It tormented Tim, the way she would lie in bed running the steps over and over. Unable to get up until she had gone back through it all.
‘You have to stop,’ he said, in the initial months. ‘It’s not your fault.’
Then, ‘If you don’t blame me, then how can you blame yourself?’
Because I’m her mother, she wanted to scream. I’m her mother and where was I?
By the end, he was swinging himself up and out of the bed, unable to bear even being next to her while she silently replayed the careful choreography of her daughter’s last evening.
‘How nice it must be to forgive yourself so easily,’ she said to his retreating back one morning. There it was, the unsayable said. The imbalance of their burden. Where he saw punishment, she saw penance.
He moved into the spare room that evening. There was one last spike of hope. Their social worker suggested they take a day away together, somewhere meaningful. They went to the beach, the scene of Tim’s marriage proposal lifetimes ago, in search of the couple they once were. Their flimsiness was no match for the sea. There was nothing left to say. Nothing left to save.
‘We deserve more,’ he told her. ‘After all we’ve been through.’
He took only an overnight bag, coming back for the rest of his stuff the following week while she was at work.
In truth, it was nice to have the house to herself. Her memories spread out and breathed a little more easily without someone else’s watchful eyes.
Nina pulled on her clothes in the dark, fumbling in the drawer for clean underwear. It seemed too personal, somehow, to leave it lying there overnight, exposed in the darkness of her bedroom.
She drank her coffee in the rocking chair in Aisling’s room. She was reminded of the time Aisling was sick. It was nothing much, just some vomiting bug, but she refused to drink anything. Nina sat with her in the corner of the room and rocked her to and fro. When her little hands tried to fight off the bottle, Nina pinned her arms with one hand and used the other to force the bottle into her mouth, squirting the teat into her throat over and over, keeping up a light sing-song all the while.
‘You were like your man out of Reservoir Dogs,’ Tim teased her afterwards and they laughed and laughed.
Aisling recovered after a day or two, the way babies do, and Nina forgot all about it. Her hard hands on the soft little body. Her lack of gentleness.
The mothers she met yesterday would have memories like these. They, too, would look at every little action through a funnel of regret, every fragment broken open to the elements.
* * *
The car brought its usual relief. In the weeks after Aisling’s death, she drove in circles at night, unable to sleep but afraid of the release of sleeping tablets. There was something intoxicating about the quiet and she would drift slowly through red light after red light until the darkness began to lift.
She drew up at a set of lights once, to find a woman in the car alongside, a toddler asleep in the back seat. The woman smiled and shrugged in a what-can-we-do kind of way. Then, her eyes cut to the empty car seat behind Nina and she turned away.
She drove the seductive open length of the quays as carefully as if Aisling was in the car with her. Le Repos des mes, Tim had said earlier, and it jolted her. He was so taken by that painting, dovetailing neatly as it did into his then-unexamined idea of an afterlife. She had teased him, then put it aside as something that had no bearing on her life. She thought of her little performance in the kitchen earlier. Did part of her secretly believe Aisling watched over her? How Tim would laugh if he heard her doubt.
The radio replayed soundbites from government ministers on the previous night’s panel shows. They used up their few minutes asking to please not be interrupted, to be allowed to finish the point. It was never anything worth hearing in the end, only the promise of a full investigation and an official report. The Malteser approach, she and Tim used to call it – sweet words around an airy lack of substance. Its predictability, the sordid, deniable, back-slapping, dirty hole-and-cornerness of it all angered her. Instead of going into the media room, she went to the barrier and stood there, looking at the site itself.
‘You deserve better,’ she said aloud to the pile of rubble. The words left blood on her teeth. She must have been chewing on her bottom lip while listening to the radio.
It had started with picking at her split ends in the hospital. She sat next to Aisling’s cot for long hours, needing something to do with her hands that didn’t involve slapping anyone. By the day of the funeral, she was chewing on the tips of her hair. She moved onto her nails some weeks later, after flick-reading an article about a woman who had a two-pound hairball removed from her gut.
