by Bryce Taylor
Daniel changes the iPad back to roast beef, ticks the bottom of each picture and puts the iPad back and goes back to his lego.
Well, even I have to admit that is impressive. It's one of the more constructive conversations that Daniel has ever had. That Daniel isn't throwing himself on the floor, curling in a ball, after shrieking that he wants fish and chips for a half hour is a miracle.
Mam explains that it is easier for Daniel if the house is tidy, if he knows what is going to be happening and there aren't any loud noises or strong smells.
"Where are you smoking?" I ask curiously. It is not as if she has given up, I can still smell it on her breath.
"I go for a walk," she says.
I raise my eyebrows. Firstly, Mam doesn't like to go outside and secondly it is hard leaving Daniel even for five minutes.
She shrugs.
"There's a picture for that," she says pointing at the iPad.
Mam and I talk for a few minutes longer whilst she starts to prepare dinner. Daniel picks up his iPad again. Looking at a large week planner.
"What's he doing?" I ask Mam, curious despite myself.
"Sully," Daniel says in his loud flat voice.
I raise an eyebrow at Mam.
"Sully is coming tomorrow," she says.
"Yes," he says and points at his iPad.
I raise an eyebrow.
"Sully?" I ask.
Daniel ignores me.
"Sully is the carer," she says and mouths to me, "Daniel loves her."
"Hopefully she sticks around," I say derisively.
Mam glares at me, makes a shushing face and mouths; he can hear us.
Apparently, we care about this now.
Mam waxes on about Sully for a few minutes. How she came just when Mam had thought she couldn't go on, the week of. Mam pauses, looking uncomfortable and I flinch realising she meant the week Diarmuid had died.
Mam hurries on, telling me how clever she is and how when she first came Daniel was throwing an epic tantrum, but she just ignored him and told Mam to go and sit on the couch, turned the volume down on the telly and started cleaning.
When she had cleared the dining table she put a box of lego on it and left it there. Daniel eventually picked himself up and played with the lego and she just kept cleaning.
Then Mam had joined her.
She and Mam cleaned for the whole day and then the next day and Mam took two more days after that to finish the house from top to bottom.
The next week she brought the trestle tables and tape and iPads. She made Mam go to Daniel's square over and over again and then stop just before she was going to step in. So that Daniel would know no-one but him could go in.
They practiced putting things in Daniel's 'neutral zone'.
Then the rest of the day Sully worked at one table and Daniel at the other. Both building lego.
Mam writes on a piece of paper, 'Every time Sully finishes something, Daniel has to build one exactly the same'.
Cute. If he wasn't thirty-eight that is.
"So now, that is what they do," Mam says, "they build lego all day and it is lovely."
"What about Daniel's speech therapy?" I ask truculently, after all that is part of the point of having the carer, not to play lego all day long.
"They do it on the iPad by Skype," she says. "Sully says that we shouldn't have to leave the house for things that Daniel doesn't like doing."
I can't even count how many times Mam has said, 'Sully says' so far in this conversation.
"So, what is she like?" I ask thinking that there is no fecking way that any home aide I know of would willing go to this much effort for the few euros they are getting paid each hour.
"Oh, she's a lovely lass, older than the others, maybe thirty? Australian, lives down in Rochestown. God knows how she can afford it on these wages," she says.
I have frozen at the word 'Australian'.
"Is her name actually Sully?" I ask Mam too, too casually, a crystal of ice unfurling in the base of my spine.
"Oh, no, that is the name that Daniel calls her, you know from Monsters Inc?" she says.
"What is her name?" I ask carefully, foreboding striking a wedge in my chest.
Leigh could pass for thirty even if she must be forty now.
"Leigh, why?" Mam says.
Fuck.
"Expensive car?" I ask.
Mam is frowning at me.
"She drives a nice little hatchback," she says, confused.
"What does she look like?" My voice is now hard. I can't imagine Leigh driving a hatchback, but an Aston Martin probably wouldn't be plausible.
"Here, I've got a photo of her," Mam says casually, somehow unable to deduce the importance of my question from my tone of voice. She shows me a picture on her phone of Daniel and Leigh absorbed in their lego.
Mam is looking at me strangely.
"What's wrong, love?" she asks.
"Apart from the fact that my ex is now masquerading as my brother's carer?" I ask bitterly, "Fecking everything."
Just the thought, Leigh here, in this dingy flat, cleaning this filth.
Mam's constant smoking.
Daniel.
Mam's eyebrows raise almost as far as her hairline.
"That is Leigh?" she asks. "The one who still sends you letters?"
What?
