The Curfew

He was walking back up the street from the seafront when he looked up and saw the woman coming at him. He’d been watching the leaves. Ex-Hurricane Ophelia was heading toward Dublin and the leaves were blowing the wrong way. They were passing him, dashing by him, rolling up the hill. The curfew would be starting in half an hour. He’d been giving out about it earlier, before his wife left for work. Do they think there’s a civil war? It’s only a bit of weather. But, actually, he liked the drama of it. Even now, walking home—striding, he was striding, a man on a mission—he felt involved, ready, ahead of the coming catastrophe. It was doing him good. He was carrying drugs in a paper bag, but he felt like a man who didn’t need them. He’d already folded the garden chairs and put them away, he’d tucked the wheelie bins well in under the hedge. He’d put candles around the house, just in case. He’d done other stuff, too. He was all set.

He liked the word—curfew. He liked the daft importance of it. There’d be Army tenders patrolling the streets, amplified voices warning citizens to stay in out of the rain. Get back inside—you’ll catch your death! There’d be bursts of gunfire; blood would flow in the gutters, downhill, while the leaves skipped and swirled up the hill.

He didn’t have to visit his mother.

He didn’t have to work.

He didn’t have to tell his wife about himself and the widow’s block.

He’d be safe inside the curfew for a while.

—Bring it on, he said, aloud. There was no one else on the street. Blow, winds, and crack your fuckin’ cheeks.

Then he looked up and saw the woman. She was wearing one of those baby slings, and the baby was facing out, looking his way, right under its mother’s chin. There were two faces coming straight at him.

It wasn’t a baby.

—What should I do? he’d asked.

—Nothing, the doctor had said.

—Nothing?

He’d had a health check a couple of weeks before. A routine check, offered by his health insurer—free. Heart, prostate, eyes, ears. He couldn’t remember what else, and all he could really recall was the prostate test. The doctor was a woman, and he hadn’t cared. He’d lain on his side and grabbed his knees as she’d told him to, and he’d been fine with it, and pleased, even when he saw her dropping the latex gloves into a bin as she told him he could sit up again. He’d felt modern. It was something he’d never tell his daughters about, but he would still remember, as they lectured him on gender identity or the glass ceiling in Irish universities. I know what you’re talking about, he’d be tempted to say. A woman doctor had her finger up my arse, and she was thoroughly professional.

He loved his daughters’ lectures.

A week after the checkup, his phone had vibrated in his pocket. He didn’t know the number on the screen.

—Hello?

It was the doctor.

—How are you today? she asked.

—Grand, he said. Yourself?

She told him he had coronary-artery disease.

—Oh.

—You shouldn’t worry, she said.

—What does it involve? he asked. Exactly.

She told him there were high levels of cholesterol in his arteries. One of them was seventy per cent blocked.

—Seventy per cent?

—Yes.

—That’s nearly three-quarters, he said.

—We’ll need to do further tests, she said. And, again, there’s no need to be worrying yourself unduly. It’s called the widow’s block, by the way.

She sounded cheerful. He liked that.

—The blocked arteries? he asked.

—Yes, she said. The condition. That’s what they call it. The widow’s block.

He liked the sound of it. The fact that he had a wife helped. It made sense, somehow. It was almost noble. He was taking the pain for her.

There was no pain. There had been no pain. Not an ache, not a twinge. But now he had a heart problem, a heart condition, a fuckin’ disease.

—What should I do?

—Nothing.

—Nothing?

—For now, she said. You’re fine. There’ll be further tests, and we’ll organize an angiogram. Stents might be wise. But nothing for now. And don’t Google.

—O.K.

—That way lies madness, she said.

—What’s an angiogram? he asked.

—You can Google that one, she said. That’s just information.

He liked her. He couldn’t remember what she’d looked like.

—Can I Google “stents”?

—You can. But leave it at that.

He put his phone back in his pocket and continued working.

He wrote “angiogram” on an envelope. He wrote “stents.” He wrote “artery” and “coronary.” And “nothing.” And “disease.”

It wasn’t a baby in the sling. It was a Teddy bear. They—the woman and the bear—had nearly reached him now. He didn’t have to move, or shift—sway to the left or right—as he often had to when he encountered people coming the opposite way. They were between trees, him and her, so there was plenty of room on the path.

A Teddy bear—a biggish one; it fit neatly into the sling. A baby-sized bear—a big baby. It was wearing a jumper, and it wasn’t new. It was older than any baby who might have owned it. He looked at the woman, although he didn’t want to; he didn’t want to see her looking back at him. He didn’t want to be caught. She looked straight ahead. He felt like a spectator watching her through a window. He wasn’t there, near her, right beside her.

