My Dad Is Ten Years Old

by Mark O'Sullivan

  ‘Course not,’ he says. ‘I’m not with it. Come into the sitting room. I’ve the fire on.’

  We head in. More flowers. Walls, carpet, curtains, sofa and armchairs and, on the mantelpiece, a crystal vase full of real ones. Lilies with their white mouths open, the orange stamens removed. No mess in this house. There’s music playing. Some tragic, singer-songwriter stuff. Over by the corner beside the widescreen TV, there’s an acoustic guitar on a stand.

  ‘You never told me you play the guitar.’

  ‘I don’t. My father does.’ An embarrassing admission that he regrets because I find it so hilarious. I wish I didn’t feel so hyper.

  ‘He’s not one of those sad middle-aged guys you see on YouTube doing Elvis songs or something, is he?’

  ‘He is on YouTube, actually,’ Brian says and sits on one of the two armchairs and not here beside me on the sofa where he’s supposed to sit. ‘He does a couple of Johnny Cash songs. It’s fair bad. I’ll get the orange.’

  And he’s up and away. Leaving me to sit here, the bottle in one hand, the backpack in the other. Some host, Angie says. And I’m some guest, sneering at his folks.

  I drop the backpack on the sofa and get a quick swig from the bottle and a second while there’s time. It goes down easy. When Brian comes back in, the vodka hits my stomach and I have to swallow hard to keep it from coming straight back up. I sit down before I fall. I rest my head back among the sofa flowers and let the dizzy swirl pass before I open my eyes again.

  Brian is sitting opposite me. Two glasses and two bottles have appeared on the coffee table and I don’t remember how he got there or how they got there. I sit up and try to act naturally. My foot starts tapping. I have to look down at it to make it stop. Another tablet might help.

  ‘Do you have any crisps or snacky stuff?’ I ask.

  ‘Sure,’ he says. ‘I could do some chips or something if you like.’

  ‘No, crisps are fine.’

  He’s as relieved as I am when he heads to the kitchen. I fish around in my backpack and get another tablet. I cough to cover the crinkling sound of the foil breaking. I take a swig from the bottle of orange to get the tablet down. It’s the kind of orange you’re supposed to dilute and is so sweet and concentrated, I gag and almost spray the lot out over the coffee table. I’m pouring us a drink as Brian returns.

  ‘Roast beef flavour is all we have,’ he says and I have to work hard not to wobble as I pour, he’s watching me so closely.

  I lean on the coffee table to make sure I set the bottle straight there.

  ‘I don’t know if it’s me or the table, but one of us is wobbling,’ I say. Another dumb chuckle comes. ‘You should take it back to the shop. The table, like.’

  ‘I made it myself,’ he says.

  He’s heading towards the armchair and I make room for him on the sofa in as obvious a way as I can, short of saying, ‘Sit here and hold me.’ He obeys, but reluctantly. I raise my glass and he takes his.

  ‘Cheers,’ I say.

  ‘Eala, can we talk?’

  ‘Sure.’ The orange takes the edge off the vodka and the third tablet is calming me down. Or is it four I’ve taken?

  ‘I mean before you drink any more of that stuff.’

  ‘Look, Brian, there’s nothing to say,’ I tell him and this bit is easy because I’ve rehearsed the lines so often. ‘It wasn’t your fault, the car, the speed bumps, what happened to Dad. There’s nothing to forgive, if that’s what’s on your mind, OK?’ And I throw in the clincher I’ve prepared. Something to prove I’m not some silly skanger throwing myself at him. ‘You’re not my bête noire or whatever.’

  ‘Your what?’

  ‘Bête noire. It’s French.’

  ‘I didn’t do French in school.’

  ‘I was writing this history essay about the Holocaust.’ Shut it, Angie says. He’s looking at you like you have two heads. ‘And Dad gave me the, whatever you call it, the phrase. It means black beast, like. Something to fear, something to blame or whatever. The Jews were the bêtes noires of the Nazis, like. Or was it the other way round? I can’t …’

  ‘Eala? You’re not yourself.’

  ‘Everyone keeps telling me that. Who do they think I am then?’

