She examines the palms of her hands, following the lines there with her fingers. I notice how her fingernails are bitten to the quick and how some are bloodied at the edges. I wonder if it’s her blood or Dad’s.
‘I wanted to wait until we’d sorted it out before I told you,’ she says. ‘Or, at least, get to the bottom of it. I didn’t want to make this any more difficult for you and Sean. You don’t deserve this, Eala.’
‘None of us do, Mam.’
She puts her hands away into her folded arms. And it’s not the tight grip from earlier as she spoke to the Guards. She’s gone pure limp. Every part of her. She sinks down in her seat.
‘We had … we have these insurance policies,’ she begins. ‘You know, life insurance, medical, income protection, that kind of thing. Martin does all that stuff for us. So after the accident we needed to draw on some of these policies. Hospital bills to pay, mortgage and all the day-to-day bills. Things have been getting tight since I took this unpaid leave. Very tight.’
‘And the insurance companies haven’t paid up?’
The tips of her fingers burrow at her brow, leaving deathly pale patches that fill in slowly with a purplish pink.
‘Well, when you’re signing up for these policies, you have to send copies of birth certs, passports and whatever. To prove you are who you say you are, basically. And …’
‘And?’
‘And Jimmy’s birth cert is faked.’
‘Faked?’
Mam nods, sits up straight, stretches her back as if to get out from under some great weight. And how dumb am I? All I can think of is that birthday party we had for him when he was forty; and the cake Mam bought was a bit small, but we stuck forty candles on it anyway and he lit all of them and the cake got so hot the icing started to melt; and everyone’s screaming laughing because we can’t blow out the candles because they’re special ones Mam bought that keep lighting up again after you think you’ve blown them out; and he has to pick up the plate the cake’s on with oven gloves and bring it outside the back door so the house won’t go up in flames … And it wasn’t even your birthday, Dad ?
‘Martin thinks that somewhere along the way, Jimmy got into some kind of trouble and had to change his identity. Or had it changed for him …’
So whose birthday was it, Dad, who were we singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to?
‘… he was twenty-two when I met him. Or that’s what he told me. We shouldn’t be talking about it in this awful place.’
But what better place to have your world turned upside down once again than this roomful of drunk and damaged, half-daft and fear-filled people? Turned upside down and emptied.
‘I don’t think we should tell Sean yet,’ Mam says. ‘He’s so volatile, God knows how he’d react. Especially after today.’
She takes my hand. Her fingers are bony and sharp and she has no idea how tight her grasp is or how painful.
‘I know it’s been hard for you too, Eala, but I know I can trust you to be more sensible, more level-headed.’
Maybe. Maybe not. Whatever sense or level-headedness I ever had seems to be fading fast. Mam lets my hand go. Maybe it’s the fluorescent light in here, but our skin – the skin on the backs of my hands, on her face – is mottled and it’s like we haven’t washed for days.
‘All this hassle with the insurance means I’ll have to go back to work, Eala. I’ve no choice. You understand, don’t you?’
‘So who takes care of Dad?’
‘We’ll find someone to come for a few hours during the day,’ she says. ‘I’ll be on a three-day week for a while so that’ll make it easier.’
And Dad emerges from the corridor of treatment rooms, led by a red-haired nurse who looks about fifteen, but a tired fifteen who’s seen so much that nothing will ever faze her any more. Dad’s right arm, his whipping arm, is bandaged up. He points at the young nurse.
‘She’s gone and given me a jab in the arse,’ he calls across the waiting area at us. ‘It’s well sore.’
One of the loud-mouths guffaws and Dad dips his head. It’s like he’s onstage and has lost his nerve. We go and rescue him. He’s had stitches put in two wounds. Seven stitches in all. And a tetanus jab, which is all he wants to talk about as we make our way out by the lobby of the hospital. I imagine going back inside and making my way to Ward 310, to Brian. But that’s all I do. Imagine it.
Outside, among the smokers gathered by the main doors, we find Sean. He’s talking on his mobile phone. He ends the call abruptly when he spots us. I get the feeling he has something to tell me. I hang back and let Mam and Dad go on ahead. Sean catches up with me.
