by Alex Coleman
My limbs took off in four different directions. “What?” Ignoring me, Melissa patted Colm on the arm and said, “Yes, but the guilt is what’s causing the inferiority complex. The two go hand in hand.”
“What are you talking about?” I screeched.
Colm’s head swayed from side to side. “Maybe ‘guilt’ is the wrong term –”
“Look,” I said. “Pick a term, any bloody term, and just tell me what the hell you’re getting at!”
“All right. When you met Gerry, from what Melissa tells me, he was considered quite the catch. He’s still a seriously good-looking man – I mean, you’re a good-looking woman, Melissa’s right. And I’m sure you were lovely back then, don’t get me wrong.”
My eyes narrowed. “Just say whatever it is that you’re going to say.”
“Well … you got pregnant very quickly after you started going out.”
“And?”
“Is it possible that maybe you felt … somehow …”
Melissa stepped in, her patience suddenly gone. “That you’d trapped him.”
I’d thought the inferiority theory had been bad enough. This was something else. “That I’d trapped him?” I said. “I didn’t get pregnant on my own, you know!”
“Of course not!” she said, all energy now, as if we were finally getting somewhere. “We’re not saying that you did trap him, we’re saying that may have been the way you felt. Maybe that’s still the way you feel. Which is why you’re not particularly bothered that he’s screwing around. You don’t think you have the right to be.”
“I am bothered,” I said slowly. “I’m very fucking bothered. And you know what else? I’m tired. It’s been a long day. I’m going to get my case from the car and hit the sack.”
Melissa turned away.
“Listen, Jackie …” Colm began.
“No, it’s all right. Don’t worry about it. I’m knackered, honestly.”
“Let me get your stuff for –”
“Thanks, but I’d rather get it myself. I could do with the oxygen.”
I got up and walked away, horribly conscious of the sound of my footsteps on the wooden floor. It seemed to take me about half an hour to get out of the house. I didn’t take a single breath along the way. Outside, it was surprisingly warm for the time of day – alarmingly warm, if Al Gore was anything to go by. A couple of teenage girls were sitting on the wall next door to Melissa’s. As I passed, I heard one of them saying that she couldn’t wait for the party the following night. It was going to be both “wicked” and “banging”. Her friend responded with at least as much enthusiasm. Their hoots and giggles followed me across the street, mocking me and my age and my clothes and my hairstyle. When I reached the car, I walked straight past it. I had no plan to go anywhere in particular – I was just glad to be putting one foot in front of the other. A couple of minutes later, I found myself outside a shop on the main road. The decision to go inside and buy cigarettes didn’t seem to come from my own brain. It was if it had been taken elsewhere and then relayed to me; not so much a personal choice as an instruction from on high. I was at the counter before I gave it a thought. The thought was Phew – thank God you brought your purse on this random, not-going- anywhere-in-particular walk.
“Ten Silk Cut blue, please,” I said to the girl.
There was a magazine rack to my left. My eye was caught by a publication called Your Story. Although it featured a number of intriguing headlines: “Haunted By My Own Dog!”; “Boozy Surgeon Ruined My Nose!” The one that really sucked me in was this: “My Cheating Husband Will Never Stray Again!” I grabbed the mag and offered it for scanning.
“Six-forty altogether,” the assistant said.
Peering into my purse, I realised that I had no notes. When I fished around for change, I came up with six euros and forty cents exactly. I took it as a sign from God that he wanted me to inhale poisons and read crap. He had his reasons, no doubt.
Back at the house, I stuck my head into the living room and apologised for taking so long. Melissa nodded and then went back to her book.
Colm said, “That’s okay. Did you go for a stroll?” “Yeah,” I said. “Just a wee one. Clear the head. You know.”
“Fair enough.”
“I’m off to bed then.” “Right so. Goodnight.” “Night.”
Melissa closed her book with some force and looked at me properly. “Sleep well,” she said thinly.
“I’ll try,” I told her. “See you in the morning.”
