Room Little Darker

by June Caldwell

  Peter Papadoo rushes in looking like a right ball of shite. Straight from work. Slathered in muck and leaves. ‘This can’t be fucking happening,’ he says, apologising, all a-fluster. Looking for an in-the-know, big league doctor, an expert, an un-doer of crummy miracles. Awful sorry, so sorry, sinfonietta of sorry from a lot of mouths. ‘A terrible thing though very rare, but I’m afraid it’s now a definite’. Staff nurse crumbled in disinfectant grips him. Into a foggy cubbyhole. Flicks a chart that shows exactly how it can happen. A laminate chart. Team arrive. She won’t even take Panadol for a headache. Ran two mini marathons last year. Not a bother with the other three. How can this be? ‘It’s rare, but not exceptional,’ Dr Falvey tells him. ‘We need to take her now, immediately. You wait outside. Someone will be with you as soon as we know more. We need to move now, sharp.’ Plastic doors plash a sulk of dead air. This is what it’s like when the planet putters out its last dingy light and a lone animal wiggles in the flourishing fade.

  Beard rubs his nose with a peach linen hanky, eyes streaming. Wash away irritants, scratch, piece of grit. Paces the virgin PVC floor. Flicks pen top in out, out in, sterling silver. Hippocrates used silver to treat ulcers and wounds. He calls them over. Points to the machine. ‘Bring me through it,’ he says. ‘Bring me through it.’ ‘We suspected it was related to epilepsy but …’ No, not you Dr Falvey. Her. Step up. ‘Is this the appropriate time?’ Dr Falvey asks. There’s little time. Her family is outside. It’s exactly the right time. What else are they here training for? Inches forward in rumple-toe shoes; Nurse Bernie from Skerries. Pure gas at karaoke and never wanted to be a nurse but for her broad-shouldered adoptive Ma who took her on by the grace of God and claimed it as a sound idea. ‘The scan shows a blood clot.’ I can see that already, Beard says. And what else? What about intracranial blood flow, other vitals? ‘It’s not good,’ Dr Falvey butts in. Let her answer, I’m asking her. ‘A massive stroke on top.’ On top of what? ‘On top of other internal injuries.’ But are they classed as actual injuries? ‘What do you mean?’ It’s not a trauma per se, so what is it exactly? ‘Brainstem death,’ Nurse Bernie says, her knees buckling. ‘Excuse Bernie, doctor,’ the other wispy nurse whispers. ‘She’s also pregnant, a few weeks in.’ Well this is how you learn. Get the family in pronto. I also need to speak to Boyne ASAP. Girls, wait, girls, listen up, it’s also classified as whole brain death, not just brainstem death. Make sure to know the difference. There’s an important medical distinction here. Baby is still with us. Heartbeat strong. What’s the husband’s name? Go find Boyne. As hospital manager this is totally his ball.

  Peter Papadoo shuffles in with Grandpa Brian. Brief relief that she is now in a room of her own behind reception, tucked away from the beeping ant stream. ‘My sunshine, my beautiful lil’ sunshine,’ he says in a slurp voice, touching Mama. ‘You who were always so stunning, no less dazzling now.’ Peter Papadoo starts to sob. ‘Don’t Brian, don’t.’ When we took her home from the hospital she slept for a month. We thought there might be something wrong then. She barely drank a sup. Then overnight didn’t she sprout up a big pink hibiscus. Tallest in her class at age six. Nicknamed the Spinning Pea because she could never sit still or do one thing at a time. She started up her own dance troupe of young ’uns, did she ever tell you that? The Beaumont Belles! Prancing around the dining room table in a heap of made-up steps and flounces. Leader of the local litter club, scrubbing up them filthy laneways at the back of the estate. Mother to I don’t know how many gerbils. When she was fourteen she came back from a school trip to Paris having spent all her money on presents for us, every last blasted coin. That’s the type she is. Thermometer of the Eiffel Tower on a Bakelite base.

