Three Wise Men, page 37
‘No, I’m Frances,’ she smiles. ‘Let me prop you up.’
She leans across, fabric conditioner wafting from her uniform, and adjusts the headboard. Now Gloria can distinguish apple green walls and a window. Branches belonging to a tree she can’t see wave jauntily at her from the right hand comer of the window.
‘Imelda,’ she gasps. ‘What happened?’
‘I’m not Imelda, I’m Frances,’ she corrects her gently. ‘You nearly died, Gloria, your husband sat up all night with you, you’ve a sound man there. He’s just gone to the canteen for some breakfast, he shouldn’t be long.’
Someone must have sent for Mick at the bank, his office isn’t far from the Rotunda. Poor Mick, he’ll be so worried. There’s something about Mick that bothers her; she frowns, thinking what it might be, but her brain aches. She squeezes at her memory, trying to pop out the missing constituent like an orange pip, but all she’s left with is a pounding headache. She looks towards the tree, its leaves whisper softly in the wind. The sibilant sounds are moving closer. It isn’t the tree, it’s people murmuring outside her room.
The door opens again and Jack and Kate walk in. She’s puzzled to see them together, then her memory returns. Jack and Kate love one another, they want to be together forever. Kate told her so, in this hospital bed. Was it this bed? She doesn’t remember the room being green, Gloria thought it was orange. Perhaps they moved her to a new room.
Kate goes to sit on the end of the bed, thinks better of it and pulls a chair close to her. Jack walks to the window and looks out.
‘Eimear won’t like this.’ Gloria’s voice squawks like a rook’s.
Kate simply takes her hand and strokes it.
‘You can’t let her find you two together, she might get suspicious,’ says Gloria.
She’s exhausted by the effort of constructing a sentence and turns her face to the pillow. It feels damp, there are tears rolling down’ her face – she’s not even aware she’s crying.
‘She doesn’t know,’ says Kate.
She soon will, thinks Gloria. But Kate isn’t talking to her, she’s addressing Jack. ‘She doesn’t know,’ repeats Kate.
A man’s hand rests on her head. ‘Glory,’ he says. Why is he calling her Glory?
The disturbing mass hovering on the horizon edges nearer, it sneaks into her consciousness. Kate and Jack have left the door ajar. Down the hall, she hears a new-born baby cry. The name flashes into her mind. James Spencer Mallon.
‘My baby! What are they doing to my baby, why is my son crying?’ screams Gloria.
She claws at the drip, in a headlong rush to drag herself from the bed. Arms restrain her and she flails, screeching. Primeval wails. Jack calls and a nurse comes running, there’s a needle and she sinks into oblivion.
Gloria opens her eyes and there’s the mint ceiling again. This time it’s only Kate sitting by her bed reading a magazine: Gloria watches her for a few moments before she realises she’s awake.
‘Gloria.’ She sets the magazine down.
‘Tell me what happened to my baby.’ Gloria turns insistent eyes towards Kate. Desolate eyes.
‘He’s dead.’
She registers the information. ‘He’s dead.’ She turns the sentence around and examines it. No pain, no surprise. Nothing.
‘I’m so sorry, Gloria, your baby’s dead. I wish there was a better way to tell you, I wish I knew how to prepare you.’
‘I want to see him.’
‘Do you think you should? He’s …’ she hesitates.
‘I want to see him.’ Gloria’s speaking decisively, there’s no shrieking this time. No more needles.
They carry her son in, wrapped in a lemon blanket. He has black hair, like Jack. Or Mick. His eyes are closed. She wonders what colour they are. She’d like to open the lids but she can’t, that would be defiling him – they were never opened. Gloria hopes they’re green, like her own. His face is waxy, blue-white, its features perfect miniatures, feathery black eyebrows. He’s twenty-one days early. She touches his skin, it’s cold. She pulls the blanket away and her gaze is drawn to his neck, encircled by an ugly scarlet band, a fiery necklace that scalds his white skin.
Gloria turns outraged eyes to Kate, who looks helplessly at the nurse. Gloria wraps her baby carefully in the blanket and brings him under the covers to warm him. Kate and the nurse are staring but she ignores them.
