by Neil Hegarty
So, it couldn’t be the Pill.
But there were plenty of other reasons why a man and wife would find themselves with two children only: to do with pipes and tubing, perhaps, or to do with something else a little more on the grave side. Incompatibility raised its head – what did the priest know? – and more than one person yearned to be a fly on the wall of that confessional.
Philomena knew the stories, and recognised the glances.
The men, after a pint or two, might have commented that Philomena was the wearer of the slacks there, or so it seemed; that Cormac – in spite of appearances – was the sort of fella who did as he was told. The women, like Philomena, kept their thoughts to themselves, for Philomena was quiet-spoken and kindly, was popular in the town, was not the sort of women to be shredded by gossip. And she went to Mass daily.
Maybe the women also envied her: envied her her two children at any rate, though nothing else, perhaps, about her life. Perhaps she had been ahead of the game, they thought, gazing around and down at their own numerous broods: perhaps, in spite of appearances, she had been quick off the mark, with the Pill. Perhaps Philomena was the sort of woman who liked to take charge of her life.
It seemed unlikely though, didn’t it?
No: much more likely that she had just had two children. Surely no priest would be able to quibble with anything to do with this marriage. It was more likely that, since Cormac was in any case a withdrawn sort of man, he’d got the timing right and had withdrawn here, too.
Philomena, at the counter at Comyn’s, had looked at the blue veins running across her hands, and waited for her duck eggs, and thought of all the things that people were saying about her, about her family, about her daughters. She knew all of this talk, all of these words – how could she not, in a small place? – but better to say nothing.
Now, at her own kitchen table, she looked at her bright-eyed younger daughter, who spoke out. What had Bríd Glackin said, her lips tight, her forehead scored and furrowed with frown marks, what had she said? – too many opinions, that girl, and too fond of the sound of her own voice, and too much, and too much like Maeve. What was wrong with these two girls? What was Philomena doing wrong? – because she was clearly doing something wrong. So Bríd Glackin seemed to think.
But also: be careful. What happens to girls in Ireland who get uppity? – a list of possible outcomes, and none of them good.
Philomena watched Roisin, now. She had watched her in the incubator, then in her crib: Roisin had been premature – and the birth was dreadful, a horror of pain and fear, with nothing but death looming at the end of it all. She had – had she screamed? She thought she had, and they had made her sip water, and crunch ice that shattered at first like glass in her mouth. The crunching of pieces of ice: sharp, and then melting, as she bit down and screamed.
There had been no need for questions. The midwife’s face told her everything: it was set, professionally motionless, until the worst was over. Then, as the ice began to melt, the baby was given her start in the world, and the midwife’s face melted too, and sagged with relief and tiredness, and she changed her tune, saying soothingly that it hadn’t been so bad after all. Had it? ‘Think about the baby you have,’ the midwife said, as she must have said a thousand times before. ‘You’ll soon forget about the other things.’ The cracked tooth, the red rips in flesh. ‘And this little one: she’ll be fine now, she’ll soon put on the weight, you did well.’
Cormac was at home minding the elder girl. Men, the midwife told her, were beginning to attend in the hospitals, the odd man at any rate, it was the modern way – but Philomena said, no, not this husband; and the midwife said nothing more, and got on with it.
No, no Cormac hovering in the delivery room. Imagine. Philomena could not imagine, and she was relieved about that, one thing to feel relieved about, anyway. She could stand many things, including excruciating pain and fear, and blood, and torn flesh, and the cracked tooth: these all came with labour. But not that: not Cormac at her side, at such a time. She had the room and the baby, to herself. And now she nodded and smiled at the midwife – mildly enough, given what she’d just been through. This wasn’t it at all.
This was the last time she would have a baby, and she needed to take it all in, to remember it. That was all.
She closed her eyes and felt tranquillity, opened them and felt her cracked tooth with the tip of her tongue; looked at this tiny scrap of a thing, this second daughter, touched her tiny cheek.
