Ahoy for Joy (12 page)

At last Bernie noticed the staring of his wide eyes and came over, “how are we this morning?” she asked smiling sympathetically. Michael didn't answer.

She checked a few of the whirring machines behind him which emitted sporadic pips and toots while their little green monitors flickered digits or messages and graphs with fuzzy lines on their screens. Once more, she sat on the bed beside him.

“Look, there's someone you need to talk to.”

Michael didn't react.

“You don't have to if you don't feel up to it. It can wait. You are my number one priority. It's you we are concerned about. Getting you better.” She smiled. Her smile was kind and reassuring, but not broad enough to show a tooth. Her disposition immediately engendered a sense of trust in Michael and he felt every inclination to take whatever direction she proposed.

“Who?” He asked at last.

“He's a man from the Northern Ireland office. He needs to talk to you about your parents.” She paused briefly, her dark eyes gazing at him intently as she tried to measure his level of understanding. “Ok?”

“OK,” replied Michael. The tears built in his eyes. He was seventeen years old and almost a man, but yet still a child. Emotionally at that moment, he was as a tiny toddler who yearned more than anything for the warmth of his mother's embrace. He looked around, noting her absence.

“I'll be here too. All the time.” She squeezed his hand once more, taking care to avoid snagging the catheter. “OK?” she asked once more.

“OK,” replied Michael.

Bernie upped herself from her perch and walked swiftly off towards the door. She returned a few moments later with two men. One was the doctor, he remembered from the previous day. The other was a man in his fifties who wore a grey suit with neatly trimmed brown hair and a moustache shaved rather too far above his lip. His mannerisms were courteous and pleasant but could not disguise the cold air of the establishment that he represented. It was the doctor who spoke first.

“You've been badly injured, Michael. Do you remember what happened?”

He didn't wait for a reply and Michael offered none.

“You were shot in the neck. You've been out for a while. You woke up yesterday and we did some checks. Then we sedated you overnight. We operated twice. It was a nasty wound. A lot of blood was lost, but we've stabilised you and it looks like you should be OK. The next day or two matter, but we do have some bad news. “Can you remember anything?” he asked once again hoping Michael would help him out by delivering at least some of the news himself.

Besides the dreams, Michael did have a hazy recollection of the confrontation, but he had no idea of the outcome. He didn't remember the gunshots or the tragic events that followed.

The man in the grey suit leaned forward. “Michael, I am from the Northern Ireland office. Do you know what that is?”

He nodded.

“Look, there was a shooting. You were shot, as you know.” He paused a little, thinking. “The wound in your neck is a gunshot wound.” Michael lifted his hand and touched the bandage on his neck with the back of his knuckles. “The thing is,” the man went on, “both your mother and father were shot in the same incident.”

The news seemed to take Michael by surprise. Suddenly it became clear to him. When he woke, there was no Mum, no Dad, no hugs and kisses from a loving family, just some nurse. He looked bitterly at Bernie, her sympathetic face suddenly offensive to him for the surrogate role he now saw she sought to play.

“Well are they all right?” he demanded, the force of his voice straining at the still fragile wound that had grazed his oesophagus, causing him to cough uncomfortably. Bernie lurched quickly forward, steadying him on the bed, holding him firmly on the shoulder and connecting his eyes with her own penetrating gaze. Michael pushed her away roughly.

“Michael, I'm sorry, really I am. I'm sorry but they're both dead.”

Michael hadn't been expecting that. He had known things went wrong, violently wrong. Reasoning with himself, he presumed they had got to his father.
Maybe he could remember the shots
. He thought he could remember his scream, but his mother too. How could that be? That was implausible. He had been protecting her. He strained in the bed.

“Take it easy,” said the doctor, but the boy struggled once more. Then he felt a sharp flick of pain in his arm.

When he awoke, he was alone. Two nurses were sitting at a small table at the far end of the room, writing, like they were completing forms or some other bureaucratic activity. They were in the midst of a hushed conversation. Michael set about listening.

“Poor mite,” said the first nurse, “some bloke in a suit had to break the news to him. Sad when there is no-one. No-one close to break the roughest news, only some faceless bureaucrat. I'm sure he's glad to be back at home, his day's work done. Not much of a job.”

“Well, it's worse for us,” said the second nurse, hushing her tones. “We have to live with this all the time. He gets to just pop in, deliver the news and hop out again, back to his pen pushing or whatever it is he does.”

