Helen waits, clinging to the cot bars, immobilised with fear.
She tenses at the tread of her father’s boots mounting the stairs; his belt makes a slithering sound as it’s uncoiled from around his waist, the buckle jangling against the door handle. The baby senses the tension in the room and his crying jerks into whistling half-sobs. It’s as though he, too, is poised for what follows.
‘Pull your nightie up and bend over.’ Daddy’s voice is conversational.
She whimpers, pushing her face so hard against the cot rails that two indentations etch themselves into her right cheek. The baby is mesmerised.
‘I’m waiting.’ The voice is still gentle.
She’s incapable of obeying. Her puny body quivers, shuddering and subsiding with gulping breaths.
Her father’s hands seize each shoulder, bruising the flesh, and haul her away from the cot. The nightdress is yanked over her head and a button pops and rolls dizzily like a spinning top. As her father propels her to the side of the bed, face pressed against the rosy candlewick cover, Helen’s mother walks from the room, steering a gawping Geraldine ahead of her.
With the first blow of the strap, cracking against her bottom and thighs, the baby howls. The belt rises and falls to the baby’s screaming and it saves Helen the bother of crying. Her body twitches as her brother sobs for her.
Later, when she’s blubbering in bed with camomile lotion on her welts and the trace of her mother’s kisses damp on her face, Geraldine slips something smooth and round into her hand. It’s the pearl button from her nightdress.
‘I crawled under the baby’s cot and found it for you, Helen,’ she whispers.
Helen’s fingers close over the disc with the same reflexive action that the baby’s fingers fastened on her thumb. It’s still wedged in her hand when she awakens the next morning. She flushes it down the toilet and washes her hands afterwards like a good girl.
She returned to the present with a jolt, her nails jagging crescent moons into the palm of each hand.
‘How can Patrick love me? I’m unlovable,’ whispered Helen, awash with self-loathing.
Molly knew if she didn’t get up right now there’d be no lying in bed waking up gradually with a cup of coffee, no leisurely shower, no time to drink a second cup of coffee while she applied her makeup. She lay on ten more minutes: that meant slapping on the warpaint at the DART station again; another five minutes: she’d just traded in breakfast – what odds, the cereal was stale and the bread could probably crawl to the toaster of its own accord. She wrenched herself out of bed and made it to the bathroom, bouncing off walls, before she ran out of time to wash.
Minutes later she was at Blackrock station, waving a mascara wand, which could double as a threatening weapon, in the direction of her eyes, and debating whether to collect a chocolate chip muffin or a toasted cheese sandwich on her way into the office. She found herself ordering the sandwich; obviously the great nutritionist in the sky was on her case again. She even asked for a few slices of tomato to accompany the cheese as a nod to healthy eating.
It was quiet as she strode through the Chronicle’s newsroom, aiming for the seat furthest away from the newsdesk. Out of sight, out of mind. Hopefully it wouldn’t be a busy day; maybe extra advertisements would be booked and they’d drop a few news pages. She was two months behind with her expenses and tomorrow was the deadline. The paper’s expenses forms were demonic to fill out; if there wasn’t money in it you’d never persist. She barely had time to slide the wrapper off her breakfast when a 127-page report from the Department of Justice into drug abuse in prisons landed on her desk. Stephen Horan, the news editor, delivered a crocodile smile along with the depressing information that the security correspondent, who’d normally tackle this tome, was on holiday. Frank Dillon could reel off the difference between hepatitis B and C without looking it up while Molly wasn’t even sure how to spell it. Nevertheless she was stuck with making a page lead out of the report. May it be lashing with rain wherever Frank was. She hoped he’d spent a fortune jetting off in search of winter sunshine and wound up with freak monsoons. She studied the report’s index, quivering with distaste as she imagined all those bruised and prominent veins locked up together.
If only someone had explained to the prison junkies how many KitKats they could buy for a fix before they started down that road. Molly was a great believer in chocolate as the ultimate high. Her life was devoted to reading the backs of chocolate bars to assess cocoa solid content. White Toblerone was her all-time favourite, especially the massive surfboard version, but she was forever keen to track down and taste new chocolate sensations. Her handbag always contained a part-nibbled bar of something. Today it was Cadbury’s Bourneville. Sometimes she bought Wholenut for protein, but generally she believed the nuts used up valuable chocolate space.
‘Good weekend, Molloy?’ asked Barry Dalton, who tended to sit beside her when their shifts coincided and there was a free desk. News reporters worked four-day weeks, in varying shifts, and this system meant no one was in a position to claim a patch of Formica as their own. It was possible to go weeks without seeing some of your colleagues.
Molly hadn’t borrowed pens off Barry in at least a fortnight, and she was delighted to see him. As he needed even more caffeine than she did to make it through the day, she could always rely on him for mercy dashes to the canteen or Café Aroma.
‘Come for breakfast and tell me all about your endless hooleying since I saw you last,’ suggested Barry, convinced single people enjoyed fascinating social lives.
‘This is breakfast-a-go-go.’ Molly indicated her toasted sandwich and polystyrene cup.
‘Eat up and we’ll head off so.’ His sing-song Cork accent was as pronounced now as the day he’d first arrived in Dublin, hefting a portable typewriter for the novel he’d never finish and a miraculous medal from his mother, lost before it had a chance to work any miracles. Unless it was working them for whoever found it.
‘Barry Dalton, what sort of a porker do you take me for? Don’t answer that. But even I need a breather before tackling a second breakfast. You can bring me back another coffee if you’re headed for the canteen, though.’
‘I’ll give it a few minutes. It’ll be jammed with all the classified ads girlies shortly.’
‘Shame on you, you’re supposed to be a happily married man. Mind you, half the kerb crawlers in the city are happily married men.’
‘Did I intimate I’d be doing anything other than salivating, Ms Moral Majority? Obviously I operate on the noli me tangere basis. Besides, looking isn’t a crime. It only proves you’re a normal healthy male.’
‘And that, your honour, is the case for the defence.’ Molly fired her sandwich wrapper binwards and drained the coffee.
Barry passed her the serviette she was scrabbling for. ‘Normal healthy males have normal healthy urges which they don’t act on because, um, remind me why we ignore our normal healthy urges?’
‘You’re happily married. And because you’d have no chance with the classified girls anyway because you’re twice their age, podgy around the love-handles zone and you don’t wear your shirt outside your trousers like the lads they go out with.’
Barry
