by Orna Ross
Final witness was Miss Margaret (Peg) Parle of Mucknamore. As this witness took the stand, commotion broke out, with much talk among the audience and again, cries of protest from the family of the deceased. After order had been restored, the police officer appealed to the jury to decide if the inquest was being properly conducted. The jury pronounced themselves perfectly satisfied that the case was being conducted in a most excellent manner by Mr Brosnan.
Testimony continued. Miss Parle said she was speaking on behalf of her family, as her father was too unwell following a recent bereavement. She was then questioned about a gun that was found in a ditch between her house and The Point the morning after the night in question. A witness had identified this gun as belonging to her brother, an Irregular killed in action some months ago. Miss Parle said she had no idea how it had turned up where it did.
PO Brosnan: When did you last see it?
Miss Parle: Before my brother was shot, I think. I can't really remember.
PO Brosnan: We've witnesses who say it was seen at your house recently.
Miss Parle: I'd say any such witnesses were only trying to bring us trouble.
PO Brosnan: We also have witnesses who say you blamed the deceased for the death of your brother.
Miss Parle: There's those who say so, I know that.
PO Brosnan: And what do you say?
Miss Parle: I say leave us alone. I say, stop trying to make something out of nothing.
PO Brosnan then asked Miss Parle about her movements and the movements of her family on the night in question and witness gave answers that showed all had alibis for the entire evening.
Therein the evidence ended. Mr O'Donovan rose to his feet again. He wanted to know why others had not been called on to testify. He became very excitable and made a number of allegations and was again ordered to be quiet or to leave the court.
Police Officer Brosnan said that he was as aware as the next man of the horrors dividing the country in two and so he had done everything to procure all the evidence possible. If anything in the nature of foul play had occurred, he had no evidence of it. All the evidence that had been unearthed he had placed before the jury to whom he now left the case.
The jury retired and returned with the verdict that the deceased had died from asphyxiation in sinking sands. There was no evidence to show how he came to be walking in such a treacherous area so late at night. Their verdict was "Death by Misadventure". They extended their sympathy to his relatives.
Crest
1995
Let go, my sister suggested, that night after we calmed down. Let go, the sea waves whispered throughout my summer in Mucknamore. Let go, my own musings on freedom had urged. Then along you come and do it for me.
Nine months you spent dissolving my self from within and then at last you are here, out in the world. At last, I am holding you and knowing that your need, your ferocious, helpless human baby need, will reconstitute a whole new self around you.
From now on, I'll still be me, but I will also be all yours.
What an entrance you make! It begins with small contractions, well spaced, and for hours I cope well, but then I end up on a hospital bed the height and width of an ironing board, under orders not to move. All I want to do is get down on all fours. Maeve is there beside my bed, her cheerleader's face making me snap, pain growling through me. It was a mistake to bring her: I'm not going to be able to do this, I am going to fail at what she did effortlessly.
They put me on an oxytocin drip to speed the labour along: it is now four p.m. and I have been having contractions for fourteen hours. When I came into hospital, after holding out at home with Maeve as long as I dared, I was only two centimetres dilated. I later learn that it is normal for first labours to be lengthy, but my midwife tells me it's a problem. I hold out against her first offer of the oxytocin "to help me along", and her second. But when she tells me if the labour goes on "too" long you may become distressed, I capitulate.
As soon as the drip goes in, the pain becomes intolerable. I feel that the God I have always doubted has my belly in His fist and is intent on proving His power. Before long, I have a drip in my right arm, a blood-pressure monitor on the left, an epidural anaesthetic in my lower spine, a catheter bag to my bladder, a foetal monitor through my cervix onto the baby's head. My limbs tremble.
Every so often a falsely cheerful midwife comes in, snapping on a plastic glove to do another "internal". I hate her, I hate them all, and their steel instruments and unfeeling machines, but it is a machine, the foetal monitor spinning slow scrolls of paper etched with stalagmites and stalactites, your heartbeat, that keeps me from wanting to die.
