Life can change in an instant. That's what it says on the jacket of a book I'm reading. One minute you're eating a Chinese takeaway in front of The Apprentice, the next the phone rings and the voice at the other end is saying something that simply doesn't compute, writes Róisín Ingle
Suddenly the sweet-and-sour prawn balls that you shouldn't be eating anyway - they're so far off the glycaemic index it's not even funny - taste even more like plastic than they did when you started eating them. As Alan Sugar decides which of his proteges to fire, the voice tries to convince you that a close relative has gone missing. Bizarre and unbelievable but, apparently, true.
I will spare the blushes of all involved by not naming the main characters in this story. The missing person had been due to meet his wife and a colleague in a city-centre hotel that night for dinner. By the time I got the call his wife and colleague had been waiting there for an hour and a half. Our missing person couldn't be contacted on his mobile, and because not turning up without an explanation was totally out of character, the man on the phone with the bad news - also a relative - had called the gardai, who had contacted the hospitals. Would I please go to the hotel to comfort my relative's wife, who was in the throes of imagining the worst? Is the Pope German? Oh, ja.
It would hardly have been polite to refuse, although as well as suffering from acute indigestion I was, by this stage, utterly confused. The confusion swiftly became panic, which in turn morphed seamlessly into fear. When was the last time I saw him? What were the last words I had said to him? Why had I forgotten to text him on his birthday? I confess that, with a deadline looming, I also reflected on whether this family emergency was a good enough excuse for not delivering an article on time. I'm a tiny bit ashamed of that now.
By the time we had driven to the hotel I was up to 90, thinking of all the horrible things that might have befallen the missper, as they call them on those cop shows. In the lobby his distraught wife and I hugged and cried, then scurried back to the car, saying we would check her home for signs of our missper before deciding what to do next. We spent the 10-minute journey retracing his steps that day and trying to convince ourselves, unsuccessfully, that he was safe. Our voices were strange and strained and speeded up. We were waiting for everything to change.
For a few moments I know we were thinking the same thing. We were imagining a world without him. I thought of my mother enjoying Ibsen at the Abbey, unaware that the life she had left outside the theatre doors was not the same one she would emerge to. I wondered whether had she already sensed something was wrong as the characters moved across the stage. I wondered how we would tell her what that something was.
It was while retracing his steps in our head that a spark of hope lit up the gloom. One of us hit on the notion that, after a heavy week, he could have gone for a pre-dinner nap that turned into a sleep so deep that he couldn't hear his phone. Knowing the missper as we do, the snooze factor seemed a plausible reason for the unexpected events of the evening. Suddenly I realised my breath wasn't coming in short puffs any more. It was as if a cloud had lifted. Sure enough, when we reached the house we discovered that our missper was just a sleepy young man with a bad case of snoring. Embarrassed but relieved, I told the gardai to call off the search, went home to congealed prawn balls and took painkillers for my headache.
Last December we didn't get the chance to imagine a world without my brother Brian. By the time we heard about the tsunami he had already phoned to tell us that, despite the fact that he was bodysurfing when the wave hit, he was, incredibly, alive. We were spared that frantic, fearful time when nothing is certain and everything - everything bad, anyway - is possible.
The book I'm reading is called Moments. It's a collection of short stories by 39 Irish women based around those moments in life when something shifts inside us and we glimpse a light in the darkness or come face to face with the monster under the bed. Everyone involved, from the editors to the writers, has worked for free. The full cover price of the book will go to Goal, to help victims of the tsunami, who know more than most how quickly our world can change. In the time it takes to walk into a book shop and buy it we can change somebody's world. That is in no time at all. A moment.
Moments is published by Clé, €10