I was more like Robinson Crusoe, that first night, than like any Arctic explorer. A castaway, adrift in the dark of Copenhagen. And I was still like him, two and three days later, gathering supplies and utensils, still waiting for my suitcase to arrive from the airport.
The year in Copenhagen was full of adventure. I learned to speak Danish fluently. I wrote a good part of my thesis, I attended classes in the Folklore Institute, I made many friends. It was one of the best years of my life. But that is all another story.
Everything I reported back to Bo, in a regular correspondence, letters two or three times a week, back and forth. The correspondence was interrupted for a few months by the postmen’s strike in Ireland, during which contact was almost impossible. Bo still had no phone in his flat. I had access to the coin box in the hall in Albertslund. Once or twice Bo called, from a coin box or from his office. Someone would answer the phone, then come and knock on my door.
Oliver wrote a few times but the correspondence soon fizzled out. My heart was not in it and neither was his.
Finally, he wrote to protest about a short story I published. The story was fictional, but had been inspired by an episode, not a pleasant one, in our relationship. ‘Do not use me in your productions,’ Oliver wrote, furiously.
I was furious too. The characters in my story bore no resemblance to us. Only Oliver and I would have recognised that the episode was based on a real event. While I know very well that nobody appreciates finding themselves or their actions depicted in fiction, even if they are presented in a good light, this now seems to me a classic male attempt at censorship and control.
But what annoyed me most was the use of the word ‘productions’. Not story, work, fiction.
I never wrote to him again.
WEDNESDAY
DAY 11,997
Trying to escape
On Wednesday morning, I rang the hospital. Bo was all right, according to the nurse. I asked to speak to the consultant under whose care Bo had been placed. The telephonist said she would connect me. But the person I put through to was not the consultant but a member of his team. I told her I was interested in getting Bo transferred to a private room or to a private hospital. She was sympathetic and said she would see me when I came in, just to ask for her.
I set to work, my goal being to have Bo moved to a good hospital. That was my priority for Wednesday. I wanted to get him away from the antique-looking drip, from the crowded ward, and into a hospital where he would have comfort and dignity. I still didn’t realise that the main difference between the private hospital and this HSE institution was that the medical care in the former would be much superior; I still didn’t realise that this HSE hospital could lack more than stylishness and comfort. I was still in ordinary time, concerned with aesthetics, not that they are unimportant.
First I telephoned the clinic in which Bo had received his cancer treatment in Vincent’s Private. I spoke to one of the medical secretaries.
‘He needs a nephrologist,’ she said. ‘We don’t have many. We have one or two here.’
‘So what should I do?’
‘You need to ask one of them to take Bo as a patient.’
‘Thank you.’
I didn’t phone one of the nephrologists. Who were they? How could I telephone complete strangers and ask them to take Bo out of Loughlinstown and into St Vincent’s Private? Instead I decided to ring the urologist who used to treat Bo in the Private Outpatients’ Clinic attached to Loughlinstown and in the Blackrock Clinic. Surely this was a urological problem to some extent? Anyway he is someone we knew and liked. But when I phoned his clinic, an answering service told me he would be away until 24 November. This was Wednesday 6 November. (Gustav Adolf’s Dag – if we had gone to Uppsala, as usual, none of this would be happening.) I then telephoned the GP, who was not available but who would phone me back. Finally I tried to trace the consultant. I hoped he would have a private clinic somewhere. The website for Loughlinstown supplies no information about its consultants, about its staff. I was beginning to wonder if this consultant was actually in situ in the hospital. Perhaps he was represented by his team? I checked the lists of consultants in Blackrock, Vincent’s, and the Beacon. There was no reference on any of the lists to this particular consultant. I wondered if he actually existed.
Two hours on the net and phone got me precisely nowhere.
I went to the hospital.
The doctor that I had spoken to on the phone earlier saw me. She was very reassuring.
‘Bo is responding slowly to the hydration,’ she said. ‘A bit slower than we anticipated, but it will work in time.’
Wednesday lunchtime. It will work.
I pointed out that the drip was actually not functioning as we spoke (and I wondered if it had functioned at all, during the night, when I was not there. The bag of urine was half empty.).
‘I’ll put it in myself,’ she said.
She put it in deftly, more neatly than it had been inserted before, and I was impressed by her skill and kindness.
I pointed out that Bo’s stomach was swollen, but she touched it and seemed unconcerned.
She explained that there were no private rooms in Loughlinstown, and that patients couldn’t be transferred to another hospital just to get a private room.
I explained, tactfully, that we were very happy with everything – everyone was good and the care excellent (which was a barefaced lie, but I thought it diplomatic to be complimentary). But it was not the right environment for Bo. He needed quiet. And if he had to stay in for a while he would have a lot of visitors. There’s nowhere for visitors to be, in this ward.
‘Believe me, I know where you’re coming from,’ she said. ‘If it were my parent I’d put them in the car and drive them to the Blackrock Clinic or the Beacon, I wouldn’t call an ambulance. But he’ll be out soon probably.’
I sat by the bed.
