Bad Things Happen Page 3

  “Anything interesting?” Caitríona yawned and stretched past me towards the coffee-maker to pour herself a cup. “Want a top-up?”

  “Er, no… no, I’m fine,” I said to her back, gathering up the assorted letters, flyers and envelopes and stuffing them in my briefcase. “Nothing interesting, just the usual. I’ll sort them out later in the office. I better jump in the shower, I’m going to be late.”

  How many others around Ireland, I wonder, had frantically hidden that letter from sight that morning? I thought about my father and imagined his reaction to the letter’s arrival. In the months leading up to Aoife’s birth, we had discussed her only briefly and infrequently in stilted conversations. And yet when I told him that we had decided to give her up for adoption, he had been clearly shocked. I don’t know what he had expected, but I think now that he considered my giving her up as a slight on my mother’s memory. She had died to give birth to me, and yet I was prepared to give away my own child lest it should interfere with my life’s plan.

  I knew I had to talk to Caitríona about the letter, but I needed time to prepare my case. All that week, I could think of nothing else. I studied the Adoption Agency website carefully in the quiet moments at work, toggling quickly to a random spreadsheet like some guilty workplace internet surfer if anyone looked like coming into my office. By the time I took the train home that Friday evening, I had planned every last detail of my campaign.

  I could smell her perfume as I opened the door. She was coming down the stairs, and she threw her arms around my neck and kissed me.

  “Hiya,” she said with a broad grin. “Good day?”

  She took my hand and pulled me towards the kitchen.

  “I’m just in,” she went on, oblivious to my silence. “Traffic was a shocker. And now I need a glass of wine. And so do you.”

  She went to the fridge and pulled out an open bottle of rosé. She poured us two glasses and handed me one, raising hers in a toast.

  “What are we drinking to?” I asked.

  “Another week without getting killed or fired. To life’s small mercies.” She raised her glass again and took a mouthful. Her frivolity gave way to concern when she registered my tone. “Are you ok, love? You look worried.”

  I pulled the envelope from the inside pocket of my jacket and handed it to her.

  “This came Monday morning. Lochlann sent it on.”

  She put down her glass, and pulled the contents from the envelope. My legs felt suddenly weak, and I sat down. I watched her face, looking for any clue as to what she was feeling. The face I knew so well, could read so easily, became an unfamiliar mask and gave me none. She finished reading and put the sheaf of papers on the table.

  “Did you ask for this, Aengus?” she asked quietly.

  I shook my head.

  “No. They were sent out to every household in the country, to launch the new database.”

  She nodded.

  “So now what?” she asked.

  I paused, ready to rehearse the lines I had been practising all day. But I fluffed them, and there was no prompter at stage left to help me out.

  “I’d like to register. I’d like to say we are willing to make contact.”

  She looked at me for a moment, then came over to where I was sitting and crouched in front of me. I knew this woman so well, and yet I would never have predicted her response. A furious rejection of my stupid notion, I could have predicted. Even a nodded agreement through tear-filled eyes. Instead, she took my hands and looked at me.

  “Love, we can’t. Not now. She’s just eighteen, her life must be all over the place. She’s doing her Leaving Cert, going to University, crying over boys, fighting with her parents. The last thing she needs is us wading in, with all that emotional baggage. Not now.”

  “But what if she thinks we just don’t care, couldn’t be bothered? What if she wants to contact us, but can’t find us? Don’t we owe it to her to make ourselves available, to at least be there if she needs us?”

  “Not yet. We owe ourselves as well. We had a rough start, but we built a life. A good life. We got through it together, and we’re still here. I don’t want to ever risk that. This isn’t some minor distraction, is it? If we go there, we’d better be ready for everything it brings. And we don’t have a spare minute in the day, our lives are full as it is. We’re knackered half the time, how would we manage everything this would bring?”

  She stood up and leaned over to cup my face in her hands.

  “We had good reasons for doing what we did, and they haven’t changed. We weren’t ready to be parents then, and we’re no more ready now.”

  I realised that she too had been rehearsing, if not for today, then for the inevitable. She retold a confused and desperate part of our lives as though we had had mature and rational discussions, and then arrived at a logical conclusion. Maybe that’s the way her mind made peace with it, but it was eighteen years too late for that conversation. Eighteen years ago, mixed up and naive, I hadn’t known what to do nor what I wanted. I had relied on Caitríona to do the right thing, and my complicity then made me an accessory to the crime. And besides, I knew that everything else she said was true. We had worked hard to construct a life in which we were, to all intents and purposes, happy. Crossing this minefield threatened to blow it all apart.

  The breeze had picked up slightly and gently blew balmy air into my face as I ran, ruffling the feathers of the gulls as they walked along the cliff edge. The train of thoughts that accompanied me as I ran was approaching a station I didn’t want to visit. I didn’t want to go there, but there was no way off the train. In that September my world was, without warning, torn asunder. During a particularly mild week of that Indian summer, two policemen in shirt sleeves came to the office and asked if there was somewhere quiet we could talk. They said that her car had been hit by a truck that veered out of control on a bend in the road. They said she had been killed instantly. They asked if there was someone I wanted them to contact, a friend or relative. They said they were sorry.

