But oh how you would love to be wrong.
‘Lovely afternoon,’ the woman said. They might be at a tea party, except for the dirt under her fingernails and the smell of outdoors that clung to her clothes. ‘I’m May.’
‘Nina.’
‘It’s a sad thing.’
‘It is,’ Nina agreed. No matter that she didn’t know the specifics or the generalities, whether life or a paper cut. Sadness was everywhere.
They sat side by side and drank their coffees. The footpath was hard on her backside and the coffee tasted faintly of its plastic lid, yet there was more comfort in it than any rosary. Tim found their daughter in talk, in prayers and groups, and families; she carried her inside, needing only silence to hear her clearly.
‘Let me pay you,’ the woman said, suddenly, placing her empty coffee cup on the ground as if it were glass.
‘No, please, there’s no need.’
‘I insist.’ From within the plastic bag, she drew out a sheaf of papers, removed one, stroked it fondly and handed it to Nina. It was a page from an online shopping order, culled from who knows where, someone’s rubbish bin, or a spilled sack trailing the back of an early-morning bin lorry.
‘Will that cover it?’ May asked, with odd dignity.
‘More than enough, thank you,’ Nina told her. She took her cue for dismissal and rose to leave, awkward on sleeping feet.
Of all the documentaries and think pieces on homelessness, none ever quite answered the question of why. Or, more accurately perhaps, who? What differentiated the person led straight off the edge of the cliff from the person who veered harmlessly along the grassy verge? There but for the grace of God, Tim might say, easy inside the security of his new, more grown-up family.
Noel’s phone call saved her from going back inside.
‘They’ve agreed to an interview,’ he told her.
‘They?’
‘The bus driver and the woman that got out.’
‘Richie Murray and Alina O’Reilly.’
‘That’s them. They’re still at the hospital.’
‘What about the scene?’
‘You wanted the people, this is the people.’
‘Okay, I’m on my way.’
‘The backlash against the woman is getting nasty. All nonsense, according to the Defence Forces statement, but see if you can get a reaction from her.’ His tone softened. ‘Can you handle it?’
She could. Of course she could.
She looked for Tim as she gathered Ben and her things. I have to go to the hospital, she could say, I have to go back, and the feel of his eyes on her as she walked away would be enough to straighten her spine. But that privilege was no longer hers. Instead, she let Ben drive her there, fiddling with her phone under the guise of getting the latest on the comments against Alina, then telling him to follow her inside when he had the gear assembled.
She walked across the hospital car park in the faded light of winter’s early dusk. Or perhaps the whole world had dimmed. Her heels clicked and crunched on concrete and gravel, as solid as if a real person walked in her shoes. It was two years since she came out the door of this hospital and got into a waiting hearse – she on one side, Tim on the other. They might have been returning from holidays, were it not for the tiny coffin on their laps, lighter than hand luggage. Heart luggage. The words rose like a giggle in her throat.
The pinkness of the casket was an affront, you knew the moment you saw it. But you hadn’t wanted any part in choosing it, had been too busy giving in to your grief, indulging the weeping and the hysterics as they came. So you sat in the back of the car, ashamed at how wrong it all looked. Ashamed of saying goodbye to your girl in what amounted to nothing more than a monstrous jewellery box, one final betrayal at the moment of her leaving the world.
No. Wrong. She had already left the world, left you. That was simply the moment of her leaving your arms.
This is your marketplace, this cattle call of souls, if any part of you believes in such a thing. You traded the lightness of your child’s body, the barely-there weight of her in your arms as she died, and you took that weight into your heart. You traded her fine wisps of hair, smoothed back from her face by sweat, for lines on your face and in your soul. The death of your child aged you with its small irreversible indignities. Hair turned grey, face creased with pain, these things do not return to themselves when you close your front door on the temporary mourners.
In here, you do not look out of place.
Nina stopped, breathed. The automatic doors opened and sucked her in.
