BREEDIE FLYNN IN geography. Across the room from me because we’d been separated for talking. Scowling at the cool girls in their huddled, smirking group. Curling her lip at the lads at the back, flicking a spit ball from her desk back towards them. They’re talking too, sir, she suddenly says, and Hornycords Hannigan turns around from the blackboard, from his chalk diagram of the layers of the earth, and Breedie is pointing at the cool girls.
Worry about yourself, Miss Flynn, and the F you’re going to get from me at Christmas.
You’re going to give me an F for Christmas? An eff? And she draws the F along her breath and purses her lips to the shape of a kiss. And the lads laugh and the cool girls roll their eyes.
Hornycords takes his position facing us, sitting back against the edge of his desk. He seems priapic, as he always did, because of the way his perpetual corduroy trousers bunch at the fly. He folds his arms and opens his mouth to speak but Breedie gets there first.
I like your big erection, sir. And Hornycords Hannigan’s eyes widen and swing towards her and his arms uncross and his hands swing down to form a shield across his crotch, of their own accord it seems, and he straightens himself and he opens his mouth but no sound comes out, and Breedie says, At the side of your house. Is it a kitchen extension or an extra bedroom?
And Hornycords flops empurpled into his chair and even the cool girls are laughing and Breedie Flynn winks across at me, and I wake up laughing and crying and I’m still here and she’s long gone.
*
Dying seems as unreasonable as living. If only there could be a switch, a painless, instant shutting down, a certainty of stopping in the space between heartbeats. An assurance that no cells would burst, no vessels implode for want of air, no searing agonies would see us out, no ground or breaking waves would rush to meet us as we fell, and receive our bodies, broken and living still, aware of the receding light. I feel my baby’s stillness, like he’s hiding from my thoughts. Emotions travel through placentas; I read that in the book. My baby’s tides turn at the pull of my gravity.
*
I studied English and history at the University of Limerick. I did a master’s in journalism. I tried and tried: I wrote pieces about GM food and whaling and direct provision for asylum seekers; I reviewed books and films and plays; I wrote a searing article on inverted sexism as a trope in advertising. It was published in a broadsheet supplement, and when I looked at the online edition there was a stream of comments beneath it and my stomach burnt with the excitement of it all and I waded into them and saw myself being attacked and I mounted a defence of my position and I gloried in my new-found notoriety and I railed against this narrow, straitened, un-nuanced, reactionary brand of feminism, and declared myself to be a proponent of the purest form of equality, and I was so happy with myself, and I was never asked to write for that paper again.
I couldn’t get regular work. I could sense Pat’s delight. He desperately wanted to keep me, in every sense. I registered for substitute teaching work. I got none. I advertised grinds in English. No one wanted them – except, years later, Martin Toppy, and he didn’t really: his father had misread my ad. They pulled up on the kerb outside in a blacked-out SUV. Will you taych that boy to read? Martin Toppy’s father said. All he brang home from school was nits. The blessings of God on you. His face was dark, flat-nosed, battle-scarred. He was a bare-knuckle boxer who’d retired undefeated. There was talk around the town of drugs, protection rackets, laundered fuel. He had a faded ad, written in marker, in his hand. My mobile number and address were on it. I’d pinned it years before on the noticeboard in the church.
He handed me an envelope stuffed with cash and drove away and left his son standing outside my house, looking down at his feet, silent and dark-haired and sad.
*
I haven’t gone to see my father yet. It seems less urgent now, since meeting that Traveller girl, and I can find no earthly connection between these things. Tomorrow, maybe. My father will be giving his days to standing at his sitting-room window, watching out for me. He’ll have chocolate-chip cookies in the cupboard because he knows I like them. He’ll have proper coffee, and he’ll have the biscuits and the coffee arranged at either side of the French press he bought in Aldi, even though he has no idea how it works. He got it just for me because he knows I like that oul complicated coffee. I think of him standing in a supermarket aisle, picking French presses up and examining them and putting them down again, trying to work out the differences between them, worrying he’s getting the wrong one, asking the checkout assistant if he has the right sort of coffee bought to go with the yoke.
