The Woman Who Stole My Life (5 page)

‘When you’re going through hell, keep going.’

Extract from
One Blink at a Time

Most people in intensive care are model patients. That’s because most of them are in a coma. Also, most people’s stay is a short one – either they die or they improve and go to a different ward. But I was in the unusual position of being there for the long haul and the nurses weren’t geared up for that. They didn’t talk to me because they were out of the habit of talking to any of their patients – and what would be the point, seeing as I couldn’t reply?

When they turned me or attached a new feeding bag to the port in my stomach, it was done with the same force as if I was unconscious. If a tube popped out of me, they jammed it back in like they were shoving a plug into a socket. Sometimes, mid-manoeuvre, they remembered that I knew what was happening and they apologized.

But those were the only times a member of staff spoke to me and I was nearly mad with loneliness.

There was nothing to distract me – no phone, no Facebook, no food, no books, no music, no conversations, nothing. By nature I was a chatty person – if a thought came into my head I immediately blurted it out, but now it had to bounce off the wall of my skull and back into my brain, with all the thousands of other unuttered thoughts.

I was allowed two visits a day, each a paltry fifteen minutes
long. The rest of the time I was locked in my own head and I never stopped worrying. There was a rackety routine in place to take care of Betsy and Jeffrey but every day was a challenge: Mum worked shifts in an old people’s home, Karen was a workaholic – so was Ryan, come to think of it – and Dad’s back could go without a moment’s notice.

I was also anxious about money – Ryan earned a lot but our outgoings were massive and we needed what I earned from the salon.

And even though we had health insurance, like all insurance policies it was riddled with cut-off points and caveats and exemptions. When I’d signed up for it I’d tried my best to understand what was covered but my focus had been on insuring the kids, not Ryan and me.

Bigger than my worry about money was my angst about Betsy’s and Jeffrey’s emotional health – I could see the fear in their eyes every time they tiptoed up to my bed. What would this trauma do to them long term?

Ryan and I tried excruciatingly hard to be good parents, what with the expensive school and all the extra-curricular stuff, but this was going to feck them up rightly. How could it not?

Almost as bad was the guilt I felt about Mum and Dad. I was an adult, their job as my parents was done, yet I was breaking their hearts. It was agonizing when they came to visit – Mum held my hand and wept silently and Dad clenched his jaw and stared hard at the floor. The only thing Dad ever said to me was, ‘When you’re going through hell, keep going.’

The few breaks I got from worrying were spent marvelling at the life I used to live. How lucky I’d been – there I’d be, driving a car and eating raisins that I’d found abandoned in a bag on the floor and giving Betsy a pep-talk about her oboe lessons and deciding I couldn’t be arsed to go to
Zumba – multi-tasking like no one’s business, every muscle group in my body involved.

And now here I was, so paralysed I couldn’t even yawn. I’d have given ten years of my life to be able to put on a pair of socks.

I swore that, if I ever got better, I’d regard every single movement I made as a little miracle.

But would I get better? There were moments – about a million times a day – when I was certain that I’d be locked into my useless body for ever.

I kept trying to make my limbs move, I’d concentrate on a particular muscle until I felt my head was going to burst, but nothing ever happened. It was obvious I wasn’t getting any better. But at least I wasn’t getting any worse – I’d been terrified that my eyes would seize up and my one small way of communicating would be blocked, but they had kept working.

All the same, I was finding it hard to stay hopeful. Ryan did his best to stay positive – he really was heroic – but he knew as little as I did.

When I’d first been diagnosed my condition generated a lot of excitement among friends and acquaintances. The chance that I might die added extra lustre. According to Ryan ‘everyone’ was begging to visit me and dozens of well-wishers sent flowers even though Ryan told them that flowers weren’t allowed in ICU. Candles were lit in my honour and I was ‘kept’ in people’s prayers … but the days passed and I didn’t die, and when I was eventually pronounced ‘Stable’, my fans deserted me within moments. Even from my hospital bed, I could feel their deflation. ‘Stable’ is nearly the dullest of all medical descriptions – only ‘Comfortable’ is worse. What people really like is a good ‘Critical’. ‘Critical’ has mothers lingering at the school gates, gleeful with
horror, saying sagely, ‘It could be any of us … There but for the grace of God.’