‘What?’ I say.
His eyes slither about and I can’t get a fix on them. He’s definitely got something to tell me, but now he’s having second thoughts. Why do I feel so sure it’s another bad news story featuring Dad?
‘What?’
‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘Nothing …’ I can tell before he speaks again that it’s going to be a lie. ‘I was …’ He’s stumped again. He looks down at the phone in his hand and finds a way to rescue himself. ‘I been talking to Brian.’
Now my head swerves in another direction. Angie’s whispering in my ear. I bet Brian wants to go out with you, Eala. Shut it, Angie. My heart’s on speed.
‘He’s had a major row with the old man, above in the ward,’ Sean says. ‘He’s not going to college. Told Starsky he never wanted to.’
‘So what’s he going to do?’ I ask, stupidly disappointed.
‘He wants to be a carpenter. Fair cool, isn’t it?’
‘Who does he think he is?’ I say. ‘Jesus?’
I watch Dad tag along after Mam in the stark sodium yellow light of the hospital car park. A big, loping, hunched man dragging his left foot every few strides, fiddling with his outsized watch, sneaking looks from side to side like he’s checking no one’s following him. The back of his white Real Madrid jersey is manky with dirt and grass stains. The number 6 is still quite clear, but the name above it – Zidane – is obscured.
Who are you, Dad? Who are you, Jimmy?
13
I won’t sleep tonight. The court case starts tomorrow afternoon. Mam said I didn’t have to go to school in the morning, but I’d rather be anywhere than at home these days. I’ve rewound the image of Clem Healy falling from his bike so many times that I’m beginning to see it all as if it’s recorded on a CCTV camera. A black and white version of the real thing growing more grainy with each rewind, and eerily silent. As silent as our house had become in the weeks between Dad’s battle with Argos and the arrival of the Ice Queen.
Dad was due back to see the psychiatrist a few days after his showdown in Mrs Casey’s garden anyway. I can’t blame Mam for giving Dr Reid the low-down on Dad’s battle with Argos. So Dad got to pop some stronger pills. And become a pure zombie. But there was a bright side to it as the owl said to the pussycat in the middle of the night. That’s one of Dad’s old ones. In fact, there was a brighter side to his being doped up to the eyeballs. He seemed barely to have noticed the changes happening around him. And there’d been more than a few.
Sean stopped talking to him. Brian slipped off the radar altogether. I never expected his unlikely kindness to last anyway but, in fairness, a broken nose is a better excuse than most. If he couldn’t have Sean and Brian, it seemed he didn’t want anybody. He refused even to watch TV with us in the sitting room. Always had some excuse and when we started lighting the fire there in the evenings, he latched on to that too.
‘I don’t like fires,’ he complained. ‘Why do we need a fire? The house is warm enough.’
When we stopped lighting fires, of course, he didn’t want to be with us either. Instead, he spent most of his time in his room, staring at the walls. No football, no treadmill running, no Xbox, no helping Tom to load Lego into the green tractor.
‘Jimmy silly,’ Tom would complain and
get a half-hearted lecture from Mam that led to another of those pathetic, pointless rows we all slipped into too easily. It never mattered how these rows began. The subject always ended up the same. Mam’s being back at work.
‘Couldn’t you have at least waited until after the court case?’ That’s Sean for you. The Lord of Logic. He tears strips off Mam for abandoning Dad and he’s the one won’t talk to him?
‘You’d prefer to live on the side of the road in a caravan, would you, Sean?’ I say.
‘Shut up.’
‘You shut up.’
‘I’m warning you, Eala.’
‘Go jump in the river.’
‘Lads, please.’
And so it went, day after day, until the Ice Queen came and cast her spell. Marta Pelova is Dad’s care assistant. I gave her the Ice Queen title. Her hair’s been dyed blonde so often, it’s strawy and has no sheen to it. Her features are perfect, but strangely not at all beautiful. She has the personality of a snowball. With a stone at the centre. Dad loves her.
