‘Please do,’ he mouths to me before his head sweeps backwards and his once white T-shirt, so bloodied, charred and torn, is the last thing I see before my own world goes pitch black.
It is over.
This whole living nightmare of today is over for us.
At least, it is for now.
2008
Ten Years Later
4.
KATE
Ifix my silver hoop earring in the bathroom mirror of my Dublin apartment and Sam, fresh from the shower, slips his arms around my waist, kisses the skin on my neck and sends a shiver right through me. I savour how he snuggles into me, making me feel like the luckiest girl in the whole world.
Next Wednesday, it’s going to be three years to the day since we first met. Sam McGarry, a news journalist with exotic Mediterranean looks, caught my eye in the hospital canteen one sunny August afternoon when he was in with us to cover a story on how the looming recession was affecting the health service, and once our eyes locked, the rest was history.
He asked a few questions, like every good journalist does, sent me flowers a few days later, invited me for dinner, and it’s been happily ever after since then.
His nonstop inquisitive nature keeps me on my toes andmakes me marvel at his vast knowledge of everything from current affairs to pop culture, and maybe I’m barking up the wrong tree, but I’ve a secret funny feeling by his unusually quiet behaviour lately that he may be planning something very special for next week – I wouldn’t dare say it aloud to anyone, but I think he might be planning a proposal.
‘Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you today?’ he asks, catching my eye over my shoulder in the mirror. ‘I could cancel the meeting, even at short notice. I don’t mind. Honestly.’
His caring side also never ceases to amaze me.
‘I’m sure,’ I tell him, turning to face him. I run my finger down the side of his face and then lean in to kiss him goodbye. He smells manly, fresh and clean, and I’m tempted to change my mind and stay here in the safety of my cocoon with him, one hundred miles from home in a city where hardly anyone knows my history and connection to the memorial service today. ‘I’ll have our Maureen and Shannon by my side – but thank you. It means a lot you’d do that for me.’
My train leaves from Dublin’s Connolly Station in about forty minutes, and I can walk there in fifteen from my apartment, so I’d better get going. Today is a day I’ve been contemplating for a long time but deep down I know I need to do this. I’m looking at it as another layer of armour, another milestone, another element of closure for the horrorof that day that sometimes seems so long ago, but at other times feels as if it happened only yesterday.
Almost an hour later I sit on the train, thankful for the empty seat across from me so I can while away the time on the two-hour journey north alone and prepare myself for the emotions that today’s short event will bring. It’s important that I go. I know it is on so many levels. I need to show solidarity for the people of my home town and, most of all, I need to acknowledge how far I’ve come since the day that almost ruined my life.
I say almost because I refuse to give it that power.
‘Name your trauma,’ I was told in one of my numerous counselling sessions over the past decade. ‘Give it your own name so you can visualize it as a thing and rise above it. Never, ever give it the power to destroy you.’
And so, I named it ‘Terror’. It’s the best word I can come up with to describe what we all went through on that horrific Saturday afternoon in the worst massacre in our country’s modern history. Terror.
As the train rattles along the coastline out of the city, I close my eyes and reflect on all that has happened since. A year out of university to recover physically after my leg was smashed from knee to ankle; my mother’s early and welcome release from prison, which was like someone wrapping a blanket of comfort around my broken heart and fragile mind; my eventual graduation as a nurse, which made the local newspapers as a good news story linked to such anatrocity, and a move to Dublin to work in a hospital where I’ve met so many good friends and, of course, Sam.
‘I’m thinking of you, gorgeous. Stay strong,’ he texts me, which makes me smile as I lean my head against the window on the train. My overnight bag, which sits at my feet, contains a birthday card and a phoenix necklace gift for Shannon, who turns sixteen today. My sweet, brave, beautiful niece who has risen from the ashes in so many ways, turning her pain into art as she paints her way towards becoming, I’ve no doubt, a much-sought-after artist when her grammar-school education finishes.
And as I make this journey home to see them all, I wonder – as I so often do – whatever became of the boy in the white T-shirt, David Campbell, or the ‘ice-cream shop boy’ as Shannon has so fondly referred to him since. I picture his face in the shop that day, blushing when I caught him staring my way and then the look of fear that engulfed him only minutes later as we sat together in that bloodied doorway, soothing our desperate, terrified minds as best we both could.
I did try to look for him afterwards, of course. In fact, as soon as my leg had healed properly, and as soon as I was mentally prepared to look him up, I went to his house, which I easily found out was five miles out of town, but the response I got that day almost destroyed me all over again. Nothing could have prepared me for it.
‘So, you’re the famous Kate?’ his father, who introducedhimself as Reverend Campbell, had said when he greeted me at the huge shiny red door of the magnificent manor.
The driveway to their family home was a breathtaking, winding lane of pale pink gravel, framed to the sides with neat flowerbeds filled with delicate white roses and neatly trimmed miniature hedges. The house itself was jaw dropping and ivy clad, overlooking acres of land, and I could see a tennis court in the background, tucked behind a separate cute yellow rose garden with a water feature at its centre.
Reverend Campbell was a smaller man than I had expected him to be, given David’s tall and strong stature. I’d known of him to be controversial yet well respected, and although my mother sniffed when she heard of my enigmatic ‘friend’ David’s connection to him, she knew her own personal opinion would never stop me from trying to track David down as I’d promised to. Reverend Campbell wore dark rimmed glasses that sat so close to the end of his nose they might fall off, and he immediately invited me into a large parlour and sat me down, explaining that David had gone to stay with a friend in Scotland for a few days. He had to do that quite often. He had to get away from it all.
‘I’d really like to chat to him again, just to – you know – talk things through,’ I explained, feeling my breathing go shallow as old familiar emotions crept up on me. ‘It’s hard to describe to anyone who wasn’t there at the time, I suppose, but we shared a very frightening moment and he reallyhelped me and my niece, so I’d like to thank him properly in person. And to see if he’s OK of course.’
He paused, took a deep breath and then sternly locked eyes with me.
‘David doesn’t talk much about what happened,’ he replied. ‘I don’t push him to.’
