As You Were

by Elaine Feeney

  ‘Well, that’s a lie . . . of course you know quite rightly where you were born,’ Jane said. ‘I, for one, was born at home,’ she announced, folding her palms out forwards like a rose opening and willing us all to engage in follow-the-leader.

  Margaret Rose played along. She was born at home too, somewhere near Clare, and her surname was Sherlock, after her husband, proper order, though there was something unconvincing about the way she said it, as though she were still testing out the name, trying it on herself.

  I was born here in this Hospital, I told them, and my maiden name was Hynes, and still is my name, and always would be. They all said aw, as if it was a shameful thing, so I quickly explained that my mother had no pain relief during my birth, that she was a solid and rather silent woman, practical, and that she spent forty-two hours in labour with me without eating a morsel or muttering a word, and they said ah, as if this were a good and positive thing and made up for my faux pas.

  Jane continued to chat about her own birth, as if present in faculties and not just body. She was told repeatedly by anyone who came near her, from dinner-bringers to consultants, that she was taking up a bed on the Ward and that she really needed to get one of her family in, to help her consider ‘options’.

  Nurse Molly Zane said she was born in Melbourne, and her mother was Irish or her mother’s mother. She didn’t have red hair or a love of the Irish or gift-of-the-gab according to her mother. Though Hegs and Margaret Rose most vocally insisted on the girl’s Irishness as though this were a compliment, Molly was Australian. She had a marvellously uncivil swagger and a wide face. She was told, she said, that Ireland treats its nurses poorly, doesn’t like its women too public, and takes them like tequila, quietly sharp, somewhat submissive, with a pinch of daft. So far, this theory had proved itself to be true.

  Molly had visited the Molly Malone statue in Dublin when she first arrived in Ireland, the only touristy thing she did, though Bobby her wife loved touristy things. But Molly went along for Ms Malone, her namesake, had that song her mother would sing to her when she was a little pissed. She was unimpressed with the statue, and as she looked down on her large cold breasts and watched her push her cart, make a living, she couldn’t help but wonder why Molly Malone was left out to the mob, day and night, why we could all ogle her fine cleavage from an open-top bus ride, why a nation had chosen to demean a woman like this? But did it worry her? No. Molly Zane considered a lot while worrying about very little.

  ‘When I think about how the world just turns,’ she said, jabbing my arm with a needle, ‘and holds on, ya naw, I get very overwhelmed, darl. But I don’t worry, waste of time.’

  The yellow sun shone for everybody, and this, it seemed, pleased Molly Zane. Homes stayed standing, the moon did things to the tides, babies left on doorsteps were taken in and given out again, planes stayed in the air. And when you lay on the ground on a summer’s day, it looked after you, held you in its earth hug as it gently turned. For the past twenty-seven years, Molly Zane’s head had not risen above thirty-seven degrees.

  ‘I always loved travelling,’ Margaret Rose said.

  ‘Rilly? Whereabouts, hun?’

  ‘Ah, only England, few trips, yeah mostly England, lived behind Wembley far a few years, loved it, a big gang of us would head off to Horse Shows up narth, lots of family and always business to be done up . . . ya knows the ways?’ She nodded at her Nokia, and back at us. It wasn’t a question. It was a statement of fact, we all returned nods in her direction, though in truth, none of us knew the way of Margaret Rose’s business.

  The day Molly said yes to travel with Bobby, was the first day she scalped a cadaver.

  ‘Scientists,’ she said, ‘harvest cells from the scalps and brains of cadavers.’

  Margaret Rose grew pale.

  ‘Once I watched my anatomy teacher slice the forehead skin of a cadaver and peel it back. Eventually the brain was opened like an avocado sliced. Popular now, avocados,’ she said. ‘Miss the ones from home.’

  I distracted myself.

  What if

  I didn’t eat sugar for a year?

  What if

  all I really needed was air?

  What if

  there is a cure?

  What if

  I have wasted too much time?

  What if

  I could slow this down? Shit.

  What if my children thought I had just disappeared, run off with another man, and I arranged someone to send them something every year for their birthday and Christmas, and though they hated me for running off, they never knew of my death? What if this were easier? For them.

