At this, Ali startled the assembled waiting visitors with a raucous laugh. ‘Crisp residue!’
After a moment, Mini joined in.
‘These are Skips.’ Ali feigned indignation. ‘Prawn cocktail is a better class of flavour than your average crisp – everyone knows that.’
Mini wiped her eyes, and her laugh died away but she looked a bit more relaxed. Her fidgeting subsided.
‘Dad would’ve approved,’ Ali continued.
‘Hah. I’ve never seen Miles with a crisp in my life.’
‘This crisp grudge is off-the-charts snobby,’ Ali said. ‘Anyway, I didn’t mean he’d eat them but the man loved a seafood platter, you can’t deny it.’
‘Ah,’ was all Mini said.
They were getting into tricky territory here. Their unspoken approach to Miles was a careful exchange of information.
Ali would text:
Went to Dad today, we listened to Wilco’s last album and I gave him dinner – new levels of gross on that front. Can we not just Deliveroo in something that doesn’t look regurgitated?
While Mini might respond something like:
Spoke to Miles’s team this morning, they’re talking about the morphine patch. Sadly they meant for him, not me.
They were rigid about never veering down memory lane. When, wondered Ali, had her gorgeous dada become such a source of pain? Talking about who Miles had been was like pressing a bruise on her heart. Yet today, perhaps because of the meeting, Ali felt like pressing on.
‘D’you remember him and his lobsters?’ Ali ventured. She never could’ve predicted that one day her father’s grotesque, near-cannibalistic relish of lobsters would become a source of nostalgia.
Mini was reading her emails, but she smiled and then closed her eyes, her mouth a firm, insistent straight line. Ali realised that whatever hurt she felt thinking about her dad’s cruel existence, it was nothing compared with the anguish Mini carried in her very bones.
For many years, Ali had been angry with her parents for being so bloody Irish and refusing to acknowledge his illness. Then she’d just been angry with Mini because it was easier than blaming an ever-more-helpless Miles. And then when her anger just seemed exhausting, it became easier to disappear – online, into wine, anything rather than face reality.
A moment of clarity descended on her then, and her mother’s pain was palpable – all the more so for how competently she’d hidden it. All the years since Miles had lain suspended in a terrible middle place, so too had Ali and Mini. Her phone pinged with notifications and she felt hounded. She’d backed herself into a corner where she could neither face up to her life as it was nor escape the life she’d concocted online. She felt jangly. More panic. Ali, this is what you get for lying, she admonished herself.
‘Mrs Riordan?’ A sweet-faced older male nurse appeared beside them. ‘The team are waiting for you both.’
Ali tried to force down the rising dread as they followed him to a part of the home Ali’d never visited before. Upstairs in a large airy office, four different people were introduced but Ali struggled to grasp who each of them was. She studied the plate of biscuits in the middle of the desk – who brings biscuits to a meeting like this? She heard their words, tinny and distant, as though they were coming through a bad phone signal instead of from the lips of people seated just across from her.
‘As agreed, there’ll be no more interventions.’
‘We just want to make him as comfortable as possible.’
‘We suggest you come as often as you can.’
Ali couldn’t take any more in. Her thoughts were roaring, her heart was charging and she couldn’t breathe. She found herself standing before she’d even thought to get up. Everyone stopped talking and looked at her expectantly. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t stay. I’m sorry, Mum.’ She turned to Mini, who sat defeated in her chair. ‘I’m not feeling very well.’ Ali could barely get the words out.
She grabbed her bag and fled before anyone could intervene. Pushing the door from that airless office, with the shitty biscuits and even shittier words, was like surfacing for air. She hurried down the bright corridor, down the stairs and out through reception into the sunny day beyond. Finally, about halfway down the driveway, she paused, taking huge gulping breaths that didn’t seem to quite fill her lungs. He really is going to die – they said as much. That’s what all those euphemistic phrases like ‘make him comfortable’ mean.
She knew Mini would be pissed at her ditching like that but she just couldn’t cope with the enormity of it all. Even though she hoped against hope that Miles would die and they would be released from the agony of counting hours watching his lifeless eyes, she couldn’t sit with the knowledge without feeling smothered by it.
Even out here among the trees, with birds singing and the pale March sun shining, she couldn’t get far enough from this truth.
She rummaged in her bag for something to put some distance between this moment and herself. She came up with her phone and hit the Story function. She carefully checked her face to ensure she looked OK – her hair was in plaits because she wanted a beachy look for the event later. She shook it out now and touched up her lips.
She checked all around to make sure no one was coming and then stepped off the path into a gap between some trees. She set up the pic, letting a little sunlight drape across her face, accentuating her cheekbones, and took about thirty shots, trying slightly different faces for each. Smile, half-smile, laughing while fixing her hair and looking over to the left. She took some time narrowing down the choices. The final snap was cute – she looked good with her hair in loose waves and her brown eyes open wide, relaxing under the trees. She did some correcting in FaceFix, adding a bit to her lips and losing a bit from her jaw and nose. She could feel her breathing quieting and a calm settling in her chest.
Thinking about how #blessed I’ve been these last few months. It’s been a pleasure to share this journey with you all. I can’t thank you all enough for everything you’ve given me. Without you guys, I wouldn’t be doing so many incredible things in my life right now. I can’t wait to share some of these with you all soon. #influencer #collab #happydays #loveyouall #AlisBaba #myday #mylife #LittleStoriesFromMyLife #watchthisspace #excitingproject
