Lifesaving for Beginners (7 page)

We have decanted from the couch to the floor and are lying on cushions, halfway down another bottle, and we’re watching
Judge Judy
on the telly and roaring laughing at a woman who’s suing her ex-boyfriend for stealing her hair straighteners and the pair of FitFlops that, she said, were the main cause of the tautness of her calf muscles.

That’s when Thomas arrives.

I realise he’s in the apartment only when he’s at the door of the sitting room.
He’s in his farm gear.
A woolly jumper with a hole in the elbow.
The trousers of an old suit, tucked into mud-spattered wellington boots.
The wellingtons are the ones that I bought him.
As a joke.
They’re bright pink with yellow buttercups here and there.
I never thought he’d actually go ahead and wear them.

Because it’s a bit of an awkward situation, I start to laugh.
It’s not that I find anything funny, exactly.
It’s just .
.
.
I don’t know.

Thomas doesn’t laugh.
In fact, I get the impression he’s pretty ticked off.
The wine has anaesthetised me, but, still, that’s the impression I’m getting.

He says, ‘I thought you were working.’

I say, ‘I thought
you
were working.’

‘I was.
But I got worried about you.
When you didn’t phone.
And I couldn’t get through to your mobile or landline.
And you didn’t respond to any of my emails.’

I look at Nicolas and I giggle and I say, ‘I’m fine.
There’s no need to worry.
I’m having a lovely time, so I am.’

For a moment, nobody says anything and it gets pretty quiet in the apartment, and I’d say, if I were sober, it’d be a damned awkward type of silence.

Then Thomas says, ‘I’m going to go.’

‘But you just got here,’ I laugh after I say that, as if I happen to think that’s pretty funny.

Thomas doesn’t think it’s funny because he just looks at me like he has no idea who I am.
Then he looks at Nicolas, who stands up and holds out his hands as if he’s expecting Thomas to slap cuffs on him.
Nicolas opens his mouth as if he’s going to recite a poem and that’s when Thomas says, ‘Goodbye,’ in a very serious, final sort of a voice and, before I can think of anything funny to add to that, he’s gone.
Just like that.

Gone.

It’s as if he was never here.

I look at Nicolas and snigger, the way drunk people do when they can’t think of anything to say.

Nicolas says, ‘I should split.’

Split.
The state of him.

He doesn’t try to kiss me or anything.
I think he may have kissed me at one stage during the afternoon.
I remember thinking: Christ, that’s a long tongue.
But I have no recollection of an actual kiss.

It doesn’t matter now.

It doesn’t matter anymore.

Three months later .
.
.

I check the calendar.
It’s the sixteenth of October, which means it’s ten weeks exactly till my tenth birthday, which is also Christmas Day and, who knows, it might even end up being the new baby’s birthday, if it comes three days late.

That’s a lot of things for one day.

I wasn’t supposed to come until the twenty-fifth of January.
Mam says I was the best Christmas present she ever got.
I got a dog for Christmas when I was a kid.
I taught him to jump through Faith’s hula hoop.
His name was Setanta, after Fionn MacCumhaill’s dog.
He died about six months after Dad went to Scotland.
The vet said it was something to do with his kidneys but I think Setanta’s heart was sort of broken, because Dad was the one who took him for walks and fed him and let him sit on his lap, even though Setanta was a really big dog who moulted a lot and was a bit smelly, to be honest.
For ages after Dad left, Setanta sat in the porch every day at half six, waiting for him to come home.

I was mad about Fionn MacCumhaill and the Fianna stories when I was a kid.
The Fianna were this cool band of Irish warriors and Fionn was the leader.
They were always fighting with other gangs but the Fianna mostly won.
They were pretty legend.
Mam read the stories to me.
Sometimes Faith did, if Mam had to work late at the Funky Banana or go to her book club or something.
Faith was pretty good at reading them but she wasn’t as good as Mam at the voices.
And she kept stopping at the exciting bits to play her violin.
She said every story needs a soundtrack but I prefer just getting on with things.

