by Cathy Kelly
‘I’ll call you later,’ Red had said.
He’d offered to buy his parents a big house in a posher area of the city when he first made money, but they’d refused.
‘This is our home, son,’ his father had said, and Red understood that. Still, he had to ask.
He went into the house, where his mother was busy cooking up a storm after his phone call on the way from the airport.
‘I wish you’d phoned and said you were coming over before you actually arrived in the country,’ said Myra O’Neill, with a faint hint of irritability in her voice.
Red grinned. He knew she wasn’t in the slightest bit irritable, knew she was overjoyed he was there at all. As soon as he’d rung to say he was in Dublin, he was pretty sure she was on the phone straight after to tell his two brothers, setting up a family dinner to beat all family dinners because there was nothing Myra liked more than a big O’Neill get-together.
‘Great to see you, son,’ his father said with a thump on the back.
It was how the O’Neill men greeted each other. Myra was an entirely different story. She grabbed her tall son, taller than her since he was about twelve, and held on to him as though she though her heart might break. But despite the hug, her words were sharp: ‘It’s a long time since we’ve seen you, Mr Red,’ she said, with her back to him now, working away at the oven. ‘I hope you don’t think you’ve forgotten about us over there in London. You have to always remember where you come from, Red—’
‘I think he knows where he comes from, love,’ interrupted his father bravely.
Myra rounded on her husband. ‘He knows well enough where he comes from, and we both know that, but –’ she cast a fond glance over at her eldest son – ‘it’s a mother’s job to remind her kids sometimes.’
Myra was outraged that Red was staying in a hotel.
‘What would you want to be staying in a hotel when we’ve still got your bedroom here?’ she demanded.
Red didn’t want to mention that hotels had beautiful en suites, room service, a mini-bar where he could get himself a whiskey and soda, and sit down in front of a widescreen television to watch a match. Hotels didn’t have people who enquired about his every move, asked after his social life and whether he’d met any nice girls, and did he hear about the death/marriage of XYZ, people he could no longer remember, but whom, according to his mother, he ‘knew as well as you know me’.
The flood of both questions and information was always somewhat dizzying when he came home. He’d forgotten the pace with which the O’Neill family lived. It was his mother, really. Myra O’Neill was a force of nature, a woman who was a stalwart of every charity going, had been on the school board when her kids went to St Fintan’s, and who’d been involved in every part of their life. She was the one who’d kept them on the straight and narrow in the years when it was very easy for young fellas with little job prospects to go off the rails. She was the one who’d marched round to friends’ houses when there were too many bottles of beer being shared among underage drinkers.
Red could remember one incident when he was seventeen, going on eighteen, and felt perfectly entitled to have a beer if he felt like it, when his mother had turned up at a friend’s house and caught him by the ear – yes, the ear – and hauled him out of the room as if he were a fifteenth-century serving boy. She’d belted him on the head all the way home.
At the time he’d been outraged, but now he could understand it. She’d seen plenty of kids from Longford Terrace turn out entirely differently from the way the O’Neill boys had turned out, and she wanted to make sure that her sons had the best chance in life.
He sat at the kitchen table, a mug of tea in front of him and some of her home-made scones, even though he said he wasn’t hungry, and weren’t they going to be having dinner soon anyway?
‘Nonsense,’ his mother said. ‘Look at you! Not an ounce of fat on you. Too much time in that gym, I imagine, and not enough time eating proper food. Sushi, I suppose, and all that type of mad uncooked stuff. I don’t hold with that sort of food. Good, proper Irish cooking is what you’ll get here.’
Red and his father exchanged glances and smiled at each other. It was great coming home. Nothing changed here, which was what made it so beautiful.
Red and his father talked a bit about work, football, the local team his father had supported all his life, the government and the grandkids. Little Timmy, Dan’s oldest, was walking now.
‘He’s a total pet, he is,’ said Red’s father proudly.
How long would it take? Red wondered. He took a quick glance at his watch. Five minutes?
