by Ber Carroll
‘Thanks, Dad.’
He grasped her hand in his, his eyes filling up. ‘I hate seeing you confined like this.’
‘I think it’s some divine plan to teach me the virtue of patience,’ she joked, blinking back her own tears.
‘Some chance,’ and they laughed tremulously together.
Frankie sat in the armchair and opened up his newspaper. Katie started one of the novels. The afternoon passed by companionably, like many an afternoon where they had read alongside each other on the deck at home. However, there was no scent of warm wood or potted flowers here, only the distinct detergent-like hospital smell.
‘Dad . . .’ said Katie when she came to the end of a chapter.
‘Mmm.’
‘Have you looked up your family at all?’
‘No.’ His eyes were downcast but Katie could tell that he had stopped reading.
‘Why?’
‘They’re not from round here. It’s not as convenient as you might think.’
‘Where are they from?’
‘Belfast.’
‘Oh.’
That certainly explained why she wasn’t able to find any trace of them in Portmarnock.
Frankie’s eyes started to move across the page again.
‘Life is short, Dad,’ said Katie quietly. ‘If there’s any lesson to be learnt from this accident, then it must be that. This is your chance – here and now – don’t use convenience as an excuse because even I know that Belfast is only a few hours’ drive from here.’
Slowly, the newspaper came down and revealed Frankie’s face. The daylight coming in from the window was unkind to his wrinkles and made his hair look more white than grey.
He’s aged over the last few months, she realised, and even though she knew that aging was part of life, she felt sad.
‘It’s complicated,’ he sighed. ‘I didn’t just leave, I was told to go. My family refused to accept your mother . . . she was a Catholic . . .’
Katie absorbed this significant piece of information. It didn’t take long for things to click into place. ‘That’s why we never went to mass like other families.’
He nodded. ‘Your mother and I felt that religion was used to justify many acts of cruelty: the troubles in Northern Ireland; Rose’s father and his narrow-minded, unforgiving piety . . . We were burnt by religion in more than one way and, whether right or wrong, we steered clear of it in Australia.’
Frankie looked vulnerable and Katie decided to chance one more question.
‘Do you think your family would still bear Mum a grudge after forty years?’
‘The grudge is centuries old, love,’ he said sadly. ‘Forty years is but a drop in the ocean.’
Chapter 29
‘I really like Dublin,’ said Stephen a few days later. ‘I love the oldness of it, the vibe on the street, the way you get potatoes of some description with every meal, even pizza. You know, I’m starting to realise what I’ve missed out on by not travelling more.’
‘Well, you should spread your wings, my dear brother,’ said Katie, and added mischievously, ‘before you settle down with your phantom girlfriend.’
He smiled sheepishly. ‘Her name’s Tamsin. She’d like to travel too, but it’s hard for her right now . . .’
‘Don’t tell me she’s in prison?’
Stephen didn’t laugh at her joke. ‘She has a child, a two-year-old girl called Emily.’
Katie frowned. ‘Were you afraid that we’d disapprove? Is that why you didn’t tell us about her?’
He folded his long, gangly arms. ‘I didn’t want you all to judge her . . .’
‘But I wouldn’t have judged her,’ Katie protested.
From the look on Stephen’s face, it was clear he disagreed.
‘Tamsin is a stay-at-home single mother. She’s from a different orbit to you. She lives on welfare. She’d think I was lying if I told her how much money a partner earns –’
‘But I’m not a partner.’
‘It’s only a matter of time.’
‘Just because I’ll earn a lot of money one day doesn’t mean I can’t relate to people who don’t.’
‘It’s not just money. It’s ambition. You’re the most ambitious person I know, Katie.’
‘You always said that was a good thing,’ she pointed out, perplexed.
‘Yes, I did,’ he shrugged, ‘but now I’m not so sure. Tamsin is the kind of person who enjoys what each day has to offer; she doesn’t force deadlines or goals on herself; she’s philosophical rather than logical. Being with her has made me see things differently.’
