Trigger Warning
“Who’s the father?”
The girl squirmed uncomfortably on the faded brown velour couch. Her cheeks flushed and her voice was timid, “It doesn’t matter.”
“It doesn’t matter? It doesn’t matter?”
The woman shouted, and continued, “Oh but it matters very much.”
The girl whispered, “He doesn’t want to know anything about it.”
“How convenient!” The woman replied bitterly.
“I’ll deal with it myself.” The girl replied, finding her voice.
“Who else knows?” the woman demanded, panic rising in her chest.
“Just Amy”
“Amy. I might have known that Amy was involved. She’s nothing but trouble.”
“Leave Amy out of this!”
“How am I going to face people when they find out? Mary Keane will be over to me in a shot, delighted to hear the bad news, smiling while she’s sticking the knife in.”
“What do you care about Mary Keane? It will be someone else tomorrow.”
“That’s the thing, it will be someone else tomorrow, but I will forever and always be referred to as the mother of the school girl who got into trouble.”
The girl fired the fatal arrow, “As opposed to “The woman whose husband drank himself to death?”
The woman sank into the armchair and rested her head in her hands, her lank mousey brown hair falling over her shoulders. The girl tossed the cushion aside and ambled over, balancing on the wooden armrest beside her.
“I’m sorry…… for everything.” she said in a quiet voice.
The woman, wiping her tears with the back of her hands, lifted her head and took the girl’s hand in hers and pleaded, “I only wanted a better life for you, I only wanted you to get a good education, a good job, not to be stuck in a dead end job like mine.”
The girl pulled her hand away and stood up.
“I’m going up to my room.”
The woman sighed. When the girl had left the room she rose and went into the kitchenette. Standing at the sink she stared out at the brambles, the high grass dotted with daisies and dandelions and the rotting timber shed. She looked up at the billowing grey clouds moving slowly across the sky. Her cheeks flushed. She would be the talk of the parish. The shame of it. She could hear them now, “only a school girl, what hope had she brought up in a house like that? Her life is over…”
Turning her back to the window, she cast her eyes to the Sacred Heart picture, appealing to the tortured Jesus, “She’s only a child, God help her. She knows nothing about the reality of giving birth, the pain and the indignity. Once the baby’s born it’s the end of her life as she knows it, the end of her freedom. She hasn’t a clue what’s ahead of her; the responsibility, the worry, the bills. God help her. God help me.”
Boiling the kettle, she put a heaped teaspoon of Nescafe coffee into the faded floral mug and added a drop of milk from the plastic carton. Pulling out a John Players blue, she cracked a match and lit the cigarette, inhaling deeply. She thought of the story she had read, about a middle aged man in Dublin who had nearly drowned while out swimming. He told the lifeguards who had rescued him that his life had flashed before his eyes; in an instant he saw his childhood pet dog, the mountain bike he got for his twelfth birthday, his first job working for a builder, his mother’s funeral and his fiftieth birthday party. She had wondered if a person had the ability to see their future flash before their eyes would it make living easier or harder.
Stubbing her cigarette out on the large brown glass ashtray that her husband had brought her home one night from the pub as a belated birthday present, she put on her denim jacket and pulled the door shut behind her, making her way to work in his Ford Fiesta. Everyone seemed to be staring at her in the shop, but she knew that it had to be her imagination. The girl hadn’t told anyone else except her good for nothing friend, Amy. Her mouth twisted as her thoughts turned to Amy. When she returned home, the house was in darkness. The fluorescent strip light in the kitchenette buzzed and flickered when she turned it on. The counter top was covered in stray bread crumbs and a butter covered knife lay beside an empty cereal bowl, Weetabix cemented to it.
“It’s bad enough having to clean up after one but now I’ll be cleaning up after two.” she exclaimed bitterly as she filled the bowl with water, leaving it to soak in the brown stained enamel sink. Kicking off her shoes, she put on her well-worn navy slippers and padded into the sitting room. A torn page from a copy book lay on the teak coffee table.
“I’m staying at Amy’s for a few days.”
The woman sighed, relieved.
