In Blackrock we lived five minutes by car from Grandad’s house and 15 minutes from John of God’s psychiatric hospital, into which Grandad regularly disappeared. As a child I never knew why Grandad sat there for weeks, suffused with inexhaustible sorrow. At eight, I thought it must be a luxury hotel. I boasted in school about my grandaddy staying in a palace and ran out crying when an older girl said Grandad was “a loony”. Mum drove home, her knuckles a white shade of fury, like the steering wheel was an older girl’s neck she wished to strangle.
Nobody would want to strangle Grandad: he lacked a scintilla of malice but was like a black hole, sucking all energy into its depths. For 30 years he accepted widowhood as a fossilised state: a terminus where he sat in a suit and tie, patiently waiting for God to collect him. He drove Mum demented, while she constantly drove him to medical appointments or to be fitted for hearing aids he never wore in case they got lost. She patiently corrected him as he started forgetting my name or called her by his late wife’s name.
Mum was deeply caring, but sometimes frustration overcame her. Afterwards she felt angry with herself for having lost patience. But one afternoon I saw Mum not get angry but get lost. Late for a medical appointment, we halted at traffic lights. When the lights changed, Mum didn’t move. She stared through the windscreen, like Grandad beside her, oblivious to motorists beeping. When the car horns reached fever pitch I shook her shoulder.
“You looked miles away,” I said, scared.
Mum drove on. “I was in Canada.”
I learned the story of Canada once when Mum was making my school lunch. I asked her what she wanted to be at my age and she replied quietly, “One thing only: to be a Canadian.” At 18 she tried to make her dream happen, swapping her parents’ house for a flat in Toronto. Toronto was lonely, she confessed. On icy weekends, when not working as a waitress, she was often the sole passenger on the ferry out to the islands. She felt hints of spring there one Sunday as she walked past closed amusement parks, envisaging how, when these islands filled with bathers, she would lose her shyness and emerge from her chrysalis to make friends.
Her fingers were frozen that day after the ferry docked, but a sense of duty made her call home. Watching passengers boarding the ferry, she only half-listened to her father. Then his words sank in and Mum watched the ferry sail back to the islands, leaving her ensnared in the childhood she’d fled from. Mum caught an overpriced flight home: the doctors who discovered the cancer had given her mother three months to live.
Her childhood home on Avoca Road felt like a museum to an unspoken suffocation she was desperate to escape. She never asked her mother the questions she longed to ask: her mother would regard such intimacy as impertinence. Instead what Mum recalled about her mother’s death wasn’t the terrible pain but the banality of the conversation, the labyrinths of avoidance. Yet she sensed how much her parents conveyed without seemingly saying anything: they possessed an intricate code of restraint to register unexpressed emotions. Her abiding image was of them stoically holding hands – one in bed, other seated – awaiting death as quietly as if awaiting a bus to see Maureen Potter in the Gaiety.
After the funeral, neighbours discussed the tragedy of Grandad’s helpless grief as doctors tried to patch up a man who had lost his reason to live. Nobody mentioned Mum’s tragedy; how her dream of becoming a Canadian was gone. How could an only daughter abandon a father reduced to wandering hospital corridors in a dressing gown? But as Grandad’s malaise threatened to destroy her, she met Dad, who became her sanity and rock. Grandad was released from hospital but was sufficiently high up in the Civil Service to never need to attend work, beyond a momentary daily appearance to register his existence. He thanked Mum for each meal while claiming everything tasted like cardboard. Then, beyond commenting on how pale she looked, he ignored her.
Dad’s flat in Belgrave Square became her sanctuary, the foreign land to which Mum migrated: cycling there to escape her father’s unbearable sadness. Dad made her feel truly loved. By the time Grandad announced his intention to return to work full time, marriage to Dad had become Mum’s New World. But in her mind she never left behind her other imaginary life in Canada.
One night I dreamed I was with Mum in the Yukon. Inuit families slid past on sleds, drawn by huskies whose tongues caught teeming snowflakes. Mum was shivering, barefoot in a nightdress. But it wasn’t her goose-pimpled flesh that chilled me: it was how her shoulders bled as she inched forward; harnessed to the block of ice she was dragging – the overwhelming burden of being an only child.
I saw her torn in two: trying to raise me yet give Grandad the assisted independence to live on his own. By the time I was 15 he was no longer safe alone. A fuse blew in his brain so he could no longer keep track of time. Most evenings he phoned to complain that nobody had visited in days, though we were only just home after spending hours with him.
Mum had his name down for nursing homes, but finding a bed was impossible. By then Mum had a job managing a boutique in Blackrock: another glance to create her own identity. Phone calls from suppliers about cashflow: calls from Grandad to complain that his care workers were robbing him. Consignments of dresses from Rome: urine-stained sheets to be washed daily. Overdue invoices and rotas for care workers tasked with dispensing Grandad’s medication.
Finally Mum moved him in with us when his situation became untenable. At 8am she would feed him and put on another wash of wet bedclothes before leaving him in an armchair as she raced to open the boutique. She closed early for lunch, running home, unsure if he would be there or sitting in the rain outside his own home.