*

Michael nodded off again. It was the next morning when he awoke and the sunlight once again flickered through the edge of the blind. Bernie was sitting on a chair beside the bed. The images, the hallucinations, the noises and dins subsided. Sleep was terrifying. Waking horrific. There was no peace. The facts hit him once again. His parents were dead.

Bernie smiled quickly at him when she saw his eyes were open, then checked her upside down watch and scribbled something on the blue clipboard sitting on her lap. She looked back and forth at the electronic equipment mounted mostly behind him and entered some more information in the notes. A light flashed in his eyes once more. She smiled. “That's fine,” she said reassuringly.

She got up and placed the clipboard quietly in the holder at the end of the bed.

“Mum and Dad are both dead,” said Michael at last.

Bernie nodded, pulling the seat once more close to the bed and taking his hand in hers. Her grip was firm, warm and soft. It was motherly and he found comfort in her touch, but the tears still welled in his eyes. She held on, making no sound. Michael wanted to hug her, but couldn't easily move. She leant forward and pushed his hair away from his face. Then she kissed him softly on the forehead as a mother would a small child.

Close to him now, Michael could smell her scent. It was clean and clinical, but there was also a mild perfume, a feminine smell perhaps from a soap or shampoo. It reminded him of his mother.

The body in a wretched state provokes a mental development in the mind, one of expediency, immediacy and pragmatism. In the previous few days, Michael Coglan had had everything he had in the world taken from him. Following such a shock, a mental dilapidation towards oblivion is not uncommon. For many the sheer trauma is sufficient to imbalance the thought processes into a semi-permanent state of denial that can last months or even years causing dysfunctional and unpredictable reactions. But these are only some of the cases. For Michael, who had lived such a melancholy existence for so long, living in a world where tragedy looked always to be etched on his face, in reality he had grieved for years for loved ones not yet lost. He had been conscious of the dangers of his father's job. Mentally, he had not only prepared for such an event but to some degree already existed as if it had happened.

It was the loss of his mother that left him so terribly alone. She represented everything good in the world, his only real stability in the haunted life he lived. Over the days that followed and as his memory of the events pieced together, he punished himself for her loss.
Why did he return home? Why did he confront the assassins? What came over him? Why hadn't the quivering wreck, fearful of his own shadow that had always left him shaking in the corner, deserted him?
Instead, he sought to save and protect. He had confronted his most fearful demons, but to what end? To death, to loss and to misery.

The anger grew in his mind, perpetuated by his own self chastisement as logic gave way to emotion. He could feel a violent rage building in his mind and did nothing to resist it. Roughly, he pulled the catheter from his hand, ripping open the vein into which it fed its nonsense and hurled the stand across the room sending the tubes and wires trailing across the floor, oozing cloudy liquid in their wake. It slammed into the unoccupied bed opposite with a loud crash that echoed in the silence of the night. Tears streamed once more down his cheeks and his hand oozed blood onto the sheets beside him.

He had half expected a major incident to be reported, but a nurse he hadn't seen before turned up not quite immediately and looked him over only briefly before taking care of the mess on the floor. She quietly removed the stand and its contents from the room altogether, before returning to inspect his cut hand. She pulled over one of the little tables on wheels that they rolled about everywhere, with sterile packs of needles and syringes and bandages and the like and set herself down beside him on the bed.

“Do you want me to attend to that?” she asked at last, beckoning towards his bloody hand.

Michael felt indisposed to answer, but he held his arm out all the same, guilty at the mess the blood was making to the sheets and the pyjamas they had given him to wear. She turned and sat with her back to him shielding his view with her body. She wore no bonnet and he found himself watching her narrow neck and the back of her head as she worked. Her fair hair parted sharply on top and he could see the white skin of her scalp between the taut follicles gripped firmly in place by the hair grip on her crown. His hand hurt and he wondered if she was awkwardly having to remove a broken needle or valve from his flesh, but he made no sound. Instead he just watched her work, feeling comfort in her closeness to him, the sharp iodine vapour mingling with the tears that still streamed down his face.

She was young and he wondered if she had parents, or a family or a boyfriend or someone.
Anyone who loved her
. He had expected she would scold him or at least scowl or even worse, try to comfort him, but she didn't. She worked at his little wound, mopping the broken flesh and then finally placed a foam pad over the cut which she asked him to hold while she taped it in position.

