by Orna Ross
No, I’ll spare my blushes by lying: “My friend is pregnant and asked me to ask you how she’d go about getting to England for an abortion.”
No, she’ll see through that.
I won’t say the word. I’ll just throw myself on her compassion. “I’m pregnant. Help me, please.”
When the lecture is over, I follow her out the door, but a guy comes across to talk to her and I am not brave enough to intrude myself between them. I let her melt away into the crowd.
I turn desperate. That word, that word, that horrible word. If I can’t even say it, how am I going to be able to do it?
After another night of tossing and sobbing, I blurt it to Deirdre at coffee break.
“Oh, no,” she says — just what he said when I told him. “Jesus, I should have thought of that. I’m so stupid. What are you going to do?”
“England.”
“Oh, Lord. You poor thing. Is he going with you?”
I shake my head, a snap from side to side. “I don’t want him to.”
“Why not?”
I have no tidy answer to that. Deirdre stirs her coffee, probing my closed face. “Is this what you want or what he wants?”
“Both.”
“Poor Jo.” She puts her hand on mine. “Look, if you’ve made up your mind to do this, you have to just go and do it. You can’t be condemning yourself all the way.”
All around us, crockery clatters, spoons tinkle and voices talk. Happy talk, from laughing student faces, talk about essays or relationships or plans for tonight or the weekend.
“What about money?” she asks. “It costs a lot of money, doesn’t it? And you’ll have to get a boat and stay over there for a few nights.”
“He has money, he’s said he’ll pay.”
She nods, approving. “The least he can do.”
I sip some of my coffee. Tepid and bitter.
“Do you want me to come with you?” asks Deirdre.
“Oh, Dee, would you?”
“Of course I would. Of course, if you want me to.”
A wave of gratitude and relief breaks inside me. Everything flows out of me then. I tell her my trouble with the clinic, and the Right to Choose girl, and my worry that I won’t be able to make it happen.
“What about an English telephone directory?” she says. “They stock them in libraries, don’t they?”
“The directory would never be allowed to carry the addresses of places like that?”
“I’d say they might. They’re a crowd of heathens over there. They’re allowed do whatever they like.”
She squeezes my hand under hers. “If not, we’ll find a way. This doesn’t have to be as hard as you’re making it, you know.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re doing what you have to do.”
“I know. It’s just I never thought—”
“I know, no one ever does. But you’re a good person, Jo. Don’t believe anyone who tries to make you think anything else.”
She takes me over, hauling me off to the library to find a London business directory. She places it in front of me, opens the front pages under the letter A.
“Wouldn’t it be under Clinics or something?”
She upends the book and pushes it across to me. There it is, between Abattoirs and Abrasive Materials, two matter-of-fact words on a page: Abortion Advice.
We write down the names of the clinics and their telephone numbers, then take the bus into town, to the public telephone boxes in the General Post Office with their heavy, sound-proof doors. I squeeze in, line my £5 worth of fifty-pence pieces on the shelf, dial the first number on my list and am quickly through to a matter-of-fact English voice.
Certainly, she can give me information. Have I done a pregnancy test? What stage am I at? Am I certain that abortion is the option I want to take? In that case, as I am from Ireland, they can fit me in to do everything within twenty-four hours: counsel me in the morning, perform the procedure in the afternoon and I can leave the next day. I must, however, spend the night in England; that is a legal requirement. Would I like to book an appointment?
Clunk, clunk goes my money, dropping down.
I give her a false name for her appointment book: Siobhán Devoy. Her soothing voice drones on. Would I like details of bed-and-breakfast accommodation near the clinic, details of local transport? Have I any more questions? No? In that case, they look forward to seeing me on Saturday the 24th.
“It’s all arranged,” I say to Dee, coming out. “Saturday week.”
“There, that was easy, wasn’t it?”
It was. Too easy. Too, too easy.
* * *
London. Immediately, I love it. Capital of Great Britain, still thinking itself capital of the world. Great big London.
Coming in on the train, I am shocked by its size. Dee and I sit staring through a rain-spattered window as mile after mile after mile of housing whips past, endless back views of endless backstreets. On and on it goes and still on, and on, until it begins to feel like somebody’s idea of a mad joke.
The whole country is so different. As we moved out of Wales and through the middle of England with its giant power stacks, belching baleful ugly clouds at the sky, I thought of Daddy and wondered for the first time how he really lived during his years in one of these grim-looking towns.
And as we come out of Paddington Station and travel into the centre, everything tells us that we are in a new country. The red buses and pillar-boxes that to our eyes should be green. The awe-inducing buildings, taller than trees and wider than fields. Not just the touristy places, the palaces and churches that boom their importance with arches and turrets and carvings of impossible magnificence, but also the day-to-day buildings, the banks and offices and shops just sitting, resplendent, at the side of the street, thinking nothing of themselves.
I wish that Dee and I were what we seem to be: two young visitors with backpacks, here for the sights.