My favourite story is the one with Fionn and the Scottish giant.
Mam took me to the Giant’s Causeway when I was a kid.
I saw the stepping stones the Scottish giant used to cross the sea to Ireland.
I held Mam’s hand when I saw them but I wasn’t scared.
Sometimes adults make up stories and they’re not true.
Like Santa.
He’s not true.
Sully told me and Damo.
Sully is Damo’s big brother.
He’s in the army and he tells me and Damo loads of stuff.

Sully isn’t his real name.
His real name is Jacob, I think, but everyone calls him Sully, on account of his surname which happens to be Sullivan.

It’s Sunday, which means we have to go to the graveyard.
Faith likes going there on Sundays.
I don’t know why.
I don’t like going.
It’s always really cold there, even if it’s warm everywhere else.
Faith says, ‘Wear an extra jumper.’
She’s in the attic, looking for Mam’s rosary beads.
She says she wants to put them on the grave.
Mam got the rosary beads from her grandmother, who lived to be a hundred and one.
I swear to God.
She got a hundred pounds from the President of Ireland because she was so old.

I don’t think the beads are in the attic but Faith says she’s looked everywhere else.

I asked Mam if Santa would still come to you if you didn’t believe in him.
She said she thought he might.
She said even if you didn’t believe in him, he’d still believe in you.
Adults say weird things.

Last year, Dad came to the house for a couple of hours on Christmas Day but I reckon he won’t be able to make it this year, because of the baby.
Dad says he has to be there for that.
I will be a half-brother.
A half-brother means that Celia is not my mam.

Faith says that Mam can hear me and see me and when the sun shines, that’s Mam, smiling.
Faith is my sister but she’s an adult.
That’s because she was born a long time ago.

There’s a bit of cobweb in Faith’s hair when she climbs down from the attic.
She’s got papers in her hand.
I ask her if she found the rosary beads but she shakes her head and says, ‘Go and tidy your room or something.’
She doesn’t even look inside my room to see if it’s messy.

I pick up the clothes on my bedroom floor and put them all in the linen basket.
Then I go and call for Damo.

He says, ‘Look at this,’ when he opens his front door.
He sticks his tongue out and pushes the tip of it into his nose.
He can make his eyeballs shoot up inside his head too.

I wish it were Wednesday.
I’d be going to lifesaving class after school, if it were Wednesday.
I might be getting my brown badge next week, if I know all the answers.

I check the calendar.
It’s 16 October.
Four months.
Four months since the accident.
Four and a half, I suppose.
And only three months since Thomas left.
It seems a lot longer than that.

Not seeing Thomas is like giving up cigarettes.
I’ve never given up cigarettes but I imagine it would feel like this.
There are triggers.
Triggers that make me think about Thomas, and maybe even wish he was here.
Like I’d wish for a cigarette if I hadn’t had one for an hour or so.

Stress.
That’s a trigger.
When I feel stressed, I think about Thomas.
That’s probably why I’ve been thinking about him so much lately.

Or, oddly, when I’m happy.
When something makes me smile.
Or even laugh.
Something funny, I mean.
Or weird.
Or one of those strange road signs.
Like BEWARE – BLIND PEDESTRIANS.
Something that makes me feel sure that when I look at Thomas, he will be smiling too.

Four months.

That’s all it takes.

Four months for everything to fall apart.

I’ll be forty soon.
January.
That’s when.
And Christmas to get through before that.

I’m nearly forty and I should be dead.

I should have died in a pile-up.
The newsreader would have described me as a thirty-nine-year-old woman.
A thirty-nine-year-old woman was killed this afternoon in an accident on the M1.

A thirty-nine-year-old woman.
That would have got people’s attention.
Would have given them pause.
Might have prompted them to look up from their dinners, shake their heads, say something like ‘Tragic’, or ‘Such a waste’, or ‘You just never know, do you?
When your time is up?’

That didn’t happen.
Instead, I’m a nearly-forty-year-old woman who has been the victim, it seems, of a miracle.
That’s what everyone called it.
I’m supposed to be grateful, apparently.

Instead, I’m alone and I haven’t written one word in four months.

