I Found My Tribe

by Ruth Fitzmaurice

  Wolves make a bond for life. We can no longer hold each other and wrap limbs together. When machinery, air mattresses and tubes distort distances between you, how do you hold on to your wolf bond? I wish in urgent whispers for an answer.

  When we moved back to Greystones, our marital bed became a hospital contraption. It had multiple tilts and reclining functions. We are mid-thirties eighty-year-olds with a bed built for easy TV watching. Sit up. Lie back. Raise your legs. For the first month our mattresses reeked like a plastic ashtray. The previous occupant had been a big smoker. He died and left a scent. Simon’s side of the bed soon needed his own motorised air mattress. In the most romantic of gestures, he bought me a fancy pocket-sprung double-layered single for my side, complete with a quilted mattress protector. Farewell to cold slippery foam. I no longer slept on Dead Man’s smoke stench.

  I lie on my well-padded mattress at a moderate tilt with restless pulsing limbs. My feet feel oversized and swollen. Motors hum like machine guns all around me. Television sounds seep into my dreams. This bedroom is a sensory assault of sound, light and equipment. I am locked in a half-dream. Benedict the night nurse is slapping cream on Simon repeatedly and I can smell it. He massages limbs and I am engaged in a small earthquake.

  I cover my face with the duvet and then my brain does an odd thing. It starts chanting the Lord’s Prayer in a frantic holy loop. Funny brain, why do you resort to this mantra? As a little girl I found solace kneeling before home-made Catholic altars. I dressed them with frilly tablecloths, statues and flower-filled egg cups of bluebells and snowdrops. I was so good. Maybe I still yearn to be good. It’s more likely I’m just desperate.

  I take to sitting in cars again. Hunter sleeps in his car seat holding a naked plastic baby. Sadie is snoring. I wish I could sleep and wake up renewed, but I never do. I would love to sleep for a month, be on my own for a month, leave and live in isolation to think and drink tea, hear the clock tick, and rest my limbs on a quiet bed. All I have are these bleary warm moments in cars and it’s never enough to feel restored.

  When my mother was a girl she fell asleep on a picnic blanket in a grassy field. She woke with a persistent pain in her ear. The pain was dull at first. It grew in intensity until she could bear it no more. Her father finally took some tweezers to her ear and pulled out a big fat earwig. This monstrous thing had nestled into warm waxy crevices and locked pincers around her inner ear.

  ‘Tell us the earwig story!’ we would beg my mother as kids. ‘Please!’ It was by far our favourite tale. Without exception, as adults we are all now morbidly terrified of earwigs, pincer tails and all. It’s the kind of fear that makes the most rational eyes water with horror.

  Annagassan beach in Co. Louth is vast and flat. When the tide is out, miles of soft sand make it the perfect terrain for galloping horses. As a child I visit with a friend whose mother keeps horses. She leaves us playing in puddles while she gallops wildly towards a distant line of blue sea.

  Our boots begin to sink until suddenly we are engulfed in quicksand. Laughing and whooping we realise that we are permanently stuck. This is the attack of the dreaded sand monster. We are daredevils locked in a great adventure. Still laughing, our eyes frantically search the horizon for that horse silhouette.

  We exist in a pocket of time that feels endless. What if she doesn’t come back? How long can we last? Wellies are sucked under and the sand rises up to our knees. Our hands sink up to our elbows as we fall forward. The laughing stops. We fall silent.

  Our saviour returns on horseback. She finds two half-sunken little girls with legs boasting ever-increasing splits. We are slumped forward and soaked to the skin. The mother pulls us out like popped corks. Shivering in our knickers, we huddle under a blanket in the back seat of her car, giggling all the way home.

  I was trained in radio production to have alert ears. My ears and soul are savagely sensitive to music. If a song doesn’t suit my mood, I will leave the room in a panic. Perhaps that is why the whirring, squelching and farting of electrical equipment is so hurtful to me. I am also particularly stubborn. When my feet are sinking in sand, I tend to stand stoical. This time I know there is no hope of a horse on the horizon. That makes it so much harder to be brave.

