*
The first thing you need to do with Dina on days like this is get her indoors. A big part of what looks like madness is actually just tension, free-floating terror growing bigger as it gets buffeted around in currents and hooks onto everything that drifts past: she ends up frozen rigid by the immensity and the unpredictability of the world, like a prey animal trapped in the open. Get her into a familiar enclosed space with no strangers, no loud noises and no sudden movements, and she calms down, even has long lucid patches, while the two of you wait it out together. Dina was one of the factors I kept in mind when I was buying my apartment, after my ex and I sold our house. We picked a good time to split, or so I keep telling myself: the property market was on its way up, and my half of the equity got me a deposit on a fourth-floor two-bed in the Financial Services Center. It’s central enough that I can walk to work, trendy enough that it made me feel a little less like a loser for failing at marriage, and high enough that Dina won’t be spooked by street noise.
“Yes thank God about time,” she said, on a wild rush of relief, when I unlocked the apartment. She shoved past me and pressed her back against the wall by the door, eyes closed, taking deep breaths. “Mike, I need a towel shower, can I?”
I found her a towel. She dumped her handbag on the floor, vanished into the bathroom and slammed the door behind her.
Dina on a bad one could stay in the shower all night, as long as the hot water doesn’t run out and she knows you’re outside the door. She says she feels better in water because it makes her mind go blank, which is crammed with so many kinds of Jung that I wouldn’t even know where to start. As soon as I heard the water running and her starting to sing to herself, I shut the living-room door and phoned Geri.
I hate making this call more than I hate almost anything in the world. Geri has three kids, ten and eleven and fifteen, a job doing the books for her best friend’s interior design company, and a husband she doesn’t see enough of. All those people need her. No one alive needs anything from me except Dina and Geri and my father, and what Geri needs most is for me not to make this phone call. I do everything in my power. It had been years since I had let her down.
“Mick! Hang on a sec for me, till I get this wash started—” Slam, click of buttons, mechanical hum. “Now. Is everything OK? Did you get my message?”
“Yeah, I got it. Geri—”
“Andrea! I saw that! You give it back to him right now or I’ll let him have your one, and you don’t want that, do you? No, you do not.”
“Geri. Listen to me. Dina’s losing it again. I have her over at my place, she’s taking a shower, but I’ve got stuff I have to do. Can I drop her down to you?”
“Oh, God . . .” I heard the breath leak out of her. Geri is our optimist: she still hopes, after twenty years of this, that every time will be the last, that one morning Dina will wake up cured. “Ah, God, the poor little thing. I’d love to take her, but not tonight. Maybe in a couple of days, if she’s still—”
“I can’t wait a couple of days, Geri. I’m on a big case, I’m going to be working eighteen-hour shifts for the foreseeable, and it’s not like I can bring her to work with me.”
“Oh, Mick, I can’t. Sheila’s got the stomach flu, that’s what I was telling you, she’s after giving it to her dad—the two of them were up all night getting sick, if it wasn’t one it was the other—and I’d say Colm and Andrea’ll come down with it any minute. I’ve been cleaning up sick and doing washing and boiling 7-Up all day, and it looks like I’ll be doing the same again tonight. I couldn’t manage Dina as well. I couldn’t.”
Dina’s episodes last anywhere between three days and two weeks. I keep some of my annual leave saved up just in case, and O’Kelly doesn’t ask, but that wasn’t going to work this time. I said, “What about Dad? Just for once. Couldn’t he . . . ?”
Geri left the silence there. When I was a kid Dad was straight-backed and lean, given to clean, square-edged statements with no wiggle room: Women may fancy a drinking man, but they’ll never respect him. There’s no bad mood that fresh air and exercise can’t mend. Always pay a debt before it’s due and you’ll never go hungry. He could fix anything, grow anything, cook and clean and iron like a professional when he had to. Mum dying blew him right out of the water. He still lives in the house in Terenure where we grew up. Geri and I take turns calling down to him at the weekends, to clean the bathroom, put seven balanced meals in the freezer and check that the TV and the phone are still working. The kitchen wallpaper is the acid-trip orange swirl that Mum picked out in the seventies; in my room, my schoolbooks are dog-eared and cobwebbed on the bookshelf Dad made for me. Go into the sitting room and ask him a question: after a few seconds he’ll turn from the telly, blink at you, say, “Son. Good to see you,” and go back to watching Australian soap operas with the sound turned down. Occasionally, when he gets restless, he extracts himself from the sofa and shuffles around the back garden a few times, in his slippers.
