‘I can hang on to it for us both,’ she says as if she can read my mind. ‘So why don’t you go ahead and have yourself a big old meltdown now while we’re driving because she’s going to need you to be strong when you get there, and Adam is going to need you to be strong too.’
I nod.
‘I mean it. Go ahead. Have a meltdown,’ she says as if she is ordering me to lose it for a bit. For some reason I can’t quite think of, the whole situation seems so utterly ridiculous to the point that I want to laugh. Quite possibly hysterically.
‘I can’t have a meltdown on demand,’ I say.
‘Really? I remember the Becca Burnside who could faint on demand in secondary school whenever we needed a distraction from handing in our Latin homework. Surely the very same woman could meltdown at will.’
‘What did Will ever do to deserve a meltdown?’ I ask her, one of my father’s old jokes coming instantly to mind. Any time we watched a movie and some heroic commander would shout ‘Fire at will!’ my dad would ask us what poor Will did to deserve it. We’d groan in the way all children do at their dad’s jokes but secretly we loved it. We knew on some level we were parcelling away these little jokes and sayings into sections of our brains where they could be called upon one day in the future when they were needed – perhaps when we were parents ourselves, or when we needed our parents most of all.
‘Very funny,’ Laura says. ‘Your daddy would be proud.’
‘I hope so,’ I tell her. ‘And I hope he’s standing at the end of a long white corridor right now, his back to the light, telling my mother it’s not her time and she better get her arse back into her bed.’
‘I hope so too,’ Laura says.
‘I really have far too much work on to be dealing with a wake and funeral right now,’ I say, leaning totally into gallows humour. ‘And I definitely don’t have time to start clearing that house out to sell it. Where will I put ninety-seven crocheted baby blankets, a wardrobe largely stocked with Bonmarché’s finest polyester, and Roisin Burnside’s famous towel collection?’
My mother’s obsession with buying towels is a thing of legend among my friends. At one stage Niamh asked did we ever wash them or just use a new one each time. Mum can’t go to Dunnes, Asda, Matalan or Next without stocking up. She has more towels than any woman living alone needs, or could need. I’m sure there are towels there that still have the tags on andwhich she bought in TK Maxx in 2008. I’ve even teased her she could open a towel museum.
‘You could always eBay them?’ Laura says. ‘Or wrap them as presents. You’ll never need to buy another secret Santa gift again. You fulfil your present-buying obligation and everyone gets lovely new towels. It’s a winner all round.’
‘Do you want some new towels, Laura?’ I ask.
‘I will never say no to new towels. But let’s not jump the gun. Please God, there will be many more towel-buying days in your mum’s future.’
God, I hope so. I promise if there are I will never, ever tease my mother about her strange habit ever again. I promise I will take her out simply to buy as many towels as she might want.
The hospital comes into view and instinctively I take a deep breath, knowing everything might change in the next few hours and ultimately there is very little I can do about it. I have to push down the meltdown I’m finally ready to have. It’s too late now. I need to get on with things. I have to be strong. I have to advocate for the most important woman in my life and I have to plan for a possible mega clearance on Egyptian cotton towels.
28
SEASONS OF LOVE
Laura
Laura drops Becca off at the entrance to A&E and tells her she will park the car and join her shortly.
She watches as her friend puts on her very bravest face and walks in towards the uncertainty that lies through those double doors. Laura has not been in the hospital since Kitty was unwell and the memories are not ones she wants to relive, but this is not about Kitty. This is about Mrs Burnside – the woman whose house she spent as much time in as her own during her teenager years. The woman she thought was strict back then but now, having a teenage daughter of her own, she feels more generous towards her.
She doesn’t know how Becca will cope if the worst happens. Already she has seen her friend cycle through a whole host of emotions – from shock to fear, to denial, despair and even a valiant attempt at humour before they had reached this point of no return. There is no hiding from this any longer.
Laura hopes she has done a good job of supporting herfriend. She really, really hopes that Becca did not feel her shaking, and did not hear the fear in her voice.
As she pulls into a parking space, she feels her own grief rise up like a bubble, almost choking her. Everything is changing, she thinks. Everything that she thought was sure and for certain no longer is. Kitty is gone. Mrs Burnside is seriously ill – Mr Burnside gone a few years. Robyn is fast approaching adulthood. A new generation has been born out of their friendship group with the arrival of baby Clara. She is not the person she was a year ago, but how could she be? A woman does not lose her mother and survive unchanged.
But even though it has been brutally hard, and even though she knows this season of change is not over, that there are more changes to come – changes she hasn’t even acknowledged to herself yet – she knows that this is where she is meant to be.
She is on her own spiritual journey, and those journeys are even less comfortable than a four-hour Ulsterbus journey from Derry to Dublin circa 1994, with mouthy teenagers smoking, the heating on the blink, the toilets locked in Monaghan and an army checkpoint at Aughnacloy treating you like a terrorist. She survived the Dublin runs. She can survive this.
This is the stage of life in which she is meant to figure it all out. Who really cares about her. Who she really cares about. Who has her back and who absolutely does not. Who she would drive to the hospital in a crisis, and whose hand she would want to hold when her world is falling apart.
She allows herself a cry, because she needs to have a cry, and then she phones Conal and tells him what is happening and that he needs to get his arse to the hospital because Becca needs him, and she loves him, even if she is terrified of moving in with anyone right now. He tells her he is on his way. No more questions asked.
Her phone screen lights up just as she is about to slip it back into her handbag. It’s Abby.
Hey, wondered how your choir night went? Coffee before class tomorrow? 9am? I’ll let you pay! ;)
