Bad Things Happen

by Tim Buckley

  “The message Aoife left when she contacted the agency, she said she was playing music in Paris. I went to Paris and searched every club I could find. Eventually I found La Caleche. I saw the message you left.”

  She furrowed her brow.

  “The message?”

  “Yes, in the old photo album. Claude showed it to me, although I think he probably wished he hadn’t. I think he wanted to throttle me!”

  I smiled, and she smiled back and nodded.

  “Ah yes, of course. Claude is quite protective!”

  I swirled the wine around the glass and stared at its sweeping spiral.

  “What’s she like?” There was no other way to say it, no way to introduce the subject or ease into the discussion. Like a sky-diver, either you jump or you don’t. There’s no easy way down.

  There was a pause and I didn’t even try to fill it. Hélène said nothing for a minute, two maybe. Just took a long, slow drink from her glass. Finally she spoke.

  “She’s pretty, I guess,” she said quietly, as though conceding that she had thought otherwise and had been finally convinced. “She is dark, her skin I mean. Her hair is long, she is tall…” she sub-consciously acted out each description with her hands, putting a finger to her face, touching her hair, raising her hand over her head. “She is a little bit too thin maybe… I don’t know.” She raised an eyebrow. “She looks nothing like you.”

  We both laughed nervously.

  “Well, thank God for that at least,” I said awkwardly, predictably, with a hollow laugh.

  Thank God she looked like Caitríona.

  “She’s not so reliable, like I told you. She doesn’t like to stay somewhere or to do something for a long time, and sometimes when she makes promises, well, she does not always keep them.” She shrugged and her face was conciliatory. “She worries about a lot of things, about everything. And I think she tries to run away.”

  She drank more wine and emptied her glass. I poured her another and filled my own.

  “It is too early for a lot of wine,” she joked, weakly.

  “Extenuating circumstances,” I said.

  “She is a good musician,” Hélène continued. “In her first year, she won the prize for being the top of her class, although I think maybe she was not the best. But she is very good. Very good.” She nodded and opened her eyes wide to make sure I understood.

  Neither Caitríona nor I could hold a note, and I could think of no musicians in my family, no uncles who sang at family get togethers or at Sunday mass. But then we weren’t really a sing-song family.

  “Is she happy?” I asked quietly, “Do you think?”

  Another silence.

  “I do not think she is unhappy, not all of the time,” negatives tripped over negatives, and she was unconvincing. “But I don’t know if I could call her happy. I think she is looking for something.” She shrugged again. “But she doesn’t know what it is so she can’t find it and that makes her sometimes sad.”

  “What about her family? Do you know her family?”

  Yet another silence, which I was starting to understand always preceded what she thought I might not want to hear.

  “That is difficult,” she sighed a long sigh. “Her parents both worked at the University in Paris. When Aoife told them she wanted to look for her natural parents, they were angry a little bit – no, they were disappointed I think. They didn’t shout or argue, but it became difficult, like they became strangers. Then her parents were offered a place at a university in America, and Aoife decided to stay in France. When they went away, she decided to leave school, to try to find work.”

  It was my worst fear, that she might be unhappy and alone. No wonder she thought I had abandoned her.

  “They still talk, of course, on the phone and maybe they are not so angry now, they understand a little bit. But it is not like when she was young and it is a little bit sad.”

  Out at sea, a swarm of gulls followed a fishing boat headed back to Howth harbour, diving and swooping in futile unison.

  “What does she want her life to be?” I was searching for the words, but I couldn’t quite frame what it was that I wanted to know. “What is she going to do?”

  “I don’t think she knows. Like I said, she is searching for something, but she does not quite know what it is that she is searching for. I think that is why she wants to come to Dublin. She says it is for our music, that we will discover new ways to play here, but I think there is something else also. I think she has always wondered what it is like to be really Irish, to live here, to be a part of it. It is like she knows she is Irish, but she doesn’t know how to be Irish.” She clenched a fist as though grasping the very essence of Irish-ness. “I know the music is a part of it, but it is more than that. And with her family so far away, there was no reason not to go now.”

