Her colleagues at the hospital gave her a hamper full of blue baby clothes and blankets. She sneaked them in from the car and we buried them in the back of her wardrobe under shoeboxes and suitcases. My father refused to acknowledge her straining stomach and she didn’t want to do anything that might provoke a disappearance. Another baby was further evidence that time was moving forward and life was happening.
One night they sat at the kitchen table. She had her arms folded over her body, trying to suppress the eager bulge of her stomach.
‘So.’ He scraped his knife across the plate. ‘Where are you going to put it?’
My mother unearthed the Moses basket from under the bed. I lined up my Barbies and narrowed my eyes, choosing who to sacrifice to the baby. I never liked Sindy in her tacky yellow dress. I wrapped her up in a piece of kitchen roll like a shroud and gave her to my mother to take to the hospital.
69
You are somewhere else and I am with him. His body does not hold mine the way yours does. He is cold to the touch but smells grimy delicious. All your rules are broken and there are no cloudy bathtimes or reading books in bed. He tastes of earth and sky: a good kind of dangerous.
70
My brother was born by Caesarean. It was a traumatic procedure and he arrived in the world swollen and covered in bruises, screaming down the hospital. There was an advert for Tefal electrical products on the telly. The microwaves and blenders were operated by scientists in white coats, their foreheads huge and domed to fit their massive brains. My dad nicknamed the baby Tefal for six weeks, until we all agreed on Josh.
‘Funny name,’ said my Uncle Pete as he peered into my brother’s yellow face. ‘Sounds a bit soft, like. Might turn out to be a puff, with a name like that.’ He had a coloboma in his right eye and three holes in his heart.
71
Medicine sting at the back of my throat. Blood and crusty stitches. I press my fingers to the marks the doctors made. How did that tiny body do that to you? He is bruised and screaming. Did I do that to you? Parma Violets give me headaches. I hate the green Opal Fruits but I must suck them while the adults talk. Your stomach is puffy and pink but there he is, swaddled safe in soft blanket. Shush, the baby is sleeping but I don’t want a baby. I want to run up and down in my tap shoes. I want you to hear me.
72
Our house contracted jaundice. Everything existed as normal but all of the colours were sickly. My mother could see the imprints of hospital walls on the backs of her eyelids. My father hovered around making cups of tea and putting things away, not knowing where to keep the dread that loomed in the doorways.
I took advantage of the distraction to wear my hair down for school. I skipped through the corridors with it streaming behind me. My mother sat for hours with the nit comb, dragging tiny eggs from my head while my new brother grizzled on her knee. The tea-tree oil smelled sharp and clean, mingling with the disinfectant in hospital waiting rooms.
Our parish priest turned up at the front door wielding rich, heavy incense and anointing oils and a bag full of candles and laminated prayer cards emblazoned with pictures of patron saints.
‘Please.’ He drew the curtains slowly. ‘Turn off the lights.’ My baby brother lay in the furry brown pile of our living room rug. I imagined that to him it must seem like a forest in winter, the leaves fallen from the trees.
‘Our Father who art in heaven.’ The priest closed his eyes and began to murmur, rubbing oil between his fingers, placing his hands on Josh’s head and over his heart. My mother kneeled reverently in the corner while I clattered up and down the hallway in my tap shoes singing, ‘Everybody needs a bosom for a pillow’ along with the radio.
‘This is bullshit you know, Suze,’ said my father later, from his perch in front of the fire.
‘What is?’
‘All this God stuff.’
She gave him an exhausted look.
‘What else do you suggest?’ she asked him.
His cup of tea shook in his hands. They watched it slop onto the carpet and they cried together in fat wet drops, tears mingling with the biscuit crumbs and bits of fluff.
73
I am spreading out my life across my grandfather’s cottage. I try to make space for my things in the kitchen cupboard and the pope plate falls out and smashes on the tiles. I look at the shards for a moment and wonder whether I should feel guilty. I consider collecting the pieces and gluing it back together. I decide that sometimes things are just broken, and it is better to leave them that way.
