The Pull of the Stars

by Emma Donoghue

  Bridie asked, Climb up the side of the roof, you mean?

  I smiled at the notion. No climbing necessary. There’s a flat part one can walk out on, between the pointy sections.

  Well, that’s a relief.

  What I treasured about this young woman was that she never said no. She was game for anything, it seemed, including scrambling up the gabled roof of a four-storey building.

  I grabbed a handful of blankets from a shelf as we were passing. I led Bridie through an unmarked door and up a narrow staircase. The last, smallest door seemed a dead end, but I’d been up here before when I needed a break, a breath, a cigarette, and a view of the city. I told her, It’s never locked.

  Out onto the tarred rooftop. It was a grand clear evening, for once, not a rag of cloud in the navy-blue sky. On a fine day in summer, there’d be little knots of staff basking during their dinner hour, but after nine o’clock on an autumn night, the two of us had the expanse to ourselves.

  The old moon wrote its last faint C just above the parapet. A little streetlight leaked up from the hushed city below. I leaned my elbows on the bricks and peered down. I said, A walk would have been nice too. Maybe another day.

  It hit me that once the hospital got back to its standards and routines, an unqualified skivvy would no longer be needed or, in fact, allowed. Odds were, Bridie would be thanked and discharged. Would I ever—no, how would I contrive to see her again?

  I’m a grand walker, Bridie was saying, I can go on forever. Every Sunday at the home, we used to go five miles to the sea in a crocodile.

  Ridiculously, I envisioned her in the belly of an actual crocodile. I tried to replace that picture with an image of a small Bridie dancing on the shoreline, tossing stones at the waves, running into the water and screeching with delight.

  You went bathing?

  She shook her head. It was just for exercise. We had to turn around and walk right back. We weren’t allowed to link arms or we’d get the strap, but we could chat without moving our mouths.

  I didn’t know what to say.

  Face tipped up to the sky, Bridie swayed.

  I took her elbow. Don’t topple over the edge, now.

  The stars are so bright, I’m dazzled!

  I looked up and found the Great Bear. I told her, In Italy, they used to blame the influence of the constellations for making them sick—that’s where influenza comes from.

  Bridie took that notion in stride. As if, when it’s your time, your star gives you a yank—

  And she tugged as if reeling in a fish.

  It’s hardly scientific thinking, I admitted.

  She said, Maybe not. But I have heard it’s all set down up there.

  What is?

  The day each of us is going to die.

  That’s pure nonsense, Bridie.

  She lifted and then dropped her bony shoulders. I don’t have to be scientific; I’m not the nurse.

  You’ve the makings of one, though. If you wanted.

  Bridie stared, then laughed that off.

  I did realise that this job was too grim for most people, all the stinking and leaking and dying. Mine was a peculiar vocation.

  You know, Bridie, I mark down every patient I lose.

  Where? In a book?

  I think you saw me doing it.

  I pulled out my watch now, without looking at the time, and dropped it in her palm, facedown.

  Bridie weighed it in her hand. Would this be solid silver?

  I suppose so. It was my mother’s.

  (I added that so she wouldn’t think I’d earned enough to buy myself such a thing.)

  She murmured, It’s still warm from you.

  The chain between the two of us was a taut umbilicus.

  I put my finger to one of the bockedy scratched circles on the watch back. Every full moon means a patient of mine who’s died.

  But not through your fault.

  I hope not. It’s hard to be absolutely sure. In this job, one has to learn to live with that.

  She asked, And the little curved pieces?

  They’re crescent moons instead of full ones.

  The babies?

  She never missed a trick, this one. I nodded.

  Bridie peered more closely now. Some are only little scratches.

  Those ones were stillborn. Or miscarried, if far enough on that I could tell whether it was a girl or a boy.

  So you scar your precious watch for all of them because you feel bad?

  I shook my head. I just…

  Bridie suggested, Want to remember them?

  Oh, I remember them anyway. Often I wish I didn’t.

