by Elske Rahill
The itinerant girls were looking at him. They could hear the shrieks. The green-eyed one had dimples twitching in her cheeks. She wanted to laugh at him. He was aware, suddenly, of his briefcase open at his feet. He hadn’t closed it after taking out his phone. His wallet was lying mouth open on top of some thin files. There were two fifties and a five clearly visible, sandwiched between layers of fine Italian leather and silk. The girl saw him look at the wallet, and then at her, and he was too embarrassed to reach down and tuck it away, buckle up the briefcase. Carla was still screaming. He didn’t want to speak. The girl would hear his accent, and she would laugh. What would he say anyway?
‘Well done, Carla. Well done, darling.’
‘I have to go, Daddy. I have to ring Mark! Ahhhhh!’
The girls had lost interest in him now. They were messing with the boy behind them. The boy’s ears were red. They were leaning around the seat, reaching into his pants with their lovely young hands – the rough palms, the filthy nails, the cracked metallic nail polish. It was electric blue today. The boy was hunched over his crotch, shrugging them away with increasing humiliation and anger. Poor kid. Adrian had the impression the boy might hit the girls if they didn’t stop. The mother leaned over and slapped them each on the knees. ‘I didn’t raise you to be doin like that.’ The girls turned around and sat on their hands, but they couldn’t stop laughing. Then the taller, beautiful, green-eyed one said, ‘Come on, Mammy. We’re to be gettin off.’ As the woman passed the boy she clipped him on the ear. ‘Go for a walk first,’ she said.
Before dismounting, the mother took an old buggy from where she had left it by the side door. On the pavement she assembled the buggy with a deft flick of her foot, arranged some blankets to resemble a small baby, and covered the bundle with a rain protector. Then she handed each of the girls a paper cup, and fixed their hair.
Cords
WHILE DONNA STANDS in line she thinks about her feet and the floor beneath them. She tries to keep herself planted steadily on the squeaky lino, to fix herself there, in focus, long enough for the lady to get all the details she needs. The registration booth is beside the pedestrian entrance and there must be a fault with the doors, because they keep snapping open unprompted and sliding slowly closed, admitting the night air every time; a gust of frost to relieve the frowzy vacuum of bleach and instant coffee and unwashed skin.
The lady sits behind a yellowed plastic screen that has scratches and smears on it, and a little cluster of round holes for her to talk and hear through. She leans back, twirling a pen between her fingers, pulls her chin into her neck and peers at Donna over small glasses. ‘Right, what’s the patient’s name?’ As Donna tries to speak the lady squints, turns her head to the side and pushes her ear closer to the screen:
‘Sorry, you’ll have to speak up. He’s how old?’
A blurring feeling is starting in Donna’s hands. She touches the tips of her thumb and forefinger together. She thinks about the border of her body – the outline of her hair, the scuffed toes of her trainers – the points where she ends and the space around her begins. She has to repeat the things – his name, the spelling of their surname... and she stumbles over his date of birth, never very good with remembering numbers. There is a couple standing behind her with a limp, pink-faced child in the father’s arms. Instead of her own words, Donna can hear only the man saying, ‘Ridiculous. There’s people here with kids. Ridiculous standing here.’
When the lady is finished with her, Donna turns to go. As she passes the couple, the mother rolls her eyes at her, and the father shakes his head. It is only then that Donna realizes it is she who is ridiculous. It is she who was standing there.
*
The doctor’s smooth, clean hands are younger than his eyes. A single frown line cleaves his forehead; ‘You don’t have the name for what he took?’
‘Sleeping tablets I think, but—’
‘—but you don’t know which ones, and you don’t know what else. Yes?’
Donna nods but she has missed a beat, the response coming too late; a ridiculous nod to no one. The doctor has already turned to her brother. The words come loud and distinct from his sturdy frame:
‘What did you do here?’
