Where the Edge Is

by Gráinne Murphy

  Later, he would realise that he ran towards this building without a thought in his head.

  * * *

  The tech guys had made a good job of the visuals. Tim watched the image on screen, layers of grey gravel like bubble wrap being pushed away by a bright blue stripe of virtual water, leaving nothing but a thin black line under the model bus. He felt for the little bus as it broke the surface and fell into the hole. Then an agonising five-second wait before the network of pipes in the surrounding area crumbled, with water beginning to creep towards the bus.

  Leo sighed. ‘At least they didn’t put any model people in it.’

  ‘Or the camera footage.’

  ‘Christ. Don’t.’

  Earlier, they had sent the camera back in to assess the situation. Breathless from his sprint from the site, Tim joined the cluster around the monitor hoping for… what? A bird’s-eye view of people sitting in a circle singing cheerful songs?

  The view was grainier than before, the camera not penetrating as deep as it had previously, the rock and rubble blocking most of the side panel of the bus. It took a few seconds of fiddling with the settings to realise that it wasn’t grit smearing the lens, but water. Coming in slowly, but coming in nonetheless. It was impossible to say how long before it would flood the bus. The geologists were hunched over their calculations: the absorbency of various rock and soil types, the rate of water flow.

  Manpower was the only solution. The teams were already assembling and suiting up. For all that Tim had cheerfully told Laura they would move the rubble stone by stone, the reality was more complex, with the likelihood of a rockfall dogging every move.

  ‘Donnellan wants to visit the site.’ The Chief slammed the receiver down. ‘The caring face of the government in the run-up to the election. He wants to be seen wearing a helmet. Jesus fuck.’

  ‘We can refuse,’ Leo said.

  The Chief sighed. ‘We’ll give him five minutes, Leo, while you brief the team for entry. Tim, can you take him to the family centre then, let him shake a few hands before we send him over to the media. With any luck they’ll eat him alive.’

  That would go down like a lead balloon, Tim knew. The last thing the families needed was to have politicians paraded in front of them. But it wasn’t his decision. He would just have to keep it as short as possible.

  When the Chief brought Donnellan and his entourage back in from the site, Tim met them at the door.

  ‘Minister, this is Tim Kelleher. Tim was part of the working group that tested the framework before it was adopted. Tim will take you in to meet the families. I’m needed elsewhere, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Are the media in there too?’ Donnellan asked.

  Tim gritted his teeth. ‘No. We like to give the families their privacy.’

  ‘Can’t win them all,’ Donnellan said. ‘Smart move, Tim, watching it all from in here. The front lines are a young man’s game!’

  He wasn’t any better in front of the families.

  ‘I wanted to come and visit the site and meet with yourselves,’ Donnellan started. ‘And offer you my assurances that the government fully supports the rescue effort and sympathises with your situation.’ He stopped, seeming intent on making eye contact with every individual in the room. ‘I have met with the coordination team on site and I understand that they are in good possession of the facts of the situation and I share their confidence that a rescue is imminent. And a happy outcome for you all, please God.’

  Blowhard. Saying the one thing the team had so far managed to avoid. The implied promise that none of them could stand over.

  ‘What I think we can take from the situation so far is the strength of the coordinated response from the principal emergency services, the kind of coordination that is the lynchpin of the major emergency framework brought in by the government…’

  It was no place for useless politicking, but cutting across a minister was above Tim’s pay grade. Deb would be well able for him. Heading people off at the pass was one of her specialties. The open-hearted could speak with a bluntness forsworn by others, they were assumed to have no hidden agenda. She would tell him anyone could do it, that a path only became a path when someone else walked it.

  He cleared his throat.

  ‘Minister Donnellan, I’m sure you’d like to meet some of the families now,’ he said, when the man stopped to draw breath.

  While the minister made his way from table to table, a young woman appeared at Tim’s elbow.

  ‘Loretta Keaveney, Media Liaison for HSE South,’ she said, shaking Tim’s hand. ‘Alison told me I would find you here. We’re close to entry, she said, so I wanted to come over and talk through the next stage with you.’

