All We Shall Know, page 8
Mary Crothery slept for most of the journey home, turned sideways in her seat with her knees drawn up, and I kissed my fingertips and touched her forehead and she smiled in her sleep like a child.
I stood and watched a black-haired infant, standing by a river throwing stones. High up into the air and his head would rise and fall in following and his laugh when the stones splashed into the glass-smooth water rebounded off the far bank and rang in my ears, like something too beautiful to be of this world. Be careful, little man, I was saying, and I was walking towards him with my hands out, but my legs felt heavy and stiff and he looked back at me and smiled and the sun lit his face and glinted off his eyes and he flung his two arms upwards, and as his pebbles flew away across the waiting water, he wobbled on his little legs and fell, and disappeared below the bank, and still my legs wouldn’t carry me towards him and I woke with the sound of splashing in my ears and a scream on my lips that made no sound because the breath was gone from my body.
I keep these terrors for my sleep. I want the air about me to be still and calm. I check myself daily now, all the parts of me that will change. I watch for the white marks of calcium deficiency on my fingernails and I search along my skin for red spots betraying stress on my liver and I count the beats of my heart for fifteen seconds and multiply the number by four, and I check that the rhythm of the beats is even, a strong and steady sinus. I measure my wrists and ankles around with my thumb and index finger to mark in my mind any changes there. I do these things and then I sit still until I feel him stir and then I do them all again. My bump is tiny and neat and I cup my hands around it and stare at my naked self, and I think of Eve and all the sins done in the world since hers, and of my own sin, and I feel no shame, only a wonder, that I could be standing here, admiring this small warm mound, my perfect swelling.
All the marks we ever made will fade away, and all the memories of all the things we ever did will die, and it will be as though we never existed. There’s no more to be done, now that we’ve committed our terminal atrocities. There’s nothing to be felt now but a strangely blunt dissonance, a place without edges or dark corners, a soft, low buzzing in the background, like fabric gently tearing, a world of vague, uncertain shapes and sounds, stretching away behind my naked mirror image, the woman in the glass before me with her thumbs and forefingers touching on either side of her stomach, the space between her hands forming the shape of a heart against her flesh.
I can’t bear the thought of being scanned, the cold gel and the friendly smile and the ultrasound machine traversing me, circling, searching for a heartbeat. I remember the eyes of the technician the last time, the downturned lips; she was young and inexperienced and I think she almost cried. She told me not to worry too much and put her hand on mine and with the other hand she rang a bell for help, and a tall and handsome obstetrician came and relieved her of her discomfort. But I’d known, each time, from the blood, the amount of it, the dark clots, the stabbing pangs and the terrible stillness. And I’d shouted up at Pat to get away from me, that he was probably happy, that he was off the hook, and he shook his head and closed his eyes and put his two hands to his face.
I know it would be okay if I went now and presented myself, and asked to be admitted to the system, added to the roll of expectants, pencilled in for scans and checks and reassuring words, for antenatal courses where I could sit cross-legged on a cushion on the floor and chat and laugh and listen to a kind and battle-weary midwife tell us how to use our breasts. I can feel him and I know he’s strong, but I felt a dull pain low down beneath my bump last night and my knees buckled in fear and I had to lean against the hall table and breathe evenly and deeply till it passed. And I know I have to do this, to leave this town and drive the twisting road to Portiuncula, because everyone here goes to the Regional in Limerick to have their babies, and at least one face in ten would be familiar, and there’d be no way to keep a secret there.
Week Twenty-four
I WENT TODAY to my father’s house and I told him. The sky was split between black rainclouds and piercing, watery sunlight as I drove, and a rainbow arched above the earth, and I knew my father would be watching it as he watched out his window for me. I’d caught an intimation of reproach on the phone, in the moment after I said, Hello, Dad? A second or maybe two of heavy silence, and he left it there in the silence, his tiny hint of censure, of course he did, and there was only relief in his voice when he said, Oh, love, what way are you at all?
And I said, I’m fine, Dad, I’ll be out to you tomorrow. Do you need any messages?
And he said, No, love, I’m well stocked. Begodden I am. I’ve plenty. What time will you be here about?
