The Year I Met You (6 page)

I feel dread but I fix my face into what I hope is the perfect look of interest.

‘Would you be his godmother?’

Ta-da. Third one in two months, it has to be a world record. ‘Oh, Bianca. I’d love to,’ I smile. ‘Thank you, that’s such an honour …’

She smiles back at me, delighted by her request, one of the most special moments in her life, while inside I feel like a charity case. It’s as if they’ve all made a pact to ask me to be godmother in order to give me something to do. And what will I do? Go to the church and stand by their side while they hold the baby, while the priest pours water, while everybody does something and I stand idly by.

‘Did you hear about your friend’s son?’

‘What friend?’

‘Matt Marshall,’ Bianca says.

‘He is
not
my friend,’ I say, annoyed. Then, deciding it’s best not to argue with a woman who has just given birth, I ask, ‘What did his son do?’

‘He put a video up on YouTube telling the world how much he hates his dad. Mortifying, isn’t it? Imagine talking about a family member like that.’

The baby in Bianca’s arms lets out a scream.

‘This little fucker keeps biting my nipple,’ she hisses, and I’m immediately silenced as her mood swings again and darkness descends in the hospital room.

She moves her three-day-old son into a different position, holding him like a rugby ball, her enormous breast bigger than his head and looking like it’s smothering him. The baby sucks and is silenced again.

It is almost a beautiful moment, apart from the fact that when I look at her she has tears streaming down her face.

The door opens and her pale husband Tristan ducks his head in. He sees his firstborn and his face softens, then he looks up and sees his wife and his face tightens. He swallows.

‘Hi, Jasmine,’ he steps inside and greets me.

‘Congratulations, Daddy,’ I say gently. ‘He’s beautiful.’

‘He’s got a mouthful of fangs, is what he has,’ Bianca says, wincing again.

The baby screams as he’s pulled away from her chapped red raw nipple.

‘Seriously, Tristan, this is … I can’t …’ Her face crumples.

I leave them to it.

I tell myself while driving that I am not interested in watching your son on YouTube. I tell myself I won’t stoop to your level, that I have far more important things to do than think about you and absorb myself in your world, but all I actually have to do that day is shop for dinner. Shopping for one person doesn’t depress me as it does some of my other single friends; I am happy to be alone and everybody needs to eat, but it has come to this. Eating. Eating was something I had to squeeze into my busy day because I had to, to stay alive. Now it is something to string out, make an afternoon of. The last few days I have made elaborate meals for myself. Yesterday I spent fifty-five minutes in Eason’s browsing the shelves for recipe books, spent sixty minutes buying the ingredients, which took me two and a half hours to prepare and cook, and then I ate it in twenty minutes. That was my entire day yesterday. It was enjoyable but the novelty has worn off many of the things I was looking forward to doing in my ‘time off’.

When I pull into the supermarket car park, the day surprisingly bright and sunny for the first time in weeks though it is still cold, I take my phone out of my bag and go straight to YouTube. I type in Matt Marshall and immediately ‘Matt Marshall’s son’ pops up as an option. I select it. Posted late last night, it already has thirty thousand views – which is impressive.

Though I have never seen your son close up, the image of him is immediately familiar to me. It is what I see most days as he leaves for school, head hidden under a hood, his face downward, earphones on his head, red hair peeking out from under his hood as he walks from the house to the bus stop. I have been his neighbour for four years and it occurs to me I don’t even know his name, but the comments beneath the video tell me that it is Fionn.

Way to go, Fionn!

My dad is a loser 2, know how u feel!

Your dad shud be locked up 4 da shit dat he says.

I am a registered psychologist and I am concerned by your outburst, please contact me, I can help.

I’m a big fan of your dad, he helped my son when he was being bullied in school, he helped shed light on bullying laws in Ireland.

May the angels heal your inner anger.

Your dad’s a loser and you’re a fag.

A small slice of the supportive comments the viewing public have made.

