by Tim Buckley
I turned round slowly and I felt a surge of relief that I didn’t have to do this on my own.
“Lochlann,” I whispered. “It’s Aoife.”
He looked at me for a moment, and then he just nodded. He came over and he hugged me, for the first time I could ever remember.
“Doctor Walsh is an old friend of mine,” he said, quietly. “He told me what had happened.” He stepped back from me, and was not embarrassed by the affection. “He said they’re not sure what’s wrong with her, that they’ve been treating her for some weeks and she has very suddenly become ill. He said that her white blood cell count is very high, that it may mean an infection of some sort. They have run some tests and they expect to know more in the morning.”
Two nurses came in, and one of them smiled kindly and touched Lochlann’s arm.
“Would you mind waiting outside a few minutes?” she said. “We’re just going to settle her down for the night.”
“Of course,” he said. He turned to me. “Let’s get some coffee,” he said, gently but firmly.
We went down to the hospital café and he got us two coffees. The café was filled with a hospital’s damning sense of futility. Families and friends reassuring patients, who no longer noticed the indignity of dressing gowns and slippers, that it would all be fine. And neither of them knowing whether or not to believe it. Or believing that if it was fine, it would only be a matter of time until it wasn’t. It’s always just a matter of time.
Lochlann swept biscuit crumbs from the seat of the chair with his newspaper and a wrinkled lip.
“Are you alright, Aengus?” he asked, looking hard into my eyes.
I shrugged because I felt nothing.
“I don’t know, Lochlann,” I said, with a shake of my head. “Christ, how could I not have seen it? It was so obvious.” I buried my head in my hands and sighed hard and long.
He nodded, maybe he had been asking himself the same question.
“In the back of your mind, I suppose, you were not looking for a young French woman,” he said. “You had no reason to question her story, and it was so plausible.”
“Maybe. But I should have seen Caitríona. She’s in her eyes Lochlann, she’s right there – and I missed it. She never wanted me to look for Aoife, but it’s as if she’s relented and she was pointing her out to me, telling me where she was.”
“Aengus, you will not want to hear this nor will you see the truth in it for at least a while. But you know that I will not seek to salve your pain with platitudes, and so know that I mean this sincerely. Whatever has gone before, you have nothing to regret in the way you have behaved and in what you have done since you arrived here. You have sought to do the right thing for Aoife. You tried to help and protect her when you thought she was Hélène. More than at any time in your life, you have the right to be proud, if not the circumstances. In time it will become clear. Until then, trust yourself to do the right thing. If it feels right, it almost certainly is. If you believe that Caitríona is helping you, then that is surely why.”
I nodded, and smiled a brief ironic smile. I had always said, in my more acerbic moments, that it would take a confluence of disasters to bring Lochlann and me together. And so it had transpired. But it was a fleeting scepticism. I knew what it was like to need him and not to have him, I knew it well enough to know how much I needed him now.
“It’s never enough, though, Lochlann,” I said, “is it? Not for Oran, not for Aoife now, not for Aoife twenty years ago. You like to think that if you put everything you have into it, commit yourself fully and with every last stroke of your strength, that you can achieve anything. Isn’t that what all those self-help books would have us believe? That we can do anything if we set our minds to it? But it’s just bollocks, isn’t it? Whether it’s all predestined or it’s a random game of chance or some divine power decides our worth and defines our fate – it’s got fuck all to do with doing your best, hasn’t it? Just look around you.” I waved my arm around the café, drawing curious looks from those sitting quietly around us. “How many of these people will walk out of here because their families pray hard for them or because they really believe that if they fight this thing, they can win? And how many will walk out with some cancer still destroying them from the inside, knowing that it’s not over yet, but it’s not over? And how many will never walk out.”
Lochlann looked at me and I swear he understood. He knew exactly what I meant. He had probably had the same rant at God a million times since the day I was born and Claire was taken away. And he nodded.
