by Alison Walsh
That September, Mary-Pat had brought her to the clinic in Mullingar, a discreet place tucked away on a backstreet, with a small brass plaque with a polite ‘Women’s Clinic’ engraved on it. She was sixteen years old. Mary-Pat had barely said a word to Rosie from the time she’d come down to breakfast that morning, face chalk white. She’d put her hand there, low down, beneath her stomach, where the pain gripped her, feeling as if it were pulling everything inside her into it, like a black hole. She’d barely got the words out, ‘Mary-Pat, I think …’ and then she’d looked down to see the blood streaking down her legs. She’d given a little moan then and had fallen onto her knees, a wave of pain pushing her down towards the floor. ‘What is it, Mary-Pat, what’s wrong with me?’
Mary-Pat had said not one word, but instead she’d been a blur of motion, wrapping her in the old Foxford blanket, then stomping up the stairs to her bedroom. There was a clattering and a creaking as the wardrobe door was opened and then closed again, and then her footsteps echoed along the landing to the bathroom, where the medicine cabinet was opened. Then there was silence, followed by the slam of the cabinet door, and then Mary-Pat’s heavy footsteps on the stairs. When she came into the kitchen, her face was red with exertion and she was carrying a greying black duffle bag. She hardly glanced at Rosie, but instead filled a glass of water and then handed it to her with two paracetamol.
Rosie’s face was now shiny with sweat and the pain in her abdomen had spread to the top of her legs, which were now numb. ‘It’s bad, Mary-Pat,’ she moaned. ‘Am I going to die?’
In reply, Mary-Pat gave her hand a brief squeeze. ‘You are not, do you understand me? We just need to get you to the doctor. Now, can you put on a pair of tracksuit bottoms?’ and she pushed Rosie’s feet gently into a baggy pair of grey jogging pants, pulling them gently up towards her thighs, so that Rosie could shuffle her bottom into them.
‘Can you stand up?’ Mary-Pat had said gently. ‘We need to get you into the car before Daddy and Pi get back.’
Rosie had looked at her sister, but her expression was neutral, businesslike, as she’d helped Rosie into her favourite pink sweatshirt, and Rosie was glad of it. If Mary-Pat wasn’t panicking, maybe she’d be OK. Mary-Pat had picked her up under the arms and manhandled her through the open door, down the path, opening the passenger door of the car, grunting with the effort, then pushing Rosie’s legs into the footwell and slamming the door. She’d run around then to the driver’s side and got in. ‘Right, let’s go.’
Rosie had leaned her head against the window, even though it rattled so much she thought her teeth would fall out of her head.
The doctor had been kind, gentle when she said she needed to ‘take a little look’. ‘It might hurt a bit, so just try to relax,’ she’d said. Rosie had to grip Mary-Pat’s hand, squeezing it so firmly, her sister had given a low moan. ‘Easy, Rosie.’
‘Sorry,’ Rosie had said. ‘It hurts, Mary-Pat.’ She was a child again, complaining when Mary-Pat brought her to the dentist. And then the doctor had said that the neck of the cervix was open and they’d need to do a D&C. ‘They just need to make sure there’s nothing left, so that you don’t get an infection,’ Mary-Pat had said quietly.
‘Nothing left.’ She hadn’t seen it as a baby then. She’d just seen it as something terrible that had happened to her body, that was being expelled, like an alien. ‘I don’t know what’s happened to me,’ she’d gulped, sobbing. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Rosie, you do know, and it’s not nice, but you need to accept it.’ Mary-Pat had been firm. ‘There’s no other way.’ And something about the words, about the closed expression on Mary-Pat’s face, made Rosie shut up. She knew what her sister was saying. ‘Grow up. Accept what you’ve done.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she’d said quietly.
Mary-Pat hadn’t replied, but instead had put the blanket around Rosie’s shoulders and led her to the car, opening the passenger door and easing her into the seat. And Mary-Pat had been silent all the way home, but the pile of fag ends in the ashtray told a different story.
