A Ghost in the Throat

by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

  The days in our home-place had always been the same: the same joys and drudgeries, the same cycles of childbearing and wakes, the same ringforts, the same fields filling and emptying and filling again with voices, with grass, with beasts, and with hay. Everything repeated and repeated again. My family had lived within these hills for centuries. I knew that there had been many other girls who had made their homes on this ground before me, girls who were grown now and gone into the ground themselves, their babies – my great-grandmothers – grown and gone the same way. Nothing I knew was ever truly new; every path I followed had been written by the bodies of others, the course of every track sculpted by the footfall of those who came before us. For-ev-er. For-ev-er. To the well. To the haggart. To the shed. To the hill. Along these ways, grasses hummed their old tunes, blackthorns pointed their warnings, and every well held the memory of whispered human desire. Maybe I was a strange child, feeling the constant hum of the past just beyond me, real as a bee, or maybe every child shares that feeling. All I knew was that I felt safe, there, in the echo of their company.

  NOW

  Weaning. Weaning. My family asks about it often, their brows lifting at the sight of a toddler strutting across the room to tug at my breast. My husband asks too; his sleep is fitful, disturbed and, like me, he is weary. Still, my instincts scold me to tolerate my petty exhaustion and focus instead on giving my daughter all she needs – she takes such comfort from her moments of milk that to deprive her of it seems not only selfish, but somehow cruel. I find that I’m too tired to keep going, but too tired to summon the determination to wean. What should I do? If I sought advice from my past – if I called a question of my body – what reply might I receive?

  Eventually, my body makes the decision on my behalf. No more, my exhaustion says, no more. First to go is my daughter’s dawn feed, our beloved morning ritual snuggled under the duvet, her head in my elbow. One morning, she wakes to a voice calling her from downstairs instead. Before she can roar for milk, she is already splattering her spoon in a bowl of porridge and fruit. The following week, I begin the slow reduction of her many afternoon feeds. Whenever she tugs at my sleeve, I pass her a sippy-cup of water instead. Sometimes she glugs it happily, eyes grinning beyond the neon tilt of plastic. Other days she slaps it out of my hand, screeching in outrage and grief, throwing herself to the ground and flinging herself side to side. Mama, she screeches, Give. Me. NUMNUMS. Fat tears roll down her cheeks as she beats the floor with her fists. The part of me well-trained in subduing my own desires observes such displays in admiration. I stroke her hair and tell her the old lie, ‘Hush, now, hush, everything will be OK.’ She soon grows used to the new shape of her days, stirring only once at night for water. She sleeps, now. I sleep too.

  Ten years have passed in which I have been pregnant, or breastfeeding, or both. Quietly, I hope that there will be another baby to busy me soon, but now, for the first time in a decade, I dream through the night, undisturbed. My sleeping mind leads me to a house on a hill, where milk is rippling every window. Peering in, I see that pale liquid pouring thickly over every bed and chair, over floorboards and rafters, jostling every kettle, TV, and laundry basket, every radio and phone, in tides of deep, dense milk. My dreaming knuckle raps the door. Knock knock. A woman is sweeping through those sunken rooms, her broom glimpsed, then gone, then glimpsed again, dark hair floating tall over her head, eyes on the floor. She can’t see me. I knock again. Who’s there? she says, smiling to herself, and when her neck twists, her eyes are full and white, staring with milk. I wake, shaking. What will become of me, in the absence of this labour, all this growing and harvesting? Without milk, how will I see? Without milk, who will I be?

  THEN

  My childhood home stood on a steep hill whose precarious angles refused the press of balers and other modern machinery. Once the grass stretched elbow-high, my father rumbled up in an old tractor. Inside, my mother worried that the slope would defeat him, sending his vessel toppling. It didn’t. The field was soon translated into stubble, sharp underfoot. I tugged on my wellies and gathered armfuls of hay while my father pitchforked neat stacks. The sun did her duty well: she worked every blade of grass until it dried to a brittle filament and they could all be hefted to the shed. Colossus: that wall of hay reached right to the roof. It seemed so strange, how this displaced volume of grasses could fill a room with enough fuel to nurture others’ hunger through the cold months to come. Outside, it had been conquerable even by a girl like me, but in here, it was immense. Even indoors, though, my body remembered the grass. I wondered if it remembered me too.