  ‘Next stage?’

  ‘Media centre at the hospital, who takes point on statements once the action moves over to us, that kind of thing.’ She clicked the lid of her biro, ambition fairly crackling off her.

  ‘Of course,’ Tim said. ‘Just give me a few minutes to finish up in here.’

  Donnellan was on his final round, giving it the two-hands double-pat of sincerity, when Jason lost his temper.

  ‘More fucking suits?’ he shouted. ‘What we need is more men on the ground. Does nobody understand that?’

  ‘The response to this situation is part of my department’s strategic—’ Donnellan began.

  ‘Strategy? You’re joking, right? What you need is more tactical. More guys willing to get in the goddamn hole.’

  Tim intervened. ‘Mr Teegan’s son, Paul’ – thank Christ he always had a head for names – ‘is one of the people on the bus.’

  ‘I understand your frustration,’ Donnellan said, ‘I assure you everyone is doing everything necessary to get your son out.’

  ‘Everything necessary? You’re joking, right? Tell me you’re joking. Am I going to have to go in and get him myself? Because I tell you, that’s the way it’s looking to me right now.’

  ‘The rescue team are being briefed as we speak,’ Tim said. ‘They’ll be in there in the next few minutes. They’re nearly there, Mr Teegan. It’s nearly over.’

  ‘Is it really?’ Jason’s wife, Elmarie, asked him. ‘Is it really nearly over?’

  God damn Donnellan for putting him in this position.

  ‘It really is,’ he told her. He held his hands in front of him, resisting every impulse to cross his fingers.

  ‘Thanks, Tim,’ the minister chuckled, when they were safely back in the lift. ‘Not an easy situation in there.’

  ‘It’s a tough day for them,’ Tim agreed.

  Part of him believed it was toughest on the fathers, the men reduced to sitting on the sidelines overcoming their own urge to pull the child out themselves. People talked about the ferocity of the maternal instinct, the ability to lift cars for their offspring. The ferocity of fathers had to be contained, channelled into holding back, supporting, a simmering presence.

  Aisling needed a lumbar puncture to confirm the diagnosis. The nurses were apologetic about it, knowing its bad press, but almost certain wasn’t certain enough. There was no time to waste, they had Nina gowned up and ready before he even thought to ask, ‘why you?’ He was answered with a row of pitying smiles, as if it was self-evident: his job was to wait. He stood outside the door and wondered why the assumption that she was a good mother outclassed anything he might have done. Through the door, he heard her sing the silly songs that made Aisling smile when she was conscious. He was a good parent, although he would not have thought to sing. Nina, when they came out, was pale. ‘What happened?’ he wanted to ask, but he couldn’t put her through reliving it, so he held her hand in wordless sympathy, the not-knowing burning a hole in his belly all the while.

  For a sudden, savage minute, he admired Jason’s angry bluster, his refusal to parent silently.

  * * *

  Leo texted, ‘Starting final run-through’, and Tim went to the crisis centre, flicking through the early news stations while he waited. ‘Taking the pulse,’ they called it on
the Media and PR Diploma he did as part of his training for this job.

  ‘Of course, this part of the county is notoriously marshy,’ a commentator’s voice boomed out. ‘So there’s nothing really to say that this kind of erosion isn’t happening in other places. This might be just the first weak spot, given its proximity to the channel of the river.’

  Jesus. He paused again on a particularly teeth-grating segment about the will of God and thought immediately of Alina. How was it that people heard her statement as somehow frightening, when it so closely mirrored their own? So much of it was just habit. Although, he had noticed, after his father died, his mother started invoking his dad’s name instead of God. As if having been awarded his seat in heaven, his father had some kind of clout up there. The idea would have made his dad laugh. He would have looked at Tim’s mother with affection, finding her oddnesses endearing in the way he always did.

