Rosie had been upstairs, as usual, but I brought her up a cup of relaxing tea.
‘Sweetheart?’ I called gently through her door. ‘How’s it going in there?’
Silence. I pushed open the door.
‘Rosie, I have some nice camomile…’
She was asleep on the bed, her breathing light and steady. For a moment, I just gazed at her. The poor girl. Fully dressed, her long hair falling over the pillow.
I remembered when she was a little girl and we’d walk to school together, knowing so clearly that this was a golden moment in my life. You, as their mother, define their world, you shape it and make sense of it for them, sharing the life so intimately with your small child. I stayed in my marriage for her, I became a teacher because I thought it was more family friendly, I wanted to make the world perfect, or as near perfect as was possible, for her but it seemed it was never quite enough.
I hovered for a moment with the cup of camomile tea. Should I leave it or bring it downstairs? Leave it. I went to her desk to place it down.
One notebook was open, the pen lying across it, as though she’d been writing and, overcome with tiredness, had fallen asleep. It was just a glance, but something made me take a second look. It was the uniform look of the writing, the fact that it looked so unlike a piece of revision work or an essay of any kind. It was Rosie’s handwriting, though, her loopy biro, the way she did her a’s, the slightly embellished f. But it was the same sentence, over and over again, the same phrase, over and over.
I hate my life. I hate my life. I hate my life.
The same words covered the page. I flicked through the whole book. Everywhere, the same sentence, filling the pages. This must have taken weeks and weeks. Months.
I hate my life. I hate my life. I hate my life.
I looked through other papers on her desk, the ream of foolscap, all covered with that phrase. The same, page after page after page. Months of work, the careful writing of this horrible sentence. She hadn’t been revising, she had been filling notebooks with this one thought.
I hate my life, I hate my life.
On the shelf above her desk were other A4 pads, I flicked through them, all of them, the same.
I hate my life. I hate my life. I hate my life.
My darling girl. My beautiful girl. The person I loved more than anything, my absolute pride and joy, the girl who had everything, was good at everything, the person who had the world at her feet, laid out like the finest carpet, hated her life, and had become stuck on this one thought and couldn’t move forwards. She must have been so terrified. Why hadn’t I realised? Why hadn’t I checked, helped her, asked more about how she was getting on… there were so many signs. So many obvious signs and I just assumed – hoped – that it would be okay.
I stood there, for a few moments, not quite knowing what to do. I thought back to Celia’s party, and then when she called me at the cake sale. And the fact that she hadn’t gone to see any of her friends for months, or been out of the house.
But all the time, I had thought she was getting closer and closer to the end, when in fact she was getting further away. Because the one thing I wanted for her was for her to love her life. That’s all I had ever wanted and if she didn’t, then I had failed.
‘Mum. What are you doing?’ Rosie was sitting up, furious.
‘Rosie… why didn’t you say?’
She stood up and angrily grabbed her notebook from my hands. ‘Why are you going through my things? I can’t believe you’d do such a thing!’
‘Rosie, wait…’
‘Everything’s fine, Mum. Don’t look at me like that.’
‘You can’t keep saying everything’s fine when obviously it isn’t. You should have told me. I could have helped. I could have helped you.’
‘And done what exactly?’ Rosie started to cry, great rackety sobs, the kind I hadn’t seen her take since she was tiny. They were filled with hopelessness and devastation, as if her life had come to an end.
‘Rosie… Rosie…’ She stood trembling and shaking in my arms, her head pressed onto my shoulder.
‘Mum…’ was all she managed. ‘What am I going to do?’
I pulled her onto the bed and we sat side by side, both her trembling hands in mine, and we waited until her breathing slowed down.
‘Right, Rosie, whatever you are thinking now, that none of this can be fixed, it can. It’s a case of how you recover. Setbacks are just that. Until your comeback. You get up again, you move on and you learn. Do you understand?’
She nodded, her lip wobbling.
‘Because it doesn’t matter. Exams don’t actually matter. Going to college doesn’t matter. None of those things will make you happy. Not really. Well, they will but true happiness is something that comes from in here.’ And I pressed my hand to her heart. ‘Get that right, and the rest is easy.’
She nodded again.
‘Do you want to tell me what happened?’
‘I was doing all right… I thought. All last year, I kept up with everything. All the work, the study events. I did well in my mock exams… remember?’
