Less Than Perfect Page 5

  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.

  Chapter 7

  The keyhole was hazy, indistinct. I frowned at it until it came into focus. Lining up my key, I was on the verge of inserting it when the door was whipped open.

  ‘What kind of hour do you call this?’

  I blinked. My father had waited up for me. He was wearing his dressing gown, not a fluffy cheap thing but maroon-coloured velour, very suave. His stare reminded me that he’d asked a question. I glanced at my watch. The face was blurred, like everything else.

  ‘Small hand on four. Big hand on two. Ten past four.’ I looked up to add defiantly, ‘That’s am, of course, not pm.’ I passed him in the hall and climbed the first few steps.

  ‘You’re drunk!’

  I didn’t grace this very obvious statement with a reply.

  ‘I’m talking to you. Face me and show some respect,’ he shouted.

  I stopped, turned and viewed him from my elevated position. Even though I was drunk and full of resentment, I was struck by how handsome he was. His expression was stern, his brow lined with a frown, but the effect of his aqua eyes and high cheekbones prevailed over his mood. My father, the pinup professor.

  ‘Yes, Daddy,’ I replied in a sarcastically sweet voice. ‘I’m drunk. That’s what teenagers do. Among other things, like taking drugs and screwing around.’

  ‘Don’t you dare speak to me like that!’

  I saw the phone in his hand and realised that he hadn’t been waiting up for me at all, that he’d been on one of his oh-so-important phone calls, at four o’clock in the morning!

  ‘Who the hell are you to tell me what to do?’ I spat. We glared at each other.

  My mother appeared on the landing, with bleary eyes and tousled hair. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked, looking from Dad to me and back again.

  It was high time for her to ask that question. She’d allowed him to ignore her, to ignore us. She’d allowed him to comfort people he didn’t know, to talk late into the night to strangers, while we were left to our own devices, neglected, cast aside for a higher cause.

  ‘Why don’t you ask him?’ I said darkly.

  ‘Caitlin, I don’t like your tone,’ Mum said.

  ‘Can’t you see what a hypocrite he is?’

  ‘Caitlin!’

  ‘He’s there for everybody, everybody but his own family.’

  The irony was that Dad was an expert on hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is acting contrary to what one believes. Hypocrisy is deceitfulness, deception, duplicity, falseness, insincerity, phoneyness and two-facedness. Professor Jonathan O’Reilly of Queen’s University not only lectured on the subject of hypocrisy, he embodied it in his own everyday actions and behaviour.

  ‘I’m going to bed now,’ I declared.

  Like all the bedrooms upstairs, the room I shared with Maeve was built into the roof. The ceiling sloped at the sides and I banged my head against it as I lurched towards my bed. I swore and rubbed my head before lying flat on my back, fully dressed, the room swirling around me. In her single bed on the other side of the room, Maeve was part of the merry-go-round. Maeve, Mum, Dad, Liam, me, round and round our faces went. How would it end, I wondered? What would it take to make it stop? To enforce some form of normality? Almost eight months had dragged by, each feeling longer than the one before. Were the men who parked the car that day back to normal? Had they been out tonight, drinking at their local, having a laugh with their friends? Did they ever stop to think of the fifty-three people they’d murdered? Of all the people in this town left with broken hearts and shattered lives? Did those men live normal lives now or did they still make bombs?

  I’d gone back to university at the start of the new academic year and house-shared in an area of Belfast called The Holy-lands, which was rough and overcrowded. I desperately missed what I’d had last year. I missed the feeling of security at the Elms and I missed Josh so much that it physically hurt, stabs of pain that would start as soon as I woke up and continue throughout the day. I struggled through classes without a shred of the drive or focus that I’d had in my first year. I walked to and from university, robotic until a car would slide into the kerb to park, at which point I would be seized by panic and start to run. Loud or sudden noises made me jump in fright. Though the end of the academic year was only a few months away now and the finish line in sight, my nerves were stretched to breaking point and I felt I would hardly make the distance, that I couldn’t endure another moment in this place.

  This weekend was Easter and tomorrow morning we would go to mass as a family, followed by an early dinner of roast meat, potatoes and vegetables. Everyone in the family, including me, would go through the motions. I would sit in the church pew and at the dinner table pretending to be present, when in my head I had retreated to last year, when Josh and I had consummated our relationship and had our whole future in front of us, a future that seemed even better and brighter after the signing of the Good Friday Peace Agreement. A future that would still be intact if only we hadn’t gone into town that day. If only that dark-green car had parked somewhere else. If only people had not congregated around it. If only Josh had not turned back to warn them. If only …

  The bedroom continued to swirl around me and I imagined myself disappearing into a vortex that sent me hurtling back to last year. As if to mock such a fanciful idea, the room’s turning slowed and everything became stagnant. I was lying on the bed, my face wet, sobs caught in my throat. There was no going back. I was stuck right here.

