Blue Sky July Read online

  I spend all summer in Sacrifice.

  Fighting passing thoughts and passing feelings.

  I fight the ones that make me cry at night and those that come when I’m alone.

  I fight the ones that drop in unexpectedly and the ones that make themselves at home.

  Everything’s a battle on the inside.

  There are the letters I write to charities,

  the new equipment I can’t lift upstairs,

  the strangers who ask God to bless him,

  or give him money at the summer fairs.

  There are the boys in the park who throw stones at the ducks and

  follow us with their eyes.

  There are countless fears

  that flutter up inside.

  And steps,

  everywhere—

  thousands of them!

  There are so many places where I make a fuss,

  because his wants or needs

  are not considered as important as

  the rest of us,

  my heart’s become a warrior’s shield,

  and the city

  like a battlefield.

  We escaped to The Moorings this summer, Joeski and I, but no matter how many picnics and stories and songs we had, no matter how many times Mum sunbathed beside us, Dad mowed the lawns and the sun passed over, turning the windows into glitter, it wasn’t like it used to be. The Moorings was up for sale, the sun felt cold and my parents talked a lot of getting old.

  Summer has quite forgotten itself this year,

  and has so little to say,

  that when our blue badge came the other day

  we went out to celebrate, Joeski and me,

  and parked all over the city,

  on double-yellow lines.

  (five years)

  I put hyacinths on the table and Alex arrives with a carful of blown-up balloons.

  Marchant comes from Bristol, Julie and Freya from London, everyone from the Steiner school.

  It’s the party of parties, the best in town; we have cake, games and music and Paddy the Clown.

  Later, when they’ve all gone home, we have a barbecue, Alex and I.

  We get drunker, turn up the stereo even louder, and dance together under the stars, twirling our laughing child, one then the other, around the flames.

  It’s early morning, when they’re both asleep,

  and there’s no one about but the moon,

  that I sob my heart out.

  Still the same old grief,

  still the same old longing.

  David calls it progress, this secret sobbing I do.

  He says it’s the only way out,

  the only way on,

  the only way through.

  He says there’s no overnight sleeper out of Sacrifice.

  YEAR SIX

  “TA RA, luv,” he shouts out, when the taxi comes, and sets off with his elderly escorts, the three of them collapsing in giggles. “We taught him that,” they shout back to me excitedly. “He’s real Cardiff now.”

  I stand on the doorstep this autumn, waving at their three white heads which bob about as the taxi pulls away. He is singing a song and they are singing with him. He doesn’t look back—not once.

  “He’s made mates,” I think, as he disappears up Market Road to his world away from me. He sings all the way, they tell me. That’s how they’ve learned to understand his words, they say. That’s how he teaches them.

  Joe is, school says, a spirited child and has settled in well this term. He does not ask for me. He likes to laugh, they say, and enjoys the music, especially the singing in assembly, and the disco every Friday where he sits in his wheelchair and kicks his legs in time with Scott and Kylie.

  The teachers have rigged up a switch for him, and say that now he presses a button to answer questions of multiple choice it takes half the time it does to get his words out, and they are quite amazed by what he knows and understands. They have started to think he might be “bright.” Bright, this child that wouldn’t know us—next year perhaps, he’ll be a genius!

  His message book has gold and silver stars—“Good Days,” his teachers call them—and his life without me appears to be full of them.

  Yesterday is gone. Dried up and dropping with the leaves.

  The birds have flown and the shifting skies look big and strangely

  bare.

  He has moved on, and does not need me there.

  And, now he sings in other worlds,

  and has suddenly let me go,

  it’s this I know.

  That love grows even stronger in the wide, empty spaces of his

  absence

  and next to this all problems evaporate like dreams.

  It’s him I’m missing now,

  not what might have been.

  The pictures on the dresser in the kitchen span five years now. Alex on assignment in his black polo-neck and raincoat at the Eiffel Tower, the most handsome man in the world, and one with me and my big, round tummy, watching the dolphins swim in Cardigan Bay. Joe in a baggy blue suit leaving hospital, and one with my mother by the rose tree.

  Joanna, Julie and I with our bellies then our babies, arms round each

  other, smiling. Callum and Freya up on the cliffs in shorts and stripy

  T-shirts like Swallows and Amazons, Ambra in a field of golden corn,

  Joe in a poppy field, and the photo booth at Woolworth’s,

  on a swing,

  on a bed, on a knee

  laughing next to a Christmas tree,

  family all about him.

  These are my chosen pictures, the ones I display, and the ones that in their own perfectly poised and soft focus way have sustained me, smiling back each day. You can’t tell from these photos that there’s anything wrong, anything different, they look quite normal.

  Alex has given me pictures, too, today, a dozen or so of his “journeys with Joe,” as he calls them.

  There are a few of their weekend trips up the valleys together, sitting on mountains or waiting for trains—Bridgend, Cwmbran, Pontlottyn, where he said they got off, smiled and got back on again.

  And there are a few a little closer to home. These he’s shot in black and white, neatly captioned, and are now laid out across my kitchen table.

