The unexpectedness of her swearing made him laugh, but she was already gone.
* * *
He was a million miles from laughter when night fell and they were no closer to an end. An island nation with plenty of ships and lifting machinery and every one of them seemingly too heavy. Throw a stone on a normal day and you’d hit a builder, yet it took three hours to find one and get the machine in position. It lasted less than a minute before the cracks radiating out from the hole began to advance and spread. The machine retreated, leaving the road like something out of an Indiana Jones movie.
They were doing their best and coming up short. Every time. Every fucking one of them.
‘Should I congratulate you on your scoop?’ Nina was coming out of the bathroom, her head down, focused on her phone. Who was she texting this late at night? ‘I suppose you’re feeling very pleased with yourself.’
‘Excuse me?’ She looked up at him.
‘You certainly made a story out of nothing,’ he went on, anger making him reckless. ‘That poor Alina O’Reilly, suffering from shock, and you had her cocked up in front of the whole country putting on a headscarf and talking about Allah. I didn’t take you for a racist, whatever else—’
‘Get a grip,’ she said, sharply. ‘Nobody put Alina in any kind of position. She is as entitled as anyone to talk about her beliefs. Nothing could have been less racist. And what did you mean, “whatever else”?’ she went on. ‘Whatever else, what?’
‘Whatever else you might have asked her,’ he said. He heard how flimsy it was.
‘Things must be bad if you’re out here picking fights,’ she said.
How much of their marriage was spent in this space, where the slightest thing could deepen a fight, or dissolve it entirely. It was the phone that tipped the balance. The way she slid it into her pocket as if it was of no importance and stood facing him, her eyebrows raised. ‘I’m here,’ those eyebrows said.
‘Off the record?’
‘Of course.’
‘The Coast Guard helicopter did eight or ten passes with a thermal-imaging camera. The surface material is heat permeable, so they should have been able to pick up heat signatures of anyone alive in there.’ He stopped, swallowed.
‘Fuck. Does that mean…?’
He spread his hands wide, palms to the ceiling. ‘Not necessarily. We just don’t know.’
‘Those poor people,’ she said.
Anyone else would have thought she meant the six souls trapped under the earth. He knew better. He could see the stories of the families written all over her face. He had a sudden urge to go home, to say goodnight to the children.
‘I didn’t know she was going to say any of that,’ Nina said. ‘Alina, I mean. Nobody did. Her poor husband was terrified.’ She looked away, as if the question was casual. ‘Did she really believe it, do you think? That people bring it on themselves?’
Tim couldn’t help it, a snort of laughter escaped him. ‘Pretty convenient, considering she got out,’ he said.
‘Do you believe it?’ Her eyes were back on his.
‘No sane person, no matter how devout, believes in the existence of a divine balance sheet,’ he said. ‘Rest assured of that.’
‘I hope they’re asleep,’ Nina said.
She spoke so softly he wasn’t sure he heard her right. ‘Le Repos des mes,’ he said. ‘That Repose of the Souls painting we saw years ago, remember?’
She shook her head.
He had been so moved by it that he didn’t see a single other thing in the exhibition. It was simple, sombre. A sky full of souls, all watching over one house. Like guardian angels. He forgot about it shortly after, but then, after Aisling, he remembered and looked it up online. There was something comforting in the idea that people could still watch each other when they were gone. See how it all turned out.
‘I have to go,’ he said.
‘Of course.’ She lifted up her hand as if to touch his arm, then let it drop back down to her side.
He took the stairs two at a time. It was night-time, the roads were quiet. He’d be home and back in forty minutes. A quick hug, if they’d let him.
* * *
They were in the kitchen when he got to Deb’s house – home, he corrected himself. Laura was bent over her homework, while Deb tapped away on a laptop beside her. Brendan was standing by the sink, slurping cornflakes out of a bowl. Would he be able to tune it out better if Brendan was his?
‘I didn’t expect to see you,’ Deb said, getting up to kiss him hello. ‘Is it over?’
