Once in a Lifetime (38 page)

‘Why would I faint?’

‘I don’t know.’

They glared at each other.

‘Sorry.’ Des lay down on the bed with her and hugged her so tightly she felt her ribs crunch. ‘I’m worried about you.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘You’re not. You’re going to the doctor.’

Next morning as they sat in the surgery waiting room, Des worried about Dara fainting, while Dara worried about paying for the doctor. They were broke, how could they afford this?

They were only just managing to live and pay the rent as it was.

‘We should just go home, darling,’ she said. ‘I feel fine now.’

‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘You’re going to see the doctor, you’re sick.’

In the surgery, Des sat on a chair and looked anxious, while the doctor calmly checked Dara’s blood pressure, asked her questions, dipped a couple of sticks in her urine sample, and prodded the glands in her neck.

After a while, she held up a skinny white tube.

‘It’s not a urinary tract infection or a kidney infection, but I think I know what it is.’

‘What?’ Des looked as if he was expecting the worst.

‘You’re pregnant,’ the doctor smiled.

‘Jesus!’ said Des.

‘Pregnant?’ Dara repeated in wonderment, and then said again in her mind: pregnant, her? Then she felt a wonderful!

joy seeping up from her toes to the top of her head. Pregnant, They were going to have a baby, how absolutely incredible.

Des grabbed her and kissed her on the lips fiercely.

‘I’d tell you two to get a room,’ joked the doctor, ‘but it’s clear you’ve already gone past that bit.’

The day her brother Greg was marrying Ruth she woke to a beautiful April morning. The wedding had been arranged with some haste because Greg had got a contract to move to Sydney with his company, and who knew when he and Ruth would be home again to marry with all their family and friends present.

‘Are you ready?’ Des called up the stairs to Dara.

They’d found a small house in Ashbourne and even though it was a long way from Des’s work, it had a garden and plenty of other families with young children around. Perfect for when the baby was born.

‘Ready as I’ll ever be,’ Dara said. Her hair shone, her cheeks glowed with a rosy quality that was just her, not powder or cream blusher, and even if her voluminous black cotton dress and flat sandals were hardly high fashion, she knew she looked as well as she ever had in her life. Like a goddess, ripe with power and love.

Because of you, she murmured to the baby inside her belly. Because of you.

Without her child, she didn’t know how she’d be able to cope with this day.

She could smell her father’s breath as soon as he opened the back door of Des’s car: the sweet, honeyed smell of an early-morning drink mixed in with the heady aroma of

yesterday’s booze soaking out of his pores. Dara said nothing as he got into the back seat, just smiled hello and kept her hands closed over the swell of her belly. There was something diseased about the smell of old alcohol. They told pregnant women not to breathe in other people’s smoke. There should be a similar warning about smelling a hard day’s drinking on somebody.

‘Never thought I’d see this day,’ her father said happily.

He was always happy when he’d had a few early morning scoops, Dara thought with anger. Happy when there was a party where he could play hail-fellow-well-met to all and be the life and soul. No wonder so few people had ever realised that Bernard Murphy had a serious drinking problem. All they saw was charm personified at parties, followed up by a little slurring of words and a fondness for sitting at the piano and singing Percy French songs. Where was the harm in that?

They didn’t see the anger that surfaced when the party was over, or the damage he could do when there was no admiring audience to watch him, just the unwilling audience of two: his son and daughter.

The car jerked at a red light.

‘Sorry,’ said Des apologetically.

She gave him a small smile. He was as nervous as she was about the day, only because he wanted it to be right for her.

Dara could feel her heart racing with anger. It was bad for the baby. She forced herself to breathe deeply and let the rage evaporate. No, she wouldn’t let anything bother her today, she vowed. Today was Greg’s day, and for him, and her beloved Ruth, she’d go to the wedding, smile as if they were indeed a normal family where the only son was getting married, and even dance with her father when the time came.

She’d do it for Greg and Ruth.

The actual wedding part didn’t trouble her. It wasn’t the church where she and Greg had gone as children - that would

have been hard, sitting in a pew looking at the same stations of the cross on the walls and falling back into that dark place of childhood where there was always fear and tension. Thankfully, Greg and Ruth had chosen a church near the hotel where the reception was being held. It was comfortingly unfamiliar, with a choir of schoolgirls who sang at weddings and played the guitar as accompaniment. It held no memories.

