2009 - We Are All Made of Glue (39 page)

“Where am I?”

“You’re on your way to hospital.”

“Oh.” He seemed disappointed.

“I’m your mum.”

“I know that.”

I held his hand, whispering little mother-words as we ripped through the evening streets, siren howling.

The ward they admitted him to was the same one Mrs Shapiro had been in that first time. The sister—I didn’t recognise her—came and drew the curtain around us. It was frightening to be on the inside of that drawn curtain. I remembered the gurglings that had come from the next bed as the lady of the pink dressing gown passed away. The doctor who came round to see us seemed hardly older than Ben—in fact he had the same gelled-up hairstyle as Damian.

“It seems like he’s had a fit,” he said. His voice had a nasal Liverpool twang.

“What—epilepsy?”

“Could be. Could just be a one-off.”

“But why?”

“Too early to tell. We’ll have a better idea when we’ve done the MRI scan.”

“When will that be?”

“Tomorrow. He’ll see the neurologist. Let him sleep it off tonight. We’ll keep an eye on him, don’t worry. It’s not that uncommon, you know, in young people his age.”

He smiled awkwardly, fiddling with the stethoscope that hung round his neck. He was trying to be kind, but he was too young to be convincing.

Then the curtain parted and Rip and Stella came in. Rip ignored me, and I think I might have done a runner if Stella hadn’t come straight up and hugged me.

“What’s up with Ben, Mum?”

How pretty she was, but so thin—too thin. She smelled of apple shampoo and neroli. I held her and stroked her hair that sheafed down her back like dark silk. I wanted to burst into tears, but I forced a cheerful grin on to my face.

“Something happened—he had a fit, or something. I think he’s going to be okay.”

Stella squeezed her brother’s hand. “Yer daft little beggar.” She was putting on a thick Leeds voice, the voice of their shared childhood banter.

He opened his eyes and looked around with a beatific smile on his face.

“Hey, everybody!” Then he drifted off again.

Rip stood framed by the curtain, trying to hector the doctor into conversation, demanding explanations and clarifications which the young man was clearly unable to give, and all the time carefully avoiding meeting my eyes. When the doctor left he came and sat on the other side of the bed, still ignoring me, and took Ben’s other hand, leaning over and talking in a sickly cooey-cooey voice. I got up and walked out.

I went as far as the swing doors, then I stopped. I knew I was being ridiculous. I turned round and went and sat in the day room to calm down, clenching and unclenching my hands—in—
two
—
three—four; out—two—three
—
four
-breathing in the heavy medical air that was thick with all the anxiety and grief that had been exuded in this room. I remembered the drip lady, and the wild cackling. What had all that been about? It seemed an age ago. A minute later, the door swung open and Stella came in. Her face was red and blotchy. At first I thought she was upset; then I realised she was furious.

“Mum, you’re mental—you and Dad—you’ve got to stop acting like kids. We’re sick of it, me and Ben. We want you to…I dunno…like, grow up.”

She was chewing at a strand of hair that had straggled across her face, just like she’d done as a child. I stared at her. She was twenty years old, as skinny as a twig, and she was wearing a skirt that showed her knickers when she bent over; and I’d carried her in my belly and fed her at my breast, and here she was telling
me
to grow up.

“Yes, but what about
him?
” I whined.

“Him, too. I’ve told him, too. Both of you. You’ve got to stop it.”

She sounded just like Mrs Rowbottom reprimanding Gavin Connolly for flicking pellets.

“But he started it.”

“Doesn’t matter who started it. We’re fed up of it.
And it
’s not doing Ben any good.”

She brushed back the hair from her face and tried to look stern.

“Okay. Well, I will if he will. But I’m not…”

“So just go back in there, and smile at him, and…I dunno…just be
normal
, Mum.”

So I did. I smiled at Rip, and he smiled at me, a bit awkwardly, and he explained that he’d had to move out of Pete’s place, and he’d tried to ring me to tell me that Ben was coming home earlier than expected, but I’d not rung him back. When an accusing note slid into his voice, Stella threw him a warning look.

“Dad!”

She would make a great teacher, this girl.

