She stopped, drained, finally out of inspiration. A small breeze was cold on her damp cheeks. Her eyes still stung: more tears weren’t far away, wouldn’t need much encouragement to fall. She’d always been quick to cry, regularly bawled her eyes out at the cinema.
There was silence for a few seconds. Another car drove onto the bridge then, but Sarah didn’t turn towards it, made no move to intercept it. She remained standing where she was, her eyes still fixed on the woman’s face, every sense alert to the possibility of any sudden movement – though what she could do in that eventuality was beyond her. Grab on, and maybe get pulled over the railing herself? She imagined the two of them spinning through the air like a pair of circus acrobats, whirling and flailing as they plunged towards the water. The thought was horrifying: she shook her head to dislodge it.
Finally,
the other woman moved. She lifted an arm and brought the sleeve of her sheepskin coat once across her eyes, and Sarah realised she was wiping away silent tears of her own. Then, without looking in Sarah’s direction she turned away abruptly, drawing keys from her coat pocket. Sarah watched as she walked around the Beetle and opened the driver’s door.
‘Are you OK to drive?’ she asked. ‘I can stay a bit longer if you want.’
The woman ignored her. She got into the car and switched on the ignition as she banged the door closed. Sarah stood and watched as the Beetle pulled away too fast, causing the tyres to screech loudly for an instant. She waited until it turned off the bridge and disappeared.
They hadn’t exchanged names. They would probably never lay eyes on one other again. For all Sarah knew, the woman was going to drive to the next bridge and throw herself off it, uninterrupted by a babbling, tearful cyclist. Sarah might read about it in tomorrow’s paper:
Volkswagen Beetle found abandoned by river, fears for driver’s safety.
Had she made a difference? Had anything she’d said struck a chord? She’d never know – but if she read nothing over the next few days, if there was no report of a missing woman on the radio, she’d tell herself that maybe she’d been of some help. She’d let herself believe that she’d saved a life, and hope she was right.
She leant against the railing, trailing the scarf over it and pressing her hands against its cold metal, just as the woman had done. She drew in the dank scent that came up from the river beneath her. Imagine wanting to throw yourself into that freezing water, imagine how desperate you’d have to be, how low you must have fallen to want that.
She pressed her icy palms against her cheeks and eyed the scarf, lying limply there. Should she tie it onto the railings in case the woman came back for it? But that seemed unlikely: the scarf was probably the last thing on her mind right now. Sarah might as well keep it, although she couldn’t imagine ever wanting to wear it, pretty
as it was. Maybe she’d wash it and add it to her next charity shop round-up.
She retraced her steps to where she’d left the bike, her legs unexpectedly shaky. She pushed the scarf into her handbag, beside the envelope of references she’d brought along to the interview. So unimportant it seemed now, whether or not she was offered the cook’s job. She remembered her nervousness as she’d cycled to the nursing home just a couple of hours earlier, not knowing that the real challenge would come on the way home.
As she cycled off, none too steadily, the rain returned in earnest, stabbing into her back, her shoulders, her head. She hardly noticed it.
A
ll the
way back to Dublin she shivered violently, despite the heavy coat and the relative warmth of the car. Driving through the outskirts of the city, wipers slicing away the rain, she noticed that she was almost out of petrol. Dusk was falling, headlights were being switched on in other cars, streetlights were winking into life. Lights appearing all around her, the whole world lighting up, and nothing but darkness inside her, nothing but a black gaping hole where her heart, or her soul, or her entire being, used to be.
She tried not to think, she tried to keep her head empty. She pulled into a petrol station and rubbed her numb hands together for several minutes before getting out. She pumped fuel into the tank she’d deliberately ignored all week, certain that whoever filled it again wouldn’t be her.
A line from a song floated unbidden into in her head, something about learning the truth at seventeen, as she stood by the car, watching the money gauge as it climbed to five pounds. Janis Ian’s dreary, angst-ridden song had come on the radio as she’d fed Alice her breakfast that morning, and now it returned, spinning on its imaginary turntable in her head, spewing out its woebegone lyrics.
