The Fall Girl (32 page)

‘How long have you been watching me?' she says, swinging round and stuffing something into a drawer.

‘You want this baby as much as I do, don't you?' I say, stepping into her room.

‘Don't talk nonsense.'

‘Let me see.' As I walk towards the drawer, she stands with her back to it.

‘Go away,' she says. ‘Get out of my bedroom right now.'

‘I'm not going anywhere until I see what's in that drawer.'

‘It's none of your business.'

‘If you don't let me see, I'll go downstairs, open the front door and walk up and down the street until everyone witnesses this,' I say, pointing at my stomach.

‘If you do, my girl, you won't get back in.'

‘I don't give a monkey's. I'm sure someone will take pity on me.'

‘For God's sake, Frances, it's just something I knitted for the baby.'

‘I want to see it.'

‘Why?'

‘I just do. What's wrong with that?'

With eyes downcast, she steps to one side. As I reach out to open the drawer, she says, ‘It'll be cold in October,' then turns on her heel and walks away.

Inside the drawer I find three matinee coats in white, yellow and pale green, three little hats and mitts to match, and two pairs of bootees in yellow and green. One by one, I spread them on the eiderdown. Three little sets: all that's missing are the white bootees. They're the sweetest things I've ever seen. Picking up the white matinee coat, I sit down on the bed and lay it across my tummy. The mere thought of being separated from my baby sends me into floods of tears.

‘Getting yourself into a state is no good for the baby,' my mother says.

I hadn't heard her come back into the room.

‘I love the little pearl buttons,' I snivel, fingering them.

‘Here,' she says, handing me a handkerchief.

‘We could always raise it together.'

‘No,' she says, shaking her head.

‘What does it matter what other people think or say?'

‘It mightn't matter to you, but it matters to me and it'll matter to that child.'

‘Times have changed.'

‘Oh, don't kid yourself, Frances. Children born out of wedlock will always be considered bastards. That's what they were a hundred years ago, that's what they are now, and that's what they'll be a hundred years from now.'

Nancy gives me a quick examination. I've been complaining about pains in my back all day.

‘Likely it's the lack of exercise,' she says. ‘You're bound to be stiff and you sitting about all day.'

‘That's probably all it is,' my mother says. ‘Sure, she's not due for six weeks yet.'

During the night the pain grows stronger. It feels as if an iron claw is crushing my back. I don't want to disturb my mother. She's already said that all pregnant women get aches and pains. When it eases, I try to sleep, but each time I'm about to drift off, it comes back – fiercer, sharper, longer. Around three o'clock, when the pain becomes unbearable, I roll out of the bed and crawl across the room and on to the landing.

‘Daddy,' I cry out. ‘Daddy! Daddy!'

My mother comes to me first and tries to pick me up off the floor. She's shouting at my father to get up and ring Nancy at once. I'm clutching the carpet pile and moaning with pain. My father's bare feet hurry past me and thud down the stairs.

‘Offer it up,' my mother says, getting down on her knees and rubbing my back. ‘Think of it as penance and offer it up.'

‘Nancy's on her way,' my father pants, dashing up the stairs.

Taking an arm each, they help me back into the bedroom and lay me down on my bed.

‘Can you feel the baby moving at all?' my mother asks.

‘No,' I cry, as another spasm seizes me.

When Nancy arrives, my father leaves the room and the two women start to strip me.

‘She's definitely in labour,' Nancy tells my mother, as she removes my panties. ‘She's had a show. You'll have to take her straight to Castleowen hospital.'

‘Castleowen!' my mother says.

‘Yes. Youse mightn't make it to Enniskillen.'

‘We will.'

‘Youse mightn't, Rita.'

‘Joe!' my mother shouts. ‘Get dressed quickly.'

‘You get ready too,' Nancy tells her. ‘I'll stay with her.'

‘Oh, the pain,' I cry. ‘Make it stop.'

‘You're all right, love; just take deep breaths,' Nancy says over and over as she dresses me. ‘There's no need to panic.' But her voice is shaking, her hands are fumbling and her eyes are taut with fear.

Outside I hear the car's engine running. My mother sends Nancy out first to make sure there's no one around; then they both help me into the back seat. All the time, I'm groaning and crying and begging them to take the pain away.

‘Keep going, Joe,' my mother says, as we head into Castleowen. ‘Enniskillen is only thirty miles away. We'll get there.'

‘No,' I howl, as he turns left to follow her instructions.

Nancy is sitting in the back with me holding my hand.

‘Her contractions are getting worse, Rita,' she says. ‘My advice is to turn back. What do you say, Joe?'

‘It's up to Rita,' he says.

‘If she delivers it in Castleowen,' my mother says, ‘town and country will be gossiping about her by morning and then where will we be?'

The pain spreads across my stomach and down into my groin. Every mile we travel seems longer and bumpier than the one before. Nancy tells my father that I'm sweating buckets and asks him to turn down the heat, but he can't; he needs to keep the windscreen clear. While I cry and curse and dig my fingers into the back of my father's seat, my parents say a
frantic rosary and Nancy says, ‘Take deep breaths, Frances. Come on now. Calm down, deep breaths.'

