“Wishes are fulfilled and their dreams come true”

THE gentle swell and curve of west Cork is another world, I think to myself as I drive through bleak landscape north-west of Tuam.

Twenty minutes shy of Sligo, I take the turn off to Corrigeenroe and my flattened spirits rise; now I’m entering another world, a silent world of mountains, lakes and famine ghosts. After knackering my car’s suspension on a tiny boreen, finally I arrive at my sister’s house.

Yet another world inside; a warm domestic one that has four young children in it, each one bursting with the immediacy of its own need to say hello. They kiss me hard and hover politely, until I remember the chocolate I’ve brought in my bag. Then other needs take precedence; one-and-a-half-year-old Lola wants a story about an owl, Aida wants someone to do something about her tummy-ache, Marius wants to play with toy robots undisturbed and Rosie, 11, wants to see Twilight, Breaking Dawn at the cinema tonight.

Over the course of the evening, their small wishes are fulfilled and their compact little dreams come true. Just like that. This is dislocating; I’m used to teenagers’ dreams and wishes, which tend to contravene either universally recognised health and safety regulations or common sense. Often both. I’ve grown accustomed to being the snag in them and know my way round the labyrinthine dilemmas they pose. In other words, I’ve forgotten the time when my children’s dreams were simple and it was in my gift to make them come true.

Marius sets up his robots at the table while I read Lola her owl story in front of the fire. I make to-whit, to-whoo noises and her solemn eyes widen suddenly with delight. She bats off Rosie, who’s come to listen, with a soft left hook; her dream doesn’t have Rosie in it. Aida listens on the sofa opposite, tummy-ache soothed by clean pyjamas and her mum’s lap. Rosie says ‘Lola likes the cat noises best’ but keeps the right amount of distance from her sister’s left hook. I make cat noises and Lola wriggles with delight and looks at me as if I have just spun straw into gold.

It’s time for bed. Marius packs up his robots and takes them to bed, Lola’s coaxed upstairs with a bottle of milk and Aida is carried up by her Dad.

Rosie, the eldest, remains. We talk vampires — she’s read the Twilight series 14 times — while my sister phones the cinema. When her mum returns, Rosie sits stock still. “There are a few tickets left,” my sister says, but explains that unless we move fast, the tickets will go. Rosie moves fast. Getting her coat she says, “I have a feeling this might be a DCT night.” DCT, she explains, means Dream Come True.

As we drive through the dark, Rosie holds tough. “I just know this is a DCT night,” she says, “we’ll get tickets, I know we will.”

In the foyer, we queue for tickets. “If we don’t get tickets for tonight, we’ll buy them for tomorrow,” I say.

I cannot bear the thought of a stoic Rosie. “That’s a good idea,” she says stoically.

“Why don’t we get an ice cream anyway, while mum queues?” I suggest.

She’s standing next to me at the back of the foyer, holding a chocolate scoop when my sister comes towards us punching the air with three tickets and there is that look, that spinning gold from straw look again, lighting up Rosie’s eyes like candles. “This is the best night of my life,” she says, “this is my dream come true.”

Two days later, I start the long drive home, re-entering my own domestic world at last just before midnight.

I find my teenage daughter upstairs on my laptop, where her lifeblood is being sucked out of her by that digital vampire, Facebook. I climb on the bed and give her a kiss. She gives me one back and asks me about her cousins in Sligo. I tell her about Rosie and her DCT’s.

“What’s a DCT?” She asks, looking at the screen. “A Dream Come True,” I say. “You used to say that about going for a scone in Harte’s coffee shop, when you were about six or seven. You’d sit there with your scone and jam, so excited and I’d feel like a fairy godmother.”

My daughter types something into Facebook chat. I tell her about getting tickets for Breaking Dawn, how Rosie said it was the best night of her life. My daughter says “aah, sweet.”

Then she says, “I went to see it yesterday and it was crap.”