Grounded

by Wilkinson, Sheena;

  I lie on a narrow bed thing in a cubicle with green spotty curtains. Even when I close my eyes the green spots stay.

  The doctor looks about my age but she can’t be. She’s very cute, with glossy black hair in a plait. She shines something in my eyes that makes me want to sneeze.

  ‘Can you tell me what today’s date is, Declan?’ she asks.

  Haven’t a clue, but then I’d normally have to think about that one.

  ‘OK, your birthday?’

  That’s easy, 15 December. I think. Near Christmas, anyway.

  ‘Hmm.’ She stops shining the light in my eye. ‘And you don’t remember what happened?’

  Cam breaks in. ‘Like I told the nurse – I came back to the yard and found him like this. Disorientated.’

  ‘I don’t even remember being at work today. I thought I was going mad.’

  ‘No madder than the rest of us,’ the doctor says.

  ‘That’s debatable,’ Cam says.

  ‘No, it’s very common with a head injury to lose your memory of the events leading up to it,’ the doctor goes. ‘It’s nothing to worry about.’

  ‘But …’ How can it be nothing to worry about, forgetting a whole day? Ending up in this state with no idea how it happened? When Cam says, ‘The most likely thing is he’s fallen off a horse,’ I get a tingle, like being on the edge of waking up, but then it’s gone again.

  ‘We’ll do a CT scan, just to make sure, see if your brain’s swelling,’ the doctor says. ‘We’ve no way of knowing if you lost consciousness, so we’ll have to err on the safe side. Have you vomited?’

  ‘No. I don’t think so.’

  ‘We’ll send you down for the scan as soon as possible,’ the doctor says. ‘In the meantime, just rest.’ Like I’m going to jump up and start dancing.

  ‘I’ll call your mum,’ Cam says after the doctor bustles out.

  ‘Don’t – she’ll worry.’

  ‘Declan, she’s your mum; she’s supposed to worry.’

  ‘But …’ It’s too complicated to tell her that I try not to let Mum worry in case it sends her back on the drink. Seaneen would understand. I wish Seaneen was here.

  Seaneen – something about Seaneen. Oh God, we had a row. Piss off to Germany then. When was that?

  A nurse comes in just as Cam’s taking her phone out of her pocket. ‘You can’t use that in here,’ he says.

  ‘Sorry – I’ll go outside. Actually, Declan, give me your phone; you’ll have the right numbers.’

  ‘Don’t phone Mum. Please. I’ll be home in a few hours and she can see I’m fine. If you say hospital she’ll panic. You don’t know her.’

  ‘Declan, apart from anything else, I need to get back to the yard,’ Cam says. ‘I don’t know what happened. I need to check the horses are OK. I had a quick look round before we left and everything looked fine – but something happened to you and that means something may have happened to one of my horses too.’

  One of my horses. Again that tingle.

  She holds out her hand for my phone. I can’t win. She goes out. I keep my eyes shut. I feel her come back I don’t know how much later, but it’s easier not to talk. Then I hear a voice and it isn’t Cam’s or the doctor’s.

  ‘Hey Dec,’ Seaneen says.

  My eyes snap open in time to see Cam’s mouth open in shock as she looks at Seaneen’s belly and then at me.

  ‘Seaneen,’ she says. She can’t keep her eyes off the bump. ‘Right,’ she says. ‘Well, now Seaneen’s here I should get back to my horses.’

  ‘Cam –’

  ‘What?’

  I swallow. ‘Can you keep an eye on Folly for me?’

  ‘Folly!’ Seaneen cuts in. ‘Psycho, more like. I knew she’d end up killing you.’

  ‘I’m not dead.’

  Cam stares at me. ‘Folly?’ She narrows her eyes. ‘You haven’t been trying to ride her, have you?’

  That tingle again. Red in front of my eyes and a sudden wallop of fear. ‘I – I suppose I must have been.’

  Cam shakes her head. ‘God, Declan, I thought you’d learnt sense. A yard full of people to help you and you wait until … You know, you asked for this.’ She suddenly sounds really pissed off. ‘You’re lucky you weren’t killed.’ And she parts the curtains and stalks away.

  Seaneen looks after her in surprise. ‘What’s up with her? She looked at me like I’d two heads.’

