Fly in the Ointment Read Free Page A

course I didn’t know it at the time. Believe the comforts people offer you and you can easily manage to persuade yourself that everyone else’s teenagers look as sour and pale and moody as Malachy did, spend whole days in bed, and steal from their parents’ pockets. Who is to know the shade of difference between healthy rebellion and the slow, steady disintegration of a young person’s personality?
    Not Stuart. He put a huge amount of effort into staying away from the house. We barely saw him. Meetings. Work trips. Conferences abroad. And not me, either. I only saw what I was brave enough to see, and that was no more than what I felt strong enough to deal with. I only worked part-time (in a dry-cleaner’s – perhaps the fumes softened my brain). But they were long enough hours to offer the escape from truth so many parents need.
    Now, of course, all this time later, I can face the facts. Already by fourteen Malachy was in with the badcrowd. By fifteen he was in thrall to drugs. By sixteen he was a junkie – dishonest and snivelling, with a heap of seedy friends who, even when you’d taken Malachy’s phone away from him, still managed to find some way of signalling this week’s special offer to him over the hedge.
    Did we talk about it, Stuart and I? Barely at all, beyond the day-to-day recounting of our son’s tantrums and disappearances, occasional paranoid fits and the anxious complaints of the neighbours. I certainly wouldn’t have asked for Stuart’s help or advice, knowing only too well the sort of wrangle it would have set in train. More of his tiresome accusations: ‘If you’d not spoiled that boy . . .’ My counter-arguments: ‘If you had ever been
here
.’ No. Better to press on alone, phoning the police to insist that they came round to clear the drug-sellers away from the front of our house; making excuses to drop Malachy off so close to school in the morning that there’d be at least a chance he’d feel too idle even to bunk off; trying to stop him leaving the house for ludicrously spurious reasons at all times of the day and night.
    All hopeless. And, once Malachy had finally rubbed enough of his reeling brain cells together to spark the realization that he was now old enough to leave school, a whole lot worse. I dreaded leavingthe house. I dreaded coming home again. And I loathed being in it. So when the social worker, Mrs Kuperschmidt, finally advised me to offer him the choice – full drug rehabilitation in a clinic or leave the house – he sulked, then shouted, but he left the house. The next time I saw him he was hanging round the door to the shopping centre along with a girl with a nose jewel so lurid it looked like a bad sore, and shorts halfway up her arse.
    I stopped to talk to him. ‘Look at you, Malachy. Just
look
at you.’
    He turned away. ‘Oh, piss off, Mum!’
    A spark of interest flashed across the girl’s bland face. ‘Are you Mally’s mother?’
    To this day I am glad I held back the bitter ‘I
used
to be’ that sprang to mind and told the girl instead, ‘Yes, I’m his mother. And on the day he finally manages to convince me he’s sorted himself out, then I’ll be happy to have him back.’
    She turned to Malachy. ‘Did you hear what she said?’
    He muttered sourly at the pavement slabs beneath his feet.
    â€˜
Well?
’ she demanded.
    He scowled at her. ‘Well, what?’
    â€˜What are you going to
do
?’
    He looked a bit baffled. ‘What do you mean?’
    â€˜I’m asking, are you going back?’
    He nodded towards me. ‘What, with her?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    He stared at me with venom. ‘Not if she’s going to keep on and on at me like before. Not if she’s going to be rude to my friends and nag me all the time.’
    Oh, blessed are the peacemakers. She turned to me.