Upstairs, I flaked out on the bed and opened Your Story. The cheating husband piece was by “Brenda”, a woman from Manchester who’d found a pair of furry handcuffs in the glove box of her old man’s car. She knew he wasn’t using them on her, so she confronted him. He confessed to an affair, at which point she decided “to teach him a lesson he would never forget!” (Almost every sentence ended with an exclamation mark.) Brenda’s solution to her problem was to e-mail everyone on her husband’s rugby team to let them know that furry handcuffs were nothing compared to some of the gizmos and get-ups he’d employed in the marital bedroom. “Your pal’s favourite game of all,” she revealed in her final paragraph, “is to play naughty schoolgirl and strict headmaster – with him as the schoolgirl!” The plan, if you could call it that, worked like a charm. The husband became a laughing stock among his friends (who forwarded the mail to everyone they knew) and wound up “so depressed he can barely leave the house, let alone find a new mistress!” Brenda seemed to think this was a great victory, but I wasn’t so sure. She hadn’t done anything to ease her own pain, had she? All she’d done was hurt her husband, which was both easy and, in the grand scheme of things, pointless.
I tossed the magazine to the other side of the room and rolled over onto my back. What was Gerry up to now, I wondered? On those rare occasions when I went out alone for the evening, I usually came back to find him sprawled across the sofa in front of an action movie, covered in a thin layer of Pringle crumbs. Tonight would be very different. He wouldn’t be seizing the opportunity to revert to teenagerhood; he was more likely to be curled up in a little ball, cursing himself and wishing he was dead. At least, I presumed he was. There was always the possibility that he was next door, tearing Lisa’s clothes off with his teeth. But I found that unlikely.
The simple truth was this: I believed him. I believed him when he said it was a one-off, and I believed him when he said it would never happen again. It was entirely possible for a spouse to have sex with someone else as a sort of mistake, and then never do it again.
I knew that for a fact, because I had done it myself.
CHAPTER 8
When 2002 gave way to 2003, I dared to hope that the calendar change might do wonders for my state of mind. Although my parents’ accident was still horribly recent, at least now it was something that had happened “last year”. But there was no improvement. I was still a zombie, slouching silently from room to room, crying more often than not. I hadn’t slept for more than a couple of hours at a stretch since the accident and was stupefied by even the simplest of everyday tasks. There had been several occasions when I had been reduced to a quivering heap on the kitchen floor by the sight of a pile of ironing. Even my beloved cooking had lost all appeal; for the first time in their lives, the kids came home not to long-since perfected favourites or to bold new experiments but to boil-in-the-bag curries, oven-ready chips, frozen pizzas. Gerry was worried, and repeatedly told me so. He thought I should “talk to someone”, meaning a counsellor or a psychologist. Every time he brought it up, I just shook my head and shuffled out of his sight. Talking couldn’t possibly help. Nothing could. My sole consolation was that this, surely, was my allocation of misery for the next couple of decades. There would be no more bad news for a long time. There couldn’t possibly be; it would be unfair.
And then, one crisp January day, Chrissy came through the front door in tears. The tears were not so unusual in themselves – she’d been known to come in crying because it was co
ld out. When I asked her what was wrong this time, she buried her head in her hands and sobbed so hard that I couldn’t make out what she was saying. She’d bumped into someone or other who’d told her something or other. Gradually, I realised that she was talking about Jonathon Mullen. Then I heard the words “brain tumour” and I joined her in the sobbing. Jonathon was an eight-year-old neighbour of ours. He was quite possibly the sweetest child I’d ever met in my life. I don’t think I would have liked him so much if he’d been physically cute; the effect might have been overpowering. But he had buck teeth and a big nose, and I had never seen him without a little green river snaking its way down his top lip; it was like his trademark. He was obsessed with toy cars. Most little boys like them, of course, but Jonathon was something else. He had literally hundreds, which he used to line up on the footpath outside his house, as if he was some miniature Arthur Daley. If you expressed even the tiniest bit of interest, he’d bend your ear for half an hour, holding one of his fleet in the palm of his hand and telling you all about its real-world counterpart.