74
His body is fragile. We have to be gentle. How can anybody be so small? Look at those tiny fingernails. He is yours now too and there is less of you for me to hold. I run my own bath and brush my own hair and wear my tartan skirt that I am not usually allowed to wear. I am loud and wild in the schoolyard. I have to clatter shriek and get it all out until back home to shush now, the baby is sleeping.
75
Burtonport is a remote place. There are fields and beaches and a smattering of houses. The fishing port is almost defunct due to laws passed to save the seabed and the pubs and shops and restaurants that lined the street when I was a child have closed down. There is a small town a few miles away with a SuperValu, a betting shop and a library in a disused church. Old men in waterproof coats shuffle up and down Main Street and young boys in fast cars come out at night, revving their engines in the supermarket car park. I cannot drive so I cycle there and back a couple of times a week, my backpack bursting with vegetables and bottles of whiskey to get me through the nights.
My little brother passed his driving test a few months before I left and took me out for a spin in his new car, delighting in having passed a milestone before me. I looked at his hands on the steering wheel and noticed that his long, clever fingers are exactly like mine.
‘Look,’ I said, spreading my palm like a star and resting it next to his. ‘Our hands are exactly the same. Isn’t that weird?’ He moved his hand to change gear and rolled his eyes.
‘Not really,’ he said, as though it was obvious. ‘You’re my sister.’
76
My mother and my auntie tucked Josh into his baby carrier in the back of her red Panda and drove up to Holyhead in the middle of the night, where they caught a ferry across the dark ocean to Belfast. They took a flask of hot tea and a batch of egg mayonnaise sandwiches wrapped up in tinfoil. They stopped at the services to switch drivers.
‘Have a sarnie, Susie love.’
My mother zipped up her baby inside of her coat and held him close to her heart, guilty that it was beating so loudly against his small, broken one.
‘I wish I could feel the pain for him,’ she said, pressing her fingers into stray grains of salt on the sticky table. ‘Why can’t you do that? Take someone’s pain out of them and carry it?’
‘Oh, Suze.’ My auntie put her gloved hand over my mother’s bare one.
It was winter and they drove all the way to the west coast through the fog-smothered mountains. The roads were cling-wrapped in ice and lights trembled in the hills like beads from a broken necklace. They followed directions scrawled in blue biro on the back of a hospital appointment card to a house on the edge of a village.
‘Hello. Hello. Welcome.’ A small woman in a woollen jumper kissed cold cheeks and foreheads, her brow knitted with the night. ‘Come on in. Come on in. We’ve been waiting for you.’
They followed her into a sitting room smelling of candlewax and peat smoke. A table had been pushed against the back wall to form an altar. It overflowed with wooden rosary beads and tarnished silver crucifixes and plastic flowers and prayer cards and images of the Virgin Mary in gold gilded frames. People wrapped in coats perched on chairs or cushions on the floor with their shoulders hunched and their eyes closed, noiseless words dribbling from their lips. Ill and elderly people formed a line by the fire, wheelchairs and breathing apparatus glinting in the firelight. The air was heavy with incense. Josh was the only baby. Father Sweeney was a healer
. He walked into the room with his eyes lowered and a ripple of hope flickered across the carpet.
‘Welcome, everyone,’ he began in a soft voice. ‘We are gathered here tonight to ask the Lord our God to have mercy on the people we love.’ He looked around the room slowly, meeting the eyes of every person and smiling gently into their wan faces. ‘Let us pray not only for the sick and elderly among us, but also for the friends, families and carers who have brought them here today. Let us lift up our hearts to the Lord and ask him to fill us with strength during this difficult time.’ People lowered their heads and murmured ‘Amen’ to the carpet.
