After 32 years of marriage, my husband refused to let me touch the cast on his right leg
After 32 years of marriage, my husband refused to let me touch the cast on his right leg — I thought he just didn't want me worrying about him until I accidentally saw what he was hiding underneath it.
Paddy has always been like a child when he is ill.
A cold means soup and tea and extra blankets and a running commentary on exactly how bad he feels.
So when one of the lads from work brought him home one afternoon with his right leg in a cast, I was expecting him to be more helpless than usual.
He said he had gone over on a wet floor at the yard and done his ankle.
"Six weeks, the doctor said." And he sighed. "This is going to be miserable."
Which is exactly him.
And for the first few hours he was perfectly happy to let me bring him food and fill his glass and build pillows round him.
And then I reached towards the cast.
And he moved his leg away. "I've got it."
And I laughed. "Since when?"
"I just don't want you knocking it."
And the next morning I offered to wrap it before his shower.
"No. I'll do it."
And a few days later I went to sort the padding at the top of it, and he pulled that leg back off me.
"Don't touch the cast."
And I stood there looking at him.
This is a man who once had me take his temperature four times in one evening.
And he would not let me near it.
And over the next fortnight it got stranger.
He started locking the bathroom door. He would not let me help him cover it. At night he kept that leg on his own side, always out of reach.
And every time I asked about the follow-up appointment he changed the subject.
And then one night there was a crash from the bathroom.
And I went in and he was on the floor beside the bath.
And part of the cast had come open.
And he grabbed a towel and tried to get it over.
"Don't touch it."
And before he got the towel across it I saw what was under there.
And my stomach went.
"Paddy. What in God's name is that?"
What it was.
A tag.
A grey plastic box on a strap round his right ankle, about the size of a packet of cards.
There is no break. There never was. He went over on nothing at the yard because he was never at the yard that afternoon; he was at the courthouse at Drumbaun.
And he bought that cast online for sixty-one pounds, from a place that does them for film work, and he put it on himself in the car park at about half two, and then he rang Shay and asked him for a lift home.
Twelve weeks. Seven at night until seven in the morning.
And what he had told me, with a straight face, in our own kitchen, was: six weeks, the doctor said.
What it was for.
The ninth of May, 2025. Drink driving.
Nobody was hurt. There was no collision and no other car involved. He was stopped at about half eleven at night on the Kilnary road.
And he went to court on the fourth of September and he got a ban and a fine and a twelve-week curfew, and the curfew is because of 2019.
There was a 2019.
He was done in the March of 2019 on the same road and he was under on that occasion by a very small amount and he got points and a fine.
And I knew about 2019. I was there. I went with him.
And I said a thing to him in a car park at Drumbaun in the April of 2019 that both of us have remembered for six years, which is that if he ever did it again I would not be able to look at him.
I meant it at the time and I said it to frighten him and it worked, and it is the reason there is a sixty-one-pound cast in a skip behind my house.
That is the only thing he has ever said in his own defence about the whole of it, and he said it in the hall at about one in the morning, and it is: "You told me what would happen."
The ninth of May.
And here is where this stops being a story about a man who hid a tag.
He was out that night because I rang him.
I was at my sister Bernie's, four miles the other side of Kilnary, and I had had two glasses of wine and it had got to about eleven and I did not want to leave the car there overnight because I needed it in the morning.
And there were no taxis and the one firm I rang said forty minutes.
So I rang my husband at eleven o'clock at night and asked him to come and get me and drive my car home while I sat in the passenger seat.
And he said yes.
He had been at home all evening with the match on. I know what he had had, because I know him, and the answer is two or three.
And he came. He got into our other car and he drove four miles to my sister's and he picked me up.
And he was stopped on the way back, with me in the passenger seat.
I was in the car.
That is a sentence I have had to say out loud to four people and have not said at all to about forty.
What I did at the side of that road.
Nothing.
I sat in a passenger seat on the Kilnary road at half past eleven at night and watched a guard breathalyse my husband and I did not get out of that car.
