Flid

Colin Stewart

Description

Flid is a book about a character. A character with a disability. But forget everything you think you know about disability and meet Kevin.What follows is a moving and sometimes comic account of a life lived to the max. No arms, no legs no problem! Watch as Kevin navigates his way through school, the workplace and university, _breaking barriers at every step. An optimistic and ebullient force, it is only when Kevin unexpectedly finds love again, in later years, that he is called upon to reassess a condition he has long come to accept.

Informations

• Publié par: Distributed by eBookpartnership
• Date de parution: 01 novembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781839785498
• Langue: English

Extrait

flid
Colin Stewart


Flid
Published by The Conrad Press Ltd. in the United Kingdom 2022
Tel: [phone]
www.theconradpress.com
[e-mail]
ISBN 978-1-839785-49-8
Copyright © Colin Stewart, 2022
All rights reserved.
Typesetting and Cover Design by: Charlotte Mouncey, www.bookstyle.co.uk
The Conrad Press logo was designed by Maria Priestley.


We hold these truths to be self-evident …


Prologue
C athy has a soft spot – asks me how I know him. I tell her I’m writing a book. She pauses, pointing out Pamela Jones as she glides across the hall within, continuing in a whisper: they had a relationship you know…
It isn’t true, but I don’t correct her.
What about you? I ask.
Me? No… though I’ve thought about it, she admits, a slow drag sending spirals of smoke sprawling up into the chill night air. I do fancy him, she continues in an undertone, and I think he’s an extraordinary person. She holds my eye now, making sure I’ve heard and understood, before conceding with seeming regret: but I think we’re better off as friends.
There were many eulogies that night: some official, delivered from a clearing of chairs at the far end of the room, some only in passing.
When I took a seat next to Pamela Jones, who I didn’t yet know by sight, she had almost immediately turned to introduce herself, before asking how I knew Kevin.
I’m writing a book about him, I had replied, smiling despite myself, adding quickly, and you’re in it.
There should be a whole chapter on me, she snorted. We went to school together you know…
I did.
Pamela had given her testimonial earlier in the evening, recalling a scene I already knew by heart and had written about, relating – with a laconic drawl – how she had pulled unexpectedly onto the Donnellon drive in her brand new car. Rushing out to investigate, Mrs Donnellon had almost immediately declared that her son would not be driving any time soon.
Kevin would pass his test within a matter of months, Pamela observed, as the room erupted into generous applause – this the sort of reversal they had come to expect of their celebrated friend.
Breathless and red of face, his tongue loosened by the alcohol he had been consuming throughout the day, Mark Holt took to the floor with an unsteady shuffle, before running emotively through the various campaigns they had worked on together over the years. There were tears in his eyes when he detailed his friend’s courage, explaining that Kevin had never been one to duck a fight: an inspiration, he averred, despite difficulties he had never made an issue of.
We were here to celebrate Kevin’s fiftieth year, the room full of people I had already written about, who I felt I knew despite having never met, refracted as they were by time and perspective.
James Schaer, the nephew, gave a reading next, reciting a poem that Andrew Kavanagh, one of Kevin’s oldest friends, had composed for an earlier occasion: forty-eight lines of twenty-four rhyming couplets. I know them both; I have written about them too. The poem was utter doggerel.
As this latest speaker stepped down, I turned my head about the room, only now noticing the photographs affixed at shoulder height to the walls around us. There were others spread across the tables too, like oversized playing cards, each showing Kevin in a different time and place, offering their own florid documentation of his varied life and career thus far: the confidence and exuberance were hard to ignore.
The room is full of thalidomides, all now around fifty years of age, as has to be the case, and – suddenly lost in their incestuous midst – I realise that they will all soon be footnotes, their stories forgotten.
I watch closely as the tributes run on, Kevin’s face betraying an increasing, if good-natured, bewilderment at the manner of representation. Those garbled portraits don’t seem right, and we both know it, skewering as they do into a reductive parody.
A captive audience, at his own event, volunteering genial bemusement to everything that is said – with smiles and acknowledgements to the guests who plead his attention – Kevin wonders whether he really belongs, what his life amounts to, whether anybody truly knows him. I wonder, too, as recollections of my own return, scenes I had thought forgotten.
But this isn’t about me.
What had been clear, from the moment we started to talk, was the precision of Kevin’s memory in picking out those sharp pinpricks of detail, the bright particulars that blazed a fevered course through the space of time that lay between, Kevin bringing each lucidly to life.
My own memory, conversely, is grey and tortuous: an ash that whistles through heavy winds over desert flats – dead ends, lacking substance.
But this isn’t about me.
She said, simply, ‘It’s not going to happen,’ and whatever trailed after – contrition, apology, reconciliation – he didn’t hear. Stood at the kerb, under a quickly-darkening sky, barely aware of the rain that had just started to fall, a heavy burst starching the shirt he had put on specially for the occasion, there was nothing he could offer in response.
‘It’s not going to happen.’
Did she repeat the words, or is their meaning still ringing from that single pronouncement?
But this isn’t about me.


