We skipped food, went straight to the car and headed back in silence, both wondering what could have happened to make Mum call so often. Okay, we were late, but not that late. I kept trying Mum’s mobile and the house phone, but there was no answer from either.
We were close to home when Dad drove round a bend and we found ourselves staring at a car in the ditch. It was a yellow Volkswagen. Helen’s car. Dad pulled onto the verge and we ran to the car. We didn’t have to open a door to look in because the front passenger door had been ripped off. It lay beyond the car, in the ditch. The near side of the car was crumpled in, the bonnet raised, revealing a tangled mass of engine parts. The car was empty. Dad just stood staring at the car, like he was paralysed.
I used the front passenger seat to clamber up onto the roof. I wanted to look over the hedges to see if there was anything beyond on the winding road. I don’t know what I expected to see – another car perhaps, or Helen limping along towards The Haven. The limping along bit was wishful thinking – I could bear to think of Helen with minor injuries, but what if my sister were hurt a lot worse?
My heart thumped. Perhaps she’d already been taken to hospital by ambulance. Perhaps she was dead. She could have been dying in the tangled wreckage while Dad and I were in the clubhouse, or even when we had been at the range, which was almost close enough for us to have heard the crash.
‘Nothing,’ I shouted to Dad, easing myself down.
‘We’ll have to go home,’ said Dad. I nodded.
We raced home. I was hoping that we’d find Mum putting a few plasters on Helen, but I knew really that the car was a write-off and that must mean Helen had more than cuts and bruises.
I jumped out of the car as Dad slowed down in the driveway and raced through the back door. All seemed normal. M was in his basket and came forward, wagging his tail. Mozart was weaving about on the kitchen table. There was no sign of Mum, Ian, or Helen, but we saw the note soon enough. I grabbed it. It was written in a shaky version of Mum’s handwriting:
Helen in Beaumont hospital. Car accident.
No indication of how badly Helen was hurt. We tried Mum’s phone again. Then Ian’s. ‘They must be in the hospital and have turned their phones off,’ I guessed. From my frequent visits to Accident and Emergency departments for rugby injuries, I knew phones had to be switched off near medical equipment.
‘We’re wasting time,’ said Dad. ‘Let’s go.’
Desperately needed: the power of positive thinking
Dad drove towards Dublin with ferocious determination. He took some chances, and we reached the hospital in record time. I kept ringing Mum and Ian, but their phones were still off and the hospital line was constantly engaged. It wasn’t just Dad’s driving that was furious. I knew he was keeping his worry at bay by being angry.
‘I always said Helen needed more driving lessons. I blame the examiner who passed her.’ Then he thought of someone else to blame. ‘And that Sullivan! Since she met him, she’s been rushing about – home from work, then zooming back into Dublin for a date.’ Since Helen spent about three hours getting ready for any date, that wasn’t actually fair, but I kept quiet.
All I kept thinking was: why had she been taken all the way into Dublin? There were smaller hospitals nearby. It must be because her injuries were so serious she need special attention, special equipment.
When we pulled into the hospital car park, I couldn’t wait for Dad to park. As he slowed the car, I opened the door and leapt out. I raced into the reception and asked where Helen Stirling was. The receptionist looked up her name slowly, as if it was routine, which it was for her, I suppose. Dad had parked and was beside me by the time I got an answer. We walked down corridors that smelled of disinfectant and illness at the same time.
We found Ian and Mum in a waiting room. Mum was still wearing her boat-like slippers. She ran up to Dad. I heard him ask, ‘How bad?’ and strained to hear the answer.
I heard something like broken bones, but then Mum spoke so softly I couldn’t hear the rest.
‘What?’ I demanded. ‘Where is she? How is she?’ I couldn’t believe how I felt. Frantic is the best word I can think of. It was seeing the car and then having a long journey knowing nothing, having time to imagine the worst.
‘She’s in surgery,’ Mum said.
‘What for?’ Dad and I asked together.
‘She hit the steering wheel, here.’ Mum pointed to her forehead. ‘A piece of bone is resting on her brain. They’re operating to lift it.’
