TUESDAY
DAY 11,996

‘The Children of Lir’

When I got home from the hospital, Gari, my neighbour on the other side, had left a message on the phone. She asked me to ring. ‘It doesn’t matter how late it is, just call. And if there is anything I can do, I will.’

Everyone else was more alarmed than I was. It was as if they had a premonition. But Bo would be home tomorrow. That’s what the doctor had said.

I didn’t call. It was almost one in the morning.

I got up at about seven and telephoned the hospital.

A nurse told me Bo had been a bit uneasy during the night but was sleeping. She told me I should see the doctor when I visited the hospital, and said visiting hours were between two and five. She said he would probably stay in hospital for the day. I told her I had something to do during the morning and would be in at two. I phoned Bo, who sounded okay. The rash had gone, he said. Great, I said, I’ll see you later, around lunchtime.

Then.

I drove to Lake Derravaragh, near Multyfarnham, in County Westmeath.

The producer – her name was what? Emma? – wanted to record the interview about ‘The Children of Lir’ in one of the places associated with them. The Children of Lir, Fionnuala and her three brothers, were transformed into swans by their stepmother, who had baulked at murdering them. Enchanted until a king’s son from the north of Ireland married a king’s daughter from the south of Ireland, they were banished to lonely places. They spent three hundred years at Lough Derravaragh, three hundred years in the Moyle, the stretch of water between Antrim and Scotland, and three hundred years at Lough Derg. Then they returned to Mayo, to Inis Guaire, where the spell was broken. Now nine hundred years old, they were baptised by St Maolaoise, and then died.

I had wondered about the point of going to Lough Derravaragh. Would it really make much difference where a radio interview was recorded? Perhaps the idea was that the place would enhance mood, inspire me in some intangible way? However, I felt reasonably happy, driving to Multyfarnham. I have visited Lough Derravaragh, always for very brief visits (by which I mean, about twenty minutes or half an hour) on several occasions since I first saw it fifteen years before. In 1998, Ragnar, our son, was attending a summer school in German, which was held in the boarding school in Multyfarnham. One Sunday, Bo and Olaf and I came to visit him – I was charmed by the old quaint village, and the smooth, flat lake. We had ice cream and coffee in the wooden cafe there – there was a caravan park on the edge of the lake, and I thought how nice it would be to have a caravan in this mythical and lovely place. Since then, on the way to or from Mayo, I have often made the detour and looked at the lake, usually with Bo. I was not sure when I was last there with him. Possibly as late as the previous February, when we were at the Merriman Winter School in Westport, and drove along this road, the M6.

Emma was waiting for me outside the church in Multyfarnham. We drove down to the lake, through trees like clouds of gold – such a perfect autumn that year after a perfect summer. The lake stretched, flat, gleaming under a blue sky through which the white cold clouds scudded. Reeds grew on the edge and in clumps, like islands, in the lake itself. There were four swans swimming on the waters, which lapped on the shore with a soothing, soft sound. That would be good, on the radio. (But can’t they do it with sound effects? A dripping tap?)

‘It is good to be here!’ I glowed.

The water on the flat lake was choppy. Although there had been no wind, or at least not much wind, on the road, down here a cold brisk breeze blew off the lake. Russet gold the reeds. Blue and pewter the lake. Green fields on the far shore.

It must have looked different, on the summer day in 1998, when we first came here and I thought, what a great place for a holiday. Though that, I remember, was a grey overcast day, a not very good Irish summer day.

We did the interview.

We had to keep moving out of the wind. We stood in the shelter of Emma’s car, facing the lake. Every so often, a passing vehicle would disturb the recording and I would try to repeat whatever I had been saying when she stopped recording.

It all went well, though, and I felt I had done a good interview, although I could see Emma wince ever so slightly when I said I didn’t think ‘The Children of Lir’ was a very good story. It has a weak storyline. Good folk tales have strong plots. ‘The Children of Lir’, which grabbed the public imagination soon after it was first translated in about 1850 – just after the Famine – is, I think, a fragment of a real fairy tale – a fairy tale like ‘The Twelve Brothers’, which you can read in Grimms’ Fairy Tales, or H.C. Andersen’s ‘The Wild Swans’. Or else it is a scrappy legend that later evolved into a good story. The scribe messed it up by giving it a Christian ending. It is not in the Irish canon of oral tales. No doubt this has been investigated but I hadn’t time to do much research before this interview.

