by Marian Keyes
‘You’ll have nowhere to live!’ Jeffrey says.
‘Wrong!’ Ryan’s eyes are sparkling (but the wrong sort of sparkling, a scary form). ‘Karma will see me right.’
‘But what if it doesn’t?’ I feel horribly uneasy. I don’t trust karma, not any more. Once upon a time, something very bad happened to me. As a direct result of that very bad thing, something very, very good happened. I was a big believer in karma at that point. However, as a direct result of that very, very good thing, a very bad thing happened. Then another bad thing. I am currently due an upswing in my karma cycle, but it doesn’t seem to be happening. Frankly, I’ve had it with karma.
And on a more practical level, I am afraid that if Ryan has no money I’ll have to give him some and I have almost none myself.
‘I will prove that karma exists,’ Ryan says. ‘I’m creating Spiritual Art.’
‘Can I have your house?’ Jeffrey asks.
Ryan seems startled. He hasn’t considered such a request. ‘… Ah, no. No.’ As he speaks, he becomes more convinced. ‘Definitely not. If I gave it to you, it might look like I wasn’t doing it for real.’
‘Can I have your car?’
‘No.’
‘Can I have anything?’
‘No.’
‘Fuck you very much.’
‘Jeffrey, don’t,’ I say.
Ryan is so excited he barely notices Jeffrey’s contempt. ‘I’ll blog about it, day by day, second by second. It’ll be an artistic triumph.’
‘I think this sort of thing has already been done.’ A memory of something, somewhere, is flickering.
‘Don’t,’ Ryan says. ‘Stella, don’t undermine me. You’ve had your fifteen minutes, let me have mine.’
‘But –’
‘No, Stella.’ He’s all but shouting. ‘It should have been me. I’m the one who’s meant to be famous. Not you – me! You’re the woman who stole my life!’
This is a familiar conversational theme; Ryan refers to it almost daily.
Jeffrey is clicking away on his phone. ‘It has been done. I’m getting loads here. Listen to this: “The man who gave away everything he possessed.” Here’s another one, “An Austrian millionaire is planning to give away all his money and possessions.”’
‘Ryan,’ I say, tentatively, keen to avoid triggering another rant from him. ‘Could you be … depressed?’
‘Do I seem depressed?’
‘You seem insane.’
Even before he speaks, I know he’s going to say, ‘I’ve never been saner.’ Sure enough, Ryan obliges.
‘I need you to help me, Stella,’ he says. ‘I need publicity.’
‘You’re never out of the magazines.’
‘Home decor magazines.’ Ryan dismisses them with contempt. ‘They’re no good. You’re matey with the mainstream media.’
‘Not any more.’
‘… Ah, you are. A lot of residual affection for you. Even if it’s all gone to shit.’
‘How are you going to make money from this?’ Jeffrey asks.
‘Art isn’t about making money.’
Jeffrey mutters something. I catch the word ‘knobhead’.
After Ryan leaves, Jeffrey and I look at each other.
‘Say something,’ Jeffrey says.
‘He won’t go through with it.’
‘You think?’
‘I think.’
22.00
Jeffrey and I are sitting in front of the telly eating our pepper, pineapple and sausage stew. I’m trying hard to force down a few mouthfuls – these dinners of Jeffrey count as Cruel and Unusual Punishment – and Jeffrey has his face in his phone. Suddenly he says, ‘Fuck.’ It’s the first word we’ve exchanged in a while.
‘What?’
‘Dad. He’s issued a Mission Statement … and …’ Speedy clicking. ‘… his first video blog. And he’s started a countdown to Day Zero. It’s Monday week, ten days’ time.’
Project Karma is a go.
‘Keep breathing.’
Extract from One Blink at a Time
Let me tell you about the tragedy that befell me nearly four years ago. There I was, being thirty-seven and the mother of a fifteen-year-old girl and a fourteen-year-old boy and the wife of a successful but creatively unfulfilled bathroom designer. I was working with my younger sister, Karen (but really for my younger sister, Karen), and generally I was being very normal – life was having its ups and downs but nothing to get excited about – when, one evening, the tips of the fingers on my left hand started to tingle. By bedtime, my right hand was also tingling. Maybe it’s a sign of how dull everything was that I found it pleasant, like having space-dust popping under my skin.