Fionn is fifteen years old and from his uniform each morning I can tell he attends Belvedere, a costly private school in Dublin. Though I haven’t watched it yet, I already know that they will not like this. Here on the screen I can see he has brown eyes, his cheeks and nose are lightly freckled. He is looking down at the webcam, his laptop at an angle to take him all in so that the lights on the ceiling are blaring in the camera. His nostrils are wide and flaring with anger. There is music in the background, I guess he is at a party, I’m guessing he is drunk. His pupils are dilated, though perhaps the anger is causing that. What ensues is a four-minute rant about how he would officially like to separate himself from his loser dad, you, who he believes is not a real dad. He says that you are an embarrassment, a waster, his mum is the only person who keeps things going, you have no talent. And on it goes, a well-spoken boy, attempting to be harder than he is in a badly constructed attack on you, outlining why he believes you should be fired and never rehired. It is a rather embarrassing rant that makes me cringe and watch from behind my hands. The music in the background gets louder, as do male voices. He takes a quick look behind him and then the video is over.

Despite the way I feel about you, this does not fill me with any kind of happiness or entertainment. I feel bad for watching it, I feel bad for you, for all of you.

I do a quick shop, feeling glum as I hurry down the aisles. Sometimes I forget why I feel that way, I just have this feeling that something bad has happened to me and affected my life. Then I remember why I feel down and I try to shake it off, because it has nothing to do with me. Trouble is, even though I know it’s silly of me, I can’t help feeling connected to what happened.

I keep the dinner simple – aubergine parmigiana – and I finish the last glass of the bottle of red wine from the night before. I settle down to ponder your problem as if it is mine. What should we do about Fionn, Matt? There is no action in your house. Your wife’s car is gone, and you are all out. Nothing.

Dr Jameson’s bedroom light goes out. I have no solutions, Matt.

I have fallen asleep on the couch for the first time in my life and at some hour I wake up, very confused as to where I am; the only light in the room is the flickering, muted TV. I jump up and kick my plate and cutlery to the floor, smashing my wine glass. I’m fully alert now, heart pounding, and I realise what has woken me. It is the familiar sound of your jeep speeding down the street. Avoiding the broken glass at my feet, I go to the window to see you driving erratically, swerving into your driveway coming dangerously close to your garage door as usual. However this time you don’t brake and you crash directly into the white door. The garage door shudders and vibrates, the noise echoing loudly off the sleeping houses. I can picture Dr Jameson waking with a start, fumbling to remove his eye mask. On cue, Dr Jameson’s bedroom light goes on.

The garage door stays standing, the house doesn’t topple on to your car. Unfortunate really. Nothing happens for a while. ‘Paradise City’ is still playing, blaring. I can see you, unmoving in the driver’s seat. I wonder if you’re okay, if the airbag has exploded and knocked you out. I think of calling an ambulance for you, but I don’t know if it’s needed and it could be seen as wasting emergency services’ time. Though I very much do not want to leave the safe haven of my home, I know I can’t just leave you there.

You slept in the car last night, not even bothering with your usual routine of banging at the doors and windows of the house, but somewhere between me falling asleep and waking up, you’d managed to get inside the house. I wonder if your son let you in. I wonder if it had become too much for him and he’d disobeyed his mum’s orders to ignore you and instead answered the door and confronted you. Already fired up from the video he’d made, he told you what he thought of you. I’d like to have seen that. I know that’s weird.

Tonight you are worse than usual. I suspected this would be the case. I’m sure you know about the YouTube posting. I listened to the radio to see if was true about your suspension and there was another DJ filling in for you and the team. You and the team have all been suspended for your naughty New Year’s Eve antics and I see you have used your time not to spend a rare midweek evening at home with your family or to ponder your actions, but by drinking the night away. It was odd not to hear your voice on air; you’ve become synonymous with that time of night in most people’s homes, cars, workplaces, vans and lorries on long overnight drives. Learning of your suspension makes me surprisingly not as happy as I’d imagined, but then I come to the conclusion that it might be a good thing. It might make you think about all the lowly things you have said and discussed on your show, and how that has affected people and how you can improve yourself and thereby improve the lives of so many that you have such influence over. It makes me think of the one that makes me hate you, the entire reason for this anger I feel towards you.

