Obedient as a doll, Orla’s eyes closed. Somewhere overhead, the hum of machinery started again.
TIM
‘The Dublin team are on their way with a GPR unit,’ Tim told the families. ‘It should be up and running within the hour.’
‘Will it show them… inside the bus, I mean?’
‘I’m afraid that GPR – Mrs Phelan, isn’t it? Lucy’s mother? – isn’t quite the same thing as thermal imaging. That’s the one that picks up traces of heat, you’ll have seen it on television during avalanches and the like. GPR looks for objects underground, cracks, changes in material, all things that will show us exactly where the bus is and the safest way to get to them.’
‘Is it dangerous? Is there radiation?’ Paul’s mother, Elmarie, asked. Her husband, Jason, looked sharply at her.
‘Only tiny amounts,’ Tim told her. ‘Less than one per cent of your mobile phone.’
Words of false comfort were useless, he knew that. Every parent’s wish: that their child would never know fear or pain. When it was his turn, he sat by Aisling’s bed and prayed for painlessness. Yet towards those at the funeral who pressed his hand and talked about an end to her suffering, he felt a monstrous rage. Pain, after all, meant life.
* * *
The engineers were younger than Tim expected, full of excitement about their equipment and what it could do.
‘Applied engineering, man,’ one guy smiled. ‘This is what it’s all about. I’m Russell, your walker, and Ferg here will run the monitor.’
‘Quite a crowd you’ve got out there,’ Ferg said, while Russell fitted safety equipment.
The crowd had increased since the last statement. The whole idea of GPR was lapped up – any kind of gadgetry seen on TV fired the public imagination.
‘You’ll need to clear people back,’ Russell said. ‘Her antenna needs a clear twenty feet.’
‘What we really need is Finder,’ Ferg said, busy with cables and wires. ‘Real top-of-the-line stuff. Uses microwaves to detect people’s heartbeats when they are buried under collapsed buildings. Works through nine metres of anything.’ He shook his head in admiration.
Tim imagined a bank of monitors set up along the perimeter, one after another fading and flatlining while the team moved in bursts, flaring like rubber-soled lightning, here and there and useless. On Ferg’s screen, Russell walked in careful parallel lines inside the barrier while Leo watched from the side of the site.
‘Any subsurface variations, both metallic and non-metallic, will bounce a signal back. Could be a length of pipe or something, the GPR won’t differentiate. A fancier one would give you a density reading and show the metals in colour. We’ve been campaigning for a new one, but, you know, budget cuts.’ Ferg’s voice was glum.
When the walk-through was complete, Russell and Leo joined them in the meeting room, to the evident disappointment of the media, whose shouted questions went unanswered.
‘There’s a consistent metallic read about twenty-five feet east of the road and that’s our best guess for where the bus ended up. You saw the depth reading change significantly on that side? Road surface alone wouldn’t account for that density of a read. The county engineers tell me an underground car park was started as part of a development that was abandoned during the recession. That would explain the bus ending up at that depth.’
‘How close can we get?’ the Chief asked.
‘There’s a pocket that seems solid enough on this side of the site. That might be our safest bet.’
‘If we used an excavator instead?’ Tim asked.
‘Lighter but far slower,’ Leo replied.
There was no decision to make – the balance of safety and speed was what they were trained for.
‘Let’s start at twice the safe distance and get as close as we can,’ the Chief said.
‘I’ll keep the system on. A change in the read will tell us if the stability changes. Should give you enough time to pull back,’ Ferg said.
If. Should. Might. Could. The in-between words.
Tim updated the information board, arrows connecting every step to the next, as if each action could simply assume the success of that which went before. They were certain, the arrows. Complete in themselves.
The media did the same thing, delivering life in black and white. Was that the reason for Nina’s intransigence, her insistence on absolutes? Or was the reverse true, that journalism attracted her because of those qualities she possessed? It was unsolvable, she was already emphatically herself when they met. They were at the same birthday party, each connected by a different friend. She refused to be impressed by a firefighter, she told him, it implied a recklessness that she could neither understand nor applaud. It should have been a one-night stand, except they went for breakfast, a walk, an afternoon movie. Less than twenty-four hours in and he knew she was the one.
* * *
A quick scan of Twitter revealed that the media hashtag #corkbuscrash, trending for the past couple of hours, had been overtaken by #staystrong, into which the public poured their support for the families and those at the scene.
One-liners and easy, distant sympathy. Every second person sharing that ‘there are no words’. If that were true, then say nothing. Or say what you needed to say, but privately.
The cranks and conspiracy theorists were there, of course, with their ugly theories and apocalyptic speculation, sidelining those really involved. He read an article once on the politics of grief, drawn in by its promise to guide him on how not to say the wrong thing. In any traumatic event, the person to whom it was happening was in the centre, with those next most involved in a slightly wider circle out, and so on. Getting it right was simple, the article said, you just had to remember to protect and support those in smaller circles than your own. It would have helped more if he hadn’t realised halfway through that Nina believed herself alone in the innermost circle. Who knew, maybe he believed it a little himself.