He shook his head. ‘Flying visit, that’s all.’
He bent to kiss Laura’s head. ‘What are you working on?’
‘You smell funny,’ Laura said, wrinkling up her nose.
‘Funny how?’ He made a show of sniffing himself to make her smile.
‘Like when the tumble dryer is left on too long,’ she said.
‘You’re right. There are oil heaters in the meeting room. I smell just like them.’
‘You were on the news,’ Brendan said, between bites.
‘We’re falling over news crews. It makes everything that bit harder.’
‘The public have a right to know.’ Brendan had a thirteen-year-old’s self-righteousness.
‘They do,’ Tim said, evenly.
‘I mean, all afternoon all anybody talked about was safety and then, the next thing, the crane cracks the road.’
‘It was hardly a stamp of confidence,’ Tim agreed. ‘But what was the alternative? We had to try. That’s what we’re trained to do.’
‘Some training,’ Brendan said. He put his bowl in the sink and left the room.
‘How did it happen?’ Laura asked, her face tight with worry. It was hard to tell if it was the bus or the tension. Everything worried her. Would Aisling, too, have grown up carrying the weight of the world on her soft shoulders?
‘We’re not a hundred per cent sure yet, but it looks like the run-off from the river, you know the way it’s been flooding a lot in the last while?’ He waited for her nod. ‘All that extra water might have stayed in the ground and washed away so much of the foundations of the road that there was nothing to hold it up.’
‘Then the bus was too heavy and broke through it,’ Laura said. ‘Like ice.’
‘Exactly.’
‘The driver and that woman are okay, right? That means the others are more likely to be fine too, doesn’t it?’
Tim’s throat closed for a second at the idea that these questions were in her head. That she had to know these things happened in her world. He nodded. ‘We’re optimistic.’
‘What happens next?’ Deb asked.
‘We might have to do things the old-fashioned way,’ he said. He took a sheet of paper and sketched a chain of emergency workers, smiles on their faces and a pile of stones behind them. Propaganda at its finest. The safety chain, the Dutch called their safety management system, a series of steps to tether one thing to another. Straight-talking people, the Dutch.
‘Will you be one of them?’ Laura pointed to the little stick figures.
He felt rather than saw Deb stiffen. She had told him early on that if he was still on the front line she wouldn’t have agreed to the blind date. She could never have a relationship with an active firefighter, she said. It wouldn’t be fair on the children. He told her she was right. That firefighting was a young man’s game, there was a reason they offered early retirement. He didn’t tell her that there was also a reason so few of them took it.
‘They need me outside,’ he told her. ‘To keep track of everything that’s going on.’
‘I’m glad,’ Laura said.
He wished he could be sure that it was worse to be on the ground, facing the ball of fire, instead of outside, spinning it.
* * *
‘I’m not sure she should know that much about it.’ Deb folded clothes in their room, neat his ’n’ hers piles on the bed. He had a sudden urge to fling them everywhere.
‘She
obviously heard it on the news during the day. I didn’t tell her anything she didn’t already know, except how we’re going to get those people out.’
‘Even still. It’s not what she should be thinking about before bed.’
Was this what it would be like? Tim wondered. Having to run every conversation past Deb first? Perhaps he should ask her for a list of approved topics. That way he could be sure not to offend. ‘Should I have refused to answer?’
‘Don’t be silly. It’s just a bit morbid for her, that’s all.’ She began to put clothes into drawers.
‘As a child, I lay in bed the night before my thirteenth birthday, waiting for twelve o’clock,’ he imagined telling her. ‘When it came, I was so relieved that I wouldn’t die before I became a teenager.’
But her sunny disposition – one of her most attractive features, he reminded himself – wouldn’t admit the possibility. ‘It was probably a thought you had much later,’ she would tell him. ‘You’re rewriting history.’
Nina would be tolerant. No morbid imaginings of his could touch the darkness she lived in.
