Loe raamatut: «How to Fall in Love», lehekülg 2
3
How to Recognise a Miracle and What to Do When You Have
The room was still and quiet, the only sounds the steady beeping of Simon’s heart monitor and the whoosh of the ventilator as it assisted his breathing. Simon was the polar opposite of how I’d last seen him. Now he looked peaceful, the right side of his face and head bandaged, the left side serene and smooth as if nothing had happened. I chose to sit on his left side.
‘I saw him shoot himself,’ I whispered to Angela, the nurse on call. ‘He held a gun up right here,’ I gestured, ‘and pulled the trigger. I saw his – everything – go everywhere … How did he survive?’
Angela smiled, a sad smile, not really a smile at all, just muscles working around her lips. ‘A miracle?’
‘What kind of a miracle is that?’ I continued to whisper, not wanting Simon to hear me. ‘I keep going over it, over and over in my head.’ I’d been reading books about suicide and what I should have said, and they say that if you can get a person threatening suicide to think rationally, if they actually think about the realities of suicide and its aftermath, then they could, they might abort the decision. What they’re looking for is a quick fix to end the emotional pain, not to end their lives, so if you can help them see another way to ease the pain then maybe you could help. ‘I think, considering I had no experience, that I did okay, I think I really got through to him. I think he really responded to me. For a moment, anyway. I mean, he put the gun down. He let me call the guards. I just don’t know what it was that sent him back into that head space.’
Angela frowned as though hearing or seeing something she didn’t like. ‘You know this isn’t your fault, don’t you?’
‘Yeah, I know.’ I shrugged it off.
She studied me, thoughtful, and I concentrated on the right wheel of the hospital bed, how it caused a black scuff mark when it was moved each time, lots of scuff marks back and forth, and I tried to count how many times it had been moved. Dozens, at least.
‘You know there are people you can talk to about this kind of thing. It would be a good idea to get your concerns out.’
‘Why does everyone keep saying that?’ I laughed, trying to sound carefree but deep down feeling the anger burning in my chest. I was tired of being analysed, tired of people treating me as though I was someone who needed to be handled. ‘I’m fine.’
‘I’ll leave you with him for a while.’ Angela stepped away, her white shoes silent on the floor as if she was floating.
Now that I had come, I didn’t quite know what to do. I reached out for his hand but then stopped myself. If he was aware, perhaps he would not want me to touch him, maybe he blamed me for what had happened. It had been my job to stop him and I hadn’t. Perhaps he had wanted me to change his mind, he had been willing me to say the right words, but I’d failed him. I cleared my throat, looked around to make sure no one was listening and I leaned in closer to his left ear but not so close as to startle him.
‘Hi, Simon,’ I whispered.
I watched him for a reaction. Nothing.
‘My name is Christine Rose, I’m the woman you spoke to on the night of … the incident. I hope you don’t mind my sitting with you for a while.’
I listened for something, anything, and studied his face and hands for signs that he was upset by my presence. I didn’t want to cause him any more pain. When all on the surface remained as it was, calm and still, I sat back in the chair and got comfortable. I wasn’t waiting for him to wake up, I didn’t have anything I wanted to say to him, I just liked being there, in the silence, by his side. Because when I was by his side I wouldn’t be anywhere else, wondering about him.
At nine p.m., after visiting hours, I still hadn’t been asked to leave. I guessed regular hours didn’t count for someone in a condition such as Simon’s. He was in a coma, on a life-support machine, and his condition wasn’t improving. I spent the time thinking about my life and Simon’s and how our coming together had irrevocably changed both of our lives. It had only been a few weeks since Simon’s attempted suicide, but it had sent my life spiralling in another direction. I wondered if it was pure coincidence or if me being in that random place had been fate.
‘What were you doing there?’ Barry had asked me, confused, sleepy, sitting up in bed with his scrunched-up face, his tiny eyes enormous after he’d reached for his black-rimmed glasses on the bedside chest and put them on. I hadn’t known how to answer him then; I wouldn’t know how to answer him now. To say it out loud would be embarrassing, it would highlight how ludicrously lost I had found myself – the irony of that statement not lost on me.