But nails were too visible. Her hands, after all, were a vital part of her job, her means of convincing the world that she was calm, ready, on their side. Her lip, by contrast, was private, her own tongue the only guest. Sometimes, at night, she imagined chewing away until there was nothing left, erasing herself bit by tiny metallic bit. Guilt, it seemed, tasted like iron.
* * *
She would have known Tim’s footsteps anywhere.
‘It’s too early to say good morning yet,’ she said.
‘I couldn’t sleep either,’ he replied.
‘Ghoulish, I know,’ she said. She wasn’t surprised to hear that he had gone home. He used to crave the release of sex whenever work was particularly intense. They both had. They used to joke that holiday sex was the worst they had.
What was it his woman did? She was some kind of number cruncher, that tiresome kind of person whose life was governed by month end and year end. There was a small satisfaction in knowing there was little need for release there.
‘What’s the plan for the morning?’
‘It’s a work in progress,’ he said.
‘Now is the hour of faith,’ she said. At his sharp look, she added, ‘The Church doesn’t get a monopoly on hope, for goodness’ sake.’
When he moved to sit on the footpath, it felt like an invitation.
‘I lied,’ she said. ‘I didn’t forget the painting.’
He nodded. ‘I thought as much.’
‘I think I get it now.’
He said nothing and she thought maybe she misread his intention. Tiredness could have driven him to sit, maybe he didn’t want to talk at all.
He caught her hand, stopped it in its path up and down her arm. ‘Let me see.’
‘It’s all in my head,’ she joked. ‘Wasn’t that what the psychologist said yesterday?’ They both laughed.
‘I joined a grief group,’ Tim said. Then, with a note of apology, ‘I’ve only gone a couple of times.’
It was the one piece of advice they had rejected. Neither of them felt it necessary to share their grief with strangers. They had each other. They believed that was enough.
‘I went once myself,’ she said. ‘It’s fair to say I didn’t warm to it. Nor they to me.’
It was the polite fiction of it you hated most. Sold to you as a place of honesty, you sat and vomited out your loss until you were red raw, unwilling to spare anyone any detail when you weren’t spared yourself. The lie became apparent when you had to listen to people who had lost their elderly parents and pretend that their loss was the same. You were expected to sit and be grateful when people heard your story and chimed in. Everyone knew someone who had had it. They held these stories up to you as if they could compare. As if some other child’s eventual survival was relevant. They believed themselves helpful when they told you they could imagine what you were going through. How could they, when to you it was still unimaginable? It was better, far better, to carry your daughter inside yourself, a lifelong first trimester of grief. What little you had left went to protecting yourself from having to soothe others’ distress at your sad story.
Tim was the only one who might have understood. But you were on separate sides of a living divide. Neither of you had the energy to shout yourselves hoarse about every tiny daily thing when eve
n the smallest whisper took more than you had to give.
‘Only once? I win,’ Tim said, and they shared a smile.
‘I don’t know whether to think it’s strong or sad that we only went when it was too late for us.’
‘Given that we both hated it,’ Tim said, wryly, ‘it’s fair to assume it mightn’t have helped matters.’
‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend?’ she offered.
‘Smile and smile and be a villain,’ he countered.
‘Did Deb go with you?’ She hated herself for asking.
‘I didn’t tell her I was going. I wanted to… see what it was like.’
‘Don’t tell me how to grieve—’
‘And I won’t tell you how to grieve,’ he finished.
Love flared and she swallowed it back. ‘I covered a story at Halloween. That woman whose dog was tied to a firework, do you remember?’
He nodded.
‘Listening to that woman talk about her grief, I felt like it was the first real conversation I’d had since Aisling died. She got it, in a way most people don’t. Does that sound nuts?’
He looked at his hands, folding his fingers together. ‘I don’t want Deb to come to the group with me,’ he said. ‘It’s not her loss.’
