I want to tell the story of my family. It's not a particularly long story.
A thin woman with dark hair, jeans and a jacket is walking along a city street. She has a handbag over one shoulder, and in a box, she has a birthday cake. This is for a colleague of hers. It’s a victoria sponge, with cream filling. There is clumsy icing on the top, and the woman has candles in her handbag.
The woman stops walking, and carefully places the cake on a windowsill. Then she falls over. People run to her, and they call an ambulance. It takes thirty five minutes to get there, even though you could walk to the hospital in fifteen. When the ambulance arrives, a man and two teenage girls have been taking care of the woman. They put a coat over her, to keep her warm, and the man has been holding her hand and telling her she’s going to be all right.
The woman blinks and smiles. Her face looks strange, uneven. She tries to say she’s ok, but it comes out slurred. She smiles at the girls, but it looks like a grimace. The woman arrives at the hospital fifty five minutes after she put the cake on the windowsill.
The hospital go through her bag, set aside the candles, and find her ID, and call her office. They tell give the nurse the details of her next of kin, her husband. All of this takes time.
She has a second stroke an hour and twenty minutes after she put the cake down, four minutes before I arrived at the hospital. I sat beside her bed for almost two days. Then the machines were switched off. and I held her hand until it was cold. I used to say she had cold hands when she got into bed. I had a very childish thought. I wish it hadn’t happened. I wasn’t ready.
Cait’s favourite song was ‘Calling Occupants of Extraordinary Craft’ by the Carpenters. That was my only contribution to her funeral. Her family organised everything. Her brother didn’t think she liked that song. I didn’t feel like telling him about the time we lay naked on a bed in a B&B in Donegal, with her playing it over and over again on her phone. Both of us singing the words, and humming along with the guitar bit.
I play over everything that happened that morning. I think about how I had an early meeting. I had to present a new finance process to the team, and I talked through it with myself in the shower. I got dressed in the dark. I used to hang my shirt on the wardrobe door, so I wouldn’t wake Cait.
I made a car cup of instant coffee, scalded my mouth, put on my shoes, and went into the bedroom to say goodbye.
“How are you feeling, love?” I said.
She twisted her head up to me.
“I’ve a mouldy headache, I’d a crap night’s sleep”
“I hope you feel better, we’ve pills in the kitchen”
“Sure I’ll be grand, how are you feeling?”
“Grand - I scalded myself on the coffee, listen, I’ve to run - I’m late”.
I kissed her, and she snuggled back into the pillow.
The last thing I said to Cait was that I scalded myself on some coffee. She had a headache that was a precursor to the massive brain bleed that would kill her four hours later, and I told her there was paracetamol in the kitchen.
I drove the same road I’ve always driven - ninety minutes door-to-door. I know I got petrol on the way, because I found a receipt, but I can’t remember getting it. It was a tuesday, so I probably did. I mostly got petrol on a Tuesday on the way in. I can’t remember it at all.
I can’t remember anything about the meeting, and I’ve never looked for the notes on it. Everything about that morning seems grotesque. She was alive, and we were apart. I try to picture it, and it’s all gothic skies and darkness, a manic cartoon of bad traffic and shouting radios.
The previous night, Cait had made the cake - her colleague didn’t have any family in Ireland, and Cait wanted to make sure she had something homemade on her birthday. I spent the evening staring at my laptop, and watching videos of people shoot things with paintballs in slow motion. We had a cup of tea, staring at the television - repeats of old episodes of Family Guy, that we’d seen at least twice before, and went to bed, promising to go to bed earlier the next night.
I wasn’t ready for her to be dead.
I stayed with my brother and his wife for a few days after the funeral. I didn’t go back to \work, and I spent the days in the gym. I ran on a treadmill until it hurt, and when it hurt, I sped up, until I thought couldn’t run anymore, and then I sat down on a bench, and started thinking about Cait, and thinking about the four minutes I was late.
I wanted to tell her I love her forever. I wanted to take back everytime I complained about going to dinner parties with her. I wanted to feel her hand, warm in mine. One day, at two o’clock in the morning, I drove into town, to where she collapsed, panicked, in case the cake was still there.