It
wasn’t about learning the truth, it was about recognising the lies. Helen had known it all at seventeen: she’d been wild and hungry and impatient to turn the next page of her life and meet head-on whatever and whoever was waiting there. It had taken her almost another seventeen years to understand that happiness never lasted, that good didn’t triumph, that love only laid you bare for the pain that was waiting.
You must have family
, the woman on the bridge had said, butting in where she wasn’t wanted. Forcing Helen to remember Alice, who smelt of wet grass and pepper, who couldn’t sleep without her thumb tucked into her cheek, who screamed if the landing light was turned off, whose chubby little wrists poked from the horrible pastel-coloured cardigans that Helen’s mother insisted on knitting.
Alice, the reason Helen hadn’t been with Cormac at the end, hadn’t held his hand as he’d slipped away. Alice, whom Helen wanted to hate for that but couldn’t, because Alice was part of Cormac. She was all he’d left behind.
But the timing, the cruel timing of the rash that had prompted Alice’s babysitter Anna to phone Helen, the rash that had forced Helen to leave her dying husband’s bedside and attend to Alice, who, it turned out, didn’t have meningitis after all, just an outbreak of psoriasis – and by the time Helen had got back to Cormac, it had been too late.
She felt the rumble of the petrol through the nozzle she held, heard its gush into the tank, smelt its acrid tang. She would have done it. She would have climbed onto the railing. She would have jumped out of this putrid life without a backward glance, without a second’s hesitation, once she’d keyed herself up enough. She would have done it, if it hadn’t been for the interfering woman on the bridge, the crying stranger, with hair the colour of crispbread, in a hideous green trouser suit.
She
pulled the nozzle from the tank and hooked it into its cradle. She screwed the petrol cap back on – and then she slammed both of her palms hard on the roof of the car, causing a man at the next pump to look across, startled. She ignored him, feeling the sting of the blow, doing nothing to lessen the sharp heat of it.
Enough lies: of course she wouldn’t have done it, because she was a fucking coward. The other woman had had nothing to do with it: all she’d given Helen was an excuse to walk away.
She leant against the car and wrapped the sheepskin coat more tightly around her. She closed her eyes and saw herself standing by the railing, looking down at the rushing water. She remembered taking a deep breath and preparing herself to do it – and her body had refused to move, refused to obey her mind’s command.
She’d lit a cigarette and drawn furiously on it, still determined to carry out what she’d come to do. She’d cursed her stubborn, traitorous limbs, willing them to move, but the more she’d thought about it, and pictured herself doing it, the more terrifying the prospect had become.
And out of nowhere she’d heard the soft whirr of bicycle wheels going past. She hadn’t looked around, had kept stock still and waited for whoever it was to disappear again, but then she’d heard the wheeze of brakes being pulled, and a few seconds later the clack of approaching footsteps. Female footsteps.
The best of it was, the
killer
was, the woman probably thought she’d saved Helen’s life. She’d probably congratulated herself all the way home because she’d rescued someone who was about to jump off a bridge. She’d never know the truth, never know that Helen had already been saved – or damned – by lack of courage.
And her beautiful scarf was gone. Serve her right, too proud to take it back from the woman she’d told to keep it. The ridiculously expensive scarf Cormac had bought her for their first anniversary was gone to a stranger. One more layer to press onto the slab of her grief.
In
the small shop beside the petrol station she bought two atrociously priced bananas and a bag of jelly babies. She ate the bananas driving through the wet streets to her parents’ house. She slicked on more lipstick as she sat in the parked car outside their wrought-iron gates, listening to the engine ticking itself to sleep.
She wouldn’t try it again, she knew that. She’d gone to the edge and pulled herself back, and now there was no edge any more. She couldn’t do it: the will required for such an act wasn’t in her. The knowledge brought no relief, made her no happier; on the contrary, she now had the added torment of the realisation that there was no escape.
She wondered suddenly if Alice could possibly have been the reason for her failure today. Maybe, despite her conflicted feelings about her daughter, there was some unacknowledged umbilical connection to Alice that had prevented Helen from climbing onto the railing and letting go. It sure as hell hadn’t been the thought of never seeing her parents again.
She pulled the key from the ignition – forget it, it was over now – and got out, wrapping Cormac’s coat tighter around her as she hurried through the petering-off rain up the driveway.
