It will happen, my whisperers promise. Trust us…believe in us…we are the whispers of what should have been.
David was reluctant at first to move from my bed, but when I told him I’d suffered some spotting, he understood. Nothing must endanger this new life we’ve created. I reassured him of my love, explained how hormones go berserk during pregnancy and lovemaking is impossible. ‘Afterwards,’ I promised him, ‘afterwards when our baby is born, everything will be different.’
When I came home from the studio on the night before he left, he asked me to sit down and talk to him. He placed his hands on my arms and sank me into a chair.
‘Be still,’ he’d said, ‘and listen to me. All this rushing around and working such late hours. Apart from our trip to Dublin, I’ve hardly seen you since I came home.’
He kissed me, his mouth seeking some response. My body clenched in protest, and I accused him of being demanding, selfish, thinking only of his own needs. How was it possible that he could not hear the terrified whine behind my bluster?
‘Why,’ he’d asked, ‘do you spurn me? Do you think I’m a beast, incapable of lying by your side without wanting to invade your body?’
I almost told him. I could feel my knees weakening, the urge to kneel before him and confess. But the whisperers moved from gentle persuasion to implacable authority and straightened my spine. I faced him down, this man whose children I carried so briefly, all five of them, and who now urge me onwards…No more…no more…no more.
He drew away from me and wished me goodnight, chastely kissing my forehead. I understand his desire to be part of my experience but this is a journey I must take alone.
The rain had stopped by the time we left the Nutmeg and shoppers were drifting back to the market stalls. A traveller sat on a blanket outside the café. She was young, twenty at most, a baby in her arms, and a dull-eyed small boy hunkered beside her. I searched in my purse for coins but Miriam went back inside to buy coffee and sandwiches for the mother, milk for the boy.
‘It’s a boy child, missus,’ the traveller said. ‘A big boy child for his fine strappin’ mother.’
Her hard, experienced eyes seemed to sear through my secret. The pavement swayed, or perhaps I stumbled, and the coins fell from my hand, rolling across the uneven surface until they were clenched in the boy’s fist.
Phyllis Lyons arrived back from the pharmacy with her mother’s medication and asked if she could get a lift home with me. Her car was being serviced and she’d missed the twice-hourly bus that runs past her house. Miriam waved and left us together, glad, I suspect, to escape to her house on the other side of Market Square.
Throughout the journey home, Phyllis talked non-stop about her mother’s ailments and her efforts to alleviate them. I stopped outside her gate and waited for her to leave the car.
‘Come in and say hello to Mammy,’ she said. ‘She loves the bit of company.’
I stared at the grey lace curtains on the front window. Her mother would have been watching us, stooped on her Zimmer frame. Inside, the air would be stale and smoky.
‘I’m expecting a call from David,’ I said, and Phyllis nodded, as if my excuse echoed all the others she’d ever heard.
She stepped from the car and walked around the side of her house, squeezing her stocky figure past the tractor. Farming her few acres and looking after her mother…it can’t be an easy life but she accepts it without complaint.
I turned down the lane and drove into the grey arms of Rockrose. I locked the front door behind me. Such relief, being alone again, able to breathe, to open my waistband, to allow the silence to settle until only the whisperers were audible.
I speak to women all the time. They look at my bump and confide in me. One woman told me she’d never once, during the nine months of her pregnancy, felt her baby move. He’s eighteen years old now, on a track and field scholarship in the United States. Another woman was told by her gynaecologist that he could not detect her baby’s heartbeat. That night she felt the first fluttering of life in her womb. Put a group of women together and they’ll tell stories that mystify the medical profession.
Carla Kelly writes about them in her pregnancy diary. The happy, clappy stories about babies who kick and jog and elbow their way towards birth. I sent her a letter shortly after that night. I asked her how it was possible to keep hoping when the womb rejects the dream. An anonymous letter, of course. She could not deal with my story. She passed my letter on to Alyssa Faye for her advice column. As a psychologist, Alyssa Faye believes she has a deeper understanding of the human psyche than the average journalist. Human suffering is grist to her mill. For three weeks she analysed my miscarriages, analysed my head, analysed my emotions. I did not write my story to pad her column. I wanted to see if Carla Kelly could understand, empathise. I got my answer.
Last week in Dublin, I saw her in Brown Thomas with her husband. At least I assume that’s who it was. He stays out of her limelight but she held his arm in a way that suggested he was her rock. They were looking at baby clothes. I followed them from the department store and up to the top of Grafton Street. The flower sellers were busy. Birds of paradise flamed against white chrysanthemums and tightly coiled rosebuds jutted like spears from overflowing buckets. She bought the roses and continued onwards. I lost sight of them when they entered the Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre. I probably could have found her. She’s tall and distinctive enough to stand out from the crowd but I was too weak to move any further. I sat down in a coffee bar and asked for a glass of water. The waitress had the experienced eyes of an older woman counting months. She brought the water sharply and asked if I’d like her to call a taxi.
‘You think it’ll never end,’ she said. ‘Especially the last months. But it does and then you’ll know all about it.’
She spoke with relish, they all do, warning of impending chaos and tiny impetuous demands that will turn my life upside down.
The taxi came shortly afterwards. I caught a last glimpse of Carla Kelly and her husband as I was leaving. They were laughing at something one had said to the other. Her head was thrown back, her hand covering her mouth, as if her laughter was a wild thing she must contain. It’s a long time since I laughed that way. Had I ever? I must have, especially in the early days with David. Now I laugh on cue. It sounds natural, spontaneous, even contagious. In public relations, where it’s necessary to flatter and admire, I have acquired certain skills. I lean on them now but, from time to time, they slip. Then all I have to do is touch my stomach. Small gestures create an easily translatable language that gives me leave to be tired, anxious, irritable, uncomfortable and, occasionally, irrational.
Was it irrational to follow Carla Kelly that day? Of course it was. I realise that now but she is the face of Anticipation, taunting, flaunting; telling us it’s easy, so easy and natural to carry a baby in the womb for nine dangerous months.
I too used to keep a diary. I made the last entry when I was sixteen years old. Hard to believe that’s twenty-three years ago. I was pregnant then, eight months gone, on the final stretch, so to speak. And on the verge of becoming a teenage statistic. I lost my boy in March, gone before he had time to draw breath. Lots of blank pages afterwards. The world had become a greyer place, not worth recording. Nothing left for me except my scans and a whisper of what might have been.
‘You’ve had a lucky escape,’ my father said when I was discharged from hospital. ‘Best thing you can do is get on with your life and forget it ever happened.’ He’d taken care of everything and discouraged me from visiting the Angels’ plot in Glasnevin Cemetery. It’s such a poignant place to visit – that treasured, communal space where the tiny ones rest together.
‘It’s a new beginning for all of us,’ he said. ‘No looking back.’ My mother was dead by then and he was about to be married again. He’d changed from the grim, dead-eyed man I used to know. His face was plumper and he laughed easily,