But ‘Stable’? It means if you’re looking for excitement, you’ve backed the wrong horse.

Somehow twenty-three days had gone by – I was like a prisoner scraping lines onto the cell wall, where measuring the passing of time was the only bit of control I had.

I looked at the clock again – there were still nineteen minutes to go before I was turned, and my hip was aflame with pain. I couldn’t take this. I was going to go mad.

But seven more seconds passed and I didn’t lose my mind.

How
do you go mad, I wondered. That’s a useful life skill that should be taught in schools. It’d be very handy to be able to go out of your wits when everything got a bit much for you.

I could see the call button – it was less than a metre from my face. I willed my head to move along the pillow, I summoned every ounce of strength inside me, so that I could butt it. I could do this. If I wanted it badly enough, I could make it happen. Weren’t we forever being told that the human will is the strongest force on the planet? I was thinking of all those stories I’d read in Dad’s
Reader’s Digest
s when I was a kid – amazing stories of women single-handedly lifting jeeps in order to save their child’s life, or men walking forty miles through rugged terrain with their injured wife on their back. All I had to do was headbutt one small call button.

But despite the tumult inside me, nothing happened. Wanting something badly enough was no guarantee that it would happen – I’d been misled by
X-Factor
. Yes, I wanted to move my head. Yes, I was hungry for it. Yes, I was prepared to do whatever it took. But it wasn’t enough.

If only one of the nurses passing by my bed would look at
me. Surely they’d see by my eyes that I was in agony? But they didn’t do random checks; the machines took care of everything and nurses only appeared when something started beeping.

The only person who could get me through this was me.
Hang on, Stella,
I spoke softly to myself,
hang on.

So I listened to the ventilator and I counted to seven and I counted to seven again and I pretended that my hip didn’t belong to me and I stopped looking at the clock and I kept counting and I kept counting and … here came two nurses! It was the time! ‘You take the top end,’ one of them said. ‘Careful with the ventilator.’

I was being lifted up and suddenly the pain had stopped and the relief flooded me with ecstasy. I felt high, floaty and joyous. I was set down on my right side and the nurses straightened up my tubes. ‘See you in three hours,’ one of them said, and looked straight into my eyes. I gazed back at her, pitifully grateful for the human contact.

As soon as they were gone, the fear of dying seized me. It was always at its worst in the few moments after someone left my bedside. I’d been wondering if I should get a priest to cleanse my soul. But even if I’d been able to ask, I suspected that God didn’t play by those simple rules. Whatever I had done in my life – and sometimes my misdeeds didn’t seem so terrible and sometimes they did – it was too late now to be forgiven.

My biggest fear used to be something awful happening to my kids, but contemplating my own death was – I was surprised by my selfishness – more frightening.

Here came Ryan, Betsy and Jeffrey! One after the other they kissed my forehead, then backed away quickly, bumping into each other, terrified of dislodging my tubes.

Self-consciously, the kids delivered ‘news’ that they’d saved up since their previous visit, the day before.

‘Oh my gosh!’ Betsy said, with surprise that was badly rehearsed. ‘You haven’t heard? Amber and Logan are on a break!’

Amber was Betsy’s best friend, Logan was Amber’s boyfriend. But maybe not any more …

Tell me!
I tried to push encouraging vibes out from my eyes.
Go on, my sweetie. Any kind of chat is appreciated round here. And I’m so grateful that you’ve knocked that praying business on the head.

‘Yes! They had like this big talk and Logan said he intuited he was holding Amber back? In her personal development? He didn’t want to take a break but he thinks it’s the right thing?’

God, they were so serious, this generation of kids.

