The Better Woman (6 page)

A girl Sarah met at the clinic, whose name she didn't know, told her that it was a nurse's full-time job to reassemble the parts of
the babies to ensure they had been fully removed. Sarah couldn't get the image out of her mind. Was it true?

She was given Panadol and antibiotics on leaving the clinic and reminded that she had to go for a check-up in six weeks. The drugs didn't work. The cramps were excruciating. Were they normal? Or were they pangs of guilt?

Bus to Pembroke, rocky crossing on the ferry, bus to Cork. Almost home. How could she look Peggy in the eye? The girl in the clinic had also said that whilst the mother was given an anaesthetic, the baby wasn't given anything. Was that true? Did the baby feel itself being taken out bit by bit?

Sarah turned her head towards the bus window so that the other passengers wouldn't see her tears. Why had this feeling of horror taken so long to surface? Why hadn't it made its presence felt when she had been on the bus leaving Cork? Why hadn't she met that girl somewhere else, before it was too late for both of them?

Icy rain dashed against the window. Sarah was overcome with bleakness. Those last few weeks of summer, the happiness of being with John, the headiness of their illicit love-making, all that seemed a world away now. John was lost to her. She was lost to herself.

She cried the whole way back to Cork. For the baby. For John. For Peggy, who would be devastated if she knew the truth. For the nurse, if there was one, who had to piece the babies back together. For her mother, because if she'd been alive there might have been some other way forward.

Sarah went through the motions of everyday life. She attended lectures, drank the awful coffee at the college canteen and made small talk with her classmates. At home she picked at her dinner, helped in the shop and tried, mostly in vain, to finish the day with some study. But her daily routine was an act, a farce. Inside she was dead.

Nuala was the only one who had any inkling of how bad she felt.

‘You need to talk about it,' she urged.

‘No,' Sarah shook her head vehemently. ‘Talking makes it worse.'

At night, in her bed, she wept and wept, her knuckles pressed against her mouth, muffling the sound so it wouldn't travel to Peggy's room. She hated herself for being so stupid as to get pregnant. She hated herself for being so spineless as to have an abortion. She hated herself, period. By the time morning came
around, the skin around her eyes was taut with dried tears, and her insides were hollowed out by self-hatred.

She thought a lot about her mother, particularly late at night, as she wept. Kathleen Ryan: mother at twenty, dead at twenty-three. Had she ever made a mistake of this proportion? Had she ever felt that she'd totally and irrevocably screwed up her life?

Sarah had known from a young age that her mother had died from kidney failure. She'd accepted it at face value. Mother: kidney failure. Father: motorbike accident. Was it that cut and dried?

‘Why did her kidneys fail?'

Peggy, knitting by the fireside, stalled over her stitch.

‘Because her health was bad,' she replied. ‘She hardly ate.'

‘Why? Was she anorexic?'

‘Not as such. Her problems were mostly in her head. She had chronic depression and that was at the root of the eating disorder. Whenever she was black, she would lose interest in food – sometimes she wouldn't eat for days on end, she'd be as weak as a kitten.'

Sarah was gripped by fear. She had her mother's genes. Was she predisposed to depression? Was that why she couldn't hold it together now?

‘On her wedding day she was so thin she looked as though she'd float away in her white dress,' Peggy continued, memories clouding her face. ‘She improved when she became pregnant with you. But she was deeply depressed after the birth and she regressed again. Of course, she went from bad to worse when Tommy died. It wasn't any wonder that her kidneys failed in the end.'

Peggy had never been so frank, had never talked to Sarah in such a grown-up way.

‘I worry about you, Sarah. I worry that you're like her . . .' Peggy trailed off before adding, ‘But at least you eat. Thank God for that.'

Sarah was overcome by an overwhelming need to talk to her mother. She wanted to ask her what the depression felt like. To find out what, if anything, made it go away.

‘Why did they have to take her body back to Donegal? Why didn't they let her be buried here in Carrickmore with Dad?'

‘Well, all of her family was in Donegal . . .'

