Heaps of Trouble (13 page)

When I tried to ask the voice (before it faded away into the gloom) if it could put out the bright light and eliminate the smell, I found that I could think the words but not form them with my mouth; instead all that came out was a choking noise. Turning my face to see if that would help my speech, I felt gentle but firm hands placed on the wad of bandages around my head and that same voice said, ‘Now, just be quite still, and we will have you out of X-ray soon.'

All at once I awoke with as much shock as if I had been catapulted out of my well like the shell from a large-calibre gun and dumped on the ground in the sunlight. What's more, it seemed that the friction of this sudden discharge had scorched my body and melted the flesh on the front of my torso. And then I felt the bandages being removed gently from my eyes; my first sight was the face of a nun looking down at me.

Jesus Christ, what the hell is Sister Charlotte doing here and how did I get back to Golden Bridge School? I thought I had moved on from there? Very slowly the nun came into focus and I realised, with relief, that it wasn't Sister Charlotte after all, only somebody that looked like her.

‘Merciful God, Doctor, but I think he will be able to see again, at least from the right eye.'

‘DV, sister, DV. Now remove the bandages from the left eye.' These words came from a voice a little way off and behind her. With the bandages removed, the eye surgeon came into view. (I only remember hearing him called DV, which I later found out is the Latin abbreviation for ‘God willing'.) Leaning over my head, he peered into both eyes and, grunting with satisfaction, he complemented the nun on her good work and, without another word, left the room.

‘I'm going to leave the bandages off now, as your eyes need oxygen and, merciful God in heaven, but it's nothing short of a miracle, an absolute miracle…but I knew the holy water would work. I will be back tonight to bless them again.'

Making the sign of the cross over me, she went over to the other bed in the room, which I realised held my father. After checking the dressing on his chest, she whispered something to him, before leaving with a whoosh of her long black dress. I was in a small room with white walls, ceiling and floor; my bed was pushed right up against the left-hand wall, leaving the door to the room directly at the end of my bed. Across to my right was a larger bed containing the father who was gazing at me and grinning, as if he was glad to see me. As soon as our eyes met he said, ‘Welcome back to the land of the living, Son. How are you feeling? You had us worried there for a bit.'

Well that was a good question, how was I feeling? I didn't know, so I started to explore the situation. I was in a cage; well not exactly in a cage, rather one had been placed over me with a single, white blanket on top, so that it was as if I was lying naked inside a small tent that was draughty and cold. From what I could see of my body through my right eye, all of my top half was covered with squares of sticky, orange gauze that had been placed over me like a patchwork quilt.

Since I couldn't see or feel my legs or feet, I couldn't check their condition. As I became more and more aware of my surroundings, I began to feel a strange sensation over the top half of me, including the top of my head, which began as a sort of low, pulsating pain that accelerated quickly, causing me to cry out. Until it finally settled down to a constant throbbing, at which point I heard the rattling of a trolley as the door opened and a nurse approached with a syringe. Thankfully, before she reached the bed I drifted into darkness, only this time I must have slept, because I never again saw my well.

The following days in hospital settled into a routine that I marked off into three sections during my waking hours – 8 a.m., noon, and 6 p.m. – since these were the times for my injections and I came to hate them more than my captivity. I woke up in the morning to a nurse turning me over on my side and jabbing me with a needle. Then spent the rest of the day, in dread, listening for the noise of the trolley marking her return for the next injection. My arse became so bruised that, in the end, the nurses had difficulty in finding an unused spot. After the stabbing, the blanket and cage would be lifted off and the sticky, gauze patches would be removed with tweezers, my skin sprayed with an ice-cold substance, and new patches applied. At eight o'clock every evening the nun reappeared and anointed my eyes with holy water.

My feet aroused the most interest, especially in the doctor and his apprentices who crowded around the end of my bed each morning during the doctor's rounds. Since I couldn't see or feel anything in that area, this didn't bother me at all. I was heavily sedated and so the significance of the situation was lost on me. As it turned out, they were worried as to whether I would ever walk again.