‘We never stood a chance, did we?’ she said. It was true. There was something about seeing their joint life’s work crushed as if it were nothing. It took past, present and future with it.
‘We survived it.’ His hand gripped hers, warm and strong. ‘And I’d say we’re both still a step away from the blue plastic bag.’
She smiled at their old code. Then his phone buzzed and he let go of her hand.
‘That’s Leo,’ he said. ‘There’s a problem with the pipes. I have to go.’ He paused. ‘Are you coming?’
‘I’ll stay here for a minute or two longer.’
‘To enjoy the rain?’
‘To enjoy the rain,’ she agreed. She closed her eyes and listened to him walk away.
* * *
The crowd returned when the rain stopped. The protesters with their banners kept to one side. ‘End corruption’ and ‘Jobs for the boys’ waved alongside ‘Asylum seekers out’ and ‘No room for Allah here’. Here and there people ate breakfast, taking small guilty bites of croissants and rolls in white waxed paper from the deli nearby.
May, too, was back. Nina watched her stalk the perimeter, her lips and hands moving to some internal conversation, her plait twitching with every rock of her heels. Was it for warmth she kept it long, Nina wondered, or was there some other reason? For women, after all, hair was a semaphore of mood. ‘Is she still washing her hair?’ her mother used to ask Tim in the weeks after the funeral, reading the smell of shampoo as a badge of her willingness to live in the world. She was right. Nina continued to wash her hair every morning, pulling and dragging her fingers through it, willing the post-pregnancy hair loss to end.
‘It’s still fucking falling out!’ she cried to Irene in desperation.
‘Do you think it’s alopecia?’ Irene asked, her hands over her mouth with horror. ‘As if things weren’t bad enough.’
You wished that your hair would fall out until it was all gone, how savagely you wished it. Baldness would have marked you out.
May stalked the eaters like a cat, watching them drop thick unfinished packets into bins, then darting forward to paw them back out. The hypocrisy of her, claiming that people were better off dead when she herself fought for every hard day she got. She skittered off to a corner and stood with her back to the wall, cradling the food as if was the most precious thing in the world.
You got to hold Aisling when the machines were turned off. You would have a few minutes, they told you both. As if warning you to pack a lifetime of love and wisdom into its shortness. ‘We’ll make it meaningful,’ you promised each other and it was just the next in a line of promises shattering.
You were paralysed with all that you should say. More aware of yourself than of Aisling. Should you focus on memories, on mental snapshots? Or should you tell your daughter about the world she was leaving, the life she might have lived within it? To your shame, your arm tingled, already tired of the dead weight.
It was supposed to be special.
It was supposed to be everything.
But it wasn’t your girl. There were no gurgles or giggles or screams. She was a giant grotesque doll, the essentials all there but painted on, lacking animation. So unlike Aisling that it was hard to believe in your own grief while you held her.
Afterwards, confronted by her absence, it was all too easy to find evidence of her passing. Life and its little ironies. Fuck it anyway.
* * *
The job of shoring up the mouth of the hole was complete. Wooden struts were placed with precision, crossing each other over and down in a bid to stop the hole closing in on the rescuers. Here and there, gaps were left for the firefighters to gain access. She imagined them resting on the planks, like the games of KerPlunk she used to play with Irene, pulling out one stick at a time until the marbles all went crashing in a great pile to the bottom of the tray.
‘They’re not rushing it. They’ve learned from their mistakes,’ she overheard a man in the crowd saying, before he bit into his burger.
Everyone loved a bit of drama near them, loved to pull their chair up close to the bad in life and lean forward in the knowledge they could pull back whenever they wanted to. ‘If there’s anything I can do,’ people said, through the safety of borrowed tears.
‘Don’t they look like a calendar, though?’ A woman nudged her friend and they laughed and took photographs.
‘It won’t be much longer,’ Nina told Noel on the phone. ‘Minutes, if that.’
