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My Dad Is Ten Years Old
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PENGUIN BOOKS
Mark O’Sullivan is an award-winning writer whose work has won a Bisto Award in Ireland, the Prix des Lecteurs in France and an International Youth Library White Raven Award. His books have been translated into many languages. He is married with two daughters and lives in County Tipperary.
Books by Mark O’Sullivan
My Dad is Ten Years Old
MARK O’SULLIVAN
PENGUIN
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
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First published 2011
Copyright © Mark O’Sullivan, 2011
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-141-96132-3
For Joan, Jane and Ruth – and in memory of Della
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
1
My dad is ten years old.
One evening last year when he was forty-two, he went jogging along our street. A quiet street leading down towards the river that passes through town. I used to like it here. Old three-storey houses, steep banks of steps up to the front doors. And lots of trees. And in the autumn, wet and deadly leaves. ‘Worse than black ice,’ the Guard said that evening, ‘those leaves’.
So, he’s running, my dad. He’s wearing blue retro tracksuit bottoms. He’s over six feet tall so they don’t look too baggy on him. And one of his Zinedine Zidane jerseys. He has a collection of them. The club jerseys. The black and white stripes of Juventus. Real Madrid’s white. An assortment of blue French national jerseys. That October evening, he was wearing his World Cup 1998 French jersey. His lucky jersey.
So, he’s running. And he’s listening to his MP3 player. His jogging music. The Undertones, a Derry punk band from the late seventies. Loud, catchy guitar riffs, a tearaway beat. And not angry Sex Pistols punk but, as he used to say, joie-de-vivre punk. Happy to be alive punk. Sometimes I wonder which track he was listening to when it happened. Like it matters. ‘You’ve Got My Number’ or ‘Teenage Kicks’ or his anthem, ‘Jimmy, Jimmy’? We’ll never know now because his MP3 player was lost in the chaos after the accident.
In my mind it’s always ‘Jimmy, Jimmy’ that’s playing when I think of that terrible day. His name is Jimmy. They told us not to call him Dad any more. It might freak him out. More than he’s already freaked out, if that’s possible.
So, he’s forty-two and running. Clearing his head after another day in his workroom. Coming back from school, I’d look up at the first-floor window on the left where he sat when he worked and that smile would be there to greet me. It was like the sun breaking through on a cloudy day or a street light on a misty winter’s evening. It was like he sat there all day waiting for his little girl to come home.
So. Running. On the return leg of his five-kilometre run out the Borris Road and along by the River Walk and back. Dad loved the river. When we were small, he used to take me and my older brother Sean for walks down there. We’d feed the ducks, big busy families of them squabbling over the bits of bread, but still floating away in convoy after the squabbling was done. We’d watch the swans drifting gracefully along the water. He’d get us to look below the surface to where their webbed feet paddled like mad. ‘Looking cool is hard work,’ he’d say.
He’s zipping back through Cathedral Street now. It’s getting dark and the cathedral clock is lit up like a yellow moon high above. Twenty to seven, give or take a few minutes. He crosses Blackcastle Bridge and jogs through the Town Square. Most of the shops have closed for the day and there’s not many people about. He turns into the Long Mall, passes the charity clothes shop, the rows of redbrick houses and, among them, our favourite sweet shop where he used to take me and Sean for treats.
It’s one of those cool, old-style kind of shops. All dark timber and high shelves and old Mrs Casey, who happens to be our slightly peculiar next-door neighbour, shrinking a little more behind the counter every day. It’s our kid brother’s favourite sweet shop now. Except it’s Mam who takes him for treats.
Tom, our two-year old. Also known as ‘The Surprise Addition’ shortened to Saddo by Sean. Also known as Snot – Sean’s idea again, needless to say. Also known briefly as Zizou – Zidane’s nickname – but only by Dad and not any more. Mam used to say Tom would end up with multiple-personality disorder, but she doesn’t joke about stuff like that any more either. I wonder what we would have called the baby Mam lost a month after the accident?
What’s Dad thinking about as he jogs by the shop? Some new angle for the series of books he was working on back then? That’s what he did. Illustrated his own and other people’s books for young kids. Like early readers, five- to seven-year-olds kind of thing. And he did freelance graphics for ad agencies. Logos for companies and organizations and such. When we were younger, he worked on animated films. We watched All Dogs Go to Heaven and The Land Before Time a hundred times to see his name come up on the credits, and he still did some work on cartoon shorts and other bits and pieces.
