Doing everything they can. Everyone’s official line. Instead of saying they were sitting on their arses in an office at the other side of the country, spitting out soundbites.
What better could be said of himself, he wondered, as Leo gave the signal and the units went in to lay the struts. To the watchers, this would look humdrum. He was one of the few that knew those two-by-fours would mean the difference between life and death for everyone who went into that hole. He might be in an office, he might only be passing information from one side to the other, like misery’s errand-boy, but he was no sideline gawker. He knew the cost of every decision made.
NINA
Her heart beat to the sound of Alina’s words. She breathed them in and out. When she washed her hands, the water sang them. She walked and they crunched under her feet. ‘Nothing is an accident,’ Alina had said. ‘These things happen because we made them so.’
It felt like falling and landing at the same time. Finally, someone had said it out loud. Not the empty comfort of everything-happens-for-a-reason fatalism, but the hard fact of individual responsibility, the indisputable hand of people in their own fate. The thing that nobody dared to say to her before now: this thing happened because you made it so.
Nine months and four days waiting for Aisling.
Eleven months and nine days with her.
Twenty-two months and thirteen days without her.
And counting. Always counting.
These numbers that replaced the ones that tormented and comforted you by turns when you walked the hospital floors waiting to find out if Aisling would live. Then, it was the limits of time, chances, percentages. Then, the song you hummed was twenty-four-hours-and-. ten per cent-chance-and-. The prayers of science over your daughter’s tube-tangled body while you stroked the side of her arm, the side of her face. Sideways touches the only kind permitted.
This thing happened because you made it so.
* * *
Leaving the hospital after interviewing Alina and Richie was a blur. Ben might have talked on the way back to the crash site, or maybe not. She couldn’t have said.
She sat in the media centre with her phone in her hand, scrolling news feeds with a studied frown. Around her, the room hummed with gossip and rumour. Every time someone went to the bathroom, it seemed, they came back with a wilder theory as to what would happen next. The only certainty was the crane that had been brought in. People huddled around makeshift dinners of Pot Noodle and coffee, and an almost perceptible cheese and onion crisps vapour hung in the air. Outside, evening had fallen, slowly at first and then all of a sudden, as if someone had grown tired of holding up the sky. Everywhere Nina turned, she looked without seeing. Was she even real?
‘I need the loo,’ she said to no one in particular and stumbled to the door.
On the other side of the door stood Tim. For a second, she thought she had imagined him.
‘I suppose you’re feeling pleased with yourself,’ he said. ‘Parading that poor Alina O’Reilly around, making a mockery of her. I didn’t take you for a racist.’
She could have reacted angrily, she would have been within her rights.
‘The scarf was a nice touch,’ he added.
She wanted to tell him that the scarf was the one thing she understood. The drive to wear something that symbolised belief. She wore a locket around her neck, precious with a lock of her daughter’s hair. It was the one thing she could bear. Having never been a living thing, Aisling’s hair was no more dead in the locket than it was on her head.
She wanted to ask him why he felt the need to be mean. But when she looked up to say it, his eyes were bloodshot and it might have been the day after they turned off the machines, so close did she feel to him.
‘Things must be bad if you’re out here picking fights,’ she said.
Something in him crumpled as he told her that the thermal-imaging camera had picked up no signal.
‘I didn’t know Alina was going to say any of that.’ It was the only comfort she could offer him. Or maybe it was comfort she was looking for.
‘Do you believe that people bring things on themselves?’
He sighed. ‘Faith is faith, Nina. It’s not some kind of divine balance sheet. This isn’t the Middle Ages.’
‘Or the eighties.’
He blinked, confused.
‘AIDS,’ she said, by way of explanation. That got the ghost of a smile and she watched him take the stairs two at a time. Once upon a time, he wouldn’t have needed her to explain anything, he would have followed her thoughts as surely as Theseus in the cave of the minotaur.
‘You should go home,’ she told Ben, when she went back inside. ‘Nothing much will happen now until daybreak. I’ll see you back here before the early news.’
* * *
At home, the sense of unreality persisted. Nina found herself, bizarrely, performing somewhat. Putting an extra something into her movement as she baked a potato in the microwave and crumbled some cheese over the top. Humming a little here and there. Exaggerating her gestures with a light self-consciousness, as if others’ eyes were on her.
When she went upstairs to change her clothes, she went instead to Aisling’s room and lay on the floor beside the cot. If Aisling had been a little older, perhaps there would have been a toddler bed here that she might have curled into. It was not the worst ‘if’.
The room was warm and cosy. The radiator was timed to match the rest of the house, a tiny private memorial in the monthly heating bill. It was her equivalent of going to the grave. In Aisling’s room, she could feel the warmth of her blood, the bubble of her laughter. Here, there was neither stone nor earth between them.
In the early days after it all, lost in the flurry of bravado and life-goes-on that flooded into the sudden space in their lives, she and Tim had a drink with everyone that came to the house. ‘To celebrate her life!’ they cheered, clinking their glasses at every mention of her name. Her baby as a drinking game. The memory made her shudder.
