Seán was looking at her, his mouth loose with fright, as if she had turned into someone else, instead of finally finding a part of herself missing all along.
‘Alina, are you suggesting that the victims, the people still trapped in the bus, somehow brought this on themselves?’ Nina’s voice was careful.
‘Of course not. She’s in shock,’ Seán said. ‘She’s not even… I mean, she doesn’t even go that often…’
He didn’t realise that he had taken his hand from hers.
‘Nothing is an accident. The righteous have nothing to fear.’
‘Something like this, the shock of it,’ Seán tried again. ‘You understand…’
But they didn’t understand. They never would.
* * *
‘Sacred Heart, Alina child, what a fright you’re after giving us all.’ Seán’s mother ushered Alina in the front door as if she owned their house. Talking talking talking, like it changed anything.
‘I’m sorry, Annie.’ What else could she say? She was sorry, as it happened. Even though her only crime was to get on a bus and survive a crash.
‘We were half out of our minds with worry, you know.’ Annie scolded Alina as she prodded her along the hall and into the kitchen. ‘I have the kettle on, you’ll be wanting a cup of tea.’
‘Alina’s exhausted, Mam,’ Seán said. ‘I think a lie-down would be best.’
He had been like this since the interview finished, tongue-tied, speaking only to tell her how tired she was, how she would feel like herself again in a day or two. He did not mention what she said and neither did she. Her certainty under the lights had given way to a sort of numbness. She doubted if she could decide on a pair of shoes to wear.
‘Thank you, Annie. Tea would be lovely.’
Another lie. A kind one, the sort she became practised in after meeting Seán. Forcing down many cups of milky tea when the sharpness of lemon was what she wanted. It started innocently, a step towards being accepted by Seán’s mother. Already put off by her skin, her beliefs, her failure to gossip, Annie needed no further ammunition against her. Rude refusal of the customs of her tea might have been a fatal blow. Seán, for all that was wonderful within him, used up much of his courage in bringing her home. She was not sure he could withstand a strong attack on their relationship by his mother.
‘We saw the pictures on the news,’ Annie continued, taking tea things out of cupboards with great familiarity.
Full milk, white sugar, the things Alina only kept in her kitchen for Annie’s visits. The biscuits were already on the table, arranged on a plate as if they were food. Dark, sticky jam in between mounds of whipped sugar, turning a single cup of tea into a child’s birthday treat.
‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, weren’t you lucky?’ Annie touched her forehead, then her chest and each shoulder, marking a cross on her body. It had the wrong dimensions, pushed out of shape by Annie’s short neck and broad chest.
‘Very lucky,’ Alina agreed. She was out before they even knew she had been involved, what need for this great drama? But that was her mother-in-law’s way, to make something out of nothing, to hold life’s horror up to the light, the better to admire her own place of safety.
‘I told Seán – didn’t I, Seán? – that you have no business on those early buses. Not at that hour of the morning. It’s a car of your own you need. Didn’t I say it, Seán, not a month ago? Oh, I know’ – she held up her hands as if warding off a crackpot theory – ‘the planet and all that.’
Little point in explaining it again. In winter, Seán took the car and she the bus. Spring and autumn, he cycled and she drove. In summer, when university let out, they decided day by day.
‘It was muggers you were worried about, if I remember rightly.’ Seán rolled his eyes at Alina behind his mother’s back.
They used to make her feel special, these gestures he made without his mother seeing. The two of them together. When she told her mother, laughing, happy to show that Seán could protect her, her mother didn’t share the joke.
‘How can you trust that he is not making these faces also with her behind your back? Someone who laughs at others is simply someone who laughs at others.’
Her mother’s words burrowed under her skin and hid in the place where her insecurity lived, coming out when she and Seán argued. When she wondered if he only married her to seem less boring to other people. To himself, maybe. If he believed her perceived exoticism was somehow catching. Never mind that she grew up here, went to school here, froze with Jack on the Titanic and ran across America with Forrest, knew all the words to Baz Luhrmann’s sunscreen song. Never mind that she was the same as every Irish girl he had grown up with. The same in every way but one.
It shamed her when he introduced her to work colleagues and she heard a boast in his voice. It shamed them both when she wondered if he was more racist than any of them.
‘I knew it wasn’t right,’ Annie said now, clicking her tongue against her teeth when Seán put the milk carton on the table. She took a jug from the cupboard, washed the dust away and placed it on the table. Click, click, click, went her busy tongue. How tired it must be at night-time. ‘I had a bad feeling about it all. Nobody should be going around that hour of the morning that doesn’t have to.’
Here it came, what she was building up to, the real problem.
‘Why you can’t go and say your few prayers in the Sacred Heart chapel when it’s only across the road, I will never understand,’ Annie said. ‘It isn’t even a church, if that’s what you’re worried about. It’s a perpetual chapel, no tabernacle. They couldn’t say Mass in it even if they wanted to.’
‘Mam.’ Seán’s voice was a warning.
‘Sure, God can hear you wherever you are,’ she said, with a sniff.
‘It’s about more than that, Mam, and you know it. You wouldn’t go to the mosque on Sunday mornings instead of Mass, would you?’
