Centaur

by Declan Murphy

  I continued to see Joanna while I rode for Josh Gifford. She transformed my entire view of the world. I was a boy when I met her; Joanna made me a man. I remember that period in my life like it was yesterday. Starlit skies and warm summer nights. My career advancing with every ride, beautiful Joanna by my side. We were the perfect couple in a perfect world – glamourous, successful, exciting. Much like a painting by an Old Master, our life had a distinct and magical allure – even a speck of imperfection was viewed by the beholder as an intentional brushstroke. I couldn’t have asked for more. Everything you could want from life was mine.

  Then I had my fall. And the course of two lives was irretrievably altered.

  Yes, mine …

  But more importantly …

  Hers …

  At the time of Declan’s accident, we had been together for five years. We were deeply in love, practically married. He had come out of the mist, this Irish man with the intense blue eyes, ridden up to me on a horse, quite literally, and swept me off my feet. I loved our life together; it was a storybook romance. Except I was living it.

  2 May 1994 was like a knife that cut my perfect life into two clean pieces. The Joanna Park that went to sleep on 1 May died that night. The next day, at approximately 2 p.m., a new Joanna Park was born, changed for evermore.

  On the morning of the Haydock Park races, I awoke with an uneasy feeling. Declan and I had discussed Senna’s death the previous night and I was full of misgiving that morning as I saw him off to the races. Being a jockey’s wife or girlfriend, you are constantly, every moment of every race, aware of the dangers involved. I was always worried, living in the fear that one day he would go out and never come back. It was as if every time he was going out to race, he was going to war – it was really that unpredictable. So, it was not uncommon for me to be apprehensive under the best of circumstances; every morning that he went out to ride, I would worry, and then when he would finish for the day, I would feel a sense of relief that he was OK, that he hadn’t had a fall. I suppose because of Senna’s death, and because Declan – usually so calm and unperturbed – seemed so shaken by it, I was even more anxious than normal that morning.

  At the time of Declan’s race, on the afternoon of 2 May, I was getting ready to go to Lester Piggott’s yard – where Declan had horses – to ride out. The BBC was on – I would always watch Declan’s races on TV, of course in part because I was supporting him, but also because at the end of every race, I would feel happy that it was over. So, I was on a chair in front of the TV, leaning over it, ready to go and ride a horse that we kept at this yard – a horse that was being rehabilitated, that needed riding twice a day. I had on my breeches, boots, all of it. I was half watching, half ready to go, keys in hand.

  And then I saw him fall.

  I knew instantly that it was bad. I had seen Declan fall in the past on television, and usually it was a matter of minutes before he was back up on his feet and the commentator would typically say, ‘Declan Murphy is about to get up’ or ‘Declan is winded’ or whatever.

  This time, there was nothing. I knew there had to be something very wrong when the BBC presenters on live TV seemed to hesitate and stall. Sir Peter O’Sullevan’s usually very smooth, very confident voice had noticeable breaks in it as he cut off with a cryptic ‘Unfortunately Declan Murphy is not yet up on his feet’. This was easily six or seven minutes after the race. Then I heard Julian Wilson come on to say, ‘OK, we’re going to leave it there. We don’t have any more news of Declan Murphy at this time.’

  And then, quite abruptly, they went off air.

  I was convinced he was dead. I had imagined this moment many times since Declan and I got together, but nothing really prepares you for it when it happens. I sat on the sofa, frozen with the shock of it all. I didn’t cry, I just sat there.

  There was this silence that was deafening; that felt like it went on for ages before anything happened.

  Suddenly, I snapped out of it. I couldn’t just sit there. I felt like I had to do something, find out what was going on. So I rang Declan’s phone, hoping that someone in the weighing room would answer it and tell me what had happened, where he was, if he was alive. I must have tried like an obsessed teenager – twenty or thirty times, at least. But his phone just rang and rang and rang. Eventually, I gave up. Next, I rang the racecourse, who wouldn’t give me any information at all. Then it occurred to me to look up the nearest hospital to Haydock Park. I assumed if something had happened, a hospital would logically be the first port of call. I found out it was Warrington and I called them. Finally, I got something back. They told me that someone had indeed called from the racecourse and that they were expecting a casualty to be brought over by ambulance. They weren’t allowed to tell me anything further, but this was enough for me – if they were bringing him in, it meant that he wasn’t dead. Yet.