The next day, the midwife told her that she had spoken, had done what she considered to be her duty. Had drawn Cormac aside, in the Jeyes-smelling corridor. ‘She needs a bit of support, but she’ll be fine. Don’t be worrying, but support her, and she’ll be fine.’ What had Cormac said? – the midwife didn’t say; but very likely nothing, not a word, just stood there and wondered (his eyes looking down at the floor) why this busybody woman was talking to him in this fashion, very likely wound up the conversation as fast as possible. Philomena listened as the midwife reported on the conversation, and smiled, and watched the midwife contemplate the strangeness of husbands and wives, the flatness and sluggishness of people in the face of the miraculous.
You don’t know him, Philomena thought.
Later, in those first weeks when the family was safely together under the one roof and the routine re-established, she waited for Cormac to go to bed at his usual time, and leave Philomena to sit up, hour by hour, and watch the tiny baby’s chest rise and fall. She could never again go through something like that labour, that birth. She looked over her shoulder, looked back at death, and looked away. Cormac would just have to understand.
*
Now, Philomena sat at her table and watched her daughter. The meal was not very modern – shepherd’s pie, a heaped white blanket of mashed potatoes – though with sweetcorn and greens on the side, for Philomena was anxious to boost her family’s intake of vitamins, to stave off the cancer and the blocked bowels (for herself, not least) for as long as possible. Comfort food, though she herself was not feeling comfortable.
Philomena was light, pale. Two daughters explained the slicing frown mark: danger, rape, molestation and thuggery scraping to get in, a curved animal claw glimpsed scrabbling into the space below the door – daughters were no laughing matter. Nor were sons, of course, people said, but in a different way; after all, it’s a whole lot easier to rape than to be raped, if it has to come to that. But at least Philomena’s blessing could now kick in again: only two daughters and not three or four or five or more than five, like everyone else. Only two to fret about. She could see how people got hold of the ideas they had about her.
And also, Roisin and Maeve seemed like nice girls. Or nice enough, anyway.
There was a touch of – of something there, and people, not only Miss Glackin, liked to gesture towards this, when the subject came up. Philomena: a good egg, but she’ll need to keep an eye on that Roisin; Maeve has a way about her that she’d do well to get the better of, and Philomena will want to see to it that her Roisin doesn’t go the same way.
So they liked to say, in the town, and Philomena knew it. They meant spirit, that Maeve had spirit, and Philomena knew this, too. She had high hopes for Maeve: higher than Maeve had any notion of.
Philomena looked at the yellow cube of corn speared on a tine of her fork.
And little Roisin, holding forth with seeming confidence. She spoke of facts, and Philomena listened. She saw her elder daughter listen to Roisin, the shepherd’s pie and greens and sweetcorn cooling, taking a back seat. The conversation made Philomena nervous.
‘A fact?’ said Maeve, and Philomena saw her husband stir in his seat.
‘Let her speak,’ Cormac said.
9
‘What’s it called, Mammy, when a bit of rock, when it shines, when you see it shining?’
‘Shining?’
She watched her mother set her fork down carefully on the edge of her plate.
In Roisin’s head, in her mind’s eye, the
bit of rock on which Mary stood shone and sparkled: she wanted to know if what the little ones said was true, if there really were diamonds hidden inside the rock. She’d had the girls’ attention that day, at break: she had told them all about her visit to Holy Mary – up close, she was right there, with her nose on a level with Holy Mary’s shoe, or where her shoe would be if she were wearing a shoe, she was closer than any one of them had ever been, since this had all started.
‘I’ll tell Miss Glackin,’ said one voice. A nasty, spiteful voice – but Roisin knew she’d not tell.
‘You’ll not dare tell,’ she said. She didn’t even look towards the voice; there was no need to look.
Had the statue moved?
‘I think I saw her move. I think her eye moved and looked at me.’
A breathing, in the little crowd of girls, like one breath. How excited the girls had been.
She hadn’t said anything about the shining rock, though. About touching it, about feeling the rough, cool stone. Why hadn’t she said anything? – it was hard to describe why she was excited, why she found it exciting. It wasn’t just about the diamonds. Although—
‘Like there are diamonds in the rock. The statue is on a rock, is standing on a rock, and the rock has a shine in it, like diamonds. Are they diamonds? In the rock?’
Daddy said, ‘It’s called mica.’