Bob, in the bed next to Bo’s, had had his nebuliser removed. This enabled him to shout abuse at the nurses as they went about their work.
‘You fucking bitch, come and help me! Where are the cunts?’
He had a very loud voice and a violently angry face, but he seemed to be secured in his bed in some way. At least he couldn’t get up to attack anyone. The staff were stoically oblivious to the abusive remarks he directed at them, which flowed out in a torrent whenever he was not wearing his nebuliser.
‘Fucking bastard! I’ll slit your throat!’
Possibly he was an Alzheimer’s case? One of those whose personality changes under the influence of the disease, who are transformed into monsters by it? Nobody explained. The other patients, and visitors, had to listen to his stream of invective.
Pat, in his black pants and white shirt, came over and straightened Bo’s slippers at the end of the bed. I smiled at him, and nodded my thanks.
In the afternoon, the GP phoned the hospital to find out how Bo was, and later he phoned me on my mobile. I went out on to the dark corridor to take the call. I asked him if he could help me to get Bo transferred to Vincent’s Private.
He said I would have to talk to the consultant in Loughlinstown and get him to agree to a transfer. Then I would have to get a consultant in Vincent’s to agree to take Bo.
At that moment, I thought: If Bo dies in Loughlinstown I will never forgive these doctors.
But I didn’t say it. Not out of consideration for his feelings, but because then, on Wednesday, the prospect that Bo might die still seemed so remote as to be unthinkable.
On Wednesday night, Olaf came out to visit, alone. He and I sat with Bo. Bo had now been re-bedded in a proper hospital bed, the kind that can be raised, so he was more comfortable. The drip did not seem to be functioning properly, although it was inserted.
‘It’s working,’ Olaf said.
It was dripping but very, very, very slowly, a tiny little drip about once every thirty seconds. Had it moved faster, earlier? Was there a reason for this slowdown? The bag of urine seemed not to have i
ncreased at all since morning.
Bo, half sitting up, was hallucinatory, for the first and only time.
He talked, a lot.
He believed he was sitting in the car. He talked about secondary roads and main roads, we should take this road, and that road. I engaged in the conversation. He believed we were in the car, driving around the Fanad peninsula in Donegal, as we had been doing just a week earlier. He was remembering the little roads of Fanad – a criss-crossing network, passing lakes and humpbacked hills, mountains and sea, farms and churches and islands, from Fanad lighthouse down to Kerrykeel and Magherawarden. We drove the roads again, in the hospital ward.
‘Emmet,’ he said.
‘Robert Emmet?’ asked Olaf.
‘I have a nephew named Emmet, do I not?’ Bo asked.
‘Yes, you do.’
We both laughed. Olaf was disturbed, more disturbed than I was, by Bo’s ramblings. It didn’t upset me since I found it easy to enter into the spirit of it, as if I were walking or talking in Bo’s dream. And it passed quickly, as I knew it would. Bo slept. A hospital worker, wearing a uniform like a garda, came around and rang a bell and asked us to leave.
Olaf took the 145 back to his apartment in town, and I went home.
The Thousandth Day
We continued to meet in secret, in Bo’s apartment, from September 1979 until May 1982 – two and a half years.
The secret became more widely known. In May 1981, for instance, we celebrated Bo’s fiftieth birthday with a party in the flat to which two of his colleagues and their wives, as well as Bo’s daughter, Marja, were invited. My family too knew of the relationship. I was living at home again, which I found difficult, but Bo advised against moving out. We were to be married as soon as I finished my PhD. What was the point? I spent weekends, at least one night a week, at his apartment, anyway.
As soon as I returned from Denmark I got a job on the Urban Folklore Project, collecting folklore in Dublin. This was a dream job, independent, interesting. It involved meeting all kinds of people, interviewing them, recording them, transcribing the recordings.
Although I was now working in my field, it was in a position that was both menial, in the sense that it was badly paid, and anomalous. A big youth employment scheme – eighteen people were working on it, some with qualifications in the subject, some not. Nobody was going to ask questions about my right to such a job, which would last for eighteen months. The question of a career in folklore, the subject I was working on for my PhD, and in which I was passionately interested and now, after a year of intensive study in Copenhagen about which I was very knowledgeable, was uppermost in my mind. Bo preferred to push it under the carpet. We did not discuss how it would be possible for me to work in this field. In Dublin, in Ireland, there was only one place in which the subject could be pursued professionally, namely UCD, where he was head of department. I persisted in believing that since this was the case, since there was only one possible place of employment for someone with my qualifications, I was entitled to apply for any job that came up. Jobs didn’t come up very often, needless to say, and there would be several applicants for anything that did arise. That I would be viewed with resentment and suspicion if I happened to get one of these jobs did not bother me much. Bo seemed not overly concerned about it either. The problem was in any event hypothetical.
