Week 22 - Andrew - Perfection

In Laura’s tradition (see her developing ‘Noni’ stories), I’m going to flesh out a previous week’s story here. This week’s thing is in part, a follow on from this story.

Genevieve, my Thule Monitor, has gone missing before. Close to disastrous, but we managed to sidestep armageddon. During the cold war, the same thing happened the real Thule Monitor - a B52 bomber, circling Thule radar station and watching for the first shots of World War 3, crashed. A cabin heater caused a fire that spread throughout the aircraft. The crew ejected (one was killed while leaving the plane), and the airplane plowed into the ice.

Cait used to babysit, when she was in school. Mam was friends with a couple in Terenure, and they were Cait’s only customers. She would get the bus across, and stay with the child, while they went for a drink, dinner and a play. Typically, she would arrive at half five. The couple would be gone by six, to be back for eleven. Thinking back, this gave her a five hour head start.

That night, I arrived back to the house - I lived at home during college - at half nine. The answering machine on the dark hall table was blinking red. The message was from Mam’s friend - Had anyone heard from Cait? She had tried to ring her own house, but Cait wasn’t answering. There was no panic in her voice. She suggested herself that Cait may have gone for a walk around the neighbourhood. She said not to worry - They were just going into the play and still on schedule to be home for around midnight. They could drop Cait home.

Absentmindedly, while the message was playing, I stuck my head into Cait’s room. Genevieve was missing.

When it crashed, the Thule Monitor was carrying four hydrogen bombs. Some of the materials within these bombs exploded on impact, and spread radioactive debris over and through the sheet ice of Baffin Bay.

I had a car. After a summer working two jobs, I bought an unreasonably large, unaffordably old BMW. There’s no doubt that it should have been scrap, but it was my first car. I worked weekends to pay for parts, petrol and insurance.

Later, when I was going over this, I wondered why I acted so fast here. I tried to retrofit clues, to forensically recreate the synapses that fired, as I grabbed my car keys and ran for the driveway. I can’t explain why I knew immediately what happened.

The picture in my mind at that point was in sharp focus. Cait had waited until the parents had left the house, waved them off. She had undoubtedly given them a ten minute period to get away from the house. She had taken the child, put it in a buggy, and walked out the front door.

I was nearly certain she would have brought a bag of things - and explained it as homework. Cait was always practical in her deceptions.

I pulled out of the driveway, and crunched the gears in front of the house. Cait was limited to walking and public transport. It was Friday night. She couldn’t leave the country - She hadn’t a passport yet. Every year, we took the same holiday, to the same mobile home in Brittas bay.

The mobile home one mile from a bus stop.

I left the car skewed across the road as I ran back inside. The caravan keys (two silver keys, woolen tassel keyring) should have been on the owl hook in the kitchen.  The owl’s glass eyes just about picked up the glint of my headlights through the hall. The glint seemed to point to the empty hook, second from the left.

Again, thinking back, I’m almost sure I wasn’t the one driving. The same force (the driving force!) that planted the certainty of what Cait had done in my brain took the wheel while I was pre-occupied - frantic arithmetic - Terenure to Brittas and back before midnight. Would the petrol hold out? What if I was stopped? Am I mad, can we ever escape armageddon? The driving force held firm, skilful. It wasn’t me dropping gears into turns, blasting the heavy BMW around slower drivers and holding the car on a knife edge around wet Wicklow roads.

As I got closer to Brittas, the road surface became worse. When I passed the bus stop, the tarmac gave way to gravel. The back of the car skidded more. Closer to the caravan park, again - I don’t know why - I cut the lights.

I bounced the car quietly over the grass, down the row of mobile homes - all empty on a November Friday. All of them were dark. I was wrong. Cait had been out for a walk. The child had cried, and Cait had put it in the buggy for a few minutes. Me thinking that Genevieve held any significance was ridiculous. I’ll check the door to be sure, turn the car around, and get back on the road. I’ll drive back like a normal person.

I stopped the car beside the sixth home on the right, ours - handed down from a great-uncle. (Openly sorry for my widowed mother)  I got out, and walked over to the door - the wet grass seeped through my runners, and soaked the bottom of my jeans.

I tried the cold aluminium handle. The door opened. The mobile home smelt of damp mattresses and distant camping gas. I stepped in. Cait was sitting on the sofa bed in the dark, the baby in her arms. There was a bottle on the table. The only light was from the street light outside.

Cait was still wearing her anorak, and the baby was sleeping. Cait was sitting, staring into space, silent.

I sat down beside Cait, and didn’t say anything. I wish I could say ‘there were no words’, but the truth is, there was so much to say that it all became jumbled, so I said nothing.

After a minute, she looked up. ‘Will we go back?’ she asked. These were the only words we exchanged all evening.

We put the buggy in the boot, and started back on the road. The driving force took over again - Cait sat in the back, holding the sleeping baby in her lap. As we hammered up the Dublin road in the old BMW, I started to picture it as an old tin can. I thought about tyre treads, and wet roads - the car was too old to have gone through any safety checks. If we had a tip, at this speed, the three of us would be killed instantly.

The roads were clear - I can’t remember us passing another car. We were fast and accurate on empty roads. The BMW held a firm line.

We pulled into Mams’ friends’ street at half eleven by the soft orange light of the dashboard. I cut the lights again. We unfolded the buggy. Cait strapped the still sleeping baby in. I said I would wait for her.