***
‘Yes, I did,’ Rosie told Mark now, as if he’d asked her to tell him everything, instead of sitting there, digging a hole in the bank, completely silent. ‘And then Mary-Pat said she couldn’t put up with it any longer, so she said I had to leave.’ She was being mean now, rubbing it in, but she was angry with him, so angry. Can you not think of a single thing to say, she thought. Not one word?
She remembered what she’d told Mary-Pat that morning. ‘I know you think I’m a slapper, but I only did it once.’
Mary-Pat had replied, ‘Let’s get this straight. I don’t disapprove, love. I don’t have any moral objection, in case you think I do. It’s just that I’m afraid – that’s what it is. I’m afraid because nothing I say or do matters any more. I can’t control you and I’m frightened of what might happen next.’
Rosie turned to Mark now. ‘I was scared, really scared, because I had nowhere to go, not really. I begged her, but she said it was too late.’
She was trying to provoke him, to get a reaction. He cleared his throat, finally finding his voice. ‘Where did you go?’
‘Does it matter?’ she snapped. She didn’t want to tell him about that night, the last one she’d spent at home, even though she’d never forgotten it. She’d fallen into a deep sleep on her bed, and she awoke to find Mary-Pat standing beside her, looking down. She’d jumped in fright, wiping a sliver of drool from the corner of her mouth. ‘What time is it? How long have I been asleep?’ She’d half-sat on the bed, looking out the window to the soft early-autumn light.
‘It’s eight o’clock. Your friend is outside.’
For a second, Rosie had thought she’d meant Declan and she’d panicked, but then Mary-Pat had said, ‘It’s Mark.’
Rosie had been silent for a few seconds before answering, ‘Tell him to go away. I don’t want to see him.’
And, until just a few weeks ago, she hadn’t.
He turned to her now, his eyes soft. ‘No, of course, it doesn’t bloody matter. I’m sorry you had to go through that. Sorrier than I can say. I was your friend and I let you down. I should have been there for you and I wasn’t. If I’d known—’
‘You’d have done what exactly?’ She wasn’t going to make it better for him now, even if it was true.
‘I’d have done something,’ he protested, but they both knew it wasn’t true. What could he have done? ‘Rosie, I …’ He gave a long sigh, and began to say something, but then changed his mind. ‘What’ll you do now?’
‘No idea,’ Rosie said shortly.
‘You’re not happy, I can see that. And I don’t blame you, after everything that’s happened …’
‘I could be happy. You could make me happy,’ she said in a small voice.
He stuck his hands in his pockets now and looked down at the towpath, running a foot back and forth across the grass. ‘I couldn’t, Rosie. I can’t take it all away, everything that’s happened. I love you, but that’s not enough. It wasn’t enough then, and it won’t be enough now. Because no matter what I do or say, you won’t accept yourself and like yourself, and it’d be like loving someone who isn’t the real Rosie, if you see what I mean.’
She wiped the tear that was dripping off the end of her nose. He was right. She wasn’t happy and it wasn’t the wedding, or even Daddy, it was something else, something right inside her that didn’t work. That was empty. ‘I know,’ she agreed sadly.
‘Sorry,’ he muttered.
‘Don’t be.’ Rosie sniffed. ‘Because you’re right.’ She stood up, straightened herself, pulling the hem of the coat down. ‘I’ll see you around, OK?’
His face twisted into a grimace. ‘Ah, Rosie, don’t be like that.’
‘I’m not being like anything.’ She sighed. ‘I’ve just had enough, OK?’
‘OK.’ He looked stricken, the almond shape of his eyelids visible as he looked down at the ground, before picking up a stone in the
grass and tossing it into the canal, where it landed with a gentle ‘plop’ and a ripple spread outwards, right to the edge of the irises that lined the canal bank.
‘So, I’ll see you,’ she said and walked away, and even though as soon as she’d got twenty yards from him she’d burst into tears, great streams of them running down her nose, gulping down the lump in her throat, she didn’t turn around. Not once. She just kept walking.
October 1978
Michelle
‘Mammy, do you think we’ll know when the world’s going to end?’ Pius is sitting at the kitchen table, tapping a pencil repeatedly off the surface, and I wish he’d just stop. Then Mary-Pat reaches out and knocks it out of his hand. ‘Ow!’ he protests and pushes her copybook off the table, a cheeky grin on his face. She leans over as if to pick it off the floor, sticking out a foot while she’s at it and flipping the stool from under him so that he lands on the floor with a thump.