Or maybe he was thinking about some of the future projects he sometimes
mentioned? A graphic novel, that set of books for kids with disabilities, some kids’ books without texts he’d always wanted to try. That was Dad all over. Always wanting to move on to the next thing, always wanting to try something different to what had gone before. So, who knows what’s on his mind as the junction into our street comes into view?
It’s pure weird to think that I saw the kid on the bicycle maybe thirty seconds before our world exploded. I was in my bedroom directly above Dad’s workroom. It was the last night of our school show and I was a bundle of nerves. Every year the final performance is filmed and released on DVD for parents who want to show off their little darlings – it’s a joint production with the boys’ school my brother goes to – or for those particularly sad little darlings who like to show themselves off. And I had another reason to feel nervous. Mam and Dad were coming that night. They’d wanted to come earlier and more often, but I wouldn’t let them. I’m sorry now I didn’t.
I can’t remember why I looked down at the street at that moment. It was dark and the street lights were on. The kid on the bike was racing and looking back over his shoulder. There’s a speed bump below our front gate that was put in after some joyrider crashed into the River Walk wall at the end of our street a few years ago. I knew the kid on the bike was going to hit the bump hard. He did. Then he went sailing over the handlebars.
At first, I thought he’d been racing some other kid, but the panicky way he scrambled back on the bike, his head snapping in the direction he’d come from, convinced me that someone was chasing him. Then he was gone. I waited a few seconds to see who followed him, but I heard the screech of car brakes in the distance and I thought, because there was no loud bang, he’s just about missed getting wiped out.
I told Mick Dunphy about this after the accident. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t. Like it matters why this kid, Clem Healy, was cycling so fast and recklessly? Now, I have to give evidence at the court case in October. Sean got right thick when he heard me tell the detective sergeant what I saw. Or what I thought I saw.
‘Great,’ he goes. ‘Now the little bastard can blame someone else and he’s off the hook.’
Dunphy calmed him down. He knows Sean pretty well. His son, Brian, and Sean are best drinking and, I suspect, hash-smoking buddies. Well, he knows about the buddies bit anyway. He dresses like a character from a seventies cop show, which is how he got the nickname Starsky. Leather bomber jacket, shirt opened down a few buttons, white sneakers and, worse again, white socks. He hasn’t changed his hairstyle since about 1975.
Clem Healy has always denied anyone chased him that evening. So, I imagined it? Or he’s too afraid of whoever was following him to say? The story around town is it had something to do with drugs. His father, Trigger Healy, is a well-known pusher and they say he used his fourteen-year-old son to move stuff sometimes. Still does, probably. He did the same thing with his older son, Sham, who ended up doing time in juvenile detention for handling ecstasy tabs. Some father.
So, running, thinking, listening. Dad’s close enough now to see the name plate of our street. He’d have seen the cars revving up at the junction to take off as soon as they got the green, but not the kid cycling like crazy on our footpath to avoid the speed bumps. ‘Jimmy, Jimmy’ or ‘You’ve Got My Number’ or ‘Teenage Kicks’? Each song louder and faster than the last so it didn’t matter which one was playing. Dad wouldn’t have heard the slam and whine of brakes as the lights before the kid turned red, or the bicycle tyres screaming like a bag of cats to find a grip on the wet leaves along the path.
Then Dad turns the corner into our street and gets the flying missile of a fourteen-year-old kid, complete with hard helmet, into the forehead. He’s thrown back and his head slams into the pebble-dashed gable end of the corner house, splitting his skull open. And he falls through the years like he was spinning down some sick time machine.
A few minutes passed, I don’t know how many, before the whine of the ambulance siren reached me. I can’t honestly say I knew straight off that Dad was in trouble. I heard the crunch of gravel on our drive and looked down. It wasn’t Dad coming in. It was Mam going out. When she got to the footpath, she broke into a run. That was when I knew. I raced downstairs and out. Up ahead on the footpath, I saw some stranger kneeling and holding Dad’s head like it might come apart if she let go. My memory blanks out after that. Dad’s too. Except his never came back.
When he woke in the hospital he had a mental age of ten with no clear recall of anything that had ever happened to him. So far as the doctors and psychiatrists can tell, his memory is a broken jigsaw, the pieces scattered, too many of them lost forever. Much of the time, as Dr Reid at the rehab centre explained it, he’s constantly bothered by the kind of dread you feel when you wake from a nightmare, but can’t remember the details. He still doesn’t know who we really are. Not Mam. Not any of us. He doesn’t know who he was or is. And today Mam’s bringing him home.