The meaning of the words hit me. Helen was having brain surgery. That’s why she’d been brought to Beaumont.
‘Will she be alright?’ I asked. I wanted what I knew I couldn’t have – a definite yes. Mum gave me a little pat on the arm and said, like I was still a baby, ‘Alright? Of course she’ll be alright!’
Mum started to cry. ‘The surgeon who spoke to me said he does this sort of operation often. But there’s always a risk …’
Ian rushed up. He had two plastic cups in his hand. He gave one to Mum, thought for a second and handed the second one to Dad.
‘You’ve heard?’ he asked. The mock-cockney accent was gone. He looked worried sick but calm, dead calm and I knew I had to stay like that too. Mum looked as if she was close to fainting and Dad was all quivery around the mouth. ‘We’ve just got to wait,’ Ian said. We all sat down on a long seat. I leant forward, head down, thinking, making sure I didn’t cry. Helen. I wanted her back, just as she was, just as she had been – vain, silly, crazy about one boyfriend or another. Boyfriend! I looked up quickly.
‘Has anyone told Sullivan?’
Swift looks all round. Mum and Ian had been too busy talking to doctors, then seeing Helen into the operating theatre. No one had given Sullivan a thought. Something changed for me at that moment. Okay I hated the guy, hated the way he was getting at me at school, hated the injustice of losing my place on the A team. Hell, just the weekend before I’d saved him from a mauling from M only to save M’s ass! But he was Helen’s boyfriend. She spoke about him, Brendan says this, Brendan says that, as if quoting Holy Scripture. And he had a doelike expression when he looked at her. He needed to know what had happened.
Trouble was, none of us had his phone number. Of course I’d see him at school the next day … if I went to school. I suddenly saw that life had changed. The old routine was gone. Dad and I wouldn’t be stuck on the Long Mile Road tomorrow morning. We’d still be at the hospital. I felt sick to my stomach, thinking of the way things might be by then.
Ian was focusing on how we’d contact Sullivan. He’s remarkable, my brother. In ordinary, everyday situations he’s useless. It’s a miracle he can travel to London and back by himself. When we had seen him off at the airport at the beginning of his first term, I’d prepared myself for a call from Krakow, Delhi, or Brisbane because he’d wandered onto the wrong plane. Then, just when he’d established an unrivalled reputation as a complete airhead, Flimsy McFeeble became sturdier, stronger. He took control and amazed me by holding it all together. ‘I’ll drive home and find Helen’s phone. I reckon it’ll be in the car. I’ll keep my phone on, so as soon as there’s any news, go outside and phone me. Right?’
‘Right,’ I agreed and before he left we hugged. The Stirlings had to stick together now.
Our long wait started. Even though there was a TV blaring out in the waiting room, I couldn’t watch it. We ate crisps and chocolate bars from the vending machine, drank tea that could have been coffee, coffee that could have been tea. It didn’t matter. We just had to get through the hours until Helen’s operation was over.
As night approached, the hospital became quieter. There was still activity – strong lights burning and the clatter of trolleys, doors bursting open with new casualties who we stared at with morbid interest – but now we kept our voices down, as if we had dim memories of the world outside where sleep came with the night.
I got to thinking about death and the first time I realised, properly realised
what it meant. It had been when my great-uncle Albert died. We went over to clear out his house in Waltham Abbey, in England. There were all his familiar things – his old armchair, papers he’d been reading, an old pipe, even a musty smell that belonged to his old house. The antique that had always fascinated me, a ship made out of spun glass in vivid red, white and blue, still stood on a mantelpiece. But Albert was gone. Gone, leaving all his stuff behind him. Death was leaving, without goodbyes. It meant never seeing someone again, never hearing their voice again. Words unsaid, arguments unfinished, a story that comes to an abrupt, shocking finish. I began to shake.
‘Are you cold?’ whispered Mum. I shook my head.
‘You okay?’ I asked. She nodded, then crumpled and I put my arm around her. I thought about the power of positive thinking. I had to get Mum envisioning Helen better. ‘She’ll get through this,’ I told Mum. I had to give her pictures, real pictures. ‘Helen will be sitting up in bed within days. You know how she paints her toenails?’ I impersonated Helen in the middle of a grooming session. ‘Which colour looks best? This vermillion, or the lavender? This one brings out my skin tones. This one will coordinate with my new top …’ Mum managed a smile.
