‘I’ve shit myself,’ Charlie says, as I put shopping bags down on the kitchen table. ‘And I still can’t have a bath.’ There’s no water coming from the hot tap in the bathroom; the one in the kitchen sputters and scalds. There’s been a problem with both of these taps since Charlie moved into the flat a year ago; Val and various handymen have come and gone, but the problem persists. Once tolerable, the faultiness of these taps now preoccupies Charlie, and on bad days it can make him despair, saying that he hates his life, that he has no life, that he’s going to go for a walk and he won’t be coming back.
We’re two months behind on the rent, because I’ve run out of money. I had been heavily supplementing Charlie’s meagre disability benefit to make the monthly payments, but I can no longer afford to do so. I enter and exit quickly, hoping I won’t run into Val, who has never once chased us or complained. He showed such compassion when Charlie was picked up by the police car outside the flat that day, and when I subsequently had to explain to him that his tenant had Alzheimer’s disease and to apologize for not having told him before. But Charlie is defensive; he says it’s ridiculous that we are paying rent at all for a residence without a working bath. That he hasn’t been able to wash for weeks. And he’s fed up hearing Val stomping about above him all day and night long.
The flat smells bad this evening, with Charlie’s accident and the presence of three dogs – Sunny, who’s asleep on Charlie’s bed, lame old Lottie, padding up and down the hall, and Blue, who watches us from where he’s curled up on the sofa, his eyes sad under greying brows. I’ve been worried that Charlie has been forgetting to feed him. I suggest that perhaps I or Domino or one of his carers could take over this task. He snaps at me, says he isn’t a fool and that he is still capable of feeding his dog. I regret it and apologize to him a little later. ‘You’re sorry about what dog thing?’ he says, and I see that I’ve got away with it. I sit down beside him, kiss him on the forehead. He picks up a slipper, compares it to the one he’s holding in his other hand, then throws it across the floor, not seeing that they are a match.
I go to fill up the kettle to boil water for a bath and I find his soiled underpants soaking in the kitchen sink. I wash and rinse them and when the bath is finally full and warm enough to bathe in, I call Charlie into the bathroom. I’m about to help him undress – he stands with arms outstretched, ready for me to take off his sweater – when Sunny pushes her snout through the opened door. She has Ted, Charlie’s precious bear, the one he has asked me to ensure that he is buried with, between her teeth. I yell at her, force her jaw open and tease out the sodden bear. She has ripped off Ted’s entire face; there is nothing left but one glazed orange eye.
Charlie holds the savaged bear in his hands, but he doesn’t shout at the dog. He just sits there silently, examining the bear that has been with him since he was a baby. The sight of this is too much. Charlie puts his arm around me as I sit down on the bath’s edge beside him and fall apart.
This has happened before. At my sister’s house last week I’d felt so overwhelmingly sad that I’d had to let myself out of the house and into the back garden, where I’d knelt on the wet grass and howled. I didn’t fully understand what was wrong with me – was I still grieving for my mum? For the baby we lost? For Charlie and the long goodbye we were all having to endure? For this illness that is robbing the Nipe of a happy childhood? Or was it the prospect of the future for her and me without Charlie? Something snapped that evening and I could no longer function.
‘You stay here. I’ll talk to my mum,’ the Nipe had said to my sister, when she’d seen that I was outside. She sat on the bottom step of the stairs to put on her runners, struggling a little to tie them.
She stood over me in the garden in the rain, her small hand rubbing my back. ‘What’s wrong, Mum? Please don’t be sad. Please, Mum.’ And when she saw that she couldn’t comfort me, she began to cry too.
When I tell my doctor how I feel and ask for a short course of Xanax to make me less anxious, he refuses; he says that they’re too addictive. I dispense three every day to Charlie. Because he will not get better, because there is only one direction that this illness can go in, despite occasional plateaus, there seems to be no limit to how many mood-lifting, anxiety-easing medicines he is prescribed. The doctors are more concerned with how Domino and I can manage his moods to make our lives easier while minding him. Their main goal is to prevent him from getting too low or too agitated. But because I am still seen as stable, as managing, my doctor refuses to give me either Xanax or antidepressants; he writes me a prescription for some sleeping tablets and beta blockers instead.