  The house phone rings out in the hallway. It can’t be Mam, can it? Jill wouldn’t do that to me, would she? Betray me? Maybe I should’ve left my phone on so I’d know if Mam was trying to find me.

  ‘That’ll be my mother,’ Brian says. ‘She said she’d ring every evening.’

  ‘Leave it.’

  ‘I can’t. She’ll ring my mobile anyway until I answer.’

  ‘Switch it off then.’

  ‘I can’t. She’s a worrier. She’ll panic if I don’t answer,’ he says and he’s on his feet before I can hold him back, which was supposed to be my next move except my brain couldn’t get the message to my hands quickly enough.

  ‘I won’t be long.’

  He closes the sitting-room door after him. I don’t mind. I pour myself some more vodka. No orange this time. I can’t hear what he’s saying out there, but I can sense the annoyance in his tone. I gulp back the vodka and pour another neat one and knock that back too. I kick off my shoes and lie out on the sofa. No more talking, Angie tells me. When he gets back there’ll be no more talking. I take one of the flowery cushions and hold it close to me. I sink into a daydream, evening dream, whatever. Holding Brian. Holding my child. Humming ‘Tomorrow’ and ‘Somewhere’ and ‘Tonight’. Out along a river, floating, flowing …

  ‘Eala?’

  Brian is kneeling beside me. I try to raise my arms to him, but they won’t move. I’m cold. My blouse is open all the way down the front. I can’t make his three faces come together as one. The coffee table is empty. How did that happen? My arm comes up and falls on his shoulder. I can’t remember telling it to.

  ‘Jeez, Eala, what –’

  ‘Angie,’ I say, all slurred and slowed down. ‘Call me Angie. I know about Win too and the baby. But don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone, right? Our secret and this is our secret too, right?’

  I can’t hold my head up so I take a rest. I look for my cushion, my baby, but it’s not there. When I wake up I’ll find it. I’ve taken a sleeper by mistake, that’s what’s wrong. But I’ll be grand once I sleep it off. Grand.

  ‘You bastard, you’ve spiked her drink, haven’t you?’

  ‘No way, man. She’s out of it. She was out of it before she got here.’

  Out of what, I’m thinking? And what’s all this noise? I force my eyes open. Sean and Brian are scuffling by the sitting-room door, but their movements are weirdly slow like they’re underwater. Sean catches him with a punch to the jaw, but Brian doesn’t swing back.

  ‘Jeez, Sean, if I did anything would I ring you?’ he pleads. ‘I don’t know what to do. Should we get a doctor?’

  ‘Look at her blouse, you scumbag,’ Sean shouts and takes another swing, but misses.

  I look down. I’m all buttoned up again except the buttons are in the wrong holes. I start chuckling. I try to lift my head and I can feel the vodka moving up from my stomach and what if it goes back down the wrong way?

  ‘Help me,’ I say, but I can’t tell if they hear me.

  ‘Help me.’ They’re so busy fighting, they’ve forgotten I’m here. I don’t want them to fight over me.

  ‘Help me.’ Why won’t they listen? Please, listen to me.

  I’m outside of myself. Looking down at the girl lying on the sofa, at two guys trying to wrestle one another to the ground. Further and further up I float and I’m afraid because I need to get back to my body. Except it’s not me down there now. It’s Angie. Further and further up and what if I never come back together again?

  Who will I be then?

  31

  When I was seven years old, Mam took me to see my first musical in the school assembly hall. We went with
one of her workmates whose daughter was playing the part of Ado Annie in Oklahoma. I was beside myself with excitement. High on cola and chocolate and ‘I Cain’t Say No’. Until the interval came and I threw one of my weird wobblers.

  The thing is our assembly hall stage doesn’t have curtains. So the lights go up for the interval and I’m there, all confused, looking up at the empty stage while Mam’s trying to bring me outside. She was a smoker back then. She was also, more than likely, bored out of her tree. But I’m looking back at the stage and I’m going, ‘What if something happens while we’re gone?’ And she’s going, ‘Nothing happens in the interval because they’re all taking a rest, OK?’ I’m not convinced, sniffling and sulking as I follow her out. Long after the show was over – days, weeks later – I still had it in my head that we’d missed some really important twist in the tale.

