Bad Things Happen Read online

  Bad Things

  Happen

  TIM BUCKLEY

  Copyright © 2019 Tim Buckley

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Front cover photograph by Mark Buckley

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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  ISBN 9781789019216

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Matador® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  For my angel.

  And for ours.

  Special thanks to Mark for the cover and for everything else.

  And thanks to Johny “Midnight” Reid for the crash course!

  Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 1

  There are days and moments that become the landmarks by which we navigate the brief histories of our lives. They are the time-stamps by reference to which every event, no matter how significant, is marked before or after. That day was to become my Pharos, the beacon whose beam would forever illuminate my memories and reminiscences. Sometimes, those days creep up on us, unexpected, unbidden. But on a bright late-summer morning, staring out over a calm sea from high on the cliff-top, I had a sense that everything was about to change. And so it would. But in all of the daydreams that I’d choreographed of that day, I could never have imagined how the scenes would play out.

  I had arrived in Dublin the afternoon before. Looking down from the plane, in the clarity of mature summer, I could see all the way up the coast to the Mourne Mountains. I hadn’t been back for almost five years, but the sight of the fields and the housing estates and the roads of County Dublin stirred in me a nostalgic sense of home. It was the same every time I had come back from London – the absurd niggling disappointment that amid the bustle of traffic and the chaos of school playing fields, maybe the place hadn’t missed me nor even noticed I was gone.

  The taxi had dropped me in Howth, a small fishing village on the coast just north of the city. The soundtrack to the twenty minute drive from the airport was the driver’s dogmatic diatribe on the ills facing the country and his bitter assurances that I was better off out of it. I was glad to escape. I wandered over to the harbour wall, bag slung over my shoulder, and looked out to sea. To my left, fishing boats were preparing for a night shift trawling for whiting and pollack and mackerel. Beyond the winking lighthouse at the harbour entrance, the swarms of gulls, razorbills, gannets and guillemots swooped and screeched around the rocks on Ireland’s Eye.

  This was the village in which I was born and in which I spent my childhood. And yet, after nearly twenty years away, I was checking into a small hotel on the harbour front. I had thought about calling my father, telling him I was home, asking him if perhaps I could come and stay. But I hadn’t really spoken to him for, I don’t know, almost a year? And so I hadn’t had the nerve to make the call. It had always been so, ever since I could remember. My mother had died giving birth to me, her first child. I had come early, with scant warning, and there had been no time to get her to the hospital. An awkward and harrowing birth begat an awkward and often harrowing child, and the effort had been too much for her.

  She had been my father’s soulmate and muse, and there was never any doubt in my young mind that, given the choice, he would have sacrificed me to save her. Not that he was ever unkind or cruel. He provided for me in a way that was the envy of my friends. But there was no bond between us, and I think that I presented him every day with a reminder of what he had lost.

  My father was born to a wealthy Dublin family, and his inheritance had allowed him to pursue a life in the arts. A painter of no little ability, he was hailed as one of Ireland’s greatest living artists and feted among Dublin’s art cognoscenti. His obligations to and place among Dublin’s social elite meant that I spent my evenings at home with nanny after nanny, each of whom in turn would be hired only to leave soon after, driven away by my father’s austerity and the loneliness of life in the big house with only a small boy for company. As soon as I reached the age of twelve, I was enrolled in a boarding school miles away. For both of us, I think, this was a chance to start again.

  I know he blamed me for her death. Maybe he would never admit it, but he did. And all through my life I was a source of disappointment to him. Try as I might, I could never bring him pride or joy. And I tried. I painted and studied and played music and football, but nothing was worthy of more than a cursory “Good boy, well done”. Nothing I did merited the bear-hug, or the whoop of pride of the other fathers. We never went to the ice cream shop after school to celebrate a passed piano exam or a gold star. We never sat over dinner recounting tales of some epic footballing victory over St Jarlath’s or St Joseph’s. And yet I idolised him and craved his esteem, his acceptance even. But my efforts served only to prove to him that I was as self-centred and careless of others as I had been the day I was born.

  I went to bed early in the small room on the hotel’s top floor, but slept only fitfully. I finally surrendered to the demon insomnia and got up as the sun rose early over the nose of Howth. I pulled on my running shoes and kit and made my way through the deserted lobby to the front door.

  Running gives me time to think, to disentangle the problems that vex me. When I run, there are no distractions, no interruptions. The metre of my footfall somehow provides a rhythm for my ponderings. The curved peak of my running cap creates a tunnel that bounds my vision and focuses my thoughts. Through the dark days after Caitríona, it became a sanctuary to escape both the reality of her loss and the well-meaning but cloying sympathy of my friends. In those days, I needed clear space in which to make some sense of what had happened, to somehow make a plan for the future.

