A police officer took me by the arm and forced me away from my pile of rubble. ‘It’s deadly, love. The buildings are unstable and you could get injured yourself.’
I heard afterwards that the local hospitals were a hub of confusion, relatives running in and out of wards, shouting names of missing wives, husbands, sons and daughters, praying that they were lying injured on a hospital bed rather than in the makeshift morgue at the army base. Someone offered me a lift but there was no point: Josh wasn’t at the hospital. I didn’t have the consolation of hope that he might have gone into a shop on a whim, or dawdled too long talking to a friend. I knew exactly where he’d been standing when the bomb went off, and now he was gone.
An ambulance officer told me that the sports complex had been appointed a meeting place and I went there instead. When I got there, I used the public phone to call Josh’s parents but they weren’t at home. I tried my own parents, only to find the same. Mobile phones had not yet hit the mainstream, and chaos reigned as survivors were unable to quickly reassure worried relatives that they were safe and those with bad news, like me, were unable to pass it on.
I don’t know how long I was at the sports complex. I sank to the ground, the wall hard against my back, and hugged my knees. I tuned out the howls of grief and anger and disbelief. My own screams had died inside me and I was left with a sense of being outside my body, looking on at myself with a sense of detachment.
Once, when I looked up, I saw Mandy, her face blotched from crying. She told me that her older sister, Fiona, was missing. I hugged her and tried to find words of comfort but at the same time I couldn’t fathom that her sister could be missing, possibly dead, that Mandy’s large irreverent family could be damaged in such a way. Fiona was even bubblier than her siblings, her hair highlighted an unnatural blonde, her fingernails polished in dazzling colours, her voice perky as she chatted to customers at the supermarket checkout where she worked. Fiona couldn’t be missing. She was too loud and too vibrant to be overlooked.
Carly was at the sports complex, too, waiting to hear news of her aunt and cousin. She was pale – even her mouth looked white – and her mother and father and uncle, who stood to the side, were like ghosts hovering in the shadows.
Both Mandy and Carly asked why I was there, who was missing, but I couldn’t answer, couldn’t say the words. In scared voices they suggested names until I nodded. ‘Oh, Caitlin. Oh, Caitlin.’
Finally Mum and Dad arrived, scanning the room frantically before finding me alone on the ground. Mandy’s family had been called into a private room and we all knew by now that you were only called into that room when the news was bad. Carly had drifted back to her family, each paler than the other but still hoping against all odds that a thirty-five-year-old woman and her ten-year-old son had not been among the fatalities.
Mum and Dad rushed to where I was slumped, their eyes widening at the soot caked on my skin and clothes, then looking into my face and finding an answer they couldn’t bear to hear.
‘No.’ Mum shook her head.
‘How can you be sure?’ My father, always checking the facts.
‘He … he was … standing right there,’ I managed, but couldn’t continue.
Dad got down on the floor beside me, on his knees. He crushed me to him, his torso shaking against my face. He was crying.
Shocked at this, I began to cry too, tears gushing and streaking soot onto his white cotton shirt. I was vaguely aware that we were making a spectacle and at any moment I expected him to pull away, to suggest we both compose ourselves until we were somewhere more private. But he didn’t. He stayed with me, cried with me, until my eyes were empty and dry. When I finally pulled back from his embrace and got to my feet, he put one arm around my waist and one around Mum’s, and we left the sports complex united in our grief.
Aesthetically, the funerals looked the same. Black jackets, white faces, grey skies, the sombre tones of priests and reverends, the sobbing bowed heads of the bereaved. So many funerals to go to: Fiona, Mandy’s sister; the man who lived in the estate next to ours; a girl I knew vaguely from school; and a joint service for Carly’s aunt and cousin. They blurred together, the funerals, and the most appalling thing was that by the end I could hardly distinguish Josh’s from the rest. Black, white, grey. Black, white, grey. Mum went to the ones she could muster enough strength to endure, but Dad was there for all of them, by my side, his arm holding me up, and I was thankful because at that time I wasn’t sure I could ever hold myself upright again.