Katie stared him straight in the eye. ‘She sounds lovely and I’m very sure, regardless of what you say, that I’m really going to like her. To be honest, I don’t care if your girlfriend is a pole dancer with six kids – I’m just glad that you’ve found someone to be happy with. Now, quit labelling me as a money-hungry ambition freak and hand me the remote control. You’re a Star is coming on.’
Katie was halfway through the last of Frankie’s novels when someone rapped on her door. She could tell from the sound of the knock that it wasn’t one of her usual visitors.
‘Come in,’ she called.
It was Mags. She tiptoed inside and glanced surreptitiously down the hallway before closing the door behind her.
‘I know it’s not visiting hours – why they can’t coincide with lunch hour, I don’t know – I had to sneak past the main desk – I didn’t want them to catch me and kick me out!’
‘They don’t enforce visiting hours for private patients,’ Katie told her and Mags looked mildly disappointed that her subterfuge had been for nothing.
She put some glossy magazines on the bedside locker. ‘Something for you to flick through – I know you must be bored to death – Sarah says hello – she’s got a new boyfriend – oh, and I have something here from Mary . . .’
She took a small envelope from her shoulder bag and handed it to Katie who placed it, unopened, next to the magazines on the locker.
‘Sit down, Mags,’ said Katie and gestured towards the armchair.
Mags perched on the very edge of it, as if there was some unwritten rule that visitors outside the official hours were not permitted to make themselves comfortable.
‘How’s the clinic going without me?’ asked Katie.
‘Ted’s sent us someone new – his name is John – he’s a bit green – Ted sends his regards, by the way.’
The question answered, an awkward silence descended on the room. Katie looked at her friend closely. She seemed even skinnier than before, the cheeky look had gone from her eyes and her chatter was nervy rather than natural. Then, somehow, Katie knew what had caused the change.
‘You’ve broken up with Seamus, haven’t you?’
The expression on Mags’s face confirmed it was true. Katie reached out to clasp her hand with its long thin fingers and protruding knuckles.
‘Were you here when I was in a coma?’ she asked suddenly.
‘Yes – I told you about Seamus – a bit late, I know – and you weren’t even conscious –’
‘I remember your hands, Mags. I must have been conscious on some level.’
‘Spooky.’ Mags gave an exaggerated shudder. ‘If I had known that I wouldn’t have gone and told you my deepest and darkest secrets.’
Katie laughed. Over the last few weeks she had missed the quirky, effervescent girl who had given her such a unique welcome to Dublin. She should have guessed about Seamus; in hindsight, all the signs had been there.
‘What happened with Seamus?’
‘It was the drinking. That weekend we went to Galway to patch things up, well he drank like a fish, and I began to see a pattern. He doesn’t drink like the rest of us, to have fun, he drinks to get drunk. I could see what kind of life was in front of me if I stayed with him – and I knew that if there was a time to get out, it was now . . .’
Mags looked sad and vulnerable and close to tears. Katie continued to hold her han
d. They sat in silence for a few minutes, a silence where Mags was thinking of Seamus, and Katie of Jim.
‘Mags, did you tell MFJ in Sydney about my accident?’
She nodded. ‘I spoke to Neil, your boss.’
‘What about Jim? Did you tell him?’
Mags’s face was clear of its usual reticence regarding Jim. ‘I asked Neil to put me through but he told me that Jim was out of the country. He promised to pass on the message – and then he asked me not to speak to anyone but him about the accident – he personally wanted to handle all of the internal communication – and he also asked me to send him a weekly update on your recovery.’
Jim must know, Neil would have told him. Why hasn’t he called me?
Katie, more from habit than anything else, didn’t let Mags see how crushed she was.
‘It’s just like Neil to be so controlling,’ she remarked and changed the topic of conversation to the clinic.
She cried and cried after Mags left. She couldn’t believe it of Jim. Surely her accident overshadowed their petty argument? What was she to read from his silence? That it was over? Should she call him and get him to spell it out?
