‘Me.’
‘A nurse?’
‘A nurse.’
‘Good.’
‘Everything went well, Eve. You’re going to be fine.’ Lily fixed her pillow.
‘Where’s Ben?’ Eve said, battling the urge to sleep.
‘He’s on another floor.’
‘How is he?’ Eve said urgently, knowing she had only a little time before the drug took over and she disappeared.
‘He’s OK.’
Although twenty years had passed since she’d last seen Lily, and although she was doped up to high hell, Eve knew she was evading the truth. ‘Your voice still rises an octave when you lie,’ she said.
‘OK,’ Lily said. She took Eve’s good hand. ‘He’s not so good, Eve.’
‘How bad?’ she asked, battling to stay alert.
‘He’s in a coma.’
‘But he’ll be OK,’ Eve insisted.
‘I don’t know yet,’ Lily said, and she was only half lying. He could still live and there was no need to tell Eve it would most likely be in a persistent vegetative state.
‘Oh, God almighty, Lily, he has to be OK,’ Eve said, beginning to slur. Big fat tears rolled down her face. Her head was as heavy as a bowling ball and her burning eyes sealed shut.
When she was asleep Lily wiped her old friend’s wet face gently with a tissue.
The next time Eve woke it was to a rumpus. Lindsay Harrington in the bed opposite was a senile eighty-three-year-old who’d just had her hip reset following an accident in a park. She had mistaken a passing Bernese Mountain Dog called Prince for the pony she had had by the same name as a young girl. Her daughter had turned in time to see her mother attempt to mount the confused animal, which bolted, leaving Lindsay on the ground with a broken hip and talking about sending him to the sausage factory. Eve heard the voices of the nurses as they tried to restrain the old lady, who was shouting, ‘Will you please let go! I have to find my handbag!’
Eve heard a nurse calmly telling her that she didn’t have her handbag with her.
‘Well, that’s because it’s been stolen! I’m surrounded by bloody peasants!’
‘Nothing has been stolen, Mrs Harrington,’ another nurse said. ‘You have to stay still – you’ve just come out of theatre.’
‘Oh, really?’ Lindsay Harrington relaxed. ‘I do love the theatre.’
One of the nurses must have pushed a button because Lindsay Harrington disappeared and Eve soon followed.
Lily was too tired to face dinner when she got home. She was pale with exhaustion so her husband took pity on her and ran her a bath. He helped her in and sat on the toilet, watching her as she sank into it.
‘I haven’t seen you this tired in years,’ he said. ‘Is it your shoulder?’
‘It’ll be fine.’
‘I didn’t mean to hurt you. You know that.’
‘Of course I do.’
‘Why don’t you take the rest of the week off?’
‘No,’ she said, mild alarm in her voice.
‘You’re so desperate to get out of this house,’ he said sadly. ‘It’s not like anyone will die without you.’
Lily had learned to ignore her husband’s disregard for her work. ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘It was a long day.’
‘OK. I have something for you,’ he said. He went into the bedroom and returned a minute later with a box.
Lily dried her hands with a towel and opened it to find a beautiful gold bangle inside. Declan didn’t believe in a joint account but he was generous when buying his wife gifts. Lily often thought the reason she got away with second-hand and homemade clothes was because of the jewellery she wore with them. Declan had a habit of buying it when he felt bad about something. Her collection was extensive. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said.
‘So are you,’ he said, ‘and I should say it more often.’
She sighed and took his hand in hers. With her heart in her mouth she seized the moment. ‘I have a favour to ask,’ she said.
‘What?’ he said, placing the bangle on her arm and admiring it.
‘Scott wants to work in the garage with your dad this summer.’
Declan stopped gazing at the bangle and looked at his wife with a pained expression. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.
‘They must have talked about it when he was here for dinner a couple of weeks ago.’
‘And Scott wants to work in that garage?’
‘Scott doesn’t know the man you knew, Declan.’