“I know, Aengus,” he said. “I know it well. All you can do is try to make nobody’s life any harder than it has to be. And then do what you can to deal with your own.”
Once, on a winter weekend away in the Alps, Caitríona and I fell victim to wild weather – gale force winds and heavy snow – that closed in on the mountains and drove us to the village coffee shops, peering out wistfully over steaming mugs and urging the clouds to part and the sun to emerge over powdery slopes. They didn’t and it didn’t and so we moved from the café to the bar and settled in for the evening. I don’t remember how, but we got talking to a young New Zealander who was spending the winter season bumming around the Alps in search of deep snow, steep slopes and beautiful girls. In stark contrast to the bar full of frustrated, griping Anglophones bemoaning the waste of their days in the mountains, he was calm and unruffled. And as the evening wore on and the beer opened our minds and our mouths, he shared his wisdom with us.
“Life,” he said, “is just the sum of your experiences. Life without experiences is just an existence.”
Life is just the sum of your experiences. It stayed with me, and as we rode the wave that was our life, we started to define that life by the experiences we had. He was right, life without experiences is just existence, the daily monotony of the suburbs. And experiences don’t have to involve leaping into steep couloirs or jumping off a bridge suspended on an elastic rope. Experiences are whatever triggers the frisson of excitement in your gut and the spark of wonder in your soul, and we are all different. But a day without that surge of passion or a day that doesn’t take you even a little closer to it, is a day wasted.
He was right, but in time it occurred to me that he had missed something. It only counts if you share it. An experience tasted alone is surely just an event? It only accentuates the loneliness of being alone. And it’s not just about not being alone. Sharing it with someone who means nothing to you – who might be there but can never be with you – is sometimes even lonelier. The people that share your world define the experiences that in turn define your life. And when the wave crashes, and you emerge spluttering and coughing from under the water, it’s only the people who really shared your world that will still be there to soothe your hurt.
It’s how I define a friend. Someone who allows you to experience the passion and someone who is still there to pick you up when the passion deserts you and someone who helps you to find the passion again. Lochlann, as usual, undersold himself when he said that he just tried never to make anybody’s life harder. Perhaps that was true of those people he didn’t know. But if he called you a friend, then although he might not often stoke the flames of wonder, he would always be there to pick you up when they had been doused.
I never really had a family. Maybe that’s why I struggled with the distinction between family and friend. Either someone was your friend, or they were not. The fact that they were your brother or your sister or your cousin was just nomenclature. Lochlann was never really my father, but I had craved his friendship. And now that we had gone some way to clearing the air, I found that I was happier to have found a friend than recovered a father. A brother is just someone you have been around your whole life, someone you have had a better chance to know and understand. Someone who shares some genetic componentry, whatever that means. It doesn’t mean that he is your friend. It doesn’t mean tha
t he can turn an event into an experience. But if he is your friend, if he does share and stoke and intensify the passions in your life, if you will both be there when you have lost sight of the wonder and you know that you will both look for it again, then that is a bond stronger and more pure than mere blood can ever forge.
The café lights were turned out one-by-one, and I looked up to see that there were only a few people left. I looked at my watch.
“I think they will probably ask us to leave quite soon,” Lochlann said. “Do you want to go back up for a few moments?”
I nodded.
“I will wait for you in the reception,” he said.
I went back up to her room, and stood at the open door. A nurse was checking and adjusting, and noting every detail on the clipboard that hung at the end of the bed.
I stood and stared, wanting just to be allowed to look at her. This was the baby we had left behind in the cot in that musty old maternity hospital room. Had she woken up that day from some warm and cosy dream, and looked around for us? Had she listened for the voices she had come to know from the womb? Had a wide-eyed panic welled up inside her when she couldn’t find them? Perhaps that lost, frightened look in her dark eyes had been etched there at that moment, when the days-old infant realised that we were gone? And perhaps it was made permanent by a life spent searching, not for us, but for something she could never quite explain? I might never be her father – I had no right and no idea – but I could try to be her friend. I had failed her once when the wonder disappeared. I would not fail her again.