‘Aaaah, help me,' I scream. My lower body feels as if it's being torn apart. I'm sure I'm going to hear my pelvis snap.

‘Keep her quiet,' my father says, ‘we're coming up to a checkpoint.'

‘But the baby's coming,' I sob. ‘The baby's coming.'

‘Don't push yet whatever you do,' Nancy says. ‘We're nearly there now.'

‘We have a young lassie in labour,' my father tells the policeman and we're immediately waved on.

In the next couple of minutes, the pain becomes so intense that I start to lose consciousness. Nancy is looking at me and her lips are moving, but I can't hear a word she's saying. It feels as if my ears are bleeding.

What happens after that is hazy. I remember the cold night air, the vibration of the trolley as I'm rushed down a corridor. I can still hear the huff of my own breath inside the mask over my mouth and nose, the jangle of medical instruments. I don't know if the blinding light that makes me squint is real or just a figment of my imagination, but I do know that the living, breathing baby I see, all dressed in white with rosy lips, is just that.

‘They did everything they could for her,' my mother whispers before I even manage to raise my post-sedative eyelids.

She and Nancy say I shouldn't see her, but I know that if I don't, I'll lose my mind. A kind nurse takes me to her and lays her in my arms. I look down on her tininess and cry on top of her.

‘I was right to want to keep her, wasn't I?' I sob, stroking her cheek with the back of my forefinger.

‘Of course you were,' the nurse says.

‘She's my flesh and blood after all.'

‘Yes, she is.'

‘My little girl.'

‘Yes.'

‘My disgrace.'

‘No, Frances,' she says, putting her arm around me.

‘Yes,' I say, lowering my head and kissing her cold lips. ‘My beautiful disgrace.'

I saw my therapist today.

‘I'm very sorry about your daughter, Frances.'

‘Thank you,' I said, wiping the condensation from the window. ‘You're the first person to say that to me.'

‘Were you told why she died?'

‘Yes.' I sat down and touched my throat. ‘The umbilical cord was tangled around her neck.'

In the long sad silence that followed, I tried to remember her perfect little face, but I couldn't picture it. It was like waking up from a dream, still feeling absorbed by its atmosphere and charged with its emotions, but unable to grasp its physical existence. In frustration, I began to cry.

‘Does she have a name?' he asked, passing me the box of tissues.

‘No,' I sobbed, ‘just Baby Fall. My mother and Nancy told me there was no point in giving her a name. She was a stillborn, not a child. Stillborns didn't get names.'

‘Do you mind me asking, where was she laid to rest?'

‘With Aunty Lily.' I began to twiddle her wedding ring on
the chain round my neck. ‘I suppose I should be grateful for small mercies – she couldn't be in better company.'

‘That must have been a difficult day for you.'

‘It took place sometime after dark, but I wasn't there. My father and Father Vincent buried her before I was discharged from the hospital. It was all very hush hush.'

‘Do you visit the grave?'

I shook my head. ‘I could never face it.'

‘Do you think you could face it now?'

‘Maybe … some day. When the time is right. When I'm ready to let her go.'

‘Only from this life, Frances. She'll always be in your heart, where she belongs.'

Placing my hand on my chest, I inhaled a languishing breath. ‘God, how I'd have loved her.'

‘You still do and you always will.'

‘Remember I told you about the three knitted sets I found in my mother's drawer, and that all that was missing was the white bootees?'

‘Yes.'

‘The day my father drove me home from hospital, I made him stop outside a drapery shop and I went in and bought her white bootees. I still have them. I carry them around in my pocket on her birthday.'

‘That's good. It's comforting to have something to hold on to.'

‘Imagine if she'd lived, Lesley's son Simon would have a sister only five or six weeks younger than himself.'

‘Did you ever see Lesley again after she had her baby?'

‘No. I thought about writing to her a while back, but I've changed my mind.'

‘Why?'

‘Because I have to move on. If our paths are meant to cross again, then they will.'

‘
Che sera, sera
.'

‘Yes,' I smiled, ‘according to Aunty Lily.'

It's Friday evening and I'm just over my second week at college. I'm doing a six-month course in gardening and landscaping. I do believe I've finally found my niche.

After I left hospital early last month, I moved to Salthill in Galway and rented a one-bed-roomed apartment not far from the sea. And yes, I have a room with a view. It was daunting at first, setting up home in a strange town, but I'm beginning to feel a little more at ease in my new surroundings, especially since I started my course. Apart from the fact that it's keeping me busy, I'm enjoying the company of the other pupils, who are mature students like myself. The weekends, however, are still pretty lonely.

Once a month, I travel to Dublin to see my therapist. We talk less now about the past, and more about the future.

A couple of weeks ago, I jotted down my new address on a scrap of paper, slipped it into an envelope and sent it to my father, just to leave the line of communication open. I miss him dreadfully. When I picked up my post from the front doormat an hour ago, I saw his handwriting on one of the envelopes and I'm just about to open it. My hands are shaking.