Much later on, when the long evening had dwindled away the last of the daylight, she opened Mary’s envelope. There was a prayer card inside. She read the beautiful words and was so touched by them that she started crying all over again.
Chapter 30
Rose’s stay in Cork extended to a week, and she was markedly different when she came back. Katie felt it from the moment she walked in the door, but she couldn’t put her finger on what it was. She looked the same, talked the same, yet Katie knew that something very fundamental had changed in her mother – whether it was for better or worse she wasn’t yet sure.
Rose talked about Liz and what a lovely time they’d had together.
‘It felt wrong to be giggling and laughing with her when you’re here laid up on a hospital bed,’ said Rose, looking a little shamefaced.
‘Don’t be silly, Mum. Being a misery guts isn’t going to make me feel better. I’m glad you two had fun together.’
Then Rose became nostalgic. ‘When we were children, Liz could always make me laugh – sometimes at the most inopportune times, like the middle of mass, and we’d both get a clip around the ear as result.’
Katie smiled at the thought of two giggling fair-haired girls in the church pew. ‘Did you like Cork? Did Liz take you sightseeing and torment you with constant photographs?’
‘Yes,’ a shadow came across Rose’s face, ‘we saw some of the sights.’ She paused and wetted her parched-looking lips. ‘Actually, Katie, there’s something I need to tell you – something I should have told you a long time ago, but I was too ashamed . . .’
‘What?’
Rose looked down at her hands and examined them as if she had never seen them before. Seconds ticked by. Whatever it was she wanted to say, it seemed to be taking every ounce of her will to muster up the words.
‘My memories of Cork aren’t very happy. I was in a home down there . . .’ Her voice trailed away.
‘What kind of home?’ asked Katie and then suggested the first thing that came into her head. ‘Was it a mental institution?’
‘No.’ Rose directed a vague smile her way before dropping her eyes again. ‘It was a home for unmarried mothers.’
Katie’s jaw dropped open. ‘Does that mean you had . . .’
Now she was the one who couldn’t finish her sentence.
‘Yes.’ There was force behind Rose’s affirmation, as if she was sick of the denial. Then she raised her head and looked directly at Katie. ‘Stephen was not my first child. I had a little girl, Ellen, in the early hours of 11 June 1962.’
Her staggering confession brought about a range of extreme feelings in Katie: a searing curiosity to know more detail, a sudden wariness towards Rose because she felt that she must hardly know this woman at all, and a terrible fear about the fate of the baby.
All those emotions threaded through her voice when she asked, ‘What happened to Ellen?’
Rose sighed. The sound was soft yet ridden with guilt. ‘That’s what I’m trying to find out.’
Katie looked at her in total confusion.
You gave birth to Ellen; you’re her mother. How could you not know what happened to your own baby?
‘Ellen was with me in the home for the first three months of her life,’ Rose started to explain. ‘She was beautiful – a shock of black hair on her head, big blue eyes, bonny cheeks. She thrived despite the grim surroundings. The home was run by the nuns and I’ll never, to my dying day, forget the cruelty of the sister in charge.’
Rose paused, as if she needed to recharge her batteries before providing any further description of the home.
When she continued, her sadness had drawn the strength from her voice and it was much weaker. ‘Heavily pregnant girls and sleep-deprived new mothers scrubbed floors and tended the gardens, but the worst job of all was the steaming-hot laundry – your hands would be red raw afterwards. We weren’t allowed to use our real names. I was called Pauline. And we were not allowed to speak to each other. The only time the silence was broken was for prayer or when some poor girl was being berated by the sister.’
Katie tried to visualise what her mother was describing. It sounded like something out of Dickens’s era rather than the sixties.
Bewildered, she asked, ‘Why did you stay there if it was so bad?’