  The early morning air was heavy with the smell of fish and diesel as I turned away from the pier and its winking lighthouse
, and headed for the dirt track that quickly climbed to the crest of the high cliffs. To my left and below, the sea lapped at the rocks and fizzed gently with each receding wave. At the cliff edge, there was a new billboard set in an ornate wooden frame. I stopped as I came to it and paused my stopwatch. Set into the frame was a map of the coastline below showing the whereabouts of the wrecks of ships that had come to grief on its rocks. It showed some ten or fifteen wrecks, where each was bound, and a shivering estimate of the number of lives lost with each one. The Leinster, the Queen Victoria, the Prince – looking out to sea that morning, it was hard to imagine it so wrathful and violent as to claim even one ship, but below the glistening surface lay the victims of its latent power or of the German U-boats that patrolled the coastline during two world wars.

  There might be, I suppose, in some parallel dimension, a chart that records the lives that have come to grief on the jagged rocks or beneath the howling gales of fortune. Our names, perhaps, appear beside the picture of the wreckage, surrounded by the flotsam of lost ambitions, the jetsam of vanished dreams. Was some traveller at that very moment perusing a billboard and shaking his head, saying to his companion “Ah, the Aengus, what a tragedy that was, what a waste...”?

  I shook myself free of the place to where my mind was wandering, restarted my watch and set off again. Caitríona couldn’t bear the whining of the self-proclaimed hard-done-by, and I fight to stop myself sliding into the same trap. It seems to me that those who feel most sorry for themselves are often the very ones with most for which to be thankful. It is, perhaps, their being accustomed to good fortune, spoiled by it, that makes them more vulnerable to misfortune. I never wanted to yield to that weakness lest I should fail Caitríona or, if ever we should meet, appear weak to Aoife.

  The path wound its way down from the cliff-tops toward the Baily lighthouse. The morning sun was taking the faint chill out of the air. My pace had quickened in my idle musing until I had to stop, out of breath and sweating hard. I stood bent over, hands on knees. A lady taking her dog for its morning stroll was coming toward me. The little terrier ran up enthusiastically and sniffed at my ankles curiously, and the lady slowed as she tried to decide if I was in need of some help. I rubbed the little dog’s head.

  “I’m grand, thanks,” I said to her, panting like the terrier, “thank you.”

  She smiled sympathetically and walked on. I sat down on the soft grass and looked again out to sea. Aoife’s birthday was a little over a month away. It was twenty years since I stood in the maternity hospital as a startled eighteen year-old, wondering how I had ended up there and what the future could possibly have in store for a fool who had thrown it all away.

  I had met Caitríona shortly after leaving school to start university in Dublin. She shared a house with one of my class-mates and three other lads – one of whom was her brother – all hailing as they did from the same town in County Wexford. I had met up with them in a pub in the heart of Dublin’s student flatland. Surrounded by the sound of excited country accents, we talked about life in Dublin and the price of a pint, and we debated the controversial issue of the day – the provision of information on where and how to obtain an abortion, a question that deeply divided the student community at the time. A third year Law student, she was almost three years older and a lifetime more sophisticated than me. Her opposition to abortion and to the distribution of information that might encourage it and undermine the life of the unborn child was total, violent. One of our group was a Students Union representative from the Agriculture faculty, and his ill-advised assertion that the Union had not only a right but an obligation to provide such information to its members precipitated a tirade of such vitriolic incredulity that he silently finished his stout, picked up his satchel and mumbled away from the table. I was enraptured.

  In the days that followed, I could think of little else. I suppose the awe in which I beheld my new-found liberty in the city and the university gave me an innocent verve and an eagerness that was in some way attractive. To my bewilderment, it appeared that Caitríona thought so, and where others in her position might, for the sake of her own credibility, have sought to hide a romance with a younger student, Caitríona almost flaunted it as a symbol of her scant regard for convention. I was caught in a whirlwind that provided an education of which Cardinal Newman might not have wholly approved, but one that accelerated my journey from boyhood to manhood. And as I grew in maturity and experience, so our relationship burgeoned and became one in which I was an equal partner. We spent our time engaged in student politics, in raucous socialising and in furious, passionate lovemaking. It was an idyll that hit a sudden and insuperable impasse sometime after Christmas.