‘You did brilliantly.’
‘I thought I was going to be okay even though there was this feeling starting to spread inside me. It was like it had taken root and every day I could feel it getting bigger. Not hugely but there was a feeling every morning, when I opened my eyes.’
‘What was it?’
‘Like a ball or a knot or stuff, right in the middle of me. And I couldn’t concentrate. Or eat. It was like it was this alien inside me…’ She gave a wonky smile. ‘That sounds weird.’
I shook my head. ‘No it doesn’t. Nothing you say ever sounds weird. Go on.’
‘Well, I first felt this thing, this alien, last summer. All I could think about was September when this year would start. The last year. The most important year. No one has been able to talk to me about anything but the exams for ages now. It was all, when are you doing the Leaving, what subjects are you doing? What college? I felt like screaming and all the time I had to be nice and polite and tell them over and over again. Everyone asks you, Mum. Not just family members but people in the shop, the guys down in the sailing club. Even the postman asked me!’
‘And then…’
‘Well, I didn’t do any work all summer. I kept convincing myself that I would start in September and that I would be brilliant, keep to study timetables and go for walks and just be… you know… methodical. Cool. But… I don’t know. I just didn’t. And then Jake finished with me…’
‘It’s not easy, is it? A relationship ending like that.’
She shook her head. ‘No. No, it’s not. And, it didn’t help my alien. It just kind of doubled in size overnight. Sometimes I would feel as though it was going to take over my whole body. I felt so scared. I mean, we haven’t had to be in school since January. All the study events were optional, if you were able to do it at home, then they didn’t bother you. And I just let it all get on top of me.’
‘Don’t they have counselling services? Someone you can talk to?’
‘Yeah, they are always saying, if you need help, you can go and talk to Miss Byrne.’
‘Oh, sweetheart, why didn’t you?’
‘I felt ashamed,’ she said. ‘Embarrassed. Like I was a failure. Which I am.’
‘You’re not. You’re absolutely not. Doing well in exams does not signify success in life, just in exams. It’s how you deal with things when they go wrong. What you learn, how you bounce back, what you take with you to the next experience. Do you see? But why didn’t you talk to me? I could have helped…’
‘I kept thinking, if I could just get working, I’d be all right. I kept thinking, I would start tomorrow. It wasn’t too late. And then it was Christmas…’
‘Christmas!’
‘Yeah…’ She hung her head. ‘It goes back as far as then. But I thought, I’d just take that time off and then start in January. It wasn’t too late. But I just couldn’t do it.’
‘And the hating your life… when did you start doing that?’
‘Once I wrote it, and then wrote it again, I swear it helped… just naming what I felt was good for me.’
I put my arm around her and squeezed her. ‘Couldn’t you have talked to your friends if you couldn’t talk to me?’ I said gently.
‘It was easier not to see them. I couldn’t do with all their exam talk and college talk. So I said that you had said I couldn’t go out or contact them…’
‘Really?’ I said.
‘It was just easier that way.’
‘Okay, let’s not worry about any of that now. You’ve got your first exam in a week.’
‘Oh mum,’ she wailed. ‘I can’t do them.’
‘Really? You could try and just see how you get on?’
She shook her head. ‘Don’t make me. Please don’t make me.’
‘First thing’s first, I’ll call the school and chat to them. Miss Byrne for one, okay?’
‘I can’t do them,’ she said. ‘I’m going to fail everything.’ And she began to cry again. ‘And I’m never going to go to Trinity. Or do a stupid internship. Dad’s going to be so mad.’
‘No, he’s not… he’ll be fine about it.’ I hoped he would, anyway.
‘But, Mum, I didn’t actually want to go anyway. I don’t want to do Law. It’s not me. It never was. But Dad’s never shut up about it. Ever.’
‘He just wanted something nice for you and this is what he thought was something nice.’ Bloody Michael, I thought, though. Not only has he compounded her stress and panic by talking incessantly about Trinity and the following in the Fogarty footsteps, but he was never around. He hadn’t actually taken a proper interest in how she was going to get there. ‘Well, thank God for that,’ I said. ‘It took this, all of this, for you to admit you don’t want to go to Trinity to do Law. Bit of an elaborate way of going about it…’
‘Yeah…’
‘I got stuck, just like you have, once. And you think that you are never going to be unstuck or even how on earth you are going to move on… is that how you feel?’ She nodded. ‘I think finding that way of writing something down, like you did, was really clever of you, because I didn’t do that, when it was me. I just stayed indoors for weeks and weeks.’
