Policemen turned up and a lovely female Garda kept saying I needed something sweet. Someone produced anon-diet soft drink from a machine to restore my blood sugar. Yet despite the kindness afterwards, the residual fear of it all has not gone away. Nobody was caught.Drugged-up muggers are part of society and the garage’s security cameras were on the blink. So nobody’s doing time for it.
Except me.
My inspiration for work has dried up. I’m nervy all the time. I’m taking tablets to help me sleep, and worse, the only person I have told about the tablets is Dan. And even then, I’ve implied that I’m getting over it because the family is dealing with so much worse.
Because compared to what happened to my father last year, being mugged is nothing.
In September last year, Dad – Lorcan Abalone, larger than life, that glorious mix of gentleman and bon viveur – was hit by a stroke. We knew about strokes – Dan’s father had had one and had recovered with a mild speech defect.
But my dad – at this point, it appears as if a miracle will be required. His stroke was what the Professor called ‘bilateral infarcts into the caudate heads’, which resulted in a syndrome called Aboulia.
I dutifully wrote this down when the Professor told us because I knew we’d never remember. We were all in shock, anyway, and these cold medical words were mystifying in our distress.
‘Aboulia,’ I’d thought blankly. Sounded like a North African dish. Something with pomegranate and harissa. Not a catastrophic event.
A percentage of people with this can recover to varying degrees, the Professor explained, but over the months, it became clear that my father was not among them. The neurological damage means that while he is still alive, the man who was Dad has gone. His eyes, silver grey with a ring of blue around the irises like mine and Scarlett’s, stare unseeing at us and at the world. Mum insists he recognises us. I disagree.
He can no longer happily tell people how he’s grown heritage tomatoes for years; how his elderberry wine is exquisitely palatable; how his surname, Abalone, comes from Spanish ancestors who traded in iridescent abalone shells; how we and Granddad Eddie were the only Abalones in the phone book: ‘unless Con gets himself a wife,’ Dad would say, with a naughty grin at Con, who was – inevitably – between girlfriends.
Now he mutters, but not in any language we understand. He is not paralysed, but he does not walk or move.
He is with us and yet, gone.
The loss is so huge that none of us can get our heads around it.
And the grief is endless. It’s hard to have anyso-called ‘closure’ on continual pain.
After Dad had spent two months in hospital, and three more in a specialized rehabitilation centre, my mother brought him home, having used much of their savings to have parts of the downstairs of the house converted for a disabled person. Despite all sorts of dire warnings from the nursing home staff about how she would not be able to care for someone so utterly disabled, sheiscaring for him, with us providing both practicalback-up and limited financial help.
‘He is coming home with me,’ she said fiercely, ‘where he will be loved. He needs to be at home. So his brain can mend.’
Dan’s and my fingers found each other as she told the assembled family this. Brains can mend. I now know more about brain plasticity than I ever thought I’d know but there is tragically no sign of any improvement in Dad’s condition.
Therefore, I cannot talk to my mother about my anxiety/fear/trauma following the attack.
Imagine the conversation: Your darling husband lies in bed or sits in a wheelchair, cannot feed himself, has no control over any part of his body and does not appear to recognise you – and I want to moan about having been mugged.
See? No contest.
So only Dan knows about my insomnia and sleeping tablets; but I cannot let him know how shaken I really am because he will want to wrap me in cotton wool until I get better. I cannot take time off for this to happen. I have too much to do. Besides, I believe in fixing myself. I will fill in my gratitude diaries and attract happiness from the universe, that’s what I’ll do. Can’t do any harm?
It takes five minutes to find shoes for myself and Teddy, some clothes for her, and my purse.
We are now within three minutes of a fabulous Italian coffee shop, not to mention a deli, a pub called McQueen’s, a butcher’s, a SuperSpar, a fruit and vegetable shop so narrow that it looks as if only one person can fit in it at once, and a hairdresser’s called Sharleen’s Coiffeurs. We did a serious recce before buying and, coupled with the fact that we were actually only moving ten streets away from our old house, the presence of all these adorable shops plus a village green swung it for us.
Well, that and the wall and theseven-foot gate.
Bellavista sounds like a town perched on an Italian sea clifftop, boasting hordes of tourists, tiny but wildly expensive hotels where a coffee on the admittedly breathtaking terrace will cost you a day’s salary, and where fast foreign cars complete with elegant tanned people litter the place.
In reality, it’s a small part of the city with avillage-y look to it because once upon a time, itwasa village. That was in the horse and cart era.
Nowadays, it’s three miles to the centre of Dublin via atraffic-riddled artery into the city.
Here, it’s blissfully lovely to stroll out of our house and a few yards down the road to the little village proper and the scent of real coffee. The coffee shop is called Giorgio and Patrick’s, so clearly I’m not the only one to feel the Italian vibe.
Teddy is still discussing what sort of bun she can have – chocolate, chocolate or chocolate – when we arrive at the same time as a very elderly, thin and yet not at all fragile lady with a small fluffy dog on a lead.
I open the door for her but instead of going in, she smiles a lovely smile up at me and says, ‘You must be Freya.’
