Chapter 32
THIRTY-TWO
14 AUGUST 2005
Another morning, another sleepless night. I feel hollowed out with tiredness and unable to focus on anything. The words on this page are blurry and coming even more slowly than usual. I cannot paint – when I sit in front of a blank canvas there seems no point in marking it with a brushstroke or line of charcoal. When sweet Luke called me up to the first floor yesterday to show me the newly stripped panelling there, I could barely summon any enthusiasm, even though I could see how wonderful it looks.
Around me, the house is slowly coming back to life, the warmth of summer seeming to bring its blood rushing through its veins. The garden exploding in fruitfulness – the blackberries are ripening and the gnarled old apple tree is laden with fruit. Thanks to the Preservation Trust grant, I paid some electricians to do the rewiring, and I have a man coming next week to quote on repairing the roof.
But inside I am cold as ashes – as lifeless as this place was when I first moved in.
My thoughts return constantly to that contact register. The damn legislation. I don’t even know what the register looks like – I imagine it being a book, a heavy, dusty tome, although in reality it’s probably a database on a server somewhere. Either way, it is a source of torment to me, like a cancer growing inside me. Like how I felt before she was born – as if I had been infected by some parasite.
All I wanted was to be rid of it – this thing that was growing inside me, threatening to destroy me. But I couldn’t wish it away or even purge myself of it through violence – although God knows I tried; in a lifetime of riding horses, I never fell as often or as hard as in those few months.
That was how my grandmother found out – not through the changing shape of my body, which I hid beneath an old-fashioned girdle unearthed from a trunk of my mother’s clothes, but because I appeared to have lost the ability to stick on a horse. And once she knew, it was all over – there was no escaping her and the help she promised me.
No one would know, she said. Only her and the nuns at the clinic. No one would ever find out. Once I had resigned myself to the fact that I would have to go through with it, something changed: I felt a kind of acceptance and then something almost like fascination. What was growing inside me was a person. I would never know her – thanks to the slow circling of my mother’s wedding ring on a string over my belly, I was sure this would be a daughter – but I could see her, just briefly, hold her and then say goodbye.
But it didn’t turn out like that. I tried so hard – I really did. Goaded by the midwives, who told me I was being a silly girl, weak and cowardly as well as sinful, I tried. Truly, I did. If my grandmother hadn’t intervened and insisted a doctor be called, I would have died and so would she. As it was, we were both saved. Saved by the oblivion of a general anaesthetic and a knife through my skin.
Even then, I begged them not to operate, because I knew what would happen once I was unconscious. It did, of course. By the time I came round, they had taken her away. Only my grandmother was there by my bed, holding my hand, saying, There, there, Orla. It’s all over now.
I believed her – all these years, I thought that what she’d said was true.
But she was wrong. I have the means to make contact with her now and I can’t stop asking myself the question: if I wanted so much to see her back then, why can’t I bear to do so now?