It’s weird, what you end up thinking about in a crisis. Certainly not the things you might have supposed.
‘Lezzers,’ someone shouts, and I lift my head and see a group of boys. Teenagers. Maybe fifteen years old. Acne-soiled faces and all dressed in identical tracksuit bottoms, hoodies and runners.
‘Get lost,’ I shout after them. I feel Iris begin to shake again and I tighten my arms around her, but it is not more spasms, as I had feared. She is laughing.
Her body is shaking with laughing. I look at her. The spasm is losing its grip on her face and her mouth releases her laughter. I sit up.
‘What’s so funny?’ I ask. I have to admit to being ever-so-slightly affronted by Iris’s mirth.
‘Get lost,’ Iris manages to say between laughs.
‘Well, they were being rude,’ I say.
‘You didn’t have to be so brutal,’ Iris says. She pushes herself into a sitting position. She looks pale and her breathing is fast, as if she’s run for a bus. Otherwise, she seems fine. I reach over and remove blades of grass from her hair.
‘It’s all go,’ Iris says, shaking her head.
‘Has that ever happened before?’ I ask. I’ve seen tremors running up and down her arms and legs before, but nothing like this.
Iris nods, and I wonder what else she goes through. What else she doesn’t tell me.
‘Weren’t you afraid?’ I ask. ‘You were so close to the edge when it happened.’
Iris shakes her head. ‘No,’ she says. This seems preposterous, given the extent of my own fear.
‘Why not?’
‘Because you were here.’
‘Oh,’ I say.
‘You’re quite the Amazonian, aren’t you?’ she says.
‘I’m just stronger than I look,’ I say.
16
BEFORE YOU START TO MANOEUVRE, YOU MUST EXERCISE DUE CARE AND ATTENTION.
The boat to France only takes an hour. And it’s going fast. Much faster than the one from Dublin to Holyhead, it seems to me.
Everything’s gone smoothly. No queue at the ferry office in Dover. No problem purchasing tickets for Dad and me, despite the last-minute nature of the transaction. Lots of room for manoeuvre in the car park on the boat. I gave nobody cause to beep at me. And Bakewell tart in the cafeteria, which is exactly what Dad ordered. And yes, I know I could have given him a slice of lemon drizzle and told him it was Bakewell tart and he would have eaten it with equal enthusiasm, but that is beside the point.
These are good things. I could have called them Signs. Signs that I’m on the right track. That I’m doing the right thing.
Iris is playing Scrabble on her iPad. We have not talked about the plan for hours. This is good. Not quite a Sign. But it feels good. It feels like a lull.
Dad finishes his Bakewell tart and falls asleep, his head on top of his arms, which are folded on the table in front of him. Like in junior infants when the teacher would tell you to ‘Téigh a chodladh’. Go to sleep. I remember closing my eyes tightly – Mr O’Toole would patrol the classroom, inspecting us – and me, digging my fingernails into my arm so I wouldn’t fall asleep in case I didn’t wake up the second we were told to.
My phone rings and I wrestle it out of my handbag before the shrill sound wakes Dad. I glance at the screen. It’s Kate.
‘Hello love,’ I say, my tone light and breezy. I sound like a woman who hasn’t a worry in the world.
‘Mum, what on earth is going on?’ Kate sounds worried.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Where are you?’
‘Oh, you know, out and about. Where are you?’
‘I’m at your house.’ It still sounds strange. She used to call it home.
‘Oh. Right, yes, your father mentioned you were coming up this evening. Did you … find what you were looking for?’
‘What? Oh, yes, I did. But look, that’s not why I’m ringing, I—’
‘Did you get something to eat?’
‘Dad’s gone down to Macari’s for chips, but listen, the thing is—’
‘Chips?’
‘Yeah.’
Brendan does not eat chips. For starters, there’s the small matter of his cholesterol. Six points it was, at his last check-up. Not staggeringly high by any means, but still, significant enough. And Brendan is careful about what he eats. Or should I say I am careful about what he eats. Left to his own devices … well, I’m not sure because I always leave portions of dinner in Tupperware containers in the freezer if I’m not going to be there, except there aren’t any at the moment because I am supposed to be there.
