annashay 
by Brian Kirk
TOM WOKE UP from the dream just as the alarm sounded and lay there experiencing a not unpleasant feeling along with the usual fatigue. Although she was lying beside him, he sensed a gulf had formed between them over the years. Lately his sleep was often interrupted—sometimes by her restlessness, sometimes by his own rising panic about the way the world had changed so much in the past year.
The dream’s glow evaporated as he contemplated the day ahead. It took him a moment to realise it was Saturday. Then he remembered it was the day he was to bring his mother for her first shot of the vaccine. All the days had become indistinguishable lately so this could provide some novelty. They had been working from home for months and, since the colleges closed, their daughters were back at home too which meant that every day they sat in separate rooms within the house, meeting up at mealtimes and in the evening occasionally to watch TV. On top of that he had taken his mother out of the care home a few weeks back because he was concerned about the spread of infection there. So here he was, blessed among women.
In the dream, she didn’t look like herself. She was young, but he was just as he is now, waist deep in middle age and looking and feeling every bit of it. God, how her smile lifted his spirits, if only for a moment. She took him in her arms and smiled at him. She kissed him. Then the bloody alarm went off!
The queue at the Vaccination Centre ran from the doorway of the multi-storey car park and across the road to the theatre building where the vaccines were being administered. He made the mistake of parking on the top level and they had to wait an age for a lift to take them down to the ground floor. Men and women in high-vis jackets guided them across the road while he was careful to keep his distance from those in front. His mother sat placidly in her wheelchair as they took their place in a geriatric conga line. Ahead of them were other sons and daughters shepherding ancient and infirm parents, some of them on walking frames, some with sticks and some, like his mother, in wheelchairs.
He was happy enough to be there in that slow-moving queue. It gave him time to think about her, to try to recall the details of his dream. They had been going to see a band, a band they used to see years ago, but he couldn’t recall the name. Perhaps she liked them more than he did and he just went along to be in her company. He filled the idle moments in the queue with thoughts of her. The way she held her cigarette, although she hadn’t smoked in years. Her cream moustache when she took the first sip from her glass of Guinness. The dark mole behind her ear, rough to the touch of his finger when he cradled her head and kissed her. Her skin milk bottle white, her fingers fine and tapered, the nails unpainted but well kept. When he exhausted the details of the dream, he took refuge in memory. He went all the way back to the start, to times he hadn’t thought about in years, to when he knew her first, before they even spoke to each other. Those times when he saw her among a group of friends but didn’t know her name and was too shy to ask. Someone called out ‘next’, but he didn’t hear, or he ignored it. People behind him in the queue began to complain and he could feel the memory of her slipping away as he wheeled his mother to the desk to check in. They wanted identification, date of birth, a form filled in. He struggled to make himself heard behind his mask and the glass. He wondered did the mask also hide the annoyance he felt, the helplessness that went with being there, just another number among the crowd. He felt bad for the girl behind the desk then—was probably the same age as his older daughter and was just doing her job after all.
He was fed up with the whole thing, the working from home, pretending to care about the job. In the middle of meetings on Zoom he found himself drifting back to nights out thirty years ago with her. Whole sections of conversations went missing as he struggled to maintain a pretence of interest in what his colleagues were saying. On an online training course he learned that there were side effects to working remotely—stuff people didn’t even notice. Disengagement from the team, dejection, apathy. He realised how you can be lonely, even in a group. It was the lack of an alternative physical space to be in that was the main problem for him he thought. He moved between the kitchen and the desk in his home office, which was just a small table in the corner of their bedroom. At first, when he went out for walks, neighbours stopped to chat at a distance; everybody marvelled how things could change so quickly. Now they just nodded and passed by. Maybe things were changing all the time, long before the pandemic and he never realised it. He was changing. She was changing. Time was passing, that was for sure. They were older, maturing, deteriorating.
When the girl had finished checking his mother’s details, they were told to take a seat in a waiting area and asked to be patient. He could see his mother getting drowsy, so he talked to her, to keep her going until the doctor saw her. He asked her questions about the past, what her life was like when she was young. That was where she liked to live now. She hadn’t lost her mind, she knew what day it was and who the President was, but she much preferred to situate her ebbing life back in those days when she was young.
Her thoughts range back beyond the time she met his father, as though her true self remained trapped in those distant days before he even existed, when she was completely herself. Sometimes he worried that if she didn’t remember his father, then he might never have existed at all. He tried to recall moments father and son had spent together. It was hard to find anything of worth; his mind chose to reflect his dad in a series of still images, dressed in his Sunday best, smiling, or frowning depending on the day. He realised then he was not remembering him at all, but merely a series of photographs from family functions in the distant past. He began to doubt his own existence then. He knew that he too would die someday, just as his father did, and be erased from the memories of those he loved.
