‘Trust me,’ he says, when I’m all ready to go. ‘If I were to put you or Ben in any danger I’m pretty sure my aunt Mabel would haunt me for ever.’
My stomach flips and at that, he goes around the back, but I freeze with fear.
‘No, seriously I don’t think I can do this!’ I squeal, gripping the handles on the sledge. ‘I’m sorry I’m just a big mouth with big ideas I can’t follow through on. I need to get off.’
Again I feel his hands on my shoulders, but this time he pushes me forward and squeezes in behind me, his arms coming around by my waist where he takes my hands off the edges and takes hold of the rope. He puts his feet into two little home-made rests at the front and I try to ignore how physically close I am to him right now.
‘You’re not getting away with it that easily,’ he tells me. I feel his breath in my ear and hear Ben’s squeals of delightbeside us. The heat of his body behind me makes me close my eyes and breathe out, as a flurry of emotions runs through me. I haven’t been so close to a man in years, and I try to ignore how good it feels.
‘Mum, it’s a baby slope!’ Ben shouts across at me, bringing me back to reality. ‘I’ll race you both! One, two, three, go!’
And at that, Aidan tips the sledge and we’re off before I can protest any more.
‘Woah!’ I shout as we dip over the brow of the hill and slide down towards the hedge at what I’d feared might be lightning speed but realistically is only slightly faster than I’d ride a bike. The wind lifts the stray hairs that flow around my face beneath my woolly hat and the breeze almost takes my breath away but the rush I get, even from such a modest first attempt, is enough to get my heart racing and to my surprise, I get a real buzz as we slide down the hill next to Ben with our arms in the air.
We come to a hasty stop at the bottom when the sledges chunk into a mound of snow just before the hedge, and Ben squeals and giggles beside me, then laughs hysterically when Aidan and I manage to tip over and land on our sides, leaving me totally covered in icy whiteness. I laugh until my sides are sore.
‘Are you still alive?’ Aidan asks, doing his best to clamber out of our snowy mess.
‘That was so amazing!’ says Ben. ‘I want to do it again! Get up, Mum! Again!’
Aidan helps me up, taking my hand in his and using his other hand to hoist me up gently by my elbow. His eyes dance as he steadies me, and then he helps me brush off the excess snow from the back of my jacket.
‘I want to do it again!’ I say to him. ‘That was so good!’
‘Deal!’ he says, and the three of us race to the top of the hill again, the sound of our laughter the only sound that breaks the silence of the woods behind us.
It is tranquil, it’s exciting, and it’s as if we are lost in our own world far up high from the village and far away from the pain we’ve known for the past few days.
And so we slide down the hill again and again, and before we know it, the sun that has lit up our day of fun on the slopes of Ballybray goes down, and a midnight-blue sky with a bright moon takes over.
‘That was the best fun ever,’ Ben says on repeat as we pack up, soaked through, freezing cold, but warm inside with joy. ‘Mum, I can’t believe you actually went down the steepest part of the hill on your own and you didn’t even tip over!’
The dark rings under Ben’s eyes that I’d obsessed over for days seem to have disappeared and his once pale face is now almost a tomato shade, but the best thing is how his eyes sparkle as he speaks. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my son light up the way he has today. His hearty laugh echoed in the stillness of the winter sky and the more he laughed, the more Aidan and I did too.
Mabel used to remark how my whole face changed whenBen laughed, and I think that’s why she made sure he always had plenty to smile about when we were in her company. It’s not that she felt sorry for us in any way, though I sometimes accused her of doing so when I felt she was being too kind, but more that she loved to see other people happy. Seeing and hearing my son laughing makes me happy. I think it always will.
As we pack up before we venture on and make our way back down to the village, slightly breathless and exhausted, Aidan is smiling, Ben is smiling, and I am smiling from ear to ear. I think Mabel knew exactly what she was up to when she left us the instruction to do something that makes us feel alive. The more I got to know her throughout the years, the more I realized that nothing she ever did was accidental. Every word, every conversation, every move she made had a purpose, and that purpose was always to spread kindness and joy, or to raise a smile, usually in someone who needed it most.
She knew we would need this to get us out of the stagnant misery that had engulfed us since her passing.
It’s been the most wonderful, beautiful crisp winter’s day, and we are remembering her just as she would have wanted us to. I’m cold to the bone, yet I feel like so good, as if something has awakened within me and as the moon shines down on us now, I begin to thaw ever so slightly. It’s hard to pinpoint this feeling I now have inside. Is it a new sense of hope, perhaps? Or could it be of a new beginning or at least a step towards a life here without her?
‘I have to give it to you, thatwasfun,’ Aidan says to me. He has a healthy colour in his cheeks too.
‘It was amazing, thank you,’ I say, and I mean it truly. ‘I’m glad you changed your mind and joined us.’
‘I am too,’ he says.
I’m so glad that Aidan had the courage to push ahead with Mabel’s wish for us to do this together, but I also can’t help but wonder where his wife is while he is here, and how she might feel if she knew he was having so much fun with me and my son here today.
As Ben shivers towards me now, I remind myself that Aidan Murphy’s marital status is absolutely none of my business and curse myself for my usual overthinking. I pull Ben closer to warm him up with a towel and, as I dry his hair as quickly as I can, I feel Aidan watching us.
‘You know, seeing you do that just reminds me of me and my mum when I was little,’ Aidan tells me, wrapping his own towel now around his strong shoulders. He dries the back of his neck and hair in horizontal strokes as he speaks. ‘I remember her doing that to warm me up around this very same spot when I was about Ben’s age.’
‘That’s nice,’ I say, momentarily sensing his sadness and still scrubbing Ben’s head to make sure it’s as dry as I can make it. ‘You must have amazing memories of your childhood here, even if Ballybray is the land where time stands still and we have DVD players and the like.’
He smirks at my nudge towards his earlier, less complimentary comments about the place he once lived.