When she was done, she turned and looked up at him. He looked at his hand once more. It was clean. The blood was mopped and the stains on the sheets had mostly dried.

“Do you want me to put another one in? I can do it in your other hand.”

Michael didn't answer. She got up and looked at the clipboard at the bottom of the bed. Michael had already learned that these sheets on which they scribbled notes and referred to often was now the bible of his life, or at least the case notes that provided continuity throughout his twenty-four hour care. Nothing happened without the clipboard. He watched her diligently as she read.

“There's some pretty important stuff they've been giving you. Really, you should have it. I can put another one in.” She looked at him expectantly. “It's no bother. It'll only take a tick.”

Michael nodded. She rolled her little table to the other side of the bed and opened another sterile pack. It contained a tiny ‘T' shaped tube with a little tap on it. Then she opened another with a needle. This time she faced him and he could see what she was doing. She held his hand firmly, then scrubbed the back with alcohol, before saying; “little prick” at exactly the same time as she slid the needle expertly into the vein on his right hand. It swelled and turned a little purple, then she connected the tap to the body on the end of the needle. Michael watched her work as before, again focusing on her white scalp, but this time he could also see her eyelashes blinking periodically as she worked and her delicate fingernails void of paint or varnish. Within minutes, she was done. “Hold on a minute,” she said at last and left the room.

She arrived back a few moments later with a new stand with tubes and poly bags of fluids, just as before and before long had his intravenous drip reconnected. When she was done, she sat briefly on the bed. “They'll change those for you in the morning,” she said looking at the blood stains on the sheets. “You gonna be alright?”

Michael nodded and she got up to go. Just as she was collecting the wrappers and swabs together, Michael's eye caught her gaze “What's your name?” he asked.

She smiled, for the first time. “My name is Anna.”

Whatever nurse Anna had put in the drip had a rapid effect, or perhaps his body was just exhausted from the anger that had dominated his mind over the previous few days, but he slept well for the rest of the night. When he awoke in the morning, he felt a tiny flicker of peace in his mind, the first since his admission to hospital. He knew he had to come to terms once more with the loss of his parents, the way he had done every morning, but the mention of the name ‘Anna' had jolted his thoughts into a less weary consciousness. The Dutch girl had hardy left his mind since they first met a year and a half ago and almost everything he had thought or done since then, was in her name. However, in the last week, the joint urgencies of injury and grief had dominated his thought processes and the reality of the life he was leading had come to the fore. There had been little room for fantasies of love.

Now she was back in his mind and the thought of her warmed his soul.
She
wasn't dead! She was surely very much alive! His relationship with her was not of the unconditional nature a child enjoys with their parents and he still feared her feelings for him may not be of the same nature or intensity as his for her. However, she was at least a living soul with whom he had some connection. He allowed his mind to drift towards her, visualising her in his mind and enjoying little sparkles of positive energy that began to flicker inside him. At first he felt guilt, like he was smiling at a wake. He felt a painful conflict between the two apparent opposites of grief and love but the short periods when he immersed his mind in thoughts of Anna, lifted his heart and gave him the will to live. Of course, he was no stranger to mental conflict and used to living with such unease. In any case, deep down, he knew his parents would will him well. He knew they would wish love for him and want him to carry on. He comforted himself and thought of his parents, seeing them in his mind's eye, now looking at him as he remembered them. Rightly, he concluded there was no rational conflict between his love for Anna and that of his lost parents.

As the days ticked by, Michael felt his strength recover, and he and Bernie drew closer. She had tended to his every need with a saintly dedication since his arrival at hospital. She worked in the day, and he would watch her go about her business, checking on this and that, but she would also sit with him in the evenings. They would talk a little, with Bernie recounting little tales of hospital life with a rather amusing irreverence Michael rather liked, or relating the occasional more upbeat pieces of news from the world around them. Life went on, even while the ill were ill and the dead lay in their graves. But Michael didn't engage much. This was in no sense off-putting to Bernie who was happy to sit in silence, just being with him, sometimes for long periods after her shift was over.