He was standing at the window as I turned into the yard, and the grass on the front lawn was longer than he’d ever let it grow in my memory, and the evergreens against the fence were growing out towards wildness, and the beds had all been taken by the grass. Daffodils bloomed in unruly ranks along the borders, vying with the weeds for space. My mind can measure these things, can note these markers of decline, but my heart can only close itself in fear. How much I need my father to be here, waiting, thinking about me, my lovely quartermaster, in charge of a store of unconditional love. Someday maybe I’ll do something to deserve it.
He planted an apple tree at the end of my garden once, when I was pregnant the first time. He patted the earth around it with the flat of his spade, and straightened, and wiped the sweat from his eyes and said, without looking at me: That’ll still be here in fifty years, please God. And maybe your child will stand where we are now, or your child’s child. And I’ll be long turned to dust.
And I had to say, Stop, Dad, please don’t talk like that.
And he laughed and said, No one lives for ever. And he sat on the garden bench beside me and held my hand a few weeks later and said nothing at all, about life or death or anything else, because he was afraid to speak, I knew, because he couldn’t trust his voice, or the waiting tears to stay unfallen.
We sat today and I drank inky coffee from the French press, and he drank milky tea, and he asked over and over was the coffee all right; he wasn’t too sure, you see, was he doing it exactly right, but there was a video of how to do it exactly right on the internet, and he’d followed that, because it was a long while since he’d used the yoke. He only ever drank tea, and anyone that might call would only ever have a sup of tea, but he knew the benefits of coffee, for sure, how it would help you to concentrate if you were tired, for driving especially, Lord, it’s great now for anyone driving a long journey, how they can stop off any old where and get a cup of coffee, in a paper cup with a special lid, to bring with them in their car and sip away while they’re driving, the way they’d stay alert, and he’d started making it about ten minutes before I was due to arrive because the nice darky lad on the internet said it was necessary to let the coffee – what’s this he called it? – oh, ya, infuse, and sure he supposed it’s the same as letting tea draw.
I’m pregnant, Dad.
And he looked at me and said, Oh, love. Oh.
And I said, It’s not Pat’s. I had an affair.
And he waited for a long moment to be sure of his voice, and he said, Is it true that Pat’s gone from you? Minnie Wiley asked me that before devotions last Sunday evening.
And I said, Yes, Dad. I should have told you earlier.
And he said, You couldn’t have news before Minnie Wiley. She’d tell you what you ate for your breakfast. And he looked down into his tea and he sighed, and said, What sort of a man is he at all? To say he couldn’t manage things. And I didn’t know what to say so I said nothing.
My father described to me his days, as if to put in context how my news might fit with them, or maybe just to be saying something, to dilute the thickness in the air between us. He rises early and unstiffens himself as best he can and he manages the stairs the finest if he takes his time and he watches the birds and the brightening sky from the back window, and he tightens up the place a bit, and he has his tea and porridge and a cut of toast and marmalade, and he performs his ablutions, and he puts on his corduroy trousers and his polished shoes and his shirt and pullover and jacket, and he goes out the door to Mass. He has a bit to eat some days at lunchtime in the café below; there’s a grand girl working there from Latvia or Lithuania or one of them places, and she’s solid lovely, as nice of a girl as you’d meet, the very same as an Irish girl she is, the way she’d welcome you and ask to know were you all right while you’re having your bit to eat and asking do you want a fresh sup of tea. More days he has his lunch at home, a bit of ham or chicken and a hard-boiled egg and a few slices of bread and butter. And he reads the newspapers in the afternoon, The Times and the Indo, and the Herald the odd evening. And he has his dinner fine and early the way he was advised one time, a couple of chops maybe, and a potato, and he looks at the television in the evenings, the news and the weather and whatever match might be on, or a film maybe. And the odd evening he goes down as far as Ciss’s for a pint, and those evenings he’ll smoke one cigarette before bed, and there was never a man yet killed by one cigarette in a blue moon.