  In truth, there was no-one to provide comfort. We had what seemed like legions of workmates and social acquaintances, but our own relationship was such that neither of us had formed or nurtured deep friendships outside the bubble we inhabited. I felt desperately, irredeemably alone. In the days that followed, I understood for perhaps the first time the true nature of despair. It wasn’t that I had no interest in anybody nor in anything, it was that nobody and nothing else existed. I inhabited a place in total and complete isolation. I didn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep. I hallucinated that it had all been a nightmare or a mistake or a plot or a bad joke, and came back to reality with a jolt of real physical pain. I had no sense of future, no sense of what I would do or of how I would live in the weeks and months ahead. The future was an abyss, the edge of which was just beyond now. In truth I don’t know how I negotiated the weeks after I lost her, I don’t know because I simply don’t remember. I think I was given sedatives by a friend who was a doctor, but I don’t know. It’s not that I can’t remember, it’s that I wasn’t there.

  For the year that followed, I thought little of Aoife. It wasn’t that I forgot about her, it was that I simply couldn’t let her into my head. Partly, it was because she reminded me of the days leading up to her birth, in that dingy flat on the south side of Dublin. Those were the days when we were, I think, the closest we have ever been. And partly it was because I would have felt somehow disloyal to Caitríona to think about Aoife and, inevitably, about making contact with her. Caitríona had made clear her feelings, and I wasn’t ready to question them. In that year, I spoke to Caitríona every evening. I told her how my day had been, what I had done, asked her how she was and listened intently to her response.

  I found myself suddenly unable to make decisions, and I realised how much I relied on her advice and her guidance. Things that would have been minor irritations – a row
at work, a problem with the car – were inflated into great dilemmas simply because they were all that there was. A year before, they would have been relegated to the second division of considerations after where to go for dinner and what to do at the weekend. I can’t explain the sense of isolation I felt. Surrounded by people – nice, good people – I was constantly consumed by overwhelming loneliness, bitterness and melancholy.

  The trail had turned inland away from the shore, climbed to the Summit and now descended back into the village. Townsfolk and holiday-makers, perhaps awakened by the heat of the summer sun that belied the early hour, were wandering about. An old man and his wife sat at a table outside a café, each with a frothing coffee mug. They were deep in conversation. Animated, excited gestures reinforced their every point, laughter punctuated the discourse. They touched each other all the time, a hand on the shoulder or arm or thigh. If someone had asked me just two years before how I would grow old, this was the picture I would have drawn. The two of us, just happy to be.

  The most striking difference in life without Caitríona was the expanse of time to be filled. My friends had picked up wives and children and houses in need of endless repairs. I could sense their awkward embarrassment as they declined an evening in the pub, or invited me to come join them for dinner at their home instead. But seeing someone else’s textbook family served only as a cruel reminder of just how totally ours had disintegrated. And so I would thank them and, with a cheery “maybe next time”, hang up the phone. My desperate concoction of social events had nothing to do with trying to enjoy myself – they were designed just to fill the time. In the days before I lost her, I would have filled that time by simply being with Caitríona. Talking, laughing, reading the papers, going for a walk in the hills, having a beer in some quiet pub watching the world go by – happy just to be.

  In time, I felt dislocated, disconnected from the place that had become my home. I was once again an outsider in a city I had known for more than ten years, I didn’t belong. The places we used to frequent were now out of bounds, not just because of the memories they reawakened, but because I had no place there. The coffee shop on Chiswick High Road, that had been our Saturday afternoon home, was now alien to me. The river-side at Richmond, where Sunday morning strolls gently cleared Saturday night hangovers, was a place I barely recognised. I heard eastern European and Asian and African voices in shops and on trains, and I felt like a trespasser in their world. I wondered if these immigrants making a new life here ever learned to feel really at home or if, like the thousands of Irish emigrants who had made journeys to America and Australia and England, they brought their culture with them and carefully nurtured it in foreign soil. Never really belonging.

  If there is a general discontent that pervades our world today, how much is due to our increasing disconnection from it? The endless quest for wealth and adventure rips us from the communities, even the countries, in which we were born, and plants us in alien environments. Yet our sojourns are so often temporary, stopovers on life’s grand journey, and it is this very transience that makes us lose sight of what we stand for. Even for our parents, self-definition used to be such a simple thing. Now, in strange cities and strange lands, we search out new tribes and new, more convenient codes. Old, established communities were built on virtues and mores that evolved over generations, yet now are locked away in storage like the abandoned belongings of many a modern-day Diaspora. Not because we discard them, but because we forget them. Once noble and dignified, community self-regulation has lost its authority. Instead we have to rely on judicial systems designed for another time and ill-equipped for the task.

  I had always thought that belonging was a function of place, where we live our lives. I think now it has as much to do with the people with whom we share those lives. Maybe more.

