been told by Mum about anger. If you close your eyes and count to ten it either doesn’t matter or you’ve forgotten. Anger is like adverts that way. Also, don’t let your mum brush your hair if she’s angry. And if she’s angry and asks ‘Do I look stupid?’ do not answer.
I think about this, but I’m still mad. So I take one packet of biscuits and open them and stamp them into the floor. Then I take two cartons of milk, and pour them onto the biscuits. Then I take a tin of soup and open it and pour the soup over the kitchen chairs. Then I find crisps: when we thought crisps were extinct. I eat as much crisps as I can, then throw the rest around like confetti.
Then I get the best idea. I go upstairs and take the camera out from under Calum Ian’s pillow. Then I go for
I take one picture of me smiling, then leave.
To put the cherry on the cake I borrow Calum Ian’s spray-can and spray a big gold
When I get home I find out that’s where the MacNeil brothers have been.
Everyone is standing around Duncan like he’s become very important.
His face looks queer. It’s red on one side and so puffy his cheek droops and you can’t see his eye.
Me: ‘You’re turning into a pig.’
Duncan looks sad about this, but too tired for fighting. Elizabeth glares at me and kneels between us.
‘Does it hurt?’ she asks.
Duncan doesn’t mention if it does. Calum Ian says, ‘I’m always warning him, I’m forever warning him, but does he listen? His fingers were manky when he was picking at his scabs. He’s an eejit; he needs back in Cròileagan.’
Nursery was years ago for Duncan – so it’s not kind to tell him this. His good eye grows the spike of a tear and his mouth turns down.
Elizabeth goes to her bedside cabinet and takes out three of the books from her boring book collection. The first is called Medicine for the Rural Doctor. The second, Clinical Medicine. The third, A Colour Atlas of Dermatology. This is an atlas not with maps but with pictures, and of faces and bodies. Two of the books have her mum’s name written on the inside. On the other she’s written: Belonged to Dad.
Elizabeth: ‘The redness, it sort of stops in the middle … Is there a problem where it can stop like that?’
Calum Ian: ‘Look at these!’
Me: ‘Some of those pictures are scary.’
Alex: ‘I’ll get a wrong dream …’
Elizabeth: ‘Let me mark the page – stop, give them back.’
Me: ‘That’s rotten!’
The book is something you can’t stop looking at, even if you close your eyes. The pictures make me laugh and gasp. But then Elizabeth is shushing us, and I realise that we must have forgotten about looking after Duncan. He’s holding his hood up high over his face.
We look as seriously as we can. Elizabeth goes through all the pictures. Then she puts a plastic strip on Duncan’s forehead which glows red for hotness.
Elizabeth: ‘He has an infection.’
Duncan: ‘Don’t tell me it’s bad, please …’
Elizabeth: ‘Is your eye sore?’
Duncan: ‘How can an eye be sore? It’s just sore if you get a stick in it or something. Your eye can’t get sore.’
Elizabeth: ‘Around the edges? Your eyelid?’
Duncan: ‘Oh aye. That’s sore.’
In the end we can’t decide if Duncan has Rosacea, Forehead, or Acne Vulgaris, Cystic, Face, or Herpes Zoster, Ophthalmic distribution, or Erysipelas, Face or Impetigo Contagiosa, or Dermatitis / Eczema, Secondary spread face.
Calum Ian: ‘It all looks the same.’
Me: ‘Could it be all of them at the same time?’
Elizabeth: ‘I don’t think so. That’s not likely.’
Me: ‘Then just some of them?’
Elizabeth: ‘Don’t know.’
Calum Ian: ‘I thought you did know? I thought you were the doctor’s girl, who had learnt everything before going to big school? That’s what we believed. Or what you wanted us to believe.’
Elizabeth looks hard at the book. Then she asks us for an extra moment, and goes out into the garden.
Alex eats a biscuit and stares at Duncan as if he were a dinosaur in a museum. I look at Calum Ian and say, ‘You actually like Elizabeth, don’t you? Bet you draw pictures of her at home where she’s the mum and you’re the dad and we’re the kids. Bet you do.’
Calum Ian’s face changes and changes: the last change turning out to be the worst.
‘Where you fucking been, Gloic?’ he says. Then: ‘You fucking stay away from our house, all right?’
Too late – I’m thinking.
For about the first time, though, I have doubts about what I did.
I go to the window. Elizabeth is in the corner of the garden. She’s talking with nobody there.
When I go outside she stops. When I ask who she was talking to she says, ‘Nobody.’ She looks shy again when I ask if it was her mum or dad.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ I tell her. ‘It’s natural. I talk to other people all the time.’
‘I know you do,’ she says.
We stand staring at her book. It’s open on a page, of a sad boy with angry skin and terrible bumps on his face. The illness he has is called Smallpox, Scarring of Face.
Me: ‘Is that the illness we all got?’
Elizabeth shakes her head.
‘It looked a bit like that. But I checked before. The illness we had isn’t even in the book.’
The wind hushes and shushes across the grass. Elizabeth looks at me funnily. Then she takes my hand and says, ‘We need to go up to the hospital. He needs antibiotics. I don’t want to go there on my own.’
The