I passed the boutique after school once. Three customers chatted on chaises longues; sipping the coffee Mum provided but otherwise ignoring her. Mum kept washing her hands at the soap dispenser. I was studying Macbeth, but Mum was not trying to wash away invisible bloodstains. She was trying to cleanse the stink of urine and of porridge wiped from Grandad's chin.
No night went undisturbed. Smoke alarms at dawn when he decided to boil potatoes for dinner with no water. He couldn’t decide if Mum was his wife, daughter or mother, but this placid man flew into rages: a primeval terror at sensing reality slipping. Mum tried to shield me, but I’d wake at odd hours, not knowing what to expect. One night I crept downstairs, drawn by Mum’s faint weeping. I tapped on the downstairs toilet. Mum told me to go away. I pushed open the door. Mum knelt. Grandad could neither haul himself up from the toilet nor let go of the handrail without falling back.
“He’s had another accident,” Mum said. “He can’t help himself, but I can’t help him either. He needs professional care.” She looked up. “Go to bed, Sophie. You’re too young to witness this.”
“I want to help.”
“Then promise that if I get this way you’ll put me out of my misery and make it look like suicide. I’m losing my sanity watching him lose his. It would kill me to imagine you enduring this.”
“Let’s get him to bed, Mum,” I said, wetting a towel. “Then get you to bed. You can’t take much more.”
Grandad’s appointment at the geriatric unit got pushed forward. Dad took the day off to go with Mum. Grandad pulled himself together when confronted by the doctor, but Mum insisted that the doctor repeat his questions until it became clear that Grandad barely knew his own name. The doctor’s secretary asked Admissions to find a bed. Grandad would be officially in the system once this golden ticket was found. He would become a bed blocker that the hospital could only shift by finding a nursing home. Mum knew that there would be months of fights with hospital social workers trying to bully her into taking him out. But no matter how angrily Grandad demanded that Mum bring him home to his wife, he would be safe in hospital – after Admissions located this magical bed.
No bed became available all day. At 6pm Mum and Dad’s only option was to wheel Grandad down to the war-zone maelstrom of the emergency department. The triage nurse explained that he was in a queue for admission but would lose his place if he left the hospital. No doctor would examine him, and nurses could only assist in bringing him to the toilet. They would try to get him a stretcher before dawn. But there was no chance of a bed before tomorrow, when the Admissions office reopened.
Eventually Dad persuaded Mum to go home. I had food waiting, but she barely ate. I bullied her up to bed. After an hour I checked upstairs. She lay fully clothed on the bed, her eyes open. I took her hand.
“What sort of daughter am I?” she whispered.
“A good daughter.”
“I’ve could never do anything right.”
“Who told you that?”
“My parents: every day of my childhood.”
“What was your mum like?”
“She stored up complaints like cardigans to keep her warm. We loved each other and fought like cats and dogs.”
“You must sleep, Mum.”
“I can’t sleep for long. Otherwise your dad will sit there till dawn. Putting Grandad into hospital feels like the cruellest betrayal.”
“You know it’s the only option.”
Mum squeezed my hand.
“He doesn’t know it. I’m a grown woman, yet I’m still desperate for his approval, hoping that just once he’ll say something nice.”
“Dad and I love you.”
She held my hand. “Get to bed. I’ll go in at midnight. Your father has work tomorrow.”
I kissed Mum’s forehead. I closed her door and knew something special had occurred: Mum had let me glimpse her inner world. I couldn’t sleep. At midnight Mum left. An hour later Dad came home. I opened my bedroom door. I never saw him so tired, after hours listening to Grandad’s terrified complaints. He tried to say, “Go back asleep,” but was too exhausted for words to come.
He closed their bedroom door. He would fall asleep and not hear me slip out on my bicycle. Rock Road was quiet. Mum would be furious, but I wanted to be there for her and Grandad in his agonised bewilderment.
At the entrance to the emergency department a Polish mother was cradling a six-year-old girl. The child’s skin looked mottled, her demeanour listless. The mother had scrubbed vomit off her coat. A security guard was explaining how she must bring the child to the children’s hospital in Crumlin. But the mother seemed incapable of comprehending his words. She addressed me in a distraught onslaught of Polish.
“The child should see a nurse,” I told the guard.
“You wouldn’t bring a child into this bedlam.” Reluctantly he admitted me to a holding-pen zone. I spied Grandad in a wheelchair, Mum holding his hand. Grandad seemed asleep with his eyes open. He looked unhinged, like he had disappeared into a sphere beyond feeling, leaving Mum to feel the horror for them both.
A girl in a short skirt shrieked into a mobile phone. Her boyfriend had gashed his skull fighting outside a nightclub. His X-ray would take hours. The girl beseeched the caller to collect her; otherwise she would miss last drinks at the club. Grandad stared at how her skirt revealed the curves of her buttocks. I don’t think he understood that anything was real. Mum stared at another young woman collapsed on the floor; people stepping over her unconscious body. I sat on a plastic chair and took Mum’s hand. She looked too tired to be cross.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she said.