Thinking about my father makes my head reel. I just won’t. I won’t think about him. But I’ll go tomorrow to see him for sure. I’ll tell him I’m fine, and Pat is flat out, and I’ve been doing a few bits for magazines, and I’ll bring them up to show him when they’re out, and he’ll say, Oh, God, do, be sure and do. I’d love to see them. He read an article I wrote for a Sunday paper once about abortion and I saw him redden and take his glasses off and wipe them and put them back on, over and over again, as though the reading of my article was hurting his eyes and he needed to stop every now and then, and I heard him say, Hmm, as he read, and he folded the paper to quarters after he’d finished, and he looked at me and said, Well done, love, that’s very good, and he went an hour early to devotions.
I felt an urge today to fortify myself. I drove to town this morning and I bought folic-acid supplements and iron tablets. I asked the girl behind the counter for advice on what was safe to take in pregnancy. Her voice was soft and soothing but I couldn’t hear her words: my eyes and mind were drawn to people at the other tills, people holding children by the hands, harried and happy, suffused with normality.
The little bottles are arranged on the kitchen table in front of my laptop. As I write, the table jiggles on its uneven legs. The bottles dance a little, like small children saying, Me, me, look at me. I asked Pat a million times to fix this table. I feel a spark of annoyance that could flame easily to anger. Imagine, I still have some left for him, after everything. I have to try to concentrate on breathing in and out, slowly, centring myself. Tapping these keys and watching these words form into sentences soothes me. I’ll have to remember to delete all this.
Martin Toppy sat here in this seat for all of his lessons, and I sat across from him with my back to the window, facing away from the light. Pat always left as he arrived, and went to training or the clubhouse or a meeting of some parish thing or hurling thing or any of those things I’d stopped being interested in years ago, and they barely nodded if they passed each other in the kitchen or the hall. He spoke always in a whisper. His skin was dark and his hair was thick and black so that his eyes seemed even lighter in contrast, soft and baby-blue. His eyes seemed always to swim with sorrow; he seemed always on the very verge of tears. His first lesson with me was a year ago, or just over it. He barely spoke in those first two hours. He sat at my kitchen table with a mug of tea and a plate of chocolate biscuits untouched before him. His eyes were cast down, his cheeks were a livid red, even against his sun-browned skin. His hands were clasped together in his lap, prayer-like in mortification. I asked him if he knew the alphabet. He shook his head without looking up. I had no beginner material. I hadn’t expected to be teaching literacy. My material was on the Shakespeare plays prescribed for the junior and senior cycles, on John B. Keane and Sean O’Casey and Kavanagh and Yeats, the modern novels and essay writing. But the notes felt crisp and fresh through the oil-stained envelope, and I thought, How hard can it be? I wrote out an upper- and lower-case alphabet on a sheet of poster paper with a thick black marker. His eyes followed my hand. I called it out to him, slowly. He nodded slightly as I sounded each letter. I wrote his name for him. Do you recognize it?
He shook his head. The tears were visible now in his eyes. He drew a big hand across them. I’m thick, he whispered. I’m thick, miss.
*
This baby is going nowhere. It’s funny how I know. If I don’t eat, it’ll take what it needs from my blood and softening flesh. I knew from before the sickness, before the first crampless day, from the moment I let what happened happen, from the feeling of something fulfilling itself, some implacable notion of Fate. My first and second miscarriages happened at night; both times I was woken from dreams of my mother by a searing, stabbing pain, and found myself soaked in thick, dark wetness. The memories of the dreams came to me days later, and then only the impressions of them: my mother smiling at me, as she almost never did in life, and pressing her cold hand softly against my cheek, and saying, Don’t worry, my love, don’t worry.
Pat rang my mobile yesterday, late in the evening. What could he have to say to me? I let it ring out and he didn’t leave a message or try again.