When there is no response the doctor leans over him: ‘We are going to clean your stomach, okay?’ Her brother closes his eyes and Donna wonders at his eyelids; a metallic mauve sheen on them – were they always that colour? And the skin so thin. She remembers a punctured butterfly dropped from the cat’s mouth, the way the wings had dulled to dusty flakes, the ugly rind of its centre, black blister eyes. She wonders at how bodies keep so well intact; how eyelids don’t tear with wear, how all the liquid and heat of insides stay ordered and contained beneath the skin.
‘What is his name?’ asks the doctor.
‘Kyle.’
‘Kyle, we are going to give you a blood test to see how much damage you have done. We are going to put some charcoal into your stomach now to clean it and you will feel sick. Okay? Kyle, would you like us to do that? You will feel sick and then you will feel better.’
Kyle rolls his head.
‘Say yes, Kyle,’ Donna says. She talks loudly, as though speaking on the telephone, trying to communicate over a long-distance call with a crackle in the line.
‘He has to accept treatment,’ says the doctor, ‘otherwise I can’t—’
‘Say yes, Kyle. The doctor has other people to see.’
Sore sounds strain through from far back in his throat: ‘Fuck you,’ then, his lips barely moving, ‘slut.’
He turns his head on its stiff neck, in the doctor’s direction, his voice easing out. ‘Yep—’ he opens his eyes, a sardonic kink in the line of his lip, ‘—I’ll have the black stuff.’
The doctor asks Donna to leave them. She leans to kiss her brother but there is the nausea again, burning up into her throat, so she has to stand up straight and exhale. She goes into the corridor and pulls the curtain behind her.
*
This is a makeshift ward because the hospital is full up tonight. There are three other beds in the corridor, separated by sheets of green plastic hung from rails on wheels. Strips of milky light run along the ceiling. There is no traffic outside, only the occasional whine of an ambulance.
Donna rubs the small of her back and walks up and down and the rhythm of it soothes the urge to vomit. There is a woman in an oversized jacket pacing outside the curtain opposite. She is talking quietly into her phone, hand cupping her mouth. When the call ends Donna makes eye contact. She needs the lady to smile but her eyes slide away.
It is the force of the vomit that knocks her down, or the force of suppressing it; a thud from the base of her spine, filling her throat, stopping her breath and she can hear, past the drumming of her pulse, the lady’s irritation, her posh accent, ‘Do you need a nurse? Here, have some water... oh for Jesus’ sake... hello, can you fetch me a nurse please for this girl?’
When she can speak again Donna says sorry. ‘Sorry. I just need to get sick. I’m a bit pregnant.’ She didn’t mean to say that.
The woman is kneeling beside her. She has ropey hair held up in a scrunchie, and a down-turned mouth.
‘Put your head between your knees. Will I get a nurse for you?’
‘I’ll go to the toilet. I’ll be fine once I’ve been sick.’
‘Do you want a ginger biscuit?’
‘No, no. Thank you.’
‘How old are you?’
‘Eighteen.’
‘Sorry to ask, just you look younger. You with that boy?’
‘My brother. I’m alright now. Thanks.’
‘Well. Congratulations.’
*
The doctor is still there, his hands sheathed in a thin white sheen, holding a bucket to Kyle’s chin. Kyle retches weakly, and tongues out the last strings of charcoal.
‘He has done this before?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you know why?’
‘I�
��m going to London. I was supposed to leave today. My granddad’s not well and stuff so, you know... it’s only me and Kyle and my grandma really and he doesn’t think I should go.’
‘He has had help?’
‘He was in St Pat’s for six months last year.’
‘Maybe you should call them. Let them know anyway. It would be good, I think. They may have advice for you.’ He peels the gloves off, revealing hands the colour of biscuits, pale nails. The latex fingers hang shrivelling in his grip.
Her brother has collapsed back down on the bed. There is a thick silicone tube coming from one of the machines beside him. It is draped over his face and disappears under the blue blanket. There are other, smaller wires tangled about the sheets and stuck at his wrists.
‘We will get the results in an hour or so,’ says the doctor. ‘You should go home now. You are no use to him here.’
*
There is no chair. After the doctor has left, Donna squats beside the hospital bed, hands gripping the metal frame, cheeks pressed on her arms.
