One for the Road: Down with the sickness

For a while there, I went on such a good run of being sickness-free that I began to look at people who were always down with a dose the way I imagine the very rich look at commoners: With feigned sympathy and the secret conviction that nobody could end up in such a horrid condition without having somehow brought it upon themselves.

My sister, her man and their two daughters were the main victims of Lord Emmet’s health snobbery, though they never knew it.

For months, barely a week went by without at least one of their faces being encrusted in a thick mask of dried snot.

I often imagine how tricky nights out must be for Toni.

“Hello, this is my partner Tom. He cannot speak right now because his entire head is encased in hardened mucus, but he is positively charmed to make your acquaintance.”

Many times I called round to find their living room transformed into a makeshift infirmary where, instead of being mainlined vitamins and handed antibiotics, the puffy-eyed, pyjama-clad patients were plied with cold and flu capsules and told to chain-watch episodes of ‘Bluey’ until they either recovered or suffocated.

“Oh, you poor things,” I would say. “Another dose and not one of you spared? That must be the fifth plague to hit this place in, what, three months? Some people just have no luck.”

Then I would reluctantly kiss one of them on the crown of the head and swim through the sputum to freedom.

Later I would call up to my ma and da’s house to diagnose the Coyles from a safe distance.

“It’s the vegetarian streak in them,” I would begin. “Not enough meat.”

My da would chime in. “Aye, but it’s all the same vegetables. Not enough variety. When’s the last time ye saw one of them weins eating a turnip?”

Then my ma: “Here, it happens to every family when they’re going to school and staying at baby minders. They pick up everything, bring it home and give it to the whole house.”

There would be a pause before me and my da looked at each other, as if to say, “Don’t women say the craziest things?”

What puzzled me most about the Coyles’ endless under-the-weatherness was the sheer variety of symptoms. One day it was a headcold, the next it mutated into a gut-spilling, bowel-busting bug of the most vicious kind.

For reasons best known to my subconscious, this only deepened Lord Emmet’s belief that their wretchedness was, in some fundamental way, their own fault.

For months, I observed their house like a scientist peering into a petri dish – only with a superiority and judgement that has no place in a laboratory.

Then the other night, it all came back to bite me.

I do not know what time it was, but I awoke on the cusp of projectile vomiting across the room. I sat bolt upright like a zombie in a coffin and sprinted for the toilet, getting my head over the bowl just in time.

For the next 24 hours I woke, sweated, ran and retched.

Of course, at no point did not blame myself. I had endless sympathy for my own plight. Were I not myself, I might have described the crooked creature occupying my bed as a pathetic, self-pitying mess of a man.

“Why, why, why, why?” I repeated, doubled over in the fetal position and clutching a blanket like a dying peasant in a Russian novel. “WHY, WHY, WHY?”

Time did its thing. The following day, when I woke, the blades inside my stomach had been blunted.

In their place, I had developed a dose.

“Niamh,” I shouted when I noticed her shuffle across the landing.

“Yes?” she said, opening the door a crack.

“If you’re going to the shop, get me a steak and a bag of turnips.”

“Right.”

“Oh, and before you go, stick on an episode of ‘Bluey’. I’m gonna try make it downstairs soon.”