The Closet of Savage Mementos (13 page)

BOOK TWO: 2011

Chapter One

I
wake in the night, sweat-hot and stuffy headed, with a phrase dancing like a mantra through my mind:
The quick and the dead. The quick and the dead.
I sit up, sure that the baby is gone; that it is no more than a kidney-shaped blob, clinging by a fibre to the inner wall of my womb, its tiny heart stopped. Sobs bubble from my mouth – big, shuddering, ridiculous sobs – and tears slip down my face.
The quick and the dead. The quick and the dead.
When I realise I am howling – I hear the terrible sound of myself as if from another room – I clamp my lips tight, not wanting to wake Cormac. It all stops as fast as it started, but I am fully awake now; I look at Cormac, deep in sleep, and envy him. I reach for the pregnancy book that sits, bible-like, on the bedside locker.

Quickening
, I read,
is the first faint fluttering movements of your baby at about eighteen weeks’ gestation. It was once believed that the baby only became alive at this time.

‘Became alive,’ I say aloud, and feel comforted. ‘Become alive.’ I pat my belly, rub it, and tell the baby to be good. ‘Stay with me, please, stay,’ I urge. I cannot lose another child.

The baby is slow to get going most days, preferring to loll about in the nest of my belly while I settle into the morning. I wait every day for it to wake. Cormac handles my bump each time he passes me. He loves to feel and see the baby move, making patterns under my skin, and he holds his palms against my tummy, cradling me like an anointing priest. When my bump is bared, Cormac kisses my mottled belly skin and says, ‘This is your daddy. I’m here. I can’t wait to meet you.’

The scans are more frequent now and when the doctor – while probing my swollen stomach with cold gel and her magic wand – comments that the baby is lazy, I agree. We watch the screen and track the baby’s liquid movements: the slow curl of a fist or waggle of the head. It is hard to believe that the fuzzy monochrome image is anything to do with the life that stirs under the mound of my stomach: it is like looking into outer space.

‘You’ve no disco dancer there,’ the doctor says, and gives me a chart to record the baby’s every move.

‘Your first?’ the midwife says, wearing me like a glove puppet.

‘Yes.’

She presses my knees wider apart and eyeballs me, not sure, I suppose, why I am lying. She withdraws her fingers with a suck.

‘Five centimetres,’ she says.

Cormac looks at me, then at her. ‘This is our second baby, really. My wife had a miscarriage last year, at fourteen weeks.’

The midwife nods. ‘Daddy, will you wait outside a minute?’

‘I’ll be in the corridor.’ Cormac squeezes my hand; he leaves the room.

‘Mrs Spain,’ the midwife says, frowning at me, ‘a stitched perineum heals eventually but, let me tell you this, it leaves a scar. And anyway the post-partum vulva never goes back to its former state. Are you with me?’

‘What does it matter?’ I hiss, bending into another contraction and humming my way through it.

‘Please yourself,’ she says, snapping off the white gloves that are brown with my blood. ‘Was it a difficult birth?’

‘Forceps.’

‘When?’

‘Twenty years ago.’

‘This one will come easier.’ She smiles tightly and opens the door with her foot. ‘Daddy Spain,’ she calls, and Cormac comes back in. ‘Five centimetres means we’re halfway there. Halfway to somewhere.’ She leaves.

‘Are you OK?’

‘I’m grand. One’s just ending. They’re coming faster now.’

Cormac looks stricken, frightened. He rubs my arm. ‘Will I text Verity? My ma?’

‘Wait until the baby’s here.’

Another contraction begins to band my belly; I start to hum again, pressing the noise into the roof of my mouth. I get to my knees and rock, holding onto the bed rail.

‘Poor love.’ Cormac stands to the side of the narrow bed and places one hand to the base of my spine. I push against him to ease some of it, to feel him there, solidly behind me. When the contraction subsides I collapse onto his arm. ‘You’re doing great, Lillis. You’re brilliant.’

He helps me off the bed and I stand at the window, looking down at the street. A teenage boy cycles past, the front wheel of his bike wobbling while he uses one hand to pull a croissant from a paper bag and snatch bites from it. I can see the railings of Merrion Square Park and I think of the statue of Oscar Wilde that is in there, slouched on a rock, leering stupidly. I sway from side to side, holding onto my belly. Another contraction starts and I grip the windowsill and close my eyes; I concentrate on the cold floor against the soles of my feet. A stray thought flies: if the baby is a boy, maybe we will call him Oscar.