  I heard a car pull up outside, our front gate being opened, footsteps coming towards the house. My first thought was that it was Patrick, the boy I’d kissed earlier on that evening and who had subsequently dropped me home. Even though I’d given Patrick my phone number, I didn’t plan on seeing h
im again. He fell so far short of Josh that I’d had tears in my eyes as I kissed him. I’d been trying to numb the pain, to do something other than grieve, but now I was left feeling more lonely and bereft than ever.

  No, of course it wasn’t Patrick following me inside, he didn’t even know me. It was much more likely that the footsteps belonged to someone from my father’s group, one of the people who had access to him twenty-four seven, unlike his family.

  I heard the sound of clanging glass, the footsteps retreating, a door slamming, an engine revving and moving away, but stopping again further down the street, the sequence repeated as before. It was the milkman. I fell asleep, relieved to have figured something out at least.

  ‘You’re making a big mistake.’

  ‘That’s what you think.’

  ‘Qualifications mean everything.’

  ‘No, they don’t.’

  ‘I can’t believe you’re doing this!’

  ‘Well, I am.’

  ‘Why? Why now? You’ve only got one year to go.’

  ‘Because I can’t stand it for another moment, let alone a year!’

  My replies were quick. Sometimes I hit the mark and I hurt him. We were like fencers, our words swords.

  ‘Please, Caitlin. You’re a clever girl but clever often isn’t good enough. You need your degree, that piece of paper. Sometimes it’s all an employer has to go on.’

  He could be quite persuasive, my father. He knew how to phrase things, how to strike that chord. He knew that beneath my pain and sorrow and the need to flee, there was ambition, battered and bruised but ambition nonetheless. He knew that I ultimately wanted to get a good job and to do well in the world.

  ‘I’ve made up my mind, Dad. There’s no point in talking about it anymore.’

  ‘What are you going to do if you’re not going to study?’ He was at a loss. It was unimaginable to him that people could have lives and careers without an academic qualification.

  ‘I’m going overseas.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Australia.’

  I’d chosen Australia for distance more than anything else. My parents wouldn’t be able to ‘drop over’ to see me and neither would I be expected to ‘drop home’ for a visit.

  I got to my feet. There was no point in staying a minute longer.

  He looked up, his face weary and strangely vulnerable. ‘Is it because of me?’

  ‘Partly,’ I replied harshly. Though our paths rarely crossed these days, I knew he was there in the background, somewhere on campus, be it his office, a lecture theatre or the canteen. And I couldn’t stand it.

  But of course it wasn’t just him. There were many, many reasons. I would never feel safe again, not in Clonmegan or Belfast or anywhere in this country. I was sick and tired of religion and politics and their sheer divisiveness across every aspect of daily life. I’d had enough of the flags and threats that lurked around every corner. The low, grey skies left me claustrophobic and barely able to breathe. If I didn’t get away I feared that I’d completely crack up.

  I closed my father’s office door behind me and for a moment it was just me and his secretary. She was stacking papers on her desk and I waited for her to look up. ‘Can you remind him of Mum’s birthday next month?’ I hated to think of Paula sad and lonely on her birthday, without even a token gift from her husband.

  The secretary blinked her cornflower-blue eyes. She was quite pretty; it was a rather odd time for me to notice this fact. ‘I always remind him of birthdays. He’s generally too preoccupied to remember …’

  I nodded and left.

  Outside the sky was lower and greyer than ever. Drops of rain started to fall before I left the campus. I quickened my pace and didn’t once look back at Queen’s University. As far as I was concerned, that era of my life was well and truly over.

  Part Two

  Chapter 8

  Melbourne, February 2009

  I slide the cue back and forth between my thumb and forefinger until it’s steady. Then, with a fluidity that originates from a completely different time and place, I strike the white at its centre. It smashes into the other balls and scatters them around the table. One rolls into the bottom left pocket. I’m on stripes.

  Derek’s a silhouette at the far end of the table. He holds his beer bottle by its belly and his tie has long since been abandoned. There’s no outward sign that he’s in charge of the fastest-growing division in Telelink, a telecommunications giant in Australia.

  I pot a second ball, the purple, and I can feel rather than see his patronising smile.

  ‘Luck of the Irish, eh?’

  I shrug. ‘What do you think I should go for next?’

  ‘Try the blue.’