  The one of Joe in the throngs of the crowd at the football match on City Road, a blaze of the bluebirds all about him, has been captioned: One in a million.

  The one of Joe at school, wearing a corset, splints, and a patch on his eye, and the one at the Rubicon Dance Center, kicking his legs in his shiny black wheelchair as the ballerinas skip and twirl and fly around him. Both have Spirit written on the back.

  I’ve lost hours today, glancing back and forth between the dresser and the kitchen table, looking at these black-and-whites the way you do those 3D pictures that need time and effort to really see their meaning.

  Minutes before Joe came back home,

  I took the old ones down,

  and put the new ones in their place.

  I carry Joe on my back now to the places we can’t get to any other way. Up and along the beaches at Southerndown, up to the tops of double-decker buses and up to the thousand acres of rural art-space outside Cowbridge that’s known as Coed Hills.

  The Steiner club meets here on Saturdays, and he drifts above the tangled sprawl of children, suspended in my backpack, adding the happiest broken note to their choir.

  Winter is upon us now.

  Among these moonspun mushrooms and dream-caught birds, he is growing too heavy to carry,

  the magic’s running out,

  and the trees look like upside-down broomsticks at this time of year.

  On the stage, it’s hard to spot him. With his sky-blue frame and lopsided pose, he looks just like the rest here. An orphan in Oliver Twist, and there are lots of orphans, lots of frames and lots of kids inside them in rags and caps, with soot on their cheeks and smiles on their faces.

  The conductors ar
e like shepherds behind them, correcting a twisted limb here, a fallen head there, wiping sweet little mouths everywhere. And behind them are the wheelchairs, some almost dainty, some industrially wide, and one like a hospital bed, with cushions and a horizontal, curly-haired child inside.

  Oliver Twist is a boy on crutches who speaks through a synthesizer. “Please, sir,” he says, when he presses the yellow button, “I want more?”

  The Artful Dodger is a teacher, and the dance, choreographed beautifully by teenage girls in electric wheelchairs holding baskets of flowers, brings one group of parents to their feet.

  The chorus, full of determined strikes of the piano, abandoned shouts, uninterpretable wailings and extra-loud conductors, is like nothing I’ve ever heard before.

  This end of term at Craig-y-Parc school has a paralyzing effect

  on me.

  I can’t move a muscle,

  until Alex appears and takes my hand,

  and suddenly I hear the singing,

  feel my body,

  and see Spirit staged before me, in all its glory.

  My sister is at pains this year to point things out to me.

  She thinks it’s time to change my life now—go back to work, perhaps, get a hobby, be something more like the “feisty” girl I was before.

  My sister says that if I keep my life on hold, before I know it I’ll be old.

  Joe’s become one of the crowd in Malagny this Christmas and can be much more a part of things. If the girls watch videos so can he, and if the boys play guitars he can, too, now, one that has buttons in the place of strings.

  He has started to sleep when everyone sleeps, eat what everyone eats, and I write him a part in our Christmas play. This year we staged it on the sofa and Joe was the spaceman who we pretended had crashed there with fistfuls of secrets and stardust, just like The Little Prince.

  Sometimes I think Joe’s life is now as full as any other,

  perhaps sometimes even better,

  I didn’t do the half of what he does at his age

  with the passion he enjoys it.

  I didn’t love to sing and dance,

  had never heard of Beethoven,

  and I didn’t have a fraction of

  his quite amazing spirit.

  I’m also aware Joe’s life would be fine

  if I began to lead a little more of mine,

  it’s just my heart that doesn’t seem to get it.

  Every hour that I’m awake I want to heal him,

  every night when I go to bed,

  when we can’t get his wheelchair close to the holly,

  when the candles burn my eyes at church in Virry

  and I ask the priest to pour more water on his head.

  We walked and pushed the kids round Lake Geneva, the night before I left Malagny. My sister pointed out Rousseau’s island and the sparkling Jet d’Eau.

  It was the start of a brand-new year and the trees looked beautiful.

  Huge white lights hanging in their branches,

  like suspended moons

  splayed out across an inky sky.

  Joe could see them.

  My heart’s an ocean of storms this Christmas,

  every minute

  I want to heal him.

  It is a kind of limbo, New Year,

  time is lost, time is not yet.

  Full of hazard lights and thick gray fog,

  and people looking inward,

  while they’re out there, seeking God.

  There are courses galore in Cardiff, and a thousand pieces in The

  Guardian about the thousand paths,

  the thousand books,

  and the thousand ways to change your life.

  There’s doctors’ advice, tips from the stars

  and all the New Age stuff

  which claims people who aren’t happy

  just don’t love themselves enough.

  My mother’s joining a golf club this year. It helps her not to think of things, she says. Alex is doing Buddhist meditation, Sian stage-three Tae Kwon Do, and Sue’s doing an Alpha Course in Bristol. Sue says when Marchant was in a coma, God spoke to him and told him, “I bring you this body to bring love,” and that it’s given her a whole new direction.

  Gratia plans to go to La Gomera in the spring and has asked me to go with her. Sam at the shop is learning the guitar and a girl I talk to on the high street says she’s found the Santo Daime.

