nun or herself more. The misery wells up and splashes down her cheeks. It’s not fair, she sobs against the starch. The worst sort of pillow talk. But even weeping requires energy that she can’t muster – the tears peter out and she’s left with a thumping headache.
Imelda lands back with the doctor, who glances at her blotchy face and decides to jolly her along. Gloria imagines him dressed like Ronald McDonald handing out balloons.
‘Now, now, we can’t have this moping, there’ll be plenty more babies,’ he booms.
Imelda sits beside Gloria and holds her fingers in her capable, calloused nurse’s hand – Gloria is amazed at how needily she clings to it.
‘This is only a temporary setback, you’ll be pregnant again in no time,’ insists Dr Hughes.
Feck off, you quack, she says, but only inside her head. She feels better and a twitch that could pass for a half-hearted smile chases across her face. The doctor is delighted with himself.
‘Sensible girl,’ he nods, flicking through her notes.
He’s headmasterly, jowly and heavy-handed with the aftershave. A few checks and he’s on his way.
‘I’ll be seeing you in the maternity ward one of these days,’ he calls from the door.
Not if I see you first, you scut, she says, but naturally it’s only inside her head again.
Kate and Eimear arrive simultaneously: Kate is weighed down with bribes – a stack of magazines in her arms as well as flowers – while Eimear proffers a box of chocolates so large she should have applied for planning permission.
‘God love you, Gloria, you’ve been through the wars. How many pints of blood did they pump you full of? I wonder whose blood it was? I hadn’t a notion ectopic pregnancies were so serious – that you can actually die from them. You’re not going to die on us now, are you, break up the trio?’
Kate rattles through this without so much as drawing breath, she always did take life at the gallop. Eimear is quieter, she perches on the edge of the bed and looks steadily at her friend’s wan face.
Gloria sees Kate’s game, she’s trying to pretend she didn’t visit her earlier. While Eimear struggles to open the window – it’s painted shut – Kate gives Gloria a cautionary look, taps her finger against her lips and says loudly, ‘Mulligan here and I bumped into each other by the front desk.’
As she gushes on about what a fright they’ve had, Eimear leans across, whispers, ‘Poor you,’ and touches the invalid’s hair. It’s exactly what she needs. The stroking soothes her, she has a little wallow, then, when Eimear murmurs, ‘Such bad luck,’ she’s ready to be brave.
‘Good luck, bad luck, who knows?’ Gloria gives an elaborate shrug.
They stare at her a moment before laughing aloud – nervous peals, admittedly, but better than none at all.
‘Good luck, bad luck, who knows?’ they repeat, mimicking the shrug.
It’s their mantra, the three have parroted it for years when one of them has a setback. Unbelievably it does cheer them up.
Gloria is almost enjoying their visit. Perhaps that’s an over-statement, since she’ll never rejoice in anything again, but they do distract her from her misery – and from Kate’s atomic conversational gambit of a few hours earlier.
‘How’d you end up with a private room?’ asks Kate, as she rips the cover off Eimear’s chocolates. ‘You could fly from Dublin to Florida and back for the price of a couple of nights.’
‘Mick’s job at the bank gives us free health cover.’
Gloria is vague, she’s scrutinising the contents with the due gravity such an outsized package of cocoa solids deserves. Chinese farmers could probably grow enough rice to feed a family of eight on a patch of land the size of this box. The chocolates are called Inspirational Irish Women and they make their selection from such luminaries of Hibernian womanhood as Lady Gregory and Countess Markievicz. Kate chooses Maud Gonne so she can tell her Belfast hospital story again.
‘Remember the summer you worked as a domestic in the Royal?’ Gloria prompts her and she’s in like Flynn with the rest of the story.
‘One of the regular domestics was called Maud and if anyone asked for her when her shift was finished, I used to tell them, “Maud’s gone,” and then double over,’ she recalls. ‘None of them ever seemed to get the joke, they just thought it was a mistake to take on light-headed students.’
‘Which it was,’ interjects Eimear.
‘Which it was,’ agrees Kate. ‘The amount of pinching that went on was serious. I still have a conscience about the breast pump I stuffed into my holdall – I didn’t even know anyone who was breastfeeding. I ended up dumping it in the Lagan one night.’
‘You were young and stupid,’ consoles Eimear. ‘Weren’t we all.’
‘What’s my excuse now,’ Kate responds.
It jolts Gloria back into a recollection of her friend’s transgression. How can she giggle with Eimear about student high-jinks when she’s behaving like a low life with her husband? This needs sorting – only not just yet. She aches too much to concentrate on anything but her own hurt.
She watches her friends as they chatter, flicking through magazines and reading her get-well cards. Kate’s guessing who they’re from by the pictures on the front. She lifts one that reads ‘To My Darling Wife’ in gold lettering and says: ‘Next-door neighbour? The boss? No, it has to be from the cat.’
‘You fool,’ Eimear slaps her playfully.
If only she knew, frowns Gloria, there’d be nothing light-hearted about that blow. But she can’t be the one to tell her. Can she? She sucks on a ragged fingernail and tunes out of their conversation, content simply to have them there in the room with her. Her two best friends. They interpreted it as a sign when they were chosen for the nativity play: they’d been singled out to become a troika.
Ostensibly the roles went to the girls because they were the tallest in the class and the likeliest males, providing curls and dimples could be overlooked. But they knew better – it was meant to be. When three girls have been through the Loreto Convent school play together, wearing scratchy cotton-wool beards, it forms a bond. How they swanned about in their cornflake-box crowns.
Gloria is six again and decked out in her mother’s ruby quilted dressing gown, trailing sleeves and trailing hem. Eimear was the black wise man and wore not just a crown but a turban too. Of course you’re only meant to have one or the other but when Eimear saw her friends’ gilded concoctions she threw a tantrum until the nuns gave in to her. And that took some scene because nuns aren’t ones for giving in: it sets a damaging precedent.
Eimear carried the gold, Kate the frankincense and she had the mirror. That’s what they called it, initially by mistake and then as their first private joke. Gloria still has a photo of the three of them, looking bashfully exotic in their cobbled together finery, with Sister Thaddeus – the play’s director, casting manager and costumier – exposing an excessive quantity of gum alongside. She came from Dublin, the finest city in the world she claimed, and none of them could contradict her. At six you don’t tend to be well-travelled.
