How to Fall in Love (3 page)

Angela frowned as though hearing or seeing something she didn’t like. ‘You know this isn’t your fault, don’t you?’

‘Yeah, I know.’ I shrugged it off.

She studied me, thoughtful, and I concentrated on the right wheel of the hospital bed, how it caused a black scuff mark when it was moved each time, lots of scuff marks back and forth, and I tried to count how many times it had been moved. Dozens, at least.

‘You know there are people you can talk to about this kind of thing. It would be a good idea to get your concerns out.’

‘Why does everyone keep saying that?’ I laughed, trying to sound carefree but deep down feeling the anger burning my chest. I was tired of being analysed, tired of people treating me as though I was someone who needed to be handled. ‘I’m
fine
.’

‘I’ll leave you with him for a while.’ Angela stepped away, her white shoes silent on the floor as if she was floating.

Now that I had come, I didn’t quite know what to do. I reached out for his hand but then stopped myself. If he was aware, perhaps he would not want me to touch him, maybe he blamed me for what had happened. It had been my job to stop him and I hadn’t. Perhaps he had wanted me to change his mind, he was willing me to say the right words but I’d failed him. I cleared my throat, looked around to make sure no one was listening and I leaned in closer to his left ear but not so close as to startle him.

‘Hi, Simon,’ I whispered.

I watched him for a reaction. Nothing.

‘My name is Christine Rose, I’m the woman you spoke to on the night of
… the incident. I hope you don’t mind my sitting with you for a while.’

I listened for something, anything, and studied his face and hands for signs that he was upset by my presence. I didn’t want to cause him any more pain. When all on the surface remained as it was, calm and still, I sat back in the chair and got comfortable. I wasn’t waiting for him to wake up, I didn’t have anything I wanted to say to him, I just liked being there, in the silence, by his side. Because when I was by his side I wouldn’t be anywhere else, wondering about him.

At nine p.m., after visiting hours, I still hadn’t been asked to leave. I guessed regular hours didn’t count for someone in a condition such as Simon’s. He was in a coma, on a life-support machine, and his condition wasn’t improving. I spent the time thinking about my life and Simon’s and how our coming together had irrevocably changed both of our lives. It had only been a few weeks since Simon’s attempted suicide, but it had sent my life spiralling in another direction. I wondered if it was pure coincidence or if me being in that random place had been fate.

‘What were you doing there?’ Barry had asked me, confused, sleepy, sitting up in bed with his scrunched-up face, his tiny eyes enormous after he’d reached for his black-rimmed glasses on the bedside chest and put them on. I hadn’t known how to answer him then; I wouldn’t know how to answer him now. To say it out loud would be embarrassing, it would highlight how ludicrously lost I had found myself – the irony of that statement not lost on me.

Aside from what I was doing there, the fact I’d chosen to engage with a man with a gun in a deserted building was enough to cause me to question myself. I liked to help people but I wasn’t sure it was just about that. I saw myself as a problem-solver and I applied that thinking to most aspects of life. If something couldn’t be fixed, it could at least be changed, particularly behaviour. My belief system was born of having a father who was a fixer. It was in his nature to ask the problem and then set about fixing it as he did for his three girls growing up without their mother. Because he lacked Mum’s instinct to know if things were right with us or not and he had no one else to discuss it with, he would question us, listen to the answer, then seek out the solution. It was his way and it was what he felt he could do for us. Left with three children under the age of ten, the youngest only four years of age, a father does what he can to protect his children.

I run my own recruitment agency, which sounds basic enough, only I prefer to think of myself as a match maker, finding the right person for the right job. It’s important to bring the right energy for the right company, and vice versa, what the company can do for a person. Sometimes it’s just mathematics, an available job for an available person with the appropriate skills; other times, when I get to know the person, like Oscar, I really go beyond the call of duty when it comes to placing them. The people I deal with have different emotions about their goals, some because they’ve lost their jobs and are under great stress, others simply fancy a career change and are anxious but full of happy expectation, and then there are the ones who are stepping into the workplace for the first time, excited about new beginnings. Regardless, everyone’s on a journey, and I’m in the middle of that. I’ve always felt the same responsibility for each of them – to help people find the right place in the world. And yet, using that philosophy, my words had landed Simon Conway in this room.