Weeks later, after everyone had gone and they were left with the reality of their twosome, she continued to drink. Night after night, the wine poured in and mean words spilled out, a sour displacement. Tim’s patience wore thin.
‘She can’t keep doing this to herself,’ he told the social worker. ‘She isn’t moving on. The drinking is only driving her backwards, to relive it all.’
You marvelled at his earnestness. His ignorance. How did he not understand that backwards was exactly where you wanted to be? Backwards was closer to your baby. You wondered how you ever suited each other well enough to believe in a life together.
‘We’ll get through it,’ he promised. That proved the distance between you: he already wanted to be beyond it while you would have given anything to remain forever stuck. He held your hands and cried into your hair and you thought about the fact that fifty per cent of couples who lose a child stay together. How was it possible that so many made it through?
She stopped drinking. The acid stayed inside her, breaking out through her eyes in unguarded moments, boring into his back, making him feel exposed. Who could blame him for seeking ease somewhere else?
* * *
She was watching TV with the sound turned off when her mother phoned. The EastEnders credits were her cue to call and discuss the events of the episode.
‘We’ve been watching it together since she was a teenager,’ she told strangers, in the conversations she started in supermarket queues and dentists’ waiting rooms.
Her mother was not a stupid woman. She must have realised that these conversations about TV characters had replaced any talk of her daughter’s own life, yet she held onto them as evidence of progress.
With her mother, she talked about fictional people. ‘I can’t believe she’s going to marry him after everything he did.’
With her father, she talked about current affairs and the state of the nation. ‘A vote of no-confidence wouldn’t help things now, they just need to get on with it.
’
She watched the phone until it stopped ringing. You used to talk together about Aisling all the time when she was alive. That was the thing with talking about loss, it wasn’t safe. No matter their best intentions, people’s tolerance had a shelf life. They couldn’t help it. Eventually, there was a first cut-away of the eyes, a faint hint that they were indulging the same old story. There was simply no way back to meaningful conversation after that. It made you hard, loss did. Hard, and self-reliant.
The less you talked about what you lost, the more you thought about it. That was where the real danger lay. In the comfort of the past. In earlier times, they understood, using bloodletting to release the diseases of mania and depression. It would be a lie to say you hadn’t thought about it, looking at the small, childless freedom of the razor carelessly left on the edge of the bath. But it was never a real possibility.
Without you, who would remember Aisling?
The phone stopped ringing and Nina exhaled in time with the creaking house. There were so many little noises that had been masked by Tim’s presence. Never noisy, he nonetheless had a way of filling up the space, of warming the air. An impression of safety, even today, when she was no longer entitled to feel it.
At the time of Aisling’s death, she and Tim had been trying again, a little soon for the perfect two-year gap between siblings, but she hadn’t wanted to overshoot the window, so they started early. It had taken her five months to conceive Aisling, they reminded each other, breathless with freedom after almost a year of fettered, condom-punctuated sex.
They kept trying for a while afterwards, pushing themselves towards each other in search of a moment of forgetting. Until that arch of forgetting began to seem a betrayal of the highest order. How could she call herself a mother if she sought out moments away from the memory of her girl?
Would another child have healed the rift between them? The social worker was careful not to disaggregate those particular statistics. Perhaps he or she would have bowed under the weight of all that expectation. Little Fergus or Aoife, doomed to live forever in her imagination.
* * *
‘Is it too late to ring?’ she said, when Irene answered the phone. ‘Sorry about earlier. It was one of those days, you know.’
‘I’ve just been watching it on the news. Jesus, Neen. It’s like something you’d see in a third-world country.’
‘Tim’s here. I mean,’ she corrected herself, ‘he’s there. He’s some kind of communications liaison or something.’
‘That’s weird.’
‘Not really. It’s his job now. If anything, he was more surprised to see me intruding into his world. Besides, I haven’t even seen him that much. Just at the general press briefings.’ She wasn’t lying, exactly. It was just that there was nothing to be gained from telling her sister about the roil and joy and dread between them. ‘How’s the little man?’ There was no surer way to deflect Irene than asking about Dónal Óg.
‘Full of beans. He’s busier than myself. It feels like there’s a blasted birthday party every weekend.’ She couldn’t conceal her pride at his popularity.
‘And you? How’s work?’
‘There aren’t enough hours in the day,’ her sister sighed. ‘If I could only knit myself a few more!’
You wish for fewer hours in the day. You will the days smaller, so that on your next birthday you might find you had skipped forward a year or two or ten. You, the non-believer, hoping for the miracle of being nearly finished.
‘Mam wants me to drive her to some reunion on Sunday,’ Irene said. ‘I would, but three hours in the car is too much for Dónal Óg. It doesn’t seem fair.’
‘I’m sure he won’t mind.’ Nina sidestepped the gap in which she was meant to insert her own offer of help.
‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance you could take him for a few hours?’
Nina flinched. Soon after the water park debacle, she had tried again. She met Irene and Dónal Óg in the city centre one Saturday morning for coffee. First, Irene told her, they had to get his hair cut, it was the only appointment she was able to get. It was an involvement she was unprepared for. She had to remind herself that her sister meant well.
