Life, Interrupted

by Damian Kelleher

  Once Polly and Uncle Stu have left, it’s just me, Jesse and Mum, the way it always used to be. We have the telly blaring away in the background but to be honest, it’s some rubbish talent show and we’re not really watching.

  ‘So what are we going to do tomorrow?’ asks Jesse. ‘You can come and see me play if you like. It’s the semifinals. We’re playing Endymion Road at home.’

  ‘She doesn’t like,’ I say. ‘Mum’s not up to seeing you and your footie-mad mates prancing around a field.’

  ‘Yes, you are, aren’t you, Mum?’ says Jesse. ‘You want to come and watch me play, don’t you?’

  ‘Course I do, love,’ says Mum, trying to pull herself up a bit in the wheelchair. Although it’s got her here (and I don’t see how we would have done without it), it’s a bit like a prison, confining her and hemming her in. I can see her pressing her finger on her pain-relief box, which means something is hurting bad.

  ‘You okay, Mum?’ I ask her.

  She winces a little, as though, now I’ve noticed, she can stop pretending that she’s feeling fine.

  ‘Just my shoulder again,’ she says. ‘I think I may need one of those painkillers now, Luke, love.’

  Polly has lined up all Mum’s pills on the side in the kitchen and labelled them with what times we have to hand them out so we can’t give her the wrong drugs. This is just as well as I don’t fancy being had up for mumslaughter if I got them mixed up. She’s also left some painkillers for times when Mum really needs them (like now). Mum knocks a couple back with the remains of her tea, and, although the TV is still spewing out its rubbish, she closes her eyes.

  There’s a ring on the door and Uncle Stu is back with the pizzas, some beer for him and there’s ice cream and fizzy drinks too. Mum wouldn’t normally allow this, (ice cream maybe, but not the drinks), but she doesn’t say anything when he waves the stuff at us victoriously. We just grab a pile of plates and sit round in front of the telly getting stuck into the pizzas. Uncle Stu offers Mum a beer, but she says she’s not sure if it goes well with heavyduty painkillers (‘I’m feeling a little woozy as it is’) and she’s not up to it anyway.

  To be honest, it doesn’t look like she’s up to the pizza, either. While we set about the Al Capone (chilli beef with extra peppers) and Veggie Massacre (roast veg with extra mozzarella), Mum lies back and takes the odd nibble at a sad, solitary slice of pizza and a tiny bit of garlic bread.

  ‘Not eating much, Pat?’ Uncle Stu asks.

  ‘It’s the drugs,’ says Mum. ‘Don’t have much of an appetite right now.’

  ‘You’ll need to keep your strength up, sis,’ says Uncle Stu. ‘Try and eat a bit more . . .’

  She raises the pizza slice to her lips very slowly, and her hand has a slight shake to it, I notice.

  ‘That’s the girl,’ he says, like she’s a small child who just needs a little encouragement. But I notice she only takes the tiniest of bites, and the effort of raising the pizza to her mouth seems to have worn her out.

  ‘What time is kick-off tomorrow then, Jesse?’ asks Uncle Stu.

  ‘Twelve noon,’ says Jesse. ‘Will you come too, Uncle Stu?’

  ‘Course I will,’ he says. ‘Anyway, who’s going to drive your mum to the match if I’m not there?’

  chapter seventeen

  Most Saturdays, the only thing that drags me out of bed is the prospect of a slice of hot buttered toast, a steaming great mug of tea and a lazy lounge on the sofa in front of some mid-morning kids’ TV. But my body clock seems to have tuned in to Mum being back home again; when I check my alarm I find it’s just gone eight and I’m wide awake.

  Downstairs, I find I’m not the only one who’s up with the lark. Uncle Stu is shovelling cornflakes down his throat (so we didn’t scatter the whole box yesterday I’m relieved to discover) and Mia (where did she come from?) is sorting out Mum’s medicine.

  ‘I’ll need a hand lifting Pat when she’s finished,’ she says to Uncle Stu.

  I say my ‘good mornings’ and head towards the lounge to see Mum.

  ‘Oh, give her a couple of minutes, love,’ says Mia. Then she drops her voice a tad and mouths, ‘She’s on the loo.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say. I don’t like to point out that, before Mum got ill, Jesse and I were in and out of the bathroom constantly while Mum was on the loo, but somehow I suppose it’s different when you have to be lowered on to a cold-looking bedpan and lifted off again when you’ve finished.