“This is a Ferrari F50, Mrs O’Connell,” he said to me one day. “It has a four-point-seven-litre engine and a top speed of two hundred and two miles an hour. They only ever made three hundred and forty-nine. Everyone goes on about how cool they are in the magazines. But I think they’re butt-fugly.” He kicked a football into our front garden one summer’s evening and took out a rampant sunflower which was far and away the most successful plant I’d ever had. I found out about this tragedy, and who was behind it, because Jonathon immediately rang the doorbell and owned up. He stood on the front step with his football under his arm, slowly shaking his head as he shifted from foot to foot. “I’m very sorry, Mrs O’Connell,” he said solemnly. “I really liked that flower myself. It always looked like it was smiling.”
It’s stupid and wrong to think that one particular child deserves to get a brain tumour less than another, but still … that was exactly what I thought at the time.
Jonathon’s dad was a tall, whip-thin forty-something called Tony. He’d been our neighbour for about two years. Gerry and I knew three things about him: he worked for Bank of Ireland, he’d moved around the country a lot, and he was a widower. His wife – we didn’t even know her name at that point – had died of liver cancer when Jonathon was just a toddler. If we’d known him a little better, no doubt we’d have found it easier to call over and express our sympathies on this, the latest tragedy to befall him. As it was, it took us a couple of days to gather the courage. When we did finally manage it, we found him understandably pole-axed. He made tea and produced biscuits, as if we’d dropped by to see his holiday snaps but seemed unable to meet our eyes. His son was sound asleep upstairs. He was going to have an operation in a few days’ time, but the doctors had said there was no point in admitting him before then. When Tony told us that, I could tell by his expression that he’d taken it to mean “He might as well spend a few nice days at home, just in case they’re his last”. Gerry and I asked banal questions and received horrifying answers. On his discovery of the problem, for example: Jonathon had been playing on his PlayStation a few weeks previously when he suddenly threw the controller across the floor. It was unlike him and Tony asked him why he was being so bad-tempered. There was something wrong with the game, he said, or the TV – sometimes he could see two of everything.
I found it difficult to ask about Jonathon’s chances of survival, not just because I didn’t want to hear the answer – although I didn’t – but because I couldn’t think of the right way to phrase the question. Eventually I settled on “Is the surgeon confident?” It was hard to tell, Tony explained; the guy was so relentlessly cheerful and positive that you wanted to grab him by the lapels and shake him. He certainly said he was confident – repeatedly. But that was little comfort.
We stayed for about half an hour and left feeling as if we had made things worse with our hopeless clichés and watery smiles. “If there’s anything we can do ...” We said that at least six times, knowing full well there was absolutely nothing and it was at best pointless and at worst deeply irritating to keep asking.
Jonathon’s operation came and went. It was a success, of sorts. Ninety-five percent of the tumour was removed, but ninety-five percent wasn’t good enough; he needed radiation treatment to take care of the rest. Tony seemed to find this news even harder to take than the original blow. He’d been stressed to the point of breaking by the operation, but now he fell into a state of deep depression. I had started to call over every couple of days, usually without Gerry, and I saw him deteriorate right before my eyes. While his physical decline was dramatic and obvious, the thing that really worried me was the way he gradually lost the ability to hold a conversation. He wasn’t just being quiet. When you spoke to him, he would nod or shake his head and his lips would move in silence, as if he understood the general concept but couldn’t quite remember how to take part. He broke down one night and told me in short, stuttering sentences that he’d had several violent rages during which he’d smashed about half of his crockery and every mirror in the house. His cousin, Maria, who looked after Jonathon when Tony was at work, had seen the damage and had told him to wise up. They’d fallen out over it and now he felt more alone than ever. I reached across the table and patted the back of his hand, wishing I had this Maria character within throttling range. Once again, there was nothing I could say that might actually help. But he seemed to appreciate the contact.