  I keep coming back to that memory these days. Keep thinking that while I’ve been lying here in my room – what is it? – eight, nine days now, things have changed, things have moved on in the house below me and in our lives.

  I spent two nights in hospital. The first was a nightmare. I woke in a snow-blind panic in the brightly painted ward, certain I was in a psychiatric ward and that somewhere else in the building, Dad was locked up too. While Mam and a young doctor and a couple of nurses tried to calm me down, I got this flashback of me standing at Brian’s door. I couldn’t remember anything of being inside the house, but I went ballistic again imagining the worst. I pleaded with Mam to get me the morning-after pill, but she assured me that nothing had happened. They’d checked me out and the thought of being poked at like that really freaked me. I was going mental until I got this jab that seemed to freeze my veins and then slow my brain to a crawl.

  ‘Don’t let them make a zombie of me, Mam,’ I cried.

  ‘There’s nothing to worry about,’ she said from so far away I thought I might never see her again. ‘You’ll feel much better when you wake and I’ll be here every minute, OK?’

  ‘What happened to me? Why did I go so crazy?’

  I was getting drowsy then and didn’t catch everything the young doctor told me. Stress, fatigue, the cocktail of alcohol and Dad’s drugs, she said. But I knew that already. What I didn’t know was that the antidepressants Dad has to take are some new type and are not to be messed around with. The doctor thought these SSRIs had ratcheted up the anxiety and panic I’d been feeling. I was lucky I hadn’t been taking them longer, she told me. I didn’t feel lucky. And how ironic is this? She thought it would be a good idea for me to tease out any ‘issues’ that might be bothering me. With a psychologist. Fortunately, the jab soon sent me into the deepest, longest sleep I’d had for months. Fourteen hours straight I slept.

  And sleep is all I’ve been good for ever since. That and pretending to sleep. Whenever the front door bell rings, as it does now, I’m convinced it’s Miss Understanding. I go under the duvet again. I don’t want anyone poking around in my brain, stirring up all the stuff I’m not ready to think about yet.

  The voices from downstairs are muffled. I let a minute or two pass and I’m thinking about easing the duvet down when I cop that someone’s already in the room. I listen. Weird how you can tell who’s out there by the sound of their breathing. It’s Mam. I listen closer. She’s alone.

  She’s been in pottering around my room a few times already this morning. Twice she’s woken me as she put away some fresh clothes in my dresser and apologized in a fluttery, hyper kind of way that wasn’t her at all. I know she’s psyching herself up for some major announcement. And what else can it be but that she’s decided Dad should live in Martin’s house when the Head-Up people have got it ready? There’s a space in the pit of my stomach where the panic should flood in, but it doesn’t.

  ‘I didn’t wake you, did I?’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I was stirring anyway.’

  She’s standing there with another bundle of my clothes. She must’ve washed every last blouse and hoodie and pair of jeans of mine. That brisk, fresh tang the steam iron raises from newly dried clothes hangs in the air. I take a few big breaths of it. She places the bundle on top of the dresser and sits on the bed beside me. Some loose strands of hair fall across her eyes and she brushes them back.

  ‘You look so much better,’ she says.

  ‘I must’ve freaked everyone out,’ I say.

  Fingering one of the crocheted daisies on the duvet cover, she doesn’t know how or where to start. Only now do I cop that it’s the duvet cover from Dad’s bed. I look along the line of daisies. The one Dad pulled out is still missing. I try to recall what I did with the threaded flower when he gave it to me, but I can’t.

  ‘Do you remember anything about that first night in hospital?’ she asks. ‘The things you said?’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘The doctor thought you mightn’t. “Retrograde amnesia” they call it.’

  ‘What things, Mam?’ I don’t really want to hear this, but I know I have to.

  ‘All that stuff you’d bottled up inside for so long,’ she says. ‘I wasn’t watching out for you, Eala. I was tired. And I sent the wrong signals to you. And … Eala, we have to learn to keep everything out in the open. Everything. No matter how off-the-wall it seems.’

  ‘The baby thing? Can we not talk about it, please?’

  Mam lies against me. I can feel her breath on my cheek and her heartbeat on my spine. I close my eyes. The comforting after-wash of sleep calms me. Deep inside, there’s a silence like nothing I’ve ever known. The arguments raging in my brain ever since Dad’s accident have stopped. Something has changed in me and, maybe it’s because I’m still too tired to think clearly, but I can’t account for it.