"Phhhhh."
"And again, push," says Midwife One, looking at the monitor screen. She stands to the left of my bed with one of my legs in her arms, her colleague on my right has the other, and between them is a baby who's refusing to arrive. The epidural means I can't feel my contractions and I only know to push when they check the monitor and tell me.
"Push," says Midwife Two.
"Ph-ph-phhhhhhhhhhh."
I feel no active pain, nothing except a growing nausea in my stomach and a ferocious, dead trembling in my numbed, spreadeagled legs that extends up into my trunk. But Maeve, who's down at the other end, watching, is excited.
"Oh, Jo, there's the head," she says. "Black hair! Black! Thick as a brush. Go again."
"Push," says Midwife One.
"Good girl, push," says Midwife Two.
"Yes, push," says the obstetrician, two of the ten words he has so far exchanged with me in the fifty minutes he's spent fiddling with, and staring into, my nether regions. The others were, "Hello, Mum. How are we doing? Good, good."
Phphhh. Phphhh. Phphhh. Phphhhhhhhhhhhh. Oh God, I'm going to vomit. "I feel sick, I'm going to be —"
I gawk and Midwife One whips a silver-tin bowl from somewhere and sticks it under my chin. My insides contract, hurtling vomit out at one end and at the other squeezing you, like I'm a tube and you are a squidge of paste. You spurt out and the obstetrician and the two midwives all pitch forward to catch you. It is he who succeeds, grasping you with two firm hands, and for the first time I feel gratitude towards him.
"Oh, Jo," Maeve says. "Just look! Oh, the little darling!"
At last you are here. You are pink and purple. Your eyes are open. Your forehead is furrowed under a thatch of black hair and your hands are under your chin as if you're praying. Two fists like unbloomed buds. Four limbs curving close to the trunk, fat knees and elbows bent. A blue-and-cream woven cord attached to the stomach. A pair of distended, swollen testicles.
Testicles?
"You're a BOY?" I shout it out loud, my surprise filling the whole room and flowing out into the corridor.
Maeve laughs. "He's gorgeous, Jo! Oh, he's beautiful. A real beauty."
I want to hold you, but my stomach is taking another heave.
"She's going again," says Midwife Two, putting the tin bowl, still full of vomit, back under my chin. I spew again, trying to look at you at the same time. A second, deeper heave and I gawk – auggghhhh! – and something else spurts out of me. The placenta. It too flies through the air, as you did, but this time the medics fail to catch and, splat, it hits the obstetrician's face like a slap of liver.
"Oh dear," I say. Blood is dripping from his jaw. "I'm sorry."
"It's not your fault," says Midwife One.
I know it isn't. Really, I'm not sorry at all. Their whole way of doing this was so awful, so heedless of my needs, so careless of my hopes. It is their fault, not mine, that I am stirred and shaken to vomiting.
Though later I'll resent them and their hospital procedures for utterly failing to give this holy moment its due, right now it doesn't seem to matter, because they are handing you over. Here you are, in my arms at last. Your skin is smooth, silky new. You give your arms and legs an awkward jerk, astonished, it seems to me, to find space where the womb wall used to be. You are wrapped in an aura of sereni
ty, still attuned to that other place, wherever it is you came from. I pull you in close. Your first holding in this new world.
Babies are our chance, I understand, our best stab at heaven. Life is always offering us the opportunity to give, to help, to serve, to take the path of the good, the path of the happy, but most of us only manage it for our children.
And some fail even in that.
What about me? Your new blue eyes are looking up at me like I'm all you'll ever want and I make a vow into them, to strive to be enough.
"Do you want to try to feed him?" Maeve suggests.
I look at her and see that her eyes are glittering with standing tears reflecting the light now coming in the window, as dawn breaks on what appears to be another shell-grey, Irish day.
