The last time I gave birth my labour seemed shorter, less acute than any that had gone before but mercifully such details are blurred. Since then in my dreams I’ve experienced the birth process over and over again but with one difference, my child always lives. The boy is handsome, articulate too. You’ve never heard anything like the wisdom that comes from his lips. Only a few hours old and he expatiating like Solomon on every subject under the sun. That the doctor and nurse are impressed is plain to see. ‘Truly amazing!’ they say. ‘Not at all what you’d expect from...’ leaving unsaid what’s in their minds. But in my own I complete it for them. Not what you’d expect from seeds planted so late in life. Never mind, I think. Maybe I’ll hold on to this one. But alas, with the dawn’s first cold kiss on the windowpane he goes the way of all the others.
The dreams are my one consolation, filling me with new kinds of hope, new belief that there might be, no, shall be, a happy ending to my quest for the perfect child. Irrational you might think to base so much on a feeling of physical wellbeing in the aftermath of what is, after all, merely a dream.
True, after they had delivered me of my child, after they had scrubbed my insides out and left me squeaky clean, I was sunk in a slough of despond. My arms with nothing to hold, my body plundered. As the luminous fragility of early morning light displaced the sleepless hours of darkness despair entered my soul. Before long the ward maids came clattering in, carrying pails of milk for the nursing mothers, their ear-splitting cry, ‘Milk for the breasties’ one more cruel reminder of my loss and causing the demented woman in the adjoining bed to stir fretfully beneath her blanket. She, likewise pipped at the post with the delivery of her stillborn child, added her lamentations to mine. She was not long arrived in the country. I knew this because we had shared an alcove in the emergency department for some hours when she had raved of ambush and treachery.
In the struggle to give birth her hair had escaped from its frizzed loops and snaked Medusa-like across the pillow. Her skin was deeper than the deepest café au lait with the deceiving sheen sometimes seen in tubercular patients or on the skins of thoroughbreds. In her sleek plumpness Rosa brought to mind a dark feathered, full-breasted, bird slowly fattening for the Christmas market; strange in one who had so recently fled from a ravaged, war-torn zone. Concealed under a rick of hay Rosa had been smuggled out of that troubled city whose new laws were dictated by the controlling Ubermenschen. Travelling across the plains she found asylum with two British doctors, a husband and wife team. Hence her fair knowledge of English. In the home of her protectors she had passed the months of her pregnancy, opening doors to patients. Until impressed by her intelligence the married medics began sharing their knowledge, teaching her to sterilise instruments and to seam torn flesh with catgut. And all the while she carried out her duties her bump increasing so gradually it might have been inflated by single, spaced-out puffs of air.
That was my own interpretation inspired by her poetic, not always inaccurate, use of our confusing language. From Rosa’s own account she was happy and well cared for as she serenely awaited the emergence of her child. Until one unsuspecting day her past had relentlessly overtaken her forcing her to flee that comparative haven and take refuge in our green isle. That the child she carried was not her first conception came as a shock. Somehow I’d envisaged her as the virginal victim of some brutal, late-night marauding patrol. I’d imagined her carrying that first fruit snugly in the sling of pelvic muscle, until the moment when her contorted limbs and heaving breath brought her to the final panting expulsion of an infant who had not lived to register vocal appreciation of his mother’s supreme birth-giving act.
But this was not the case.
Rosa revealed that she had already given birth to three healthy children, all of them girls and all sired by different partners, confiding in me her sorrow that the child the fates had seen fit to deliver stillborn had been a boy. She laid no claim to have wedded any of the fathers, affirming only that each one had made good babies. In my own quest for good baby-makers I too, had favoured the best of healthy young males none of whom exhibited any visible disability. But in every instance once conception occurred, doubts set in convincing me of the existence of some hidden genetic disorder and compelling me, regardless of pain, to root out what had been so hopefully planted. Better sure than sorry has ever been my way of thinking. And yet at no time my sufferings so intense, so extreme that they could not be eased by contemplation of that perfect, as yet unborn, dream child of mine.
In those bereft hours Rosa and I were joined closer than any set of Siamese twins, linked by our common bond of sorrow. The ward women, you could tell, were moved by our plight, if unsure which of us deserved sympathy the most. Even Sadie, round-the-clock feeder of strapping twin boys, found time to slosh milk on cornflakes for the traumatised refugee. ‘Human, ain’t she? Even if she’s black,’ doubtfully defending her Samaritan act before the jeering milk maids.
‘Sister says yer to get outa bed if yer rainbow-coloured,’ their only response, as they clattered off yodelling their obscene cry.
Sister Luke said other things. ‘Don’t brood,’ she advised. ‘Keep your minds and your hands busy.’ Hands I understand. An extra pair can be useful where busyness abounds. But my mind now has never been anything but active. But it was to Rosa after all that she spoke. Only later she uttered to me in private the dispiriting, cryptic remarks which in essence denied the existence of my stillborn children. ‘There was no baby, dear. Not this time nor before. Believe me now, Mary, when I say there never was any baby.’
