‘I keep you best Sunday biskits . . . maybe even little cake.’
Chapter 5
Hey
. . . Hey there! How’re u? (Hug emoji)
Horny and tired . . . You?
. . . Fuck. Soz. I’m OK
I want some sweets
. . . Ah poor you – chocolate? How you feelin?
No – apple drops. Come in with some, please, might die if you don’t xoxoxo
. . . I’m not coming in – can’t xoxoxoxoxo
Y? (Crying emoji – full tears – gushing one – almost could be laughter)
. . . Kids asleep ya twat (Three small bed emojis)
Leave them
. . . No x
Fuck you. Ah no only joking, don’t leave them (Sideways laughing emoji – def too much)
. . . I won’t . . . stop worrying . . . so no better?
Nope (tearless sad face)
. . . Soz xxx
I know, such a balls (Basketball emoji. Total accident)
. . . You missing the kids? They all send love hearts, Nathan has made a dino card this time . . . Brachiosaurus x
Sweet. Yeah, yeah, send them some back xoxoxoxoxo (Three hug emojis and a turd)
. . . They’re fast asleep . . . Joshua made dinner; well put pizza in oven without box
Sinéad typing. Undo typing . . .
Ah nice. Fair fucks Joshua. Yup soz indeedy. U drinking?
Long Pause . . . .
. . . A typing . . . not typing . . . typing again . . .
. . . No (Monkey covering eyes emoji times two)
Bullshit
. . . Just a small one, beer
Fuck. Ouch.
. . . Soz
Stop fucking saying soz. I’m watching Suits (Heart emoji – red)
. . . That shite?
It’s not shite. What you watching?
. . . Grand Designs (Small house emoji)
Liar
. . . I am, swear, repeats . . . the one where they build the house out of hay
Ahhhhh . . . without me (Sad face – one tear – most distressed emoji imo)
. . . SO Soz
I’m still horny (Aubergine)
. . . Wank to Hegs
GROSS (Green vomit face). Feel like I’m gonna die (Automatic coffin suggestion. Deleted coffin – fuck – fuck suggestions)
A typing . . . not typing. Long pause. A typing again . . .
. . . You serious? Wanna talk?
Alex would be sat at home with a large bag of cheese puffs, doors and windows all open, radio blaring, TV blaring, pale ale of some description with a wolf on the front, in a small can like on Australian soap dramas, but classier, and perhaps it would be a grapefruit beer (or blood orange of late).
I didn’t want a call.
Shane began to groan, his laptop charger had disconnected. I got out and plugged it back in; his eyes were not in focus, one was wet like a tiny pool of water on a beach far from the tide. He seemed way more distressed than before. I asked if he’d like me to put on some music or something, but he didn’t answer. His bag of piss was full, bright yellow, and I said I’m so sorry as I stared at it. And then I went back to bed.
Talking to Alex via text was much nicer than dealing with his breathing and humming and hawing and real-life him. He was more eloquent or direct in texts, and they allowed little room for me to get edgy. Emojis offered due emotion, quickly and without complication or effort. I was ever so grateful for them. Especially my mother’s, even if she sent them mostly by accident, they made her look utterly emotional, which was brilliant, especially the mad weather ones and the completely out-of-character, big bursting-red hearts.
No, too noisy
. . . Don’t die, but fuck off with the horny text. It’s your meds driving you cray cray
Most men would be thrilled to hear their wife was horny. Honestly, apple drops. Begging. Pleaseeeeeee.
. . . Not if they’re an In Hospital Wife. Horny in Hospital wives – not a turn on. They still make apple drops? Shit, I can’t rem last time I had them (Hospital emoji)
Lolz (full stop? Ouch. Bit much.) Yeah. They do (still make them).
. . . Nightnightnightnight. I love all your punctuation.
Night. A few bags, please, surely someone can sit with them?
. . . NO. Who? Now seriously fuck off. I love you. I’ll bring some tomorrow xXx
A typing . . . not typing
. . . PS don’t die. Rem to floss. Bye (monkey covering little eyes) PPS I’m in bed now. Beer gone. Wrecked. Love you xxx
Hegs began to snore and Jane was nibbling Bourbons like Minnie Mouse.