The doctors never seemed to do anything for themselves: once they were all jammed into the tight space around the end of my bed, a nurse would have to fight her way through the mob to lift up the sheet, which she would drape over my tent. Then the head doctor would address the multitude, explaining that before them was a young boy who was a burn victim. And, to insure that all of them grasped the situation, he would continue, ‘…and, as you can see, while having sustained third-degree burns to his upper body, his ankles and feet have sustained burns to the…'; here he always lost me, since it all sounded like Greek. Picking each of my feet up by the big toe, he'd haul them into the air, as if raising the tail of a horse to show its rear end to some prospective buyer. With that, the rest of them would push and shove each other out of the way in their eagerness to peer at the prize on display. Without so much as a ‘good morning to you', he would then drop my feet and march out of the room with the rest of them scurrying after him.

The father had also been slightly injured in what was now officially referred to as the ‘explosion', following the lead of the newspaper and TV coverage of that fateful day. I had been placed in the father's room so that he could keep an eye on my condition; likewise the mother was installed in Catherine's room, to perform a similar task, although she herself had been uninjured in the explosion. As I began to be given the details of the story, I discovered that Catherine was in a much more serious condition than I, owing to her age, but her condition was now being described as ‘stable'.

At times during the day our room was crowded with people from the Gardaí, which was carrying out a full investigation, or insurance agents and representatives from the Calor Gas company, all of whom trying to fit the pieces together to discover the cause of the explosion. When asked for my opinion, I could only choke out ‘a blinding ball of flame hit me', by way of explanation for the whole saga.

At first they tried to pin the blame for the catastrophe firmly on the shoulders of the father. At one point they (being Calor Gas) suggested that, since he had been lighting the Primus stove at the time, it was in fact this object, filled with its pint of methylated spirits, that had caused the fireball and not their Calor gas bottle, as previously suggested in the news. At which the father threw his bedpan at them. It missed and bounced off the back wall, but it was enough to send the two agents running out of the room and that was the last we saw of them. The father's reaction was based on Garda findings in the course of a thorough inspection of the scene of the explosion.

They had found a small, pinhead-sized hole in the top of the gas bottle, which apparently had been the result of corrosion. The father had only replaced the gas bottle a few days before, and it had been leaking slowly over the couple of days leading up to the ‘big bang'. With the weather being so nice, and especially with there not being a breath of wind, the gas had settled on the ground, spreading silently as the bottle discharged its deadly substance. The gas companies only gave their product an odour after our accident, and so our bottle continued to leak undetected.

Catherine, who had been lying on a foam mattress a few inches off the ground, was, in effect, lying in the gas layer. As soon as the father struck the match, she was engulfed in a sea of flames that had consumed the mattress in seconds, nearly incinerating her, and resulting in burns to over 70 per cent of her body. The father, who had been stooping over the cylinder while attempting to light the small stove, had received burns to his chest and right arm as a result of the initial ignition of gas that was still escaping from the hole in the top of the bottle. Once ignited, it had flared back in its attempt to suck oxygen from its immediate surroundings and had burnt him, before exploding out in a fireball across the clearing towards me.

If I had been sitting a few feet to either side, the jet of burning gas would have missed me completely and exhausted itself against the far ditch. This was corroborated by the position of the burns to my body, since they showed the fireball had hit me full in the chest, face and head, leaving my left arm unscathed, while badly burning my right. The damage to my feet and ankles resulted from standing in the layer of burning gas near the ground.

The mother, who had been sitting on a deck-chair at the side of the caravan with her feet elevated, had received no injury. But to a certain extent she had suffered the greatest shock, as she had heard the loud bang and been temporarily blinded by the ball of yellow flame that shot across her vision, obscuring the clearing. Regaining her senses quickly, with all of the bushes surrounding the clearing on fire, the mother had rushed into the smoke and spotted Catherine lying on the smouldering remains of the mattress, with her dress completely burned from her body.