 … And I wouldn’t be so sure about Logan’s noble motives.

‘Amber is like, devastated? But it’s sort of cute that Logan is so mature –’

Jeffrey, clearly not gripped by the Amber–Logan saga, blurted out, ‘Last night we watched
The Apprentice
! It was cool.’

Oh God! What about their study? I put a lot of time and energy into making them knuckle down to their schoolwork and I was terrified that Ryan would let it all slide away to nothingness while I was lying here, powerless.

‘They needed a treat.’ Ryan sounded defensive.

Yes, but …

You’d think you wouldn’t worry about things like that, small things, when every day you’re afraid you might die and go to hell, but there you are.

To deflect attention from his misdeed, Ryan picked up my chart. ‘It says you had a good night’s sleep.’

But I hadn’t – it was impossible when the lights in ICU blazed twenty-four hours a day, the burning in my hip woke
me up every couple of hours and the three-hour turns happened all through the night.

‘Amber says the break is a good thing. It will make their bond stronger. But, Mom, can I say something? Does it make me a bad person …?’

Say it! Say it!

‘… I think Logan just wants to get with other girls.’

Me too! Remember that business in the summer!

‘I’m like remembering … that girl, in the summer.’

Yes! The girl who worked in the fishing boat?

‘It’s not cool to call a girl slutty, I know it isn’t, Mom, so don’t yell at me – oh right, you can’t – but she
was
kind of slutty.’

Betsy was beautiful, with coltish limbs and a mane of long, wild, blonde curls – she’d got the best bits of Ryan and me – but she cultivated a vehemently unsexy look. She dressed in baggy, shin-length pinafores and strange misshapen knitwear that made Karen say, in contempt, ‘She looks like a nineteenth-century crofter.’

‘I know Logan said he’d just been helping the slutty girl when she’d got tangled up in the net,’ Betsy said, ‘but …’

I’d never believed it
.

‘I sort of thought he was like lying. And last night Amber was like spying on Logan.’

Oh my God! This was as good as a soap opera.

‘Well, not spying, but … watching his house. And she said the slutty girl got out of a car and –’

‘Time’s up.’ A nurse was standing at the foot of my bed.

What? Already? No! I needed to hear about the slutty girl! I’d have cried with disappointment if my tear ducts had been working.

‘I don’t want to go,’ Jeffrey said, suddenly sounding young and vulnerable.

‘You have to,’ the nurse said. ‘Patient needs her rest.’

‘Mom, when will you be better?’ Jeffrey asked. ‘When are you coming home?’

I stared at him.
I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

‘Soon,’ Ryan said, in a fake reassuring voice. ‘She’ll be better soon.’

But what if I wasn’t? What if I was like this for ever?

Ryan bent over me and stroked my hair back from my face. ‘Hang on,’ he said quietly, looking steadily into my eyes. ‘Just hang on. You do it for me and I’ll do it for you and we’ll both do it for them.’ We shared a soul-moment, then he stepped away. ‘Okay, kids,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

Off they trooped and I was on my own again. I couldn’t see the clock but I calculated that it was two hours and forty-one minutes until my next ‘turn’.

I hurry into the house, keen to put my disastrous shopping trip behind me. Jeffrey is at home and my heart leaps to see him. Despite his incessant petulance, I love him with a tenderness that feels almost painful.

‘Sorry,’ I say.

‘For what?’

‘You didn’t shrink my clothes.’

He looks at me with fear on his face. ‘Were you always this insane?’

I straighten my spine, fully set to take umbrage, then my phone rings. It’s Zoe. I waver for a moment – I really don’t feel able for this – but maybe she’s calling to cancel tonight’s Bitter Women’s Book Club. Also she’s my best friend, so
of course
I answer it. ‘Zoe?’

‘You won’t believe what that geebag has done now.’

There’s no need to ask who the geebag is – it’s her ex-husband, Brendan.

