On the Bloody Streets of Omagh

It was a moment that seemed to stand still, a moment that you knew that you would never forget, even if you wanted to with all of your heart, mind, body and soul. It was a moment that seemed to stretch for a lifetime, even though it was just that; a moment. A lot of things can happen in one of those moments, an ever-lasting moment. Ever-lasting moments were called ever-lasting moments for a reason, and Seamus Donovan knew exactly why. It was because one of these ever-lasting moments did last for forever. Even though that moment, that split second of time, not even a fraction of his life, had lasted no more than a blink of an eye, the ripples of consequence would stay with Seamus until his dying breath, and he knew that for a fact.

And so a lot of things did happen in that moment. There was the original moment, where, with a cruel act of cowardice and a deafening roar, the heart was ripped from a town and over two dozen families, and then there was the ever-lasting moment, where Seamus would wake up and sit bolt upright in bed, covered in cold sweat, reliving that first moment over and over again. The ever-lasting moment where he would be doing something completely normal, talking with his wife, playing with his children, and perhaps one of his children would fall and graze his or her knee and screech with pain and shock like children do at that age, even if it didn’t really hurt that much at all. And that little scream would catapult Seamus back to that day, where so many children were shrieking and crying, and it would only be when his wife would ask his name that he would jerk back into reality, and come back from that terrible day ten years ago …

*

Let's start with the original moment. The original point in time where we meet Seamus, who is twenty-one years old and who is at university studying history.

Saturday afternoon: the street is alive, packed with children playing and laughing, mothers herding them along to do their shopping, fathers chatting with work colleagues, grandmothers and grandfathers coming along to see their grandchildren trying on their school uniform for the first time, ready for school the next month. People working, serving people in shops and cafes, polishing and cleaning the glass of the shops. The sun is warm and bright and glints off the windscreens of the cars crawling slowly along, the side windows down to let in the cool breeze. Picking up and dropping off … a silver car drops off a mother and her child and they wave and disappear into the crowd, a green car pulls up and two gossiping teenage girls jump into the back, laden with shopping bags, a red car pulls up and two young men get out and dander down the warm street, leaving the little car parked in the shade.

Seamus Donovan is standing in the doorway of one of the shops, waiting for his little brother, Lorcán, to finish getting his school uniform for his final year in high school. He was looking forward to it at the moment: as the youngest boy with all of his brothers gaining excellent GCSE results and going onto university, he was eager to prove himself and get into his A-Level studies, and to do this he had to pass his GCSEs that would be in the summer of next year. Seamus wondered if Lorcán would feel the same way after the first term.

"Look at the fifth year ties," Lorcán grimaced, holding one up. Seamus turned around and chuckled.

"We never had them when I was in fifth year. You're making me feel old."

"That's because you are old." Lorcán replied cheekily. "Ah, well, at least everyone will be able to tell who the fifth years are, and we'll be able to execute our authority over them easier."

"If I find out that you've been bullying any first years, Lorcán Donovan, I'll hunt you down, put your head down a toilet, and flush it."

"I believe it was you who kept putting first years in the bins, Seamus?" Lorcán reminded him.

"I don’t recall that." Seamus replied innocently.

"I do, because I was that first year." Lorcán replied, shaking his head.

"Well, we're family, so that doesn't count."

"Yeah, family … such love we have."

Seamus grinned.

"It's the tradition. It happened to me when I was a first year … it's just what goes on. Enjoy being top of the food chain."

"But you just said –"

Seamus would never find out what Lorcán was going to say as a comeback for his earlier comment, as that was the precise moment in time that the life changing, destroying moment occurred outside.

Seamus had seen what would have caused the moment had he not been looking at his brother at the time. He would have noticed that the street had become more crowded as people were moved towards it, he would have noticed the little red car that had been innocently parked across the road from them, almost directly opposite, suddenly explode and disintegrate before his eyes, but he didn't see any of this.

He was never sure exactly what he did see, on the rare occasions that he allowed himself to think about it. He only remembered the loudest sound that he had ever heard in his life, as though a freight train and collided into a brick wall and spontaneously crumpled and exploded at the same time. He remembered flying forwards as though a huge gust of wind had pushed his back and send him hurtling towards who knew what, and he remembered lots of small and sharp objects hitting him. He remembered thinking that this was it, he was surely dead now, and then he remembered everything going dark.