‘Welcome, Ms Cassidy. I’m Victor Griffiths, Hospital Director.’ A tall man came forward to meet her.
‘Nina, please,’ she said, shaking his hand.
‘If you’d like to follow me, we have our interview room ready for you.’
He led her down familiar corridors, her breath held until they passed the stairs to the children’s ward and moved safely beyond it to the well of the lifts.
‘How are Mr Murray and Mrs O’Reilly?’ she asked.
‘I can’t tell you that, Ms Cassidy, Nina, as you well know.’ Victor twinkled at her. ‘But I can say that I wouldn’t be letting you in here if they weren’t up to it. All the rest they can be telling you themselves. Far be it from me to steal their fifteen minutes of fame!’
Ben was already inside the room, setting up, and Nina busied herself with her preliminary notes, while waiting for Victor to stop hovering.
‘It’s good to have you back under better circumstances,’ he said, in a low voice. ‘I hope you are doing well in yourself.’
Nina smiled, stretched it out for long seconds. There were few questions a bright smile didn’t answer.
‘We’ll start with a few questions for you, Victor, if that’s all right?’ she said.
‘Of course, Nina,’ he said, delighted, before excusing himself for a few minutes to prepare, as she guessed he would, giving her a break to gather her thoughts.
The room was pale grey with one turquoise wall, an effort to combine hygiene and homeliness. A large painting took up most of one wall. ‘Donated in memory of Lydia Costelloe’, the little plaque underneath announced. The painting was a woman, half-sitting, half-lying, four children cluttered around her. She looked beatific or exhausted, one enormous breast hanging out of the front of her dress, held firmly by the child nearest to it, his own pendulous belly mirroring her breast, one growing the other. Poor Lydia Costelloe, whoever she was, was lucky she couldn’t see it.
The extension of that symbiosis beyond your pregnancy shocked you, you were both consumed and renewed. Your old life, your old self, pushed out with the afterbirth, like being in a witness protection programme, your old identity no longer available, a new one all ready and waiting for you to step into. Relearning the world together.
In labour, with each contraction your heart expanded to accommodate your daughter. Shed like excess weight, your heart was left with folds that hang empty, too big for the little that was left.
The door opened and Victor stood to one side, shepherding people in ahead of him.
‘Here we are.’
‘Good afternoon, Mr Murray, Mrs O’Reilly.’ She stepped towards them and back into the world, the perennial hand out in front of her, ‘I’m Nina Cassidy. Thank you for agreeing to share your story today.’
ALINA
Seán insisted on pushing Alina’s wheelchair to the interview room himself, leaving the orderly to walk crossly beside them. She saw the same look on the faces of the small boys in their housing estate who sat on the kerb and waited in vain for their turn to be the goalkeeper and thus to join the game.
When the hospital director opened the door and ushered them in, Seán was the first to step forward and greet the lady reporter. ‘I’m Seán O’Reilly and this is my wife, Alina.’
She admired him in that moment, so tall and well-spoken, so sure that it would all go well. When, though, had the word wife lost its thrill?
‘Alina
was on the bus,’ he added. ‘Richie here got her out.’ He placed a large hand on the bus driver’s shoulder and rocked it backward and forward.
The man’s belly shook like pudding and Alina swallowed a giggle. Was it a good idea to do this, she wondered, when she felt so unlike herself?
Seán leaned forward and took the woman’s hand again. ‘I read about your daughter. At the time, I mean. I wanted to say that I’m – we’re – sorry for your loss.’
Alina watched the woman’s face. She did not look as if Seán’s sympathy was welcome.
‘We don’t have little ones. Not yet anyway,’ he looked at Alina and squeezed her hand. ‘But I can imagine.’
Alina pitied his foolishness. How could he think it possible to imagine the loss of a child without ever having had that child? If the woman reacted, she hid it well.
‘Thank you. It means a lot when people remember.’
