Into the Night Sky

by Caroline Finnerty

  At last the nurse comes out and calls Ella into the room. Ella eyes the needle, which lies at the side of the cardboard tray, waiting to pierce through her baby’s pudgy skin. She sees its pointed sharpness and knows it will wake her. She wants to run with her there and then, but instead she does as the nurse tells her and takes a seat at the end of the desk while the nurse busies herself with filling out Maisie’s vaccination card.

  “It’s nice to finally meet you, Ella,” the nurse says.

  Ella’s ears automatically pick out the word ‘finally’.

  “I think it was your childminder that I met the last time?” the nurse continues.

  Ella nods. “Yeah, you would have met Mrs Frawley then.”

  “You must have gone back to work early?”

  “Yes, I had to go back when she was only a month old.”

  “Wow, that must have been tough! Well, it’s nice to finally meet Maisie’s mum.”

  Ella is grateful that she doesn’t mention the newspaper headlines.

  “So how are you getting on, Ella? You’re probably a dab hand at it by this stage – Maisie is your third child, right?”

  “She cries a lot.”

  The nurse looks at Ella first and then at Maisie who is still sleeping soundly in her car seat.

  “She’s a baby – they all do that unfortunately!” She laughs. “You’ve probably just forgotten since the other two.”

  She doesn’t remember it being like that with the other two.

  “I keep thinking that she’s going to stop breathing or something.”

  “I think most parents will admit to worrying about it at some stage but as long she’s sleeping on her back and not wrapped up too warmly, she should be fine.”

  “So it’s normal then?” she asks.

  “Completely,” the nurse smiles.

  “I just feel useless though.” The words are out before she knows it.

  The nurse puts down the vaccination card. “But did you feel like this with the other two?”

  “Well, I can’t remember, I . . . em . . . I . . . wasn’t around that much when they were small if I’m honest.”

  “Oh.”

  Ella can hear the judgement in her voice.

  “Look, I think all mothers feel like that at some stage,” the nurse says, “even when they’ve had babies before.”

  “But why don’t people ever talk about it? It’s just so . . . so . . . massive.”

  The nurse peers at her over the rims of her steel-framed glasses. “Okay, why don’t you lift her out and strip her down to her vest – it’s two jabs today, I’m afraid.”

  “But she’ll cry!”

  The nurse laughs. “I vaccinate over twenty babies a day – believe me, I know she will cry!”

  Ella bends down, unstraps Maisie and delicately unzips her from her padded snowsuit. Maisie startles and her brown eyes pop open.

  “Hello, beautiful,” the nurse says and takes her hand.

  This woman, this strange woman, seems more confident than Ella is with her own daughter. “You’re not going to like me, no, you’re not,” she coos. She instructs Ella on the best way to hold her. “Right, are you ready then?”

  Ella closes her eyes and waits to hear Maisie’s roar. Finally it comes, a desperate waaah, waaah, before she starts screaming.

  “It’s okay, little one, it’s okay,” Ella says over and over again.

  “All right, Ella – if you turn her this way, we’ll do the same again on the other side.”

  She reluctantly does what she is told. And this time Maisie roars and Ella wants to cry with her.

  “Don’t worry, we’re all done. Now, if she develops a temperature or is irritable give her some Calpol. Of course, if at any stage you’re worried, give the surgery a call. Here’s a card with our number.”

  Ella manages to calm Maisie down and get her back into her snowsuit. She is just about to go out the door when the nurse stops her. “Why don’t you and Maisie go along to the mother and baby group? There’s one on in the Parish Hall every Friday morning.”

  “Oh, I don’t think I’m a mother-and-baby-group kind of person,” she says, dismissing her quickly. It sounds like her very worst nightmare.

  The nurse looks at her as if she’s trying to assess her. “Really?”

  “It’s just not my scene,” she adds with a tone of defensiveness.

  “Well, if you say so, but it can be an invaluable way of meeting other people in the area or even just to have a cup of tea and a chat with mothers going through the same thing as you. Maybe you shouldn’t rule it out without giving it a go.”

  “Okay, I might . . . ”

  But she has no intention of going anywhere near it. Listening to other mothers worrying about how many poos their baby does in a day or how to introduce lumpy food to their baby’s diet. She’s not like them. No way.

  Chapter 11

  They are a thoroughly modern family, the Traynors, or should that be the Traynor-Corless-McWilliamses? It sounded like a firm of solicitors when you said it like that. Rachel and Marcus were on their way over to the house of his ex-wife, Jules Corless, the mother of his two grown-up children Eli and Alexandra. Jules had recently had a third child with her new husband Brian McWilliams and they were having a barbecue to celebrate the child’s christening.

  It is just after seven when their taxi pulls up on the tree-lined avenue in front of Jules’ and Brian’s house. They get out, Marcus takes her hand in his and they walk up the path towards the door.

  “Rachel, come on in – it’s so good to see you again!” Jules says, opening the door and taking her warmly into her arms.