  Our marital bed is damaging my soul. It wasn’t immediately obvious that it was doing so. Hurt crept into the warm crevices of my ear like a nasty earwig. Only when it dug deep did I feel the pinch. It’s a dull ache that grows and grows until one day it is monstrous. I am exhausted. After six years, the ear pinching is unbearable. I make the impossible decision to leave our bed.

  For months, I wander the house at night. I pass out on couches and crawl in beside kids like some kind of bed gypsy. There is no solace in the frantic dreams that seem intent on tormenting me. I wake on the hour, two, three, four a.m. At 5 a.m. I give up and shuffle around the house like a monk. The darkest hour is just before dawn. I make tea and stare at walls. I see the sun come up and watch it slowly paint the sky.

  I don’t know how to be this person who doesn’t love her bed. I used to tell my husband his imagination would always save him. Now my own dreams torture and prod me all night. I miss my daydreams and the solace of sleep. I miss man skin and wolf bonds and shared beds without alternating pressure functions.

  Wolves stay together until they’re dead, but what if the death is a really slow one? We are left dangling, daring to hope, not to hope. A slow living death of many plateaus, false alarms and subtle dwindling.

  If I was a mermaid, I would send a lonely song out to sea. A single tragic note wailing on the winds. I would hold that note until my breath was gone. Everything I took for granted about myself – all my strengths – seems to have left me. They hightailed it out of a noisy hospital bed that now closely resembles a leaking boat.

  I am back to staring at fantastical shapes and faces. They leap out from the wooden slats above my head. I have claimed the spare bottom bunk in the boys’ bedroom as my own, with a well-placed teddy and owl cushion. The boys are giddy with excitement. ‘We like having you here, Momma,’ they giggle with camping adventure delight. I fall asleep to the sweet lullaby of warm, rapid boy-breaths.

  My ears are at peace but my head is too busy for sleep. I did my very best, but a deep bond has been broken. Simon sleeps alone with a baby monitor and a nurse listening in. He has 20-minute checks. I love him. But now I just look at him from far away. The silence is deafening. My heart falls into my stomach repeatedly. Our marital bed is gone. I sleep fitfully and wake each morning with a gasp.

  Murder

  Sadie is skipping around Simon’s bed singing in an operatic roar. ‘Momma, I don’t want a big giant Dadda. I just want a tiny Dadda. A Dadda like this one.’ This child has no fear of new nurses. She scrambles into every nest, a brazen cuckoo looking for cuddles. Finding a knee to sit on, she smiles sweetly. ‘Can I play with your phone?’ she demands with her prettiest wide-eyed blink. There may be many knees and phones but there is only one Dadda.

  I have thought about murdering my husband. I get these lustful feelings, murderous in the most mysterious way. I don’t think a mother could ever feel like this. I think only a wife would. I used to consume Agatha Christie books as a child. Wives would kill their husbands casually with poison and pointed lack of passion, just for money or titles or a house or some land. It was all quite clinical. Nothing like the frenzied feeling of seeing your beloved in anguish. This is primal raw passion that screams STOP IT! THIS HAS TO END NOW! It is the chaos of pure wifely love.

  Organising the art show for Simon’s birthday, I want to get his window view exactly right. While he is out on the film set, I lie on his bed to figure out which part of the wall he can see best. Lying on his noisy air mattress I instinctively decide to stay still and see how long I can last. Alternating pressure pockets ripple underneath me and churn my stomach to seasickness. Thirty seconds in and the urge to move my head is a loud scream. My eyeballs strain left and right to such a limited range. Less than a minut
e passes before I leap from the bed. I can never fully comprehend his view because it would break me.

  I’ve accepted these lustful, murderous feelings as completely natural. They make me proud because I could never actually kill my husband. His suffering is great but he has no desire to die. There is no guilt. The murderous thoughts only mean I truly love him. A wife could not claim her beloved without also claiming a desire to end this much suffering. There are moments when tears flood his face into a frozen grimace and his eyes are wild and wretched with agony. When empathy pulls you into his unscuffed shoes for a mere five seconds, have a taste of concentrated terror. Even a heart of stone would be moved to murder, at least for a moment.