The 1980s was a decade of recession and unemployment. Many young people emigrated. Recruitment to the public service and the universities was limited. ‘Embargo’ was a word in common parlance. Embargo on recruitment, embargo on promotion. ‘Frozen’ was the adjective increasingly used in relation to positions. A job could be advertised and filled – and then frozen: that is, not filled. Or advertised, and frozen just before candidates were interviewed. This happened in connection with a few university positions of which I was aware, not in my field.
Curiously, the National Library advertised for Assistant Keepers Grade Two in January 1981. I had finally handed in my doctorate, which had taken five years to complete – given that I was working full time for four of those years, and learning a new language and participating full time in university courses for one of them, it was not a very long time, but it seemed long. Five years during which my relationship with Oliver had ended, my relationship with Bo had started and continued, during which I had had three different jobs and one year abroad. The years of my twenties. I was twenty-two when I started my PhD and twenty-seven when I handed it in for assessment.
I, who had vowed never to return to the National Library, applied. There was little else to apply for; nothing, in fact. Not having an income was an impossible situation. I didn’t consider the dole. Nobody in my family knew anything about it. It wasn’t that we were prejudiced against it, particularly. It was simply terra incognita to us. We were the sort of working-class people who always worked, and, as somebody once pointed out to me, in some bewilderment, I seemed to ‘like working’ and to get jobs easily. From the moment I finished the BA, in September 1974, until January 1982, I had never been without some sort of regular income – from jobs, scholarships, tutoring. Something. I felt at a complete loss when I realised that at the end of the week beginning 1 January, there would be no money at all coming in.
This was a class preoccupation, the desperate need for paid employment. Working class. My more bourgeois friends had no difficulty enduring periods of unemployment – they had a certain sense of entitlement, and, I think, a sense of security. They could say things that sounded quite outlandish, such as, ‘Well, the only thing I know how to do is write.’ Or ‘paint’. They might as well have been saying, ‘The only thing I know how to do is play marbles.’ I laughed when I heard some of these proclamations, from aspiring artists or academics who really believed that they were speaking from a position of necessity, who genuinely believed that they ‘could not’ work in an office, or a school, not to mention a factory, when it was abundantly clear that they spoke from a position of choice. Only people with money somewhere in their background could afford the luxury of such firm self-belief, such glorious ambitions to live lives that did not, for a start, oblige them to get up early in the morning and clock in. ‘I don’t do mornings!’ I had heard one of those people say. ‘I can’t do a job that involves getting dressed every morning.’
Did they really believe that everyone who had a job felt born to get up early in the morning, wash and dress, catch a bus, and work all day in an office or a shop or a field until 5.30 or 6? Did they really believe that all those people had chosen to do that, rather than ‘not do mornings’ and write a great book?
It wasn’t a choice open to me. There was no money to shore me up while I ‘found myself’ – accepting the scholarship to Denmark was as wild and free and reckless as I was ever going to get. I belonged to the ranks of those who have to earn their living. So I applied to the library and, to my surprise – and to that of many people – was offered the post again.
In 1978 I had left the library. And now in April 1982, almost four years later, I was back. It was a relief to get a job, and, in 1982, something of a miracle. With very mixed feelings I took up the position.
Some changes had occurred. There were a few new staff members. The previous director had taken another job, as head of one of the university libraries, and been replaced. I sat in a different room, a much nicer room, than the one I had been in previously. The work of checking catalogues continued, but there seemed to be a lot less of it. The atmosphere was lighter, more optimistic, more cheerful.
The National Library had begun its march out of the nineteenth century and into modernity. It was a much happier and more stimulating environment than it had been in the 1970s.
A few weeks after I started working in the library, I was conferred with my doctorate. Bo joined me and my family for a celebration dinner, in a restaurant that was popular just then: a cosy bistro on Pleasant Street, off Camden Street – the area that would soon be called Portobello, and become very fashionable, but was still in
transit from slummy to trendy.
Now there was no reason to postpone the marriage further. Looking at the little houses on Pleasant Street, and Synge Street, some of which were rundown and some of which were being newly gentrified, with geraniums on the windowsills, the thought crossed my mind that I would like to live in a place like this.
Love can go smoothly, or it can, as in fairy tales, involve a series of tests.
I had been tested several times already, more than most, perhaps. There was the issue of Bo’s age – I had to overcome my own and my family’s and the wider community’s prejudices and just do what I wanted to do. There was the Oliver hurdle which I had stumbled over ingloriously rather than tackling with noble dignity. There was the PhD – Bo was definite that no marriage could occur until the doctorate was finished. At first I was fully in agreement with him, but as time, and the PhD, dragged on, I wondered if it was such a good idea to wait. I was determined to finish it – the idea of not finishing never crossed my mind. But I believed I could be married and finishing a PhD at the same time; that I could find a new supervisor, and that indeed that might have been preferable.
But now that hurdle was crossed. I was a doctor. My photograph appeared in the newspapers, smiling at the camera in my red gown and black cap, clutching my rolled-up scroll, my PhD.
In the library, everyone congratulated me. But more than one decided they should let me know that my achievement was not worth much. They told anecdotes about jobs for junior office workers. Half the applicants had PhDs. The folly of it all!
Twelve Thousand Days Page 13