She passed. He didn’t look back. He kept going, up to the house. The curfew was coming, the ex-hurricane was coming. He wanted to check the wheelies again, he wanted to make sure all the windows were fastened. He wanted to get off the street.

She didn’t look like a mother.

He didn’t know what that meant, really. He could hear himself telling his wife this, and she’d ask him. She was thin, he’d say. She didn’t look like a woman who’d recently been pregnant. They’d had four kids of their own; he’d lived in the world of babies and pregnant women. He wasn’t a total eejit. She was skinny, he’d say. Very—unusually—skinny. Her face was—the word was there, waiting for him—empty. Her face was empty, he’d say. Vacant. Expressionless. She walked right past me, he’d say, like I wasn’t there.

He got his keys out. He’d have the right one ready when he got to the front door.

He remembered the weight of his youngest daughter, Cliona, in one of those slings. They hadn’t had one—they might not have been invented yet—for the other kids, the boy and the two older girls. They’d had a backpack thing, like a rucksack, for carrying them.

He’d hated the backpack, six or seven years of having the thing on his back, not being able to see the baby as he walked. He’d hated it until the child was old enough to grab his hair or his collar and he’d know it was fine back there. There was a day in Kerry, on a beach, years ago. The eldest, Ciara, was the baby in the backpack. He’d been up early that morning; it was his turn. He’d put her in the backpack, kissed her forehead, hoisted her onto his back, and gone walking. He hadn’t even checked the weather or looked out the window. If you’re able to see Brandon in the evening you’ll be grand, someone, some oul’ lad with a peaked cap, had told him. And he’d seen the mountain the night before—he was sure he had. So he’d fed Ciara, shoved a slice of bread into his mouth, and walked out the back door of the house they were renting for the week.

There was a dead whale on the beach, they’d been told when they were eating in the local pub—he couldn’t remember the name of the pub or the name of the beach. He’d walked down a lane, crossed the main road, and ten more minutes along a narrow line of tarmac to the beach. Ciara was eight months, and he hadn’t started doing what he did later with the others, talking to them over his shoulder, talking to himself, asking questions they wouldn’t be answering. It was early—about seven, he thought; he’d done that thing, taken his watch off when the holidays started—but it was already hot. He reached the sand. The beach was empty, no one else on it at all. The whale, he knew, was to the left. About twenty minutes along the strand, they’d said. You won’t fuckin’ miss it, sure. He’d started walking along the hard sand at the edge of the sea, and somewhere, ten minutes in, he’d decided that Ciara was dead. And he kept walking until he could see the whale, and smell it. He was afraid to stop, submit to the feeling, the certainty he knew was false.

He found it hard to identify that man as himself now, the eejit stepping over the sand. The mad logic of parenthood. He’d stopped when he knew he was smelling the whale. His destination. He couldn’t remember the smell; he couldn’t remember the words he’d used to describe it when he got back to the house. Atrocious, probably; fuckin’ atrocious. Unbelievable—ah, Jesus. He didn’t know. He knew it had been terrible enough to halt him. He could feel it on his skin, adding oil to his sweat. He was about fifty yards from the carcass. He stopped looking at it; he wasn’t interested. It was different shades of gray; that was all he remembered. He took off the backpack. He parked it on the sand. Ciara was fine. She was sleeping. He’d remembered to put her sun hat on before he left the house; her neck was properly covered. He’d never told anyone that he thought she was dead, that he’d carried her, dead, for twenty minutes. She was in Vancouver now. She’d be Skyping him later. He hadn’t thought of it in years, that day on the beach. He’d never tell her—he didn’t know why not.

He was at the front door. But he stepped off the porch and walked back across the small garden to the wheelie bins—brown, green, and black—and the hedge. He looked again, made sure they were tucked in under the lip of the hedge, that they wouldn’t be lifted by the wind that was coming. He pushed them in farther. He didn’t know what else to do with them. He could bring them into the house. But he wouldn’t. He didn’t want his wife to find them lined up in the hall. Maybe he’d look out the bedroom window and see them spinning up, like Dorothy’s house in “The Wizard of Oz.” Something to tell Ciara when they were talking. The brown one landed on the old witch across the street.

He let himself in.

The house was still empty. The way he’d left it. His wife would be home soon. She’d have to be. She’d have to get home before the curfew kicked in. Or else she’d be trapped in a spotlight, shot on the front step by some kid in the Army.