After a while, the nurse says, ‘Shall I take him for you now, Gloria?’
‘Where are you bringing him?’ Gloria doesn’t look up. Her eyes are on her baby’s face.
‘To another room,’ says Frances.
‘Can’t he stay here with me? He’s no trouble, I like having him by me.’ Gloria can sense her hesitation but still she doesn’t look up.
‘Five more minutes,’ says the nurse.
Gloria nods. ‘You two wait outside,’ she orders them.
Again there’s indecision.
‘Five minutes,’ she tells them firmly. ‘James and I want to be alone together.’
When the nurse returns for her baby, she hands him over without an argument. She’s memorised his face now.
‘How did it happen?’
Kate takes her hand. ‘He was strangled by the umbilical cord as you gave birth. It was a tragic accident, no one could have foreseen it. The cord wrapped itself around his neck, the doctors did all they could to save him.’
Her voice carries on, waves crashing against jagged rocks. Gloria doesn’t bother listening, she feels empty. She moves her left hand, the one without a drip attached, to touch her stomach – perhaps it’s all been a mistake and James is still safely inside her. Her hand jerks from her front as from an electric shock, it’s agonising to touch.
Gloria looks at the tree again, the corner of it that she can see. Little boys like to climb trees, little boys like James. God oh God oh God.
‘I’ve sent for your mother,’ Kate’s voice breaks through her mental barrier. ‘She’s due to arrive this evening. Rudolph’s driving her down.’
‘How did I reach the hospital?’
‘Jack drove you in. Apparently you went into premature labour and he bundled you into the car and flew like a bat out of hell with his foot through the accelerator. He’s been desperately worried about you.’
She nods indifferently.
‘Your mother and Rudolph want to bring you home to Omagh to recuperate as soon as you’re well enough to travel,’ Kate goes on. ‘But if you’d prefer to stay in Dublin, I’ll take some time off work and move in with you.’
Gloria remains mute.
‘The doctor will come by this evening and explain exactly what happened,’ says Kate. ‘That’s if you want to know the details – if it isn’t too soon.’
She trails to a halt and fidgets with the bedspread. Gloria closes her eyes and feigns sleep. Kate waits a moment and then tiptoes from the room.
Gloria’s not surprised she lost her baby, he never belonged to her. She didn’t come by him fair and square, she swindled him out of fate. She’s an impostor. There are only so many babies to go around and she didn’t wait her turn, she ran off with someone else’s. She wasn’t meant to become pregnant by that IVF session; it wouldn’t have happened if she’d used Mick’s sperm instead of Jack’s.
‘I pulled a fast one,’ thinks Gloria, ‘but I didn’t get away with it.’
Mrs Gilmartin said she saw a dark-haired boy playing in her garden but not yet. It’s too soon, she told Gloria, he’s not ready yet.
Fertility treatment. Futility treatment. Gloria sighs. People go to the futility clinic and they hand over their money and expect miracles.
‘We have faith in our doctors and scientists the way our ancestors relied on their shamen, their witchdoctors, their druids, their priests. But doctors can’t work miracles, any more than priests. They can only help nature along. Nudge her, kick-start her, supply a missing component. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t,’ Gloria recites her hopeless credo.
‘What do you mean there’s only a one in four chance, doctor? This is the twenty-first century. We can clone animals, we can probably clone people only no one’s prepared to admit it yet. So why can’t I have a baby?’
Gloria screws her eyes shut but still her brain torments her. The world is full of women having babies, there are teenagers with defiant bellies congregating around the doors of this very hospital, puffing nicotine into their lungs as hard as they can. Drinking cans of lager, maybe doped to the eyeballs. But they’re pregnant, they’ll have healthy babies they may not even want. Oh, sure, they’ll love them once they’re born, they’ll do their best by them, but they couldn’t love their babies more than she loves hers. It’s not fair.
This is natural selection and, guess what, she’s been deselected. Her face contorts with despair.
‘Dear Ms Mallon, we are sorry to inform you that you are not eligible for motherhood. Please reapply in your next life.’
Fuck that.
Her mind is playing tricks on her, looping back to her ectopic pregnancy. She remembers the elderly nun who visited with the holy picture of Virgin and Child: ‘Pray for us sinners.’ Prayers won’t help Gloria’s baby.
