The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon
There was no way that Darragh could ever accept the apology, but Angie hit send anyway. The conversation had been reduced to a thread of her green speech bubbles down one side of the screen: A digital monologue, long unanswered.
Next, she texted his brother, Cos to arrange to sit down and talk it all through. They settled on The English Market in one hour. Cool, he typed, signing off. There was nothing cool about it and his suggestion otherwise gave her pause. He was the last person she wanted to see, but it was best to clear the air. She dressed in jogging gear that had been gifted to her by the manufacturer back when there had been talk of a sponsorship. Nowadays she wore it exclusively for comfort. She had recently tried therapy and found herself seated across from a man who wore a shark’s tooth on a rope necklace, Crocs and a white pony tail. He referred to the jogging gear as her cocoon. He promised she would emerge from all of this a stronger person, a more vibrant person. Angie didn’t show up to her second appointment.
❦ ❦ ❦
The cab driver didn’t match his photograph which sat above his licence number on the dash. The picture looked like an aspiration he was drifting further from with each grey hair, each roll of fat. He seemed to share Angie’s lack of appetite for small talk. The only chatter came from the radio. When the host mentioned that the organiser of the West Cork Marathon was coming up after the break to discuss the upcoming event Angie instinctively reached out and switched it off.
‘A woman after my own heart,’ said the driver, ‘Too many people are afraid of silence these days.’
Angie showed him the kind of tight smile that would stem any further outbursts.
It was less than a year since she’d placed fourth in the West Cork Marathon, but it felt like a highlight of a different lifetime, maybe even one lived by somebody else. That race was Darragh’s first competitive run. She was the one who gave him a taste of the high – took him on her dawn training runs through the low hills behind their housing estate. She kept a gentle pace. The trail shimmered with dew and they ran in easy silence as the ochre red sun flared over the lip of the valley. His smile and his stamina grew with each passing morning. Now she hadn’t seen dawn or anything like it for close to a year and the earth on Darragh’s grave had long since settled. But still she unlocked her phone to check the wording of her apology text. She passed the rest of the cab ride in silence, watching rain spill down the windscreen, the wipers trying their best against it.
The entrance to the market was clogged with a knot of damp bodies sheltering from the weather. She had to squirm her way through as they stood gawping at the sky like rain was some new curiosity to this part of the world. Inside, only a sparse crowd milled along the tight web of paths under the high gothic arches of the old marketplace. She had been holding onto the hope that he might not show, but Cos was seated at a counter that wrapped around a griddle where potato hash and onions and spiced sausage spat and smoked to a golden-brown mess that roused a hunger in her. She’d have to suffer that hunger a little longer. A meal, she had decided, would make the meeting feel like something it was not.
The skin of Cos’s face was mottled red, his eyes heavy and glassy enough to make her question if the beer in his hand was a continuation of last night. She thought she spotted a tremor run through his free hand.
‘Will you have one?’ he said.
The thought of it set her stomach churning. ‘I think I’ll stick with coffee.’ Though she said it to Cos, the woman behind the counter placed a mug under the spout of the machine and began grinding beans. Even if she had the mind for a drink, the beer in his hand didn’t look too inviting. There was no condensation on the bottle. It looked like it had been taken out of a cupboard rather than a fridge. It didn’t seem to matter to Cos. He was just clinging to whatever was within reach.
Angie peeled off her rain coat and lay it across the empty stool between them. She cleared her throat to make way for words that died before they reached her mouth. She couldn’t pick the right ones. Cos tried on a smile that quickly faltered into something closer to a cringe. It was his smile that caused all the trouble when they bumped into each other the night before. She had been walking the streets to escape the apartment and her own bleak company. She found Cos smoking outside the front door of a pub, whatever alcohol he had on board swaying him gently in the rain. His smile when he saw her was the same one all the Costello brothers shared. There was something of Darragh in it. Maybe even enough of him there to tease a smile back onto her own face. She joined him inside and he seemed glad of the company. They drank like the world was ending. When he spoke, she watched the faint dusting of freckles across his nose. Most people couldn’t tell them apart by the freckles alone, but she knew the pattern of Darragh’s so well that she couldn't trick herself into finding his face in his brother’s. It was their eyes that rhymed the most though. Dark eyes flecked with ice-blue shards and whenever Cos smiled, she watched the familiar way the skin at their edges creased and for the briefest of moments she could find Darragh there. She wished it was as simple as blaming the drink, but what she had wanted was a way to make that smile hold – to keep it for the night.
