The Silent Dead (Paula Maguire 3) (15 page)

Why would she do that?
Kira had asked. Why would Mammy want to kick Rose out?

Never mind
, she’d said.
Let’s have a drink of Coke and some Skipps
.

‘Bye,’ she whispered to Daddy. Rose she knew was coming with them. She could see it in her smile in the picture.

‘Show some respect,’ Mammy muttered, pulling at her suit jacket. ‘We have to honour Rose’s memory.’

As if she didn’t. As if she ever stopped.

Chapter Eighteen

Paula had a bad feeling about the service. It was the idea of crowds, after all she’d been reading about crushing and trampling, the panic on the day of the bomb.

She couldn’t get used to the contours of her body being so changed and stretched. Like trying to put a glass on a table when you were drunk and missing, smashing it. She got dressed in her childhood bedroom, bumping into the shabby old furniture. She could of course have moved into her parents’ room – PJ had gone and it wasn’t too likely Margaret was coming back to sleep in it – but she couldn’t bring herself to do it, so she stayed, ridiculously pregnant, in her single bed. Dressed in a shapeless black shift she’d bought in Dunnes, she shoved her feet into wide flats, broken down at the back, and bundled her hair up. She went into her parents’ room to check her reflection in the house’s only long mirror. All was still. Her mother’s perfume bottles – Anaïs Anaïs, Chanel – sat on the dresser, a thin coating of dust over all. The venetian blinds let in the light in slats, dust floating in mid-air. The bed was stripped and neat. Paula held her breath and shut the door behind her.

Parking restrictions were in force for the service, so once she neared Crossanure she had to leave the car along the road. Already people were moving towards the main street in groups, families, couples, children. She was the only one alone, lumbering along, her own counterweight. Soon she was tired and needing to pee. She thought quite seriously about turning back. Standing in the heat for hours with a full bladder wasn’t all that appealing. But she remembered Amber Martin, and Rose Woods, and Patrick Ward both Junior and Senior, and all who’d come into that town on a normal bank holiday, just like her, but never made it home again. She kept walking.

Despite growing up nearby, Paula had never actually been to Crossanure before, and so she saw in her mind the present day, five years on, superimposed with ghostly images of how it had looked after the bomb. The petrol station was still boarded up. It had never sold – haunted perhaps by the people who’d died there: Tom Kennedy and Lisa McShane in a car parked by the air station, Rose Woods on the forecourt as she was passing, the worker from Nigeria who was manning the pumps. The other people burned and maimed. High Street itself had been rebuilt, but it was too easy to picture the rubble, hear the screams on the bit of shaking camera footage someone had taken that day. The people they were searching for had most likely planted that bomb, hefted the bag into the bin, primed it and walked away to safety, while mothers and children were being herded to their deaths. They must have looked them in the face, knowing some of them would die. You couldn’t put a bomb on a street full of children and call it
collateral damage.
And yet Paula was trying to find them, bring them home. Because that was all she knew how to do – find the lost. Whatever they’d done.

The streets of the small town were full of people. She didn’t want to go further. Her body was resisting, pulling her back, but she forced her legs on to the heart of town, the square where the bomb had gone off in a litter bin. The crowd was several hundred strong, spilling all the way out of the square and down the street. She saw Guy and other police officers on a raised platform with folding seats. The families were on the other side. She recognised several faces: Ann Ward and John Lenehan, seated with his stick in front of him. He nodded to her, his differences with the group clearly put aside for this occasion. Despite the hot day, his skin was as pale as paper. The police and journalists were to the right. Corry had picked a black suit with a pencil skirt, neat and sober. The men wore black ties. Paula wondered did you own one as a matter of course, when you had to go to dozens of funerals. The crowd was ringed by officers in high-vis jackets, though there was no need. A more sombre and well-behaved gathering would have been hard to find. Somewhere in the low murmur a baby cried, but otherwise the crowd was quiet, almost weary. Paula thought she understood. More than a decade after the Good Friday Agreement, you wouldn’t think you’d still need to attend peace rallies.

Guy helped her up onto the low platform, avoiding her eyes. ‘How are you?’

‘Fine. I needed to be here.’

Helen Corry looked tense – Paula knew she’d been closer to the bomb than most, as officer in charge of the control room that day. Her manicured hands were folded tightly in her lap.

