by Emma Cooper
‘That’s exactly what I’m worried about.’
‘I’m fine,’ he mumbles as he puts a nail in his mouth and reaches for the hammer.
‘Look,’ I say, taking the picture frame and holding it while he begins to hammer the nail into the wall. ‘I need you to tell me how to help you.’
He hammers the nail five times then reaches out his hand to me; for a fleeting moment I think that he is reaching out for help, but it is just the picture that he wants.
‘I don’t need you to do anything. I’m fine.’
‘Well, I can’t leave you alone for more than a few minutes without worrying, so you’ll be doing me a favour if you just tell me what I can do to help.’
We stare at each other for a few minutes.
‘Stop coming around so much, you need to trust me.’
‘I can’t.’
‘I’ll call you. When I feel . . .’
‘Suicidal?’
‘Empty.’ He looks away then. I can see he is uncomfortable talking, but this is a big step towards him opening up.
‘What . . . hungry?’ I smile, making light of his sentiment, trying to let him know that talking about it isn’t such a scary thing to do.
Week Thirty
Samuel
Sweat sticks last night’s clothes to my body as the shivers take hold. Michael is lying next to me, his own shame and exhaustion evident as he mirrors my actions and lies motionless and prone. The sharp edges of my bedside cabinet arrive beneath my tapping fingers; the bottle crinkles and cracks as I bring the water to my lips. The house shakes with me as I hear Sarah storm up the stairs and throw open my door.
‘Come in why don’t you?’ My voice is gravelly and whiskey-soured.
‘What the hell were you thinking?’ she shouts. I flinch at her volume and pull myself up. ‘It is not OK to take my husband to a strip bar!’ she yells.
‘It’s not like we forced him,’ I answer sheepishly, even though I have a vague recollection of him trying to get us to go home.
‘No, Mule, you didn’t force him, but you and Da were so pissed, apparently, that he didn’t think you were in any fit state to get home safely, if at all!’ Sarah is blazing at the end of the tunnel, but I look away from her, preferring to fill the tiny gap of sight with a piece of my navy curtain.
‘It was Da’s idea and can you . . . lower your voice a little?’ I fumble with a packet of paracetamol and pop two in my mouth, chasing them down with the water.
‘Well, Mr and Mrs McLaughlin aren’t speaking to each other this morning, so you can have all the peace and quiet in the world!’
‘Samuel Rupert McLaughlin! Get your backside down these stairs right now!’ Mam shouts.
‘Jesus, she hasn’t used “Rupert” for a long time.’ I can hear the smug smile in Sarah’s voice. ‘You’re properly in the shit.’
‘Feck’s sake.’ I lie back down and cover my eyes with my arm. Images from the day before fill me with a wave of nausea.
I remember opening the whiskey early on and Da telling me I was too young to be drinking the doom away before lunch time.
‘If you want a drink, let’s go and have a pint in the pub.’ He had taken the bottle from me, making me eat a sandwich with bread as thick as bricks.
I’d let him lead me, not caring who he stopped to talk to, not caring if they were looking at me with that look that is supposed to be sympathetic but just feels cruel. I just didn’t care about anything.
Beer kept flowing. Da became louder and more theatrical, getting in drinks for old friends who came to join us. The more drunk I got, the less empty I felt. I liked listening to them talking; it reminded me of the way things used to be around here before the gastropubs took over. Most of the community would meet every Saturday night in the local pub, even if it was to pop in and buy eggs from behind the bar, or to fetch home someone because their tea was ready; every weekend this family of neighbours would stop to speak: everybody knew everybody. As I listened to their stories, their jokes, the images of Sophie and her child began to slip away. Michael led me back and forth to the toilet; even though he was a little unsteady, a little clumsier, he still looked after me.
Duncan joined us later. It had felt late, but I think it would have only been early evening. Connor, my old school friend, had come crashing through the door wearing a veil and heels. He was on his stag night; that’s how we ended up in a strip club.
