Less Than Perfect (6 page)

Mum and Dad rushed to where I was slumped, their eyes widening at the soot caked on my skin and clothes, then looking into my face and finding an answer they couldn't bear to hear.

‘No.' Mum shook her head.

‘How can you be sure?' My father, always checking the facts.

‘He … he was … standing right there,' I managed, but couldn't continue.

Dad got down on the floor beside me, on his knees. He crushed me to him, his torso shaking against my face. He was crying.

Shocked at this, I began to cry too, tears gushing and streaking soot onto his white cotton shirt. I was vaguely aware that we were making a spectacle and at any moment I expected him to pull away, to suggest we both compose ourselves until we were somewhere more private. But he didn't. He stayed with me, cried with me, until my eyes were empty and dry. When I finally pulled back from his embrace and got to my feet, he put one arm around my waist and one around Mum's, and we left the sports complex united in our grief.

Aesthetically, the funerals looked the same. Black jackets, white faces, grey skies, the sombre tones of priests and reverends, the sobbing bowed heads of the bereaved. So many funerals to go to: Fiona, Mandy's sister; the man who lived in the estate next to ours; a girl I knew vaguely from school; and a joint service
for Carly's aunt and cousin. They blurred together, the funerals, and the most appalling thing was that by the end I could hardly distinguish Josh's from the rest. Black, white, grey. Black, white, grey. Mum went to the ones she could muster enough strength to endure, but Dad was there for all of them, by my side, his arm holding me up, and I was thankful because at that time I wasn't sure I could ever hold myself upright again.

Two months later, there was a meeting in town for the families of the victims; I went with Mum and Dad and Maeve. It was chaotic, people talking over each other, angry, grief-stricken, each one wanting their voice to be heard.

‘Who did this? What are their names? Why haven't the police arrested them?'

They were all good questions but at that point nobody in the room had any answers. We knew only what had been reported on TV: the bomb had been planted by a group who was opposed to the Good Friday Peace Agreement. Apparently, there had been warnings, phone calls to the police and media, but the warnings hadn't been clear enough: the wrong area had been evacuated and instead of shepherding people to safety, the police had unwittingly directed them into the vicinity of the bomb, multiplying the deaths and casualties. Fifty-three people had died: Catholics, Protestants, women, men, schoolchildren and babies. Hundreds more were injured, with shrapnel wounds, missing limbs, horrific burns.

‘These men have committed outright murder. They must be brought to justice …'

I thought of the two men I had seen get out of the car. I couldn't remember their faces but I remembered the colour of their hair and that they'd been wearing jeans and jackets. They looked normal, not the kind of men you'd expect to be driving a car loaded with four hundred pounds of explosives. Had they made the bomb themselves or was that someone else's department? How did one learn to make a bomb? Who had taught these men the rudiments of wiring and timing and all the other things they needed to know? I visualised a classroom scenario, an industrious atmosphere as the students worked with bent heads and dextrous fingers, the teacher, hands clasped behind his back, peering over their shoulders and commending their progress: today's subject, bomb making.

‘They cannot get away with it just because the powers that be are afraid that the peace agreement will be compromised!'

Sounds of consensus reverberated around the room. There was a strong feeling that the police were proceeding too cautiously, afraid to rock the boat, to compromise the clearly overestimated peace agreement.

I sat in the meeting, listening to the anguished and uncontrolled outbursts. Men, women, teenagers, children, speaking without turns, airing their grief and confusion and their need to know that at the end of it all there would be justice.

Justice, it seemed, was the only thing that would ease their pain.

Eventually a man stood up and called for order. He said that we wouldn't get any answers unless we all pulled together, joined to form one voice. He was a soft-spoken, unassuming man but people listened nevertheless.

Before I knew it, my father was standing too, giving his unqualified agreement. ‘I'll do all I can to help the families here tonight, to bring their concerns to the police and the political parties, and to ensure that the people responsible for this atrocity will be brought to justice.'

