This little house of ours holds a lot. A family of five children, a father who can move only his eyes, a daydreaming mother, a mass of medical equipment that hums and squeaks. The swirly mad vortex of MOTOR NEURONE DISEASE. We are spinning, surviving and trying not to get pulled down the plughole. The footfall is high in this house. I should hoover more. Nurses and carers steer tactful soft shoes around us all. Lint balls gather in corners. My husband needs a ventilator to breathe and a person to stay with him at all times. Often that person is me. I spend a lot of time in this house and Tree really helps.
When I was at school, I was runner-up in an art competition. The Minister for Health gave me a prize for my grey pencil drawing of a sad girl reading a book. Outside her window, a group of children played in full colour. My poster slogan to promote healthy living read, ‘Life Is No Fun In The Company Of One’.
Company is not a problem for me these days. I am just so popular in here. How could I ever be lonely in this house? That schoolgirl knew nothing about this life. Raife loves the word ‘inappropriate’ but I don’t think he knows what it means. His use of it is downright inappropriate. ‘Don’t talk about me to other people,’ he scolds, ‘it’s inappropriate’. It seems that eight is the age of reason. The age a child sees their own nakedness and roars ‘Don’t see me! Don’t judge me!’ They scold their mothers often. My own mother sees too much even from the end of a phone. She holds that special mother key. Turn it half an inch and the tears will flow. My mother might be my friend but really she is something else. She is the only person who will ever worry if I leave the house without a coat on.
Simon’s MND has made me wildly inappropriate. I have no social filter. I don’t remember the rules. I worry about wearing this pain in company. How much is too much? Simple questions like ‘How are things?’ become impossible. Thank God for old friends. They are like wishing wells; my pain is a stone that won’t make a splash. New friends are tricky. Maybe I don’t need them? My three-year-old is screaming at me because his shadow won’t go away. He growls his drunken toddler slur, ‘Stupid Momma. Stupid shadow.’ These children are everything but they are not my friends. Mostly they’re not even friendly. The schoolgirl was right. I am a pencil drawing in grey. I am so popular in here it stinks. Even the dog and the cat agree. I am talking to a tree, for God’s sake. I need some colour and company.
Company scares me. I must venture out with armour on. My slogan will be a happy one. So many beautiful women greet me and take me into their company. In the right frame of mind, in the right moment, I am enjoying this. The subtle orchestra of the chit and the chat. I am enjoying it all. Eye-rolls at the mention of the husbands. He never helps. Problems at work. I got him a gym membership for Christmas. I am enjoying this, really am. I just feel a bit tired. I am fighting the urge to just lie down on the ground and cover myself with a blanket. I smile at them all and feel like an alien. Their problems are just as important as mine. How are things? I have no language for this. I will go home to my husband because he is my friend. Eye-roll. He is a friend, he’s my very best husband. Don’t see me! Don’t pity me! Stupid company. Stupid MND.
But company keeps calling and I’m too stubborn to quit. Somewhere above the chit and the chat a woman I barely know announces that her marriage just ended and her husband is living in the shed at the bottom of their garden. The collective clink of coffee cups goes silent. It’s a showstopper. We all mutter condolences. Company is humbled and so am I. And then, blessedly, the chat moves on.
Walking home alone I laugh out loud, not at this woman’s pain, but at my own stupidity. The rules were all in my own head. Wear as much pain as you like, or wear none. Stupid rules. Stupid me. I laugh because colour is all around me and company is my new best friend.
Daydreams
I’ve spent most of my life in a daydream. Ireland can be so cloudy and grey it feels like somebody turned the lights out. Daydreaming really helps with this. Lights don’t matter much when your dreams are shiny. Daydreams just don’t care if it’s cloudy.
Parents perpetuate certain stories about their children that become pure fact. ‘You were always a child who loved her bed,’ my mother still says. ‘You never wandered from it. Once you went in there, you never came back out till morning.’ Of course I didn’t. Bed is the birthplace of dreams and daydreams. Bed was my safe harbour after steering the dark waters of reality all day.