  I had barely put the phone down when I got a call from Declan’s driver, Jim Hogan. His usual big, bold, full-of-life voice cracked as he uttered the words that will be etched in my memory for as long as I live. ‘It’s not good, Jo, it’s not good. Blood. There was blood everywhere. So much blood.’

  After that, for the next few moments, it was the calm before the storm. I remember walking around the house, looking at pictures of Declan and me, our house, my life, thinking, It’s all over.

  Seconds later, I looked up at the TV and what I saw chilled my spine. Sky News had put out a ‘Breaking News’ headline that flashed across the television screen before my very eyes: ‘Irish jump jockey fights for his life’, it read.

  And then the phone started to ring off the hook.

  I kept screaming at the phone because it kept ringing and ringing, and all I wanted to do was find a way to get to Declan. Then, like a missive from heaven, a path appeared. One of the calls was from a friend of Declan, who told me that he had heard the news and wanted to help. In a gesture of unprecedented generosity, he told me that he could have his plane ready for me within the hour. I was over four hours away from the hospital by road on a good day; that day was Bank Holiday Monday and I knew the roads would be jammed. I could think of no quick way of getting up there and suddenly I had a plane I could use – it was like a miracle, really. What more could I ask for?

  Jockey Michael Hill’s wife, Chrissy, had always been a good friend to me and she offered to accompany me on the plane. There is a landing strip at the back of the July racecourse in Newmarket that runs parallel to the racetrack and this is where we headed. When we arrived on the runway, we saw Barney Curley standing there, and the three of us made the hop across from Newmarket to Liverpool in fifty minutes.

  It was the longest fifty minutes of my life. Chrissy tried to comfort me as best she could, but there wasn’t so much as a whisper from Barney. Not a shred of compassion.

  The silence stung.

  My boyfriend, my love, was lying in a hospital somewhere, in what state no one knew. I was a twenty-two-year-old girl confronting possible death for the first time in my life. Declan worshipped Barney. Under the circumstances, I would have expected a little bit of empathy, some reassurance, a scintilla of solace. Any human connection – a touch on the arm or a ‘Don’t worry, Jo, I’m sure he’ll be fine’ would have gone a long way in helping me ride the waves of anxiety.

  But nothing ever came. Barney Curley sat in silence.

  At the time I remember thinking how heartless he was, how inconsiderate, how absolutely selfish. Many years later, I would realize how wrong I was in my assessment, how inconsiderate, how absolutely selfish. Barney Curley’s badge of distinction was that he never showed his cards. His face was always an impenetrable façade, devoid of any display of emotion. It was no different that time on the plane, as he sat by himself, his hard eyes closed, head leaning against the window in silence. But I should have known better, because even while his face betrayed nothing, his silence spoke a thousand words.

  I realize now that this man, usually overflowing with self-confidence, was riddled wi
th guilt. He had always had faith in Declan’s class as a jockey, but it was far greater than that. Declan had been like a second son to him – Barney didn’t love many, but he genuinely loved Declan. It seems inevitable now that he was contemplating his part in this whole thing – if he hadn’t brought an eighteen-year-old Declan over from Ireland in the first place, we wouldn’t be here, on this tiny six-seater plane, going to see if he was alive. And so if Barney was silent, it wasn’t because he was indifferent to my emotion; it was because he was consumed by his own.

  We all become selfish when we’re floundering in the puddles of grief.

  When I got to The Walton Centre, there were paparazzi all around. The entrance to the hospital was mobbed – there were cameras everywhere trying to take my picture, reporters trying to ask me things, even as I fought my way through them and made my way to the main reception.