  ‘I reckoned ya need to see the body dead,’ Molly said. ‘It’s no use hilping the living if you weren’t willing to face up to the consequences of them dead. See, I have such respect for the dead.’

  Margaret Rose retched as Jane nodded, her head high up and then her chin tipping on her sternum, top of the class for Jane.

  ‘Washing the body, fixing it. It’s so special. That’s an honour, ya’naw?’

  That was all she missed, avocados. When Molly spoke about her parents, she spoke rapidly in the third person. Molly’s mam drinks, ya’naw? Molly’s dad was always very busy, ya’naw? Yeah, sure, she Skyped her parents the odd time, her mother preferred phone calls so she could continue sipping nips of Sullivan’s Cove, her bent over a moonbeam granite worktop, so that after an hour or two on the weather, the Hospital, old school friends, her daily routine, the arrogance of her father, her speech became so slurred that she was perfectly incoherent. The disclosures were embarrassing. So in an effort to balance the awkwardness, or perhaps due to the steroid concoction that made me buzzy, I told Molly and Margaret Rose about the time my grandfather drank a house. It was the first time I’d spoken about it – how he drank it brick by brick until nothing was left save for a child’s rainbow spinning-top on the linoleum when they shut the door on it and a woman that never spoke to him again. Ever. Then, in free fall, he drank away the clod-wet site the house lay on. I understood how this could happen. I also understood that this was something to be both afraid and ashamed of.

  ‘I’ve never taken ta the air, mind you,’ Margaret Rose interrupted, changing the subject, but I felt she was protecting me, not berating me. ‘Boat’s as far as I could go, ’tis unnatural I always think, something so large in the sky. Drink’s a terrible thing,’ she added, acknowledging me almost as an afterthought, unable to avoid it. ‘Just terrible. Has the country ruined and more countries too. Yar both not alone. Every family’s affected. Does terrible damage, just terrible. They say they canny help it, mind you, but it’s terrible, especially on children.’

  It was dusk. The air was lumpy and heavy, and it was hard to get a decent breath in.

  Or out.

  ‘Oh no, hun, I think this is blocked, see if I can flush it through for ya, ’K?’ Molly said, sitting on my bed, as she slapped hard the swollen watery back of my hand. ‘Sorry. Shit. Shit. Sorry.’ She slapped it again as she told us about the day she decided to travel to Ireland. She’d watched a man soak a hunk of pork in a big plastic bucket. He looked Irish, and that was the sign she needed. My mind was on the juicy pork joint, the crackling lid of hide left on top of the muscle, mother telling me to mind my teeth. The bolus flushed through me, fast gushes now, stinging the life out of my hot veins. The cannula was always angry.

  ‘He reminded me of Ireland, the chef guy,’ Molly said.

  ‘Really, why?’ I said.

  ‘Don’t naw, see he lift the shoulder steep overnight in a basin of lemons and ipples with some cinnamon sticks.’ The Irishness wasn’t jumping out at me. ‘The water was dripping off the meat and it made me bloody horny. Irish men do that to me, see.’

  ‘I love the crackling,’ Margaret Rose said.

  Molly squeezed through the end of the fluid that hung over me in a transparent plastic, her hands cupped possessively around the sack as her white top lifted to reveal the lace edging of a powder-blue bra.<
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  ‘I always go by my gut when it comes to doing a line. Especially with a woman,’ Jane said, pulling a pair of red fingerless gloves from her purple holdall and stretching the leather onto her fingers, then thumbs, onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnineten. The gloves had knuckle holes so Jane’s round bones bobbed like four pale heads in sleeping bags.

  Molly Zane perched on the edge of the bed writing down my numbers, chewing on the furry troll of her pen, then sucking on its lime hair. My blood sugars, the speed blood was pressing through me, the amount of sugar leaking, protein in my piss, beats of my heart, systolic/diastolic, amounts of drugs taken, time given, numbers of drugs to be taken, if I’d pissed, if I’d shat. Then, finally, she shoved a clean jab of blood thinner into my wobbly stomach.

  ‘Ya know, ya rilly need to start to think about some treatment, darl . . . or at least chat ’bout it . . . look, see, I’m here, any time. I’ve taken on so many shifts, ya’ll see me all the time, ’K?’ she said, leaning over me with a syringe.

