by J.A. Skinner
Chapter 20
Monday 26th May
The disease is caused by a faulty gene on chromosome 4 which produces the protein called Huntingtin. It was discovered in 1993. The faulty gene leads to a damage of the nerve cells in several areas of the brain.
‘Morning my chicken licken, lots of mail for you today, some of it even looks important. Maybe better have your coffee first, you look a bit pale.’ All this flows from Aileen, of course as I walk into the office on Monday morning.
I feel tired and fragile. I sit at my desk, easily decide to ignore the untidiness and sip my coffee. Coffee, when you really need it is like a blood transfusion. Now with a bit of a hangover I need the caffeine to seep directly into my veins and start a revival process.
After the trip to Glasgow yesterday, I got off the train at Motherwell and immediately felt a bit lonely. I took a taxi to the Firpark club and had a few pints. Then I met up with two mates and had a couple more. There was a comedian on. Maybe it was because of all the beer, but I found him very funny. He did the usual Scottish thing of taking the piss out of ourselves, especially when he described us Scots as the only people in the world who sunbathe with all our clothes on. I’ve seen it, in fact I saw it at the Glasgow Green yesterday and I’ve done it.I have been prone on the beach at Girvan in a biting wind, with the sea the colour of slate wearing jeans and a jumper, and socks and shoes. Maybe later testing the water with cold toes, water that is icy, so cold you couldn’t even drink it. As a nation we are also very distrustful of the weather. If it’s bad, we say it is bound to get worse, and if it is fine and sunny in the morning, people have been known to say, ‘Too bright too early.’ Meaning it can’t last.
As I walked slowly home at midnight I kept thinking what a good day out I had had with Mags and the kids. It was just a normal nice thing to do. However, there’s a wee nagging doubt this morning lurking somewhere in the hangover like a mushroom growing in a dark place. Am I ready to commit to a relationship with three children? It would be easy to move it on, have sex, make plans and play at happy families. The problem is that long term hasn’t been my strong suit so far. There’s a train of thought, according to the oracle, my Mother, that you shouldn’t mistake a night out with the boys or a noisy party for happiness. She says being happy is a quieter thing. A one to one thing. I wonder now if Mags is my one to one, a ready made family with three lovely kids. Maybe I’m scared to move on, and I really would hate to break her heart.
It’s early days yet, and I can’t wave a magic wand and change her into a virgin bride. Of course, there’s always the chance she still might meet her prince charming, and I’ll need to look for another noisy party.
Opening the first piece of mail gives me a shock like a slap in the face, straight back to reality. It’s a copy of a memo from head office. Harry must have the original, as it’s a request for both of us to attend a meeting in Fife to discuss the suitability of a match for my prospective adopters.
My god! A match must mean a baby.
I take the stairs to the third floor two at a time and Harry is waiting for me at his door with a grin on his face, holding the original memo in front of him like a breastplate.
‘This could really be it Tommy,’ he says.
‘Is that the truth, or an act of faith on your part?’ I gasp. The stairs have taken their toll on my fragile state and blood is pounding painfully in my head. I’m also having a caffeine palpitation rush.
‘Do you know something I don’t?’
‘Plenty!’
He motions for me to sit down and tells me he has been on the phone all weekend with this one, and his wife is ready to divorce him. He has had to meditate for a while this morning to get his head straight
The story so far is that apparently, a very chubby fourteen year old in Fife was able to conceal her pregnancy for nearly seven months. Like a lot of modern families this girl’s parents only met her at mealtimes after school and work, and the teenager spent most of the rest of her life in her bedroom playing computer games and chatting on the phone. She was in complete denial until three weeks ago when she confided tearfully to an increasingly suspicious teacher, who immediately pressed all the alarm buttons. Everyone had been in complete crisis mode since then.
The immediate concerns were medical, as the girl had had no anti-natal checks, no scan, and no blood tests. Amazingly, everything seemed fine. It has been said that the ideal physical age to have a baby is fifteen but the ideal emotional age is forty.
The parents were badly shocked at their daughter’s pregnancy, but just as distraught that they hadn’t known what was going on. They managed to rally round and were able to discuss all the options. This is an almost definite decision for adoption.
This young girl has admitted she is in no way capable of being a mother and the father is fifteen years old with priorities at the moment of football and sitting his O levels next month. It was left up to the parents of these teenagers to take responsibility and work it all out. Both sets of parents have all already made it clear that they certainly don’t want to be substitute parents, and they are not ready for full time grandparenthood.
I can’t imagine what kind of courage it takes to make these kinds of decisions. This teenage girl must seem like a complete stranger to her Mum and Dad. One day you’re washing and ironing her school uniform and making the packed lunch, and the next you’re taking her to Fife Maternity for an ultrasound. On top of that they have to deal with teachers, social workers, police and lawyers, because this is a girl who is not old enough to give informed consent to sex. In law she is a victim of unlawful sexual intercourse, rape or sexual assault. The reality was probably a mixture of experimentation and coercion. It is unlikely that charges will be brought in a case like this, but if they are, the teenage father will have the stigma of a schedule 1 offence on his record for the rest of his life. At his age he won’t realise how disastrous that could be. I feel I have lost my power of positive thought. How on earth can any good come out of this mess, yet if it means a baby for Kate and Phillip it will seem like a miracle to them.
‘This sounds like a nightmare Harry, I’m glad we are not dealing with the family end of things.’