  Do they haunt you, like?

  I struggled to find the words. I have a sense that they want to be recorded somewhere. Need to be. Demand to be, even.

  Bridie stroked the silver curve. It’s a sort of map of the dead, then. A sky full of moons.

  I took the watch back and tucked it into my pocket. I told her, I’m often just as haunted by the ones who live. Mrs. White’s boy, for instance.

  Bridie nodded.

  I keep thinking, instead of him going into the pipe, if some nice young couple—like the O’Rahillys, say—if they didn’t mind his lip, and adopted him…

  Bridie grimaced. Mary O’Rahilly’s a sweetheart, but he’s a thug.

  I was knocked off balance by that matter-of-fact sentence. Her husband?

  Well, he wallops her, doesn’t he?

  She read my appalled face and saw that this was news to me. Oh. Couldn’t you tell?

  She wasn’t triumphing at all; she was just thrown by my naïveté.

  It added up. Young Mary O’Rahilly’s timidity, the many things that seemed to make her husband cross…and the old blue marks on both wrists. She’d claimed to bruise easy, and I, gullible as a probie on her first day, I’d left it at that.

  Bridie, I breathed, you know things you shouldn’t. Especially not at about twenty-two.

  Her half smile was rueful.

  I admitted, No one’s ever lifted a hand to me in my life.

  That’s good, she said.

  I’m beginning to know enough to know that I know nothing.

  Bridie didn’t contradict me.

  I moved along the flat middle of the roof. I found a pitched section and put down one of the blankets against the slope. I squatted to sit, tucking my skirts around me to keep the cold out, and leaned back on the clammy slates.

  Bridie fitted herself beside me.

  Button up your coat to keep warm, I advised her. And here, lean forward—

  I swept a second blanket over our heads and down behind us like a cloak. No, a magician’s cloth. I shook a third out to cover our knees.

  Tell me about it, I said into the silence. Your—the home. If you don’t mind?

  The pause was so long, I thought Bridie probably did mind.

  Then she said, What do you want to know?

  Anything you remember.

  I remember it all.

  Her face worked as she thought about it.

  She said at last, Old pee and rubber, that’s what I smell when I think of it. So many of us had accidents in the night, see, that at a certain point they said we could just sleep on the waterproof undersheets and spare the laundry.

  It was in my nostrils now, that acrid reek.

  There was this one teacher who’d come into class, going like this—Bridie wrinkled her nose in imitation. Every day she’d call out, Who can I smell? Who can I smell? But the thing was, Julia, we all smelled.

  That’s terrible.

  She shook her head. What was terrible was how every one of us would throw a hand in the air, eager to call out another girl’s name, name her as the smelly one.

  Oh, Bridie.

  A long minute stretched while I let all this sink in.

  She said, Then there’s the beatings. I can feel them in my bones.

  I cleared my throat. Beatings for what?

  She shrugged. You might be made an example of fo
r sleeping in the wrong position, or sneezing at mass. Writing with your left hand, losing a stud off your boot. Having hair that was curly, or red.

  I reached out to the faint fuzz of amber escaping from her pins. Why on earth—

  They said it was a mark of badness and hung me up by my bun from a coat hook.

  I pulled back my hand and put it over my mouth. Couldn’t you have told someone about the mistreatment? A teacher at school, say?

  Her smile was dark. Oh, Julia. Any lessons we had were in the home—it was the school too, see?

  I saw.

  But in fairness, they weren’t all divils there, she told me. A cook we had in my last years, she took a liking to me. She’d lay the apple skins on the very top of the scraps so I could nick them when I carried the bucket to the pigs. And one time a whole half a boiled egg.

  My mouth was flooded with sour.

  Bridie went on. I was no hand at knitting Aran jumpers or embroidering vestments, so I was put on novenas. We nibbled on candles those days, or paper, or glue, anything to put in our stomachs.

  Novenas? I repeated. As in nine days of prayer?