My memories of the club are hazy. Michael had struggled to negotiate the steep steps that took us down into a room where dark clouds covered the end of the telescope; the only light leaking through was made of purples and blues. Deep bass tones had reverberated through Michael and thudded in my ears as I stumbled towards the bar, edges of tables bumping into my sides as half-filled glasses wobbled and spilled on to the tables.
As another wave of sickness floods through me, more than one image of Duncan’s hands beneath me, helping me stand, fills me with embarrassment. My vomit had landed on tables and shoes because I couldn’t navigate my way to the men’s loos quickly enough. The sound of my retches mixed together with the blues and the purples at the end of the tunnel.
I have memories of sounds after that, Da apologising on my behalf, telling them I was blind drunk and laughing loudly at his joke, a joke that he had told several times throughout the night. There were angry male voices and Duncan’s calm tone, offering to buy them a round of drinks.
‘Do you know what would have happened if that group of men had got hold of you?’ Sarah asks, and I can hear the worry in her voice.
‘Jesus, Sarah, let it go, would you?’ I turn on my side as Mam calls me again and threatens to throw cold water over me if I don’t go downstairs right this instant.
‘Fine. You want to throw away the rest of your life drinking yourself to death, be my guest, but don’t fucking take my husband with you.’ The door slams, her feet pounding against the stairs, as she leaves us and our sickness in peace. Michael and I groan and pull the duvet over us as we slip into fractured dreams about the night before.
The dreams end abruptly as I bolt upright, cold water dripping from my eyelashes and sinking into last night’s clothes.
‘I said downstairs, Samuel, and I meant it.’ I hear Mam slam down the empty cup and charge out of the room, her familiar powdery smell following her like an eager friend.
Da is at the table and by the fractions of his face that I can see, he looks how I feel. Mam is slamming things around the kitchen; cutlery crashes inside drawers, the lid on the teapot shaking with fear as she pounds it into place. The kitchen is rich with the smell of bacon and my stomach turns over in response.
‘Sammy,’ Da greets.
‘Da,’ I reply. Mam pushes a glass of something fizzing into my hand; my nose moves towards it, the familiar smell of Alka-Seltzer turning my stomach. I push it away from me as Mam bangs another glass down on to the table, for Da, I presume.
‘Now, if you two can drink the Swan out of whiskey then you can bloody well drink that. That and a bacon butty will sort you out and then you pair of eejits are going to sit at this table and you’re going to listen to what I have to say.’
Mam, it turns out, has a lot to say.
As I nurse a cup of black coffee, and force a mouthful of bacon down, Mam begins. ‘Right, first things first, Samuel, you’re not dying.’
‘I know—’
‘Shush!’ she snaps, and I scan the room to find where the slight nostril snort of amusement is coming from and see parts of my sister’s red hair from beside the door. ‘You two great idiots, with your bucket list, are swanning around as if you’ve got a month to live. Sammy, whether you want to accept it or not, you need to prepare for when your sight goes, and that means applying for a guide dog and—’
‘Guide dog my—’ Da begins.
‘Mr McLaughlin, you shut your piehole! You’ve done enough damage!’ The table wobbles as her hands slap the surface. ‘There are lots of things you need to learn to do as a blind person,
Sammy. Like how to post a selfie.’
‘What? I know how—’
A fuzzy image of Da laughing his head off as we staggered through the lounge replays in my aching head. He was showing Mam the selfie I’d taken of us but hadn’t managed to hit the selfie mode. Instead – as Mam is demonstrating by pushing Da’s phone screen into my face – is a pair of tits. Good ones, but tits nonetheless and I’m not talking about me and Da.
‘Christ, woman, it was only a strip club, not the red-light district,’ he grumbles.
‘I couldn’t give a flying fish about the strip club,’ Mam answers. I’ve given up trying to track her movements as she bangs about the kitchen. I focus on Sarah’s hair instead as she twirls it around her finger like she used to when we were kids.