The sights. A group of boys our age jostling each other off the pavement, their dark skins and the whites of their eyes shining. A black woman at least six and a half foot tall, hugely beautiful in red and yellow. Another brace of boys around the entrance to a park, gravity-defying hair like cockatoo plumage, chains and spikes jangling. It has been raining and water is spilling from chutes, gutters are running, puddles lap like miniature lakes. Statues glisten, seem more animated to me than any statues I’ve ever seen, dead men and horses and lions invigorated by the rain, their eyes alive to the bustle about them and the washed, pale-blue sky.
I love it all but I especially love the people sliding past each other, unseeing, locked in the shell of their own thoughts. You could never do that in Mucknamore or even in Dublin. Here, I marvel, you can be no one right in the middle of everyone.
That’s when I let it out first, the thought that has been there since the start. Could I stay?
Even the language is not really the same. In the pub at lunchtime, I ask the barman in a pub for a white lemonade and he hands me a biscuit. Three times I have to repeat myself, blushing redder each time, before he hears what I am saying. Dee is bent in two, behind me, laughing.
Afterwards, at the clinic, she tells the story to one of the nurses, an Irish girl from Carlow called Mary, as a joke but Mary doesn’t laugh. She tells us that in England, there’s no such thing as red lemonade. She tells us she had great trouble making herself understood when she came over here first. She tells us that the English think we talk like those stage-Irish people on TV and in the films. We all sound the same to them, whether we’re from Wexford or Dublin, Cork or Donegal.
Mary has lost a lot of Carlow from her own way of talking. She speaks slowly and quietly, separating out her words; speaking not for herself but for the person who’s listening to her.
She’s a nice person and a good nurse. As she takes my pulse and blood pressure, only a shade at the very back of her eyes shows her awareness of what I’m doing. She is sorry for me, I know, for all the women here in the clinic
. I know – even as she gently leads me into theatre, even as she offers me her hand to hold while the anaesthetic takes affect – that later on I will resent this pity.
Afterwards, when it is over and I wake up, she is there again, offering me tea, but I don’t want to talk to her or to Dee or to anyone now. I wrap my arms around my empty body and ignore the look that passes between them, turn in my bed to face the wall, my back to them and the rest of the ward, the rest of the world. I feel scoured.
After a time, Mary comes over and taps me on the shoulder. I have to get up, she says.
“No. I can’t.” I am giddy with absence.
“You have to.”
I try, but my legs are too empty to hold me up. I feel like a blow-up doll with an air-leak. “I can’t stand.”
“That’s the anaesthetic,” Mary says. “You have to help it wear off.”
She gets Dee to walk me up and down the stairs.
While all this is going on, underneath I am thinking about staying, the idea hardening inside me while I try to pull back from everything else. But it’s not until next morning over breakfast that I finally get the idea up and out. “I’m not going back.”
Dee stops her toast on its way to her mouth. “What do you mean?”
“I’m not going back to Ireland.”
“Yeah, let’s stay forever.”
“I mean it, Dee. I’ve been thinking about it ever since we arrived. I’ve made up my mind.”
This is unfair to Dee, I know that. She has been good enough to come across to London with me and now I’m going to leave her to go back alone. And she will have to find somebody else to share our flat.
She tries to change my mind. I haven’t got a job. I haven’t got anywhere to live. What about my degree? My family? Rory?
“Rory and I are finished.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“I do,” I say, and I almost do. We’re finished for sure if I go back. Our only hope is if I stay here and he proves himself, proves us, by coming after me.
As for Mrs D., I haven’t spoken to her since the night I left Mucknamore. It’s unthinkable that I should go back to living off her money, under her charge, and I know now that Granny and Maeve cannot help. The strength of Mrs D.’s weakness has us all in its grip — but not me. No more.
Dee thinks I am being overdramatic. The whole point of having an abortion, she says, is so you can step back into your life as if nothing happened. She says I’m overtired, a bit depressed maybe. It’s natural, after what I’ve been through. Come to think of it, she should have expected something like this. This is no time for making big decisions. I should go home, see how I feel, and if I’m the same in a few weeks, I can come back.
It makes sense, what she is saying, but it terrifies me. If I go back, I know I will never escape again. While she is speaking, my feelings are banking up inside against her words and, for the first time in our friendship, she doesn’t sway me.
After breakfast, we pack up our weekend bags and I go with her to Paddington railway station. Up to the last moment, she doesn’t believe I’m not going with her. At the platform, I give her a hug, thank her for everything.
“You really mean it? You’re staying?”
I nod, more nervous than I’m admitting.
“But what will you do? You’ve no job, nowhere to live, no money.”
“I’ll be all right,” I say.
“Here,” she says, unzipping the front pocket of her backpack. She presses something into my hand.
My fingers close around some notes and coins. I feel tears pressing against the back of my eyes.
“I owe you,” I say.
She smiles, shakes her head. “It’s not much. I wish it was more.”
“I don’t just mean the money.” We look at each other, awkward with feeling. The train growls behind us, anxious to leave. “You’d better go.”
“Yeah.” She turns, strides down towards the second-class compartments.
A thought strikes me. “Dee!”
She turns back round and I see she is crying. For me?
