It was immediately apparent just how many phrases and aphorisms revolve around feet, as when my sister Maeve made reference to the staff nurse keeping Daddy ‘on his toes’ and making sure he ‘toed the line’, two phrases I can’t imagine her using in any other circumstance. The delightful Sister Francistine, the nun who was the principal of our primary school, came to counsel my father and ended her visit by agreeing it was no use being negative. ‘You just have to take each day as it comes,’ she said, ‘and put your best … face … forward.’ We said nothing. ‘Um,’ she added so quietly it was hard not to laugh in her face, ‘is that the phrase?’ Whether it was before, it certainly was after, and has been a favourite in our family ever since.
My dad’s resilience was remarkable, and within a few weeks of coming home from hospital he had mastered his prosthesis to the point where he could ride a bike fairly easily. This was particularly surprising to us, since he hadn’t been seen on a bike for maybe upwards of a decade and hasn’t been seen on one since. When he returned to work, he didn’t make a big fuss about what had happened, and didn’t bother telling his more casual acquaintances, who often had no idea about the prosthesis and presumed he just had a slight limp. This led to complications once, when he slipped and fell on an office visit to Belfast. It was, luckily, a minor fall, more embarrassing than anything else, although it momentarily dislodged his prosthetic leg. As he winced on the floor, pride dented but physically unharmed, a colleague took him by the hand and looked in horror at the unwelcome right angle that had formed in my father’s trouser leg. ‘Jesus!’ he said, thinking my father hadn’t yet noticed his shinbone snapping in two. ‘It’s a bad fall, Joe.’ You might not find that story funny, but when I tell it to Northern Irish people, it kills.
The aftercare my father received from the hospital included offers of meetings, rehab activity programmes and support groups for people dealing with amputations, all of which he declined. I’d say it was because he wanted to move on, or because he didn’t want to be defined by his disability, but it’s more likely he simply couldn’t be arsed. He had spent so much time in hospital that he had no interest in going back for non-essential purposes, let alone hanging out with loads of new people into the bargain. In the first few weeks after the amputation, I noted the stack of unread pamphlets he’d been sent, advertising local get-togethers and sporting events for the benefit and interest of Northern Irish amputees. We laughed bleakly, unforgivably, as we saw that the legacy of the Troubles had monopolised even these, and that 90 per cent of the people featured in their articles were people who’d been injured in sectarian fighting, not those who stashed Fanta and organised annual world cups of rich, sweet desserts.
‘I could go with you,’ I said, ‘and tell them you lost the leg when the customs hut was destroyed. Taken out by a flying sink, maybe. That way you won’t lose feet – I mean face. Is that the phrase?’ We drove to the hospital, finding comfort in the laughter of the slaughterhouse, and through tears he told me just how awful I was.
13
Dead and Dying Cows
A few years before we were married, my wife and I took a city break to Bilbao, which did not go to plan. We hadn’t been on holiday for a long time and booked the cheap deal on a whim about a month before we were to travel. I don’t know what our plan actually was, but by the time the trip came around we hadn’t received the windfall we’d clearly been expecting to fund it, and subsequently had to slum it the entire time, with no cash beyond what we had to spend on transport and accommodation. My wife, a vegetarian, found there was almost nothing she could eat in any of the places we visited, and on more than one occasion her requests for a fully vegetarian salad were met with grilled chicken served with anchovy sauce. The rain was so bad that the only shoes I had with me became waterlogged within a few hours of our arrival and were noticeably smelly by the second day of an unjustifiably lengthy four-day visit. My feet swelled up, and more than once I’m sure other tourists moved away from me. One French gentleman pointed at my limp and sodden shoe and said, ‘Ze trench foot, yes?’
For three more days I took tired, smelly steps around a city that might charitably be said to contain two good days’ worth of tourism, with a First World War foot disease, under a wet mesh of rain that poured, ceaselessly, from a sky the colour of a switched-off telly. The only great memory that survives is of the Guggenheim, which we liked so much we visited three times. I was struck by Louise Bourgeois’s Maman, the thirty-foot sculpture of a spider that towers over its rear entrance.
Before I learned to package all the stuff I knew into the kind of A+ anecdotes for which I’m so rightly celebrated, I settled for simply following people around while I reeled off random facts: species of dinosaurs, collective nouns for animals, rare types of clouds, particularly snazzy prime numbers. And spiders. I knew loads about spiders. So when I read in the brochure that Bourgeois intended this big bronze monster, jealously guarding its abdominal clutch of marble-hewn eggs, as a tribute to mothers and motherhood, I knew this was bollocks. Spiders are terrible mothers. No maternal instinct at all. Spider mams just fuck off, and it’s left to the dad to collect, guard and then lick the eggs into shape, cowering on whatever godforsaken leaf she’s left him on until, finally, they burst in their hundreds, sending a spindly mass of spiderlings crawling all over his pliant, furry body. A process I refuse to believe even a spider wouldn’t find extremely upsetting.
I found myself saying all of this to my future wife like a crazy person. I had no idea where it was coming from. My eyes buzzed and my throat felt hot. I broke down, possessed with a baffling sense of indignation that spider mams had been let off the hook by the whims of this deluded sculptor. The rage came fully formed from many years of telling people these specific spider-mam facts.