"She still sends me letters?" I ask, incredulous.
"Yes, you told me you didn't want them, but she has sent one every single month," she says, "like clockwork."
Jesus Christ.
That was years and years ago that I'd said that. You'd think Mam would have mentioned something since then.
"Do you still have them?" I ask, feeling more broken inside than I should about this.
Mam takes one look at my face and goes to her bedroom. Brings back a shoebox, hands it over. It is heavier than I thought.
I leave.
Chapter 22
I drive home numbly, rain pouring down, wipers frantically swiping away the water, my old car fogging up from the inside. The shoebox in the backseat, Em in the front telling me about crèche. I tell myself I'll wait till she is in bed till I open them.
I don't.
Once we are in the door, Em still squelching about in wellies on the carpet, I pick one from the box at random.
The date on it is from two years ago.
I rip on the envelope and start to read the first page.
Dear Aednat,
I am sometimes happy you are no longer reading these letters. It is surprisingly cathartic sending these words across the sea to you, my imaginary friend in Ireland.
I am currently in the happy place where I am 99% dead inside and the 1% of me that is alive is not able to scream loud enough to be heard. Just a tiny whisper from across the canyon. I miss feeling alive, but feeling dead is less painful. Sydney is such a small town that I can't still work here and not feel fear of running into people, all judgement and pity.
I realise that there is nothing holding me here, yet here I am, haunting my old life, not having absorbed the enormity of the change. The permanence of it all.
I can't do this. I can't read them.
It hurts too much.
I put them away resolutely and make dinner. Play with Em until bedtime.
Read her a story, the Snail and the Whale, the one she wants to have every night now.
She has taken to praying before she goes to sleep, telling Daddy about her day, a hundred tiny things that she thinks are important to tell him of. She makes me somehow start to believe that he might be listening. I watch her fall asleep before I retreat back to the kitchen.
Stare at the pile of washing up that I can't bring myself to do.
Again.
The box of letters is a physical presence, a pressure from the bookcase and I find myself sitting on the lounge cradling the box in my lap.
I sort them carefully. One a month without fail and start to read them from the beginning.
In the fi
rst year, everything is on the surface ok. Amusing anecdotes about the hospital, people we know and the things they are doing. Hassling me about the glorious Irish weather with regular updates about horrible Sydney days of winter sunshine. She briefly tells me she has moved, about the apartment she has rented near the hospital. It must be a studio because she mentions the handiness of her morning routine, three steps to the bathroom, five to the front door, one block to the hospital. There aren't any other details about her life though. So reading between the lines she is working, working and working. That she has divested herself of everything but the one thing that she thinks matters.
The last missive of the year, dated on Boxing Day is the shortest yet. A few lines scrawled on the back of an admissions form, to the effect that Gloria has turned up at the hospital with her family and a belated Christmas dinner. I smile, a tear prickling the corner of my eye, I can just imagine.
The start of the second year the handwritten letters stop and I get impersonally typewritten pages instead. I miss her terrible handwriting immediately. Being forced to slowly cipher her letters somehow increases my enjoyment. Also, I know what it means. That her hands are bad enough that she is trying to preserve them. She says nothing about it though. The occasional witticism about hating other doctors more now that she had to deal with waiting rooms the only other clue that it is all slowly coming apart.
After a few months she is reduced to sarcastic remarks about current affairs. There apparently being nothing in her personal life worthy of comment. Copy and pasted headlines with a few lines under each one that are still funny enough that years later I'm chuckling under the worry about her.
October and November are just two postcards, one literally just says, 'Jesus, worst fucking postcard ever', the other a few laboured lines about the breakfast she is eating at a cafe whilst writing the card.
My too late worry and annoyance that she is telling me about her avocado and toast when there is so much more she needs to tell me.
The end of the year sees a bumper handwritten letter, post-marked NYC. A few words about a holiday with Justine and then pages about the Met and Central Park and Broadway shows. Of walking around Brooklyn and going to the symphony and the opera. Catching a performance of Radiohead that she describes in such detail I can imagine I am there. I'm crying as I read this partly because it's the headspace I'm in. Mostly because it means her career is over and she is still in her thirties. That her whole reason for being is gone and that I wasn't there for her.
That there isn't one word of complaint.
The next year she is at school. She is both lecturing on surgical techniques and studying, a masters in hospital administration and she sounds happy. Running marathons and going to the movies. She reads Finnegan's Wake and complains about the complete incomprehensibility of it all. She must be making friends because her letters are now peppered with 'we' went to this show and 'we' hiked here. I wonder if it's always the same person.
If it's a girl.