  Caitríona had been feeling unwell for a couple of weeks, a condition she dismissed as the result of some particularly heavy drinking over the Christmas break. It was only when she missed a second period that she became really worried and agreed to go to the doctor. The change that the dawning realisation cast on her was immediate and dramatic. The explosive extrovert that had so captivated me three or four months before withdrew from life and into herself. On the morning of her appointment with the local GP, she seemed to me so much smaller and younger, a meek and timid shadow of herself. In hindsight, we knew the answer long before we came out of the doctor’s surgery. We walked in shell-shocked silence along the canal, and sat down on a bench. The early spring chill made sure that we were alone, and we huddled together for warmth and solace in silence. We stared into each other’s eyes, searching for an answer that neither of us could find.

  In the couple of months that followed, we lived in a daze. We told nobody, spent long evenings alone together trying to figure out the right thing to do. Intense though the early days of our relationship had been, we had never strayed into discussions about the future. The thought of Caitríona as a mother, or of us as parents, had seemed as far away as senility and death. Yet now that I was faced with an irrefutable reality, I was forced to confront those thoughts. And when I did, I had to admit that in this intensely ethical, wildly courageous student was the germ of a passionate, devoted mother. I started to reconcile myself with a view of the future that would have seemed as alien as a television soap opera only weeks before. I painted in my head romanticised pictures of us as happy parents, successful young professionals and tireless socialites, and somehow I reconciled these three into one achievable persona.

  Caitríona plucked me violently from this naïve reverie. She had, in the weeks that followed the positive pregnancy test, regained a great degree of her hitherto feisty demeanour. She dealt with the uncertainty and the fear with a heightened abrasiveness and an even greater disdain for the views of those with whom she disagreed. Even her closest friends were beginning to avoid her. As her final end of year exams approached, she used this increasing isolation as an excuse to study even harder than usual. She was neurotically obsessed with not throwing away what she had worked so hard to achieve. Then I made an offhand remark about how we would manage no matter what happened, and the dam burst.

  “What did you say?” she demanded, putting her cup of tea down on the table.

  “You know,” I said, putting my arm around her shoulder to draw her closer. “We can get through anything. Even if we have to put our plans on hold for a few years, we’ll still be fine. Who knows, we might even make a good family!”

  She stared at me as though I had suggested termination, and the coldness of her glare froze the smile on my face.

  “Are you really that stupid?” she whispered slowly, almost spitting out the words. She pulled away from me, and buried her face in her hands. “Jesus, how could I have let this happen? What possessed me?”

  She stood up, and stared down at me. From a whisper she moved to a menacing growl to a furious scream.

  “We have nothing. No money. No qualifications. No jobs. D’ya think my parents are going to be standing beside us, shoulder to shoulder? I can just see my mother
rubbing my bump, can’t you? She’ll be so excited.”

  She was incandescent with rage and I worried that she might make herself unwell. I stood up and reached out to sit her down. She slapped my hand away.

  “Get your feckin’ hands off me,” she screamed. “Do you not understand what’s happening here? Can’t you see? Are you that blind?”

  “Caitríona, calm down, please,” I appealed to her, partly for her own good, partly to stem the words that were stabbing like knives. She had never spoken to me like that before, and I suddenly realised that in a few short months she had become the very point of my life. I couldn’t lose her, couldn’t imagine a life without her. And yet my hero was filled with contempt for me.

  She relented a fraction.

  “I should have realised that you just don’t have a clue,” she said, her hand to her forehead. “I should have seen it. Jesus Christ, do you have any idea just how screwed we are? I’ve ground out the last three years to try and get this degree, to try and give myself a chance. I’m no legal genius, Aengus, I’ve had to scrap for everything and it’s been hard. But it’s all I’ve ever wanted, you know? I want be able to stand up for people who can’t fight for themselves, and if I don’t get through my finals, then I’ll never be able to do that.”

  She shook her head.

  “And now even if I do get through these exams, it’ll take some CV to convince a law firm to take me on. Me and a baby. Do you see yet? Everything I’ve dreamed of is over, before it even started.”

  She sat – more fell – down into the armchair.

  “We can’t keep this child. I just can’t play Mammy.”

  And so the decision was made. I don’t know if I agreed or disagreed, but I knew what she said was probably right and I had no alternatives to propose. We got through the rest of term, and Caitríona sat her exams with her condition less and less concealed beneath the billowing clothes she had taken to wearing. After her last exam, she was secreted away in her Wexford home, like a Provo taken to a safehouse. I was, unsurprisingly, persona non grata in her parents’ house, and Caitríona was reluctant to come to my father’s house. So we saw each other only infrequently during the summer. The separation was like torture.