Maeve has brought me in Ria's old swimming ring: without it, I could not sit. Once the epidural wore off, I felt how I'd torn. Sixteen stitches in three layers. I walk like a cowboy on hot coals, but it doesn't matter. Nothing matters, everything zings. I'm still euphoric, higher than an acrobat, higher than an aerobat.
Hormones, Maeve says. She may be right, but that's not how I want to think about it.
She and I can't stop talking, talking, talking, like we've only just met. Last night she stayed late, laid across the end of my bed like I used to lie across Richard's. I'm giving her tips on how to handle Donal, Sue Denim style. She manages to implement about a tenth of the advice, but it's keeping them from settling back into the habits that ran them into trouble. In return, she gives me tips about baby care and mothering, which I intend to implement completely. If I can.
She's practicing freeing up, while I look forward to pinning part of myself — the part that spun loose when Richard died — right back down.
You start to cry and Maeve picks you up and hands you over. I am struck again by how beautiful you are, much, much more beautiful than any of the other babies in the ward. Maeve has told me that when researchers gave new mothers T-shirts worn by their own and other babies, all the women were able to smell out the one their own baby had had on. It's the kind of thing I wouldn't have believed before, but that now makes perfect sense. Now touch and smell and taste have the solidity of sight. I run my nose along the sweetness of your skin between earlobe and chin, then follow the trail with a line of kisses, while Maeve watches, smiling bounteously on us both.
The door opens. A massive bunch of flowers comes in, and behind it is Rory. He looks around the bouquet, hesitating in the doorway. Nervous. As well he might be.
Maeve gets up. "I think it's time I was off," she says, awkwardly. "Ria will be home from piano practice."
She bends to kiss my cheek, while squeezing my biceps tight enough to bruise, and whispering in my ear: "Treat 'em mean to keep 'em keen."
What I said to her earlier about Donal. I manage to keep a deadpan face as I wave her away with a "See you tomorrow."
"I'm sorry," Rory says, once she's gone. "I know it shouldn't have taken me so long to get here."
"Damn right it shouldn't."
His hair has got longer; he has it tucked behind his ears. "I couldn't come until I was certain, Jo."
His eyes are close to mine, shining bright. And though I'd prefer if I could be angry with him, I know that if I were to look in a mirror, I'd see mine are their twin reflection.
* * *
Rory puts the flowers on the table under the window, the briefcase he's carrying on the floor beside the bed, and sits down beside me. "Congratulations," he says, easing back the blanket that wraps the bundle in my arms. He smiles at the sight. "Did everything go okay?"
His voice quavers. He is nervous, but I am calm. Already blooded.
"Fine," I smile, lying the mother's lie, discounting the barbarity of the process, the three layers of stitches, the nipple that's beginning to crack.
"Do you have a name?"
"Richard," I say, smiling.
"It's not —"
"A boy? Yes."
He laughs.
"I know," I say. "So sure and so wrong."
"You don't mind, do you?"
"Mind? No, not at all. It wasn't that I particularly wanted a girl."
He looks back in at the little sleeping face. "Richard, eh?" He tries it out. "Richard."
He takes a chair and we relax a little and I tell him about the birth, the drip and the vomit and the hurtling afterbirth. I make a good story out of it and when I reach the part about the placenta going all over the obstetrician's face, he throws back his head in a laugh, the way he does.
"And then," I continue, keeping up the entertainment, 'when it was all over, they handed him to me and I was brought face to face with these two enormous purple balls."
Why didn't somebody tell me about that in advance? I thought there was something wrong with you: such an angry colour and so huge, like an accusation.
"It was the same with Daragh," he says. 'Orla and I were shocked."
Daragh? Orla? Is this how it is to be?
"But they're shrinking now, right?" he says to you, putting out a gentle hand, stoking your black hair flat across your head. Watching his palm passing over that dip in your scalp makes my insides clench. "Get used to it, son," he says. "It'll be the story of your life."