  ‘It’s OK, Eala. Before I had the miscarriage, I was thinking along the same lines. That our having a baby around might somehow bring him back to himself, bring him back to us.’

  I open my eyes and the room is bright with surprise. I know what’s changed. Angie is gone. Only now do I realize that I haven’t imagined seeing or hearing her since I came back from hospital.

  ‘There was more?’ I ask.

  ‘Well … this business about Martin and me.’

  Mam sits up again. I sneak a look at her. She’s smoothing out the duvet cover, fixing her hair, delaying. A cloud has passed across her face, a hint of annoyance

  ‘You won’t believe this, Eala,’ she says. ‘Martin and Fiona have been going out together for the last three months. But neither of them wanted to tell me because I was … because we were going through such a hard time. If they’d been upfront, you’d have had one less thing to worry about.’

  Bitterness narrows her eyes, wrinkles the pout of her lips, ages her. I don’t like the way this is going.

  ‘I’m tired of people thinking they know what’s best for us,’ she says. ‘Right from the start, Fiona’s been harping on and on. “This won’t be easy, Judy. Don’t feel you’ve failed if you can’t handle him, Judy. Keep all these ‘alternative care options’ open, Judy. You have to look to the future, Judy.”’

  This is what I’d wanted all along. Mam showing Miss U the door, refusing to listen to her advice. But now it feels all wrong. She’s up and pacing the room, moving things as she goes like she believes nothing is in its rightful place. A hairbrush, the tartan blanket at the end of my bed, the left shoulder of her cardigan. A kind of wildness in her, but vulnerable too. I’m afraid for her.

  ‘We’ve been to the bottom, Eala, all of us, and it can’t get any worse. I’ll be giving up the job. I’ll get a Carer’s Allowance. I mean, it’s not great money, but we’ll manage. And, anyway, you were right about Marta. I don’t know why I ever took her on. All this nonsense about being Ballroom Dancing Champion of Moravia. I mean, really. All lies, my guess is, everything she said. All lies.’

  She’s pulling at the top drawer of my dresser again. It won’t yield to her. She’s trying so hard that the dres
ser shakes and the floor shakes and the bed sways beneath me.

  ‘Dad tried it on with Marta, didn’t he?’ I say and Mam gives up on the drawer and fiddles with the catch of the wardrobe door instead.

  ‘He’ll be home next week,’ she says, bright and upbeat again, opening the wardrobe, the clothes hanging there like a choice. ‘And it’ll be better this time, Eala, because we’ll know what lies behind all those fears of his.’

  My brain blanks. Maybe I’ve done some permanent damage after all, with the bucketload of tabs I’ve popped. Mam comes and kneels by the bed.

  ‘In the hospital you told us how he remembered living on a boat and his talk of fire on the water and how he was afraid of killing the Man again,’ she says. ‘And the tracing agency have been able to piece the story together. We know who he was, Eala. Who he is.’

  ‘We have a name?’

  Mam nods. She sits on the bed beside me. I stare up at the ceiling and follow the faint traces of the rivery cracks in the plaster Dad filled in before he painted it a few years ago.

  ‘His name is Georges Dorar.’ I haven’t heard her do a French accent since the days when she still sang ‘Hymne à l’Amour’ in the kitchen.

  My body unclenches itself. A hush descends on the room. I should be afraid of what I’m about to ask, but I’m not.

  ‘Did he really kill someone then? This … The Man?’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘He was eight years old and imagined it was his fault. But, no. The inquest report is clear on –’

  ‘Who was the Man?’

  Mam pulls up the sleeves of her cardigan. It’s like there’s some unpleasant job to be done and she’s trying to convince herself to go at it.

  ‘The Man was his father.’

  It’s weird, but I’m more shocked at how stick-thin her arms are than by what she’s just said. They’re the arms of a size-zero model.

  ‘Jimmy’s parents were both, well, junkies, I suppose. They lived in fear of having Jimmy taken from them by Social Services. His mother, Cath Wilkins, she’d been taken into care herself as a child. She was sixteen when Jimmy was born.’