‘I haven’t even told you the end of the story; brace your horses, please.
‘Brace myself, or hold my horses,’ I automatically correct.
‘Brace something, she gave birth on Friday night at eleven o’clock,’ Harry stops for dramatic effect and takes a deep breath, ‘three weeks premature, little twin boys about four pounds each more or less, absolutely perfect.’
I have to get up and walk about, as I’ve now lost my power of speech. This is absolutely amazing, these boys could be matched with Kate and Phillip. We must be in with a chance or I wouldn’t have been given all this information. The babies are still in hospital in Cupar, safe and sound, gaining some weight till they move to foster care and final decisions are made. It’s so scary to think that tentative plans are now being made that will change the lives of a few people for ever.
Harry’s nerves are a bit jangled now and he starts watering his plants furiously. After sousing a prize fern, he says,
‘Everything has to be kept quiet for now, not a word to anyone. If all goes well we will go straight from the meeting on Friday to see Mr and Mrs Bailey.’ Then with his usual trick of reading my mind he says,
‘Do you think they’ll refuse to consider twins?’
‘No,’ is all I can manage.
He replies ‘Is that the truth or an act of faith?
Back downstairs, sitting back at my desk again I stare into the middle distance, as is my recent habit, thinking that this is going to be a tense week until Friday. I can’t tell Kate anything although I’m dying to it would be too cruel if it didn’t work out. I pray that the twins don’t get snatched back into the bosom of the family, it often happens like that. I better not even arrange to see Mags this week as the stress of not telling her would make me weird. I have the major monumental task now of
having to get my paperwork up to date before the meeting.
I look at all the work on my desk and despair. I still have the kids in foster care after the kitchen fire in urgent need of review. They at least need a plan and a timescale for going home and my country and western party girl has been as good as gold. She is sober, full of remorse and has turned up for all the contact meetings. She is also going to A.A. twice a week, but I think there might be a social or possibly romantic element to that.
What would be ideal, for her future and for the children, would be if she threw her husband out, and changed the locks. On her own she copes quite well, and gives the children adequate care, what a horrible word, but it’s a benchmark of child management, adequate care, adequate parenting, adequate housing and so on. With rhinestone hubby, true knight of the sofa on the scene, they either fight monumentally, and get a bit violent or they drink, party, and sometimes have sex on the couch while the children are around. My professional powers in this case unfortunately don’t encompass instigating divorce.
I call Mags and get no reply. I leave a message saying I had a lovely day yesterday and I enjoyed her normal children but now have a very busy week ahead, so I’ll call her at the weekend. I hope that doesn’t sound too pompous, being busy, when she is probably busier than me every day of her life. She’s also worried about the Huntington’s disease, and so she should be. She’s trying to gather information where she can from the family to try to unravel the story. John Coyle seemed to have suffered for a long time, but Mags’ Aunt, her father’s sister, is well and past the dangerous middle years of the onset so she is most likely unaffected. That only leaves Peter, if he didn’t have the disease Mags and her children and Mickey are fine. We know already Kate is in the clear. Peter had one fatal heart attack, but he could have been displaying some of the signs before that. Possibly changes in personality, depression, tremors, and twitches. Some of these are hard to detect in someone close to you as it is a slow progressive thing. It could be a hidden legacy for Kate, a bomb with a very long fuse.
Of course the real tragedy is the fifty-fifty chance of passing it on to your own children, Kate is a happy lovely mother with a lot of strength, but I don’t know how she would cope with that. The guilt would be tremendous. The lack of genetic counselling to my mind is criminal. The Catholic Church has a lot to answer for by avoiding this issue for years for the sake of their ancient laws against contraception. Wiping this disease out with all its heartache and tragedy once and for all could be as easy as the affected families choosing not to have children of their own and not passing the gene on to another generation.
Wang drifts into my room and I snap out of my daydreaming in a heartbeat. He is full of good advice about the adoption meeting, he starts with,
‘Wear your best suit for the meeting,’ what a laugh, I don’t actually have a suit, never mind a best one.
I tell him I have a kilt and jacket I keep for formal occasions, and he turns pale until he realises it is a joke. Next he says, very seriously,
‘Keep you cards close to your face.’ I try not to laugh and confirm I’ll keep everything close to my face and chest, and for the hundredth time ask him why he feels he has to play with the English language so much, as there just too many pitfalls. He says, as usual that he thinks his English is fine, he was ‘zhuang yuan,’ the best graduate in his English class, and he had been brought up by his Grandfather with the maxim, ‘Jing xi zi zhi’, which means, respect and cherish words. He feels if he gets the words wrong sometimes, they still deserve respect, and who am I to judge him as I haven’t studied any language but my own. The Chinese dialect which is his native language is monosyllabic and words like confidentiality and unpredictability send him into raptures of seven syllables. It also has no verb tenses, so for him to be able to conjure up ‘by nine o’clock tomorrow it will have been raining for three days,’ a not uncommon weather pattern in Scotland by the way, is a future perfect continuous whatever thingy of pure ecstasy for him.
My phone rings and I answer and hear the dreaded words
‘This is the police at the Motherwell station,’ oh happy day, ‘are you free to sit in on an interview with some shoplifting minors? We can’t seem to locate the parents.’
Well I guess it’s my turn, all part of the child ‘in loco parentis’care service. Once again I have to remind myself that I didn’t come into this job for the glamour.