‘I see that Coco around sometimes,’ his mother said long before the five-minute limit was up, and even though he was turned away from her, Red could practically sense the way her back had stiffened.
Coco, whom his mother had adored, had become ‘that Coco’ as soon as she’d hurt Myra’s son.
‘She’s not married, engaged or anything like that. No. Hmm. I keep an eye on her. Not that I let anyone know I’m keeping an eye on her, Lord, no. I see Pearl sometimes in the church or in the supermarket. Decent woman, Pearl is, always has a word for me, but we don’t talk about … you know. Better not to talk about those sort of things. But still, if I got my hands on that girl—’
‘Ma,’ said Red. ‘That’s all in the past. Forget it, will you?’
He heard keys in the door, noises of his brothers and their wives, shrieking of a baby, scampering toddler footsteps, and he knew he was saved. Because the more he thought about it, it wasn’t over with Coco, was it? Still, his mother didn’t need to know that.
Coco sat in the chair beside Jo’s bed in the six-bed St Teresa’s ward and wished, not for the first time, that magic existed and she could magic away both Jo and Fiona’s pain. Her friend’s progress was still painfully slow, despite all the neurologist had said about brain plasticity – or was it elasticity? She still got that wrong. But he was confident about her recovery.
‘You may still have some speech issues, but with rehab, I’d like to think we could get you nearly back to possibly ninety per cent original mobility,’ he said cheerfully the morning before when he’d come in. ‘You’ve had a mild stroke, Jo, so, although it may not feel like it right now, you’re one of the lucky ones, definitely.’
‘Don’t feel thlucky,’ said Jo. ‘Ninety per thent. Not a hundred. A hundred’s what I want.’
Her speech had come back remarkably well, but she still spoke as if the words had to form much more slowly in her brain. Certain words eluded her and she continually mispronounced others. This was a mild form of aphasia, Coco had learned. Jo had had a certain amount of spontaneous recovery but would still need speech therapy.
Hearing that made her shriek to Coco: ‘I don’t want it! I teach people; I don’t get taught!’
Coco had spent hours searching the internet about strokes and had read miracle stories about recovery, but Coco no longer told these to her friend. Jo seemed so angry all the time. It was as if this injury had changed her from a happy person into someone who saw doom and personal disaster around every corner. Not just random disaster, but disaster deliberately for her.
‘Why me?’ she said to Coco often. ‘What did I do wrong?’ Because of her speech problems, this came out slowly as: ‘What thid I tho wrong?’ with Jo wincing as the words came out of her mouth.
There were no answers for a question like that, and Coco would just rub Jo’s good hand whenever she said it.
‘You’re getting better,’ she’d say ineffectually.
Jo had nearly full use of her left hand and arm again, although she still had huge problems with leg control.
‘I can’t walk,’ Jo said loudly. ‘I can’t talk to my daughter. I can barely concentrate. I can’t always control when I pee! I’m wearing old person nappies because there aren’t enough people here to get me to the loo and I am
not having a bloody catheter. How can I look after her? Someone will take her off me!’ Jo said in anguish.
‘They won’t,’ Coco said firmly, but soon after she made an excuse to go out to get coffee for them both and walked wearily to the nurse’s station halfway down the corridor.
‘Don’t you have psychiatric help for people who have strokes?’ Jo asked, only to have an older nurse look at her with pitying and sympathetic eyes. ‘My friend’s not coping well …’
‘There are help groups and the rehab helps too – seeing other people in the same position seems to take away the “why me” thing,’ the nurse said, hands flying as she organised files as she was speaking. ‘It’s not easy for a young woman to be living an ordinary life and to suddenly end up in a hospital bed, incapacitated, scared, with no way of knowing how it will all turn out. Plus there’s the lady opposite her who’s also had a stroke and her prognosis isn’t as good, as you can see.’