  She does not look good, not good, not good at all. Her bones splinter when her limbs are lifted. There’s a piece of mould growing from her head that looks like a clouded wedding bouquet. Falvey brings in a consultant from outside. ‘Numerous infections, the eyes won’t close. She needs ongoing everything, there’s talk of meningitis, drugs for the bowels, the stomach, a series of slow flows. She needs to be turned on the hour, it’s …’ Stop you there,’ he says. ‘I have never seen the likes. In all my years, across many countries. What have they said of the legislation exactly?’ There’s no machine on the planet that can keep this up. What is the confusion about? ‘It’s complex,’ Falvey says, without being sure exactly. Sometimes that’s how complex complexity is. He thinks of the vending machine Oath they all took with no sub-clause for the good poisons that might squall a swell as big as the Hill of Tara with dolmens and dirt tracks underneath. He thinks of his own daughter bouncing on a space hopper. He thinks of banshees and their pneumonic screams, how they are specifically designed to scare young boys. His mind turns to golf. There is so much tediousness and yet nothing more to do here. He takes his own blood pressure.

  The media is assembling, queuing in their cars on the tar. Remember no cameras, just facts. We’re not that sick. Have a good look at the Texas Futile Care Law, it’s not so dissimilar to ours. No opinion pieces, leave that to the idiotic blogosphere. If there’s only 20 percent chance of survival at twenty-four weeks, what hope has this mitten at eighteen? Is there anyone out there who’s prepared to talk openly on this? A similar case up North maybe? Get a flaky feminist to do a lawnmower mouth on it. What are the doctors saying? Are we talking severe handicap or stillborn? How far is the State willing to go? Where is the precedent? Get an intern down to the courts, always murmurs in the corridors there. Follow the cloaks, no cacking off to Guards, keep it lean, a crisp 800 words.

  Owen refuses to come to the bed. There is a wail inside his stomach that wants to plaster the walls of the world with hot pins. She is asleep too long and he can’t sleep at night as a result. He never thought her to be so mean. Isaac broke so many of his toys in these two weeks, the longest running hours of his life. Even the wooden tractor bought in Galway beside the pie shop where daddy burnt his mouth on a slimy red pepper. Instead he watches the drift of skirring seagulls on Dublin’s skyline, so far up the clouds look like soapy blobs that slip off the scrubbing brush in the sink after dinner. ‘Why didn’t Edel come with us?’ Isaac asks Peter Papadoo, though he takes a little while to answer, explaining she has a snuffly nose and doesn’t want to give Mama a bad cold. ‘Is Mama trying to be inside Halloween?’ he enquires. ‘Her face looks like the pumpkin we put on the windowsill in the sitting room except for the colour.’ Peter Papadoo clasps an arm around him into the tightest of hugs. The most crucial thing about being a boy of his age is to be brave at all times, to push on like a musketeer in a jumbo maze of briers. ‘Can we get crisps from the machine?’ Give it a minute or so more. Talk to your Mama there, tell her what you’ve been up to. ‘What’s the point?’ Owen pipes up. ‘It’s not like she can actually hear us or maybe she doesn’t even want to anymore.’ No, no, no, no, no, that’s not true! That can’t be true and will never be true. She is just not well. It’s not her fault. You do understand it’s really not her fault? ‘Yesterday Owen bashed the machine in the hall when the chocolate wouldn’t fall out proper,’ Isaac tells him. ‘That’s totally not true!’ Owen says. ‘You are making things up all the time Isaac.’

  The simpering PR guy shows Peter Papadoo and Grandpa Brian how to use the Tassimo in time for the meeting. ‘Pop a pod in there – Samiaza or Café Hag are pretty good – but of course it’s up to you.’ Grandpa Brian has his eyes hooked on the unperturbed frosted head of Boyne sitting at the long rectangular table at the very top of the room. ‘I’m not in the mood for refreshments,’ he says. It was all ‘tragic and unfortunate … difficult, and challenging’ until they put it in writing they wanted the life support switched off. Now they were being summoned to several ‘briefings’ per day. Talk of ‘viability’ and ‘potential legal consequences’. Host of other fruitless buzzwords and lardy sentences stuck snug in a worn book. ‘Look at the state of them,’ Grandpa Brian says, pulling at Peter Papadoo’s elbow. ‘It’s
looking more and more like the Last Supper every day.’