Now, not for the first time, she caught those eyes fixed on her chest. She had caught him in the past, when he joined her and Darragh on a run or when he called over for a poker night. His attempts to disguise it were so amateur they had struck her as almost cute. But after last night, he held a steady gaze, like her body was something he was now entitled to.
‘You know that’s not happening again?’ she said.
He looked like he’d been slapped across the face. He surely wouldn’t want to relive that anyway, she thought. It had been a desperate, clumsy effort. Their bodies had rebuffed like matching poles of two magnets, too alike in their grief to attach – to heal one another. Angie’s coffee arrived in a shallow mug with steam wisping off the surface and she cupped her wet hands around its heat.
‘He’s been gone a year,’ said Cos, ‘You know it’s okay to be with somebody else. I don’t mean me, just, somebody.’
‘I don’t need your permission to move on.’
‘And I’m not giving it, Angie. There’s only one person who can give you that.’
She knew then this meeting was a mistake. The last thing she needed was advice from a man who needs a drink to keep his hand from shaking at ten in the morning. She eyed the nearest exit and found that the downpour had only strengthened. Outside, runnels of rainwater traced the grout lines of the cobbles, merging into a stream that washed down the pedestrian street. In the stall across from where they sat, a middle-aged woman sifted through a pale of olives with a miniature shovel. It was one of those artisan stalls where Darragh would pass half a Saturday morning among the cured meats and wheels of soft cheeses, the burlap sacks filled to the throat with roasted nuts and dried figs and apricots, dried chillies hung in bunches from butcher’s hooks. On the side of a re-purposed bookcase lined with jars of kimchi and raw honey was a poster for the West Cork Marathon. It had been this way for months. She had tried to tamp down the memory, but it had a way of finding her.
She had waited for Darragh at the finish line, long past the time they had estimated for him. She waited until the shadows stretched long on the ground. Until only a few stragglers remained on the course and the water station had been all but cleared by the finishers. Until she heard the faint crackle of a paramedic’s radio and the words ‘cardiac arrest’ hit her ears like a starter pistol and she took off running back through the course. There was a small crowd gathered before the nearest kilometre marker. She edged through to where he lay motionless in a bed of nettles. She didn’t know why, but her first thought was that these people were intruding on what should be the most intensely private moment of his life. All she wanted was a moment alone with him – a moment to breathe. If she had the strength she would have carried him herself, over the finish line and away from the swarming crowd. She got her chance to carry him later that week, with her arm linked around Cos in the awkward stutter-step procession through the graveyard. Each of the five men under the coffin with her were tall enough that Angie had to walk on the balls of her feet to feel Darragh’s weight press against her one final time. Some of the older men watched disapprovingly as she climbed the slope towards the grave. She never understood that. Would their wives not do the same for them?
‘My mother was asking for you,’ said Cos, teasing her back to the here and now.
‘How is she?’
‘She’s broken, Ange. I don’t know if there’s any fixing her.’
‘I feel bad that I gave up on calling over to her,’ said Angie, ‘but I couldn’t spend another morning in her kitchen watching her stare up at that Sacred Heart picture on the wall. It wasn’t doing either of us any good. Is she getting out any more, at least?’
‘She’s where you left her.’
He took a long, warm gulp from his bottle and set it down on the counter. ‘The way Darragh went,’ he said, ‘It seems to be happening left and right. I swear it’s on the news every other week. There was a goalkeeper up in Galway last month, keeled over during a match. Gone at the age of twenty-two and no warning.’
‘They call that the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon,’ Angie said.
‘The heart condition?’
‘No,’ said Angie, ‘It’s when you see or hear something seemingly for the first time and then all of a sudden it’s everywhere. Like say you buy a new car and next thing you know every second person on the road seems to be driving the same one. It’s always been that way. You just don’t notice it until it affects your life.’
‘My mother sees it differently,’ he said, ‘She’s always had this idea that when anybody is lost God will send a sign to help them find their way. Pebbles, she calls them. If they don’t get your attention He’ll send another and another until there’s a mound of pebbles so high that you can’t fail to see them. She reckons maybe it's a sign I should get myself checked out. These underlying conditions can be hereditary.’
‘Might be no harm, Cos.’ She didn't mean to look at the bottle as she said it. It just happened naturally.
He peeled a long sliver from the label and rolled it into a ball between his thumb and forefinger. ‘I’m going to a meeting tonight,’ he said, raising the bottle meekly by the neck in case the subject of the meeting wasn’t obvious.
The honesty of it caught her off guard. He’d never tended to talk about anything real, at least not to her. ‘Fair play,’ she said.
‘If I make it past the car park this time,’ he said.