Aside from what I was doing there, the fact I’d chosen to engage with a man with a gun in a deserted building was enough to cause me to question myself. I liked to help people but I wasn’t sure it was just about that. I saw myself as a problem-solver and I applied that thinking to most aspects of life. If something couldn’t be fixed, it could at least be changed, particularly behaviour. My belief system was born of having a father who was a fixer. It was in his nature to ask the problem and then set about fixing it as he did for his three girls growing up without their mother. Because he lacked Mum’s instinct to know if things were right with us or not and he had no one else to discuss it with, he would question us, listen to the answer, then seek out the solution. It was his way and it was what he felt he could do for us. Left with three children under the age of ten, the youngest only four years of age, a father does what he can to protect his children.
I run my own recruitment agency, which sounds basic enough, only I prefer to think of myself as a matchmaker, finding the right person for the right job. It’s important to bring the right energy for the right company, and vice versa, what the company can do for a person. Sometimes it’s just mathematics, an available job for an available person with the appropriate skills; other times, when I get to know the person, like Oscar, I really go beyond the call of duty when it comes to placing them. The people I deal with have different emotions about their goals, some because they’ve lost their jobs and are under great stress, others simply fancy a career change and are anxious but full of happy expectation, and then there are the ones who are stepping into the workplace for the first time, excited about new beginnings. Regardless, everyone’s on a journey, and I’m in the middle of that. I’ve always felt the same responsibility for each of them – to help them find the right place in the world. And yet, using that philosophy, my words had landed Simon Conway in this room.
I didn’t want to leave him alone, and returning to a borrowed flat with no television and nothing to do but stare at the four walls did not appeal to me. I had many friends who I could have stayed with, but as they were mutual friends of mine and Barry’s, they were slow to offer, reluctant to get in the middle of the mess, to be seen to be taking sides, especially when it was me who was coming out looking like the bad one, the big bad wolf who’d broken Barry’s heart. It was better for me not to put them through that stress. Brenda had invited me to come and stay with her, but I couldn’t put up with my sister fretting about my supposed post-traumatic stress disorder. I needed to come and go as I pleased without any questions being asked, especially ones about my sanity. I wanted to feel free – that’s why I’d left my marriage in the first place. The fact that I felt more at home in an intensive care unit than I did anywhere else said a lot.
So here was the thing I couldn’t tell Detective Maguire, or Barry, or my dad and two sisters, or anybody, really. There was a specific place I was trying to find to make me feel better about myself. I learned this from a book: How to Live in Your Happy Place. The idea was to choose a place that made you feel uplifted. It could be somewhere you connected with a memory that enriched your soul or simply a place where you liked the light, or a place that made you feel content for a reason you couldn’t recognise on a conscious level. Once you found that place, the book offered exercises to help you summon the same happy feeling you associated with that place absolutely any time and anywhere your heart desired, but it would only work if you had found the right place. I’d been looking. It’s what I was doing on the building site the night I met Simon Conway. It wasn’t the building site I was looking for, it was what used to be there before it became a building site. I had a happy memory there on that land.
It was a cricket match, Clontarf versus Saggart. I was five years old and Mum had died only a few months before and I remember it was a sunny day, the first after a long, dark, cold winter, and me and my sisters were there to watch Dad play. The entire cricket club was outside, I remember the smell of beer, and I can taste the saltiness on my lips from the packets of peanuts I was consuming one after another. Dad was bowling and it was close to the end of the match; I could see the intense look on his face, the look we’d been seeing every day for the past few weeks, the dark look with his eyes practically lost beneath his eyebrows. He went for his third bowl and the guy batting completely misjudged his swing and missed. The ball hit the wicket and the guy was out. Dad yelled so loudly and punched the air with such ferocity, everyone around us erupted in cheers. It frightened me at first, watching the mass hysteria, like they’d all caught some weird virus that I’d seen in a zombie movie and I was the only one who hadn’t been affected, but then as I watched Dad’s face I knew that it was okay. He was wearing the biggest smile, and I remember the looks on my sisters’ faces. They weren’t too bothered about cricket either – in fact, they’d moaned the entire way over in the car because they were being taken away from playing with their friends on the road – but they were watching him celebrating, being lifted onto his team mates’ shoulders, and they were smiling and I remember that was the moment I thought, We’re going to be okay.