The nurse turned from her work, and smiled at me gently.
“It’s getting late and you know you shouldn’t really be here,” she said, softly. “Tell you what, I have to go and check on someone, I’ll be back in a few minutes. You can say a quick goodnight.”
She winked at me kindly and hurried off out the door, and I walked slowly over to the bed. Aoife lay still, her eyes closed, and her breath seemed worried and shallow. I took her hand again, small and soft and smooth, and stared at her. In the days before, Hélène had been passionate and vibrant – in the studio, at the concert in the Arena, at the exhibition. But today Aoife looked tiny and delicate, almost childlike. It wasn’t just that she was ill, not just the shadow of this place, she just looked different. It was nothing I could have pointed to, it was simply that she was a different person now. The metamorphosis was complete, and the butterfly had emerged from the cocoon.
Her eyelids fluttered, like the butterfly’s wings, and then opened slowly. She lay still, but turned her eyes to look at me. After so many hours behind the easel, I knew Hélène’s eyes so well. But Aoife’s eyes took my breath away. I squeezed her hand gently.
“I’m going to make it right, Aoife,” I whispered. “I promise I’m going to make it right, and I won’t ever let you down again.”
Her eyes never left mine and she lay still. Then, her grip on my hand tightened just a fraction, and I thought I saw the shadow of a smile flicker across her lips, like the fleeting shapes you think you see in summer fields when the breeze plays with the long grass. She closed her eyes again, but still she held my hand.
I stood there, wanting just to be near her. After a few minutes, the nurse came back into the room. She laid a hand gently on my shoulder.
“You get yourself off home. I’ll look after her, I promise.”
I nodded and quietly promised the same.
CHAPTER 37
The wind from the sea is steady and cold, and from time to time it carries a thin spray of rain. The gulls are fighting and scrapping to make their way out to the water, giving up and taking shelter on the ground to regroup and try again. Dark clouds are trundling across the morning sky, and below them the sea rumbles and rolls, punctuated by the white caps that brave the angry water. I’m sitting on the Head and watching the sea and the birds and the waves as they go about their business. The tides still ebb and rise. The world continues to turn. The broken old bench has been rotted by years of salt on the wind. The Baily’s light is flashing bright against the sullen sky.
I found her. After all this time, time spent wondering and dreaming and fantasising, I finally found her. Have you forgiven me? Do you understand? Are you quietly glad that I looked for her? And found her?
And I didn’t see it. You must have shaken your head in frustration at my failure to see. Gullible and naïve, that’s what you used to call me, right from those very first passionate days.
“Did you know there’s no such word as gullible in the dictionary?” you said to me once, and then you howled at my fascinated surprise until I thought you might be sick.
Were you screaming at me, these last weeks? Gullible, blind eejit! I can hear you now, softly mocking me while you shake your head and smile and tell me you love me all the same. I saw you looking out at me from her portrait, but still didn’t see. I felt the comfort of a past even though we shared none, but I still didn’t see. I saw Lochlann take her to his heart from the day he first met her, but still I didn’t see.
You know that I loved her even before she was Aoife. Of course you do. You would have loved her too. You know that I would have done anything for her, to protect her or to bring some light into those lost eyes. I was proud of her already, before she was Aoife, proud of her music and her angel’s voice. Proud of her gentle kindness. She was to me everything that I had prayed Aoife would be. I was even pierced with the guilty fear that I might love this stranger more than my own daughter.
Our little girl grew and blossomed. From the seeds of the fairest flowers are the fairest flowers born.
And then our little girl passed away in the night.
Just slipped away peacefully, they said. But they always say that, don’t they? How can it be peaceful? How the hell can it ever be peaceful? Wouldn’t you always be fighting? Wouldn’t you always be scared?