‘Oscar for a boy?’ I say, as the pain descends and peters out.

‘It’s a girl, I can feel it in my waters.’

The labour gets too much; I start to weep and hiccup, I feel shivery. Nothing Cormac says comforts me. He pulls woolly socks over my toes and puts my dressing gown on my shoulders. I shrug him off when he tries to hold me. The midwife offers jabs and gas; I take the epidural. Just as I did last time.

Back then, a junior midwife from Edinburgh and I did crosswords and watched cookery programmes on a TV that was stuck high on the wall in that long-ago room. A blue room. A room the colour of forget-me-nots where my son was pincered from me and I tore open, in more ways than one. He emerged bloody, bruised and quiet, nosing the air like an expert, taking us all in: me, the young midwife, the consultant and his flock of medical students who were brought in to learn what a difficult birth looks like. They stood by my high bed and discussed what they had witnessed, while the young midwife hauled the placenta out of me and I held my son and shook. When all the tests were done and the room emptied out, we stepped through the sunrise together: me, the young midwife and my son. Fingers of rain pulled along the small window of the labour ward and we sat in the quiet, the three of us.

Now, I imagine my labia, first like the gluey, crenulated frill of a snail, easing backwards; then pulled taut when the baby’s head juts against the opening, rushing forward to meet us. This is the most up-to-date epidural and with it I can feel the baby’s progress down the canal; it is a positive sensation, a grounding to earth.

Cormac holds one of my knees, the grim midwife the other, and I push, chin to chest; push, push, push.

‘That’s it. Good girl,’ the midwife says. ‘You’re a champion at this. Good girl, good girl.’

It is a long time since I have been called a good girl and it makes me giggle. Cormac looks at me and grins. ‘Nearly there, love.’

I want to be present at both ends. I want to be the one pushing life into the world and I want to stand at the end of the bed, watching my child’s head force through.

‘Baby’s nearly here, Mrs Spain. One big push now. Come on, let’s go.’ The midwife drops my leg and scurries to the foot of the bed. ‘Here’s the head.’

She grabs my hand and places it onto the wet, pulsing skull of my baby. ‘Oh,’ is all I can say, at the thrill of it, the velvet life of it. ‘Oh!’

‘Come on, now. Here we go.’

I push down with force and the baby whooshes out into the midwife’s hands.

‘Jesus,’ Cormac shouts, ‘it’s a baby.’ We all burst out laughing, me hysterically. Like the first time I gave birth, I am shaking and cannot stop.

‘It’s a girl,’ the midwife says, and plops her onto my already slackening belly; her pickled beetroot skin is warm and soft. The baby nods her head as if to say, ‘Yes, I have come. I am here at last.’

Before I gave birth, the young Edinburgh midwife offered me a sweet which I took, then another, which I refused, because I didn’t want her to think of me as one of those people who takes everything that is on offer. She told me not to tell the other midwives that I had eaten a sweet because I was meant to be fasting. She was a gentle girl, eager to be pleasant – the way, I had found, many Scottish people were.

‘Mum’s the word,’ I said, and we both laughed, a little awkwardly.

‘Why are you giving up the baby?’ she asked. ‘You seem nice. Capable.’

I folded my hands over my bump. ‘This is the last thing I’m cut out for. Bad mothers run in my family.’

‘What does the dad think?’

I shook my head. ‘He doesn’t know.’

‘Most girls would, you know, terminate.’

‘I’m happy to give the baby to someone who really wants it. You know, a woman who can’t get pregnant, or is too old, or whatever.’

‘You’re brave,’ she said, rolling another sweet from the packet and popping it into her mouth.

‘It would probably be braver to keep it,’ I said.

We were left alone for an hour. Baby Malachy in his clear plastic cot, so like a tub; me on my bed, with tea and toast, gazing down on him.

The midwife returned.

‘Baby has to leave now,’ she said, as if he was going to take himself out of his cot and walk away across the floor.

Her words were hard to take in. My ears fended them off and pushed them away into the air. I stared at the midwife, feeling helpless and stranded on the delivery bed. My head was wobbling – actually shaking up and down – and the euphoria of finally getting to see the baby drained from me like sweat. It was a long, stubborn birth, all of me was empty and sore, but here he was, the boy who had made me huge, who had kicked me to pieces for months on end. The midwife put her hand on my arm and rubbed my skin, hurting me; I was too distracted to tell her to stop.