Floss. The sum of our love.
*
Hospital Sundays were strange. I felt strange and although time was moving, it was stuck on strange same. It was just another Hospital day, without the good doctors who were off in their holiday homes or running marathons or whatever else it is that doctors do when they’re not doctoring.
Outside of here, Sundays smelled free, if being free has a smell, like rusty wood incense, leather or cold air. Sundays smelled like Alex. Male. I didn’t check emails on Sundays. (At least not in front of him and definitely not until after sex and a shower.) It was coming to the end of the Premier League season. That was the hot topic. And their hot Sunday topics sometimes got in on me.
Everything so cyclical.
After the season ended the transfer markets would open and then the boys would divert onto some European thing. Except Nathan. He excelled at the role of middle child with a terrifying love of dinosaurs, Thomas the Tank Engine, socks with sandals and rational-thinking-that-bordered-on-catastrophic-thinking. But among the other three, there was talk about the World Cup qualifiers around the corner, the corruption of the Russians, and sadness in the FIFA world, which was hurting them. Not a lot of food in the house. Which was hurting them too. They were now living on pizza, which wasn’t hurting. There’d be much talk about men wearing earrings and hairstyles and left kickers, and the most pressing question of all, whether or not the English team would be allowed to bring the wives to next year’s World Cup, if they qualified, considering the media frenzy following around Victoria Beckham many years ago in Baden-Baden, the chariot with the horses and the sixty pairs of sunglasses like glitzy Tommy fucken Shelby’s.
I missed having my daughter to talk to, though the thought of it also frightened the life out of me. I would be too strict, just in case she turned into that woman following her husband’s success on a chariot in Baden-fucken-Baden. Nothing would be appropriate, not her hair or her smell or her clothes or her swagger. I’d be too tough on her. In the way mothers are with daughters, because they know, mothers. They know how different it is. Boys were fine. Besides, they had coped well without me for years. Ten.
I was ten years working madly and thinking about manoeuvres and strategy, so that at the end I’d have photos to hang all over our concrete lives (aka The House) and everyone would be comfortable and none of them would want for things, the way I had wanted, that crippling awfulness of not having The Things; clothes and runners and schoolbags and music lessons and gym gear and labelled denims and fancy stuff and days out and Irish summer college and keyboards and hamsters and roller blades and computers and the best games and if they had all of that, then no one would notice them in the wrong way, and therefore if I did a little groundwork, you know, when they were small, when they’d hardly notice my absence at all, then we’d all be safe from judgement. I wouldn’t have to rely on a man leaving money on the counter in a small dim kitchen for our survival. When the mood took him. Or not leaving it. When the mood took him.
But this was bullshit and in the end, my business was really an addiction. For once I knew the other personalities up against me, it became personal, and though I could logically analyse my addiction, every small battle was a cortisol flood, a problem I could solve, and I couldn’t leave go. Even a rotted shed in the Hebrides would get me going, wherever they are.
I never planned to have my children so quickly. They came along. My grandmother often said, once they get in they have to get out. There’s only one way out. And after they came along, the act of parenting was so brutal.
It was the happy/sad/worried.
Sad with the manic stress, sad with the rejection, sad with the crippling brutality that having mortal children brings with it. Happy with the small everyday OK. Happy when we laughed. Poo. Dick. Fart. Willy. Stupid words that made them tear up laughing. The routine. Happy with the smell of their necks in bed at night, asleep. Superhero movies. Soccer. Happy when the day went OK when nothing was too good or too bad. Happy for a non-event day, but then the long twisting before sleep, that comes when their mortality punches you again. Or the nights they make you promise that you won’t die until they are old, and it’s a terrible promise that you can’t possibly keep. Stressed with the other parents that parenting brings into your world, especially the judgy ones. Ones you never asked for. Ones you’d ordinarily run a fucking mile from. Social situations you would never go near. I left most of that to Alex. I ignored them. School parents. Hanging around the gates in tracksuits, sippy coffee cups and large sunglasses. I am good at ignoring people, like a mime artist. I’ve even done this to Alex. The ignoring. I was outside Boots’ pharmacy once and spotted him out of the corner of my eye, and then in the sharp turn of an instant, I completely avoided him. Freeze. Then the moment passed, so that to suddenly shout his name would have been so terribly awkward, the delayed wave, grimace. So I ignored him. My own husband. I just kept walking. Later that evening we had roast chicken. He had stuffed it with plums, I remember because he apologised for burning the plums and I said it didn’t (really) matter, that the plums gave flavour and made it moist.
