Twelve Thousand Days

by Eilis Ni Dhuibhne

  ‘My colleague who works out there thought the price was a bit high. He hasn’t seen the house, though.’ She paused and added, ‘It’s near a county council estate.’

  This could have been interpreted as ‘The house is much too expensive and it is in a dodgy area.’ But I didn’t interpret it like that. I didn’t know about council estates and what they meant for property values in the Dublin suburbs. I took the advice at face value.

  Our offer was accepted. That was on a Wednesday. The next day the house was advertised in the property supplement in the Irish Times for £55,000. Obviously it had been impossible to pull the ad in time. We then withdrew our offer of £60,000 and offered £54,000.

  You could have bought almost anything anywhere in Dublin for that money in 1982. In Ranelagh or Dalkey or Ballsbridge. Killiney. Fashionable areas that were going to become ever more fashionable, where property values would increase enormously.

  We didn’t know anything about property, values, desirable neighbourhoods. We loved the sea view, and the willow tree and the big sycamores, the rhododendrons in the big back garden. We overlooked the basic kitchen, a damp patch on the sitting room wall, the functional 1960s exterior: seaside bungalow.

  That it was far from the city centre we saw as a minor problem. All my life I had lived within walking distance of Grafton Street. I wanted to get away from the area I had grown up in, Ranelagh – poised to become the most desirable place to live in Dublin. Bo had also lived there, when he first came to Ireland. His memories of it were far from happy.

  So we bought the house in Seafield, which was called Cala D’Or. Sometime in July we signed the papers, and in early August moved in.

  We decided to have a quiet wedding. We went back to Sweden, and married in our favourite city, Uppsala, in December 1982, at a small ceremony attended by Bo’s brother and sister and a few friends. His sister and brother were the sponsors. After the wedding, in the registry office, we had dinner in a famous old restaurant, looking out over the English Park, covered in snow. What did I wear? A dark blue suit, designed by John Rocha, still an exclusive, expensive designer in those days. It had a tight jacket with puff sleeves, and a skirt gathered into a blue leather cummerbund. A white lacy blouse and a blue hat with a feather. The suit was stylish, slightly avant-garde, flattering. ‘Now that’s clothes!’ someone said, when I wore it to a party some months later. It was the kind of outfit I could wear again and again.

  But dark blue? For my wedding? What a strange choice.

  Ever since, I have regretted not wearing white, which would have looked so perfect in the snowy landscape of Sweden.

  About a month after the wedding, back at work in the National Library, I ate a sandwich at a new cafe on Molesworth Street. I usually went out to lunch, in some cafe in town, rather than sensibly and frugally eating in the tea room of the Library, which was a smoky shabby prefab in the yard at the bottom of Leinster Lane. I loved walking around Grafton Street, Stephen’s Green, Dawson Street, having a look in the shops, picking up bargains, and eating in some cafe, usually on my own, although I regularly met friends for lunch in the Kilkenny Shop or the Alliance Française. Cafes were always springing up and closing down in Dublin in the eighties, recession or no recession, just as they are today.

  It was a tasty sandwich, bacon and avocado. But in the middle of the night I felt extremely sick, as nauseous as I ever had been. I vomited profusely during the night and the next day. I was convinced that I had been poisoned by the sandwich. There was no possibility of going to work the next day, and in the evening I went to the doctor. She agreed that it could be food poisoning. Then she asked if there was any chance that I could be pregnant.

  ‘It’s very unlikely,’ I said

  But she did a pregnancy test. A week later she telephoned me with the result. I was at my desk in the National Library.

  Positive.

  I telephoned Bo from the coin box in the hall of the library, which was more private than the room that I shared with several other librarians.

  ‘Jag är gravid,’ I told him in Swedish.

  ‘Va säger du?’ he didn’t understand.

  ‘I’m pregnant.’

  He laughed and whooped.

  ‘Du är havande.’

  The old-fashioned way of saying you are pregnant, in Swedish. In his day they didn’t say ‘gravid’. Just as we usen’t to use the word ‘pregnant’, but some euphemism. ‘In the family way’. ‘Expecting’.

