Inner Core
I never admitted it to my wife M, but I really wanted the boy with the toothy grin to pull the trigger and shoot the French woman who was standing a few steps from us. I had nothing against her, I didn’t want her to die. But at that moment, I wanted everything to pause, so I could hear the crack of a gun blast, smell the gunpowder, and see if I could follow the bullet spinning through the air. I even considered what it would be like to lick the spattered blood from my face, wipe M’s jacket down, and go for dinner on the Asian side of Istanbul, just as we’d planned.
Lying awake back home in Dublin a few months later, I pondered this, as images of that evening flickered in my mind. Dizzy, my breath shallow, the small of my back tight, I fumbled in the dark for my watch, just like I did every night, knocking my hand into a book and a glass of water. It wasn’t there, of course it wasn’t.
I was sure that my watch had been stolen from our hotel room in Istanbul, on the last day of a city break M and I had taken. I knew that I’d wound the silver winder, which kept the mechanism faintly ticking just before I’d gone to bed. I knew that I’d placed it by the side of my bed, the strap doubled over, so I could see the watch face. I knew that I’d reached for it first thing in the morning, but for some reason hadn’t put it on. I knew after breakfast that it was gone.
“My watch, have you seen it?” I’d yelled, my heart palpitating with panic.
“What?” she’d shouted from the shower. “Didn’t you leave it by the bed?”
I spent what seemed like hours tossing clothes, opening cupboard doors, rummaging in bags, chucking sofa cushions, and retracing my steps around the hotel. While I searched, I kept touching my wrist, as if I could still feel the silver strap pinching the hairs on my arm.
It had been my father’s Tissot, the watch my mother had placed on my wrist the day after he’d died. The hotel manager shrugged when I suggested that it might have been stolen. I didn’t want to spoil M’s birthday trip, and at some stage she held me tight and told me to stop, “just stop bloody looking.” Reluctantly, I called the search off. “It’s only a watch, these things are replaceable,” I’d said, trying to convince myself.
