‘What do you fancy eating?’
‘Wha’ever,’ he says but hardly pauses before he asks, ‘you got any chocolate biscuits? And milk?’
‘I’m sure we have. But not too many biscuits, OK?’
Damn. Now I’m at it. The kiddie talk. He lowers his head. He’s hurt. The thing is Dad has put on a lot of weight. Before the accident, all the jogging and the five-a-side football he played twice a week kept him in shape. Now his stomach stretches the blue football jersey to its seams.
‘Take off your coat, Jimmy,’ I say. ‘And make yourself at home.’
He gazes open-mouthed around the kitchen, and in my head I’m screaming. Surely you remember something here? The cream-coloured Aga you baked brown bread in, the wine shelves you put up over by the door, the fridge magnets you were always buying: ‘You don’t have to be crazy to work here – but it helps!’ and ‘Never do today what you can do tomorrow’!
‘There you go, Jimmy. We’re nearly out of biscuits.’
He’s disappointed with the two chocolate rings on the plate before him. Mam sweeps in like it’s another normal day coming towards an end. Putting the messages away, filling the kettle, talking for the sake of talking.
‘… And the traffic wasn’t bad until we got to Abbeyleix … but the petrol light was coming on and we had to leave the motorway and go into Urlingford … there’s a nice new Italian restaurant there now, I never knew about …’
I don’t know how she keeps it up. Dad follows her every word as though she’s telling us something of vital importance.
People think Mam is cold, that she’s too rational about what’s happened. I’ve seen it in their eyes. But she was never the touchy-feely type. I prefer it that way, no matter what people might think of her. We never had to put up with that awful smothering-mother crack. She had her own life and didn’t need to live every minute of ours. Her job as a social worker. Her passion for the choral group she sang with. Granny Rogan was the same. Practical, independent, busy.
Granny Rogan died when I was eight. I didn’t know her very well. She’d moved to New York years before when her husband passed away. I saw her maybe three or four times in my life. Mam went over to New York a few times, but didn’t like the man her mother lived with. He was way too loud and right wing for Mam’s liking. She and her mother agreed to disagree. Granny Rogan got on with her life and Mam got on with hers. That’s Mam all over.
But I watch her move around the kitchen and I see the change in her. She never did anything fancy with her long blonde hair and was never one for pots of make-up or expensive clothes. She didn’t need them. Now, though, it’s like the skin is so tight on her cheekbones and forehead you’d swear she’d had botox treatment or something. She doesn’t look real any more. Her face looks like mine feels. Stiff and sore from pretending to smile.
I remember she told me once about the November day they got married and how bitterly cold it was when they went out to have the wedding photos taken in some hotel garden and how her face was frozen in this mad smile all through the reception. And Dad chips in, ‘To tell you the truth, Eala, I thought I’d married one of the witches from Macbeth!’
‘I’m finished,’ Dad says. ‘I’m still hungry.’
‘How many biscuits did you have?’ Mam asks him. She brushes a few crumbs from the corner of his mouth and pulls her hand away quickly when she realizes what she’s done.
‘Just the one,’ he says, dead serious.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. He’s a kid who wants another biscuit, I tell myself, not my father telling a lie. There’s a funny side to everything. Isn’t there?
‘You’re a chancer, Jimmy,’ I tell him. ‘You had two.’
‘Maybe it was two small ones,’ he says quietly.
His head goes down again. He’s doing the wristwatch thing. I know from the rehab centre that it’s a sign he’s getting agitated and he’ll have to be popped up with more drugs to settle him down. The oversized digital watch he timed his runs with was about the only thing that survived the accident. Now he won’t take it off day or night. When he’s stressed he starts beeping the little buttons and looking at the watch like he’s late for an appointment or waiting for someone to arrive. He’s got this hangdog look on his face, his gaze flitting from the watch to the biscuit tin on the table.
‘Take another then, Jimmy,’ I say.