Mrs Leonard was very elderly, she was bed-bound, her speech was entirely gone and she moaned non-stop, which was upsetting to both her family and Jo, who’d hissed: ‘Is that going to be me soon?’
‘No matter how often Mr Carter –’ the nurse said the consultant’s name with reverence – ‘says Jo is on medication now to stop her having another stroke, I know she keeps looking at Mrs Leonard in the bed across from her and she’s scared.’
They both considered this basic fact. Jo had been luckier than Mrs Leonard, who’d been seriously damaged by her stroke, but there were no guarantees for the future.
‘What about Jo’s family? I haven’t seen any sign of a dad for the little girl?’
‘Long gone,’ said Coco grimly.
‘Parents?’
‘You must have missed them. It was quite a show. They brought along some tame preacher guy to say that Jo had sinned but had paid the price now.’
The nurse shuddered. ‘That helped no end, I’m sure.’
‘Oh, it was a great help,’ Coco agreed. ‘On the plus side, it was the first time I saw Jo attempt to get out of the bed on her own, though.’
‘Frustration makes people do that. Then they risk falling … It’s a long process. You’re a good friend. You’re taking care of her daughter, aren’t you? Pet of a thing. Never says anything, though, does she?’
Coco nodded and found her eyes filling with tears. ‘She doesn’t speak as much anymore. Before, you couldn’t shut her up, but now … Now she just looks at her mother as if she’s terrified she’ll go away. Or …’ Coco could barely say it. ‘Die.’
‘Children react to these things differently,’ said the nurse, ignoring the whole dying part of the conversation.
Probably part of the training, Coco thought: ignore any madness from patients’ families. ‘How she will cope depends on how you and her mother cope,’ the nurse went on. ‘I’ve seen it before. If you pretend nothing’s happening, kids internalise it. Years later, then they’re traumatised by what they never coped with. You’ve got to keep talking about what’s happened to her mother. Face it all head-on. You might say that to Jo. Tell her she needs to cope for her daughter’s sake. That might help.’
Coco needed to work up the courage to impart this information, but today she sat and talked quietly with Jo as if they were in a café having a chat, with Fiona amusing herself in the background. The way they used to before.
Jo’s face was much better but she still didn’t look quite like herself. Strange how you could have the same eyes, same mouth, but add in the faintest tilt to one side – which Mr Carter said could be gone soon, given her general progression – and eyes angry with emotional pain, and the person could look entirely different.
She’d never been much for dolling herself up with make-up, but now Jo refused to wear so much as lipstick. It was her personal rage against the world that had made her into what she saw as a helpless woman in hospital.
Apart from the slowing of her speech, Jo’s main disability was lack of movement in her left leg. It had improved considerably but wasn’t perfect and, for Jo, perfection was what she was aiming for.
The hospital was planning on discharging her soon, pending improvement, and the next question was whether she’d need an actual rehab facility or whether she’d go home and have outpatient rehab for both her physical injuries and her speech problem – assuming, Coco thought, that Jo agreed to have speech therapy.
‘The lack of control is so very frightening,’ the kind nurse had also told Coco. ‘We must try to remember that when a patient is being bad-tempered.’
Fiona sat on the edge of the bed, holding her mother’s good hand, while staring up at the television set mounted high on the wall at the end of the ward. Coco had switched on a children’s cartoon show on the small TV, the way she did every afternoon she brought Fiona into the hospital.
‘What am I going to do?’ said Jo, with anguished eyes.
Locked in TV cartoon world, Fiona appeared not to have heard her, but Coco knew she had. She could tell. Funny how spending so much time with Fiona had opened her eyes in so many ways. All Fiona’s little mannerisms were obvious to her now. That faint slumping of the shoulders told her that Fiona’s heart was breaking but that she was pretending to watch the TV, where three fabulously skinny Hollywood tweens were discussing boys.
‘You will survive; we all will,’ said Coco fiercely. ‘We will get through this and life will be fabulous. And then …’ Coco cast around for something wonderful. ‘Then the three of us are going to Disneyland Paris for a holiday!’