And I listened while he described his days to me, filling the space between us with a picture of a life lived alone but still selflessly, because his only concern, I know, though he’d never say it, is me, and whether I’m okay, and whether I’ll ever have a child the way I wanted to, and whether there’s something wrong that can’t be righted to say I lost two little babies before they had a chance to take a breath, and whether Pat is good to me, and whether I’m any way contented. And what small bit of peace he might have drawn around him in his silent days, in his kneeling at his stations or his watching of a match or his drinking of a pint, is gone from him now, because of me, and my new trouble. And the shake I see now in his hand was put there by me, and the tear that glints in the corner of his eye, and the words that come from his mouth. Don’t worry, love. Don’t worry. Things always work out in the end.
Oh, Daddy, if only that were true.
I slept well last night and woke looking forward to Mary Crothery’s visit. I want to practise writing with her, to see her making letters on a page. Two o’clock came and went without a sign of her. I sat and wondered, worrying the edges of a book. I wish she had a phone so I could text. She had, I think, but it was confiscated as part of the stripping away of her privileges, the punitive diminution of her inflicted by Mommy, who’d never get over the disgrace of it. What that wan done to the family. I drove at the end of the unused hour to the Ashdown Road, and met the mumbling sentry and the ragged swaggering boys, sparring in the spaces between puddles, and one of them shouted, Them is all gone away, ma’am, as I put a foot on Mary’s bottom step.
Gone away where?
Dunno, England?
And a burning started in my belly and I felt the baby stir. I read about that happening: agitation from adrenalin injected by sudden stress. I tried Mary’s door anyway, and it was locked, and the curtains were drawn across the windows, and my breath caught a little in my throat, and I felt a little light-headed, and I gripped the handrail by the steps for balance. Are they coming back? I asked the boy who’d lost the fight the other week, and he said, Prolly. Spose. Weddin. Tarmacaddanin. And he turned his faintly bruised and sullen face away from me, and he raised his guard again.
I sat back in my car and started for Daddy’s, and changed my mind and turned for home. I vacuumed up and down the hall, and changed the sheets on all the beds. I folded clothes Pat’s father hadn’t taken, and pressed a shirt against my face, and breathed in ghostly sweat and skin. I wondered where he was again, and how he filled the gaps I used to fill. I went in the end to Daddy’s, and he wasn’t there, and I sat on the concrete bench at the end of the garden and cried, and suddenly he was sitting beside me, and he had a hand on my shoulder, and he was saying softly, embarrassedly: Ah, now, ah, now, you’re okay, pet.
Were you in with the doctor since I saw you last?
No, what’ll a doctor tell me that I don’t know?
Daddy looked at the sky, where he always looks. Oh. Ah, boys. Would you not go in for a check-up? And I said I would, as soon as they called me with a date and time; I’d asked for an appointment. Oh. Righty-oh. Well, that’s good, anyway. And he told me how worried my mother had been, all through her pregnancy, how she’d taken to her bed for days and weeks at a time, and had been as weak as a sop and had had pains head to toe; how he’d stayed at home from work to mind her and got in terrible trouble with his boss because he’d taken holidays that hadn’t been approved and they’d docked his pay. How he’d feared so much for both of us because she wouldn’t eat for a time and hardly drank a sup of water, even, and lay still with the curtains drawn and barely spoke, until for a finish he’d fetched the doctor and he’d come to the house and told her sternly that she had to buck herself up, that there was nothing medically wrong with her, that she had to eat properly and drink water, and the doctor gave her tablets to take and a page of writing that she would study intently and never let her husband see but he thought it was a list of things she had to do, and things she had to eat, and she lifted herself out of it for a finish and everything was grand afterwards. That’s the way of things, sometimes, my father said. Things happen inside in a person that they think they have no control over, and it turns out they do, but they need to be told by someone else.
I read a book about a man who lives alone in a small house in a small town that was almost destroyed by war. And his neighbours and his childhood friends set upon each other, and the love of his life was killed. And after the war was over, the town and the people left living there had to continue living, watching all about them through uneasy eyes, remembering and thinking always but never speaking of the things that happened. I feel a kinship with that imagined man, living where blood once ran, surrounded by the echoes of screams.
