Gran preferred those sachets, even though they were obviously much more difficult for her to use. I went to the hall door and called Dad, listening for my own voice echoing.
‘I think he might be outside still, love.’
‘But it’s dark outside. What’s he doing?’
I was uncomfortable in my wet clothes, and irritated all of a sudden by Mam. And here was Blue, who’d just nearly given me heart failure, acting as if nothing had happened, the stupid dog.
I could just make out a tiny blotch of red where Dad’s fire had been as I stood at the back door, and the smell of damp burned wood, but no sign of him. I shouted into the darkness. His voice ghosted out from the shed, and a dull beam of light from his torch fell on the gravel. Blue ran out through my legs towards the shed, barking at him, then back at me, lingering halfway between us, unsure of what to do next. Dad appeared, patted her roughly on the head, and she dashed into the house ahead of him. His face was ruddy with the cold and his hands smeared with green and black mould and sap from the wood.
‘You’re to wash your hands before you come anywhere near the table,’ Mam told him.
There was small talk over dinner that evening – about the Christmas holidays, and the new gravel the Reillys had bought for their driveway. Gran ate, as usual, in front of the television in the front room. I cleared the table afterwards and put the kettle on. Mam told me to get the chocolate Hobnobs out of the cupboard, like a good girl. We only ever had them when we had visitors.
‘Now sit down, love,’ she said, and told me, in a bit of a roundabout way, that she was going to have a baby.
I said nothing.
Mam was forty-four. That was way too old to be having babies as far as I was concerned. I suddenly felt a terrible itch at the back of the knees from the damp tights I had on me.
Dad said nothing.
The first thing I asked was ‘How long?’ I might as well have asked them right out when they’d last done it. It made me feel sick, talking about this here in our kitchen. After dinner. On a school night. They were still at it. At their age. Under this roof. While I lay innocently tucked up in bed. All the filthy details rushed into my head then: they mustn’t have used a condom, or, worse than that, they had used one and it had come off or broken. My mind’s eye was forced to zoom in to the moment of its removal from the penis. (I couldn’t think of it as anything other than a ‘penis’. The names the girls at school used seemed inappropriate.) I thought about gobbing on her.
‘Baby’s due tenth of May,’ Mam said.
‘Tenth of May, love,’ Dad said.
He was turning one of Gran’s sachets of salt over and over between his thumb and forefinger. It made a tiny swishing noise like surf.
I fucking heard you, I wanted to say. Shut your fucking mouth.
Then, to make things worse, they suggested that I move to the big room downstairs so that they could use my room as a nursery. I’d been in that room since I could remember. But that didn’t seem to concern either one of them.
The whole time Mam was stroking my shoulder with one hand while her other lay protectively on her belly. It was too much. I tore out of the room and bolted myself into my bedroom for the rest of the night. They didn’t follow me. They knew better than to do that.
That night I dreamed all the little orphan girls were living with us. Only there wasn’t enough room in the house so I had to sleep outside in the shed. And I watched them through the kitchen window, all bawling and clawing at my mother for milk. And then I was watching myself watching them through the window and I woke up in a cold sweat.
Mar was warming herself on the classroom radiator, her skirt hoiked up just under her buttocks, her long skinny legs resting on the back of one of the plastic chairs.
‘You look like shit.’
‘Thanks.’
I couldn’t tell her. I don’t know why. I told her I hadn’t slept.
‘Thinking about your man again?’ She wiggled her hips. ‘Disco is on the twen-tee-fourth. I heard on the bus this morning.’
I felt a little faint with excitement.
Mar underlined ‘come’ in the last line of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ in English class that morning – ‘Of what is past, or passing, or to come’ – and pushed her book in front of me. I didn’t even laugh. Usually I would. Usually we’d both nearly choke laughing. But it just made me want to cry. And the words ‘perne in a gyre’ spinning round in my head.
After lunch we went out to the woods to collect specimens of moss and fern and suck insects into pooters. Beetles, mostly. And woodlice. I walked a little behind the rest of the class, the sleeves of my jumper pulled down over my hands. I had this weird feeling I was being watched, and even glanced quickly behind me a few times to make sure. The trees were bare; I could see right to the road; there wasn’t a soul about. Not even a car passing. The sky was milky blue. It looked as though it might snow.
Soon the walls of my bedroom would be painted in pastel shades for the baby, and my bed replaced by a cot. And how was I going to convince Mam and Dad to let me go to this disco when they’d already said that I could only go out (maybe) during the holidays? What if I never got to meet this boy? I could hardly approach him in the cemetery. It had to be a slow set. Somewhere dark, crowded, noisy, so that he couldn’t see or hear me too well. My mother was going to swell and give birth. I wouldn’t be the only one anymore. I would have to look after it when they were too old. They were going to die.
Mar ran back and handed me a woodlouse in a jar. ‘Here, you can look after this.’
‘Great, thanks a bunch, Mar,’ I said, putting a foot out to trip her up. At least I had her.
It was around that time that Celia’s book appeared on Mam’s bedside locker. Mam hadn’t said a word about it. Mind you, I’d hardly spoken to her after she told me about the baby. But I was sure she wanted me to find it. I was always snooping around her room, trying on her clothes. Sometimes even Dad’s clothes, I got so bored of my own. It was like when she left a copy of What’s Happening to Me? in my room. She didn’t say anything that time either.
She just waited.
I used to keep it under my mattress and take it out every night to look at the rude pictures of girls with varying sizes of boobs, and boys standing on diving boards trying to hide their erections. I never said anything to her about it. But then one day she just called me into her bedroom and read through it with me, very slowly. As if I couldn’t read. She read it straight through from cover to cover, then asked me if I had any questions. I said ‘No’ and got off the bed as quick as I could and went outside in the garden to play.
I knew that Gran had had to give Celia up because she wasn’t married. Mam and Uncle Patrick had had some kind of falling out over it. That was all I knew. If I ever asked Mam she’d just say, ‘I’ll tell you when you’re older.’ The book, which was called The Little Ones, was a black glossy hardback with a photograph on the front of a serious-looking little girl. She looked like she’d lost her mother, like I did once in the supermarket, only she’d lost her so long she’d given up bawling. It was inscribed inside ‘To Deirdre. With love from your sister, Celia’. I didn’t even know they were in touch. I couldn’t think of Celia being a grown-up. She was just this wee girl on the mantelpiece, suspended in the past. The back stated simply that Celia lived in Oxford with her two cats. I remember that making me cringe, the idea that she was one of those smelly cat women. She probably had no children. Probably treated her cats like they were human.
The introduction was brief:
Industrial schools