As You Were

by Elaine Feeney

  Eight months since Magpie.

  When I listened to my heart beating, pain shot through the soles of my feet, electrical energy sizzling up through my shins. It was like fish angrily nibbling my feet, Gara Rufas or the like, and then a few cheap Chinese foot-eaters started to savage me. You shouldn’t listen to your heartbeat (beat), and especially not the heartbeat (beat) of your in-utero child. It sounds like the kid’s on speed. My daughter made no sound at all. Not one. Not one small gallop stride babies make inside you. Nurse. Now. Cold jelly. All chat. Bit of cold. Now. There. No chat. Cold jelly. Wipe jelly. Silence. They warn you about the cold jelly more than any part of pregnancy or motherhood, perhaps because we are awkward with truths or because we can put language on discomfort that’s rather painless, cold jelly, sand in your socks. But of course, the worse the pain, the sparser language becomes, until eventually we pulverise it, language, and we are only left with our pain.

  Alone.

  The midwife moved the heart-beat prong around, pushing down hard. I heard gurgling as I had eaten a bar of Turkish Delight. I hadn’t been feeling movement and when I’d Googled it, it said to relax, try a little sugar. The baby should start to flap soon after with the energy surge. Like a butterfly inside, the nurse said at first, does it feel like a butterfly? Can you feel anything at all? And she was saying, oh now, come on, where are you hiding? When was the last time you felt something? Can you remember the time? Maybe last night, perhaps after dinner? Or this morning? Anything? No. OK. That’s OK. We’ll double-check with a scan.

  Double-check.

  It feels like nothing. I can’t feel anything. I screamed. It feels like fucking nothing.

  NOTHING.

  Next a radiographer arrived and moved another bigger prong around on my belly, over and back, tracing my fallopian tubes, in and out, pushing on my full bladder, the window to the baby, she said. Under her arms was getting wet, a creeping pattern crawling along her blue scrubs, making two navy patches. I remember she was Welsh because I love a Welsh accent and she said apologetically, now where are you hiding? And so I immediately began apologising for screaming, and then took to apologising for lots of things, eating the lovely chocolate, and apologising for reading my book, until there was very little left to apologise for except the dirty cubicle curtain, and she apologised for this, and we were all apologies. Until the prong was pushed down on my pubic bone, hard, and I apologised for the bone, and she apologised for hitting off it. Then a doctor arrived swiftly, and he took the prong up and off my belly, placing it back in the claw of the machine.

  I’d failed. Again. And he didn’t contradict me.

  I wanted it out. Now. I begged Ms Welsh to please just get it out now. But she had lost her voice and was rubbing my forearm up and down. Please. I can’t bear it. But then the doctor interrupted and muttered something about spontaneous and labour. As though, together, we would waterfall her out. It’s dead, I screamed. But he wouldn’t listen. ‘All in its own good time’, he said, as if I was ageing a barrel of whiskey. A cask. I picked up my book as the jelly was getting sticky on my belly and I thought of myself as an utter cunt; it was disgraceful to have eaten such a large bar of chocolate just moments before I knew my child was dead, the pink sweetness made its way back up my food pipe to goad me. I had thought the sugar would make her squirm and wriggle and wake her up and I would discharge myself from this fuck of a place once I felt some movement. I said something like this. But no one listened. Then I vomited.

  And Ms Welsh said she was so very sorry for my vomiting. Or my vomit.

  I think you’re just a very weak child. And the nose running on you again. Wipe it up, you amadán.

  My book was James and the Giant Peach, Joshua’s copy. It was dog-eared and wet as he was far too young to read anything properly, preferring to suck pages. I was alone in the room then. You get an Alone Room with a couch and a telephone and no TV when you have a dead baby inside you. Just when you need a distraction, they leave you all alone, with a telephone. You can’t call anyone at that moment because they’d shower you with advice about trying again, even with the dead inside you. God is Good. What’s for you won’t pass you. God is Good. God, I wonder what happened? Did you wash windows? That can sometimes kill them. Did you eat shellfish? God is Good. Did you rub a cat?

  God is so overfuckingrated.

