The Wild Rose and the China DollI am the oldest I have ever been, and the youngest. Saddled with Original Sin, so they say, but am I guilty of anything, except need?
Jim and Eileen are newlyweds, embarking on a joined life that even the Catholic church could not discourage. He is back from the war. She is a machinist, escaping industrial drudgery and a household in which she is, like the furniture, utilitarian. It is 1946. Had it been 1986, we would not be here, in this place. But it is not. It is 1946 and much is pre-ordained.
On a frozen beach, brown waves thundering under a gritty pier and a grittier sky; I burst, sparkling, into minute life. Eileen felt it, felt the weight, the entrapment; and tumbled from the dizzy up-draughts of her new freedom. Jim did not. Not yet. But he was not a mother. Neither was Eileen, but the expectations of others withered her options. Tied off the fresh buds of new love, escape, and shared adventure, so her future would shrivel and die, like wild roses strangled by murderous scrambling brambles.
Months of wearying vomit sucked down Eileen’s soul as pregnancy expanded her body and made her feel unlovable. Instead of smooth, fashionable pleats, she wore barrage balloons and called herself ‘fat’. Jim took a brick to work, wrapped in brown paper and pretending to be a dripping sandwich, and put away threepence a week for baby things.

The fire is taking hold; flames licking, flicking over the curtains, and dancing among the blankets on the cot. There are firemen with hoses, with hatchets, chipping at bits of burning wood and purging them with water. One of them declares the cooker to be the culprit, but he is wrong. The cooker is part of the conspiracy though. Along with the fireplace that barely draws a draught, and so keeps this place cold as cave mud. Along with the gas lamps that do not light because the bills had not been paid. Along with the cracked windows that Jim stuffs with newspapers to keep the chill fingers of night out of their one and only room. The cooker is complicit by not telling anyone about the half strength feed they are making up because neither of them has read the instructions. Eileen cannot, because she stopped reading when the nuns started beating her. Jim will not, because baby food is a woman’s job, and he is a man.

Eileen’s days stank with the detritus of child-rearing. Faeces-encrusted nappies to wash in the stone sink under biting cold water. Clothes to drip and never quite dry before a fire darkening from lack of fuel. Feed to make up on a cooker that stuttered its flames, and stayed silent about important things. Jim shared the stink at night. At night, he wore his overcoat and socks in bed, and got up to growl at neighbours who hammered on the door to complain about the baby’s screaming.
Yesterday, the rent collector called. Eileen handed to him the crumpled note and the rent book from the biscuit tin that never held any biscuits. The man signed the rent book and handed it back. Eileen returned it to the biscuit tin. Then she closed the door, clicked over the latch, and turned to look at the piles of foetid nappies, chilled to rigidity on the stone floor. She looked at the empty grate where the fire should be. At the shrieking infant, pulling in icy air and bawling clouds of freezing mist back out over its grey blanket.
‘Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.’
She put on her coat and buttoned it tight. She unlatched the door, and slipped slick as mercury out into the rain, to walk where the ghost of her life showed her the way. Later, Jim’s arms warmed Eileen when he found her sitting in a pool of lamp light outside the dance hall in town. Too late, they could not warm their blue and white porcelain doll in its cot when they returned. Its hunger now a thing without further purpose. Its voice, an echo in the damp, stagnant walls.
‘Get a fire going, Jim. I think the baby’s cold.’

Now, Jim and Eileen stand clutching each other. She with empty eyes you could lose your life in; he with an expression that no one could read. They will be bereft for a while, when they are no longer shocked. They will be lost in this loss; silvery stars of a tragedy, picked out ghostly in the ghastly illumination of brief, tragic fame. Then they will be left alone to make sense of it all. But I can see – I already knew – that they have all they need in each other. That this leaving is a godsend. Wrapped in their own insularity, they turn away to forget.

Conboy-Hill 2012.