A Gift to You

by Patricia Scanlan

  She only brings the car at the weekend because she can’t afford the weekly all-day fees in the Mater Hospital car park. The costs are prohibitive and money is tight now. Have the authorities any idea of the added hardship that is inflicted on people who have to visit a seriously ill patient day after day, month after month? she wonders. Not that they care. No one cares for the likes of her.

  She sighs, leaning across the passenger seat to haul her tote bag off the floor. Beaumont Hospital is the worst, she decides. A walk to a ward that takes fifteen minutes from the car park, and fifteen minutes back, leaves precious little time for a visit. The queues at the pay stations tip you over the hour, and it all costs a fortune, she thinks crossly, remembering how she would go from three to six euros in the blink of an eye.

  Life is harsh, cruel now, post-Celtic Tiger, and ordinary people are ground down, paying for the immoral gambling of bankers, developers and greedy, corrupt politicians. White-collar criminals that lied through their teeth and broke many laws. It enrages her that so many of the perpetrators of heinous crime against the citizens of this benighted isle of so-called Saints and Scholars, continue to live in their big houses, and enjoy their foreign holidays and play golf in their posh golf clubs, scorning the notion that a ‘personal guarantee’ really applied to them. The judges, far removed from the hardship of the hoi polloi, have put none of these gurriers behind bars. And why would they? They’re all in the same clique, playing golf and enjoying fine dining and giving each other the nod about stocks and shares and when to buy and when to flip. You scratch my back, I scratch yours.

  She is grumpy this morning, she acknowledges, heartily sick of the daily trek, and the effort to be positive and supportive. How she would love to be the one being nurtured and cherished and supported, she thinks sorrowfully, easing her arthritic body out of the car.

  ‘Stop it!’ she chides herself aloud. She cannot afford to give into weakness. She has to be strong. At least she will have the luxury of coming out to her car, and not having to wait for a bus to get her home this evening, she comforts herself, double-checking that the door of the Yaris is locked.

  Leo Street is quiet, resting in the early-morning pale wishy-washy October sunlight. A black cat is sitting outside a crimson door, vigorously licking herself clean – the only sign of life. Curtains and blinds are still drawn, shutting out the day as people take their Saturday morning lie-in. A puff of wind tosses crispy golden leaves in the air and they frolic down to her feet, reminding her that autumn has arrived and she needs to get her gas geyser serviced. More money. She is considering installing a wood-burning stove. Gas-heating is so expensive now and their savings are dwindling.

  She stifles a yawn. She would love a lie-in, she thinks wistfully, rounding the corner to the NCR and making her way to the automatic doors of the new Whitty Building, opposite Mountjoy’s women’s prison.

  The Mater Misericordiae Hospital. Misericordiae, meaning ‘mercy’ or ‘pity’ in Latin. Misery in her vocabulary, she thinks wryly, holding her hands under the sanitizer and rubbing the gel onto her palms and between her fingers. She would like a cup of coffee and a cookie but the prices charged by the small café are unbelievably exorbitant and she has her flask of tea and a sandwich in her bag. She steps onto the escalator and ascends slowly to the first floor.

  The hospital is eerily quiet, unlike weekdays when patients, visitors and medical personnel throng the corridors. All the services are pared back at the weekend. People are only allowed to be sick and have needs fulfilled from Monday to Friday. Her husband will get no badly needed physio or doctor visits, no X-rays, tests, nothing! It is a five-day hospital, thanks to cutbacks. Her eighty-five-year-old brother was thrown out of a private hospital, with undiagnosed pneumonia, on a Friday morning, due to ward closures for the weekend because of pressures from health-insurance companies. He ended up at death’s door and in hospital for another six weeks because of a crazy, dangerous and short-sighted strategy that cost the private-health-insurance company thousands more than his original hospital stay should have done.

  It’s all about ‘beds’ now, not patients. If only the nuns were in charge of the HSE, it would be a different kettle of fish, she ruminates. The hospitals went to pot once the nuns withdrew from running them and ‘managers’ took over. She gives a delicate snort. Bad scran to the ‘managers’. They needed to spend a few days lying on a trolley in A&E and it might change their tune.