‘But I was here. Didn't I count?'

‘Of course you did. Maybe I should have pushed harder, but I wasn't feeling too strong myself . . . Tommy and Kathleen dead two years . . . you needing my care . . .'

Peggy, her face a sheet of sadness, took a stitch. The wool slipped off her needle and her expression changed to one of annoyance.

‘Why didn't they want to take
me
back to Donegal?' Sarah persisted.

Peggy, having recovered the dropped stitch, looked up. ‘That was never discussed.'

The conversation ended there but it left another layer of blackness in its wake. In short, Sarah hadn't been good enough for her mother's family in Donegal. Just as she hadn't been good enough to make her mother want to eat, to live. Just as she hadn't been good enough for John's mother or, when it came down to it, for John himself.

The occasional letter came from France. John told her he was very privileged to be tutored by someone of Cécile's calibre.

She's quite the character with her florid clothes and flappy upper arms. She calls me her ‘petit penguin' – apparently I keep my arms
too close to my body when I'm playing. She criticises every little mistake in her booming voice; it was daunting at the start but I'm used to it now – in fact, I'm in awe when she plays back my pieces to show me where I've gone wrong. If I could be half as good as her . . . She says I have the potential to be one of the best in the world, I just have to practise, practise, practise. So no holidays at Christmas or Easter for me; just practise. Why don't you come and visit me instead? I can speak fluent French now and I should be able to nip away from the piano for long enough to show you the city the locals love.

The underlying tone of his letters was friendship, not love. Sarah kept them in her bottom drawer but didn't pen a response, and certainly didn't intend to visit him. As far as she was concerned, it was better that they never spoke again. How could she face him? How could she hide the bleakness that was now her life? How could she hide that she still loved him, despite Vanessa, the baby, and everything else?

Sarah turned over the exam paper and her eyes skimmed the questions. They seemed manageable; she wasn't going to be punished for cramming a year's study into a few weeks. She carefully reread the first question and began to write her answer in the booklet provided.

Three hours later, the supervisor rang the hand bell.

‘Pens down. Please stay seated until I give you permission to go.'

Sarah and the other students waited in the stuffy hall for a few extra minutes while their papers were collected.

‘What did you think?' asked Tim Brennan as they walked outside.

Tim was in her class. He was intelligent and, unlike most of the other boys, quietly self-assured. Sarah had vaguely noticed that he was rather attractive. On first look, there was nothing too remarkable about his near-black hair and pale skin. It was his eyes, dark and brooding, that made you look again.

‘It wasn't too bad,' she replied.

‘I thought it was tough.'

Sarah looked at the faces of the students around her and realised that most of them, like Tim, weren't very happy.

‘I really didn't think it was too bad,' she repeated sheepishly. ‘But then statistics, or any kind of maths, are my strength.'

In truth, the exam had given Sarah a sense of achievement, something she hadn't felt in a long time.

When she got home that evening, she went for a run. Her legs were stiff and jerky on the tarmacadam road. She climbed a gate. The grass was softer, kinder to her legs. Adrenalin kicked in. She'd almost forgotten how good it felt: a natural high.

Economics was the next paper. Sarah was more focused. Some of the darkness had cleared from her head. She was smiling when time was called. Tim noticed.

‘You actually like exams, don't you?'

‘It's like an adrenalin rush,' she admitted. ‘Not knowing what the questions will be, trying to decide which ones to answer, cramming it into the time allowed. I bet you think I'm weird.'

He laughed, which she assumed meant that, yes, he did think she was weird.

On the day of the last exam he asked her if she was coming for a drink with the rest of their class.

Sarah hesitated. She'd promised Peggy that she'd be home by four-thirty.

‘I have to –'

He jumped in before she could finish. ‘Come on, Sarah. You've kept to yourself all year. Why don't you come to the pub and get to know the people you'll be graduating with three years from now?'

Suddenly she saw herself through the eyes of her classmates: moody, remote, unfriendly.