‘I’m a sinner, I deserve to be punished, but what did he do wrong?’ she beseeches, although she’s unsure who she’s importuning.
‘Come to think of it, what did I do that was so terribly wrong? I want my Madonna and Child moment too.’
Mother most pure, mother most chaste, mother inviolate, mother undefiled.
The words of the Rosary return to Gloria, her parents said it every night of their marriage. Perhaps her mother says it still, on her own. Gloria’s not pure, or chaste, or inviolate. The medics have defiled her with their syringes and probes, their promises that were as empty as her arms, their caveats that didn’t prepare her for failure.
Virgin most prudent, virgin most venerable, virgin most renowned.
She’s not a virgin, never mind a ‘virgins of virgins’, but the Catholic Church doesn’t worry about tautology. Do you have to be a virgin to get pregnant?
Spiritual vessel, vessel of honour, vessel of singular devotion.
All these vessels, containers, receptacles – this Virgin Mary they’re told to use as a role model isn’t a woman at all, she’s a giant womb.
‘Listen, God, if you’re out there, if you exist, I’m willing to be a womb too. It’s what you created me for, isn’t it? But you won’t let me, you changed your mind, you gave me a womb and then blocked up the entrance. That’s some joke, isn’t it. And the joke’s on me.’
Gloria tries to cover her face with her hands but the right arm is still immobilised by the drip. She’s too tired to rant, it’s over now. She tried to buck the system and she failed. No guts, no glory. Jack calls her Glory. Eventually maybe the best she’ll feel is … resignation. For now she’s too weary for any sensation.
‘Visitors to see you, Gloria,’ says Frances.
She’s wearing trousers, nurses have been allowed to wear trousers since the last time Gloria was in hospital. You see how life moves on, whether you care or not.
It’s her mother and Rudy. Her mother bursts into tears as soon as she sees her shrunken daughter. Dispassionately Gloria watches her face explode into blotches. She has an old lady’s perm; when did her mother become an old lady? Gloria watches her and wonders who she’s weeping for: Gloria, herself, her baby?
So many tears shed in a lifetime. People cry because they cut their finger or because someone makes a cruel remark. And then they lose someone they love and all anyone can do is cry again, there is no other mechanism to express sorrow. But tears run out, sooner or later, their tracks dry and start to itch, gulping sobs quieten, shoulders stop heaving.
Gloria and her family talk, but not about the reason for their visit.
‘Was there much traffic on the road?’ ‘Did you stop for a break?’ ‘Did you find your way through the city easily?’
Questions requiring answers that pass the time.
‘How’s Noreen?’ Gloria asks.
Rudy shifts in his seat. She’s not supposed to enquire about his wife, who’s pregnant too. Only four months but she still has her baby safely inside her. Her womb is like the Virgin’s, fulfilling its purpose, Noreen’s pregnant and she’s empty.
‘How’s Noreen?’ she repeats.
‘Grand – we thought it best for her to stay at home,’ Rudy answers.
‘Naturally,’ she agrees. ‘She has the baby to consider.’
Rudy’s jumpiness increases.
‘Why don’t you go outside for a smoke,’ Gloria suggests. ‘If you light up in here they’ll have to evacuate the building, there’ll be so many alarms flashing. There should be a payphone out there somewhere, you can call Noreen and tell her you arrived safely. You don’t want her worrying more than she has to. Under the circumstances.’
‘Come home with us,’ says her mother, as soon as they’re alone.
‘I don’t think they’ll be letting me out just yet. And I suppose there has to be a funeral, I can’t miss that.’
‘You don’t have to arrange the poor mite’s funeral, surely Rudy or Kate can sort that out for you.’
‘I want to do it. Mammy, I want to see my son laid to rest. He didn’t live in the world but he lived inside me, for nearly nine months.’
‘Where will you …?’
‘I haven’t thought.’ Lines criss-cross her forehead. ‘I suppose they must have a plot here in the hospital, or there’s a holy angels’ plot in Glasnevin Cemetery for dead babies, maybe he should go there.’
‘Gloria, tell me if I’m interfering, but there’s always the family grave.’