‘Now? Does he have to go right now?’

‘You should hold him again.’

She placed the bundle that was my son into my arms. My little Malachy. Malachy Dónal. His face was the colour of corned beef – he looked as if he had been boiled. He had a pug nose, tiny eyes and a pouting lower lip. I kissed him on his hot, soft cheek. Malachy was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen; he looked like neither me nor Struan but was a total person all to himself. I held his neck in my elbow crook and breathed deep on his blood-warm smell. I touched his ears and eyelids with my fingertips; examined the lilac almonds of his fingernails. What this baby would look like had not occurred to me. I certainly never expected him to be so perfectly beautiful.

‘Will I take him?’

I nodded, there was nothing else to do; I had refused the offer to keep the baby with me for a few days, thinking it would be easier to break away immediately. The midwife stalled, as if she wanted to say something. My eyes pulled away from her face to Malachy’s. My sweet baby. My son.

‘Camera!’ I said, relieved that I had remembered.

She placed Malachy on the bed beside me and pulled my camera from my bag. I took a few shots of him, blanketed and snug, his dark eyes roving, reading who knows what in the air about his face. I picked him up again and the midwife took a picture of me holding him; she took it quickly and I wanted her to take another in case it didn’t turn out, but she was brusque now – killed with efficiency – so I didn’t ask.

‘All done?’ she said, putting the camera back in my bag.

‘There’s a paperweight with my things. Take it; it’s for him.’

She rummaged and held up the plumbago egg. ‘This?’

I nodded. ‘Oh, and there’s a blanket and a hat.’ I stared at Malachy while she fished them out of my bag.

‘Is that everything?’ the midwife said.

I nodded again. She pushed the paperweight into the hat, put it into the folds of the blue and green blanket then, tucking the bundle under one arm, she lifted Malachy from my arms and walked away. I sat and stared at the door through which they had left for a long, long time.

Chapter Two

U
nlike the rest of the men who grew up in our area, Cormac is not now fat. He is hefty, stocky even, but he has kept his young man’s shape. He is four years older than me – which seemed a lifetime when he was Dónal’s big brother – but, of course, it is nothing now. His friends and our friends – old school pals and local kids – as well as all of our enemies, are suddenly adult and equal. We are in the same game: we birth late, struggle to pay off big mortgages, muddle through careers, and we watch our parents become the elderly of our neighbourhood.

Meeting Cormac again was like coming home. It wasn’t just that he looked like Dónal, he was a grown-up, solid version of him. And he had a calm that roped me in; he drew me to him like the lunar pull on the sea. Cormac was newly returned from Australia when we met at a mutual friend’s housewarming party. I had recently finished with my latest pointless boyfriend and we fell together and found it worked. Instantly, it worked. Within a year we were married and we did the whole bit: the Happy Ring House, the lace wedding dress and grey morning suits, bride and groom speeches, the honeymoon in Greece. A month after the wedding I was expecting our first child, whom we lost – our poor, half-born baby. Then I got pregnant with Nessa and she stuck.

Like the wall of a dam shouldering water, Cormac holds me up. He is absolute and fixed, a sure thing. I lie with him at night, soaking up his man smell: sweat and skin and spunk. I trace the zip of his spine and finger his sleeves of tattoos. I trail my hands across the inked feathers and the fish; the anchor; the roses and hearts; and the name ‘Janelle’ – his Australian love. He has offered to get a cover-up tattoo to obliterate Janelle, but I like the curl of the letters and the cutesie sound of her name. I used to razz him that if our baby was a girl we could call her Janelle but he didn’t join in with the joke. He is too steadfast and serious for real teasing. With Cormac, I am beyond safe; he is the first man who has made me feel free from danger, cherished. At last I know that I have love. I no longer have to confuse desire, coupled with loneliness or grief, for love. This is it.

These days, within me, I hold a little of everything I understand about love and its loss: losing Dónal, loving Struan, losing my son, the grief over my miscarried baby, loving Nessa and Cormac. All of it swoops and collides inside, making me soar and crash, soar and crash. And Cormac and Nessa are, of course, the easy part of it all.