  He missed them both, but securely, with a kind of nostalgia for all the good years he had with them. They didn’t make marriages like that any more, built to last, no matter what. In the aftermath of his and Nina’s separation, it took his moving out to really recognise the quiet achievement of his parents. Forty years together, with little fuss or fanfare. It was the way of their generation, coming together in pairs and groups, family, neighbours, community, friendships made up of blood and geography, the concerns of a small coastal town. Finding enough comfort in it to keep going. On the rare Saturday mornings after a boat lost at sea, they would line the beach, him and his dad together with the other men and boys, watching the waves for the body to wash back in. Behind them, the families would wait in the car park, afraid to look, afraid to know. Feeling their eyes on his back and knowing that he would spend his whole life trying to make sure that fewer faces like that had to exist in the world.

  ‘It’s a good thing you do,’ his dad said to him once, careful to hold onto his words until he was standing in the doorway and could walk away from the drift they left behind.

  Neither of his parents ever knew Aisling. His father never saw Tim’s own face become the thing they stood shoulder to shoulder to keep out.

  ‘That’s why I don’t fly Ryanair,’ a listener confided to the presenter. ‘I’m always sure that if I pick my own seat, that’ll be the one that gets ejected or that’s fatal in a plane crash.’

  ‘So instead of picking your seat, you feel like you’re picking your fate,’ said the presenter, ‘I see.’

  Surely the whole point about fate is that it cannot be chosen, it just comes. God spare him this crap.

  ‘Are you listening to this, Dad? Can you have a word with someone?’ he said to the empty room.

  Even after shutting off the radio, the woman’s fear stayed with him. She sounded so exposed. He found himself dialling Deb’s number.

  ‘How’s Laura?’

  ‘She’s fine. She didn’t eat much, her stomach was still a bit tender, but she went off to school no bother.’

  ‘Maybe she should have taken the day off.’

  ‘You know Laura, it would kill her to miss a day of school.’ Deb laughed.

  ‘Even still.’

  ‘Tim. She’s fine. I wouldn’t let her go if she wasn’t.’

  There it was again, the chiding tone. The I-know-better. Laura was too thin already, he knew, but he was afraid to bring it up with Deb.

  He dropped his phone onto the desk, activating his laptop. The screen saver was an image he liked of a man sitting in a tiny lamplit caravan at the foot of a giant wall. He never decided to his satisfaction if the man was safeguarding whatever was inside that wall or if it kept him out. Either seemed plausible, depending on his mood.

  There was scuffling outside his door and it swung open to reveal Leo, pushing a young man inside ahead of him. ‘We caught this fool trying to get through the perimeter. He says he wants to go into the hole.’

  ‘She’s in there,’ said the man. ‘I have to get her out.’

  ‘All you’re doing now is preventing us from getting in there,’ Leo said.

  ‘Our job is to go in,’ Tim said. ‘Why don’t you sit down and tell me what you think we need to know? Anything could help.’ He drew a notepad towards him and clicked his pen.

  Leo mouthed a thank you and headed back out to the real work.

  Sitting and quiet, the man was older than Tim first thought. Early thirties, probably, with a newly shaven head.

  ‘Aftersun works wonders on the rash,’ he found himself telling the man.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I had the same thing the first time I shaved my head. A charity thing, you know.’

  The whole unit did it, caught up in their own big-man-ness, cocksure that their ten thousand euros would be the sum that would change the world. Nobody told him about the spots, how vulnerable and ugly his head would look.

  He got up and poured a paper cup of water for the man. ‘Drink this.’ Sometimes they just needed something to focus on. With one hand taken out of play, he would be less likely to make a bolt for the door. ‘I’m Tim,’ he said. ‘What’s your own name?’

  ‘Kieran. Kieran O’Halloran.’

  ‘Who were you trying to get in to, Kieran?’

  ‘Lucy Phelan, my girlfriend. Ex-girlfriend. Girlfriend.’ He put his head in his hands. ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘You’re not sure she’s in there?’ Even though Tim knew she was. Lucy Phelan, twenty-eight, postgrad student. Only daughter of Patricia, she of the high heels and running mascara.

