Chapter 17
CHAPTER 17
December 1969
Bernie
I scrubbed our flat from top to bottom this morning but I can still get the stench of dead meat. The walls have soaked the scent up over the years and every so often they take pleasure in spitting it back out. I suppose that’s to be expected when you live above a butcher’s shop. It’s not so bad now, but in summer, if I open the windows, the smell is rancid enough to knock a horse.
My doctor says a woman goes funny when she’s expecting a baby. Smells things she normally wouldn’t. Feels things she normally doesn’t. I wonder how he knows, having never had a baby grow inside him.
“You’ll be grand, Bernie,” the chap with the glasses and posh accent said on my last visit to the hospital. “Stick your head out the window—for a bit of fresh air and whatnot.”
I know where I’d like to stick him , I think, as another bout of morning sickness hits and I take his advice. I open the window and stick my head out. I observe the street below as I take deep breaths and count backward from ten.
It’s my first experience of a hospital birth, and, if I’m honest, I’m regretting the decision. I won’t tell Dan, of course. He’s slaving all hours to pay for it.
“I think we need to come into the twenty-first century,” I said. “Home births are gone with the flood.”
Dan didn’t argue. He said if it made me feel better, we’d find the money. He can’t understand why I’m so sick this time around.
“You’ve had three already; shouldn’t this be a breeze to you?”
None of my pregnancies were a breeze, but this one is particularly difficult.
“Ma, Ma, Ma, I need to pee,” Elizabeth, my middle daughter, shouts, racing toward me with her dress pulled up to her belly button.
“All right, all right,” I say, reluctantly pulling my head back inside.
We’re too late and a yellowish puddle circulates on the floor tiles.
“I’m sorry, Ma. It sneaked up on me.”
“S’all right,” I say, worried she’ll be twenty-one and still wetting her pants.
“Marie,” I call out. “Fetch the mop.”
My six-year-old knows the drill. She returns carrying a timber-handled mop twice her size.
“Oh no you didn’t,” she says, pointing at the puddle and then at her sister.
Marie begins to laugh. Elizabeth begins to cry. And, Alice, my youngest, loudly stirs from her nap.
I hurry into the one and only bedroom and pick my one-year-old up from her cot. I sit her on my middle, where her little brother or sister is growing.
“Shh, shh. It’s all right, it’s all right,” I say, and I wish I believed my own words.
“Maaaaaa,” Marie calls out. “She did it again.”
I rejoin my older children in the remainder of our flat and observe the second, and growing, yellow puddle.
“Elizabeth,” I scold in a tone sterner than I have energy to produce. “If you do this again, as Jesus is my guide, I will slap you. Do you hear me?”
“You’re going to get your arse reddened.” Marie laughs.
My hand flies and comes down on Marie’s bottom. “Where did you hear that word?”
My eldest child stops in her tracks and tears fill her eyes as she reaches behind her to rub where I’ve just slapped. “A boy in school,” she says, her bottom lip dropping. “I… I… I…”
I realize she doesn’t know what she’s said, and I want to take it back. I want to cuddle her and tell her how sorry I am.
“Well, don’t ever let me hear you say it again. What would Father Matthews say if he heard you say something like that? And with your first Holy Communion just around the corner.”
“I’m sorry, Ma,” Marie says, beginning to mop up her sister’s mess.
At just six years old, she already carries out responsibility greater than any child her age should. She helps me cook and clean, and although she teases Elizabeth from time to time, she is a caring older sister.
I sit the baby down on the tiles, and she protests at the cold. She cries and reaches her arms back out to me.
“Marie, play with your sisters, please,” I say, taking the mop from her to finish cleaning.
Marie is relieved by her new chore and she joins the baby on the floor. Soon all three of my girls are playing and laughing. I finish mopping and turn my attention to the stove. A large pot full of Alice’s cloth nappies is about to boil over. I kill the heat and lift the pot to the sink. It’s heavy and I hear something in my back click before pain shoots down my legs. I yelp like a wounded animal. Marie is on her feet in an instant and the fear on her face is worse than the pain.