The first thing that he knew when he came back to his senses was that he was lying on something very awkward and hard. Forcing his eyes open, he could see through a red haze that he was on what looked like a pile of brick, stone, glass and tattered and burnt clothes. He wondered why the world had suddenly gone red. He wiped his eyes with the back of one of his hands, and this hand came off bright red. He realised that he was looking through his own blood, and he desperately tried to sit up, but pain shot through his stomach area and he collapsed back onto the hard surface, squeezing his eyes shut and gasping.

He didn’t know what had happened. For a brief moment, though he did not know why, he thought that there had been an earthquake or a tornado, or some other sort of freak natural accident. At that moment, however, reason and sense caught up with him, and he realised that things like that didn’t usually cause a fireball, nor did they usually occur in the middle of August in Omagh in Northern Ireland.

Seamus forced his eyes open again, trying to sit up. This time, he battled through the pain and made it onto his hands and knees, and then he looked around himself.

It was to be a decision that he would regret for the rest of his life. If Seamus could have gone back to this exact moment with knowledge he had when he remembered back to it, he would have never looked. He would have lain on the floor pretending to be unconscious until he was taken away, and spare himself the horror of what he saw that day.

Right away, Seamus knew that it had been a bomb, and that the red car that he had seen parked must have had something to do with it. The place where he remembered that it had been parked was a huge crater, looking like some sort of surreal volcanic eruption. Seamus squinted at it. Water was pouring out of the deep crater and over what looked like rock blown up from under the street, and cascading down the street, but the water was bright red. With a jolt of awful realisation, Seamus realised that the water was red with blood, and the 'rocks' were people.

Dead people.

The buildings around the crater were ruined, pieces hanging off of them as though they had been ripped off by some sort of huge monster, pieces strewn in the street and roofs caved in. The people who were now stumbling around were broken too, much in the same way as the buildings, with pieces missing and hanging off them, and bits strewn over the street.

Seamus watched what was going on with a sense of confusion, realising that everyone was deathly silent, even though their mouths were open and they were trying to make noise. As this thought crossed his mind, sounds started to reach him, and suddenly he could hear everything through a loud ringing in his ears, and he realised that the bomb blast must have temporarily deafened him.

It was another moment that, looking back, Seamus would have liked to change. He wished he had stayed deaf until he was out of there, because it was the sounds that still haunted him in a lost area in the back of his mind. Instead, through the ringing in his ears, he could hear all of these horrible sounds, so different from the sounds of laughing children and chatting mothers and fathers, and cooing grandmothers and grandfathers of earlier.

Saturday afternoon, and the street is dead and dying and wounded and broken. The sun is no longer warm, not compared to the pain of the burnt and the chills of the injured observing the scene. It's packed with children crying, children screaming, children dead and children dying with no one to hold them and comfort them. Mothers screeching their children's names, tears running through the blood and burns on their faces as they stumble around the place where they last saw their precious children, frantically looking around for them, praying that the leg on the floor to the left wasn't their child's, but all the while knowing that the blood on the floor must partially belong to their son or daughter.

The fathers who were chatting earlier are now silent and blood-stained, tearing at the rubble with their bare hands, pulling out both survivors and bodies, joined by men who are not blood-stained, who have ran to the street from other places, like so many other people have. Policemen drenched in blood, running up the street, being pulled here and there, helpless as to what to do. Some policemen can’t keep their emotions in check and are crying, others are staring around with a look of total horror upon their faces.

Other children are staggering around, screaming for their mothers, fathers, friends, brothers, sisters. Some are too injured, and are sitting on the floor, large eyes wide and swimming with tears, silent and shaking.

Seamus watched it all, his heart hammering. A short distance from him, a small boy is sitting, looking at his leg, which is lying several metres away from him, with his shoe still on it. Seamus stumbles towards him, almost blinded with the pain from his abdomen and head, and he can hear the child muttering the same words over and over again.