In the hairdresser’s, she watched as his hair fell to the floor in chunks, all of his messy, careless, beloved hair. In the space of ten minutes, it seemed, her baby nephew was gone and a different child was in his place. A changeling story brought to life.
‘There, now,’ Irene said, pleased. ‘Look at you with your big-boy haircut, all ready to start preschool.’
‘It’s a sad day, Missus, how fast they grow up,’ the hairdresser said, and Nina had to clench her hands on the back of the seat or she would have slapped her with the alternative.
Dónal Óg looked painfully new, his face framed against nothing. How could he ever survive the world? In the coffee shop, he swung his legs and ate his muffin and she looked at the tough haircut, the softness beneath, and it broke the last little bit of her heart.
‘Nina? You still there? Can you take him, just for a few hours?’
‘I don’t think so,’ she said, slowly. ‘With everything going on at work right now, it’s going to be full on for a few days. I’d hate to say yes and then have to let you down.’
‘They’ll have them out shortly though, won’t they?’
‘Once they’re out, it’ll only get busier. Noel has me covering the family angle.’
‘They must be in bits.’ Irene paused. ‘You’re minding yourself, Neen, right?’
‘It’s not like I’m down in the hole.’ She heard the snap in her voice, but there was no way to take it back.
‘I just want you to be safe,’ Irene said. ‘I only want the best for you. We all do.’
We love you. We want the best for you. Code for enough now. Time to get on with things. Time to move on. As if love and concern somehow made their judgement acceptable. She tried, she really did. After all, she loved them too.
‘Promise me this time you’ll tell Noel if it gets to be too much?’ Irene demanded.
At the back end of last year, she had interviewed a woman whose son died of leukaemia years earlier. He wasted away to nothing; his mother showed her the pictures.
‘Every starving child I see on the television has his face,’ the woman told her, as she loaded up lorryloads of food and medicines for a charity campaign.
They ran the interview next to a segment on wedding diets, the bride-to-be on a ketosis kick, receiving eight hundred calories a day through a tube in her nose. Nina blazed into Noel’s office, pinching at her own scrawn and calling it the dead baby diet. He asked her to take a month’s holiday before she said something he wouldn’t be able to overlook.
‘I’ll tell him,’ she said.
‘Nina.’ Her sister’s voice was half-plea, half-warning.
‘I promise,’ she said.
Upstairs, she took off her outside self with relief. She laid out her clothes for the following morning, brushed her teeth, climbed into her side of the bed. Tim’s side remained resolutely his.
On every channel, they showed footage of the crane advancing into position, then the great roar from the crowd as it retreated. For a moment they showed the faces of those other parents. They stood by the barrier, suspended between two versions of their lives, their children just outside of arm’s reach.
Beside her, the baby monitor glowed, crackling lightly with the proximity of her silent mobile phone. The noise comforted her. Souls above, looking down, Tim said.
How much lighter your days might be if you could be sure of seeing her at the end of it all. If years were to pass, would she recognise you? In the years since her death, you have worn the same perfume, kept your hair in the same style and colour. And Aisling, would she still be the age she was that night or would time have moved on there, too? Might you be given the gift of seeing your daughter grown up?
Every child has his face, that other grieving mother said to her.
No child has
Aisling’s face. You know because you never stop looking.
* * *
Nina woke sweaty and trembling. She sat up and tried to identify the sense of wrongness she felt, her body heavy seconds ahead of her mind.
Aisling.
Her name stretched tightly across Nina’s forehead, a hairband made of pain. In the early days of her pregnancy, she used to go to bed early, lying with her hand on the curve of her belly, just the two of them. Now, it was mornings that were theirs.
She closed her eyes and ran the steps in her mind, the well-worn memory of that last night with her daughter.
You bathed her together. She was still baby enough that her bath was a delight neither of you would forgo. You rocked her in the chair, reading her a story while she had her last bottle of the day. She wasn’t even that interested in the bottle any more, she spent more time putting the lid of the bottle off and on than she did drinking from it, applauding herself each time. You let her, it was an excuse for one last cuddle after the day.
You placed her in her cot, kissed each of her three soft teddies in turn before kissing the little lady herself and pulling the door almost closed behind you.
Did you do anything differently? No. At eleven months old, her routine was well-established.
Did you notice anything unusual? No. She was a little warm, maybe, but she was just out of the bath.
Was Aisling upset or trying to climb out of the cot? No. She lay quietly – too quietly? – a teddy in each hand, the little music box emitting wave sounds.
But you were so tired. Always so tired. You were back at work, with a baby to look after in the evenings and a life to live. Could you swear that her cheeks weren’t the faintest pink, the infection signalling its intent? Could you swear that some little part of you wasn’t itching to pull that door behind you and escape to the quiet of your living room, to the Valentine’s Day dinner and glass of wine that were waiting? Your answers were untrustworthy, the carpet of your mind worn thin with retracing your steps.
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