After Nessa was born and we were left alone in the delivery suite to get to know her, Cormac cried. I rubbed his shoulders as he sat on the bed, holding our daughter. I hadn’t seen him cry since we got together. He couldn’t speak and he tried to hold back the tears, but they emerged anyhow, on reluctant sobs and sighs.

‘Do you want to talk?’ I said, pulling a ragged, powdery tissue from my dressing-gown pocket for him; it was all I had.

‘Ah,’ was all he could say, another attempt to quell the crying. He dabbed at his face with the tissue.

‘Is it your da?’ I asked, knowing how new life and death get wrapped tight together, and his father was not long dead.

Cormac nodded, then shook his head. ‘It’s Dónal really.’ He gasped and swallowed hard. ‘It’s that he never got to do any of this: meet someone, have a kid. Just to grow up. He never got the chance.’ He kissed Nessa’s head. ‘Da and Dónal – they’ll never meet her.’

I stroked his neck and kissed his arm; I lay back against the pillows and he put Nessa beside me. He told me he was OK, said he was sorry; he didn’t want to upset me. The whole scene – Cormac with our daughter and his tears, the way he was fixed over her – made me love him more.

I dread Verity’s visit to see the baby, sure she will arrive stinking of alcohol, her pores weeping the stuff all over me and Nessa. I am worried about what she might think, say and do. She avoided the maternity hospital, sending word that her ‘ward phobia’ meant she couldn’t come and that she would see us at home.

But, like the dyed-in-the-wool contrarian that she is, Verity does not reek of drink when she arrives; in fact, she smells of Lux and her clothes are ironed. I am beached on the sofa, under the baby, as usual. She blusters in, her face alive, and I can tell it is not vodka that has her animated. There are no slack, soft edges to her eyes and her smile is real.

‘Mother, you’re flapping,’ I say and, unlike herself, she giggles madly.

‘Where is she? Where is this granddaughter of mine? Let me have her.’ She stands over me, twiddles her fingers and reaches for Nessa.

I hand the baby to her. ‘Say hello to your Granny Verity, Nessa. Granny, meet Nessa.’

‘Oh,’ she says, ‘oh and oh and oh, would you look at her?’

Verity holds Nessa expertly, her long arm under her back; she sings her name into her face and smiles. Cormac lifts cushions, so that she can sit down on the sofa beside me. She doesn’t say ‘How will you cope?’ or ‘Imagine, you a mother!’, which is what I have heard from some; Robin had a go, of course. Neither does she try to jolly me along, or pretend things won’t be different or strange. She is – and here is a word I never thought I would use about my mother – perfect.

I lie awake, listening to the joyriders careen up the valley; boy racers in souped-up Hondas, tearing the arse out of the night. The rip and wheen of their cars is a familiar night-music; it makes me extra glad to be with Cormac and Nessa, the three of us snug in the one bed, cloaked in love. But I am sore and restless; day and night I want to lie in a hot bath to ease the pain, to make me feel OK. I want a magic shot of energy to take me through these few weeks.

My mind is alive with memories and questions – there is a constant drone in my brain – but I am so shockingly tired that none of it coheres. I stare at Nessa and try to remember what Malachy looked like. In my memory he is longer, bigger, a more solid prospect altogether; he had a rotund belly. Nessa is slender, girlish, slight. Even still, when I dress and undress her, I sometimes expect her to be a boy.

I slide from the bed and go down to the sitting room. By the light from a high white moon, I pick up and examine all the baby cards that are ranged on the mantelpiece. They have soothers on them and bunnies; teddies and ribbons; ducks and prams; they have acres of babies dressed in pink, pink, pink. I read the messages inside and let all the good wishes and congratulations seep into me like oil through muslin. I want to soak up the breadth and width of my good fortune and leave all else aside. My father and India sent the biggest card of all, one with a black Madonna and child, and it makes a curious contrast to the girly, swirly cards given by others. It looks out of place and it bothers me suddenly – its preachy serenity – so I shove it to the back, behind the rest of the cards.

I go to the window sill and stick my nose into the bunch of blush lilies that Cormac brought me in the hospital. I hear the ragged call of our neighbour’s rooster, sending up his cries to the moon – does he never sleep? I breathe deep on the lilies and look up to watch the moon ride across the sky, a rolling pearl. This is me now, I think; this is who I am meant to be: mother to this child. All is well.