Less Than Perfect (5 page)

Back in the room, I took one last look around. The space looked small and bare and insignificant, as though Josh and I had never been there, as though we had already been relegated to the past, a memory. Next year the room would take on some other first-year student's personality. The bed, stripped down to its chequered mattress, would be slept in by someone else – one person, I assumed, not two. Josh and I would sleep in another bed in another room and make another year of memories together. Though I felt a little sad to be leaving this room and this year behind, I already couldn't wait for what was ahead.

In no time at all we were driving out of Belfast towards Clonmegan. As the concrete and uncompromising lines of the city gave way to the gentle roll of countryside, I dwelled on the year gone past. I felt grown up and more worldly than this time last
year. I had lived away from home, fended for myself, and I now knew what it was like to love someone and to be loved in return. The fact that Belfast wasn't an easy city to live in, that it was unpredictable and sometimes rough, made me feel strong and more resilient.

And the fact that loving Josh could be hard too, that we had greater challenges and frustrations and limitations than other couples did, made me love him all the more intensely and completely.

Josh and I strolled into town, hands entwined, the sky overhead more white than grey. I caressed the calluses on his fingers as they curled around mine. Town was busy – kids shopping with their mothers for school uniforms, teenagers scouting for jeans and CDs – and a sense of anticipation prevailed due to the carnival that would move through the streets later in the day. Some of the shops had tables outside displaying fresh produce, house wares, shoes, tempting passers-by with a faux-market feel. People meandered across the road and in and out of shops, relaxed but with a broad sense of purpose, unlike Josh and me, who didn't have any reason to be there.

When we reached Chapel Street, I touched Josh's arm and drew his gaze to my mouth. ‘What do you want to do?' I asked.

He grinned in reply and used his free hand to rub his stomach.

I shook my head in mock disbelief; we'd had a sandwich at home only an hour or so earlier. ‘I'm not hungry yet.'

‘Have a look around the shops until you are?' he suggested.

‘It's depressing looking at stuff I can't afford to buy,' I signed back.

We stood on the footpath communicating with a mishmash of sign, speech and facial expressions, oblivious to everything but our conversation until a dark-green car pulled in so close that it startled us both and Josh pulled me away from the kerb. Two men got out of the car and it seemed natural to exchange apologies, us for standing too close, them for not tooting to make us aware that they were pulling in. But the men were already walking away, their eyes fixed on the ground in front of them.

‘Rude,' I mouthed to Josh.

He didn't reply, but he put his arm around my shoulders and drew me closer, his eyes on the men until they melded into the crowd.

We continued onto Main Street where we traipsed in and out of a few shops. I saw a pair of ballet flats that would be both stylish and practical for university when I went back after the holidays, and tried them on, knowing full well that I couldn't buy them. Unemployed like Liam, I was living off Mum and Dad. I had tried to get a summer job in town, dropping copies of my CV into the shops and sports complex, calling into the pubs and restaurants and imploring for a few hours' work a week, but the harsh reality was that Clonmegan had more students home on holiday than it had summer jobs. Mum would have bought me the shoes if I'd asked, but asking wasn't easy, not at my age, and certainly not with my father within earshot. My lack of
gainful employment was a blot on his reputation, his ethic of hard work and just reward, and it provided me with an insight into how awful it was for Liam. To be honest, I felt quite guilty about my brother. In the past, witnessing his arguments with my father, I'd privately thought Liam wasn't trying hard enough to get a job, that he should make do with bar work or something in retail until his dream job eventuated, but I was now realising, first-hand, that any kind of work was hard to come by in our town. The next time we went for a drink together I would hook my arm around Liam's neck, half choking him the way he always did to me, and say sorry for not fully understanding and sympathising with him, and for not always taking his side in those clashes with my father.

