Lifesaving for Beginners

by Ciara Geraghty

  ‘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.

  ‘And everything else?’

  ‘Fine,’ I told him.

  Another pause. I could hear him gearing up to say goodbye. ‘You could come over and collect the cords,’ I said, holding my breath in the pause that followed.

  He knew what I meant. We’ve had post-break-up sex much more often than would be considered appropriate in a break-up guide book, I’d say.

  ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea anymore,’ he said.

  ‘I never thought it was a good idea. Yellow cords.’

  ‘They’re beige.’ He laughed. I always loved his laugh. The sound of it. Girlish. Almost a giggle. And the fact that I could still make him laugh.

  ‘So are you coming?’ I kept my voice light, unconcerned. The pause was the worst one yet. The one that told me we were nearly there, Thomas and I. Despite the dragging of my feet all the way, it was nearly done.

  Then he told me. ‘Kat,’ he said. ‘I . . . I’ve been meaning to tell you . . .’

  Still I said nothing. But I knew. I knew what he was going to say. Minnie saw them. She mentioned it. She said, ‘It’s probably nothing but . . .’

  Thomas said, ‘I’m sort of seeing someone.’

  I said, ‘How do you sort of see someone?’

  ‘I mean, I am. I’m seeing someone.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Her name is Sarah.’

  ‘Sarah? Sarah Keeling? From the Farmers Journal?’

  ‘Yes. I didn’t think you knew her.’

  ‘I met her once. Tall. Bony. Pointy tits.’

  ‘Where did you meet her?’

  ‘When you forced me to go to the cattle mart, remember?’

  ‘I didn’t force you to go.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem like the type of thing I’d attend of my own free will.’

  Thomas didn’t say anything to that. It sounded like he was rubbing his forehead. He does that when he’s tired.

  ‘You went out with her before, didn’t you?’

  ‘That was years ago.’

  ‘She told me. When we were at the trough. You’d gone to examine hooves or something.’

  ‘Anyway . . . I wanted to tell you, you know, just in case . . . ’

  ‘In case what?’ I said. I was impressed by my voice. It sounded like the voice of somebody who was thinking about what to have for dinner.

 
; ‘In case . . . you know . . . look, I just didn’t want you hearing about it from anybody else, OK?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Of course. Why wouldn’t it be fine?’

  We haven’t spoken since then. It’s just as well, really. The past is better left behind. It’s time to move on. That’s what Minnie says. And in the daytime, it’s fine. It really is. I have Ed and Minnie and my writer’s block and being nearly forty and the faint, lingering pain in my one hairline-fractured rib to distract me.

  It’s only at night.

  Four o’clock in the morning, in particular. Your resources are depleted at this hour. Your resolve is not what it should be. I let myself out onto the balcony and rummage in my dressing-gown pocket for a pack of cigarettes. My hands shake and it takes a while to get one of them lit.

  ‘You OK, baby?’

  I look round. There is no one here but me.

  It’s Friday night. Ant and Adrian are home for the weekend. They come home a lot now. They are twins, which means that they look the same and talk the same and they used to do a magic disappearing act when they were kids. Everyone believed it, including me. They’re even more identical than Fred and George Weasley. They are studying science in London, which happens to be the capital of the UK and England. Ten million people live in London. Ten million and two, now that Ant and Adrian are there.

  Damo thinks Ant and Adrian are cool. Probably because they have long hair and they don’t live at home anymore. Damo says that when he doesn’t have to live at home anymore, he’ll stay up all night and he’ll eat his dessert before his dinner and he’ll never eat one single green. That’s what he calls vegetables. Greens. Even carrots and cauliflowers.