  ‘According to the weather forecast,’ says Uncle Stu, reading from the newspaper, ‘it’s wet and windy today but hot and sunny tomorrow. Now, hot and sunny Sunday says “barbecue” to me.’

  He puts the paper down.

  ‘What do you reckon, Luke? I don’t suppose you lot have got such a thing as a barbecue out the back?’

  ‘There should be one in the shed,’ I say, ramming bread into the toaster. ‘It may be a bit old and rusty, though. Don’t think we used it at all last summer.’

  In fact, I know we didn’t. Because it rained all summer long, and even when it stopped raining, it looked like it was about to start again. Mum’s never been a great barbecue fan, either. Although she’s not exactly a bra-burning feminist, Mum believes blokes are just as capable as women of putting on the washing and clearing up the kitchen. And, although she’s a dab hand with a screwdriver and she’s redecorated the whole house at some stage, the art of the barbecue has somehow passed her by.

  Uncle Stu is out the door like a whippet on steroids, diving into the shed and rummaging about with gusto. After a lot of clattering, he merges with a nasty blackened barbecue grill.

  ‘It’s all there,’ he says. ‘Good scrub and a bit of elbow grease and that’ll do the job, I reckon. So what do you fancy? Sausages? Chicken? Burgers?’

  Mia calls Unce Stu to go and help her with Mum, so I get handed the encrusted article and a Brillo pad that’s going to transform this grease-fest into the best thing since a George Foreman grill. I haven’t even had my toast yet.

  ‘Give Golden Balls a shout, would you, Luke?’ says Uncle Stu once Mia has gone. ‘If he’s going to be charging up and down the field in a couple of hours he’ll need some breakfast inside him. Tell him I do a mean scrambled egg.’

  ‘A barbecue?’ says Jesse. ‘We haven’t had one for ages.’

  We’re driving to the footie match in Uncle Stu’s car, and we’re a bit late. Mum is sitting in the passenger seat, next to Uncle Stu. She’s under a blanket although it’s not that cold. Jesse is trying to put his kit on in the back of the car and he keeps kicking me, and kneeing me and shoving his elbow into my face as he struggles to get his footie shirt on. He keeps checking his bag every two minutes to make sure he hasn’t forgotten his lucky troll.

  ‘All the more reason to do it tomorrow,’ she says. ‘Not that I’m going to be much use, mind, in this thing . . .’

  She tries to indicate her wheelchair but then realises she’s not actually in it right now, and that seems to surprise her. It took a good fifteen minutes to get Mum in the car. Uncle Stu had to lift her in, fold down the wheelchair (‘I’ve got a degree in languages, not engineering,’ he muttered as he struggled with the release mechanism) and then try and squeeze it into the boot. Jesse, who could have been changing while this was going on, was looking on gormlessly, checking his watch every now and again as if that would help speed them up.

  ‘Oh we don’t need you,’ says Uncle Stu, turning to Mum. ‘I’m the barbecue king round here. And I’ve got my special helpers, right, guys?’

  Once we’re parked up, Jesse rushes off to join the team (he’s put his shirt on inside out and hasn’t even noticed, the dork), while Uncle Stu and I sort out the wheelchair and Mum. I seem to be better at getting the chair into position than Uncle Stu, so while I sort that, he lifts Mum out of the car.

  ‘How much d’you weigh these days, Pat?’ he asks.

  Mum looks half asleep, but she smiles. ‘Cheeky,’ she tells him. ‘You should know never to ask a lady her weig
ht.’

  ‘We’re going to have to fatten you up,’ he says. ‘You’re all skin and bone, sis, like a little sparrow.’

  He’s holding Mum in his arms and gently lowering her into the chair. She raises her head slightly and plants a kiss on his cheek.

  ‘There’s a peck for you, then,’ she says.

  All this wheelchair malarkey has made something very obvious to me: Mum is actually quite frail and probably shouldn’t be out here in the open air (especially when it looks like it might rain at any minute), watching a football match. Uncle Stu phoned Polly just before we left and asked her if she thought we ought to be taking Mum and she told him, ‘It’s her weekend, let her do whatever she wants. It’ll probably do her a power of good.’

  Mum said,‘I want to watch Jesse play,’ and Uncle Stu said, ‘You’re meant to be taking it easy. Haven’t you got some important knitting to do?’ and Mum said, ‘I’m your big sister and I may be ill, but I can still give you a very hard clip round the ear if you’re not careful.’

