Читать книгу The Twinkling of an Eye - Sue Brown - Страница 11

It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your

calculations, if you live near him.

– The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

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‘Is Craig okay?’ Meg asks me, concerned that her brother is still asleep at 11 am.

Stepping gently around the wooden floorboard that creaks, I tiptoe into his warm, sunny room. He is curled on his side, facing the poster-covered wall, but his chest is rising and falling gently under his short summer pyjamas. I offer a tentative reply.

Dylan phones. His kite-surfing dad, Peter, whom Craig so enjoys, is taking him to Blouberg beach – would Craig be keen to go along?

‘Dylan, I’m sure he’d love to, but you aren’t going to believe this – he is still fast asleep! I will ask him to call you as soon as he is up.’

Perhaps woken by the phone, Craig appears in the kitchen doorway, with a smile that strikes me as rather goofy but endearing, a sprinkling of midsummer freckles across his nose.

‘I have a sliiight headache – but I definitely want to go.’ He runs inside when we arrive at his friend’s house, already playing table hockey against Dylan – who received it for Christmas – by the time I catch up. My son’s face is hidden under his peak cap as we say goodbye.

It is late that afternoon when the phone rings again. This time it is Dylan’s mom, Di, unable to hide her concern.

‘Sue, Pete is on the way back from the beach, coming straight to you. Craig has started vomiting in the car.’

Like a U-boat breaking the surface in an old World War Two movie, I now see with petrifying clarity what has been roiling in the deep. That his illness has been no ordinary tummy bug. This – superimposed on the so-called reflux, his personality changes, uninhibited speech and lopsided face – has my brain reeling with its new, chilling certainty.

Peter’s car pulls up, and all four queasy occupants peel out. I send Craig inside to lie on the couch, with his friend to chat and keep an eye on him.

Peter and I set about cleaning his car – my brief postponement of addressing the emergency of my son’s illness. As we hose down the car mats and beach paraphernalia on the lawn, Peter stops me to say, ‘Sue, his eye…’

I cut him off nervously: ‘I know. I am going to take him to the doctor now.’

Inside Craig, talking nonstop as usual, keeps putting one hand over his mouth and dashing to the loo under the stairs to be sick, before returning to continue where he left off in the conversation.

My husband learns of the latest episode in Craig’s unravelling health when I phone him. He is not medically minded, and I know that he does not quite understand what this means. But he hears the anxiety in my voice, and it echoes his gut feel that something is seriously wrong with his son.

Armed with a towel and plastic bag, I bundle Craig into my car. Soon lethargic and sleepy in the sunny backseat, he needs to be coaxed to climb out of the car door I am holding open for him, and to walk across the parking lot into the Mediclinic.

It is early evening, the waiting room almost empty. The receptionist, seeing that Craig might be sick, sends us straight to the nurses’ station, where the kindly sister makes him comfortable, his head elevated, on an examination bed.

He is feeling a bit better, it seems, but unaware of the now eerily obvious palsy on the left side of his face.

He beams that Dylan’s little sister had kept proposing to him in the car.

‘She wanted my arm or leg, Mom. And, when I said they weren’t detachable, she asked for some of my hair. She even wanted to marry me after I had thrown up on her Hello Kitty stilettos!’

The young, bearded doctor on call draws back the curtain to see this new arrival. He looks exhausted, but takes in Craig’s facial palsy while listening to my newly compiled history of the symptoms. His face registers deepening concern.

In a darker room, he looks properly into Craig’s eyes. Both optic discs are – as he suspected – blurred and swollen. He can see I understand this means raised intracranial pressure; that he does not need to spell out, in front of Craig, that something is pressing on his brain.

An urgent MRI scan, he says, is needed the next morning – we’ll also need to secure a neurologist’s referral on the day before New Year, a tall order as most specialists are away for the holiday season.

‘It is possible,’ he says unconvincingly, perhaps shoring up some hope himself, ‘that this is a very unusual migraine presentation.’

The signs are classic brain tumour symptoms – but neither the doctor nor I dare verbalise this yet. On the way home, I stop with Craig at our local DVD store, vainly hoping that a fun, family movie will provide a distraction for the evening ahead.

‘And how are you, young man?’ asks the friendly man to whom Craig always recites our contract number.

‘Fine thanks,’ he replies, and quietly asks me: ‘How could I say I am having a brain scan tomorrow, Mom?’

At home, Neil and Meg find out about the proposed scan. The doctor could see in both Craig’s eyes that the pressure inside his head is raised. But I stop short of revealing my suspicions about the probable cause of the pressure on his brain.

When I am alone, I seek out my old neurology textbook and look up ‘brain tumours’ – where, as expected, I read about my child in print. I do not trouble Neil, even later when the children are in bed, about this. It feels too much effort to explain what I know has not even occurred to him. Or, by keeping this information to myself, I buttress the horror from spilling into what could be the last day of pretend normality.

Like a child playing peek-a-boo, who thinks she becomes invisible when she blocks her own eyes.

I toss and turn until the early hours, dozing off from time to time, but my half-dreams are disturbing. And each reawakening in the dark brings an unpleasant feeling – like an electric shock that runs down my arms and into my palms – that I have never felt before.