‘Still, he sounds promising!’ I tell her, trying to encourage her a little. She deserves some love in her life at last. Gone are the days when she’d wait and pray for my sister Maureen’s dad to come out of the pub for long enough to financially support her, or for my own father a few years later to do the same.
She looks like a different person these days than the woman I used to visit in prison ten years ago. She is rounder, fresher in the face, and she appears a lot younger than her fifty-two years. I feel sorry for her still, but only in the sense that she wasted so many months in a place she should never have been, serving time for a crime for which she had been entirely framed by those who still know the truth to this day. People like Sean McGee and his tribe, who continue their campaign in an underworld I’m glad to be away from. But my mother’s time in prison has made her stronger, steelier and more admirable, as she has battled against prejudice and judgement from a lot of people who know nothing of her story and couldn’t be bothered to take the time to listen to the truth. She is my mother and I will always love her and defend her deeply.
‘Nana’s mad in the head about the lovely Liam, Kate,’ chirps Shannon. ‘He phones her over the weekend, but it’s purely platonic of course! Just good friends, you know?’
‘Sounds like it,’ I say with a wink. I check the time. It’s almost time to go. ‘Where’s Mo?’
‘Doing her hair upstairs, or should I say,tryingto do her hair upstairs,’ says Shannon, rolling her eyes in a way only a teenage girl can. ‘She has no clue. Please go and help her, Kate. She won’t let me anywhere near her mop of curls and says I’m obsessed with hair straighteners, which may be actually true.’
Going by Shannon’s poker-straight long blonde hair and heavy side fringe, I can see my sister definitely has a point. Shannon’s eye make-up is heavy too and she still wears braces on her teeth, but to me she will always radiate beauty and survival and her school grades are on the up, telling us that she has a very bright future.
‘I can’t believe I’m the mother of a sixteen-year-old!’ Mo says when I come to her beauty regime rescue. ‘How on earth did that happen, Kate? And how come she’s so bloody sensible, not that I’m complaining. I was pregnant when I was her age! I sometimes think she’s more like you than she is me. In fact, I don’t think it. I know it, thank goodness.’
We need to get going, so I quickly fix Mo’s curls so that they frame her pretty face, say goodbye to Mum who has opted to stay at home and prepare the birthday dinner rather than face the crowds and no doubt the cameras that will be at today’s memorial, and we walk the short route into town together, where it’s predicted that thousands will travel to pay their respects on this ten-year anniversary.
‘Do you think we’ll ever see him again?’ Shannon asks me as we join the expanding crowd of people, gathered around a purpose-built stage in the town centre, where a specially commissioned sculpture is set to be revealed. Dignitaries from all over Ireland and afar, representing most walks of life, can be spotted in the distance as TV cameras and press photographers scramble for their reaction.
I don’t need to ask Shannon who she is talking about. I already know of course. She’s talking about the ‘ice-cream shop boy’.
‘I’d love to see him again, darling, but I don’t think we’ll see him today, even if he is here, not in these crowds anyhow,’ I reply, scrunching my nose up as I scan the masses of people. ‘I hope wherever he is that he’s happy and well.’
‘I do too,’ she says, clutching my hand, and then taking her mother’s with the other. ‘I’ll never forget him.’
There’s a weight in my stomach at the enormity of standing here again, and when the speeches begin in memoriam to those who lost their lives and to the many, many victims who were injured, I can’t help but sob from my very core as memories come flooding back, making me weak and feeling like I’m 20 years old again and not the confident, city-living 30-year-old who deals with trauma on so many levels in my job on any given day.
‘Oh, David,’ I find myself whispering, and I can feel Shannon’s eyes on me as the crowds close in. His face is inmy mind when I close my eyes, and his face is on every person who stands around me when I open them.
I know that I long to see him again more than I ever realized. I don’t know why I want to, but I just do.
I have such a strong feeling he is here somewhere, and I wonder if he could possibly feel the same as I do.
For some reason, I think he might.
DAVID
‘How’re you feeling? Remember what we said when we decided to come here. We can leave at any time you feel like it. You don’t have to stay.’
Lesley’s singsong voice lilts in my ear as I stare at the ground, doing my best not to let this all totally overwhelm me.
I’ve asked her so many times not to fuss, but every time I look her way she is staring at me as if she could possibly help me at all right now. She could never fully help me. No matter how empathetic she might be, she wasn’t there to witness what I did that day.
There are so many people, and those who speak and address us up on the platform could be reciting nursery rhymes for all I can tell. I can barely look up in their direction, never mind absorb what it is they have to say.
Shiny new shop fronts whose names I don’t recognizeline the streets in front and behind me from where we stand. Newly laid cobbled pavements lie under my feet. Everything is in full working order again here, but the mood is different and of course it will never be the same again. It’s not the place I know any more. Nothing is the same.
The corner shop where Aaron and I spent carefree days working and joking together was never rebuilt as it once was, and a shoe shop now operates from beneath brand-new walls on the same site. My stomach leaps when I think of him, but I’m not ready to show it here. I’ll do that in my own time. I don’t want to break down today.
‘I’m OK so far, Les, thank you,’ I whisper to my fiancée, knowing she means well by checking. She glances around to look at me, but I know if I catch her eye at all, I’ll go to pieces. I have never reacted well to people feeling sorry for me. Maybe it’s because I had always been used to my father’s tough love, but the very moment someone sympathizes or tries to understand how I feel deep inside about what happened, I tense up and walk away. I can feel it happening now. It’s not Lesley’s fault. It’s no one’s fault. She means well but if she asks me if I’m OK again I might have to leave her and be alone to compose myself.
The growing crowd is becoming very claustrophobic and the stupidly unnecessary shirt and tie I wear is choking me. I wish I’d dressed down a bit. I don’t see anyone I know or recognize, but I try to cop on and stop feeling sorry for myself by realizing that amongst these masses of people arehundreds who have their own version, their own suffering, their own trauma to deal with day in and day out of their lives. It’s not just me who feels like this, and the thought of that alone, although comforting in a way, is also very hard to absorb. We are all victims – we are all someone’s father, mother, son, daughter, husband, wife, sister, brother, cousin or friend. Everyone remembers their own side of the story. Everyone remembers exactly where they were in town or at least where they were further afield when they heard the news.
‘I’ll never forget when the phone rang that day,’ I hear a lady say beside me to her friend. ‘My blood ran cold. I just knew it was bad, but no one thought it would bethatbad.’
Everywhere around me shares different versions of the same story.
Most people stayed here in town afterwards and picked up their lives as best they could over the years. Some, like me, chose to run away and start all over again, hoping the nightmare would stay put, but the horror followed me of course. I’ve learned over time how there is simply no way of escaping your own mind and memories. You can run from them, but you can’t hide, no matter how far away you try to go.
‘Here, have a sip of this,’ whispers Lesley again, handing me an open bottle of water. I wipe beads of sweat from my brow with a handkerchief. ‘You look like you might need it.’