He went down, through the house, to the kitchen.

He took the tablets, the three slim boxes, out of the chemist’s paper bag. His new pills. His regimen. He put them standing in a row. They looked unfinished like that. He needed more boxes. Stonehenge. He could make a joke of it when he was telling her later.

He got his reading glasses from the table. He’d left them on top of the book he was reading; he always did that. “The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America.” They could all fuck off till he’d taken his pills, and found out what it was that he was taking.

He’d loved carrying the youngest girl, Cliona. Any excuse, almost literally any excuse, he’d slide her into the sling, her face looking out at the world, and go off—to the shops, town, the seafront, nowhere. He’d loved the weight there against his chest and the fact that he saw what she was seeing. He could feel her excitement, her legs hopping, the approaching faces breaking into smiles—for her, then for him. She’s gorgeous. She’s a dote. Proud of his daughter, proud of himself. Cliona in the sling, Conor in the buggy, Ciara and Maeve on either side holding the handles. Down through town, through the crowds, Henry Street, Grafton Street. People made way, he never lost a child.

The doctor had sent him leaflets in the post. “The Fats of Life—The Lowdown on High Cholesterol” was one. He wasn’t fat. He hadn’t read it yet; he’d glanced at it. There was an article about some smiling actor from “Fair City” who’d taken “control of his cholesterol” and a page called “Recipe Corner.” There was another leaflet. “Angioplasty & Coronary Stenting.” There were no pictures in that one. Definitions, questions answered, a detachable consent form at the back. He hadn’t read that one, either.

He took his glasses off the book and went back to Stonehenge. He listened, for whistling wind, falling branches, roof slates decapitating pensioners.

He remembered Hurricane Charley—in 1986, he thought it was. He’d sat on his bed all night and waited for the windows to fly in on top of him, shred the curtains, impale him against the wall. He’d lived alone then. It was the last time he’d felt physically frightened; he thought that was true. That was more than thirty years ago.

He looked at the three boxes.

—The maximum dose, she’d said, the cardiologist, this morning when he’d met her. To be on the safe side.

—O.K.

—One piece of advice.

—Yes?

—Don’t Google, she’d said.

—Your colleague said that as well.

—Good, she’d said. You know enough for now. You’ll pick up more as we go along.

She was looking at him over her glasses, as if she’d stopped being just a doctor and had become his new friend. He wondered later, when he was looking at the scrambled eggs he’d ordered in the café across from the hospital, and the little portion of silver-foiled butter for the toast, if that was him, seeing her like that, or if it was her, part of her training or her personality. He’d taken the advice; he hadn’t Googled “coronary-artery disease.”

He looked at the boxes. He picked up the biggest one. Rosuvastatin Teva Pharma. It sounded like a star or a planet. Forty milligrams. The maximum dose, the cardiologist had said. That fact had impressed him.

—We need to get the cholesterol right down to where it should be.

—O.K.

May cause dizziness, a label on the box said. He picked up one of the other boxes. The same thing—May cause dizziness. If affected, do not drive or operate machinery. Did that include his laptop? Or the printer. He’d joke about that, too, when he was telling his wife. I fell off the laptop—within seconds of taking the things.

There was a leaflet—another leaflet; death by fuckin’ leaflet—inside the box. He unfolded it. It looked a bit like the instructions that came with a washing machine or a blender: Read all of this leaflet carefully before you start taking this medicine because it contains important information for you. He’d never read a leaflet in his life. He thought that was literally true.

—Decide on a time of day, the cardiologist had told him. Morning, evening—whatever suits.

He didn’t want to become the man who forgot his pills, or the man who remembered his fuckin’ pills. He could hear his father. Where are my pills, where did I leave my pills? The refrain that had made the grandkids—his kids—laugh whenever they heard it. They still said it, ten years after his father’s funeral, when they were looking for the salt on the table or a missing sock under a bed—when they were home.

He had no grandkids to entertain with his pills. He’d take them—the pills—in the morning, with the porridge. He’d told the cardiologist that he ate porridge every morning. Oh, that’s great, that’s helpful. Three tablets—he’d call them tablets; it was better, more adult, than pills. Where are my tablets, where did I leave my tablets? One of each, once a day. Two statins, one aspirin. It wasn’t complicated. He’d manage. He’d opened the two other boxes. One of the pill cards had the days of the week on serrated squares—Mon., Tue., Wed. Did that mean he’d have to wait till Monday before he started? If he started now, he’d be taking his Monday pill—his Monday tablet—on a Wednesday. He was fuckin’ wild. He stood and got himself a glass of water. He had a look out the kitchen window while he was at it. The branches on the tree next door were waving; they were bending. He could hear a siren, off somewhere. He could hear wires whistling—he thought he could.