At the lectern, Jarlath Kenny. Mayor of the town, who’d likely shot a few Protestants and police officers in his time. Was he the one behind this case; did he know where the remaining terrorists were being kept? The memorial itself was shrouded in a black curtain, casting a shadow over the crowd in the sunlit square. Already people were sweating and loosening ties. Paula wondered how long it would last, as she took her seat. She was scanning the opposite side for Kira. No sign. Then she saw two figures being hustled through the crowd by officers – Kira and the mother. She’d studied that file until she felt she knew them all, each sorrowful face, each line of loss that was etched onto them. The Woods family took their seats. None of the others looked at them.

The ceremony began at 10.30 a.m. There would be a minute’s silence at 11.17 a.m., when the bomb had gone off. First there was a priest and a minister. Paula had never heard of either of them and assumed they’d been chosen to give the correct religious balance. There was also a black man in a colourful outfit who delivered a blessing in a language no one seemed to understand. This would be for the Nigerian. She assumed the African woman in the headdress was his sister, over from London. She hoped everyone had someone there for them. Even Niall McShane had come, sitting on the very back row with his folding chair pushed back, as if he might bolt. There was a young girl with him, around twelve or so, whose face was already swollen with crying. He held her hand tight. The sound of monotonous weeping had started up as soon as the blessings began. Paula realised it was Mrs Woods who’d begun it, her mouth open and slack. Perhaps she was drunk again. Her remaining child ignored her, looking stoically ahead.

The blessings had finished. She shifted in the hard chair. She was by now dying to pee and a trickle of sweat was working its way down the back of her thigh. She hoped to God she didn’t go into labour right now. That would be inconvenient, but the baby had no idea she’d been brought to this ceremony of death, swimming around in the cushioned warmth inside. Guy was trying to catch her eye. She ignored him, licking the sweat from her top lip. She was very aware of Corry nearby, Avril and Gerard in the row behind. Bob, presumably, was not allowed to be there in an official capacity. Fiacra hadn’t turned up. That would be a very black mark. She heard feet on the metal staircase to her left – someone was coming up it. Maeve. Her fair hair was loose, shiny, and she wore a black trouser suit with red Converse underneath, a flash of colour among the sombre mourning outfits. She didn’t look at Paula.

Jarlath Kenny was saying, ‘I’d now like to ask Miss Maeve Cooley to read the dedication. Miss Cooley has worked extensively with the families, and they’ve asked her to represent them here.’ Maeve smiled at him blankly as he gave her the microphone. The smile didn’t reach her eyes. Paula remembered the allegations in Maeve’s book, that there was pretty much nothing to choose between Kenny and the man who’d orchestrated this bomb. So why was one on the podium and the other disappeared?

Maeve arranged some pieces of paper on the lectern, cool and in control. Her voice with its soft Dublin accent was steady. She was reading a poem. It began, ‘Do not stand at my grave and weep. I am not there, I do not sleep.’ A sob came from the side of the families. Paula looked and saw most of them were crying. Several of the men stared ahead, white-faced. Dominic Martin held Lily Sloane’s hand as she wept. Looking over he met Paula’s eyes and she felt a stab of pain. She stared at the ground while Maeve read, squinting her eyes to try not to let any tears fall out. This wasn’t her loss to cry over. In the crowd there was a low noise of sniffing. People held each other’s hands and leaned together. She felt movement beside her – Guy was reaching for her hand. She let him take it, though she was lathered in sweat. His pulse was racing.

‘Do not stand at my grave and cry. I am not there – I did not die.’

Maeve had finished. She looked across the square to the memorial. Later, Paula would see it on TV, Maeve with her chin raised, her eyes blinking and one strand of hair falling over her face. Two uniformed men pulled the ropes on the black curtain and the shroud fell back from the memorial. It was twelve feet high, a column of glass etched with the names of the dead, so light shone through and they floated, casting shadows over the crowd in the sun. The names seemed to radiate out. It was too far away to read them. The crowd threw up a murmur, then a faint smattering of applause rippled and died, awkward. Jarlath Kenny took the microphone again. He hadn’t changed his expression at all during Maeve’s recital, and Paula wondered how it made him feel, knowing he’d caused equal loss to other families. If he even felt at all.