Sometime during the night, I half-woke and noticed that now my feet were tingling as well. Lovely, I thought, dreamily, space-dust feet too. Maybe in the morning I’d be tingling everywhere and wouldn’t that be nice.
When the alarm went off at 7 a.m., I felt knackered, but that was par for the course. I felt knackered every morning – after all, I was very normal. But this particular morning, it was a different sort of tiredness: a bad, heavy, made-of-lead tiredness.
‘Get up,’ I said to Ryan, then I stumbled down the stairs – and in retrospect, I probably really was stumbling – and started boiling kettles and throwing boxes of cereal onto the table, then I went upstairs to rouse (i.e. shout at) my children.
I went back downstairs and took a swig of tea, but to my surprise it tasted strange and metallic. I stared accusingly at the stainless-steel kettle – clearly bits of it had infiltrated my tea. It had been such a good friend all these years, why had it suddenly turned on me?
Giving it another wounded look, I started on Jeffrey’s special toast, which was simply ordinary toast without the butter – he had a ‘thing’ about butter, he said it was slimy – but my hands felt fumbly and numb, and the enjoyable tingling had stopped.
I took a mouthful of orange juice, then spat it out and yelped.
‘What?’ Ryan had appeared. He was never good in the mornings. He was never good in the evenings either, come to think of it. He might have been in top form in the middle of the day, but I never got to see him then, so I couldn’t comment.
‘The orange juice,’ I said. ‘It burned me.’
‘Burned you? It’s orange juice; it’s cold.’
‘It burned my tongue. My mouth.’
‘Why are you talking like that?’
‘Like what?’
‘Like … your tongue is swollen.’ He grabbed my glass and took a swig, and said, ‘There’s nothing wrong with that orange juice.’
I tried another sip. It burned me again.
Jeffrey materialized at my side and said accusingly, ‘Did you put butter on this toast?’
‘No.’
We played this game every morning.
‘You’ve put butter on it,’ he said. ‘I can’t eat it.’
‘Okay.’
He looked at me in surprise.
‘Give him some money,’ I ordered Ryan.
‘Why?’
‘So he can buy himself something for breakfast.’
Startled, Ryan handed over a fiver and, startled, Jeffrey took it.
‘I’m off,’ Ryan said.
‘Grand. Bye. Okay, kids, get your stuff.’ Normally I ran through a checklist as long as my arm for all their extra-curricular activities – swimming, hockey, rugby, the school orchestra – but today I didn’t bother. Sure enough, about ten minutes into the car journey, Jeffrey said, ‘I forgot my banjo.’
There was no way I was turning around and going back to get it. ‘You’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘You can manage without it for one day.’
A blanket of stunned silence fell in the car.
At the school gate dozens of privileged, cosmopolitan teenagers were milling in. It was one of the greatest sources of pride in my life that Betsy and Jeffrey were pupils at Quartley Daily, a non-denominational, fee-paying school, which aimed to educate ‘the whol
e child’. My guilty pleasure was to watch them as they traipsed in, in their uniforms, both of them tall and a little gawky, Betsy’s blonde curls swinging in a ponytail and Jeffrey’s dark hair sticking up in tufts. I always took a moment to watch them merge with the other kids (some of them the offspring of diplomats – the light bulb of my pride glowed extra-bright at that bit, but obviously I kept it to myself; the only person I ever admitted it to was Ryan). But today I didn’t hang around. My focus was on home, where I was hoping for a quick lie-down before going to work.
As soon as I let myself into the house, I was overtaken by a wave of weakness so powerful I had to lie down in the hall. With the side of my face pressed against the cold floorboards, I knew I couldn’t go to work. This was maybe the first sick day of my life. Even with a hangover I’d always shown up; the work ethic went deep in me.
I rang Karen and my fingers could barely work the phone. ‘I’ve the flu,’ I said.