  “What about me?” Marcus asks, leaning in to give her a kiss on the cheek.

  “And you, of course! Come on through to the garden – Brian is just lighting the charcoal.” She stops and places her hand on Rachel’s elbow. “And don’t worry, we have special veggie sausages just for you, Rachel.”

  In the early days, when she had first met Marcus it used to freak her out, the level of comfortableness and good relations between them all. Any divorced couples that she knew were acrimoniously divorced – they hated each other with a lingering bitterness. But Marcus and Jules still liked each other and, more than that, Marcus counted Jules as one of his best friends. Rachel used to feel intimidated by it, if she is really honest, and whenever she talked to her best friend Shirley about the closeness of his relationship with his ex-wife, Shirley would scrunch up her face in suspicion: “Isn’t it a bit weird though? You don’t think there’s anything still going on there, do you?” Rachel had worried about it for a while, treating Jules with a wary coolness every time they saw each other. She had eventually spilled out her feelings to Marcus, confessing how strange she found it all, and he had seemed genuinely upset. He had never thought for a second that she would find the whole thing unsettling. He had assured her that they just had a great friendship and he was very proud of how they had managed to maintain their relationship after the divorce because their two children would never know the tug of sparing one parent’s feelings over the other’s or the stress of trying to keep them apart at family occasions.

  “But if you get on so well, why did you and Jules break up then?” she remembered asking him.

  “Because we are essentially two very different people. We started out as friends in university – then we got together and soon after she was pregnant. We were so young and naïve – we were only eighteen. When I look at Eli now, I can’t imagine him being responsible for a baby and he’s nearly six years older than I was at the time! Our parents were keen for us to get married, so we did, and then we had Alex. But sometimes when you’re with someone from such a young age you don’t even know yourself properly and it was only as we got older that we both got to know ourselves and realised that our relationship was essentially what it started out as: friendship. We had drifted apart and were more like brother and sister than husband and wife. We’ll always love and care for each other, but som
e people are meant to be just friends and me and Jules were that.” He had pulled her up on top of him then. “But you and me, we’re meant to be lovers and friends, and that’s the best bit.”

  They are all sitting down around the table now while Brian flips meat on the griddle. The smell of the lilac tree scents the air. The sun is just starting to set in a pinky orange sky.

  “So how are you finding it all?” Rachel asks as Jules fills her glass with chilled white wine.

  “I’m good. I don’t remember being this tired with the other two, though, but that would be my age – ‘elderly gravida’is what they described me as in the hospital – but look,” she is nodding over to where Eli is cradling his infant brother on his knee, “he’s the best thing to ever happen to our family. He’s cemented us all together.”

  Jules had told Rachel the story about how she didn’t realise that she was pregnant until she was ten weeks gone. She had put her absent period and emotional state down to the start of the menopause and so at the age of forty-three with a twenty-four-year-old son and a twenty-two-year-old daughter it had certainly come as a surprise.

  Rachel gets up to fill her plate with salad. She looks over at Marcus who is now lifting the baby from Eli’s arms. She watches for a moment as he strokes his head, then he puts his fingers inside the curl of the child’s fingers and he grips on tightly. She feels her chest tighten and her breathing seems to stop. It feels like someone is searing a hot rock of coal through her heart. The longing feels so acute, so painful. She badly wants this for them. So badly.

  “What about you, Rachel?” Jules says, coming up beside her and following her line of vision over to Marcus. “Do you think that you and Marcus will ever have children together?”

  “Hmmh, I’d like to, I really would, but I don’t think Marcus is quite there yet,” she says wistfully. “I’m not sure if he’s ever going to be there, to be honest.” She combs her fingers back through her hair. She feels uncomfortable talking about this with his ex-wife. It feels disloyal to him somehow.

  “He’ll come round. Marcus loves you very much – I can see that. What you two have together is different from what we had. If he knows how much it means to you then I’m sure he’ll realise that it would be really good for both of you.”

  Rachel really wants to believe what this woman is saying. All she wants is for Marcus to turn around to tell her that he has changed his mind and is ready to start a new journey into parenthood with her, but she also knows him well enough to realise that that isn’t going to happen.

  Jules continues around the garden, filling up the wineglasses of her friends and relations, while Rachel makes her way over to sit down beside Marcus. Dusk starts to fall as the sun sets in an intense orange glow. She lets her weight sink into the chair; for some reason her whole body feels heavier now than when they had first come in. The candles on the table in front of them flicker in the gentle evening breeze. He gently places the baby into her arms and they each know what the other is thinking. She traces her finger along the clockwise whorl of hair on top of the baby’s head. They feel the weight of sadness descend upon them yet again.

  When they leave the barbecue, they flag a passing taxi down on the street outside. They sit into the back seat and Rachel rests her head on his shoulder. Street lights flick past the window outside. The taxi brings them to his place: a two-up, two-down red-brick house on the South Circular Road.