  What surprised me most was the discovery that, during all those years, the pill, while I had been on it, and the condoms, had really worked. I had always used contraceptives but never really believed in their efficacy. They looked so flimsy and unreliable. But I became pregnant the minute we stopped using them. We, who looked so stiff and bookish, were very lucky in that way. Nine months after our wedding, almost to the day, our first son was born. Two years later, we had a second boy. The lights of my life.

  THURSDAY

  DAY 11,998

  ‘The Battle of Ventry’

  Bo’s last Thursday on earth was a sparkling gem of a day.

  I was doing another interview. Halloween week, the season of radio shows about folklore. In the old days, on Halloween, the sidhe or the raths opened and the fairies sneaked out, the graves opened and the dead walked the countryside. Now the radio producers’ minds open and they want to talk about old customs, old ways, old tales. This time it was to be a panel discussion on storytelling. It would take place from three to four in the afternoon, in RTÉ. I was going to say something about the kind of stories we told in Ireland. The challenge in these discussions is to say something that is true, but not too complex. People expect you to describe stories as if there were only a few, or a few kinds, while there are hundreds of thousands, and many different genres. It is like being asked to describe Irish literature in a line or two. Impossible. But that is the challenge.

  I thought I should have a few examples. One of the stories I like to tell is ‘The Man Who Had No Story’. Once when I asked Bo what his favourite Irish folk tale was, he said it was this particular one. It’s a story that illustrates the importance of storytelling in the Irish community. As the title indicates, it’s about a man who has no story, but who goes on an outing, has some strange experiences, and comes home with a story to tell. But I knew – for some reason – I should mention Fenian tales and I didn’t really know any very well. I consulted Seán Ó Conaill’s Book – I think – or some other collection. I read ‘The Battle of Ventry’. Wrote a few notes.

  Went to the hospital.

  It was about noon. Bo seemed much the same, perhaps a little weaker. The bag of urine was depressingly light. The drip was dripping much faster than it had been, and I realised that it was not functioning properly at all last night when I was visiting, and perhaps for the entire night after that. Who would have checked? The doctors on their rounds this morning.

  Bo’s voice was weaker. His stomach was more swollen. His ankles were swollen. Oedema. I pointed this out to a nurse. She shrugged and did not seem unduly concerned.

  He was lying back and had little energy.

  I told him I’d leave for a few hours in the afternoon, that I was doing an interview on RTÉ about storytelling. Kelly Fitzgerald, with whom I had collaborated on Halloween night, a week earlier, would also be on it. I said I had been trying to tell ‘The Battle of Ventry’.

  ‘Never try to tell “The Battle of Ventry”,’ Bo said, with a flare of his sharp humour, but in such a weakened voice. ‘It is a terrible story.’

  ‘Which one should I tell?’

  ‘“Fionn in the Cradle” is good,’ he said. He began to tell it but gave up before the end, although it’s a short tale.

  Lunch was served. Fish and potatoes and soup. He waved it away. The sight of food made him feel sick – he probably felt very sick all the time. There was a dessert, jelly and ice cream, and I fed him a little of that. I gave him drinks of water but now, for the first time, a nurse came and tol
d me not to. The drip was enough. At two I left, took the 145 to RTÉ, and did the interview. After the recording, the producer told us it would be broadcast on 28 December, after Christmas. A question popped up in my mind, out of nowhere, out of fear that was obviously gripping me then, although in the hospital they were saying Bo would be fine. I asked myself this: Will he be alive when this programme is broadcast? I could not imagine what it would be like, if he were not.

  Kelly, who is a very warm, kind young woman, walked along the road with me towards the bus stop. She told me that Brenda Ennis, the author of The Secret of the Sleeveen, which I had launched just one week earlier on Halloween, was very anxious to meet me, to give me a present. I knew this since Brenda had mentioned it to me on the night of the launch. I explained that Bo was in hospital, so for the moment I’d rather not make an arrangement to meet. Maybe in a week or so. Kelly was surprised, and rather alarmed, but I calmed her down and said it was nothing serious, he would be fine soon. I said this. I still believed this. Bo was at the end of his trial period. Actually he was past the end, so why wasn’t I hearing about the next phase of treatment? They would try something else now.

