Postscript(37)

I open my door. ‘Ginika,’ I call out firmly and she stops. ‘They’re going to care for Jewel though, aren’t they?’

‘No,’ she says, her eyes flat. ‘They never cared for her from the second they knew about her, they’re not going to start caring about her when I’m gone. They don’t deserve her.’

‘So who’s taking Jewel?’

‘Social have sorted a foster family. She goes to them when I’m in treatment. But you don’t have to worry about that bit,’ she says. ‘You only need to worry about teaching me to write.’

I watch her walk across the courtyard to the steps. The gang part just enough for her to squeeze through and she pushes past them. Words are exchanged. Ginika has enough attitude to beat them away. I glare at the gang angrily, the best suburban middle-class idiotic scare that I can muster, and contemplate attacking them with a crutch.

Then I quickly lock the doors.

It would be a lie to say that I did not lie in bed weighing up whether I should offer to take care of Jewel for Ginika, to promise her a life of love, comfort, support and promise of a safe future. I should have heroically made the gallant gesture of offering to be her guardian. But I am not that person. I am not that pure. I thought about it, entertained the notion and all of its possible angles for at least seven minutes in a detailed daydream where all versions were analysed comprehensively. But no matter how I altered the daydream, this terribly lucid daydream, my final decision was still no. I worry about Jewel, I worry about her future, who will care for her, who will love her, whether she will be placed in safe and loving arms or whether her life will be terribly impacted by a series of foster homes and a feeling of displacement in the world, a loss of identity, like a feather blowing in the wind with no one to lift or anchor her. These haunting thoughts dominate my mind far longer and with greater intensity than the daydream of caring for her myself.

But all thoughts lead to the same conclusion. Just because I’ve had my share of problems, I cannot become a fixer. Gabriel is right on one thing: that behaviour would be unhealthy. If my involvement in the club is to be a success, I can’t become too involved. I have to rein myself in and be realistic. I agreed to help the PS, I Love You Club with writing their letters, not their lives.

My mission – my gift to Jewel and Ginika – will be for Jewel to have a letter, handwritten to her, by her mother, to have and to hold, wherever in the world Jewel may end up.





18


Richard, my eldest and most dependable brother, arrives at my house twenty minutes early. We greet, awkwardly, as if we’ve just met, the only way you can ever greet my socially challenged brother. This half-hug is made awkward because of the large toolbox in his hand, weighing him down on one side, and even more so because I’m dressed in a bath towel, dripping with water from the shower that I had to abandon midway through to go down the stairs on my behind to answer the door because he’s early, and with the cast on my ankle, showering is no easy feat. I’ve covered my cast with plastic wrap and sealed it at the top and bottom with elastic bands to prevent the water from dripping down my leg. The itching in my leg is intensifying and I wonder if I should have been more careful the past few weeks to protect the cast from water. To add salt to my wounds, my lower back is paining me from the pressure I’m placing on it with the crutches, and I can’t sleep properly, though I don’t know if that’s solely because of my ankle or because of everything else going on.

Between avoiding banging the toolbox against my leg, and trying to avoid my wet body, Richard doesn’t know which way to look or lean. I lead him to the living room, and start to tell him what I need him to help me with, but he can’t focus.

‘Why don’t you … fix yourself first?’

I roll my eyes. Patience. It is true that we revert to the childhood versions of ourselves with family members. At least it’s true of me. I spent most of my adolescence – and twenties, for that matter – rolling my eyes at my very particular brother. I hop back towards the stairs.

Dry and dressed, I meet him in the living room where he can look me in the eye properly.

‘I want to take down these photo frames but they’re, I don’t know, screwed to the wall,’ I explain.

‘Screwed to the wall,’ he repeats, looking at them.

‘I don’t know the terminology. They’re not on a string, hanging on a nail like the others, is what I mean. The photographer hung them for me, like he was afraid they’d fall off in an earthquake, as if that would ever happen.’

‘You know there was an earthquake twelve years ago, twenty-seven kilometres off the coast of Wicklow in the Irish Sea with a three-point-two magnitude, which was ten kilometres deep.’

He looks at me and I know that he’s finished speaking. He mainly speaks in statements, and rarely opens these up for discussion. I don’t think he realises this; he probably wonders why he doesn’t get responses. His conversations work like this: I deliver some information, then you deliver some information. Any following of natural links away from the subject is liable to confuse him. To his mind, these digressions from the main topic of discussion are not valid.

‘Really? I didn’t know we had earthquakes in Ireland.’

‘There were zero reports from the public.’

I laugh. He looks at me, confused, he didn’t intend it as a joke.