They all looked at him, Philomena and Maeve and Roisin: when he spoke, they listened, that was the rule in this house, and they all knew it. ‘Mica is a sort of mineral,’ he said.
‘A mineral?’
‘Not that sort of mineral.’ Maeve tittered bravely. ‘Not like Club Orange. Daddy means mineral like the shiny bits you saw in the rock.’
A pause, and Roisin looked up at the top of the table, and he spoke again.
‘And you get shiny bits, as your sister would say, shiny bits of it in granite, that’s what the rock is called, granite, and it makes the granite shine. That’s what those hills are too, outside the window.’ He waved an arm towards the kitchen window. ‘So that’s what you call the shine that you can see: it’s called mica.’
Cormac had already cleared his plate, and set his knife and fork down neatly. He did not look at his younger daughter.
‘Mica,’ Roisin repeated.
So that’s what it was, the shining. It was mica. And she’d seen it before.
‘I saw it before,’ she said, ‘on holiday. In the field. With the donkey. Do you remember, Maeve?’
Maeve nodded. ‘I do remember,’ she said, ‘the old donkey in his field,’ and Roisin sat back happily, and looked around at her family, sitting there at the table in the kitchen. The kitchen that, her mammy told her once, wasn’t very nice. The yellow of the walls was not a nice yellow, ‘wipe-clean’ was what her mammy called it.
Or, ‘bird-shite yellow’, Maeve liked to call it, when their daddy wasn’t around. And bird-shite yellow was a better description. You got a lot of that particular shade of bird-shite yellow round about, their mammy said once (she didn’t mind bad language, so long as their daddy wasn’t around to hear it): and it was as well to blend in, she said, so they had gone for it too.
Why was it as well to blend in? Roisin had asked – but no reply worth listening to. ‘Oh, it just is.’
And the kitchen was a bit gloomy, maybe, with all those cooking smells, and a bit dark too. The light on all the time. ‘A man’s world,’ their mammy said, ‘and a man designed this room and this house, and that’s all there is to say about it.’ And the sooner Maeve and Roisin passed their exams and got away, far away, she said once, the better.
Roisin ate her sweetcorn and looked out of the window. A rock that sparkles, a magic rock.
The bungalow looked out across the fields. Away in the distance, the fields stopped and the granite hills began. On frosty mornings and before rain, you could see every tree and every bush on the hills, you could see the trees planted there specially for wood and growing in a perfect square. But on rainy days, the hills vanished from sight, like magic.
She already knew that this was bad country. There were rushes growing in the fields, like tiny forests, and there was clay underneath the grass, blue clay that would turn your spade. And the water lay on the grass, for days and days, sometimes. It couldn’t drain away. These were fields that kept people sad, and kept them poor. It was easy to know this; you didn’t need to keep your ears wagging. Nothing for potatoes in these fields, nothing for cows. Almost nothing for sheep, here.
She wouldn’t be poor, when she grew up, and neither would Maeve be. Their mammy had said so.
And little enough to see in wet weather. Just the vanishing hills. On grey days, wet days, stormy days, Roisin saw her mammy standing at the kitchen window and looking out: into mist, into the rain lying on the rushy grass. She said once, ‘What’re you looking at?’ – and her mammy turned a little from the sink and said that she thought, some days, that she could see the grass turning blue.
Turning blue?
‘I mean, the clay coming up through the grass, the blue clay.’ Then she’d given herself a shake and said, ‘Ignore me, I’m talking nonsense,’ and went on about her business. Roisin had stood there, then, on tiptoes, where her mother had stood, and she too had looked out at the fields.
Mica, mica.
Sparked by a thought of – of what? Of… and that was it, of sunlight on a craggy coast, a holiday in the west. Ages ago – such a very tiny girl, she must have been. A lighthouse, white-painted, black-striped, perched on rocks above a curve of yellow beach. The rocks are the black of – basalt, her daddy told her, and she isn’t much interested in basalt. Basalt is too black, is dull, it’s like a black, black night. But there are more colours than black, and more rocks than basalt. The beach is backed by hills, grey hills like home.
Granite hills, she knew now. She sat very still at the kitchen table, and looked at her mashed potato, and her yellow sweetcorn. It was something hard to remember, and to stay remembering. It was easy to forget.