The baby’s parents car passed me, as Cait walked towards their house. It flashed as it passed her, and swung into their driveway. In the split second that the car was invisible, Cait reached down and pinched the child. I could hear it wake up and start to scream and cry. Always practical in her deception.

I got out of the BMW, and walked over. Cait was in the garden, talking to the now-wailing baby’s parents. The mother was thanking Cait - Cait was explaining that she had been walking him around the block, and he had been screaming all night.

The father handed Cait an envelope, and rooted through his wallet for an extra tenner - ‘Since he’s been a nightmare’. Cait smiled - ‘No’, she said ‘He’s perfect’

I waved, and said hi - I had been passing, and knew that Cait might need a lift. There were smiles - how helpful! There were offers of tea, which we declined. Cait and I walked back to the car in silence.

Not all of the weapons could be located after the Thule Monitor crash. Large chunks of the contaminated ice shelf had to be shipped to North Carolina. Nuclear armageddon was avoided -  and as a direct result of the accident at Thule, the phoneline between Moscow and Washington was strengthened.

Week 20 - Andrew - Twist in the tale.

My sister is missing.

I am in Atlanta airport, sitting at the bar of a Starbucks in the Food court. I have a lukewarm pint of coffee, and my mother is on the phone. I’m conscious that if she keeps talking, I’m going to have to charge my phone so that it will last me the rest of the journey.

It has always been like this. My sister will slip away, out of my mother’s sight, and Mam will think she’s missing. There will be phone calls. Long phone calls, while my mother goes over her full day’s movements, the times she has last seen my sister.

My sister, Cait, will re-appear a day or two later, hungover, in strange clothes. She never talks about where she goes. She just walks into the kitchen, and makes two cups of tea, Mam will cry and scream, and ask why she does this to her. Cait never says anything. She just puts one of the cups of tea in front of Mam, and drinks her own.

Cait lives at home. She works irregular shifts in a garden centre. She runs in the mornings, buys fruit from the greengrocer near my parents house, then sits online for the day. We don’t look like brother and sister. She is tanned and sinewy, an elaborate tattoo of flowers and birds climbing up one arm. I run to fat, permanently pale, with deep, blue bags under my eyes. She doesn’t smile, except at animals and babies. I’ve been told i giggle like a schoolgirl.

I know she’s ok. In the cold war, the Americans kept one aeroplane permanently in the air, over Thule in Greenland. This plane circled one specific radar station. The Russians couldn’t mount an attack without first destroying this radar station. If it looked like war, the Americans would get on the radio. If the plane was still in the air, and radar station was in its usual spot, then they held off on armageddon. The plane was called the Thule Monitor.

Genevieve is my Thule Monitor. Genevieve is a stuffed cat, a ragged baby toy. There are the traces of scorchmarks on Genevieve’s leg. While Genevieve is still in the house, I’m confident that we’re at most 48 hours away from more tea & hysterics. When Cait leaves for good, and she will, herself and Genevieve will walk out the door together.

Today is not that day - the first thing I asked Mam to do was to check her room, and to describe her desk. Genevieve is in her usual spot. Right now, I’m only worrying about the battery on my phone, and how to while away the next three hours in Atlanta.

*     *     *     *     *

Cait came into our lives with a silver twinkle in a pure blue sky. Dad had taken myself and Mam to Ardgillan park for a picnic. I remember this in colours. There was a field, glossy green grass - out to the horizon. Dad, in his grey t-shirt and jeans, was kicking the white ball.

We were on our own, the three of us. Then there was that glint in the sky. Dad was teaching me about airlines. He asked me what it was. I saw the red tail, and the white body - Qantas! He laughed, and rubbed my head - asked me where it was from. I knew Qantas were from Australia.

Dad kept watching the plane. I kicked the ball to him, but he wasn’t looking at it. The plane was getting bigger. There wasn’t any noise, either - there normally is with jets. The plane looked like it was turning. It was very low.

Dad picked me up. He grabbed me underneath my arms, so fast it hurt. Then he started running, and shouting at Mam. He was telling her to run, and he was running. He forgot the ball - I kept trying to tell him, but he kept running. He ran until he found a little stream, in a ditch. He threw me into the ditch, and jumped in with me. He pulled Mam into the ditch as well. I kept trying to look up, but he kept holding me in the ditch.

My feet were wet, and I looked up. The Qantas plane was so close. It flew right over our hiding place. Then it crashed, and there was a huge noise, and it started to get very hot. Dad pushed mam and I down, into the water. He told me to keep my head out of the water, but to keep everything else in the water. He said he was going to see if anyone needed help. Mam tried to stop him, but he told her to mind me.

It got dark, with all the smoke. Dad was gone for a long time. He came back, wild-eyed and covered in black. he jumped in the stream, and splashed water on his face, kissed me on th head, and ran back. When he came back the second time, he had a baby with him, crying and holding onto a raggedy, scorched stuffed cat. He was covered in blood. He handed her to Mam, and ran back over the ditch. He said there were more.

There weren’t. We waited. Hours later, the firemen found the three of us. They pulled us out of the ditch. They gave us blankets, and sat us in an Ambulance. No one asked us our names. We walked past rows of bodies. Mam started shouting about Dad. They found his body. He had managed to get into the cabin. He was killed when one of the fuel tanks exploded. Mam screamed when she heard that.

While we were waiting in the ditch, the baby dropped the raggedy stuffed cat. I held onto it. That night, when Cait was asleep in our house for the first time, I put it on the pillow beside her.

While the plane stays in the air and while Genevieve is still in her usual spot, we can hold off on armageddon.