  Every time love takes me here, I am pulled up short by our children. They dote on him. They seek him out and put their hands on him. His face glows like a Christmas lantern. His eyes gleam and although there is so little movement left, they shine enough that you know he is at peace. His eyes are set in a different shape. Sadie pats his face, Hunter grins at him. Jack burrows for cuddles, Raife talks his talk and Arden leans nearby in true cowboy style.

  Michelle and I are running one day when she doubles over and stops. ‘I’m fine, I’ll be fine,’ she mutters, but she is bleeding. We make it to her house and I leave her reluctantly. ‘Go home, Ruth,’ she insists, ‘my sister will be here any minute.’ I have to go home to wash the dog and collect the kids and get the dinner and I should never ever have left Michelle. Her sister arrives to find her collapsed on the bedroom floor. In hospital they diagnose a gastric disorder and put her on a massive dose of steroids. When a mighty warrior falls, we all falter. We can only wait to ask her what the hell we are supposed to do next.

  The dog got sick and it gets too much. Pappy, our beloved basset hound, has turned into an asshole, I tell my husband. A chronic skin condition had made him a grumpy bastard for quite some time. He ate something odd in the garden and slumped into a half coma. The vet tried to put him on a drip and he attacked her. ‘The next 24 hours will be critical,’ warns the vet. ‘He has terrible deep veins.’ They can’t get the drip in. I stare at the dog in wonder. My own veins sit plump and fat on scrawny arms, but Simon’s veins are notorious. ‘He has terrible deep veins,’ say the doctors as they pincushion him at each hospital visit. Oh, God help me. The dog and Simon are united in illness and bad veins.

  I pace the floors waiting for word of Pappy’s fate. Suddenly I am so angry at the two of them. How dare they both get so sick? Perhaps we need a death. A release from all this pain. A resting place for it. If death is coming, so be it. Better that the dog gets his. Pappy just might be the sacrifice we need. We can sell his canine soul for our own sanctuary. I am ready.

  I am not ready. Pappy survives and I take him home in utter relief. My tough talk is total nonsense. I’m no more ready for death than Simon. Pappy’s skin continues to worsen. I am bathing him more than the children. At least they don’t try and bite me. He growls and snarls at everyone. I barricade myself with couch cushions just to get him out the back door. He lunges at me baring pointy teeth and red gums. I am properly afraid with tears in my eyes. He is a big dog and very strong. One day he bites Arden’s best friend’s hand and breaks the skin. I am petrified and tell Simon we need to take him back to the vet.

  I visit Michelle who is run down but not broken. She is taking her steroids and is resolved to follow a raw food regime to get herself back on track. The warrior doesn’t get tragic. There is fire in her eyes. ‘We’ll run again soon,’ she growls at me. Michelle may be a mad raw-food hippie, but she has no doubt. Maybe we’re all deluded but I know for sure we will run.

  Familiar with Pappy from previous visits, the vet doesn’t feign surprise. Pappy greets her by attacking both her and the assistant. He nearly bloody savages them. Maybe he knows what is coming. She says that bassets can go this way and when they do, they only get worse. People can learn to live around them and not piss them off but in a house of five children, that would be impossible. He couldn’t be rehomed with his untreatable skin and aggressive streak.

  Mother bear kicks in and I know I cannot bring Pappy home. The vet has confirmed all my worst fears. Someone will get hurt. I am not brave enough to go home and bring him back here again. I need her to guide me through this horrible process. I sit and hold him while she puts him to sleep. It is the worst thing I have ever done, but I cannot let him back among our children. Simon had suggested his mum might take him. I won’t offload a problem dog on a good lady I love, who is already carrying so much. I don’t want anyone to live with the guilt of this decision but me. I have failed the dog and I am the one who will carry it.

  I whisper into his warm fur as the big blue syringe begins to take effect. His breathing gets slower. The vet quietly leaves the room. I weep over him and stroke him as I whimper, ‘Sorry, sorry, Pappy … I’m so sorry I called you an asshole.’ There is no forgiving this, but I beg the dog anyway as I spill tears and his life slips away. His breathing just stops but his nose is filled with heat. His chest is not moving and it makes no sense. The vet returns. ‘Do you want to keep his collar?’ she asks gently. I stare at her blankly because there is no time for me to have the slightest clue.

