Mary Costello - Academy Street

Weeks passed. She was late. She had known from the start — amid the confusion of shame and fear she had expected this too and now it was almost a relief to be right. To know the worst had come, and the wait was over. In those first nights she had lain awake visualising the swim: the millions of spawning sperm racing upstream inside her and her mountain of eggs — her twenty-five years’ stockpile of ova — waiting to receive them. She said the word aloud, impregnate . He has impregnated me. She had the thought that she might be multiply, copiously, pregnant. Her breasts grew tender and swollen and she woke to the taste of metal in her mouth. She sat on the toilet and willed herself to expel it. Nauseated, she leaned over the edge of the sink. She ran the bath and sat in boiling-hot water. In her mind’s eye she saw diagrams from her biology books, altered and nightmarish now — blown-up uteruses housing grotesque bodies with large heads and bulging eyes and torsos enfolded in dark creaturely skin.

At the mouth of sleep she tried to reach him, to dream him back. She could bear anything if he appeared. She listened to the ticking of her brain, hyper alert to the minute register of cells dividing and multiplying in the new body, the new brain, inside her. Then dawn arrived and with it the calamity of a new day.

Night after night, she contemplated her options. She ventured down avenues that frightened and sickened her. Words, unspeakable words, remembered from books and magazine articles and hearsay. She stared at the ceiling. It need not be terrible. There were people who could assist, direct her — the word was procure —if she had the courage to ask. But never in her whole life had she had one iota of courage. She had sought, always, silent consent for everything she had done — as if she were without volition, as if a father or mother or God himself sat permanently on her right shoulder, holding sway over her thoughts and actions. And when consent was not gleaned, or was felt to be withheld, she resumed her position of quiet passivity. It was not this alone she suffered from now, but terror, and a complete paralysis of the soul.

She lay awake, dried-out salt deposits on her cheeks. She had prolonged hope to almost unendurable limits. He was gone. All glory, all happiness, had gone with him and she was left imperilled. The memory of the night flooded back, their bodies. She had seen him in his private throes, at his most secret, defenceless self. Did that not count for something? She wore herself out thinking, her lips bitten and bruised. Finally, she slept. She dreamt she was in a big old house, fleeing from someone along dark corridors. She ran to the farthest room and locked the door, her heart a sea of panic. She heard footsteps, saw the handle turn. She ran to a window, saw that the glass was veined with cracks, millions of cracks, barely holding, and the walls the same, and the ceiling — everything about to shatter. If she as much as left a finger on anything, or stirred, or breathed, a ton of glass would cascade down on top of her.

She felt someone in the room when she woke. She closed her eyes again. Madness, she thought. Yet she felt something, a foreboding. A memory returned, of being alone in the chapel one evening as a child, and in the haunting sacred silence being seized by a fear that the Blessed Virgin would appear and speak to her, claim her.

The room had an eerie glow now, a strange transient beauty. She sat up. The glow intensified, and she felt its dangerous intoxicating allure. She stepped onto the cold lino and crossed the floor and raised the window blind and there, in the building across, a fire blazed. Flames rose out of windows and leapt upwards, licking at the bricks. She felt its heat, its burning brightness on her face. Panicked, she ran to the door, ran back again. She tried to see into the heart of the fire, beyond it. She imagined rooms, furniture like her own, paint blistering, ceilings buckling and collapsing. Everything consumed. She saw her own reflection in the glass. The whine of sirens carried from the far side of the building. She shrank back from the window into the ghostly glow of the room, the fire’s haunting crackle in her ears.

She saw it as an omen. Who would save her? Who in the world would save her? Who would remember her? She was already burning. A fallen woman.

∼

Over the city, dawn was breaking. She was on the roof, the light diffuse. A cluster of flower pots sat in the corner, the flowers wilting, their best days over. She leaned over the wall. Far below the first of the day’s cars glided by. To her left she saw the tree-tops in the park. Soon they would shed their leaves. Easterfield’s leaves were probably gone, blown away now. More than a year had passed since she’d seen those trees, the beeches, the injured ash. Time, moment by moment, trickling away to bring her to now. She kept her eyes on the trees, the rays of the rising sun just then touching the uppermost branches. She could not go back. She could not face her father. He had raised four motherless daughters, delivered them into womanhood without blemish, and he had not been found wanting — his moral compass had sufficed. She remembered his face. She could hear him. Street walker…Bringing disgrace down on top of me…Driving me into an early grave…Your mother…Your mother…Don’t ever darken this door again…

My dearest Tess,

How are you? I keep hoping you’ll come. I had a letter from Maeve last week. Poor Dadda. I remember what Mamma said to Evelyn and me before she died. ‘Ye have a good father but ye have a hard father.’ When I think of him now, sick, I’m filled with pity. I didn’t always see it this way but now my heart is crying for him, and all his struggles. And the way he always stayed loyal to her. So much harder for a man.

  I long to see you, Tess. When will you come? Write anyway, tell me how you are. I dreamt of you the other night, that you were a little girl again and you fell into the old well. Oh, aren’t dreams terrible things?

  I hope you’re living it up there in the city. I imagine you on summer evenings walking downtown with a handsome man. Oliver too, with that girl you told me about. All of you together.

  And you with your beautiful soul shining out of you. Oh Tess, you’re worth ten of the rest of us.

God bless,

Claire

One day she saw that the trees were bare. It was November, the seasons had changed unknown to her. On the ward she placed pills in an old woman’s hand, the skin parchment thin. The woman was watching TV, almost in a trance. As the World Turns . Her hand brought the pills to her lips, then halted and hovered there. Tess touched the hand and guided it to its destination. A moment later, stretching up to replace an IV vac she felt constrained, her uniform tight, her body constricted. She glanced down and saw the swell of her breasts, fuller than before, and her heart dropped. Soon, her belly would begin to bulge. A hush fell on the ward and when she looked up all eyes were trained on the TV. The programme had been interrupted for a news bulletin. The newscaster, uncertain, moved his head from script to camera and back again. The president had been shot. People let out little gasps. Tess stood before the TV. She remained there, staring, when the commercial break came. Nu Soft fabric conditioner. Niagara laundry starch. Chewing gum for heartburn.

Two days later, at home, she watched the killer being killed live on TV. And then, over and over, the president’s motorcade speeding along the Dallas streets, his beautiful wife crawling, scrambling in her blood-splattered suit, frantic to get out of the car. Tess watched, stunned. Why was Jackie abandoning him in his hour of need? Did she not want to hold him, die with him even? Or does self-preservation trump love? She turned from the TV. Then the truth hit her — Jackie was climbing to get to her children. Her frantic scramble was to get to them, wherever they were, fling herself over them, save them.