It was a shock when I realised I was still wearing my school uniform. I didn’t feel like a schoolboy anymore. I didn’t know what I felt like but it wasn’t that. I took the uniform off and threw it in the laundry basket. I wondered if Mum would wash it, iron it, fold it up and put it away in a box as some sort of relic? Or would she give it to a charity shop for some other boy to live out his teenage years in? For him to wear the skin of the boy I had been? Would he feel the things that I felt? Would any trace of my experience linger in the stitches? Would he sense the ghost of me and be haunted by the memories I had had when I wore it? They weren’t all bad but few were easy. Did I really want anyone else to feel all that? I didn’t know. Maybe in the morning when the uniform had been washed and dried I’d know what should be done with it. All I knew that night was that I’d never wear it again and something about the shedding of it offered me a sad kind of hope.
44
‘Brendan,’ Mum called. ‘Phone.’
I made my way downstairs. We kept our phone on the third step closest to the wall even though the hall table was right there. We kept it on the stairs because it’s where Mum used to sit when she spoke to Granny, which she had done every single night, but she didn’t sit for phone calls anymore, she always stood, she always crouched.
‘Jennifer,’ she said, straightening up and holding the receiver towards me on its spiral cord. I came down the next few steps to take it and sat down.
‘Hello?’ I said, as if Mum hadn’t said who it was.
‘Did you forget about me?’ Jennifer said.
I was supposed to have phoned her on the night of her last exam, but because of everything that had happened Jennifer hadn’t even crossed my mind; Ihadforgotten about her.
‘No,’ I said.
‘It was my last exam yesterday and … I thought … I thought you’d said you’d call.’
‘Sorry, Jennifer. Ronan got taken into hospital.’
‘Oh my God, is he OK?’
‘Yeah, or no, I don’t know.’
‘What happened?’
I told her everything I knew, which wasn’t much.
‘So that’s why I didn’t call, sorry.’
‘Oh my God, Brendan, no, don’t apologise,I’msorry. I just hope Ronan’s going to be OK.’
‘I’m seeing him again this afternoon and tomorrow morning, more or less as much as I can.’
‘Absolutely, let’s raincheck our plans for tomorrow, that’s what I was phoning about so …’
‘Or …’ I said, feeling a kind of need, ‘… we could still meet. In the afternoon? After I get back from the hospital?’
‘Are you sure? I mean, I’d love to see you but …’
‘Yeah, no, let’s do it, I’d love to see you too.’
Jennifer, I discovered, liked mini marshmallows on top of her hot chocolate. It wobbled as I took careful steps towards where she was sitting. The place was usually very busy on a Saturday, she told me, so we were lucky to get the popular soft-chairs-by-the-window spot. I set the tray on the table and sat down beside her.
‘Cheers,’ she said, lifting her mug.
‘Cheers,’ I said, lifting my mug of tea and clinking.
A blot of brown foam from her mug latched onto mine. I wiped it off with my thumb and licked it.
‘Do you feel up to talking about Ronan? How was he this morning?’ she asked.
‘Hard to know. They were going to do more tests after I left, but no changes while I was there. I’ll see how he is again tomorrow.’
‘Want me to come with you?’
‘They’re keeping visitors limited at the moment.’