“None of us should be.”
The Polish mother had been admitted. A nurse was getting the child to bend her neck and stare at bright lights. As the nurse questioned the mother, the child stared fearfully around. I waved. Tentatively she waved back.
“She’s too young to be here,” Mum said.
“And Grandad’s too old.”
The child waved again. Mum waved back and was rewarded with a smile. A young doctor passed. Mum touched his coat and pointed to the unconscious young woman.
“She shouldn’t be lying there,” Mum said.
“It’s where her friends always dump her. She’s safer on the floor: she can’t fall.”
“It’s chaos in here.”
He shook his head. “It only chaos when she wakes.”
“They promised my father a trolley.”
“Unfortunately he’s not a priority.”
“But every drunk is?”
“We patch up people and ship them out.”
“He’s desperately tired. They promised that once Admissions reopens he’ll be prioritised.”
The doctor looked exhausted. “We don’t know what other priorities will arise. I can’t promise he won’t still be sitting here tomorrow evening.”
“He’s soaking: in his second pair of wet trousers. If he’s receiving no attention, let me take him home to change his clothes. I’ll have him back at dawn.”
The doctor shook his head. “If you take him away he’ll lose his place in the queue. I’m sorry.” His bleeper went off. “We’ll get him a trolley when it’s quieter.”
The doctor walked away. I took Mum’s hand. “Go home,” I said. “I don’t mind sitting with Grandad.”
Grandad stirred from his stupor and stared after the doctor. “What did the conductor say?” he asked. “Will this bus ever reach Blackrock?” He peered at Mum, his voice expressing concern. “You look too tired for a girl your age. Your mother will be cross at me keeping you out so late.” He screwed up his eyes in the fluorescent glare. “Is your friend stranded in the snow too?”
I patted his knee. “You know me, Grandad: Sophie.”
“Have they taken you hostage too, Sophie?”
“You’re not a hostage, Grandad.”
“Am I dead, Sophie? Who’d have thought you could wet your trousers in purgatory?”
I looked away: I needed to be strong for Mum. The Polish mother seemed reassured. Her daughter waved, being carried towards the exit. Mum stood up.
“Follow them out, Sophie,” she said.
“I’m not leaving you here with him.”
“We’re bringing him with us.”
“He’ll lose his place in the queue.”
“He won’t.” Mum gripped his wheelchair. “It’s such a shithole country that nobody will notice he’s gone. We’ll get him a meal and some sleep. Then we wheel him back as if returning from the bathroom.”
“It’s against the rules.”
“Fuck their rules.”
I’d never heard Mum curse before. She weaved a path through the crowd, and I followed, scared by her agitated manner. Suddenly we were in the moonlight, wheeling him towards the multistorey car park. I tried to help Mum push the wheelchair up the slope, but she radiated a manic energy, as if pushed beyond her limit. We reached the car. She beckoned me to help lift Grandad into the passenger seat, but he became agitated. “Who’s kidnapping me now?” he demanded.
“We’re bringing you home,” Mum snapped. “Let me fasten your seat belt.”
“Go to hell, whoever you are. You won’t tie me down.”
Twice Mum snapped his belt shut and he forced it open. Finally she abandoned trying to strap him in. She motioned me into the back seat and drove off. There was no danger until Grandad glanced across in amazement.
“What are you doing, child? You’re too young to drive.”
His hands grasped the steering wheel as we emerged on to the lower tier. The car park looked deserted. Then I saw the Polish mother. She was about to strap the child into a booster seat. But the girl stood beside her. The car careered wildly: two sets of hands struggling for the steering wheel.
The Polish mother looked up, terrified. The child should have been equally scared. But perhaps everything was so strange that she could not comprehend the danger and ran towards us. I can’t say what happened: the car’s motion threw me backwards. This saved me from serious injury. I was hurled against the seats when the car rammed into a concrete wall. I don’t know how far the child’s body was carried on the bonnet. The collision occurred on the passenger side: even if Grandad was wearing a seat belt he might not have survived. It was like all strength was expelled from my body. When I finally managed to scramble up I knew Grandad’s neck was broken. He stared back at me from an impossible angle.
Mum’s safety airbag saved her life. She was unconscious but alive. I wanted to say I loved her, but, even if awake, she would not have heard me over the blaring car horn, which summoned security men. For a moment I was unaware of the child crushed by the tangled bonnet. There was my world inside the car and the world of the Polish mother cradling her dead child. Our two worlds collided when a security guard forced open my car door.
The car horn sounded even louder, yet the woman’s cries became audible. I tried to put my arms around Mum’s neck, but a man lifted me away from the horror in the car and brought me into contact with the horror outside it. He gently placed me down. I didn’t feel like an adult any more. I was a crying child, encircled by awkward men, all desperate to comfort me, yet conscious that my body possessed too many curves for them to rock me in their arms.
Dermot Bolger's latest works are a novella, The Fall of Ireland, and a poetry collection, The Venice Suite: A Voyage Through Loss
