Notes from a Coma (13 page)

A couple of weeks after that incident in the church we had our first real argument, our first lovers’ tiff. The weather had taken up and I suggested we go away together for a few days, just a week or so on our own to get some sun on our pale faces: the kind of thing lovers do, I didn’t think it was too much to ask. Of course looking back now what I was really trying to do was move our relationship on to another level. We’d been a couple about three years by then but we’d never been away together, never spent any time alone together, so one week in August seemed to be just the thing. JJ had holidays coming and I had some money put by; I couldn’t see a problem.

But JJ wouldn’t hear of it. He wasn’t being awkward or anything but the idea just struck a fear into him I had never seen before. He put his foot down, a blank refusal; it was as if I’d asked him to up sticks and move away altogether. That shocked me because it was the first time he’d ever refused me anything. As a rule he was only too happy to do anything to please me, anything to put a smile on my face as he put it himself. It was just the way he was. All the care and attention he’d lavished on me at the beginning of our relationship hadn’t tapered off in the least. He’d kept it up effortlessly. Three years had shown me that it was more than
the rush of attention you’d normally expect at the beginning of a relationship. All the presents and gestures, the courtesy and attention—he was a real romantic.

But this idea of going away together was different. He wouldn’t even discuss it.

“No, Sarah, let’s not get into this. I don’t want to go anywhere.”

“It would only be for a few days, JJ, some sun and sand, waking up together. Just some time to ourselves.”

“You’ve been planning this?”

“Don’t be paranoid; it’s a suggestion not a plot. We could go anywhere.”

“I’m not going anywhere. You go, get someone else to go with you.”

“I don’t want to go with someone else. This is about you and me. Let’s get a map and stick a pin in it, do something reckless. We have the time and the money, a few days away—we could forget about things for a while.”

“No.”

“What are you afraid of? This is what lovers do. It would be such fun.”

“I’m not afraid of anything, go yourself, I don’t want to hear anything more about it.”

And that was the end of that discussion.

So my idea came to nothing. I was so angry I threw a huff and went away with a friend—ten days driving around France. It was good fun but towards the end I was glad to be getting back. By then of course I’d cooled down and forgiven him. All I wanted was to see him and show off my
new tan. But when I got back I found that everything had gone to hell.

First thing in the door Mam tells me he’s in hospital.

“I tried to contact you but your mobile was out.”

“When did he go in?”

“Five days ago, Thursday afternoon.”

“An accident? What happened?”

Mam blanched and looked down at the ground.

“No, Sarah … he’s in St Theresa’s.”

“He’s not a well man, Sarah,” Anthony said when I drove over to the house. “He’s not a well man at all.”

Whatever about JJ, Anthony looked ghastly. If I hadn’t known I might have thought he was the one who was sick. He stood there in the middle of the kitchen, no shave and the hair standing out on the side of his head as if the fright of the last few days was still thrilling through his system. My own sudden appearance had upset him also. He kept tugging at the cuff of his shirt and looking around the kitchen as if he’d misplaced something. The curtains hadn’t been drawn; the kitchen was filled with this orange murky light. A mess of stale dinner things lay on the table and the chairs were covered with clothes and papers; in just five days the bachelor had broken out in Anthony.

“The trouble with that fella, Sarah, is that he’s too smart for his own good. Too smart entirely.”

“I’m going over now, Anthony. Can I bring him anything?”

JJ’s bedroom was where he spent most of his time reading and listening to music. Unlike the kitchen it was perfectly tidy: his books and CDs on one wall and his bed against
another, the wardrobe built into the wall opposite. Whenever I went into it I always had the feeling I was entering a monk’s cell. No posters or pictures or anything on the walls, just the bare necessities. This was the kind of impression JJ strove towards. He had this idea that if your bedroom was tidy then your life was tidy also. That was why he decluttered every couple of months or so, sorted out all his old clothes and letters and anything he didn’t need. He’d gather the whole lot up in a black bag and light a fire against the gable of the shed and stand over it till it burned away. It always made him feel better he said, gave him the impression of moving on, turning over a new leaf.

Anthony put a few things into a bag, underwear and T-shirts and so on. I pushed in his Walkman and a handful of CDs. Anthony handed me the bag.

“When you see him, Sarah, don’t be too shocked. He’s not a well man.”

He was in St Anthony’s ward, sharing a room with five other patients. An old man with a wide grin on his face sat propped up on a pillow by the window. Opposite him a young man was turned face to the wall clutching a small radio to his ear. JJ was sitting on the side of his bed in his own clothes—jeans and T-shirt and a pair of toeless sandals. They were his clothes all right but they didn’t seem to fit. Hanging limply, drooping and creased, they looked as if they’d died the moment he’d pulled them on. No light in his eyes or colour in his face and his hair swept over to one side of his head, like a little boy going
up to his first Holy Communion. This more than anything upset me. He looked so lost in himself; there in body but his mind a million miles away.
^*
I sat down beside him and took his hand.

“How do you feel?” I seemed to be asking that a lot lately.

“How do I look? Tell me how I look?”

“You look lost, pale and lost.”

“That bad?”

“No, you’re awake, that’s a good thing.”

He was looking at me intently, scanning my whole face. A gust of breath shuddered through him. He placed his hands on his knees to steady himself.

