‘You’ve another thirty years in you,’ I say, staunchly. Because he might have. He’s only seventy-two and people are living to be ancient. But not necessarily people like my parents.
From the age of sixteen Dad did a physical job, loading and unloading crates, in Ferrytown docks. That wrecks a person, much more than sitting at a desk does. He was twenty-two the first time a disc slipped in his back. He spent a long time – I don’t know, maybe eight weeks – immobile in his bed, on strong painkillers. Then he returned to work and eventually banjaxed himself again. He got injured countless times – it seemed to be a feature of my childhood that Dad was ‘sick again’, something that rolled around as regularly as Hallowe’en and Easter – but he was a fighter and he kept on working until he couldn’t any longer. At the age of fifty-four, they’d broken him beyond repair and that was the end of his working life. And his money-earning life.
These days, the docks have machines to do the unloading, which would have saved Dad’s back but would probably have meant he didn’t have a job at all.
‘Please, Dad, do it for me. I’m your favourite child.’
‘I’ve only got the two. C’mere …’ He indicates the book on his lap. ‘Nabokov. The Original of Laura, it’s called. I’ll give it to you when I’m finished.’
‘Stop trying to change the subject.’ And please don’t make me read it.
It’s a curse being Dad’s ‘clever’ child. He reads books the way other people take cold showers – they’re good for you, but you’re not expected to enjoy them. And he’s passed that way of thinking on to me: if I have fun with a book, I feel I’ve wasted my time.
Dad’s as thick as thieves with Joan, a woman who works in the local library and who seems to have adopted Dad as her project – no author is too obscure, no text too unreadable.
‘It’s his final novel,’ Dad says. ‘He told his wife to burn it but she didn’t. Think of what a loss to literature that would have been. Mind you, he’s a right dirty article …’
‘Let’s go on the stairlift.’ I’m keen to stop talking about Nabokov.
Slowly Dad gets to his feet. He’s a small man, short and sinewy. I offer him my arm and he slaps it away.
Out in the hall, Karen has returned to ground level and I study her clothes and hair with interest – in our unadorned states we look very similar so if I copy what she does, I can’t go wrong. She seems to be managing this warm-weather-transition thing with ease. Black skinny jeans with zips at the ankle, sky-high wedges and a pale grey T-shirt in some funny shrunken fabric. The whole effect looks like it cost a fortune but it probably didn’t because Karen is very clever that way, very good with money. Her nails are perfect nude ovals, her eyes are blue and framed with lush lashes and her blonde hair – which in its product-free condition is as wild and curly as mine – has been captured and tamed into a sleek bun. She looks glossy but casual, relaxed but elegant. This is the way I must go.
I grab pretty little Mathilde. ‘C’mere till I squeezy you!’ I say.
But she struggles and says, in high alarm, ‘Mummy!’
She’s a drip, that child. Five-year-old Clark is better. I’d say he probably has ADHD but at least he’s a bit of fun.
‘Stella!’ Karen plants a kiss on each of my cheeks. It’s an automatic thing with her. Then she remembers that it’s only me. ‘Sorry!’
Dad actually smiles. He’s amused by Karen’s aspirational ways and – though he wouldn’t admit it – a little bit proud of them. I used to be the success story of this family, but in recent months I’ve been stripped of my rank and the position has passed to my younger sister.
Karen is a ‘business woman’ – she owns a beauty salon – and she looks every inch of it. She’s married to Enda, a quiet handsome man from a monied Tipperary family, who’s a superintendent in the Gardai.
Poor Enda. When he started dating Karen, she was so brisk and sassy and pulled-together that he mistook her for middle-class. Then, when he’d fallen in love with her and it was too late to back out, he was introduced to her family and discovered that she was an entirely different beast: working-class-made-good.
I’ll never forget that day. Poor polite Enda, sitting in my parents’ teeny-tiny front room, trying to balance a cup of tea in his giant lap and wondering if he’d ever arrested Dad.
Twelve years later we still laugh about it. Well, Karen and I do. Enda still doesn’t find it funny.
‘Out of me road, Parvenue,’ Dad says to Karen.
‘Why do you call her “Parvenue”?’ Clark asks. He asks every time but doesn’t seem able to retain information.