Locking the back door, she switched off the yard light and the sitting room light and made her way to the bathroom. Letting the hot tap run for a while over the beige facecloth, she then wrung it out and wiped her face with it, her skin breathing in its warmth. Brushing her teeth, she stared at her reflection in the stained mirror and then spat out the foam, rinsing her mouth with the running tap water. When she switched on her bedroom light, her eye caught the photo album on the bottom shelf of the pine plywood bookcase. Picking it up, she brushed the dust from its black cover and opened it, revealing pictures of the girl in the photo pockets. Her husband was holding the girl aloft, like a trophy. She was squealing with delight. Her little dimpled cheeks and her laughing eyes as her father had just thrown her in the air and caught her on the way down had been captured by the woman with her Polaroid camera. There was another one of her swaddled in pram blankets. She had been a serene baby, cooing and laughing in the cot. There she was, her first day at school, her little chubby hand clasping her school bag, her neat new uniform, her white socks pulled up to her knees. There she was, herself and her father with two ninety nines, squinting in the sunlight. Those were the days.
The days before the factory had closed down, the days before bills became the everyday problem, the days before drink had been used to fill the endless time with nothing else to do, the days before he felt worthless and life seemed pointless. Stroking the two happy faces with her thumb, she smiled and then her tears dropped on the plastic cover. Curling up under the bed covers, she prayed to her dead husband for strength. She prayed to him to turn her heart of stone and bitterness into something loving again.
Standing on the stool, she hoisted herself up into the attic and pulled out the bags that lay behind the Christmas decorations. Pulling out the whites and lemons and the little soft toys, she returned the rest to the attic. She would find the strength to carry on. She had found the strength when Paddy died, she would find it again. A new life might bring back a sliver of love, of hope, of kinship. She arranged the baby clothes neatly on the girl’s bed. It was a sign of peace, of acceptance, an apology of sorts that would never be verbalised.
Several days later the woman returned from work and her heart thumped fast when she saw the girl’s shoes strewn on the sitting room floor. She knocked gently on the girl’s door but was disappointed when she called out that she was already in bed and that they would talk in the morning. She returned to the kitchen, switched on the kettle and when it boiled, she stirred the hot water into a cup with a teabag in it. Swirling the teabag around with a teaspoon, she then squeezed it against the side of the cup. When she opened the press door under the sink to toss it into the bin, she gasped. There lay the baby clothes and toys. Tossing the teabag into the sink, she pulled out the lemon babygro that lay at the top of the pile to find that it had been cut with scissors and as she trawled through the stash, she found each unredeemable item.
Her face flushed in anger, she was speechless and she trembled as she made her way to the girl’s room. The last time she had been this enraged was when a neighbour had called to the back door a week after the funeral, looking for the money that he had loaned to her husband, money that she knew had been spent on drink. She had used the widow woman’s curse and a few more with it and the man had been left in a state of shock and embarrassment. It had worked. It had been effective. If she had hid her rage, like she usually did from people outside of the family, he would have returned again. Storming over to the girl’s door, she banged her fist against it and called out, her voice trembling in anger.
“Open this door. Open this door immediately!”
The girl stirred and she heard the bed creaking. Standing back, she listened to the sound of the key turning. When the girl slowly opened the door, the woman gasped. The girl’s face was pale and gaunt and her eyes were red rimmed. Behind her, the woman could see tissues scattered around the faded pink carpet. Her anger dissipated. Her brow furrowed and she whispered,
“Are you alright?”
The girl nodded but as she turned, the woman saw bloodstains on her nightdress. She sat on the side of the bed, her shoulders drooped. The woman stood over her.
“You need to see the doctor.”
“I already did.”
“What’s the matter, what’s wrong? Is the baby alright? Are you alright?”
The girl looked wearily at her. When she spoke, her voice was hoarse.
“I need to rest, I just need to sleep.”
“Are you sure you’re ok? Are you sure that the baby is ok?”
“Just let me sleep. I’ll talk to you in the morning.”
“Once you are both ok?”
The girl sat up, her face tight and full of fear, but the woman pulled her close and she rocked her back and forth as she had done when she was a baby. The girl allowed herself to be rocked. She breathed in her mother’s scent, the scent of stale cigarettes and fresh Palmolive soap. Her mother’s arms held her like scaffolding. It had always been her father who had held her as a child.
“Lie down now and rest, tomorrow is a new day, a new beginning.” the woman reassured her.
She lay back into the single bed, her hair strewn across the pillow. The woman pulled the pink satin bedspread up under her chin. Kissing her fiercely on the crown of her head, the woman then left the room without uttering another word. Closing the door gently behind her she knew that they would never speak of this again.