  Tonight we are having beans on toast for our dinner. I don’t like beans so I am having toast. Adrian makes my favourite drink, which happens to be hot chocolate with two marshmallows on the top. If Mam was here she would make me eat the beans. Or she would make something else, like spaghetti Bolognese. I love spaghetti Bolognese. Spaghetti is made from flour and water. Miss Williams has a machine that can make spaghetti. I’d love a machine like that. Today, she asked us to write a story about anything we like so long as it had the words adventure and holiday and storm in it. She likes getting us to write long stories so she can text her boyfriend during the class. Damo says he’s read her messages and there’s lots of sexy talk in them, but I don’t know if that’s true.

  I wrote about me and Mam going on holiday to Spain. That bit is true. We really did go on holiday to Spain last year. In the story, I said we sailed there and there was a big storm one night and we got tossed overboard and we would have drowned if it hadn’t been for my lifesaving, because I was able to rescue everybody, even Mam. That’s not true. We went to Spain in an aeroplane. There was no storm but it rained one day and the waves were huge and Mam wouldn’t let me go swimming. Miss Williams liked my story. She says I’m going to be a writer when I grow up but I don’t want to be a writer. How boring is that? She also says that I might be a computer programmer on account of being the person she always asks to fix the computers at school whenever there’s a problem with one of them. She points at me and says, ‘Fix it, Bill.’ I like computers but I’m still not going to be a computer programmer, even if Bill Gates happens to be the richest man in the galaxy.

  No, what I’m going to be is a lifesaver. Maybe on a beach or in the swimming pool. So is Damo, even though he doesn’t go to lifesaving like me. I said I’ll teach him everything I know next summer, if Faith brings us to the pool. Or the beach, maybe.

  Faith and Ant and Adrian are drinking wine with their dinner. Adrian’s not really supposed to drink wine because of what happened when Dad told Mam about Celia. Adrian drank loads of wine that night and Dad couldn’t see out of his left eye for about a week afterwards, on account of the swelling.

  I drank wine once but I had to spit it out. It looks like blood. When you cut a worm in two, it doesn’t die. It just grows into two worms. Me and Damo cut one but nothing happened. It just lay on the path and didn’t move, and then we got bored waiting so we went and climbed the tree in Damo’s back garden. I can get to the middle bit but Damo goes all the way to the top. I checked on my way home and the worms were gone.

  After dinner, I go into the sitting room but the only movie that’s on is Up and I’ve seen it loads of times. Mam loves that movie but she always cries when Carl looks at the pictures of Ellie in his photo album.

  I pick up the zapper and change the channel. Some boring programme about women who make stuff out of lace. Who cares? Ads, ads, ads. Some show about men going bald. Football. People talking about football. Another football match. Film reviews. This is better. The latest Declan Darker movie. Faith says I’m not allowed to watch those movies until I’m fifteen, which probably means there’s loads of blood and guts and kissing in them. She says I can’t read the books either till I’m older. Sully reads them. And Rob. And Dad. Dad loves all thrillers but he says Killian Kobain is his favourite thriller writer. Damo says he’s read them all too but I don’t think he has because he hates reading. They show the trailer and it looks deadly and there’s not too much blood and guts in it. If I wasn’t going to be a lifeguard, I’d probably be a policeman in New York, just like Declan Darker.

  Now they’re talking about another film. I think it’s in French because the people in the film are saying ‘wee, wee, wee’, which is French for ‘yes’.

  I switch back to Up. It’s the bit with the balloons. I’d love to attach balloons to our house and then we could fly away. Maybe to Ireland, where Mam is from.

  I wonder if you went up high enough in the sky, would you get to heaven?

  I’m only half Irish but Mam still makes me call her Mam, like Irish people do. She says her mother would turn in her grave if I called her mum, like Damo calls his. I didn’t think dead people could move. Only if they’re zombies. Damo dressed up like a zombie at Halloween. When we met Carla, he did that thing he does with his eyes and tried to chase her. But she wouldn’t run away. She’s probably the only girl in our class who doesn’t run away from Damo when he does the thing with his eyes.

  I go into the kitchen to get some more Coke. Faith’s face is all blotchy and red. She looks like Stan in my class when Damo and Alex are picking football teams in the yard.