  ‘Dunno.’ I close my eyes again. I thought people were meant to get sympathy when they were hurt. When Vicky broke her leg she’d everybody dancing round being lovely to her.

  ‘Look,’ Seaneen says, and her voice is harder than Seaneen’s voice ever is. ‘I came because Cam couldn’t get hold of your mum. She didn’t give me much choice. But that doesn’t mean … Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten about last night?’

  ‘I know we had a … a fight. I didn’t remember if it was today or yesterday.’ The pain bashes at my skull.

  A nurse sweeps in. ‘They’re nearly ready for you,’ she says. ‘Somebody will come and wheel you down. You’ll have to take your earring out. Any other jewellery?’

  I fumble with the stud in my ear and give it to Seaneen to mind for me but she sets it on the bedside table.

  The nurse looks at Seaneen and smiles at her belly. ‘Congratulations,’ she says. ‘When are you due?’

  Seaneen places her hand over her bump. ‘January,’ she says in a much nicer voice than she’s been using with me.

  ‘Everything going OK?’

  ‘Yeah. Had a scan today. You could see …’

  I close my eyes again. Women can go on like this for hours.

  ‘Declan,’ Seaneen says. The nurse has gone. ‘Look. My dad’s waiting for me in the car park. I only came because Cam said somebody had to. And I’ – she nibbles her fingernail the way she does when she’s upset – ‘was worried about you. Even though –’

  ‘What?’ It’s hot in here but the air round my face goes suddenly cold.

  Her voice hardens again. ‘You haven’t even asked about the baby. You knew I was having the scan today. Or had you forgotten that too?’ Her voice is suddenly hopeful.

  ‘I hadn’t forgotten. I just – I have other things on my mind here.’ Maybe this comes out wrong. But I have just had a bang on the head.

  ‘Exactly.’ She wrinkles her mouth as if she’s trying not to cry – but she can’t be; Seaneen hardly ever cries. Only she cried last night. I remember that. ‘Declan, I saw the baby today. On the scan. And it was’ – she shakes her head like she can’t find important enough words –‘amazing. You could see … this perfect wee person. But you should have been there.’

  If I’d gone to the scan with her I wouldn’t be lying here waiting for a bloody brain scan with my head about to explode. ‘I’ll make it up to you.’

  ‘No, I don’t want you to.’ She takes a deep breath. Her chest rises and falls. ‘You were going to leave, so … I don’t want you around any more.’

  Piss off to Germany. But she didn’t mean that.

  ‘Seaneen, I’m sorry about the scan, but –’

  ‘No, listen.’ Her eyes fill with tears. ‘This is hard enough for me. When I saw the baby on the scan I knew … that’s a person, Declan. A child. And he deserves better than a dad who doesn’t want him. No, shut up, you don’t. You never have. And I’m not going to spend the next year or two years, or however long it takes, waiting for you to admit that and clear off. Because you will, Declan; you know you will. And I don’t want to have to tell that child that his daddy’s gone. I’d rather do it on my own from the start.’

  ‘So you’re dumping me?’

  ‘I have to. And don’t pretend you’re not glad.’

  And she stumbles out through the green spotty curtains.

  4.

  I get the scan. It’s a bit scary but it doesn’t hurt. The machine whirs and buzzes in a cold room, and then I have to wait for ages.

  Mum arrives in a panic; she was in town with Stacey and forgot her ph
one and she’ll never forgive herself and she always knew those old horses would kill me in the end. Finally the doctor comes back with the results. There’s nothing much wrong. A simple concussion. I have to go home and rest. She gives Mum a list of things to watch out for and a prescription for painkillers. I hope they’re strong. I hope they knock me out for days.

  And through the pain and the worry about Folly, Seaneen’s cold, clear voice, again and again. Don’t pretend you’re not glad.

  When the doctor says rest at home for at least a week, I go, yeah, yeah, of course, planning to make my escape back to work as soon as I can. Lying round the house – no way. I haven’t been home during the day for years and I don’t intend to start now.

  Only I reckon without three things.

  One is the headache. The pills take the edge off it, but even so I sweat out hours lying still in bed, knowing that if I move too fast, even just sit up, the sickening swoops of pain are waiting for me. I flick through old horsey magazines, but every few pages an article about reschooling a nervous horse or a photo of a grey horse makes me lay the magazine down.