‘What happened?’ Her eyes were wide, listening.
‘Oh, it was a long time ago. A really long time. Before you were born. But it changed me, that experience. Reshaped me. My life wasn’t the same again. Couldn’t be.’
Before
Nora was at home with me, taking care of me as I lay in bed, facing the wall. She’d never been particularly maternal before and neither of us knew if she even had it in her. Seemingly she did.
‘Red phoned,’ she said. ‘I told him you were out, like you said.’
I didn’t respond, just stared at the intricate flower patterns on the wallpaper, the curls and curlicues, the swoops and sweeps of colour. Rosaleen had chosen it before it became my room. It was in her colours, the greens and the turquoises.
‘He sounded really upset,’ she said. ‘In tears.’
The feel of the ruffle on the pink bedspread against my face, the sound of the starlings gathering in the tree in the churchyard behind the house. The nothingness, the emptiness, the deadness in my belly.
*
Where do you start, how do you even tell you daughter this thing that happened? How do you put it into words that she might understand, that might explain who you are to her but will certainly make her feel differently from you?
‘Rosaleen was ill for at least a year before she died,’ I began. ‘She was diagnosed with cancer and initially she didn’t tell us. We noticed she was getting thinner and paler. And she stopped going swimming. She’d head down to the Forty Foot, get changed and then just stand there, on the top step, and let the sea wash over her feet. “That’s enough,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll go any further,” as if she was talking about her own life. But then when Nora and I were told, we assumed she’d get better, as you do. We were certain she would be fine because Rosaleen always was. Somehow. Anyway, Red and I had both finished our teacher training…’
She sat up a bit. ‘Red, as in that man Red? Who brought the book round?’
‘Yes. As in that man Red.’ I half smiled at her.
‘You were going out with him? I thought it was a bit of an odd thing to do, bring a book to a stranger’s child.’
I nodded. ‘There you go…’
‘And you never told me? I didn’t know any of this!’ She was half-shocked, half-thrilled with this previously classified information.
‘Ro, I didn’t tell you then but I’m telling you now… So Rosaleen was dying, but I was meant to be going to San Francisco with Red so I stayed just to see her back on her feet again and I would join him later. But her dying, well, it kind of put a spanner in the works…’
‘You were going to live together?’ Rosie was delighted with this idea of her mother. ‘You and Dad didn’t, did you?’
‘Red was different, okay? It was an entirely different relationship.’
‘Obviously,’ she said.
‘Rosaleen was chatting to all her friends at the Forty Foot. She hadn’t been in the water all year. And everyone was so happy to see her back and I had to wait for her for ages before she finished talking to them. But I didn’t mind really because the sun was out.’
*
I stopped speaking for a moment, thinking of Rosaleen and me. We walked home, my arm in hers, because she wasn’t able to cycle, her asking me all about the phone call I’d received from Red. He’d found a place for us. Haight Ashbury. Not luxurious, he’d said. But it was perfect. Perfect for us. I hadn’t told him my secret. I thought I’d tell him when I was there. It might mean coming home to Ireland sooner than we’d thought. Or we could stay there. I imagined us, our lives together, getting jobs and buying a house. Bringing up a little American child. Who would never know the delights of Cadburys or Tayto crisps but would race home-made go-carts and have lemonade stalls. I’d walked home in the sun, thinking that I could never be this happy again. I’d see Red next week and I’d tell him and… and…
‘So, Rosaleen and I went home, together, talking all the way, about San Francisco and my plans. It’s funny because I always thought she and Nora were chalk and cheese but Nora is so like her in so many ways. Maybe I’d just never noticed and she always was. Or maybe it’s just getting older. Anyway, when we got inside, we had a cup of tea and I told her…’
‘Told her what?’
‘That I was pregnant.’
‘What?’
‘Pregnant. I mean, it was an accident, it wasn’t meant to happen but I wanted it. I mean, I loved Red and I knew he loved me. I wanted the baby.’
‘Oh my God…’
‘But she died that day. Granny Nora and I organised the funeral, got everything organised… but I hadn’t told Red about the… you know… the baby.’
‘Did Granny Nora know?’
I nodded.
‘But why didn’t you tell Red? It was his baby too.’