‘I’ll go so... Will I go, Kyle?’
When he doesn’t reply she stands over him.
‘Answer me. Will I go? Is that okay? I’ve missed the flight now so... I’ll go home.’
‘Fuck you,’ he says.
Her brother’s mouth twists to a sneer, or is it pain making those shapes?
There was no need to panic the way she did. There never is. There is no need for their grandmother’s lips to wash livid, for her old hands to tremble, and her face drop into palms full of breath and tears. Kyle has never been as close to death as he would like. Their mother did it quietly and efficiently and only once; she did not feel the tug of life’s cord, anchoring her here beyond purpose. Kyle is not made the same way. Like Donna, he is compelled to follow each breath with another; like her he is wired with alarms and trip switches and can never make the leap to meet their mother where she left them. Donna is the only one who knows it. She can see how shallow his wrist scars are, and in the wrong direction.
‘Do you have any money?’ says Donna. ‘I left everything at home.’
Kyle closes his eyes.
‘Kyle, answer me. Do you have a phone?’
Her cousin Ailbhe will be on her way to the airport to pick her up already. She will watch everyone filing in from the Dublin flight and when there is no one left she will think Donna has backed out of the abortion, remembering the placards of dead babies they saw that time on Grafton Street; mangled corpses with putty limbs. There was one she would remember often; a human shape with a dent for a mouth, belly purple and veined and a jelly tube fleshing out into a bloom of blood. It was a woman her grandma’s age who held that picture, mouth closed, cheeks puckered as though dissolving holy paper, one hand gripping a stick while rosary beads worked like ants through the fingers of the other.
‘It’s not what they made us think,’ said Ailbhe. ‘It’s fine, Donna. It’s really fine. And the ladies are so nice. They understand...’
Kyle’s hand twitches. The tube that was across his face has caught in his mouth and he opens and closes his lips slowly, trying to make them meet. He frowns through the drowse and his taut cheeks crinkle, as though he might cry. Donna leaves him struggling weakly. She can feel how blank her face is. She puts her hand to her belly; a hard swell like something inflamed. With the same dumb compulsion that makes her brother breathe in and out, makes his heart suck and spew, her body is throbbing at a little capsule of fluid and tissue, bringing it blood and protein and whatever else is keeping it growing. If no one interrupts it will keep chugging steadily away until it has filled another being into life, and the thought of that secret mutiny, tucked with something like pleasure in her womb, makes a laugh bubble up into her throat, but then no sound comes.
Her brother puffs, indignant at this small discomfort. She watches him snorting, his head swaying slowly, hand lying still now under the glare of small wires thatched with the miraculous intimacy of veins over the wool blanket. He is unable to identify the thing that is bothering him and his head rocks from side to side with increasing distress. She stands over him and checks herself for any sympathy. Nothing. Only the backache, the weary ankles. It takes an effort – a moral effort, to move the drip away from his mouth. No one will ever know.
Donna rests by the bed on her haunches, her head on her arms and the bars of the bed cold in her grip. She has missed it now; the kindness of an adult woman with a dainty voice, the gentle efficiency of painkillers like her cousin described. If you’re from Ireland they won’t give you the pills, Ailbhe said, they do the hoover instead, but at least that means it’s over and done in one go. Ailbhe paid for the flight and booked the appointment. She might refuse to pay for another one. She wants Donna to stay in London. ‘Granddad wouldn’t want you to throw your life away now,’ she said. ‘We’ll find you a job. Don’t stay in Dublin for Granddad. It’s not what he’d want.’ But there was the time Granddad talked about the British throwing their half-baked children into buckets; there was the lady on the helpline, whose voice sounded so wobbly with hurt. She said there were always better options, her granny might understand, and if not she could stay in a special house until the baby was six months old. ‘A new baby is always welcome in the world,’ she said.