  Today, there’s a fairly good crowd which I put down to the fact that it’s the semi-finals. There’s no sign of Jack or Freya though I reckon they may put in an appearance. But Uncle Stu makes up for them in the noise department. I swear, he’s almost as loud as Jack’s grandad’s rattle. He shouts at all our players, bellows ‘Come on now, Jesse!’ every time the ball travels so much as ten metres within my brother’s radar, and, when one of our Joan of Arc players gets booked for a dodgy tackle, he calls the ref a name that gets him a very stern look from Mum.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he says by way of explanation. ‘It’s a football match. Swearing is all part of the fun.’

  ‘There are children here, Stuart,’ says Mum. ‘So there’s no need to call the poor bloke’s parentage into question.’

  ‘Are there?’ Uncle Stu looks around as though he’s observing the scene for the first time. ‘D’you know, I hadn’t even noticed . . .’

  Perhaps it’s Uncle Stu’s very vocal support or perhaps it’s Endymion Road’s lack of any kind of defensive tactics. Whatever, the opposition certainly seems to be all over the place, and ten minutes before half-time, Ryan Dunbar boots a long ball up to Shav, who rips through the defence like a hot knife through butter and just taps the ball past the keeper. Easy.

  The home crowd claps like mad – Uncle Stu manages to whistle really loud with his fingers stuck in his mouth – and even Mum manages to tap the side of her wheelchair and wave at Jesse, despite the fact that he had nothing to do with the goal.

  At half-time when the oranges come out, Uncle Stu gets a call from Polly on her mobile asking if Mum is still up for a bit of a shop later with Mia.

  ‘Do you know,’ says Mum, speaking her words slowly and deliberately, ‘I think all this fresh air has worn me out? D’you think they could manage without me?’

  Uncle Stu turns away and speaks quietly into the phone and when he turns back he smiles and says, ‘It’s fine. She’s cool with it. They’re going to nip down to Rugs R Us later and bring you back a Day-Glo Afro.’

  Mum tries to whack him playfully with the back of her hand but he dodges the weak blow and says, ‘If you’re not careful I’ll leave you and your wheelchair at the side of the road.’

  The second half isn’t exactly riveting. Freya turns up late, looking distinctly flustered.

  ‘Sorry, she mutters. ‘I was waiting at the bus stop for Jack. Why does he never have any credit on his mobile phone?’

  Jesse actually gets more into the game than he had done earlier, but, judging by the amount of time Freya spends shouting at him from the sidelines, he’s not having his best match ever. It gets worse when Rottweiler Rubinstein pulls him off ten minutes into the second half, and Duane Mulholland gets a chance to show us what he can do.

  Mum can see Jesse is deflated. ‘They’re one-nil up. I don’t know why he’s looking so glum,’ she says.

  As time ticks on, Endymion Road get more desperate and our lot seem to concentrate just that little bit harder. Five minutes from the end, an Endymion Road striker makes a break for it and starts heading for the goal. He’s not the fastest runner in the world, but the only thing that stands between him and the keeper is Duane Mulholland. It’s dangerous. Duane comes running at the kid and gives a beautiful sliding tackle. Crisis averted. We all mop our brows. Still one-nil.

  When the whistle goes, the Joan of Arc boys start bobbing up and down and Duane gets his hair ruffled a lot. I can see this is getting right up Jesse’s nose, though he’s joining in the celebrations. They’re in the finals after all. Jesse’s younger and smaller than everyone else on the team and they seem to look upon him as some kind of flukey mascot. Mum blows him little kisses as they dance about and when he rushes over to join us, Uncle Stu says, ‘Get yourself shaved and showered, Jesse, and we’ll get back home to celebrate.’

  That’s when I realise that it is our home again. We’ve squeezed the McLafferty cuckoo out of the nest, even if it is only temporarily – and I don’t want her back.

  chapter eighteen

  The rest of Saturday melts into a kind of crazy fondue of chocolate, champagne and celebration. Uncle Stu nips into an off-licence on the way home saying he’s ‘seeing a man about a dog’ and emerges with a big bag of goodies. There’s champagne for the adults, chocolate for me and Jesse – and there’s loads of it, Flakes, Aeros, Lion bars, the lot – and it’s all to celebrate Joan of Arc’s semi-final victory.