His face creases into a grimace and then the tears come. ‘She … hurt … meee,’ he wails, as I go to him and pick him up, setting the stool back on its feet and whispering and murmuring soothing words, while shooting Mary-Pat a dagger look. She looks triumphant, returning to her task of writing out a poem about Hallowe’en in her lovely handwriting.
I feel my fists clench, and I have to push the anger down inside myself. It’s always there these days, that anger, hovering just below the surface, ready to break out at the smallest excuse. I have to take a deep breath now, to hold it in, and I say quietly, ‘Mary-Pat, we’ve spoken about gentleness, haven’t we?’ as I settle him back on the stool, feeling his thin body vibrate with rage. Her smug smile tells me that she didn’t exactly take our conversation to heart, and once again, I wonder about the savagery siblings feel towards each other. I never really understood it, being an only child and the centre of my parents’ universe. I never had to fight for love; it was given to me for nothing. All I had to do was just stand there and receive it, to bask in the glow of my parents’ attention, but my children circle each other like wary animals, waiting for their chance to grab their moment, to triumph over their siblings and get a little sliver of Mammy, a crumb of a kiss or a story told only for them. They’re prepared to fight each other for this, to injure each other; it’s so raw, so basic, this need and this struggle that sometimes I find it just so overwhelming; I wonder if I can satisfy this need, if I’m enough.
‘I don’t think we would know,’ I say, once order has been restored and the three heads are bent over the copybooks. ‘It’d probably happen too quickly for us to realise.’
‘But Brother Marcus says that there will be a big plague and pestilence and people pretending to be God only they’re not, “And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet,”’ he intones in an imitation of a deep baritone. ‘And because there are lots of wars now, doesn’t that mean the end is close?’
What on earth are they filling the children’s heads with in that school? I knew that they should never have gone there, but John-Joe insisted, even though he hates that kind of thing, the religion that so dominated his early life. I don’t know, but it seems to me that being a Catholic isn’t just about going to Mass and praying; it’s about culture, about sharing, about sin, about feeling guilty about everything all the time. I can’t honestly understand why he’d want to subject the kids to that, but he says they need structure, that Frau Hunkel’s little Steiner school at the end of the towpath will just fill their heads with ‘Teutonic rubbish’, which alternately makes me laugh and want to kill him. Whatever happened to wanting them to take a different path? It seems being a father has turned him into an arch conservative. At least in some ways. He is such a contradiction, John-Joe, and sometimes I think he just takes a position to be contrary. We aren’t legally married, the children aren’t baptised, so let’s beg and plead to allow them to go to a Catholic school instead of the obvious choice. Oh, it’s maddening.
But I’m trying to be conciliatory at the moment. We’ve reached a truce after months of arguments, of skirmishes over the breakfast table, in bed, in the bathroom, in the garden; mostly about food and bills and the goats. Those bloody goats. Morecambe and Wise. To think I once wanted goats when, now, they just seem to me to be a symbol of everything that’s gone wrong for us.
He came home with them late one night, crashing and banging about, cursing and muttering under his breath. I woke with a start, pushing June off me, as she’d sneaked into my bed, and sitting up. I remembered a moonlit night almost ten years before, when he’d stood below my window and quoted Shakespeare. Now, all I could hear was a stream of expletives. ‘Where the hell did I put my effin’ keys?’ Under the stone beside the front door, I thought silently to myself, gritting my teeth. Look under the bloody stone. But it’s too late: ‘Michelle,’ he yells. ‘Michelle, are you awake? I can’t find my keys.’
For goodness’ sake, I think, pulling myself out of bed and going to the window. I open it and Romeo is standing below me, swaying. He has a bit of frayed blue rope in either hand at each end of which, I realise, is a goat. When he sees me, he throws his head back and beams. ‘My love. Look what I brought home for you.’ He tugs the rope to which the two animals are tethered and they bleat forlornly.