Week Twenty-five
PAT CAME TO the door yesterday, just as the light was starting to fade. Hello, I said, in an unintentionally interrogatory tone, like a telephone greeting, like I didn’t know him. He stood, hunched and stooped and streelish, and his arms hung long by his sides. He looked older, and had lost weight, and his hair seemed thinner on top.
Long seconds passed, until he said: Sorry, Melody. Sorry. I shouldn’t of said I’d kill you.
And I replied: Shouldn’t have. Confusion flashed in his eyes, then recognition, of that old familiar correcting, my bitch-reflex, working unbidden. He reddened still more. His face shone. And I wished I had razors for teeth to cleanly slice from me my wicked tongue. I knew he didn’t know what do with his hands; so, unthinking, I took one in mine. He opened his mouth, in shock at my sudden gesture of tenderness or to speak, I don’t know, but no words came. So I just said, It’s okay.
Just that, and he smiled a shallow smile in reply, a bare upturn of the corners of his lips. His eyes lowered to my bump; a shadow caressed his face. He gently reclaimed his damp hand and stepped back, turning for the narrow, weed-lined path, mad zigzags opened along its length by rain and frost. He was wearing the Levi’s I bought him a few Christmases ago. They bagged unbelted around his narrow arse. His sloped shoulders were hunched; his half-ironed shirt billowed mournfully from his bones in the rising breeze. He looked back from the garden gate and waved, and lingered for a second, and turned away from me.
I stayed standing at the door looking out and across at the obsessive-compulsive gardens of my neighbours: lozenges of unstained tarmac flanked by ranks of straight-edged plants. How many of them know? Someone was looking back from a house directly across and down a bit, towards the bend. Mrs Brannigan. Or Flanagan. Or some-fucking-thingagan. And I watched Pat walk away. And I called him back.
He spun on his heel the second I called, and was back through the gate and in the door before I could register properly what I’d done. And he stood in the hall and said, What’ll we do? And the question was at once strange and familiar. And it felt for a moment like it felt when we were seventeen and we’d only started having sex and we found ourselves in a private place where we couldn’t be heard and there were no parents about and no possibility of them for a known and definite length of time. When we were seventeen he’d say, Come here, and I’d say, Just a shift, that’s all, and he’d say, Ya, I know, and within five minutes we’d be in my room or his room, naked save for our underwear, and he’d fumble and curse at the clasp of my bra, and I’d take it off for him and he’d say, Thanks, and I’d say, Jesus, and we’d writhe in sweat to a burning point and I’d say, Fuck it, go on, go on, but make sure and pull out in time, and we’d gasp together as he entered, and I’d gouge furrows in his arse with my fingernails, and he nearly always would pull out in time, with tenths of seconds to spare, because he’d have waited for me, saying the alphabet backwards in his head or thinking about the naked bodies of his grandmother’s friends, and the sheets of the bed would be destroyed and folded carefully, sticky patch inwards, and smuggled to the bottom of a laundry basket, and we’d dress ourselves and lie on our backs holding hands and talking about God knows what, and sometimes if our time allowed we’d do it all again.
My father walked into my room once on an early midsummer afternoon when we were both asleep, naked, covered only by a sheet. Pat had cycled round that morning when the house was empty but for me and my mother’s ghost, and she never bothered us. We’d thought we had hours yet. But Daddy had left in a hurry that morning and he hadn’t packed a lunch and so he’d come back just after one and he’d noticed clothes strewn on the stairs and he’d picked them up and he was holding them in shaking hands and looking down at us when I woke up and said, Daddy, what the fuck? and I pulled the sheet tight around my nakedness and Pat woke then and laughed in panic and Daddy said, Oh, sorry, cripes, I thought there was no one here, I was only tightening up the place, your clothes were left on the stairs, and he looked down at his hands and it was Pat’s Chelsea jersey he was holding, and my bra, and my skirt, and he dropped them onto the foot of my bed and he said, Anyway, anyway, ah, boys, and he was red from his neck to the top of his lovely head as he retreated, and Pat and I looked at each other and laughed into our pillows and listened for his leaving so we could do it again.