I spent glad nights and endless daylight hours as a little girl nesting in my bed. Outside of the brightly lit kitchen our house was old and cold and creepy, but I didn’t care. From my bed I was too busy staring at my radiator. It had faces on it. Endless fantastical faces, shapes and stories. They leaped out from the warped leaky paint. My radiator was like Lucy’s wardrobe. It transported me to Narnia every time.
‘Dinnertime!’ my mother would call from the warmth of the kitchen. Food is possibly the only acceptable reason to break a daydream. I would leap out of my daydream and in my head I was cheering, ‘I’m here! I’ve come back! It’s all right!’ Hasn’t anyone wondered where I’ve been? Have seconds or hours or days just passed? But in a big old busy house of six children, nobody had really noticed. Nobody noticing made the daydreams more wonderful.
Daydreams were solitary things until somebody noticed. Simon arrived and interrupted my daydreams. Simon spoke in CAPITAL LETTERS. He sauntered up all blue eyes and dancing hands. His voice strolled right through my daydreams and had a good gawk. He talked a lot and I liked his talk. The Voice and the Daydreamer linked arms. That voice made the daydreams so tasty and tangible.
Sharing my bed with love was a revelation. There were flushed faces and mortification if we bumped into our neighbour the next morning. The walls of those terraces were like paper and the poor man’s bedroom was through the wall from ours. I could never look him in the eye. He could only have noisy-neighbour hate in his heart.
The Voice and the Daydreamer took Sunday long strolls together and paused only to eat. When you’re in love and gripped by good sex, food is never more wonderful. They liked to eat a lot. They wandered and embraced and wandered and ate all the best food in the land.
They ate and locked limbs and ate some more and made new daydreams together. They made up stories and planned amazing projects. He wanted to direct movies and she wanted to write books. That voice and those daydreams combined were a creative dream come true.
The right man in your bed is a glorious thing. The smell and taste of him, the wrapping and grappling of limbs. Even Simon’s obsession with listening to the Blade Runner soundtrack every night before sleep was oddly glorious to begin with. Love was not blind, but for me it was clearly deaf.
Daydreams are lovely because you can take them in the right direction. You can choose where they go. Reality is never like that. Daydreams never really bite you in the ass, unless you have an ass-biting fetish and I don’t. Reality is harder to steer altogether. I have often been daydreaming when reality takes a sharp turn.
I am standing on a flashy street corner in New York City chewing a giant pretzel and my boyfriend is acting strangely. I barely notice because New York is full of noise. We are here for a screening of Simon’s short film at a festival and it occurs to me that Simon is a bit twitchy. He’s nervous about his film, I think. Then I take another pretzel bite. I dive back into some Yankee diner daydream that’s flipping home fries.
I am too busy diner-dreaming to notice Simon buy two ‘I Love New York’ shot glasses right under my nose and a snipe of champagne. So when he drops to his knees at the top of the Empire State Building it’s more than a shock. I just didn’t see it coming. It hadn’t entered my head.
The Voice from his knees is the squeakiest and most nervous I’ve ever heard him and the Daydreamer is puzzled. Marriage? It hadn’t ever occurred to me. But now that it has a voice, suddenly it seems like the most fantastic, stupendous and best idea in the whole goddamn world and New York City. Say it in your normal voice, I squeak back, and the voice repeats it in regular
CAPITAL LETTERS. Ruth Patricia O’Neill, will you marry me? YES! I shout – in capitals too – and from the top of this skyscraper, daydreams and reality embrace as though they are always one and the same thing.
My children are notorious bed-hoppers. They seem to wander through the night, their hot little bodies crawling for fresh crevices, burrowing in multiple beds. The more beds the better.
With each year of marriage we graduated to bigger and better beds. More sophisticated duvet covers. A solid ship on the shores of a shared life. Plenty of well-placed plump cushions and patterned throws.
We once lived in the Louth countryside. Three years married, our shared life came to a glorious crescendo with the mother of all ship-beds. A seven-foot behemoth, a magical beast of dark wood and miles of mattress. We had hundreds of cushions and could fit in the entire family of four. A frantic wriggler and a still little sloth both slotted in perfectly. Some children are wriggly and their chubby toes scratch your back all night. Others are solid hot water-bottles who never stir once they find their spot. We had both kinds.