‘Are you staying the night?’ I say.
‘Yes. What time will you be home?’
‘You’ll have to make up your bed, I’m afraid. There’s a pile of freshly laundered sheets in the hot press.’
‘Mum, look, there’s something going on, isn’t there?’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Dad was sitting in the rocking chair when I let myself in. The place was in darkness. And when I asked him where you were, he got all vague and evasive.’
My heart is racing.
I should be more prepared for this conversation. I should have thought of something to say. Some excuse for my absence. Written it down. Memorised it.
I picture Kate, pacing in our kitchen, twirling a strand of her long brown hair around her fingers, working a piece of gum around her mouth, straightening the framed photograph of my mother that hangs on the wall there. Always on the move, my Kate. Even when she was a baby. Always turning the page of the book before I had finished reading it to her, The Owl Babies, Horton Hears a Who, Rumpelstiltskin, The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
When I’d get to the end, she’d turn back to the beginning so I could start again, her small, pink fingers reaching for the corner of the page, already thinking about the next bit of the story.
And Brendan. Sitting in the dark. On my rocking chair. He never sits on the rocker. He says it gives him motion sickness. He sits on his own chair. With the lights on.
Down the line, the silence stretches. Expands. Kate is a listener rather than a talker. Anna talks nineteen to the dozen. I find our conversations soothing, Anna talking at full tilt and me nodding and saying Really? and Oh! and Hmmm at intervals, just so she knows I’m still there. Still listening.
Iris mutters a word under her breath and taps-taps-taps on the screen of her iPad, looking pleased. I’m guessing a triple points word.
Dad lifts his head, turns it, and settles it on his arms again.
I take a breath. ‘The thing is, Kate, I’ve gone away for a few days.’
‘Gone away?’ I might as well have said I’ve flown to the moon, such is the degree of incredulity.
‘Eh, yes.’
‘But you never mentioned it.’ Kate sounds suspicious. And it’s true that I am not someone who goes away. And certainly not without mentioning it. ‘Where have you gone?’
I look out the window. Already I can see an outline of land. A concentration of light, bright against the darkening sky, that must be Calais. ‘I’m on a boat to France.’
‘With Iris?’ Kate asks.
‘Yes.’
‘Oh,’ says Kate, and for a moment I think that will be that. And then she says, ‘But why has Papa gone with you? He hates going on holiday.’
Really, there was no need for Brendan to go into such detail. Although what Kate says is true. Mam would have loved to have travelled more.
I tell her about the infestation of vermin and the home closing down for a week, which is good because it takes a while and steers us away from the whys and the wherefores.
Down the line, I hear the plaintive whistle of the kettle in my kitchen and I wonder how I ever found the noise annoying. It sounds so familiar to me. So innocent somehow. I think of my tea set in the press. The bone china set my mother left me, ivory teacups, with dainty pink roses on slender bright green stems painted inside.
‘So,’ I say brightly. ‘H
ow about you? Tell me everything. How’re rehearsals going?’
‘Oh Mum, it’s all going desperately,’ says Kate, and here I am, back on familiar ground, one of my children showing me where it hurts and me making soothing noises as I apply the antiseptic cream and plaster. And even though I haven’t had to play this role for a while, I have forgotten none of my lines – unlike the lead in Kate’s play it seems.
‘When are you coming back?’ Kate asks at the end of a technical story about lighting and a dramatic tale of attempted food poisoning of one of the actors by an understudy. I think that was the gist of it.
‘I’ll definitely be there for your big night,’ I tell her with the type of confidence that other people have. Confident people.
‘And you’re not to worry about the hotel. Dad will sort all that out,’ I add as if this is something I have no doubt about.
‘It’s just … I thought you and Dad were coming down the night before? To bring me out for a good-luck dinner?’
‘You know, I think you were right about that, Kate. I’ll only end up making you more nervous.’