We were finished at about 11.30 and I was in the hospital at 1.

Bo was sitting up in bed. A drip was attached to his arm, a bag to his bladder. He had eaten some lunch.

‘I feel tired,’ he said.

He had been tired for a year. Sometimes more tired than others. He hated feeling tired, and resisted taking a nap in the afternoons – although he usually did, in the end, and felt better for it. For the past week, since the episode of the tablets, he had been unusually tired.

I sat beside him for just a few minutes, then told the staff nurse I was here and would speak to the doctor whenever possible.

Quite soon – surprisingly soon – a doctor came. He told me Bo’s kidneys were not in good condition. He asked me if he had had problems with kidney function.

No. Never.

He told me they were trying hydration.

‘We will try it for forty-eight hours or so,’ he said.

So. Until Wednesday. Or Thursday at the latest.

‘He is old.’

Old? An alarm bell rang in my head. Bo was 82. His sister was 93. His brother lived to be 99, and died one month short of his hundredth birthday. But that was in Sweden, where they have a very good health service. Bo paid what a politician had recently called, sneeringly, ‘gold-plated insurance’ in order to access a good health service in Ireland, the private health service that had served him well in his cancer treatment and where nobody had mentioned his age. But now, because we had come to the local hospital, and the possibilities for treatment were more limited – he was ‘old’. Is that, in fact, a translation of ‘dispensable’?

‘And with underlying problems – the cancer, diabetes – the outcome can be uncertain.’

Bo didn’t have diabetes but I didn’t contradict him since it seemed like an unimportant detail. I just stood there, listening, taking it in, feeling increasingly worried.

‘If hydration doesn’t work, then we will try something else. The worst case scenario is dialysis, or a kidney transplant.’

A kidney transplant. He sensed my shock and spoke gently.

‘It is possible that one round of dialysis would get the kidneys functioning again. It does not mean that he would be on dialysis permanently. But first we will try this.’

Okay.

I sat beside Bo and told him, more or less, what the doctor had said. They’ll try the drip for a day or two, and see how you get on.

The bag hanging from the side of his bed was filling, slowly.

‘It’s not a good colour,’ the doctor said. ‘It should be the colour of straw. Light.’

But it looked normal to me. Normal urine colour. Urine is a pale gold only if you have drunk a lot of water. Most of the time it is a deeper colour. Bo’s urine was always a deep colour, and rather strong smelling, and I have the impression that this is how it is, normally, as you get older.

These are the sort of observations you begin to make, in these circumstances. Bo didn’t much like talking about his bodily functions. Though he did, of course, to me, a lot, over the past few years. He wouldn’t use a chamber pot or anything, but always insisted on going to the bathroom.

Maybe I have a kidney problem too?

The solution dripped steadily from the drip over his bed – which was an ordinary bed, not a hospital bed. It was attached to a machine which set off an alarm if the drip stopped. The alarm rang often, because the drip did not seem to be attached firmly enough to Bo’s arm.

The nurse would come and fiddle with the drip and turn off the alarm.

‘He keeps pulling it out,’ she said.

The contraption looked primitive, to my eyes. I wondered if there were more up-to-date drips, drips that would not detach themselves so easily. I could research that – now – but what good would it do? To Bo? To me?

I sat, Bo dozed, I read my novel.

Two physiotherapists came along.

‘We’re going to help you get out of bed, and start walking.’

They were pretty young women. Bo smiled and made a joke.

‘It’s for when you go home. So you’ll be well able to move about.’

The curtains were pulled and I moved to the end of the ward. I walked about the hospital.

Loughlinstown is run entirely by the HSE, which makes it unusual in Dublin, where the majority of hospitals are still owned officially by religious orders. On the outside Loughlinstown looks quite attractive – a cluster of long low buildings, with a big bay-window-type door as its main entrance. It nestles in trees, and from its elevated location there is a fine view of a footbridge over the motorway, cushions of trees, and, beyond, the wooded hills of Killiney and Ballybrack. Indeed, on a sunny day – and all the days of the week in question were gloriously bright days – it looks like a delightful hospital. You would imagine that it could be a flagship medical centre for the HSE. Or a perfect site for a private clinic like the Blackrock Clinic.

The entrance area to the main hospital is also quite pleasant – airy, bright, with a little shop to one side, and some brightly-coloured chairs in a waiting area.