Chapter 1
K evin Donnellon was delivered at Walton Hospital on 28 November 1961. His mother, Agnes, heavily sedated at the conclusion of the long and difficult birth of her fifth child, was barely conscious.
There was pity rather than wonder when the newborn was revealed, with Agnes still too confused to take proper account of what was uncharted territory and no one knowing if Kevin would last the night. Thalidomide – the ‘super drug’ – had been withdrawn from the pharmaceutical shelves by the morning, with cause belatedly following effect.
I first came to know Kevin through my brother, Gary, who met him off the back of a six-month youth employment scheme he was forced to attend in the spring of 1984, our relationship initially conducted at something of a remove.
Kevin was twenty-two and, slowly filling out into the man he would become, no longer the child he had once seemed set to remain, though his smooth, heart-shaped face, with its button nose and fleshy pink lips, was ageless, some said cherubic. Initial impressions proved misleading – the squashed-red pug nose, which had been broken on numerous occasions, that of a boxer or a drinker; the chin, cleft ; the man himself anything but an angel.
Kevin’s face was broad and articulate with wide-spread, asymmetric blue-grey eyes, the right of which – its feathery brow lifted in permanent entreaty – like glass compared to its heavy-lidded companion. Rising lavishly over these eyes, on the ridge of a particularly pronounced brow, the untutored supercilia allowed for the full range of expression. Worldly and innocent, candid and calculated, incredulous and naïve – as quick to engage a friend as a stranger – Kevin was a challenge to interpretation.
Behind the bloated, childlike lips that retreat to reveal a gummy, protuberant smile (his most habitual expression), Kevin’s teeth are straight, square… and false – ‘ Crowns !’ he cries, reading over my shoulder, ‘they’re crowns !’ – drawing the discriminating eye almost intentionally from the scar cutting a left-right diagonal across the soft convex of his pale philtrum.
His hair, which would suffer any number of revisions over the years was, at the time, a feathery brown mop, his diminutive ears showing like golf balls through the rough, while his upper lip would soon be sporting the bum-fluff moustache which was then the fashion.
By the time I had been properly introduced and first took account of his appearance up close, Kevin was boasting a high-alkaline permanent wave from his recent visit to Smithies (on College Road), having spent the better part of an hour straddling a reclining chair as the noxious glue was applied.
Revelling in the weft of his new pelt, russet gold in full sun, Kevin had felt like a new man when he set off on a celebratory drive. ‘A Solid Bond in your Heart’ played on the radio and he sang hoarsely along, licking at the footballer’s moustache now perched on his upper lip.
The moustache was gone within a month, Kevin shaving smooth after learning of its preponderance within the gay community.
‘I had a reputation to uphold,’ he chuckles, though the approbation of the herd did little to forestall his next misguided phase – New Romantic.
Kevin, in truth, rarely stuck with anything: his hair, short and sharp one day, might be left to go to seed for the rest of the year. His most dramatic makeover came during the fortnight when he briefly considered himself a punk, his dismayed mother barely recognising her son when he rattled home, a bona fide goth. The jarring effect of the heavily applied eyeliner and the jet-black Liberty spikes was only slightly confused by the chaste check shirt that Kevin wore down below.
‘Is that you?’ his mother quivered, which seemed an exaggeration.
Kevin’s gossamer-thin locks were all too soon receding anyway, and though he made an occasional attempt at the Bobby Charlton comb-over, it was quickly apparent that he was fighting a losing battle. Henceforth, he kept the stylings strategically short, clipping those steadily reducing strands back up with the tide of a naturally high hairline.
The gold glint of stud that idled on the dimpled lobe of his high-set left ear was a later addition and came as a surprise when Kevin called me across, asking after my brother.
‘He’s in, I think,’ I said, just as Gary came striding down the path, kicking up stones.
Kevin turned the engine in reply and, dropping the ball from under my arm, I backed away to watch from a suitable distance as, spinning