And when we got home at about one I made tea and neither of us said anything about what the next bit was going to be.
And the next morning I asked him what happened now.
And he said he would sort it.
And I said right.
***I said right.***
That is the entire extent of what I did about it between the ninth of May and the eighth of September.
Not one question. Not one. Four months.
The four months, laid out, because I never asked sounds like absence and it was not.
The tenth of May: I ask him what happens now. He says he'll sort it. I say right. That conversation lasts about nine seconds and I have timed it in my head since.
The twenty-third of May: a letter comes with a crest on it. He takes it off the mat. I am two feet away with a cup of tea and I watch him do it and I turn round and put the kettle on.
The eleventh of June: Bernie rings me and asks, carefully, whether everything was all right that night. And I say it was fine and change the subject, and my own sister lets me.
The third of July: he is out on a Thursday and tells me it is the course. I say how was it. He says long.
The nineteenth of August: I use the phrase when Paddy's car is back in front of a woman at work. In the August. Fourteen weeks into a car sitting on my own drive.
And the thirty-first of August, which is the one: he asks me, out of nowhere, over the dinner, whether I am working the Thursday week.
And I say yes, all day.
And he says grand.
He was checking. That is the question of a man finding out whether his wife will be in the house on the fourth of September, and I answered it in about a second and a half and passed him the potatoes.
What he told me instead.
That the car was in at the garage. From the May.
I never asked which garage.
That there was a course he had to do, on two Thursdays in the July.
That Shay was giving him lifts because of the parking at the yard.
None of it stood up for one second if you looked at it. Our car sat on the drive the entire time. I walked past it every day.
And I did not look at it, because I had decided in a kitchen on the tenth of May that this was going to be a thing he sorted, and that my part in it was finished, and that if I did not ask I would not have to be the woman from the car park in 2019.
He did not deceive me for four months.
He put up a set of explanations that a child would have seen through, and I accepted every one of them inside about two seconds, because the alternative was a conversation in which I would have had to say what I had done on the ninth of May.
The fourth of September.
He went to court on his own.
That is the part I cannot get round and it is worse than the cast.
A man of fifty-eight got up on a Thursday morning and put on his good jacket and told his wife he was at the yard, and got a lift to Drumbaun with Shay, and went into a courtroom on his own and was sentenced.
And then he sat in a car park and put a fibreglass cast on his own leg with a mirror and a packet of instructions.
I was at work. I finished at four. I came home and there was a man on my sofa with his leg up saying six weeks.
And I made him a dinner and brought it in on a tray.
Shay knew. Shay drove him there and waited and drove him back, and Shay has been in my kitchen about nine times since the September and has never said a word, and I have not been able to be angry with him about it for longer than about a day at a time.
And the eighteen days between the cast and the bathroom, which I have had to go through properly because I have been calling them the fortnight it got strange.
Eighteen days of a man in his own house keeping one leg out of reach of his wife.
He slept on his side facing away from the eighth of September to the sixth of October. Twenty-eight nights.
He did not get in the car with me once, because the tag has a box in the hall and he could not explain being in a passenger seat going nowhere.
He stopped doing the bins, which he has done for thirty-two years, because the bins go out at ten past seven in the morning and he was not permitted out of that house until seven, and the margin frightened him.
I noticed the bins. I made a remark about it on about the twenty-fourth of September and it was not a kind remark.
And he took it. He stood in that kitchen and let his wife be sharp with him about the bins rather than say one word.
That is the detail that I would take out of the whole of this if I could. Not the court and not the cast.
A sarcastic sentence about wheelie bins, from me to him, on a Wednesday morning in September, while he was standing there wearing an ankle monitor under a fibreglass shell because of a lift he gave me.
The twelve weeks.
It ran from the eighth of September to the first of December.
Seven in the evening to seven in the morning, which for a man who has not gone out after seven since about 2014 is not much of a punishment, and he has said so himself.
And there is a box in the hall that we told the children was a new router.