‘Okay,' she agreed and put her satchel over her shoulder. ‘Lead the way.'

The Western Star, the favoured pub of UCC students, was packed to capacity. Tim, after buying two beers at the bar, pushed a path through to the beer garden and joined a group with several familiar faces. Sarah knew some of their names, but not all. Self-conscious, she drank down her beer quickly.

‘Surprised to see
you
here,' one of the girls remarked.

Sarah shrugged. ‘There's a first time for everything . . .'

‘We were just talking about our plans for the summer,' said another, more friendly girl. ‘Are you going anywhere?'

‘No. I have to help my grandmother with her shop – she's getting on and she relies on me for all the heavy work.'

‘Is that why you don't hang around at the college much?'

‘Yeah.'

Any remaining animosity fizzled away under the hazy May sunshine. Sarah went to the bar next and, at huge expense, bought a full round of drinks.

‘Making up for lost time,' she explained when she returned.

Tim eyed the wine she'd bought for herself.

‘Not a beer girl?'

‘I'm good for one or two. Then I switch to wine.'

‘I'll have to remember that for the future,' he said, giving her a long, meaningful stare.

Sarah, with a faint blush, started to talk to the girls once more.
The friendly one, Emma, told her that she was going to spend the summer au pairing in the south of France. Sarah swallowed a large mouthful of wine. France. John. Would it ever stop hurting?

The afternoon stretched into evening.

I should call Nan to let her know where I am.

But every time she looked over at the public phone booth, there was someone using it. Finally, it was free. She slid twenty pence into the slot and waited for Peggy to answer.

‘Hello.'

Sarah could hardly hear her grandmother's voice over the cacophony of music and loud voices around her.

‘Hi, Nan. Sorry, I should have rung sooner. I went for a drink after the exam was over – it's been hard to drag myself away. I hope you weren't worried.'

Peggy responded but Sarah couldn't make out what she was saying.

‘I'm sorry, Nan,' she repeated. ‘Look, I'll be on the last bus.'

Again, Peggy's voice was an indecipherable murmur. Sarah hung up, hoping that her grandmother wasn't too angry with her.

She turned away from the booth and came face to face with Tim.

‘Not calling a boyfriend, were you?' he asked with a worried frown.

She shook her head.

‘Before we get really drunk, and you think I don't mean this, I want to tell you that I really like you, Sarah Ryan. Will you go out with me sometime?'

Sarah returned his gaze. His eyes were magnetic. She felt as though she could get lost in them.

‘I'm complicated, Tim. Best not to get involved with me.'

‘What does complicated mean?' he asked in his forthright way.

‘You don't want to know.'

She did like Tim. There was something romantic about his pale skin and those dark, deep eyes. But he'd run a mile if he knew the truth about her.

Emma gave Sarah a knowing wink when they returned to the group.

She leaned forward to whisper, ‘You and Tim seem to be hitting it off, at last.'

‘What do you mean “at last”?'

‘Well, he liked you from day one. But he thought,
we all
thought, that you had a boyfriend.'

‘I
did
have a boyfriend,' Sarah admitted, her voice choking despite her best efforts.

‘Sorry,' Emma looked dismayed, ‘I didn't mean to upset you.'

‘It's okay. It's all over. Has been for ages.'

Much later on, after promising Emma that she'd write to her in France and exchanging phone numbers with another girl, Fiona, Sarah said goodbye.

‘I have to make a run for my bus,' she explained.

The street outside was thronged with students, some going home, others heading off to the many end-of-term parties that were being held in the digs close to the college.

‘Sarah, hold on.'

Tim had followed her out.

‘Can I walk with you?'

‘Okay,' she shrugged. ‘But we have to be quick.'

They set out at a brisk pace towards the heart of the city. Sarah's senses were heightened and everything around her seemed more
vivid, more immediate. The night air was deliciously warm, the sky a blanket of stars, the headlights of passing cars dazzlingly bright. She was drunk. But only a little. Just enough to be able to pretend for a moment that the last nine months of her life hadn't happened.