You stir at the touch, then settle back down.
"How's the writing going?" Rory asks. "I suppose it's on hold now?"
"No, I'm still managing to take some time with it. It won't let me go."
"You're nearly finished, then?"
"Near enough."
He reaches down to the floor for his briefcase, clicks it open. "In that case, I've something for you."
"What? You're not serious? More from Mrs D.?"
"Your final delivery. You were only to get this if you fulfilled the request made in the first one and produced a family history. I reckon you've done that." He hands me a mail-bag envelope, padded and very full.
"What's in here?"
"More letters, I believe."
"Really? Whose? Why were they kept separate from the rest?"
"I don't know. I was just..."
"...Following orders."
"Yes."
Yes. Mrs D.'s yes man, keeping this from me all summer. Is this why he is here? Nothing to do with us at all?
He hands me a white envelope, just as he did back in May, after her funeral. This time I open it immediately and read it in front of him.
The same salutation: Dear Siobhán.
* * *
Dear Siobhán,
Mistakes! My life, like everyone else's, is full of them. As I draw near to meeting my Maker, I am trying to put mine right.
Because you have appreciated the other papers and photographs I left you, I now give you these letters too. They will come as a bit of a surprise, I don't doubt — then again, you're surely getting used to the surprises by now.
You'll see there's a lot of letters, going back a long way, to just after the time when Maeve first got your address in England. From that day forward, your Gran wrote you a letter on the last day of each month and give it to me to stamp and send with the rest of the post. Only I never did. Each month, I'd put the letter in the secret drawer at the back of the bureau instead.
Now I know you'll think the worst of me for this, so let me say a few words in my defence. Your grandmother blamed herself for your leaving and staying away, a version of events which was all wrong — I'm sure you'll agree with that much. That woman was forever putting herself in the wrong and the older she got, the worse she became on that front. It was my strong belief that she should have some sign of interest from you before running after you with letters and attention.
I also thought, for a long time, that in giving them over to me, she was leaving the decision in my hands. That although we pretended the letters were sent, she was content that they wouldn't be, unless I was happy to send them. We had those kinds of understandings around a lot of things, no need for words.
By the time I realised that wasn't how it was i
n this case, that she only gave them to me because it was me who handled all the post for the house and the shop, it was too late. I couldn't start sending them off to you suddenly, out of the blue. You'd surely have told her. So I had no choice but to continue doing what I'd always done.
And so it went on to a few weeks before she died. Around that time, she spoke of you, said that if I ever saw you again, I was to tell you she was sorry. I told her I wouldn't, that she of all people had nothing to be sorry for, she was entirely misguided, etc. etc., but she became quite fixed and agitated on the matter and made me promise.
Now, by your actions, you have shown you care enough to know, so now I can tell you that.
And allow you the letters of that good woman. And as I do I think that perhaps it all turned out for the best, for I believe you will be a lot more open to them at this point than you would have been back when they were sent.
This is the last of it, Siobhán. No more communications from me, no more surprises. And I do hope that you will see my gesture for what it is.
I'm not one for the words, as you know — and those who don't write themselves get forgotten. I've accepted that. The only other thing I have to say is that your grandmother was the best person I ever met. None of us measured up to her. We can but try.
Which is why, as I go towards God, I want you to know that I, too, forgive all.
Your loving Mammy.
* * *
I take a quick look at the letters, conscious of Rory's eyes on me. Enough to see that they are lovely, simple and straightforward, each one passing on the doings of the days that had passed since the last.
Auntie Nora's health and Mrs D.'s golf scores and Maeve's teaching triumphs. News from the village and stories from the pub. Her work for Fianna Fáil. Helping to set up a credit union and a running-water scheme. And, at the end of each one, the same two sentences: "Know that we think of you and pray for you every single day, Jo. God bless you and keep you safe, Your loving Gran."