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 matchmaker, 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 them 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 who 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 onto 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’d 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 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