As the weeks dragged by, I found myself investing more of myself in Jonathon’s health than I would have thought possible. Every time I visited him in hospital, I came away cursing God and his mysterious bloody ways. When I saw my own children, I hugged them until they could stand it no more and wriggled away, complaining. One Friday night I called over and found Tony off his face on whiskey. He made no attempt to keep himself together in front of me. As I ran through my usual list of hopeless offers – to Hoover the house, do the laundry, scrub the bathroom, bring yet another lasagna – he gradually curled up into a ball on the sofa and then cried for a solid hour. I sat down beside him and … and nothing, actually. I just sat there, listening to his wails and gulps and periodically rubbing his back. When eventually I got up to leave, he grabbed my sleeve and told me in a matter-of-fact manner that he had no plan to go on living if Jonathon died. My mouth fell open. I started to protest, but he put his finger to his lips and shushed me. It’d be easy, he said. No body. No fuss. He’d just leave the house one day and he wouldn’t come back. Then his face creased up and he pulled me closer. I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone, was that understood? It was to be our little secret.
I got away from him as quickly as I could and ran home to Gerry. He had no doubts. “The authorities” – whoever they were – would have to be informed. How would I feel if the worst happened and he followed through on his threat? The man needed help. I knew he was right, of course, and yet I hesitated. There was still a good chance, according to the doctors, that Jonathon would pull through. And even if he didn’t, there was no way to be sure that Tony would actually do anything. He’d been very drunk when he said it. Gerry was furious at me and said that if I didn’t tell someone, then he would. We argued about it constantly. He became increasingly angry as time wore on, but I came to realise that his own threat had been an empty one; he had no intention of telling anyone. Without ever making a firm decision to do so, I wound up keeping my mouth shut. I saw Tony as frequently as ever during that period, but never found a way to ask him if he’d meant what he’d said. Quite apart from anything else, I got the distinct impression that he didn’t remember saying it. I convinced myself that by bringing the subject up, I might only succeed in planting an idea that he’d never seriously considered.
And then, slowly but surely, the news from the hospital began to turn positive. The “ifs” and “buts” that had peppered every doctor’s report gradually dropped away and the word “remission” was spoken out loud. Tony seemed unable to believe it and did
n’t show any real signs of relief until he was given a firm date for Jonathon’s discharge. The day before the big event, he called at my front door. He looked like a different man, as if he’d been suffering from a demonic possession and had just had a very successful session with an exorcist. I made tea and we sat down at the kitchen table. It was the first conversation we’d ever had in which it was okay to laugh, and we did. He told me that Jonathon had demanded a welcome home party and had specified that the venture should be undertaken with an attitude of “Money is no objective”. Tony had already been planning one, of course, but had made a great show of pretending that he wasn’t keen on the idea. Jonathon went spare when he heard his dad’s protestations about being broke and having no time to get things organised and ended up calling him a “complete bastard”. Hadn’t he noticed that his son had nearly died? Hellooo? What the hell was wrong with him? My smiles and giggles gradually faded as Tony related this story, and he noticed. Did I think he had been cruel? Not so. I had to understand something – he’d been sure that he would never get the chance to tease the boy again; that it would be all hand-holding and anything-you- wants until he finally slipped away. This wasn’t cruelty; it was normality. He teared up when he said this and I found that it was contagious. Before long, the pair of us were bent double over the kitchen table. Then Tony got up and came around to my side. He leaned over me and put his arm around my shoulder. I’d been his best friend in these last few months, did I know that? Even though he had no family – no brothers or sisters, no parents, no wife – he’d felt supported and that was down, almost single-handedly, to me. He wanted to thank me, from the bottom of his heart. I had never heard anyone use that phrase before. It should have sounded corny. But it didn’t. I told him he was perfectly welcome – cried it more than said it. And then he kissed me on the forehead, the way you might kiss an infant. I cried on, as did he. It was only when he leaned closer still and kissed me on the cheek that I realised what was going on. I turned my face towards him and he kissed me on the mouth. Then I was on my feet with my arms around his skinny frame. Without a word, we walked down the hall and up the stairs, where we did the things that I had only ever done with my husband. At the time, my only conscious thought was that life was fragile and brief. My parents were dead. Tony’s parents were dead. His wife was dead. His son had just scraped through. Yes, it was sympathy sex. But it was myself I was feeling sorry for.