‘You haven’t the flu,’ she said. ‘Everyone says they’ve the flu when they just have a cold. Believe me, if you had the flu, you’d know all about it.’
‘I do know all about it,’ I said. ‘I’ve the flu.’
‘Are you putting on that funny voice so I’ll believe you?’
‘Really. I’ve the flu.’
‘Tongue flu, is it?’
‘I’m sick, Karen, I swear to God. I’ll be in tomorrow.’
I crawled up the stairs, stumbled gratefully into bed, set my phone for 3 p.m. and fell into a deep sleep.
I woke dry-mouthed and disoriented and when I reached for a swig of water, I couldn’t swallow it. I focused hard on waking myself up and swallowing the water, but nothing happened: I really couldn’t swallow it. I had to spit it back into the glass.
Then I realized that, even without the water in my mouth, I couldn’t swallow. The muscles at the back of my throat just wouldn’t work. I concentrated hard on them, trying to ignore the rising panic, but nothing happened. I couldn’t swallow. I actually, really, couldn’t swallow.
Scared, I rang Ryan. ‘There’s something wrong with me. I can’t swallow.’
‘Have a Strepsil and take some Panadol.’
‘I don’t mean my throat is sore. I mean I can’t swallow.’
He sounded bemused. ‘But everyone can swallow.’
‘I can’t. My throat won’t work.’
‘Your voice sounds funny.’
‘Can you come home?’
‘I’m on a site visit. In Carlow. It’ll take a couple of hours. Why don’t you go to the doctor?’
‘Okay. See you later.’ Then I tried to stand up and my legs wouldn’t work.
When Ryan came home and saw the state of me, he was gratifyingly contrite. ‘I didn’t realize … Can you walk?’
‘No.’
‘And you still can’t swallow? Christ. I think we should ring an ambulance. Should we ring an ambulance?’
‘Okay.’
‘Really? It’s that bad?’
‘How do I know? It might be.’
A while later an ambulance arrived, with men who strapped me to a stretcher. Leaving my bedroom, I had a stab of sudden shocking grief, as if I had a premonition that it would be a long, long time before I saw it again.
Watched by Betsy, Jeffrey and my mum, who were standing at the front door, silent and scared-looking, I was loaded into the van.
‘We could be gone a while,’ Ryan told them. ‘You know what A&E is like. We’ll probably be hanging around for hours.’
But I was a priority case. Within an hour of my arrival a doctor appeared and said, ‘So? Muscular weakness?’
‘Yes.’ My speech had degenerated so much that the word emerged like a slurred grunt.
‘Talk properly,’ Ryan said.
‘I’m trying.’
‘This the best you can do?’ The doctor seemed interested.
I tried to nod and found that I couldn’t.
‘Can you squeeze that?’ The doctor gave me a pen.
We all watched as the pen fell from my clumsy fingers.
‘How about the other hand? No? Can you raise your arm? Flex your foot? Wriggle your toes? No?’
‘Of course you can,’ Ryan said to me. ‘She can,’ he repeated, but the doctor had turned to talk to someone else in a white coat. I caught the occasional phrase: ‘a fast-moving paralysis’, ‘respiratory function’.
‘What’s wrong with her?’ There was panic in Ryan’s voice.
‘Too soon to say but all of her muscles are shutting down.’
‘Can’t you do something?’ Ryan beseeched.
The doctor was gone, being dragged across the room to another crisis.
‘Come back!’ Ryan ordered. ‘You can’t just say that and then not –’
‘Excuse me.’ A nurse pushing a pole ushered Ryan out of her way. To me, she said, ‘Just get you on a drip. If you can’t swallow, you’ll get dehydrated.’
Her search for a vein hurt, but not as much as what happened next: a catheter was put into me.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Because you can’t get to the toilet on your own. And just in case your kidneys stop working.’
‘Am I … going to die?’
‘What? What are you saying? No, of course you’re not.’
‘How do you know? Why am I speaking so funny?’
‘What?’