But Grandma wouldn’t throw her out. She would just heave more burden onto her shrinking frame, the same way she carried Donna and Kyle even after her hips were too old to be resting children on them and her lungs too wet with grief. ‘Don’t do something you won’t be able to live with,’ said the lady, ‘not unless you are one hundred per cent sure...’ But time is moving only towards one outcome. Every moment she is becoming more pregnant. She can already feel it washing in; a current steady and mesmerizing and powerful as the sea. She knows how easily it could loosen her grip on herself; the relief of surrender, the way it could wash through her and take her with it into a world of its own making.
Her brother makes a spluttering sound and Donna pulls herself up on heavy legs. His face is expressionless. It’s his eye sockets and his lips, when they’re sapped of everything like that and the skin eerily bright. That’s what’s reminding her of Granddad.
For years their grandfather has been hooked up to machines the way Kyle is now, his legs shrinking from disuse into the skinny pegs of a boy. He can’t eat so they have unstopped his belly button and pegged a tube to it, for pumping the food in. Every few hours a nurse comes in and pours grey liquid into a bag that hangs from a hook at the top of a three-legged metal bar. The liquid sloshes into the plastic and it heaves about like an old cow’s udder. For two years all he has tasted is his own mouth. The gums must be hollow where the teeth used to be. If he ever puts his tongue in them he will feel little caves of scarred flesh; little hollows of stone-hard blood.
When Kyle was little Grandma sometimes wondered quietly who his father was, because of the alien cut of him, all cheekbones and warm skin and the large blank eyes, and because he was so tall compared to the rest of the family. Granddad didn’t let her talk like that – it was only alone with Donna that Grandma said, ‘You know I wonder, sometimes... was it that boy with the tattoos...’ as though there might be clues written on his father’s biceps that could help them with the riddle of Kyle. Now, though, with his lips stiff and drooling, his body limp, surrounded by metal and flashing lights, Kyle looks like their grandfather. It’s the shape of the bones with the skin scraped back, the muscles lax, the hopeless mix of assent and concentration along the crinkle of the brows and, pumping him alive, the ugly cord like a battered twist of meat.
Because of the stroke, Granddad couldn’t move at all for months. Then he learned to control his left hand, lifting his puffed fingers slowly, one by one, like a heavy fan. These days he can hold them up for a moment, pointing his forefinger, poised as though about to land one of his reassuring facts, opening his mouth, taking a breath, gagging to speak. Then he looks disappointed, and sighs, and his hand drops. In the jaundice of his ey
es death makes its undignified appeal.
Whatever Donna should feel for her grandfather has dissolved now into an abstraction of love; a duty. But her grandma is in love still. She spends her days sitting, massaging his arms, talking. Every morning he is dressed in a crisp white shirt that she has washed and ironed. Every evening he wears matching cotton pyjamas. She irons those too. At the end of her visits she packs his soiled clothes into a pillow case, plucks out the dead flowers from the vase, and puts his favourite album on repeat.
*
Donna waits until day, crouched outside the curtain, rubbing her ankles. The morning light washes in through the plate glass like a hospice watercolour; the pigments strained to weak pink, pastel purple.
The posh woman comes out from behind one of the curtains, still wrapped in the large grey sports jacket. It reaches her knees and is folded over itself at the front, pinned to her body by tightly crossed arms. Her face is stern, her lips straight. Tiny red veins cover her face like filigree. She nods at Donna’s belly.
‘When are you due?’
‘Oh. No. I’m only thirteen weeks...’
‘That’s my son in there. He took an overdose.’
‘Oh. Same. My brother.’
‘It’s the third time.’
‘Fifth time,’ says Donna. ‘He never takes enough...’
‘I remember being pregnant,’ she says. ‘You getting lots of kicks now?’
‘I don’t know. I think sometimes, maybe. Maybe I am imagining it.’
‘Enjoy it. You never forget your first pregnancy. I’ll never forget the first flutter. They’re so tiny, aren’t they? They sort of tumble in your tummy. I remember thinking it was like having a little fairy fluttering around in there.’
‘I saw the scan and it was curled up, scratching its head. The doctor said it was only that big.’ Donna shows her how big, making a two-inch gap between thumb and forefinger.
‘I don’t love him,’ says the mother.
‘Your son?’