  Dr Falvey outlines what he considers to be equitable fact: mechanical support is normally only used to keep organs intact until such a time as donation is feasible. Absence of neurological activity, already determined, is legal death. In his opinion, if he may be so bold as to state it out loud right here, the Eighth Amendment shouldn’t even come into it as she’s already gone. Boyne cuts him off as he would a hunk of ribeye. ‘It is not our job to stand on top of the law, but to serve beneath it.’ Grandpa Brian reminds them that legal submissions will be heard in the morning, it will be more obvious what way to go. ‘According to your own paperwork, she was very much looking forward to the birth of this child,’ asserts Boyne. ‘Of course she was!’ Grandpa Brian replies. She had chosen names. She had decorated. She had made provisional enquiries at the same multidenominational school the others go to. The child’s presence in the world was almost tactual, tangible, inasmuch as her roaming heartbeat was. ‘We are heaps ahead of the United States,’ Opus Dei says. ‘They don’t recognise such a right until it’s out and about sitting on the ground looking and smelling like a baby before it’s deemed to officially be one.’ Grandpa Brian and Peter Papadoo don’t care if Ireland is an ejecta blanket of ignorant moon and the rest of the world is an even rougher surface still, they cannot and will not change their minds. ‘It’s about dignity,’ Grandpa Brian informs the table. ‘Our resolution is as solid and still as she is.’ Boyne shuffles his papers. ‘We have to be very careful here not to confuse relative with absolute value on human life, while of course trying our very best to do right by your daughter.’

  Floppy liver strapped to chrome and fibre plastic in a cleaning closet on the fifth floor. Sanctify me in a sick bag. The next incy step for ethical kind. Gashed from Mama at night five days ago, Speculum Man who delivers premature babies with distinction and expert of women’s parts; Beard, with the aid of Boyne’s blind eye, decided it was the only way to save me from fire. They plan to grow me for twenty weeks and see how it goes. In a few weeks I’ll be plump enough for a tube through the nose into the windpipe, a mix of air, oxygen and prayer. Dr Falvey will be pulled in to see me this afternoon though they have the colour of him in advance. His Facebook page shows just how much of a rancid cause carrier he is: Royal Society for the Preservation of Marine Animals, Doctors for Gaza, Great Apes Survival Partnership, No Fracking Europe, but barely able to look management in the eye or answer his wife back. He’ll keep his mouth shut alright. ‘O, God! O, Jesus Christ! No! How is this possible? Pure monstrous!’ Beard will explain a gorgeous filthy irony – new technology from an abortion clinic in Canada – where there’s no restriction on gestational limits, an exodus in reverse. And don’t start going down the calculable line of Frankenstein, for pity’s sake, who else will give a flying shit about me!? The country is run aground (they are saying), abortion under certain circumstances will be all circumstances before too long. This is our only chance to prove the body politic wrong. Think ahead to the golden moment, where we present our findings. The look on their faces.

  A legal envoy from the courts is set to visit to clock my heartbeat for a flipchart, except I’m no longer where he thinks I should be. They will probably take a line in from another, between 120 and 180 beats per minute, steady whoosh of citizen. No visitors allowed in to see Mama now under any circumstances, because she is, let’s be very clear about this, not in decent fettle. Stew meat that’s been on too long, melting collagen, thawing into gelatine. Peter Papadoo can’t bear to look at her face, the smile of his saucy brunette having flown the nest for sure. Her voice follows him about the house in every cupboard he opens. ‘Will you just try to fold the clothes for once, not fling them!’ He’s down at the courts most days flagellating and flailing, trying to grab as many legal eagles and politicians as he can. ‘Our hands are tied,’ they tell him, with shoulder pat. ‘But it shouldn’t be too long now.’ Grandpa Brian is burying underground, eating soil, hiding from the bloodthirsty mink as he sees it. Dr Falvey uses the phone in reception to join a tennis club. It has brand spanking new Tiger Turf that’s resurfaced every year and you can play under floodlights seven nights a week. Mojitos cost only €6 for members.

  She’s come to get me. ‘Rascal flower, butter fairy, there you are! Come here to me now. Don’t make me run after you!’ Unhooking tubes like you do with a baby seat in a good-sized family car. Messianic puddle on the floor is all that’s left. Experiment over, hypothesis incomplete, breakthrough broken. ‘You don’t mind, do you, if we hang around for a small while?’ Mama says. Daddy is in a right fluff and needs our support. ‘Look at you! You are cuter than I thought I could ever do! Is that not a Cheshire Cat smile? Also I think it would be good for you to get to know Owen, Isaac and Edel a bit better. They’re all so different … delightedly themselves. It sometimes pinches the breath right from me. Good God, they will go nutso for you though! Be prepared. Edel will likely put dresses on you. She really wanted a sister.’