‘We will begin with a decade of the rosary and then I will spend some time with each of you individually. Please feel free to move around the room but do respect the needs of others. It’s a small space.’ He closed his eyes as people rattled rosary beads on bony wrists.
Father Sweeney walked around the room reciting prayers in a low voice and laying his hands on the people who had come to him for healing. He spent a long time bent over Josh in his carrycot with his eyes tightly shut, resting his hands over my brother’s tiny body without ever making contact with his flushed skin. When it was time to leave, the housekeeper took my mother gently by the arm.
‘I have never seen Father spend that long with anyone. Something special is going to happen for your son.’ My mother crossed herself with holy water and they bundled back out into the night.
They brought me back an illustrated children’s book of the story of St Bernadette and a string of heart-shaped rosary beads made from pink faux pearls. I wore it under my school blouse like a necklace.
77
My mother went back to the heart doctor. He was a doctor of physical hearts, the type that pulse beneath ribs and lungs, but not the other type, the raw kind we couldn’t see. He smeared jelly over my brother’s shallow chest and put the cold instrument on his skin. He frowned and looked at the monitor, speckled with snow like a television lost between channels. It was indecipherable to us, the uninitiated. My mother jumped involuntarily, her muscles warped and tangled through months of pregnancy and fear.
‘Very strange,’ murmured the consultant to no one in particular.
‘What is it?’ she choked. She thought about walking out of the room and leaving us there. The doctor with his cool hands, the sad baby on the table, me, my father, the dark knot of the future. She could start a new life in a different place and pretend that none of it had ever happened.
The consultant switched off the machine and gently wiped the jelly from Josh’s chest. He took her hands in his.
‘Mrs Bailey,’ he said. ‘The atrial septal defect does not appear to be showing up.’ My mother bit her lip. ‘That is to say, the holes in your baby’s heart have closed of their own accord.’
She looked into his face. ‘Closed?’
‘Yes. Closed. This is very unusual. The heart is a very powerful muscle, Mrs Bailey, but I cannot provide you with a detailed explanation of how this has taken place. It is something of a miracle.’ The consultant smiled at her very gently and pressed his gloved hands onto her baby’s head.
‘This child,’ he said, ‘wants very much to live.’
78
The seasons are beginning to change. There is a chill in the air and it is tangy and sweet. It is the feeling of cold air on bare legs; playing out in the street as a child as the night closes in. Breathing in the dusk like smoke. Knowing that at any moment my mother will shout my name from the doorway, calling me home for the night. Secretly wanting her to; that safe, yellow space of bedtimes and steamy kitchens.
When the sun sets here the clouds are edged in brown, as though they are fruit that has been left out for too long. I think that if love was a colour then it would be brown. It is the colour of rust and rot and decay, of avocados spoiled by the passing of time and of dirt and age and things that have been forgotten. It is the colour of tobacco and coffee, of soil and chocolate and whiskey; things that are delicious in a heavy, cloying way.
When the tide is out and all the rocks are exposed, everything is brown. The seaweed rotting in the air, the mulchy seabed, the sky and the sea and the sand. It is a bruised, violent kind of beauty and it seems to me that maybe that’s what love is like, in its purest form. Maybe it is no coincidence that bloodstains are brown. That dried-up, flaky residue that leaks from the heart.
79
Josh usually sat in front of the television watching cartoons, or crawled around the sitting room smashing Lego bricks together and screaming.
‘Something is wrong,’ said my mother. She vacuumed around his cot while he was asleep but he didn’t stir. My father slammed doors and sang songs at the top of his voice but my brother didn’t turn around. He lay on his back staring at the ceiling, unresponsive to the cooing and trilling around him.
‘It’s alright, man,’ said my father, trying his best to be tender. ‘You’ve just had a bit of a shock and now you’re expecting the worst. Everything is going to be alright.’
My brother was diagnosed with deafness a few weeks later.