  “But she didn’t come to Dublin? Why didn’t she come?”

  She shook her head, and sighed.

  “Suddenly, she wanted to take the chance to travel before she came to Ireland, before she settled down again. She asked me to go with her, but I didn’t want that. We had made all of our plans, made all of the arrangements, and I just wanted to come here, to make a start. So she went and she said she would come here when she was finished. So I’m here, and she will come when she comes.”

  So close and yet so far away.

  “How about friends? Apart from you. Does she have good friends?”

  “She is my best friend – but I don’t think she is the best friend of anybody else. She has friends, for sure, but she keeps them at a distance. She won’t let anybody get too close. People don’t like that, maybe.” She looked and me and paused, perhaps looking for an answer.

  “Is she…” despite all of the times I had practised this very conversation, the words failed me. “…nice? I mean, is she a nice person?”

  Hélène’s brow furrowed, surprised, as though she hadn’t ever considered the question before.

  “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “What is a nice person? She is not a saint, but she does not try to hurt people. It’s just that sometimes she is careless with people.”

  “How do you mean?”

  She blew out her cheeks and her expression was one of benign exasperation.

  “She frustrates her friends, I think. She agrees to do something and then changes her mind, it seems sometimes for no reason. I think she seems a little bit wrapped up in her own world, with her own problems. And she is always afraid that the worst will happen, she is… how do you say it in English?”

  “Pessimistic?”

  “Yes, I think so. She is pessimistic.”

  “Does she frustrate you?”

  She hesitated, then nodded slowly.

  “Yes. A little.” She grinned. “She is stubborn also, so stubborn, even when she knows she is wrong! And she has an opinion about everything, I mean everything, even things she knows nothing about!” She shook her head as though irked, but her eyes exposed a warmth, a friend’s affection.

  Hélène looked at her watch. She was playing in Naas that evening and it was almost time for her to go. I was drained by the conversation, more drained even than after any morning’s work.

  “Can we just go back to the studio for five minutes?” I asked, sensing that she was anxious to wrap up for the day.

  It was nearly the end of the week, and Hélène’s charcoal image grew bolder on the canvas board. But still the background wasn’t right. It would be better when the paint was added, I reassured myself, adding the impression of light through the window. But the shapes and the angles were still askew and the pencilled texture of the stone walls didn’t create the atmosphere that it should.

  “Sure,” she said.

  As we walked back to the studio in silence, she looked up at me.

  “Are you ok?”she asked.

&nbs
p; I looked back at her, once more surprised by the question.

  “Yes, “ I said, after a moment. “Yes. Thanks.”

  Hélène sat down in the chair, and I pulled a sketch pad from the drawer in the little desk. With a pencil, I roughly sketched her outline and the dimensions of the shapes behind her – the window, the ceiling line, the corner where the walls met, the floor. Then I held it up beside the easel to compare the two and to see where I had gone wrong on the canvas board.

  “I need to go, Aengus,” Hélène said after a few minutes, apologetically.

  “Shit, yes – sorry. Of course, you go ahead and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER 20

  I picked up the empty bottle and glasses from the desk, walked with her to the gate, and went into the kitchen. I was putting the glasses in the dishwasher when Pauline came in with a basket of laundry. I had only just been forgiven for my non-appearance at dinner earlier in the week, and Pauline had remained a little bit cool with me. Still, she was warming again and she recoiled in mock-shock at the sight of the wine bottle.

  “Bit early for that, isn’t it?” she laughed. “Still, drinking wine in the garden with a pretty French girl – nice work if you can get it, eh?” She nudged me with an elbow and, giggling at her own wit, started loading the washing machine.

  “Very funny,” I smiled. “I’m about to make some coffee – would you like some?”

