Two Lives

21

Bríd Beamish is the first to go. Bríd Beamish received messages from U2. She was told U2 were in trouble. She kept contacting the Garda, saying the IRA were after them. Dave Lee Travis spoke personally to her, sending her messages through his disc-jockey chatter. When her father said he wouldn’t have Dave Lee Travis’ name repeated in the house she lit a cigarette and dropped it into the petrol tank of his Ford Cortina. She travelled to Lincolnshire in search of café life and was missing for a month. Afterwards she said she’d been on the game, an expression that confused her family until someone in a bar told her father what it meant. Schizophrenia was the diagnosis. And mild erotomania.

Bríd Beamish waves at the congregated women. She stands by the open back door of the car her father had to buy when she destroyed his Ford Cortina. Right as rain she’ll be, provided she doesn’t fall down on the medication: presentable is what they mean, and looking at her the women agree she’s a lot more presentable now than she was the day she arrived, no reason not to believe she’ll walk up the aisle. ‘Cheers, dear!’ the Spanish wife calls out, and old Sister Hannah, who developed a great affection for Brid Beamish, who was her confidante, is tearful.

The car door bangs, tyres crunch on the gravel.

‘Back to prostitution,’ Small Sadie predicts in her shrill screech.