  This emerging sense that I was living outside the world I used to inhabit was catalytic. I needed to find Aoife. I couldn’t decide what my motivation was. I was wary of committing the greatest treason, as Eliot would have put it, of doing the right deed for the wrong reason. I couldn’t claim that I had spent the preceding eighteen years desperately trying to find my daughter. I had been busy with other things, selfishly pursuing dreams and aspirations and goals. I could not justify what felt like a betrayal of Caitríona for anything less than a whole-hearted belief that it was, firstly, the right deed done, secondly, for the purest of reasons. The decision occupied my every waking moment for weeks.

  I had never really agreed that this was too fragile a period of Aoife’s life to risk encroaching now, but to acknowledge that even sub-consciously felt almost like an insult to Caitríona’s memory. If Aoife wanted nothing to do with me, she was under no obligation. If she did, then I owed it to her. If she wasn’t sure, then she still had time to consider her reaction.

  I couldn’t bear to even think about Caitríona’s other argument, that it risked shattering the life we had built. That life was a distant and impossibly poignant memory. It was a year since I had lost her, and I felt like she was getting away from me. Lots of people missed her. They would phone me or send me emails or approach me awkwardly to say that they still thought of her, and that she still made them smile. But I wanted her to be more than an incidental memory that sat in the sidelines of people’s busy lives. I wanted her to remain always as important to someone as she was to me. I wanted to share her, so that she could never get away from me. And I wanted Aoife to know her, and to be proud of her.

  At the same time, I truly worried what Aoife would think of our failure to break cover, of our failure to make any attempt to find her or at least to make ourselves available. When I thought of her, I had always pictured her young life filled with ponies and picnics and happy families. But losing Caitríona cast clouds over my imaginings, conjured possibilities and circumstances too ugly to bear. What if she needed a friend, what if she had her own traumas to overcome and felt as alone as me? What if she needed me?

  Those were my reasons, and I came at last to the conclusion that joining the register was the right deed. I just hoped that Caitríona would understand.

  The application form was available from the Adoption Agency website, and I was surprised at how straightforward it was. It seemed somehow inappropriate that the initiation of so momentous a process should be so simple, so uncomplicated. I completed the administrative details required. Section four asked what level of contact I wished to have. I ticked “Willing to Meet” without hesitation. I signed the form, attached a photocopy of my passport for identification purposes and sealed the envelope. Dropping it in the post-box, I felt a kind of relief for the first time since Caitríona left me. I took it as a sign of her approval.

  Thereafter, my first task every morning was to log onto my email account to check for progress. For the first couple of weeks, there were regular administrative updates, confirming my ID and Password, clarifying some personal details, confirming that I was registered and that they would be in touch if Aoife registered and agreed to some form of contact. After that first burst of activity, the trail grew cold and I was greeted every morning by an empty inbox. I remained philosophical. After so many years, it would be foolish to expect immediate results. I took comfort from the fact that even if Aoife had registered and ticked the “No Contact” box, the Agency would have notified her of my registration. Unlikely as it was, I was invigorated by the prospect.

  It was maybe a month or six weeks after I had mailed my application form, and I sat in my office with a cup of coffee. As I had done every morning since registering with the Agency, I started my day by opening my personal email and checking for an update. The note from the Adoption Agency was titled simply “Your enquiry”. I put down my coffee and opened the note. I read it once, and again, then again, lest I should in my desire for progress misread or misinterpret it. But it was clear.

  It said that the party with whom I sought contact had registered with the database some fifteen months before. Havi
ng conducted the requisite identification checks and having completed the matching procedure, they were now pleased to confirm the nature of her registration. She had, it appeared, registered as “No Contact but willing to share information”. In the event that a related party registered with the database, she had instructed the Agency to forward a letter to them. It was attached and I clicked on the icon and opened the attachment.

  The attachment was an electronically scanned copy of her letter, and it took my breath away. This was my first hard evidence that she existed in a world outside my head. Here was a letter in her hand-writing – tangible, physical evidence that she communicated with other people, that they could see and hear her, that they reciprocated. Up to now, she had existed only in my realm. Now Aoife existed in the greater world.

  Her letter, though ambiguous, betrayed a sense of curiosity and perhaps a need to start what might be a protracted long-distance courtship. She said she had moved with her parents to Paris as a young child, but that she had spent all of her summer holidays back in Dublin. She had won a place at a school of music to study the violin, her passion in life. In the evenings, she worked as a musician in clubs in Paris, all the while writing music and dreaming of a recording contract. She gave no surname. The words on the screen made me breathless, light-headed. I stared at them for what must have been close to an hour without moving, gruffly waving away anybody who came to my door. Her registration made clear that she was not prepared for contact, but there was not for an instant any doubt that I would go to Paris to find her. I ignored the nagging voices in my head, taunting me that she clearly felt no need of me, that I had no right to go there, that my reasons were redundant. The fact of her registration and her letter betrayed, at the very least, a curiosity. That was enough.