Roisin was in that hall in the October. She put her coat on the stairs about a foot from it.
And they have both been told since, by him, in the January, in my sister's front room, which was his idea and which he did properly.
Donal has been fine about it. Roisin has not and is still not, and that is between the two of them and I have stayed out of it, and she has not asked me one question about the ninth of May.
I have been waiting ten months for her to ask me and I think she is not going to, and I have worked out why, which is that she has asked her father and he did not tell her I was in the car.
He has not told anybody.
And the guard on the Kilnary road, who was about twenty-six and who has been one line in this.
He was polite the whole way through. He explained everything twice. He asked Paddy to step out and he did the test on the verge with the hazards going.
And at one point he came round to my side and put his head down to the window.
And he asked me whether I was all right to get home, and whether there was somebody who could come.
I said my sister was four miles away.
And he said: "Would you like me to ring her for you, love?"
And I said no, we'd be grand.
That is the second phone call I did not make on the ninth of May, 2025.
The first one I made and should not have. The second one was offered to me by a man of twenty-six standing in the rain, and I turned it down, because ringing Bernie at midnight would have meant saying out loud, to my sister, why her brother-in-law was on that road.
And then the two of us got a taxi home at about half twelve, which was arranged by that same guard, and neither of us said a word in it.
Forty minutes earlier a taxi had been too long to wait for.
What happened in the bathroom.
He had been trying to wash with the leg over the side of the bath for eighteen days.
The cast was never designed to get wet. It was coming apart from about the second week and he had been patching it with tape from the shed, which I found a roll of in the bathroom cabinet in the November and which I had assumed was for the window.
And on the sixth of October he went over on the mat.
And he was on that floor with a towel in his hand saying don't touch it, and he was not protecting a secret at that point.
He has told me since what he was actually doing, and it took until the February to get it out of him.
He was trying to work out whether there was still a version in which I did not find out.
Fifty-eight years old, on a bathroom floor, with a broken fake cast and a tag showing, doing arithmetic.
And then he gave up and said: "Sit down, Oonagh."
And he told me the whole of it in about eleven minutes, in order, with nothing left out, which is more than I have ever managed.
And Shay, who drove him to Drumbaun and who has sat in my kitchen since.
He is forty-one and he has worked with Paddy at the yard since 2016 and he is not a close friend; he is the man who gives him lifts.
And in the November, after it all came out, I asked him straight, standing at my own sink, why he had not said anything to me.
And he did the thing men do, which is look at the floor and say it was not his place.
And I let him have that for about four months.
And then in the March I asked him again, in the yard, because I had worked out that it was not the answer.
And he said: "He asked me not to. And I'd have wanted the same."
And then he said one more thing, which is the only outside view anybody has given me of the whole business.
He said: "Oonagh. He wasn't hiding it from the house. He was hiding it from you specifically. There's a difference and everyone could see it but you."
Everyone. Shay. Bernie, who rang in the June. His brother, who I have since found out knew from the September.
Three people, standing round the edge of it for four months, watching a man build a wall with one woman on the other side of it.
And not one of them came to me, because every single one of them assumed that if I wanted to know, I would have asked.
Why he did not tell me on the ninth of May.
Because I would have made it mine.
He has not said that. I have said it, in a room, on a Tuesday, to a woman called Halla, in the March.
If he had come to me in the May and said I'm going to be charged, I would have taken it over.
I would have found the solicitor and I would have rung the court and I would have had a folder, because that is what I do, and I did it for his mother in 2016 and for Roisin's mortgage in 2021.
And somewhere in all of that I would have had to decide what to do with the fact that he was on that road because of me.
And there are only two things I could have done with it. Said it out loud, which would have been in a solicitor's office in front of a stranger. Or not said it, and run the whole thing from behind my folder, and let him go to court on his own anyway with me in the gallery being helpful.
He knew both of those. Thirty-two years.
So he took the whole thing away from me and carried it to a courthouse on a Thursday in his good jacket, and bought a cast so that his wife would not have to find out what she was.
