Delphine's Socks
Quest
Jack and Hannah Ormerod and Lucia, Delphine & Fin
Sat 23 Jul 2016 20:03
 ‘Come on, Delphine! We’re going to be late.’ It was twenty-past eight and Delphine was sitting and drawing. I looked over from washing-up. She was drawing her new favourite thing, a Harry Potter take on Diary of the Wimpy Kid. Harry, Hermione and Ron were all missing a bit of their faces and looked like they should be going to Greg Heffley’s middle school. ‘Delph, why don’t you put on your socks?’ ‘I can’t put on my socks.’ ‘Really? I’m sure I’ve seen you put on your socks.’ She shrugged and kept drawing. I sighed to myself. This meant I was going to have to do it for her, that is if we wanted to be on time. I thought of Monique and pictured her piercing eyes waiting in the dance studio. We wanted to be on time. ‘It’s cause you’ve got Cerebral Palsy,’ Lu said matter-of-factly from the other side of the saloon table. ‘But you shouldn’t let that stop you doing things.’ I looked up. Lulu was talking into her hair, painstakingly taking out the rollers she’d bought from The Bazaar, a Chinese shop next to St. George’s market. She'd slept in them and was struggling to free her hair. Every roller so far had been like a stubborn toddler unwilling to open its grubby hand. At least I could see she was starting to win by this point and a large proportion of her head was covered in curly blond locks. ‘What’s Cerebral Palsy?’ Delphine said to her drawing. I found myself opening my mouth but forced it to shut again. This wasn’t my conversation. ‘It’s people like you,’ Lu said, gripping the next roller like it was just about to run off, 'who’ve had something happen to them when they were in their Mummies' tummies. Sometimes one side of their body is weaker than the other, like yours or sometimes they’re really poorly and they can’t even walk or talk.’ Silence filled Quest. This was unusual and on most other occasions a welcome phenomenon. This time however, the silence was heavy and laden with something; perhaps understanding. I couldn’t tell. I could see that Delphine’s shoulders were further hunched into her drawing though. Lulu pulled out the last roller with a pop of satisfaction. ‘You must have seen other kids with Cerebral Palsy in May when you went to your therapy centre in Cardiff,’ she said. Delphine shook her head definitively and straight away. Nothing wrong with her memory then. ‘We were the only ones there that morning,’ she said, ‘there was nobody else around.’ At this moment Jack came in from the cockpit. Before I’d started washing up, we’d taken the dinghy down from her nocturnal resting position hoisted up the side of Quest and as is proving a summer routine, the dinghy was full of rain water from a night of heavy showers. Jack was bailing the water into a bucket for washing clothes. Over the past year living on board, I’ve still not got over the mix of sophisticated instruments; satellite phone, trackers, solar sensors and battery regulators, a machine under our sofa that turns seawater into water we can actually drink while we use rain water to wash our sheets and knickers. Of course we could take them to the laundrette but I think sometimes Tesco’s does have a point. ‘What’s this?’ Jack said, catching Delphine’s last sentence. We brought him up to speed with the conversation and watched his face flash into a smile. ‘You’re right, there was no body else there when we went to the Bobath this year.’ With this, he made his way past Delphine and Lu towards the forward head. ’Nice hair, Lu.’ ’Thanks,’ she said, beaming and shaking her head like a well-fed horse. I pulled the plug out of the sink. The forward head is where I need to be, I thought, brushing my teeth and trying to look human. I looked up at the clock and ran a hand through my hair, gauging its crusty, sea-salt levels by how easily my hand went through. Ouch, should have washed it last night. Oh well. I took one step out of the galley instead and into the saloon, sat down, found Delphine's socks and grabbed her right leg. I didn’t ask for it though and under normal circumstances she may have protested about my lack of manners but didn’t this time, probably after counting the stress lines on my face. The usual thought assailed me as the clock ticked on; I'm the only one in this family who aims to be on time, though I’m sure if I disappeared from this planet, the Ormerod family would seamlessly adjust and never be late for anything. It’s like they play this late game just to stress me out. Still, the irony is that putting Delphine’s socks on is a sort of stress-therapy, since to do it as efficiently as possible requires a certain degree of calm. Indeed, I felt my breathing slow down while hiking the pink sock over her ankle. 'So Delph, what did they teach you again in the Bobath this year?’ Every time Delphine goes to the Bobath for therapy, they try to teach her something she can do on her own. ‘They taught me to put my socks on.’ Her sock was just short of its final adjustment. ‘They what?’ I looked up her leg until I got to her face, whereupon I could see that Delphine had produced her most toothiest of smiles. Love from F/F Quest and her crew xx |