I went to the development to get that feeling again, but when I got there I saw a ghost estate and I met Simon.
When I left Simon at the hospital that night I continued on my quest to find places that uplifted me. I’d been doing it for about six weeks by that stage and I’d already been to my old primary school, a basketball court where I’d kissed a boy I believed was way out of my league, my college, my grandparents’ house, the garden centre I used to go to with my grandparents, the local park, the tennis club where I spent my summers, and various other haunts that had been the location of good memories. I’d randomly dropped in on an old primary school friend’s house and proceeded to have the most awkward conversation I’d ever had, and immediately wished I hadn’t bothered going. I had visited her because when I was passing I had a sudden memory: the warm, sweet smell of baking in her kitchen. Every time I played there, her mother seemed to be baking. Twenty-four years on, the baking smell was gone, so was her mother, and in its place were my exhausted old friend’s two children, who were using her as a climbing frame and wouldn’t give us a second to talk, which was a blessing as we had nothing to say to one another anyway above the silent question on her lips: Why the hell did you come here? We weren’t even that close. Assuming I was going through something, she was polite enough not to say it out loud.
For the first few weeks, not finding my place didn’t bother me, the searching was a way of passing my time, but after three weeks my inability to find my place started to prey on my mind. Instead of re-energising me, it was in fact undoing the good memories that I had.
After that hospital visit, I was even more intent on finding a place. I needed a lift and knew that returning home to the magnolia-walled rental was not going to offer me any solace.
This was what I was doing the moment the highly unlikely event occurred for the second time in the same month to the same person.
4
How to Hold on for Dear Life
The streets of Dublin city were quiet on a Sunday night in December and it was bitterly cold as I made my way to the Ha’penny Bridge from Wellington Quay. Snow was threatened, but hadn’t come yet. The Ha’penny Bridge, officially known as Liffey Bridge, the charming old footbridge with its cast-iron railings spans the river, connecting the north of the city to the south. It came to be known as the Ha’penny because that was the toll when it was constructed in 1816. One of the most recognisable sights of Dublin, it’s especially pretty at night when the three decorative lamps are lit. I had chosen this place because as a part of my college degree, Business and Spanish, I had to live in Spain for one year. I don’t remember how close we were as a family before Mum died, but I most certainly remember us tightening our bonds afterwards and then, as the years went on, it seemed unfathomable that any of us would ever leave the fold. Going into my college course I knew that the Erasmus placement was an inevitable, unavoidable reality and at that stage I felt the overwhelming desire to sever those bonds and stretch my wings. As soon as I got there I knew it was a mistake; I cried all the time, couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, could barely concentrate on my studies. It felt as though my heart had been ripped from my chest and left at home with my family. My dad wrote to me every day, witty musings of his and my sisters’ daily life, which attempted to lift my spirits but only fuelled the homesickness even more. But there was one postcard in particular that helped me snap out of the chronic homesickness. Or rather, the homesickness was still there, but I was able to function. That postcard had been of the Ha’penny Bridge, at night time, with the Dublin skyline lit up in the background and all the colourful lights reflecting in the Liffey below. I had been enchanted by the image; I’d looked at the pixellated people and I’d tried to give them names and stories, places they were going, places they were coming from, familiar names going to and from locations I knew. I pinned it to my wall when I slept and carried it around in my college journal during the day. I felt like it was a part of home with me at all times.
I wasn’t stupid enough to think that this exact feeling would be replicated the moment I saw the bridge, because I saw the bridge almost every week. By this point I was well seasoned at searching for my happy place and knew it wouldn’t be instant, but I was hoping I could stand there and at least recall the emotion, the experience, the feelings. It was night, the skyline was lit up in the background, and although the new buildings along the docks created a different image from my old postcard, the reflection of the lights in the dark river still seemed the same. It had all the right elements of the postcard.
Apart from one thing.