Granite. In which diamonds are caught, as though the hills are a fishing net. A sparkle, catching the eye, catching the sunshine that catches on the waves on the ocean, and on the hills at home, and on these hills too.
Roisin sat very still.
Granite, and mica, and granite hills and mica mountains, right here at home, in the distance, over the boggy fields, and now she knew the words and names.
And now Holy Mary.
Maeve said, ‘Can I have more sweetcorn?’
And now the family is on holidays by the sea, and the picnic is over. A small holiday house, a bungalow, on a slope above the beach, the lighthouse; a bench against the wall of the house on which Roisin and Maeve sit, in the sun, looking down on the beach and the sea. Brown legs and arms, and the rub of one toe against another toe, comfortably, and they discuss what they have seen and done: a crab in the deep rockpools on the far side of the beach, a bold crab that seized a stick in his claws, a stick that Maeve pushed at him, and he took the stick and dived into the depths of the pool.
‘Put your hand in, Roisin,’ says wicked Maeve. ‘Go on, put it into the water. I dare you.’
Roisin shakes her head.
‘Cowardy custard,’ says Maeve.
‘You put it in yourself,’ Roisin says, and she leans over the pool and looks into the black water. Black kelp like a tongue, and silver-and-brown barnacles clinging tight to the rock, and the crab, down there somewhere, holding the stick. And Maeve’s face behind her, reflected in the pool, reflected against the blue, sticking out her tongue: Roisin turns quickly, she looks over her shoulder – but Maeve has vanished, she is gone. Roisin looks over her other shoulder: Maeve has moved faster still, she is settling herself on a warm, flat slab of rock nearby. ‘You didn’t dare,’ Roisin says, and Maeve smiles.
‘I asked you first,’ Maeve says, summoning the sacred rules of the game; and Roisin sits back on her heels, vanquished by this cleverer elder sister.
Maeve is not wicked.
She loves Maeve more than anyone in the whole world.
And then a voice calling them. Up at the house, their mother has already sliced baps and ham, cut red tomatoes, cut bananas into the tiny slices that Roisin likes, fetched the tea leaves, filled a flask with hot water, and fished the red lemonade out of the tiny fridge. They’ll have their lunch on the grass outside the house, then the girls will take a nap.
‘Girls, come on up now.’
For another moment, Roisin looks at her brown toes. During this holiday, their toes have grown into the rocks; they can run and scamper, almost, as fast across the black rocks as they can across the sand.
‘Come on, then,’ Maeve says, and Roisin’s toes hit the grass. The picnic is ready. They are starving.
And now.
The baps gone, the red lemonade gone, the banana skins tidied away neatly, Roisin watches as Maeve pushes her luck.
‘Mammy,’ Maeve says.
Their parents’ eyes are closing; Roisin can see. The sun is warm, the grass smells green.
‘What is it, Maeve.’
‘Can we go and see the donkey?’
For – you can forget the lighthouse, and the rocks, and the sea, and even the fierce crab with its stick – they have discovered the best thing, the most exciting thing, right there in the very next field. Maeve discovered it on the first morning of their holiday. A donkey lived, all alone, in the little field just over the hedge: a friendly, placid donkey, that swished its tail, that blinked its eyes to show long, pretty lashes, that closed its eyes when the girls, having wriggled their way through the dense fuchsia hedge and discovered this silent field – this silent, sunken field, in which even the wind did not seem to blow, this field with its hedges dripping, said Maeve, with purple fuchsia flowers and open red roses, this field with a great rock of grey granite swelling up through the grass – and approached timidly, and held out their hands timidly, and then, emboldened, scratched him under his chin. He blinked, he liked that, he liked being scratched.
They have come every day since. All three days. The donkey likes apples, so they feed him apples; and he likes Crunchies, so they shared a Crunchie with him, once, a quarter of a Crunchie for Roisin and a quarter for Maeve and a half for the donkey. They have come every day – and now Mammy says they can go again. She will fall asleep on the dry grass, in the sun. So will Daddy. ‘Off you go,’ Mammy says, ‘and stay in the field.’