Once you leave this hallway, though, everything changes. You are back in another era – the 1950s possibly. Antiques and relics of bygone times are fashionable but nobody wants an old-fashioned hospital.

A very long corridor runs the length of the hospital. Along this corridor are wheelchairs, and other bits and pieces. Handwritten or at least very amateurish posters show arrows for the Eye Clinic. There seem to be dozens of these signs for the Eye Clinic. Bo and I laughed about them, the last time he was in the hospital, trapped for three days after dropping by for an outpatient treatment for constipation (which they treated, very effectively). The corridor is about two hundred yards long, maybe longer. There is one junction, a right-hand turn on to another corridor, that leads to another ward, and to the canteen.

‘They have a fantastic canteen,’ a nurse in St Vincent’s Private Hospital told me. ‘There’s a brilliant chef. The staff love it. They have to ban patients from it, otherwise they’d be all in there. The food for patients is not great.’

Visitors can use the canteen too. But it is only open for them from 12.30 to 2, and from 5 to 6. For the rest of the time there are no facilities for refreshments apart from vending machines full of crisps and chocolate. There is a vending machine for coffee but it was broken for a few days during this week.

At the end of the long corridor is the ward specialising in geriatric care. You open a door and pass a toilet. Sometimes the public hospitals have a serious shortage of toilets and bathrooms. I remember my mother, a patient in St Vincent’s University Hospital – that is, the public part – a dying patient, was distressed because they never gave her a shower or washed her hair. She was there for weeks, and had to use a dry shampoo to make her hair look reasonably presentable. (Do you care about your hair when you are very ill? Yes. You do. She did.)

Next there is a desk – the nurses’ station – and a room marked ‘Staff Only’.

Then a series of wards – maybe four – with six beds to each ward. The beds are very close together. There is space for one chair beside each bed, no more. There is a sense of clutter everywhere – it is cluttered because there are too many people in a small space. It is completely different from the calm, spacious, clinical emptiness of the room Bo had in Vincent’s Private, rooms with big windows looking out over the Dublin mountains or the golf club, rooms with chairs for visitors, with their own bathrooms. All that.

I remember what it was like in the 1950s. I was in Harcourt Street Children’s Hospital for about ten days, with an ear abscess, and ‘getting my tonsils out’, as almost everyone did then. My bed was in the corner of a big ward, with perhaps twelve beds in it. My mother was allowed to visit for one hour a day. This was before I could read and I was very bored. After the operation, I was in great pain for days, maybe weeks – I could only eat jelly or ice cream. But the ward was spacious and airy, with high ceilings, and plenty of room between beds. That’s how I remember it. Of course, I was five or six – everything looked big.

In the ward that Bo was in you could reach out and touch the patient in the bed next to you. Almost. Is this healthy?

In the bed to the right of Bo was a big red-faced man. Bob? Some such name. On this day, the first day, Bob was having some trouble with his breathing, and had an oxygen mask over his face most of the time. A blessing, although we didn’t know that yet. In the bed opposite was a small neat man called Pat. Pat was up and about. He was very tidily dressed, in black pants, neatly belted, and a white shirt.

When I got back, the physiotherapists were finished with Bo. He was sitting on the chair by the bed but asked to be put back in. He felt tired. They helped him back – with great difficulty. Bo, who on Sunday could walk downstairs, sit at the kitchen table, sit in his big red chair in the living room and watch Downton Abbey, on Tuesday could not get out of a chair and get into bed.

Why didn’t we ask questions about this? Had he broken a bone? Had he been X-rayed? I will find the answers to these questions two years later, in a report I commissioned from an expert consultant in England, who examined the medical files. The answer is yes, there was a small fracture, and no, apparently he was not X-rayed.

I asked Bo if he would like to read Bombi Bitt och Jag, the little white first edition that was lying on his locker. He shook his head. The big black Parkinson history lay like a sombre cliff beside Bombi Bitt. My stomach tightened when I looked at it. This was the first time in his life that Bo was unable to read. Unwilling to read. Maybe not the first time. There have been hours when he has recovered from operations, when he was emerging from anaesthetic. He could not read then. But he always recovered very quickly, in hardly any time at all, usually. And if he was awake at all, he always wanted to read.

‘Bo is very resilient,’ I would say, triumphantly, when people asked. And it was true.

But now he hadn’t had an operation. He wasn’t very ill. It’s nothing serious. They’ll hydrate him, he’ll be out in a day or so.

