Roseanne's Testimony of Herself

I am not very well, it seems, I am poorly, but I need to keep going at this because I am coming to the part that I need to be telling you.

Dear Reader, God, Dr Grene, whoever you may be. Whoever you are, I pledge you again my love. Being an angel now. I am joking. Flapping my heavy wings in heaven. Maybe. Do you think so?

Terrible, dreepy, dark February weather I remember, and the worst, most frightened days of my life.

Maybe seven months I was at that time. But I could not mark it for sure.

I was growing so heavy that my old coat could not hide my 'condition' at the shop in Strandhill, though I chose only the last hours of darkness in the working day ever to go there, and in that way winter was a mercy, dark by four.

When I looked at myself in the mirror of the wardrobe I saw a whitened phantom woman with a strangely lengthened face, as if the weight of my belly was drawing me down everywhere, like a melting statue. My belly button was pushed out like a little nose and the hair under my belly seemed to have grown to twice its length.

I had something in me, like the river had something in it when the salmon were running. If there were still salmon in the poor Garravoge. Sometimes the talk in the shop was of the river, and how it was silting up because of the war, because the wharves and harbour upriver in the town itself were closed for the duration, and the dredgers no longer hauled up the great buckets of mud and sand. They talked about submarines out in the bay of Sligo, and the shortages, the scarcity of tea and the odd abundance of things like Beecham's powders. They might also have mentioned the scarcity of mercy. There were next to no cars on the roads and my hut was silent most nights, though bicycles and walkers and pony-and-traps did make their way out for the dance. Someone in Sligo had got up a charabanc and it would come crawling over the sand with its cargo of revellers like a stray vehicle from another century. The Plaza sent out a few points of light which might have been a beacon to any German airplanes in the sky, the like of which I had seen returning from their work in Belfast, but nothing rained down on those dancers except time.

I was only the observer of these matters. I wonder what my fame was in those days, the woman in the corrugated-iron hut, the fallen woman, the witch, the creature 'gone over the edge'. Like there was a waterfall at the edge of their world that a woman could be washed over, like an invisible Niagara in daily life. A vast high wall of boiling, misty water.

A nice-looking woman in an ermine-collared coat looked at me one day as she passed. She was very well-to-do, with black polished boots, and brown hair whose style was the result of many hours in the hairdressers. There was an old house with a high wall across the road from my hut, and she was going there, and there was the sound of a party somewhere, a gramophone playing that song Greta Garbo used to sing. I thought I knew her, so that I had stopped uncharacteristically on the road, without meaning to, as if it were some other days. Much to my astonishment, when I glanced in the gates, I saw Jack McNulty, in the most tremendous coat as usual, but I must say also with a haunted, exhausted face. Or maybe I saw everything in those terms in those days. I wondered therefore if this was the famous Mai, the grand girl of Galway that he had married. I supposed it was. She was my sister-in-law, I suppose – as was.

She seemed suddenly angry and bothered. I am sure I looked a sight, in my wretched coat that had never been much to write home about, and my brown shoes that had turned into clogs of a sort because I had no laces for them, they needed delicate, long laces that such a shop as Strandhill boasted did not stock. Yes, maybe my lower legs showed I had no stockings, which I know was a crime, and as for the swelling stomach under the coat…

'Gone over the deep end, have we?' she said, and that's all she said. She went on then through the gates. I looked after her, marvelling at the words, but also, wondering how she meant it, cruelly, despairingly, factually? It was impossible for me to know. The couple went on together into the house, not looking back, in case I suppose Mai were to be turned to a pillar of salt, glancing back at Sodom.

The weather was worsening and I was growing sick. It wasn't just the sickness in the morning, going out the back of the hut onto the marram grass and heather to retch into the wind. It was another sort of sickness, something that seemed to boil in my legs, and hurt my stomach. I was getting so heavy that it was starting to be difficult to rise from my chair, and I had a great fear of being suddenly stuck there, stranded, and my greatest fear was for the child. I could see sometimes little elbows and knees poking out under my skin, and who could want to bring danger to such a thing? I did not know the number of months, and I was so terrified I would start to birth the baby, far from anyone who would help me. I wished time and again I had spoken to Mai, or called out to Jack, and I don't know why I did not, except that my state was visible and plain to them, and they had not thought to help me. I knew that wild women on the plains of America went into the scrubland alone to give birth to their children, but I did not want Strandhill to be my America, and have to attempt something so lonesome, so full of danger. While it had been just myself, I had learned a little strategy of secrecy and survival, but now I was drifting well beyond that. I did pray to God that He might help me, I said the Our Father a thousand thousand times, if not on my knees, then by necessity in my chair. I knew I must do something, not for myself, as it was clear I was beyond help and sympathy, but for the baby.

It was somewhere in those days of February that I set out on the road to Sligo town. I had spent an hour or two washing myself. The night before I had washed my dress, and tried to dry it all night before the dying fire. It was a little damp when I put it on. I stood before the mirror and combed my hair again and again with my fingers, because for the life of me I couldn't find my brush. I had one last spark of red lipstick in a surviving tube, just one last smudge for the lips. I wished I had some pancake for my skin, and all I could do was take some old plaster off the part of the hut that was the fireplace, built of solid stone, crumble it in my hands, and try to smear it on evenly. I was going into the town itself and I would have, to some degree, to be respectable. I worked away at myself like Michelangelo on his ceiling. There was nothing I could do about my coat, but I tore a strip off the sheet on my bed, and wound it round my throat for a scarf. I did not have a hat, but anyway, the wind was so fierce it wouldn't last long. Then off I went, pushing further up the hill than I had been for a long time, passing the Church of Ireland church at the corner, and onto the Strandhill road. I wished I could hitch a lift from the underbelly of one of those German planes I had seen, because the road stretched long and forbidding before me. The mountain reared up at my right, and I wondered at myself that I had ever walked up there so readily, so easily. It was as if a hundred years had elapsed.

I don't know how many hours' walking it was, but it was a long, hard walk. The sickness, though, seemed to pass from my body as I went along, as if there was no room for it in my present emergency. I started to become strangely buoyant and hopeful, as if my mission might be blessed after all. I started to tell myself, she will help me, of course she will help me, she is a woman also, and I was married to her son. Or might have been if it hadn't been crossed out in Rome. I thought, cold though she had been those years ago, when first I appeared in her bungalow, surely her long experience of the world would oblige her to cast aside her dislike and – and so on.