  This isn’t good advice. There’s no shot to be made with the blue and Derek knows this. I get him back by freezing the white against the wall.

  I swig from my glass as Derek surveys the table. I should go home; I’ve had more than enough to drink. But I need to play Derek along a little bit further before calling it a night. He’s one of my more difficult clients, his ego oversized and unpredictable. He regards his multimillion-dollar budget as a statement of power, and he spends it with a great deal of self-importance and flamboyance. I’m a good match for him, though, and I’m confident that I can channel his ego and budget into the single biggest order ever placed with Learning Space, the company I work for.

  Derek balances the cue and leans forward. He has a nice arse, I think offhandedly, but he’s not my type. He’s too full of himself, too arrogant. I’m not his type either, with my fiery hair, pale skin and eyes, and faded freckles smattering the curves of my cheeks. I look Celtic through and through and Derek’s taste in women, if his current girlfriend is anything to go by, runs more towards exotic.

  He strikes the red in the wrong place and it stops short of the pocket. ‘Close,’ he says with a wry grin.

  It’s not close at all.

  I gulp down more of my drink before taking the cue from his outstretched hand. I draw a mental line between the white ball and the one I’m aiming for, the green. It goes in, rolling along the underneath of the table with a satisfying rumble.

  ‘Well done,’ he says condescendingly.

  I’m perfectly lined up for my next shot and it goes in just as nicely.

  Derek, embarrassed that I’m better than him, looks around to see who’s watching. ‘Where did you learn how to play pool?’

  ‘From my brother and his friends.’

  ‘With pints of Guinness lined up on the sides of the table and Irish ballads playing in the background?’ he sneers.

  ‘Something like that.’

  I scan the table. I could set up the last three balls, but that would piss Derek off even more. It’s a fine line with him: he has to admire me, respect me; a little hate is good too, so that I can push him, like I’m doing now. But there is a line.

  I clip the yellow and leave it deliberately shy of the middle pocket.

  He puts down his drink. He has a purpose now: to regain dignity. He struts around the table. Squats. Measures. Bends over and gives a group of girls standing close by a tantalising view of his nice arse. He makes the shot and gets it in but he isn’t lined up for the next one. This doesn’t stop him from being inordinately pleased with himself.

  ‘Hold on while I go to the bar.’ He’s gone before I have the chance to stop him. I’m tired by now, my body aching for rest. I’ve been playing to his ego all evening. Over dinner. Over drinks. This game of pool. Now more drinks. Still, though, if this is what it takes …

  Derek re-emerges through the haze, tall and confident. People move out of his way. He hands me a bourbon and Coke.

  ‘Did I ask for this?’

  ‘Just drink it.’

  Sometimes he’s domineering and possessive with me, as though I’m his girlfriend, which I’m not and never will be. This do-it-or-else attitude is his way of flirting. He knows that I have his measure, that I will only allow him to act like this
to a certain degree.

  I don’t like bourbon but drink it anyway. It tastes of my determination.

  ‘Blue or orange?’ I ask.

  ‘Blue,’ he replies.

  The blue is in a slightly better place but it’s still a challenging shot. I get the bridge and sit on the side of the table.

  ‘One leg’s meant to touch the ground,’ he states with ill-disguised competitiveness.

  ‘That rule’s for people who are more than five feet tall,’ I retort and cut the blue on the side. It spins into the pocket. The white draws back perfectly and I’m able to send the orange into the same pocket. I slide down off the table, not missing the look of annoyance on his face.

  ‘So, Derek,’ I begin as I size up the yellow that I left hanging by the middle pocket. ‘Do you have firm dates for the training rollout?’

  ‘It’s scheduled for May,’ he replies, mollified by my question: I’m seeking his business; he has the veto, the power.

  ‘Do you have a better idea of numbers?’

  ‘Approximately three thousand employees.’

  ‘Do you still think the program will fit into two days?’

  ‘At a push.’

  ‘How about two long days?’

  ‘How long can you make a day?’

  ‘As long as you need it to be, Derek,’ I say matter-of-factly. ‘In fact, we can train your people through the night if that’s what’s needed!’

  He hardly notices when I sink the black. He looks as though he’s seriously considering it: training through the night.

  The game is over and I nod to the group of men whose gold two-dollar coin rests on the edge of the table. ‘It’s all yours.’ I smile at them, and then turn to Derek. ‘Why don’t we say 8 am till 7 pm, five rooms running concurrently?’

  ‘How long would it take in total?’

  ‘Three thousand people would go through in about eight weeks.’

  He nods, suddenly looking impatient to go. He slings his suit jacket over his shoulder and I put my bag on mine. Outside it’s warm but the sun has long gone.