18
The good thing about working in a newsroom: you stay informed, up to speed with what’s going on in the world – the injustices, the corruption, the natural disasters. The bad thing about working in a newsroom: you stay informed, up to speed with what’s going on in the world – the injustices, the corruption, the natural disasters.
After The Chronicle laid me off, I continued to seek out my daily fix of information, reflexively checking my phone every hour for alerts on what was happening across the globe. These past few weeks, I haven’t felt the need to stay on top of the news agenda as much. It’s been a relief, to suspend reality. To pretend – if only for a little while – that life is fair and people are uncomplicated.
For some reason, the old urge for information is back. I’m not sure what’s driving it, this compulsive need to know all the bad things that are going on in the world. It’s like when you have a canker inside your mouth and you can’t stop biting it. I scan the terrifying headlines on my laptop. Floods in Europe, the deadliest in a hundred years. All but one of the baby-faced kidnappers of the Parisian oil executive arrested and facing twenty years in jail, their futures in tatters. (One commentator pointed out the irony of the defendants’ sentence, given their unpromising future was the reason they committed the crime in the first place.) Prince Harry agrees to a massive publishing deal to write his literary memoirs.
I’ve been working on the new website for the guesthouse – slowly but surely, it’s getting there – but I keep getting distracted. Like now, I’m trying to extract something useful from a forum of English-speaking B&B owners living in France. I was hoping for marketing tips and advice on drumming up business, but it’s mostly people moaning about the French and how, if they’d known they’d have to change their driving licence, they wouldn’t have voted for Brexit.
Opening up a new tab on my browser, I log onto the Chronicle ’s website and read Dermot’s column on Dad’s interview with Alice Hoolihan. It's brutal. He calls Dad ‘the worst thing to come out of Ireland since Jedward’ and ‘more obnoxious than an open letter’. I wasn’t expecting Dermot to give Dad an easy ride, considering our fraught history, but I would have thought the least he could do was not describe my father as ‘a perfectly wrapped kilo of Irish gammon’.
Who was that woman with Jack? He’s free to sleep with whoever he likes, obviously, but Jesus, he’s a fast mover. Shouldn’t he be focusing on his book instead of man-whoring about the village?
I slap myself on my cheeks and shake my head vigorously, willing myself to snap out of it, whatever ‘it’ is, and continue doom-scrolling the latest horrors. A girl Ari’s age is trapped underground after falling down a well being built in a drought-ravaged village in Eritrea. Rescuers are working around the clock to get her out. I feel a wave of nausea pass through me. Please let her be okay. Snapping shut the lid of my laptop, I blow my nose loudly and toss the used tissue into a mounting pile in the wastepaper basket beside the sofa. I don’t know how I’ve managed to catch a cold in the middle of summer. I stand up uneasily and make my way into the kitchen to fix myself some hot water with lemon and honey. In the medicine cupboard, I find a sachet of soluble paracetamol and tip it into the cup. While waiting for the kettle to boil, I stand like Wonder Woman for two minutes, staring out the window at Jack’s room, wondering if he’s there. Cillian told me power posing can change hormone levels in the body by increasing testosteroneand decreasing cortisol.It works – I feel briefly restored. I hate it when he’s right.
I return to my laptop and type ‘life-affirming events’ into the search engine. On the first page of results there’s an opinion piece about Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck getting back together after a twenty-year hiatus. Their reunion, suggests the writer, is an antidote to these troubled times, a shining example of love conquering all. My eyes start to stream, from the virus, not Bennifer’s happy ending, although it really is something they found their way back to each other after all this time. My head throbbing, I swing my legs up on the sofa and check my phone – thirty minutes until I have to pick up Ari from school. Lying back on a cushion, I close my eyes, my hot drink untouched.
One of the hardest things about being a single parent is getting sick. It’s simply not an option. Your child-rearing standards start to slip, for one thing. More screen time and convenience food, less patience for big feelings. During lockdown, my biggest fear was Ari and me catching Covid at the same time. That I wouldn’t be able to look after him, spot the signs of his deterioration. Whenever we’d go to the supermarket, I’d scan our surroundings for danger – other people not maintaining the two-metre distance, tins of tuna that had been overly handled. We’d get home and I’d haul Ari into the bathroom and scrub our hands until our knuckles bled. He cried every time.
This is why I do everything I can to stay healthy – eat my five-a-day, keep my alcohol intake to a minimum (though you’d think I was a demon for the drink listening to Ari’s threats to cut off my wine supply each time I do something to offend him). For Ari. And I guess for me too. I can’t afford the sense of helplessness that comes with depending on other people. The visceral need for touch and connection that’s part of the deal when you allow yourself to be vulnerable. When a simple act of someone wrapping a blanket over you feels like the greatest kindness in the world.