As a result of my current and thankfully temporary brush with unemployment, I had already resolved to stay in Belfast next summer. I was still afraid of the city, of the violence that simmered beneath the surface, of the armoured cars and the RUC in their rifle-green uniforms who still had a presence despite the peace agreement, but I figured I had a much better chance of getting summer work there than in Clonmegan. I could have considered London or somewhere else in Europe but I wasn't prepared to leave Josh behind, not even for a few months. When I went abroad, he would be with me. It would be something we did together, as a couple.

With no choice but to leave the ballet flats behind, I wished that we had stayed at home, cuddled together on the couch, rather than embarking on this pointless trip to town. Window shopping every now and then was perfectly fine, but not for the whole summer. Then I remembered my father, his foul
humour that had propelled us off the couch and into town in the first place, and decided this had been the better alternative after all.

Josh, now starving, steered me towards one of his favourite cafés, where we ordered drinks and food and smiled at each other in the subdued lighting. We'd been together just over a year now, my nineteenth birthday in July coinciding with our first anniversary. I couldn't remember my life without him. I couldn't remember what it was like to take a stroll without my hand being held in his or what it was like to wake up without seeing him or, at the very least, thinking of him. I knew what made him laugh, what he found frustrating or annoying; I could read his mood in a second. I knew the tender look he'd get on his face before he kissed me. I knew his touch, the differing pressure of his fingers when he was conveying comfort, or simple affection, or a prelude to sex. Being at home over the holidays meant we couldn't sleep together and I missed the closeness of waking up next to him, the luxury of feeling his naked body along the length of mine, the heat that radiated from his skin, the heaviness of his arm resting on my waist.

‘I miss you so much.' I sighed. ‘I must be the only student in the country who can't wait for the summer to be over.'

He nodded. ‘It's been hard. When I wake in the morning, it feels wrong that you're not there. All day at work it's like something's missing – I don't feel right until I see you again.'

My fingers interlaced with his across the table. ‘Next year will be different,' I promised. Next summer, in Belfast, I would have a job
and
a flat, and Josh and I would continue our physical relationship uncurtailed.

‘For a start, let's try to get a double bed.' He grinned, and suddenly we were both fondly recalling our cramped legs and sore backs from the single bed at the Elms.

Josh's order came, burger and chips, and he ate with relish. It amazed me how he could eat so much and still be so lean. He burned off the calories so effortlessly. I had to watch my diet more carefully. My meal was a salad, chicken, bacon and croutons scattered among leaves of cos lettuce. Josh offered me one of his chips; I savoured it in my mouth, hot and salty, but refused when he offered me a second.

We were almost finished eating when it happened, a ruckus at the doorway, a police officer booming above the hum of conversation and background music, ‘Evacuate the premises. Everybody out, please!'

‘Why?' asked a woman who had only just received her meal.

‘There's been a bomb warning. Everybody out! Now!'

I signed to Josh what had been said and we stood up from our table. He had his burger in his hand as we left the café and joined the stream of people making their way down the street. We didn't hurry; like everyone else, we didn't perceive the warning as a real threat. Josh chewed the last of his burger as we ducked under the tape cordoning off the street. People milled around, mildly annoyed at the interruption to whatever they'd been doing, waiting for the all clear so they could go back. Josh and I had no reason to wait; we'd had no reason to be in town in the first place.

‘Home?' I arched my brows with the question.

He nodded absently, his eyes skimming the crowd, his expression becoming slightly perturbed. Though he took my hand and
walked with me, he kept twisting his head, looking back. Something was making him more and more agitated.

‘What is it, Josh?' I asked.

He stopped. ‘Stay,' he said thickly, resting his hands briefly on my shoulders before walking back towards the crowd, his steps becoming quicker, more urgent, until he was jogging. I watched, confused and concerned. I saw him take strangers by the arm and pull them aside. I saw the puzzlement on their faces at being manhandled, and at his obvious lack of verbal skills. He succeeded in moving a few of them and then, through the gap, I saw it: the dark-green car, the one that had parked so close to us earlier. Something about it, about the drivers, had bothered him then, and now it was bothering him again. Josh relied heavily on his instincts. He saw things that others didn't, sensed things. Why was he moving people away from the car? Jesus, he didn't think that –

The blast was ear-splitting, so ferocious that it pushed me back and I fell to the ground. For a few moments I was dazed, oblivious even to the pain in my elbows, which had taken the brunt of my fall onto the unyielding concrete. I gingerly lifted one elbow, wincing as I did so, then the other, and stumbled to my feet. In front of me, where only moments before there had been a relatively ordinary scene from a relatively ordinary Saturday afternoon, a plume of black smoke soared into the sky, contaminating its whiteness, its purity.