  Boyne’s wife turns up at the hospital at the chink of dawn for a good aul bicker. His own fault for not picking an equal. He has not been home since I went missing. She thinks he’s having an affair. To her it’s a matter of plausible explanation. She discussed it at length with the other ladies at the gym. It’s not that she’s totally thick but certainly she wouldn’t have even a quarter of the brainpower as him. He told a colleague when he met and married her it was all a bit of a package deal. Measure for measure, tit for tat, tooth for tooth. He’d done that 1980s’ thing of spotting her across a packed dancefloor: ‘That’s the woman I’m going to marry!’ She has zero concept of the pressure he’s under now. Volumes of paperwork alone would depress an Olympic diver. Skill of skills to stop a post-mortem too. If it gets out he’ll lose his bonus or even worse: there’d be a sticky public enquiry. He leaves her to the front door by A&E, kisses the sacred space between her cheek and chin and watches her disappear into a pack of parked cars. She understands now how exhausted he is. She may have made another dumb mistake thinking otherwise. The sun is back out from her skirt shadows. He pops that awkward small bone in his neck before strolling back through the double doors towards the waiting mob.

  The Glens of Antrim

  He gets in touch with the moniker ‘Ivan Campbell’ and says it’s an old email account he only uses to send hate mail to local politicians. Says something along the lines of you were never just a hole to me and that email from Marcus back in the day was indefensible. Nobody has ever kissed me the way you did in that old house in Belfast … sorry I hurt you, we were all fucked up beyond recognition. I ping one back with the subject line ‘Coolio Babycakes’ explaining that I’m living with the other guy in Dublin now, and he’d have to ask permission! Finally I crack a joke about how natural it feels driving a scooter gripping both handlebars. Why do people spin the breeze holding only one? Oh you were so good at that, he types back, the very best. I can’t help but smile. Back to the salt mines for us so, I tell him.

  From: Ivan Campbell <666ni@yahoo.co.uk>

  Sent: 06 June 2016 16:39

  To: Rosie Dew

  Subject: Re: Those salt mines

  Yes, we’re all dark and intense up here. A mixture of miserable winters and a terrible history. Like Russia only with Orangemen. Truth is my life is suburban and fine. I do DIY, work on cars and boats … really I should go and live in Arkansas. Kids are well and my twin daughters are now sixteen, excelling at school being regularly first, second or third in a year group of almost two hundred girls. I am justifiably proud of them. The wee man, now seven, is going to be an actor. He’s naturally dramatic; loves reading and goes to drama class as well as judo. Maybe he’ll be the next Bruce Lee or Steven Seagal. I have great sex with my wife from time to time. We found the key to it, but it’s infrequent, which is a pity. I gave up swinging the same time as I gave up cigarettes, a true test of will. Still think of women a lot but haven’t sucked anyone’s cock s
ince way before the last time I screwed you, however long ago that was. Although I remember it was straight after you’d got out of the bath, you came down and lay in front of the open fire in the living room. You were, unusually, stark naked and your skin was still damp and warm. That was incredibly sexy. Who was the ‘mad bint’ you talk of, what was her name? I’m sure her kids were okay for food. Those little loyalist tykes are on fish suppers straight off the breast.

  An estate agent is what he was supposed to be when he swanned up in the slick navy Audi in his pinstripe suit. In turn I would play the bored solicitor’s wife on the hunt for a country pile. ‘Wear a tight Lycra top with your tits hanging out. Purple lipstick, black trousers, heels, a smart jacket. I want food or dirt in the cleavage. You’re unintentionally slovenly and that’ll be dealt with later when you’re tied. There’s a postcard of a naked woman on the dashboard. She’s leaning on a chair, pointing into the distance. There’s a pillbox hat on her head and a small snake wrapped around one ankle. Study her as we drive off but don’t mention her. Don’t look at me either until I pull up at a chosen location. Only speak when you’re spoken to. If you laugh I’ll put you out of the car. Are we clear?’