I didn’t want to leave him alone, and returning to a borrowed flat with no television and nothing to do but stare at the four walls did not appeal to me. I had many friends who I could have stayed with, but as they were mutual friends of mine and Barry’s, they were slow to offer, reluctant to get in the middle of the mess, to be seen to be taking sides, especially when it was me that was coming out looking like the bad one, the big bad wolf who’d broken Barry’s heart. It was better for me not to put them through that stress. Brenda had invited me to come and stay with her, but I couldn’t put up with my sister fretting about my supposed post-traumatic stress disorder. I needed to come and go as I pleased without any questions being asked, especially ones about my sanity. I wanted to feel free – that’s why I’d left my marriage in the first place. The fact that I felt more at home in an intensive care unit than I did anywhere else said a lot.

So here was the thing I couldn’t tell Detective Maguire, or Barry, or my dad and two sisters, or anybody, really. There was a specific place I was trying to find to make me feel better about myself. I learned this from a book:
How to Live in Your Happy Place
. The idea was to choose a place that made you feel uplifted. It could be somewhere you connected with a memory that enriched your soul or simply a place where you liked the light, or a place that made you feel content for a reason you couldn’t recognise on a conscious level. Once you found that place, the book offered exercises to help you summon the same happy feeling you associated with that place absolutely any time and anywhere your heart desired, but it would only work if you had found the right place. I’d been looking. It’s what I was doing on the building site the night I met Simon Conway. It wasn’t the building site I was looking for, it was what used to be there before it became a building site. I had a happy memory there on that land.

It was a cricket match, Clontarf versus Saggart. I was five years old and Mum had died only a few months before and I remember it was a sunny day, the first after a long dark cold winter, and me and my sisters were there to watch Dad play. The entire cricket club was outside, I remember the smell of beer, and I can taste the saltiness on my lips from the packets of peanuts I was consuming one after another. Dad was bowling and it was close to the end of the match; I could see the intense look on his face, the look we’d been seeing every day for the past few weeks, the dark look with his eyes practically lost beneath his eyebrows. He went for his third bowl and the guy batting completely misjudged his swing and missed. The ball hit the wicket and the guy was out. Dad yelled so loudly and punched the air with such ferocity, everyone around us erupted in cheers. It frightened me at first, watching the mass hysteria, like they’d all caught some weird virus that I’d seen in a zombie movie and I was the only one who hadn’t been affected, but then as I watched Dad’s face I knew that it was okay. He was wearing the biggest smile, and I remember the looks on my sisters’ faces. They weren’t too bothered about cricket either – in fact they’d moaned the entire way over in the car because they were being taken away from playing with their friends on the road – but they were watching him celebrating, being lifted on to his team mates’ shoulders, and they were smiling and I remember that was the moment I thought – we’re going to be okay.

I went to the development to get that feeling again, but when I got there I saw a ghost estate and I met Simon.

When I left Simon at the hospital that night I continued on my quest to find places that uplifted me. I’d been doing it for about six weeks by that stage and I’d already been to my old primary school, a basketball court where I’d kissed a boy I believed was way out of my league, my college, my grandparents’ house, the garden centre I used to go to with my grandparents, the local park, the tennis club where I spent my summers, and various other haunts that had been the location of good memories. I’d randomly dropped in on an old primary school friend’s house and proceeded to have the most awkward conversation I’ve ever had, and immediately wished I hadn’t bothered going. I had visited her because when I was passing I had a sudden memory: the hot warm sweet smell of baking in her kitchen. Every time I played there, her mother seemed to be baking. Twenty-four years on, the baking smell was gone, so was her mother, and in its place were my exhausted old friend’s two children, who were using her as a climbing frame and wouldn’t give us a second to talk, which was a blessing as we had nothing to say to one another anyway above the silent question on her lips:
Why the hell did you come here? We weren’t even that close.
Assuming I was going through something, she was polite enough not to say it out loud.