  “D’you know I’ve been dying for a cup of tea, Aengus,” she said. “Good lad.”

  I made Pauline’s tea and some coffee for myself to offset the effects of the wine and made my way back to the studio. I picked up the sketch pad and held it up again to the easel and the canvas board. The easiest thing for me to have altered would have been the window, but its scale looked fine relative to Hélène’s outline and the room’s dimensions. The ceiling height, too, looked in balance with the room. But somehow the walls and the window looked too close to her back, like she was in a cell. And that in turn gave the walls an ominous appearance, as though they were closing in on her.

  I thought about Hélène’s veiled criticism of Aoife – that she was perhaps wrapped up in her own world – with a pang of guilt, and about my own tendency to intolerance of those who seemed preoccupied with their own travails, to the exclusion of any concern for others. It was, I think, an intolerance that had lain dormant during my university years, but took firm root when we moved to London. Dublin, or that piece of it that I inhabited, was a small enough city – and Howth a small enough village – that people knew you, or they knew your parents or your grandparents. And they asked them about you or you about them. Maybe it was a feigned interest, I don’t know, and maybe it got a bit irritating from time to time when their earnest concern seemed more like nosey curiosity. But it was a reassuring trait of community to feel that people cared. It was, I suppose, part of my father’s almost-celebrity status, particularly in Howth, but I could not walk down the street in the village without fielding enquiries as to his well-being.

  The corollary was also true: a consistent humility, a determination not to trouble others with one’s own difficulties. An expression of concern or a simple enquiry would rarely uncover a problem, even when you knew all was not well.

  “Grand, grand – sure you know yourself,” they would reply to a “how are you?”.

  Even when you knew of a problem or misfortune and expressed sympathy or concern, the response was as likely to suggest guilt or justifiable comeuppance as bitterness or rancour.

  “I heard your car was robbed,” you might say.

  “Ah sure, wasn’t it my own fault to leave the feckin’ door open. How are you anyway?”

  I was always conscious that my cosy, hearty reflections on Irish life might be naïvely inaccurate, the emigrant’s tendency to romanticise. I knew, I suppose, that it was hardly a universal truth of the Irish national psyche, this compassionate strength of character, this stoical indifference to adversity. In Dublin, bemoaning was often dressed up as indignation. I remember the story about a Dubliner who was passing a fire station while the firemen were conducting a practice drill. He stopped and looked on very approvingly at their industry, until one of them pulled a wrong lever and unleashed a powerful jet of water that hit him square in the chest, knocking him over and leaving him saturated. Brushing himself off, he stood up and shouted at the errant fireman, “Jaysus, you wouldn’t feckin’ do it to me if I was on fire!”

  But our London was a bigger, more impersonal, more transient place. We lived on the same street for almost ten years, and yet fostered no close friendships nor even neighbourly acquaintances. People I passed every day on the street or saw at the tube station would walk by with diverted or downcast eyes. Even when I went running in the park, other runners would give the lie to our supposed bond of suffering by looking the other way rather than returning my nodded greeting.

  I think it was a lack of empathy that permeated those relationships that we did forge, too. I got the sense that people didn’t care. No, it’s not that they didn’t care – rather, they were preoccupied. They had drama enough in their own world and had no time to pay any real attention to ours. I often found myself recounting stories to people who would listen with avid, active interest, and I knew I had had exactly the same conversation the last time we spoke. And I knew that this time, too, they were listening but not hearing, and they would forget again. It wasn’t even that they forgot. That is too harsh, suggests an active decision not to care. It was just that their lives and minds were full, there was no room for more. Like an overflowing bin, the things I tossed in would just fall out. Other people’s problems just didn’t fit.

  And it didn’t make London a bad place to live. We had friends whose company we heartily enjoyed. We had good times and good experiences, we laughed and we had fun. But without ever admitting so much, we knew it was skin deep. Even though we never let it bother us to the point where we acted, I could not shake a nagging pique that people’s troubled progress through their own lives left them little capacity to really care about ours.

