Читать книгу Thanks for the Memories - Cecelia Ahern, Cecelia Ahern - Страница 15

SIX

I watch the three children playing together on the floor of the hospital, little fingers and toes, chubby cheeks and plump lips – the faces of their parents clearly etched on theirs. My heart drops into my stomach and it twists. My eyes fill again and I have to look away.

‘Mind if I have a grape?’ Dad chirps. He’s like a little canary swinging in a cage beside me.

‘Of course you can. Dad, you should go home now, go get something to eat. You need your energy.’

He picks up a banana. ‘Potassium,’ he smiles, and moves his arms rigorously. ‘I’ll be jogging home tonight.’

‘How did you get here?’ It suddenly occurs to me that he hasn’t been into the city for years. It all became too fast for him, buildings suddenly sprouting up where there weren’t any, roads with traffic going in different directions from before. With great sadness he sold his car too, his failing eyesight too much of a danger for him and others on the roads. Seventy-five years old, his wife dead ten years. Now he has a routine of his own, content to stay around the local area, chatting to his neighbours, church every Sunday and Wednesday, Monday Club every Monday (apart from the bank holidays when it’s on a Tuesday), butchers on a Tuesday, his crosswords, puzzles and TV shows during the days, his garden all the moments in between.

‘Fran from next door drove me in.’ He puts the banana down, still laughing to himself about his jogging joke, and pops another grape into his mouth. ‘Almost had me killed two or three times. Enough to let me know there is a God if ever there was a time I doubted. I asked for seedless grapes; these aren’t seedless,’ he frowns. Liver-spotted hands put the bunch back on the side cabinet. He takes seeds out of his mouth and looks around for a bin.

‘Do you still believe in your God now, Dad?’ It comes out crueller than I mean to but the anger is almost unbearable.

‘I do believe, Joyce.’ As always, no offence taken. He puts the pips in his handkerchief and places it back in his pocket. ‘The Lord acts in mysterious ways, in ways we often can neither explain nor understand, tolerate nor bear. I understand how you can question Him now – we all do at times. When your mother died I …’ he trails off and abandons the sentence as always, the furthest he will go to being disloyal about his God, the furthest he will go to discussing the loss of his wife. ‘But this time God answered all my prayers. He sat up and heard me calling last night. He said to me,’ Dad puts on a broad Cavan accent, the accent he had as a child before moving to Dublin in his teens, ‘“No problem, Henry. I hear you loud and clear. It’s all in hand so don’t you be worrying. I’ll do this for you, no bother at all.” He saved you. He kept my girl alive and for that I’ll be forever grateful to Him, sad as we may be about the passing of another.’

I have no response to that, but I soften.

He pulls his chair closer to my bedside and it screeches along the floor.

‘And I believe in an afterlife,’ he says a little quieter now. ‘That I do. I believe in the paradise of heaven, up there in the clouds, and everyone that was once here is up there. Including the sinners, for God’s a forgiver, that I believe.’

‘Everyone?’ I fight the tears. I fight them from falling. If I start I know I will never stop. ‘What about my baby, Dad? Is my baby there?’

He looks pained. We hadn’t spoken much about my pregnancy. Early days and we were all worried, nobody more than he. Only days ago we’d had a minor falling-out over my asking him to store our spare bed in his garage. I had started to prepare the nursery, you see … Oh dear, the nursery. The spare bed and junk just cleared out. The cot already purchased. Pretty yellow on the walls. ‘Buttercup Dream’ with a little duckie border.

Five months to go. Some people, my father included, would think preparing the nursery at four months is premature but we’d been waiting six years for a baby, for this baby. Nothing premature about that.

‘Ah, love, you know I don’t know …’

‘I was going to call him Sean if it was a boy,’ I hear myself finally say aloud. I have been saying these things in my head all day, over and over, and here they are, spilling out of me instead of the tears.

‘Ah, that’s a nice name. Sean.’

‘Grace, if it was a girl. After Mum. She would have liked that.’

His jaw sets at this and he looks away. Anyone who doesn’t know him would think this has angered him. I know this is not the case. I know it’s the emotion gathering in his jaw, like a giant reservoir, storing and locking it all away until absolutely necessary, waiting for those rare moments when the drought within him calls for those walls to break and for the emotions to gush.

‘But for some reason I thought it was a boy. I don’t know why but I just felt it somehow. I could have been wrong. I was going to call him Sean,’ I repeat.

Dad nods. ‘That’s right. A fine name.’

‘I used to talk to him. Sing to him. I wonder if he heard.’ My voice is far away. I feel like I’m calling out from the hollow of a tree, where I hide.

Silence while I imagine a future that will never be with little imaginary Sean. Of singing to him every night, of marshmallow skin and splashes at bath time. Of kicking legs and bicycle rides. Of sandcastle architecture and football-related hot-headed tantrums. Anger at a missed life – no, worse – a lost life, overrides my thoughts.