Suddenly he pops up from his crouched position, spreads his elbows deliberately wide and sends the biscuit tin crashing to the floor. I’m still holding Tom so I can’t stop it from falling and all hell breaks loose. The bang of the tin on the hard ceramic tiles wakes Tom. He takes one look at Jimmy and starts screaming. He clings to me so tight, he’s strangling me. Tom’s screams startle Jimmy. He stands up and begins to back away.
‘It’s only D–’ The word almost slips out. ‘It’s only Jimmy.’
‘I didn’t mean to,’ Jimmy says. We’ve seen him throw wobblers in the rehab centre but this is different. This is home. This is where we have to live.
Tom’s head comes up from my shoulder again and looks at Jimmy. He’s recognized the voice, I’m sure of it. He looks up at me like I can make sense of all this. I can’t. I hold him as tight as I can without hurting him.
Mam puts her arm round Jimmy’s waist and gives him a squeeze and turns him away from the table. Her face is grey. Maybe all our faces are grey. That’s what it feels like. We’re the ghosts of the family who used to live here before the accident.
‘Tom got a fright when the box fell is all,’ she says and steers him towards the door. ‘Why don’t we go sort your room?’
He looks back over his shoulder at Tom and me.
‘They don’t like me,’ he says.
‘Course they do, Jimmy,’ Mam tells him, and they’re gone.
3
Tom’s sleeping again, at last. I lie beside him, my mind turning and turning as I listen out for Sean, ready to spring up as soon as I hear the back door creaking open. I had to read the same book three times for Tom. Not one of Dad’s. I can’t bring myself to look at Dad’s books, never mind read them aloud. I doubt I ever will. Anyway, all of his books are in the workroom on the first floor and none of us goes in there any more.
All his stuff is exactly as he left it. The shelves of books. The antique wooden mannequin he bought in a junk shop in Waterford. The reams of drawings stacked on the floor. The architect’s drawing board he worked on. The big ceramic beer mug he kept his pens and memory sticks and stuff in. A motto encircles it. What goes around, comes around. The high swivel chair that was like a carnival ride for me when I was a kid. His last, unfinished drawing is still pinned to the board. Terry the Tank.
Terry’s an army tank who doesn’t want to go to war any more. He wants to go play with the elephants instead. So he pretends to be an elephant. In the earlier books, he’d pretended to be a giraffe, a teapot, an ostrich. In each book he gets sussed out and rejected. The message being, of course, that he has to learn to be himself. Dad’s having to learn that all over again too. He’s come a long way.
At first, they told us he might never come out of the coma. After two weeks, we began to believe them. And terrible as it was to see him lying there in Intensive Care, hooked up to all kinds of monitors and drips, it was still him. Still our dad. Still forty-two years old. When you saw the flicker of his eyelids every now and then, you could believe that he was still in there, dreaming up new ideas. Then they told us that if he did wake he might be brain-damaged. We didn’t believe them. Or only Sean did. Sean was tearing himself apart and we knew why. Like we don’t all have regrets, Sean?
Long before the accident, I was well over the little girlie thing of believing in the perfect father. Secretly, though, I liked the fact that Dad was different. He didn’t have some run-of-the-mill job for one thing. In looks and colouring he was different too. Dark-eyed and sallow-skinned, it was easy to believe as he did that
his roots lay in North Africa. And he was so laid-back with that breezy Eastenders accent we’d tease him about while he mimicked our flat Tipperary accent and the phrases we use – ‘fair lousy’ and ‘pure gutted’ – that he found so hilarious. Sometimes he seemed more like an older brother than a father.
He told me once that he wrote those books of his because, inside, he was still too much of a kid to write anything else. When I think of that now, I so wish I’d asked him more about his childhood. It wasn’t exactly a no-go area. He’d tell me funny stuff that happened to him, but there was never a mention of unhappiness and there must have been a lot of that. Never knowing who his father was, having little or no memory of his mother, who died when he was five years old, living in foster care and, at sixteen, making his own way in the world with no one to help him. Why didn’t I dig deeper? Maybe I didn’t want to risk losing that jokey, easy-going relationship we had. I knew I was lucky.