  NOW

  Once I stop breastfeeding, my right breast shrinks fast. It sags, exhausted and stretch-marked, making the lazy breast the plumper of the two. After a shower, I finally meet my own gaze in the mirror I have so often polished unseeingly, observing the purplish smudges that shadow each of my eyes. I drop the towel, and document my body with curiosity: my milk-bottle thighs split by turquoise seams; my breasts, lopsided and glorious; the holy door of my quadruple caesarean scar, my sag-stomach, stretch-marked with ripples like a strand at low tide. My bellybutton grimaces there, the invisible cord that will always connect me to my mother, just as hers connects her to her mother, and on, and on, and on. I study this body of mine, just one more in a long line, and feel no revulsion, only pride. This is a female text, I think. My body replies in its dialect of scars. Ta-dah! it seems to say, Ta-dah!

  —

  My right breast continues to dwindle as it cleans itself of residual milk-clutter. I throw all my old nursing bras into the bin, goodbying their grey cotton cups and their well-worn plastic clips. Finished – tick. Somewhere in the warm dark of my body, another clock was tick-ticking, building something that will soon threaten me, but I don’t know that yet.

  My new bra comes home swaddled in layers of frothy pink tissue and ribbon. To tug its clips into place is to lift my breasts to a false illusion of perkiness. In this elaborate edifice of metal and lace, my breasts appear almost normal, as though I’d never used them at all – but the body remembers. When I squeeze my right nipple, a pale drop winks back.

  THEN

  By autumn, stiff new school shoes were scrambling me all the way to the top of the hay mountain. I was in trouble again. I stretched myself in my high nest and pouted. I had been lazy, and now my mother was angry, dangling a plastic bracelet she’d found in my pocket. Such carelessness could have destroyed the washing machine, and then what would she do? I was a brazen child, I shrugged at her scowl and sprinted away before she could catch me.

  High in the hay, I’d hidden a bag that held some glucose barley pastilles and a comic, and now I tucked myself so close to the rafter that I could see every rough splinter. When those old-fashioned pastilles were sucked sharp, they sliced my gums, and a red tang slid through the sweetness. Somewhere in the warm dark of my body, a clock was tick-ticking. I pinched my eyes tight and tighter until the dark behind my eyelids exploded like fireworks, and made myself a little bat, tucked snug all day, dreaming herself back into night. My mother’s voice soared the air, and in my hurry down before my hidden room was discovered, I found myself slipping face first, the force too quick for me to grip any of the hay’s slipping blades, until I landed on the shit-dark floor of the shed, my mouth smashing into the steel of a gas barrel. I sat up and spat half a front tooth into my palm. It was pale and wet and red, all at once. My mother screamed.

  ‘Don’t you worry,’ the dentist said, eyes smiling above his mask, ‘we’ll have you back to yourself in no time. Now then, deep breath for the needle – good girl.’ He built a careful symmetry in my mouth, binding a fragment of the past to a new present. In the mirror, the tooth looked so real, an intermingling of truth and fiction visible every time I spoke. My precious artifice: where my tooth is bound to the prosthetic, my mouth holds both truth and lie.

  NOW

  Every day, I kneel in the same pew and pray to the same god as my mother, with its halo of deterge
nt and its holy whirr. I repeat her devotion, rummaging my children’s pockets for perils lurking beyond the rustle of fabric: a coin or a pine cone, a marble or a conker. One night, I find a hard little bump tucked into the pocket of my left breast. My fingers stop, then fumble back. Snuggled in layers of breast tissue, I find a second one. A second what? My mind screams one word, over and over again.

  Again, I feel myself slipping. I try to talk myself out of panicking, telling myself that such lumps might be some sort of side-effect of lactation, but in truth, I know that’s impossible. This is my left breast after all, it hasn’t produced more than a drop of milk in years. Besides, I am intimately familiar with every permutation of mastitis: the shivering fever, the weakness, the horror, the swelling infection. This is different. What if I hadn’t weaned my daughter, I think, might I have prevented this?