Sean’s out and up to no good with Brian Dunphy as usual these evenings. Scooping pints of cider and playing pool in the backroom of Brady’s Bar, no doubt. The Surprise Addition is asleep on my bed and snuggling up to his green plastic tractor. His fair hair’s wringing with sweat after a couple of hours of jumping mad around the house. Some kids have mad half-hours. Tom has mad half-days. I don’t mind. The thing is with little kids, you’re so caught up in minding them, laughing with them, even getting thick with them, that you can forget what’s bothering you. For a while anyway.
In the calm after Hurricane Tom, I’m at my window, but I’m not looking down at the street. I’m looking at my reflection in the glass. This pure loopy wig of orange-red curls on my head from last year’s school show. And I’m humming ‘Tomorrow’. I put on the wig every now and then to give Tom a giggle. Sometimes, it’s the only way to make him laugh these days.
There’s a car moving along the street outside. I don’t see it but hear its slowing-down sigh and I know the car is ours. How weird is it that you get to recognize the sound of a car like the way you recognized your tiny brother’s cry in a roomful of babies at the maternity hospital?
The car pulls into our short pebbled drive. I take off the dumb wig and put on a smile. The kind you’re never fully dressed without. I pick up Tom and he doesn’t even wake. For a moment, I think how lucky he is to be so young and innocent. But, of course, he’s not lucky. At least I had Dad for sixteen years. That’s something to be thankful for.
Isn’t it?
2
Dad’s afraid. He stands with his hands hanging by his side in the hallway. His shoulders are hunched. He has on one of his blue French jerseys under the khaki green parka he always loved. Not the lucky 1998 jersey. They’d had to cut that off him after the accident. He’s like a kid waiting outside the school principal’s office for a ticking-off. For as long as I can remember, he’s kept his head shaved, but over the last few weeks, he’s let his hair grow again. The glossy black straggle of curls is dusted with grey and doesn’t hide the long scar above his right temple. Nor does it hide the bald patch on top. His Zidane tonsure, he used to call it.
‘Jimmy’s here,’ Mam says. I can see she’s as gutted as I am that the house hasn’t sparked some light of recognition in him. ‘Isn’t he looking well?’
She winces and I know why. It’s so easy to slip into talking to him like he’s a kid. But you can’t exactly talk to him like he’s forty-two either. So it’s like trying to invent some new language in between.
‘Hi, Jimmy,’ I say and already I’m stuck for words.
‘Awright?’ His sweet cockney greeting stabs into my heart.
His voice is timid and shaky. Tom’s forehead rests on my neck and I don’t know if the perspiration is his or mine.
‘I’ll get the rest of the bags from the car,’ Mam says. ‘Is Sean here?’
‘He’s on his way,’ I lie and silently curse him.
‘Sean,’ Jimmy says and brightens up some more.
‘Tom’s tired out from jumping around all evening,’ I say. ‘He’s getting to be a real handful.’
‘Will he wake up soon?’ Jimmy asks in a whisper. ‘Can he talk yet?’
At the rehab centre Tom never made a sound. We didn’t bring him often. The visits unsettled him too much, so he hasn’t seen Dad for maybe two months.
‘Talk? He never stops,’ I say and then I suddenly realize I haven’t kissed Dad like I did every time we visited him.
For me, everything was easier in there. The greeting kiss, the talking, even playing the games of matching shapes that helped him get back some of his hand-eye coordination or the child-like wordplay that got him speaking again. Our visits lasted only a few hours and not every day at that. It was like you always knew there was an escape hatch. I feel bad for thinking I needed one, but that’s how it was. Now there’s no escape for any of us. Except for Sean.
I kiss Dad on the cheek, but it’s Jimmy I link with my free hand into the kitchen. I wish I could be the two-year-old sleeping through all this. Jimmy doesn’t walk like he used to. He’ll take a few steps that seem perfect. Then he drags the toe of his shoe along the ground for one step. Hemiplegia they called it at the rehab centre. The weird thing is that there’s something really familiar about that walk and I can’t figure out what it is.
‘Are you hungry, Jimmy?’ I ask.
‘Yeah,’ he says and I can see that the kitchen is yet another strange new world to him in spite of all the meals he’s cooked here over the years in that ‘Housewife of the Year’ apron he designed and got printed for himself. It’s got this drawing above the slogan. A bleary-eyed woman, her hair in curlers, a cigarette dangling from her lips. Nowadays, I wear it.
My Dad Is Ten Years Old
White Lies