‘Mum, do a thumbs up.’ We’re in bed; the Nipe’s face is too close to mine.
‘Shush, I need to sleep.’
I’ve drunk too much red wine and have just taken a Stilnoct sleeping tablet to get me through the night. I can’t lift my hand to give her a thumbs up; every part of me feels too heavy.
‘Mum, say I love you.’ I try these words – the ones I say to her a dozen times a day. And I think I say them to her, but they must come out wrong. I just want to sleep.
‘Mum!’
‘What is it? I’m fine, everything’s OK. Off to sleep.’
‘Mum, one of your eyes is shut. Why is one of your eyes shut, Mum? Mum, Mum, what’s wrong, Mum? Mum, why can’t you do a thumbs up?’
When I collect her from a play date the next day, she has an impish smile on her face and is angelically obedient when I say it’s time to go home. In the car she gives me a little bag – she and her friend had gone to the second-hand shop in Sandycove with four euros from her money box to spend on a toy. Instead of a toy she bought me a pair of dangly silver earrings and a chunky silver bracelet with a huge daisy on the front.
*
Outside the church, parents chatter and pace, arms folded against the cold. We are gathered by the main doors, waiting for them to be opened: internal sounds of the organ tuning up and the small excited voices of children heighten our expectations. A red-faced parishioner finally appears, opens the double doors and bends to bolt them into place. We surge forward into the warmth, keen to get a seat with a good vantage point of the altar. Charlie’s just ahead of me in the crowd, but this sudden movement makes him panic – he looks back at me, startled, and feels for my hand, finds it and grabs hold of it.
The vicar, in full robes, greets everyone as we enter. He remembers Charlie’s name, shakes his hand. The organist is poised to the left of the altar, the music teacher crouched below the children as they are ushered into their places, giddy, some of them fretful, needing the loo, seeking out and waving at their parents in the audience. The church is full, even the gallery above us is busy, and the children are difficult to pick out beyond the stuffed pews. The words of their song are hard to decipher, shyness keeping their chins to their chests, and one of the microphones isn’t working. Charlie gets restless early on, roots in his pockets for his mint humbugs and tissues.
After several hymns and a play, there is a prize-giving ceremony. There’s a big cheer for the Nipe, when her entry for the art competition is announced as the winner. The painting she’d submitted was one that she and her dad had worked on together. Charlie had found an image for her to copy in one of his old Rupert Bear annuals and had guided and advised her as she painted, but when he was in the bathroom, trying to work out how to refill the water glass for the brushes, she made a bold departure from the image and added a big messy rainbow with smiling clouds on either end of it. Charlie was furious when he returned and told her that she had completely ruined it – not recognizing that this originality, going against the rules and painting outside the lines, was the very thing that made her just like him.
We go down to Dalkey village for pizza to celebrate Nipe’s achievement. It’s early – only seven – and the restaurant is quiet. Charlie doesn’t fumble for his glasses any more or try with great effort to make sense of the menu. It’s simpler now: I read the menu to myself and order for all of us: margherita pizza for the two of them, followed by ice-cream; a bowl of pasta for me. To drink, apple juice for the Nipe, wine for me and a hot whiskey for her dad.
We move to a different table as soon as we’ve ordered; the grinding and hissing of the coffee machine are torture to Charlie’s ears. And we move again just as our food arrives because we are now too near the kitchen and the clatter of plates being stacked makes Charlie wince and threaten to leave.
I help him locate his knife and fork on the table and place them in his hands; he insists on cutting up his pizza though he finds it very difficult, the prongs of his fork turned upward, his knife the wrong way around. The Nipe sits back in her seat with her pizza in her hand and watches her dad struggle, sees salad slide off his plate, looks at me and back at him.
Our conversation goes in circles, the Nipe interrupting continually, me trying to pretend each of Charlie’s questions is new.
Charlie: How’s your grandmother?
Me: My godmother? She’s OK, though she’s just had a hip replacement…
Nipe: Mum, can I borrow your phone?
Charlie: Fuck. I’m dripping from the nose. Where would I find a tissue?