The hotel itself was pretty, ivy-covered and managed by a charming couple who must have had a new bridal party every weekend, but carried on with delight as if the Murphy/Keogh wedding was the highlight of their hotel’s entire calendar.

Nothing was too much trouble. They dragged an armchair out for Dara, with a footstool and an armload of cushions during the sherry reception in the small bar so she could sit in comfort. Most people were standing, so Dara was at a lower level to them all, giving her the opportunity to sit back and watch. She saw her new sister-in-law swirling around the guests in her pretty cream silk gown, the baby roses in her hair drooping prettily in her fair curls. She watched Des talking kindly to Ruth’s elderly great aunt who’d been anxious about not knowing anybody outside of the wedding party, ‘and they’ll all be too busy to have time for me.’

She watched Greg’s eyes following Ruth round the room, and saw how he’d held a glass of beer at the start, but put it down without drinking more than a sip. And she saw her father talking to Ruth’s dad, standing beside the bar with pints in front of them. Bernard had one foot balanced on the rail at the base of the bar, a position he adopted so frequently that Dara wondered whether the muscles in one leg were shorter than the other. One pint became two, followed by whiskey chasers. She couldn’t hear from where she was sitting, but she knew the script.

‘Ah sure, it’ll be a long time till the dinner and the wine.

Let’s have a couple of short ones to keep us going.’

She and Des drank mushroom soup, ate wild Irish salmon, devoured a beautiful meringue confection topped with raspberries, and occasionally held each other’s gaze during the speeches. As father of the groom, Bernard Murphy wasn’t due to give one, but that had never stopped him before.

Yet he sat happily beside Ruth’s mother, without any visible sign that he’d drunk enough to flatten any normal human being.

‘It’s been a beautiful day, hasn’t it?’ Ruth’s father said to her, as they sat at the side of the room while the tables were reorganised for dancing. ‘We were lucky with the weather, although I’m sure you would have been happy if it hadn’t been so warm.’

Dara smiled at him. ‘We were lucky in every way,’ she said.

In the end, it was the dancing that got to her. The band played cover music and the first dance was Ruth’s favourite song: Billy Joel’s ‘Just the Way You Are’. The singer had a good voice, Dara thought absently, as she watched her big brother holding on to his beautiful bride and moving gently around the dance floor.

Ruth’s mother and Dara’s father began to shuffle round the floor and then everybody else was up too, and all the formal bits of the wedding were finally over. The band wove the end of one song into another and Louis Armstrong’s ‘What a Wonderful World’ began.

‘Come on, pet, let’s shake a rug.’

Dara refocused to see her father standing beside her. ‘I’m not dancing, Da,’ she said. ‘Ruth’s dad asked me if I wanted to give the whole family dance a miss, and I said yes. I’m too pregnant.’

‘Nonsense.’

He had a firm grip on her arm and pulled her to her feet.

Strange how he could look so gentle and yet be so strong.

Deceitful. ‘A little dance will do you good.’

He put one arm around her and held her other hand in his, looking down to concentrate on his waltz. He always prided

himself on his dancing: he could even do the foxtrot, he said, although Dara had never seen a sober rendition of it.

She set her face and let him manhandle her round the floor.

She refused to let him see how it hurt.

‘You’ll come and see me when the baby’s born, won’t you, pet?’ her father said.

He stumbled a little but she was holding him, so she kept them both upright. He was still a tall man, although the muscles he’d once had were run to fat and his belly was as swollen as hers from years of drinking beer after beer.

Followed by whiskey chasers, of course.

Dara wanted to say, Of course, we’ll visit you, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t lie, not now, not with her baby inside listening. There had been enough lies in the Murphy household and there would be no more.

‘It’s a great day,’ he went on, ‘a great day indeed. Not many a man can see his son and daughter married within a year of each other and think he did it all himself. I wasn’t a bad old father, now, was I?’