This time? She pursed her lips, but before she could get the first word out, he killed the question with a shake of his head.
‘How about you?’ he said, ‘How are you doing?
She had been asked the question with every intonation possible since Darragh’s death and had held onto the truth like a rare jewel that must be protected at all costs. Maybe it was his honesty that had loosened her grip or maybe she was just too weary to hold it any longer.
‘I’m gone a bit strange in myself,’ she said.
‘It’s to be expected.’
‘When I stepped outside the hospital after the doctors said they’d done all they could, everybody was on their phones breaking the news. Your mother was calling your father. You were calling your sister, and I took out my phone and I realised I had nobody. The only person I could think to call was Darragh, so I texted him.’
Cos slid his hand towards hers then caught himself and drew it back to the safety of his bottle.
‘I still text him every day,’ she said, ‘but the worst of it is that I check my phone constantly to see if he’s replied. I mean what kind of carry on is that? You’d be sectioned for less.’
‘Does it help?’ he asked with a desperate hope in his voice.
‘I don’t know. It used to, I think.’
Cos nodded solemnly. ‘Let me know if you find something that holds,’ he said, picking at a crack in the burnished countertop with his thumbnail now.
‘I told him about last night,’ she said, ‘I told him we slept together.’ She didn’t know why she had said it, but he was being honest with her, so why not? His face flushed. It could have been guilt. It could have been the hangover. It could have been whatever else he was holding onto that he wasn’t ready to speak yet, maybe never would be. She didn’t ask.
For the first time in a long while she had shared the truth, but there were limits to her honesty. She didn’t tell him that she still washed herself with the same Lynx Africa shower gel that Darragh used and lingered in its scent until the water ran cold. She didn't tell him about her journaling. How she felt that she was slowly losing the memories she had made with Darragh, that they were being siphoned off in her sleep. Of course, she couldn’t say exactly what was missing, she woke only with the feeling of loss. So now when a fresh memory of him did flit across her consciousness she recorded it in a notebook she carried at all times in her handbag. And she didn’t tell him that she hadn’t run a step since the day Darragh died for reasons she couldn’t fully explain to herself – no matter how many people told her it might be the first step on a long road back to herself. She had even changed her number to avoid the sponsors who wanted to pay her to make a career of her talents.
They each sat silently with what they had done as the rain pelted the roof high above them like artillery fire. A man with a flat cap and thin beard lowered himself onto the far side of the wraparound counter and was served a heap of potato hash and sausages with a thick pink sauce that clung to his moustache as he chewed.
‘I think I'm going to go,’ Angie eventually said, looking down at her untouched coffee.
‘Do me a favour, will you?’ said Cos, ‘Next time you text my brother, tell him I miss him.’ His smile was only a half-formed thing without the eyes involved. Then it fell from his face altogether.
She paid for the coffee, rose from the stool and shook the droplets from her raincoat. ‘Mind yourself, Cos.’
Outside, the city was empty. A newspaper vendor called out through the rain to her alone, it seemed. Everyone else had found shelter. She hunkered under the awning of a Turkish barbershop and instinctively took out her phone. In the messaging app her thumb hovered over the keypad, the text bar flashing expectantly. There were things that needed to be explained to Darragh that she couldn’t conjure the words for. And now that she had let another person in on this private thing they shared, she had the uneasy feeling of being observed. But the thing that held her back most was that she hadn’t been able to explain to Cos how the texts helped – or if they helped at all.
She slipped the phone back into her pocket. At the end of the block a lone jogger flashed across the street and disappeared behind the buildings. Over his wet gear he wore a green t-shirt with a circular yellow logo on the back. She recognised it at once. She had the same one stashed away at the back of her wardrobe with 4th place stitched across the chest.
She thought of Darragh’s mother and her pebbles. How they could be piled up all around her, but she’d never see them if she was fixated on only the Sacred Heart picture on her kitchen wall. Angie hoped that a world that narrow couldn’t last forever. She walked out into the rain, allowing her stride to lengthen with each step, gathering pace until she glided above the wet ground, water spraying from her heels. In a flat out sprint she passed the corner where the jogger had been, but he was nowhere to be seen – vanished forever among the raindrops. She fell into a stride that felt alien to her bones. It wasn’t the same stride as before and perhaps never would be. All she could do was put one foot in front of the other in search of a rhythm, either familiar or new.
Stephen Brophy is the winner of the 2021 Montana Prize in Fiction. His short fiction is upcoming in Cutbank and appears on Bandit Fiction, Flash Fiction Magazine, and Shotgun Honey, among others. He lives in Cork with his fiancée and two sons.
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