I said, “Geri, please. It’s only for the night. She’ll sleep all day tomorrow, and I’m hoping I’ll have work sorted out by tomorrow evening. Please.”
“I would if I could, Mick. It’s not that I’m too busy, you know I wouldn’t mind that . . .” The background noise had faded: she had moved away from the kids, for privacy. I pictured her in their dining room strewn with bright jumpers and homework, tugging a strand of blond out of its careful weekly set. We both knew I wouldn’t have suggested our father unless I was desperate. “But you know how she goes if you don’t stay with her every minute, and I’ve Sheila and Phil to look after . . . What would I do if one of them started getting sick in the middle of the night? Just leave them to clean up their own mess? Or leave her and have her start carrying on, wake the house?”
I let my shoulders slump back against the wall and ran a hand over my face. My apartment felt airless, stuffed with the reek of whatever fake-lemon chemicals the cleaner uses. “Yeah,” I said. “I know. Don’t worry about it.”
“Mick. If we can’t cope . . . Maybe we should think about somewhere that can.”
“No,” I said. It came out sharp enough that I flinched, but Dina’s singing didn’t pause. “I can cope. It’ll be fine.”
“Will you be all right? Can you get someone to sub for you?”
“That’s not how it works. I’ll figure something out.”
“Oh, Mick, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. As soon as they’re a bit better—”
“It’s OK. Tell them both I was asking for them, and you try not to catch whatever they’ve got. We’ll talk soon.”
A distant yell of fury, somewhere on Geri’s end. “Andrea! What did I say to you? . . . Sure, Mick, Dina might be better herself by the morning, mightn’t she? You never know your luck.”
“She might, yeah. We’ll hope.” Dina yelped, and the shower shut off: the hot water had run out. “Gotta go,” I said. “Take care,” and I had the phone stashed away and myself neatly arranged in the kitchen, chopping vegetables, by the time the bathroom door opened.
I made myself a beef stir-fry for dinner—Dina wasn’t hungry. The shower had settled her: she curled up on the sofa, wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants that she had taken out of my wardrobe, gazing into space and rubbing dreamily at her hair with a towel. “Shh,” she said, when I started to ask delicately about her day. “Don’t talk. Listen. Isn’t it beautiful?”
All I could hear was the muttering of traffic, four floors down, and the synthesized tinkle of the music that the couple upstairs play every night to send their baby to sleep. I supposed it was peaceful, in its own way, and after a day keeping hold of every thread in that tangle of conversations, it was good to cook and eat in silence. I would have liked to catch the news, to see how the reporters were spinning things, but that was out.
After dinner I brewed coffee, a lot of it. The sound of the beans grinding sent Dina off on a fresh fidget: padding restless barefoot circles around the living room, taking books off my shelves and flipping the pages and putting them back in the wrong places. “Were you supposed to be going out tonight?” she asked, with her back to me. “Like on a date or something?”
“It’s Tuesday. No one goes on dates on Tuesdays.”
“God, Mikey, get some spontaneity. Go out on school nights. Go wild.”
I poured myself a mug of espresso strength and headed for my armchair. “I don’t think I’m the spontaneous type.”
“Well, does that mean you go on dates at the weekends? Like, you’ve got a girlfriend?”
“I don’t think I’ve called anyone my girlfriend since I was twenty. Adults have partners.”
Dina mimed sticking two fingers down her throat, with sound effects. “Middle-aged gay guys in 1995 have partners. Are you going out with anyone? Are you shagging anyone? Are you giving anyone a blast from the yogurt bazooka? Are you—”