‘I know. But it was going to be a surprise and I thought I’d wait and then… well, sometimes you don’t think straight… Anyway, I was still meant to be leaving right after the funeral. I was determined to go. And then I would tell him. It was only a week. And even all that week, being so sad about Rosaleen, the baby kept me going. My lovely baby… it was like I knew him or her – I never knew which – it was as though we already knew each other.’ Rosie’s face was full of sympathy.
‘I thought about what he or she would be like,’ I went on. ‘Would they look like me or Red, or be entirely their own self? I couldn’t wait until I was able to bring my baby to the Forty Foot and swim there, just like Rosaleen and I used to. So, the morning of the funeral, I woke up and for some reason I wanted to go swimming. It was the one place which I most associated with Rosaleen. But…’ I stopped, not wanting to cry or do anything that might upset Rosie.
‘Go on…’
‘Well…’ I could still feel the cold instantly leeching into my skin, soaking my bones, so cold, it made me gasp as I paddled around, trying to get warm. ‘Well, I lost the baby. And I thought it was because I went swimming. I thought the water had done something, like it was powerful.’
‘Really?’ Rosie’s eyes were wide-open, as she tried to make sense of everything. ‘Oh Mum…’
It was devastating. Red and I were over. Life shifted entirely in a different direction. Permanently altered, forever scarred, I thought I was an entirely new Tabitha but it was only recently, since Red had come home, that I had realised that she was still there. She’d just been hiding.
Before
Me, floating on my back, feet sticking up out of the salty blue of the sea. I put my hands on my belly. I don’t feel any different. Or wait… was that a flutter? The shift of a million cells working day and night to create this new life, this baby inside me. ‘I can’t wait to meet you,’ I say to myself, to my baby. But when I turn over and plunge again under the water, I gasp with the shock, my body immediately numb and a strange feeling in my stomach, cramp gripping my insides, cold settling into my bones. Eventually I pull myself out and shiver while I get dressed, my body getting colder and colder on the cycle home.
Later Nora and I stood in the church together, my body frozen, teeth chattering under Red’s old winter jumper I’d pulled from my wardrobe. I thought of Red in the warmth of San Francisco. I’d be there too, just as soon as Nora and I organised everything here. It would do me good to get away. I didn’t want to be in this house without Rosaleen.
But it was later that evening when I began to feel really unwell, when the pains in my stomach began to jar, causing my legs to wobble. Eventually, I fell onto my bed, the pain making me double up. I knew what was happening, but even when I saw the blood, I didn’t believe it. I didn’t want to believe it. And I lay there, quiet in that moment, when no one could tell me for sure that everything wasn’t okay. I had lost my grandmother and my child in one day. Lying on my bed, the house dark, writhing in agony, too much in pain and too confused to turn on the lights. Knowing I should go to hospital but that would make it real, official and all I wanted was a few moments longer with my baby. I was still a mother. In that space between life and death, between fantasy and reality, where a tiny part of me could still pretend that everything was all right.
*
Rosie was holding my hand. ‘Who looked after you?’ she said, quietly.
‘Nora. She… well, she was amazing. Stayed with me for months afterwards, refused to go down to West Cork,’ I said. ‘Which itself was a miracle, knowing that a tepee in Mizen Head was waiting for her. And a vat of something unspeakable involving lentils…’ I was desperately trying to make light of what happened. I didn’t want to burden Rosie. I didn’t want her to worry about me as well. ‘Yes. I remember she brewed me some kind of tea, involving liquorice root. She says it had healing properties. She was wrong. It just made me think I could never have a sherbet dip-dab ever again.’
Rosie very nearly laughed.
‘The thing is,’ I went on. ‘I didn’t think I’d recover, really. I had never thought that losing a baby, someone you had never met, something that was an accident, not planned, could mean… could mean so much.’ I managed to keep my voice steady, well aware that I didn’t want to freak Rosie out too much.
‘And that’s why you never swim there?’
I nodded. ‘I can’t. I just can’t.’
‘The point of all this, Rosie, why I’m burbling on, is that I do understand. I know what it’s like when you don’t know what’s coming next and you feel overwhelmed…’
‘That’s how I feel. I’m scared.’
We were still holding hands.
‘We all feel like that. Life is scary. The trick is just accepting that. Feel the fear, but know that things do get better. After all, I had you.’