‘You think?’ said Sean.
It was hard to tell. The child was four years old: she spent her day in a state of constant imagining. But Aileen said she stopped dead in the street, or startled at nothing. Every so often, she lifted a hand as though brushing cobwebs from in front of her eyes. She said strange things. Aileen did not know if this was some kind of shadow of the seizures that had now stopped, or a side effect of the pills she took to stop them. Sean privately thought it was a symptom of Aileen’s anxiety, but they both listened to Evie’s prattle with a more attentive ear.
After months of this fretfulness and concern, and many hundreds of hours on the internet, Aileen decided to take Evie off her medication.
‘I want my little girl back,’ she said.
Aileen’s worry had become impossible. She had worried so hard and for so long, it had transcended itself and turned into a rapture of care.
‘It’s not her anymore,’ she said. ‘It’s not Evie.’
Sean argued that the child was only four: ‘She’s changing every minute,’ he said. ‘She’s never the same.’
To which Aileen answered, ‘
So Evie was weaned off her tablets and the seizure, when it happened, was almost a relief, after so many days of waiting for it to come. Days and weeks of being present and mindful, waiting for the crackle in her brain, fearful of the shadows, as the sun was cut to flitters by the roadside trees. Do you smell something, Evie? Do you see something? What are you thinking, Evie?
It happened in the creche where Evie now spent her days. The woman in charge didn’t seem to bat an eyelid. It was an event. She had managed it.
‘I just held her in my arms,’ she said. ‘Poor little mite.’
Not that they liked her for it.
‘What a cow,’ said Aileen, because reality had shifted for them, one more time. They were now looking at a world in which an absent, juddering child was a normal thing. Their child. Their beautiful, ever-present Evie.
There is no doubt that Aileen, who was above all things rational, was not behaving rationally when she decided to put an end to this nonsense, once and for all. She put Evie on a diet. It was a medical diet. The hospital they attended did not supervise it, but some hospitals did, she said, though it was usually for children much worse off than Evie. It was a ketogenic regime – like Atkins but weirder and stricter – it seemed to involve endless but very exact amounts of whipped cream. No carbohydrates were allowed. None whatsoever. Not an apple, not the stain of sauce on a baked bean. One crisp and the child would be foaming at the mouth and falling under the nearest bus, no question.
Sean should have argued it out, he said. Or he should have talked to her more – Aileen that is – made her feel less lonely in it. But it was all unstoppably itself, he thought. And there was nothing so terribly wrong with whipped cream. So he just let her at it.
The diet never worked. At least, Evie never stuck to it – Sean suspected, besides, that the creche woman was feeding her Hula Hoops, out of sympathy. They started fresh every Monday, by Thursday Evie would be discovered with sugar on her breath. Aileen would go into the next room in order to compose herself, then she would come back to discuss things with Evie.
‘Remember, Mrs Mooch, how we talked about your brain?’
One evening, after finding a nest of peach stones stuffed down the back of the sofa, Aileen stood and wept. They were turning their daughter into a failure, she said; their fabulous daughter, who was now a constant disappointment to them; also, when it came to food, an accomplished thief and liar. And though Aileen saw all this happening, she did not know how to fix it, and there was nothing Sean could do except stand outside the circle and tell her that everything was going to be all right when it was not all right. It was all impossible. And it was all her fault.
It was during this phase of their lives, the ketogenic phase, that I saw Sean for the first time, standing at the bottom of my sister’s garden in Enniskerry. I do not know what he was thinking about. He might have been thinking about Evie, or about work, or about a woman at work. He might have been admiring the view, or wondering how much the houses were worth, between here and the sea. Perhaps he was pining for my sister Fiona, who is so pretty and sad. Or he might have been thinking about nothing. The way men often claim to do.
‘What are you thinking about?’
‘I don’t know. Nothing much.’
It is fairly clear, however, that he was not thinking about Evie in any practical way, because, when she came up behind him there was a stolen smear of something sticky and very purple on her little face.
He said, ‘Oh for God’s sake, Evie,’ and he sighed. He watched Aileen scrub at the gunk with a paper napkin, then he looked over to me.
Of course, I know Evie’s story mostly from Sean’s point of view, and I know that Sean does not always tell the truth. Or he does not remember the truth. The way he tells it, he met Fiona’s sister (as he used to think of me) for the first time, walking in Knocksink woods, with the kids up to their knees in muck. He has no recollection of me at the party, standing by the fence.
But whatever way he remembers it, there is something in Evie’s story that Sean is constantly trying to understand. Something about himself, perhaps.
And then there is Aileen.
Evie marched into Terenure – quite early on – and handed me a battered-looking envelope, then she rolled her eyes, and clumped off to switch on Joan’s crap little TV. Inside was an information sheet, headed ‘What to Do When Someone has an Epileptic Seizure’. This was clipped to a pathetic note from Aileen – typed, unsigned – that began, ‘When Evie was four years old, she was diagnosed as suffering from benign rolandic epilepsy of childhood (BREC). Recently that diagnosis has been under review.’ I read it all. I didn’t understand a word of it. I said to Sean, ‘So what exactly is wrong with her?’
‘Actually nothing,’ he said. ‘She’s fine.’
Evie, still off the medication, went to school the autumn after the party in Enniskerry, and Aileen had a whole new reality check. The very nice and very young teacher listened to her tale and blinked twice. She said, ‘Could you run that by me again?’ Sean and Aileen then spoke to the headmistress who was completely reassuring. She also reminded them, on their way out the door, that there were twenty-nine other children in Evie’s class.
In October, Evie had a seizure in the line before the bell went, and everyone made a great fuss of her. But there was one little girl who was mean and really, as Evie said to her mother, with all the wisdom a five-year-old can muster, ‘It’s just not me, you know?’
They laughed when she said it, but they were ashamed too. Evie was saying that this might happen inside her, but she was outside it. It was not for her a question of poetry, or personality. It was just a bad thing that happened to her and she wanted it to stop.
They had to admire the person she was, at five years old, and hope she never lost it. Aileen relented. They put her on a different drug which slowly made her fat and, perhaps – again it was hard to tell – a bit incontinent. The seizures stopped. All her loopiness faded away. If anything, she seemed a little dull, though that might have been an illusion of her new girth – and besides, she was growing up. Also out. By the time I saw her in Brittas she was a different person. This time it was Sean who had put the child on a diet – for looking, I suspect,
That autumn, at Dr Prentice’s suggestion, they tapered the dose, and then, finally, gave it up. Nothing happened.
Evie was absolutely herself – body and mind. She was a little private, perhaps; watchful and solitary. There was, when I met her upstairs on New Year’s Day, a stilled and expectant look, like a child who has known danger, or one who is slightly deaf. She continued free of seizures: her childhood illness was now finished. In a way, it had never been very terrible. She had suffered, the summer of the whipped cream diet, four or five major seizures. Her last was the one in the yard, the year she started school. She did not have another problem until she was ten years old.
And that, so far as I can tell it, is what happened to Evie. But it is not the whole truth. It is just the truth in a concentrated form.
