To break myself so badly that no one – not even all the king’s horses and all the king’s men – could put me back together again.
I even planned it. It was the awful winter of 2010. The snow didn’t seem to stop. The headlines were filled with record low temperatures. The River Foyle froze, Europe’s fastest-flowing river, now creaking, slow, thick with the effort of trying to break through the ice.
I planned to go the beach. I would wash down some pills with vodka, walk down to the shore front, sit crossed-legged on the sand, and wait for the cold to feel too warm. Wait for the vodka and the pills to lull me to sleep, or to a place where I didn’t hurt so much.
Maud thinks I mustn’t have really wanted to do it. She thinks it was all a cry for help. Why else would I have sent Ben an email telling him that it was my turn to leave him? That I couldn’t live without him.
Maud needed to think it was just a cry for help, if you ask me. Because it was too hard to think it was anything but. And my parents? I don’t think they have ever forgiven me. I let them down. How could I have done that to them? As if I had done it just to spite them. Our relationship has never recovered. I have never recovered.
2007
Rose
Rose Maguire: is in a relationship with Cian Grahame
There’s a freckle about two inches under my left breast that Cian loves. I’m not sure I even paid attention to it before he told me how cute he thought it was. Before he circled his finger around it as we lay in bed together before leaning across to kiss it, so tenderly that I could only hold my breath.
‘Even your imperfections make you more perfect,’ he had whispered, and my heart had soared. I was falling in love with him. Properly in love. Not just lust, or desire or those feelings that aren’t real that just rush in at the start of something to make people obsessed with each other. This was something more. Love that I’d read about, where you feel invincible; as if you have met the other half of yourself that you didn’t quite know was missing.
I knew that I ached when we weren’t together – although he sent me flowers to work, called me at lunchtime, sent romantic text messages telling me he couldn’t wait to be with me again. When I went home he would come and make me dinner – and he finally let me start reading what he had been working on.
It was so different to what I normally read – but it was good. He was good. He had talent to burn. I wanted to tell everyone about him – about his writing – but God, he was so shy about it. So secretive. It had to be just right he said. I felt so privileged that he let me read it.
But more than that, Cian wanted me to keep him company while he wrote round the clock. I was his muse, he said. Imagine that. Me? A muse! It made me feel unique and special, even if sometimes it seemed that a muse’s role was not to talk much but supply cups of coffee and Custard Creams when needed.
Of course I got to be there when the doubt started to creep in too – doubt, it seems, having a habit of creeping in with writers quite frequently at 3am when I was trying to sleep. But I loved him enough not to mind waking to soothe him, to calm him with a kiss. To tell him how good he was. It made me feel special, and he would hold me tighter and tell me he didn’t know how he ever wrote without me, how he felt as if he was on the cusp of his life finally coming together, both personally and professionally. He was getting all he ever wanted – and taking me with him.
There was a hotshot agent interested in representing Cian and this book so the stakes were high on him getting this just right. It was incredible pressure to work under. Not like my job where I went in, sorted out people’s teeth, and went home again. I didn’t have to think about my job morning, noon and night. Cian said the book was always with him. Always. I’d laughed, asked him if it was with him even when we were, you know …
He looked at me very intently and I felt that familiar curl in the pit of the stomach – the one that made me want to forget the run of myself and have noisy, messy sex with him right there and then.
‘It’s always with me,’ he had said and then he’d kissed me so passionately, with such an intensity it almost took my breath away.
If he became a little distracted from time to time I reminded myself it was, as he called it, just part of the creative process. I remembered how it came and went – how when things were going well for him he became almost euphoric with the joy from it and I encouraged those good times and was suitably sympathetic when he had a bad day.
And I revelled in the highs – in the way he kissed that freckle just under my left breast and told me that my imperfections made me more perfect.
Perhaps it was the same with him? And God, I was falling so in love with the perfect and the imperfect parts of him that I don’t think anything could have stopped me.
Emily
A man was arrested in relation to Rose Grahame’s death two weeks after I started work at Scott’s Dental. I say a man, but he was more of a boy. Nineteen years old. A ‘frequent flyer’ at the local Magistrates’ Court, according to the prosecutor who oversaw his first appearance. Charged with a host of offences, including Aggravated Vehicle Taking and Failing to Stop and Report an Accident, Kevin McDaid wore a greying shirt with a black tie – probably the only tie he owned, bought for funerals – along with a cheap suit as he stood in the dock. The pictures in the local media showed him trying to hide his face as he was led in handcuffs from the court building to the waiting police van. Remanded in custody. Bail denied. But his solicitor made it clear he would appeal that decision in the High Court. There was every chance he’d be out on the street in days. A young lad who had a penchant for stealing cars, driving them too fast and leaving them abandoned somewhere. He’d never offended on this level before, his solicitor said. ‘Racked with guilt, my client has been unable to sleep and has turned once again to alcohol and drugs.’
He had ‘simply panicked’ when he hit Rose and had driven on in that state of panic. He knew there were people around who could help Rose. He didn’t think he’d hurt her. Not really. Not enough to kill her.
It probably made me a bad person that I sagged with relief at the news. He was admitting it. It had been an accident. I had overreacted thinking it was anything more sinister than that. Maud had been right. Things had been crazy with Ben. That he had got in touch again so close to Rose’s death was nothing more than a coincidence.
Kevin McDaid ‘wouldn’t trouble the court’ his solicitor had said, indicating his client would be pleading guilty to all charges. It should have made things easier. Possibly even make us feel some compassion of sorts for Kevin McDaid. Kevin McDaid, who hadn’t even shaved before his court appearance, if the pictures were anything to go by. His stubble, unlike Cian’s, was the kind that was borne out of laziness and not any kind of a style statement.
Although there was a trace of utter wretchedness about him – in the way he walked, the scuffed trainers on his feet, the panicked look on his face – I couldn’t bring myself to feel sorry for him. Even though I, of all people, knew that people could fuck things up.
He was nineteen. Even if he got a heavy sentence, he would still be out and walking the streets in his early thirties. He would still have all the years Rose didn’t have.
The news of the arrest and of the court appearance saw a dip in mood at Scott’s. It made me feel a little guilty that it had brought me a sense of relief I hadn’t felt in weeks. At least I didn’t have