  Later in the afternoon, Mia and Polly descend on the house like a plague of wig-bearing locusts. Uncle Stu takes this as his cue to buy the food for tomorrow’s barbecue, so he disappears off to the supermarket, while Polly and Mia start pulling wigs out of boxes. Mia doesn’t seem to think it right that Jesse and I are around for the restyling of our mother’s hair, but Mum is adamant we should stay.

  ‘I want to spend as much time with the boys as I can this weekend,’ she says, when Mia hints that we might want to make ourselves scarce. ‘It’s their weekend, too. And anyway, it’s not as though they haven’t seen the new bald me.’

  ‘You’re not bald,’ says Mia, ‘just thinning.’

  ‘It’s only a matter of time,’ says Mum, touching her head to check she still has some hair hanging about.

  ‘When we told the woman at Holt Bros why we wanted the wigs, she couldn’t do enough for us,’ says Polly. ‘They were practically falling over themselves to shower us with dodgy wigs, weren’t they, Mia? They said just pick out a couple you like and we can take the others back next week.’

  Mia nods. She’s always been a good friend to Mum, and I sense there’s been a bit of jealously creeping in since Polly came on the scene. Polly is quite relaxed around Mum – letting her do what she wants, not fussing too much or pussyfooting around – whereas Mia wants to wrap Mum up in tissue paper and put her away somewhere safe. But today without Mum around, Mia and Polly have obviously been getting on quite well. They even stopped for lunch together.

  Polly lays all the wigs out on the bed. There’s a red curly wig which even makes Mum smile as it’s lifted from the box, a blond Marilyn Monroe, a frumpy brown number and a black bob that’s totally Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction. Mum puts on a long blond wig with a fringe and Mia passes her a mirror. Mum starts laughing.

  ‘Oh, I look like Alice in flipping Wonderland,’ she snorts.

  ‘It’s fabulous!’ laughs Polly.

  ‘Not at my age,’ says Mum. ‘Queen of Hearts is more my style.’

  Polly can’t resist the call of the wig and before long she tries on a serious black number that makes her look like a rock chick, and Mia slips a platinum blond beehive over her head. She looks in the mirror and screams.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she laughs in mock horror. ‘I look like Dusty Springfield’s mother.’

  They are all swigging champagne now – even Mum has half a glass – and they’re starting to giggle.

  Polly lifts her glass of champagne and cries, ‘Cheers! Here’s to good hair days!’ and Mum
adds, ‘Good wig days!’ and they all chink glasses and take a swig.

  ‘Come on, you two,’ says Polly. ‘You’re not getting away with it either. If you’re joining the Wig Club, you’d better get your hair-don’ts on.’

  Jesse sits stony-face in brown curls (‘Aw bless, he looks like Shirley Temple,’ says Mum) and I’ve got a punky red number with purple highlights.

  ‘What were you thinking, Polly?’ asks Mia. ‘That’s hardly you, Pat, is it?’

  ‘Well, I rather like it,’ says Polly. ‘Looks good on you, Lukey. Here.’ And she passes me the mirror. I’m not keen on ‘Lukey’ and when I see my face I’m not so wild about the wig either. I start blushing furiously.

  Polly is practically convulsed with laughter. ‘Now your face matches your hair,’ she screams, and they all cackle away like a coven of sozzled witches. Jesse and I can’t help but join in, and soon we’re all helpless with laughter and playing musical wigs.

  By the time Uncle Stu gets home, laden down with bags, the wigs are back in the boxes ready to be returned to Holt Bros and Mia’s messing around with Mum’s thin hair.

  ‘I think I’m more of a hat person than a wig person,’ says Mum.

  ‘Definitely,’ says Mia. ‘I’ll have a look in the hat department when I take this lot back.’

  ‘Any of that champagne left?’ says Uncle Stu.

  Polly holds the bottle aloft, then tips it upside down. The smallest of drops escapes.

  ‘Oops,’ she says, then gives a loud hiccup. ‘All gone.’

  The rest of the evening is a rather sober affair (in every sense). Mia and Polly leave together and the four of us just chill out. Mum lies on her bed watching TV, but she seems quiet, miles away. She’s looking at the TV, but she’s not watching it. She’s thinking.

  At around three a.m., I can hear Mum calling out. She’s calling for Uncle Stu, and when I open the door I can hear voices coming from downstairs.