  On the morning that a doctor’s hand hunts my breast for further clues, my eye flies through the window, carrying me elsewhere. He is an exceptionally kind man, warm and caring, but his hands today are cold. Once he finds the second lump, his voice calls me back from the distance. He is frowning at my left nipple, inverted and shy. I think of the many occasions when this man has heard me imagine a baby’s heat-rash into meningitis, or worrying a bump into a fractured skull, and I will him with all my might to grin again now. Instead, he pokes my armpit, then squeezes my breast again. I hear my voice quiver like a child’s, and when words emerge, they too, are the words of a child. ‘… but – but, will everything be OK?’ He prints a letter referring me onwards for further tests. ‘We just need some more information, that’s all. Go home, have a cup of tea. Try not to worry.’ When I slide five crumpled tenners towards the receptionist, my face remembers its script and twists itself into a polite smile. That’s all.

  In the car park, the steering wheel cradles my brow as tears puddle my lap, each drawing its own slow, salty pool in the fabric. Beyond, three skinny starlings grip a wire in silence. I look to the rooftops, where satellite dishes turn their ears skywards, straining to catch invisible signals from the dark distance. I know, then, where I need to be. I don’t go home; I turn the key.

  At Kilcrea, the silver stones of the door welcome me back in their cold way. I tell myself that I don’t know why I’ve come here, but I do. I do. I don’t recall which words I utter, I only know that my face grows wet and my throat grows hoarse. I take comfort in the knowledge that I am far from the first woman to have wept in this place, where I am both surrounded by others, and utterly, utterly alone.

  THEN

  Alone, I was shivering on the toilet, my breath a cloud between me and a word I’d never seen before, a streak scrawled by my child-body on a wad of paper. Pale and wet and red all at once, the sight made me wonder whether my tooth in its palmful of blood had been an omen of sorts. I wasn’t sure how to translate this text, but I knew it meant change and I knew it meant shame. It would have to be concealed. This was how my body turned towards womanhood – in reluctance and in fear. I wished I could resist this change somehow, that I could choose, instead, to stay in my days of girlish invisibility. I folded a book of clean tissue and tucked it against my skin. I’d have to make myself read it later, and if it held more words by then, I’d probably have to tell my mother. How I hoped those pages would remain unwritten. The following week, I was chewing gum when a man said I looked like a slut. I wasn’t entirely sure how to translate that word either, but by the way he spat it I deduced that it couldn’t be good. At home, I unwrapped more gum, but all the mirror saw in me was a shy little animal grinding her cud.

  NOW

  At the breast clinic, I am one of nine women sitting topless under identical dressing gowns. Abrasive and dense, the fabric rubs horribly against the skin. I hate these garments, and I hate this room. From the wall, the usual saints grimace, their haloes a perfect match for their yellow plastic frames. The TV chats incessantly as Judge Judy reprimands a line of people who have misbehaved, pointing at them in ferocity until they wince like dogs, hands stretched to her in supplication, with their wounded feelings, and their hurt paws. Bored, I walk to the window.

  My view of the city is peculiar from this height, a map of all the roads I got lost in as a student, suddenly coherent from this new distance. My gaze soars the rooftops of college flats, prefabs, and the ornate gables of Victorian three-stories, until I find the long, modest roof of the Colletine Monastery. In its snug attic, bats are sleeping. Pipistrelles. It is the largest colony in the city, or so I have heard. Soon, the females will form their seasonal mothering clusters, and then, by milk and by warmth, their infants will grow, until autumn finds them weaned and ready to leap from the attic into dark lives of their own.

  Two decades before, when I should have been at anatomy class, I sat in that chapel alone, viciously hungover, staring upwards through the stained glass. I didn’t know about the bats then, but they were present nevertheless, cloaked and dreaming somewhere beyond my broken silhouette. I knelt. I wept. More than anything, I wanted to die. Now I find myself peering down at that same glass from a window high on the other side, longing to live. My phone rings but when I fumble it from my bag and answer, no one is there. Hello? I say. Hello? I wait for an answer. None comes.