All of which thoroughly cast me down. May God forgive her for saying such terrible things and denying me the hope of ever producing my perfect child, my dream child, as if he had no right to life.
As for Rosa, she became cheered enough to dance for us, her straining bodice showing signs she was lactating, twin constellations in the Milky Way. On proud stamping feet she belaboured an invisible tambourine, ululating plaintively, while all about her the women applauded her wild dervish. Following the success of this performance they made Rosa their special pet and she became a familiar sight with outstretched hand, trudging from bed to bed, ‘For the love of Jesus,’ she’d beseech, showing her gold fillings in an earnest grin, ‘Please, for the love of Jee-sus!’
When she ran little errands for them they rewarded her with small coins from the change; Sadie, mother of the insatiable twins, and other nursing mothers, her best customers. ‘Pretty Rosy-Posy,’ they praised and ‘Romany Rose’ although no one could say for sure where she had been born. She could equally have hailed from Lithuania or, further still, Estonia. But it pleased them to be gracious.
Ah, beware the fickle favour of the mob. Even then her star was in its descent. Sister Luke, always short of nurses, gave her little jobs to do. On discovering that Rosa could take temperatures and keep ward charts, talents learned under the tutelage of the DoctorDocs, Rosa no longer trudged from bed to bed in subservient attitude but with authority. When singled out once again for her dextrous use of a hypodermic syringe, the mood in the ward grew spiteful and the women dubbed her Rosa Klebb. Gleefully, the hospital orderlies took it up, even old death’s head, the porter, whose idea of fun was visiting the morgue, cackled moistly at the joke.
Men can be very cruel but then so can women. Putting poor lactating Rosa in a ward full of new mothers and she with no infant of her own. At night the sight of Rosa in penitential position tearfully expressing her milk into the bath – so much creamy liquid spouting from those swollen coffee-coloured breasts – moved me strangely and inspired a dream in which all of us, women and children, were drowning in great vats of milk. Only dream child and I managed to escape. This I felt was a good omen and so I told Sister Luke but still she continued to deny all that I had endured. Ah, but what does she know of sorrow and suffering for once you have set your sights on the perfect child no other will do.
All too quickly Rosa lost her bloom and the sheen faded from her skin. She might have been merely pining for the men who made good babies but I blamed the malice of the ward. Alas, the situation turned out to be more crucial for Rosa’s decline stemmed not from persecution but guilt.
‘I have done a bad, bad thing,’ she sobbed, when I came upon her in her usual penitential position. ‘Jee-sus is punishing me for giving away my babies.’
I knew then what had sent Rosa fleeing into exile. Picture the scene. Her latest baby bought and paid for while still in the womb. With the adoption papers signed and the couple eagerly awaiting delivery of the child Rosa decides too late she wants to keep this one. Escape is her only avenue. Only death, not legalities, had cheated her in the end.
The word soon got around and, in high moral indignation, the ward women refused to allow her near them. They even began calling me names, ‘Dipso’ and ‘Cocaine Mary’. It was the price I knew for having befriended her. Indeed, we might have been half-sisters, Rosa and I, just like her little daughters long since auctioned on the market and gone their separate ways.
In vain was Sister Luke’s appeal on behalf of ‘the poor unfortunate in your midst used and abused all her life,’ for it merely confirmed what they had already suspected, that Rosa was blighted with more than ill-luck and would infect them all. If they only knew what I knew they would have had even greater cause for alarm. But did I warn them? No, I did not, for between me and Rosa existed a certain bond, them I owed nothing.
It all began the night Sadie - dead to the world - slept through the 2 a.m. feed. The twins were all set for a good rumbustious, ward-waking roar when in the gloom a stealthy movement caught my eye, and before long their whinging turned to greedy gusty sighing. Sounds of gratification that I was to hear again and again and always under cover of darkness for Rosa the Wet Nurse took great care to avoid discovery.
Out of loyalty I kept my counsel about her nocturnal activities just as she kept hers about my forays on the drugs cupboard. Let me tell you even if my dream child had been involved I would have acted no differently, been proud even. And that’s saying a lot, watching her hour after hour in the shadows, selflessly nursing those infants in expiation for the sin of selling her babies, maybe herself too.
Now whenever the ward women heap their petulance upon Romany Rose, or grumble about her immoral or unsanitary habits, I tell myself before long they may very well have more to contend with than dirty fingernails or body lice. For the way I see it the various strains coursing through Rosa’s milk are linking the ills afflicting Eastern Europe with those of our small island in the Irish Sea; microscopic and deadly they flow freely along the vast network of tributaries, impartially acquainting the older micro-organisms they encounter with newer, more virulent ones. In this manner that seemingly innocent milkshake continues to spread the malevolent strain which had its origins elsewhere.