For the first few weeks, not finding my place didn’t bother me, the searching was a way of passing my time, but after three weeks my inability to find my place started to prey on my mind. Instead of re-energising me, it was in fact undoing the good memories that I had.

After that hospital visit, I was even more intent on finding a place. I needed a lift and knew that returning home to the magnolia-walled rental was not going to offer me any solace.

This was what I was doing the moment the highly unlikely event occurred for the second time in the same month to the same person.

4

How to Hold on for Dear Life

The streets of Dublin city were quiet on a Sunday night in December and it was bitterly cold as I made my way to the Ha’penny Bridge from Wellington Quay. Snow was threatened, but hadn’t come yet. The Ha’penny Bridge, officially known as Liffey Bridge, the charming old footbridge with its cast-iron railings spans the river, connecting the north of the city to the south. It came to be known as the Ha’penny because that was the toll when it was constructed in 1816. One of the most recognisable sights of Dublin, it’s especially pretty at night when the three decorative lamps are lit. I had chosen this place because as a part of my college degree, Business and Spanish, I had to live in Spain for one year. I don’t remember how close we were as a family before Mum died, but I most certainly remember us tightening our bonds afterwards and then, as the years went on, it seemed unfathomable that any of us would ever leave the fold. Going into my college course I knew that the Erasmus placement was an inevitable, unavoidable reality and at that stage I felt the overwhelming desire to sever those bonds and stretch my wings. As soon as I got there I knew it was a mistake, I cried all the time, couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, could barely concentrate on my studies. It felt as though my heart had been ripped from my chest and left at home with my family. My dad wrote to me every day, witty musings of his and my sisters’ daily life which attempted to lift my spirits but only fuelled the homesickness even more. But there was one postcard in particular that helped me snap out of the chronic homesickness. Or rather, the homesickness was still there, but I was able to function. That postcard had been of the Ha’penny Bridge, at night time, with the Dublin skyline lit up in the background and all the colourful lights reflecting in the Liffey below. I had been enchanted by the image, I’d looked at the pixellated people and I’d tried to give them names and stories, places they were going, places they were coming from, familiar names going to and from locations I knew. I pinned it to my wall when I slept and carried it around in my college journal during the day, I felt like it was a part of home with me at all times.

I wasn’t stupid enough to think that this exact feeling would be replicated the moment I saw the bridge, because I saw the bridge almost every week. By this point I was well seasoned at searching for my happy place and knew it wouldn’t be instant, but I was hoping I could stand there and at least recall the emotion, the experience, the feelings. It was night, the skyline was lit up in the background, and although the new buildings along the docks created a different image from my old postcard, the reflection of the lights in the dark river still seemed the same. It had all the right elements of the postcard.

Apart from one thing.

A lone man, dressed in black, clinging to the outside of the bridge while he looked down into the cold river that ran swift and treacherous beneath him.

On the steps of the Wellington Quay entrance a small crowd had gathered. They were standing looking at the man on the bridge. I joined them in their shock, wondering if that was how Roy Cleveland Sullivan had felt when he was struck by lightning for the second time:
Not again.

Someone had called the police and they were discussing how long it would take them to arrive, and how they might not get there on time. They were all debating what to do. I couldn’t help but see Simon’s face before he pulled the trigger and then afterwards, in intensive care, replaying the way his face had changed in his apartment before he picked up the gun. Something had triggered that moment. Could it have been what I said to him? I couldn’t remember the words I’d spoken; maybe it was my fault. I thought about his two little girls, waiting for their daddy to wake up, wondering why he wouldn’t wake up like he always did. Then I looked at the man on the bridge and thought about the countless lives that would be impacted by his need to end his pain, his inability to see another way out.