A lone man, dressed in black, clinging to the outside of the bridge while he looked down into the cold river that ran swift and treacherous beneath him.
On the steps of the Wellington Quay entrance a small crowd had gathered. They were standing looking at the man on the bridge. I joined them in their shock, wondering if that was how Roy Cleveland Sullivan had felt when he was struck by lightning for the second time: Not again.
Someone had called the police and they were discussing how long it would take them to arrive, and how they might not get there on time. They were all debating what to do. I couldn’t help but see Simon’s face before he pulled the trigger and then afterwards, in intensive care, replaying the way his face had changed in his apartment before he picked up the gun. Something had triggered that moment. Could it have been what I said to him? I couldn’t remember the words I’d spoken; maybe it was my fault. I thought about his two little girls, waiting for their daddy to wake up, wondering why he wouldn’t wake up like he always did. Then I looked at the man on the bridge and thought about the countless lives that would be impacted by his need to end his pain, his inability to see another way out.
Suddenly, adrenalin pumped through my body and there was no other decision that I could make. I had no choice: I had to save the man on the bridge.
This time, I would do it differently. Since Simon Conway I had read a few books, trying to figure out what I’d done wrong, how I could have talked him round. The first step would be to focus on the man, ignore the commotion around me. The three people beside me were starting to argue about what to do, and that wasn’t going to help anyone. I put my foot on the step. I could do this, I told myself, feeling confident and in control.
The icy wind hit me like a slap across the face, telling me, ‘Wake up! Be ready!’ My ears were already aching from the cold and my nose was numb and starting to run. The tide was high in the Liffey, the water black, murky, malevolent, uninviting. I detached myself from the people waiting expectantly behind me, and tried to forget that every word I said and every shaky breath I took could be carried on the breeze to the spectators’ ears. My view of him grew clearer: a man in black, standing on the wrong side of the railings, his feet on the narrow ridge above the water, his hands clutching the balustrade. It was too late to go back now.
‘Hello,’ I called gently, not wanting to give him a fright and send him into the water. Despite trying to be heard above the breeze, I kept my voice calm and clear with an even tone and soft expression, remembering what I’d read: avoid sharp tones and maintain eye contact. ‘Please don’t be alarmed, I’m not going to touch you.’
He turned to look at me, then his eyes went straight back down to the river again, staring intently at the water. It was clear that I had barely penetrated the thoughts running through his mind; he was too lost in his head to notice.
‘My name is Christine,’ I said, taking slow, steady steps towards him. I stayed near the edge of the bridge, wanting to be able to see his face while I spoke.
‘Don’t come any closer!’ he shouted, his voice revealing his panic.
I stopped, happy with the distance; he was an arm’s length away. If I absolutely had to, I could grab him.
‘Okay, okay, I’m staying here.’
He turned to see how far I was from him.
‘Keep focus, I don’t want you to fall.’
‘Fall?’ He looked up at me quickly and then down again, then back up at me and our eyes locked. He was in his thirties, chiselled jaw, his hair hidden beneath a black woollen hat. His blue eyes stared back at me, big and terrified, pupils so large they almost took over his eyes, and I wondered whether he was on something or drunk. ‘Are you for real?’ he said. ‘Do you think I care if I fall? Do you think I got here by accident?’ He tried to zone me out again and concentrate on the river.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Leave me alone,’ he snapped, then added gently, ‘Please.’
Even in distress, he was polite.
‘I’m concerned. I can see you’re distressed. I’m here to help you.’
‘I don’t need your help.’ He blocked me out and focused on the water again. I watched his knuckles, wrapped around the iron, going from white to red as he tightened and loosened his grip. My heart hammered each time his grip loosened and I dreaded them letting go completely. I didn’t have much time.
‘I’d like to talk to you.’ I moved a tiny bit closer.
‘Please go away. I want to be on my own. I didn’t want any of this, I didn’t want a scene, I just want to do this. On my own. I just … I didn’t think it would take so long.’ He swallowed again.
‘Look, nobody is going to come near you unless I say so. So there’s no panic, no rush, you don’t need to do anything without thinking it through. We have a lot of time. All I ask is for you to talk to me.’