  ‘I’m not sure she’s my girlfriend. We were together two years, nearly, and then she broke up with me for no reason, out of the blue, like, and I heard she was seeing someone else. Some big businessman. A married fella. I bump into her in the city from time to time, like Wednesday night, she came back to my place when the pub closed and I thought, I thought…’ He slumped a bit in his seat. ‘She left before I could ask her if we were back together or what.’

  Somehow Tim doubted it. If she was creeping out before he woke up, then that told its own story. Something about the way Kieran insisted that he met Lucy by accident didn’t ring true. Easy to imagine him gathering titbits of information about her, hanging around in the hopes of meeting her in a vulnerable moment.

  His eyes darted sideways as he talked, casting upward and left most frequently. Tim heard the voice of his media instructor telling them that this was one of the body’s most consistent ‘tells’.

  ‘Nine times out of ten looking up and left means a lie,’ he had said. ‘People look up because it’s instinctive when you’re thinking. There’s no good scientific reason for why they look left, but it seems to hold true all the same. To outsiders, looking up seems sincere, it’s looking down that seems to generate mistrust. One of life’s many little quirks.’

  ‘What do you do if you’re the exception?’ Tim asked. He liked this kind of stuff, knowing it made him feel more interesting somehow.

  ‘Learn to retrain yourself and bloody fast, before you’re on national TV looking shifty.’ They all laughed together.

  Nothing about Kieran suggested he had invented this relationship in order to garner sympathy. Not like some of the others who turned up to the site or phoned the hotline. Still, there was no telling with people.

  ‘Tell me about Lucy,’ he said to Kieran. This wasn’t his job, not really. The guards already had enough information from her mother, but the longer he kept the man in here, the less chance he would disrupt Leo’s final run-through.

  ‘She’s my whole life,’ Kieran said. ‘Life with her was perfect. We used to sit together and talk for hours, you know? We really understood each other.’

  Tim knew. He had felt the same about Nina, as if they fit together perfectly. Before Aisling, he had kept her passport photo pinned inside his helmet, touching his finger to his lips then to her face each time he got into the rig.

  ‘She can’t die,’ Kieran said. ‘Not when I only just got her back.’

  ‘The team are doing everything they can to
get everyone out safely.’

  ‘She doesn’t even know how much I’ve changed,’ Kieran said. ‘All the things that annoyed her before. The things she left me over. I don’t do any of them any more.’

  Tim nodded. Let the poor fool believe it if he needed to. Older and wiser men knew that women didn’t share the things that annoyed them most intensely.

  ‘Seriously, man, I’ve changed,’ Kieran insisted. ‘I can be who she needs me to be now.’

  Lord spare them all from a man who thought he had changed. What, he wondered, would Deb choose to modify? Who did she wish he was? The social cache of him, such as it was, hadn’t quite worn off yet. He could still see a little burst of pride in her when she introduced him to friends, told them he was with the fire service. Nina was the same. Then it began to wear away, a mouse nibbling on a wire, a little bit here and a little bit there. Until suddenly the fuse box was gone, seemingly out of the blue, and no one but the mouse any the wiser about what had happened.

  ‘Have you someone you can call to come down and take you home?’ Tim asked.

  ‘I want to stay here,’ Kieran said. ‘Please. I want to be here when she gets out.’

  ‘If you go anywhere within spitting distance of the cordon, then I’m going to have the guards take you into custody until it’s all over,’ Tim warned him. ‘Nothing surer.’

  ‘I swear, man. I swear,’ Kieran said.

  Tim walked him to the edge of the crowd, watched him skirting the emptier spaces to take up a position at the back. He saluted Tim, who made a ‘V’ of his two fingers, pointing them from his eyes to Kieran’s face.

  Kieran nodded, pointing at himself then at the ground.

  One of the private television stations was doing a piece to camera while they waited for the rescue to begin. He walked over closer to listen in, careful to stay out of the range of the camera.

  ‘The Tánaiste and the Minister for Transport were unavailable to join us this morning,’ the reporter said. ‘But they have assured the families that they are doing everything they can to resolve the situation as quickly as possible with regard to the safety of those concerned.’