He sounded noble, inspiring even, and I could see from the faces around me that people were listening and responding to him in the same way they had to the man who'd spoken before him. They wanted to be led, to be taken charge of, and to have their voices channelled into one. But most of all they wanted justice, and that was my father's specialty. He knew all about justice and what was right and wrong. He'd been teaching it for years.

As I sat there listening, my hand in Mum's, we were both completely unaware that this was the beginning of a crusade that would in the end mean even more heartbreak for our family. By the time we filed out of the room, a committee had been formed and Dad was already in the thick of it. We left him behind, talking animatedly to the other committee members, and went home to a dark, empty house.

Over the following weeks and months, I analysed things more thoroughly. All those rules and values my father had preached about and stuffed down our throats replayed in my head, baseless all of them, a stupid waste of time and effort.
You'll be safe if you keep to the rules
…
A good life is one lived according to one's values
… I was a loyal daughter as much as I was a loyal friend. Despite my occasionally rebellious behaviour, I had essentially believed and trusted in those rules. The truth – that life was randomly and senselessly cruel and had no regard for rules or
values of any kind, that safety was nothing more than an illusion – shattered my whole belief system.

I went over the events of that fateful day, picked them apart with the precision and objectivity of a forensic scientist, and came to realise my father's part in it all. And I saw this new committee, this crusade, for exactly what it was: a means of assuaging his own guilt.

I didn't cry in front of Dad again, instead retaining my tears for the privacy of my room or the shower. I pushed him away whenever he tried to hug me, comfort me or ask me how I was. We would not have been in town that day if it hadn't been for him. I could not get past that fact. And I could never forgive him for it.

The keyhole was hazy, indistinct. I frowned at it until it came into focus. Lining up my key, I was on the verge of inserting it when the door was whipped open.

‘What kind of hour do you call this?'

I blinked. My father had waited up for me. He was wearing his dressing gown, not a fluffy cheap thing but maroon-coloured velour, very suave. His stare reminded me that he'd asked a question. I glanced at my watch. The face was blurred, like everything else.

‘Small hand on four. Big hand on two. Ten past four.' I looked up to add defiantly, ‘That's am, of course, not pm.' I passed him in the hall and climbed the first few steps.

‘You're drunk!'

I didn't grace this very obvious statement with a reply.

‘I'm talking to you. Face me and show some respect,' he shouted.

I stopped, turned and viewed him from my elevated position. Even though I was drunk and full of resentment, I was struck by how handsome he was. His expression was stern, his brow lined with a frown, but the effect of his aqua eyes and high cheekbones prevailed over his mood. My father, the pinup professor.

‘Yes, Daddy,' I replied in a sarcastically sweet voice. ‘I'm drunk. That's what teenagers do. Among other things, like taking drugs and screwing around.'

‘Don't you dare speak to me like that!'

I saw the phone in his hand and realised that he hadn't been waiting up for me at all, that he'd been on one of his oh-so-important phone calls, at four o'clock in the morning!

‘Who the hell are you to tell me what to do?' I spat. We glared at each other.

My mother appeared on the landing, with bleary eyes and tousled hair. ‘What's going on?' she asked, looking from Dad to me and back again.

It was high time for her to ask that question. She'd allowed him to ignore her, to ignore us. She'd allowed him to comfort people he didn't know, to talk late into the night to strangers, while we were left to our own devices, neglected, cast aside for a higher cause.

‘Why don't you ask
him
?' I said darkly.

‘Caitlin, I don't like your tone,' Mum said.

‘Can't you see what a hypocrite he is?'

‘Caitlin!'

‘He's there for everybody, everybody but his own family.'

The irony was that Dad was an expert on hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy is acting contrary to what one believes. Hypocrisy is deceitfulness,
deception, duplicity, falseness, insincerity, phoneyness and two-facedness.
Professor Jonathan O'Reilly of Queen's University not only lectured on the subject of hypocrisy, he embodied it in his own everyday actions and behaviour.

‘I'm going to bed now,' I declared.