Finished, Deb stood and stretched, her T-shirt rising above the waistband of her pants, the softness that spoke of her contentment. He went to her, ran his finger along the line of winking skin, and she turned to face him.
They were red and breathless, like teenagers fumbling in the back of a car, when Deb stopped.
‘Laura’s crying.’
She had been sick, there was vomit stuck to everything when he led her out to the bathroom, the sour smell of her reminding him of nights pulling drunks from crackling hallways and rivers.
‘I have to get back,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘I know. It’s fine.’ Deb kissed him and closed the bathroom door. He could hear her running the bath for Laura, her voice a constant reassuring stream.
* * *
In the dark, everything was strangely quiet. The vigil was long over, the crowds scattered to their homes for the night. No doubt they would be back at first light. He didn’t know Nina would be there, but as soon as he saw her standing at the barrier, he felt he had always known.
‘Is it too early to say good morning or too late to say goodnight?’ she said, without turning.
‘Couldn’t stay away?’ he asked.
‘I’m like one of those ghouls,’ she said. ‘Hanging around to see if bodies are brought out under cover of darkness.’
He wondered if he looked as tired as she did. If, once again, they had matching purplish shadows under their eyes. Like Halloween bookends they were, once upon a time.
‘What do you think the day will bring?’ she asked.
‘I wish I knew.’
‘Now is the hour of faith,’ she said.
When he looked at her, she shrugged. ‘The Church doesn’t get a monopoly on it,’ she said.
He moved to the side and sat on the edge of the footpath. The air was still, a rare moment of quiet in the city.
‘Le Repos des mes,’ Nina said, coming to sit beside him. ‘I lied yesterday when I said I had forgotten it.’
‘You called it creepy, if I remember right,’ Tim said, nudging her arm.
‘I couldn’t understand what you found so comforting in it at the time. But now…’
‘Less creepy?’ Tim offered.
‘Less creepy,’ she allowed.
‘You okay?’ he gestured at her hand, running its track up and down her arm as if battery-powered.
‘It’s a little bit worse than usual,’ she said. ‘It’ll pass.’
‘Can I see?’ He took her arm and pushed the sleeve up gently, exposing raw, scaly skin. ‘Do you have anything to put on it?’
She made a face. ‘Did you not hear our friend yesterday? It’s all in my head.’
They laughed at that idea, that stress could be imaginary. The luxury of it. The sheer stupidity of people.
‘I joined a grief group,’ Tim said, suddenly.
He didn’t mean to tell her. So many people had advised them to go, telling them that meeting others who had gone through the same thing would lessen their burden. They both baulked at the idea. Tim because he couldn’t bear the idea of talking about Aisling with strangers. Nina because she rejected the idea that the burden should be lessened.
‘Don’t look so shocked,’ he said. ‘I’ve only gone once or twice.’
‘How come?’
‘It all felt a bit… staged, or something. A lot of them had been there for a while and there was this real sense of one-upmanship there, like everyone’s grief was graded.’
There was a couple there, their teenage son the victim of a hit-and-run. That mother was the real yardstick in the group, her shock and grief open like a vein the length of her arm. The father sat silently, his grief pale beside hers. In a child’s life, fathers got to be heroes just for being there. In a child’s death, they got second billing for reasons everybody knew and nobody understood.
‘Seeing as we’re confessing…’ Nina nudged his arm as he had done earlier.
‘No way! You too?’
‘One session. They thought I was a stuck-up bitch.’ Her laugh was a hurt bark. ‘A woman asked me one day if I thought I was better than them, just because I didn’t want to go into the ins and outs of how Aisling died.’
He understood the impulse to stay silent. He had felt it too, a reaction against people’s greed for the story, the horror. Himself and Nina the cautionary tale that everybody dreaded. He could see how withholding it would feel like a small victory. If he was being honest, he could also understand the confusion of those other nameless grief-stricken parents. Nina had a way of making her mourning seem better than anyone else’s, made purer somehow by the fine filigree of her grief. When they – the they that peopled their lives back then – suggested cremation as a way of keeping Aisling with them, Nina was furious. ‘It’s not the same,’ she kept saying. ‘I didn’t carry ashes.’
