Lifesaving for Beginners

her eyes disappear. Now her face looks like it has only a nose and a mouth and zillions of lines where her eyes used to be.
    The old lady says, ‘You can take any of them from this stop, young fella. They’re all headin’ the one way. Like the rest of us, wha’?’ She whacks the other old lady on the arm with her handbag and the pair of them cackle, like the hens at the petting zoo in Brighton. I don’t really get it but I laugh along because Mam always said that you should be polite to old people. I suppose it’s because they’re so old and they might die any minute.
    I walk back to Faith and tell her about the bus. She nods and says, ‘Thank you, Milo.’ She leans against the wall and closes her eyes.
    We wait for the bus.
    Coming up the road is a woman with a boy. The boy is six or seven, I reckon. The woman is his mam. You can tell by the way she walks ahead of him and then stops and looks back and waits for him to catch up. The boy is holding a string and the string is attached to a balloon. One of those helium balloons you sometimes get at posh kids’ parties. The balloon is red and because the evening is so cold and dark you really notice it, that balloon. The way it sort of dances at the end of the string. And the colour too. A really bright red, like a fire engine. The boy is holding the string in one hand and an ice-cream cone in the other. Adults always wonder how kids can eat ice cream in the wintertime, but it tastes exactly the same as it does in the summertime.
    The mam takes a tissue out of her pocket and walks back to the kid. She bends so she can wipe the melted ice cream off his hands. She wipes his face too, even though there’s no ice cream on his face.
    That’s when he lets go of the string.
    That’s when the balloon floats away.
    It’s funny how quickly balloons can float. One minute, they’re right there. Right beside you. And the next, they’re gone. All you can see is a little circle of red in the dirty grey of the sky. You can hardly see the string anymore.
    The kid is crying now. He cries really loudly for his size. His mouth is open and his tongue is white, on account of the ice cream.
    I look away. I wouldn’t want people looking at me if I was crying like that, in the middle of the street.
    I look at the balloon instead. I wonder where it’ll end up. England, maybe. It’ll never come back here, that’s for sure. Not unless the wind changes direction, and even if it does, I bet it’ll be burst by then.
    The kid has stopped crying now. His mam wraps a tissue round the cone and hands it back to him. She says something. I don’t know what. But it must be something nice cos the kid smiles.
    If I rubbed a lamp right now and a genie appeared and granted me a wish, I’d wish that Mam were here. If she were here, I know I’d be wearing a warmer coat. She was always going on about wrapping up if it was cold out. Perishing. That’s what she called it.
    It’s perishing outside, so it is. Wrap up warm, Milo, there’s a good lad.
    And Faith wouldn’t be crying in the middle of the street.
    And we wouldn’t be in Ireland. Or, if we were, we’d be on our holiday and I’d be the one with ice cream dripping everywhere, even in the middle of winter. Mam knew about ice cream and the way it tastes the same in the winter as it does in the summer.
    I look at Faith. She’s still leaning against the wall and her eyes are still closed. I don’t know why I’m thinking about genies and lamps. There’re no such things as genies. Everybody knows that.
    I zip up my jacket and I put up my hood. I push my hands deep into the pockets.
    When I look at the sky again, the balloon is gone.
    It’s like it was never there at all.

 
    Nothing happens.
    Nothing you’d notice.
    I don’t ring Thomas.
    I tell Brona I can’t talk right now. When she rings, I say, ‘I’m in the middle of a chapter.’
    I listen when Minnie tells me about spinach and how it’s a great provider of folic acid, which is really essential at this stage of the baby’s development.
    ‘Tell me to fuck off if I’m boring you, won’t you?’ This is after she’s been talking about her stools – that’s what she’s calling them now – and how regular she is compared with before, when days could go by without so much as a whimper out of her bowel, never mind a movement.
    I say, ‘Of course you’re not boring me,’ which is a lie.
    I don’t tell her what happened. That Faith came to Dublin. I don’t know