He was silent. More gentle questions led to no answers. I was ready to listen, ready to say all the right things, but my questions were being met by silence. On the other hand, he hadn’t jumped yet, at least there was that.
‘I’d like to know your name,’ I said.
There was nothing from him.
I pictured Simon’s face as he looked me in the eye and pulled the trigger. A wave of emotion rushed through me and I wanted to cry, I wanted to break down and cry. I wasn’t able for this. Panic welled inside me. I was on the verge of giving up and returning to the small crowd of spectators to tell them I couldn’t do it, that I didn’t want to be responsible for another victim, when he spoke.
‘Adam.’
‘Okay,’ I said, relieved he was engaging with me. I remembered a line in one of the books that said the person attempting suicide needed to be reminded that there were others thinking of him, loving him, whether he felt it or not, but I was afraid it would send him in the opposite direction. What if he was here because of them or because he felt he was a burden on them? My mind raced as I tried to figure out what to do; there were so many rules, and all I wanted was to help.
‘I want to help you, Adam,’ I said finally.
‘There’s no point.’
‘I’d like to hear what you have to say,’ I told him, remaining positive. Listen thoughtfully, don’t say ‘don’t’, don’t say ‘can’t’. I ran through everything I’d read. I couldn’t get it wrong. Not one single word.
‘You can’t talk me out of it.’
‘Give me a chance to show you that even though it may feel like this is the only option, there are many more. Your mind is so tired now – let me help you down. Then we can look at the choices. They may be hard to see at the moment, but they do exist. For the time being though, let’s get off the bridge, let me help you to safety.’
He didn’t answer. Instead he looked up at me. I knew that look, that familiar look. Simon had worn that expression too. ‘Sorry.’ His fingers loosened on the iron bars, his body leaned forward, away from the railings.
‘Adam!’ I dashed forward, pushed my arms through the wide railings and wrapped them tight around his chest, pulling him back so hard that he slammed into the railings. My body was pressed so close to the railings that his back was tight against my front. I buried my face in his woolly hat, squeezed my eyes shut and held on tight. I waited for him to pull away, wondered how I would keep my grip on him, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to for long if he used his strength to resist me. I waited for a spectator to come running and take over, hoped that the gardaí were nearby so that the professionals could step in. I was out of my depth – what did I think I was doing? I squeezed my eyes shut, rested my head on the back of his head; he smelled of aftershave, clean, like he’d just taken a shower. He smelled alive, like someone who was on his way somewhere, not someone who had been planning to jump off a bridge. He felt strong and full of life too; I could barely wrap my arms around his chest he was so broad. I held on to him, determined never to let go.
‘What are you doing?’ he panted, his chest heaving up and down.
I finally looked up and checked on the crowd behind me. There was no sign of garda lights, no sign of anyone coming to help me. My legs were trembling as if it was me that was staring down at the depths of the Liffey’s darkness.
‘Don’t do it,’ I whispered, starting to cry. ‘Please don’t do it.’
He tried to turn around and see me, but I was directly behind and he couldn’t see my face.
‘Are you … are you crying?’
‘Yes,’ I sniffed. ‘Please don’t do it.’
‘Jesus,’ he tried again to turn and look at me.
I was crying harder now, sobbing uncontrollably, my shoulders jumping up and down, my arms still wrapped around his chest, holding on for dear life.
‘What the hell?’ He moved some more, shuffled his feet along the edge of the ledge so he could turn his head and see my face.
Our eyes locked together.
‘Are you … are you okay?’ He softened a little, coming out of whatever trance-like state he had been in.
‘No.’ I tried to stop crying. I wanted to dry my nose, which was running like a tap, but I was afraid to let go of him.
‘Do I know you?’ he asked, confused, searching my face, wondering why I cared so much.
‘No,’ I said, sniffing again. I squeezed him tighter, hugging him like I hadn’t hugged anyone for years, not since I was a child, not since my mother held me.
He was looking at me like I was crazy, like he was the sane one and I had lost it. We were practically nose-to-nose as he studied my face, as if looking for far more than what he could see.