That seven-foot bed was soaked by sunlight coming through our glass patio doors. They looked out on a country paradise of round green fields for miles. Despite the moving toddler traffic, I always slept peacefully and well. In the midst of wakeful baby nights, I could soothe myself back to dreamy sleep. I could cuddle some milky toddler skin, or roll them right out of the way to find man skin and long limbs and a neck you could sink your face into and then breathe deep.
Still living in the countryside and third time pregnant, I’m waiting for Simon in a neurologist’s office. This green top makes my belly look like a glorious round hill on the Louth–Monaghan border. In my head I am drawing a childish picture of drumlins beneath a cartoon sun. My dad has parked the car and joins me in the waiting room. Ooh, the grassy hill has just met a whole load of mud, I think gleefully as his muddy feet leave great streaks all over the floor. He is mortified but I can’t stop giggling.
Afterwards, it will be the first time I ever regret a daydream. Why didn’t I take more notice? Why wasn’t I more prepared for the hit? I’m imagining shapes in Dad’s footprints when the neurologist calls me in. Simon is standing up, with the palest face. Sound sucks out of my ears when the consultant speaks from behind his desk. ‘Sorry, it’s not good news.’ Simon’s voice is no longer in capital letters. What’s the prognosis? I ask with a whimper. Three to four years to live is the reply. TO LIVE? screams my brain in capital letters. MND is not an acceptable reason to break a daydream and it also wants to break a life.
The mother of all beds could fit the family fine until an unwelcome bedfellow came along. MND was a sneaky sort of a guest. At first all it wanted was a few extra pillows. Plump cushions had more function now than just being pretty props. Then MND wanted a sliding board so Simon could get into bed at all. We had banana-shaped ones and bendy ones but the best was a simple plain plank of wood that I would wedge under him like a seesaw and slide him down with one fell swoop. My arms got some shape to them. The bed was less roomy but we were all still aboard.
Sunlight still lit up our mornings but all the manoeuvring messed with the magic just a tiny bit. MND was tired and cranky. Our marital bed was under siege. It was a place where we now cried a lot.
For the first time it felt like daydreams couldn’t save me and nobody seemed to notice. We were all too busy. MND had turned our big bed into a battleship. Well, if this is war, I thought, then hear me roar. Bring it on, you bastard. I want my daydreams and my bed back.
Kisses
Alone at my cove, I blow sweet kisses out to sea. Thank you, sea. I can make sense of things here. The rolling rhythm of waves. How fantastic that the waves and I are hopelessly romantic. They somehow steady me. I am steady on the cove steps, gazing proudly back to shore.
A man on the beach is strolling with his son. He throws his boy high on his shoulders and his son laughs into the wind. It carries across the water and hits me hard. I am startled. The casual sweep of this man’s arms, the wild abandon of his son’s laughter, some of it, or all of it, startles me. It’s a hollow sick feeling. Unsteady.
The gait of this man. His body harnessed in confident motion … My husband can only move his eyes. I kiss the soft cheeks of my children and his unfurrowed, troubled brow. Incessant waves become staggering. I stop blowing kisses out to sea.
In the wilds of Donegal, back when I was at a summer Irish school, I walked into the woods with a boy from the North wearing a bomber jacket. He was tall and much older than me and an experienced kisser. The kissing went on for hours and it was only that, just kissing. But I was just twelve years old and it felt too much. I wandered back to the Bean an tí’s house in a daze to my bunk bed and straw mattress. My entire stomach had evaporated and the numb feeling crawled up into my throat. I couldn’t even eat toast. I want to stay with the memory of this twelve-year-old girl, but my thoughts move to murkier waters. I remember a man called Dave the DJ.
Dave lived in a granny flat with his Peruvian wife. She had a rice cooker of which he was very proud. His wife cooked the perfect rice, Dave would boast. The language barrier possibly diluted his general intensity, so his wife considered Dave to be quite normal. She was a stern-looking woman, but then living with a man who drank only Coca-Cola and had a fine burger sheen to his skin might make you grumpy.