  When times were good, perhaps it was relief that prompted them to openly broadcast their successes and good fortune. When times were bad, they were careful to dress up their failures, quick to lament the injustice of their misfortune. It was never malevolent, never malicious, just self-preserving. But the protective barricades we throw up around our own worlds often just isolate us, and keep out the very people who might help or alienate those who would share our happiness. And the more we do it, the less we communicate. And the more walls we build. Maybe it’s why big cities can be such lonely places.

  Maybe it was just because it was Aoife that I felt the twinge of guilt. Had Hélène been recounting the story of some unidentified friend who had let her down, who had gone travelling when they had agreed to go to Ireland, whom others found frustrating because she was too self-absorbed to care about them, maybe I would have nodded with knowing contempt. I had done it so many times before. And how many of those whom I might also have dismissed as “careless with people” had legitimate reasons for their introversion? How many had failing relationships or hidden illnesses? Difficult children or financial worries?

  But it was Aoife. And whether it was because I could never imagine her as flawed or because I blamed myself for any flaws she might have had, I could never have been contemptuous of her. Does a parent have to, by definition, love his child? Surely there are children so vilely unpleasant or viciously unkind to challenge even a parent’s love? I suppose it’s the important distinction between to love and to like – it is the fate of a parent to always love their children, even if they can’t bring themselves to like them. And maybe in those instances, is it the child that the parent loves, or the vision they had for what their child could be? Wouldn’t that be the worst punishment? A life sentence.

  I remember one time we went away for a weekend with some friends and their two young child
ren, who were – if it is possible for there to be more than one – the anti-Christs. They dedicated the weekend to weaving a tense misery around everything that we did and, when we could take no more and made a hastily transparent excuse to get away early on Sunday afternoon, we sat in silence in the car until Caitríona turned to me and said matter-of-factly:

  “I’d kill myself. If I had those two, I’d kill myself. I’d kill them, only I’d go to jail. So I’d just kill myself. And you for doing it to me.”

  Maybe that was why I never truly questioned Caitríona’s insistence that we would not have another child. Because the lottery of it scared me. That you could end up with a child you didn’t actually like, or that your child could be unhealthy or disabled. I’m not sure anybody ever really believes the former – we think that no spawn of ours could be so bad or that we will be able to mould the child of our dreams. But that latter possibility truly terrified me.

  In my daydreams of meeting Aoife, she was perfect. Of course she was. She was funny and kind, pretty and engaging, positive and bright. Over the years, I would play with the child Aoife in the park and then sit with the growing teenaged Aoife in the cafés in my mind. We would laugh loudly and unself-consciously and play happily with a ball or on swings, or linger over coffee and deep conversations while she joked and teased me and touched my arm and listened intently to my every word. Although strong, she would tell me about her problems, seek out my advice and gratefully accept my help.

  But sometimes, when I saw a misbehaving child scream at a ragged parent in a shop or on the street, I wavered. What if Aoife was like that, not a perfect angel at all but a child-demon? And later, when I saw surly teenagers slouching angrily down the street, it made me wonder again and imagine an altogether different Aoife, until I guiltily threw the treacherous thought away.

  Now the creeping doubts were back, but this time supported by the substance of a reality I could only have imagined up until now. Now, the picture emerging in my mind’s eye was based not purely on my imaginings, but on the weary reports of a good friend who knew her well. And the question loomed starkly: you might find her, but what if you don’t like her? In some ways, I conceded in my mind’s debate, there was no reason I should like her. There was, for a start, the generation gap. She probably communicated only with abbreviated tappings on a keyboard rather than by talking, watched reality TV rather than football, and listened to hip-hop or boy-bands on her iPod rather than U2 or Dylan. Her character would surely have been shaped by her parents. She was almost French, for Christ’s sake, all pouting affectation and Gauloise cigarettes. And she was given to self-obsession. A chasm of age, culture, technology and gender.