The spell between us was broken when some idiot watching from the quays shouted ‘Jump!’ The man in black started trying to wriggle out of my grip with a renewed anger.
‘Get your hands off me,’ he said, struggling to shake me off.
‘No,’ I shook my head. ‘Please, listen …’ I tried to compose myself before continuing: ‘It’s not what you think it’s going to be in there,’ I said, looking down and imagining how it would feel for him, staring into that darkness, wanting to end it all; how bad things must be for him to want that. He was studying me intently again. ‘You don’t want to end your life, you want to end your pain, the pain you’re feeling right now, the pain that I’m sure you wake up with and go to bed at night with. Maybe no one around you understands that, but I do, believe me.’ I saw that his eyes were filling, I was getting through to him. ‘But you don’t want to end it all the time, do you? Just sometimes it passes through your mind, probably more often lately than before. It’s like a habit, trying to think of different ways to end it all. But it passes, doesn’t it?’
He looked at me carefully, taking every word in.
‘It’s a moment, that’s all. And moments pass. If you hang in there, this moment will pass and you won’t want to end your life. You probably think that no one cares, or that they’ll get over you. Maybe you think they want you to do this. They don’t. No one wants this for anyone. It might feel as if there are no options, but there are – you can come through this. Get down and let’s talk about it. Whatever is going on, you can get through it. It’s a moment, that’s all,’ I whispered, tears running down my cheeks.
I took a sidelong glance at him. He swallowed hard. He was looking down now, thinking about it, weighing up his options. Live or die. Surreptitiously I scanned the bridge entrances on Bachelors Walk and Wellington Quay; still no gardaí, still no members of the public to help me. I was glad of that at this stage; I had managed to engage with him, I didn’t want anybody else to distract him, panic him, bring him back to that place again. I thought about what to say next, something that would make the time pass until professional help arrived, something positive that wouldn’t trigger any anger in him. But in the end I didn’t have to say anything because he spoke first.
‘I read about a guy who jumped in the river last year. He was drunk and decided to go swimming, only he got stuck under a shopping trolley and the currents swept him away. He couldn’t get out,’ he said, his voice cracking with emotion.
‘And you liked the sound of that?’
‘No. But then it will be over. After all that, it will be over.’
‘Or it will be the beginning of a new kind of pain. As soon as you’re in that water, no matter how much you want it, you’ll panic. You’ll fight it. You’ll struggle to take in oxygen and your lungs will fill with water because, even though you think you don’t want to live, your instinct will be to stay alive. It’s in you to want to stay alive. As soon as the water is drawn into your larynx, another natural instinct is for you to swallow it. Water will fill your lungs, which will weigh down your body, and if you change your mind and decide you want to live and try to get to the surface, you won’t be able to. And the thing is, there are so many people around you right now, they’re ready to dive in and rescue you – and do you know what? You think it’ll be too late, but it won’t be. Even after you lose consciousness, the heart will carry on beating. They can give you mouth-to-mouth and pump out the water and fill your lungs with air again. They could save you.’
His body was shaking and not just from the cold. I felt him go limp beneath my arms. ‘I want it to end.’ His voice shook as he spoke. ‘It hurts.’
‘What hurts?’
‘Specifically? Living.’ He laughed weakly. ‘Waking up is the worst part of my day. Has been for a long time.’
‘Why don’t we talk about this somewhere else?’ I said, concerned, as his body went rigid again. Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to talk about his problems while he was hanging off the side of a bridge. ‘I want to hear everything you have to say, so let’s get down now.’
‘It’s too much.’ He closed his eyes and spoke more to himself. ‘I can’t change things now. It’s too late,’ he said quietly, leaning his head back so that it rested by my cheek. We were oddly close for two strangers.
‘It’s never too late. Believe me, it’s possible for your life to change. You can change it. I can help you,’ I said, my voice little more than a whisper. There was no reason for me to project; his ear was right there, at the tip of my lips.
He looked me in the eyes and I couldn’t look away, I felt locked in. He seemed so lost.
‘And what happens if it doesn’t work? If everything doesn’t change like you say it will?’
Tasuta katkend on lõppenud.