‘That’s different,’ Annie said.
‘Different how, Mam?’
‘I wouldn’t know what to do in one of those places,’ Annie said. ‘It’s different for Alina. She’s been inside the church plenty of times, she knows her way around it. Isn’t that right, Alina love?’
Alina smiled vaguely. How could she describe the feeling of peace when she got on the bus, knowing that she would shortly slip in the side door and join the community of women, the warmth that settled inside her. Studies said that regular attendance at religious services increased feelings of well-being, but sitting among those strangers was more than simple calm. It felt vital in some way. She was spared the betrayal of her own reply by Annie bowing her head.
‘Bless us O Lord as we sit together. Bless the food we eat today…’
The words, heard so often, floated in the air before settling on her tablecloth. She would have to wash it, she realised. Bleach it of its foreign meaning. She wished she could cover her ears with her scarf, but she had removed it in the car on the way home, anxious to be rid of the tag rubbing against her ear. Some Muslim, she, to reject such small discomforts.
‘I think I might need to go and lie down,’ she said when the prayer ended.
‘I’ll be here if you need anything,’ Annie said. ‘I told Seán I’ll stay for a few days until you’re back on your feet.’
‘Thank you, Annie. Thank you, Seán.’
‘You know how hard it is for me to take days off in term time,’ Seán’s voice was apologetic.
‘It’s fine. Please don’t worry.’
It was not fine. Something he should have known. As her husband. As a human. She pretended to be asleep when he came in to kiss her goodbye before leaving for his evening lecture. Every year, she memorised his timetable, calculated how long it would take him to walk from the lecture theatre to his office, gather his bag and coat, collect his bike from the rack – or the car – and leave the city behind, so that she would know when to expect his key in the door. She almost always got it right, except on days when he was accosted by a st
udent with a question or a colleague or, on the brightest days, when he went straight from the lecture hall to their house, surprising her with an extra twenty minutes of the evening together.
She wondered if his mother would go with him, grabbing with two hands at the chance of time alone with her son. But after the front door closed between them, she could hear Annie moving around, the whirr of the handheld hoover as she gathered up the coconut flakes from those poisonous biscuits. The hoover was the wedding present she liked least and yet used gratefully every day. That, alone, should have told her… but she couldn’t remember what it should have told her.
Had she fallen asleep or not, when Annie pushed open the bedroom door without knocking?
‘Alina? Your friend Margo is on the phone. Will I tell her you’re sleeping?’
‘No, it’s okay.’ Alina held out her hand for the phone and Annie handed it to her before going to stand in the doorway, not even pretending not to listen. Was it good or bad that such pretence was gone? Did it mean she was as close as family or inconsequential as a stranger?
‘Aren’t you the one for the high drama!’ Margo said.
She wasn’t sure if she was expected to answer. Or what she might say if she did. ‘Hello, Margo. How are you?’
‘Run off my feet, thanks. Doing the work of two people while you’re at home napping and eating biscuits. Isn’t it well for some?’
‘I won’t be out long, Margo. The doctors said to rest for a day or two, but I’ll be fine then.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Margo’s voice softened. ‘People will still be breaking their hips and needing to order plastic replacements next week. Just don’t be listening to the nonsense on the radio. People are terrible, they would depress you.’
‘What are they saying?’ Alina didn’t know why she was asking. She could already hear the whiteness of their words.
‘I’m hardly going to repeat it, now am I?’ Margo said. ‘Didn’t I just tell you not to listen?’
* * *
‘I hope she wasn’t pressuring you to come back to work?’ Annie came to take the phone.
‘She’s just being practical.’
‘She might as well be getting used to doing without you.’ Annie winked at Alina. ‘You rest now, you might be needing your strength sooner than you think. Days like today make us all think about the future, about the important things in life. About family.’
Annie’s hints were never subtle. When asking her to stop didn’t work, Seán told Alina to simply ignore her, to pretend she hadn’t understood.
‘You’re right, Annie. I should rest now. Thanks.’
She placed the phone beside her on the bed. It was spiteful, she knew, to take the thing that gave Annie such a sense of purpose.
‘I just need to give Dympna a quick tinkle,’ Annie would say, settling herself at the table with a pot of tea and the inevitable biscuits.
Seán was delighted. ‘Isn’t it great that she can use the phone here and we don’t need to worry about it? I hate to think she’s worrying about the phone bill in her own place at her age, after everything she did for me.’
Who could argue with that? She did indeed raise Seán, a fine son, a fine man. If she had not yet let go of him, was that the worst crime?
Without the phone, Annie turned the radio up loud, that awful show she listened to every evening, a man with a loud voice encouraging other loud-voiced people to phone him and discuss the things they found important. Things that required shouting and the casting of aspersions. The application of slights to others.
No matter which way she turned in her bed she could hear the voices, low enough that she had to concentrate to make out the words. It made it worse to have to work so hard to hear such filth. They talked about the bus crash. Some idea that builders were to blame. Or the planning board, who gave land to underground car parks so that the river came in and washed away the road.
‘There needs to be criminal prosecution,’ a woman insisted.