Sixteen years ago, on another station at another hour, you hosted a discussion about Down syndrome. It was about many aspects of Down syndrome, and some of it was informative, thanks to the angry but firm woman who called in from Down Syndrome Ireland to explain the realities. Unfortunately she was deemed too calm and patient for your show and you quickly hung up on her. The others were uneducated, obnoxious ignoramuses who were given far too much airtime. Much of the discussion was about CVS, Chorionic Villus Sampling, and amniocentesis, also referred to as amniotic fluid test or AFT, which is a medical procedure used in prenatal diagnosis of chromosomal abnormalities and foetal infections. The most common reason to carry out such a test is to determine whether a baby has certain genetic disorders or a chromosomal abnormality such as Down syndrome. Women who choose to have this test are primarily those at increased risk for genetic and chromosomal problems, in part because the test is invasive and carries a small risk of miscarriage. I can see why you wanted to have this conversation; it is worth having the conversation, it could help women make the decision, if dealt with in a mature and honest way – but not in your way, not in the way your show handles things, trying to stir up controversy and drama. Instead of handling it in a mature, honest way you invited lunatics on to show the worst side and voice their uninformed opinions of Down syndrome. For example, an eejit anonymous man who had just discovered his girlfriend was having a baby with Down syndrome and what rights did he have about stopping this?

I was seventeen years old, at a party with a guy I had fancied for ages. Everyone was drunk, someone’s parents had gone away, and instead of listening to music it had been cool to listen to Matt Marshall. I didn’t mind you then; in fact I thought you were cool, because it was cool to hear the kinds of things you were discussing back when we were still trying to find our own voice. But the conversation made me feel ill, the conversation drifted from the speakers and continued into our room at the party and I had to listen to my friends, who should have known better, and to people I didn’t know, and the guy that I fancied, giving their opinions on the matter. Nobody wanted a child with Down syndrome. One person said they’d prefer one to a baby with AIDS. I was sickened by what I heard. I had a beautiful sister asleep at home, with a mother who was undergoing treatment for cancer who was more distraught about leaving my sister than leaving anything else in her life, and I couldn’t quite take what I was hearing.

I just got up and walked out. The guards picked me up along the coast road. I wasn’t falling around the place, but I was quite emotional and the alcohol only made me worse so they brought me to the station for my own safety, and a warning.

Mum was sick, she needed her rest. I couldn’t call my aunt after what had happened over the past few weeks in her house between me and her son Kevin, nor could I go back to stay in her house after the event, so they called Dad. He’d been out on a date with a new girlfriend, and they collected me in a taxi, him in his tuxedo and her in her ballgown, and they brought me back to his apartment. They’d both been throwing eyes at each other and giggling in the cab; I could tell they were finding the entire thing so much fun. As soon as we got to the apartment they went straight out again, which was a blessing.

So I stand at the window now and watch your unmoving body in your jeep, not caring whether you see me watching or not because I’m worried. Just as I’m thinking about going outside to assist you, the jeep door opens and you fall out. Head first, your back facing out as if you’ve been leaning it against the door. You slide down slowly and your head hits the ground. Your foot is tangled in the seat belt on the leather seat. You don’t move. I look around for my coat and then I hear you laughing. You struggle to untangle your foot from the seat belt, your laugh dying down as you become irritated and need to concentrate on freeing yourself as the blood rushes to your head.

You finally free yourself to begin your shouting/doorbell-ringing/banging act, but there is no response from the house. You honk the horn a few times. I’m surprised none of the neighbours tell you to be quiet; perhaps they’re asleep and they can’t hear. Perhaps they’re afraid, perhaps they watch you as I do, though I don’t think so. The Murphys go to bed early, the Malones never seem to be disturbed by you and the Lennons beside me are so timid I think they would be afraid to confront you. It is only Dr Jameson and I who seem to be disturbed by you. Your house is completely still and I only notice now that your wife’s car is not parked on the street as it usually is. The curtains are not drawn on any of the windows. The house appears empty.