Nipe: Did Dad just say the F-word? Mum, do I have to eat my broccoli?
Charlie (getting up, looking for a tissue): Ouch. They left some metal in my shoulder where they gave me the flu jab.
Me: I don’t think they did, Charlie. Maybe it’s a bruise?
Charlie: Domino’s going to get the doctor to look at it. Domino’s brilliant.
Nipe: Phone, Mum?
Charlie: Any news on the book?
Me: No, still waiting. My agent –
Nipe: Mum? If I don’t eat my broccoli can I still have ice-cream?
Me: Try and eat some. Nipe, will you do your Australian accent for Dad?
Nipe: There’s a shaaahk in the waw-tah.
All three of us laugh.
Nipe: Want to hear my Indian one?
Charlie: How’s the big lad? (This could mean our mutual friend Keith or our old neighbour’s autistic son.)
Nipe: Mum?
Me: What is it? Can’t you see that your dad and I are talking?
Charlie (putting his head in his hands in exasperation and waiting till his daughter is quiet): Any news on the book?
Me: No, still waiting to hear.
Charlie: How’s your grandmother?
Me: Godmother? She’s fine, though she’s just had a hip replacement…
Nipe, unhappy with her ice-cream flavour: What the weasel in the peasel?
A baby starts to scream at a table nearby.
Charlie: Jesus Christ, I have to get out of here.
When we’re getting ready to leave, the Nipe slides off her chair, asks for her dad’s hat, and tells him that she wants to put it on his head. She takes the hat – a Fargo-like one with fur lining and ear flaps. He leans forward and talks her through how to close the clasp under his chin.
‘Do my shoes look angry to you?’ Charlie asks on our way out. All three of us look down at his feet. He is wearing brand-new Converse high-tops – the white rubber so bright and the fabric so clean they make me think of Ernie and Bert from Sesame Street; of an episode I remember from childhood where Ernie tap dances with pigeons. They are the least angry shoes I’ve ever seen. We laugh; the Nipe takes her dad’s hand, begins to skip beside him. But he stops and asks us to look at them again, he wants us to agree with him. And when we look properly, when we see his feet from his viewpoint, we understand what he means: the way the laces are slanted through the holes makes them look like the furrowed brows of a very angry pair of shoes.
Charlie says he has wanted to say something to me for years, since he met me at Annaghmakerrig. He says he really needs to get it off his chest.
‘I’ve always felt that there is something wrong with your feet. I always have to have a quick check when I see you. I think that they’re probably normal, but I just need to be sure.’
We both look down at my feet and back at each other. I look at him bemused. He hugs me and laughs.
‘Bye, Dada, I love you!’ the Nipe shouts from the back seat when we drop him home. She’s agreed to wait in the car while I run in with him, give him his night-time meds and settle him into bed.
Nothing.
‘Say I love you,’ I whisper to Charlie.
‘I love you, darling,’ he says, turning to me and putting his arms around my waist.
‘No, tell your daughter that you love her.’
‘I told her earlier.’
‘Well tell her again.’
Silence. Then, irritated: ‘I don’t understand what you’re asking me.’
When I get back in the car: ‘Mum? Why wouldn’t Dad say he loved me?’
*
Domino spotted me from the window of a café she was in as I walked home through Dalkey village one afternoon last week. She rushed out to catch up with me, said that she was going to ring me, that she had come up with an idea, a solution. She said she’d been giving it a lot of thought and that if it was OK with me, she would like to move in with her dad.
Initially I was unsure: it seemed an extraordinary sacrifice for a woman still in her early twenties, and too much pressure for her to take on single-handed. She assured me that she wanted to do it, that she would apply for Carer’s Allowance, and joked that it would save her the cost of years of counselling as it would bring her close to her dad again after feeling quite let down by him as a teenager, when he had separated from her mother. Her only stipulation was that they find somewhere new to move to together – she did not want to live in Shanganagh Terrace.
We agreed that the present arrangement was not sustainable. For her, the long daily drive from Ringsend, where she was living with her mother, was too arduous and expensive. For me, the cost of paying for weekly groceries and rent, of driving each morning to give Charlie his breakfast and again with the Nipe each night – never knowing what we might find when we got there – and then home in the dark with the Nipe in her pyjamas and too late to bed, was not a routine we could continue indefinitely.
