‘A girl!’ the midwife calls out.
Hamish stands up, about to punch the air but he stops himself.
My marble travels to Angus’s corkscrew. It misses but nobody’s looking, nobody’s seen it happen. Everyone is frozen in place, Mrs Lynch goes still. Waiting; they’re all waiting for the baby to cry.
Hamish puts his head in his hands. I check again. Nobody is looking at me, or my taw, which went straight past Angus’s, it didn’t even touch it.
I take a tiny step to the right but they’re still not looking. I reach out my foot and push my marble back a bit so that it’s touching Angus’s Popeye corkscrew. My heart is beating wildly, I can’t believe I’m doing it, but if I get away with it then I’ll have the corkscrew, it’ll actually be mine.
All of a sudden there’s a wail, but it’s not the baby, it’s Mammy.
Hamish runs inside, Duncan follows. Tommy grabs Bobby from the dirt and carries him into the house. Angus looks down at the ground and sees his marble and my marble, touching.
His face is deadly serious. ‘Okay. You win.’ Then he follows the boys inside.
I pick up the green corkscrew and examine it, finally happy to have it in my hand, part of my collection. These are incredibly rare. My happiness is short-lived though as my adrenaline begins to wear off and it sinks in.
There’s no baby girl. There’s no baby at all. And I’m a cheat.
‘Sabrina, are you okay?’ Eric asks me from across his desk.
‘Yes,’ I say, keeping my voice measured while feeling anything but. I have just fired my mug at the concrete wall because I missed a near-drowning. ‘I thought there would be more pieces.’ We both look at the mug sitting on his desk. The handle has come off and the rim is chipped, but that’s it. ‘My mum fired a teapot up at the ceiling once. There were definitely more pieces.’
Eric looks at it, studies it. ‘I suppose it’s the way it hit the wall. The angle or something.’
We consider that in silence.
‘I think you should go home,’ he says suddenly. ‘Take the day off. Enjoy the solar eclipse everybody’s talking about. Come back in on Monday.’
‘Okay.’
Home for me is a three-bed end of terrace, where I live with my husband, Aidan, and our three boys. Aidan works in Eircom broadband support, though it never seems to work in our house. We’ve been married for seven years. We met in Ibiza when we were contestants in a competition that took place on the bar counter of a nightclub to see who could lick cream off a complete stranger’s torso the quickest. He was the torso, I was the licker. We won. Don’t for a moment think that was out of character for me. I was nineteen, and fourteen people took part in front of an audience of thousands, and we won a free bottle of tequila, which we subsequently drank on the beach, while we had sex. It would have been out of character not to. Aidan was a stranger to me then, but he’s a stranger to that man now, unrecognisable from that cocky teenager with the pierced ear and the shaved eyebrow. I suppose we both changed. Aidan doesn’t even like the beach now, says the sand gets everywhere. And I’m trying to stay off dairy.
It is rare that I find myself alone in the house; in fact I can’t remember the last time that happened, no kids around asking me to do something every two seconds. I don’t know what to do with myself so I sit in the empty, silent kitchen looking around. It’s ten a.m. and the day has barely started. I make myself a cup of tea, just for something to do, but don’t drink it. I stop myself just in time from putting the teabags in the fridge. I’m always doing things like this. I look at the pile of washing and ironing but can’t be bothered. I realise I’ve been holding my breath and I exhale.
There are things that I need to do all the time. Things that I never have the time for in my carefully ordered daily routine. Now I have some time – the whole day – but I don’t know where to start.
My mobile rings, saving me from indecision, and it’s my dad’s hospital.
‘Hello?’ I say, feeling the tightness in my chest.
‘Hi, Sabrina, it’s Lea.’ My dad’s favourite nurse. ‘We just got a delivery of five boxes for Fergus. Did you arrange it?’
‘No,’ I frown.
‘Oh. Well, I haven’t shown them to him yet, they’re sitting in reception, I wanted to wait to speak with you first, just in case, you know, there’s something in there that might confuse him.’
‘Yes, you’re right, thanks. Don’t worry. I’ll come get them now, I’m free.’
And that’s what always seems to happen. Whenever I get a minute to myself away from work and the kids, Dad is the other person who fills it. I arrive at the hospital thirty minutes later and see the boxes piled in the corner of reception. Upon seeing them I know immediately where they’ve come from and I’m raging. These are the boxes of Dad’s belongings that I packed after Dad’s home was sold. Mum had been storing them, but she’s obviously chosen not to any more. I don’t understand why she sent them here and not to me.
Last year my dad suffered a severe stroke, which has led to his living in a long-term care facility, giving him the kind of skilled care that I know I could not have given with three young boys – Charlie at seven, Fergus at five and Alfie at three years old – and a job. Mum certainly wouldn’t have taken on the role either as she and Dad are divorced, and have been separated since I was fifteen. Though right now they’re getting along better than they ever have, and I even think Mum enjoys her fortnightly visits with him.
There are those who insist that stress does not cause strokes, but it happened during a time when Dad was the most stressed in his life, coping with the fallout of the financial crisis. He worked for a venture capital company. He scrambled for a while, trying to find new clients, trying to win old ones back, and all the while watching lives fall apart and feeling responsible for that, but it wasn’t sustainable. Eventually he found a new job, in car sales, was trying to move on, but his blood pressure was high, his weight had ballooned, he smoked heavily, didn’t exercise, and drank too much. I’m no doctor, but he did all of these things because he was stressed, and then he had a stroke.
His speech isn’t easy to understand and he’s in a wheelchair, though he’s working on his walking. He’s lost an enormous amount of weight, and seems like a completely different man to the man he was in the years leading up to his stroke. The stroke caused some memory problems, which enrages Mum. He seems to forget all the hurt he caused her. He has been able to wipe the slate clean of all of their problems and arguments, their heartache and his misdemeanours – of which there were many – throughout their marriage. He comes out of it smelling of roses.
‘He gets to live like none of it happened, like he doesn’t have to feel guilty or apologise for anything,’ Mum regularly rants. She was obviously planning on him feeling bad
