ANNIE WOKE UP WITH A CRY OF TERROR, PUSHING BLACK water away from her as she drowned. In her dream she had been a man voyaging across the sea from the Americas to England. She sat up in the bed, the dream, recurring, fading now. She listened to the house. Nothing stirred. She was alone, just her and the baby. She felt it now, moving, stretching, restless. Its little feet kicked against the womb. She put a hand on her belly, soothing it. A boy or a girl? She thought a boy. She got up, wrapped herself warm. Shuffled into the kitchen. Wan light pushing in through the dirty window. Someone should clean the glass, she thought. No more Jamie to come bursting in. No more constables to chase him. The street outside was so quiet. She was so sick of the quiet, she thought. She was so sick of lonely shores and cold winds, houses where the foundations slowly rotted, of fence posts bleached with saltwater, of fields where sheep feasted on grass grown from the bones of druids and dead saints. She wanted modernity, she thought. She wanted lights, laughter, noise. She wanted to drive in an automobile!
She went from room to room, restless, the baby inside her restless too. She wondered what it would grow up to be. So far it was living. She knew this was not always the case. But so far everything seemed fine. She was fine. The baby was fine. She was repeating herself. Was that bad? How much was too much repetition? She wanted to break free from it, do something new. To get away. Instead she went down to the basement.
A rug on the cold floor, the colour of old, dried blood. Like someone was shot on top of it with a pistol, and slowly left to bleed to death. Old china cups and plates covered in dust, sitting on cabinets of unvarnished wood. As though someone had gone to all the trouble of making the cabinets, then lost interest just before the finish. It suited her grandmother, all of that. Dead flowers in a vase. A painting of sheep in pasture on the wall, unsigned. It wasn’t very good. Some old man in Queenstown gave it to her grandma once. Why, Annie didn’t know. She liked coming down here, though. The floor above was still splintered wood, since no one repaired it, but the shotgun Jamie used was taken away by the constables. Annie went to the empty fireplace. Grandma used to sit there sometimes, late at night, when she could be bothered to light a fire. She read – trash, mostly – and drank and sometimes talked to herself. Sometimes Annie sat with her. Now the hearth was cold and had been for a long time. Annie reached inside the fireplace, withdrew the box with plates and prints. She put it on the low table and sat in the old chair Grandma had used. She opened the box.
There was Agnes Pugh, the fishwife, in bed with Mrs Smith, the bank manager’s wife. And there was Joe Doyle with an English sailor, and there was Lily with an English soldier, and there was Eleanor Wallace with the mayor. It was just dirt. Annie looked at it in distaste. She had felt soiled by doing this work, but it was a means to an end. She gathered together the photographs and put them in the fireplace, and tossed a match into the pile.
They burned so quickly, like something ending. She stared until there was only ash.
Something moved inside her. A sudden pain. Then wet.
‘Oh, hell,’ Annie said.
*
The pain was more frequent now. She’d walked out as she was, into the cold night, feeling almost preternaturally calm. She knocked on next door’s. Charlie’s mum answered, bleary-eyed, fag in mouth.
‘Oh, love,’ she said.
She sent Charlie-Next-Door out. Annie went back to the house. The pain again, shooting through her. She heard the automobile before anything else. Then the door. Lily and John Savage, soon to be of London, still of Cork.
‘It’s here?’ Lily said.
‘It’s here,’ Annie said.
Lily sat with her. She held her hand. Rain pattered against the window.
‘What are you thinking about?’ Lily said.
‘A ship on the ocean,’ Annie said. ‘Moving on the waves.’
‘We’ll call him Edgar,’ Lily said. ‘If it’s a boy.’
‘That’s a nice name,’ Annie said.
A knock on the door. Charlie-Next-Door burst in, with his mop of dirty blond hair and running nose. He grinned shyly.
‘Did you get the midwife?’ Lily said.
‘I got what I could at this hour,’ Charlie said. ‘I mean, Mrs Dolan’s down in Queenstown visiting her daughter, and Francine’s passed out blind drunk listening to records.’
‘Do I have to do this on my own, Charlie?’ Annie said. ‘Jesus, you’re as useless as tits on a nun.’
‘I got the next best thing,’ Charlie said, and he grinned in that idiotic way of his, which Annie didn’t like one bit.
There was a knock on the door.
‘Hello…’
Another wave of pain coursed through Annie’s body, and then Eleanor Wallace came into the living room, looking brisk, looking efficient, and looking mostly sober.
‘What are you doing here?’ Annie said.
‘You need a midwife,’ Eleanor said.
‘So?’
‘So I have some experience, as it happens.’
‘Jesus,’ Annie said.
‘Just relax,’ Eleanor said.
‘Don’t tell me to relax!’
‘Baby won’t be out for a while yet,’ Eleanor said, sitting next to her. ‘Charlie, why don’t you go back to your mum. Lily, make us all some tea. John—’
‘Yes? Yes?’ he said. All mockery gone, he looked as nervous as a wash rag ready to be squeezed.
‘Make a fire,’ Eleanor said. ‘It’s freezing in here.’
‘Right you are,’ John Savage said.
Annie lay back. She closed her eyes. She could hear them moving all about her, getting busy like bees in a hive. She hated all of them suddenly.
She wished they would all go away.
Another wave of pain. She gritted her teeth. This wouldn’t go on forever, she thought. Eleanor Wallace’s cold hand on her brow.
‘This is what women do,’ Eleanor said. ‘We give birth. Your child will be free in his own country, Annie.’
‘Screw you, Eleanor,’ Annie said.
*
‘Push! Push!’
‘Shut up!’ Annie screamed.
The baby was coming. It wasn’t making it easier for her. She was on all fours, her guts loose, the smell nauseating, the fire too hot, Eleanor too bossy and Lily too timid, and John hiding in the kitchen – a small mercy, at least. This wasn’t men’s work, she thought, because men could never handle it.
‘I can see the head!’ Lily said.
‘Keep pushing!’ Eleanor said.
‘Shut… up!’ Annie screamed.
But she pushed all the same. She had no other choice. And the baby kept coming, and coming, and—
*
‘It’s a boy!’ Eleanor Wallace said. Annie could barely see for the pain.
‘What are you doing!’ she said.
‘I’m just going to pull out the placenta,’ Eleanor said.
‘You what—’
She didn’t scream but Eleanor pulled and something wet and bloody plopped out of her and fell on the floor where it joined all the other fluids. Eleanor held a knife. She cut the cord. Annie heard a baby suddenly cry. The sound felt so alien in that old room. For a moment she had an unbearable desire to laugh. Then she felt something small and warm on her chest as Eleanor placed the baby there.
‘Let him feed,’ Eleanor said.
An overwhelming rush of something she couldn’t quite put a label to washed over Annie. The tiny thing nestled against her, helpless and infinitely fragile.
Where did he come from? she wondered. How was it possible that lives just came, out of nowhere, just as they were so quickly snuffed out? She had taken too many photographs of the dead. Now she tried to frame this scene in her tired mind. Virgin and Child, in Repose. The baby’s tiny lips found her nipple and fastened. A rush of something that might have been love washed over her, almost breaking her against some distant shore. She closed her eyes.
‘Just give me a moment,’ Annie heard herself say. ‘Just give me a moment before you take him away.’