Domino began her search in Dún Laoghaire, only ten minutes from where we live, but found nothing affordable there. After several weeks of hunting she sent me images of a small house in Ringsend. It looked clean and cosy and was a five-minute walk from Mariad’s house – she and Charlie still got along extremely well and it would give Domino some comfort to have her mother so close.
Charlie is reluctant when I talk to him about the move.
‘Will I be very far away from you?’ he asks.
‘Not too far – about forty minutes, I’d say. But I will visit as often as I can and I’ll call you every day.’
‘I’ve got the two towers there and the beach, and I can walk into the city,’ he says, trying to be more positive.
‘And you’ve got the canal.’
This draws a blank – he can’t remember it, or visualize it when I try to describe where it is and tell him that we have walked along it together before.
He doesn’t know the area well, he will be further away from the Nipe and me, he is not sure about the idea of living with his grown-up daughter – but he knows he has no money and no independence and therefore little choice. I see that he is scared but he tries to be upbeat; I feel a combination of profound relief and profound sadness at the idea of being further away from him, of severing more ties.
Domino uses the money from the lift-door project to secure the new house; the landlord agrees to a year’s rent up front. Because of the distress and frustration the project had caused Charlie, it was never mentioned again by any of us after he returned from hospital. Domino rolled it up and took it back to her mother’s house and finished it on her own, and she had presented it to the Hewsons a few weeks previously.
The Nipe and I will see Charlie much more infrequently, and we will inevitably become more distant. There will come a day when he won’t recognize me or his youngest child, yet he may still know his ex-wife and his two elder daughters. I dread this time, and I will miss him wanting me and depending on me. I dread him no longer remembering anything at all about the crazy, silly, funny, sweet, terrible, heartbreaking and happy things we have been through in our eleven years together.
*
We visit Charlie on his first weekend at the new house. The timing of our visit is not sensible. The Nipe is tired after a sleepover, and I am in very poor form after a night out with a friend who confirmed my suspicion that Charlie’s old group of Dublin friends believed that Mariad and Domino exclusively had cared for him since we moved from our home in Bray, and that I had simply abandoned him.
Earlier in the day Nipey had said that she didn’t want to go to her dad’s new house. Twice on our journey there she’d said that she didn’t want him in a new home where she didn’t have any friends, like she did at Shanganagh Terrace, and she didn’t want him to be so far away from us.
She brightens a little when she sees the Coronation Street-style houses and asks if she can cross the narrow, quiet road on her own. ‘Left, right, left,’ I say as I stand on the pavement and watch her set off.
Inside, she is excited by the little house and how cosy it is. As we traipse up the stairs behind her, she says she wants to see her bedroom. We explain that there are just two bedrooms – one for her dad, one for Domino – because the house isn’t big enough for more.
Back downstairs there is nothing for her to do. She asks for my phone, she wants to be cuddled but keeps changing her mind about who she wants to sit beside. ‘It’s so unfair,’ she says again and again, to herself but aloud. I begin to tell a story; she interrupts. Charlie roars at her to be quiet, and when she isn’t he gets out of his seat and stands above her, wags his finger and shouts. She asks him to tickle her; he leaves the room and sits in the toilet at the back of the house in the dark. Domino coaxes him out again and tries to calm him down.
The Nipe begins to cry for her dad and asks again to be tickled. He says no. Then he says that he wants her to leave. She looks at him, confused, and he says if she won’t leave he will leave himself.
He storms about the house – up and down the stairs – in search of his coat, hat, whatever. He pushes past Nipe as she sits on the bottom step, crying and asking why he wants her to leave and why he doesn’t care about her.
I lift her, screaming and kicking, into my arms and we go out into the street. Her dad passes us and strides down the road, with no notion of where he is or where he is going. The Nipe yells and yells for him with her arms outstretched: ‘I want Daddy! Give me Daddy!’ she shouts, again and again, as she watches him walk away. She screams the same words, hoarse and snotty, on our car journey home, until I pull over at a garage and she throws up.