‘Your child is profoundly deaf,’ said the nurse, her fingernails catching on sheets of paper as she pulled them briskly from a plastic wallet. ‘He was unreceptive to sounds of up to one hundred decibels. He certainly cannot hear the frequency of human speech. We will provide him with hearing aids but his hearing loss is so severe that it is very unlikely they will make a difference.’
My mother felt the walls of the consultation room pressing into her, crushing her bones and making her smaller.
‘You will be eligible to claim disability living allowance from the government,’ continued the nurse. ‘Here are the forms.’ She handed them to my dad.
My parents walked dizzily into the daylight. They looked at each other. My brother started to cry. My father passed baby Josh to my mother and then he turned and left her alone in the middle of the car park. The sun bounced on car windscreens, mocking her with its vitality. She envied the cars their neat, ordered boxes, logically planned and painted carefully onto the ground.
When she was home, my mother sat alone in the silence of the sitting room and wrote her feelings into letters she would never send. She stroked my brother’s skin over and over. It was soft and kept her tethered to the tangible world. She couldn’t bear that he had no idea what sort of life the world had in store for him. It was such a terrible kind of innocence.
My father walked through parks and fields and forests, sleeping rough and trying to shake off his own shadow. My mother was sick with worry, but she knew from experience that he would come back, eventually. He was gone for three days.
80
How to know this baby? This person who is us and yet not us. We press our hands to the small of him. His talcum powder sick. I want to lose my face in his peachy soft but I cannot. There are always walls between us. Beds and blankets and doctors. We are the only ones ever to be shaped from the same kind of strange and yet there are words making spaces. Sounds he will never know. A kettle boiling. A car door slamming. Frantic whispers in the night. Your hands can be his words but I am only small and I need something to hold on to. How can we crack open the silence? How do we break invisible things?
81
I have felt desperately lonely before, in the middle of a city holding hands with a lover. The kind of loneliness that grips your heart in its fist and squeezes until there is nothing left. I am very alone here in Ireland, but I am not particularly lonely. There is a gentle isolation in remote places. I think of my ex-boyfriend in London, but I do not feel sad. From time to time I think it would be nice to feel the touch of someone else’s hand on my back, just for a moment.
82
‘It must be my fault,’ my mother cried to Auntie Marie over cups of tea in scornful orange mugs. ‘I must have caught something when I was pregnant without realising.’
‘Oh, Suze.’ My auntie cradled Josh in his blue knitted blanket. It was edged with a silky ribbon and he liked to rub it be
tween his thumb and forefinger, soothed by the softness. ‘Don’t be like this. He’s perfect as he is. He’ll manage. We’ll all manage.’
When my father took to bed and couldn’t stop drinking, my mother called the doctor to prescribe him Valium.
‘I think I’m dying, Susie,’ my father choked beneath sour-smelling blankets. The doctor left a pot of pills with a curt nod at my mother. I sat on the kitchen floor and played with my Polly Pocket, safe in her plastic universe.
Josh’s inability to communicate made his bones itchy. He screamed around the clock and never left my mother alone. He was always pawing at her and hanging from her arms. He was blond and button-nosed and his skin was sweet like sugar paper. She stroked his cheeks to send him to sleep and tried to make up with kisses for the mistakes she thought she made in her womb.
They went from doctor to consultant to audiologist and back again. His world was made up of corridors painted in creams and teals, machinery that he couldn’t hear clicking and whirring behind closed doors. We learned to think differently; outside of the language of our thoughts and the language of the family we thought we had. We had to think outside of language altogether.
83
Donegal is teaching me a new vocabulary. There are words for different kinds of mud and bracken, lots of different words for ‘wild’ and different words to mark the passing of time. You can learn a lot about a culture through the words that people use most regularly. I want to drop my new words into conversation, in the post office and at the grocery shop down the road, but they are chewy in my mouth like peanut butter. I don’t know if I have a right to this language, spoken by my Irish family and butchered by the English on my father’s side.
Saltwater Page 5