  Adrian puts his hands on Faith’s shoulders and says, ‘Not being a blood relative of Hamish McIntyre has to be a good thing, right?’ Sometimes, Adrian calls Dad ‘Hamish’ instead of ‘Dad’.

  I’m not very good at football but I get picked for the team because I’m the fastest runner. That’s because of all the muscles in my legs from the lifesaving. I have to pass the ball when I get near the goal. I pass it to Damo. He says, ‘HE SHOOTS . . . HE SCORES . . .’ just before he puts it in the net. He pulls his shirt over his head and runs around. Once he ran into the trunk of the chestnut tree and had to get four stitches in his forehead. He says he was knocked out but I saw his eyes moving.

  The phone rings and nobody answers it so I have to go out to the hall and pick it up. It’s Dad. He nearly always rings on Friday night. ‘How’s tricks, me wee man?’ he asks, like I’m a little kid.

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘What are you up to?’

  ‘I’m watching Up.’

  ‘How’s school?’

  I say, ‘Grand,’ the way Mam does.

  ‘Will you put Faith on?’ He never asks about lifesaving. Maybe it’s because I only started doing it after he went to Scotland to do sex with Celia, which is what you have to do to get a baby. Sully told me and Damo all about it. He says you don’t get a baby if you use a johnny. He gave us a johnny but it burst after we filled it with water and threw it out of Damo’s bedroom window.

  I say, ‘Faith is in the kitchen with Ant and Adrian.’

  He says, ‘Go and get her for me, like a good wee man.’

  I say, ‘OK, but . . .’

  He says, ‘What?’ His voice sounds
like Miss Williams’s when Damo tells her why he hasn’t got his homework done. ‘I’m running out of patience, Mr Sullivan.’ Her lips get very thin when she says that.

  I say, ‘Faith is crying.’ I don’t say ‘again’. I don’t say she’s been crying a lot since last Sunday when she found the papers in the attic, instead of the rosary beads.

  ‘What?’

  ‘She’s crying. In the kitchen.’

  He says, ‘What’s wrong with her?’

  I say, ‘I don’t know.’ That’s true. I don’t know. Every time I go into the kitchen, Faith looks away so I won’t notice that she’s crying. And they stop talking. The way adults do when they’re talking about something that’s not suitable for kids.

  Dad says, ‘It’s probably boy trouble, eh son?’ I don’t think so. I saw Rob kiss Faith this morning before he went to his job at the shop where they fix guitars. A proper kiss. On the lips, I mean. They closed their eyes and kissed for ages. Over a minute, I reckon.

  ‘Hang on.’ I go into the kitchen.

  Adrian is saying, ‘I swear, Faith. We didn’t know. Tell her, Ant.’

  Ant says, ‘He’s telling the truth, Faith. We hadn’t a clue until you rang us the other day.’

  I look at Faith and say, ‘Dad’s on the phone.’ I don’t tell her that I told Dad that she’s been crying. I shouldn’t have told him. I don’t know why I did. Sometimes adults know what to do about things but I don’t know if Dad will, to be honest.

  Faith says, ‘Christ,’ and wipes her nose with the sleeve of her jumper like she’s always telling me not to do.

  Ant hands her a tissue and tells her to take it easy. He says, ‘Maybe there’s an explanation.’

  Faith laughs like someone who doesn’t think anything is funny. Then she blows her nose. It sounds like Damo’s trumpet. He got it for his birthday but he still can’t play it. He just blows into it.

  Faith says, ‘Bedtime, Milo,’ before she leaves the kitchen. I have a feeling Faith is mad with me except I don’t know why. I even tidied my room yesterday without anyone asking me to, but I don’t think she noticed.

  Adrian says, ‘I’ll bring you up.’ He picks up his glass of wine and finishes it. It’s probably just as well Dad’s not here tonight. ‘I just have to go for a piss first.’