‘I wish my dad would loosen up,’ my friend Jill said once. ‘And be more like yours.’ In fairness she had good reason. Her dad’s a religious nut and a bit of a tyrant.
‘We fight too, believe me,’ I said.
And we did, though I never had one real stand-up row with him. Just the usual stuff. Like me looking to get a picture phone when they first came out because someone in my class had one, or wanting to go to the over-sixteen night club when I was fourteen. Or the teasing he got up to. He was always at it. In the weeks coming up to last year’s school show he drove me demented singing ‘Tomorrow’ at me, lisping the s’s and rolling the r’s. I’d get so thick but I’d never totally lose it. I knew he was messing and not sneering. Sean didn’t have my patience. The night before the accident he exploded. And for the dumbest reason you could imagine that had nothing at all to do with Dad. Unrequited love.
Somehow, the Surprise Addition had managed to get hold of Sean’s mobile in the kitchen and took it under the table with him. Sean and me were in the sitting room watching a Champions League match on TV with Dad. So Tom had a good chew on the mobile, mashed up the keys and cracked the screen before dumping it on the ground and toddling off to wreck something else. When Sean eventually found the phone and recognized the little teeth-marks, he went ballistic.
First he blamed Mam for letting Tom take the mobile. Patient as ever, she promised to get Sean a new mobile, but he was shouting by now.
‘But I can’t get any texts tonight. And I can’t send any. And all my numbers might be wiped.’
‘We’ll get the new one tomorrow, OK?’ Mam said.
‘That little snot can do what he wants around here.’
‘Why don’t we lock him up in the garden shed for the night, Sean,’ I said. ‘Would that ease your pain?’
‘Mind your own business, Eala.’
Tom wasn’t helping the situation. He looked out from his hiding place behind Mam and grinned from ear to ear. Then, as Dad came into the kitchen to see what was up, Sean whacked Tom across the face. And I mean whacked. Tom had only recently started to walk and I don’t know how he stayed on his feet, the slap was so hard. We were used to the pushing and shoving that most brothers and sisters get up to now and again, but this was way out of line. There was a stunned silence like everyone was waiting for Tom’s screams to convince us we hadn’t imagined what Sean had done. Then he started.
Sean tried to escape from the kitchen but Dad blocked the doorway. Mam picked up Tom. His cries turned to gagging and then coughing and I knew he was going to make himself sick if he didn’t calm down.
‘Let me pass,’ Sean grunted. ‘I’m going upstairs to finish my homework, right?’
‘Do you feel better now, Sean?’ Dad said.
‘What?’ Sean said.
‘Now you’ve hit a small child, do you feel more like a man?’
Sean tried to get by but Dad wasn’t ready to move yet.
‘Did I ever hit you, Sean?’ Dad said.
‘Maybe you did … when I was a little fart like him … maybe I don’t remember.’
‘You reckon you’d forget somethin’ like that?’
‘Let me out, will you?’
‘No one gets so angry about a mobile phone, Sean,’ Dad said. ‘What’s all this about?’
‘Nothing.’
But I knew and I punished him with it. Fair lousy of me, I know, but the school show had me all uptight that evening too.
‘There’s this girl he fancies,’ I announced. The girl in question being my best friend Jill. ‘And today he discovered she’s going out with his best pal. How dumb are you, Sean?’
He fired off a couple of obscenities at me, found a gap between the doorframe and Dad, and made his escape.
‘I can’t believe he could do something like that,’ Mam said. She’s always had this major thing about violence and aggression. I mean most people do but Mam’s seen the damage upfront all her working life ever since her first job as a social worker in a refuge for battered wives.
‘I’ll talk to him,’ Dad said.
Which he did. We’d all gone to bed before they’d finished talking up in Sean’s bedroom. Or before Dad finished talking, more like. He’s never said, but I get the feeling Sean didn’t take the dressing-down too well. Next morning, the morning of the accident, he’d already left for school when I got up and before Dad drifted downstairs. That’s really getting to Sean now.