  The second thing that stops me escaping is Mum. She’s turned into bloody Florence Nightingale. She never leaves me alone with her wee cups of tea or food that I can’t eat. She never stops asking, ‘Do you want anything? Can you see all right? Will I bring in the TV from my room? Are you hungry?’ And when I say no, I’m fine, she doesn’t get the hint; she hovers, all hopeful, like she’s begging me to give her the chance to look after me. Finding things to tell me. She tells me Vicky’s home from wherever, devastated because she didn’t get her grades for Cambridge. She tells me Stacey found a stash of pills in Cian’s room and he hit her when she told him she’d flushed them down the loo.

  She doesn’t mention Seaneen and neither do I.

  I tell her I want to be left alone and she goes downstairs all droopy.

  I hear the hoover and the TV, the sounds of Mum’s days. She’s busier than she used to be. She does a lot of housework and her friends call in; their voices drift up the stairs. She never used to have friends, only boyfriends.

  And the third thing that stops me escaping, even when the headache dulls down to a bearable ache and the room stops its drunken spinning, is me. Because the thought of going out in the street, up to the yard, into town, anywhere, is just too much. I’m grounded, rooted to my room, stuck here. Sometimes I think I’ll never move again.

  On the third day, or the fourth, or maybe the seventh, I don’t know, I’m lying in bed when the doorbell rings. It bores into my head like a drill. Mum’s out but I’m not moving. It’s probably Stacey or the window cleaner or something. But it drills on and on and the only way to make it stop is to get out of bed and deal with it. I drag myself up, hating the whiff of a body that hasn’t had a shower for days, and pull on some track bottoms. ‘I’m coming, for Christ’s sake!’ I yell down the stairs. The stairs rear up at me, even though I’m going down them. I have to grab the banister rail, like Gran when she was old, like Mum when she was pissed. The bell rings on.

  Maybe it’s Seaneen.

  As I grab the front door handle I realise it’s probably Mairéad and Gary. They’ve lain in wait for Mum to go out and now they’re going to pounce. But she dumped me, I get ready to tell them, pulling the door open.

  It’s Cian. Bloody Cian.

  ‘What the –’

  ‘Let me in, please.’ He’s nearly crying.

  ‘Should you not be at school?’ I’ve kind of lost track but I don’t think it’s the weekend.

  ‘Look, please, let me in – I’m in trouble.’

  ‘Why am I not surprised?’

  ‘No – real trouble. Please.’ His face is white, the spots round his mouth standing out like a rash.

  I don’t want him coming in. Then again I don’t want to keep standing on the doorstep half-dressed either, so I stand aside and he pushes in past me.

  ‘Right, what is it?’ I ask, sitting down on the sofa arm.

  ‘I owe somebody money. Emmet McCann.’

  ‘Drugs?’

  ‘He let me have some – I’d no money and he said I could take them and pay him later. I thought he was dead on. He’s been letting me get stuff for weeks. Only now he wants the money and I can’t pay him back.’

  ‘Are you stupid or something? That’s the oldest trick in the book. McCann won’t let you away with that.’ Well, I suppose Cian knows that or he wouldn’t be snivelling to me about it. ‘Anyway, what’s it to do with me?’

  Cian looks at the carpet. ‘You’ve got money. I saw it that time …’

  ‘Saw it? You mean tried to rob it?’

  ‘Declan, I’m desperate.’ He glances round as if Emmet McCann’s hiding behind the sofa. ‘He’s going to get me, I know he is.’

  ‘You should have thought of that.’

  ‘But I needed the stuff!’ he cries. ‘Declan – please. I’ll pay you back, I promise! There’s nobody else I can ask. Please!’ He’s shaking. If I’m the closest thing he has to someone who can help him, that’s pretty pathetic.

  ‘No,’ I say. I don’t even have to think about it. ‘There’s no way I’d give anybody one penny for Emmet McCann, let alone – how much is it?’

  ‘Two hundred. Just a loan.’

  ‘I haven’t even got the money any more,’ I lie. ‘It’s all gone on Folly.’

  ‘But …’ He starts to blub and wail. ‘He’ll kill me, Declan, I swear.’

  ‘I can’t help that.’

  ‘But what am I going to do?’