And I’m nearly forty.
It sits on my horizon, wobbling like one of those horrible jellies Mrs Higginbotham used to make for our birthday parties when we were between the ages of four and eight.
Nine, according to Mrs Higginbotham, was too old for jelly-on-a-plate.
Thank Christ.

I say, ‘I hate being nearly forty.’

Minnie says, ‘Consider the alternative.’

‘At least I’d make a nice corpse.’

‘A forty-year-old corpse.
You’d still be forty, dead or alive.’

‘Nearly forty,’ but Minnie’s not listening anymore.

I’m going to be forty.

Soon.

I suppose the other stuff is bad too.
The stuff about the writing and Thomas and the fact that I could have died.
Everyone said I could have died.
Thomas said it most of all.
He said it was a miracle I walked away with hardly a scratch.
I said there’s no such thing as miracles.
He said it didn’t matter if I believed it or not.

One bloody miracle and everything falls apart.

‘We want different things.’
That’s what Thomas said the day he came back for his stuff.
I suppose that’s true.
We were very different, me and Thomas.
I didn’t mind how different we were.
I even miss it, sometimes.
Like the other day, when I was doing my impersonation of the weather girl on the telly (I can do a near-perfect imitation of her accent, even though she’s from Longford, which is one of the trickier ones), I smiled at the place on the couch where Thomas used to sit.
As if he were still sitting there.
As if I thought he were still sitting there.

I get nervous when that happens, so I find something to do.
Like scrub the burned milk off the inside of the microwave.
Ed likes hot chocolate but he hates cleaning.
And I’m not betraying confidences by saying that.
It’s there for everyone to read on his Facebook page.

It’s four o’clock in the afternoon.
I hate afternoons.
Cigarettes don’t taste as good in the afternoons.
It’s too early for a drink but you’ve had too many teas and coffees and water would make you cry with the boredom of it.
Consider its properties: tasteless, odourless, colourless.

I told Brona about the writer’s block.
I was a bit excited about it, really.
I’d heard of it, of course.
There was a programme on the telly.
But I’d never had it before.

Brona said, ‘Oh that.
That happens to all writers.
It won’t last long.
You’ll be fine.’

I say, ‘No, it’s serious.
I mean, I’ve had a life-changing experience.’

‘A life-affirming experience.’

‘I could have died.’

‘But you didn’t,’ she reminds me.

I produce Thomas, the ace up my sleeve.

‘He left me, remember?
Right after the accident.
My ribs were shattered, remember?’

‘Fractured,’ she says, but in her gentle voice so I can’t take umbrage.
‘One rib, wasn’t it?
One rib had a hairline fracture.’

I say, ‘It was agony.’

Brona makes soothing noises down the line.

‘He left me.’
I say it again.
No matter how many times I say it I still can’t quite believe it.
I am in charge of leaving.
Her tone strains a little here.
She says, ‘Only because you didn’t want to marry him and bear his child.’
I can’t blame her, I suppose.
She’s been on a quest for ‘The One’ since the early nineties.
In her eyes, I’ve committed the ultimate betrayal.
I said no to a genuine offer of marriage and the chance of having my womb filled with the offspring of a man with no obvious physical defects (unless you count his feet, which differ in length by a monumental two shoe sizes), a grand head of hair, his own teeth and a job that doesn’t involve anything illegal (like drug-trafficking) or poncy (like interior design).

I phone Ed.

He says, ‘I can’t talk.
I’m working.’
He’s not fond of talking on the telephone.
Especially when he’s working.

‘I thought you wouldn’t be busy at this hour.
It’s in between lunch and dinner.’

‘Yes, Kat, but we have to clean up after lunch and get ready for the dinner crowd.
Chef is showing me how to make croque-monsieurs.’

‘They’re just ham and cheese toasties.
I showed you how to make them years ago.’

‘No, they’re not.
They’re fancier.’

I say, ‘Do you want to go to the movies?’

‘I can’t.
Chef is showing me how to make croque-monsieurs.’