Declan was lost for words. He didn’t know what to think. His relationship with his father had always been horrendous. When Declan was growing up his father was a malevolent, violent drunk. He had chosen to discipline Declan in the way he had been disciplined as a young boy in a Christian Brothers boarding school outside Kildare. If Declan did anything his father considered to be breaking the rules, he would deliver him the worst and most brutal kind of beating. Declan had tried his hardest to be the best boy he could be but the rules changed depending on how much his father had had to drink. Mostly he damaged Declan just enough to terrify him but not enough to invite suspicion. The Christian Brothers had taught him well. Declan’s father was a haunted, angry, bitter man. His mother was a quiet, distant woman who tended to live on another plane of existence, one that was sustained by prescription drugs and an unhealthy ability to disengage from reality. She had married a cold man and once when she’d had one too many glasses of wine she had admitted to her fifteen-year-old son, much to his embarrassment, that it was a miracle he was born because she could recall on one hand the amount of times they’d made love. She was her husband’s housemaid and mother to his child, and although no one but the man himself could say if he had ever loved her, in the eighteen years they’d been together he had never once laid a violent hand on her. She turned away when her son was being disciplined, and pretended nothing was happening if her husband really lost it.
When Declan was thirteen he joined his friends Gar and Paul for a smoke behind the bike shed in the schoolyard. Their teacher caught them and duly reported their misbehaviour to their parents. Gar was grounded for a week. Paul was grounded for two weeks and made to go to Confession. Declan was punched in the stomach, stripped of all his clothes and locked into the coal-shed behind his house. With only straw to warm him, he was imprisoned there for twenty-four hours before his father freed him.
‘Well, Smoky Joe, fancy a cigarette now, do you?’ he had asked, and laughed as Declan made his way back to the house, blue with the cold. When he was fourteen his father kicked him so hard in the balls he had to wear a protective cup for two weeks. When he was sixteen he came home to find his father sitting at the dining-room table with a stick lying across it and Declan’s report card in his hand. Declan had averaged B in all subjects, despite the usual D in Irish. The teacher said he could do better. That warranted a beating. He smelt the whiskey on his father’s breath as he shouted, and when he grabbed the stick Declan punched him hard in the face. His father was shocked but still much stronger than his son. Declan received a broken collarbone and two cracked ribs. He sat in the hospital waiting area listening to his mother tell the receptionist that he’d been playing rugby, and when he was being patched up, the doctor relived his own glory days on the field.
‘It’s a hard game but worth it,’ he said. ‘It might feel like for ever but you’ll be back on the field in no time.’
Declan was silent while his mother smiled and thanked the doctor. She told him what a promising rugby player Declan was and how proud she and his father were.
Afterwards he had called to see Lily. She was alone as per usual: her mother had taken a job working in a pub. She realized instantly what had happened and took him inside. They lay together in her bed and she held him while he cried like a baby. He never told anyone else what he went through at home but he told Lily everything, every beating, every humiliation. They were so alike in a lot of ways, both only children deprived of the parental love that was supposed to be bes
towed naturally. They were both control freaks. In their early years together Lily would have said that the only thing that differentiated them was that, while she was emotionally neglected, she was never subjected to deliberate cruelty. In later years she realized that there was something else: she was a giver and her husband was a taker. He found strength in her acceptance, love and support of him and she found love in his dependence on her. They needed each other desperately. They fitted. They had their own little world that no one was privy to, not even Eve. She would never have understood and Declan would have killed himself if anyone had found out – God knew he’d been close to it before they had found each other.
Declan was desperate to go to university in Cork, not just because he wasn’t sure he’d get the grades to follow Lily into Trinity: he wanted to go to Cork to get away from the house that he had nightmares about. Back then, Lily would have followed him to the moon to save him. When Declan got a place in Cork, he cut his ties with his parents and never returned to the house. The day after he left for college his mother moved out and went to her sister, who lived on a farm in Sligo. Although she and her son exchanged Christmas and Easter cards, she never accepted her complicity in Declan’s maltreatment, and never apologized or tried to make it right. Their relationship had never progressed past those two cards each year.