Jo looked at her blankly.
Disney? Like I care about Disney, were the unspoken words.
It was the first time Coco realised that she’d spoken entirely for Fiona’s benefit. Jo was in emotional pain but she was an adult and she needed to help herself too. But Fiona was nine. Fiona needed all of Coco’s energy to help her. That’s what mothers did. And for now, Coco was all the mother Fiona had.
She reached out to touch her goddaughter’s small shoulder. Fiona half-turned and, for the first time in a long while, she saw the glimmer of a smile in Fiona’s eyes.
She wasn’t going to let Fiona internalise this pain and think that it was her fault, or suffer with the whole thing later in life – the way she had, Coco realised. Not being able to deal with her mother’s disappearance as a child had made it all the harder when she was older. Cassie had acted out; Coco had assumed that everyone was going to dump her – so she got ready to dump them first.
Like Red.
This would not happen to her darling Fiona.
At home in her apartment, Coco made Fiona’s lunch for the next day at school, put water on to boil for the pasta, ran a speedy bubble bath for Fiona, and then, once Fiona was happily nestled up to her neck in bubbles, Coco rang her sister.
‘Can you talk?’ she asked.
‘Course, for you, anytime,’ said Cassie, tidying up in the kitchen after dinner. Loud music emanated from Beth’s bedroom – a sure sign that quality homework was being done. Lily was at the kitchen table making a model of the solar system in a shoebox, using round things that she was supposed to paint vaguely like the planets. Saturn, with its darned rings, had caused both Cassie and Lily a lot of trouble. During the making of it, Cassie had wondered if a kitchen-table business could be set up by creating a mail-order company for strange school projects that defied even the most diligent cutting up of cereal packets and use of double-sided sticky tape.
‘It’s about Fiona,’ whispered Coco. ‘She’s in the bath.’
Cassie said, ‘Keep going, darling,’ to Lily and went into the hall to talk. ‘Tell me what’s wrong,’ she said, the way she’d been saying it for almost thirty years, since almost before her little sister could talk.
‘She’s so quiet these days …’
‘She does perk up when she’s here, though,’ Cassie pointed out. ‘She loves Beth and Lily, and even t
he cat will sit on her lap.’
‘He’s a healing cat, I told you. No, it’s a combination of two things. In the hospital after school this afternoon, she was very quiet – which she usually is – and a nurse said something interesting to me. She said how Fiona copes with all this depends on how the adults around her cope. If we pretend it’s not happening and don’t deal with it, she won’t have the skills to deal with it. She’ll bury it inside and it will be like a grenade waiting to go off when she’s older.’
Cassie took a swift, shallow breath in.
‘But if we talk about it,’ went on Coco, ‘and deal with it, then she can too. Does that make sense to you? I’ve been scared of talking too much because she’s only nine and I don’t know how Jo would want to do it, but Jo’s not acting like herself right now. I wanted to know what you thought?’
Because of our mother? Because nobody ever spoke about her and we were too little to understand?
Cassie was afraid she’d spoken these words out loud, but then Coco said, ‘You know, from a mother’s point of view. Does that make sense? Is Fiona old enough to hear all this stuff?’
‘It makes perfect sense,’ said Cassie, thinking how she still had the grenade sitting inside her. But she was an expert at being like a second mother to Coco, which meant being expert at pushing her own worries aside. ‘She and Jo were especially close. They were a unit on their own and it must be terrifying for both of them to have this happen. Jo is scared out of her mind, Coco – you can see that. I saw that when I went into the hospital to visit her last.
‘Anger is all she’s got right now. So you’ve got to be Fiona’s mother for a while. Tell Fiona what’s going on, in a gentle way: explain that her mum is upset, that it’s going to take time, but that she is loved and cared for. That her mum will get better, and she might not be as quick at running or things like that, but she’ll still be the same mum. And tell her she’s got you with her.’