m Lucy. There’s been—’

  ‘Paul,’ he said. The effort made him pant.

  ‘Hi, Paul. You must like music. Anytime I see you on the bus you have headphones on.’

  He thought a smile but couldn’t make it happen. She noticed him.

  She was right, he wanted to tell her, he did always wear headphones. His mother didn’t like him wearing his hood up, so headphones were the next best thing. Since Gemma, he turned the sound up louder, trying to frighten away the memory of it.

  ‘Do your family know where you are?’ Lucy asked.

  His eyes closed without his say-so, but it didn’t seem worth the effort to argue the point with them.

  His mother knew he had taken the early bus the last couple of weeks. Ever since he and Gemma had finally done it and he couldn’t look at her any more. The sight of her waiting at the bus stop or sitting a few seats in front of him made him dizzier than Friday nights drinking WKD. He wasn’t even sure how it had happened, how sex had gone from a sweaty blurry fantasy in his own bed and shower (and sometimes in the living room late at night on his own) to mortifying reality with a girl he fancied too much to be practising on. Everyone pretended previous experience, he told himself. He’d seen pornos at Dec’s parties, yeah? The lying was expected, it just had to sound a bit real. He made up a story about a girl at camp and a habit of scratching her face in time to his thrusts.

  ‘If she’s scratching while you’re banging her, mate, you’re doing it wrong,’ Dec jeered. Better to be bad at it than not in the game at all.

  Sex, he called it in the privacy of his own head. The word fuck reminded him of rappers and he had enough people in his head already, between the porn cast and Dec and Gemma herself, without Drake or Kanye in there too.

  He had wanted Gemma, he really had, not just to be done with his embarrassing virginity. It hadn’t even been a thing until the summ
er before Transition Year, when the posturing about who had done what to whom and in what position was all anyone wanted to talk about. He had little to add, beyond shifting in the cinema, a bit of tit-rubbing and frantic dry-riding in the laneway outside afterwards. He wanted to be a real person, not just all talk.

  ‘Pass Maths,’ he said, but the words didn’t come out properly.

  ‘What’s that?’ Lucy leaned in closer. ‘You’re looking for your hat, is it?’

  Bastards told him he had to drop down to lower-level maths for the Leaving. The honours class was, they said, some way beyond his ability. He didn’t need to tell his father to know what he would say. The thought of it gave him a sudden savage need to do something to mark the event, to be a man of action. Once you took away the talk, it turned out to be surprisingly easy to get into Gemma’s pants. To get her out of them.

  The constant music blocked out the memory of his own stupid voice afterwards. Telling her he was sorry, he meant to pull out, really. She kept her back to him and he could see the scatter of pimples on her arse. It made him feel close to her to know that about her.

  He winced.

  ‘Try not to move around so much,’ Lucy said.

  She must be watching him. Wouldn’t Dec just love that? An older woman, no less.

  In his head, when he reran it, things went differently; he was manly, prepared, sliding smoothly into coupledom. His mother’s voice in his head rather than his father’s. In reality, he sat on the bus, staring miserably at her back, his own scumminess exponentially increased by Dec beside him, whistling and making V-gestures behind her back, expecting him to laugh along. It gave every morning the feeling of a wet Tuesday morning with double maths. He didn’t mind Mondays. That was the kind of thing he could have told Gemma, if he wasn’t such a dick. Instead, he started getting the early bus, hating himself for telling Dec that Gemma was pestering him to ask her out.