  Bridie nodded. People paid the convent to have them said for special intentions.

  That flabbergasted me, the notion of children praying on an industrial scale, children so hungry they’d eat glue.

  She added, I loved it the odd time they hired me out to farms, though. I could snatch a few berries or a turnip here and there. Cattle feed, even.

  I tried to picture that, the small redhead worming her way between two cows to scrabble in their trough. When did you start work?

  As soon as we were dressed in the morning.

  No, but what age, roughly?

  Bridie didn’t answer, so I rephrased it: Don’t you remember a time before they made you knit or weed or say prayers?

  She shook her head a little impatiently. The home needed running. We had to clean and cook and mind the little ones as well as do the money jobs to earn our keep, see?

  Such lies! I exploded. The government pays per head.

  Bridie blinked.

  From what I’ve read, the monks or nuns just run these places for the state. They get a lump sum for each child in their custody every year to pay for food and bedding and whatever else is needed.

  Is that right? Bridie spoke with an eerie calm. We were never told.

  I realised it was the same shameful trick used in the institution a few minutes’ walk away through these dark streets, the place where women such as Honor White were obliged to work off the costs of their own captivity for years on end.

  Enough, said Bridie.

  But—

  Julia, please, let’s not waste any more of this fine night raking over bad times.

  I tried. I gazed up at the sky and let my eyes flicker from one constellation to another to another, jumping between stepping-stones. I thought of the heavenly bodies throwing down their narrow ropes of light to hook us.

  I’d never believed the future was inscribed for each of us the day we were born. If anything was written in the stars, it was we who joined those dots, and our lives were the writing.

  But Baby Garrett, born dead yesterday, and all the others whose stories were over before they began, and those who opened their eyes and found they were living in a long nightmare, like Bridie and Baby White—who decreed that, I wondered, or at least allowed it?

  My stomach growled so loudly, Bridie giggled, and I did too.

  I remembered what had been sitting in my bag all day. I asked, Peckish?

  Why, what’ve you got there?

  Chocolate truffles from Belgium and an Italian orange.

  Bridie marvelled, No!

  Birthday presents from my brother, Tim.

  The fruit was easier to peel than I’d expected. Its perfume spritzed off under my thumbnail. Behind rags of white, the flesh was so dark in the starlight, it looked nearly purple.

  Bridie peered at it. Ah, wouldn’t you know, after all that, it’s a rotten one.

  It is not! Smell it.

  She looked revolted but leaned in for a sniff. Her face lit up.

  I said, Blood oranges are called that because of the colour inside. Ever so sweet, and hardly any seeds.

  The segments parted in my fingers. I ripped the thin membrane. The sacs ranged from yellow through orange to maroon, almost black.

  Bridie bit a segment warily. Oh—the juice almost leaked from her mouth, and she had to suck it back—that’s only glorious.

  Isn’t it?

  Happy birthday, Julia.

  I licked trickles of juice off my hands in a way that would have caused Matron to sack me on the spot. Yours too, now, remember? The first of November.

  The first of November, she repeated solemnly. I won’t forget.

  Happy birthday, Bridie.

  No sound now but the small wet noises of the orange being devoured between us.

  You’re awfully easy to talk to, I found myself saying. Since Tim came back from the front, he doesn’t.

  Bridie didn’t ask, Doesn’t what? Instead, she asked, Doesn’t talk to you?

  To anyone. Not a word anymore. As if his throat’s been cut—except the damage is all in his mind.

  I wasn’t sure why I felt compelled to blab all this, to set one small pebble of pain on the scale against Bridie’s boulders.

  It’s not something I usually tell people, I added.

  Bridie asked, Why not?

  Well. A sort of superstitious fear, I suppose, that once I say it in so many words, it’ll be true.

  Bridie put her head to one side. Isn’t it true already?

  Yes, but…more official. Permanent. I’ll be Julia with the mute brother.

  She nodded. Does that mortify you?

  That’s not it.

  Grieves you, Bridie suggested.