‘A Parvenue,’ says Dad, ‘and I’m quoting from a book, is “A person from a humble background who has rapidly gained wealth or an influential social position; a nouveau riche; an upstart, a social climber.”’
‘Shut it!’ Mum says, shrill as anything. ‘She might be a Parvenue but she’s the only one in this family with a job at the moment! Now get in that stairlift!’
I take a quick look at Karen, just to check that the Parvenue thing hasn’t upset her, but not at all. She’s remarkable.
She helps Dad into the seat. ‘Get in, you old snob.’
‘How can I be a snob?’ he splutters. ‘I’m part of the under-class.’
‘You’re a reverse snob. A well-balanced working-class man: you’ve a chip on both shoulders.’ Then, with a flourish, she lifts the lever and Dad rises up the stairs.
We all clap and shout, ‘Woohoo!’ and I pretend I don’t feel sad.
Overcome with the excitement, Clark decides to take all his clothes off and dance, naked, in the street.
Dad returns to his customary position in his armchair, studiously proceeding with his book, and Mum, Karen and I sit in the kitchen and drink tea. Mathilde snuggles on Karen’s lap.
‘Have a fairy cake.’ Mum throws a sixteen-pack, cellophane-wrapped slab of buns onto the table. I don’t need to look at the ingredients to discover that there’s nothing that sounds like food and that the eat-by date is next January.
‘I can’t believe you eat this shit,’ Karen says.
‘Well, I do.’
‘Five minutes’ walk away, in the middle of Ferrytown, the Saturday Farmers’ Market is selling fresh, handmade cupcakes.’
‘It’s far from fresh, handmade things you were reared.’
‘Grand.’ Karen is too canny to waste her energy getting into an argument. But she’s going to leave soon.
‘Have a fairy cake.’ Mum slides the package at Karen.
‘Why don’t you have a fairy cake?’ Karen replies and shoves the package back.
The fairy cakes have suddenly become a battleground. To diffuse the tension, I say, ‘I’ll have a fairy cake.’
I eat five of them. But I don’t enjoy them. And that’s the main thing.
‘To be able to scratch the sole of my foot using the big toe of the other foot is nothing short of a miracle.’
Extract from One Blink at a Time
My left hip felt like it was on fire. I could see the clock at the nurses’ station – that was one of the perks of being on my left side; when I was on my right side I was just staring at a wall – and it was another twenty-four minutes before someone came to turn me. They rotated me every three hours, so that I wouldn’t get bedsores. But the last hour before ‘the turn’ had started to become uncomfortable, then painful, then very painful.
The only way to endure it was to reduce time to bouts of seven seconds. I don’t know why I picked seven – perhaps because it was an odd number and it didn’t divide into ten or sixty, so it kept things interesting. Sometimes four or five minutes could pass without me noticing and then I got a lovely surprise.
I’d been in ICU for twenty-three days. Twenty-three days since my body had packed up on me and the only muscles that worked were the ones in my eyes and eyelids. The shock had been – was – indescribable.
That first night in hospital, Ryan was sent home by a nurse. ‘Keep your phone
by your bed,’ she told him.
‘I’m not leaving here,’ he said.
‘If she deteriorates further, we’ll ring you to come in. You’d better bring the kids too, and her parents. What religion is Stella?’
‘… None.’
‘You must say something.’
‘Catholic, I suppose. She went to a Catholic school.’
‘Okay. We’ll organize a priest if one is needed. Go on now. You can’t stay. This is the ICU. Go home, get some sleep, keep your phone on.’
Eventually, looking like a whipped puppy, he went and I was left alone and I plunged into a surreal horror world where I lived a thousand lifetimes. I was in the grip of the worst fear I’ve ever known: there was a very real chance I was going to die. I could sense it in the atmosphere around my bed. No one knew what was wrong with me, but it was obvious that all the systems in my body were shutting down. My lungs had given up. What if my liver failed? What if … horrifying thought … what if my heart stopped?
I concentrated all my efforts on it and urged it to keep beating. Come on, come on, how hard can it be?
It had to keep beating because, if it didn’t, who would take care of Betsy and Jeffrey? And if it didn’t, what would happen to me? Where was I going? Suddenly I was staring into the abyss, facing the likelihood that this was where my life ended.