I feel like I’ve lost two people. I knew Hélène for only such a short time, but she was my friend. I think we were going to be close friends. She was so kind and gentle and calm, and I just wanted to look after her, to make her happy. And now I’ve lost her and I’m going to miss her. I’m going to miss spending every day with her in the studio. I’m going to miss chatting about her music and her gigs and where they’re playing at the weekend. I’m going to miss listening to her talking fondly about Gerry in that achingly coy way she had, not even realising she was in love with him.
And I’ve lost the chance I had of meeting Aoife. Because I never did meet her, not really. I only ever met Hélène. And now I feel like I’ll never meet my daughter. And I feel this raw guilt that it’s Hélène I’m going to miss most, and not Aoife. How do I make sense of it? How do I make it right, when I can’t even figure out what’s wrong?
I should feel lost. I should feel desolate and beaten and hopeless. Just like I did before, just like I’ve felt almost every day since you went away. I’ve been flapping around in the dark like a bird trapped inside the house, and now I should feel like I’ll never, ever find a way out. But I don’t. It hurts, of course it does. The pain of losing Hélène, of losing my chance to know Aoife, of losing the chance to get a little piece of you back, it’s like a knife turning over and over in my gut. The sadness in her eyes still haunts me, it will always haunt me, and it hurts to know that I wasn’t there to make it go away, that I was never be able to make it go away.
But I can live with pain. The desolation of these past years sucked the life slowly out of me. But I can live with simple pain. And I’ve had enough. I’m angry with the past. It’s just been playing with me, like a cat before it kills the mouse. It’s been taunting and tormenting me. And now I’ve had enough. I don’t want to go on living like this, I can’t. It has to stop now. Yes, it hurts, but the pain can no longer be all there is. After every end we search out a new beginning. This time, I need to find mine.
Look at Niamh. And Oran. And Lochlann. They have al
l had to fight their own darkness, and they have found the strength to fight. When I saw Oran’s dignity in the face of everything, it made me feel ashamed of my own weakness. I look at Niamh and the way she controls her own world, because she has to and she accepts that responsibility. I look at Lochlann and the way he’s learned to live with the grief, and the way he’s still able to care about other people and the way he still wants to help them.
They all make me ashamed, and they make me want to be strong. Because they are all what you would want me to be.
You have to let people help, they told me when I lost you. But they have to be the right people, that’s what nobody told me. The people with you when you’re riding on the great wave of your life aren’t always the people you need around you when it crashes. And nobody tells you that. And you think they’ll help you through it, but they can’t. Or they won’t. Or they don’t know how. Or they don’t even see that you need help. The people we had in our lives are not bad people. We just never owned enough of each other. So they were always on the outside, and I just couldn’t let them in.
And it’s not just about your friends and the people that share your life, it’s about the place too, and everybody in it. Everywhere is different, that’s why we want to explore. That’s why we left Dublin, to break free and to taste something new. The differences were exciting and new and they made life fresh and interesting. We always had something to explore and somewhere new to go. But it’s when your life takes a different path from the one you had planned, when it goes wrong, that the differences don’t seem so exciting anymore. They seem threatening and mean and spiteful. And a place and a culture that will never be your own can suddenly alienate you. Remind you that you don’t really belong.
I never thought I’d come back to Dublin, even in the days after you left. But now I’m not so sure. I always wanted to create something beautiful, but I never tried. I talked to you about it until you must have been tired of hearing it, but I was always afraid that if I tried to capture the dream, it might evaporate in my hand. Because I couldn’t do it. Or because it wasn’t what I thought it would be. And then I wouldn’t have the dream anymore. Best never to try because then you always have the hope. But I tried and I still have the dream and I want to try again. Oh, I’ll never be as good as Lochlann, never achieve his acclaim. But that’s ok. If it lets me live my life then that will be enough. That will give me a purpose and a direction and I won’t flap and flounder my way through the world anymore.