  Back at the hospital, there was a new development. Bo was wheezing. I saw a young doctor, the night doctor, who looked like an intern. She gave him a nebuliser, which helped his breathing and seemed to give him some energy.

  That evening, Marja, Ragnar, Olaf and Nadezhda, came to visit. Again we were quite a crowd in the ward, and there were no seats for anyone. Nadezhda had brought a little tub of fresh fruit – melon, grapes, pineapple – and she fed some of this to Bo. She knew he loved melon. He ate it.

  We were cheerful. Bo was glad to see everyone. Two nights before, when he was stronger, much stronger, he had looked at the departing Ragnar and Marja and Olaf with pride, and said how well they looked, intimated that he was glad that he had such presentable children. Now he could not say that but he enjoyed having them around his bed, and talked excitedly, at length, but in such a weak voice that we couldn’t really hear what he was saying.

  We left obediently at about nine. Marja offered to spend the night in Shankill, with me, and I was glad of the company. We drank some wine and talked about strategies. Marja and Ragnar would get an appointment with the consultant the following morning, and persuade him that Bo should be moved to a hospital where he would be more comfortable. They would be calmer and better negotiators than I could be, I knew, and I felt reassured. My plan was to drop Marja up to the hospital, then go to UCD and teach my Friday class. I would not get back to the hospital until about five. But Marja and Ragnar would be there, and with luck Bo would be moving to a better hospital.

  ‘They’re closing down the A&E in Loughlinstown in a few weeks,’ Marja said. ‘It was on the news last night.’

  I laughed. If Bo had fallen ill a few weeks later he could not have been taken there. He was among the last cohort of patients that were ever admitted to that A&E.

  We went to bed at about midnight. At half past twelve, my mobile rang. I had a moment of panic. The hospital.

  The call was from Bo’s mobile, which he very seldom used, although I had called him a few times in the hospital on it, since he had no bedside phone, needless to say. Indeed there was no telephone access to patients except by way of their own mobiles. But although the screen told me the phone was Bo’s a nurse spoke first.

  ‘Your husband asked me to phone. He wants to speak to you.’

  She gave the phone to Bo.

  ‘Hi darling, what’s up?’ I asked.

  ‘I am in such terrible pain,’ Bo said. He emphasised the word ‘pain’. ‘They don’t understand what I am saying.’

  ‘I’ll go up there,’ I said.

  ‘No no no no no!’ he shouted, insofar as he could shout. ‘Do not come up here. Talk to them.’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll talk to them. Take it easy now, darling, I love you.’

  I spoke to the nurse.

  ‘He is in terrible pain,’ I said.

  ‘I will give him some painkillers,’ she said.

  ‘Ring me if anything happens,’ I said.

  ‘He will be all right. He has been agitated.’

  What do they mean when they say a patient has been agitated? Do they mean he has been shrieking with pain? Begging for help?

  ‘I will ring you if there is anything.’

  I went downstairs and told Marja. I wondered if I should go to the hospital. But I had had two glasses of wine, I didn’t think I should drive.

  But couldn’t I have risked it, for once?

  Couldn’t I have got a taxi?

  I was going to teach in the morning. I was still in ordinary time, watching the clock. I still didn’t get it.

  I went back to bed.

  The Last of April

  I had seen the rafts being built by students. An igloo, made of white fibreboard. A flying saucer. The Simpsons and Donald Duck. The rafts were under construction on the bank of the River Fyris during the last week of April. Between the clear, fresh birch trees and the sparkling water where the ducks paddled they sat, waiting to be finished. The apartment where we always stayed in Uppsala, belonging to Bo’s brother Hugo, was in a block on the bank of the river and so I saw the rafts as I walked along the path into the centre of town, just a few minutes downstream. They looked amazing: they were imaginative and witty and meaningful, but as well as all that they were seaworthy, or at least riverworthy. That students of literature and medicine and history, that any student at all, could make such things impressed me immensely. I longed to see the rafts on the water sailing down the river. But for some reason we always went home before that happened. On the Last of April. That’s what Bo, and therefore I, called it – Sista April – although I noticed that people called it Valborgsmässoafton, Walpurgis Night. Uppsala was Bo’s city. But he had left the country in 1970. Now he was out of touch with the idioms of the day. The basic language had not changed, of course, but the slang had, and so had a lot of the usages. They said things that he had told me were incorrect, impossible: like Jag älsker glass, I love ice cream. When he was a young man, you could only use the verb ‘to love’ about a person. People would think you ridiculous if you announced that you loved a thing. There was another expression for that. But now you could love ice cream, or a new frock, or a movie, just as in English.