* * *
‘This isn’t public information,’ the Chief warned.
Tim had closed the office door and asked him straight out if there was any truth to the suggestion that planning misconduct caused the accident.
‘When that area was being developed for apartment blocks, the initial planning refused to allow the underground car parks. The area was already very built up and so close to the river. A report said to leave it alone, it was needed for drainage.’
‘But?’
The Chief shrugged. ‘A change of personnel later and the car parks were back in the plans.’
The prospect of another corruption scandal was wearying. Church, state, the guards, even charities, one after the other revealing the rot beneath the power. There would be a formal investigation, of course, a careful report that did nothing to shore up fragile faith in the innate goodness of people.
‘What effect did the car parks have on the road?’ he asked.
‘The engineers’ theory is that the far side had to take on all the drainage and, over time, the volume of water eroded the foundations of the road.’ The Chief sighed and rubbed his hand over his face. ‘Look, we don’t know anything for sure yet and, to be frank, it’s not our concern. That’ll be a job for the investigation afterwards.’
Every firefighter would agree the worst cases were those that were preventable. But it wasn’t Tim’s business to judge. His job was to run the board, monitor the information, pull together statements for every eventuality, put words between the politics of it and the people. Necessary work, if not exactly what small boys dreamed of.
* * *
Instead of returning to the crisis room, he found himself pushing open the door to the media centre. He couldn’t – wouldn’t – tell Nina anything, of course, but he needed to know how far the story had gone. Inside it was quiet, as a man spoke to the assembled group. Dressed in a natty suit, with a manicured moustache, he was out of place in the disarray. Poirot, if he had been born in Ireland. Tim recognised him from a workshop he attended once u
pon a time. He was a psychology professor at the university, a grief and trauma specialist.
Tim moved further into the room, settling his shoulder against the wall, watching the watchers. Doreen, the HSE social worker assigned to the families, came and stood beside him.
‘Is it not a bit soon for this?’ he asked, nodding towards the front.
‘Dr O’Caoimh contacted us, wanting to help. Do you know any other trauma specialists willing to step in at a moment’s notice at no charge?’ she whispered back.
‘At times like this it is natural to look for answers,’ Dr O’Caoimh said.
Wrong, Tim thought. Answers didn’t become an issue until afterwards. It was adrenaline that powered people through catastrophe. It was hope – the ultimate survival instinct – that dragged them to the finish line. It was only later that the quest for meaning started, the picking apart, the if-onlys that drove people to despair, to a frantic search for meaning, to drink.
‘What advice can you give the families to help them through these difficult hours?’ asked one of the reporters. As if silence wasn’t the only possible refuge during such a wait. Had O’Caoimh said nothing, Tim might have had a bit of respect for him.
‘I urge them to take this present moment for itself without worrying where it might take them, without looking too far forward or perhaps giving into the temptation of looking backwards and wishing things were otherwise.’
The last thing people in difficult situations needed was to be advised to battle every human instinct, to be made to feel that their worry was counterproductive, that they were somehow doing it wrong.
Watching Nina’s family deal with their grief, Tim had wondered how his own parents would have handled it. If they, too, would have tiptoed around them. But his parents had died years earlier, his connection to home long gone. A fact made more real by the strangeness of his uncle and cousins at the funeral. The loss of his parents gave an odd comfort. Nights he couldn’t sleep, he would imagine Aisling in heaven, being spoiled by her grandparents. In his imagination, heaven looked a lot like the local playground.
‘One step at a time,’ Dr O’Caoimh was continuing. ‘That’s the key.’
Where did that leave readiness, that bracing of the body and the mind against the worst? Hope needed some small area to flourish.
In the pause between questions, Tim heard the low chant coming from outside, where someone had started the rosary again. No doubt they thought it was a comfort to the families, there would be much mention of community spirit. If he closed his eyes, he would be able to picture their faces. Pity. Gratitude. There-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I. The self-serving sympathy for which the lost were supposed to thank the lucky. Community. The clawing hands of strangers. People clutching at him or avoiding him, either too close or too far away. Forever splitting groups of friends into those who could and were, and those who couldn’t and therefore weren’t.
They had heard them all. The more catastrophic the occasion, the greater the number of such clichés that people rolled out, believing that to say anything was better than saying nothing: ‘You were chosen for this because you are strong’; ‘God never made a burden that he didn’t make the back to bear it’; ‘No cross, no crown’. The countless ways in which people swallowed the first and most natural reaction, their relief that it was not them.
Dr O’Caoimh made way for the garda liaison to update on access and security for the vigil planned for that evening. Tim glanced out the window at the darkening sky. With winter well underway, nature itself was working against them.
When the doctor passed him, followed by Nina, something in her face prompted him to turn and leave the room with them.
‘The majority of people who have undergone trauma will carry it with them,’ Dr O’Caoimh was saying. ‘There’s a certain theory that traumas – particularly those which severely breach our emotional boundaries – manifest on our external boundaries, literally appearing on our skin.’