  As soon as I got inside, I found the first member of staff I could and I asked the two questions foremost on my mind: One, was he alive? And two, could I see him?

  The answers, in order – because the order was very important – were, yes and no.

  I was told that Declan had been brought in alive and that he was in the operating theatre at the moment, he had been in there for a few hours already. So I sat in the waiting area – a windowless room, bright with fluorescent ceiling lights. The space was long and narrow, with three or four distinct seating areas, consisting of chairs arranged in a U formation around low wooden tables with fake flowers on them. There were signs everywhere – on walls, on stands, even stuck on the floor – in bold, bright letters, reminding people to wash their hands. I sat alone, staring at the bright purple plastic flowers in front of me, staring at the signs, thinking, Is he even going to come out? Is he going to come out in a sheet?

  After what seemed like hours, I was received by a man who introduced himself to me as Professor John Miles, Declan’s brain surgeon. He escorted me to a room, sat me down and offered me a glass of water. He then proceeded to inform me, in the most matter-of-fact tone you can imagine, that my entire world as I knew it had been ripped apart. Apparently, Declan had suffered a very severe head injury and was lucky to be alive. That, and the fact that two blood clots had been removed, were the only two bits of good news. The bad news came in more generously. First, there were no guarantees that he would live. If he did live, he was most likely going to be brain-damaged. He might be paralysed. One of his blood clots had been a hair’s width away from his optic nerve, so it was more than likely to have been damaged. As a result, he might wake up blind in one eye. ‘We don’t have definitive answers at this point,’ he had told me, not unkindly, ‘but I am just preparing you for what might come.’

  It’s strange. You see dramatic moments like this in movies and you think it’ll be very emotional, but actually it’s all very practical. You don’t cry; you think. The thoughts in your head are so functional, so objective, they border on seeming insensitive, cruel almost. The right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, I remember thinking to myself. John Miles had said he might be blind in one eye. Which eye, I wondered, left or right? Had it been damaged by the surgery or by the accident itself? If it was the surgery, it was likely that the right eye would be affected. But if it was the accident, he’d probably lose function in multiple organs on the left side of his body, including his left eye. Yes. Left eye, I concluded, he’s probably going to be blind in his left eye.

  Then, suddenly, I suppressed a desire to scream. What the hell was I doing? ‘Stop it, Jo, stop it,’ I said out loud to myself. ‘Get a grip, for God’s sake.’ So I stopped myself from going any further because I knew that even one more step down this track meant that I stood in real danger of being derailed. I had to stay in control, because nothing else seemed to be in any sort of control. So instead, I just sat there in silence.

  And then I was taken to the ICU to see him.

  It really was very theatrical. They walked me there wordlessly and then, in one sweeping motion, they drew back the curtain and left me to process the spectacle that lay on the other side. It took several sharp intakes of breath to compose myself, because the man on the bed looked like a monster. His head was huge and distended. He had large rings around his eyes that were jet black. Funnily enough, there wasn’t a mark on his body. It was wired up, but it looked absolutely normal. It was just his head and his face. And his eyes. What wasn’t covered in bandage was as black as night. I kept staring at that face, thinking, Who is this? Did they really want me to believe this was Declan? It wasn’t him there. I didn’t know this person.

  I still don’t think I cried. Shock, I learnt, kills tears.

  I kept thinking about the eyes. Those eyes on that body. They weren’t Declan’s eyes. I knew Declan’s eyes. His eyes were what first drew me to him …

  I first saw Declan on Newmarket Heath. I used to ride past him when I was in a string of horses. I was in one string and he was in another. You would get these massive strings of horses that would cross each other at certain times in the morning – sometimes there would be five, sometimes ten, sometimes twenty. We used to have to ride through the village of Exning to take us up to Newmarket Heath, and there were areas where the paths narrowed and the strings of horses would pass each other, single file, at very close range.