Get out of my head, Dave, I don’t want you here. I worked in radio for five years but that was eleven years ago. I’d rather be brave and think of my husband’s lost kisses. Lips that lock into each other. A wrapping, twisting, hungry kiss. The only other food Dave ate besides burgers and his wife’s perfect rice, were spring rolls. These rolls were made with care and deep-fried by the tiny, delicate hand of a Filipino half his age. She sometimes visited the radio studio. All Dave talked about was her spring rolls. They were so tasty he couldn’t stop himself once he started a plateful, he said. She would giggle a lot with her milky-coffee skin and a smile like sunshine. Dave didn’t care much for real sunshine. He worked a lot of DJ nights and preferred artificial light. First thing in the morning before going on air, he would pull down all the shades in the studio, make it cave-dark, rub his hands together and say let’s get some burgers.
I used to lock lips with my husband. Now those lips hang loose. His eyes burn bright. ‘Kiss me on the lips’ demands the computer voice, ‘My mother kisses me on the forehead.’
Have I forgotten how to kiss? Does the body remember? It remembers in dreams, all right. In dreams I am master of the movie kiss, swelling music and softly merging silhouettes.
Dave would constantly fret about his Filipino fan’s admiration. What am I going to do? he would ask me, head in his hands. Stop eating spring rolls, I would say. Go home to your wife, Dave, and remember how much you love her rice. Nothing ever came of it but he was addicted to all the drama.
Does my husband dream of lost kisses? Lost kisses with me? I doubt they are with me. Dream kisses work best if they don’t pull you back to your partner, in sickness or in health.
Dave’s other great obsession was conspiracy theories. Give me stuff on UFOs he would say and growl sightings of crackpot alien stories into the mic with more conviction than a newscaster breaking the latest bomb threat.
I will kiss my husband’s loose lips if he wants me to, but my lips find the man at his brow. I crave the curve of his forehead not to be motherly, but to remind me of this man. He’s still here and there’s fire in those eyes.
The last time I saw Dave was my last day in radio. When he heard I was leaving, he walked up to me and kissed me as hard as he could right on the mouth. He walked away without a word. A startled, unwanted kiss. Unsteady. I never spoke to him again. A selfish man. I miss him sometimes. Dark devious desire that repels and attracts.
Go away, Dave. I remember raw passion as something more beautiful. Lunging, tearaway kisses in a toilet cubicle. That first lock-lipped kiss in a night club. Sweaty kisses in a beach hut in Thailand. I gaze out to sea. The
se memories disperse on foam and surf. I want to grasp them. Instead, I am stuck with Dave.
My twelve-year-old self was wise. She knew when dark desire was too much. She didn’t go back for more kisses in the woods. She fell back on dreams. Her appetite returned. Steady. Such a lovely thing, a movie kiss. Sitting on the cove steps, I try and banish Dave. But there’s no policing him here. Not at my cove with the relentless roll of waves.
I am rolling in thoughts of the past. I roll under with the fear that my own longing will turn grim and stale and devious. The empty feeling will grow. It will veer from the movie kiss to selfish places. Soft waves still roll to shore. The sea is calm today but the wind is high and I wish that the man and his laughing son would just leave the beach and that Dave would get out of my head.
My son Raife crept into bed one morning and folded himself against me in half sleep. ‘I had a lovely dream,’ he said. ‘A girl called Tiger with golden hair. She kissed me but I woke up and she was gone. I felt sad.’ My longing is not selfish. Not like Dave. It is still pure as my son’s heart and a twelve-year-old girl unable to eat toast with the Bean an tí.
The deep longing that gets buried in daily tasks. The dark longing of the soul to make contact. Steady, then unsteady. The rolling of waves. But it’s pure, not devious. Not even graphic or naked or hardcore. It’s as simple as a kiss. I look to the beach again at the man and his son. Waves return to a steady rhythm. I blow another kiss back to shore.
Happiness
Home is a patterned plastic tablecloth. I see a young wife at her new kitchen table. Her soul sits and ponders happiness in the morning sun. Happiness casts slanting light on the plastic orange print. She is practising her new signature with a self-conscious flourish on a piece of paper. She writes it over and over again. Ruth Fitzmaurice, Ruth Fitzmaurice.
I Found My Tribe Page 2