Like all the bedrooms upstairs, the room I shared with Maeve was built into the roof. The ceiling sloped at the sides and I banged my head against it as I lurched towards my bed. I swore and rubbed my head before lying flat on my back, fully dressed, the room swirling around me. In her single bed on the other side of the room, Maeve was part of the merry-go-round. Maeve, Mum, Dad, Liam, me, round and round our faces went. How would it end, I wondered? What would it take to make it stop? To enforce some form of normality? Almost eight months had dragged by, each feeling longer than the one before. Were the men who parked the car that day back to normal? Had they been out tonight, drinking at their local, having a laugh with their friends? Did they ever stop to think of the fifty-three people they'd murdered? Of all the people in this town left with broken hearts and shattered lives? Did those men live normal lives now or did they still make bombs?

I'd gone back to university at the start of the new academic year and house-shared in an area of Belfast called The Holy-lands, which was rough and overcrowded. I desperately missed what I'd had last year. I missed the feeling of security at the Elms and I missed Josh so much that it physically hurt, stabs of pain that would start as soon as I woke up and continue throughout the day. I struggled through classes without a shred of the drive or focus that I'd had in my first year. I walked to and from
university, robotic until a car would slide into the kerb to park, at which point I would be seized by panic and start to run. Loud or sudden noises made me jump in fright. Though the end of the academic year was only a few months away now and the finish line in sight, my nerves were stretched to breaking point and I felt I would hardly make the distance, that I couldn't endure another moment in this place.

This weekend was Easter and tomorrow morning we would go to mass as a family, followed by an early dinner of roast meat, potatoes and vegetables. Everyone in the family, including me, would go through the motions. I would sit in the church pew and at the dinner table pretending to be present, when in my head I had retreated to last year, when Josh and I had consummated our relationship and had our whole future in front of us, a future that seemed even better and brighter after the signing of the Good Friday Peace Agreement. A future that would still be intact if only we hadn't gone into town that day. If only that dark-green car had parked somewhere else. If only people had not congregated around it. If only Josh had not turned back to warn them. If only …

The bedroom continued to swirl around me and I imagined myself disappearing into a vortex that sent me hurtling back to last year. As if to mock such a fanciful idea, the room's turning slowed and everything became stagnant. I was lying on the bed, my face wet, sobs caught in my throat. There was no going back. I was stuck right here.

I heard a car pull up outside, our front gate being opened, footsteps coming towards the house. My first thought was that it was Patrick, the boy I'd kissed earlier on that evening and who had
subsequently dropped me home. Even though I'd given Patrick my phone number, I didn't plan on seeing him again. He fell so far short of Josh that I'd had tears in my eyes as I kissed him. I'd been trying to numb the pain, to do something other than grieve, but now I was left feeling more lonely and bereft than ever.

No, of course it wasn't Patrick following me inside, he didn't even know me. It was much more likely that the footsteps belonged to someone from my father's group, one of the people who had access to him twenty-four seven, unlike his family.

I heard the sound of clanging glass, the footsteps retreating, a door slamming, an engine revving and moving away, but stopping again further down the street, the sequence repeated as before. It was the milkman. I fell asleep, relieved to have figured something out at least.

‘You're making a big mistake.'

‘That's what you think.'

‘Qualifications mean everything.'

‘No, they don't.'

‘I can't believe you're doing this!'

‘Well, I am.'

‘Why? Why now? You've only got one year to go.'

‘Because I can't stand it for another moment, let alone a year!'

My replies were quick. Sometimes I hit the mark and I hurt him. We were like fencers, our words swords.

‘Please, Caitlin. You're a clever girl but clever often isn't good enough. You need your degree, that piece of paper. Sometimes it's all an employer has to go on.'

He could be quite persuasive, my father. He knew how to phrase things, how to strike that chord. He knew that beneath my pain and sorrow and the need to flee, there was ambition, battered and bruised but ambition nonetheless. He knew that I ultimately wanted to get a good job and to do well in the world.