  She walks along the deserted corridor, lined with empty clinics, that leads to the lifts, and becomes aware of footsteps echoing behind her. Not a doctor, or a consultant, she decides. They walk with brisk strides. Always in a hurry. Places to go, people to see. Don’t get in my way, please. Not a nurse in squeaky soled shoes, or an administrator click-clacking along in high heels. She knows the distinct types after all these months.

  It’s a man and he’s gaining on her as she turns right and crosses to the bank of lifts. He overtakes just as the steel doors open to one of the lifts and she follows him in. He jabs his finger on the seventh floor button and glances at her enquiringly. ‘The same,’ she responds. He leans against the handrail and she rests against the opposite one.

  ‘Doors closing,’ the automated voice says and then they are cocooned in their steel box with the big glass wall that looks out onto the new hospital complex, and the unexpected vista of the green purple smudged Dublin mountains in the distance.

  Will the man chat? she wonders. Some people do, some people don’t. He’s not a doctor. He’s a tired, careworn, middle-aged man in a crumpled suit, and if he’s going to the seventh floor, life is hard for him, she reflects.

  ‘Not a bad day,’ he says politely, making the effort.

  ‘No,’ she agrees, injecting a false note of cheer into her voice, ‘not a bad day at all.’

  ‘We did well this year,’ he observes, as the lift glides slowly upwards and the sun spills over the autumn-dabbed mountains, a backdrop to the massive glass link corridors to the old hospital.

  He has a West of Ireland accent. Connemara, perhaps, she guesses.

  ‘It will shorten the winter.’ She tries to be as positive as he’s been.

  ‘True.’ The lift judders to a halt and he courteously stands back to let her out.

  ‘Thank you,’ she murmurs, unconsciously taking a deep breath, as they walk towards the entrance to the seventh floor, mentally preparing herself before passing through the big grey doors that lead to the oncology wards.

  He inhales too and they smile at each other. ‘Hard, isn’t it?’ she says.

  ‘Very.’ He exhales a gale force sigh. ‘How long have you been coming?’

  ‘Eleven months. You?’ They slow down to talk.

  ‘Three,’ he says. ‘You’re a veteran.’ His eyes crinkle in a smile. They are cornflower blue like her husband’s.

  ‘You could say that.’ She smiles at his droll humour.

  ‘My son is very ill,’ he volunteers hesitantly. ‘And you?’

  ‘My husband,’ she says, passing through the door he holds open for her. There is no need for histories, descriptions and comparisons. They are on the seventh floor, that is enough.

  ‘Hard,’ he says again. ‘Very hard.’

  ‘It’s the anxiety.’ She grimaces. ‘The constant, grinding anxiety and getting the phone calls that make you think this is it!’

  ‘Exactly! We’ve had a few of those, too.’ He nods empathically as they walk along the entrance hallway towards the long corridor that houses the wards. ‘There’s nothing worse than being called in.’

  They stop at the intersection. ‘I’m this way.’ He indicates right.

  ‘I’m the other.’ She smiles at him.

  ‘Where there’s life there’s hope,’ he says, and, as if it was the most natural thing in the world he reaches out spontaneously to pat her back.

  She gives him a hug and they stand there, two strangers comforting each other. They give each other one last smile before they go their separate ways.
‘God go with you,’ he says, raising his hand in farewell.

  ‘And with you,’ she responds fervently. ‘And with you.’ She hears his footsteps, solid and determined, fade away and she turns left.

  ‘Come on, old girl, chin up,’ she encourages herself, walking past the nurses’ station. Her knees ache, as does her neck, a creaking jagged unforgiving pain that keeps her awake at night. She is bone weary.

  She stops at the green door behind which her husband lies in a bed that puffs and blows, surrounded by bleeping machines, and tubes and drips and lines, and grey cartons for vomit, and rubber gloves and pill cups, all the accouterments of the very ill.

  She takes another deep breath and pastes a smile on her face as she has done, day in, day out, week upon week, month upon month, for all of this long, exhausting year.

  She glances to her right, there is no one else around, the man is gone from sight, but further along the corridor she knows that he is doing the same as her, putting on the brave face, showing courage, being kind and adapting to a world that has narrowed to this, the seventh floor of a hospital, where the most part of their life is now spent.