That is not a kindness and I have stopped describing it as one. It is a man avoiding a conversation at a cost of sixty-one pounds and twelve weeks and a daughter who will not look at him.
But it was not done to me. That is the thing I had wrong for about four months after the bathroom.
It was done so that I would not have to do it to myself.
And Bernie, who rang me in the June and who I have had to go back to.
She lives four miles the other side of Kilnary and she is sixty-one and she has a spare room with a bed made up in it and has had since 2014.
I have stayed in it twice in eleven years.
And on the ninth of May she offered. She said it twice — once at about ten and once at about eleven when I started looking for my phone.
She said: "Oonagh, stop in. It's made up."
And I said I needed the car for the morning.
Which was true. I had a thing at nine and the car was on her drive.
And when I finally told her the whole of it, in the March, in her own kitchen, she listened to all of it and then she said: "What was the thing at nine?"
And I could not tell her.
I have looked. It is not in my diary and it is not in my work calendar and there is nothing in my phone from the tenth of May that suggests I was anywhere before half nine.
Whatever it was, it was not a thing. It was a reason, produced at eleven o'clock at night to a sister who was offering me a bed, by a woman who wanted to be in her own house.
And that reason is the whole chain. There is nothing underneath it. I did not want to sleep at Bernie's.
Where we are.
The tag came off on the first of December. A man came to the house at about ten in the morning and it took him four minutes and he was perfectly pleasant.
The ban has eleven months to run and he does the bus and he has not complained once, which is not like him and which I find harder than the complaining.
And I have not touched a drink since the sixth of October. That is mine and it is not a penance; it is that I cannot get the ninth of May into a shape where two glasses of wine at my sister's are a separate thing from a tag on a leg.
He still drinks. Two, at home, on a Saturday. I have never asked him to stop and I am not going to.
And Roisin, who will not look at her father and who has not asked me anything.
She is thirty and she is the one who is like me, which both of us have been told since she was about four.
And in the January, in Bernie's front room, he told the two of them the whole of it except one part.
And she asked him — and Donal has told me this, because I was not there, which was also his idea and which I agreed to — she asked him: "Where was Mam?"
And he said: "At work."
On the fourth of September that is true. She was asking about the ninth of May and he answered about the fourth of September, and she was not quick enough to notice because she was crying.
So my daughter has a version in which her father drove drunk on his own on a road at half eleven at night for no reason anybody can name.
And she has had it since the January and she has rung me eleven times since and we have talked about her flat and about Donal and about a cat.
I have had ten months and about forty opportunities.
And every time I get near it I arrive at the same place, which is that if I tell her, she will have to decide whether to be angry with me — and she is thirty, and she is like me, and she will not be able to, and she will carry it instead.
Which is exactly the reasoning her father used on the ninth of May.
It is in this family. He did it to me and I am doing it to her and I can see myself doing it and I have still not rung her.
And the last thing.
The cast is in the shed.
I did not put it in the skip. I said that at the start because that is what I have been telling people and I have gone back and let it stand so that you would know I do it too.
It is on the shelf above the paint, in two pieces, with the tape still on the inside.
And in the February I asked him why he had kept it.
And he said he had not kept it. He said he had put it out for the bin in the December and I had brought it back in.
And I had. I remember doing it. It was a Tuesday and it was in the recycling and I took it out and put it in the shed and I did not think about it for ten weeks.
So neither of us has thrown away a sixty-one-pound fibreglass cast bought off the internet by a man who did not want his wife to know she had made a phone call.
He put it out. I brought it in.
And it is still up there, and I know exactly what it is doing on that shelf, because I have had fourteen months to work it out.
As long as that thing is in my shed, the story has a prop in it.
May you like
And a story with a cast in it is about a man who lied to his wife for four months.
Without it, it is about a woman who rang her husband at eleven o'clock at night on the ninth of May and then sat in a passenger seat and said nothing at the side of a road.