  I looked away, pretending not to hear her, and spaced out as Jane moonwalked across the tiles in her knickers and a scrub top, the red fingers fanning her face.

  ‘Here to talk, ’K, hun?’

  ‘’K,’ I said.

  Jabs from the blood thinner shots left a nasty raw sting. I didn’t feel them going in, but the pain on withdrawal is like a tomcat peacocking his dick needles and pulling out quickly.

  Molly Zane and Bobby were weeks shy of their twenty-seventh birthdays and they would mourn Amy Winehouse for a copious amount of time, they loved her, ya’naw, like I had with Cobain and my mother with Elvis (though she hid it), until the moment came, as it always does, where they’d begin to doubt her and buy health insurance and liquorice tea for their bowels, and coconut oil for pulling the toxins out of their gums, and they would, like every other demented couple, begin arranging cushions to make diamonds out of squares on their narrow couch, buying toilet rolls in colours that matched their toilet suite and drawing open-mouthed fish stencils on the bathroom walls, spraying birdcage stencils on the kitchen walls beside pictures of themselves-with-large-jugs-of-beer-and-bungee-jumping-off-cliffs. Molly Zane took all the extra Hospital shifts she could, mostly to avoid making any real-world decisions. I didn’t share these secrets with her, these you have to learn for yourself.

  ‘Anyway, drugs time for you, missy . . . just have a little think,’ and she tucked me in. Eek. And while I enjoyed watching her mouth move, making shapes, the vintage pink stain of her lips, lying there made me a prisoner to any chat anyone wanted to have.

  Hospice is not an option. I can’t be alone at night. The desperate hush-hush of weeping midnight terrifies me. There weren’t options. I’d started panicking in the middle of the night, the brutality darkness brings, and waking lathered in that sticky sweat that turns cold and feeling a warm hand pressing down hard on my throat. At home I’d try to scream but my tonsils would be swollen up like water balloons and nothing would come out. Alex would ask if I was OK. Yes. Fine. Just a bad dream. Another one? Yeah. Turn out. It’s fine. Night. Spoon. Unspoon. Spoon. Night. I’d lay there long enough to talk to myself and try and talk myself down from it.

  Arrow. You Are Here. It’s OK. Remember.

  Arriving in Hospital, everyone panicked. Tubes went up my nose, down my throat, next they’d need to put one up my urethra, like Shane, and I’d have a bag hanging off me too. I resisted this the most, tried to clean up my own accidents without them noticing. On the Ward they were trained to keep you alive, like vultures. I needed to go where they were trained not to.

  Home.

  Chapter 4

  Sunday rainfall was heavy and winds battled the dodgy windows as Molly pushed them open. The gusts knocked over some cards and kidney dishes on the windowsill near Jane. I watched as the fog cleared. The day was like a home-from-school-sick-day, when my mother would open the single-pane windows, mahogany frames, clearing away the condensation from the night’s sleep. We’d listen to a radio drama, one set in a hotel near the seaside, hands around mugs of tea. We could hear the actors breathe, sneeze, the rustle of paper, supressed coughs, giggles, seagulls, rattling of cutlery, clink of crockery. Then she’d go back to her work, sweeping, wiping, lifting, folding, pushing, feeding, steaming, boiling, carrying, wiping again, placing, dragging, sewing, preparing, chopping, cutting, peeling, slicing, ironing, setting, washing, drying, lighting, sweeping again, ironing. Sometimes crying.

  ‘I love Tom, you see,’ Jane said, striding out, criss-­crossing the Ward moving away from the draught. ‘Have you seen him? He went up the yard under an hour ago because there’s a cow calving. You know if he’s not up soon I’ll need to bring him down the calf-jack myself, none of you seem likely to stir out. Aren’t you all a right lazy bunch? And signs on you all, you could all do with a breath of fresh air.’

  Jane wasn’t wrong.

  By lunchtime Hegs was heaping red jelly from an ivory bowl into another ivory bowl of ivory ice cream with an ivory plastic spoon clutched in his fat ivory fingers. Claire was bolt upright on the chair beside him, pulling faces at the ritual that was being inflicted on the dessert.

  ‘Ah, but it’s a Sunday,’ he muttered a few times, noting her discomfort.