  Myself and Contents and the two aunts, Spiker and Sponge, were all rolled up fetal in the bed. Howling. That’s what they called it now, Contents. And they didn’t probe it or talk to it with their useless machine, now that the machine no longer answered back. How terrific it would be to escape to the middle of a peach, right into the core where a brown stone sits heavy, waiting to come out. Waiting. No heartbeat. Never listen. Nothing is real before you first hear its sound. And just like that, I lost my daughter. As though I weren’t fit to mind her. As though I had left her down at the Salmon Weir Bridge or behind the barbeques in Woodie’s or at a train station. Lost. I lost her.

  The heart is for a doctor and a Valentine card.

  Alex had a mouse-like heart murmur. Though, I must confess, I’ve never actually listened to the heart of a mouse with a stethoscope, but once, full to his fat chin on poison I’d laid down, one sat in my hot-press, ever so bloated, and I watched his big heart beating to the rhythm of his tiny breaths. He was perched on a white and silver Just Engaged xxx towel and he died like this, staring at me with his pretty beady eyes. I buried him in the towel underneath the Leylandii trees in the back garden, proficient as I was at killing and burying little things of great beauty.

  Chapter 2

  Hospital evenings on the Ward brought a tea of green offerings, soggy scallion-streaks like solidified washing up liquid strewn across lumpy potato-salad and coleslaw dollops in low mountain ranges, knife marks slashed into the beige plates, vile green-pink tomato quarters, and a slice of ham rolled up, pumped with water. Its jelly eye stared at me.

  ‘More soda bread?’ said Michal.

  The soda bread tasted good like my grandmother’s baking. I remember nestling into her skin and the beads of sweat on her forehead in the tiny hot kitchen, back when I used to hang around her neck and lay my head into her warm freckled cleavage.

  Margaret Rose Sherlock loved the soda bread. Hegs loved it too, though his daughter never allowed him to put butter on it, and consequently he found it difficult to swallow dry, coughing loudly and irritatingly as he ate. Jane refused Hospital food and searched her purple holdall for half a beef burger patty that she had upon her entry to Accident and Emergency. She looked for it with such fervour and a fixed determination that I was certain if she could locate it, it would indeed save her life and give us all a boost.

  Shane was nil-by-mouth.

  The butter in Hospital was real and straight from a factory in teeny gold-foiled patties.

  ‘More coffee?’ Michal offered.

  ‘I’d like some,’ Margaret Rose said, but Michal ignored her, as he continued to pour for me in a highly exaggerated action. I was determined to keep Margaret Rose on side and offered her my cup. She declined with a gracious hand wave and turned her head away. The coffee came with an ivory plastic wand. No silver spoons, no chink-clink of cutlery. But it was, for all intents and purposes, a luxury item, and one of the last things I could stomach, so I didn’t care. Or complain.

  ‘They were stealing the teaspoons,’ Michal said, reading me.

  ‘Who? The patients?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘and they think Polish are stealing everything. They blame Polish for everything, y’know? But

  it’s not just Polish, it’s everyone, stealing, Irish stealing too . . .’ he said, glancing quickly at the floor. ‘And in maternity they’d steal anything, yuss? It gets way more crazy up there. The hormones . . . turning them into mad stealers.’

  ‘Fuck,’ I said, ‘really . . . d’you think the hormones turn them into kleptomaniacs? Nesting?’

  Michal considered this. ‘Hmm, maybe. Perhaps. I dunno.’


  Jane began tightly rolling herself in my curtain, waving her long arms above her head, then she swan-dived forwards and clapped her own performance. I clapped too, like when a baby does something slightly dangerous but exciting.

  ‘No sure why all the stealing . . .’ Michal said, still mulling it over, as he began unravelling Jane like a roll of new carpet. Jane Lohan hadn’t had one single visitor during her time on the Ward and Margaret Rose said that this was very sad for a woman with nine children, a husband and a dog.

  I received some cards and texts from the boys. Mostly lines of emojis. Turds, cherries, hearts, soccer balls, cats, laughing faces, pizzas at dinnertime. I sent back salad and fruit emojis. They’d return a green vomit face. And for as long as Alex remained innocent I could chat to him about silly things, emojis, nail varnish colours, Jane’s dog.

