Prayer for the sick

I was standing over the sink, painstakingly peeling a few prematurely extracted eggs, when, all of sudden, my five-year-old niece, adorned with tiara and tutu, came whirling through the door like a fabulous hurricane.

“And what beautician made such a good job of the Tasmanian Devil?” I asked, juggling a half-naked, half-cooked egg.

She stopped dead and glowered at me through her eyebrows.

I smirked defiantly.

Unimpressed, she squinted and drew breath.

“I no Tasmanian Devil!” she shouted, before bursting into a fit of coughing and spluttering.

I stuck my tongue out at her victoriously, as if a respiratory episode somehow meant total defeat, and returned my attention towards the task of denuding my eggs.

Then I looked up…

“Hi, what’re you doing off? Are you not meant to be back at school?”

She performed a sloppy pirouette, then, mid-spin, said, “I’m sick.”

Those present looked at her as she bounced from one armchair to the next, like Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnston springing between opposite sets of ring ropes.

“She doesn’t look very S-I-C-K,” I said to my sister, her mother.

“She actually isn’t well. She was up all night boking, she’s full of snots and her wee chest hasn’t been right for about a month,” she replied.

In that same space of time, the wee doll had somehow obtained a magic wand and was in the middle of casting a silence spell upon her granny.

“Hocus pocus wocus flocus, Ga (what she calls my ma) can’t speak until I say so!”

Lots of overly elaborate wand swooshing.

“Okay, Ga, you aren’t allowed to talk now until I take my spell off you.”

Then she chucked her enchanted implement aside, hopped up on a seat at the kitchen table and pretended to read the UlsterHerald.

“Make sure ye skip page ten, anyway,” said her Granda. “One look at it could undo everything useful you learned in P1.”

And that was me told.

Anyway, after a while, the sickness the child had been staving off came crashing down on her like a tonne of bricks, whereupon she was duly escorted from the premises, turfed into the back of her ma’s car and transferred to her family homestead.

According to her legal, bailiff-fearing guardians, she was then taken to her chamber, from where she is said not to have budged for another 24 hours.

In the restored quiet of our house, I remembered how much I used to wish that I would come down with a sickness so that I could get a couple of days off school.

In fact, I recalled on one occasion being so desperate for a legitimate excuse to miss a school day that, at the end of my nightly prayers, after having asked God to bless the whole family, right down to the dog, I put in one last word for myself.

“And, God, once you’ve done all that, only if you’ve the time, of course, go on make me wake up in the morning with vomiting and diarrhoea so violent that I cannot physically leave the house… See, I’ve my A-Level English exam tomorrow and there is not a chance I am getting ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ read from start to finish by the morning.”