Declan and Lily had been married for nine years, and Scott was eight years old, when his father knocked on the door. It was a Sunday and he shook his astounded son’s hand, telling him he had found their address in the phone book and taken a chance on them being in. Lily was quite frightened, and Declan was stunned but ready for a fight. The strangest thing happened. The ogre who had made Declan’s life such a misery sat in their kitchen and pleaded for his son’s forgiveness. He had been sober for four years. He was in AA and Declan was the last person on his list with whom he wanted to make amends.
‘I hurt you worse than anyone else,’ he said.
‘You were an animal,’ Declan replied.
‘Yes,’ he admitted. He cried and tried to explain what had been done to him at his boarding school.
‘I don’t want to know. I don’t care. It’s no excuse,’ Declan said, and his father didn’t push it.
Lily often thought about that day and Declan telling his father that his torture at the hands of the Brothers was no excuse. She agreed with him. If only he could grasp that the same reasoning applied to his own behaviour. Of course he was nothing like his father. He would never lay a hand on his children and he battled with his demons every day. Lily knew that Declan did the best he could – she just wished he could do better.
After that day, Declan’s father turned up often. When Declan realized that his father was serious about making a relationship with him and his family, and that he was utterly changed, he allowed him to visit once a month. They saw each other at Declan’s home, where he was in control: that was the only way in which he could have the man back in his life. Declan’s dad had been in counselling and he was in a group preparing a report on abuses by the clergy. He had admitted that his past was no excuse for his treatment of Declan. He had met many people who had suffered as he had and they had not turned into monsters. He was sorry and he meant it. Declan knew it but, even so, he could only just tolerate the man who worked tirelessly to become a part of his son’s new life.
Scott had adored his grandfather from day one. He loved cars and trucks and racing bikes and was thrilled that his grandfather had his own garage. He loved to tinker and pull things apart. He liked the notion of building a car, and when he was sixteen his granddad, with his father’s permission, bought him a car that needed work. Together they rebuilt its engine in Declan’s garden and under his watchful eye. When the report on the abuses committed by the clergy finally came out in 2009 the whole country gasped at what the children under the control of the Church had endured. Declan read it from cover to cover and only then did he fully understand his father’s past. They never spoke about it, but having read that report, he felt closer to his torturer. It was as though in some way they were kindred spirits. His father had been sexually abused, something he couldn’t speak about – and Declan would never ask him to. Although their relationship remained fraught it had thawed considerably over the last year.
Before he had read that report, Declan would never have considered letting his son work in the garage that had been the scene of many beatings but now, sitting in his en-suite bathroom with his wife’s hand in his, he found himself thinking more positively. ‘He does love cars,’ he said.
‘And if anything did happen and I know it won’t, but if it did it would be different,’ she said.
‘How’s that?’ Declan asked.
‘Because he’d have you to come home to,’ she said.
Declan’s eyes filled and he squeezed her hand. ‘I love you,’ he said.
‘I love you too.’
He didn’t like to cry in front of his wife so he stifled a cough and left the bathroom.
And maybe it was because Lily was reminded of her husband’s painful past, or that she had caught a glimpse of the boy she’d fallen in love with, or perhaps it was seeing her old friend battered and broken, or the ocean of grief she carried inside her – or maybe it was all of those things – but for the second time that day the tide she had tried to keep at bay rolled back in: she sat in the bath sobbing quietly until she was empty and cold.
Eve woke up twice more during the night. The first time she was screaming, having dreamed she was on a rack, her arms and legs being torn apart. She heard her shoulders dislocate and saw the Ginger Monster throw her legs into an old wicker basket. She was wet and sweating profusely. Her heart was racing and she was begging him to stop, repeating that she was sorry.