‘He was meant to pick his daughters up at five o’clock and there’s no sign of him and – yeah, you’re right! What time is it now? Twenty past five! It’s one thing to treat me like shit, but to do that to his own flesh and – oh, here he is now, the prick. Christ, you should see what he’s wearing! Lemon skinnies! It’s like he thinks he’s seventeen! Listen, come over early. Come now. I’ve already started on the wine.’

Abruptly she hangs up and I feel hunted, almost afraid.

‘Maybe you should get a new best friend,’ Jeffrey says.

For a sliver of time I’m in wholehearted agreement, then I get with the programme.

‘Don’t be mad,’ I say. ‘She’s been my best friend since I was six.’

Zoe and I had gone to school together. As teenagers, we’d swapped around the same boyfriends – in fact Ryan had been her boyfriend before he was mine – and when we grew up and got married, our husbands had been great friends. We’d had our babies almost simultaneously and we’d often gone on holiday together. Zoe and I would be friends for ever.

No matter how difficult I seemed to be finding it these days.

It was all Brendan’s fault, I thought, darkly. He and Zoe had been happily married until, about three years ago, he ruined everything by having sex with a girl from work. The fallout had been savage. Zoe said that if he promised to never see the girl again, she’d take him back, but Brendan horrified everyone by saying that if it was all the same, he didn’t actually
want
to come back, thank you.

We thought this would be the end of Zoe, that she’d just sag and deflate into a sad shell of her former sunny self. However, we were wrong. Brendan’s betrayal brought about a transformation. And not a good one.

You know the way sometimes a very ordinary woman will, out of the blue, take up bodybuilding? All the other women are happy to ponce around with sappy pink hand-weights, but this woman starts mixing protein shakes and peels away from the pack. Soon, she’s popping steroids and entering competitions and tanning herself mahogany brown. Her body changes entirely – her boobs become pecs and her arms bulk up and pop with veins. She’s down at the gym every day, grunting and lifting, giving her life and soul to this new version of herself.

Well, Zoe has done that with her personality. She has rehewn and refashioned herself into someone almost unrecognizable. And she used to be lovely, such fun …

‘So?’ Jeffrey says, in a tone that is almost wry. ‘Bitter Women’s Book Club tonight?’

I chew my lip, I chew and chew and chew as my mind goes down several avenues and finds all of them blocked, then I round on Jeffrey in a sudden fury. ‘Who has a book club on a Saturday night?’ Book clubs are midweek things, so that you have an excuse to drink a bottle of wine on a Tuesday!

‘First rule of the Bitter Women’s Book Club is that no one talks about the Bitter Women’s Book Club,’ Jeffrey says.

Wrong. First rule of the Bitter Women’s Book Club is that everyone drinks red wine and keeps on drinking it until their lips crack and their teeth turn black.

‘Second rule,’ he says. ‘All men are bastards.’

Correct.

‘Third rule: All men are bastards.’

Also correct.

‘So, ah …?’ I ask. ‘What did you think of the book?’

‘Mom …’ He shifts awkwardly.

‘You haven’t read it!’ I accuse. ‘I ask you for nothing! Just to read a bloody book and –’

‘Mom, you’re the one in the book club, not me. You’re meant to enjoy the books –’

‘How could anyone enjoy the stuff chosen by the Bitter Women’s Book Club?’

‘Maybe you shouldn’t be in it, then.’

I’ll have to get pissed tonight. Seriously pissed. I’m not a big drinker but there’s no other way I’ll get through it. This means that driving is out of the question. But so is public transport – since the split, Zoe has lived far, far away, in a suburb where buses generate the same consternation that eclipses of the sun used to cause in medieval times. (While
she was married she was domiciled in the pulsing heart of Ferrytown, adjacent to its many amenities, and her current exile in the furthest reaches of west Dublin is yet another string in her bitterness bow.)

‘Dinner with pals?’ the taxi driver asks.

‘Book club.’

‘On a Saturday night?’

‘I know.’

‘You’ll be partaking of a few jars, so?’