“Don’t tell anybody where I am,” I call. “If Maeve or my mother ask, just play dumb. Don’t mention England.”
She frowns through her cloudy eyes. “You’ll let me know where you are once you get set up, won’t you, Jo?”
“Sure.”
She walks back to me, to give me a fierce look through wet lashes. “Jo? I mean it. I want an address and phone number as soon as you have one. You’re not to disappear, d’you hear?”
“I won’t. Honestly.”
“And you never know, you might change your mind and come back. Don’t be stubborn about it.”
“You’d really better go.”
I watch until her red backpack climbs on board, then I leave. Walking away, I hear her voice behind calling my name. “Jo!”
I turn. Her head is sticking out the window. “Up the Irish!” she shouts after me.
I laugh, lift my hand in one last wave. The train revs up and begins its shunt and, before it has even pulled out, I’ve stepped away into a swarming crowd.
1923
Easter fell early and the schools started their holidays on the day before St. Patrick’s Day. On the first morning of her break, Peg came in from a long walk and found her father in the kitchen, leaning over the fire. In the stoop of him, she could see how Barney’s death, the manner of his going, had permanently affected him.
“Are you all right, Daddy?”
‘Just a bit tired, a ghrá. Your mammy had a bad night.”
“Again. You must be weary.”
He didn’t deny it and she could feel it in him, beneath his bones. Born of lack of sleep, yes, but also of taking wrong turnings all his life. He began as a boy full of fear, for he had a father who was very hard on him, and he never outgrew it, that fear. It left him not knowing how to make his own life in his own image.
Everyone else had always led him, from his father to his daughter, and now here was where he’d come to. The horizons of youth narrowed to the hurdles of age and these latest — the death of his son, the illness of his wife — were most impossible to surmount, in the too few days he had left to him. He was too old and too tired to know what to do about any of it.
All of this Peg deduced from the way he stood over the fire. He straightened himself a bit and took up the teapot, and offered her a cup, and poured it for her.
“I think we’ll have to take her into the spare room, Daddy. Then we could take turns leaving our doors open. You one night, me the next.”
“Maybe so.”
“Definitely. You can’t go on like this. Next thing, you’ll be sick too.”
When he didn’t deny it, she said, “Let’s do it now, when we finish our tea. We’ll have it all done before the shop opens.”
They found Máire willing, which helped. She’d found it uncomfortable also, trying not to disturb him in the night, knowing she was keeping him awake. “But,” she said, “Not the spare room, facing the back fields with no sun. No. Put me in Barney’s.”
Peg and her father looked at each other.
“Are you sure?” JJ asked.
She was, and Peg was sent in to prepare the room.
She walked briskly past the bed that two months before had held her dead brother and began polishing the windows, which were spattered with sand from winter winds. The fine morning was deteriorating; she had got the best of it for her walk. A wintery, watery sun seemed to throw no heat at all, but it did give the pleasure of light, especially where it struck the peaks of the waves further out. Five distinct clouds were following each other across the sky, thickening and darkening as they marched.
Once the windows were clean, she left them open a little for air, and swept the room out, and gave it a polish and, finally, set to dressing the bed. It gave her a queer feeling and she was glad she wasn’t the one who had to sleep in it. Then she scolded herself. Most people in the village had slept in a dead person’s bed an
d what harm did it do them? Few had the luxury of spare beds, never mind spare rooms.
She finished the job efficiently, went down and heated the bedwarmer, then went back to her parents.
“You’re sure now?” JJ said again to Máire.
“I am. It’s a nice little room. I’ll sleep like the —” She stopped. “— like a baby in there.”
He wrapped a blanket around her legs and two around her shoulders before picking her up. Watching them, Peg felt the mystery of a long marriage. The long melding of days and doings felt, in that moment, more significant to her than the melding of bodies to which everyone, including herself, gave so much attention.
All that seemed a small thing to hold beside her father’s gentle lifting of his wife out of her sickbed, the lightness of her once-strong frame in his arms, the unexpected gratitude in the hands that slipped around his neck, the living, companionable togetherness of them, which Peg had sometimes felt but never before witnessed.
It was a balm to her now.
JJ carried Máire into her new room, set her down on the bed and Peg went to close the window, shutting out the hush-rush-hush of the sea. When she turned back, tears were streaming down her mother’s face.
“The hurley,” she said, pointing. “I forgot about the hurley.”
Barney’s hurling stick, that had won so many cups for Mucknamore, was atop the wardrobe. They were all, instantly, flooded with memory of him, the fitness and strength of him running and hitting and scoring. There was nothing Barney couldn’t do with that hurley.
JJ still had his arm around Máire and Peg went round to the other side of the bed and sat in beside them, feeling her own tears high but not breaking, not this morning, for some reason. She passed her mother a handkerchief and the three of them sat quiet, facing the window, watching the waves.
“It’s not a bad day,” Máire said, after a while.
“It was lovely earlier,” Peg replied.
“It’s good that it’s nearly spring. Conditions will be easing soon for those boys who are left to us.”
“Now now,” JJ said. “Let’s not be thinking about any of that now.”