Two months later, there was a meeting in town for the families of the victims; I went with Mum and Dad and Maeve. It was chaotic, people talking over each other, angry, grief-stricken, each one wanting their voice to be heard.
‘Who did this? What are their names? Why haven’t the police arrested them?’
They were all good questions but at that point nobody in the room had any answers. We knew only what had been reported on TV: the bomb had been planted by a group who was opposed to the Good Friday Peace Agreement. Apparently, there had been warnings, phone calls to the police and media, but the warnings hadn’t been clear enough: the wrong area had been evacuated and instead of shepherding people to safety, the police had unwittingly directed them into the vicinity of the bomb, multiplying the deaths and casualties. Fifty-three people had died: Catholics, Protestants, women, men, schoolchildren and babies. Hundreds more were injured, with shrapnel wounds, missing limbs, horrific burns.
‘These men have committed outright murder. They must be brought to justice …’
I thought of the two men I had seen get out of the car. I couldn’t remember their faces but I remembered the colour of their hair and that they’d been wearing jeans and jackets. They looked normal, not the kind of men you’d expect to be driving a car loaded with four hundred pounds of explosives. Had they made the bomb themselves or was that someone else’s department? How did one learn to make a bomb? Who had taught these men the rudiments of wiring and timing and all the other things they needed to know? I visualised a classroom scenario, an industrious atmosphere as the students worked with bent heads and dextrous fingers, the teacher, hands clasped behind his back, peering over their shoulders and commending their progress: today’s subject, bomb making.
‘They cannot get away with it just because the powers that be are afraid that the peace agreement will be compromised!’
Sounds of consensus reverberated around the room. There was a strong feeling that the police were proceeding too cautiously, afraid to rock the boat, to compromise the clearly overestimated peace agreement.
I sat in the meeting, listening to the anguished and uncontrolled outbursts. Men, women, teenagers, children, speaking without turns, airing their grief and confusion and their need to know that at the end of it all there would be justice.
Justice, it seemed, was the only thing that would ease their pain.
Eventually a man stood up and called for order. He said that we wouldn’t get any answers unless we all pulled together, joined to form one voice. He was a soft-spoken, unassuming man but people listened nevertheless.
Before I knew it, my father was standing too, giving his unqualified agreement. ‘I’ll do all I can to help the families here tonight, to bring their concerns to the police and the political parties, and to ensure that the people responsible for this atrocity will be brought to justice.’
He sounded noble, inspiring even, and I could see from the faces around me that people were listening and responding to him in the same way they had to the man who’d spoken before him. They wanted to be led, to be taken charge of, and to have their voices channelled into one. But most of all they wanted justice, and that was my father’s specialty. He knew all about justice and what was right and wrong. He’d been teaching it for years.
As I sat there listening, my hand in Mum’s, we were both completely unaware that this was the beginning of a crusade that would in the end mean even more heartbreak for our family. By the time we filed out of the room, a committee had been formed and Dad was already in the thick of it. We left him behind, talking animatedly to the other committee members, and went home to a dark, empty house.
Over the following weeks and months, I analysed things more thoroughly. All those rules and values my father had preached about and stuffed down our throats replayed in my head, baseless all of them, a stupid waste of time and effort. You’ll be safe if you keep to the rules … A good life is one lived according to one’s values … I was a loyal daughter as much as I was a loyal friend. Despite my occasionally rebellious behaviour, I had essentially believed and trusted in those rules. The truth – that life was randomly and senselessly cruel and had no regard for rules or values of any kind, that safety was nothing more than an illusion – shattered my whole belief system.
I went over the events of that fateful day, picked them apart with the precision and objectivity of a forensic scientist, and came to realise my father’s part in it all. And I saw this new committee, this crusade, for exactly what it was: a means of assuaging his own guilt.
I didn’t cry in front of Dad again, instead retaining my tears for the privacy of my room or the shower. I pushed him away whenever he tried to hug me, comfort me or ask me how I was. We would not have been in town that day if it hadn’t been for him. I could not get past that fact. And I could never forgive him for it.