  Nothing has changed, but this day is different, she acknowledges. Two strangers have brought comfort to each other because they understood the silent suffering of the other. This brief, enriching encounter will keep her going for a while. She has been bolstered and uplifted just when she had begun to wilt.

  She opens the door. ‘Good morning, love. How are you today?’ She greets her husband as she always does, remembering her fellow traveller’s words: ‘Where there’s life there’s hope.’

  MOTHER’S DAY

  One Small Step

  I need assertiveness classes, I think to myself, as simmering with irritation as I stuff a turkey that I do not want to stuff, let alone eat. I’m really annoyed at myself. Once again, I’ve let my older sister walk all over me and behaved like an absolute doormat. Mad as I am at her, I’m even madder at myself.

  I do beg your pardon. How rude of me to launch off like that without even introducing myself. My name is Jessie Barnsley. I’m a forty-year-old wife, mother of two, freelance copy editor, palm-curling PMT sufferer and, right now, doormat. Let me fill you in before we go any further. Monica, my eldest sister, married to flashy git Kenneth, who likes to be called Ken, is having her annual family barbecue.

  Because it’s family and we are very definitely B list, she doesn’t bother with caterers, not when the rest of us can turn to and bring an assortment of grub. I get a phone call from her four days before the big event: ‘Bring the turkey over as soon as it’s cooked so I can carve it and plate it up before the others arrive. Lia [sister-in-law] can do up the salads, I’ll sort out the ribs and burgers for the barbecue.’ Monica issues her instructions like a sergeant major.

  ‘Do we really need a turkey? I don’t like cold turkey,’ I say, a tad irritably, it has to be said. PMT is beginning to kick in and besides, I have a deadline that is fast looming. I’m way behind schedule. I don’t have time to cook turkey! I tell my sister this.

  ‘What?’ Monica is clearly taken aback by my lack of enthusiasm. ‘Of course we need a turkey. We always have a turkey. All you have to do is bung it in the oven. You know Gran and Granddad won’t eat barbecue food. You know how conservative they are. And neither will Marcus after getting the trots . . . no, sorry . . . “salmonella” last year at Suzy Carter’s charity barbie.’ Monica drips with sarcasm – she doesn’t like Marcus, her brother-in-law. Mind, I’m not mad about him myself. Apart from being a hypochondriac of the highest order, he gives me the creeps. His hugs are gropy sort of hugs, if you know what I mean. You just don’t want to be left in a room alone with him. He sneaked up behind me one Christmas and I get the shivers just thinking about it.

  Monica is rabbiting on. ‘He’s such a wussie, honestly. He doesn’t just get a headache, he gets a brain tumour, and as for . . .’ I tune out and let her at it. Why does she bother going to such trouble when it’s clearly an ordeal? It’s become a sort of family tradition now, though, Monica’s barbecue. She had the first one six years ago and, between yourself and myself and I know this is a bitchy thing to say about my own sister, but it wasn’t for the love of us all. It was only to show off her posh new house in Malahide with the fabulous sea views and landscaped garden. The first year, she and Ken looked after the cooking, but the following year, when she decided to have one again and get all the family entertaining out of the way ‘in one fell swoop’ as she rather crassly put it, Lia, our sister-in-law, kindly suggested we all bring a dish.

  That wasn’t too bad. I did three dozen savoury vol-au-vents; but since then, I’ve ended up cooking a twenty-five pound turkey for the past couple of years and it’s a nuisance. I mean, it’s her decision to have a family barbecue, not mine. So why should I have to suffer? Why does she do it year after year, if it’s such a drag? I suppose she feels she has to now. It’s expected of her. Everybody groans at the thought of going, but we usually end up having a bit of a laugh at the end of the day.

  ‘I could do a salmon,’ I say now, interrupting her anti-Marcus diatribe.

  ‘Orla’s doing salmon, you do the turkey as usual and bring a bottle of gin or vodka . . .’