When I think of the turning point, the point from which it all started to get better again, I think of that Monday in March, that scene in the curtained cubicle at the hospital, Ben sitting up and trying to remember what had happened, Stella perched on the edge of the bed tickling Ben’s toes through the bedclothes and making him laugh. It reminded me of the glue exhibition, with me and Rip sitting awkwardly on each side of the bed like lumpy unpromising adherends, and Ben and Stella in the middle holding us together like two blobs of glue.

§

We sat together like that in the neurologist’s office next day, Rip, Ben and I, with Ben in the middle. The neurologist took us through a series of questions, and asked us about the circumstances of Ben’s fit. When I described the whirling screen saver and the flashing flames of the Armageddon website, he told us about a cluster of 685 cases of epilepsy in 1997 in Japan that had apparently been triggered by a single Pokemon episode on television.

“It’s possible for photosensitivity to trigger an epileptic seizure,” he said, peering at us through his small rimless glasses. “What we can’t tell at this stage is whether it will happen again.” He turned to Ben. He had a surprisingly mischievous smile for a neurologist. “Try and be more selective about which sites you visit, young man. It’s wild out there in cyberspace.”

“Right.” Ben nodded. He was embarrassed by all the attention.

But there must be more to it than that, I thought. I remembered our liminal conversation, the haunted look in his eyes.

“I can understand the computer flashing could set something off,” I said. “But what about…?” I cast my mind back. “Sometimes you said you were feeling strange when you got back from school, before you’d even turned the computer on. Don’t you remember, Ben?”

He blinked and frowned.

“Yeah. It was when I was on the bus. We passed these trees. I could see the sun through the branches.” He described a long road where low winter sunlight flickered through branches of an avenue of trees as he sat on the upper deck of the bus. “That’s when I started having, like,
feelings
.”

“But when you’ve stayed with me in Islington you’ve been perfectly all right.” There was an edge of accusation in Rip’s voice, as though I’d caused the problem.

“I got a different bus.”

The neurologist nodded. “If you find yourself in that situation another time, young man, just try closing one eye.”

So that’s all there was to it—the generations of prophets with their obscure and terrifying predictions, the reign of Antichrist, the tribulations, the Abomination of Desolation, Armageddon, the fearsome battle of all the armies of the world, the rebuilding of the Temple at Jerusalem, the end of time with trumpet clarions and fiery chariots, the return of the Messiah, the rapture of the elect—it was all down to a frequency of flashing lights, a temporary short circuit in the wiring of the brain. All you had to do was close one eye.

I felt both relief and disappointment. For there was a part of me that yearned to believe—to marvel at the prophecies, to surrender to the irrational, to be swept away by the rapture.

“So all that religious stuff is just nonsense?” Rip’s voice was irritatingly smug. I wanted to kick him, to shut him up, but I saw Ben wasn’t listening. He was studying a chart of the brain pinned on the wall at the side of the neurologist’s desk.

“It’s now believed that some prophets and mystics were in fact epileptics,” the neurologist said. “There’s thought to be a physiological explanation behind much religious experience.”

Rip misread the look on my face, and leaned across to squeeze my hand.

“Why didn’t you tell me Ben was having these problems? You should have told me, Georgie.”

“I…”
In—two—three—four. Out—two—three—four
. “You’re right—1 should have.”

I squeezed his hand back.

§

As we left the hospital, Rip asked me rather sheepishly whether it would be okay if he moved back in temporarily, and I replied rather grumpily that it made no difference to me but I was sure Ben would appreciate it. Yes, I was pleased, on the whole; things were going in the right direction. But I was surprised to find that my feelings were ambivalent. I’d got a life of my own now, and I wasn’t ready to give it up.

When Rip was around, he had a way of taking over. While he’d been away, I’d been remembering all the things I missed about him, but being with him again reminded me of all the things that irritated me. It occurred to me that maybe he felt the same way about me. So there was still a lot that needed to be resolved between us. He brought his stuff over from Islington in his Saab later that afternoon, and set himself up on a camp bed in the little mezzanine study. We tiptoed around each other, being excessively polite and considerate.

§

Him: Would you like a cup of tea, darling? Me: That would be lovely, darling.

§

That kind of tosh.

