My Dad Is Ten Years Old

by Mark O'Sullivan

  ‘Jimmy?’

  I walk into the answering silence. I’ve never been inside Mrs Casey’s house before. It’s a mirror image of ours, but feels older, much older. Dark brown with age it is. The doors, the wallpaper, the carpet on the stairs. And the smell is ancient too. Not unclean, but stale, heavy with dust. Sean is treading softly from door to door along the hall. He turns to Mam and shakes his head. She begins to mount the stairs. We hear the click of a light switch from the room straight ahead of us on the first landing. I’m a few steps behind Mam. I can see the clench of her calf muscles as she climbs, though she moves as gracefully as ever.

  ‘It’s all right, Jimmy,’ Mam says, her voice firm but gentle. ‘It’s me. Judy.’

  On the landing we gather. There’s not a sound from inside the room. Mam tries the doorhandle. I expect it to be locked or blocked in some way, but it’s not. I can’t look and Sean can’t either.

  ‘What are you doing here, Jimmy?’ Mam whispers and his answer’s a whisper I don’t catch.

  Mam goes inside and, at first, I don’t see him, I see Mrs Casey. Her head tiny on the pillow. Her eyes closed, her mouth open, no rise and fall of breath in her. Dolls never grow old, but if they did, they’d look like this. Mam moves closer to the bed and now I see him. Sitting on the side of the bed, his shoulders hunched, holding Mrs Casey’s hand.

  ‘What’s the story, Jimmy?’ Sean asks, too much anxiety in his voice to keep it at a whisper.

  Mrs Casey stirs, makes troubled dream noises. As her face moves on the pillow, I see the bruise on her right cheekbone, a purple blush. She settles again. Jimmy stretches his neck and rubs it with his free hand. He’s pure jaded, slow lids battle the tiredness in his eyes.

  ‘Every time I let go of her hand, she bloody wakes up,’ he says. ‘She won’t let me get the doctor.’

  Mam releases his hand and takes his place. She’s checking Mrs Casey’s pulse.

  ‘Why does she need the doctor, Jimmy?’ she asks.

  He’s sidling away further along the bed, trying to squeeze the life back into his hand.

  ‘She’s had a fall,’ he says. ‘I found her at the back door and I had to carry her up here. She wouldn’t let me call the doctor. She wanted to put on her face, but she was crying so much, the make-up got washed away every time she tried. The police aren’t going to nab me, are they?’

  ‘Why would they want to nab you?’ Mam says. ‘You haven’t done anything wrong, have you?’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘What brought you out here, Jimmy?’ I ask.

  ‘When I went out in the garden, I heard her crying. Didn’t you?’

  Across from the end of the bed stands a tall chest of drawers. Along the top, there’s nine or ten framed photos. Old sepias of a wedding day, a young couple sitting on a tartan blanket at a beach, a night of formal dress, him in his dickie bow, her in her tiara. All the other photos are of him. Getting a few years older before the photos stop.

  ‘Sean,’ Mam says. ‘Go and ring the hospital.’

  ‘But she’s not ready,’ Jimmy says. ‘She’ll get well thick with you, Judy.’

  ‘We’ll get her ready,’ Mam says.

  She takes her hand from Mrs Casey’s, feels the old woman’s forehead, lifts the blanket a little to look along those frail bones for further damage. There’s a small patch of blood on the nightdress near the hip. From outside on the landing comes Sean’s voice, low and urgent. Mrs Casey wakes. She looks at Mam, confused at first, then frightened. Her gaze flits by me like I don’t exist and fixes on Jimmy. Her eyes light up.

  ‘Raymond,’ she says.

  ‘Oh, bloody ’ell,’ Jimmy groans softly. ‘She’s off again.’

  He doesn’t look at all like the fair-haired man in the photos. He’s uncomfortable now because Mam’s gazing at him too. Love looks the same on every face, no matter how young or old that face is. Pain too.

  ‘Raymond asked me to fix you up for the doctor,’ Mam says. ‘We want you looking your best, all right?’

  She cleans Mrs Casey’s face with the moist tissues and finds some eye shadow on the bedside table. I can’t believe how steady her hands are, how composed she is. When Mrs Casey closes her eyelids for the eye shadow, they stay closed, and before very long we hear footsteps on the stairs and we have to leave her to the ambulance crew in their yellow Day-Glo jackets and the nurse with her blue cardigan pulled tightly about her against the cold.

  From the top of Mrs Casey’s steps we see a squad car parked behind the ambulance. Brian leans in by the side window talking to Starsky.

  ‘You told me I wasn’t going to get nicked, Judy,’ Jimmy says accusingly, but she links his arm, gets him moving again.

  ‘They’ve come to help Mrs Casey,’ she says.

  ‘She needs help an’ all,’ he says. ‘I told her who I was, but she wouldn’t believe me. Who’s Raymond anyway?’

  ‘Someone she used to know,’ I tell him.