I’d never been religious, I’d never thought about an afterlife, one way or the other. But now that there was a good chance I was on my way there, I discovered, a bit late in the day, that I really was interested.
I should have done self-development courses, I berated myself. I should have been kinder to people. I mean, I’d tried my best but I should have done more. I should have gone to Mass and all that holy stuff.
What if the nuns at school were right and there really was a hell? As I added up my sins – sex before marriage, coveting my next-door neighbour’s holidays – I realized I was a goner. I was going to meet my maker and then I was going to be cast into the outer darkness.
If I could have whimpered with terror, I would have. I wanted to sob with fear. I desperately wanted a second chance, to go back and fix things.
Please God, I begged, please don’t let me die. Save me and I’ll be a better mother, a better wife and a better person.
From listening to the nurses coming and going at my bedside, I gathered that my heart rate was dangerously fast. My fear was making that happen. It was good that my heart was still beating but not so good if I went into cardiac arrest. A decision was made to give me a sedative, but instead of relaxing me it just slowed my thinking down so that I could see my predicament more clearly.
Over and over again, I thought, This can’t be happening.
The fear alternated with helpless anger: I was outraged by my incapacity. I was so used to doing anything I wanted that I never even thought about it – I could pick up a magazine, I could shift my hair out of my eyes, I could cough. Suddenly I understood that to be able to scratch the sole of my foot using the big toe of the other foot was nothing short of a miracle.
My head kept sending orders to my body – Move, for the love of God, move! – but it lay like a plank. It was defiant and disrespectful and … yes … cheeky. I raged and foamed and flailed, but without moving a muscle.
I was afraid to go to sleep in case I died. The lights around me were never switched off and I watched the clock tick away the seconds all through the night. Finally it was morning and I was taken downstairs for a lumbar puncture, then I wished I could die – even now the memory of the pain makes me feel faint.
But, very quickly, it produced a diagnosis: I had something called Guillain-Barré Syndrome, an astonishingly rare auto-immune disorder, which attacks the peripheral nervous system, stripping the myelin sheaths from the nerves. None of the doctors had ever encountered a case of it before. ‘You’ve a higher chance of winning the lottery than contracting this yoke,’ my consultant, a plump, dapper, silver-haired man called Dr Montgomery chortled. ‘How did you manage it!’
No one could say what the trigger had been, but it sometimes ‘manifested’ (medical speak) after a bout of food poisoning. ‘She was in a car crash about five months ago,’ I heard Ryan telling him. ‘Would that have caused it?’
No, he didn’t think so.
My prognosis was cautiously optimistic: GBS was rarely fatal. If I didn’t get an infection – which I probably would, apparently everyone in hospital got infections; by the sounds of things you had a better chance of living a healthy life drinking seven litres of unfiltered Ganges water every day – I’d eventually recover and be able to move again, to speak and to breathe without a ventilator.
So at least I probably wasn’t going to die.
But no one could tell me when I’d get well. Until these myelin sheaths – whatever they were – grew back I faced a lengthy spell, paralysed and mute, in the intensive care unit.
‘For the time being, the name of the game is keeping her alive,’ Dr Montgomery told Ryan. ‘Isn’t that right, girls?’ he yelled to the nurses, with – in my opinion – rather inappropriate merriment. ‘Keep her going there, Patsy!
‘And come here to me, you!’ He grabbed Ryan by the arm. ‘Don’t you be rushing home and Googling things. They write all kinds of codswallop on that Internet and scare the drawers off of people and then you’d be coming in here boohoohooing and saying your wife is going to die and be paralysed for ever. I’ve been a senior consultant in this hospital for fifteen years. I know more than any Internet and I’m telling you she’ll be grand. Eventually.’
‘Are there no drugs to speed up her recovery?’ Ryan asked.
‘No,’ Dr Montgomery said, almost cheerily. ‘None.’
‘Could you run tests to get some idea of how bad she is … how long before she’ll be well?’