Mam wanted all of us to be there when she interviewed the Czech woman. All stiff-backed politeness, the Ice Queen sat at the kitchen table. Her mouth was the only part of her that smiled as Mam introduced each of us. It’s hard to guess what age she is. Somewhere between twenty-five and forty is the best I can do.
‘My home is Moravia,’ she told us. Dad was fascinated with her accent. ‘In Czech Republic I am nurse. I live in Ireland five years. First I work in nursing home, then in private. I am care-giver for special needs and people who die.’
We looked at Mam, who was as dumbfounded as we were. We as in Sean and me, that is. Dad didn’t seem to grasp the strangeness of what she’d said.
‘You mean palliative care?’
‘Yes. Palliative care,’ Marta said, unembarrassed by her mistake. ‘It is difficult so sometimes I want change. Special needs is good change.’
I was ready to flip, thinking, Doesn’t she have any cop-on, talking like that in front of Dad? Mam was on the same wavelength.
‘We don’t use the term special needs, Marta, OK?’ she said.
Once again, Marta showed no sign of discomfort. Dad continued to smile shyly at her and I wished he’d stop making an ass of himself.
‘This is not problem,’ she said.
I could see Mam was having second thoughts. I felt relieved. Sean did too. We were sure this was the last we’d see of the Ice Queen. We were wrong.
‘So,’ Mam said. ‘When can you start? Next Monday at eight in the morning?’
‘This is not problem,’ the Ice Queen said.
‘I’ve a pile of homework to do,’ Sean muttered and stalked away.
‘Me too,’ I said and made to follow him.
‘That’s our house for you, Marta,’ Mam said and laughed to cover up her annoyance with us. ‘Busy, busy, busy.’
‘This is not problem,’ the Ice Queen repeated annoyingly.
I don’t understand why Mam didn’t see and still doesn’t see what I saw in those pale blue eyes. Indifference. Like Dad was another client, another job. Tough luck, those eyes seemed to suggest, but I’ve dealt with worse. Indifferent or not she has this magical power over Dad and Tom. It’s like they’ll do whatever they’re told so she’ll favour them with one of her icy smiles. I wonder if it might even be that she rules by fear. Whatever force it is, it isn’t love. As far as I can see, love doesn’t work. I’ve tried.
In the week after his raid on Mrs Casey’s, I did everything I could to lift Dad’s spirits. Our usual early evening walk was off the agenda. The psychiatrist suggested we keep him out of stressful situations for a while. Exercise in the Bernabéu and on the treadmill were out too until he’d adjusted to the new dosage. His body had slowed to a crawl. I didn’t want the same thing to happen to his mind. He needed to be pushed, have his memory jolted and I knew Mam wasn’t going to do it any time soon. She’s way too cautious.
First I had to sneak the Undertones CD and the All Dogs Go to Heaven DVD from Dad’s old workroom. It was two o’clock in the morning before I got a chance to slip in there unseen. The key made too much noise in the lock, but I waited and no one seemed to have woken. I slipped inside and closed the door behind me. The blind was down, blocking out the street light. Then I almost jumped out of my skin. Someone was standing in the corner of the room.
‘Dad?’ I whispered and quickly corrected myself. ‘Jimmy?’
My eyes adjusted to the darkness and my memory kicked back in at about the same time. It had been so long since I’d been in Dad’s workroom that I’d forgotten the wooden mannequin. Added to which, someone had moved it to a different corner. Mam, I guessed, that day she went searching in there. The mannequin’s not a full figure, just a head and torso. It wears a peaked cap with the Timberland name and logo. Another of Dad’s jokes.
I stepped carefully across the floor because, under my bare feet, I felt the books and papers Mam had scattered in her search. I turned on the lamp attached to Dad’s drawing board. A set of drawings for the last book in the Terry the Tank series was still clipped to the board.
The stories are basically the same in each book. Terry’s got no one to play with. His friend Rosie the Mechanic in her psychedelic boiler suit and red bandana tries to comfort him. Then he sees a family of ostriches or teapots or whatever playing in the meadow. In this last book of the series, he persuades Rosie to turn him into an elephant. There’s a page of cloudy smoke and exclamations – Bang! Bang! Ouch! Ouch! – as she works and Terry emerges as a metal elephant. He races down to play with the real elephants, who think he’s dodgy at first, but then play with him.