When I looked up, Sullivan was charging towards us, with Ian following. ‘How is she?’ he asked.
‘We’re still waiting,’ Dad said. Ian had filled Sullivan in on what was happening, so there was nothing more to add, though when you’re that worried about something, you can go round and round, over the same bits again and again. Supposing the brain operation isn’t 100% successful and Helen’s left with some mental disability? Supposing the bone pushing on her brain changes her? Supposing we get back a different Helen? Supposing the cuts on her face don’t heal and she’s no longer beautiful? She’d hate that.
‘Mum, if Helen doesn’t look … right, will she lose her job?’
Mum didn’t answer.
‘She’ll always be beautiful to me,’ Sullivan said with feeling.
‘We’ve got to envision her better. Isn’t that right?’ I asked him. ‘She’ll be better soon. The surgeon does this sort of operation all the time. He said so. She’ll be fine. Won’t she?’
Sullivan put his hand on my shoulder and this time I didn’t resent it. ‘Sure, David, sure.’
For the first time in ages I felt we were on the same side. I remembered how it had been when he’d first come to St Joe’s. All of us knew about his rugby career: the three caps he’d gained for Ireland in a winning team in the 1990s. He’d been my hero then. He was who I wanted to be. Even though our teams had always been successful, we became even better with Sullivan as our coach. He gave us great pep talks before games. When we were facing St Mary’s, who were bigger and more powerful than us, he’d said, ‘Remember, it’s not how big you are, it’s how big you play the game.’ I’d scored a winning try for him after that. Just before a game he’d say, ‘Okay, now let your game do the talking.’
This was a bigger test. I didn’t care about the things that had been worrying me before Helen’s accident. That was all just normal life. All I wanted was for Helen to have that too, for her to be better, to have my sister back again, always there.
And so we waited.
April Fool’s Day
Midnight came. I watched the seconds tick by on the big clock on the waiting room wall and the digital calendar click to 1 April – April Fool’s Day. Every year I played a joke on Helen. She’d had fizzing sugar cubes, itching powder in her clothes and plastic flies floating on the top of her coffee. If I hadn’t bought anything in a joke shop, I made do with clingfilm over the loo seat, or hiding in a closet and leaping out on her. Usually she shrieked, called me a vile toad and wished aloud that she didn’t have a younger brother. Strange, what you can miss.
We stopped talking, all of us moving about from place to place, restlessly. Someone sat, someone got up and paced around, like that game where there always has to be one of you sitting, one standing, one leaning. But this wasn’t a game. It was just that no one could sleep, but no one wanted to be wide awake either because wide awake meant thinking about that surgeon working away on Helen’s brain.
Finally, Mum saw the surgeon she’d spoken to coming towards us. We crowded around him.
‘Helen’s in the recovery room,’ he told us. ‘The operation went well.’
‘So she’ll be alright?’ Dad asked. He wanted certainty the way I had, the way I still did.
But all the surgeon would say was, ‘Everything went as planned. I lifted the bone and now we have to wait. She won’t be coming to for some hours.’
‘Can we see her?’ Mum asked.
The surgeon looked at us all. ‘Just for a few minutes.’
Helen was lying still on the bed. There was a drip in her arm and tubes coming from her head, which was bandaged. By the side of the bandage I could see where some of her long blonde hair had been shaved away so the surgeon could get at her brain. She’ll hate that, I thought. She was linked up to a machine that showed her heartbeat as an uneven, wavy line. Always pale, she now looked ghostly white. There were small cuts all over her face. Mum and Dad had sort of brave, unconvincing smiles on their faces, as if she could see them and they wanted to reassure her that everything was going to be alright.
Sullivan hung back, as if he didn’t know whether the surgeon had included him when he said that we could see Helen for a few moments. Ian looked appalled, wide-eyed. He hated hospitals and made a fuss if he had to have so much as an injection. He hadn’t spent the time I had in casualty departments to get used to them.