  I should do something, I guess. But I have no desire for any of it.

  I’ve done a thousand courses, I’ve made a thousand resolutions and there are still a thousand things I can’t make happen.

  This year I’ve resolved to surf further for cures,

  watch a bit more telly,

  and not think too hard about anything.

  David says I’ll know when I’m ready, but that

  perhaps it might just do me good,

  to catch that early spring.

  WHEN WE wake in the mountains, we lie in our beds, Gratia and me, talking about the rain. We can hear it through the bamboo roof of our small stone casita, and we watch it through our tiny square window, like it’s a movie just for us. The rain has so many emotions and it’s been raining all week in La Gomera.

  Gratia says that when she lived here with Ioho Blue, it was always hot this time of year. She remembers driving him round in her bikini and Mercedes-Benz, and selling jewelry on the beach to German hippies and people seeking the truth.

  Ioho’s still so present, here, when we’re away from our rituals with Iona and Joe, watching the rainfall.

  He would have been seven. It’s three years since he died.

  Our tiny house is surrounded by mountains, wide-ridged barrancas, which throw themselves upward like stairways to heaven. We watch these, too, wrapped up in blankets on our balcony, looking up to the gods and back down the waterfalls in an endless game of snakes and ladders.

  These mountains show us all their passing thoughts and are constantly changing shape in the mists that come and go and hang around them, smoking.

  Sometimes Gratia sees the face of an old Guanche woman, and I find Japanese hats and the head of a king; but if the clouds come down low, we can’t see a thing and it feels like we’re part of the sky.

  Ioho Blue is laid to rest close by.

  A little higher up our mountain, at the cementerio, in its curved white walls of catacombs.

  When we went there today, Gratia rushed ahead, and I walked slowly past the black and white headstones and the drenched fresh flowers, until I reached them.

  He has no headstone: just an open shelf.

  The peeling terra-cotta plaster has the words TOGETHER FOREVER

  carved into it, and the shelf

  is ablaze with color.

  A picture of dolphins,

  a sprig of jasmine,

  a plastic toy,

  a poem that calls him a heavenly boy.

  Among the driftwood and shells,

  a faded dream-catcher,

  a St. María de Guadalupe,

  and a painted stone from Ioho’s father,

  in the colors of the ancestors.

  Earth-green,

  sun-yellow,

  bloodred,

  moon-blue,

  purple for the sky.

  The vesica piscis Gratia once left close by,

  with the symbol of

  two worlds joining.

  Gratia said she worried when she came here that his things might be trashed, but they never were. She said there was a raging storm in La Gomera, the night Ioho Blue was buried, and that nothing was touched here next morning.

  “Even the incense and matches were dry.”

  When we were there, I couldn’t imagine how it felt for Gratia. I just lay on the grass while she redesigned his shelf, and watched a señora in black, arranging white lilies, for somebody else.

  It was when we were walking home,

  and I could hear Joe laughing about his concerts, trai
n rides and

  childish endeavors,

  on the other end of my mobile phone,

  that I think I realized,

  there was all of life,

  and all of death,

  between us.

  We walked back with our arms round each other, Gratia and I. The lemon trees were soaking wet and the mountains croaked with happy frogs.

  There was a rainbow over the Valley of the Great King,

  and Ioho Blue felt closer than ever.

  There are a few thousand miles between the harbor in Gomera and Cardiff Central, but the distance feels greater when you travel it at night, and when you’re coming home.

  Alex is getting Joe ready for bed when I’m leaving. I speak to him as I paddle in the clear blue sea. “I’ll be home when you wake up,” I say. “I know,” he says to me.

  And then I catch a boat, a bus, a plane, and an overnight express train that tails the break of day, whistling through the shells of empty stations, past a million dreaming mothers, on its way.

  I have left my grief behind me on Gomera. I have taken off my watch and a thin blue line of plaited string hangs loosely round my wrist now, like a new horizon.

  Time looks more like the sky, the sea;

  a reborn mother merging with the girl I used to be.

  Coming home, I catch a train,

  that’s headed back to life again.

  Only the flower shops had lights on in my city.

  It was early Sunday morning and the clubs had closed as I walked

  up from the station to Market Road.

  The playgrounds were deserted,

  the lazy Taff hummed a song,

  HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY, a billboard winked,

  like I was special,

  the chosen one.

  This was my new world.

  The boys were still sleeping when I got in. Joe, like a curled-up love spoon in his own bed, and, across the landing, all stretched out in mine, Alex, Caravaggio dark, in a cloud of white duvet.

  They’d left other things to meet me.

  There was a trail of star-shaped stickers in the kitchen. The fridge said that Joe had started to feed himself, with minimal support at the elbow, the oven that he was doing better with his eyes, and the microwave pinged that, at the museum, he said the word dinosaur, clear as a bell.

  When I made toast and a cup of tea, the kettle whistled brightly that Eunice, his escort, had taught him to count up to sixty.

  On the kitchen table there was an appointment diary left open, covered in check marks, and a paper tree made up of news cuttings, all freshly picked. “Carers to Be Called Companions,” “Disabled Actors on TV” branches laced with triumphs over tragedy.