I have no right to be jealous but I am.
Halfway through the third year her letters reduce in size again. They don't even have the pretence of comments on the day’s news. No exuberantly worded paragraphs or carefully worded missives. Just a few lines. The weather, no more 'we' or 'our' or 'us'.
Stiffly worded sentences. I'm well, how are you?
The lack of caring makes me more aware of how deeply she must be depressed.
The next four letters are much the same. The fifth includes the line that Justine came home yesterday. I wonder what that means. Where Justine has been. If she came home from wherever she was because Leigh needed her.
The new year finally brings a letter with some substance to it. A scrawly and largely illegible letter talking about life and potential. About destiny. She must be either high or drunk and I smile to imagine it. At the bottom is a post script in far neater handwriting.
'I'm not sure why I am sending you this letter. If you can read it then I hope it contains the meaning of life. I was sure it did last night, but this morning who knows?'
I eagerly open the next letter hoping for a marked improvement. Some spark again and there are a few more sentences at least. A few lines about sitting under the jacaranda trees, the purple blossoms falling around her in slow motion rain.
There is a little more in the next letter. The discomfort of being the oldest person in all of her classes. It's the most personal detail she has told me for many letters.
She had been working at RPA, a hospital she has worked at before. In administration now and she has finished her degree, she sounds upbeat, she has ideas about fixing things and making it better. She doesn't talk much about the results. But it doesn't sound as if she is losing faith. She sounds happy again.
For a while.
Then she stops talking about the hospital or anything to do with work. I wonder what has happened to her self-confidence that she doesn't believe anymore. I finally get to the first letter I read. The only one so far with so much pain expressed in words. I wonder how I knew to pick this one first.
The next letter is a relief. Pure relief. Leigh resigned. Finished her lease and given away everything she owned. That she has bought a 4WD from some backpackers and left Sydney, that she is driving north, no destination in mind.
She signs off;
Freedom...
Your friend,
Leigh
The next twelve months are the best letters of all. Each letter a month of travel diary, in her atrocious handwriting on all manner of paper. Tales of odd things, beautiful things, boring things, the endless possibility of each day.
Of beaches and mountains and sunshine and rain and of the occasional human interaction.
Each one includes a Polaroid.
The 4WD. A sunset. A beer held up, glinting in the sunshine. The open road. An eagle tearing apart a kangaroo. Finally, one of her on top of a mountain, washed out blue sky behind her. She titles it 'my first selfie'. I kiss it gently and hold it to my chest as I read the next letter.
The last letter of her holiday she writes;
I drove into Bateman's Bay today. So close to home, although I don't even know if it is home anymore. I checked my email for the first time in months. There is a message from a hospital in Ireland that arrived yesterday. Cork university hospital. Asking if I am interested in a vice-Dean role and if so, how soon can I start?
You know I don't believe in coincidences.
Your friend,
Leigh
The final year of letters. All short. The first one the longest. Where she finds out about Diarmuid’s illness, that we are married and that we have a child. She says she is very happy about the latter two and sorry about the first. Her writing is scratchy though, the pen digging into the paper here and there.
I am suddenly aware that Diarmuid’s care had been exemplary, that nothing has been too much trouble. Appointments scheduled easily and back to back so there was no waiting around or coming back. The specialists who would call back with a free appointment next week or tomorrow or today even, if we were still in the hospital. Test results available immediately and lengthy phone calls explaining what they meant.
The experimental drug trial he had been going to start on.
I'd thought little of it, just accepted that it was. That perhaps the system wasn't as bad as my patients at the little village clinic said.
Now though I detect Leigh's hand in it all, fighting to keep him alive.
I wonder what my letters to her would have said if I'd ever written them. I never did though. I was too busy to write one the first month. The second I wrote and never posted, it sat on my window sill for weeks and weeks. The third. I never even got there. It made me to guilty to read Leigh's. When the first letter had arrived, I told Mam I didn't want to see it. I had yelled at her. So thankful to have someone to take it out on. Then I moved to Dublin and never thought of it again although I should have.
Six slow, slow years in fast forward. I wo
nder if Leigh knew each month as she sent out one more fucking letter that it would end here. Tonight. The whole boxful devoured in one sitting. That it would just come to this.
The last letter, dated just after Diarmuid’s funeral.
Dear Aednat,
I have this horror inside. That you are going to find what I've done, find me at your mother's house. That you are going to read these letters. I hope to god that you aren't. That they have been thrown in the bin. It's clear from when you saw me that you hadn't read them yet. If you have now then I need you to know they are leaves fallen from the tree. The past. The relic of a need for new growth.