‘Really?’ Kate’s voice is quiet. Like the voice of her younger self. Her smaller self. I take a breath, steel myself. ‘Definitely. You don’t need your mother holding your hand. You haven’t for years. And I’m … I’m glad about that.’ That last bit hasn’t always been true.
‘Oh, Dad’s back. Do you want to speak to him?’
I say, ‘We spoke earlier,’ except that I don’t mention what we spoke about, the me running away from home bit, because why on earth would I mention that? Besides, that’s not what I’m doing. And even if it was, what sense would it make to a daughter whose mother has never been anywhere but where she’s supposed to be?
‘Everything okay?’ Iris asks, looking up from her screen when I hang up the phone. I nod even though nothing is okay. Not really. And that’s not even including the terror I feel at the idea of driving the car off the ferry, into a foreign country in the dark on the wrong side of the road.
Iris puts down her screen. Leans towards me. Takes my hands in hers. ‘Your hands are freezing,’ she says, rubbing them.
‘They’re always freezing,’ I say.
‘Cold hands, warm heart,’ she says.
‘My heart must be on fire, so.’
Iris smiles.
‘How about you?’ I say. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Fine.’
‘What about earlier? That … attack you had. The muscle spasms.’
Iris shrugs. ‘That happens sometimes.’
‘What else?’
She drops my hands, sits back in her seat. ‘Lots of stuff, Terry. It’s a very generous disease.’
‘Have you told your consultant?’
Iris smiles, but it’s a humourless sort of smile. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Every time I get a new symptom, I tell the consultant, who nods and says, yes, that’s the MS, prescribes me more medication which makes me tired or dopey or cranky or twitchy and waits for me to come back with another little offering and so on and so forth. That’s probably why it’s called progressive MS. It does exactly what it says on the tin.’
I ignore the bitterness in her tone.
‘What about alternative remedies?’ I say. ‘Acupuncture, reflexology. And you should consider therapy, you know. You’re probably a bit depressed, which is why …’
‘Why what, Terry?’ Iris says, bristling.
‘Why we’re here,’ I say, lowering my voice. ‘Why you’re thinking about … you know … going to Zurich.’
‘You can’t even say it,’ Iris says. ‘You’re insisting on coming, and you can’t even say it.’
I hate this. I hate confrontation. Especially with Iris. I never fight with Iris. I never fight with anyone. I take a breath and say, ‘I don’t think you’re doing the right thing.’
‘Then why are you coming with me?’
‘Because you need me.’
‘I don’t, Terry. Not for this. I honestly do not.’
‘Well, I need you,’ I tell her. I know this is a cheap shot.
Iris’s body sort of sags. She looks worn out. When she speaks, her tone is slow. Deliberate. As if her voice is worn out too. ‘Some day soon,’ she says, ‘I won’t be able to walk. I’ll be in a wheelchair. I won’t be able to swallow. I’ll have to be tube fed. I won’t be able to shower. Or go to the toilet. I’ll have a hoist. I’ll have a colostomy bag. Attached to me. I will literally have a bag of shit dangling from the arm of my wheelchair. And it will smell bad and people will wince when they come and visit me and pretend that they don’t notice the bag of shit and that they’re not wincing at the smell of the shit. They will pretend that everything is lovely and nice and grand and normal and that my house, my life, doesn’t smell like shit.’
‘It won’t smell.’
‘Even my shit stinks, Terry.’ She grins when she says that, and it takes some of the heat out of this awful exchange.
‘I mean, your house won’t smell. I’ll make sure it doesn’t. You know how brilliant I am at cleaning. It’s like … my life’s work.’
Dad lifts his head off his arms, mutters something, then lowers it. Iris and I say nothing for a while. I try to still myself. My blood still feels like it’s racing around my body. I can hear it in my ears, loud as thunder. Iris picks up my hand, still cold. Squeezes it. I squeeze back.
‘Listen,’ I say quietly, doing my best even keel. ‘The thing is, you don’t know how long it’ll be before any of that stuff happens. Or if it will happen.’