I knew I had to hold it together for Mum, Dad and Helen, but I wanted to punch the wall, throw a chair out of the window, or howl. It was a bit like anger, but I knew it was some different feeling I hadn’t experienced before. I wanted, more than I’d ever wanted anything, for this not to be what life was like. I’d settle for any crappy thing – being relegated to the C team, any mind-numbing schoolday, treble French on an afternoon after the chips had run out in the canteen at lunchtime – anything so long as this wasn’t happening.
‘Come on,’ said Dad. We trailed out and Mum and Dad tried to decide who should stay at the hospital.
‘I’m staying,’ said Sullivan firmly. Mum gave his arm a squeeze.
‘Of course,’ she said, ‘but …’ she looked at Dad, ‘… one of us has got to take David home.’
‘I’m staying too,’ I said. I wanted us to stay together and all be there when Helen woke up. I was having some nightmare thoughts about how she would be changed – perhaps she would be a zombie from now on.
‘You’ve got to see to M,’ Dad reminded me. ‘And you’ve got to get some sleep so you can take over from us. Come on, Davy.’
‘We’ll phone you as soon as something happens,’ Mum promised.
Reluctantly, Ian agreed to go home too, so he drove us. It was hard to leave. It seemed like a betrayal. The cool of the night air hit us when we left the hospital. It was a shock that the world outside was still there, unchanged. How could everything seem so normal when our lives were so misshapen? We were quiet at first, making our way out of Dublin on the deserted roads, but then we started to talk.
‘Remember last year, the night of the fire?’ I asked.
‘Course.’
When the houses were ablaze, Ian had rushed in to save our next-door neighbour who was deaf and had not heard the commotion until it was too late. Ian had saved her, without a thought for his precious hands. He could have been severely burnt, his music career ruined. Forget his career, he could have died.
‘Did you, you know, think about dying when you were going into the fire?’
‘Nah. Just did it. To tell the truth, when I thought about it afterwards, I couldn’t even imagine doing it. No way!’
‘But you did, Ian. You did.’
‘Some things are scarier when you think about them than when you do them.’ I wondered if he was thinking of what it was like to be Helen at that moment. Was she scared? Could
you be scared when you were unconscious? Or was it us who were scared and Helen was just living or dying, without thought?
‘Do you think she’s going to get better?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘She’s got to. She’s got to.’
We were quiet after that. When we drove up to The Haven there was an unfamiliar darkness about the place. Nobody had been there to turn on the outside lights and there was none on inside either.
M started jumping up, scratching at my legs when I opened the back door and there was a puddle on the utility room floor. I mopped it up, changed his drinking water and filled the feeding bowls.
Ian went straight to his piano and started playing. Over the years, I’d developed the skill of blotting out his music, but now the sounds he started to make got through my defences. He was hammering away – I think he was playing something by Beethoven. It was frenzied, angry, like a tempest of sound. It was as if he was shouting, No, I don’t want this chaos, this pain! Then the playing would grow softer and it sounded more like despair, why this? For once I didn’t complain as the house shook with his playing. Ian was communicating just what I felt. I looked in on him once, but he did not see me as his hands moved along the keys like two tarantulas in deadly combat.
I wandered around the house, not quite believing that I wouldn’t find Mum or Dad somewhere. I fancied hitting a few golf shots, but all the clubs were in the boot of Dad’s car, still at the hospital. I found a broom and tried whacking a few rolled-up socks, but it wasn’t the same. M and the kitten followed me wherever I went. They hadn’t touched their food. Though both must have been hungry, they just left it. It was odd. It was as if they sensed something was wrong. I didn’t go into Helen’s room. Her things lying about untidily all over the place just brought back where she was and what was happening to her.
Finally, I climbed the stairs to my room. It had been a long day. M jumped onto my bed and started licking me. He licked and licked at my skin until it almost hurt, but all the time it calmed me down. Even though I was dead tired, I couldn’t sleep, so I tried to watch a film while we waited, alone in the big house, M beside me and Mozart by my feet.
My Nutty Neighbours Page 6