  I balanced/bargained my avoidance of opening up, being honest, with Google statistics on death, reckoning death most often comes as a shock, crossing the road, lighting the fire, swimming, getting on a train (getting off a train), slipping out of the bath, shower falls, airway obstruction from boiled sweets, allergies, drowning, taking selfies, feeding the cat, slipping out the back door, removing a wasp nest, dropping the boot of your car on your head, masturbating in an aeroplane toilet, glueing your nostrils shut. I figured, the way the world works, Alex could very well be gone before me.

  I wasn’t the type of person that could even consider writing letters to the children, or baring my soul to my husband like they do on shows like Love Island. It’s so intense, that level of public declaration, intense and crazy. I loves ya, babes. Hun babes, I so do and I’m the luckiest girl alive to have found you here in this house with all the cameras and the dorms and all that, and hun babes, loves ya. Besties. Yeah. 4eva and eva.

  Fuck that.

  The longer we were together, the harder it had become to gush promises. A gathering resentment perhaps, or cynicism, exhaustion or protection? Never say for ever. It’s very risky in any case, that kind of self-exposure. I can share my life story with a woman on a train journey but I can’t repeat it to my mother. Even looking Alex in the eye had gotten quite difficult. I can’t quite remember when this began, this oddity I feel when I look into his eyes. But to be frank, I had begun avoiding eye contact with people for some time now, long before Magpie.

  We were ‘strictly’ curtailed to two visitors at Visiting Hours, until half past nine, and the most excitement I could hope for on the Ward was Margaret Rose’s stay opposite me. Her visitors passed no heed on the poorly laminated Visitor Instructions sellotaped to the wall, and she enthusiastically encouraged the passing-of-no-heed. She had oddly olive skin, Mediterranean, and a substantially thick bob of platinum hair. The hollow rattle of her chest was not her main complaint. One eye dropped until it rested on the sharp edge of a prominent cheekbone and her forehead skin on that side was taut and unreactive, like a Phantom of the Opera mask. She spoke out of the side of her mouth in a raspy whisper. A blessed sacrament of Our Lord and the Most Blessed Virgin Mary and the ebony rosary beads hung like large caviar eggs on a frayed leather cord beside her head frame when not in use. A large charcoal Dell laptop sat on her meal table. Every night after her visitors, Margaret Rose watched the computer’s screen until dawn, mostly photos of her family, playing hypnotically, large neon love hearts bursting out here and there. She spoke gently, in a curiously cautious manner, especially when speaking about herself or her children.

  It was luring to watch her hold court and for now, the wedding of Jonathan O’Keefe with her daughter Niquita Sherlock required her full attention, as she ran the day and night of her family from the Hospital bed, simultaneously attempting to smoke out her husband, Paddy.

  Margaret Rose Sherlock, finally, had had enough.

  First the young men came. Early evening. Jovial, good-natured, full of energy, and energy drinks, pasty arms outstretched, limbs loosely held away from the body, bright colourful sports tops, baseball caps perched up on their heads, sometimes sitting like young giddy children moving up and down on a see-saw. Sitting or standing, they were constantly moving, while their feet remained rigid to the same spot like that giraffe toy where you squeezed the base and the animal’s legs buckled in a heap. They were awkward but most earnest and over-eager to help, as though their presence on the Ward somehow depended on their behaviour, which it did. And they were inclined towards a deep interest in us all. They were interested as they filled Hegs’s empty water jug, checked out my iPhone screen grab, made faces and sounds wearing my blobfish slippers on their hands, asked about the pictures of my kids, names, ages, interests. They’d take off on several trips to the loo, praying a decade of the rosary with Jane, mumbling prayers, nudged on by their mother but not quite remembering if they were the call or the response.