“Sarah,” he blurted. “That’s it … Sarah.” Tears shone in his eyes. “Christ, it was touch and go there for a moment, I was really scrabbling. What’s happened, Sarah …? Tell me what’s happened.”

“Can you not remember anything?”

“This is my first day awake. Everything’s a blank. Doctors won’t tell me anything. Tell me.” He squeezed my hand. “Please.”

“Maybe we should leave this to the doctors.”

“No, Sarah … Please.”

Of course he had to know. This was JJ, what else did I
expect? After a moment thinking about it I felt it would be better coming from me than someone else.

“You’d gone to work—or so Anthony thought. But when he got home that evening he saw your boots and jacket in the hall so he knew you were still in the house. When there was no sign of you for the dinner he went to your room and found you sitting on the side of the bed, naked and blue with the cold. Your whole face had collapsed in on itself he said, this grey colour, it looked like porridge. You didn’t speak or move or recognise him and you were as stiff as a board—like a man who’d spent the whole day doing press-ups he said. He pushed you back on the bed and threw a blanket over you and then called the doctor. The doctor spent five minutes with you and then told Anthony he was getting an ambulance to take you here. A nervous breakdown, he said. Anthony sat with you till the ambulance came but he couldn’t get a word out of you. When they brought you over here they sedated you and gave you a muscle relaxant. Anthony came to see you last night but you were asleep. He’s been here every day since you were brought in.”

“Anthony who?”

My heart lurched. I tried to wipe any expression from my face.

“Anthony’s your dad; you’ll see him later this evening. What’s the last thing you remember?”

A long moment passed.

“The last thing before you came here?”

He narrowed his eyes and shook his head gently as if clearing his thoughts.

“I was at mass, I got sick. When did that happen?”

“Over three weeks ago.”

“What happened in between?”

“You went to work as you always do. We were supposed to go on holidays but we had a fight and I went on my own. I was gone ten days.”

“Do we fight often?”

“No, not often. You’re awkward but not one for fighting as such.”

“I have this feeling … so feeble, like I’m strung out all over the place. Why do I feel that?”

“You need rest, JJ, you need to build yourself up.”

I’ve never seen anyone so lost to himself, so distanced from his own strengths and energies. It wasn’t so much that
he was disoriented or lost to the world, it was more like he’d drained away into some hole within himself and had left only this shell behind him. There beside me within arm’s reach, but the best part of him a million miles away. Was he seeing me at the same distance? I wondered. Was I as far away from him as he was from me?

“You’re going to get a lot of rest and sleep, JJ. You need it. You’ve been through a lot this last year.”

He drew my hand to his cheek. I wondered who’d shaved him.

“I need help, Sarah, I don’t know what’s happening to me. I sleep from one end of the day to the other, but waking or sleeping I can’t suffer myself. That’s all I know, I can’t suffer myself.”

We talked some more and I left him after an hour, promising to return the following day. To tell the truth I was glad to get out of the ward—the smell, those squeaky floors. At the nurses’ station I caught up with the specialist in charge and after a few minutes trying to get through to him that yes, I was his girlfriend, he told me that JJ had suffered a mental breakdown, a stress-related check of his psyche. The serious aspect of it was that part of his memory was occluded—his declarative memory, the long-term memory which deals with learned facts and narrative.

“It’s not unusual,” the specialist said breezily, “this retrograde amnesia. In this kind of breakdown there is generally some degree of memory loss and disorientation. But it’s not a calamity. It will return. The good news is that his procedural memory is intact—he showered and shaved himself this morning. That is a good sign. He will need rest
and sleep for a few days and then we can go about rebuilding him. Don’t look so worried. Whatever’s wrong with him he’s in the best place for it.”

Outside, a big yellow sun hung in the sky. Leafy trees cast shadows over the car park. It was the type of summer’s evening you made plans for, swims and walks and quiet drinks. But there I was standing in the car park of a mental hospital with a lump in my throat and my boyfriend inside bludgeoned with sedatives. And all I could think about was what that doctor had said about him being in the best place. The thing was that the best place for him was worse than anything I could ever have imagined.

Of course it’s easy with hindsight to say we should have read the signs, the writing on the wall as he’d have put it himself. But if the writing on the wall said something about a mental breakdown before the age of twenty then it took keener eyes than mine to read it.

I used to go over to him in the afternoon—I had it arranged with Sarah that she would do the evening shift. Those first few days visiting him were penance, not just for me but for him also. He spent most of his time sleeping and during those times he was awake he could remember nothing; his memory was gone. His doctor explained to me that this was not unusual in breakdowns of this type. There were therapies and exercises and medication and with time and rest he could hope to make a full recovery. It was a relief to hear that but I have to say I didn’t have much hope for him during those first few days. Seeing him in that ward, so clueless and bewildered, it was like meeting him again for the first time as an infant—an infant dropped into a twenty-year-old body. Back again in his own childhood but with no idea that it was his. Bit by bit though he did come back to himself and one afternoon when I went over he was pulling on his shirt getting ready to walk out for cigarettes.

“Let’s walk together,” he said. “A walk would be good.”

The shop was two hundred yards away, just beyond the roundabout. JJ looked pale in the sunlight, paler behind a pair of black shades. But I thought by the way he walked that something of his old self was returning to him. It was good to be out in the air as well, anything was better than wandering through those corridors. As we walked I was struck by the fact that this was the first time in years we had walked anywhere together. It’s the truth—once father and son reach a certain age they literally go their separate ways.