The Forgotten Waltz (17 page)

‘Really?’ I said.

‘Nothing being built. Not one brick, he says, on another brick, this year. Not one.’

‘Well it was too mad,’ I said. ‘Wasn’t it?’

‘You think?’

And we listen to it for a moment; the rumour of money withering out of the walls and floors and out of the granite kitchen countertops, turning them back to bricks and rubble and stone.

Shay came downstairs, freshly showered and full of himself, in his polo shirt and jeans.

‘Gina!’ he said, like we were old golfing buddies too long away from the tees. Then he left, at speed, in order to pick up Megan. Fiona started putting a salad together on the kitchen island and I said it was over between myself and Seán. Just in case she wanted to know. Just in case she was interested.

‘Finished,’ I said. I did not want to see him again. He could go back to his wife.

‘What do you mean “go back”?’ said Fiona. ‘He never left.’

‘Whatever.’

‘I don’t think he even told her, you know?’

‘No?’

So I really did mean it, when I said I did not want to see him again – not ever. Seán was three hundred yards down the road, playing the family man, my sister was in her kitchen, playing the perfect wife and I was the perfect fool. There would be penalties, I knew that. Because I really felt, just then, that I had lost the game.

‘I don’t know what you saw in him,’ said Fiona.

‘Little fucker,’ I said.

‘It’s just something he does, you know. You’re not supposed to take it seriously.’

‘Well I did.’

‘He sat there,’ she said, and she was angry now – whether she was angry with me, or on my behalf, it was hard to tell.

‘He sat there,’ pointing at a leather tub chair. ‘And he told me how lonely he was. No. He told me how lonely his wife was. How worried he was about his wife.’

‘When was that?’ I said.

Fiona looked at the sheet of glass between the kitchen and the garden, where her reflection was emerging from the dusk. She checked her face, its degree of sadness, and the state of her hair.

‘Little fucker,’ she said. ‘I was fond of him.’

And she leaned over the black granite of her kitchen island, making claws of her upturned hands, the way Seán does, when he is in persuasive mode.

But you know, everyone makes a pass at Fiona, it is the burden she carries through life. Even the postman fancies my sister, she is a martyr to it, she can’t even open her own front door.

‘When was that?’ I said again.

‘Oh I don’t know,’ she said.

And then I remembered something else about my sister. It’s not that everyone fancies her, that is not her problem. Her problem is the way they love her. Men. They don’t want to shag her so much as pine for her. That is the thing that makes her sad.

‘Years ago,’ she said. ‘I was about two minutes’ pregnant with Jack. I remember, I was really stupid with it. I couldn’t figure out what he was saying to me.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Oh I don’t know.’ She moves to the double-door fridge that seems to occupy half her kitchen wall. ‘What do they ever say?’

She opens it and the plastic seal gives way with a slight sucking sound. She says, ‘Gina. You know there’s no work for Shay. You know he hasn’t worked since October last.’

Knocking on Heaven’s Door

WHEN EVIE WAS
four years old, she fell off the swing and Aileen slapped the au pair, and Seán, when he arrived home, put his little finger into his daughter’s mouth to find where she had bitten the inside of her cheek. He checked her pupils.

‘Look at me, Evie. Now look up at the light.’

‘I lost my shoe,’ she said.

So he went out into the dusk and found the little glittering ballet flat beside the swing. The back of it was smeared with clay, and there was a little divot of turf still attached to the heel.

There was a time, after Fiona’s ruthless little anecdote in her kitchen, that I questioned everything that had happened between myself and Seán, down to our choice of bed. I had missed key details, I thought: I had misread the signs. If love is a story we tell ourselves then I had the story wrong. Or maybe passion is just, and always, a wrong-headed thing.

Now, I feel if I can figure out what happened to Evie, I can tell the story properly. If I can think about it and understand it, then I will be able to understand Seán, and ease his pain.

The evening she fell off the swing, they sat with the drained and smiling child in the GP’s waiting room, and she turned to her father and said, ‘Did I die?’

‘Don’t be silly,’ he said. ‘Look at you, you’re all alive!’

The doctor, who had a marked English accent, introduced himself as ‘Malachy O’Boyle’ – a name so makey-uppey and Irish that, Aileen said later, ‘it was definitely fake’. He sat Evie up on his examining couch and laid her down. He felt the back of her head, checked her pupils and all her signs, while listening to, and ignoring, Aileen’s clear and agitated description of events that afternoon.

‘Did she have a temperature?’

‘No.’

‘Are you sure?’ At which Aileen fell silent, because of course, she had not been there.

‘So Evie,’ he said – now he had dealt with her mother. ‘Tell me what happened.’

‘I fell off the swing,’ she said.

‘Anything else?’

‘Nope.’

‘Good girl,’ he said. ‘Did anything happen before you fell? What were you looking at?’

She gave him a keen and suspicious glance and said, ‘The clouds.’

‘Were they nice clouds?’

Evie did not answer. But she did not take her eyes off him, either then or subsequently, and when, at the end of the consultation, he offered her a lollipop she said, ‘No thank you,’ which, from her, was a very great insult indeed.