  I return to the house in a dogless daze. ‘Where is Pappy?’ says Simon. I mouth words but the shock makes it sound functional. ‘You killed my dog,’ he says. ‘You killed my dog without asking me. How could you? How could you do such a bad thing? How could you do this?’ Crushing words continue to crowd his computer screen. I plead and cry but he can’t see that I did it for love. ‘You are sick. You are unstable,’ he says and a howl rises out of me in pure primal anguish. I can’t kick him, so I kick his bed instead, as I wail and beg for him to stop.

  One sad dog story could be enough to shake down a marriage. Companionship is an angry glare through plate glass windows. We’re divided in two different worlds. Where does my husband live and what is it like there? No doubt it is lonely for him too. Oh, how lonely his world must be. Maybe all marriages end up this way. Great love turns to great annoyance.

  It is a perfect day for a swim but I’ve got the fear and may need a push. Aifric has returned to her job as an architect and has less time for swims. Michelle is still in full combat with steroids. I have just endured a day of weeping as I told each of the children individually that Pappy is gone. We couldn’t make his skin better and the vet had to put him to sleep. Hunter, my little wolf cub, takes it the hardest. Their first giant loss is completely my fault. I can still see the tears dripping from my fingertips into his warm dead fur. I stand on my own at the cove steps, the full weight of dog murder in my bones. I don’t think a dive will save me. I may sink like a stone. My husband hates me and I have never felt so alone.

  Holidays

  ‘Is France open yet?’ asks Sadie every day for three months. No, pet, it’s still closed, but our holiday is unleashed very soon. I am running away for real this time with the children and my youngest brother Joe. We are hightailing it to France on a car ferry to go camping for three weeks without Simon.

  I know that we all need this. Since Pappy died, everything about our home buzzes around my brain like fruit flies that I can’t quite swat away. They’ve crawled into the bread and linger on rotten bananas. Our house has the hum of a stinky compost bin, making it impossible to breathe deeply. I feel just as rotten. I need something, anything to take this buzzing out of my head and distract me from a cracked chest and my broken heart. Oh Lord, pour the wine.

  I plonk the kids in front of the TV with our carer Anna and sneak out to the cove. It can’t work this time. I am too far gone and the tide won’t be right. The tide is perfect. I leave a small pile of clothes on the rocks. My mind is relaxing as soon as I smell the air and my feet touch rock. Cold sea can blow those flies away in one SWOOSH! Three dives later I know that real magic is here. The stones hold secrets and the dread in my heart floats free. It is all so solitary and dreamlike I wonder if it is real. Twenty minutes later I am back home
.

  The summer Irish water doesn’t even pack enough punch for me these days. I’m beginning to believe that prolonged happiness is some sort of bullshit. Intense beautiful living involves pain. I know you, pain, my old buddy, we have been friends for so long now, what would I do without you? Life would be bright and shiny, lacking complex cloud shapes. Steeped in blue skies and anaesthesia, I could become a bored drunk with brown skin. For now I’d much rather dip my toes in cold water and plunge.

  Maybe some day life won’t be so busy. Pain will lift and I might miss it. Expect quiet days by the lake with a chick-lit novel. I can’t quite imagine it. Where would I be without the dark, raging waves and the torture? Maybe nowhere good.

  Simon insists on getting Pappy cremated. He is returned to me condensed into a cardboard cylinder printed with lush green leaves. I am not ready to show this to anyone, so I panic. I shove him under the passenger seat of my car and bring him to France. Pappy always loved a long car journey.

  Holidays are a funny old game. Expect the unexpected. You expect that you will relax. You don’t expect to be driving like a maniac, hundreds of miles on French and Spanish motorways where the speed limit is 130 kilometres and you’re clocking 150 and 160 on those sweet French hills.

  Fresh off the ferry, I wobble nervously on the right and overtake with a shudder. This translates rather quickly into DON’T FUCK WITH ME PEOPLE AND GET OUT OF MY WAY. Someone is clearly chasing me. Who is chasing me? Don’t look over your shoulder because Joe is blocking the mirror with the map and you might get sideswiped by a zippy Renault Clio weaving in and out of lanes. French drivers don’t seem to indicate.