The drip wasn’t attached to him now. They’d disconnected it while they were pulling him about for the physiotherapy. I mentioned this to the nurse and she said she’d connect it but she didn’t, for a while.

The atmosphere in this ward: relaxed, weary, messy.

I hadn’t had anything to eat since about 7 a.m., so I went to check out the canteen, which has such a good reputation, the shining light of Loughlinstown. It was closed. I tried the coffee vending machine. It took my coins but no coffee emerged. I could have asked someone about coffee – the man who looked like a security man, the woman in the sweetshop – but I didn’t.

That’s the trouble with me. I don’t ask. I don’t complain enough, directly enough, to the right people. I don’t react quickly enough. And now I didn’t know how urgent the situation was. I didn’t realise that time was running out.

I sat with Bo. He was half-asleep, half-awake. I talked a little, he talked. His voice had become a little weaker, but it was still Bo’s voice, rich, round, warm, ironic, Swedish. I gave him drinks of water. The drip had been reattached. The alarm bell went off, when he lay on the tube, when it loosened in his hand, already bruised cruelly. The bag with the liquid seemed to be too low over the bed – it looked to me as if gravity could do more to help the flow, if it were positioned higher. How amateurish it looks! And yet I didn’t really know, couldn’t remember enough to compare it to other bags I had seen. All I could remember was the room in Vincent’s Private, its professional clean clinical look, the sense of security you had there, partly engendered by the look of the place. Of course, people are very sick, people die, in such hospitals, too, but you know that the best medicine, the best equipment, the best medical staff, are available. You feel as safe as is humanly possible. Here in Loughlinstown I felt the opposite. I sensed danger. They don’t have sodium that can be taken orally. They don’t have this and they don’t have that – later a nurse will rather crossly tell me that they don’t have containers for dentures, could I bring some in myself. And all too soon I will find out that they don’t have other crucial life-saving equipment.

Meanwhile, a phone call.

It’s Emma. From the radio. ‘Children of Lir’ Emma.

I have missed a few calls from her.

She doesn’t know how to tell me this, she says. But the computer card on which she recorded my interview was corrupt. She can’t retrieve the recording.

The morning – the drive to Lough Derravaragh, the golden trees, the bleak choppy waters of the lake, all my good ideas about ‘The Children of Lir’ – gone. Three hours when I could have been here with Bo.

‘They’ve been trying but they can’t get it.’

‘These things happen.’

‘I could do it again if you can come to Lough Derravaragh again sometime this week.’

‘No, I wouldn’t be able to do that.’

She didn’t offer to redo the interview in the studio, which surprised me, but I didn’t suggest it. I didn’t want to.

‘I’ll cancel it.’

‘It’s okay, Emma. These things happen. Goodbye.’

I just wanted her off the phone. I wanted to get back to Bo. Now our life was the hospital ward. The outside world was irrelevant.

Pat came over and straightened Bo’s slippers, which were on the floor at the end of the bed. He went to the window at the end of the ward and pulled back the curtains. A nurse, small, bright, young, commended him.

‘You’re always helping me, Pat!’ she said.

She came and talked to me and Bo. She’s a student nurse, a warm and kind person, a wonderful nurse. The young student nurses, the student doctors, were among the most considerate people, the most caring people, in this hospital. I told her Bo’s drip didn’t seem to be working properly. She looked at it and agreed.

‘I’m not allowed to do anything with it,’ she said, regretfully. ‘I’ll ask the nurse.’

But nobody came.

I went home at about half past five, to touch base at the house, and to get something to eat. By now I had texted our sons to let them know that Bo was in hospital, and I’d texted Marja, Bo’s daughter. I telephoned my next-door neighbour, Gari, who had left two or three messages on the answering machine. I asked her for advice on how to move Bo to another hospital. She suggested that I telephone the Blackrock Clinic and ask them. I decided that I would work on this problem on Wednesday. She also thought that I should find out where the consultant Bo had been assigned to had his private practice.

‘They usually have clinics in Blackrock and Vincent’s as well as there.’ This seemed like a good idea.

Back in the hospital, the drip had been inserted again and seemed to be functioning. The monitoring machine had been switched off, however, so the nurses would not know when the drip slipped out. They would no longer be annoyed by the alarm.

Marja and Ragnar came to see Bo, and so did Olaf and Nadezhda. Bo was very glad to see them, and talked cheerfully enough, if weakly. It was a pleasant evening. Tuesday.