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colour-coordinated rows. I glanced at his toy soldiers, piled on a shelf in the playroom where he had chucked them that evening. That wouldn’t do. Moments later they were all poised in position.
When Ger got up at 6am to go to work his breakfast was ready and I was dusting the living room. ‘I feel so sorry for you,’ he sympathized. ‘You have been up all night.’
‘Don’t be sorry: I feel superb!’ I countered. He laughed at me. ‘You’re my dream woman! I always wanted a wife who would keep the place spotless.’
‘I don’t know what’s come over me,’ I admitted. Normally I was a disaster in the house. I wasn’t messy, but I wasn’t particularly tidy either. I could exist with a certain amount of chaos around me – after all, that’s what everyone’s house is like if they have small children. I always felt it would drive me mad if I felt everything had to be perfect. But for some reason I had suddenly become filled with enormous energy and I had to channel it into something.
‘Perhaps I’m going mad?’ I suggested. I had never felt this compulsion to clean before. ‘Look at those shoes.’ I pointed to the shoe rack, where at least ten pairs of shoes were arranged in a smart rank, so shiny so you could almost see your face in them. Ger raised his eyebrows.
‘Bernie – it’s official. You’re turning into your mother.’
My mother, Maria, was a tiny dynamo of a woman. She had grown up with her father and stepmother, who – as in the fairy tales – had two beloved children of her own. Mum was treated like a slave in her own home, and at the age of twelve she went into service like so many young girls in Ireland in the early 1920s. I remember hearing how she would have to get up at 4am to milk the cows, her fingers blue with cold, then she would go inside to lay the fires, break the ice on the wash stands, and work all day in the house without a break. When her tasks were finally over at around 11 at night, she would literally collapse into bed. She devoted her life to serving others, and when I and my four siblings were growing up in our small terraced house in Drogheda she would always be washing and scrubbing, cooking and cleaning – never resting until the place was spotless. We were poor, but we were always well turned out. And our shoes, set out for us the night before school, were polished until they gleamed.
‘Actually, I think it is the drugs.’ I had been taking them for a few days and this huge burst of energy must be one of the side effects. The oncologist hadn’t mentioned any side effects, so I dug out one of the packets and looked at the ‘patient information leaflet’. Sure enough, there, in the midst of conditions I had never heard of like promimal myopathy , Cushing’s syndrome and negative nitrogen balance , I found euphoria , insomnia and, more worryingly, psychosis .
‘Well, perhaps I could take some to improve my golf swing,’ Ger joked. ‘I could do with some help.’
Not only was I behaving as if I wanted to win Housewife of the Year 1988, I was talking nineteen to the dozen. ‘Slow down,’ my garrulous friend Emma from down the road would say. ‘Talk about gift of the gab. I can’t keep up with you.’ Yet I had to talk quickly to keep up with the speed at which my mind was going – I would be in the middle of a sentence and find myself already forming the next one. Life was going at 90 miles per hour. My brain raced with plans and schemes. I sat up late into the night, existing on very little sleep, making list after list. I still have these tucked away in a drawer, and I hardly recognize my writing – it is larger and more flamboyant than my usual restrained style. There are names of countries I wanted to visit for holidays; outings to take the children on; plans for redesigning the garden; things I thought