  A nurse calls my name, and I follow her smile to a new room. I wish I could resist the change in my body somehow, that I could remain happily unseen in my days of domestic invisibility. An hour later I am leaving the hospital, fumbling plastic headphones into my ears. In a room behind me, I am leaving a biopsy of my flesh. I may appear unremarkable to any pedestrian I pass, but under my summer dress, under layers of bandage and gauze, under fifteen syringe holes, a large hematoma is weeping blood into the darkness. A deep bruise is gathering there, swift as a cloud-shadow over The Gearagh.

  THEN

  The shed grew colder as the hay left, blade by blade ground out of existence by the slow slide of spittle and tooth. Each bolus of cud was rollercoastered through multiple stomachs and then shat back to ground in extravagant splats. In its aftermath was a newly resonating emptiness that seemed the antithesis of my once-cosy home. To test its acoustics I rocked back and forth in my boots, toe to heel, heel to toe, shouting to myself: Hello? Hello? and smiling at the aural chime my voice provoked from the walls. The rafters seemed impossibly distant already. I knew I would never reach them again. Now only bats would know that splintered closeness.

  NOW

  I wait for biopsy results. I fret. I wait. I fret.

  The letter comes wrapped in an envelope of inarticulable relief, followed quickly by confusion. That no cancerous cells have been detected is the only answer the tests provide; they hazard no explanation for the lumps. Soon, more letters arrive for more appointments, more tests, more waiting under the sharp fingers of Judge Judy.

  The surgeon’s tie is a soft pendulum as he kneads my breast, his head tilting a question mark. His verdict is that although the lumps are inexplicable, they are not cancerous, so his scalpel need not touch my skin. My fists open in relief. Somewhere nearby, a bat stirs in her sleep.

  Just as I resisted its red scrawl, I have longed to resist this truth of my body, but now I try to accept its strangeness. In my left breast I carry two lumps, neat as ammonite fossils, each a clue. When my body lies in a dissection room, a student may read these texts as easily as they will read my tattoo, my caesarean scar, or my broken tooth, translating them into the gallons I set ricocheting through the bodies of others. I think of them as commas, although they feel more like full stops. My days of milk are beginning to seem impossibly distant, as though I may never reach them again, as though only others will know that splintered closeness. It cannot be. No matter what unfolds, I tell myself that I will always hold my souvenir: the pearl and the pebble of an inner brooch fixed firmly within my chest. Whether it is a glitch or an embellishment, this is a female text, and I carry it close to my heart.

  15. a sequence of shadows

  once eibhlín dubh’s name ceases to appear in her br
others’ letters, my letters, too, falter on the screen. My sources, I fear, have dwindled to their ends. The bolted entrance of Raleigh House cannot admit me, nor can the demolished rooms of old Derrynane. All the objects I long to see have been either erased or concealed, every brooch gone, every cup dropped, every door locked, every key lost. There’s no evidence left of her life, nothing left to find. And yet. And yet, I can’t accept it. There is still so much we don’t know. We don’t know how long she lived, whether she reconciled with her family, whether she married again, whether she had further children or stepchildren. We don’t know where she lived out her remaining years, or how she sustained herself financially. Although the gravestone at Kilcrea identifies where her husband, son and grandson are all buried, the location of Eibhlín Dubh’s bones was never noted. One moment, we hear her voice, real and distinct, and the next, Ta-dah!, quick as an illusionist, she disappears.

  I try to teach myself to adapt to this sudden absence, just as I have been learning to accept another absence in my days. While I have been dwelling on the many mysteries of Eibhlín Dubh’s life, my daughter has been growing. She has her own little satchel now, to carry on her own little back. Every morning, I hold her hand and wave her goodbye at playschool, watching her hurry towards the paint-pots and jigsaws and dress-up box. I spend the subsequent hours scraping uselessly at the same old archival sources. Eibhlín Dubh is never there. My mornings are too quiet, now that my children, my purpose, and my ghost have all left me. I count the minutes until I can lift my daughter into my arms again, a squirming, living female text. At night, I cuddle her to sleep and think of Eibhlín Dubh stroking her sons’ warm hair until their eyelids flicker in dream. I imagine her lifting her head and with one last sigh, the candle is quenched. To darkness. This is it: The End.