  The order that you rode within the string was determined by hierarchy. Jockeys, being the best riders, would always lead, followed by the rest of us, riding for fun or as a hobby or for a love of horses. Declan would always be at the head of his string, and I would be somewhere in the middle of mine. And every now and again, we would make eye contact. There was always something different about Declan – he looked different to everyone else in the manner in which he rode a horse; he was always very relaxed, very sure of himself. But the most distinctive thing about him was his eyes. Perhaps because that was all I could see. He wore green silks on his helmet with this white shamrock, and a scarf that covered most of his face, but I could always see his eyes. He had an intensity about his eyes.

  And now they wanted me to believe that the man lying in that room was Declan. I wanted to scream – those aren’t his eyes. But I knew nobody would listen.

  I held his hand then – it was soft and warm. ‘Hello, Dec,’ I said. But of course he didn’t say anything back. For the first time that day I started to cry. ‘It’s me, Dec,’ I whispered. I was trying not to say too much because I didn’t want him to hear me crying. I was allowed ten minutes with him before the nurses took over again.

  From that point in time, I lost track of day and night and date and time. I sat by his bedside and I never moved from there. I became a nurse’s nightmare, obsessed, watching those machines, the colours, the lines, the mechanical sounds. If anything changed – even the tiniest variation in the colour or shape on those little screens – I would panic. I think the thing that strikes you the most in the ICU, when anyone is on intensive care, is the ventilator – it’s that noise – when you know that they’re not breathing but that, it is. I remember this one time when it went whoosh, whoosh, then did a longer than usual whooooosh and then beeped. I started screaming for help, ‘Nurse, NURSE? Is anyone there? I think he might be … dead?’

  I had to make myself indispensable. It was the only way to cope.

  When I was too exhausted to sit, I would lie on the floor. I would close my eyes, but not for long, because I thought, If I sleep, if I go, the whole thing goes. I did this for days.

  I spent my time talking to him as if he was normal, about very key things in our life at that point. I had to force myself to sound positive, really focus on not crying, not sounding worried. I kept thinking, What can I say that will get him to wake? What can I say that will trigger something in him? Because I wanted him to come home now. I was done with this. I wanted it over. I wanted the love of my life back. So I was doing everything I could – reading, holding his hand, talking. I was convinced I could wake him up, that’s how naive I was.

  It was fou
r days after his accident that he came out of his coma. Everyone had pretty much given up by that point and they had contemplated turning off the life support. They had tried three times to bring him out of it but it hadn’t worked. I witnessed it all. I was in the room and the way in which they tried to take him out of it gives me nightmares to this day. No one prepares you for this kind of thing. There’s no sugar-coating the way it’s done. They just literally took the oxygen away and left him to breathe on his own. And he couldn’t. And I was there, the whole time, watching it, watching a man gasp for air. I could see the fear in his eyes. It was savage.

  And then, when everyone had given up hope, he woke up.

  He woke with the broadest Irish accent you’ve heard in your life – as if he was a child who had never been taken out of Ireland. And he remembered all the facts of being a child. It was really quite surreal. They asked him all these questions and he got them all wrong. Not wrong, exactly – just misplaced in time. It was like they say: when you die, your life flashes in front of you. In his case, it was as if he was dying and his life was flashing before him, and then suddenly he woke up when he wasn’t meant to. The reel stopped moving. And he was still a child.

  The whole thing was completely bizarre. I was thinking, Wow, apart from the fact that you’re now alive, you’re speaking with this accent that I don’t recognize, about these things, these people that I don’t relate to. Who are you?

  I’m not sure he knew either because he did some really strange things after that.

  One time, I think it was Day 6 after the surgery, when he had been moved from the ICU to his private room, he woke from sleep, looked at me, and said, ‘OK, we’re going to Browns now,’ in a very definitive but nonchalant way. Then he tried to sit up and found he couldn’t support himself, so he fell back down. I was in the room with two or three nurses at the time and we all looked at each other. Here was a man, completely tubed up, his head bandaged, looking horrific, and he wanted to go to Browns?