I had to clear out the spare room to make space for Stella, who’d be coming home soon for Easter. Buried at the bottom of one of the drawers I found an envelope of photos. Rip and me on our wedding day: Rip was wearing a top hat and tails. His hair curled down on his collar and he had curly sideburns. I was wearing a cartwheel hat and a fitted dress with big shoulders and slut-style high heels. My pregnant bulge was clearly visible. We looked ridiculous—and ridiculously happy. Then a picture of Rip and me and baby Stella in a buggy walking round Roundhay Lake. Then Rip and me and five-year-old Stella and baby Ben on the beach at Les Sables d’Olonne. Rip and me and Ben and Stella and Mum, taken one Christmas at Kippax. Rip and I were wearing Santa hats; Mum was wearing reindeer antlers; Ben was wearing his new
Lion King
slippers and a gawky smile—what a funny little kid he’d been; Stella—she must have been thirteen—was pouting red lipstick at the camera, wearing a figure-hugging red top with a tinsel wreath draped around her shoulders. Dad wasn’t in the picture—he must have been behind the camera. The Christmas tree wearing millennium-themed baubles was clearly visible in the background. I pored over the photos, then slid the envelope under my mattress. It seemed like a good omen.

At the end of term Stella came home, and from being empty, the house suddenly became full. It was Stella who told me, over a quiet cup of tea, that Ottoline had thrown Rip out. He’d spent last night in a hotel. That’s why Ben had come home unexpectedly on Monday.

“Ben says he overheard them having a row. Apparently she told him he had a poor attitude to commitment,” she murmured in a grave voice, lowering her head, so if I hadn’t been looking I wouldn’t have seen the flicker of a grin on the corners of her mouth.

Stella made the most of her holiday, sleeping in late and taking long showers, sometimes twice a day, clogging up the plughole with her long hair and filling the house with the smell of apple shampoo. Ben filled the house with techno music and thumped around cheerfully, ho longer glued to the computer. Rip went off to work every morning, just as he had before, and in the evenings he sat at his desk and filled the house with brainwaves. We took turns to cook—
we
had two teams, Rip and Stella, who cooked mainly Thai curries, and Ben and I who cooked mainly Italian. Then Ben announced one day that he’d become a vegetarian, and we spent ages adapting and devising recipes for him. I once caught him sitting at the table and poring over a book with that same intense concentration that he had once read the Bible, but it turned out to be a cookery book: One
hundred recipes to save the planet
. The knobbly skull had disappeared under a growth of new brown curls, which he wore tied back with a red bandana.

The neurologist had suggested Ben change the screen saver, and warned him off websites with animation. He advised him to get a flat-screen monitor, which apparently runs at a different frequency, and not to sit too close to the television. We watched anxiously, to see whether he could handle his condition without medication or whether he would need to take anti-epileptic drugs.

Rip and I fell into a pattern of sharing the same space while keeping out of each other’s way. We didn’t actually divide the house but we learned each other’s habits and avoided unnecessary contact. It wasn’t positively amicable, but it wasn’t hostile, either. Sometimes, on Stella’s insistence, we all watched TV together.

“Just try to be
normal
, okay?” she coached us.

Rip and I sat on armchairs on opposite sides of the fireplace, with resolutely normal expressions on our faces, while Ben and Stella sprawled on the sofa, their arms and legs casually intertwined. From time to time one of them would try to shove the other off.

At Easter, we didn’t go to Kippax or to Holtham. We stayed at home, and Rip and I made a tentative stab at collaboration, hiding a trail of miniature Easter eggs around the house for Ben and Stella. They whooped around, pretending to be surprised. The radio was on in the background, and at one point I heard a church congregation with miserable whiny voices singing that hymn.
There is a green hill far away
…He
hung and suffered there
. I switched it off quickly. Why let that morbid long-ago stuff spoil a nice family holiday?

Water creases

O
n the Tuesday after Easter I nipped into the local Turkish supermarket and bought a large Easter egg, reduced to half price. It was a hideous looking thing covered in mauve foil with Space Invaders figures wielding ray guns all over the packaging. Someone somewhere must have thought this was an appropriate Easter gift for a little boy—in fact maybe it
was
surreally appropriate to the new reality of the Holy Land—but at least it had been left on the shelf by discerning parents, for it was the only egg they had. I carefully peeled off the REDUCED sticker, wrapped it in tissue, and set off for Canaan House.