‘But for what, Noreen? For what?’ asked the interviewer.
‘For murder, if necessary,’ she said.
‘Surely that’s a bit strong, Noreen? We don’t even know if there are victims yet.’
‘There will be,’ said Noreen, grimly. ‘I feel very strongly about this. People are getting away with far too much for far too long.’
‘I understand your frustration, Noreen, but—’
‘I speak my mind,’ Noreen said.
She sounded like Margo, who, too, asserted her right to speak her mind. Rudeness and cruelty were permitted under this guise, it seemed. If their manager asked Margo to do something she didn’t agree with, she watched and waited for the chance to make it all go wrong. Whenever she managed to shout him into doing something her way and it still went wrong, she would tell him smartly he should not have listened to her, the boss should make up his own mind and be a man about it all. So the failure of her idea was someone else’s fault too. Sometimes Alina thought it must be comforting to be Margo.
On the radio they talked about Richie, his suspension from work, the time Nina Cassidy asked him about. Alina believed what he had said: it happened and he was sorry. He didn’t seem capable of lies. He was too sad. Too sweaty.
‘He’s not racist at all,’ some man insisted. ‘It’s the other side of it I’d be worried about.’
‘Tell us what you mean,’ said the interviewer.
‘He pulled her out, didn’t he?’ said the man. ‘Before anyone else? For all we know they knew each other.’
‘Now we can’t know anything like that,’ the interviewer said. ‘There are no reports yet of any existing relationship between Richie the bus driver and the lady he says he rescued.’
‘Maybe they were in it together, the pair of them. Maybe she had him brainwashed. That’s how their religion works, it’s all brainwashing and extremes.’
‘I’ll remind our listeners again that the Defence Forces have ruled out explosives as the cause of the crash,’ the interviewer said, quickly.
‘These terrorists are years more advanced, the guards would be only trotting after them. Look at that shoe bomber…’ the man continued. ‘He lives alone, that Richie does. Put his mother in a home, I heard. Maybe he needed her house to do his plotting.’
‘Everyone is entitled to their opinion,’ said the interviewer, ‘but, again, we have no evidence yet to suggest anything of the sort.’ He stopped there to take an ad break.
Everyone was entitled to their opinion. They could not exactly say that she had an affair, that she was a terrorist, but they could wonder it out loud in front of the whole country. It should be funny that her beliefs should be held to such high standards when they had all but disappeared from her life. The vitriol in their voices shook her. How could they hate her, these people whose religion was their culture, this vast love for their books and their god? These people who celebrated belief and St Patrick the converter, who gave their god a legal place in their lives. That they should accuse her when she had let her life be filled up with weddings in churches, christenings in churches, Christmas and Mass and the tight lips of her mother. They had not stopped her family at the airport when they arrived but neither, it seemed, had they really let them in.
Her father in Saturday-morning shirtsleeves, scrubbing graffiti from the gate of their house. ‘Young people and their pranks, my dear, it is nothing,’ he told her, his smile the same smile as always.
Her mother had different words, bitter and fearful, ‘At home we saw our neighbours take up arms against each other, only days after they had eaten together.’ Her hands in fists, pounding flour.
‘We come from a place where people report each other as informers, people vanish overnight.’ Her father’s voice was firm. ‘Can you really believe that some paint is the worst thing?’
Alina turned away from the sight of her father’s arms around her mother’s shaking shoulders. Those arms could no longer hold anyone. But her mother was still here, would know t
o say the things he could not. She could not pick up the phone and call her. Not yet. Not until she needed her less.
She had chosen Seán’s life over her own. I do, she said, agreeing to it all. To putting his mother before her own. To dinner every Friday evening, their heads bowed over the table as if it was something for which they were grateful. Lunch every Sunday after Mass. A fuss made of Christmas, as if they were children. The meal and presents spoken of for weeks before.
‘She’s still disappointed she missed out on our wedding,’ Seán said each time she brought it up.
‘We had a wedding, Seán. You know this, you were there. She was there.’
But their civil ceremony, their great compromise, disappointed everybody but her father. He cried with joy, while, beside him, Alina’s mother nodded patiently and Annie complained that a priest’s blessing would have been nice. Seán’s mother might have forgiven him for marrying outside the faith if Alina had given her the wedding she wanted.
‘How many years until we have made this disappointment right for her?’ Alina asked.
Time was not the issue, of course. Only a new little Catholic would undo the wrong done to Annie.
‘You’re properly Irish now,’ Seán had said to her, laughing, the night they got back from their honeymoon to find Annie had hung a papal wedding blessing above their bed. And despite her heart, despite the veils boxed in the attic of her mother’s house, despite the Irish passport safely tucked into her handbag, she, like a tongue-tied foreign fool just off the boat, believed him.
* * *
Alina woke when Seán got in from work, his idea of closing a door gently being to push it from a distance of ten centimetres instead of forty. She could hear his voice in the kitchen, which meant his mother was still here. While she slept, her neck had stiffened, as the doctors warned her it might. The pills they gave her were in the kitchen and she resigned herself to the stiffness. Better pain than any more tea.
Where the Edge Is Page 11