“I’m all right. I’m all right,” I lie, taking deep breaths. “Nothing to worry about.”
Marie doesn’t believe me. “I’ll get Da.”
My eyes widen. “Noooo. Don’t. I really am all right, love. Da is busy workin’, best not to disturb him.”
I’m not quite halfway through this pregnancy as yet, and I’ve never seen Dan so worried. He thinks he hides it well, but I can see through him as if he’s made of glass.
“Never again,” he said last week when I lost a day in bed with a blistering headache. “I’m never putting you through this again. No more babies. I’ll sleep on the sawdust floor in the shop if I have to, but we can’t share a bed anymore once this baby comes.”
I laughed at first, but when I realized he was serious I didn’t find it funny.
“Don’t be daft,” I said. “That’s not a marriage.”
“No more babies.”
“Ma. What’s the matter?” Marie says, dragging me back to the here and now. Her little face is contorted with worry. “Are you going to die?”
“I don’t want Ma to die,” Elizabeth begins to cry.
“Kate’s ma is dead,” Marie says. “She gots to live with her granny now. And her granny is cross and smells funny.”
“That’s very sad for Kate,” I say, trying to picture the child from Marie’s class in school in my mind.
A little girl with curly red hair and no coat in the depths of winter comes to mind. Kate O’Rourke is the youngest child in a family of seven or eight or so. With no mother in the house and a father working all hours of the day to put food on the table, those poor craythurs are left to fend for themselves all day. It’s a wonder they’re in school at all. I decide I’ll pack an extra apple in Marie’s school bag tomorrow—for Kate.
“Right, girls,” I say, clapping my hands to command my daughters’ attention. “Let’s hang these up.” I point toward the pot of freshly boiled nappies. “And then we’ll go to the market.”
Elizabeth’s tears quickly turn to joy. A trip to the market and a lollipop is her favorite. Marie smiles and fetches a stool from the table so she can climb up and reach the washing line that stretches from one side of the kitchen to the other.
“Ready, Ma,” she says, and I wring out the first spotless nappy and pass it to her.
She secures it with a wooden clothes peg. Elizabeth claps her hands sporadically and cheers. “Good girl. Good girl.”
Marie and I make light work of hanging the washing. Then I take my eldest child’s hand and she hops down from the chair.
“Coats, everyone,” I say.
The girls gather their coats from the ends of their beds and put them on. Elizabeth’s wrists poke out past the ends of her sleeves and the hem barely hangs below her bottom anymore. I muffle a groan. Her coat will need replacing before this winter is through and certainly before Marie has grown out of her coat to pass it down. I take the biscuit tin from the dresser, pop the lid, and count the money inside. There’s enough for a Black Forest gateau from the fancy bakery on the corner. Dan turns thirty next week and I’ve been saving for almost three months. I hoped to have enough change for candles and some balloons too. But Elizabeth needs a coat and Dan will understand. I take a bedspread from the dresser, a heavy red one that used to be my ma’s and is one of the few items of hers that I have left now. I raise it to my face and inhale deeply. The smell reminds me of my childhood and carefree days. I savor the scent and the memory. It’s a warm woolen material and it will make a fine coat. I’ll leave it with the dressmaker in town and hopefully there will be enough material to get a coat for Marie out of it, too, while we’re at it.
I put on my own coat, which doesn’t close over my ever-growing belly. I notice a new hole in the left underarm. I’d leave it with the dressmaker, too, but I’ve nothing to wear in the meantime. I scoop the baby off the floor, pop on her coat, and the girls and I leave the flat.
“Be careful on them stairs,” I call out as Marie and Elizabeth show little regard for the slippery concrete steps leading down onto the street. “Girls, walk! No running.”
I sit the baby in the pram waiting at the bottom step. She grumbles and, as usual, reaches her arms up to me.
“Shh. Hush now,” I say, and I cover her chubby little legs with a blanket. Elizabeth curls her fingers around the side of the push bar on the left. Marie does the same on the right and together we push the pram out the door and onto the bright, busy street.