During these times, she was not primarily a nurse, but rather a friend. At first, Michael had resented the role she played, but she was determined to play it and he had few other visitors. The man from the Northern Ireland office turned up now and again, but usually he had nothing to say. It turned out that as Michael was still under eighteen, the state had appointed him as his temporary guardian. Michael couldn't remember his name. One or two people from church came, but Michael hadn't been in years and he hardly knew them. The visit was awkward. Some boys and one of the officers from the BB arrived one night, but Michael had been asleep and they were turned away. They never returned.

So Bernie became Michael's friend and confidante as he recovered in hospital in Belfast and the mention of the name ‘Anna' put an end to the anger in his grief. As the lonely days ticked by, Michael began more and more to contemplate his future and his thoughts increasingly turned to the Dutch girl. He thought to write to her and set about concocting a poem that might convey his thoughts without causing alarm. It was not an easy task and eventually he set the idea to one side. Then he thought to simply write a letter, chronicling the events of the last two weeks, just to keep her informed. It had been tragic. He'd lost his parents. He was injured, but he was recovering and would be OK. However, he had never been comfortable with the coldness of conventional text and the subject matter was more difficult than he could contemplate. The thought simply depressed him and he allowed his mind to wander to more positive emotions.

Instead, he imagined himself going to Holland. He imagined them meeting again. The cautious pride of new encounter long since gone and now the open smiles of friends who had built a relationship over the months, now reunited once more in physical proximity. That, at least was surely guaranteed, but he knew, as he had always known that his feelings for her were far beyond friendship. He knew this was love. If ever love existed, his love for her was love at its most perfect and he would speak of it. As soon as they were alone, he would tell her immediately. There was no more time for nervous caution, nor the steady pace of engaging minds.

Over the following days, Michael experienced other changes too. Firstly, he felt himself grow stronger. Sleep, dreams and reality fused together less readily than they had done before and facts became much clearer. Little by little he pieced together the events of that fateful night and he began increasingly to come to terms with his loss. But the trauma had other effects too, for his early memory slowly started to return. His dreams had been the first to spark his consciousness, but he could now remember the big house in the suburbs with its wide drive and large, well decorated rooms. In his mind's eye, he could see the conservatory at the back with the peeling white paint and the wind chime with its eccentric tones. He remembered the ivy that grew enthusiastically on the walls, the apple trees laden with fruit and the rose bushes his mother tended so diligently. This had been his dream, but he came to understand that it was not a dream, but a memory, a part of his life that had lain hidden in his sub-conscious for years. A part of his life, now released like a whole new story being narrated in his mind.

He could also remember his old school, set into the hill with its walled grounds and blackened steel gate that led through to the wood behind and the adventures it held. Faces gradually emerged, school friends, neighbours and relatives. There was of course his granny, but there had also been a period when the Coglan household was awash with visitors and Michael could now see their faces. Names were more difficult, but there were faces he remembered.

Then there was Paul. He remembered the little curly haired boy. He remembered them playing football together and climbing in the trees. He remembered Paul's house with its swings and seesaw in the garden. Even Paul's Mum and Dad, he could now see in his mind's eye. His mind flitted back and forward from the beating at the playground that Paul had borne and he felt once more the fear and anguish he had felt then. At first he resisted visiting that particular memory, but after a while he made up his mind that he would have to go there and re-live the experience. And he did. And he sought to reprimand himself no more. He forgave himself and his betrayal in the way his friend must surely have done many years before. Somehow he knew it was necessary if he was to recover his mind and move on with his life.

And move on was something he wanted to do. The grief at his parents' loss was still an open wound, but it was a real wound with pain and suffering and loss and anguish, it was not the false emptiness of the blank mind he had lived with for so long. Now he could see how mentally lost he had been. Now he could see why his mother had fretted so much. Now, he was confronting his demons one by one. From somewhere an inner strength was building in him. He started methodically to separate fear from pain and the past from the present.

And then once more there was Anna. His thoughts began with her and ended with her. At once he realised it was she who was keeping him going through this struggle. She still knew nothing of these recent events and in the end he decided he would keep it like that for now, but his plans were increasingly set. He would go to Holland. He
would
see her again.

However, on that particular day, there was just one small problem that had been lingering in his mind which despite his optimism had forced itself forward and was now gaining his attention.
He really was no longer feeling that well.

He was still lying in bed, trying to rationally evaluate how he felt, when Bernie came by, as she often did, checking blood pressure, pupil dilation and re-dressing the wound in his neck. She was going about her business, methodically as ever, when Michael suddenly grabbed her by the wrist. “Bernie,” he said slowly. “I'm really not feeling that well.”