Over the last few months Mam’s tried to get him to talk about that incident but he refuses. She worries about his dark moods, his late nights, the fact that he’s even packed in the football, which was his main interest in life before the accident. Whole days go by when he doesn’t stir from his room and he’s up there reading those dumb fantasy books of his and the collection of 2000 AD and Judge Dredd comics Dad passed on to him. He’s never come to the hospital or the rehab centre since Dad woke up. So he hasn’t watched Dad struggle to get his speech back. Or witnessed those faltering attempts to get a fully laden fork to his mouth. Or seen that pride on his face when he showed us for the first time how he could walk without a Zimmer frame.
‘I’m doing good, in’ I, Judy?’ he said to Mam.
That’s who we are to him now. Judy and Eala, his big sisters or something totally weird like that. And all this time we’ve acted out our parts. Always good-humoured. Always praising and encouraging him even when he turned narky on us in his frustration. Always making excuses for him on those days when he wouldn’t talk to us or, sometimes, even look at us. But on those hour-long drives down the motorway from Dublin we’d blank out. We’d look straight ahead and hardly exchange a word, no matter how well or badly the visit had gone. Only once did we ever cry and that was the evening Mam told me about her miscarriage.
‘You probably noticed the morning sickness,’ she said.
I nodded but the truth was that I hadn’t. You’re nearly forty, Mam, I was thinking. What were you doing getting pregnant again, for God’s sake?
‘I felt I shouldn’t keep you in the dark about it any longer, Eala, leave you wondering.’
Two months gone she was when she miscarried at work the previous week. At the hospital they’d wanted to keep her in overnight, but instead she came home and carried on as normal. While she spoke in the darkened capsule of our car, the steadiness of her driving never faltered.
‘It would’ve been too much to cope with anyway,’ she said. ‘We’ll have our hands full when Jimmy comes home.’
The car sucked us forward into the night like we had no choice in the matter. I knew I’d lie awake later and, as I always did after these drives, feel I was still moving.
‘I’m glad you told me,’ I said. Which was about half true. Glad, yes, to release some of the tears that had been welling up in me for so long. But sad, pure heartbroken. And uneasy too because the miscarriage felt like a bad omen.
Dad’s steady progress got me through the long winter months that followed. There was less of that awkward wayward
ness in his walk and his speech gradually became less slurred and hesitant. Mentally he was catching up too. Because words came more easily to him, he lost his temper less often with himself and with us. I started hoping again. In spite of Miss Understanding.
Mam likes Fiona Sheedy. I don’t. She’s around Mam’s age but looks older. They both went to Trinity College at around the same time though they didn’t know one another back then. She’s a psychologist at the health centre where Mam works. Maybe it’s because she’s had to listen to so many lousy life stories, but there’s a weariness about her and she dresses drably in lumpy jumpers and washed-out leggings, which I know shouldn’t matter, but somehow it does. Since the accident, she and Mam seem to have become soulmates.
‘She’s trying to help is all,’ Mam said when I let slip the nickname I’d given her friend. Miss Understanding. ‘Trying to keep our feet on the ground so we don’t, you know, expect too much too soon from Dad. And the reality is there’s so little help out there, we’re lucky to have her fighting our corner.’
But Fiona Sheedy smiles too much. She talks too softly. She listens too sweetly. Her head a little to the side, a wide-eyed gaze, her lips parted a fraction. A face that seems to say, I understand what you’re going through. I feel like hitting her sometimes.
A text message comes in on my mobile. Tom stirs at the message alert but settles down again once his hand finds the green tractor that goes everywhere with him. I don’t check to see who the message is from. Jill, I suppose. She was here earlier and I came close to losing it with her. What happened between Dad and Sean isn’t her fault, of course. She knows nothing about the row that’s made a bad situation even worse, but hers is another of the faces I want to slap these days. It doesn’t help that, for her, life is a game of Snap. I used to find it funny. I’d get a cold and she’d get flu symptoms. I’d get indigestion and she’d get suspected appendicitis. Now she’s got a big tragedy of her own to rival mine. Her nineteen-year-old sister Win has had a baby and her parents are not happy campers. Like I’m supposed to care?
My Dad Is Ten Years Old Page 2