—Where are my pills?

His mother came running. Running in her slippers, in from the kitchen.

—Where are your pills?

—That’s what I’m bloody asking. Where are they?

She was afraid her husband would fall dead if they didn’t find the pills. He’d nearly died; she’d witnessed what could happen. He’d had a heart attack, and a triple bypass. He was sitting opposite her at the kitchen table, then his face was in his soup and she could see the sweat running off the top of his head. Like a tap, it was. Like a waterfall. She’d phoned him—her son—and told him about the ambulance arriving, the men with the stretcher coming into the house. He’d gone over and driven her to Beaumont—the hospital. He’d looked at her face, the side of her face—the fear, the tension. She didn’t look like his mother.

—What was the soup? he’d asked her.

—Cream of vegetable, she’d said.

And she’d smiled.

—Terrible waste.

Finding the pills, knowing exactly where they were—that was the important thing. She’d spent years looking for his pills, keeping his father alive. Until the grandkids started to make a joke of it, and the fuckin’ old tyrant decided to join in.

But he’d seen it before it became part of the fun of every Sunday afternoon. He’d seen his mother’s face and his father’s, her terror and his glee, before the kids turned it into a weekly bit of fun.

—Where are my pills?

He wouldn’t have pills; they’d be tablets. He’d know exactly where they were. He wouldn’t become his father.

He put them on top of the fridge. He typed a note into his phone: tablets = fridge.

He sat on the bed. He could see the trees on the street, and the leaves falling, the chestnut leaves—huge brown hands—dropping, floating, caught by the wind and rolling uphill. If he lifted himself slightly, he’d see the wheelies tucked under the hedge. A guy on a bike went past. His hood was fat, full of the hurricane. That was all the drama—the guy on the bike.

It was half past two. He’d listened to the lunchtime news. The west of the country was being chewed by the weather; there were power cuts, roads made impassable, tin roofs pulled off farm sheds. Outside—here, in Dublin—it was a windy day. That was all. He’d been sitting on the bed, waiting. He wanted to see a car in the air, a hundred-year-old oak toppling; he wanted to witness something—anything.

And he didn’t.

The leaves were the story. The fact that nothing was happening. The leaves going the wrong way, and the woman with the Teddy bear. They were his stories.

He lay back on the bed. He turned, into whiteness and nothing—no thoughts or things. He slept.

He woke with an ache in his right arm; the ache—the pain—had woken him. Was that a sign? Was it pain in the right or the left arm that was a prelude to a heart attack? Or was that the shoulder? He didn’t know; he wouldn’t look it up. His arm was numb—just numb, the way he’d been lying on it. His wife had told him he slept with his arms folded, as if he’d been sitting in a chair and had fallen off it, straight onto the bed. He hadn’t believed her.

—Not every night, he’d protested.

—Yes—every night.

—How do you know?

—I see you.

—You’re awake?

—Sometimes.

—Why?

—Jesus, there’s a question.

She was there now. She was sitting where he’d been sitting before he fell asleep. He felt her weight on the mattress first, and saw her back. She was looking out the window. It was dark.

—Anything happening out there?

—Not really, she said. Ex-hurricanes aren’t what they used to be.

—Like everything else.

He’d have to tell her. He had the widow’s block, and she was going to be the widow.

—You made it home before the curfew, he said.

—Just about, she said.

He hadn’t moved. He didn’t want to sit up. He liked looking at her, from where he was, where she was. He’d always liked looking at her.

—Have we food? she asked.

—Loads.

—Grand.

—I put candles all around the house. Just in case.

—We can pretend it’s a spa.

She hadn’t moved. She hadn’t turned to look at him. He leaned out a bit—the numbness in his arm had gone—and put his hand on her back. He felt her move, and her hand touched his, just brushed across it.

—Get up, she said. And we’ll watch the news. All the action is over in the west. In Galway and Kerry and the other lovely places.

—The wild Atlantic way.

—There you go.

He sat up now.

—I saw a thing, he said.

He told her about the woman he’d seen, the woman with the Teddy bear.

—That’s so sad, she said.

He heard her shoes fall onto the floor, and now she was sitting beside him.

He’d tell her in a minute. He’d tell her about his tablets and his heart.

—I miss the kids, he said.

He started to cry. ♦