I slam the window shut without a word and stand there in the bedroom. Did I just dream that, I wondered, or was John-Joe standing there, drunk as a lord, clutching two goats? I peer out the window, and he’s still standing there, head down now, like a naughty schoolboy. I pull on an old jumper of his and I shuffle down the stairs, wondering as I do what would have happened all those years ago if I hadn’t answered his call when he’d stood beneath my bedroom window. If I’d just stayed in my bed? Would he just have slunk off into the night, allowing me to marry a man in a sleeveless jumper and live happily ever after? I debate, just for a second, not answering him now, not opening the door to him in the hope that he might just disappear into the darkness, with his two goats trotting along beside him. And for that second, I think I hate him. I truly, truly hate him. The feeling is so strong that my heart speeds up, my breath coming in short puffs. I have to lean on the kitchen door for a moment until I feel it subside.
I open the door and he’s standing there, his breath streaming into the night air. ‘I told you I’d find us a pair of goats and, lo, it came to pass,’ he says triumphantly. ‘Michelle, meet Eric and Ernie, or Morecambe and Wise.’
‘Where did you get them, John-Joe?’ My tone is flat and I’m aware that I sound like his mother, but I can’t help it. As time has gone on here, I’ve become the mother and he the naughty, wayward child who won’t do what Mammy tells him. This isn’t a partnership – it’s something useless and decaying and ugly and we both hate it, but neither of us seems to be able to escape it.
‘I thought you’d be pleased,’ he says dully.
‘Where did you get them?’ I repeat.
He lifts his head up now and I see a flash of defiance in his eyes, a flicker of mischief. The old John-Joe returns just for a moment, the John-Joe I remember, and I want to pull him to me and kiss him, hard. He puts his hand to his chest and sucks in a deep breath. ‘I won them, fair and square.’
‘You won a pair of goats.’
‘I did. There was a quiz in Prendergast’s and they were second prize.’ He beams. ‘Who’d have thought it? Just when we were looking for a pair, the Lord provides. It’s a miracle,’ he says with a wink.
I’m about to say something, when I hear the bedroom window open above me and a little head sticks out. It’s Pi and he turns and whispers, ‘I knew it, MP, there’s a pair of sheep in the garden, look!’ Mary-Pat’s head appears now, a tumble of curls. ‘For God’s sake, Pi, they’re goats, you big eejit.’
With the audience, I can’t say anything to him. I can’t hiss at him, ‘How the bloody hell do you expect us to look after a pair of goats, when we can hardly look after ourselves? What’ll we feed them on,
John-Joe, thin air?’ Instead, I just stand there, and so does he.
‘I’ve fucked up again, haven’t I?’ he says eventually. ‘I don’t get it, Michelle. You spend two years going on about shaggin’ goats, about the cheese and the milk and shite, about how the kids will end up with effin’ rickets if they don’t get enough calcium, and I bring you two goats and you’re not happy. You’re never happy, no matter what I do. I can’t do anything to please you.’ He sounds like a sulky child.
I curl my bare toes and clench my fists. ‘Most people don’t go to the pub and come back with a pair of goats, John-Joe. Where will we put them? How will we feed them?’
‘I’ll put them in Colleen’s old kennel and sure they’ll eat any old crap, you know that, scraps and the like.’
Now I’m properly angry. ‘Scraps of what, John-Joe? Leftovers, is that what you mean? Sure, we’d have to have food to have leftovers, wouldn’t we? And to have food, we’d have to actually do some work instead of sneaking off to the pub, and then God knows where.’ I hiss the words, because I don’t want the kids to overhear and be upset, and yet I wonder who on earth I’m fooling. We both know what I mean by ‘God knows where’. We mean to a cottage half a mile down the canal or to a council house up the town, and they’re only the two I know about.
Bridie told me about the girl in the council house, even though I didn’t want to know. I just didn’t want to hear it. I wanted to hold my hands over my ears and shout ‘la-la-la’ at the top of my voice. But she made me listen. ‘Michelle, you need to wake up and face reality. He can’t go around like that. He can’t do that to you and the children.’ Her mouth was pursed in a thin line. ‘I mean, the girl is still in a school uniform, heaven help us.’
‘Oh, God,’ I managed, trying to avoid the feeling of nausea which hit my throat at the thought of it.