And then the realisation hit me.

‘Josh!' I screamed, rushing forward, arms outstretched as though I could save him.

Roof slates, fragments of wooden beams and shards of glass hailed down from the black cloud.

‘Stay back.' Someone seized my arm. ‘It's dangerous.'

I shook myself free and kept going. Closer, the road was littered with bodies and debris, water from a burst water pipe gushing over everything as though trying to cleanse the awful, awful mess. My screams mingled with all the other screams, all the other names being called.

I reached the spot where he had been standing, and there was nothing, nothing but a pile of rubble. I knelt and began to dig through the rubble with my fingers, my hands caked with soot, ash still raining from the sky and onto the sleeves of my denim jacket.

I sobbed, digging faster, more desperately.

I continued to call his name, knowing that he couldn't hear me, not even if he'd been alive. I remember pausing for a moment and listening to the guttural, almost inhuman screams of shock and horror and grief around me, and I felt grateful, overwhelmingly so, that he was deaf to those sounds. Some things are best never heard.

A police officer took me by the arm and forced me away from my pile of rubble. ‘It's deadly, love. The buildings are unstable and you could get injured yourself.'

I heard afterwards that the local hospitals were a hub of confusion, relatives running in and out of wards, shouting names of missing wives, husbands, sons and daughters, praying that they were lying injured on a hospital bed rather than in the makeshift morgue at the army base. Someone offered me a lift but there was no point: Josh wasn't at the hospital. I didn't have the consolation of hope that he might have gone into a shop on a whim, or dawdled too long talking to a friend. I knew exactly where he'd been standing when the bomb went off, and now he was gone.

An ambulance officer told me that the sports complex had been appointed a meeting place and I went there instead. When I got there, I used the public phone to call Josh's parents but
they weren't at home. I tried my own parents, only to find the same. Mobile phones had not yet hit the mainstream, and chaos reigned as survivors were unable to quickly reassure worried relatives that they were safe and those with bad news, like me, were unable to pass it on.

I don't know how long I was at the sports complex. I sank to the ground, the wall hard against my back, and hugged my knees. I tuned out the howls of grief and anger and disbelief. My own screams had died inside me and I was left with a sense of being outside my body, looking on at myself with a sense of detachment.

Once, when I looked up, I saw Mandy, her face blotched from crying. She told me that her older sister, Fiona, was missing. I hugged her and tried to find words of comfort but at the same time I couldn't fathom that her sister could be missing, possibly dead, that Mandy's large irreverent family could be damaged in such a way. Fiona was even bubblier than her siblings, her hair highlighted an unnatural blonde, her fingernails polished in dazzling colours, her voice perky as she chatted to customers at the supermarket checkout where she worked. Fiona couldn't be missing. She was too loud and too vibrant to be overlooked.

Carly was at the sports complex, too, waiting to hear news of her aunt and cousin. She was pale – even her mouth looked white – and her mother and father and uncle, who stood to the side, were like ghosts hovering in the shadows.

Both Mandy and Carly asked why I was there, who was missing, but I couldn't answer, couldn't say the words. In scared voices they suggested names until I nodded. ‘Oh, Caitlin. Oh, Caitlin.'

Finally Mum and Dad arrived, scanning the room frantically
before finding me alone on the ground. Mandy's family had been called into a private room and we all knew by now that you were only called into that room when the news was bad. Carly had drifted back to her family, each paler than the other but still hoping against all odds that a thirty-five-year-old woman and her ten-year-old son had not been among the fatalities.