Where the Edge Is

by Gráinne Murphy

  ‘Our reporter, Nina Cassidy, spoke earlier to Richie Murray and Alina O’Reilly—’

  He muted the sound and hobbled to the kitchen for another beer.

  Even if his mam saw it, she mightn’t connect it to him, please God. On a bad day, she thought he was still in short pants. To her, he was always Richard, like his father. Richie Murray the bus driver might not shake anything loose in her. He should ring the nursing home, just to be on the safe side. Not with drink taken. He would wait till the morning.

  ‘In the meantime, you can go live to the scene on our website…’

  He sat forward in his chair, forearms resting in the hollows worn there over the years. Over the closing credits they ran a set of images from throughout the day: the ambulance taking him away, teams of emergency personnel watching a tiny unmanned camera, the crowds gathering, the man with the GPR machine, the crane. It beggared belief that, despite it all, they were still in there. That he was out here. Only for the crutches, nothing at all might have happened.

  Throughout the footage, parts of the emergency response statements were added. A man in a suit made comments that turned out to be only hot air and hope when put against the whole day together. More men in the background. The same pair, often. Calm-looking, the kind you’d want in a crisis. The real heroes.

  He’d be lucky if anyone ever got on a bus with him again. Even if he was only a fucking passenger. That was assuming he still had his job. The world and his cat saw Crazy May on the news earlier, ‘He lets me on the bus when the others don’t.’ Probably a firing offence right there. Wouldn’t that HR bitch just love to have him back in front of her again? It nearly killed her to lift his suspension the last time. He could say he didn’t know the bus pass wasn’t hers. That he didn’t know she was homeless. That he thought she had Alzheimer’s, maybe. Good call, Richie-boy, all those hours in the nursing home could come in handy. He could talk about Alzheimer’s all right – sure, didn’t he know it like his own pocket?

  Five or six beers later, he couldn’t bear any more of it. He reached for the phone on the table beside him. He kept the landline on when most gave it up, remembering his old mam saying it made her feel like she lived in a place to have a phone there. Wasn’t it just as well he did, with his mobile in smithereens somewhere on the bus?

  He dialled Sandra’s mobile number from memory and let it ring until he heard her voice on the voicemail. Her posh voice, the one she used on the reception desk at work. Whatever he might have to say, he wasn’t stupid enough to think it would bear recording. He considered ringing the phone in the flat, but it wasn’t really Sandra’s phone there, it belonged to that bastard. Didn’t everything? Even Richie’s own wife. Legal was legal, though. She couldn’t belong to that bastard for another two years and however long the divorce court stuff took. Until then, Richie was still her lawful family. Still had the high ground. Didn’t the Constitution itself say the family was the moral centre of the country? They’d get no argument from Richie on that score.

  He slept on the couch to avoid the stairs, wishing he had thought to bring a blanket and pillow down after his shower. He pulled the phone jack out of the wall. Let it ring, he wouldn’t kill himself getting up to answer it. Sandra would see his missed call and probably think his old mam had finally gone. Let her think it. Let her be upset. It might be one less rut that bastard would have out of his wife. Let him keep it in his pants for one night while she cried for his mother. Let him pretend to be supportive, shifting sideways in the bed when he got the horn at the sight of her in her short nightie. Let her call him a disgusting pig with only the one thing on his mind. The image of her in her nightie stirred him, and he pulled away at himself for a couple of miserable minutes before giving it up, too drunk or too distracted. Pathetic, Richie-boy, can’t even be bothered with yourself. It’s no wonder she left.

  It was too quiet. His own voice in his head was the only thing he could hear. He turned the telly back on.

  ‘I’m telling you now, she knew more than she let on,’ the man insisted.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked the host, egging him on.

  ‘How come she was the only one sitting up near the front?’ said the man. ‘Answer me that!’ A note of triumph. ‘She must have known.’

  ‘It was only luck that she got out at all,’ the host said. ‘The driver pulled her with him, emergency services said earlier.’