‘I wonder if he even knew.’

‘Knew what, love?’

‘What was happening. What he would be missing. Did he think I was sending him away? I hope he doesn’t blame me. I was all he had and—’ I stop. Torture over for now. I feel seconds away from screaming with such terror, I must stop. If I start my tears now I know I will never stop.

‘Where is he now, Dad? How can you even die when you haven’t even been born yet?’

‘Ah, love.’ He takes my hand and squeezes it again.

‘Tell me.’

This time he thinks about it. Long and hard. He pats my hair, with steady fingers takes the strands from my face and tucks them behind my ears. He hasn’t done that since I was a little girl.

‘I think he’s in heaven, love. Oh, there’s no thinking involved – I know so. He’s up there with your mother, yes he is. Sitting on her lap while she plays rummy with Pauline, robbing her blind and cackling away. She’s up there all right.’ He looks up and wags his forefinger at the ceiling. ‘Now you take care of baby Sean for us, Gracie, you hear? She’ll be tellin’ him all about you, she will, about when you were a baby, about the day you took your first steps, about the day you got your first tooth. She’ll tell him about your first day of school and your last day of school and every day in between, and he’ll know all about you so that when you walk through those gates up there, as an old woman far older than me now, he’ll look up from rummy and say, “Ah, there she is now. The woman herself. My mammy.” Straight away he’ll know.’

The lump in my throat, so huge I can barely swallow, prevents me from saying the thank you I want to express, but perhaps he sees it in my eyes as he nods in acknowledgement and then turns his attention back to the TV while I stare out the window at nothing.

‘There’s a nice chapel here, love. Maybe you should go visit, when you’re good and ready. You don’t even have to say anything, He won’t mind. Just sit there and think. I find it helpful.’

I think it’s the last place in the world I want to be.

‘It’s a nice place to be,’ Dad says, reading my mind. He watches me and I can almost hear him praying for me to leap out of bed and grab the rosary beads he’s placed by the bedside.

‘It’s a rococo building, you know,’ I say suddenly, and have no idea what I’m talking about.

‘What is?’ Dad’s eyebrows furrow and his eyes disappear underneath, like two snails disappearing into their shells. ‘This hospital?’

I think hard. ‘What were we talking about?’

Then he thinks hard. ‘Maltesers. No!’

He’s silent for a moment, then starts answering as though in a quick-fire round of a quiz.

‘Bananas! No. Heaven! No. The chapel! We were talking about the chapel.’ He flashes a million-dollar smile, jubilant he succeeded in remembering the conversation of less than one minute ago. He goes further now. ‘And then you said it’s a rickety building. But honestly it felt fine to me. A bit old but, sure, there’s nothin’ wrong with being old and rickety.’ He winks at me.

‘The chapel is a rococo building, not rickety,’ I correct him, feeling like a teacher. ‘It’s famous for the elaborate stucco work which adorns the ceiling. It’s the work of French stuccadore, Barthelemy Cramillion.’

‘Is that so, love? When did he do that, then?’ He moves his chair in closer to the bed. Loves nothing more than a scéal.

‘In 1762.’ So precise. So random. So natural. So inexplicable that I know it.

‘That long? I didn’t know the hospital was here since then.’

‘It’s been here since 1757,’ I reply, and then frown. How on earth do I know that? But I can’t stop myself, almost like my mouth is on autopilot, completely unattached to my brain. ‘It was designed by the same man who did Leinster House. Richard Cassells was his name. One of the most famous architects of the time.’

‘I’ve heard of him, all right,’ Dad lies. ‘If you’d said Dick I’d have known straight away.’ He chuckles.

‘It was Bartholomew Mosse’s brainchild,’ I explain and I don’t know where the words are coming from, don’t know where the knowledge is coming from. From where else, I don’t know. Like a feeling of déjà vu – these words, this feeling is familiar but I haven’t heard them or spoken them in this hospital. I think maybe I’m making it up but I know somewhere deep inside that I’m correct. A warm feeling floods my body.

‘In 1745 he purchased a small theatre called the New Booth and he converted it into Dublin’s first lying-in hospital.’

‘It stood here, did it? The theatre?’

‘No, it was on George’s Lane. This was all just fields. But eventually that became too small and he bought the fields that were here, consulted with Richard Cassells and in 1757 the new lying-in hospital, now known as the Rotunda, was opened by the Lord Lieutenant. On the eighth of December, if I recall correctly.’

Dad is confused. ‘I didn’t know you had an interest in that kind of thing, Joyce. How do you know all that?’

I frown. I didn’t know I knew that either. Suddenly frustration overwhelms me and I shake my head aggressively.

‘I want a haircut,’ I add angrily, blowing my fringe off my forehead. ‘I want to get out of here.’

‘OK, love.’ Dad’s voice is quiet. ‘A little longer, is all.’