Someone had once told Orla that grief had its passage of time. Nothing could hurry it. Two to five years was normal to grieve, going through all the processes of anger, guilt and acceptance.
Five years passed. The Garda, despite her fears that they might, never returned. The farmhouse came slowly back to life under her care. And still she longed for Redmond, for the presence of her twin at her side. And she felt plagued by guilt because she had lived, and he had not.
With so much time to think about it, she’d become convinced that the crash had been orchestrated by Annie Carter and her Mafia pals. She could never forget Fergal tapping that fuel gauge, wondering why it was showing empty when it should have been full. And now the only person she had ever loved in her entire life was gone. The one consolation was that she and Redmond had settled the score with that Carter bitch before they’d fled England. They’d finished her good and proper – there would have been nothing left of her but blood and guts. It pleased Orla so much to think of that. If the police had ever found the remains of her, God alone knew how they would have identified the cow.
The days dragged on, the skies sitting in a grey repressive bowl above her head as she went out to hang the washing. It wouldn’t dry much today, but later she’d bring it in, hang it on the clothes horse in front of the fire.
Her life was dull too, dull like the sky. She was wearing an old cotton dress of her mother’s, pulled in tight with a belt because she was terribly thin these days, as if the grief had eaten her from within. Over that she wore a faded quilted jacket – her father’s – and Wellington boots that belonged to him too. They flopped around her feet, acres too big.
Orla grabbed the peg bag from inside the kitchen door and hurried out clutching the basket of washing. In the living room of the old farmhouse her parents were watching the news on TV. She’d sat with them through the latest reports about the IRA shooting dead a policeman who’d stumbled upon a bomb-making factory in a Hammersmith basement, and the scandal surrounding Indira Gandhi, who’d now been found guilty of electoral corruption. But when the newsreader announced that a Boeing 727 had crashed at the edge of Kennedy airport, killing over a hundred people, Orla had begun shaking uncontrollably. The footage of wreckage in the water had her reliving her own nightmare struggle for life, the icy sea, the plane sinking, the loss – oh God! – of Redmond.
She looked around her at the decaying farm buildings. It was hard to believe that they had been reduced to this. Her father, who’d seen to it that the Delaney name inspired fear and respect in London’s ganglands, now a demented old man. Her mother, once so smart, so elegant, now worn down by the strain of caring for him. Her brothers, dead.