  ‘It’s not my problem.’ I can see the kid’s terrified. But maybe it’ll make him wise up. ‘Look, you’ll have to go.’

  He rubs his hand over his face. ‘But there’s nobody else.’

  ‘Sorry.’ I walk out to the hall and open the front door. I watch him shuffle down the street, not towards his own house. My hand twitches. I could have given him something. Not two hundred, but something to get McCann off his back. I nearly call him back and give him forty quid or something.

  But I don’t.

  The living room is clean and tidy, but the sour smell of Mum’s smoke makes me push open the window and stand there for a bit, breathing the air from the street. Standing makes my head swim so I flump onto the sofa. Something stabs my thigh. I pull out Mum’s latest knitting effort. It’s pale blue and fluffy, on its way to being a jumper. I stroke it. How can just winding wool round some needles and jiggling and clicking them about turn a ball of wool into something you could actually wear? You don’t need to do this any more, Mum, I think, and wonder what she’ll say when I tell her Seaneen dumped me. I shove the knitting out of my way and pick up the remote control from the coffee table but there’s nothing on that anybody with two brain cells would watch. I don’t feel like trying the horsey channel.

  I look at the tiny half-jumper and then wrap it round the needles so it doesn’t look so … human. Seaneen dumped me. I never ran out on her. She wants to do it on her own. That’s fair enough. Plenty of girls round here doing exactly the same thing. And Seaneen’s got loads of support with Granzilla and her dad and those bratty twins. They’ll love having a baby in the house. They won’t need me. What do I know about babies? And I’ll send her money. It’s not like I don’t have any sense of responsibility.

  Responsibility. Folly. I sigh. I should phone Cam. But my phone’s up in my room, I don’t feel like braving the stairs again so soon. Except I know Cam’s number by heart, and the house phone’s sitting right beside me on the coffee table on top of a pile of Mum’s TV magazines.

  ‘How’s Folly?’ I ask as soon as she answers.

  ‘Fine.’ Her voice is brisk.

  ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.’ I’m not even sure how long I’ve been off for.

  ‘We’re managing.’

  ‘Cam, are you annoyed with me?’

  She doesn’t say anything and I wonder if she’s hung up.

  ‘Cam? Did I – have I done something?’ I’m still haunted b
y that lost day. I know I must have ridden Folly, or tried to, and been thrown off, but I don’t remember. When I try there’s just a fog and a creeping fear that spreads over my mind like a bloodstain. But has Cam found evidence of something else? Something even stupider? Did I – oh God, did I hurt Folly and Cam won’t tell me?

  ‘Cam? Are you keeping something from me? Cause I’d rather know.’

  There’s a funny noise, halfway between a snort and a laugh. ‘Me? Keep something from you? Are you taking the piss, Declan?’

  Cam doesn’t say things like taking the piss unless she’s seriously annoyed.

  ‘What … what do you mean?’

  ‘Eh – the baby? When were you going to tell me?’

  ‘Oh! Is that all?’ Relief that it’s not Folly floods me.

  ‘All? Declan, you let me believe you stayed because of me – well, the yard. The job. I was feeling guilty because it wasn’t enough for you. Looking for ways to make it more worth your while. And all the time …’

  ‘But I …’ And then I grind to a jagged halt. Because it’d be a lie to say I stayed because of Folly. In the first place it was the baby. I don’t know why she sounds so angry, though. Not just angry – hurt. ‘Look, does it matter why I stayed? I stayed. And now there’s Folly and –’

  ‘I thought something as big as that, you’d tell me.’

  ‘But it’s got nothing to do with the yard.’

  Again that faint snorty laugh. ‘It’s got everything to do with the yard when your mind’s not on the job.’ But I know she means more than that. She thinks I should have confided in her. Because Cam’s been more than my employer. She gave me my first chance. The most important break I ever had. And she thought I stayed because I appreciated that. When all along …

  ‘I’m sorry.’ As usual, my crapness with words stops me saying what I really mean. That I wanted there to be somewhere where I could hide from the baby. And the longer I left it the harder it was to say, oh by the way …

  ‘Right. So was there anything else, Declan? Because I have horses to get ready.’

  I swallow. ‘Cam? You do – you do want me back, don’t you?’

  She sighs. ‘Yes. But I wish I could think that bang on the head had knocked some sense into you.’