He was waiting for her to agree. Waiting for her to say, Yes, Da, you were the best. You never screamed at us till we bid, or threatened us with the strap, or drank your wages till we had no food and had to run to Ruth’s mother for sugar sandwiches or… She stumbled on the ‘or’. It was so big, bigger than ever now that she was pregnant.

‘Wasn’t I, Dara?’

Dara could no longer bear it.

She realised she had been waiting for something, some connection that would make the past a safe place again, some moment when her father would transform into the mythical Daddy he’d never been. Like a distant dream when she woke up, she could almost touch the vision of this past. She reached out and it was beyond her grasp.

Nothing could change the past, not her wishing with all her heart, and not this day of happiness where she watched

a really happy family together, seeing them smile at each other and not set their faces into the tight masks of people doing their best not to remember.

Dara was sitting in Star’s conservatory watching Star sort out skeins of dyed silk when the contractions started.

‘Oh,’ she said in shock, hands rushing to hold her belly as the pain ripped through her.

‘Is it the baby?’ asked Star, concerned.

Through the pain, Dara nodded. When it had receded, she leaned back in her chair gasping.

‘Ouch!’ she said, and laughed with relief. ‘It must be Braxton Hicks contractions,’ she added.

She and Des had spent hours poring over their pregnancy guidebook.

Star didn’t look convinced. ‘That’s not the feeling I’m getting.’

‘No, really, your waters need to break first,’ Dara began, and stopped as a flush of liquid spilled out of her. ‘Then again - Sorry about the floor.’

It was Star’s turn to laugh. ‘This floor has seen plenty of waters breaking, I can tell you. My mother delivered eight babies in her time.’

‘And you?’

‘None - yet.’

Des was at his uncle’s farm down the road, and came speeding over to Star’s house.

‘Relax, the contractions are twenty minutes apart,’ said Dara, who was now lying on a couch in a sea of cushions.

‘We’ve ages to go, and remember what they told us in the antenatal classes? If we come in early, we’ll just be sent home again. Better to stay here where we’re comfortable.’

‘OK,’ Des said dubiously.

An hour later, Dara suddenly howled in absolute pain.

‘Des, it’s more than a contraction, don’t know what it is, but help. Help ‘

‘Let’s get her to hospital, quickly,’ said Star. ‘I’ll drive.’

Dara’s labour was long and intense, and the midwife suggested pethidine.

‘No,’ gasped Dara. ‘No drugs.’ She squeezed Des’s hand even tighter. No drugs, not now.

And then there was Natalie, with her head of silky dark hair and her outraged screaming at having been hauled out into this freezing, very bright world.

‘Send me back inside!’ she’s saying,’ crooned Des, as he held her, screaming, in his arms.

And Natalie, worn out and yet full up with joy, smiled at them both.

Star had cried when she held little Natalie in her arms.

Dara didn’t think she’d ever seen Star cry before.

‘Sorry,’ wept Star. ‘It’s just that she’s so beautiful, so precious.’

Her father came to the hospital the day after Natalie was born. Des had been with her almost all day and now he’d gone; visiting time was nearly over and along came her father.

He was drunk. Dara didn’t care. She was happy, insulated in a bubble of happiness. Her father was never aggressive or abusive when there were other people around and here, in the six-bed hospital ward, with Natalie snug in her little crib beside the bed and other mothers on either side and nurses and doctors walking up and down, Dara knew she was perfectly safe from him. Besides, he couldn’t touch her in any way, not physically, not psychologically, any more.

‘Look at the baby,’ he said, clumsily banging into the crib, reaching in as if to pick Natalie up.

‘No,’ said Dara quickly, ‘you can’t - she’s asleep.’

Miraculously, Natalie stayed asleep, even though her grandfather had made so much noise and barged into her cot.

Perhaps she knew her mother was willing her to keep her eyes closed, so that her grandfather would not pick her up and hold her to his drunken face. She slept deeply, those long lashes dark and heavenly on her soft cheeks.

‘Ah, she’s beautiful,’ said Bernard. ‘A beautiful baby. I had a few with the lads, just to wet the baby’s head.’

‘Yeah,’ Dara said. Any excuse: drinking to wet the baby’s head, drinking because somebody had died, drinking because the sun had shone, drinking because the sun hadn’t shone.