Prologue
I park the car on a grass verge at the hospital, ignoring all the signs warning me that it will be clamped.
I don’t care about clamping. I have to get into the emergency department. What does a car matter?
I half run because the heaviness in my chest since I got the phone call from the hospital won’t allow me to run properly. Or breathe. I need deep, calming breaths.
Screw deep calming breaths.
I need to be with him.
Now. Sooner.
I can keep him alive. No doctor can do it: he needs me, holding his hand, willing him back to life.
I don’t have time for the information desk – I know this hospital, see the double doors leading into the actual A & E itself, see a man pushing out of them, and I race, grabbing one swing door just before it shuts.
And I’m in.
Scanning. Peering in pasthalf-drawn cubicle curtains. A man throwing up vile black stuff.
Two cops standing outside another cubicle. A woman on a heart monitor.
And then there he is.
I see his hand lying limply. A hand that’s caressed me so many times.
I stand at the edge of thealready-full cubicle, about to speak when a doctor hangs her stethoscope round her neck and says: ‘I’ll talk to the wife.’
She’s gone instantly and I follow her, see her approach another woman. The doctor puts a comforting hand on the woman’s forearm.
‘I’m the wife!’ I say, my voice frantic.
And then, as the doctor spins round, I see the other woman, recognise her, see the horror on her face.
‘I’m his wife,’ I say, ‘not her.’
PART ONE
Autumn Leaves Falling
1
Sid
Oscar Wilde was right – work is the curse of the drinking classes. Not that there’s any drinking done in Nurture itself. I wend my way through the hordes in The Fiddler’s Elbow, neatly avoiding a guy who thinks – mistakenly – that small,dark-haired women in their thirties are only in pubs on a Friday to find handsy hunks like himself, and congratulate myself on not sweeping his feet from beneath him. Krav Maga is a greatself-defence tool but there’s a time and a place for everything.
I’m heading for the snug at the back of the pub where my Nurture colleagues will be settled in.
Nurture is an advocacy group,semi-funded by the state, set up to improve the health of the people of Ireland and to educate anyone who thinks curry chips, adeep-fried burger and asugar-laden soft drink is a fully balanced meal.
However, education is a tough job and we need aFriday-night decompress as much as any other worker, so on Fridays, even the mostgoji-berry-loving among us move blindly en masse across the road to The Fiddler’s Elbow to reward ourselves for a week of meetings, phone calls, Zoom meetings and enough unanswered emails to bury us with guilt till kingdom come.
Because of how bad the optics would be if the health gurus were spotted regularly having a drink, eatingsalt-laden pub snacks and enjoying that ritual of workplace comparing whose week was worse, we converge in the pub’s smallclosed-off snug where nobody can see us.
‘The figures came in today from the Department of Health. Diabetes Two is on the rise, despite the campaign. Ayear-long campaign,’ laments Robbie, who’s been in Nurture thirteen years, as long as I have, and is also a campaign director. I’m responsible for school health, which is like trying to hold back a flood with a very small bucket.
I pat a disconsolate Robbie on the back, trying not to spill what looks like a big brandy, and find an empty stool beside Chloe, an intern on a gap year who seems so young, she makes me feel seventy instead of justthirty-four.