Another nurse showed up, wheeling a machine. She put a mask over my face. ‘Breathe into that, good woman. I just want to measure your …’ She watched yellow digital figures on the screen. ‘Breathe, I said.’
I was. Well, I was trying to.
To my surprise, the nurse started speaking loudly, almost shouting – numbers and codes – and suddenly I was on the move, being whizzed on a wheely bed through wards and corridors, on my way to intensive care. Everything was happening really fast. I tried to ask what was going on, but no sounds came out. Ryan was running beside me and he was trying to decipher the medical language. ‘I think it’s your lungs,’ he said. ‘I think they’re shutting down. Breathe, Stella, for God’s sake, breathe! Do it for the kids if you won’t do it for me!’
Just as my lungs gave up, a hole was cut in my throat – a tracheotomy – and a tube was shoved down into me and attached to a ventilator.
I was put in a bed in the intensive care ward; countless tubes ran in and out of my body. I could see and hear and I knew exactly what was happening to me. But, except for being able to blink my eyes, I couldn’t move. I couldn’t swallow, or talk, or wee, or breathe. When the last vestiges of movement left my hands, I had no way of communicating.
I was buried alive in my own body.
As tragedies go, it’s quite a good one, no?
Now discover Marian’s other books …
The Mystery of Mercy Close
A Walsh Family novel
Helen Walsh doesn’t believe in fear – it’s just a thing invented by men to get all the money and good jobs – and yet she’s sinking. Her work as a Private Investigator has dried up, her flat has been repossessed and now some old demons have resurfaced.
Not least in the form of her charming but dodgy ex-boyfriend Jay Parker, who shows up with a missing persons case – the target: Wayne Diffney, the ‘Wacky One’ from boyband Laddz.
Playing by her own rules, Helen is drawn into a dark and glamorous world, where her worst enemy is her own head and where increasingly the only person she feels connected to is Wayne, a man she’s never even met.
Utterly compelling, moving and very, very funny, The Mystery of Mercy Close is unlike any novel you’ve ever read, and Helen Walsh – courageous, vulnerable and wasp-tongued – is the perfect heroine for our times.
‘When it comes to writing page-turners that put a smile on your face and make you think, Keyes is in a class of her own’ Daily Express
The Brightest Star in the Sky
At 66 Star Street in Dublin, someone is watching over the lives of the people living in its flats. But no one is aware of i
t – yet …
One of them is ready to take the plunge and fall in love; another is torn between two very different lovers. For some, secrets they want to stay buried will come to light and for others, the unveiling of those secrets will have tragic consequences.
Fate is on its way to Star Street, bringing with it love and tragedy, friendship and heartbreak, and the power to change their lives in the most unexpected of ways.
As the couples, flatmates and repentant singletons of number 66 fall in and out of love, clutch at and drop secrets, laugh, cry and simply try to live, no one suspects the visitor patiently waiting in the wings. For soon, really very soon, everything is going to change …
‘Zips along with engaging characters, fabulous plotting and spot-on dialogue’ Daily Mail
This Charming Man
‘Everybody remembers where they were the day they heard that Paddy de Courcy was getting married.’
But for four women in particular, the big news about the charismatic politician is especially momentous …
Stylist Lola has every reason to be interested in who Paddy’s marrying – because she’s his girlfriend, yet she definitely isn’t the bride-to-be … Journalist Grace wants the inside story on the de Courcy engagement and thinks Lola holds the key … while Grace’s sister, Marnie, still can’t forget her first love: a certain Paddy de Courcy. And what of the soon-to-be Mrs de Courcy? Alicia will do anything for her fiancé and is determined to be the perfect wife. But does she know the real Paddy?
Four very different women. One awfully charming man. And the dark secret that binds them all …
‘Gripping from the start … the master at her best’ Daily Telegraph
Anybody Out There?
A Walsh Family novel
Anna Walsh is officially a wreck. She’s covered in bandages and she’s lying in her parents’ Good Front Room dreaming of leaving Dublin and getting back to New York. To her friends. To The Most Fabulous Job in the World™.
And most of all, back to Aiden.