He cleared his throat. ‘We will now have the laying of wreaths by the families.’ In front of the stage were piles of red roses. A walkway had been made through the crowd, fenced off with metal barriers. John Lenehan was just rising to his feet when there was a shout and sudden movement in the crowd. Something flew through the air – Guy was on his feet before anyone else, she remembered after. It sparkled, it seemed like a jewel in the bright sun, then you realised it was on fire – your body started to move before your mind caught up. More movement at the front of the crowd, confusion, people out of their seats, a child wailing somewhere. Guy was in front of Paula; he’d shielded her, she realised, he’d thrown himself in front of her. Then a metallic glint in the sun and a harsh fizzing sound and someone screaming, because everyone in Northern Ireland knew a bomb when they saw one.

Then officers were jumping on someone in the crowd, pinning them down, and there was a loud, rocking bang that reverberated in your chest and the lectern was on fire and everyone scattering, and Paula turned back to the podium, too weak to run away, reaching out for Guy. Jarlath Kenny had been at the front, mouth open in shock, and had hit the deck seconds before the grenade landed. Behind him Maeve had been standing, rooted to the spot, and the force of it had hit her. She was lying on the ground, red blooming through her white shirt, her face pale. Someone was screaming, high and pure, and Paula couldn’t tear her eyes away from Maeve, as her blood ran out and pooled under her, the same scarlet shade as her trainers.

Aidan and Maeve had been friends a long time, since their first year studying journalism at UCD in Dublin. Paula herself had been stuck in Ballyterrin, finishing her A-levels, and despite the promises they’d made, tearful and Boots-17-lip-gloss smudged, she was gradually noticing Aidan’s texts get fewer and fewer, and that it was a while since she’d had one of the spiralling emails he used to send her detailing the basement computer room with the smell of warm laundry from next door. Saying how much he missed her. That time of year was always hard for her anyway, the chilly nights of October leading up to the day she’d come home and her mother wasn’t there. The feeling that the year was about to run out from under your feet like the end of an alley. Another year over and they hadn’t found her mother. Maybe they never would.

Then Aidan’s emails had stopped altogether, and he didn’t answer his phone though she let it ring for forty goes, and finally there was the email with the black typeface and the sick feeling in her stomach: she knew what was coming.

She’d asked him, in one of the long, angry phone calls he’d allowed her, if it was Maeve. Was it the funny, cool journalism student he’d been mentioning a lot, was that who he’d slept with?

No, he’d said. Weary. It was just some girl. It hadn’t meant anything. And she wasn’t sure if that was better or worse, because he’d thrown her away for someone whose surname he didn’t even know. Paula had staggered through the rest of the year, and then her results had come, a blaze of good A-levels as expected, enough to take her out of Ballyterrin to London, away from the house where she’d been waiting for five years for her mother to come back. That was when she’d realised none of it mattered, nothing was important, and she’d swallowed the contents of PJ’s medicine cabinet, all his painkillers and sleeping tablets, and been rushed to Ballyterrin hospital. Aidan still didn’t know about that. Glandular fever, they’d told everyone. A secret between her and PJ, never to be mentioned.

Now it was thirteen years later and Maeve was the one in the hospital bed, hooked up to tubes and drips. Her face was grey and still. Aidan was at her bedside, holding her limp hand.

‘How is she?’

Aidan didn’t look up. ‘Holding on. That’s what they said. Her ma’s on the way from Dublin.’

‘Is there anything I can do?’

He shook his head. ‘Just have to wait.’

‘Aidan.’ He raised his face and she saw he’d gone. Her stomach fell away. She knew this look – the one he got when it was all too much and all he could think about was being seven years old and hiding under the table at the newspaper offices as masked IRA gunmen shot his father in the head. The one that meant he was already in his mind turning to the bottle, the dark bar, the oblivion at the bottom of the glass.

‘She’ll be OK,’ Paula said. ‘They got her in time—’

‘And you know that, being medically qualified? That’s not the kind of doctor you are.’ He stared at Maeve’s face, the slow mechanical rise of her chest. Her hair was still shining and blow-dried for the occasion, spread out around her. Lying there, she looked tiny.

‘Saoirse said she’d come. She’ll be able to tell you more.’

She wanted to say ‘us’, but this loss was not hers to claim. Maeve was only her friend through Aidan. She had little stake in the chest of that lively, talented beauty continuing to rise and fall.

‘This keeps happening,’ Aidan said quietly. ‘It’s me, I think.’