  I nodded, swallowing.

  Well, she murmured. Lucky you, I say.

  Lucky for having a mute brother?

  Having a brother, she corrected me. Any kind.

  She was right, I told myself. This was how Tim was. This was the brother I had now.

  After a pause, she said: Or having anyone.

  Oh, Bridie!

  She did one of her little monkey-like shrugs.

  I cleared my throat raggedly. Tim still has his sense of humour.

  Well, then.

  Also a magpie he’s very fond of.

  There’s posh, she said teasingly.

  He’s a great gardener and a good scratch cook.

  The magpie?

  My laughter echoed across the jagged roofline.

  I divided the truffles. We scarfed up one each, then had a game to see who could take longest to melt her second one on the heat of her tongue.

  Bridie said thickly, This is some condemned man’s last meal, all right.

  I thought of the patient whose mind was turned by the flu, the one who’d jumped to his death from a window. But I didn’t say a word. Let Bridie enjoy her truffle.

  I was cold but I didn’t care. I turned my face up to the starry sky and blew out a long steamy plume.

  Did you know, other planets have lots of moons instead of just one?

  Bridie said, Come off it.

  It’s a fact. I got it out of a library book. Neptune has three, and Jupiter eight—or, no, scientists just found the ninth by taking a picture with a very long exposure.

  Bridie tilted her head to one side, as if I were pulling her leg.

  It occurred to me that Jupiter’s ninth moon might not in fact be the last; the astronomers might keep discovering more of them as the centuries slowly wheeled by. Maybe if they got stronger telescopes they’d glimpse a tenth, an eleventh, a twelfth. It made my head spin, the shining plenitude up there. And down here. The dancing generations, the busy living—even if we were outnumbered by the quiet dead.

  A man was caterwauling on the street below. I said, We should drop something on that fellow.

  Bridie laughed. Ah, stop. I like an
old song.

  Would you dignify this one by the name?

  It’s “Are We Downhearted?”

  It’s drunken gibberish.

  She sang, Are we downhearted?

  She waited for me to give the response. Then answered herself with the punch line: No! On she went: Then let your voices ring, and all together sing. Are we downhearted?

  On the third verse, I finally supplied the No!

  The time rolled by. At some point in our long and rambling conversation, Bridie and I agreed it must be well after midnight.

  All Souls’ Day now, I remembered. We’re supposed to visit a graveyard.

  Does a hospital count, since there’s always people dying in it?

  Let’s say it does. Oh, I should say a prayer for Mammy.

  Bridie asked, Was it in hospital she took her fever after your brother was born?

  I shook my head. At home. It happens every day, the world over—women have babies and they die. No, I corrected myself, they die of having babies. It’s hardly news, so I don’t know why it still fills me with such rage.

  Bridie said, I suppose it’s your fight.

  I looked sideways at her.

  What you said to Mr. Groyne about women being like soldiers, laying down their lives? Well, your job’s not to bear the babies, it’s to save them. And the mothers.

  I nodded. My throat hurt. I said, All of them I can, anyway.

  Bridie crossed herself. Bless Mrs. Power, mother of Julia and Tim.

  I bent my head and tried to join in the prayer.

  Bless all the departed, she added.

  Silence like silk around us.

  Bridie remarked, These have been the two best days I’ve ever had.

  I stared at her.

  The time of my life. Such an adventure! A couple more people are alive because of us—because you and me were here and did our bit. Can you credit it?

  But—the very best days, really, Bridie?

  Well, and I’ve met you.

  (Her five syllables, like blows to my chest.)

  You said I was a tonic, Julia. Indispensable. Didn’t you put balm on my hands when you didn’t even know me? Gave me your comb. And a birthday as well. When I broke the thermometer, you said it was your own fault! You’ve taught me so much in two days. Made me your helper, your runner. Made me matter.

  I was speechless.

  I thought again of what a good nurse Bridie might make. Has the order never proposed to have you trained in anything?