‘Once they’re all out, I want you over at the hospital with the families. No hanging around doing any kind of state-of-the-nation crap. Leave that to Mark and the political team.’ He paused. ‘Unless they’re all sent to the mortuary. Then I can get one of the others to go.’ He hung up before she had a chance to reply.
No matter. When Aisling died, a lot of people gave her their grief to carry, but not Noel. After the funeral, he followed her and Tim back to the house and sat with them until midnight came and they had survived the day.
‘You should be at work,’ she said at some point.
‘Today, the world can fuck off for itself,’ he said, and his awkwardness was more moving than all the careful condolences of strangers.
* * *
The firefighters remained in their huddle and the noise rose a little as the crowd began to shuffle restlessly. What was all the time for, all the consideration of alternatives, all the technology, when, in the end, it boiled down to people taking one breath at a time?
The families stood together, knuckling the barrier. Mothers stood shoulder to shoulder; the breadth of a wish would hardly slip in the gap between them. It was a hard place, that in-between world. Once that world came knocking, it was yours for keeps, like a strange parasite brought home from a holiday.
‘Here we go,’ someone said beside her.
It would go on to win an award for the photographer that captured the moment from high on a rooftop across the river: the women and men walking onto the site, clear purpose on every face.
Behind the crowd, where the road curved towards the centre of Kilbrone, six ambulances waited in a holding area. Emergency medical teams stood by their open doors, jumping in and out, opening supplies and kits. The injured would belong to them.
‘We want to be screaming through with the siren on,’ an ambulance driver told her at a party, years before it mattered. ‘It means there’s still a chance.’
RICHIE
‘Those little bastards,’ the glazier tutted while he worked.
As far as Richie was concerned, he could keep his sympathy. Patronising fucker. He was glad, suddenly, that nobody local was able to do the job out of hours or it would be all over the parish. Richie Murray, the soft touch.
‘They’re cold,
these old houses, I’d say,’ the man said. ‘Little enough insulation.’ When Richie didn’t answer, he carried on undaunted. ‘Would you not consider getting the double glazing in throughout? ’Twould make a power of difference in the wintertime.’
‘Maybe. We’ll see.’
‘Have to ask the missus, is that it?’ The man laughed the easy laugh of someone whose wife liked him well enough to stay.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t want some cowboy putting me on the spot for a decision on something like that.’
That softened the man’s cough for him. He finished up in silence and accepted Richie’s cheque with poor grace. Richie had the cash to hand, but he left it in his pocket. Let the prick pay his taxes like everyone else.
* * *
Richie parked under the wispy stand of trees in the nursing home car park. They were miserable at the best of times, never mind in the depths of November. ‘Landscaped’ the brochure called the place, but the trees were lonesome-looking, convincing nobody. Like the last few strands of hair combed across a bald dome.
The doctors told him it was very highly thought of, but, sure, they knew he had little choice. It was this place or somewhere in the city. At least here he could get in to see her every day. Truth be told, he was relieved enough to let them talk him into it after his mam’s last bout of wandering, when she walked into a barbed-wire fence and opened the veins of her hands trying to claw her way through to God knows where. The blood and her rolling eyes put him in a panic and he finally agreed that the Alzheimer’s had advanced to the point where she needed more minding than he could give her.
He packed her few things and handed her over to them. Passed her on like a worn-out shoe. Pigs would fly before his old mam would have shirked her responsibility like that. She stood for him all the years he could remember. Packing his lunch, checking his homework, slipping into the space between his face and his dad’s fist the odd night when there was a drop too much taken.
‘Go on up to bed now, Richie, your dad isn’t feeling well,’ she would say, beckoning him to cross the room behind her, while she held his father’s eyes with her own. He never knew what happened after he went to bed. ‘My brave man,’ she called him, when he fell and cut his knees, but he wasn’t so brave at night with his head under the pillow for fear he’d hear anything. The following day, he would always find a treat in his lunch box: two Rich Tea biscuits stuck together with butter, or, when his dad was out of work and money was short, a slice of bread doubled over, with sugar sprinkled inside.
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