"It hurts … it hurts …"

He's shivering, and the only things that Seamus can do is ease off his own coat and tuck it around the little boy, who watches him with wide eyes full of pain as he sits with his hand clutching a bloody stump where his leg should be. Seamus watches him back, and the little boy knows that there's nothing Seamus can do, apart from kiss his head and whisper that he's going to find him help, and that he'll try to find his mother, that is, if she had with him when the bomb went off.

Seamus staggers on, slapping through several inches of red water, avoiding chunks of body being washed down the street. His vision goes out of focus and he staggers over and falls to the floor, wondering why he nearly passed out, not realising that back of his own head was practically caved in by the force of the explosion, like the heads of so many of the dead that he had already seen.

He forced himself onto his hands and knees and crawled on. He had to get someone for the wee boy, he couldn't leave him …

He realised that this was going to be impossible. There were too many injured and not enough people to help. He was going to have to help. He was alive, he was lucky enough to still have all of his limbs, even though his left arm was now numb and bloody and raw flesh was exposed now he had taken his coat off. He didn't look at it too closely.

A thought hit him as he watched and listened to a father searching frantically for what sounded like his wife and toddler son. It made the pain almost vanish from Seamus's body and it made him leap to his feet as one word flashed through his brain. Lorcán. Where was his little brother?

And so Seamus, without realising it, became one of the bloody and hysterical crowd who was searching for someone, though Seamus was only hysterical in the fact that tears were running uncontrollably down his cheeks and he was shaking madly, as he made no sound, just staggered and splashed back to the pile of rubble that had been the shop that they had been playfully bickering in only minutes before. Minutes! It felt like years.

He stumbled back to the rubble, splashing through pieces of people and bits of buildings alike, blinded by fear that one of the dead might be his fifteen-year-old brother. Tears washed over him again as he remembered how eager Lorcán was to do well in his exams, to go onto Sixth Form and follow in all of his elder brothers and sisters' footsteps into university. Lorcán wanted to be a doctor, like so many of the doctors running around the place now – on duty and off duty, nurses and surgeons and anyone who had the faintest knowledge of first age were all being pulled this way and that, trying desperately to save a dozen lives at once. Lorcán wanted to save lives, too, but Seamus didn’t even know if he had a life of his own now.

The boy with the severed leg was gone, and so was the leg. All that was left was Seamus's bloodsoaked coat. He would later discover that the nurse who had been helping him had used the coat to stop as much blood escaping his severed leg until paramedics, the first of hundreds, had arrived to take him to the hospital.

The shop owner, joined by several survivors and several ones who had run to the street to help, and they're all pulling rubble away as the smell of burning flesh and the cries of dying children and the shrieks of desperate mothers become unbearable.

Someone touches Seamus's good arm, and Seamus turns to see a hysterical young girl, covered in blood. She looked foreign, with dark hair and eyes and slightly tanned skin. Sure enough, when she speaks, she is speaking in Spanish. Seamus forces his mind back to when he did Spanish as a GCSE, and manages to work out that she was with a group and she had lost them and did he know where they were?

In incredibly broken Spanish, he manages to ask her if they had been wearing anything distinguishing. He was only able to use sentence fragments and key words, but she seemed so relieved that she had found someone who at least spoke a little bit of her native tongue that she didn’t care. She had been searching for a while, being only ignored or met with the blank stares of people who couldn't understand her.

She simplified her Spanish for him, using key words back and telling him that they all had blue backpacks, but she had been separated when people have been moved by the police and she had lost them. Seamus nodded, and gently took her arm and led her back to where he remembered seeing a group of people sounding similar to her description had been standing. He couldn’t leave her. He knew people were searching where Lorcán had been, and all though he was worried sick about his brother, this girl needed more help than anyone. She was alone and foreign with nobody being able to speak her language, and he wanted to see her reunited with at least one other Spanish person from her group, so she could at least have someone who could understand her.

He knew enough fluent Spanish to ask her her name and how old she was.

"Donna Marie," she replied, and she said that she was fifteen years old. He told her his own name and as he glanced at her he realised why he hadn't thought that she was only fifteen. She was a small girl and her face was so badly sliced by broken glass and shrapnel that her features were practically indistinguishable. He could only tell the colour of her eyes and had only known that she must be foreign by the tanned skin on her hands.