  ‘Maybe there was a pair of them in it.’

  ‘Are you suggesting an act of domestic terrorism?’ the host asked.

  This frightened the man. ‘Well now, I don’t know. I’m just saying that there’s been no official statement that it wasn’t a bomb.’

  A terrorist, Richie-boy. Jesus. Lovely. A fine end to a fuck of a day.

  ‘I should point out that there was a statement earlier from the Defence Forces…’ the host clarified.

  The news bulletin claimed it had breaking news about a planning scandal, some kind of political corruption that might be to blame for the road collapse. ‘More to come after the break,’ they told him, as if it was a soap opera and not people’s lives.

  He knew there hadn’t been any gear bag of guns. Nobody with a big coat and a bomb under it. Was that even what people did, outside the movies? Did that mean it was the planners’ fault? Was it something he did, somehow, to the bus? The question that circled all day, the one he ignored.

  He lay awake to hear the news, but his eyes were heavy and he dozed off, caught by the beer and the day. He dreamt of fires, floods, his mother’s eyes, only there was glass where her eyes should be, her arms out, ‘Please, Richie’. She turned into Sandra in his arms, the pair of them buck naked, and he woke up pulling himself raw until he came in a burst, then slept curled around the wet patch like a cat.

  * * *

  The doorbell woke him. Three sharp rings, a break, then three more. She knew how to get her own back, Sandra did.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ she asked, pushing past him in the doorway like she still had a right to.

  ‘A bit stiff,’ Richie said, closing the door behind her. Whatever she had to say wouldn’t be improved by being shared with the neighbours. ‘Nothing a few days at home won’t fix, they said in the hospital.’ He followed her into the living room, his head hurting with every step.

  ‘Have you someone to come in to you? To give you a hand with things? Since your mam…’

  ‘Since I’ve packed Mam off to a home for the bewildered?’ Richie said. He usually threw the finger commas around when he said that to people, but he needed two hands on the crutches. If she had to help him up off the ground, he wouldn’t be able to hide the stone and a half he’d put on since she left.

  ‘You know that’s not what I meant,’ Sandra sighed. ‘Everyone knows she was too far gone for you to mind her any more—’

  ‘I have a few dinners in the freezer.’ Richie cut her off mid-sentence. ‘They’ll see me right.’

  ‘Put some trousers on, I’ll make tea.’

  The stain on the couch glowed as if it was radioactive. Had she seen it? Smelled it? Christ, she would think he was pathetic. He nodded towards the kitchen. ‘Can we have the tea inside? I need food with the tablets.’

  He struggled into his jeans, listening to her hum as she opened cupboards for teabags, sugar, marmalade.

  ‘I can pop in, if you want?’ she called. ‘Bring a few things over, run the hoover? It wouldn’t be any trouble.’

  ‘Lover-boy wouldn’t be happy with that,’ Richie muttered.

  Sandra walked over to the window. ‘Never miss a chance, do you, Richie? No fear the crash would have made you grow up any bit.’

  ‘You sound like your mother.’

  ‘Don’t talk about my mother,’ Sandra said, turning her head so fast he wondered for a minute if it might keep going all the way round. ‘Wasn’t she right, anyway, my mother? She told me we’d never last.’

  ‘She was a long way off,’ Richie said. Didn’t they make it to fourteen years? The ol
d bag wouldn’t even give him credit for that much, no doubt.

  Sandra breathed in, he could see the ten-count in her shoulders, the way the therapist showed her. A million years or more since they laughed about it, the pair of them breathing and counting together. He breathed the last three with her, even though she didn’t know it.

  ‘Do you want my help or not?’ she said.

  Richie pictured her in the kitchen of that shiny apartment, making sushi or caviar or whatever fancy shite that bastard ate for his tea, before putting the leftovers into a Tupperware box to bring over to him in the poky corners of his mother’s house.

