Melissa Kite

Hypochondriacs are never happy because we know that eventually all of us are vindicated. As Spike Milligan said on his gravestone: ‘I told you I was ill.’ In fact, he had it engraved in Irish: ‘Dúirt mé leat go raibh mé breoite.’ Another one was Alan Clark, who for years listed symptoms – including the merest twinge – in his diaries, along with sentiments to the effect that he knew something would turn out to be serious one day and eventually, at a fairly respectable age to get to, it did. These people are my heroes. They know of what they speak. ‘It’s a two-tone mole!’ I screamed, as I stood in front of the mirror in the downstairs loo, top hitched up to examine a blemish in a most inaccessible part of my torso. How was I supposed to have noticed that there?

My American guest went down with a cough he could not shift and, after a week of protesting that he couldn’t be ill because he was fully vaccinated for everything, he asked me to take him to a doctor. This was an even more complicated request than his desire to call Ubers, and so we set off in my car to drive around the wilds of West Cork in search of medical assistance. I began by driving to the nearest town, and I led him into the A&E department of a hospital where I laid it on thick to the receptionist about him being an American tourist visiting the land of his ancestors, and I gave his Irish surname.

My American guest kept telling me he was going to call an Uber and I could not persuade him that no Uber was going to appear in the wilds of West Cork. I assured him that the only taxi service I knew of was the local funeral director. ‘What? Will I have to go in a hearse?’ said the chap from Philadelphia, laughing. I agreed it was quirky, but the funeral director really was the only taxi. ‘I’ll take you dead or alive’ is his unofficial slogan. The American laughed and laughed and texted his sons back in Philly to tell them the joke. It’s no joke, I thought, as I dialled the funeral home. The old boy answered after about 15 rings and asked me what I wanted in an accent so thick I could barely make out what he was saying.

After running all the errands I could to help my parents, a letter from West Midlands Police arrived. They were throwing the book at us because I’d been caught doing 40mph in a 30 in my parents’ car. The photo evidence showed their little silver Peugeot being driven by me on a dual carriageway in Coventry. A dual carriageway. In what world would anyone think they should be driving slower than 40 on a dual carriageway? I was bringing the car back from its MOT, having been asked to please sort this out by my father as one of a mountain of things he had let pile up since becoming progressively sicker over the past few months, and then having a stroke.

My father was discharged from hospital with a plastic bag containing 13 boxes of pills and a vague promise that a nurse would turn up at his house to help him. ‘He’ll have a package of care put in place,’ yawned a hospital functionary, who didn’t sound at all interested. But after he got home, the only package was the big bag of pills that sat on the kitchen table and a sheet with thousands of words in very small print detailing the complicated doses, which my father, who can’t see properly, was attempting to read with a magnifying glass when I arrived from Ireland. I had no more luck than him, even with my reading glasses on.

The hay dealer showed me his latest stock and told me the bright green hay would cost me a staggering €165 a bale. ‘I don’t want to smoke it, I want to feed it to my horses,’ I said, looking doubtfully at what was apparently best meadow hay. It was a very large bale, and it was very green, but even so. I would expect to pay €80 for a large bale, so twice that did not make any sense. I took a handful of it and smelt it and it had a pungent, grassy aroma. There was a strange twang to it. I asked if he could deliver me a couple of bales and he screwed his face up. He explained he had driven it all the way from England to West Cork. He would be happy to deliver me a €5,000 job lot, and he could offer me an arrangement whereby I paid it off in monthly instalments.

My mother was about to be taken to a care home called Willow Trees, and the first thing my instincts told me about that was that willow trees would not be the prevailing feature there. When I looked it up, my suspicions were confirmed. Not only could I not see willow trees, it also had a low rating for infection and safety. I phoned a private company to be quoted a mind-blowing fee for a live-in carer for a week or two, until I can get there, so she can be discharged from the hospital ward where they are holding her – there is no other word for it – while my father is recovering from a stroke. ‘One thing leads to another. If we let the NHS send her to that home, we don’t know what will go wrong next,’ I told my father on the phone, as he lay in his hospital bed.

The US marine left his long johns down the back of an armchair and the next guest complained that she had found ‘a pair of knickers’. I ran upstairs after she told me this, she and her male companion standing in the big Georgian doorway about to leave. I found grey thermals, of the kind you might wear under hiking trousers, completely hidden, dropped down the back of this bedroom armchair and camouflaged against the taupe coloured carpet. I cursed myself for not moving the chair, which I normally do, and bolted back down the main staircase to tell the guest it really wasn’t knickers, but their car was already making its way around the fountain. Off it went down the driveway as I stood there shouting: ‘It’s not knickers!’ Darn it, I thought.

The pilot of the Black Hawk told me I could recline the seat if I wasn’t comfortable. ‘Oh, great!’ I said, and started fiddling with the rock-hard thing I was strapped into, looking for a recliner handle. ‘Not really,’ he laughed, and his square jaw barely moved. When I say square jaw, I mean he had the squarest jaw of any man I had ever seen. He looked like a cartoon character. I had not realised men could really look like that. I felt a fool. Of course the seat didn’t recline. I was strapped into a Black Hawk because I was on a press trip with Gordon Brown to Iraq and we were being flown into the Green Zone.

‘Oggy oggy oggy!’ shouted the Italian flight attendant over his intercom, and all the hen party ladies on the plane squealed with delight. I’m a nervous flier, so as I strapped myself into my seat I was already hyperventilating. It was not ideal that I was sharing my flight from London to Cork with a hen party and a head steward who was acting like he was off his rocker. The blonde girl in the seat next to me was giggling and shouting to her friends, and jumping up and down in her seat. I was about to tell her she really was going to have to stop doing that when she said: ‘We’ve been in the Wevverspoons in the departure lounge all afternoon! I’m absolutely wasted!