  I feel my blood boil – Monica and Ken like spirits, Ronan, my long-suffering husband, and I prefer wine. ‘Monica, Ronan and I aren’t mad about spirits; we prefer to drink wine,’ I explain.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ Monica can’t hide her exasperation. ‘There’ll be plenty of wine here. Look, I have to go, Ken’s entertaining some colleagues from London and I have to have a manicure and get my hair done. Bye.’ She sounds distinctly tetchy, huffy even. My heart sinks. Monica in a huff is not for the faint-hearted. She does huffy better than anyone else I know and can stay frosty for weeks.

  So that’s how, this Sunday morning, I’m up at seven-thirty, stuffing a huge, fat, white-skinned, blue-veined turkey, with extreme bad grace. This year, I’ve cheated. I’ve bought ready-made apricot-and-walnut stuffing instead of making my own. I rub the skin with lemon to crisp it up, lace the breast with streaky bacon, swaddle it in tinfoil and manoevre the roasting dish into the oven. I still feel hard done by. Resentment has multiplied in the four days since my conversation with Monica. That turkey is proof positive that I do not count in her eyes. She did not listen to one word that I said to her.

  A) I don’t like cold turkey.

  B) I’m tied for time and am under pressure with my work. I was up until 1 a.m. this morning, editing, and am bog-eyed with tiredness.

  C) Although I don’t drink spirits, I am still expected to bring a bottle of gin or vodka.

  What is it about Monica that makes her feel that what she wants is far more important than anything I might want? Why are my feelings and desires of no consequence and why do I put up with her bullying? Because frankly, that’s what it is. Bullying and a lack of respect. Monica doesn’t rate my copy editing as a job at all. As far as she’s concerned, I’m at home all day, so I don’t ‘work.’ She feels perfectly free to ring up and ask me to collect her children from the crèche, because she’s been delayed at a very important ‘strategy planning session’. She works as PA to a stockbroker and likes to think she’s at the cutting edge of high finance.

  Don’t think that I mind helping someone when they’re stuck. That’s not it. It’s just, week in, week out, I’m expected to drop everything and run to her assistance. What really bugs me is that she expects it of me and I find it so hard to put my foot down and say no. Enough is enough. Ronan, my kind and lovely husband, tells me that I have to make a stand.

  Am I being super-sensitive? I ask myself over and over. I don’t think so and, today, I’ve made a decision: this is the last turkey I cook for Monica’s damn barbecues.

  Bits of stuffing are caught under my rings so I rinse them under the tap and gaze out at my garden. It is a lovely late-summer’s morning, Monica is always lucky with her weather. Sweet pea and roses scent the air and my damso
n tree is heavy with ripening fruit. Soon, I’ll pick them and make pots of ruby red jam that my children will spread on thick chunks of bread slathered with butter.

  I hear the pitter-patter of feet down the stairs and my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Millie, bursts into the kitchen, blue eyes wide and clear, golden curls dancing, ‘’Allo, Mammy. I’ss hungry,’ she declares. I bend down and sweep her into my arms, nuzzling her neck, inhaling the delicious baby scent of her. I adore her, and my four-year-old son, Adam.

  I’m very lucky really, in case you think my life is all gloom and doom. I have a really happy family life. Sometimes I think Monica is a little envious. She might have loads of money, a big house and ‘high-flying’ career, but Kenneth aka Ken is not the ideal husband – his career is everything. He’s a pilot, and I think he plays away. Monica is very insecure about his fidelity. I know I’m being judgmental here, but I wouldn’t put it past him. He thinks he’s God’s gift to women.

  ‘I’ss hungry, Mammy,’ Millie repeats indignantly, and I kiss her again and open the fridge to get her an Actimel and milk for her cereal.

  The aroma of roasting turkey fills the kitchen as the hours pass, reminding me of Christmas. My mouth waters as I eventually lift the crisp golden bird from the roasting dish four and a half hours later. ‘Looks good, Jessie,’ Ronan approves as he slides the big plate underneath it and carries it to the table for me. He and Adam dive on the crisp streaky bacon.

  ‘Yummy yum yum!’ Adam grins, grease dripping down his chin. ‘You’re a brill cook, Mam.’ Ronan and I smile at each other over his head and I feel a moment of happiness. How lucky I am to love and be loved. They are going to play football in the park, my precious husband and son. I warn them to be back before two. We are expected at Monica’s for three. Millie is having her nap.