  ‘Just because he took my leftovers doesn’t mean I have to take his,’ he wanted to say.

  ‘That wouldn’t make us equal,’ he wanted to say.

  That would send her nuclear altogether.

  Instead he sighed and hoisted his leg onto a kitchen chair. ‘No need,’ he said, ‘but thanks all the same.’

  Her shoulders relaxed. ‘Do you want me to put the heating on for you?’ she asked. ‘It’s after taking a real dip these last few days.’

  ‘I have it on a timer,’ he said. ‘It’s daylight robbery any other way.’ He didn’t add that it was only part of the reason. That he was afraid he would forget to turn it on some night after one too many and wake to burst pipes in his kitchen. If he woke at all.

  ‘True for you.’

  ‘It’s handier anyway for when I’m on the late shift.’

  ‘It’s a new breed of cold,’ Sandra said. ‘Climate change or what have you.’

  They didn’t sound like her words. They might be that bastard’s. Or maybe it was the legacy of the recession talking. The new Irish, cynical and apathetic at the same time, the worst of bar-stool politics. It didn’t make a jot of difference that it was true that even the weather had turned against them. The new cold of winters, the army called in to defend its citizens from Mother Nature. The new shortness of summers, the golden days of his childhood and shirtsleeves from April to October long gone. A sunny bank holiday weekend the height of it. Believing that was all they deserved. That it wasn’t climate change at all, but human change.

  ‘Do you know those lads, Richie?’ Sandra said, pulling the lace curtain back a bit to see better.

  ‘Who?’ he pulled himself up, holding in the sigh of his weight, and peered out the kitchen window. Over the garden wall, he could see a few heads peering in. ‘Local lads, I think.’

  ‘Looking for your autograph,’ she nudged him gently.

  ‘A likely story.’

  ‘It was on the news, you know, about you pulling that woman out to safety,’ Sandra said. ‘They called you a hero.’

  ‘Go on out of that.’

  He saw her to the front door and watched her walk down the little path in front of the house and out onto the footpath. The gang of teenagers, five or six of them identical in matchstick-man jeans and hooded sweatshirts, sat on the kerb across the road. Their eyes followed her down to the parking bay where she’d left her car. Why wouldn’t they? She was always a handsome woman, even back when she was carrying the extra weight.

  When the doctor told them there would be no children, they didn’t talk about it much. Sandra would pull out the crisps and biscuits at night in front of the telly, ‘to cheer us up’, as she put it. Neither of them told his mam. Her disappointment, couched in grim novenas and the offers of relics, would have made reality out of it.

  Hard to say if a child would have kept them together. The poor thingeen might only have dissolved under the weight of the responsibility.

  Hard to imagine having to explain to a child about Sandra’s new apartment, about the part that bastard was to play in its life. About their new fucking daddy.

  They were better off the way they were, most likely. Que sera sera, as his mam would say.

  Sandra’s car pulled away and he had barely lowered his arse to the couch when a crash broke the silence. It took him a second to realise what it was: a stone hitting the front window. The little fuckers. It didn’t break the glass, though, nor did the next one. Third time’s a charm, wasn’t that how it went? He was left standing in the smithereens of his own living room, the hole letting their words in along with the blasts of icy air.

  ‘Where’s your girlfriend now?’

  He was confused at first and thought they meant Sandra. Had she said something to them, told them to get on home?

  ‘Where’s your headscarf?’

  ‘Terrorist.’

  ‘Osama bin Murray.’

  At this last comment they doubled over laughing and ran off before he could pull it together enough to say anything at all. If he could run, he still wouldn’t have caught them, greyhounds that they were. Kids raised on McDonald’s and the absence of a slap. He’d have been pawing the air behind them like a bear after salmon.

  Fifty-two years old and he wanted his mother. No. Thank God his old mam wasn’t here, the shock would have killed her. Not in her younger days, mind, when anyone that dared to look sideways at him got the hard edge of her hand and words that stung and kept coming. He couldn’t have gone after them, sure, look at him, stiff as a board and on crutches to boot.