Iris nods. ‘That’s exactly it,’ she says. ‘I don’t know. I have no idea. I just know that it’s there. Somewhere in my future. Waiting for me.’
I can’t think of anything to say to that. I know how much Iris hates not knowing.
‘This is why I got you to promise in Holyhead,’ Iris goes on. ‘That we wouldn’t discuss it, remember? Because I didn’t want … this.’ She waves her hand in the space between us.
I nod. ‘It’s hard,’ I say.
Iris leans forward until her forehead touches mine. ‘I don’t want to fight with you,’ she whispers.
‘I don’t want to fight with you,’ I whisper back.
‘So let’s not fight, okay?’
I nod. My head feels heavy on my neck. I’m spent. We all are. I look out of the window, as the boat cuts a furrow through the Channel towards France, leaving home, and everything familiar, in its wake.
17
EVEN WITH THE BEST HEADLIGHTS, YOU CAN SEE LESS AT NIGHT THAN DURING THE DAY.
The only sign that the Calais Jungle ever existed is a torn and sodden tent, slumped under a tree, with a sleeping bag hanging out of it, like a distended tongue.
And while the Jungle has been disbanded, the fencing has not. It’s everywhere; tall, sturdy poles tapering into sharp, twisted metal spikes.
I had to stop watching the news in the end. After the little Syrian boy was washed up on the shore in Turkey.
Alan Kurdi. Three years old. I remember his little red T-shirt. And the navy shorts that hung past his knees.
They looked brand new, the T-shirt and the shorts. I imagined his mother, holding them against his small frame in the shop. Making sure they fitted. He might have wanted to put them on straight away, like my girls always did. His mother saying, no. Saying they were for the journey.
And the way he lay on the shore, face down with his arms by his sides. The same way Anna and Kate lay in their cots for their morning naps. Except this little boy wasn’t sleeping in a cot. He was washed up on the shoreline of a Turkish beach, lying there like flotsam.
Calais looks like a town that has been discarded too. According to the guidebook I picked up in Dover, it was pretty much destroyed during the Second World War. It has the look of a place that was rebuilt by people whose hearts weren’t in it.
Or maybe it’s the dark and the rain and the metal spikes that’s creating this impression.
If I tell Iris that I am terrified abo
ut driving in the dark, on the wrong side of the road, in a foreign country, she’ll say it’s fine. I don’t have to drive. I can go home. She’d rather I go home. That much is clear.
So I don’t say that. Instead, I drive.
The good thing about driving in the dark on the wrong side of the road in a foreign country is the intensity of concentration I have to employ, leaving little space in my head to fret about the situation. Which seems a lot graver now. I have this vivid sensation of having crossed a line.
Mostly I’m worried about getting lost. I won’t even realise that I’m lost because I don’t know where I am to begin with.
I’m already lost.
That was one of my biggest fears when I was a child. Being lost. It happened once. In Northside shopping centre. I was with Dad. Which was unusual in itself. I can’t remember why I was in a shopping centre with my dad. I concentrate. It seems important to remember. I think it’s because of the dementia. I need to know it’s not contagious. Was it my mother’s birthday? Yes, that was it. No, it was the day after. He’d forgotten her birthday. He’d gone to the pub after work. She’d baked herself a cake. A chocolate cake with hundreds and thousands scattered on the top. Like a child’s birthday cake.
I don’t remember thinking that was sad. Baking your own birthday cake. I helped, as far I remember. Which meant getting in the way and licking the bowl. But Mam called it helping.
She was such a positive person, my mother. She never lost the ability to hope. To hope that Dad would come straight home from work. Hope that he wouldn’t drink too much. Hope that he might remember her birthday.
She had such a capacity for it. Hope.
Dad must have felt bad about it because there we were, the two of us, in Northside shopping centre the next day. He said I should help him choose something nice for Mam for her birthday.
‘What does she like?’ he asked me.
I don’t know how I got lost. But I remember how it felt. The realisation that I was alone. That nobody was in charge.
Rules of the Road Page 15