‘Do you go alone?’ she asked. ‘Or…’
‘Alone,’ he said. ‘I haven’t told Deb. Yet,’ he corrected himself. ‘I wanted to see if it was likely to stick before I said anything.’
‘Don’t tell me how to grieve and I won’t tell you how to grieve,’ she said, and he smiled at the quote.
‘How are you doing?’
She didn’t answer the question. Instead, she said, ‘Do you remember last Halloween, that old woman whose dog was killed?’
‘Tied to a firework. We were called out to it.’ It was a grim scene, one of the worst, in a way.
‘I interviewed her a couple of days later. No big deal, it was just a dog story, you know?’
He nodded.
‘To me a dog is just a dog, but I could have sworn I saw some of the same grief in the woman’s eyes. We sat in this dirty little living room, with one square of window at eye-level with the street and it was the first time something else felt real. Since Ais.’
‘I’m not waiting to see how the grief group goes before telling Deb,’ he said, without knowing he was going to. ‘I’m afraid she will want to come with me, and I don’t want her to.’ Support would pale beside true understanding. He didn’t want to see if that was something they could withstand.
‘We never stood a chance, did we?’ Nina asked. ‘All those social workers telling us that fifty per cent of couples whose child dies end up splitting up.’
‘Hard to tell if they were warning us or egging us on,’ Tim agreed.
‘Did we only last the year to try and prove them wrong, do you think?’
‘No.’ Of that he was certain. ‘We got each other through that year, we helped each other to survive it.’
‘And you, how are you?’
I’m afraid, he wanted to tell her. I’m afraid that I’ve made the wrong choices. That I’m with a wonderful woman I don’t love enough simply because she’s everything that I’m not. Everything you’re not. That her children will never accept me fully and my second chance at fatherhood will vanish into dust. I’m afra
id that I’ve given up the job I love and taken a lesser version because I feel it’s all I deserve. I’m afraid I’m only moving misery from point a to point b. I’m afraid that when Aisling died, my best life died with her.
‘I’m still a step away from the blue plastic bag,’ he said and wondered if his smile looked as sad as hers.
They had gone for a walk early one evening, trying to get the hospital smell out of their noses. Or the reality out of their lives, maybe. Waiting at the traffic lights, they saw a Pakistani man walking along. It was not his Pakistani-ness – if that’s what he was – that made him memorable. It was the blue plastic bag tied around his head, tucked neatly under his chin, the handles tied on top of his head, twisted together with a black wrap-tie like some sort of avant-garde style from the catwalk. From that designer who did the Fifth Element, Tim said. Gaultier, Nina said at the same time, and they laughed, delighted with themselves, until they remembered their daughter, attached to machines.
The man fascinated them both for some reason. Maybe because they didn’t know if it had meaning, this strange headpiece. If it signified anything more than his own gentle disconnection from the world. He became their private shorthand for madness. ‘I’ll be only a step away from the blue plastic bag,’ they would say to each other when things were bad with Aisling. And then, when things were worse, without her.
Rain began to spatter down lightly, flecking her cheeks. ‘I like this weather,’ she said.
He remembered. Gentle rain was honest, she used to say. Not like that false, spitty, bastarding kind of rain that drowned a person without their noticing and ruined them for the rest of the afternoon.
In his pocket, his phone buzzed. If he ignored it, would it mean there was something more left to say?
‘Leo?’
‘The engineers say the water pipes are compromised.’
‘I’ll be right in.’
When he stood outside a burning building, not knowing how a rescue was going to go, everything was simplified: it was just breathe in, breathe out. The gaps to think were so tiny that only the inconsequential things squeezed through: a song he learned from the radio to impress a girl; the U-14 semi-final they won; the shirt he wore to his grads with the little pleats down the front, his mother complaining that it was a nuisance to iron.
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