Matchstick Man by Julia Kelly

Author:Julia Kelly [Kelly, Julia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781788540131
Publisher: Head of Zeus

7

I career over speed bumps in Charlie’s old Volvo, the queue of cars behind forcing me to go faster than I want. I don’t trust my driving on this narrow, winding road, or the car which has lately begun to cut out without warning. I imagine the accident: the slam of a hand on a horn, the skid and smash of collision, the whack of my head on the windscreen. I’m collecting the Nipe from a play date at a house I’ve never been to before. I need to take the first right beyond the church, the spire of which I spot a fraction too late; I brake and swerve across the road. The driver behind revs his engine as soon as he’s clear of me. I catch a flash of his furious arms in the air through the overhead mirror.

I’m addled, a word my mother used to describe herself when she had her children hanging off her, twenty guests on their way over for dinner and the buttery mix of failed profiteroles in the bin. It’s early November 2014, six months since Charlie’s diagnosis.

A new family will be moving into our home in Bray in three weeks’ time and we have yet to find somewhere else to live. I’m stiff and sore from shifting boxes and furniture, my hands dry and cut, nails broken. We have been trying for months to declutter, to sell or give away to charity belongings we no longer need, but the task is too large and overwhelming and some things, like baby clothes, are too hard to let go of. I can’t sell my buggy and high chair to some fertile, optimistic woman whose straightforward life I imagine and resent. I’ve kept them since the Nipe was born, and I still see myself as having two children one day.

I know I’ve been impatient with Charlie while we’ve tried to pack up, sometimes unkind, asking for his help to move something and becoming immediately irritated if he looks confused or tries to carry it to the wrong place, or when he can’t follow my rushed and garbled instructions. Several times I’ve told him to forget it, that I’ll do it myself – leaving him redundant in the centre of an empty room. Since his diagnosis he has stopped pretending to understand, has stopped laughing off his mistakes. There has been a letting go and a gradual handing over of roles. Now I am in charge; when I wake each morning I feel that I am on duty, that I should put on a uniform and a badge. By evening I’m always crotchety and self-pitying – telling Charlie that I’m tired of doing everything on my own; that I wish I had someone to look after me; knowing that he wants desperately to be needed and appreciated but is no longer up to a task as disorientating to his newly diseased brain as moving house. He has generally tried to stay out of my way, often retreating quietly back to bed.

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