The doctor was a young woman, cheerful with clear brown eyes above a blue mask. She delivered the jab before his mother even realised it had happened. They were asked to wait in the Observation Area for fifteen minutes before they could leave. It’s just a formality, she said, nothing at all to worry about.
He still couldn’t get over how young she was in the dream. If only it was possible to go around again. I’m sorry, he told her in the dream. He wasn’t sure why he was apologising. She just smiled and told him it was okay. But still he had his doubts.
Soon they were outside again and back across the road, queueing for the lift. The car park was full of old men and women being helped into cars or led along by adult children. He shifted his mother carefully into the passenger seat and folded away her chair and stowed it in the boot. He waited while one particularly old man on a walking frame, fussed over by a tired looking fifty-something year old daughter, hobbled past the car before reversing out slowly. He caught a glimpse of his eyes in the rear-view mirror and he hardly recognised himself.
On the drive home he thought about the different people he had been over the years: the spoiled only child of doting parents, the rebellious teenager who caused them sleepless nights, the troubled young man who drank too much, the jealous lover, the new husband, the proud father, the diligent worker, the unfaithful husband, the older man resigned to his lot. He had no idea what she saw in him back then. No doubt he put up an impressive front, exuded that brittle confidence that always teetered on the edge of arrogance. He never hurt her, no, not physically. But he knew that he inflicted pain in other ways.
The world had changed since they were young. The definition of what it was to be a man or woman had changed. The things his father took for granted were no longer a given. He thought: if he was her, he wouldn’t be so kind, he’d make him work a little harder, make him squirm a bit.
His mother was tired when they got home, so he tucked her into bed. She was a child, and he was a father again in the way he used to be when the girls were small. He was good with them. He’d get up in the night to feed and change them, or simply just to soothe and reassure them when they had bad dreams. You forget how hard it is, being a parent to small children, how tiring it is, how weary and anxious you get. In the same way a mother forgets the pain of the first birth, allowing her to go through it all over again.
While he flicked through the Saturday paper, she made sandwiches for lunch and the two of them ate together in the kitchen while his mother napped and the girls sat in the next room hooked up to the web on phones and tablets. When they finished eating, she cleared the mugs and plates away. She stood behind him and ran her fingers through his hair and shook her head. Something must be done with this, she said. She put a towel around his shoulders, wet a comb and pulled it through his wild grey locks. She picked up the scissors and began to cut. Hair fell all around him, and he closed his eyes. Her nimble fingers grasped his hair in careful sections, and he enjoyed the pleasant tension in his scalp caused by her touch. He could feel the warmth of her body pressed close to him, one leg either side of his knee, as she reached to the topmost part of the crown. He put out his hands and held her sides. She kept on cutting and they remained as they were for a few moments, holding each other in a peculiar embrace until he let his hands fall by his sides.
When the eldest girls was two she stopped eating. They brought her to doctors and consultants who carried out all kinds of tests on her. But nobody knew what was wrong with her. And all the while she continued to waste away. Every day they tried her with new food; they begged her and cried, pleading with her to swallow just one spoonful. Each night they lay in bed together whispering hopeless words to each other: what if she never eats, will they have to feed her through a tube? what did we do wrong? why are we such bad parents? But they weren’t bad parents. At night they held each other and cried until they slept. In the morning, they did their best again. Eventually she began to eat. And they forgot how bad it was.
In the dream she is not really herself at all, but a product of his subconscious, that part of him that recognises his guilt and seeks to find a way to expiate it. So, he wheels her out—or a version of her that his secret self has cobbled together—a doll-like figure that is not her, but an avatar he can ventriloquise. He commands her to smile at him and she smiles. He tells her to say the magic words and there it is: he is forgiven.
When she finished cutting, she stepped back to view her handiwork. Her face was drawn and creased with the marks of old worries that haven’t gone away. She looked older. She fetched a small mirror from the bathroom so he could see how it looked. She left it on the table while she busied herself sweeping up the hair. When he picked up the mirror, he could only see his father. The skin dry and red in patches, the eyes liquid pink, cloudy and unsure. But that was okay, he thought. She was still here with me. Everything was okay.
oOo
Brian Kirk has published two poetry collections with Salmon Poetry, After The Fall (2017) and Hare’s Breath (2023) and a short fiction chapbook It’s Not Me It’s You (Southword Editions, 2019). His novel Riverrun was chosen as a winner of the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair 2022 and was shortlisted for the Spotlight First Novel Award 2023. www.briankirkwriter.com.
X: @briankirkwriter