When she searched and could not find me, she assumed that I had disobeyed her instructions and gone off playing, escaping the whole event. Realising immediately that Catherine was seriously injured, her nursing training kicked in: she knew that she would have to stabilise Catherine's condition before she could attempt to move her, as she had gone into shock. Thus there was a time lag, while I galloped off down to the stream to quench myself and then returned, otherwise, unknowingly, they might have driven away without me.

When the father spotted me returning, he assumed that I had been playing, as I was black from head to toe. His invitation to get into the car had been snapped at me for that reason. It was only when I had walked myself into the casualty department that any of them realised that I, too, had been involved. A kind of a comedy of errors.

Ten days after we had been installed in Ardkeen Hospital, it was announced that both my sister and I were stable enough to be transferred to hospitals in Dublin. Somehow or other I got hold of a comic; I had been warned repeatedly not to hold one, because if the ink got on my hands they might become infected. I remember one of the ambulance drivers gave it to me after they loaded me into the back on a stretcher and, securing me on the left-hand side, they went off to fetch Catherine. It was a magnificent day and the sun was shining outside the double doors of the ambulance, which had been left open. We were backed up right in front of the hospital's main entrance and, peering out, I felt that it was too nice a day to be taking a trip to Dublin, especially as we didn't know which hospital we were being taken to. Finally they wheeled Catherine out and placed her on the opposite bunk, strapped her in and closed the doors, and I felt the van shake as they climbed into the front and away we went, with sirens howling.

Looking across at her, I thought they had brought the wrong person, as the girl I was looking at seemed to have grown; this wasn't my sister at all. With panic setting in, I was just about to start shouting at them through the partition to stop, when she turned her head towards me and said, ‘Nn, Nn', and, ever so slowly, I realised that this person on the other bed really was her. She appeared to have changed much in those past ten or twelve days. I had no idea how long we had been in the hospital; if a stranger had asked me I would have guessed at least a few months. But looking closely at her through my left eye (which still was not working too well), I saw that her face had become thinner and she looked much older, as if during the stay in hospital, she had matured from a child into a young girl. There wasn't a mark on her face and her hair also seemed longer. I felt comfortable about her condition, because, from what I could see, there didn't appear to be a lot wrong with her.

I wondered where the parents had got to and why nobody was travelling in the ambulance with us? There was a space of about two feet between Catherine and I, and every time I looked in her direction she choked out words in a strange voice that definitely didn't sound like her at all. She wanted me to hand her over the comic to look at it. Playing the role of big brother, I told her ‘no' repeatedly, explaining that the ink would get on her hands and we would both get into trouble – I wasn't even supposed to have it in the first place. Then, once more engrossed in the antics of ‘Desperate Dan', I didn't notice Catherine's hand slide out from under her blanket and reach across the gap that separated us.

It was a claw that grabbed the top of the comic: her right hand was hooked in a fixed, rigid position and none of her fingers were working. The skin on her hand and (as far as I could tell) her arm was a pinkish colour, as if it was regrowing. Staring at the disfigurement, I recoiled from her in case the skin touched me. The hand was pulled back and I jammed the comic down between my bunk and the wall, as if placing it out of sight would make her forget it. Lying there staring across at her, I experienced an overwhelming feeling of shame, for I had drawn back in horror from my own sister. I wondered if I should bring the comic back out and hand it over to her. But I realised that she would probably not be able to hold it.

I began to cry. I had no idea why I should be so upset, as all I really wanted to do was reach across and hold her but, as soon as I felt that urge, I remembered the claw-like hand and knew that I would recoil from it again. So I cried for her, I cried for her not having a brother to be there for her when she most needed it, I cried because I was ashamed of myself. I cried because I was nothing but a small, selfish boy who was only concerned about his own injuries. I cried because I didn't know where my parents were and why they weren't in the ambulance with us. I cried because Catherine was smiling across at me and there was I acting like a big baby – and when that thought hit me, I was finally able to stop crying.