Malachy O’Boyle sat back in his swivel chair and, in his easy, adenoidal way, told them Evie had bumped her head, and that she would be fine. It was also possible, he thought, that she had suffered an event, a convulsion or seizure, what people used to call a fit. He was by no means sure of this, and even if she had, most children who do never have a second one. But just so they were aware of it. Just so they could keep an eye.

They left his room and they paid the receptionist fifty-five euros. Then they went out to the car. Aileen said, ‘We are going to casualty.’ She was white and trembling in the passenger seat beside him. Seán said, ‘It’s Friday evening.’

But they went to casualty, and they sat in casualty for four-and-a-half hours, in order to be seen by a tired girl in a white coat who repeated pretty much what the fake-Irish GP had said. The girl, who looked about sixteen, resisted all talk of seizures and MRI scans, allowed that she could keep Evie in for observation but it would have to be on a trolley. And so they sat, or paced, or stood beside the trolley where Evie slept the delicious, heartbreaking sleep of a child, while, all around them, Friday-night Dublin wept, bled and cursed (and that was just the porters, as Aileen tartly said). They had one plastic chair between them. From time to time, Seán bent over the end of his daughter’s mattress, and set his head on his folded arms, where he lurched asleep for thirty seconds at a time.

They stayed, itching with tiredness, until, at ten o’clock in the morning, a more important-looking doctor swept past, checked the metal clipboard, pulled Evie’s eyelids open, one at a time, and with a breezy bit of banter, gave them all permission to go home. They had no idea who he was – as Aileen pointed out later, he might have been a cleaner in drag – but they were, by this stage, pliable, grateful, almost animal. All their normal human competency was gone. The rules had changed.

Aileen swung, in the next while, from efficiency to uselessness. She bullied or she froze; there was nothing in-between. She became convinced, after many late nights on various websites, that there was something seriously wrong. Evie had been crying out in her sleep for months – perhaps a year – before she fell off the swing, and sometimes they found her confused and on her bedroom floor. Aileen dragged the child around three different GPs (‘The medical equivalent of a stage mother,’ as Seán described her), until she got a referral for a paediatric neurologist with a two-month waiting list, and that night she got, for the first time since he had known her, rat-arsed on champagne.

Meanwhile, the au pair did not so much leave as flounce out, and although they needed another, and urgently, Aileen stalled at the idea of ringing the agency again. She took half days off work, and sometimes made Seán take the other half, she rang neighbours and got babysitters in. The childcare, which had been until then a smooth enough affair – at least as far as he was concerned – became insoluble. It was as though she did not want it to work, he realised, one day when the handover went astray, and she ended up screaming down the phone at him:
You said two o’clock but you meant three o’clock. How many lies is that? How many lies are there, in a whole fucking hour?

The guilt and the worry had overwhelmed her, she said later. She just wanted to stay with Evie, all the time.

And Seán said, ‘She’s fine.’

It happened at breakfast time. Evie was always a joy in the morning – ‘You put them to bed screaming,’ Seán said, ‘and they wake up all new.’ Evie sat up in bed at first light and read a book – or just talked to the pictures – then got up at the sound of the alarm clock to slip between her waking parents. She talked non-stop, she wandered and chatted and got distracted. Her mornings were spent in a state of loveliness and forgetting: looking in her wardrobe and not remembering to dress, helping to make the porridge then letting it go cold, trying to walk out the door before she had located her shoes.

On this morning, she was neglecting her porridge for a black-and-white stuffed hen, which she danced across the table with squawks and cluckings, in the middle of which she rolled her eyes back and slid on to the floor. Seán watched her for many seconds before he even tried to make sense of what was happening. Under the table, Evie shook and rattled. Her eyes were open and fixed. She didn’t look at him, but at the wall behind her head, and what disturbed Seán, in retrospect, was the gentle, thoughtful look he saw in her eyes, like someone examining the idea of pain. Her hands were clenched, her right foot throbbed or kicked, and it seemed to him that her body was outraged by her brain’s betrayal, and was fighting to regain control. This was an illusion, he knew, but nothing could quite convince Seán that Evie was not suffering. She made small mewling sounds, as tiny and uncomprehending as when she was newborn, and her mouth drooled and snapped.

Aileen had pulled the chair back, to give her space. She stood over her daughter. Then she ducked down quickly to cushion her head from the hard tiles.

‘Don’t,’ said Seán, who had some idea that Evie should not be touched, at all.

‘Don’t what?’

Aileen’s calm was almost unnatural. She held her daughter by the shoulders, then slipped easily on to the floor and set Evie’s head on her lap, reaching up to hold on to the tabletop with her free hand.

Seán remembered this image with great clarity: the unflattering fold of fat between her knee and thigh, and Aileen, usually so fastidious, with drool smearing her skirt.

Meanwhile, Evie’s clenched hands pumped more slowly, and her lips seemed almost blue.

She was not breathing, he thought.