‘Sammy, you need to get your life together. I’m not having you living here for ever; I brought you up well enough for you to stand on your own two feet. Just because you’re going to be blind . . .’ her voice catches as she says this, ‘doesn’t mean you stop being independent. It’s time to get on with your life.’ Something is slid across the table and my palms skim across the plastic tablecloth and pick up a note, but I can’t read it without slowly moving my head across the words: it’s a number for a social worker.
‘I’ve spoken to her this morning. She can help you so much, Samuel, she can help you learn to look after yourself; teach you to iron, to cook . . . to get your life back.’
Sophie holding her family in her arms punches me in the stomach, shaking the bacon and the coffee.
‘I haven’t got a life to get back,’ I say. Michael straightens his back and we walk out of the room, closing the door quietly behind us and returning to our bed.
Week Thirty-One
Sophie
I’m trying to give Charlie some space. It’s hard not to keep knocking on his door. Every morning that I notice the curtains are open and hear the sound of his radio fills me with relief. Will I ever stop worrying about him?
Darkness fills the room as I balance my laptop on Bean. We huddle beneath the duvet, my fingers tapping away as I try to find anything I can about Samuel.
Stepping back into the world of social media fills me with apprehension. I set up new accounts, putting a picture of a leaf as my profile picture.
The sheer magnitude of social media settles around my shoulders like a cloak. The weight of it presses down on me, becoming heavier, and with every page I open, with every photo I scan, another patch of material is added: the smiles, the dogs, the babies, the food, the pouts, the memes, the proposals, the weddings, the lost and the lonely. How do so many of us do this, walk around with this cloak pulling us down, dragging behind us as we walk, the material itching us until we scratch ourselves raw? We try to make the cloak pretty, make it look brighter with a filter, happier with interesting scenery, look perfect as we gaze into our partner’s eyes. But with every new piece of material we add, no matter how special and perfect it is, we can’t stop the cloak from becoming heavier.
But Samuel never wanted to wear it. ‘I don’t do social media,’ he said. ‘It’s all fake.’
I yawn and glance at the clock – it’s half-two in the morning.
He’s not there.
My search continues as I scroll through Sarah McLaughlins, but there are so many, some without profile pictures, some with, but none of them look like the Disney character he had described. I jot down a few possible matches, but as I click on them, they don’t live in Derry.
The cloak is too heavy for me now and so I slip my arm out of the sleeve as I close down Facebook, unfasten the buttons as I log off Twitter and finally shrug it off and on to the floor as Instagram disappears from view.
Bean fidgets beneath my skin and I change position as a heel catches my ribcage. My baby is as uncomfortable as I am and I shift the laptop next to me, pull down the duvet, and lift my nightie. I laugh as a foot stretches out and then jolts against my tight skin, moving my whole stomach, but my baby is still not comfortable. My stomach arches up on one side; the clear outline of bone protrudes from my stomach then snaps back inside. I gasp as the bone pushes outwards again, the whole bump stretching further away from my own body than I ever imagined it could, and then the baby beneath it rolls over to the right side, the entire tummy moving from the left of my body to the right. My hand flies to my open mouth as I let out a giggle that is more shock than amusement as Bean stills, comfortable in its new position.
‘Oh Samuel, you’re missing it,’ I mumble and then I have an idea. When, and I do mean when, I find Samuel I don’t want him to miss these moments; I want to be able to show them to him. I smile, grab my mobile and choose the video camera option. I give Bean a good poke and film my tummy as our child pushes and turns beneath my skin. I replay it and sigh as I put the phone down and look at the clock again. I compose another email to Bret, but just as I have so many times, I delete it before I hit send. I’ve said all that I can to Bret; I’m not leaving my fate – and Bean’s – in his hands any more.
I stroke my bump. My body is uncomfortable now, the weight of Bean making my hips ache and pushing against my bladder. It takes a long time before I finally begin to drift off to sleep but just as I do, I hear Samuel. ‘I was never late for dinner because we could hear the bells from our den.’