‘In Omagh? But I don’t belong there any more, my life is in Dublin.’
‘If only your father were alive,’ she sighs. ‘He might know what to say to help you through this, his religion was a great consolation to him.’
Daddy.
Of course, Daddy.
‘I’ll bury my baby with his grandfather, they’ll open the grave for him, won’t they? There’s room, isn’t there?’
Her mother smiles and tentatively touches her hair. ‘That’s exactly what you should do, love.’
And consolation, of sorts, embraces her. Gloria falls asleep.
CHAPTER 44
‘Ring the psychic hotline for a sincere and personal reading,’ invites the chocolate voice on the radio. ‘Calls charged at £1.50 a minute,’
Eimear is tempted, she has to admit she’s tempted. She doesn’t have anyone to talk problems over with now that she’s had to amputate Kate and Gloria. Nuala Ryan has the life experience of a goldfish, she just opens her mouth and closes it if Eimear says anything she can’t cope with – it’s a wonder how she got through college. Or maybe not; she lived at home and caught the bus in to Dublin from Laragh every day, then it was back to the mountains for her.
Eimear can’t even turn to her mother because she’s still disgusted with her for splitting from Jack. Eimear sniffs: she belongs to the suffer-in-silence school of wives. Her notion of coping with a Clintonesque husband is to roll her eyes heavenwards and intone: ‘All for thee, oh Sacred Heart of Jesus, all for thee.’
That psychics ad seems to be on the radio every twenty minutes, there’s no escaping it. Eimear knows she’s scraping the barrel but she has to call.
‘Hello, caller, you’re through to the psychic hotline, my name is Liz. Have you anything in particular you want the cards to help you with?’
‘I have doubts about a relationship.’ Eimear is grateful for the anonymity of the telephone line. She’s as incognito as if she stepped into the confessional.
‘I take it you mean a romantic relationship. Concentrate on it while I shuffle the cards.’
She fills her mind with Christy and his insistence that they either move in together or call it a day. Eimear hates ultimatums but he’s inflexible.
Liz’s voice is calm and unhurried. She sounds about forty-five: Eimear imagines an apple-cheeked woman – a farmer’s wife who bakes soda farls on her kitchen table and drives her strapping sons to GAA matches.
‘What on earth am I doing?’ Eimear scolds herself. Until recently the nearest she came to a fortune teller was the booth in Bundoran on holidays, when you slid in a penny and out dropped a card. ‘A chance meeting will bring you luck.’ Now Kate’s had her out in Ashbourne hearing lectures about using and abusing men from somebody’s granny and if that isn’t bad enough, here she is paying premium rates to listen to cards being shuffled.
‘Are you a farmer’s wife?’ Eimear asks.
Liz’s laughter peals down the line. ‘I’m not married. The last time I set foot on a farm was on a school trip to County Kilkenny. I trod in something nasty and stank the bus all the way home.’
That decides Eimear. She isn’t going through with this. ‘Liz, I’m late for an appointment, I’ll have to hang up.’ And she breaks her cardinal house rule by slamming down the receiver.
Eimear sinks on to the sofa, heart pounding like someone who’s just had a narrow escape. It’s not the cream sofa she used to have in Donnybrook, part of a pair, Jack took custody of them. It’s a battered old one she bought at an auction but it doesn’t look too bad with a paisley throw. At least she kept the painting: she looks at her seascape above the fireplace. It never fails to soothe her – it could be anywhere and nowhere in this country, with its harbour at one end of a horseshoe shaped strand. In the distance there’s a purple mountain; sea, sand and mountains, an unmistakably Irish landscape.
Eimear’s glance strays around her living room – she expected to be more impatient about renovating the cottage but now that she’s in situ, she’s lost interest in sanding and polishing and checking wallpaper samples against swatches of curtain material. Perhaps the home beautiful fixation belonged to her Donnybrook life, perhaps she’s in her home mediocre phase. She still loves all the interesting trinkets she’s collected over the years but she doesn’t feel so bothered about creating the perfect backdrop for them.
Eimear is relieved she resisted the temptation to rely on a telephone psychic for the answer to the mysteries of life, the universe and number 42 but there’s still the problem of who to talk to.