‘Hasn’t the poor woman just had a lumbar puncture?’ He glanced over at me. ‘That was no day at the races, was it?’ He turned his attention back to Ryan. ‘You have to wait this thing out. There’s nothing else you can do. Cultivate patience, Mr Sweeney. Let patience be your watchword. Maybe you could take up fly-fishing?’
Later that day, when they’d finished school, Ryan brought Betsy and Jeffrey to see me. I watched their faces as they noticed all the tubes snaking in and out of me. Betsy’s big blue eyes looked terrified but Jeffrey, being a fourteen-year-old boy, with an interest in all things ghoulish, seemed fascinated.
‘I brought you some magazines,’ Betsy said.
But I couldn’t hold them. I was desperate for a distraction, but unless someone read to me, I couldn’t have it.
Ryan angled my head on my pillow so that I could look at him. ‘So how are you feeling?’
I stared at him. Paralysed, that’s how I’m feeling. And unable to speak, that’s how I’m feeling.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how …’
‘Do that thing,’ Jeffrey said. ‘I saw it on TV. Blink your right eye for yes, or your left eye for no.’
‘We’re not in the fecking Boy Scouts!’ Ryan said.
‘Do you think it’s a good idea, Mom?’ Jeffrey shoved his face close to mine.
Well, it was the only one we had. I blinked my right eye.
‘Score!’ Jeffrey exclaimed. ‘It works. Ask her something!’
Faintly Ryan said, ‘I can’t believe we’re doing this. Okay. Stella, are you in pain?’
I blinked my left eye.
‘No? That’s good so. Are you hungry?’
I blinked my left eye again.
‘No. Good …’
Ask me if I’m scared. But he didn’t because he knew I was and so was he.
Already bored, Jeffrey turned his attention to his phone. Immediately there came the sound of running footsteps. It was a nurse with a face like thunder. ‘Turn that thing off!’ she ordered. ‘Mobiles phones are not allowed in ICU.’
‘What?’ Jeffrey asked. ‘Ever?’
‘Never.’
Jeffrey looked at me with what w
as, for the first time, compassion. ‘No phone. Wow … Where’s your TV? Hey,’ he called in the direction of the nurses’ station. ‘Where’s my mom’s TV?’
‘Would you shush?’ Ryan said.
The angry nurse was back. ‘There’s no TV. This is an intensive care unit, not a hotel. And keep the noise down; there are very sick people here.’
‘Calm down, dear.’
‘Jeffrey!’ Ryan hissed. To the nurse, he said, ‘I’m sorry. He’s sorry. We’re all just … upset.’
‘Quiet,’ Jeffrey said. ‘I’m thinking.’ He seemed to be wrestling with some terrible choice. ‘Okay.’ He reached a decision. ‘I’ll give you the lend of my iPod. Just for this evening –’
‘No iPods!’ the nurse shouted from a distance.
‘But what are you going to do?’ Jeffrey was deeply concerned.
Betsy, who hadn’t uttered a word since she arrived, cleared her throat. ‘Mom, I think … I’d like to pray with you.’
What the hell?!
My own plight was instantly forgotten and I flashed my eyes at Ryan. For a while now we’d suspected that Betsy had been dabbling in Christianity, the way many parents fear their teenagers getting into drugs. There was some sort of holy youth club that trawled her school for membership. They preyed on the vulnerability of children who’d been brought up by agnostics and it looked like Betsy might well have fallen into their clutches.
It was okay for me to pray in my own head, but praying – out loud! – with Betsy, like we were middle-Americans, was all wrong. I blinked my left eye – no, no, no – but Betsy took my useless hands and bowed her head. ‘Dear Lord, look down on this poor miserable sinner, my mom, and forgive her for all the bad things she’s done. She’s not an evil person, just weak, and pretends she does Zumba when she never goes to class and can be quite bitchy especially when she’s with Auntie Karen and Auntie Zoe, who I know isn’t my real auntie, just my mom’s best friend and they’re on the red wine –’
‘Betsy, stop!’ Ryan said.
Suddenly an alarm started to sound, urgent pulses of noise. It seemed to be coming from about four cubicles away and it triggered the nurses into a frenzy of activity. One of them rushed into my cubicle and said to Ryan, ‘You all have to leave.’ But she hurried off to the emergency and my visitors, keen not to miss the show, stayed.