They glanced down at Nina’s arm, where her hand stopped in mid-scratch. ‘Eczema is very common,’ she said, pulling her sleeve down over her wrist with a tight smile.
‘Excuse me, Doctor,’ Tim said. ‘Nina, could I have a word?’
‘Is it to do with the corruption rumours?’ she asked, when the lift door closed and they were alone. ‘I was going to come and ask you, but then I got caught listening to that fool.’
He smiled despite himself. ‘I thought he might have that effect on you.’
‘So, tell me.’
‘Tell you what?’
‘The planning issue. Is it true that the engineer who greenlit the rezoning was the brother-in-law of the contractor?’
‘Where do you get this stuff? You shouldn’t believe everything you read on Twitter.’
She shook her head. ‘Ben told me. I’m not on any of those sites, you know that.’
He did know. She purged all of her accounts one evening without saying anything. The first he knew of it was Facebook notifying him that his wife no longer existed.
‘I don’t know anything about the engineers or the planners or any of it,’ he told her. ‘Hardly our priority today.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘Yes, yes, lovely party line, consider yourself unsullied. So, what did you want me for?’
He shrugged. ‘It looked like an uncomfortable conversation, I thought you could do with an out.’
‘Oh.’ A flash of her smile. ‘Whose idea was your man?’ She jerked her eyes upwards.
‘I’m sure some of them will find him helpful.’ Loyalty to the team, he supposed. Or something defensive. They used to be on the same side.
‘You would have found it helpful, would you? All that bullshit about how grief belongs to society rather than the individual? A burden shared? That would have comforted you when it was us? When it was Aisling?’ Her voice broke.
‘Jesus, Nina.’ He looked at her for a moment. ‘Are you okay?’ The question was out before he could stop himself. She would hate it, would hate him for asking. ‘It’s cutting a little close to home.’
‘Save your rescuing for the people who need it, why don’t you?’ She pushed the door to the media centre and re-entered without looking at him.
It never occurred to her that he was asking for help, not offering it. She was always territorial about her grief. She used to stiffen perceptibly when they visited the grave and found someone else’s offering, as if their sorrow somehow encroached on hers. While she tidied the grave – often gathering the offending item into a large black bag brought for the purpose – he would bow his head and pray.
On the bad days, it infuriated her. A difference in belief that started out as playfighting when they met first. Before it mattered. Theoretical arguments over a bottle of wine morphing over the years into a more bitter divide.
‘You and your bloody God,’ she spat at him once, vodka splashing her fingers as she poured.
What she didn’t understand – then or now – was that it was less about the search for comfort than about finding the strength to keep going.
* * *
‘You have to hand it to them,’ Leo told Tim, ‘they have every angle sewn up.’
They watched as a priest moved through the crowd, his soutane parting the people like a staff. The two laypeople helping him passed him bottles of holy water and waxy dead-skin-coloured candles from incongruous sports bags. Tapers followed, passing carefully from hand to hand, the wind already cast out by the mass of bodies. The swell in the number of people suggested that Dr O’Caoimh was accurate in his estimation that the vigil would serve a purpose for the local community.
‘What are we doing about the protesters?’ Tim asked Leo.
‘They’re being asked to move back before the families come down.’ He grimaced. ‘It’s the ones claiming Alina O’Reilly was involved I’m worried about. The rest are just the usual conspiracy guff.’
Tim nodded. ‘It’s being fuelled online as well, crackpot bomb theories and the like.’
‘The Chief has asked the Defence Forces to sit in on a press briefing to shut it down.’
‘They’re sure it wasn’t anything… sinister?’
Tim raised an eyebrow and Leo shrugged apologetically. ‘What could be more sinister than money?’
People, property, the environment. The safety-management system dealt out its protection in that order. It had always bothered him, that inclusion of ‘property’ ahead of ‘environment’ despite the fact that one was clearly replaceable. The same kind of half-arsed thinking that had everyone obsessed with buying houses instead of renting like the rest of the world. Except the English, but where did they learn that madness only from each other?
Well for him, the more pass-remarkable might say, with his feet firmly under Deb’s unmortgaged table. With Nina buying him out of their place last year, he was, by Irish standards, luckily debt-free. A unicorn among his peers.
He stayed where he was for a minute or two longer, watching the faint light of the candles growing with the hint of evening. He remembered his own incomprehension as a teenager going with his father to join searches for the lost at sea, thinking that surely something could still be done after sunset. It wasn’t the dark ages, after all. But it was easy to judge from the outside, less easy to balance the needs of the many and the few.
Right now, the families of those few stood at the edge of the cordon waiting for the vigil to begin. He might have told Nina he understood the need for it, but seeing them there, bewildered, it seemed no more use than offering a bottle of aftersun to a third-degree burns patient.
NINA
Nina watched the families during the vigil. Sometimes a moment of eye contact was all it took to establish a connection. People might have been chanting anything, such was the power of a solemn crowd. Hail Mary, full of grace. The simplicity of the prayer shook her heart up into her throat.
March 13th: Aisling was born. Half past four in the morning. No sunrise was ever more beautiful.
Where the Edge Is Page 8