A nurse came running into the room. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, in a soothing voice, before she pressed the button. The fire ripped through Eve and she became still, warm and heavy.
The ceiling disappeared, revealing a perfect navy-blue night sky complete with dazzling diamond stars and a pearl-coloured half moon. She was back on the road, leaning against the old stone wall separating a farmer’s field from the passing traffic. Ben was eighteen again and wearing his Bruce Springsteen T-shirt. He was sitting on the wall and she was standing between his legs, kissing his face and holding him close.
‘I wish we could just stop here and live in this moment for ever,’ he said, stroking her cheek.
‘We can,’ she said. She hugged him tight, whispering in his ear that everything was going to be fine.
The second time she woke that night a nurse was standing over her fiddling with one of the tubes attached to her. She felt groggy and sick, but the sharp pain she’d experienced earlier had dulled and she knew where she was.
‘What time is it?’ she asked.
‘It’s just after three,’ the nurse said.
‘Where’s Lily?’
‘She’s at home. She’ll be back on shift in the morning.’
‘OK.’
‘Can I get you anything?’
‘Ben,’ Eve said, and drifted back to sleep.
Lily arrived into work early and checked in on Eve. She was asleep and comfortable. Long may it last. Post-operative day two was often the worst. Hang in there, Eve. She asked the other nurses to call her when Eve woke, then got to work. As it turned out Eve waited until late morning, when Lily was at the bottom of her bed reading her chart, before she opened her eyes.
‘Good morning,’ Lily said. ‘You had a good night.’
‘Clearly we have different ideas on what constitutes a good night.’
‘Good to see you’re coming back to us.’ Lily smiled.
‘Ben?’
Lily’s heart sank. She’d dropped by the ICU on her way to her ward and he had not had a good night. ‘The same,’ she said.
‘Can I see him?’
‘No, Eve. Impossible.’
‘Because of his wife,’ Eve said, in a tone that suggested resignation. ‘Does s
he know?’ she asked, alarmed at the notion of the woman he married freaking out trying to find him.
‘She’s with him,’ Lily confirmed.
Eve sighed with relief. ‘I don’t belong there.’
‘Not to mention that you’ve two broken legs, a mangled shoulder and you’ve had enough hardware installed to give the Terminator a run for his money. You’re going nowhere.’
‘But mostly I don’t belong,’ Eve said.
Lily remained silent.
‘How long?’ Eve said, pointing to the damage to her body.
‘Weeks,’ Lily said vaguely.
‘How many weeks?’
‘Everyone heals in their own time. I can’t answer that.’
‘Ballpark.’
‘Still pushy, I see.’
‘Please.’
‘Your shoulder is the worst injury. Adam basically rebuilt it and they might have to go back in. If they do, it will be in another month or so. Your right leg is in a cast for about eight weeks, your left leg will take at least that and you’ll need physio.’
‘What about my face?’ Eve asked.
‘Well, you look a state now but you’ll heal as good as new.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You’re welcome.’ Lily sat down and pulled her chair close to the bed. ‘I found your phone. It was in your jacket pocket. I could call Danny for you.’
‘He died.’
Lily’s face fell and tears filled her eyes. It was as though she had been punched in the gut. When Eve and Lily had parted company all those years ago, Lily had lost more than her best friend: she had lost the man who had been the closest thing she’d ever had to a father, and Clooney too. ‘Oh, Eve, I’m so sorry.’
‘Thanks.’
‘If I’d known …’ Lily trailed off because she hadn’t known, and even if she had, would she have had the guts to turn up to his funeral? Maybe – after all, it was Danny.
Lily fell silent. Eve saw the pain in her face. She understood it. Lily had loved Danny just as she had. A vision of her father swinging tiny Lily around and Lily screaming, ‘Faster, Danny, faster!’ popped into her head.
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