My eyes flash open and my heart speeds up; I have a clue about where Samuel grew up in Ireland, that he lived by a church.
My hand fumbles for the light switch. I know how ridiculous this is – it’s one tiny straw to clutch at – but I reach for my laptop and carry on regardless, tapping in ‘churches in Londonderry’ into the search bar. There are a lot of churches in Derry.
But it’s a start.
Week Thirty-One
Samuel
My arms find their way through the sleeves of my denim jacket; my left hand finds its way into my pocket as my right grips on to Michael. We are going to the doctor’s and we are going on our own.
Our first problem is when we get into town, we need to cross the road, but as my fingers push the button and we wait for the green man, I find it hard to locate him. As the fist squeezes tighter and tighter, it is taking me longer to see the things I need to, even though I’ve become an expert on ‘crossings’. Mam has been noting the best ways for me to cross town, making use of pelican rather than zebra crossings as most of them will have a sound when I need to cross.
‘Did you know that the name for a pelican crossing comes from Pedestrian Light Controlled Crossing – isn’t that clever?’
‘Hmmm,’ I’d replied. I don’t really know what response she was expecting me to give. It seems that Mam has become an expert on all things ‘blind’; it’s like her new fecking hobby.
The green man flashes at me, but I don’t trust it. I concentrate on the hums of the engines of the stationary cars and only when I’m certain that they are not about to move do I step off the kerb.
My life has become something I don’t recognise. This time last year it was something that strode alongside me without a care in the world; that life – the one that revolved around a man who could see and was surrounded by light and life – has died, and when it did, it left me with its shadow. Michael rolls along the street and I bump into an overweight man, his heavy carrier bag swinging into my leg; both of us say sorry at the same time. The shadow skulks around me and the tunnel, it slithers across the buildings and trundles behind me as I follow the familiar route to the eye specialist building; no matter how hard I try to get rid of it, it follows me everywhere I go.
The doors into the building swing open easily and as the reception desk flickers into view, I don’t see the edges of a buggy that is hiding in the darkness beneath my feet and I trip over it, regaining my balance before I fall. The apology has already left my mouth, the question if the toddler is OK happening before I have instructed my mouth to open. Apologising is becoming as much a subconscious action as breathing is. I don’t need to think about it any more. The toddler is fine, no harm done
– look, he’s still fast asleep. I put together the small parts of the baby’s face to make a whole, and I smile. His name is Henry, she is telling me. I step back to try and fit the pieces of her face together; she’s pretty with green eyes and lip-glossed lips, but the look of love that radiates from her as she looks at her son knocks me off balance almost as much as the buggy had. Sophie will have that look soon; she will look at her sleeping child and will feel complete happiness: something in me changes.
The realisation is so powerful, so unexpected, that I find myself standing still, smiling at this woman, this stranger who has just told me more about my relationship with Sophie than I knew myself.
I love her enough to let her go.
Sophie’s happiness is enough for me to begin my new life without her.
This realisation is like fresh air to me. I can breathe again; I can be happy because I know she will be happy.
Plans for my future begin to line up and take order as I follow the corridor. I need to take my life into my own hands. The shadow shrinks a little as I think about the changes I must make and the answers I need to find.
‘Good to see you, Samuel,’ Dr Morris greets me. I don’t know if it is ironic that my reply is that it is good to see him too. My leg is bouncing up and down as I think of all the things I need to do. I need to get my shit together, so I can learn to be independent; I need to find a way of marking my clothes so that I can dress myself without looking like an idiot. How am I going to do that? I need to take control; I need to start living my life again.
I look up and down, to the right, to the left, into various pieces of equipment. I answer his questions, but all I can think of is how I’m going to change my life.
‘When you see my finger, say now.’
‘Doc? How can I make sure I don’t dress like an idiot?’ I ask.
‘Concentrate, Samuel.’
‘I am. But it’s important, right? That I don’t go out looking like a twat?’
