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Joseph O'Connor: My week

Sunday 27 April 2003 00:00 BST
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At the beginning of the week, my wife and I were in the middle of an almost perfect holiday. The weather was unseasonably tropical for Portugal; the food was exquisite, the wine magnificent. There had been the usual pre-vacation hassles, all of which ratchet up your stress so severely that you need the holiday just to return to feeling normally bad. The countdown to departure, the inevitably missing passports, the assembling of the paraphernalia required to satiate a lively two-year-old. (The wife and I had one bag each. The boy had so many, we were like the Stones on tour.) There was also the fact, for me at least, that since 11 September 2001, it is hard to board a plane without facing the possibility that violent death is only a matter of hours away. And I do find that tends to spoil my enjoyment of the onboard movie.

But all was fine. Downright pleasant, in fact. We were delivered to the resort safely and promptly. Shorn of care, the first days buffed us up to that elusive holiday glow only ever seen in photographs of the Blair family in Tuscany. But then it started. There was no ignoring it. Little Junior was not quite himself.

By nature my son is mild-mannered, angelic of countenance and pleasant to the last. So it surprised me, on morning seven or eight, when he took a large bite out of a wine glass. I was holding the glass to his mouth at the time, trying to persuade him to sample some of the local orange juice. Well, he sampled it "pips and all", as my grandmother used to say of over-achievers.

Slow-motion is often mentioned by survivors of shock, and yes, the next infinitesimal blip of time seemed to last about six months. Diddums looked up at me. I looked down at him. As my fingers lunged for the shard of glass protruding from his lips, they felt as if grasping through molten tar. The light in his eyes I will never forget; that expression which seemed to be saying many things, but one thing mainly: "You wanna play Test-the-Boundary? Here's where you lose, Sucka."

About 50 years later I got the shattered fragment out of his gob. Millennia passed before I wrenched apart his jaws, threw him over my knee and started bellowing "SPIT!" Miraculously, only the rim had gone into his mouth, which meant his trachea and lungs, still being intact, began to produce a screech that could have peeled vegetables. I have never actually attacked a donkey with a corkscrew but it was, I imagine, something like that. My own howlings, not to be outdone, were intense and blasphemous. He heard words he will not have heard before, few of them polysyllables.

At some point during all this, the hem of his Bob the Builder T-shirt rucked up, and it was then I saw what may have been the catalyst to his unusual behaviour. That speckling of scarlet blotches could mean only one thing. He had fallen victim to the chickenpox that his creche had warned us about.

Why any pox at all should be named after a chicken is something truly mind-boggling, if anything is. But that is the only interesting thing about it. Everything else is misery of a kind so pure you feel your heart getting slowly mashed as you watch the inexorable march of the effects. Before long the poor mite had begun to scratch, then to rake at his flesh as though trying to claw it off. Fearful tears followed; plump tears of confusion. The calamine failed to soothe, and so did our words. Soon the livid spots had appeared on his forehead and cheeks. Up and down his neck. On his ears and nose. By now he looked like that famous painting of the Spanish Boy Crying, but done by one of the Pointillist school.

Each scream of "make it stop" was like a spear through the spirit. We did our best to calm him, but it was piteously inadequate. That horror of parents – passivity – reigned supreme. All we could do was sit there and watch. Few weeks in your life involve having to observe the almost unrelievable suffering of someone you love. It is a hard lesson, but an inescapable one, that solidarity, loyalty – even love – can do so little when the pain begins to come.

The rest of the holiday is now a blur of screaming and weeping; sleepless nights; sweats and terrors. He is better now, and seems miraculously unperplexed. In fact he seems to think it was a wonderful holiday, and maybe there is an innate wisdom in such a convenient amnesia. Perhaps he has forgotten his terrible week, but his mother and I will not.

Joseph O'Connor's latest novel, 'Star of the Sea', is published by Secker and Warburg

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