The final piece of the jigsaw:

1 Feb. 2000
Crosslea

Dear Frances

I've been doing a lot of thinking these past few weeks about all them questions you want answering, and to be quite frank, I'm not sure that any good will come out of it. If your mother were alive, she certainly wouldn't approve. She sincerely believed that the truth could only ever hurt you. All I can do is hope and pray that she was wrong in her thinking.

For what you're about to read, I am heartily sorry.

You were indeed born just three months after your mother and I got married, but as I said to you before, your mother wasn't in the family way: she wasn't that kind of girl. Your Aunty Lily was your birth mother.

The man who spoke to you at her funeral was a schoolteacher and her one-time fiancé, Emmet O'Sullivan. The engagement lasted only a couple of weeks, however, because Emmet soon became aware that Lily was concealing a pregnancy. When your grandfather heard that Emmet had reneged on his promise, he stormed around to his digs and demanded an explanation. Under duress, Emmet told him that Lily was expecting and that he, never having interfered with her in that way, was not the father.

That night your grandfather gave poor Lily the mother of all beatings and threw her out. Your mother, disgusted by her father's brutality, packed both their belongings and left with Lily. Having nowhere else to go, they arrived on our doorstep. My father insisted that both girls move into our guest bedroom until
arrangements could be made for Lily to go away to have her baby. Lily, however, had other ideas, as I discovered about a week later when I found your mother on her knees by the bed, sobbing and clutching her rosary beads. She told me that Lily was planning to go to England to have an abortion. The poor woman was devastated. All she kept saying was – We can't let her do it, Joe
.

Secretly, I had my own worries over an incident that had occurred one night the previous January. Around half past ten your mother turned up on my doorstep in flitters. Your grandfather, she said, was on the rampage, looking for Lily, who was supposed to have been home two hours earlier. Knowing what would happen to her younger sister if her father caught up with her, she begged me to go out and look for Lily, which I did without any hesitation. A fella I met in the street told me that he'd seen Lily earlier that day knocking about with Sadie Sweeney, undesirable company by anyone's standards, so I drove straight out to Sadie's cottage to see if Lily was there. I could hardly believe my eyes when I got out of the car and saw the pair of them in through the kitchen window dancing around the floor in nothing more than their slips. I went inside and told Lily to cover herself up and to get into the car at once. It was only then I realized they were both blind drunk.

While Lily was picking up her clothes off the floor, the other dirty tramp was pawing at me and trying to get me to kiss her. It was woefully embarrassing. Lily wasn't even fit to tie her own shoelaces, so I bent down and tied them for her. Then I linked her arm and took her out to the car. As soon as I started the engine, she began to sob. She didn't want to go home to face her father, she said. She was very distressed. Despite her reckless behaviour, it was impossible not to feel sorry for the lassie. When I pulled up half-way down the lane, all I ever intended doing was comforting her. But she hadn't buttoned up her coat, and she smelled of perfume and she asked to be held. I don't know if her lips rose to
mine or mine descended on hers, or they met somewhere in the middle, but one way or another I lost all control of myself. Afterwards, I wept bitter tears.

When I discovered Lily was pregnant, I hoped and prayed that she would come and tell me that I wasn't responsible, but she didn't and I, to my shame, was too much of a coward to ask her. I didn't want to lose your mother, Frances. That woman meant the world to me. I had the height of respect for her. A man could go home after a night out with your mother with a clear conscience. She was a clean-living lassie, and a devout Catholic. She begged and pleaded with Lily not to go through with the abortion, offering to raise the baby for her. Eventually, after many long and emotional exchanges between the two women, Lily agreed to go to Dublin to a Mother and Baby Home, run by nuns, to have her baby. There were, however, three conditions she insisted upon: one, that she enter the home under your mother's name – she wanted no hand or part in the child's life, even down to having her name on the birth certificate; two, that I would be named as father of the baby and not Emmet; and three, that after the birth I would give her a couple of hundred pounds, enough to allow her to start a new life in England.

Although the night before Lily left for the home, I tried, when I found her alone in the scullery, to broach the subject of whether or not I was, in fact, the baby's (your) father, she never gave me a straight answer, saying only that I would be, and wasn't that all that mattered?

Your mother, either not realizing or refusing to question the extent of Lily's experience with men, insisted that Emmet had to be the father, backing up her conclusion with one question – Sure, who else's could it be?

If only Lily had left things as they were, instead of confessing all to Xavier in a letter before she died. It was only then that I knew
for sure that you were my flesh and blood. I'll never forget the look on your mother's face when she read that letter. It ruined everything: our relationship with Xavier, my relationship with your mother, but most of all, your mother's relationship with you.

She never forgave me, you know. I begged her to, even on her deathbed. But all she said was, Tell Frances I forgive her, and then she drew her last breath.

As I said, Frances: I'm heartily sorry
.

Daddy

P. S. Your grandfather Murphy died just ten years ago in an old folks' home down in Cork. As far as your mother was concerned, her father had died the night he beat the pregnant Lily, and she did not attend the funeral. You see, she was the kind of woman who found it hard to forgive. I suppose you were the lucky one.