I say, ‘I don’t mean right now.’
Although I would have gone right now if he had said yes.
‘I mean later on.
When you finish your shift.
Later.’

‘Are you coming too, Kat?’

‘Yes.’

‘OK.’
And even though this is a telephone conversation, I can feel him nodding and smiling and, in spite of everything – being nearly forty, Thomas, the bloody miracle, the pain of shattered ribs – OK, OK, one hairline-fractured rib – I smile back.

I say, ‘I haven’t seen you in ages.’
This is not true.
It just feels true.

He says, ‘I’m sorry, Kat,’ and the way he says it causes a swelling sensation inside my nose and eyes and throat.
I tighten my grip on the phone and swallow.

‘You have nothing to be sorry for, you big eejit,’ I tell him and I am relieved that my voice sounds like it always does: bored, disinterested, unemotional.

‘Will you pick me up?’
he asks.

‘I’ll pick you up at seven, OK?
We could go to the Leaning Tower of Pizza first.’

He sighs and says, ‘OK, Kat,’ and that’s when I feel a bit bad because there’s a chance I’ve been monopolising his time since the near-death-and-Thomas-desertion situations.
He hangs up before I can say, ‘Thank you, Ed.’

People say he is Down’s Syndrome.
That’s not true.
He is Edward Kavanagh.
Ed.
He is gentle and loving and funny and spontaneous.
He is moody and clumsy.
He is a great swimmer, an avid watcher of soaps, a teller of terrible jokes.
He loves going to the cinema and eating pizza.
He has Down’s Syndrome.
Down’s Syndrome is not what he is; it’s what he has.
There’s a difference.

Ed was born in the spring of 1977.
My mother never got over it.
I was five and had my heart set on a girl.
In a pink dress with blonde curly hair and a matching set of dimples.
Instead, I got Ed, who had no hair, one dimple and a hole in his heart.
In spite of these discrepancies, I loved Ed from the start and I was not a child given to gratuitous expressions of love.

Dad said he was ‘special’.
Mum called him ‘different’.
To me, he was just Ed.
My little brother.
It was only later, when he came home from school with his shirt torn and muck on the knees of his trousers or his lunchbox gone, I realised that the other children didn’t like these differences.
They didn’t want anyone to be special.

I don’t think Dad really noticed, bent as he was across his workbench in the lab where he worked all hours, examining intimate pieces of people he never met.
Mum was often away on book tours, and, when she wasn’t, she wrote in the attic room and we were not allowed to make any noise.
Mrs Higginbotham brought Ed for his check-ups and mended his shirts and washed the muck off the knees of his trousers and bought him new lunchboxes.
She told him not to worry.
Said it would make a man of him.
I didn’t think Ed was ready to be a man.

It is in the middle of the night that I can admit that perhaps it is Thomas, the absence of Thomas, that is the hardest thing.
I wake at four.
It’s always four.
If Thomas were where he is supposed to be, he would wake too and reach out one of his ridiculously long arms until his hand gets a grip on my shoulder, or my leg, or my elbow.
‘You OK, baby?’
he would say and I would let him get away with it.
There is something about four o’clock in the morning that lowers my resistance to affection.

‘You OK, baby?’

I’m not saying that I do anything as crass as move my hands along his side of his bed, now cold.
Or wrap myself in the shirt he left, like those women in the rom-coms Ed loves, with their noses buried in the soft fabric, looking tiny and vulnerable and ridiculous.

In fact, what I did with that shirt the other day was cut it up into about a hundred pieces, put it into a Jiffy bag and post it to him.
Registered post, just to be sure.
He called me when he got it.

He said, ‘Nice touch.’

I said, ‘I thought so.’

‘Should I expect more parcels of this nature?’

‘I shouldn’t think so,’ I said.
‘Although you left those cords  behind.
The yellow ones, remember?
They deserve a good hacking.’

He said, ‘They’re beige.’

‘Anyway, I can’t get the scissors through them.
The material is too thick.’

A pause.
And then, ‘How is your rib?’

‘It hurts,’ I said, even though it doesn’t.
Not anymore.