‘What kept you?’ her mother said, opening the door. ‘You said you’d be back by five. We had to put Alice to bed.’
‘I ran out of petrol,’ Helen replied, walking around her into the hall, continuing past the giant walnut hallstand, past the marble-topped side table, home to an elegant white telephone and the key to her father’s Rolls-Royce, which sat as always on top of his leather driving gloves.
‘Really,’ her mother said, a hand to the string of small, perfect pearls around her neck, ‘I have to say that coat looks ridiculous on you.’
Helen began to climb the stairs. ‘Is she in my room?’
‘Helen, she’s
asleep
, you can’t wake her. You can’t take her out in the cold – it’s not fair to the child.’
It wasn’t fair to the child that she had to grow up without a father. It wasn’t fair that the child’s mother wondered, every now and again, what it would be like to smother her with a pillow. ‘She’ll be fine, she’ll go back to sleep in the car. And I have jelly babies if she doesn’t.’
Her
mother’s exasperated sigh, which she knew intimately, followed her all the way up the stairs, but there was no further argument. The only good thing, if you could call it that, about your husband dying, about being widowed at thirty-two, was that people were forced to make allowances for you – for a while anyway.
She pushed open the door of her old bedroom and walked across the thick wool carpet towards the little hump of her sleeping daughter. Alice lay on her back, her face turned slightly in the direction of the window at which Helen had often stood as a teenager, blowing out the smoke of her illicit cigarettes.
She reached for the small black-patent buckled shoes set neatly by the bed before scooping Alice and the blanket that covered her into her arms. Alice made a sleepy, protesting sound which Helen ignored as she hefted her onto her shoulder and left the room.
Her father stood at the bottom of the stairs, arms outstretched. ‘I’ll take her.’ There was no sign of her mother – sulking, no doubt, in the sitting room.
Helen surrendered her load, grateful that he wasn’t putting up a fresh argument, and led the way to the car. Alice was manoeuvred onto the back seat and the blanket wrapped around her. Helen’s father closed the passenger door softly and walked around to the driver’s side.
‘Have you thought at all about what you want to do?’ he asked, his hand on the door to prevent it closing, and Helen guessed that he’d been instructed to bring it up. Three fucking weeks, that was all they’d given her to mourn.
She looked at him. ‘Do?’
He had the grace to look discomfited. ‘About a job, I mean. How you’re going to support Alice.’
‘Not yet,’ she said steadily. ‘I’ve been a bit preoccupied.’
He
put his free hand up, warding her off. She imagined him sitting on the bench in his wig and gown, cutting short barristers and criminals alike with just such a gesture. ‘I’m not saying you have to decide right away,’ he said. ‘It’s just … your mother and I want to help any way we can, you know that.’
‘Yes.’
‘We’d look after Alice, we’d be happy to, if you wanted to look for work. We’d love to see more of her.’
‘I know.’
‘Or if it was a question of money, if you wanted to study for—’
‘No. Look, I have to get Alice to bed.’ She turned the key, forcing him to release the door. ‘I’ll give you a ring,’ she said, pulling it closed and driving off without looking at him again. She got to the end of the road and turned left, shoving her hair angrily away from her face. Three fucking weeks.
From the back seat came a whimper. Helen said, ‘Ssh,’ and kept on driving. The trouble was, she
did
need money, or she soon would. Cormac had been useless with it, living from one engagement to the next, he and the lads doing the same dancehall circuit as The Clipper Carltons and The Dixies and all the other showbands, with no thought for the future – and Helen hadn’t been much better. One week they’d be drinking whiskey and eating fillet steak, the next they’d be pulling the sofa apart to find enough change for a pint of milk. There had been no life insurance, no talk of savings.
Alice’s arrival had prompted them to become somewhat more responsible, and for a while they’d budgeted for more balanced spending periods. Fillet steak was replaced with pork chops and chicken, and there was generally enough milk in the fridge. Cormac even opened a savings account in Alice’s name, and arranged for small monthly payments to be made into it. They still had their moments, of course, when a larger than usual cheque arrived, or when the band was booked to play the Hibernian Ballroom every Thursday night over the summer – although they realised fairly quickly that hangovers and small babies were pretty much incompatible.