  They let themselves inside and he makes them both their favourite nightcap of a Bailey’s coffee and sits down onto the sofa beside her.

  “You’re very quiet,” he says eventually. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m good, just tired.” She lies back into his arms and he strokes her hair. “Just . . . Jules asked me if you and I are ever planning on having children.” She knows she is throwing it out there to test him; she knows this but she can’t help it. She needs to discuss it again. She is so desperate to resolve this issue between them.

  “Oh . . . I see . . . And what did you say to her?”

  “I just said that I was hoping that you’d come round to the idea.”

  “But I won’t, Rachel, you know that, don’t you?” He turns to look at her and takes her hands in his.

  “I know,” she whispers, “but it’s hard. You know how important it is to me to have children. I see Jules with wee Leo, who you were great with by the way – and I wish we had that or could have that, not even right now, but I need to know that it’s in our future.”

  “I’m sorry, Rach, but it’s the just the one thing that I can’t give you.”

  “But I feel it every day – it is physically calling to me, and I know that sounds clichéd but I really have to listen to it. When I see a mother with a baby, my stomach somersaults inside because the yearning is so strong – do you get it Marcus? It’s that strong!”

  “Aw, Rach, I know, but it’s just not something I want. I’m sorry, I wish that I did, but it’s not an option for me. I have Eli and Alex and I adore them but that’s it for me. They’re adults now, they’re both in college and they’re starting to establish a little bit of independence away from me and Jules, and I love the freedom that you and I have now. I love how we can take off for a weekend or go out for dinner whenever we feel like it. It’s not that easy with babies. I hate the thought of having to go all the way back through that again. I look at Jules with her newborn and I can’t help but think it’d be my worst nightmare going back there again. I can’t go back to the sleepless nights, nappies and sterilising everything. I know it’s different for me because I already have children but I can’t go back there. I know that’s not fair on you. I’m sorry I can’t be what you want me to be.”

  It’s the familiar pang of sadness that has been coming a lot lately because she knows that sooner or later they will have to finish what they have together. Their relationship will have to come to an end because there is nowhere for them to go any more. They have come to a fork in their road and either she has to make the decision to forgo having children or else he needs to change his mind about not having more. She has given it so much thought. She has tried to imagine her life without children in it – she pictures herself as a fifty-year-old and Marcus ten years older than that again, childfree and careless as they go about life, but it isn’t what she wants for her future. Whenever she thinks about them like that, it doesn’t fill her with warmth. There is something missing from the picture.

  But they both know that neither of them is going to change their mind – they’ve been over it time and time again. They’ve fought, they’ve gone without talking, they’ve cried about it, but ultimately they both know that sooner or later they are going to have to go their separate ways.

  Chapter 12

  Ella gets up, puts on her dressing gown and goes down to the cove to smoke a cigarette. She hasn’t smoked in years but in the last few weeks she has found herself going back to them. When she is finished she takes the butt and puts it into the dustbin before going back inside to wake the girls for school. She opens each of their doors to rouse them before climbing the stone staircase to the top of the tower to get breakfast ready. A few minutes later and there is still no sign of either of the girls. She looks up at the clock.

  “Come on, girls, wake up, we’re going to be late again!” she shouts down from the balcony, looking down through the centre of the spiral staircase to the bottom of the Martello tower where the bedrooms are.

  Dot bounces up the stairs a few minutes later and Ella can hear Celeste trudging heavily behind her. They sit down at the table and Celeste eats her Cheerios behind a makeshift wall of cereal boxes.

  Ella starts buttering bread to make their lunches and opens every cupboard door in sequence, searching for missing lunchbox lids. Then giving up as the effort defeats her, she decides to put their lunches into plastic supermarket bags. Once again she finds herself wondering how Mrs Frawley had made minding her children seem effortless over the years. While the girls are eating, she goes back down to wake M
aisie. Her baby is fast asleep on her tummy with her bum raised high in the air. She rests her hand on her warm body to feel the reassuring rise and fall of daughter’s back. It seems a shame to wake her now that she is finally sleeping, having been awake most of the night, but they have to go. As soon as Ella lifts her, Maisie starts to cry. She puts her into her snowsuit, trying her best to be delicate as she inserts flailing limbs through the narrow holes.

  Outside she straps the baby into her car seat and ushers the girls into the jeep. She gets into the front seat and, when she sees the time on the clock, she knows they will definitely be late. Again. The engine roars to life and she waits for the electric gates to open.

  Maisie’s cries are ringing through the air.

  “Stopcrying, Maisie!” Celeste roars at her. “Can’t you do something to make her stop, Mum?”

  “Mum, Maisie is really annoying!” Dot complains.

  Ella’s head just hears noises coming at her from every angle, like arrows – they keep coming and piercing through her skull: the baby screaming and the two girls shouting at her to make her stop screaming. She wonders, if she pressed the accelerator really hard and closed her eyes, what would happen? Where would she end up? There is a perilous drop to the sea below – but as soon as the thought enters her head, it leaves again just as fast.