She stumbled slightly and Seamus knew that she was about to pass out. He caught her as she fell even though it made his injured arm feel as though it was being ripped off, and he gently laid her on the floor, whispering her name and gently muttering comforting terms in Spanish, using what he knew. He stayed with her though he knew that she wasn't going to regain consciousness anytime soon, but he knew that he couldn’t leave her just in case. He stayed with her right up until two paramedics suddenly appeared and began looking at her, and he was able to tell them her name and her age and that she was Spanish and the fact that she had seemed to be all right but had then passed out.

Young Donna Marie barely remembered any of this. She woke up briefly as she was being placed into the ambulance, and she vaguely recognised Seamus's face before the doors were closed and the ambulance headed to the hospital, and Seamus had turned and begun on his way back to where he had last seen his brother.

Seamus got back to the shop, his arm causing him agony now, and he saw that a couple of other people had been pulled from the rubble, but none of them were his brother Lorcán.

"Is this all you found?" he asked the shopkeeper urgently. He nodded sadly, knowing Seamus well as he had sold him his school uniform for all of his years at school in the town.

"You're looking for your wee brother?"

"Have you seen him at all?"

"He wasn't here. I'm sorry, Seamus. Perhaps he's already been taking to hospital or he wasn't badly hurt and he's looking for you?"

Seamus tried hard to believe it, but he knew that there was just as much, if not more, of a chance that his brother was making up the fragments of people scattered over the street and being washed away by the water. He decided to believe the shopkeeper for now, and so he turned and stumbled back in the way he had come to see if he could spot his brother.

The scene was even more hectic now. Policemen, firemen and paramedics, people who had run to help, doctors and nurses from the doctor's surgery or who lived nearby had all joined the throng of injured, helping them look for people or getting them to ambulances or pulling wreckage from people.

Seamus searched and searched but he couldn't find any trace of his brother, no matter where he looked. He traced the same spots over and over, seeing again and again the horrible crater that had held the thing hat had brought so much death and horror, past the over-turned and mangled pram, past the body of a tiny baby lying in the wreckage behind a shattered window with nothing but someone's coat covering her, her poor mother either dead like her or being taken to the hospital, perhaps not knowing that her precious baby was lying dead in a pile of wreckage with nobody to look after her tiny fragile body.

Uncontrollable tears helped the steady flow of blood from his head blind Seamus, and he frantically used his good arm to wipe it away, terrified that he would miss a clue that would lead him to his little brother. He couldn’t control himself, though, as everywhere he looked he passed the dead: a small boy who didn't even look in his teens lying on the floor with half of his head blown away, his eyes still open but no longer seeing, a teenage girl dead in the wreckage of a shop, a grandmother who'd never hold and coo over her grandchildren again, a pregnant woman, more children …

Seamus broke down. He couldn't take it anymore. He dropped to his knees on the floor and covered his eyes with his good hand and howled. He cried until his throat was raw, wanting to be somewhere, anywhere, but in the blood streaked streets of Omagh that day. He didn't care where he was; he would rather be one of the dead than see all of the horrors around him.

Pain was ripping through his abdomen stronger than before, and Seamus forced himself to calm down enough to lift his T-shirt and see what had happened. It was no wonder this hurt more – he hadn't see the many shards of sharp glass that had embedded themselves cruelly into his stomach, and he had managed to pull half of them out when he had lifted his T-shirt up. The pain ripped through him stronger that ever, made worse by the fact that the pain from his arm and head was combining with it.

His vision began to swim again. He slumped forward onto the bloody, rubble-strewn floor, darkness closing around him. He didn’t care, he welcomed it, anywhere was better than here …

A shopkeeper from a shop that hadn't been completely gutted saw this, and he and his brother ran forward and pulled Seamus up and brought him out of the road and into the shop. They had cleared most of the broken glass from the floor and several other people, some more injured than others, were lying in there. They lay Seamus beside them – he was unconscious and the two men could see, just like everyone else had been able to, just how badly injured Seamus was. Several people who had seen him had wondered how he had been on his feet, but Seamus hadn't realised how much the glass had sliced through him, how badly his arms were burned. Nor had he noticed that fact that his head had been so severely injured and that in places his skull was visible, and he didn’t realise that only a few slices of flesh were holding his left arm in place. He was blissfully unaware, protected by the fact that his body had realised that this was bad and had spared him the horror of seeing himself by rendering him unconscious.