Bernie smiled, that reassuring smile she always offered. “I'll get the doctor,” she said and swiftly left the ward.

The doctor checked his chest, listening to his lung function, looked in his ears, closely at his face and his eyes, punctuating his thought process with intermittent ‘hmmms.'

“And you say you have been feeling unwell, since when?”

Bernie set about strapping his arm into the familiar sleeve to measure his blood pressure and pumped up the pressure with the rubber ball.

“Well, I can feel myself getting better, but worse at the same time,” replied Michael, but his speech was now starting to slur. “It's like I'm getting weaker, not stronger. Breathing is a bit difficult.”

“Blood pressure's very low,” said Bernie.

The doctor looked alarmed. Bernie unpacked more of the little sterile packages and inserted once more a needle into his arm. Quickly, three phials of Michael's blood had been filled and she walked swiftly from the ward. It was only minutes before a crew descended and he was wheeled once more to the intensive care unit.

Michael knew little of what happened in the following few days for a battle between the medical scientists of the day was wielded with extreme valour against a force that seemed determined that Michael's time on earth was spent. He had contracted septicaemia and his blood swam with bacteria that set about poisoning his body from within causing a severe and destructive reaction from his immune system.

He underwent a series of blood transfusions as well as two further emergency operations. Eventually, his body responded to the antibiotics and they managed to stabilize his situation, but the blood poisoning had already inflicted a heavy toll and several of his key organs had been damaged. The doctors and surgeons who had worked so hard to save his young life became finally resigned to the overwhelming evidence from their tests. Michael would not survive.

When they had done all they could, they brought him round once more. Michael opened his eyes and saw the doctors, surgeons, anaesthetists and nurses gathered around the bed in the same way he had done when he awoke from his initial injury. Although dazed and weak, his body worn out from the war that had waged within him, he was remarkably lucid. He knew immediately all was not well. There was no
welcome back to the land of the living
or the reassuring chuckle of a surgeon pleased with his handiwork. Quickly, he sought out Bernie's dark eyes which now seemed black, all around, like she hadn't slept. She smiled, but it was a despondent smile and when he saw her, he knew for sure he would be joining his Mum and Dad before long.

Gradually the assembled group filtered quietly off. Barely a word was spoken. Once again, he was left with Bernie who by then had taken up her usual position alongside on his left, but the doctor remained with her. He watched momentarily as she and the doctor whispered to each other and caught her discomfited gaze as her eyes fell on him again. “We need to talk to you Michael,” she said.

The doctor was still standing and he took up a position behind Bernie, his tall stature stooped over her. He wore the same clinician's coat they all wore and Michael stared at the white image before him, a little slouched, his head bowed. His eyes were sad and empty. When Michael blinked, the white image took a black tone like the negative of a photograph and flashed dark like the cloaked messenger of the grim reaper posing before him. At last he spoke.

“You had septicaemia Michael. We've treated you as best we can and we seem finally to have managed the infection, but it took a while.” He paused so long that Bernie turned her head right around to prompt him. “It took
too
long, Michael. Do you understand me?” Michael's eyes widened. If he had had any hope, he could now tell by the tone of the doctor's voice, the direction the message would now take.

“You went into septic shock. The shock has damaged your organs.”

Again he paused as if willing someone to help him out.

“Your kidneys are damaged, maybe your heart too. We're not sure, but it is your liver that is the real problem. We've been running tests. There is hardly any liver function. The doctor was hoping Michael's layman's medical knowledge might have been better and he would have known the only outcome of a failed liver, but he just looked imploringly at the doctor, then at Bernie and back to the doctor again his eyes begging for a different message.

“Michael, you can't survive without a liver. There is nothing more we can do. I'm so sorry”

Michael felt Bernie squeeze his hand and he turned towards her, his haunting expression, focusing directly on her, once more begging for a reprieve, begging for hope. Some suggestion of what they would now do, what chance he had, but there was none. A lesser person might have looked away, even briefly, but Bernie held the young man's eyes in hers steadfastly. His haunting expression would be with her forever.

The doctor broke the silence. “Do you want to see a priest?”

“He's not Catholic,” interrupted Bernie. Then she went on, taking over the conversation, “someone from church perhaps?

Michael shook his head. “Michael is there anyone you want to see? “Do you want to see Anna?”