  On the footpath, they walk ahead of Sean and me. Mam’s trying to fall into step with him, but it’s not easy with that foot of his dragging every few paces, and it almost looks like he’s yanking her along, though not roughly. Brian and Starsky greet him, but he just nods and gets by as quickly as he can.

  Sean hangs back, talking to Brian and to Starsky, explaining what’s happened, I suppose. I catch up with Mam and Jimmy on our drive. Martin’s Mercedes is still parked there and they’ve stopped alongside it. They look beyond me to Mrs Casey’s house. The ambulance crew carries the metal stretcher down the steps over there. The cold creeps in around us. Wedding-day cold.

  ‘Do you really mean it when you say I can move into the Head-Up house?’ he asks her. ‘Say you do. Please, Judy.’

  ‘I do.’

  36

  I don’t know what this mad rush is about; maybe it’s the adrenalin still pumping through me, but I’m in such a hurry to get out of the dressing room, I don’t bother to wipe off the heavy gunge of stage make-up. I’ve wasted enough time already changing from my costume. Jill grabs me in one of her dramatic hugs. There are tears and whispers, but I can’t hear her words among the shrieks and the squeals. I break away from her, all smiles and see you tomorrow but, of course, she can’t hear me either so we laugh instead and I head through the crowd and it’s more smiles and more words I can’t hear, but I answer anyway. ‘Yeah.’ ‘Brilliant.’ ‘Sorry.’ ‘Gas, wasn’t it?’ ‘Sorry.’ ‘Thanks.’ ‘Can I squeeze by?’ ‘Thanks.’ ‘Thanks.’

  Outside the door, some of the younger guys are doing high fives and shoulder slams and trying to push one another into our dressing room. I make it down the stairs to the assembly hall corridor and it’s jam-packed with people. I can’t see Mam and Jimmy among the first-night throng. They’ll have gone outside to wait, I’m thinking, because all this noise will have freaked Jimmy out.

  There’s no short cut to the exit so I have to plough on through. Faces I know and faces I don’t know pop up before me and I try to be polite and swap a word or two, but it’s all starting to feel a bit weird. The make-up feels like it’s congealed in the shape of a mad, laughing mask that I can’t undo. I don’t like the way my heart is racing because I don’t want my brain to go racing after it. I’m still less than halfway along the corridor. I think. Everyone in the corridor seems to be at least a foot taller than me and it’s so hot in here, I can hardly catch a breath.

  Someone takes my arm and we start to shoot forward. Brian. Sean’s with him. They’re not as polite as I am as they push through, but I keep the head down and pretend I don’t notice. We get to the exit and Brian swings the door open for me. The breeze touches my cheeks and I can breathe again.

  ‘They’re waiting for you over at the front gate,’ he says. ‘You were class, man.’

  Sean lays his arm across my shoulder and gives me a squeeze.

  ‘Great stuff, Eala,’ he says and releases me.r />
  Brian touches my arm. I wish I didn’t have to go, but I do. I nod towards the front gate.

  ‘They’ll be getting cold. I’ll ring you later, OK, Brian?’

  He gives me a quick, half-embarrassed kiss on the cheek as the crowd mills past us.

  ‘Yeah, no sweat,’ he says.

  I can’t stop myself from breaking into a half-trot as I go out along the school avenue. I’ve never felt so happy nor ever felt so sad. Running helps me keep some kind of balance between the two. The ground lamps lighting up the trees on either side of the avenue make it seem like I’m still on stage. I glide by a few groups of slow-walking smokers and, at last, the front gate is in sight. Mam’s there under the light globe of the high pier. I get a quick glimpse of Jimmy before he ducks into the shadows. Mam’s arms open even as I falter, my legs gone to jelly. She holds me and I bury my face in her coat collar.

  ‘You were so good, Eala. I’m so proud of you.’

  ‘It was the hardest thing I ever had to do, Mam, the hardest thing,’ I tell her and the pain of kneeling centre stage and singing that last chorus of ‘Somewhere’ sweeps across me. It didn’t matter that it was Derek’s head in my lap. It wasn’t him I was singing for anyway.

  ‘I know, love, I know,’ she says. ‘But you did it and you did it in style.’

  ‘Will you be OK when he’s gone, Mam?’

  ‘I’ll be fine, Eala,’ she says. ‘We’ll all be fine. Jimmy too.’

  The avenue is filling up with people. We let one another go and Jimmy’s appeared again. He looks so nice in the grey shirt and new tweed jacket Mam bought for him. He’s staring at me like he can’t remember who I am.

  ‘Well, Jimmy,’ I say.

  An uncertain smile flickers across his face as he studies me. He looks away, looks at me again. And suddenly I cop what it is that makes him so hesitant. I must seem pure weird out here in the night with this stage make-up plastered all over my face.

  ‘You look different,’ he says. ‘Older.’ His gaze drifts upwards towards the tops of the budding trees that line the school avenue and then comes back to me. ‘You’ve got the loveliest voice, Eala.’