His parents had accumulated all their life, cars, children, potted plants, life-insurance policies, golf clubs, secrets, savings plans, short/mid/long term, enemies, safeguards (boarding schools, first-aid books, home insulation), lamps, crystal, deep pile carpets, Rolex watches, diamonds with big claw settings, holidays, frosted-glass doors, perfect gardeners, jumpers to throw over your shoulders when a breeze came, best lawn feed, fridge cleaners, everything matching, no books, no clutter and because of their drive to accumulate things, he wanted nothing. Nothing. And in this way we were opposites.
But we had things in common, and we promised when we were old, we’d search each other for them.
Chapter 6
‘Ye speak ta yar father yet?’ Margaret Rose asked. Her boys were back after Sunday evening tea at a chip spot and nodded their baseball-capped heads downwards like obedient stable horses. They fussed over Margaret Rose’s eyes for what would they do if Mammy didn’t see properly again? Margaret Rose dismissed such fears with a gentle swat of her hand, as if sight were an irrelevant condition of the modern age. As she spoke about their father’s absence, the mammy matador fixed her pink hoody high up on one shoulder.
Everyone has blips.
Margaret Rose was not oblivious to the knocks of the world and to the wants of a man. Just as she was finishing the last of the chips, complaining about a heavy hand with the vinegar, a man in an oversized checked sports jacket and hefty ginger moustache arrived on the Ward. He seemed uncertain as to whether he was in the right place, bowing down deferentially at myself, then Shane, across to Hegs, until he tracked back and arrived heave-ho to the end of Margaret Rose’s bed. Jane shot straight to him and greeted him in a flimsy night top with spaghetti straps like a dancer in a burlesque club.
‘Well now, who have we here, and a very good evening,’ she said, front-of-house. ‘Is Tom with you, I really do hope you brought him along for a pint?’
‘Indeed he’s not, I’m afraid, ma’am . . . very sorry,’ he replied, gentlemanly.
‘Ah that’s OK so, you see, what can you do?’
‘What can you do indeed, ma’am?’ he said, nodding.
‘But now, you see, that cow is a desperate long time calving, the poor thing. She’ll be exhausted if ye don’t pull the calf soon.’
The younger boys greeted the man quietly, by shaking his hand and nodding. One boy moved the bouquet of carnations that had lain on Margaret Rose’s nightstand down to her feet, showing them off, and in a swift changing of the guard, the boys gave up their space around her bed.
‘More power to ya, Mags . . . well, aren’t ya looking fresh?’ he said.
‘Jim, fetch a vase,’ she demanded of the visitor, and Jim mithered for a little while, awkward in the ill-fitting jacket, and a vase being unfamiliar territory. He eventually fell upon a flimsy plastic cup beside the sink, that would, they both agreed, do for now. And wasn’t it lovely of her sons to bring her flowers, how well she had reared them, she agreed.
Shane, like a blocked sink suddenly freed, let out a terrific guttural noise.