  ‘You’re a cartoon, Richie-boy,’ he said out loud.

  He had to wait for his hand to stop shaking before he could call the police. They would be able to do fuck all about it but they might board up the window for him. Keep some of that expensive heat in, if nothing else.

  PART THREE – OUT

  IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE

  WORD

  If it were a film, the camera would hold for a long moment on the hush of the scene, moving from mourner to mourner against a backdrop of some gentle instrumental piece. No. Nothing instrumental, nothing that would make a person want to sway. Something darker, with the hoarse sorrowful tones of love lived and lost. A woman, an American, someone with sky and scale in their voice. The kind that could never come from a small, wet island that rarely saw the two ends of the sky at the same time.

  There would be a montage of grief. Picture the sort of thing. Inviting unity. Pseudo-art on the universal nature of sorrow. Hands clasping. Tissues and phone numbers moving from one pocket to the next. Fingers digging warm on shoulders.

  In real life, there are no montages. The isolation that comes from knowing little or nothing doesn’t play well on-screen.

  In real life, the hush of the scene is real, the machinery quiet, the only movement coming from the fingers of the crowd. Type, click, read, react. Refresh.

  @elliepk1 Thinkin of all ur families. #staystrong #corkbuscrash #pray

  @pickitoutside Oh my god. How cud dis happen blame the planners. #corkbuscrash #staystrong #protest

  @rachdaddy1 Pipes should be replaced periodically. Not done here. Where did that money go? #corkbuscrash #staystrong #answers

  @margaretshanahan03 Why are they not doing something? They’ve been in there all night. God love the poor parents. #corkbuscrash #staystrong #dosomething

  @littleredridinghood Dey must all be ded else dey wud be doin sumtin. Lies lies lies. #corkbuscrash #liars @conspiracy

  @mxnoonan Easy to judge, not so easy to do. Don’t know how they do it #corkbuscrash #heroes

  @stfinbarrschurch It is the families we must help now. Prayer service tonight at St Francis Church. #corkbuscrash #letuspray

  @bartsimpsonspants Nuttin happenin cos waitin for bomb sqad. No coincidense she got out. Must of known it beforhand. #corkbuscrash #sendthemhome

  @ciarantimm Two of the council ‘helping police with enquiries’ after they found them at the airport. Disgrace. #corkbuscrash #answers #shame

  @rachdaddy1 RT@ciarantimm Same old thing. Watch, they will be back at airport and gone in 24 hours time. #corkbuscrash #answers #shame #disgrace

  Type. Click. Read. React.

  Refresh.

  Refresh.

  Refresh.

  TIM

  ‘Deb? Everything all right?’

  ‘Everything’s fine. I jus
t wanted to check in, see how things are over there.’

  Tim felt a flicker of annoyance. She should know better than to think he had time to chit-chat. He reminded himself that things like this brought everyone’s heart a little closer to their mouth. The call was a sign of her big-heartedness.

  ‘It’s slow but steady. There’s a lot riding on the contingency planning.’ The party line felt strange on his tongue. She wasn’t part of it, though. She wouldn’t know which or whether.

  ‘I saw the last statement,’ she said. ‘It was solid.’

  ‘Good.’ He cleared his throat, tried for something warmer. ‘Good to know we’re covering our bases.’

  ‘I’m glad you’re not taking any notice of the nonsense,’ she said.

  No fear she would come right out and say that the radio gobshites were wondering if they had any fucking clue at all. She would never just ask if they really had ballsed it all up earlier. He was so sick of this twist-mouthed country. The cynicism of the politicians seeped into everything. The bitter passivity they bred. Everyone a victim.

  ‘We need to get these people out before we start looking around for people to blame,’ he said, his voice wound tight as thread on a spool.

  ‘I’ll let you get back to it.’ She paused. ‘Fuck the begrudgers.’