So he’s having a whale of a time, but gets so excited he starts firing live rounds from his trunk and they all run for cover. He’s crying his eyes out when the baby elephant comes back and then Rosie arrives and makes him see that he should be himself and that way he’ll be accepted for what he is. In the last unfinished drawing, Rosie is walloping Terry back into shape as a tank in another exclamation-filled cloud.
Looking at the drawing, I realized that any half-decent illustrator could finish the book and who’d ever know? It was the saddest thought. It was like Dad didn’t matter any more outside of our own four walls. I searched for the Undertones CD and the All Dogs Go to Heaven DVD. I wasn’t even sure I still wanted to try them on him. But next day I did. A Saturday, so I had plenty of time alone with him.
At the breakfast table, Dad was pure out of it. The slow movements of his hand lifting the teacup, the listless shovelling of muesli into his mouth, the vacant stare. I wanted to hold him tight, squeeze the life back into him, tell him that everything would be all right. When we went down to his room, I did. I hadn’t done that for a long time. Held him, reassured him. All I managed to do was embarrass and confuse him.
‘But everything’s A-one now,’ he said. ‘Innit? I’m not a nutter any more.’
‘You never were,’ I said.
I felt broken-hearted. I split away and put on the Undertones CD. Not too loud so they wouldn’t hear it upstairs. ‘Jimmy, Jimmy’.
‘I don’t like that,’ he said before they’d got to the first words. He lay back on the bed, his eyes closed, his feet still touching the floor.
‘Give it a chance,’ I said. ‘It’s called “Jimmy, Jimmy”. I bet you’ll love it.’
‘Why do they have to shout so much?’
‘It’s punk. Joie de vivre punk.’
He yawned. ‘You’ve Got My Number’ was faster still, but didn’t keep him from nodding off. Later that morning and five minutes into All Dogs Go to Heaven he got right thick.
‘This is kids’ stuff. What you take me for, a fool?’
After the music and the film failed to lift the veil on his memories, I spent the time with him reading aloud. He liked that. He’d lie on the bed and gaze out by the window. I wonder whether he even followed the story. I know he didn’t recognize the boo
k, though he’d read it to me and Sean when we were young and often dipped into it himself.
The book was called Coral Island, written way back in the nineteenth century by J. M. Ballantyne. It was the first book he’d ever owned. There are fourteen different editions of it on the shelves in Dad’s workroom. He often told us how a description of a coral reef in that book was his first experience of actually seeing in his mind a picture painted entirely by words. When I reached that passage, I dared to hope again that a memory might be sparked in him. I might as well have been reading from the telephone directory. But I ploughed on. A few chapters each evening and we were close to the end before the Ice Queen came.
After her first day with him, I picked up the book again.
‘We’ll finish it this evening,’ I said.
‘Marta already did,’ he said. I was pure gutted.
‘We can read another one then.’
‘Marta’s starting a new one tomorrow. She said it’s good for improving her English.’
My brain shut down; my heart too. They’ve stayed shut down.
So the other day when Jill broke her silence with me and texted to say she wouldn’t be in school for a few days, that there was a major crisis at home, I didn’t bother to answer.
And yesterday, when Miss O’Neill asked me if I was going to audition for West Side Story, I nodded in a vague way that might have meant yes, no or maybe.
And this afternoon, when I sang ‘Tonight’ on the stage of the school assembly hall, there was no music in me and the acoustics in there are so weird it was like more than one of me was singing.
‘A bit on the sharp side, Eala,’ Miss O’Neill said and I couldn’t have cared less.
14
The bell for the mid-morning break is less than five minutes away. Mrs Doran is too young to have grey hair and too bouncy to be teaching something as boring as economics. At least you stay awake during her classes. She’s always liable to fire a question at you out of the blue. But this morning I’m on the edge of my seat for a different reason. And, for the moment, it’s not the court case. Jill is back in school.
My Dad Is Ten Years Old Page 8