I glance at my bottle of red wine. ‘Yes.’

‘What’s the book?’

‘A French thing. It’s called,
She Came to Stay
. Simone de Beauvoir wrote it. I only speed-read it but it was very sad. Autobiographical. Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, they were real people, writers –’

‘I know who they were.’ He sounds annoyed. ‘Existentialists.’

‘They had an open relationship.’

‘Dirty articles.’ He clicks his tongue. ‘That’s the French for you.’

‘And this other girl, they …’ How could I phrase a
ménage
à
trois
delicately? ‘They … befriended her. And she broke them up.’

‘That’s what you get. There’s a lot to be said for playing by the rules. Where on God’s earth are we going?’

‘Take the next left. And the next right. And the second left.’ We’re in Zoe’s enormous estate of identikit houses. ‘Down to the end here and go left, sharp right, yes, keep going. Second left, left again. Right. Left. Down. Go on, keep going, you’re grand.’

‘My sat-nav doesn’t know what’s hit it.’

‘Left. Left at the bottom. One more right and … pull in here.’

As I pay the driver, he looks anxious. ‘I might never find my way out of here.’

I have a sudden sense of just how deeply I’m gridlocked in this prison of suburbia. I feel like my vision has zoomed in to the top of my head, then shot out, far, far away, past the snarl of small roads, the thick cables of motorways, the viral-cluster of Dublin, the coast of Ireland, the landmass of Europe, all the way to outer space. I am tiny and cornered and afraid, and on impulse, I say, ‘Come back and get me in an hour and a half.’

‘You can’t cut out after an hour and a half.’ He looks astounded. ‘Do the decent thing. Two and a quarter hours.’

I waver.

‘Have some manners.’

‘Oh, all
right
. Two and a quarter hours. I might be drunk,’ I feel I should add. ‘I won’t be rowdy but I might be weepy. Please don’t mock me.’

‘Why would I mock you? That’s not my way at all. I’ll have you know that I’m well regarded in my community. I have a reputation – well earned, I might add – as a courteous person. Animals instinctively flock to me and … Oh look, your friend’s expecting you.’

Zoe has her front door open and by the blackness of her teeth, and the dishevelment of her hair, she’s already jarred.

‘Welcome,’ she yells. ‘To the Bitter Women’s Book Club.’

I hurry towards her.

‘Look at him. The dirty bastard,’ she says, watching my taxi driver. ‘Giving me the glad eye. Did you see! And wearing a wedding ring! Dirty dog.’

‘Am I the first?’ I step into her front room.

‘You’re the only!’

‘What?’

‘Yeah! Crowd of bee-yatches! All cancelled. Deirdre’s got a date. With some
man
. Yeah! Cancels on us, just like that!’ She
tries to click her fingers but it doesn’t work. ‘What a complete See You Next Tuesday.’

‘And Elsa? Where’s she? Have you a glass?’ My wine is a screw-top, thank God. I need to get drinking and quickly. I wish I’d started in the taxi.

‘Elsa’s mammy fell off a ladder and broke her collarbone so Elsa is in –’ Zoe pauses and delivers the next phrase with scathing sarcasm – ‘
A&E
.’

‘God, that’s terrible.’ I’m pouring the wine now. I’m pouring it and I’m drinking it and I’m glad.

‘Yeah. Pretty. Fucking. Convenient. That her mammy breaks her collarbone on the night of our Bitter Women’s Book Club.’

‘I hardly think her mum broke her collarbone on purpose … And where’s Belen?’

‘Don’t say that name under my roof. That bee-yatch is dead to me.’

‘Why?’

She put her fingers to her lips. ‘Shssssssh. Secret. Some other time. Any news?’

There is plenty I could tell her – that the Irish economy is displaying signs of modest growth, that scientists have successfully treated bone cancer in mice. I could even tell her about Ryan’s mad artistic notion. But the only news Zoe is ever interested in is break-ups – they’re food and drink to her. She prefers them to be real, but celebrity stuff will do.