~
Two days later, my head cold has migrated into my throat, my glands swollen to the size of boules . I take a Covid test. It’s negative, so I make an appointment with the local doctor, the one whose cacti Leonard looks after when he’s out of town. Leonard told me that Doctor Bourdariat has the most impressive Carnegiea gigantea he’s ever seen. He did not tell me that the man is a zygote and, objectively speaking, an absolute ride. Doctor Bourdariat smiles as he pulls down his face mask and calls my name in the waiting room, his teeth sparkling brighter than the Dog Star.
‘How can I help?’ he asks, once we’re in his surgery. He instructs me to take a seat as he slips his mask back on. Clasping his hands together, he leans forward on his desk, all attentiveness.
There’s something about the clinical setting – the white walls, the strip lighting, the giant dispenser of hand sanitiser on the desk – that lends a surreal quality to Doctor Bourdariat’s beauty. Like he’s a rare piece of art to be admired, never handled. In husky tones, I tell him about my swollen glands, my throat burning with the exertion of talking.
‘Please,’ he says, gesturing at the examination table.
I shuffle over to the bed in the corner of the room, head bowed low, avoiding all eye contact, one of the untouchables about to be healed by Jesus. Doctor Bourdariat puts his stethoscope to my back and instructs me to take deep breaths, then holds my wrist as he examines his watch. It occurs to me that this is the most physical contact I’ve had with a man since Cillian left.
‘Oh yes,’ Doctor Bourdariat mutters as he examines my throat. ‘They’re very swollen.’
He invites me to return to my seat while he makes notes on his computer.
‘You are from Ireland, yes?’ he asks as he types.
‘How did you know?’
‘Cordes is a small place. I heard an Irish family had taken over the guesthouse. There was talk of the owners selling to a big developer from Toulouse. They wanted to knock the property down and build apartments, but the deal fell through. I am glad. I have many fond memories of La Maison Bleue. I had my tenth birthday there.’
When was that – last year?
‘I went to Ireland once,’ he says.
‘Oh really?’
He nods. ‘To Kilkenny.’
‘It’s a great town.’
‘Yes, but it was strange. I could find nowhere to eat. Only pubs. You Irish like to drink, non ?’
‘Ah, there are lots of restaurants in Kilkenny and the bars do pretty decent food, too.’
Recently, I feel like a representative from Fáilte Ireland, trying to give our national image a rebrand. I can see Jack’s face now, vindicated in his portrayal of the place.
‘It was a fun weekend, though,’ says Doctor Bourdariat. ‘I love the Irish. You guys really know how to live for the moment, enjoy life.’
Do we?
I remove a tissue from the sleeve of my top and blow my nose, smiling weakly at Doctor Bourdariat. He gives me a sympathetic look.
‘Tell me,’ he says. ‘How is everything generally? Are you eating well? Getting enough sleep?’
‘I start my day with half a block of butter, also known as a ‘croissant’, and I haven’t slept through the night in twenty-eight years. But I’m doing fine!’
I grin and flash him a double thumbs-up. Why did I do that? Who gives the thumbs-up anymore? Didn’t I read Gen Z feel attacked whenever they see the thumbs-up emoji? I think they find it passive aggressive or something. If Doctor Bourdariat is offended, he doesn’t let on.
‘It mustn’t have been easy, leaving Ireland,’ he says. ‘I’ve lived in the Tarn my whole life. I can’t imagine starting over. You are very brave.’
He holds the door open for me as I leave. ‘Take care, Madame Murphy’, he says, smiling warmly.
I’m not sure if it’s being called ‘madame’ or being pitied by Doogie Howser, but I’ve never felt more old in my life.
In the queue inside the pharmacy, clutching a prescription for strep throat, I check the latest news updates. The little girl has been trapped in the well for three days now. Scores of people from neighbouring villages have come to help the complex rescue mission, working alongside search crews and first responders and engineers from around the world. I put my phone back in my bag and crane my neck to get a better view of the top of the line. What’s taking so long? I clock the back of an elegantly highlighted head and recognise the woman Jack was chatting to outside Sabrina’s house. She’s engaged in animated conversation with the pharmacist, a cantankerous old fecker, who makes Sabrina Rousseau look like Dolly Parton on Prozac. Yet he seems to be tickled by whatever the woman is saying. I try to ascertain what she’s in for. Stool softener? Worm treatment? A steroid cream for her athlete’s foot? The pharmacist discreetly bags up her prescription, beaming as his customer departs. She brushes past me, smelling of summer nights and fresh starts, and I’m struck by the same desire to egg her, like I did Jack.
What’s wrong with me? I don’t know this person. She’s done nothing to me. She doesn’t even know I exist. Is it Jack? Did I imagine a different energy between us this past week? An understanding of sorts?
See, this is what happens when you forget that life is not the leisurely buying of courgettes and moments of connection in a dimly lit kitchen while the rest of the world is sleeping. It’s famous men sleeping with chic, breezy women. It’s five-year-olds falling down wells, wells necessitated by a long-term shift in temperatures and weather patterns, driven by those who believe a private jet is a basic human right.
The pharmacist calls me forward, greeting me with his familiar scowl.