Jim pulled across the curtain and in a familiarity that only comes with growing up together, they had a long and earnest chat. Ah, Mags. Someone had a heavy hand. Yarself? Ah, now ya overdid it today. Face looks like a rock. Yarself? Oh, how can ya inject yarself? Yar mighty. Dentists are most peculiar. Ya knows they say they kill themselves a lot? High rates of suicide. Rally? Dentists. No way. Easy ta get their hands on drugs maybe. Should I ask him if he’s all right? Stop, yar terrible. Hardly a word out of him. ’Tis a strange wan though. I’m terrible sorry it’s come ta this. Are ya sure ya knows what yar at? Hope you know what yar doing? Paddy is no fool. A prick . . . yeah . . . but no fool. He might never come back. Donna set yar face like that for ever now whatever else ya do or ya’ll be in some pickle. Ah, he’ll come home. He has ta. ’Tis a bit far now. No. Of course. Shocking. Indeed. Fuck it anyway. To Hell. So. Tired. Exhausted. No. One. Yet. They’re in the old house. Bernie’s mam’s place. Bermingham. Up behind the Old Quarry Cottages. Have the number. Here. I’ll just lave it here. OK? How’re ya fixed? If ya had ta travel? Ya sure? Of course I wouldn’a send ya alone. Ah no, the Hospital is lovely. Long as they leave me alone. Haha. No. No no. Not at all. ’Twas a very dark night. Ah, that’ll be spring. Ah, right. I do think it’s the right plan. Not looking likely that the shame will smoke him out. Soon. ’K. Too young really. Ah, but now. We. Will tame. Her. We’ll try. Paddy better come back soon or I’ll tell ya. Niquita. Worried. So easily led. Very like Krystal. Jonathan – ah right little cunt. Don’na warn him. Not yet. I’ll see how it’s going.
Oh, sweet Jaysus but Paddy better come back ta not
disgrace us. I said I’d bring him back. Settle yarself. Just hope that’s where he is. But a course it is, he has no imagination. Homing.
Like a dirty pigeon.
Angelus bells faintly called out from the cathedral.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.
Jim promised Margaret Rose that he understood a sickness was the best way to tug at the heartstrings of Paddy, and specifically to shame him among family and friends, publicly. But Jim also wasn’t convinced that Paddy had strings attached to his heart, and he was, in his opinion, beyond shame. And while Margaret Rose agreed a little, she said that he was a proud man, wouldn’t like the talk if she did up and die for herself, and he’d never live down the shame of leaving her alone to die. Jim washed his hands in our little sink and left the Ward.
The last segment in Sunday evening’s triptych of entertainment was the arrival of two young girls, dancing and stretching, bending upwards and forwards in short neon tops, bright greens and pinks and pristine white frayed short-shorts that showed their bum cheeks.
‘Well, Mammy,’ they both said, kissing Margaret Rose in turn, then they opened back her curtain, and sat either side of her bed, flanking her, but it was short lived. They’d pop up, suddenly, sometimes to braid each other’s hair, or play that game where you clap at each other, mirror like, leaning against each other, dabbing their split ends back into place between their fresh lips, fingers popping each other’s large gum bubbles, in colours that matched the neon tops.
Michaela and Niquita Sherlock were the youngest dau
ghters of Margaret Rose. They spoke quickly, were high-pitched, swirling around topics, at times hysterically, as though any minute someone would drop dead, at other moments, quietly, as they began edging their way past boundaries. But mostly, they were deferential to their mother. Light-heartedly, everything was open for their criticism, from her pyjamas to her facial paralysis, but never her decisions.
‘Did ya watch Jacinta’s wedding on the laptop far ideas, Mammy?’
‘I did, Nick, I watched it again and again . . . ma God, she was beautiful, wasn’t she?’ said Margaret Rose.
Both girls nodded.
‘I want me own ta be just like it,’ Niquita, the taller of the two, said.
It was time to get a move on with the dresses. Margaret Rose told them to slow down. Paddy had to return before they could move on with it, and though Niquita woefully protested, Margaret Rose ended it, but she’d need more time and besides the stroke had made her very weak. Both girls blessed themselves at the mention of ‘stroke’.
It was what it was.
And they weren’t to bother Mammy again, for a little while at least, until she had recovered, and talk about weddings could commence upon Paddy’s return.
Seeming content with this plan, and just as they took leave, the smaller one said, rather like an announcement, or that she’d been plucking up the courage to spill it out, ‘Jonathan’s calling Niquita names again.’
As You Were Page 6