‘Because I saw what happened to the girls who ran away.’ Rose’s eyes looked defeated as she relived the hopelessness of it. ‘They never got far – the locals knew not to pick them up from the road. Even the ones who made it home were usually sent straight back by their families. Of course, the sister made sure that they suffered even more because of the transgression.’
‘I can’t believe that there was no way out of the place,’ said Katie.
‘There was one way,’ Rose conceded. ‘You could pay the council the boarding-out fee for the baby. That meant the baby could be sent on to the orphanage and the mother was free to leave the home. My mother came with the money after three months. I left Ellen behind and went with her, but only as far as the bus station. I refused to get on the bus. There was no way I could go back home to my father’s oppression. I knew Carmel and Liz would be devastated – they thought I was at hospital with some mysterious illness – but I still couldn’t get on that bus. Mother slapped me across the face, called me an ungrateful slut and said I wasn’t worth the money she’d spent on the boarding-out fee. I can still see her bitter face staring out at me as the bus took off . . . It was as if I was something come up from the gutter rather than her own daughter . . .’
Rose paused once again but Katie couldn’t bear for her to stop at this critical point. She leant forward in the bed to urge her on. ‘What happened then?’
‘I rang Frankie at work . . . God love him, he didn’t know what had become of me. He knew about the baby, of course – we were going to get married – but my mother guessed that I was pregnant and shipped me down to Cork before I had the chance to tell Frankie where I was going . . . I was in an awful state on the phone, but he was able to decipher where I was and he got the first bus down. I waited in the bus station until he came – it was seven or eight hours later. I sat, all huddled up, as silent as I had been in the home . . . I remember people coming up to ask if I was okay . . .’
Rose seemed to be running out of steam. Her shoulders drooped and her head hung, just like the girl in the bus station all those years ago.
‘So you went straight from Cork to Australia?’ Katie concluded.
‘Yes.’ Her voice was only a whisper now. ‘We left poor little Ellen behind . . .’ Her face crumpled. ‘They wouldn’t give her back to us – we weren’t married –’
‘Why didn’t you get married?’
‘Because all the marriages were through the Church. We’d sinned. I wasn’t even eighteen. Neither family approved. We didn’t know a priest i
n Cork, and Dublin was out of the question. We were too young, too intimidated by the system.’
Rose cried, softly at first.
‘That’s my shame, Katie – I left my baby behind . . .’
‘Oh, Mum!’ Katie held her cold hand tightly in hers.
Rose’s sobs gained strength until she was almost hysterical.
Over and over she repeated, ‘We shouldn’t have left her behind!’
Katie said nothing, just held her mother’s hand.
Katie knew she wouldn’t sleep that night. How could she? Rose’s revelation changed everything, absolutely everything.
Many times when she was young she had wished for a sister. Stephen had been a great older brother, but he wasn’t interested in dress-ups, dolls or make-believe tea parties.
Maybe Ellen wouldn’t have been, either. After all, she’s twelve years older than me.
But a twelve-year age gap, while significant in young children, would be nothing now; Ellen would be the same age as many of Katie’s friends and colleagues.
Is her hair still black, like mine? Is she married? Will I like her? Will she like me?
Katie lay in the semi-darkness, her mind racing as it checked over Rose’s story for gaps or cracks, in the same way it would check a client’s affidavit.
‘I told Liz everything,’ Rose had said when she could cry no more. ‘It was such a relief to tell someone after all these years – and she was so supportive and understanding . . .’
Therein was the clue to the change in Rose that Katie had noticed from the moment she walked into the room. The secret was finally out and the sheer relief had lightened her whole demeanour.
‘Liz knew where the home was,’ Rose had continued. ‘We went there together. It’s still open, but it’s been totally modernised. All the girls have their own rooms now, they’re counselled and given all sorts of options. Their lives aren’t over because of one mistake . . .’
Rose always gave people a second chance. Now Katie was able to understand why. There had been dire consequences for Rose’s ‘mistake’: a horrific few months in the home while Frankie had no idea where she was, separation from her baby and estrangement from the entire family.