Evie bucked and bucked and then stopped. She looked as though she had forgotten something. Then, after a moment of great emptiness, her body pulled in a rasping breath. After this came another breath. Aileen rubbed and patted her, making soothing, whimpering sounds and it took a long time to bring the child back to herself – or perhaps none of it took a long time, perhaps the whole thing happened in a very short time; it just felt endless and messy. Evie was confused, Aileen was confused, calling her name, rubbing her back and arms. And then, something shifted and caught.

Evie sat up. She roared. She struggled out of her mother’s restraining arms; outraged, calling the world to account.

He was so proud of her.

There are times when Seán seems to blame me for the failure of his marriage, but he never blames me for what happened to Evie. I coaxed it all out of him on the car journeys we took down to the west; the beautiful small roads along the Shannon beyond Limerick: Pallaskenry, Ballyvogue, Oola, Foynes. We drove with the wide river showing through sun-dappled trees; Seán concentrating on the driving, me safely dressed, neither of us looking at the other, sitting side by side.

Talking about her makes him simple. Seán, a man, as he would himself admit, addicted to winning and to losing – when Evie got ill, all that fell away, and the world opened up to them in a way that amazes him yet.

The morning Evie had the seizure, Aileen rang the neurologist’s office where they had an appointment in a fortnight’s time. They were on their way into casualty. Aileen was in the back of the car, holding Evie around her seat belt, and managing the phone. The doctor’s secretary said, ‘Hang on a minute,’ and she put her hand over the mouthpiece. Then she came back on to say, ‘Dr Prentice will send down the team.’

‘Sorry?’

‘When you come to casualty. Dr Prentice will see you after you talk to her team.’

And she did.

It was, for those first few hours, a kind of bliss. A doctor, two doctors, a bed in the day ward. The consultant arrived; a small, profoundly powerful woman, trussed up in a navy crêpe suit. The consultant was kind. She allowed for an MRI scan and an EEG. She used the word ‘benign’, which made them think about brain tumours. She wrote a prescription. She said a lot of nice and reassuring things, many of which were hard to remember.

They walked the hospital corridors looking for an exit, with Evie still exhausted in her father’s arms, and they felt – at least Seán felt – the heaviness and beauty of her head, as it rolled on his shoulder, the mystery of bringing her into the world, and the way she escaped the mystery by being so absolutely and pragmatically herself. They looked around them, memorising their future in this place: the signed football jerseys in their frames, the wire games on wooden tables, and yellowing murals of cartoon characters long gone out of fashion. A cleaner asked were they lost, which they were. A passing nurse said, ‘Do you know your way out?’ There were only two kinds of people in this place – people who were nice, and people who were lost. They held hands. They had never been closer; heading for the swing doors of the children’s hospital and the daylight beyond.

For the next several months they bought and wrangled their way up the waiting lists and the house was run according to Evie’s medical schedule. They rose in darkness, wrapped her in a blanket and carried her to the car. Seán drove as the dawn slipped down the hillsides, filling the bowl of Dublin Bay with a pale mist, and the sun rose out of the sea in front of them, washed and white. In the hospital, Evie was hot and damp and delicious to the touch, as they carried her down one corridor or another to the right waiting room, or the wrong one, where nice people (they were all nice, all of them) took their paperwork or redirected them, and they walked on, looking through the glass panel on each door in case they should stumble into a ward where the bald children were, or the children with scars too big for their small bodies: all the hopeful little freaks. Very quickly, they stopped seeing the children’s diseases and saw them as real children, and this frightened them too: the idea that this reversal of nature could be an ordinary thing. They did not look at their own reflections. Not ever. Each sick, or even dying, child – beautiful as a flower – seemed to be attached to some unwashed parent, who slept on the floor, and forgot to get her roots done, and looked like a refugee.

After the first few appointments, Aileen said there was no point in the pair of them spending their lives down there, she could manage on her own. Then, when the tests were clear, she threw it back at him, saying, ‘You couldn’t even come to the hospital, you weren’t even there.’

It was the relief that made her shout. The diagnosis, when it came, was very terrible, or very hopeful – it was hard to say which. Dr Prentice said that Evie would, in all probability, grow out of the seizures. She did not have a tumour, she would probably not die – unless in her sleep, suddenly, for no reason at all: unless in the bath, or under a car, or in their living room, if she had a seizure while standing beside the fire. There was nothing wrong with her, she seemed to say, except for this thing that was wrong with her. The medication was presented as a choice: seizures or no seizures, you decide.

‘Most people,’ said Dr Prentice, in her kind, crisp way, ‘opt for the latter.’

The pills made Evie confused – at least Aileen thought so. A contented, almost biddable child, she got frustrated and threw tantrums, even in the morning – when all that lovely forgetting was now turned into something more sinister. Aileen thought she might be having hallucinations.

‘You think?’ said Seán.

It was hard to tell. The child was four years old: she spent her day in a state of constant imagining. But Aileen said she stopped dead in the street, or startled at nothing. Every so often, she lifted a hand as though brushing cobwebs from in front of her eyes. She said strange things. Aileen did not know if this was some kind of shadow of the seizures that had now stopped, or a side effect of the pills she took to stop them. Seán privately thought it was a symptom of Aileen’s anxiety, but they both listened to Evie’s prattle with a more attentive ear.