  Hegs had his share of soldiering Christian paraphernalia, scalpers, rosary beads, a bottle of Knock-Holy-Water, a photo of Padre Pio’s mitten, and hanging over his head were a plethora of mass cards – A Mass for the Sick from Knock, A Trio of Masses, A Mass from Croagh Patrick and, pride of place, A Mass from Lourdes with a saying from the Romans. But Righteous One – By Means of Faith He Will Live. Mass cards should be signed directly by a priest who adds the names of the sick to their mass intentions, but now they were often purchased in a local shop, stamped by the box-load by a savvy priest as he ate jelly beans in bed while watching Sex and the City repeats.

  The gathering of religious icons made me a little envious.

  ‘Did you get iny sleep, Mr Hegarty?’ Molly said.

  ‘Well, indeed now, Miss Molly, I most certainly did get myself a little sleep, not much indeed though,’ said Hegs. ‘Shir indeed and didn’t I wake ever’hour, on the hour, but I declare to God, didn’t I manage to settle meself again?’ as he enthusiastically applauded his ability to rock himself back to sleep.

  ‘Good. Happy ta hear that, hun.’

  ‘I was, of course,’ he added rather cautiously, ‘. . . often tempted to ring the belleen, but shir . . .’ he said, ‘I couldn’t place my hand on it . . . and I hate to be a bother to ye. Is it here on my pyjamas, or where in the cursed Christ was it?’ Molly found the bell, and attached it back onto his pyjamas with a large steel safety pin, like a medal of honour, all the while patting him.

  All night through he had called out Mammmmmmmmy.

  ‘Daddy,’ said Claire, ‘you had a draught on you again last night.’

  ‘I’m fine, please stop your fussing . . .’ Hegs said.

  ‘Well, I will most certainly fuss. Wouldn’t it be worse if no one were fussing? I told that young Molly girl that window was not to be left ajar,’ she continued, nodding at Molly Zane. ‘You know something, Daddy, you can’t beat the Irish nurses. And I do not like them opening and shutting that window all the time, it’s a death-trap, the putty is all disintegrated, if there was any putty to begin with. Disgusting, the whole place would need to be levelled and, well, to be quite frank, nothing for it but to be rebuilt.’

  Molly turned and left.

  ‘Ah now, you see, you should quieten down, in fact, it would be better if you shut up,’ Jane said as she applied Margaret Rose’s blue mascara to her lower lashes with a large hairbrush in one hand and a tiny wand in the other.

  Claire roused herself and lifted up to tackle Jane, but Hegs thrust his hands out to grab and coax his daughter back downwards into her chair. He managed to grab a small crease of material on the back of her dress and pulled hard. ‘She’s gone astray, Claire, please . . . leave her be,’ he whispered, pulling at he
r again. ‘Besides she’s so very . . . well, look, really we don’t need to rattle her, please leave it.’ He stopped abruptly. Claire sat back down, rubbing her back, and continued on about her father’s care, or lack thereof.

  ‘Did you take your heart spray?’ she went on, distracted.

  ‘Yes, yes, I did, I never forget, I’ve promised you,’ Hegs softened.

  ‘Pull up those socks,’ Jane shouted at Claire, nodding at the fluffy bed socks. Margaret Rose laughed.

  ‘And your Prothiaden?’

  Nod. Bobble-Head-Hegarty. Nod.

  ‘Look, Claire, I took whatever they gave me . . . they’re too busy to be asking all your questions.’

  ‘Always a little thundering bitch,’ Jane whispered into the large hairbrush clutched in the palm of her red leather hand, before suddenly passing out on the pillow with her bottom jaw opened downwards so her chin dropped onto her chest.

  Hegs had lung cancer. This was the only definitive diagnosis on the Ward. It pleased me to know something definite, an actual real piece of specific information. His cancer had travelled upwards, awkwardly, and was now to be found meandering into his throat crevices. There were spots of cancer on his liver also, mapping here and there like stars over the night sky.

  Claire was the woman to give all the words to, he explained, for he had very sore eyes and wouldn’t mind going to sleep and if they would just leave him be, he’d be most happy. Not to be rude. Or a nuisance. But best if they let him be. And he’d take anything they could give him for the pain that would help him back to sleep after he’d cleaned up the jelly and ice cream.