While Seán continued a conversation he should have known to end, Alina glanced at Richie. His head was dipped low, showing a bald spot the size of a two-euro coin. She wondered if he knew it was there.
‘Seán,’ she put her hand on his arm, ‘could you get me some water, please?’
‘Are you okay?’
‘It’s been a long day, that’s all.’
Time moved in strange bright jerks. One minute sipping her water, the next sitting in a semicircle. The woman, Nina, sat opposite them. The spotlight behind her threw shadows onto her face, making it hard to read her expression. That must be normal, they seemed to know what they were doing.
‘Thank you all for making the time to come down and have a chat with me, I know it’s been a long day.’
There was something obedient about their laughter. The performance had already started, it seemed.
‘Now, folks, everyone is anxious to hear your story, this amazing rescue, and we’ll get to that in just a couple of minutes. I’m going to ask Victor a couple of quick questions first, just background stuff. You’ll see it’s nothing to be worried about at all. Think of it like a chat amongst ourselves.’
The men spoke first, but Alina found it hard to summon any offence. Margo would have done better in her place.
Richie mumbled his answers, making it hard to hear him. She must remember not to do that, to speak out clearly. So that they knew she could. The thought was gone almost before she could register it.
‘You’re being hailed as a hero, Richie. Tell me, how does that feel?’
‘Ah, sure, you know,’ he said.
‘I spoke to a woman this morning who told me she is often on your bus,’ Nina said.
‘It’d be hard to know,’ Richie said, without waiting to be asked anything.
‘She said her name was May,’ Nina added. ‘She might be a bit… troubled.’
‘The old lady,’ Alina said. ‘She was on the bus when I got on. She walked up and down the aisle. Up and down. Up and down.’
Seán’s hand squeezed hers and she stopped talking.
‘She told me you always let her on the bus,’ Nina smiled at Richie.
‘She showed me a bus pass,’ Richie said. ‘She doesn’t mean any harm. She only talks to herself, not to anyone else.’
‘Everybody sat in the back because she was at the front.’ Alina said. They were afraid of her, but Alina didn’t say that. The woman had done nothing wrong. The fear was theirs, not hers. Dangerous people didn’t wear it so much on the outside.
‘Did you sit in the back as well?’ Nina asked her.
‘No,’ Alina said. ‘I was in the middle.’ Her mother’s advice: sit where the driver can see you, that is how you avoid trouble. How many days had she got on and followed that advice without ever wondering how her mother came by that knowledge? Without going to her and saying, Mama. Tell me.
‘I was lucky to get to where Mr Murray could help me to climb out. Otherwise I would still be in there. Those poor people,’ she added.
‘Indeed. What prompted you to help Alina, Mr Murray? We know at this stage that the road collapsed still further almost immediately afterwards, you must have had mere seconds to decide. Can you talk us through that?’
‘They were reaching down to help me out. I heard her – Alina – asking for help and I gave her a hand up. It was as simple as that.’
‘I see.’ Nina shuffled her papers and cleared her throat. ‘This lunchtime, Mr Murray, a report stated that you were recently suspended from work for an incident that was claimed to be racial in nature—’
Richie looked at the ground, his hands rubbing one against the other. She wanted to lean forward and explain it to him. To tell him that the question might be directed at him but it was really about her. The colour of her skin complicating what he had done.
Richie coughed. ‘There was an incident, all right, but there was no racism involved.’
The story stumbled out of him. As if it was something new. A work night out. Drinks, lots of them. Pints of beer. Shots of whiskey. The teasing turned sour. A comment passed about Richie’s wife. Alina was surprised to hear the word wife; he didn’t seem married. There was something about him, a messiness, or a desperation, maybe, that a wife shouldn’t permit.
‘Do you want to tell me what he said?’ Nina asked.
‘I wouldn’t repeat it.’ He lifted his head up as he said it and caught Alina’s eye, ducking his head again and flushing.
‘You were defending your wife’s honour?’
‘It was the wrong way to go about things, whatever I thought I was doing.’