He was unaware that at that moment his mother and father had switched on the news and had seen the devastation in Omagh, only down the road from them which was already being broadcasted, although the true extent of the damaged was unknown and they could only confirm that there had been deaths, but they couldn’t say how many. He was unaware that they had realised what the huge bang had been earlier, and that they had instantly rushed out to look for their two sons Seamus and Lorcán, whom they knew had been in the street when it had gone off.

No, the next thing that Seamus knew was that he was waking up in the hospital, the screams and cries of the injured and bereaved still echoing in his head though the room was dark and for the most part calm, though he could hear the commotion in other parts of the hospital.

He tried to sit but the pain was still too great and he didn’t have the energy. Luckily for him, a nurse came into the room at that moment, to check up on him. The first thing he did was ask about his little brother Lorcán, who was fifteen and had been with him when the bomb had gone off.

"I'm sorry, honey," the nurse said apologetically. "We had over two hundred people come in - in only forty-five minutes! - earlier. I wouldn't know if your brother had been one of them. Were your parents with you?"

Seamus began to cry then, sobbing out that they hadn't been and that they'd asked him to look after Lorcán, and now he didn't even know if his brother was alive, let alone in this hospital.

"You need to calm down, you're hurt too, remember?" the nurse told him gently. "You can’t work yourself up like this. I know you must be horribly worried, but if you get yourself in such a bad state you won't be good to do anything, will you? If you survived, there's no reason that he couldn't have."

They both knew that this was untrue, but they both decided to believe it for a couple of blissful seconds where they could convince themselves that everything was all right. Seamus knew that even though he had survived, the person one metre ahead of him in the same shop had died, and he knew that there was no logical reason whatsoever to explain that Lorcán could have survived.

"I need to get in touch with my parents," Seamus eventually said. "I need to let them know what’s happened."

The nurse nodded.

"Here," she said to him, handing her a mobile phone from her pocket. "We're not really allowed to have these, but a lot of people have wanted to call home and have been too hurt to get out of bed. Just make it as quick as possible, because I'm sure you won't be the last person who'll need it and I don’t want to battery going."

Seamus thanked her and dialled his father's mobile number, knowing that his parents would have already heard and wouldn’t be in the house. The nurse went out to check on someone else, so Seamus had a little privacy in case he received bad news about his brother.

The phone was picked up almost as soon as Seamus had pressed the call button.

"Hello?" his father's voice asked urgently.

"Da, it's Seamus," Seamus whispered, feeling his throat tighten at the sound of his father's voice, dreading telling him that his youngest son was missing if they didn’t know anything about Lorcán.

"Seamus!" his father gasped. "Niamh, it's Seamus!" he added to his wife, and Seamus heard her burst into tears in the background, thanking God out loud. "Are you all right, Seamus?" Iollan, his father, added.

"I'm alive," Seamus managed a small smile. "I'm at the hospital. In Omagh, I think I'm still here, anyway … I've only just come round but I'm all right from what I can tell. Da … do you know anything of Lorcán? I lost him, I tried to find him but I couldn't, I didn’t see where he was … do you know where he is?"

"It's all right, Seamus, he's here with us," Iollan replied gently.

"He's with you?" Seamus asked, nearly laughing, or crying, or both with relief. "Is he all right?"

There was a pause, which threw cold water over Seamus's brief good mood.

"Not exactly, Seamus." Iollan said softly. "He lost his leg and he's got bad head injuries."

It hit Seamus – he knew now who the little boy who had been slumped at the kerb had been. They had both been so covered in blood and so dazed that they hadn't recognised each other. The little boy who had been staring in disbelief at his severed leg had been his little brother Lorcán.

Tears began rolling down Seamus's face for his brother, who would be devastated at the loss of his leg. A keen Gaelic player, Seamus knew he would never play that again.

"But he's alive?" he whispered hoarsely.

"He is. I suppose we can thank God for that."

Seamus agreed – at least his brother hadn't been blown to pieces like so many other people's brothers had been. Instead, he would just join the group of damaged children whose lives had been ruined. But at least he was alive …