‘Not really.’ I’m apologetic.

‘Ryan still single?’

‘Yes.’

‘Not for long, though, right? Not long before some half-wit nineteen-year-old Barbie-brain falls for his tormented-artist shite? So go on. Watcha think of the book?’

‘Well.’ I take a deep breath and try to catch my sinking heart. I’m here. I’m at my book club. I went to the trouble of
sort of reading the book so I might as well make the effort. ‘I know they’re French and French people are different to us, they don’t get upset about infidelity and that, but it was too sad.’

‘She was a little c-word, that Xavière one.’

I’m inclined to agree, but you can’t do that at a book club – you must ‘discuss’ the book. So – a little wearily – I say, ‘Was it that simple?’

‘You tell me! They were happy, Françoise and Pierre. And they invited Xavière in!’

A little startled by Zoe’s anger, I ask, ‘So it was their fault?’

‘It was
her
fault. Françoise’s.’

I swallow hard. ‘I don’t know if it’s fair to blame Françoise for Pierre falling in love with Xavière.’

Zoe stares hard at me. ‘It was autobiographical, you know. It really happened.’

I’m confused by the undercurrent of rage, but then again Zoe is always like this, it’s just worse when she’s drunk. ‘I do know, and –’

‘Stella. Stella.’ Zoe’s gripping my arm hard and suddenly it sounds like she’s got something terribly important to say. ‘Stella.’

‘Yes?’ I squeak.

‘You know what I’m going to say to you.’ She fixes me with a look that is both intense and unsteady.

‘… Ah …’

Then an unexpected wave of some new emotion washes over her. ‘Fuck,’ she says. ‘I’ve got to go to bed.’

‘What? Now?’

‘Yeah.’ She lurches out of the room and towards the stairs. ‘I’m really drunk,’ she says. ‘These things happen. If you drink a lot.’ She’s clambering up the stairs and into her bedroom. ‘I’m not going to puke. I’m not going to choke. I’m grand.’
She’s pulling off her dress and crawling under her duvet. ‘I just want to go to sleep. And preferably never wake up. But I will. Go home, Stella.’

I arrange her so she’s lying on her side and she mutters, ‘Wudja stop. I’m not going to puke. Or choke. I told you.’ She’s a strange mixture of extraordinarily drunk and entirely lucid.

She starts to snore softly and I lie beside her and think about how sad things are. Zoe is one of the most tender-hearted people I’ve ever met, a happy-go-lucky soul who sees the good in everyone. Well, she used to be. But Brendan’s betrayal hit every part of her life – she wasn’t just publicly humiliated by his leaving, she was heartbroken. She really loved him.

And to make matters worse, Brendan secretly dismantled the contract-cleaning company he ran with Zoe and carved off the big, profitable companies for himself, leaving Zoe to forage for small, unreliable, short-term jobs. She was killing herself trying to make it work.

And Zoe’s two daughters, a nineteen-year-old called Sharrie and an eighteen-year-old called Moya, despise her. They were the ones who came up with the Bitter Women’s Book Club title and Zoe adopted it in an if-you-can’t-beat-them-join-them defiance.

I look down on her slumbering form. Even asleep she looks angry and disappointed. Will this happen to me? Even though my life mightn’t have gone the way I’d wanted it to, I don’t want to be bitter. But maybe you don’t get any say in these things?

When the doorbell rings we both jump.

‘Who is it?’ Zoe mumbles.

‘My taxi driver. I forgot he was coming back. I’ll just tell him to go away.’

‘Don’t stay, Stella.’ She sits up.

‘Of course I’ll stay.’

‘Don’t. Really. I’m fine. We’ll just write tonight off and start everything fresh tomorrow. Okay?’

I waver. ‘Are you sure?’

‘I promise.’

I go down the stairs and out into the night. The taxi driver gives me a wary look in the rear-view. ‘Good evening?’

‘Great.’

‘Grand. Home, is it?’

‘Yes. Home.’