‘Sure, how could the man be a racist?’ Seán cut in. ‘Didn’t he pull my wife out of that bus?’
She was grateful to Seán for taking away one kind of awkwardness. She was. But he had taken it from Richie only to hand it to her.
‘Alina, can you tell us a little bit about your own background? You’re Lebanese, I believe?’
Always her past. Always. The largely unremembered years of her earliest existence destined to forever be the most singular thing about her. Never the life she chose for herself, an Irish life.
‘I have lived in Cork since I was six years old. I’m a naturalised Irish citizen, as are my parents. I’m married to an Irish man. If we have children, they will be Irish. Yet the moment anything goes wrong, I am Lebanese. A blow-in, a johnny-come-lately, a radical, exotic. Jokes that are not jokes.’
The light was hot on her forehead. She put a hand to her head, felt her hair. Giving up the veil, it seemed, didn’t make her the same, any more than wearing it had made her different. She took the scarf – a silk square that Seán had given her for her birthday – from the back of her chair and improvised a veil, letting her hands remember for her. Seán tensed beside her, while the others watched wordlessly.
‘This morning, for the first time in a long time, I saw the face of Allah,’ Alina said, gesturing to Richie.
‘I take it your beliefs are very important to you, Alina?’ Nina asked.
‘Not for many years and I regret that now. Today… all this? I am thankful for my life.’
‘You believe that Allah spared your life today?’
‘If not him, then who?’
‘Richie, are you a religious man? Do you believe that some higher power was at work this morning?’
‘I wouldn’t say I’m religious,’ he said. ‘But I understand what Alina is saying. God between us and all harm, my mam always said, and she always believed it too.’
‘Exactly,’ Alina said. ‘Allah chooses who to home and who to go to him.’
‘We’re not a family of faith,’ Seán said. ‘What Alina means is that this sort of thing makes you think. It would make anyone think. More importantly, we wouldn’t want to take anything away from the brave actions of this man here.’ Seán laid his hand on Richie’s shoulder. ‘But just because Alina and Richie were lucky doesn’t mean that someone wasn’t at fault. Politicians, builders, the government, the bankers, they’re all stuck in it together, they have everything sewn up. The ordinary, decent man can
hardly get approval to build a new barn and these cowboys are killing drainage with their car parks. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see it. They should be compensating the families—’
Anger turned so easily to blame if there was nothing to filter it through. In the days after 9/11, she kept her head low, bowed down by the weight of her veil and other people’s looks. After school, she bumped into a girl in the supermarket, a girl who had been in her class but left early to have a baby. Not a friend exactly but someone who had shown her casual kindnesses, offering a spare seat, sharing a book. She had her baby with her and Alina went over to congratulate her. ‘I have nothing to say to your kind,’ the girl snapped and walked away, leaving her basket of nappies and baby formula in the middle of the aisle. Sixteen, unmarried and with a baby, yet she felt Alina was the one who should be ashamed. Perhaps she was right, Alina thought. She certainly felt that shame.
Two years later, or maybe three, she read Bin Laden’s statement that it was the bombing in Lebanon that had made him decide to carry out the attack on America, so that what had happened to the women and children there would not happen again. The statement was buried in the foreign news pages that nobody important read. None of her new college friends ever mentioned it, but the idea that he was protecting her made her feel dirty again. Perhaps that girl with whom she had once shared her Friday Twix was justified in walking away from her.
‘So often when we talk about blame we put it in the wrong place,’ she said. ‘But it is not about blame, it is only about the actions of those involved. The righteous are saved and so those that are not saved are not righteous. These things happen because we make them so.’
She hoped they were watching, those girls who took all they had for granted. The men they married, the interchangeable pints-and-football men that their teenage years had promised them they were due, their babies. They should know the fear they created, the helplessness. She hoped that they stepped outside the front doors of their four-bedroomed detached houses and carried their responsibility with them, loaded into the boots of their big cars.
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