  In 2013 I decided we would finally be in Uppsala for the Last of April. Bo had talked so much about it; for years, decades, I had longed to be there on the big day. It was the biggest festival in the university town, when the students went wild. They all gathered in the big square in front of the library, Carolina Rediviva. The president of the university, called Rektor Magnificus, made a speech from a balcony. Then he put on his student cap, a white velvet cap with a black visor, like a sailor’s. And all the thousands of students donned their own caps, and ran like a river down the hill, Carolinabacken, down to … well, the river. And then they celebrated, with beer and snaps and champagne, and did crazy things. Once, my husband said, he – a student then – had walked across the high balustrade of the Iron Bridge at midnight, endangering his life, just for fun. That was the sort of thing that went on.

  We flew to Sweden on the second last day of April, 2013. We stayed in Stockholm overnight, with our son Ragnar and his wife, Ailbhe, who were living there at the time. Hugo had died in 2011, a few weeks short of his hundredth birthday, so we had no family apartment waiting for us in Uppsala, as had been the case for thirty years, since we got married in the city, from that apartment, in 1982.

  On the last of April we got the 10.10 train to Uppsala from Central Station. We were lucky to get a seat because it was packed to capacity with young people. They carried bottles of wine and beer, and backpacks. A particularly beautiful girl, with long shining fair hair and enormous eyes, uncorked a bottle of wine and began swigging from it, right there on the train. A few boys drank from beer cans but most of the young folk just chatted and laughed. The train, which I
usually thought of as a sedate, sombre train, carrying soberly dressed academic types, with their noses stuck in a book or a laptop, was full of the sound of youthful giddiness. I observed it all with what I thought of as anthropological interest, or just curiosity. Bo read his book, as he always did, on trains, planes, buses, in waiting rooms, oblivious to the noise around him.

  We were greeted at the station by hundreds of policemen, in their navy uniforms and jaunty caps, carrying batons and guns. The hordes of students from Stockholm poured out of the station, past the cycle park where thousands of bicycles stood, and into the wide street in front of the station. Like all streets beside big railway stations, it was dull and faintly depressing, but unlike most of them it wasn’t shabby. The young people moved in a mass up the street that led to the big square, the river, and, on the other bank, the massive old university on the hill. We walked along the railway street. Our hotel was somewhere along there near Linnégatan. For the first time in my life I would sleep in a hotel in Uppsala. I was excited at the prospect. Bo found it discomfiting. It emphasised the change in our lives, reminded him that his beloved older brother was dead and that we no longer had a relative in Uppsala.

  The Last of April.

  The beginning of spring in Sweden. The long white nights were starting, May could be a lovely month up here in the north. But today the thermostat in the hotel registered seven degrees, and the sky was full of edgy clouds, scuttling about threateningly. When I was a child I experienced real sadness when a picnic day turned out cold and rainy. In spite of experience, I would cling to the hope that the sun would come out, that we would sit on the grass in the country, or by the sea, our table flooded with splendid sunlight, that everything would be as it should be. Now I felt a slight tinge of that same disappointment with the elements. But just a tinge. Those small hopes and disappointments become much less acute as one gets older. Also, I had found that when I was with Bo I just didn’t feel such disappointments anyway, about big things or bad things. Bad weather? We would laugh at it. Once I was with him, I felt okay about life – protected, because he knew what to do in most situations, and also had that enthusiastic optimistic personality that is like the heat of the sun.