  The young visitors brought some carnations, bright bottles of soda and a varied selection of biscuits, mostly Mikado, as these are easily digestible to the stroke victim. Chocolate Kimberlys and Ginger Nuts should only be attempted after a dunk-in-tea, or if you have all your own teeth, they warned. They were clumsy with the grocery bags until Margaret Rose ushered them this way and that and eventually after some coaxing, they shoved them in under her bed, with a sideways flick of an Adidas runner.

  *

  Hegs wasn’t interested in them. Not in them filling his water jug, not in them looking at him, not in them trying to make polite and meaningless conversation. He’d make the most peculiar eye squints when Margaret Rose had visitors, especially when the young men called. He administered frosty hostility, though all the while remaining most cordial to Margaret Rose. The young men wiped clotted jam off Jane’s fingers, stared at Shane and blessed themselves. I couldn’t judge them for this, his peg feeds had become monotonous, as he lay awkward with his laptop opened all day and all night, nothing happening on it, no sound, just left on. I couldn’t see the screen but there were no headphones sprouting from it, and if the charger came undone or fell, he’d cry out until it was fixed back and in its proper place, propped up by an ugly doughnut cushion from the maternity ward. I was sick of the brutality of his feeds, the repulsing falseness of it, the laptop on constant charge and the way he’d look at it all day with one eye open, drooling.

  ‘What was it, Mammy?’

  ‘Was it diabetes?’

  ‘Yar father has diabetes, not me,’ Margaret Rose said, correcting them.

  ‘Did ya catch it off him?’

  ‘Bet ya did, the fat fuck.’

  ‘Haha.’

  ‘Stop that. Ya canny catch diabetes. Ya have ta have it. Or ya can get it. But it’s not contagious,’ Margaret Rose said.

  ‘Ya can catch it in Supermac’s,’ one boy said, and everyone laughed.

  ‘Or if yar a fat cunt like him.’ They laughed again, ­everyone except Margaret Rose.

  ‘Don’t speak like that ’bout your father,’ she scolded, ‘yar upsetting me.’

  ‘Sorry . . . well, what is it that ya have then, like? Everywan’s asking about ya.’

  ‘Ah now, they’re sure I had a bad stroke, far wan minute I was sitting at the sink in the kitchen about to get up and make Nora a pot of tea, and we was chatting about your father and getting him to come home to get fitted far the wedding.’

  And suddenly everyone became serious and quieter.

  ‘A stroke. Jaysus.’

  ‘Was Niquita there?’

  ‘No,’ Margaret Rose said. ‘See, I just dropped off the side of the couch.’

  ‘Jaysus.’

  ‘You were lucky.’

  ‘Did you go cold, with a bang like?’

  ‘Will yar face stay like that far Niquita’s wedding?’

  Margaret Rose moved her hands up to her cheek with a CGI definition, certain of her actions, unlike Jane who was giddy and moved her hands all day long, even in her sleep, tugging at her hair, brushing her teeth, applying lipstick and forever fixing part of herself back into its original place, even if she couldn’t quite re
member where the original place was.

  Hegs barely lifted his hands above their resting sweet spot, limply outside the thin Hospital quilt, just below his belly button.

  Chapter 3

  The Ward’s rattling windows framed the grey exterior shell of some of the Hospital’s buildings, including the Special Care Baby Unit. Clouds were billowing fast above us. The shadows of parents bent over in the Unit, known locally as SCBU, said quickly down through the nose, Scabooooo. It haunted our view, with nurses bending over the incubators and Perspex cots. I had watched my boys in those little cot homes, moments after birthing them. I was so terrified – terrified to interrupt them, to touch them, to pick them up, to bend an arm into a tiny jumper, or even just look at them in case they disappeared, or left me, or saw through me and were disappointed.

  Beyond the long windows memories of picturesque Galway flickered at me, taunting me, in the manner of a picture, fit-to-be-made-into-a-picture.

  Michal hoped his wife’s baby didn’t end up in Scabooooo and Margaret Rose blessed herself, said God was good and God was so good that he would be especially good to his wife Karolina after such a long journey away from her mother to be with him. Jane let out a terrified shriek. Hegs was oblivious to SCBU. He wasn’t entirely sure where he was born, couldn’t remember when Margaret Rose asked him and he laughed, awkwardly.