The one question the priest did not ask me, thank goodness, was why I wanted to get married. That might have held up the enterprise indefinitely, and we are already so far behind with this attempted wedding of ours that I dare not risk another hold-up. Since serving the notice at Cork Registry Office, it’s a year down the line nearly and the builder boyfriend and I are no nearer to saying: ‘I do.’ Our only option is to get married, despite all my misgivings about how corny and pointless marriage is I’m nearer to saying: ‘I really can’t be bothered.’ Or: ‘If anything happens to me just bury me in the garden and don’t tell anyone I’m dead. That way you’ll keep the house with no questions asked, and I doubt anyone will notice.

The funeral director down the lane is also the local taxi service, which partly explains why I see him drive past our back gate so often. According to my neighbours, he has been known to joke ‘I’ll take you dead or alive’, and although he has not gone so far as to have this written on the side of his car, his approach does stand as testament to the Irish having a wonderfully earthy sense of humour. The BB claimed that the funeral director eyed him, or rather sized him, as if to assess his dimensions The builder boyfriend met this funeral cabbie, or taxi mortician, when he went to the wake of the elderly man who sold us our house.

Our house was suddenly shrouded in a thick, grey mass of cloud and it felt like a sea fog had descended. The Irish could not give a damn for rules and regs and no one is going to tell them what they can set fire to To some extent it had, but the fog grew in density until it wasn’t feasible that this was coming off the sea. The builder boyfriend came in from the stable yard and reported an acrid smell in the rain. This is what happens when fog descends. People burn their most difficult and illegal waste when visibility is low. ‘It’s the plasticky dew,’ said the builder b, who likes an Irish republican song.

‘We don’t have an appointment for you!’ yelled the woman sitting behind the reception hatch. My 87-year-old father stared back at her. He had made this appointment at his local GP surgery in the Midlands and I had flown from Ireland to be with him and my mother when they attended it. We had the right day and time and he had the confirmation text to prove it. But the receptionist couldn’t find it on her system. ‘You need to move!’ she shouted at my father. ‘I’ve come a long way…’ I tried, to which she shouted back ‘Who are you!’ and didn’t wait for the answer. It wasn’t a question. Then the receptionist looked beyond my father and fixed a very warm smile on the woman behind him in the queue: ‘Can I help you?

‘Life is changed, not ended,’ said the slogan on the lectern as the priest told his flock what to think about a difficult subject, with a reassuring smile. ‘It’s quite a big change,’ I whispered to the builder boyfriend who was staring down at his feet in an attempt to stop the allergic response that was welling up. The service was commemorating those who have died this past year in our corner of West Cork, but the overoptimistic way it was being done was making us feel ever so slightly hysterical. I leaned in to the BB: ‘Have you noticed how Mary has got a halo made of the 12 EU stars?’ I stared at the slogan on the lectern, an excerpt from the Roman Missal, embroidered on an ornamental cloth.

A warm Sahara wind was blowing and by late afternoon the western sky where it met the sea was the colour of golden sand. Surfers bobbed like seals on the milky ocean, waiting for a wave. It stretched like a sheet of silk all the way to the golden horizon. Lying by the hotel pool facing the seafront, I was watching the surfers, the fishing boats, the palm trees waving on the promenade, and something else. ‘John, I just need to be honest with you,’ said a glamorous, buxom, pink-lipsticked blonde lady in her sixties wearing a leopard-print sarong, sitting on a sunbed sideways facing the back of a slim, frightened-looking man, also in his sixties. She spoke in a soft Scottish accent, coquettishly stirring a cocktail in a poolside cardboard cup.

The empty train seat looked inviting, and all three of us stared at it, then looked away, not daring to either take it, or offer it to the other. This train from Clapham Junction to Surrey was absolutely packed. But when someone got up and there was a seat right next to me, I realised that under the prevailing conventions relating to equality, I could neither take it nor offer it. I was squeezed between two ladies, one quite elderly who looked exhausted and desperate for a seat. She was standing slightly behind me, so, technically speaking, I was in line for the seat. But as she clearly had a good 20 years on me and looked tired, she should have the seat, the way I was brought up.

‘This is a New York strut,’ said the builder boyfriend as he wedged in place a steel bar, bracing shut our bedroom door to prevent us being murdered in our beds. We had been settling in for the night. The BB had been about to close the farmyard gates when a car swept inside them in the pitch dark and a man wound down his window and started chatting. My heart racing, I realised she might have read what I wrote about her – and she had come back for revenge After a while, the BB said this was all very nice but who was he and what did he want? The man said he was booked in here to stay the night. The BB said that could not be right as we were shut for a week while he did some decorating. ‘But come in anyway and we’ll try and sort this out.

‘Printers are evil,’ said the office supplies salesman after I texted him to complain that my new printer was not working. A day earlier he had installed it perfectly, and it worked perfectly – all the while he was standing there. Then he left, and the devilish thing looked at me and thought: ‘I’ll have some fun with her.’ The problem could be anything. The printer doesn’t care. All it wants to do is not work I don’t really understand why we can put men and women in space, but we can’t make printers work unless a tech expert is standing by. Elon Musk says he is going to Mars, and I believe him. I have his Starlink wifi and it’s brilliant. What I don’t understand is why Elon, who can do everything, can’t help make printers work.